‘Go home? It’s still early!’
Wang said he was tired. His father handed him a key with a room number on the key-ring tab.
‘Go and rest then. I reserved you a suite in the hotel next door.’ Wang Hu’s gaze slid to the hostesses, and he added in a low voice, ‘Which one do you want to take with you?’
‘I don’t want to stay in a hotel. I want to go home.’
‘What’s wrong with you? You’re a man, aren’t you?’
For the first time that evening, cracks appeared in his father’s joie de vivre. He looked frustratedly at his son. The Dirt Emperor chuckled at the father and son dispute, his gold-plated molars glinting.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I want to go home, that’s all.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ his father reproached. ‘The room’s all paid for. All you have to do is walk a few steps next door.’
‘No, I am going home,’ Wang said.
Wang Hu laughed indulgently. ‘Go then! All the men you see here, we all work hard. We deserve our fun. We don’t want some puritanical virgin looking down his nose at us.’
As Wang walked away he heard his father joking to the Dirt Emperor, ‘Kids, eh? Where’d he get that prudish attitude from? Not from me!’
His father was angry of course. But he hid that well.
The light was on in the kitchen when Wang got back. Lin Hong was on a stool by the counter, her blue silk robe gaping over her lacy negligee and alcohol-flushed chest. On the counter was an empty jug and a cocktail glass with a flamingo-pink paper umbrella leaning on the rim. As he entered the kitchen, Lin Hong ignored him and stared at the humming fridge with a tragic look in her eyes. Straight away Wang was guilty and concerned.
‘Have you been crying?’ he asked his stepmother.
Lin Hong sniffed and refused to meet his eyes. She slurred, ‘What do you care?’
‘C’mon, Lin Hong. What’s the matter?’
She looked at him in disapproval, as though he was the one who was drunk.
‘Have fun tonight? Drinking whisky with your father’s cronies and sixteen-year-old whores?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t.’
He stood in front of her stool, his hand resting on the counter. He could smell white rum and pineapple juice on her breath. Sugar and alcohol rushed through Lin Hong’s bloodstream, flushing her pretty, angry face.
‘You’re a lousy liar, Wang Jun. Of course you had fun. Like father, like son. You are just like him. I see that now.’
The accusation was too far from the truth to offend Wang. He sighed at his stepmother, lashing out in her lonely rage.
‘C’mon, Lin Hong. You know that’s not true. . If I had known how upset you’d be, I wouldn’t have gone.’
But her stepson’s kindness only encouraged Lin Hong.
‘Just so you know, Wang Jun, your father was using you tonight to get at me,’ she said. ‘He wants you on his side. He knows how important you are to me, and he wants to destroy what we have. .’
What we have. Wang’s heart quickened at the notion they had something.
‘Lin Hong, I don’t think my father thinks that way. .’
Wang censored the rest — that his father probably never thinks of her at all. Lin Hong’s paranoid imaginings that her husband was out to destroy their relationship were far more palatable to her than the truth, which was his indifference. Lin Hong scowled.
‘You don’t know your father,’ she spat. ‘He’s an awful man. He deserves to go to jail!’
The shimmering blue silk of her robe slipped off her shoulders as she pulled forcefully at the counter drawer, and Wang looked away from the swell of her breasts beneath her black lacy negligee. Lin Hong removed an envelope from the drawer and handed it to him. The letter was addressed to the Central Discipline Inspection Committee. Wang quickly read the contents.
‘I’ll post it tomorrow,’ Lin Hong said. ‘Anonymously, of course, with a copy of our bank statement showing deposits from various businesses. I have sent other letters before, but they ignore them. They never discipline him. I keep writing to them, though, because maybe one day someone with morals will read one of my letters and investigate him.’
Wang returned the letter to his stepmother, thinking it a waste of time. The odds of a government official being punished for corruption are the same as the odds of their being struck by lightning.
‘Be careful,’ he warned. ‘He’ll kill you if he finds out.’
Lin Hong smiled. ‘If he ends up in prison for my murder, then it would have been worthwhile.’
Wang laughed, but Lin Hong did not laugh with him. She hadn’t forgotten where he had spent the evening.
‘Which girl was he with tonight?’ she demanded, shattering the confiding mood. ‘The Russian? The girl from Shanghai?’
Wang’s instinct was to protect her feelings and deny there had been a girl. But he was loyal to her now, over and above his father.
‘She was Russian.’
Lin Hong looked sickened.
‘Was she pretty? Blonde?’
‘Why do this to yourself?’
‘I bet she had big breasts. He likes women with curves.’
‘She was nothing special,’ Wang said, ‘and she didn’t say a word. He may as well have hired out a blow-up doll.’
‘But she was young, though, right? Eighteen or so? Younger?’
Tears welled in Lin Hong’s eyes, spilling over and sliding down her cheeks.
‘Don’t cry,’ Wang groaned. ‘Not over him.’
‘Do you know your father hasn’t kissed me in two years?’ More tears chased their predecessors down her cheeks. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong with these lips? Are they as disgusting as he thinks they are? Are they?’
On her stool, Lin Hong looked at him expectantly. Under her lacy negligee her perspiration-damp chest was rising and falling, as though in anticipation. Her brown eyes seemed to be challenging him, demanding something of him. Heart hammering in his chest, Wang gazed at her, and for one agonizing moment thought he hadn’t the guts to act. Then, in a surge of courage, he lunged and clumsily banged his mouth against hers. The kiss had been inevitable — she’d been baiting him for weeks and, inexperienced as her stepson was, he was still red-blooded and male. But Lin Hong reacted as though shocked. She gasped, pulled away and slapped him across the cheek. The message was loud and clear: she was not the instigator of the kiss. Blushing, Wang stuttered apologies then shuffled away to the guest room. He didn’t even feel the sting of her slap he was so consumed by disgrace.
A quarter of an hour later, Lin Hong entered the darkness of the guest room without knocking. She slipped under the bedsheets besides her speechless stepson and kissed him full on the mouth with her sweet, rum-scented lips. Her loose hair tickled his collar bone as she moved her head down, licking his chest, her tongue circling a nipple, her hand sliding under the waistband of his shorts. Wang had fantasized about her for weeks, but now she was kissing him, and writhing on top of him, he froze. The memory, long repressed, of the last time he had shared a bed with a woman, resurfaced, inhibiting lust or any emotions other than panic and fear.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lin Hong asked, groping at his lack of arousal. ‘You can touch me if you like.’
Wang couldn’t speak. She took his hand and pressed his fingers to the moist folds of flesh between her legs, and he felt as though she was forcing him to finger a festering open wound. But he couldn’t protest. His heart was beating out of control and his lungs couldn’t take down any air. Struggling to breathe, he shoved her off the bed and she thudded to the floor. Then, his head spinning, he staggered out of the bedroom, through the living room to the balcony, where he leant over the railing and gasped at the night air like a man surfaced from drowning. Only then did his heart slow down and the panic subside.