by Martin Booth
His hands shook as he transferred the money to the inner pocket of his jacket and then rammed the handbag well down into a low, thorny bush. It was a pity, because the bag itself would have fetched a bit in a pawnshop; but a European man pawning a European woman’s handbag would have aroused suspicion, and he was sure the police kept tabs on pawnshops here just as they did in Britain. Now it would be some time before it was discovered, and by then the damp, the heat and the ants should have reduced it to a state of fragile decomposition.
He knew that he had been very lucky. He had expected he would have had to steal at least three such bags to make up his rent, but at once he had enough and some to spare even without cashing in the sterling. In comparison to what he had been two hours before he was rich.
* * *
The green tram pulled up at an island stop in the middle of Johnston Road near a playground which, every evening, attracted hoards of ragamuffin children from the surrounding sidestreets of Wan Chai. Sandingham stepped down and the tram, with much grinding and howling of metal and humming of static electricity, surged off along the sunken road rails towards Causeway Bay and North Point.
He negotiated his way through the heavy evening traffic, crossed Hennessy Road and walked down a narrower street consisting of overcrowded three- and four-storey buildings that were of pre-war construction, and showed it. Their deeply-set balconies provided the pavements with square-pillared arcades: in them collected rubbish, small urchins and elderly Chinese men who seemed to congregate always in twos and threes, seated upon wicker chairs or wooden boxes, chattering and playing tin kau.
There were shops here, too, mostly selling food. The rice shops displayed their wares in barrels or sacks open at the top, each containing a different type of rice, long grain, short grain and, for all Sandingham knew, thin grain and fat grain. To him food was food, rice was rice; he had little time for variations. The vegetable shops offered trays of water spinach, root ginger, Chinese cabbage, yam-like tubers, spring onions and watercress. The fruit shops sold mangoes and papayas, passion-fruit and oranges, bananas and pomeloes. The lights were just coming on and enhanced the exotic fruits with garish hues.
But the shops were greatly outnumbered by the bars. Wan Chai was the area of dives and brothels, cheap perfume, over-priced drinks and whorehouses, each with a neon sign outside competing with its neighbour for brightness and variation. The area was not far from the Royal Naval dockyard and was also near the Gloucester Road pier where all American sailors landed when coming ashore from warships on what was euphemistically labelled ‘R&R’ – rest and recreation. Sandingham had always been amused at this term for shore leave. They seldom rested and they often re-created.
He turned right into Lockhart Road. Just round the corner was the Vancouver Bar. He had been there often and was known slightly to the proprietor and well-known to the barman. The girls who sat in front of the plywood-panelled bar were a shifting population. They came and went as the mood, the proprietor or their pimps took them. He wondered if Lucy would be working the bar or if she had been moved on.
It was still early in the evening and the US sailors, whose ships were dry of alcohol, had not yet hit shore for a hard drinking night out; nor had Murray Barracks yet released its hoard of British squaddies for whatever dark-hour revelries were on offer: this would very likely include brawls with American crewmen. As he pushed through the bead curtain that separated the bar from the pavement Sandingham noticed the luminous hands of the clock over the drinks shelves. It was seven-fifteen.
The bar was in semi-darkness although it was still more or less daylight outside; the sun was well down over the hills of the distant western islands. In the centre of the large room was an area reserved for dancing, although this usually meant hanging around a bar-girl, hands pressing her buttocks, rather than obeying any musical impulse. This dance floor was in turn hemmed in by wooden and plastic-topped tables, at each of which was a set of metal chairs. The tables were round and bare; the floor was strewn with damp sawdust. In one corner, like a blurting electronic reptile with painted scales and hidden inner lights, was a much-abused jukebox. Overhead, four ceiling fans turned slowly in the half-light.
The rattling of the curtain beads caused a fluster of activity in a back room. The girls were still off duty, and the prospect of an early customer agitated them into action. The barman came out from another doorway, his face beaming in anticipation. He did not lose his smile when he saw Sandingham, even though he knew that this one was not a high-spending, high-rolling Yank from Ohio, hungry for a broad and a beer.
