Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  Sandingham pulled the glass door open and entered the lounge. He was careful to leave the door ajar so that the roomboy on duty could see that he meant no mischief.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘What have you asked Santa Claus for?’

  David did not turn round. He had seen Sandingham enter through his reflection in the glass before him.

  ‘There’s no such person as Santa Claus. Your father and mother – and grandpa and grandma and people – buy you presents and your parents give them to you. And,’ David added, a little scornfully, ‘you can’t say “Happy Christmas” yet because Christmas’s not until tomorrow.’

  Sitting himself in the chair across the room, Sandingham leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. The pressure of his arms hurt his legs, which had pained him continuously since the fight with the gardener the night before.

  ‘I have a present for you.’

  He offered a small package to the boy.

  David’s first inclination was to refuse it. He was very wary of Sandingham now and had taken to heart the warnings he had received from his mother, Ching and the other hotel staff. The more he considered the outstretched gift, though, the more he realised that it would be churlish to refuse. Besides, he was inquisitive and eager to discover what was in it. If he told his mother he had received it, it would be all right. Then it occurred to him that he could not reciprocate.

  ‘I’ve nothing to give you,’ he apologised. ‘So I shouldn’t accept anything.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Sandingham replied. ‘I think I’ve got all I want.’

  David took the package.

  ‘What have you done to your arm?’ Sandingham inquired.

  ‘Sprained it. Can you please start the paper off?’

  He handed the gift back and Sandingham tore the string away and peeled back the paper from one end.

  Inside was a small box. It was dented, and had obviously been used for other things before. David removed the top and looked inside.

  There was an envelope there, one of the PAA airmail ones from the desk rack in the lobby. He slit the flap. Inside was a faded photo of a young soldier.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It was a friend of mine,’ Sandingham explained. ‘In the war. A very dear friend. He is long since dead.’

  ‘Is this my present?’

  ‘Part of it,’ Sandingham said mysteriously. ‘There’s more if you feel in the box.’

  David took out a figure cocooned in crisp tissue: it was a soldier, not a private or sergeant but a major-general. The toy soldiers in his set boxes never had officers in with them: they were always other ranks. And, unlike David’s soldiers that were cast in a cheap alloy and clumsily painted on a production line, this staff officer was cast in solid lead and had been carefully and painstakingly painted by hand. Even his medals were accurately coloured, and the brown paint hadn’t gone over the edge of his Sam Browne belt once. This impressed David, for even the loader of his machine-gun crew had the paint from his helmet run on to his neck.

  With the major-general was a shining half-crown. David had not seen a half-crown since he was on the ship coming out. His grandfather had given two to him on the dock at Southampton as a parting gift. The coin was heavy with a shield design on one side and King George VI’s head on the other.

  At the bottom of the box was a third envelope.

  From it, David slid a postcard. It was an ordinary black-and-white photograph and on the back of it a space for a message. Next to that were a few ruled lines for the address and a square where one should stick the stamp. There was printing on it in characters, but not Chinese ones. Chinese ones were all angles, and these were more rounded off at the corners.

  ‘Are these all for me?’

  ‘Yes. If you should like them.’

  ‘I would. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed.’

  A moment of childish cynicism suggested to him that he might have to do something in exchange for the presents and he wondered what this might be. He was still puzzled by the photograph.

  ‘But why,’ he asked, ‘have you given me your friend’s picture?’

  ‘So that someone will remember him. His name was Bob. He was killed in Hong Kong. He is buried on Hong Kong-side.’

  ‘Do you visit him?’ David probed. His grandmother – the other one, his mother’s mother – went every first Sunday of the month to visit his grandfather who had ‘passed away’, as she put it, when David was three.

  ‘No. I never have.’

  Sandingham peered out on to the low slope of the hillside opposite the hotel. He sniffed once and David thought he had a bit of a cold.

  ‘You’ll remember Bob, won’t you?’ he continued. ‘Like you remember your Australian friend who…’

  ‘Well, I have a photo.’

