Liner

by James Barlow

  ‘He did. Come on, kid. Let’s go and see what’s happening.’

  ‘Let me wipe my face.’

  On the Parade Deck hundreds of passengers crowded the rails and moved from one side of the ship to the other in excitement. Cameras were already at work.

  The Areopagus was passing between Hong Kong Island and Tung Lung on a course of 314 degrees. The sky was faltering a little, the brilliant clarity and heat of the day sagging. It was cool. In the Tathong Channel lights were beginning to flash. Over Dragon’s Back, to the left, the sky was pinkening as the sun began to plunge.

  Stella was stimulated, and forgot her dejection. It was impossible to maintain an attitude of sullenness, whether imitation or genuine. The tremendous approaches to Hong Kong – islands of rock and flashing lights and Boeings flying over with winking red lights, one a minute, it seemed – all communicated excitement.

  The Areopagus slowed off Junk Island to pick up a pilot, and then proceeded with infinite caution. Merchant vessels, junks like swarms of butterflies, sampans, American war vessels, could be seen. As the ship turned to port into the huge areas of Victoria Harbour Stella saw the skyline of tall buildings. Skyscrapers studded the hillsides like matchboxes placed on end. How on earth had they been built on such slopes?

  Ahead was the remarkable promontory of Hong Kong’s airport runway. Boeings descended so low over the Areopagus that people flinched. They took off and roared between skyscrapers, left trails of black smoke which seemed to lie at once on mountaintops.

  Again the Areopagus came almost to a halt as the port authorities came alongside and boarded Now the sun was dropping behind Lantao Island and the whole world was silhouetted islands, flashing lights, real and reflected, and noises – Boeings coming on and off that incredible platform which jutted straight out into the harbour; the subdued roar of traffic; honking junks; sirens; bells; music and the voice over the public address system: ‘May I have your attention, please?’ But few passengers could be bothered to take their senses away from the traffic on the Hung Horn Fairway – the aircraft carrier at anchor, the whole half dozen other passenger liners, Italian, British and American, and the flood of ferries, obviously packed, crossing to and from the piers of Kowloon to those of Victoria. The Areopagus proceeded in waters nine or ten fathoms deep, crossed over submerged gas mains and water pipes, and turned north to shuffle around until she had berthed alongside the Ocean Terminal.

  Whole hours passed, very frustrating to Stella, before the excited passengers flooded ashore. She fulminated in the cabin while Bumble was put to bed, and anger accumulated while her parents simply waited for the child to go to sleep. ‘Oh, come on!’ Stella pleaded, losing patience and caution. ‘She’ll be all right.’ But her mother wouldn’t leave until Bumble was definitely asleep.

  Even then her parents’ decision was to go for a walk. ‘Just for an hour,’ qualified her mother.

  ‘A walk!’ complained Stella.

  Her father snarled at once, ‘Where d’you think you’re going? To the strip clubs or a discotheque?’

  She didn’t dare to argue, for fear of being left behind.

  But even a walk in Hong Kong took her breath away. In the Ocean Terminal alone were two hundred shops, clean, brilliantly lit, and packed with a staggering array of things. Clothes smarter than any in Australia; shoes of finer quality than it seemed possible to buy these days in England; Oriental jars and embroidered linen; fine furniture and carved chests; knitwear; watches and cameras; superb carpets; whiskey; hand-carved ivory; Irish items; Japanese transistors; Thai jewellery; Italian silks; German motorcars. And the people selling these things were intelligent and courteous, the girls often supremely beautiful.

  Her parents shook their heads, refused clumsily to negotiate with these persons, and Stella despised them. Hick people, wowsers, who didn’t even know how to enjoy themselves. They walked along the exhilarating Nathan Road, but bought nothing, seemed overawed and even alarmed. And then Patricia wanted to go to the bathroom and they couldn’t cope with that. They turned back, but Patricia couldn’t even control herself and she howled with temper when they suggested that she should go up a dark entry. She was too frightened to do so. Stella wanted to flee from them all, she was so humiliated. They went to bed at ten o’clock while Stella seethed, aware of the ship’s empty silence, hundreds of people who weren’t coming back until three in the morning –

  It was the same dreariness in the morning. They’d booked on a tour of Kowloon and the New Territories. They fussed about Bumble’s pram and looked tired before the little bus had started out. Her mother was obviously going to end the day with a headache. Serve her right for panicking about silly details.

