by Martin Booth
* * *
‘Mistah Sandin’am. You wake up please.’
He grunted and turned on to his side, facing away from the roomboy who stood on the parquet floor by the bed, looking down at him.
‘Mistah Sandin’am. I do you room now. You please ge’ up.’
Sandingham sat up and felt, as he did so, a twinge in his ankle. He looked blearily at the man standing over him. He wanted only to sleep longer, a desire in him that was deeply rooted and one which he always found inexplicable, even to himself. Lying-in was a luxury of which he had been for so long deprived that now, with it accessible, he treasured it.
As if anticipating his first words, the roomboy said, ‘It ha’f-pass ten. It time for you to ge’ up.’
Sandingham swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached to the alarm clock for confirmation. It still showed 2.09. Daylight filled the room, so it was obvious that dawn had come and gone: it was not afternoon, for he would have sensed that, and, besides, the roomboys always did their rounds in the morning. He reasoned all this quite clearly in the half-concious state into which he had sat up.
‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ll be out in five minutes. Do the next room first.’
The roomboy, who had turned aside upon seeing that the man was semi-naked, said nothing in reply. He was used to it. He simply left. Sandingham could hear him clattering a metal dustpan and broom outside, followed by the jangle of a bunch of brass keys.
His ankle hurt him. He rubbed it and the pain increased. The makeshift cloth bandage had slipped during his sleep and now he was rubbing the material of his trouserleg against raw flesh.
With difficulty, for he was stiff in every joint, he lifted his foot into the sink once more and bathed the wound with warm water, rubbing the hard, hotel-courtesy soap into it. This increased his pain but he knew it would stop any infection. He tried to remember how he had come by the cut and then it came back to him: barbed wire. Had he really tried to climb over the wire? No; he had merely swung on it. But why? Then he recalled the papaya and the birds eating seeds.
Stiffly, he lifted his foot out of the basin and let the grimy water run away. Then, under a clean flow from the tap, he rinsed and wrung out the bandage before tying it back around his cut.
The knots of the damp material held better and he tightened them firmly. Even twisting the cloth to wring it out and then to tie the knot caused his fingers to ache. He ached so much these days, especially in the mornings. Sometimes his head ached as well, a sly throb that was not centred on his brow or at the back of his head, like a migraine, but which came from the very core of his skull, the deep tissues of the brain. This morning, however, he noted with a certain detachment that the headache was absent.
He relieved himself in the small toilet that adjoined his room. His urine was richly yellow, almost amber, and it smelled bad again. Some mornings it was almost clear, a pallid stream that burned as it flowed; on others it was like today.
As the flush operated, he checked behind the cistern. It was loosely mounted a quarter of an inch out from the wall and into this crevice he had stuffed a tiny parcel, wrapped in several layers of silver foil taken from expensive cigarette packets that he had found off and on in the ashtrays of the hotel. It was safe. So far, no one had found it. He took it out and sniffed it. There was a faint scent working its way out through the foil, a scent that could have been a delicate mixture of sandalwood oil, rosewater and exotic herbs, had it not been a third of an ounce of opium.
The odour made him want it. He started to unwrap the foil but then stopped. Discipline: one could only stay alive by discipline. Hadn’t Willy always said that? And lived by the motto? And died by it, tied to a wooden cross on a beach? Besides, the roomboy was nearly through with the next room and this was his emergency cache, not one for a morning’s indulgence. He returned it to its hiding place, noting that the overhanging cistern lid still effectively hid it from view both from above and each side. Roomboys were hardly likely to lie on the ground behind the cistern and look up to catch the dull glint of the foil. To be safe, though, he took the opium out again and wrapped the foil in a sheet of lavatory paper to mask the possible gleam.
‘You can do my room now,’ he said as he left it; the roomboy was closing the door of the adjacent room. He spoke with what he hoped was dignity.
