‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ I said, and stroked her hair, caressing the back of her neck.
‘Somebody has to,’ she answered, gently rubbing the back of my leg. I was close enough to see the pale freckles on her nose that she always tried to cover with a light dusting of face powder. There was spearmint on her breath. She was forever chewing gum.
‘Are you taking any other drugs?’ I’d asked her, and she’d given me her little girl lost face, and then raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated ‘who me?’ look. She pointed at her nose with her forefinger. ‘Me?’
‘You know what I mean.’
She’d raised her eyebrows even further, tilted her head on one side and began drumming her fingers lightly on my knee. Cute.
‘What d’you mean, brother of mine?’
‘This flat reeks of pot. Do you use anything else?’
‘No.’ She was emphatic.
‘Are you sure?’ The fingers stopped drumming.
‘I never lie to you. Ever.’
She did, but never seriously, just little white lies when she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But she didn’t count them. And what the hell, neither did I.
‘There’s nothing wrong with pot, anyway,’ she’d said.
‘It’s a drug.’
‘So is alcohol.’
‘Don’t give me that.’
‘Well, you drink too much.’
‘I can handle it.’ Huh, tell that to Bill Hardwicke. Or to the clinic where he’d sent me to dry out. That was only a few months after I’d sat there and lectured Sally on the dangers of taking drugs. ‘Well I can handle pot,’ she’d said to me.
‘You can get addicted,’ I said.
‘When was the last time you had a gin and tonic?’
‘Not the same thing,’ I’d said defensively, because even back then I reckon I knew she was right and that it was big brother who’d needed looking after.
‘It is, and look at the side effects. Think about the hangovers, the times you’ve fallen over dead drunk. The times your mates on the Express have had to carry you back from some all night binge.’
‘Jesus, you’ve done it again.’
‘Done what?’ She’d looked genuinely puzzled.
‘Changed the subject around completely, so that now I’m on the defensive. How do you do that?’
She smiled like a teenager being asked out for her first date, then put her chin on her shoulder and fluttered her eyelids like a ’50s film star.
‘I’m serious,’ I’d said, and she’d stopped fooling around.
‘I do not take heavy drugs,’ she’d said. ‘I never have and I never will.’
I believed her then and I believed her now. I turned to see Howard flip-flopping towards me, sucking something green through two bright red straws and carrying a fresh gin and tonic for me.
‘I hear you and John have been winning friends and influencing people again,’ he said with a grin.
‘News travels fast,’ I said and I grinned back because the anger had gone and because I couldn’t afford to burn Howard off. I needed him too much for that. It was his city, he was the local and I had to have a guide.
‘Too true it travels fast. By the time we get back to Queen’s Pier everybody on this boat will know what you said, they’ll each tell another five people by tonight, and tomorrow there won’t be a gweilo on the island who doesn’t know what you and John feel about Hong Kong. Take it easy, laddie.’
Laddie, for God’s sake. The old faker had left Scotland more than twenty-five years ago. I shrugged and I could feel my sweat-dampened shirt sticking to my back. The anchors were pulled up and then the engines kicked into life again. It was starting to get dark, the water shifting to grey.
‘Hell, I don’t know. Sometimes I just get angry and say things without thinking.’
‘Aye, you can get away with that in London, but not here. John can, he’s always been a bit of a maverick and people are used to him by now. You’re different, and if you’re not careful they could all turn against you.’
I took a mouthful of the drink, just a sip because I was starting to get a little light-headed. I tried telling myself that I was drinking to deaden the pain of Sally’s death but I knew that was only part of it. The problem was that I enjoyed drinking, I enjoyed it too much.
‘In London it doesn’t matter how many people you offend, you’ll always find someone else to help you, someone to trust you,’ Howard continued. ‘It’s a big place. But this is a village. If you upset the local school-teacher, the postmistress, the shopkeeper and the local bobby, then it’s time to move on. The whole village will close ranks against you.’
