by Paul Theroux
They had thick, doubled-over wads of money, held together by rubber bands, the sort of wide rubber bands they used to bind chickens' legs when they carried the birds to market. They shouted, they spat, they dumped chips on the tables. They stacked their chips in tottering towers so that croupiers could easily rake them into a drawer. They made gambling seem no more than a sudden irrational discarding of money, people ridding themselves of filthy hundred-dollar notes and grunting as they flung them aside.
Mei-ping looked on without any expression, but when Bunt glanced at her she smiled—at last. It was the longest period of time they had ever spent together, and though he had it in his mind to make love to her, he had hardly touched her. Yet in this vulgar Portugee clip joint in Macao, in the dense cigarette smoke, among the Russian whores and frenzied gamblers, Bunt felt only sweetness towards Mei-ping, and sweetness towards the world. He saw that love had to be generous. He wanted to make love to Mei-ping, but not only that. He wished for her to be happy. He loved her for her nervousness, for the way she cared about her friend, for her distraction and her helplessness and her history, for the way she accepted his attention. She was a fifteen-year-old who had sailed from China alone in a fishing boat and had waded ashore at Lantau Island. She was better than he was—stronger, more decent, much nicer.
"Let's win some money."
"Yes."
"Then go back to the hotel."
"Yes."
"Yes" was the most beautiful word in the language, and in his happy stupor of love it filled him with joy.
Blackjack was a game he understood. He bought five hundred dollars' worth of chips and wandered among the tables watching games in progress—cards being dealt, chips stacked and swapped and raked, and then taken away with a clicking sound that was so final. Bunt slid onto a stool and placed his bet, signaling to the dealer that he wanted to play. He had chosen a table where several other women in black sat with their heads bowed, like a coven of witches.
Mei-ping stood behind him. He could feel the pressure of her body against his back. Only since early that evening had he learned to love the closeness of her body and gain strength from it. He watched the clean playing cards being slipped smoothly from the shuffler box by the dealer, who was a woman with the sort of fingers that were useful in a firm that did stitching and weaving. He knew the physical traits that marked a good worker—the deft fingers, the good posture, keen eyesight and concentration, the hand-eye coordination. Any of these dealers, he knew, would have been productive factory workers.
He folded three times. Then, on his fourth hand, he was dealt a six, a ten—he turned the cards slowly, peeking first, as the other players did, keeping their heads down. Should he fold again? He knew what he needed, but it was a long shot. Yet gambling was not gambling when it was safe, only when everything was risked, all for love. And so he put all his chips in a stack and tapped his fingers to indicate Hit me. The card was slipped facedown from the shuffler and pushed towards him. He turned it over: a five.
"Yes!"
An instant later, from the coven of black-clothed witches, he heard, "Bunt?"
It was his mother, sitting in the midst of the women, all the rest of whom were Chinese, yet she greatly resembled them. She had just lost the hand on his turn of the card, and her pillar of chips was being swiftly removed. Bunt had not seen her, nor she him. But she knew his voice, that strangled cry of triumph.
Collecting his winnings, three stacks of red chips, he said, "Mother, this is Mei-ping."
"Fancy that," she said, and coughed into her fist. "I'm about done, Bunt. Let's catch the next jetfoil back to Hong Kong."
"We were going to stay a titch longer." He thought of the room at the Bela Vista, the bed, the high ceiling, the view of the harbor.
"Don't be silly, Bunt. Take my bag, there's a good chap." She had already turned to go. "Stop faffing around and come along. You too, duckie."
Mei-ping stared at her, and then followed.
13
THE INTERIOR of the jetfoil, as it shook across the water to Hong Kong in the dark, was damp and foul-smelling—odors of smoky clothes and sea fog, the treacly hum of engine oil—even the loud and vibrating hull reeked of its crusted iron, a foul aroma of rust like old fruitcake. From time to time a passenger would loudly clear his throat and spit. To the Chinese, the visible world was a spittoon.
