Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [74]
Success, we thought. But then we opened the packet and found it to contain a bubble sheet of pills.
“Right idea,” said Mark with a sigh. “Wrong method.”
We were quickly floundering again as we tried to explain to the now slightly affronted lady that it wasn’t precisely what we were after. By this time a crowd of about fifteen onlookers had gathered around us, some of whom, I was convinced, had followed us all the way from the Friendship Store.
One of the things that you quickly discover in China is that we are all at the zoo. If you stand still for a minute, people will gather round and stare at you. The unnerving thing is that they don’t stare intently or inquisitively, they just stand there, often right in front of you, and watch you as blankly as if you were a dog-food commercial.
At last a 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 on 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 around 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.”
In 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. We found the people to be utterly opaque; they 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