  ‘Keep it safe.’

  David rotated the postcard. It was a funny picture. There was a river in it. On its bank was a building on top of which was a dome made of rafters but no tiles. There was a cube-shaped building to the right with a dent in the roof. All the land around was brashy and bitty-looking, as if it were coated with cake crumbs. The two buildings had no windows.

  Watching the boy trying to figure the picture out, Sandingham said, ‘You asked me once why they called me Hiroshima Joe.’

  ‘Yes,’ David said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise. And I’ll tell you. In the war I saw something very horrid and I can’t forget it.’

  ‘Everyone sees something nasty in wars,’ David interrupted. His father had told him that one evening when he’d asked what an ‘offensive’ was, which he’d heard on the radio.

  ‘This was something worse than nasty, David. It was very, very ghastly. I’m not going to tell you about it because I don’t want you to have a nightmare.’ Sandingham smiled. ‘Especially on Christmas Eve. But I have nightmares. The only time I don’t get them is when I chase a dragon or have a lot to drink in the bar.’

  ‘Chase a dragon’ meant nothing to the boy. Sandingham did not pause to explain it. He was talking now without paying any attention to David, his concentration far removed from the lounge, the hotel or Hong Kong.

  If David daydreamed like that in school, he knew only too well, the teacher would flick his ear with her nail to wake him. He was loathe to wake Hiroshima Joe.

  ‘And what I saw makes me very cross sometimes. Mad with anger. And I don’t like loud noises or bright lights. What I saw made me ill.’

  He tapped his head signifying he was crazy and David smirked, not understanding that Hiroshima Joe meant it. He thought it was just a joke. Lots of people tapped their heads if they thought you were off your rocker.

  ‘I hope you won’t ever see anything like that yourself.’

  Sandingham had returned to the present.

  ‘So do I,’ David assured him innocently.

  ‘That postcard is a place in Japan called Hiroshima. That’s where I saw what was horrid, more horrid than anything before. That’s where I went – bonkers. And that’s why they call me Hiroshima Joe.’

  He got uneasily to his feet.

  ‘Keep my presents. I hope you like your general. When you play with him and your other soldiers, try to remember me and keep my friend Bob safe and sound. And remember, too, that war is all right if you play it with your toys, but it’s bad for real people to do. More than anything else, war is the worst thing people do.’ He took one pace towards the door. ‘Happy Christmas for tomorrow.’

  ‘Happy Christmas, Joe,’ said David.

  Sandingham looked down at the little boy with his arm in a sling and the general lying on his back in the boy’s palm.

  ‘Thank you, David.’ His voice was quiet and strained.

  ‘What for? I’ve not given you anything.’

  David resolved in that second to buy Hiroshima Joe a bottle of beer from the bar for Christmas. He’d spend the half-crown on it and have it sent up by room service as a surprise, with
a note, just like they did in films.

  ‘For calling me Joe,’ Sandingham said.

  David bent down. The general now commanded his machinegun crew. The glass door brushed on the floor. When he raised his head, Sandingham was gone.

  * * *

  His mother was not at all pleased.

  ‘I told you, David,’ she remonstrated, ‘quite distinctly, not to talk to that man.’

  ‘I didn’t say much,’ David defended himself. ‘And, anyway, he talked to me.’

  ‘What did he talk about?’ his mother quizzed him.

  ‘He gave me the presents and told me he got his name because he was at a place in Japan – and that’s how he got his name.’

  ‘Well, I think you ought to spend the half-crown on his present as you suggest. Then you’ll be equal. I don’t want you to be in debt to him; one shouldn’t owe people like him something. If you give it to me, I’ll change it into dollars for you.’

  He handed the coin to his mother, placing it reluctantly into her outstretched palm.

  ‘I’d rather pay for it out of my pocket money,’ he said, hoping to wheedle the half-crown back.