Bunt shut his eyes, refusing to look at where the thing landed. The jetfoil held in its stale air the passengers' bitter emotions too—their anger, their low temperature, their sour frowns of defeat, of having been cheated, which was a kind of sickness. Nearly all of them stank with a sense of grievance and loss. Gamblers on their way home, parched and hung over, all of them losers.
This whole experience of cadaverous jammed-in people was akin in Bunt's mind to spending an hour in a mass grave. His mother, asleep, gave the appearance of being dead—and of having died violently—her head lolled and her legs splayed and her arms and hands twisted, positioned as though she had just been murdered while fending off her attacker.
Bunt was miserable. The sight of Mei-ping staring at the bulkhead only made him more disconsolate. Was she reading the sign fixed to the bracket? It gave instructions for a possible accident, with life-jacket particulars lettered in two languages: In Case of Emergency, and then some business about Muster Stations. In every corner the most innocent-seeming detail seemed to speak darkly of the Hand-over. Not only the emergency sign and the muster stations; what about that placard in front of his mother advertising Speedy Chinese Take-Away^
"What's wrong?" Bunt asked, but hopelessly, because he knew.
Still staring, Mei-ping said, "I have nowhere to go."
Deeper than their sudden departure from Hong Kong, which was just cruel, her grief was Hong Kong dog, a fever of almost fathomless woe. It was the knowledge that the way forward was indistinct, in part because the Hong Kong person had no visitable past. One of the imperatives of living in the colony was that everyone tried to concoct an escape route, whether it was a foreign passport or a relative in Canada or a marriage of convenience. Mei-ping's despair was not so much that she found it hard to imagine her future, it was—more painfully—that she could not go back. She could not return to China. She had fled on the fishing boat; somehow she had survived the fishing captain and the snakeheads. China was a hole: no one ever went back for fear of being buried alive. Hers was the worst of the Hong Kong dilemmas: she could not go forward or back. And her apartment was now dangerous.
Bunt understood her problem better than anyone, because he understood her. He had the solution, though it was still a bit premature to explain it to her. It meant fleeing for good. It would work, because fleeing was in Mei-ping's nature. He needed her fearlessness in this respect, to show him how to pick himself up and go. Without her he felt no desire; with her he was a tiger. She had the passion and the guts; he had the destination. If she didn't like England, they could try another country. He could prove to her that you could go anywhere if there were two of you, for then you were never alone, and your mother was somewhere else.
"Go to Kowloon Tong," he said, leaning over and whispering to Mei-ping. "Stay at the factory. There's a cot in my office and some food and water in the fridge. The microwave's in Miss Liu's room. She has noodles. You'll be fine."
Mei-ping was still staring at the diagrams and warnings on the Emergency sign that was bolted to the bulkhead in front of her face. She had a boy's solemnity: narrow shoulders, a slender neck, a small boy's head, even to the wisps of hair in her eyes.
"Here's the key," Bunt said, detaching it from his key ring and passing it to her as his mother, still looking mugged, sighed in her sleep.
The manner in which Mei-ping took the key, the pressure of her fingers and the trick of its vanishing in her hand, was her way of saying yes. He liked her stuck-out schoolboy jaw and her refusal to see him smiling fondly at her. He knew that she trusted him.
"On Monday we'll make another plan," he said.
She had stopped mentioning the police. There were certain situations that arose in Hong Kong, usually Chinese situations, nearly all to do with the triads or the gangs or the secret societies, that were beyond the reach of the police. This was no gang, but Hung's secrecy arid his confidence were menacing in that way. The whole of China was a secret society. For Mei-ping it was no longer a matter of finding Ah Fu but of saving herself. This was not the time to discuss any of this—the Macao jetfoil at midnight? the stale-fruitcake stink of the hull? the spitting? his mother looking battered? Besides, Mei-ping was afraid, and she was proud, and Bunt was being her benefactor. She needed face.
The jetfoil slowed and sank lower and bumped at the terminal. Betty woke, smacking her lips, making grotesque faces as she adjusted her teeth. Then she reached for her bag and thrashed to get herself upright.
