‘I still work.’
Margaret was taken aback. ‘Doing what?’
‘At the Academy. It’s just part time, but I work mornings as Bill’s assistant. I know you don’t think very much of the polygraph …’
Margaret broke in, ‘I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.’
Lyang said, ‘And we’d know if you were.’ They both laughed. Then she said, ‘The truth is, Bill’s more of a scientist than a practitioner. The Academy is employing him to develop something based on the polygraph which is more suited to the Chinese. He was responsible for persuading Lynn Pan to come to China to work on the Chinese version of MERMER.’ She hesitated and glanced over at Margaret. ‘You don’t work at all?’
‘I give the occasional lecture at the Public Security University.’
‘But no pathology?’
Margaret shook her head. ‘The Ministry is not particularly keen on Americans conducting autopsies on Chinese crime victims. I think they think it reflects badly on their own pathologists.’
‘But Bill said you’d done autopsy work for us before.’
‘Special circumstances,’ Margaret said. ‘And, then, when the baby came, things changed.’
‘How?’
‘Well, Li Yan and I are not married, for a start.’
‘Obviously.’
‘But we do live together.’
Lyang sat up, interested. ‘Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.’
Margaret waggled a finger at her. ‘That’s just it, you don’t ask. At least, that’s the position the Ministry takes. They don’t ask, we don’t tell, they don’t know. Officially. That way we get away with it — as long as we don’t marry.’
Lyang whistled softly. ‘And Li Yan wouldn’t think about giving up his job?’
‘I wouldn’t ask him,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a part of him. It would be like asking him to cut off a leg.’ She sighed. ‘The upshot of it all, though, is that it’s no longer politic for him to request permission to use me for autopsies on special cases.’ She qualified herself. ‘On any cases.’
‘So you’re leading a life of leisure and pleasure as a mother and wife … well, almost wife?’
Margaret laughed. ‘No, I think the word I think you’re looking for is vegetating.’
‘So what do you do all day?’
‘Oh, I stay home and look after our son. Do a bit of housework, a bit of cooking. I never know when Li Yan’ll be coming home or when he’ll be called out. I don’t have any friends in Beijing, so I never go anywhere …’ She shook her head in something close to despair. ‘You know, the kind of domestic bliss every American woman aspires to.’ She sat up and turned towards Lyang. It felt good to talk, to get some of this stuff off her chest. It had been a long time since there had been anyone other than Li to whom she could unburden herself. ‘It’s like I’ve stopped living, Lyang. Like my whole life’s been sucked into my baby, and my only future is to live it vicariously through him.’
‘Jesus, Margaret …’ Lyang had clearly picked up her husband’s slang. ‘You sound like you need a few bodies to cut up.’
Margaret laughed out loud. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That would probably be good therapy. You’ve no idea how much I miss the smell of an open intestine, or that slurping sound the brain makes when it plops out of the skull.’
‘Hmmm,’ Lyang said. ‘I can see how you’d miss that.’
The receptionists looked curiously at the two women lying back laughing on their reclining seats when they came in to take away the soak barrels. They returned a few moments later to dry off the two pairs of feet and place them on towels on each of the footrests. Margaret watched curiously as the two blind masseuses were led in to squat on stools at the end of each footrest. Lyang’s girl was very young, perhaps only nineteen or twenty. Her eyes were bizarrely pale, almost grey, and seemed fixed beneath beautifully slanted lids. Margaret’s masseuse was older, about thirty, and her dark eyes seemed to be constantly on the move, squinting to one side and then back again. Both were slightly built, wearing white cotton overalls, and when Margaret’s girl lathered her tiny hands with soft-scented cream and began working on Margaret’s feet, Margaret was astonished at the strength in them.
‘Of course, you know why Western men like Asian women,’ Lyang said, and Margaret could hear the mischief in her voice.
‘Why?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.
‘Because they have such small hands.’
Margaret smiled and frowned at the same time. ‘And that’s attractive because …?’
‘It makes their dicks seem bigger.’
They laughed again, and saw the incomprehension on the faces of their masseuses. A foot massage was supposed to be relaxing, therapeutic, not funny. But Margaret was finding the whole experience therapeutic in other ways. ‘I guess that must be why I fell for Li Yan,’ she said.
Lyang frowned, knowing there was a gag coming, but not seeing it. ‘Why?’
‘Because he makes my hands look so small.’
Their raucous laughter was inappropriate, and inordinately loud in the hushed atmosphere of the Jade Fingers Blind Massage Club. Margaret’s masseuse found a painful area on the sole of her foot and seemed to dig into it particularly hard with her thumb. Margaret gasped. But there was also an odd pleasure in the pain. She lay back then and succumbed to both the pain and the pleasure as her girl worked her way around her toes, down all the painful bumps in her arch, around the heel and back up the outside edge. She knew what all the muscles were, could picture them as the girl’s dextrous fingers sought them out, folded one over the other around the delicate bones of the foot. It was deliciously relaxing.
After a long period of silence, Lyang said to her, ‘What have you done about Li Jon?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘His nationality.’
‘Well, he’s both, of course. Chinese and American.’
‘You’ve registered him with the Embassy?’
‘Sure.’ It had been a complex procedure. Chinese and American laws were in conflict over the nationality of a child born to a Chinese-American couple. The Americans, the consul for American Citizen Services at the embassy had told Margaret, defined a child born to one American anywhere in the world as a US citizen at birth. The Chinese used the same legal premise for their citizens abroad, but allowed mixed citizenship couples, legally resident in China, to pick a citizenship for their kid after birth. Margaret had wanted to register Li Jon with the US embassy. Li was anxious for his son to remain Chinese. They had almost fallen out over it. In the end Margaret had persuaded Li that the Chinese were never going to deny his son nationality as long as they were there in China. But she wanted Li Jon properly registered as a US citizen so that there would never be a problem about them taking him to the US if they ever decided to go there. So she had gone to the embassy and had an interview with a sympathetic consul who set in motion a series of background checks on both Li and Margaret before finally issuing Li Jon with a Consular Report of Birth Abroad — which would effectively act as his passport for the first five years and make him officially a US citizen.
‘You got one of those Consular Report things?’ Lyang asked
‘That’s right.’
‘Yeah, Bill insisted we did that for Ling, too. So she’s a fully fledged stars and stripes citizen. It stuck in my craw a little to have to register her as a foreigner with the local police. It was expensive, too.’ A thought struck her. ‘Hey, how did you do that when you two aren’t … you know, married? Not even officially living together.’
‘We didn’t,’ Margaret said. ‘It was going to be too complicated. Officially, I still live in an apartment provided by the University of Public Security. That comes under the Western Beijing Police district. In reality, Li Yan and I share his police apartment in the Central Beijing Police district. We were just never going to be able to explain it.’