At last one young and pasty-faced man with glasses pushed through the crowd and said he spoke a little English and could he help?
We thanked him and said, yes, we wanted to buy some condoms, some rubberovers, and we would be very grateful if he could explain that for us.
He looked puzzled, picked up the rejected packet lying on the counter in front of the affronted shop assistant and said, ‘Not want rubberover. This better.’
`No,’ Mark said. `We definitely want rubberover, not pills.’
`Why want rubberover? Pill better.’
`You tell him,’ said Mark.
‘It’s to record dolphins,’ I said. ‘Or not the actual dolphins in fact. What we want to record is the noise in the Yangtze that . . . it’s to go over the microphone, you see, and…’
‘Oh, just tell him you want to fuck someone,’ muttered Chris, scottishly. ‘And you can’t wait.’
But by now the young man was edging nervously away from us, suddenly realising that we were dangerously insane, and should simply be humoured and escaped from. He said something hurriedly to the shop assistant and backed away into the crowd.
The shop assistant shrugged, scooped up the pills, opened another drawer and pulled out a packet of condoms.
We bought nine, just to be on the safe side.
‘They’ve got aftershave as well,’ said Mark, ‘if you’re running out.’
I had already managed to dispose of one bottle of aftershave in the hotel in Beijing, and I hid another under the seat of the train to Nanjing.
‘You know what you’re doing?’ said Mark as he spotted me. I’d thought he was asleep.
‘Yes. I’m trying to get rid of this bloody stuff. I wish I’d never bought it.’
‘No, it’s more than that. When an animal strays into new territory, where it doesn’t feel at home, it marks its passage with scent, just to lay claim. You remember the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar? They’ve got scent glands in their wrists. They rub their tails between their wrists and then wave their tails in the air to spread the scent around, just to occupy the territory. That’s why dogs pee against lampposts as well. You’re just scent-marking your way round China. Old habits die hard.’
‘Does anyone happen to know,’ asked Chris, who had been lolling sleepily against the window for an hour or so, ‘what the Chinese for Nanjing actually looks like? I only ask so as we’ll know when we’ve got there.’
At Nanjing we had our first sight of the river. Although Shanghai is known as the gateway to the Yangtze, it isn’t actually on it, but is on a connecting river called the Huangpu. Nanjing is on the Yangtze itself.
It is a grim town, or at least we found it to be so. The sense of alien dislocation gathered us more tightly into its grip. The people we found to be utterly opaque, and would either stare at us or ignore us. I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a Frenchman on the plane to Beijing.
‘It is difficult to talk to the Chinese people,’ he had said. ‘Partly it is the language, if you do not speak Chinese, but also, you know, they have been through many, many things. So they think it is safer perhaps to ignore you. If they talk to you or do not talk to you they are paid the same whatever, so, pfffft.
‘I think if they get to know you they talk a little more, perhaps, but pfffft.’
The sense of dislocation was sharpened by the presence, in the centre of town, of a single major Western-style high-rise hotel, called the Jing Ling. It was an anonymously grand conference-holding, revolving-bar-and-atrium-ridden modern hotel of the sort that generally I heartily dislike, but suddenly it was like an oasis to us.
We made straight for the revolving top-floor bar like rats from a sack and sat huddled for safety round a cluster of gin and tonics. After twenty minutes or so of sitting in these unexpectedly familiar surroundings, we found, as we gazed out of the panoramic windows at the vast, alien, darkened city which turned slowly around us, that we felt like astronauts in a vast, warm life-support system, looking out over the hostile and barren terrain of another planet.