Robert Ronsson lives in the Severn Valley with his wife Valerie. He retired early from a career in financial services to start writing full-time. Robert is a film enthusiast and he and Valerie help run their town’s community cinema.
Once upon a time in Chinatown
Robert Ronsson
Patrician Press
Manningtree
First published as a paperback edition by Patrician Press 2020
Copyright © Robert Ronsson 2020
The right of Robert Ronsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Patrician Press.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN paperback edition 978-1-9997030-5-9
Published by Patrician Press 2020
To Valerie with undying love and thanks for your support…
Contents
KUALA LUMPUR TO LONDON
PART ONE - 1990
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
PART TWO - 1995
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
PART THREE - 1995-1996
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
KUALA LUMPUR TO LONDON
Author's note
Acknowledgements
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
Winston Churchill
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Final line of dialogue in the screenplay of Chinatown (1974)
Director: Roman Polanski Writer: Robert Towne
OPIUM DEN (1933) Interior. Sunset.
He holds the smoke in his lungs for a long time
before letting it spiral out and up towards the ceiling.
The smoke is harsh and kind and cleansing.
It wipes out memories, strife, mistakes… and Time.
Screenplay for the final scene of Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Director: Sergio Leone Writers: Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcali, Franco Ferrini and Sergio Leone. Based on the novel by Harry Grey.
KUALA LUMPUR TO LONDON
10th May 1996
I am composing a waking dream. Cocooned in the thin British Airways blanket, near-horizontal on a business class seat, I crave sleep so that I won’t be a total zombie when we arrive in Heathrow. Hypnos, though, is a teasing gatekeeper. He opens the door and signals me to enter but, as I pass the threshold, he steps across my path.
Is it guilt keeps me awake? Or is it fear of being found out? I have not led a blameless life but I have nothing to be guilty about, no reason to be fearful. Despite this, like Dorothy’s Texas tornado, my imagination spins out of control and I’m falling, falling into the grasp of my nemesis. She is the archetypal, TV-hard, dogged detective who can construct a murder case out of coincidence. She is the witch of my insomnolence.
Since I can remember, my infallible method for finding the oblivion of sleep has been to fantasise about the future: wild, irrational tomorrows when all my hopes are fulfilled. When it works, as it invariably has until this night, I fall asleep before the blissful finale.
When I was a boy, my fantasy was that my father would come home alive from the war, a victim of amnesia, but otherwise whole. Later, when I knew how limited our lives were by lack of money, it would be Mum scooping the football pools and we’d never want for anything again. In adolescence, the latest object of my crushing desire would find me irresistible and we would enjoy a life together filled with companionable days and passionate nights. In my thirties, Mum’s illness would be arrested, we could share a proper conversation and I would be able to resume a normal life. Like I said, wild imaginings.
Now, after seeing the house and meeting Nancy, it’s impossible to fantasise a wild, irrational future when I’m still trying to figure out what to make of the last six years. The events are recorded on time’s ticker tape. It can be interrogated, spooled from palm to palm under an inquisitive eye; reviewed but never edited.
Immutable it may be, but the past is open to interpretation. Yesterday can be changed in its recollection and retelling, particularly if you have something to hide.
PART ONE - 1990
1
There’s no doubt about it, Mum was having a good day the day she died. As on every day, I coaxed her out of bed and dressed her. A good day meant she didn’t scream at me when I changed her pad. She accepted me as her son and understood I was trying to help her. She even said, ‘Goodbye, son,’ when I kissed the wispy, silver hair that hung over her forehead before leaving for work that Friday morning, the last day of August 1990.
Mum and I share the surname Cross. It’s a non-name – anonymous. A cross is the mark you make when you can’t write. She was given it when she was taken in by Dr Barnardo’s a few years after the first world war. She was a new-born and the shamed mother who left her on the doorstep didn’t leave a label. It was a starry night so Barnardo’s named her Stella. Stella Cross never married; Cross is the name I bear and no family to share it with.
That work day didn’t finish until the early hours of the next morning. The heat wave earlier that month had dissipated but the night was still humid and day-warm. Perhaps this powered my growing sense of apprehension as I approached the house. My footsteps echoed and, as I passed underneath the Aquinas Street lamps, my shadow pirouetted around me as if it were my partner in a Viennese waltz. My key scratched in the lock.
Her bedroom door was open. I could see it from the foot of the stairs. Either I’d forgotten to shut it properly or she’d wanted to use the toilet and had remembered how to work the door handle. It had been a good day for her, remember. I took the stairs three at a time, clambered over the stair gate and hurried into her room. Her chair was empty. She could still have been on the toilet. No matter how long she’d been sitting there, she’d be mouthing the word ‘finished’ waiting for me to clean her.