  Again, the very impact of the place and the strangeness and excitement took away Stella’s frustration. Maybe Diane was doing something terrific with Keith and the others, but this had a fascination even if it was a dreary tour. Perhaps tomorrow they would cross over to Hong Kong Island and have a day there. But it still seemed exasperating to be touring areas of dull flats and fields, factory sites and packed markets when they could have been doing something glamorous – Chinese opera, eating in strange restaurants, riding in a sampan with musicians serenading them; throwing crackers in some festival; travelling on the hydrofoil to gamble at Macau. Instead they were saddled with Bumble and righteousness and played it safe and did this. And it was so hot and the Czechoslovak woman’s amplified voice so loud in the little bus. They flinched before the noise and were, as usual, complaintive, or sad, staring out of the window at crowds who swarmed like bees in a hive . . .

  The woman, tough, blonde, attractive, worn out, it seemed to Stella, talked about fires sweeping squatter areas of old timber, sackcloth and cardboard, of new resettlement areas. It was like being lectured at school and Stella resented it while her parents looked gloomy and responsible.

  Stella’s eye took it in visually, without pity, as her brain accepted the facts without interest. She sweated because it was very hot again. The Czech woman was tireless, telling them about immigrants and refugees, shanty towns without hygiene, built of scrap, spreading like a rash up boulder-strewn gullies and along hillsides. Now look at it! was her message. Torrential rain had washed suburbs away; typhoons had blown down these places; finally fire had killed scores and 50,000 had become homeless in Shek Kip Mei alone . . . But the resettlement estates had gone up . . . H-blocks accommodating 2,300 people each and built in sixteen weeks. And work for the people in factories close at hand . . .

  The bus wound its way through mountains. Stella stared at buffalo and ducks, at factory estates, at people working in the fields, at gravestones. She stood in a crowd of excited Japanese, all photographing each other, at the border and gazed with indifference over flat dull earth and a river to the mountains which were in Red China. The Czech woman talked deafeningly of the bodies washed down from there, and told the passengers that the poor people of the New Territories didn’t want to find these bodies because their religion demanded that if they did they must bury them, which involved great expense.

  Stella yawned in boredom. She, too, felt seedy and liable to collect a headache. The restlessness of several passengers communicated the need for refreshment and after a while the bus stopped outside a floating teashop.

  To reach it they had to cross a frail wooden bridge. In the cafe an old woman offered washcloths, and Stella drank a Coke.

  Crossing the bridge ten minutes later voices assailed her. An old crone pleaded from a sampan. There were in fact twenty of these boats, old, full of boxes and rubbish. And Stella threw a coin into the water. The old woman with a face lined like a pricked balloon missed the coin and Stella was shocked to see her at once weeping. She howled. Other faces stared in pleading, and the old woman, in black rags, got into the water, waste deep, and searched.

  Stella began to shake and went pink in the face. It didn’
t make sense. The poverty and the scores of faces staring at her, not in resentment, but in hope. She was rich, they were poor. A coin mattered. It had no relationship to the man in the cabin fondling her breasts and her whole body shifting about so that he could and would offer tactile fulfilment elsewhere. The poor are always with us. Dr. de Haan said it often. He probably had an income twice that of her dad. College training. He was in with the big people. The voice talked with confidence and scorn, but it came from a full belly. And yet he was right. The poor were always with us, as he quoted. But it had nothing to do with this sorrow she felt. Nothing. Her tired sad parents who were so provincial and dull. And the book that made her hot in the face and moist in the areas of agitation. Why did they seem interlaced like basketry? Why couldn’t she feel sorrow for these people and nothing about the fingers pawing in the cabin and Diane’s shameless penetration, a debased quarter of an hour which had altered her character forever?

  She knew why and resented it. There was no differentiation. Her parents were right. It was all or nothing.