‘Mr Sandin’am, you okay? Long time no see you Wan Chaiside. You go ‘way?’
Sandingham leaned on the bar, rubbing the sole of his shoe on the brass rail that ran along the base on his side of the plywood. The dollar notes were uncomfortable under his instep.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not been away. Just busy on Kowloon-side.’
‘You got job yet?’ asked the barman with artful perspicacity. He added, ‘It no good you got no job. Must have job fo’ money. Fo’ good money. No money, no d’ink, no eat, no livin’.’
It was good to be in the bar once more. Sandingham felt at ease here, as if he were released from the world and its cares, petty slights and dangers in the stink of eau de cologne and sawdust and spilt drink and sweat. Somehow they disguised his worries as effectively as the sanitary wicks killed the stench of stale flesh in his hotel room.
For a brief moment the squalor of it all came to him. It seemed as if he had been living in squalor, or on the ill-defined boundaries of it, for years. He had to admit it to himself, in all honesty. And it wasn’t for lack of ready cash. It was simply a matter of habit. He had grown used to squalor. It suited him; it fitted him. He was disgusted with his world, but accepted it because it accepted him.
In earlier days, they had all sworn that it would not get to them. For many of them, it hadn’t. He saw one or two of them, from time to time, from a distance and true to type they had reverted to wearing starched white shirts and old regimental or mercantile company ties. They wore polished brown shoes, had creases pressed into their trousers, drove Ford or Austin cars, and carried leather briefcases, and talked to their wives in the street. They had succeeded. He had not.
‘Hey! You like beer, Johnny?’
Sandingham looked up. He had been staring at his shoe.
‘This no’ Johnny,’ said the voice, not loudly yet as if broadcasting the news. ‘This Joe. Hi, Joe! How you doin’ now? Long time you no come.’
‘Hello, Lucy.’ He was glad to see her and it showed in his eyes. ‘You’re still here, then.’
She was of that indeterminate age between sixteen and thirty when it is hard to judge a Chinese woman’s years. In fact, she was nineteen, but it would have been difficult to pin her down to an age or guess from her appearance. She was short and very slim, with small breasts and hip-bones that pushed hard against the tightness of her turquoise brocade cheong-sam. On her feet she wore a pair of soft cloth shoes and on her left wrist a cheap watch. She wore no other jewellery. Her hair was black, loose and long, reaching to her shoulder-blades. Her skin was sallow in colour and soft in texture; her cheekbones were not as high, and her eyes were rounder than many of her peers in the bar-world. Nevertheless she had the hard edge of the prostitute about her: a certain steeled look in her eyes, a distancing. Her voice could be raucous, and she could use her tongue with curt viciousness to put down any man that displeased her: but every bar-girl has a dream that one man will be unlike the rest, and Joe Sandingham was the one that inhabited her fantasies.
‘I stiwl here. Where I got to go? You no tak’ me out. You no buy me bar-girl champagne.’
He smiled because he liked her, and because the last word was the only one she had pronounced properly.
‘Tonight, I buy you d’ink,’ he teased.
This mild mockery pleased her for he often seemed so deep in sorrow, even in the easy atmosphere of the Vancouver Bar and h
er company. Most of the men she knew were happy enough, if only artificially so, prompted by gin, rum or rye whiskey. Joe was rarely in possession of even so much as a fragment of joy.
‘Maybe buy me out one hour.’ It wasn’t a statement or a question, but a hybrid of the two.
The barman poured Sandingham a beer in a narrow tumbler and gave Lucy an innocuous-looking fizzy drink in a flat-bowl martini glass. It was faintly yellow and came out of a champagne bottle. The bottle was only for show and to allay the fears of any half-cut jack-tar who might question where the bubbly stuff came from: in fact, it was lemonade diluted with a little cold tea to give it colour.
The beer cost a dollar, the champagne one seventy-five – to a sailor. The barman winked at Sandingham and charged him one-fifty for the two. Even that price was well over the street value for the contents of both glasses.
Lucy took the drinks to a cubicle beside the jukebox. Sitting down, she gabbled something in rapid Cantonese to the barman, who nodded. Then, reaching behind the jukebox, she turned the volume down two notches and set a slow dance record into play.