The roomboy replied politely, ‘T’ang you, Mistah Sandin’am,’ but he knew the truth about this shabby customer. He was one who seldom paid his room charge, never tipped, seldom ate in the hotel restaurant but was more likely to be found at food stalls in the streets of Mong Kok. The roomboy had seen him one evening, seated at a food stall in Tung Choy Street, eating plain rice with some green vegetables and a sliver of fish. It was probably all the man could afford.
Trying not to limp, Sandingham walked down the corridor through the floor lobby to the main hotel staircase. The floor captain ignored him: he was busy defrosting the refrigerator in which the guests kept soft drinks and perishable luxury foods which they ate in their rooms.
Sandingham glanced at the interior of the fridge with the expert eye of one trained in scrounging, his mind at once registering what there was that might be edible should he later have the luck of discovering the floor desk nearby unattended.
The stairs took him down to the hotel lobby. When he had reached the mock marble floor of the hotel entrance, he paused and surveyed what he could see. To his right was the door to the establishment’s restaurant with a lime-green plastic surround to it that was back-lit by neon strips at night. Across from that, beside the door to the ground floor corridor, was the bar. Behind it, the inverted bottles of spirits, glasses, chrome shakers and ice buckets and other paraphernalia of cocktails glittered in the coarse glare from a row of concealed electric bulbs. The barman was wiping the green marble top with a duster. Opposite, and to his left, was the round curve of the hotel reception desk with the staff seated behind it – the girl clerk who handled registration, the two Chinese clerks who prepared the bills, operated the telephone switchboard, sorted the mail and took reservations in halting English, and the manager. Immediately to his left, under the stairs, was a cubby hole in which the porter by night, and the bell-hop by day, lived while awaiting work. Ahead of him was the hotel’s main entrance, two glass doors with large metal handles in their centres bearing the initials of the hotel and its crest. Outside, sunlight blazoned off the front lawn and off the rows of porcelain plant pots containing chrysanthemums and asters: these lined the low front wall which, in turn, overlooked the street below. A taxi, a Morris saloon painted red with canary yellow Chinese characters on the doors, was just driving off. The bellboy, a Chinese lad about twelve years of age, wearing a white uniform with a matching pork-pie hat, was standing on the steps leading up to the glass doors. He was counting a tip.
The manager swivelled in his chair to talk to the register clerk. Then he stood and crossed the office space behind the desk to consult the register itself.
He was a tall man, much taller than the rest of the Chinese staff, and spoke the local Cantonese with a misplaced accent. Sandingham understood this local dialect and he knew a strange accent when he heard one. The manager’s height and intonation indicated clearly that he was from northern China. Since the Communist take-over vast numbers of well-to-do northern Chinese had flocked south and those unable to afford passage to Malaya, the Philippines or the USA had settled as refugees in Hong Kong. Those who had been well educated, especially in mission schools or overseas, had been able to obtain reasonable employment. The rest had come to form the basic labour force of the colony.
Mr Heng, the manager, was an impressive figure of a man and not just because of his height. He was in his late forties, strongly built, with close-cropped grey hair. His head was squared off on top, the shape exaggerated by his haircut, and he wore gold-framed bi-focals. He was always dressed in a smart charcoal grey or light blue suit. Sandingham coveted those suits. The man’s hands were large and although his v
oice was quiet he had an awesome temper. The staff of the hotel respected or feared him. He was not one of them. He was like a mandarin lording over his albeit small domain.
Sandingham backed up three steps. No one could see him except the bellboy, who was still preoccupied counting his small change.
The manager came out from behind the desk and walked towards the main entrance, his back to Sandingham. His highly polished shoes clicked on the floor, and then softened on the carpet that ran from the large, sunken main doormat to the stairs.
As soon as Heng’s back was to him, Sandingham went smartly down the remaining steps, turned left and walked as quickly as he could along the ground floor corridor.
It was cool there, for the corridor was bordered on one side not by a wall but by flower beds in which grew an assortment of small frond-like palms and broad-leafed bushes. He reached the rear door of the hotel unseen. It was open and he noticed that the dustbins had been taken out into the street and were now piled alongside the tea chests upon which he had earlier stood.
