So he watched, and he saw young women begin to emerge from Paradise Mansions. They were all dressed up, and like the female leads in some wildlife documentary about mating rituals, each joined one of the men waiting in the cars. They did not kiss.
One of them caught his eye. A tall girl with a flower in her hair. An orchid, he thought. Maybe an orchid.
She came out of the block opposite, and headed for one
of the 911s. She raised her face to their window and Becca waved, but the young woman did not respond. She slid her long body into the passenger seat of the Porsche, struggling with her legs and her skirt. The man at the wheel turned his face and said something to her. He was older by about ten years. The girl pulled the door shut, and the Porsche moved away.
Bill and Becca looked at each other and laughed.
'What is this place?' she smiled, shaking her head. 'Is this place a . . . what is this place?'
But he had no idea.
So they drank their champagne and watched the beautiful girls of Paradise Mansions pairing off with the men in their fancy cars, and by the time they had drained their glasses they were both dumbstruck by weariness.
So they took a shower together, soaping each other with tender familiarity, and then they got in bed with Holly between them. They smiled at each other over the child's face.
He slept until first light and then abruptly he was wide awake.
He counted the things stopping him from going back to sleep. His body clock was pining for London time. Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. the driver – Tiger – would take him to the Pudong offices of Butterfield, Hunt and West, and he would start his new job. He was curious to know where they were, and what their new life looked like in daylight. How could he possibly sleep with his head so full? As quietly as he could, Bill got up, got dressed and slipped out of the apartment.
The courtyard where the men in cars had waited for the girls was empty apart from Tiger. He was sleeping with his bare feet on the dashboard of the limo, his legs either side of the steering wheel. He jumped to attention when Bill walked past.
'Where to, boss?' he said, pulling on his shoes. 'It's Sunday,' Bill said. 'Don't they give you the day off on Sunday?'
Tiger looked blank. And then hurt. 'Where we going, boss?' 'I'm walking,' Bill said. 'And stop calling me boss.' The Sabbath may have meant nothing to Tiger but out on the streets of Gubei New Area it felt almost like Sunday morning back home, with nobody around apart from the odd jogger and dog walker, the neighbourhood shuttered and still. It was early June, and the heat was already starting to build.
Bill walked. He was hungry to see what he thought of as the real China, the China that was nothing to do with plasma televisions and Dom Perignon. The real China was somewhere nearby. It had to be. There were blocks of flats as far as he could see in a bewildering jumble of styles, but broken up with patches of manicured green and oversized statues. There were strips of restaurants – he could see Thai, Italian, everything but Chinese – a Carrefour supermarket, and a couple of international schools, including the one that Holly would go to in the morning. Little parks. A nice neighbourhood. Gubei was greener and cleaner than the grimy, crime-ridden patch of London they had left behind. His family could live here. His wife and daughter could be happy here. He felt a quiet satisfaction, mixed with relief.
He glanced at his watch and decided he had time to explore before Becca and Holly stirred. So he walked towards the rising sun and as he left Gubei New Area behind, the streets quickly filled. Women selling bruised fruit stared through him from shaded side streets. Someone bumped into him. Someone else spat at his feet. There were men in filthy, dirt-encrusted two-piece suits working on a building site. On a Sunday. And in the streets there were people. A tide of people. Suddenly there were people everywhere.
He stopped, trying to get his bearings. The roads were wide and traffic flew by, horns mindlessly beeping, ignoring red lights and pedestrians and the rest of the traffic. He saw a chic girl in sunglasses with her hair up behind the wheel of a silver Buick Excelle. There were flocks of VW Santana taxis. A muddy truck piled high with junk and men. And more trucks, lots of them, with their strange cargo of cardboard or orange traffic cones or pigs or yet more cars, so new they still shone with the showroom wax.
As the sun got higher, and Bill continued to walk east, the city got noisier, adding to his sense of dislocation. A woman on a scooter mounted the pavement and just missed him, beeping her horn furiously. Schools of cyclists with giant black visors over their faces swarmed past. Suddenly he was aware of the time difference, the light-headedness that follows a long-haul flight, the sweat of exhaustion. But he kept walking. He wanted to know something about this place.
He walked down alleys where thin men shaved over ancient metal bowls and fat babies were fed, and where ramshackle buildings with red-tile roofs were draped with drying laundry and satellite dishes. Then abruptly the jumbled blocks with their red-tile roofs suddenly gave way to the new shining towers and shopping malls.
Outside Prada men with their skin darkened by sun and grime tried to sell him fake Rolex watches and DVDs of the latest Tom Cruise movie. Young women hid from the sun under umbrellas. Naked Western models advertised skin-lightening products on giant billboards.
And as Bill walked on, he felt something that he had never felt in his life, and it was an awareness of the sheer mass of humanity. All those people in the world, all those lives. It was as if he truly believed in their existence for the first time. Shanghai gave him no choice.
Bill hailed one of the Santana taxis, impatient to see the
Bund, but the driver didn't understand a word he said and dropped him by the river, glad to get rid of him. He got out next to a wharf with a ferry; not a sightseeing ferry but some kind of local public transport.
Bill handed over his smallest note, received some filthy RMB in return, and joined the milling mob waiting to cross to the other side. He tried to work out where the queue began. Then he realised that it didn't begin anywhere.
And as the ferry filled with people, and then continued to fill even more until Bill was hemmed in on every side, and fighting back the feeling that the ferry was overloaded, he saw that here, at last, was the real China.
The numbers.
It was all about the numbers.
He knew that the numbers were why he would be starting his new job in the morning, why his family's future would be decided in this city, and why all the money problems of the past would soon be over. They filled the dreams of businessmen from Sydney to San Francisco – the one billion customers, the one billion new capitalists, the one billion marketplace.
He struggled to move his arms and glanced at his watch, wondering if he could make it back home to his girls before they woke up.
The ferry began to move.
That afternoon they did the tourist thing.
The three of them joined the queues and took the lift to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower where they stared down at the boats on the Huangpu River and saw that the city seemed to be without end.
On the other side of the tower they looked down at a park that was full of brides, hundreds of them, all in white, looking like a flock of swans as they surrounded the lakes, feeding confetti-coloured fish food to koi carp.
Bill lifted his daughter so she could see.
'New school tomorrow,' he said.
Holly said nothing, her eyes wide at the sight of all those brides.
'You're going to make lots of new friends,' Becca said, gripping one of Holly's ankles, and shaking it with encouragement.
Holly thought about it, chewing her bottom lip.
'I'm going to be very busy,' she said.
Although foreigners were a common sight in Shanghai now, Bill and Becca and Holly were the only non-Chinese at the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower that afternoon, and people stared at them.