The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (6 page)

Linyao turned her head to him while somehow managing to keep her hurt, accusatory eyes fixed firmly on Joyce. ‘Murdered fish,’ she said. ‘Fish who were caught, skinned, decapitated, murdered and put into tins, all while they were still alive, in all probability.’

Joyce shook her head in wonder. ‘Ha ha. Anchovies. How on earth did those get in there?’

Flip stared. ‘Lemme see de bottle.’

Linyao held it up. Now it was Flip’s turn to give a squeal. ‘
Aiee
! I put some of dat stuff on my snack yesterday—ach, mardared fish.’ He began spitting theatrically into a sheet of kitchen paper, and then scraping his tongue with his fingernails. ‘Ew, ew, ew,’ he whined. ‘I can’t believe I eating poor little live fishes.’

‘They’re not alive,’ Joyce said, wondering whether it would make the situation better if she admitted that many times she, too, had consumed Lea & Perrins sauce, not realising that it was not strictly vegetarian.

‘They were once,’ Linyao said, icily, ‘before they were murdered to be put into this sauce.’

‘I better go tro up,’ Flip said. ‘I
hate
dis.’

As he left, Joyce considered running after him to explain that it was too late to scrape his tongue or throw up. If he had eaten the sauce the previous day, the material would surely no longer be in his stomach, but would have moved on to his intestines, or been purged. But she decided to keep quiet. She had sinned. She was in disgrace.

‘I guess I didn’t—’ Joyce began.

‘Read the label,’ Linyao barked. ‘That’s obvious enough.’

‘Sorry. It’s really low on the ingredients list, which probably means there are only a few, like,
molecules
of anchovy in it. Not even adding up to one whole fish per bottle, probably.’

Linyao said nothing. Joyce bowed her head and tried to look contrite. ‘Sorry.’

‘I will not have a bottle of meat in this restaurant,’ Linyao shrieked. In direct contradiction to her words, she threw the bottle across the room, where it hit the wall with a crash, leaving ugly splodges of brown all over the restaurant’s east wall. ‘Now clean it up.’

‘Okay.’

Linyao turned to go back to the pantry, but then faced Joyce again. ‘And when you’ve cleaned the walls, throw away the cloth or sponge you used. Throw it away
outside
the building.’

‘Okay.’

Tears pricking behind her eyes, the young woman dropped to her knees and started picking up pieces of broken glass, while reflecting, not for the first time, that the reputation vegetarians and vegans had for being gentle animal-lovers had some spectacular exceptions—Linyao being an obvious one. Yet she felt that the chairperson of the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society was even more tense today than she had been the past few days. Was there something in particular irritating her? Or was it the already-known fact that she was a grouch, having messed up her life fairly comprehensively by the age of thirty-one? Fortunately, Linyao’s outbursts of temper usually disappeared as quickly as they began. Joyce had barely finished picking up the pieces of glass when Linyao joined her, scrubbing the wall with a dishcloth, even though it meant that the ‘meat sauce’ was likely to touch her skin.

‘Sorry I’m so uptight,’ Linyao said. ‘It’s just that Vega is—’ She paused to try to find the right words. ‘Vega is—very particular. He’s very careful. And he has a foul temper. I mean, I’ve never actually met him. But I’ve heard he’s got this hot temper.’

Joyce asked herself:
Worse than yours?
Then she blushed, wondering if she had uttered the phrase out loud. But the older woman did not immediately react, so apparently she had not.

‘Worse than mine,’ Linyao volunteered. ‘Much, much worse.’

That’s hard to believe
, Joyce thought.

‘You probably find that hard to believe,’ the other woman continued, ‘but—’ She stopped, as if she realised that it would be bad manners to speak ill of an honoured guest who was soon to grace their restaurant. ‘If he had found an anchovy in his sauce—but never mind. He’ll be here soon enough. We’ll all meet him.’ The tone in her voice was unmistakable: a one hundred per cent solution of pure, undiluted awe.