He sat down on the deck and poked his legs under the railing and over the side where they swung backwards and forwards with the motion of the boat. He was surprisingly agile for a man of fifty and didn’t spill a drop from his glass. My knees cracked and I grunted as I joined him. The back of my shirt was soaking now and I could feel beads of sweat trickle down between my shoulder blades. Howard showed not the slightest sign of discomfort.
‘Think of them as sheep,’ he said. ‘A small flock of pampered sheep who want for nothing. Then along you come, a wolf who doesn’t even bother to wear sheep’s clothing. You frighten them. You’re from the outside, you move too fast and you’ve got big, sharp teeth. They’re going to run away from you and huddle together and comfort each other and tell themselves how lucky they are to be funny, fat white sheep and not lean and hungry wolves. They’re not going to help you unless they think you’re one of them. I learnt that a long time ago.’
‘And which are you, Howard? Sheep or wolf?’
He looked at me and smiled and went ‘Baaaaaa’ in a long, low bleat that made me laugh out loud.
We sat together and watched the lights of Hong Kong island drift past, each office tower distinct in style and colour, small squat cubes, tall thin fingers of concrete, mirrored glass blocks, a plethora of designs so varied that they could have been assembled by a collector. And above them all towered the twisted knife of the Bank of China building, silently proclaiming the mainland’s dominance over the colony. ‘We are here already,’ it seemed to say. ‘And soon it will all belong to us.’
‘Why do you stay here?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately, just rested his chin on the railing. Above us, on the poop deck or whatever the raised bit in the middle of the junk was called, a small group had gathered around a young estate agent with a light green safari suit and an Oxbridge accent. Jenny was one of them. He was pointing out the buildings one by one, listing the tenants, the occupancy rates and the price per square foot. His party trick.
‘I don’t think I could work anywhere else, laddie,’ Howard said finally. ‘I love the place, the people, the climate …’
‘The women.’
‘Yes, and the women, I can’t deny that. But it’s more than that, there’s something about the place, something that grabs and holds and won’t let go.’
Fear, I thought. Fear of what might happen if he had to survive in the outside world, outside the village. Fear of being alone in a society where women didn’t fall all over you because you were white or had money or a passport. Fear of having to compete in an environment where mediocrity isn’t the norm, where only the good can succeed.
The black side of me wanted to grab him by the collar and rub his face into his fear to force him to confront it so that I could wallow in his discomfort, to shake him out of his self-satisfied contentment.
We sat without talking again, listening to the music and feeling the throb of the engines through the wooden deck.
‘There are two sorts of people out here,’ said Howard eventually. ‘There are those who come in and try to change Hong Kong, to force it to conform with the rest of the world. They try to operate here in the same way that they do business in London, New York, or Sydney. They burn themselves out trying to wheel and deal here without ever realizing that the rules are different. They usually stic
k it for two years, maybe three. Then they leave. They don’t realize that you can’t change Hong Kong, you have to adapt to it.’
‘And that’s what you’ve done? Adapt?’
‘The ones that stay accept the place for what it is, and the people for what they are. No matter how they dress, or how they speak, no matter how they adopt our lifestyle, these people are Chinese, with a culture that goes back thousands of years. Trying to change them means pushing against generations of inertia …’
‘You’ve been here too long, Howard,’ I interrupted.
‘Maybe you’re right, laddie,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right at that.’
After the junk docked back at Queen’s Pier and we’d said our goodbyes and I’d been given a frosty look and a limp handshake by Dick, Howard told me there was someone he wanted me to meet, so we caught a cab and it dropped us outside a nondescript office block in the middle of a shopping district. The aged watchman didn’t even look up from his cubby hole, eyes glued to a girlie magazine, what little hair he had left on his peeling scalp blowing in the breeze from a large shuddering fan fixed to the wall. There were three lifts but even so we had to wait the best part of five minutes before one of the stainless steel doors slid back. Howard pressed the button for the fifth floor and when the doors opened again I followed him into a dark hallway heavy with the smell of incense. To the left was what appeared to be a Dickensian lectern, and behind it a middle-aged Chinese in a rumpled suit, chewing on the end of a cheap Biro. To the right was a leather-padded door sprinkled with bronze coloured studs, bolted top and bottom and guarded by a thickset man with his arms folded across a barrel chest.