Every arrival in Hong Kong—train, tram, bus, van, ferry, subway—was treated by all passengers as if it were an evacuation on the verge of pure panic. This was no different: people mobbed the jetfoil's narrow exit door. Mei-ping made way for Betty, Bunt noticed with approval, though Betty didn't see it—she too was elbowing forward to the gangway, muttering, "Chinese fire drill."
"Bye for now," Bunt said.
Mei-ping, looking squarely at him, raised her small hand in farewell. She held her other hand against her dress, and that hand was closed, holding the key. She gave nothing away, either in her expression or her posture. Bunt was proud of her for being able to possess such secrets. He marveled at her, and his admiration of her became a general admiration for the crowd, for everyone had secrets in Hong Kong—true secrets that were akin to mysteries, for they were never revealed.
"Come along, Bunt," said his mother.
As the crowd of people hurrying towards Central surged around Mei-ping, and she was lost among those people, Bunt strained to see her, to indicate to her that he cared. The Chinese "Last Look" was so important to her. He could not find her face.
"Bunt!"
His mother began to grumble in advance at the thought of the taxi. Bunt resented her insistence on dragging him away from Macao, hated the idea that he had to go home with his mother. He was prevented from being with the woman he loved on the very night he planned to tell her he loved her.
Of all people, Mei-ping would understand. It was Chinese to have to look after your mother. It was Chinese for dull duty to separate you from pleasure. It was Chinese not to say the thing that was in your heart, Chinese to say "I don't know" when you knew, Chinese to love in silence, Chinese to reveal nothing of your feelings, especially when they were passionate. And so his leaving her in this mood of Chinese contradiction, saying nothing whatever of what he felt, he knew she would read as his desire to stay with her, to love her, to marry her, to take her away. At the moment of their Chinese separation they had never been closer.
In his bed back at Albion Cottage, he arranged his long body with his feet sticking up and he folded his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling, as he had done so happily at the Bela Vista, in the manner of the marble figures on the English tombs.
He prayed that Mei-ping was doing the same thing in Kowloon Tong. It was Chinese to suffer, Chinese not to complain, Chinese to sink into the crowd. His Last Look—not the last one he had attempted, but the last successful one, straining and raising himself up—she was moving through the crowd (he saw her head) like a lost boy. I love you.
In the morning he woke with the intention of hurrying to Imperial Stitching to see Mei-ping. He entered the lounge and saw his mother drinking tea at the breakfast table. She was reading The Sporting News, circling the names of likely horses, "handicapping the ponies," as she called it.
"Lucky us," she said, looking down.
Racehorses had names like Lucky Us, and so it might have been one she liked the odds on. Yet she was still talking in a drawling and self-satisfied way, as though to detain him. She did that sometimes, used her nagging as a net to snare him, threw up a wall of talk before him. And it had worsened lately into a sort of pompous garrulity. The deal with Mr. Hung had changed her outlook and made emphatic certain domineering traits of hers which had up to then been no more than lovable lapses of a funny old dear.
"I always thought your father was such a fool with his money. That bally factory."
She smiled at Bunt and patted the chair next to her at the breakfast table, where her tea lay steaming.
"Mr. Chuck," she said. She was still ticking off horse's names, keeping her head down. "Poor old Henners. Maybe it's true that you only miss people when they're brown bread, but if Mr. Chuck hadn't turned up his toes, would we be looking at a million quid and doing very nicely thank you? I think not."
Again the word "million" in her mouth made her seem such a buffoon; it was an even greater gaffe than all her clichés and rhyming slang. "Million" was a good test of anyone who used it, "million quid" even better. Bankers seldom said it, but passengers on the hard seats in the upper deck of trams clutching thirty-cent tram tickets mumbled "million" all the time.
"We're laughing," she said. "Here, Bunt, have a cup of tea and your porridge before it gets cold. Wang!"
Wang entered, moving sideways in his round-shouldered way, smiling nervously and saying, "Missy?"
"The master's wanting his porridge. And bring some more hot water for the pot, there's a good chap."