The two continued to clean up. Flip returned to the scene, announcing that he had changed his mind about throwing up and would just try to struggle through. ‘I tink I will have nightmares about de ghosts of anchovies ’aunting me and saying, “Why you eat me? I doen do nutting to you”. I feel like a cannibal.’

Joyce was going to say that he could only consider himself a cannibal if he, too, were a fish. But looking at his pasty face, blubbery skin and shiny hair, she felt that the comment would have been a little too accurate. And besides, Linyao’s vegetarian ideology stressed the basic unity of all sentient beings.

The three of them worked fast, knowing that there was not much time before Vega and his team of animal liberation activists were due to arrive.

But the brown stain was not coming off the wall.

‘Dis meat sauce, it stick,’ Flip said.

‘It’s
not
meat sauce. It’s got one molecule of—’ ‘I teasing you, sista.’

‘Go and get some stain remover,’ Linyao said. ‘Something really strong. There’s a hardware store on Sichuan Nan Lu which will probably have something.’

‘Will do.’ Joyce picked up her bag and headed to the door.

‘And read the ingredients,’ Linyao barked.

Flip sniggered. ‘Yeah, careful. A lot of cleanin’ fluid ackshally made of stek, you know.’

‘Har-har-har,’ Joyce said. ‘I’ll search high and low to find one which is entirely meat-free.’

As she put on her coat, Linyao’s mobile phone trilled—the ring-tone was a Cantopop tune. She burrowed around in her handbag to find it and quickly stabbed the answer button. Lines appeared between her eyebrows as she listened to the caller. ‘Not home yet? Probably stuck in traffic. It’s dreadful today. Call me if they’re not home in twenty minutes.’

Joyce gave her a quizzical look.

‘Jia Lin’s not home from school yet.’

‘Who takes her home?’

‘We have a Filipina domestic helper who doubles as bodyguard and cook.’

‘I thought you weren’t allowed to have Filipina domestic helpers here.’

‘You aren’t really. But lots of people do. She’s listed as an employee of my ex-husband’s company. Anyway, she and I take turns collecting Jia Lin from school. Well, to be honest, she does it nearly all the time, and I do it occasionally. That was my cousin. She’s at home waiting for them.’

‘The traffic’s been dreadful all week.’

‘That’s right. I’m not worried. They must be on the bus on the way home. It can take more than an hour to go that tiny distance when the traffic’s as bad as this. Now stop loitering and get the cleaning stuff.’

Linyao leaned back in her chair and a gram of the worry that she had dealt with earlier bobbed up again like a drowned man who sinks out of sight and then dramatically resurfaces. At that moment, the lucky dip of her life was evolving into something a little more serious: not a fairground game at all, now, but a game of roulette; maybe even Russian roulette. The potential pain quotient in the situation quietly rose. The delivery of a child from school to home should have been straightforward: it always had been in the past.

Scenarios crowded into her mind. She chose the most comforting and focused on them: they may have stopped off to see someone, or go to a shop. After all, what could go wrong when a child is released by one responsible adult, her teacher, to the care of another responsible adult, her domestic servant? Yet, however long the odds, she found it difficult to set the worry aside. The fact that the ball was in play was enough to cause a tiny knot in her stomach, a weight in her bowels, the beginnings of an ache in the centre of her chest.

Linyao worked hard to control her mind, slamming her thoughts forcefully back to the situation at hand. ‘Anchovies,’ she spat. ‘Vega would have killed us, and I may even mean that literally—how many other vegans can you name who carry guns?’

Joyce stepped out into the residual sunshine of the darkening day. It had been an unusually chilly week, and the morning had started out cold, with a stiff breeze shaking the trees and shrinking people into their army-surplus greatcoats. But the sun had come out by midday, and warmth had begun to creep into the air as the afternoon wore on. Now it was just after five thirty, and becoming cold again.