  She was ashamed.

  It was the time of the year when the oppressive humidity of summer had in theory ended, and the keen northeast monsoon should have set in. But the day was hot and pleasant. Fleets of giant fishing junks swept leisurely back and forth toward Macau and the China Sea. Around the Peak the sea hawks dipped and soared. Chinese children flew their bright kites in the breeze. At the Cricketers Club’s nets the men were practicing under the shadow of the Communist Bank of China across the street. In the Des Voeux bearded armed Sikhs stood guard at street corners against hit-and-snatch bandits. The street was a corridor of wealth: of banks of many nations, of gold and jade shops so numerous they might have been selling vegetables. Its regulars met in the smart coffee shops and bars twice daily, negotiating in millions over cigars. These taipans perhaps spent an afternoon in this season watching the hopefuls being put through their paces at Happy Valley race course.

  ‘Where,’ asked Dempsey, ‘would you like to go?’

  But Debbie Vertigan asked in return: ‘What shall I call you?’ – for her a more important problem.

  He suggested in his forthright manner: ‘Whatever you usually call me.’

  ‘I never call you anything,’ she told him truthfully, and giggled.

  ‘Don’t you?’ He thought about it. ‘All your uncles, you tell me, are dead! So I don’t want to be called Uncle –’

  ‘I had no intention –’

  ‘Nor Doctor or Mister. You’d better use my name. It seems reasonable enough, even if it is a silly name. Daniel. It’s no worse than Debbie,’ he claimed.

  ‘No, of course not, Daniel,’ she agreed hastily.

  ‘Let’s browse round this place,’ he suggested, having not much more idea of how to take in Hong Kong than she had.

  Debbie was in any case more mindful of being with him, very aware of his sunburned face; heedful of his contrary nature, revealed in the very Irish wit, sometimes black, the content of apparent malice only revealed as harmless by the gleam in his eyes. She admitted his choice of lightweight suit and the bow tie. Had he thought consciously about her when selecting it for the day? And, if so, what did he see in the mind’s eye? Her own apperception was modest, that of a tall thin girl with arms too long. At most she approved of her own eyes.

  Inevitably, to begin with, they talked of the ship and those aboard her, because, at the moment, these were all they had in common.

  ‘Is it true that Mr. Tomazos is drinking a lot?’ she asked in concern.

  ‘Yes. He found when he went ashore at Adelaide that his wife was being unfaithful.’

  ‘Ah!’ she sighed, hurt on behalf of the nice officer who had chided her gently about this very city. ‘How sad and hurtful. He is such a nice person. I’ll never be unfaithful,’ she claimed, and meant it.

  ‘Not even with the mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘There are always other people worthy of admiration.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘And so how far do you take it?’

  ‘My dog is faithful to me,’ Debbie claimed. ‘If I cannot –’

  Dempsey said in his forthright manner, ‘Your dog’s faithfulness is related to his dinner. It excludes his possible relationship with a bitch!’

  She giggled again, and qualified, ‘You know what I mean!’

  ‘I do, but your dog probably doesn’t . . . Still, it was damn tough on Tomazos.’

  A little later she ventured inquisitively. ‘Who is that Pauline person?’

  ‘Mrs. Triffett? Just a passenger. And a patient of mine.’

  ‘She seemed a bit hysterical.’

  ‘She is neurotic.’

  ‘And a little – vulgar.’

  ‘She has problems of a sort. Didn’t you know she’d attempted suicide? It was strictly for kicks, but she might have succeeded.’

  Debbie was startled.

  ‘But she seemed so – extrovert. And capable of enjoyment . . . You must see some strange people in your work, Daniel.’

  It gave her pleasure to voice his name.

  ‘Pauline’s problems are strictly for television –’

  She wanted to make a remark of disapproval, but didn’t dare to. The last thing she desired from him was any kind of derision.

  They strolled around the main streets of Kowloon, and it had become easier to talk to him. There were many remarkable things to jest about, to comment upon lightly, with a foreigner’s perception – a man carrying an elephant tusk; a coffin shop; very colourful flower stalls’ clothes, exotic tropical fruits . . . They refused sugarcane from one hawker, but accepted hot chestnuts from another. The smell of burning joss touched their nostrils.

