The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  She smiled.

  “Shall we have some oolong?”

  It was nearly dawn, and through the blinds the restless blue of the sea was beginning to materialize. The floating houses bobbing. She filled the kettle and broke more tea into the pot. I put my arm around her middle, drawing her a little toward me, not knowing if I should. Somehow we never made the tea. Instead, we slept again. I felt the space between her sharp shoulder blades, the knobs of the spine. There was a curious swelling along her neck and when I touched it she reached up for a moment and brushed my hand aside.

  ELEVEN

  For several nights we walked down to the restaurants in Yung Shue Wan, and while we looked up at the three giant chimneys of the Lamma power station she fed me fine long bamboo clams and slipper lobsters colored the pale pink and green of shells served on their backs under garlic crusts. We went to the Seaview and picked out leopard coral groupers from the outdoor tanks or dull red star groupers or green wrasse, and had spicy sea snails with rice wine and geoduck clams and king prawns. She ordered me fried tofu, the famous Lamma tofu of Grandma Tsiong. She skewered whatever we were eating on a metal fork, lifted it over a raised hand, and pushed the flesh onto my tongue; we ate our selections with spring onions tossed in oil, and kale, with crunchy green beans and perfect rice. “There’s a road that runs alongside the power station,” she would say, looking toward the chimneys on the far side of the bay, “called Precipitator Road, and there’s a Stacker Road, too, and an Administration Road. So poetic. Our island is a floating power station.”

  The elderly proprietors greeted her with a certain coolness, though it might equally have been some style of formality with which I was not familiar. It might have been because she was overdressed, or wore too much jewelry, but I sensed that it was not that. Nor was it because of her profession. It was something else. It was a coolness in her, too, a coolness that subtly repelled them and made them keep their distance, resentful and alert to the possibility of her displeasure. I sensed them criticizing us behind our backs. But they never said anything to our faces. I understood them. I, too, could not get to the back of her; her door would not open even a few inches. But still, one has to live.

  When the first hot mornings came and the rain cleared we got up early without a word and drank oolong tea on the terrace above the rippling bamboo and banana fronds. The cicadas coming to life, roused by instinct and dryness. The blade of the distant wind turbine rising and falling clockwise, and the sound of carpets being beaten in the houses on the hill of Ko Long. We walked up to the top, where the paths turned in different directions. From there Ko Long could have been Italy, a backwater of Ischia, but silent and neat and intensely private. The path running along the crest, and then into jungles.

  She held my hand, steadying my still-weak system, and we descended a steep incline toward a wooded beach, where the shops were closed and from where the power station could be seen, its pale brown chimneys massive and scornful and righteous. From here the path, neatly municipal, rose steeply around the bulk of stony mountains, a place of low scrub and tawny rocks hanging above a tropical sea. Pavilions on the lookout points, shaded and filled with elderly hikers.

  We walked across the island until Mount Shenhouse came into view and then the other little port of Sok Kwo Wan. The sweat dripped off her fingers and I could see the drops darken the ground. She was still closed in some way, shuttered away.

  I thought to myself that it must have been because of the way we met. One doesn’t forget such things. It was the money that had passed between us during those first hours. Money had brought us together and it had driven the wedge between us. And yet it had also brought us together again. It was always between us, like air that has not been disturbed for centuries. It poisoned us and brought us back to life; it held us apart even as it glued us at the hips. She could smell money on me, and I could smell it on her. Money, too, made us both pariahs. That was why the patrons of the lobster restaurant could not quite look us in the eye. We were outcast dogs and we had a dusty smell of kwai upon us. It was a smell like decomposition, I imagine. She was well aware of this, and I was sure it made her sadly unable to open herself to me, however much she had described the place of her childhood. She would be opening herself to more ruin, I thought, more rape at the hands of money, and that couldn’t be risked. She had risked herself once and she would not do it a second time. No one ever does, not willingly. So I was content to take her hand while we were eating slipper lobsters and let her be. I knew that she would never give anything more than compassion, because compassion was now the emotion she believed in most. She was not the only one.

  We sat by the water in Sok Kwo Wan, at the Wai Yee, and she ordered too much food because, she said, she wanted me to eat and get well again. The staff watched her sullenly from behind the tanks where the lobsters played with their antennae and the Japanese clams sulked.

  “They hate me,” she said to me under her breath. “Look at them. So pompous. So judgmental.”

  “They seem afraid of you.”

  “I wish they were. Hypocrites.”

  We ate with our fingers, scouring out the little shells of the lobsters and sectioning the humphead wrasse.

  “You miss the tables already,” she said coolly. “I wanted you to stay here. For a little while longer, anyway. But I can sense you want to get back to your tables. I won’t stop you if you do.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I can feel you thinking about them.”

  “I’m very grateful for everything,” I said. “You’ve saved me. I don’t know what else to add—”

  “But you’re bored.”

  “No.”

  “You’re bored and you have to go back to your games.”

  “Well,” I burst out, “that’s one way of putting it. Even a small player has his loves and dreams!”

  Her hand tensed and almost withdrew.

  “But then how will you raise the money?”