She wasn’t sitting on the toilet. She was in the bath in her nightdress. Her head was under the clear, cold water. Her white hair drifted in tendrils.
It was one of the paramedics who called the police. I stood in Mum’s bedroom with the blue strobe lights from the street flashing across the ceiling. The police constable was young – no older than the girls at work. He led me downstairs and we sat at the kitchen table. He had a notebook in his hand and explained how it was important to have an immediate record of what happened. He asked me to describe my day. ‘Why did you come home so late?’
‘It was always going to be a long day,’ I said. ‘I work for Scotia Mutual in the City and earlier this year the directors announced its demutualisation. Today was the deadline for the carpetbaggers to buy in—’
‘Carpetbaggers?’
‘
The people who buy bonus bonds knowing they’ll get a windfall pay out when the company’s privatised. We processed an avalanche of applications before the midnight deadline. They were still bringing them in at ten.’
‘You spent all day at the office?’
‘No. I came home at lunchtime and I also popped back about five to check how Mum was. I went back to the office around seven.’
‘Was your Mum all right when you came home earlier?’
I wiped a hand over my tired eyes. Tears welled up. ‘At lunchtime, I changed her pad, gave her a sandwich and settled her in front of the TV. She was fine. I was back again sometime after five – it only takes me twenty minutes to get here. She was asleep in her chair with the television on. Her cushions were dry.’ I sobbed. ‘She was having a good day.’
He waited for me to compose myself, his pencil hovering.
‘She leant on me as I walked her from the toilet to her room. She still smelt fresh from the day before. She goes to the day centre every Monday and Thursday for a bath and stuff. I don’t do this – care for her – every day.’
He nodded. ‘We can do this later – this afternoon. If—’
‘No. Like you said, it’s better to have it right.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I left her sitting in front of the television. “I have to go back to work this evening, Mum. I won’t be able to sit with you,” I said. She didn’t make a scene; she was having a really good day.’
‘And you went back to the office. How long does it take?’
‘Like I said, twenty minutes. Walk to the station, Waterloo and City line, short walk to Cheapside. Twenty minutes, door to door.’
‘Once you were there?’
‘The business was stacked up and I pitched in logging the forms and cheques. It’s not normally work that I do but it was every man on deck. We had handled a record for a day’s business by the time we finished at 11.37 – I made a note of it – and we opened a bottle of Champagne the boss had left for us. I gave the girls their taxi fares from petty cash. After they were safely on their way, I set the alarm, locked up and got a taxi myself.
‘Did your mother often try to bathe herself?’ he asked.
‘Never. She had difficulty working the handle on her bedroom door. She had difficulty with the geography of the house. Basically, she only felt safe in her room.’
‘She’s never run a bath before?’
I shook my head, ‘Not for the last five years… at least five years. She couldn’t work the hot tap. It’s too stiff. I didn’t get it loosened. It seemed safer to leave it that way.’
‘But she could turn the cold tap.’
‘It’s much looser. I can only think she must have filled the bath with cold water. When she got in, even if she felt the cold, she was probably too frail to get out.’ I choked back a sob. ‘Perhaps she slipped – the cold water would have made her weak – would hypothermia…?’
‘I’m sorry. This must be difficult.’ His stubby pencil paused. ‘And you’re sure she couldn’t have worked the hot tap.’
‘Go up and try it yourself, Constable. It’s hard, even for me. No, she couldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t want her scalding herself.’
He looked up sharply as if he was trying to discover something behind my eyes. ‘But you said she was unlikely to make it to the bathroom alone, so you could have had the hot tap fixed without it being a danger to her.’
‘You haven’t cared for an adult relative, have you? You’ve got to allow them some dignity. I leave my mother alone in there when she’s able to tell me she wants the toilet. I wouldn’t forgive myself…’ I covered my face with my hands. ‘In any event, I use the bathroom downstairs. She hasn’t had a bath – other than at the day centre – since… I don’t know when. I can’t remember when that tap was last used.’
The sun was rising by the time I was alone again. I slumped in Mum’s armchair – the one she should have been in when I came home. A sense of elation seeped across the dry-grit of my exhaustion. I was free at last.
At the inquest, the pathologist reported there was no evidence of scalding and, in any event, it was unlikely Mum could have turned the hot tap. Because of the water, the usual calculations to determine time of death weren’t reliable but nevertheless, she tentatively estimated that Mum died between 9pm and midnight. There were no marks on Mum’s body to indicate she had been mistreated or there had been a final struggle. The young policeman confirmed that the girls at the office and the taxi driver had verified my whereabouts.