  ‘Very well,’ she answered curtly, returning the money to him. For his part, he hastily secreted it into a pocket in case she altered her mind. ‘But that’ll be your weekly dollar for next Saturday. And I don’t see why he wants you to have the photo of his friend.’

  She picked this up from her dressing-table and studied it: the young man in it was a junior officer – that much she could see between the cracks and creases – dressed in drill shorts and a battle-dress blouse. He was standing in ankle-high grass and smiling wryly. She read the faded blue ink. ‘Bob: Penang, 1939.’

  * * *

  Evening was coming. David enjoyed watching the street lamps switch on. They popped as the power charged into them and hissed until the filaments were fully alight. In the summer, as soon as they even began to hiss, insects congregated round them.

  He folded his good arm round his bad one, inside the sling, and rested them cautiously on the lounge balcony wall. Inside the cave of his sling the luminous numbers on the watch he’d got for his birthday glowed spirit-green. He was pleased, for he had ordered the beer to be sent up to Joe’s room on Christmas morning, just before the hotel Christmas lunch. If he was in the bar at that time, then the boy had requested that it be served to him there, ‘with the compliments of a small friend.’ He’d thought of that himself.

  The street lamp clicked on. He watched it gather in intensity.

  There was a rasping sound above his head. He glanced at the hotel roof two storeys up, squinting to drive the street lights from his pupils. A stout rope had been thrown over the parapet, forming a U.

  Against the evening sky, in which the last fragments of day shone, was silhouetted Joe Sandingham. He was standing stiffly to attention, his face rigid and his eyes fixed on the darkening eastern sky.

  He jumped.

  David held his breath.

  Sandingham fell twelve feet, stopped abruptly in mid-air, made a noise like a man snapping his fingers, coughed and started to spin round slowly, like an acrobat.

  PART TWELVE

  Hong Kong: Summer, 1985

  ‘WHAT CAN YOU see?’ Annabelle asked, her hand resting upon his own. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ David replied, but he was lying – not spitefully but deliberately, so that he could savour the moment for himself.

  ‘It must be very strange for you,’ his wife commented. Her hand left his and he heard the ice rattle in her glass as she drained the last of her gin and tonic and handed it to the stewardess.

  ‘What is?’ he said, without turning his head.

  ‘Coming back. Returning to the place of your childhood. It must be weird.’

  ‘Not really,’ he lied again.

  Through the puffballs of moonlit clouds below them, that looked like spent shell-bursts and into which they were descending, he could see the ocean sparkling minutely. An island hove into view directly under his face. He pressed his cheek nearer to the perspex, forcing his spectacles askew, and saw the waisted centre of the fragment of land. On the thin causeway, lights prickled in the summer night.

  There was a chiming ping over his head. He sat back and raised his eyes to the rack above. Between the cooling vents, the call button and the reading spots, the no-smoking and seat-belt notices were still illuminated.

  Cheung Chau, he thought. We’re making our approach from the west.

  He marvelled at how clear the world always looks from the air, especially on a tropical night. It was uncomplicated, two-dimensional and yet emotionally charged. The romantic sense of foreignness lifted itself up and seemed to embrace him in its mysticism and oddness. A voice from the air around him interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman, we are now making our final descent to Hong Kong-Kai Tak. On behalf of Captain Lee and the crew may I thank you for flying with Cathay Pacific. We hope you have had a pleasant flight and look forward to welcoming you again aboard one of our aircraft in the near future. After we have landed, please do not leave your seats until the aircraft has come to a standstill at the terminus buildings.’

  The 747 entered a cloud bank. Wraiths of mist swept by the window and, across the wing, taut bands of vacuumed moisture trailed back from the leading edge.

  He was at the window once more, eager as a child to catch his first glimpse. There was a hum and bump under his feet as the undercarriage lowered and locked.

  The rim of the cloud disappeared at two hundred miles an hour and there, arcing out below him, was the whole of the waterfront of Hong Kong Island, from Kennedy Town to North Point. The scene and its suddenness took his breath away.

