The warden was clearly astonished at the size of the bribe I slipped into his palm and led me in with great courtesy. She was much thinner, so thin that it almost felt like a crime for me to be well-covered. I said her husband had left, told her he had something to do, and asked the warden to lead us out a different way.
‘I’ll give you a ride,’ I said.
I hoodwinked her.
She got into my car.
She had never been in my car before. It was strange, unreal. I backed out of the prison car park with her looking behind, guiding me in a low voice. I had never heard her speak so quietly. I was uncomfortable, confused, as if I was a thief and she was the swag. Or rather, as if she was my prey. At last I could speak to her. I had waited so long. Everything was prepared. There was no time for hesitation, even if it hurt her, even if it killed her. She was still looking behind the car, with no idea what all this was about. A curious sense of satisfaction stole over me, testament to the streak of cruelty I had discovered in myself many years ago.
It was after the Tiananmen incident — I was still a student. Soldiers chased me into a blind alley, with nowhere to hide. I knocked on every door in the alley, but no one would take me in. So I hid in a doorway, shrinking back into it as far as I could. Army boots trampled past like stampeding horses. I was squeezing myself in to the point of collapse. I was terrified. I didn’t know if I was dead or alive. The only way I could tell was to pinch my thighs and see if it hurt. I pinched so hard the pain was excruciating. All I could feel was pain, and the harder I pinched the less I was afraid. That was when I started to enjoy pinching. I pinched my first girlfriend almost to death. I used to pinch my wife until she shrieked with pain. Now I pinch my daughter.
I put my foot down and the car shot forward. She gripped on to the sides of the seat.
‘Are you afraid?’ I asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
‘Doesn’t your husband ever drive like this?’
She shook her head again. She knew absolutely nothing. Sometimes I hated her for being so ignorant.
‘It sounds like the kidney didn’t help,’ I said.
She flushed scarlet and turned to look out of the window. A flock of seagulls circled above us as we reached the new bridge, symbol of our city’s modernisation. It’s one of the world’s longest suspension bridges, so they say. You can still just about make out the slogan from when it was opened on the steel hawsers: ‘Taking a leap into the world.’ It was like she was seeing the slogan for the first time.
‘Do you know why your husband has kidney deficiency?’
She grabbed for the door handle.
‘Stop the car,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten something.’
‘Where.’
‘Back there,’ she said.
I smiled. What could she have possibly left there? Was she just avoiding the truth? Could she have known what her husband was getting up to all along? A dreadful thought. No. It was impossible. No woman could bear it. All the same I felt flustered.
‘Forget it,’ I said.
‘But it’s important.’
‘Important, huh?’ I said. ‘Your husband’s important, but look at what kind of man he is.’
‘Let me out,’ she insisted.
‘Do you know what kind of man your husband is? Do you know what he gets up to behind your back?’
‘I want to get out!’ she shouted.
‘Do you know or don’t you?’ I yelled back. I was going to tell her everything. It was my last chance. ‘Every morning when you’re busy getting breakfast ready, he’s in there, he’s … wanking.’
It was a struggle to get the words out, but what a relief.
‘I want to get out!’
I reached out and held her in a fierce grip, but she kept struggling, pulling at the door handle again and again. She was slippery as an eel.
‘I saw it, I saw everything! And you still … you still actually … ’ The steering wheel twitched in my hand. A lorry loaded with sand veered into the oncoming lane, screeching and zigzagging wildly across the road.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ she said.
When I got home the house was quiet. My daughter was having her afternoon nap. My wife was taking a shower. She came out into the afternoon sunlight, wrapped in a towel. I refused to get excited about her any more. From now on, I would ignore the rustle of clothes as she took them off and dropped them to the floor to get into her nightie.
‘Have you had dinner?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll make something for you.’
I turned on the TV and flicked through the channels. Nothing on the news about the kidney. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but there was plenty of other crime to look into — fake goods, illegal trading, tax evasion … And even if they did investigate me, even if they did find my dodgy supplements had killed a few people, well, I had only done it for my family, to give them a better standard of living. They couldn’t prove anything.
10
Let me tell you a story.
A long, long time ago, there was a husband who used to masturbate when his wife was not looking. But she knew all about it.
At first she had absolutely no idea what to do. It was quite some time since they had enjoyed sexual relations — he said he couldn’t get it up. Perhaps it was the pressure of work. He was running a big business, after all, and she understood how hard that was. She was happy with her life, though because of her husband’s impotence they had no children. But in the end she lost the courage to go on living in this way. Had he fallen in love with someone else? She couldn’t imagine who it might be, but she worried the woman could appear at any moment and her husband would demand a separation. The same thought had occurred to her many times, but the idea he might suggest it himself terrified her. Were there any good men in this world?
One day the wife went to the herbalist and bought her husband a packet of Hui Yuan kidney tonic. Everybody knew about Hui Yuan kidney tonic, it was advertised on every street corner. Even children recited the jingles off by heart. She did not believe in fairy tales like that, of course, but she hoped it might give her husband a gentle reminder. It should be perfectly obvious why she was giving it to someone who basically had no sex life at all, but if he protested, if he refused to take the hint, she could always relent and say it was a tonic to build up his general health.
Her husband did not object, he just took his medicine and never said a word. Neither did he give up his secret pastime.
Gradually she became aware that her husband never went out in the evenings. He came home from work, ate dinner with her and stayed home all night. If he was forced to take a client out to dinner he would propose a few of the usual toasts and then find some pretext to leave — he certainly was an accomplished liar. There were times when she urged him to go out, but he just said ‘You have no idea how tiresome these occasions are.’ As soon as he returned to their flat he turned off his mobile, and if anyone called on their home number he would go to any lengths to avoid taking the call. The wife did not know if any of these calls were from a woman, but she did once take one that struck her as odd: when the caller heard her voice, he or she simply said nothing. Her husband told her to hang up. He said he could not think why anyone would make silent telephone calls. But then he refused to take any calls at all. He asked her to answer the telephone for him and say he had gone out.
He never spoke of a separation.