The coroner concluded that Mum had run the cold bath herself and her condition would have prevented her knowing that she had to get out of the water. His verdict was death by misadventure.
My verdict? She had been having a good day but not good enough.
As Mum’s body passed through the curtain into the fire, I turned to check the chapel for the last time. I was still alone. Mum and I had lived in a bubble of inter-dependency. The future was a narrow ridge-top path with chasms of despair on both sides. Time pushed me in one direction; there was no retracing my steps even as the ground ahead crumbled beneath my feet.
The house’s silence fell around me like a shroud. The floorboards no longer creaked as she shuffled from bed to chair and back again. There were no more gasps or growls, no cries of ‘Finished!’. The blue light from her television had stopped projecting the spectres of soap actors across the landing.
I sat in the kitchen grasping a mug of coffee and took stock. My churning gut, my bubbling thoughts, underscored the conclusion that I was a sad, lonely, middle-aged man connected to nobody outside my work. But I must have had a family. Everybody has a family… somewhere.
2
Families have secrets. Or, more accurately, there are shadows at the edges of understanding that nobody dares ask about. For instance, Mum must have told me, when I was young, that my dad died in the war. Did she also tell me he was one of the first to land on the D-day beaches on the 6th June 1944?
Whether she did or not, it was always my belief that he had died a hero on a Normandy beach – seven months and four days before I was born. I’d also absorbed from the fabric of the house and from the gaps between Mum’s sentences, that she and Dad were going to get married when the war ended. He died and I was excess baggage.
Mum had a cleaning job in the City that meant I woke myself up and dressed myself for school from an early age. Her evening shift work at the cosmetic factory made me a latchkey kid, returning to an empty house. At my grammar school I was one of the few boys wearing a jumble sale uniform and leaky shoes.
We couldn’t afford television so I read books from the library and found another, better world solving crimes with the Secret Seven or the Famous Five, sharing adventures with the Swallows and Amazons. This was how the muscle of my imagination was nurtured and I exercised it by re-enacting my father’s warrior death times beyond measure or by conjuring up his miracle return.
I didn’t see my birth certificate until I was fourteen. ‘The school’s doing a trip to France at Easter, Mum. Everybody’s going.’
‘You’re not. We can’t afford it.’
‘They say that kids who get free school dinners don’t have to pay the full amount.’
She was wearing, as she always did at home, her ‘housecoat’. It was a blue-checked, nylon cover-up with a thin cotton belt around the waist. If an unexpected visitor rang the front-door bell she would, in a slickly choreographed routine, whisk off her housecoat before she reached the kitchen door, swoop to open the cupboard under the stairs as she passed and toss the housecoat in.
We were chatting in the kitchen. Me sitting at the squeezed-in table, Mum fussing by the gas-stove, apparently mulling over whether the poor-family subsidy made a difference. ‘I won’t take any charity,’ she finally said.
‘It’s Normandy.’ This was as near as I could go to the taboo subject of my father.
She was facing away from me and hunched over as if my words had loaded something heavy on her back. ‘You h
aven’t got a passport.’
‘They say I can use an identity card because it’s a school trip. I can get one at the post office.’
‘Why are you so keen?’
A terror gripped my throat. If I said the wrong thing now… ‘It’ll be good for my French. And I’m thinking O’ level History: 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry and all that. It’s educational.’
She turned and smiled. ‘Well I can’t stand in the way of your education, can I?’
I jumped down from the stool. My knees nearly gave way with relief. ‘I can go?’
‘How much is it?’
I told her, watching her face to see whether it was beyond our reach.
She didn’t flinch. ‘If you’re that keen, you won’t mind it being instead of a birthday present, will you? And you’ll have to save something out of your Colonial Stores money.’
She was referring to my job as an after-school, grocer’s delivery boy. I had the bike with the big basket on the front and a Colonial Stores apron to wear while I was delivering. It was a proper job. ‘Really? I can go? Thanks, Mum.’
She hugged me and I was tall enough to be able to rest my chin on her shoulder. I didn’t want her to see my face. ‘I have to have a birth certificate to get an identity card. I do have a birth certificate, don’t I?’
She gripped my wrists and held me at arm’s length. ‘Course you do, you silly ha’porth.’
A few days later she showed it to me. She pointed to the blank space. ‘They wouldn’t let me put your dad’s name on it.’
‘Why not?’
She shrugged. ‘They said the father had to be there in person because I didn’t have a marriage certificate—’
‘But that’s because you were waiting until after the war—’
‘—and when I explained that he’d been killed—’
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