  They lunched in a Chinese restaurant. It was a little disconcerting, Debbie found, for they were stared at. And it was incredibly noisy, parties of people shouting to others. She was, however, hungry, and gobbled down shark’s fin soup, fried prawns with chilli sauce, diced chicken with walnuts, sweet and sour pork, crisp shrimp with rice, and Tientsin cabbage with cream.

  ‘Want to go skating?’ Dempsey then asked.

  ‘Goodness, no!’

  ‘Skin diving?’

  ‘No, Daniel, not for me.’

  ‘As a doctor, my advice is violent exercise. But as a friend, I think a trip on a walla-walla.’

  ‘Goodness, what’s that? It sounds very Australian!’

  ‘No. It’s a sort of taxi boat. There are all sorts of islands around here, with caves and terrific views. You’d better reload your camera.’

  They hired the small motorboat and it chugged out into Kowloon Bay. The spectacle was staggering – the white stone skyscrapers, the Boeings coming in over her head onto the mile-long promontory of concrete, the crowded merchant shipping anchorage and typhoon shelter near which were hundreds of sampans. Across the water was the other tremendous horizon, of Victoria itself, more popularly called Hong Kong.

  After a while they left behind the aircraft carrier and white liners and the ferries scuttling to and fro and were tossed about a bit in open water.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Debbie asked.

  ‘I’m not sure, I think its Peng Chau Islands.’

  Just then they came up behind four junks. The two youths in charge of the walla-walla turned to grin in excitement.

  ‘Festival!’ one cried. ‘We follow?’

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Dempsey. ‘Have your camera at the ready, Debbie.’

  They saw now that the junks were being towed by motorboats. Chinese music blared from the loudspeakers lashed to the mastheads of three of them. Paper-decorated shrines were placed at the aft end of the well deck with burning candles and thick sticks of incense. The nearest junk was dressed overall with a hoist of signal flags. As they came clo
se Debbie saw that on board were scores of men and women, and these were making as much noise as possible slamming down Mah Jong chips. Children ran about and pursued each other in and out of cupboardlike cabins and through a maze of spars and ropes.

  Firecrackers exploded and on the fourth junk a hired band made as much noise as it could with clarinets, gongs and cymbals. Young men began to prance about and leap around the gunwales.

  Dempsey said, ‘If the things don’t catch fire they’ll fall overboard anyway . . . Where are they from?’ he asked the two youths.

  ‘What’s he say?’ Debbie pleaded.

  ‘From Yau Ma Ti and Causeway Bay typhoon anchorages. It’s a king of pilgrimage.’

  Scores of fishing vessels and other junks were now joining the procession.

  They were approaching an island, but to land seemed impossible because of rocks. However, the young men from a dozen boats rushed about, waded and shouted, and very soon half a dozen gangways stretched forty yards to a beach.

  The gangways consisted of planks resting on trestles and rocks.

  Women and children flooded ashore, carrying whole roast pigs on ornamented biers, decorated with paper lanterns. A few pessimists carried umbrellas. Hustlers had already set up shop to sell fairings.

  The firecrackers exploded, children shrieked, old woman carried ashore dozens, even hundreds, of hard-boiled eggs, dyed red, chickens, banners and honorific screens. The band had set up on shore.

  The launches cast off their tow and the four junks came in head on, overriding their anchors to facilitate warping out. From these, too, long planks were put ashore and votive shrines were landed, followed by the pigs, each carried on a bier.

  Hundreds of people were now ashore, milling about on a shingle beach. Their own walla-walla pulled alongside a makeshift bridge of planks.

  To get ashore was not easy. Having climbed onto the planking Debbie found that the sagging of the planks had made them springy. They had thus become bouncy and it was funny to see whole families bouncing about, and funnier still when Dempsey fell into the water. After the first shock and then the relief to seeing that he was soaked only as high as his thighs, she giggled. Plenty of people helped him back onto the plank with good humour free from malice.