‘Ah, Mr Berenger. Nice to see you again. You have your card?’ said the man with the pen in his mouth.
‘Good to see you, Mr Lo,’ said Howard, producing a green cardboard card from his wallet. ‘Business is good?’
‘Not so bad,’ he replied, then bent his head down and carefully copied the details on the card into a large ledger. When he’d finished he looked up.
‘Sign for friend, please,’ he said, and handed the pen to Howard, bubbles of spittle stuck to the end he’d been sucking. Harold seemed not to notice and made his mark in the book. The heavy unbolted the door and as it opened the sound of an electronic organ oozed out like air from a leaking tyre.
The room was a large rectangle, with about fifteen or so small tables covered with red tablecloths surrounding a small metal dance floor. It was dark and humid, the only light coming from a bar to the right of the door we’d walked through and from the single candles burning in what seemed to be jam jars in the middle of the tables. Just half of the tables were occupied, by Chinese couples or groups of middle-aged men, and the air buzzed with conversation, some whispered, some shouted, all mixed in with the whining organ, the sort of out-of-tune wail that fakirs use to bore the pants off fangless snakes.
The organist was as close to death as you can get without being six feet under the ground, bald and wizened and curled over a tiny Yamaha organ on stainless steel legs. It was the organ that had the metal legs, though I guess his weren’t much thicker. His hands were as crooked as a sports writer’s expense sheet and he had trouble touching the keyboard with more than two fingers at the same time. He was sitting alone on a small raised stage, alone that is except for a drum kit minus cymbals and a couple of rusting music stands. Behind him on the wall were a line of foot-high silver painted letters that spelled out ‘United Athletic Club’ except that the A was upside down and hanging below the rest of the line. The door shut behind us with a resounding click and a waiter stepped out of the gloom to usher us to a table near the dance floor. The metallic floor glinted in the candlelight, it was about twenty feet across and made of large plates riveted together. There were drops of water near the middle. The waiter had pulled a chair out before I realized the table was already occupied, by a guy who looked the spitting image of Bluto, Popeye’s rival. His beard was big and bushy and his eyes were virtually hidden behind sprouting brows that looked like giant caterpillars preparing to mate or fight to the death. Or both. The last time I’d seen him he was reading a newspaper over a hunchback’s hump in the FCC. I was starting to realize just what a small place Hong Kong was, how everybody seemed to know everyone else and what they were doing. Howard’s analogy of a village was a good one. Bluto almost got to his feet when he saw Howard approach, almost because as he rose his knees caught the table and it shook heavily and the candle and jar fell over and hit the floor with a crash. The organist didn’t lift his head but we got a couple of filthy looks from some of the drinkers before they took in the full size and fighting weight of the man we’d come to see. He had a gut every bit as pronounced as Howard’s but it was overflowing the top of his belt and barely restrained by a T-shirt that proudly stated: ‘Bali-Island of Tits’.
‘Meet Barry Fender,’ said Howard, and waved towards the bearded hulk who was trying to settle back into his chair as a waiter scuttled around the table and retrieved the candle. The hand that gripped mine felt like five steel-filled sausages, soft but with a scarcely concealed strength. I wouldn’t want to arm wrestle with this man. Hell, I’d think twice before sharing his toothbrush.
‘Fender, as in bender,’ he said in a gravelly Australian voice, and squeezed, not quite hard enough to need a trip to the casualty department of the nearest hospital, but close. ‘Sit down,’ he said, and ordered three beers. I didn’t argue, just said that I was pleased to see him and retrieved my hand and nursed it on my lap, rubbing it gently to try to restore the circulation.
‘You missed the show,’ he said, more to Howard than to me, and waved his half-empty glass towards the dance floor. Some of his beer slopped over his hand and he licked it off with a tongue the size and colour of a breakfast kipper.