  The skyscrapers were a mass of lights. The whole city looked like another world, an exquisite waterfall of electric sparks splashing down the sides of The Peak, around which roads were hung like shining necklaces. Traffic shimmered and scintillated. Every single dot of light seemed replicated in the waters of the harbour, upon which ferries glittered like the living bugs David knew one could buy in expensive jewellers’ which had had semiprecious stones glued to their carapaces.

  Annabelle leaned across him and said, ‘It’s beautiful beyond words.’ She was amazed at the panorama.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is.’

  It had always been beautiful. After they had left the hotel and gone to live on Plantation Road at the top of The Peak, David had realised just what beauty was: it shocked him as a child, took his breath away.

  There were nights when his parents were out at a dockyard function, or to dinner with friends, when he tricked his amah into believing that he would be good and was left undisturbed in his bedroom. He used to slip from between the cool starch of the sheets, drag a chair to the window and sit staring out on the whole of Hong Kong and Kowloon laid before him. The ferries had glistened on the black carpet of the harbour and he imagined them to be slow-falling meteorites in a heaven laid at his feet. If he looked up, the stars in the sky were as sharp and as magical.

  The broad peninsula of Kowloon projected from under the belly of the jet. Down the centre, through the plain of the sparkling tinsel of neon and halogen, of red and green and yellow and white, ran the spinal column of Nathan Road.

  By now the aircraft was at only a few hundred feet. It banked sharply to the right and dropped on to the runway that fingered out into the black sea of Kowloon Bay for nearly two miles. The strobe in the underneath of the Boeing hit and dragged grass blades and air traffic control number-plates into garish, instantaneous sight. He could remember seeing seaplanes landing in that same bay when he was a boy.

  They were met by an Englishman in his late twenties who had been sent by the Far Eastern office to welcome them and smooth their passage through immigration and customs controls.

  ‘Mr Merriton? I’m Frederick Sawyer, sir.’

  ‘Good evening, Sawyer. Thank you for coming to the airport. Most kind of you.’
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  David extended his hand and introduced his wife to the junior executive.

  ‘I have a car waiting to take you to the Mandarin, sir. Your bags are already taken care of. Do follow me. I trust you’ve had a comfortable flight?’

  The company Mercedes was parked by the kerb and the Chinese chauffeur was holding the door open as they stepped out into the humid night from the air-conditioned atmosphere of the airport buildings. The smells of the Orient, the sounds of the baggage coolies and the guttural Cantonese voices washed over them and David wondered what had happened to the thirty-odd years in between.

  ‘Sawyer, would you ask the chauffeur to drive down Argyle Street and Waterloo Road en route, please?’

  The representative gave his orders to the chauffeur in fluent Cantonese before joining him in the front of the car.

  The junction of Waterloo Road and Argyle Street was traversed by a flyover. The hill opposite the hotel had disappeared and, in its place, there were apartment buildings. The hotel, too, had gone. Just after the railway bridge, the only landmark he could remember and one that reassured him that not everything had altered unequivocally, they took a left turn and were soon on to the link road to the cross-harbour road tunnel.

  The hotel was sumptuous. Once in their suite on the twelfth floor, they showered and dressed for dinner. As the warm water flowed over him, David shed the discomfort of the long flight from London and then sat at the window in his bathrobe as his wife bathed.

  The vista before him was much the same as the one he had seen from the plane, only now he was nearer and lower to it, feeling it becoming an intrinsic part of him once more. Even though it was so changed, he knew that under its veneer Hong Kong was still as it had always been, with its tiny crowded streets and food stalls, its temples and alleys, its throngs of people and never-ending state of motion.

  * * *

  The Mercedes was waiting in front of the hotel, as David had ordered it should be. Peter Gordon, their local manager, had kept it free for him. All through the working breakfast he had had with the Chinese representatives and the man from the Los Angeles office he had been thinking ahead to this moment and now, as the car door was opened for him by the commissionaire, David felt the cold air swing outwards at him and it caused him to shiver involuntarily. He settled into the back seat.