The Shanghai evening rush hour was beginning in earnest. A cacophony of traffic sounds filled the air as Joyce tripped along the wide, uneven pavement: cars hooting, the air-brakes of trucks farting, bicycle bells jingling, motor scooters buzzing, the roar of heavy buses dragging their 12-tonne loads. It was hard to believe what her guidebook said—that just twenty years earlier, Shanghai had been a city mainly of bicycles, with just a few black ‘Red Flag’ limousines for the officials and business people. Today, you could still see hundreds of bicycles on the main roads—but they were squeezed like toothpaste into thin lines by hundreds of cars jostling their way to dominant positions at the heart of the main routes.

There had been an outcry two years earlier, when officials had proposed banning bicycles from the city centre. After all, since people of importance had cars, why did they need to cater for the rabble? The car lobby argued that in the 1930s, before the communist takeover, there had been more cars in Shanghai than in all the other cities in China put together, so it was right to return the city to being a motor capital. But the Shanghai press took the rare step of actually reporting the outcry of common citizens, and the plan was eventually withdrawn.

Yet now, day by day, an increasing number of cars of all shapes and sizes filled the city, and bicycles were again in danger of being completely squeezed out. During rush hour, the steaming vehicles inched along, radiator to bumper along every road, whether major highway or small side lane. They became trapped, grille-to-grille in the narrow roads alongside the courtyard houses in the older parts of town. They made life difficult for pedestrians as they perched half on the pavements, or sometimes simply drove along them.

In the single week during which Joyce had lived in Shanghai, the evening rush hour had stretched from being forty-five minutes during which the traffic moved more slowly than usual, to seventy-five minutes in which vehicles barely moved at all, topped and tailed by an hour each side during which cars rolled forward in bad-tempered jerks—which was also a pretty good description of the people driving them. And if an extra factor was ever thrown into the mix—an accident, bad weather, a VIP visit, a small conflagration in a shophouse on the main road—then traffic came to a complete halt for an unpredictable length of time.

Yet central Shanghai’s road problems had never quite reached the world notoriety of Bangkok traffic jams—until four days ago. On that Saturday, two major sets of roadworks began on the eastern stretch of Nanjing Dong Lu, joining the three which were already there. Five major sets of roadworks in a relatively short space were too many. On the Monday, there had been a period of steaming, angry gridlock between five-thirty and six forty-five, interspersed with spasmodic bursts of movement.

Worse was to come. This being China, with all the attendant fawning on officials, VIP visits were the worst thing. Joyce knew that later in the week, some sort of international summit was due to be held in Shanghai, with politicians flying in from around the world. Those were the worst interruptions of all. The previous Friday, a European prime minister was in town, and the main north–south road, Xizang Lu, was blocked for fifty minutes during the morning rush hour. Almost everyone had been late for work that day: one of the newspapers carried a photograph of a school morning assembly with just three pupils. Later this week—was it tomorrow night?—some sort of meeting was taking place in Shanghai involving the Presidents of China and the United States. There was also an anti-American demonstration planned, to coincide with the visit. There was much speculation as to whether the march was organised by independent activists or activists employed by the Chinese government—but whichever it was, it would bring the city to a halt for everyone except officials. It would be worth completely avoiding the centre of the city for the next couple of days, Joyce realised.

She had spent a lot of time thinking about cars and driving, since she signed up to take driving lessons as soon as she got here. Her father, who spent most of his time in New York, had been horrified to hear that she was learning to drive in China. ‘They don’t know how to drive in that country. They just
buy
driving licences—they don’t have to do any tests or anything. You’ll be flattened on your first day on the road.’ But his warnings had not been heeded. It was probably true that in parts of China you could get a driving test just by paying money to the right person—the abysmal lack of motoring skills among many rural drivers seemed proof of that. She’d heard stories of one province where the only driving test was a written one. So as long as one could memorise rules, one could get out onto the street as a licensed driver without ever having driven a car.