It was close and dark in the cubicle. The bench seat faced outwards and was padded with simulated leather that stuck to the skin of the girl’s thighs where they came into contact with it, through the slit in the side of her cheong-sam. The table in front of them bore a candle in a bottle which was lit but guttering from too long a wick. Sandingham took a long pull from the glass of beer. It was a local brew, made primarily from chemical additives. Lucy sipped her ‘tart’s tonic’, as the sailors nicknamed it, her little finger crooked as if she were taking tea in the best rectory of the thirties’ not far from Basingstoke or Oxford. Most men would have laughed at her. Sandingham did not. It was a part of her imagined world, and he acknowledged it as important to her. To him, even.
‘How you bin, Joe? You no comin’ here makin me ve’y sad.’ Her brows rutted and she looked at him in the candlelight and glow from the jukebox.
‘I’ve been all right. Very busy on Kowloon-side…’
‘You no got job?’ She was clearly incredulous but kept her voice low so that neither of them lost face with the other girls in the bar. It wouldn’t do, for either of them, if the girls knew she had a boyfriend of slight means.
‘No such luck.’
With her, as with no one else nowadays, he could be frank. Neither of them had any illusions about what they were and where they were fixed in the order of the universe. He was a tramp – or would have been had he lived in London – and she was a whore. His nemesis was poverty and his past: hers was fate and circumstance and an occasional dose of the clap. He counted himself lucky that he wasn’t starving while she saw herself as fortunate that she hadn’t contracted something worse.
‘You know, Joe’ – she sipped her drink again and pointed to it – ‘champagne a lo’d of buwshit.’
He laughed loudly and she joined in, playfully smacking his arm, glad to see him happy. Often, in the lonely hours after the US Navy Shore Patrol or the British MPs had emptied the bars of drunks and besotted members of their respective armed forces, she wondered what life would be like if she were not a Chinese bar-girl and he were an executive with Butterfield and Swire, or the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; or manager of his own Wan Chai bar. After all, a few of them were owned by Europeans or Australians, all of whom had Chinese wives or mistresses. But even in her dream she was unable to escape the image of the bars and he was unable to exorcise his past. She knew that the best she could wish for was that he would buy her out for an hour – or better, a whole night – and that they’d pretend.
Sandingham called out to the barman, ‘Gin and tonic. With lemon.’ He paused. ‘And ice.’
The drink arrived, accompanied by another beer; the barman had seen that Sandingham’s glass was empty. His initiative, as much as his clients’ thirsts, sold drink.
‘Joe, you ve’y good to me sometime.’ Lucy’s hand was on his knee and she moved it up his leg as she took her first sip of the real drink. Then, quietly, she asked him, ‘You got money tonight, Joe?’
‘Some,’ he replied.
Even with Lucy he was cagey about finances.
‘Enough? You got enough?’
He knew what enough was. Twenty-five dollars.
‘Just.’
‘Joe. You buy me out one hour. Please. I give you good time.’
Absent from her voice was the harshness of her profession. She wasn’t looking to have him, but to love him, love being rare for a bar-girl.
By now, all the other girls had arrived and settled in the bar, standing or sitting about. They were all in their late teens or early twenties and they chatted, giggled and gibed each other. They did not interrupt Joe and his partner. They knew how she felt about him.
He was silent, thinking of her in his detached way. He wasn’t looking at her, but at the candle. The flame was low now. It scorched the back of his eyes to look at it.
He had enough to take her out of the bar for an hour, or even for the entire night – it would cost him between eighty and one hundred dollars. His dilemma was whether or not he wanted her. He knew he desired her company, for she listened as he talked. But whether or not he desired her body was another matter.
‘Okay,’ he said finally.
She had been quiet, gently squeezing his thigh every now and again, avoiding the looks of the other girls who wondered why neither of them was talking.
‘Okay? What you mean, okay, Joe?’
‘I’ll buy you out for one hour. No. Two hours.’
‘You sure, Joe?’
He nodded. She left the cubicle and went to the barman who lifted the counter flap to let her behind the bar and out through a doorway in the rear. In a few minutes, she was back.