  There was nothing to say to this, except, “One of the boys will come through for me. I can beg.”

  “Will you beg?”

  “I’ll do anything. I have no shame.”

  She bit her lip for a moment, as if about to laugh.

  She asked me if I would drink rice wine. Why not?

  “Better to steal than beg,” she said, snapping her fingers at the lurking waiters.

  “I’ve always begged—it works.”

  “I’ve always stolen. It works, too.”

  We drank the rice wine a little greedily.

  “I’m a virtuoso beggar,” I laughed.

  “You can steal from me if you want. But you can’t beg from me—I won’t give you anything.”

  The boats had stopped moving across to Hong Kong; the sea was too rough and the piers reserved for the Rainbow restaurant had emptied out as the late-nighters decamped for the “Lamma Hilton.” I noticed that she didn’t get drunk; glass after glass and the effect upon her was unnoticeable. She didn’t say anything irrelevant. Her mind was perfectly focused. I began to wonder about this composure, this marvelous concentration, her hands laid on the white tablecloth like needles pointing toward invisible things. I noticed the scarf she wore around her neck. It was hiding something. We walked back to the house, a long, blowsy tramp along that roller-coaster path.

  “It’s strange,” I said, “how this storm stops and starts. It was so fine during the day—”

  “There’s no moon either.”

  I put my arm around her, and the thin hip flinched.

  In Ko Long we smoked a pipe on the bed and made love. It was slow, glacial in some way, and she was far off in her mind. I kissed the swelling around her neck, which encircled it entirely. She didn’t catch my intrusion quickly enough and she shuddered, as if discovered.

  We talked through the night.

  “You can’t go back to that life,” she said. “Stay with me. You don’t need money here.”

  For how long? I thought.

 
“You’re a gentle man. You’ve taken the wrong path.”

  “It could be.”

  “I can see you as you are.”

  “But I am as I am,” I said. “I’m what they call a night-walker.”

  “Oh, I don’t judge you. I know very well what you are. Just as you know very well what I am. We can’t do anything about it.”

  I thought, I don’t want to do anything about it.

  I couldn’t change, I admitted. It’d be a waste of time to even try. In the realm of the hungry ghosts, no effort is rewarded.

  She nodded at this, and her eyes lowered.

  “It’s always too late to change.”

  Tears welled into my eyes, and thank God it was dark and she wasn’t curious about them because I would have had no explanation. Sometimes one can feel that one has suddenly lost something that one never had in the first place. It just slips out of the hand and breaks.

  On the balcony behind us metal chimes sang in the dark, and the lights of the house near us came on. I could hear everything on the mountainside. She made no sound. She held my wrists and bent over me with her neck arched to one side, but not in avoidance. The intensity inside her was not expressive. It seemed to me—I was trying to see it—that it was coiled into a definite shape, like the metal rings of a spring compressed upon one another and forming a sort of tunnel. It expanded and contracted with small gasps and tensions of the legs, and I didn’t know what it was or why she made love in this way, which was without fluidity or affection or drama. It was as if everything around her was invisible and had no weight. I thought then that it had to be because we didn’t know each other at all, that we had merely been thrown together by chance, and this collision in the dark had its own meaning but it was not a clear one. She leaned back and her hair flew around her for a second, a great fan of scented and varnished fibers. She had the look of a dervish stopping in midspin, her eyes locked. She cried out and a second later there was no trace of that sound whatsoever.

  TWELVE

  When I woke, she was gone. Though the rain had stopped, the trees by the windows continued to drip like little taps, the eaves as well, and oily puddles had formed on the sills. I looked over at the kitchen and saw a lockbox sitting next to the microwave. She must have had thousands and thousands of dollars in there, and in the end all I needed was enough for the ferry and three hands at the Hong Fak. I could hike down the road to the jetty and take a direct boat to Macau. It was possible. I could take a bit of money and send it back to her. I wouldn’t send it back, of course. Money once taken is sucked down into the maw and never spat back up again. I said it to myself in one nice Cantonese phrase: hou yan wu chi. Dead to shame. I was dead in that sense and it no longer made any difference to me if I went from begging to stealing, it was all the same. It was a question of which one was more effective. There was no one to beg from. Still, I hesitated. Ancient scruples baked in the oven of Western civ.

  I opened the box anyway, and sure enough there were thousands of Hong Kong dollars and kwai stuffed into it. It was a small fortune. The accumulated earnings of a couple of years at least. She was getting ready to send it back to the monastery in Sando and make merit. She was, after all, a good Buddhist country girl and she would never spend the money on herself until she had made merit by sending her lucre home. Her instincts were predictable.

  I wasn’t hungry until late in the day, and she had still not come home. I sat on the deck and watched the fishing boats parade around the straits. At last I took a few bills from the box and walked down to the restaurants, where the tanks were being shown to a party of German tourists. The owners seemed surprised to see me at such an early hour and they asked me in Cantonese if I wanted my usual table. “I didn’t know I had one,” I said.

  “You always sit at table seven,” they said.

  I sat at table seven, then. They brought a menu and I asked for slipper lobsters.

  “It stopped raining,” I remarked.