When had he become "the master"?
Bunt remained standing. He said, "I was just going out."
All he could think of was Mei-ping, her small head tilted slightly to hear his knock better, or the ring of the telephone.
To challenge him, his mother put out her jaw and swelled her jowls. She was a pale woman with a fleshy face that in repose was a pudding, but her expressions of disapproval seemed to mimic many of the recent British prime ministers whom Bunt knew from their photographs. His mother had cold Thatcher eyes and a Harold Wilson pout, a jaunty Jim Callaghan jaw and Edward Heath's pink beaky nose. She was Churchill now as she shook her jowls and put out her lower lip, and Bunt knew she meant no.
"But I've got to nip over to the factory."
His mother kept her lip thrust out and said, "You'll do no such thing, my poppet."
"Mum," he said, whining slightly.
"It's a race day," she said.
"The road to Sha Tin will be chock-a-block!"
"Happy Valley," she said. "We'll take a taxi. Like old times."
"The first race is at two-thirty," he said, negotiating. "I can easily be back from the factory by then."
"Sit down and eat your breakfast, Bunt," she said, lowering her head once more and studying the racing form. "Monty's coming in an hour."
"What's he want?"
With studied reluctance, as though he were forcing her to do it, she raised her face and gave him a smile of utter contempt.
"What's he want?" she said, mimicking him. (And Bunt thought: If Mei-ping and I ever have a child, I will never ridicule him nor mimic anything he says.) "He wants to help us. He wants to discuss the sale of our factory. He wants to finalize the Hung business. Don't you see? He's liaising."
"Liaising" was another word he never imagined his mother ever using, and he noticed with satisfaction that she sounded a total plonker when she said it.
"Hung's a creep," Bunt said. "Worse than a creep."
"He is a buyer. We are the vendors. He has ready money. That is all that matters. And you call yourself a businessman?"
All this practical commercial wisdom from someone who had spent her life knitting jumpers and paying bookmakers, and showing her Chinese cook how to make oaties and how to knife the crusts from the edges of bloater paste sandwiches, and the way to butter the end of the bread loaf before sawing it off to produce a buttered slice.
"What do you know about Hung?"
"As much as I want to know. Now eat your breakfast."
Over his porridge he fretted, rehearsing a possible trip to Kowloon Tong. If he did go this morning, what would he tell Mei-
ping to calm her? There was nothing. She was safe there—she knew that, and as a long-time stitcher it was her second home in any case. He needed to act, to take her away. His fear had been that she would go to the police and accuse Mr. Hung of killing Ah Fu. But he was fairly certain that she wouldn't. She was too fearful to do that now, and she understood that while it was a tragedy that her friend was missing, she had him, Bunt, as compensation—more than that, a future.
Monty arrived at eleven, apologizing for his lateness, remarking on the view, saying what most people said when they saw the Peak fire station: "You'll be in excellent shape if you have a fire, what with the fire brigade on your doorstep." But seeing Monty unbuckling his briefcase in the lounge of Albion Cottage rather than in his chambers in Hutchison House made the sale of Imperial Stitching to Hung seem darker and more illicit and huggermugger. If his mother had become more pretentiously business-minded in an ill-informed way, and more inclined to gamble, Monty had come to seem devious and sinister. It was all Hung's corrupting influence.
Bunt sat by and watched his mother take charge, fussily, putting on her Maggie Thatcher face.
"When do we see our money?"
"It's a third-party account," Monty said. "When all conditions are fulfilled, Full Moon will be compensated by the ministry, and then the disbursements will be made. You know the conditions."
"Of course," Betty said.
Bunt said, "But I'm a dur-brain. Would you mind repeating the conditions?"
"I explained a while back that you are required to be out of the territory when the transfer is made. I will hand over the keys to the factory when the check clears. Full Moon will disburse the funds, minus closing costs, arrearages, and stamp duty."
Wang was pouring tea, making a business of it, Bunt felt, filling the pot with hot water, tapping the leaves out of the tea strainer.