He drained his second beer.
The girls waved to Lucy as she left. She returned their waves. It was as if she wouldn’t see them for days, yet she’d be back by ten. By then, the place would be packed out.
‘It not far, Joe,’ she said as she took his hand and guided him along the pavement. As they went, he cast a glance or two at his surroundings: he had not been this way before. She obviously had yet another room to which to take her clientele, and he assumed that her change of venue must mark a change of pimp or in the ownership of the bar.
They crossed the street, went down a dim alleyway between two other bars and climbed a set of echoing wooden stairs in a narrow well. At the top was a landing and, from it, three doors led off into rooms. A single, fifteen-watt bulb glowed overhead and from behind one of the doors came the familiar clatter of mah-jong pieces and conversation. While Lucy took a key from a hidden pocket of her dress, Sandingham stood quite still, feeling his nerves shivering at the sound of the game through the door.
She beckoned him and he went behind her into a small, airless room. It contained an old mahogany wardrobe, badly scratched and dented, a wooden chair, a tiny table and a wide bed with blue cotton sheets on it. There was little space for anything else in the room. On the wall over the head of the bed was nailed a wooden box, painted bright pillar-box red and, in the centre of it, a gold and red varnished household god. In front of his fierce face a joss-stick holder sprouted two sticks of incense, both of them snubbed out halfway down. The room smelled of sandalwood. A lamp was by the bed and Lucy switched it on, at the same time reaching up to extinguish the centre light, a powerful bulb in a green plastic shade. The brightness flicked off and the room became gentler. The distempered walls looked less harsh in the yellow glow from the lamp.
She sat on the bed and took off her shoes. Then she stood and tugged the zip at the side slits of her cheong-sam upwards so that both her thighs were bare to the waist. She was wearing nothing under the dress. In the traditional style, the bodice of the dress was fastened up one side, to allow for the suckling of a child, had she had one. This she unbuttoned and let slip over her skin. Her breast beneath was as sallow as the rest of her body, and as soft. He reached for the brown ring around h
er nipple, but she brushed his hand aside and, slipping his jacket off, she undid his shirt. Bare to the waist, he sat on the bed removing his shoes and socks, careful at the same time to thrust both socks into one shoe to hide the money. She saw him do this and realised what his action meant. He did have money, a good deal of it, and it was in his right shoe, jammed into the toe.
‘You wan’ to taw’k fu’st?’
‘I’m very tired,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been well these past weeks.’
He did not look as well as he had on his last visit to the bar. She saw that, even in the half-light. She did not know what was wrong with him but she made quite certain, by studying his features and actions, that it was not TB. A dose of VD was something she accepted with stoical resignation, a hazard of the job. But tuberculosis was something else altogether. Sulphur drugs and a course of injections would clear the clap, but months in a hospital out by Aberdeen harbour would be required to rid her of TB, and the degeneration the disease caused would ruin her looks and therefore her livelihood. Her fears were allayed, however. He hadn’t coughed, nor did he look empty enough of flesh and soul to be tubercular.
‘You chase too many dragon,’ she scolded him, taking his large, rough hand in both her smaller ones and tightening on it.
‘It’s not that,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not been to Ah Moy’s for long while. Several weeks. It’s not chasing dragons.’
‘You shou’d see you doc-tor. He fix you up. My doc-tor fix me up okay last month.’ She sensed he was thinking of this, and added, ‘Right now, I clear pass. No clap.’
He laughed again, quietly.
She let his hand go and deftly unfastened his fly buttons, at the same time gently rubbing his groin to help him desire her. He pulled his trousers off and lifting the front flap of her cheong-sam she lay back upon the bed. He could see her outlined against the thin blue sheets as if on water. In the faint light of the room the bush of hair just below her waist gleamed darkly and he moved towards it as she let her hands slide around his neck. As her fingers ran down his chest, she could feel every bump of his sternum, every ridge of his ribs. On his stomach, just as she started to delve her long fingers into the waistband of his underpants to pull them lower, she felt a rough, dry patch of skin the size of a dollar bill. It puzzled her and she thought about it as he moved to get himself inside her.