  The owners of this place were an elderly couple and I had to wonder if we had dined here or somewhere else. When the old bird brought my soy sauce I asked her casually if she had seen my friend, the woman I always ate with. Dao-Ming would have to walk through the restaurants to get to the ferry. She said Dao-Ming went to take the boat early and no one ever saw her. I ate my lobsters slowly. When the old geezer came to ask me how they were, as he always did, I asked him the same question. He seemed slightly insulted by it, as if such things could never be any of his business. Instead, he thought it was more appropriate to ask what I was doing all by myself in the house on the hill. There were no other foreigners living there.

  “My wife says you are hiding from the Tong. Silly. I said you were on a fishing trip. Which is it?”

  “Hiding from the Tong.”

  We laughed.

  “I see,” he said. “It won’t do you any good.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  He offered me a free glass of brandy.

  “The Tong will find you anywhere.”

  I wondered if he was pulling my leg, but the more we sipped the brandy the more I understood that this was not the case. He thought of me as the loner who came down from the hill for his dinner. It was preposterous. He said he had been anxious for my health. I was looking better, he said, and he supposed it might be something to do with his slipper lobsters.

  “My friend introduced me to them,” I said.

  “Your friend?”

  “Yes, the Chinese girl.”

  He laughed, as if without reference to me.

  “You found them yourself. You came to the tank and picked them out. You even knew the Cantonese word for them.”

  “Me?”

  “We were surprised.”

  “Every night—”

  “My wife said she’d never seen such a lonely man. Every night,” he said sympathetically, “sitting at table seven eating lobsters and talking to yourself. My wife said you were a drunk. Forgive her—she didn’t mean it badly.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  He went off, and I finished the delicate slipper lobsters lying so grandly on their backs. I ate them with my fingers, as Dao-Ming had done, with kale dipped in soy, and soon I was aware of the movement of the sea a few feet below me, its circular motions, and the silhouettes of the hillsides losing their luminous definition and fading. The slowness of this fade was in inverse proportion to the subtle fear that rose inside me, the slowing down of my sense of normality and proportion. I wondered if I had missed the beat of his Chinese. But he had said that his wife thought I was a drunk drying out in a cabin in the woods. I had heard them correctly. The increasing vagueness of the darkness was inside me as well, and Dao-Ming was lost inside it. A brief encounter blown up out of all proportion by timing.

  My hands shook as I scooped out the flesh of the lobster, and when I was done I wiped them down elaborately with a napkin and a bowl of water with a slice of lemon floating in it. The Germans roared. They were pounding down bottles of some clear liquor. Increasingly, my feeling of repulsion for my fellow Europeans was getting the better of me. But I went for the rice brandy to forget them.

  The house had an abandoned feel when I returned there, as if it were now clear that Dao-Ming would not be coming back that night, and I made myself some tea and lay down for a while.

  It was still quite early, but I was restless. I wandered about, flicking open the drawers and poking into the cupboards, playing the spy, a role to which I had no right whatsoever. Soon I began to realize that there were no traces of her at all in this place, and that even the postcard with the image of the lamasery was not necessarily hers. I turned it over and saw that there was a message written in Mandarin on the reverse side. The characters for good luck, written by someone from the other end, I imagined, the strokes long and sloppy and slightly stylized. The lamasery was identified merely as Typical picturesque monastery in Kham. Three white stupas at the edge of a forest.

  I went into the bathroom and rummaged
through things that were not hers, or even female. Ancient razors left by a long-ago tenant, and a tube of toothpaste. The mirror was frosted by what looked like a layer of salt. In the drawers were scissors, cotton balls, and some antibiotics. The towels were freshly laundered. Not just laundered but ironed. The bath had been recently cleaned and there was an air freshener hanging from the rail. The house was not quite aligned in a natural way; it had the slightly paranoid orderliness of a hotel room. As I came into view of the mirror I saw that my head was distended slightly upward by a fault in the mirror’s surface, and that my mouth appeared far larger than it was, like a mouth pulled wide with two fingers to make a face. The surface of the face seemed blurred, smeared, as if it were made of a soft wet paint that had been pushed flat and to one side. I rubbed my eyes and tried to see it again afresh, but the image of my own face did not clarify.

  I went back into the front room and opened the box. If it was not Dao-Ming’s house then there was the question of whose money this was. But of course it was her money, it was the money from the hours spent in those hotel rooms with salarymen, the money she was going to send home. I scooped out all of the box’s contents and laid it on the countertop. It was quite a haul, at least several thousand, and I began—without thinking or calculating—to roll it up in wads and stuff it into my pockets. Soon I began to balloon up with cash, and I wondered if this would make me look suspicious on the night ferry. No matter. I stuffed every last note into my clothes and then made myself a pot of tea and lay down. If she came back now I’d have some explaining to do, but I was instinctively sure that she wouldn’t. When the tea had gone down and I had thought everything over, I wrote her a note. It was an apology of sorts, and there was nothing much in it. I said it was an ungrateful thing to do, but perhaps—somehow—she could understand. It was stronger than me. Moreover, I would send it back to her as soon as I earned it back. I would definitely earn it back, I said, and it wouldn’t be long.