The street at the rear of the hotel was deserted. From over a high stone wall opposite drifted the chanting of school children learning mathematics by rote, in Cantonese. The flag above the gate of the playground and basketball court indicated that this was a Communist school.
Within fifty seconds, he had reached the end of the street and disappeared around the corner.
He was now in Soares Avenue. The buildings on either side were mostly pre-war and he could vaguely remember some of them. They were made of grey concrete in the blunt style of the thirties with small shops giving directly on to the pavement. Between the buildings lay dank alleyways, down the centres of which were gutters running with slow trickles of stinking water. When the typhoons came in the late summer months, these alleyways were awash with garbage.
As he passed the shops, he looked in them. One was a sweet-shop, its window displaying a varied assortment of Chinese confectionery in shiny paper with blue, red and green printing on the wrappers. Another was a fruit and vegetable shop. Outside this, he paused and rummaged in his pocket for a coin. A hand-painted cardboard notice, stuck vertically into a box of tangerines, stated in Cantonese that the fruit was five cents each. Sandingham understood the characters. From his pocket he drew a ten-cent coin and the woman in the shop came out from the doorway to serve him. He gave her the coin and helped himself.
This was not a shop where a European would normally go – it was in a back street, halfway up the Kowloon peninsula. Europeans shopped at the southern end of Nathan Road and even then seldom bought food. They purchased clothes, consumer goods, jewellery, curios of soapstone, jade or ivory. The buying of food was invariably left to their servants.
However, the shop owner was not surprised. She had seen Sandingham before, wandering the streets, standing by the bus stop, reading the previous day’s issue of the South China Morning Post. She assumed that he was a poor White Russian.
The tangerine was small even for such a fruit, and the peel stung when he wedged some under his fingernails. He had discovered recently that the quick on his thumbs was raw under the nails and, on occasion, it wept a straw-coloured liquid. Once, the previous week, he had woken to find the nail badly bruised, but he could not recall having caught or banged it.
He reached Argyle Street and crossed over through the mid-morning traffic to the bus stop going east. Behind him, up a low hill, Kadoorie Avenue and Braga Circuit wound through trees and past the houses of the very wealthy. He looked along the street to see if there were a bus in sight, and saw instead a large American convertible come to a halt at the junction leading up the hill. At the wheel sat a beautiful Eurasian girl in her mid-twenties. Her cheekbones were soft, her skin the cool cream so common in such a mixture of races and her deep brown eyes shone. Her auburn hair was short and she was wearing a blouse of sky-blue cotton. As she spun the steering wheel, Sandingham could see her gold ladies’ Rolex wristwatch catch the bright sunlight. He pondered how much such a watch, not to mention the girl herself, might fetch where he was going.
The bus, with its red sides and off-white roof, was not long in coming. He put his hand out to hail it and the conductor yanked on the silver grid gate at the front entrance of the vehicle. Sandingham boarded the bus and sat down on a wooden slat seat. The conductor pulled twice on the thin cord rope that ran the length of the vehicle and the bell dinged by the driver. He paid the ten-cent fare and received a flimsy ticket made of something very like thin greaseproof paper. He folded this once and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt. He would need it later.
After it had circled a roundabout, the vehicle slowed down and stopped at Kowloon Hospital where at least half the passengers alighted. This took several minutes, for the bus was full.
It was a section of the route that Sandingham did not like. As the bus pulled away from the kerb he looked at the floor between his shoes to avoid seeing anything out of the window. But there, in the rubbish under the seat, was something that rudely jarred his memory. Such was the connection with this road in his mind that even garbage on the floor reminded him of it. He smiled ruefully. It was perhaps fitting that it was such trash that did cause his brain to think back. That was what it had all been about, really. On the floor was the screwed-up silver lining of a chocolate bar.