Now that my eyes were more used to the gloom, I could see just how seedy a place it was that Howard had brought me to. The tablecloth was liberally sprinkled with cigarette burns and the floor was dirty and unswept. The paint on the ceiling was flaking off in chunks and the walls looked and smelt damp. There were either large mouseholes or small ratholes in the base of the stage.
‘She did amazing things with two ping-pong balls and a bottle of water,’ he said. ‘I got to hold the balloon,’ he added, and winked conspiratorially.
‘Thai?’ asked Howard.
‘No, Vietnamese, I think. Bloody good sort. And a great shot with the old blowpipe.’
The two of them laughed together. I didn’t get the joke but I was fucked if I was going to ask them to explain. A curtain at the far end of the room was pushed aside and a small Asian girl in baggy jeans and a floppy pink sweater flounced out with a blue canvas bag thrown over her shoulder. Fender leant back in his chair and waved as she went past. She turned up her chin and then he spoke to her in a machine gun like chatter which stopped her in her tracks and seconds later they were jabbering away like a couple of monkeys until Fender obviously said something he shouldn’t have because she hissed and drew back her hand as if to slap his face and then obviously thought better of it before cursing him and turning on her heel. Fender shrugged and watched her backside twitch prettily to the door. She kicked it impatiently until the heavy opened it to let her out.
‘What did you say to her, you randy bastard?’ asked Howard.
‘Just chewing the fat,’ laughed Fender. ‘But the subject of what she did with the blowpipe did come up, I must admit.’ He finished his beer and gestured for more. My glass was empty, too, though I hadn’t realized I’d drunk mine. I could taste lager though, so it wasn’t as if I’d been robbed.
‘Were you speaking Chinese?’ I asked Fender.
‘Vietnamese,’ he said, raising his caterpillar eyebrows as if amazed that anyone could be stupid enough to get the two languages confused.
‘Where did an Aussie learn to speak fluent Vietnamese?’ I asked him.
‘Barry here used to be in the Australian SAS,’ said Howard. ‘If you think he’s big now, you sh
ould have seen him twenty-five years ago. He was a good six inches taller and not so stocky.’
He could see he’d got my attention, so he paused theatrically and took a swill at his lager, replacing it carefully in front of him before speaking again.
‘It was the training that did it. Barry signed up with the SAS, the meanest bastards in the Australian army. They fed him on raw beef, made him run hundreds of miles in full kit, and then they made him jump out of aeroplanes three miles up in the air, carrying a bazooka and a field radio. But because the Australian SAS wanted to show how hard they really were, they refused to use parachutes. That’s why Barry here’s the shape he is – it’s the result of years of falling three miles and landing stock still on his feet. Bang!’ He slapped his hand down hard on the table and the two of them laughed like naughty schoolchildren.
‘Compacted his spine like a crushed tin can,’ spluttered Howard, and Fender leant over to slap him on the back.
‘Get fucked, Howard,’ I said, but I was smiling. To Fender I said: ‘Seriously, where did the Vietnamese come from?’
‘Vietnam, where else?’ he said.
‘Not strictly true,’ said Howard. The waiter arrived and put three more beers in front of us then picked up a bowl of what looked like processed peas and placed them in the middle of the table. Fender motioned him to take them away. ‘Not at these prices,’ he said. ‘It costs you an arm and a leg just to drink here.’
‘Only if you watch the shows,’ said Howard. ‘They charge you for each show you sit through,’ he explained to me. ‘Fall asleep at your table and you can run up a hell of a bill.’
Something was moving underneath the stage, a small dark shape that glided behind the wooden planking, visible only when it passed by one of the holes, now you see it now you don’t, like a duck in a shooting gallery.
Howard leant across the table and touched me lightly on the arm. ‘Barry here is a victim of his own IQ,’ he said in a low voice, and Fender sniggered. I felt like we were swapping dirty stories behind the bike sheds. I tried to use the beer to wash the taste from my mouth. ‘I’ll order you a G and T,’ said Howard, and he caught the eye of the waiter and spoke quickly to him in Cantonese. The drink appeared while Howard continued his story. There was no lemon, but you can’t have everything.
The Fireman Page 12