The bus halted for an amber traffic light. He looked up from his feet and automatically from right to left. A few houses with deep-set balconies now stood where gardens had once been laid out. But the soil was poor and vegetables had found it hard to gain sustenance. So had men.
An elderly Chinese in black baggy trousers that seemed to be made of tarred cloth, and a loose-fitting jacket of the same material, was crossing at the lights. Ahead of him he was pushing a home-made wooden trolley mounted on four pram wheels, and piled high with Chinese cabbages.
Bemused, Sandingham watched the man advance slowly across the road. Once, that could have been him: except that they had had their trolley made out of the chassis of a wrecked Baby Austin from which anything worth salvaging had been systematically removed and spirited away.
His eyes followed the pedestrian to the entrance of the Argyle Street camp, outside which stood a young British soldier. His rifle was at the slope and his knees were pinkly sunburnt. He was sweating profusely and had dark semi-circular stains under his armpits. He could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen. For a split second Sandingham thought he was wearing a soft, khaki peaked hat but then he blinked as a quick flash of sun came off a black Humber staff car, turning in through the gates, and he realised that the hat was actually the squaddy’s hair.
No longer able to watch, he looked at the floor again. The silver paper was stirring in the breeze. Squeezing his hand down between his legs, Sandingham picked up the foil and smoothed it out carefully on his thigh, taking great care not to tear or cause additional creases in it. Once flattened out, he held it up to the bus window. There was a pin-prick of light shining through it. Someone must have trodden it on to a sharp rivet on the floor. It was no use. Even a miniscule hole invalidated the whole sheet. If there were the slightest hole it would never have done for the condenser for the radio.
The huge open space by the fence to the airport at Kai Tak was surrounded on three sides by the intersection of three main thoroughfares – Prince Edward Road, Argyle Street and Ma Tau Wai Road. Sandingham looked at the area of dust and scrubby grass. Through the centre of it ran a depression, once a deep ditch, the sides of which had now been eroded smooth: he had been one of those who’d dug it.
Dotted around the area were small groups of people sitting or standing by low hovels made of cardboard boxes, plywood scraps, hessian sacking and splintering planks. They were the occupants of the lowest spoke on the refugee wheel of fortune – squatters who had nothing and who lived by petty crime, begging and the hardest of labouring jobs. By many of the makeshift shelters, cooking fires were smoking under oil cans and broken plates upon which the most basic of foodstuffs
was being prepared. He remembered how he, too, had once cooked with empty tin cans and not all that far away, either.
Kowloon City was walled not merely by an actual structure but also by history and atmosphere. Out of the jurisdiction of the Hong Kong Police, unmapped and with no published street plan, it was like a tiny sovereign state of its own in which the monarchs were the leaders of the Chinese criminal fraternity. Secret society bosses – the Triads and the Tongs, the Chinese ‘mafia’ – ruled with hands of iced jade and the assistance of well-trained thugs and a cast-iron oath-taking system which no one, once sworn in, dared ever violate. No European would think to enter Kowloon City, yet Sandingham did. In a manner of speaking, one of the local bosses knew him. They had met for the first time a decade before and there was, he felt, a mutual bond of shared experience between them.
He stepped down from the bus and began to walk up Lung Kong Road, weaving through the throng of shoppers who were purchasing vegetables from a large group of street hawkers. Then, looking about cursorily to make sure he was not in sight of a policeman, he crossed into the walled city. Word of his arrival, he knew, had travelled ahead of him down the narrow streets and passages, carried by small urchins operating under the orders of lookouts posted in the surrounding streets.
He was heading towards Mr Leung’s house, a building at the end of a narrow alleyway that was a cul-de-sac and therefore easily guarded.
‘What you name?’
The demand came with a firm thrust into his chest from a bunched fist. It wasn’t a punch, only a hard push, yet it momentarily took his breath away. His chest was not strong.
‘Joseph Sandingham,’ he said, adding in Cantonese, ‘Mr Leung is waiting for me.’
