The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  At first there was no conscious thought that my gambling life had come to an end. I looked down at the slot machines at the daily height of their frenzy, the roulette wheels spinning like the cogs of a huge horizontal machine. On the stage, the acrobats in white bodysuits somersaulted through the holes of a tall contraption built to resemble an executioner’s scaffold. A large feline, white, was dragged across the stage by a chain. I ate two steaks from Asia’s longest buffet, drinking iced tea with them, and then felt the sounds of the casino receding inside me, the movements on the stage turning into blurs. I got up and went down to the main floor holding my head in my hands and threaded a way out between the Klondike and Lucky Slot machines. I wanted to get out of that clean, fetid, nauseating, pop-nothingness air and gulp in the taste of the sea sweeping in on crazy winds. I got to the doors and the staff bowed and I thought I could see, moving ardently toward me through the chaos of the hoi polloi, the head of a manager of some kind whose face was overwritten with the concerns of etiquette and the need for repeat customers. I turned and made off. A Rolls was parked outside the doors and a fabulous woman was rolling out of it like a wet noodle. The face was a mask of hard sugar. I didn’t want to know who it was. I walked away, out of the glare and into the late-afternoon pallor of the roads, across which the wind swept, waking me up again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I took the ferry over to Hong Kong, the boat nearly empty. I felt deliriously happy, though I now had very little to give to Dao-Ming, and I was sure that she would understand. I felt anxious that I would now see her in her real element, without pretense, and that she knew that I was already familiar with this degraded milieu.

  I had looked through the call girl websites like 141 that list their offerings by neighborhood, each girl offering a series of demure photographs and providing her cell number and address. There was a time when, driven by loneliness, I used to take the ferry over in the late afternoon and walk to Kimberley Road, where the Venus Sauna entertained many gamblers, and make my way toward Nathan Road until I came to a large and run-down complex called Champagne Court. The upper stories of this place were a warren of hundreds of single rooms of 141 girls, each door covered with stickers in Chinese with prices and recommendations, and sometimes blurred photos of the girls inside. When the girls were busy they hung a sign outside that said Please Wait, or Well Worth Waiting For. In here could be found women of offhand, sarcastic beauty, their rooms bathed in pink light and equipped with large mirrors. The men went from floor to floor, most of them young, wandering in the labyrinths where entire subcorridors were colonized by courtesans who decorated their ceilings with fairy lights and surveillance cameras. They waited in line to ring the bells that made musical sounds and to see the face peering from around the door. They stated their prices in Mandarin, these mainland girls in gartered stockings.

  I had looked for hours on 141 until I found a Dao-Ming in Wan Chai. Most of the girls’ photos are heavily Photoshopped, and hers was no different. The skin smoothed out, the curves accentuated, the eyes made bigger. So that it might have been her and it might not. There was no phone number.

  I took a cab to Pacific Place, had a drink at the top-floor bar of the Upper House to calm my nerves, and then walked down Queen’s Road on the right side until I found number 92. There was a brightly polished metal grille door, as is usual, but no buzzer for the apartments inside. It was right by a crowded bus stop. I had no cell phone so I had to wait until an old man came out with his dog, leaving the door open for a second and enabling me to slip inside. A steep flight of steps led up to the garden courtyard of the usual dismal squalor.

  Around the courtyard were narrow apartments with folding grille gates, some of them open. The old ladies there cultivated scores of potted plants and diseased cats, and the cats and the plants lay together in the torpor of six p.m. as the light dimmed. I went from door to door trying to guess which one was the 141 girl called Dao-Ming. There was nothing on the first floor, so I climbed to the second. The grille of the corner apartment here was folded back and there was a red heart stuck on the door with the number 141, which is the usual sign that the punter has found his target. The door was plywood, with a peephole and a plastic garland nailed to it. Before ringing I listened for a while, my ear pressed close to the wood, and I heard a radio playing inside, Chinese pop music exactly like the kind I had heard during the phone call, and next to it the sound of a hair dryer. I pressed my hand against the door. The thought that it might be her was too enormous to control. And it was also too banal, too outrageous. I rang the bell.

  The radio was turned off at once, followed by the hair dryer. Silence. I heard a woman in slippers come padding toward the door. I stepped back and smoothed down my hair, with the involuntary vanity that overcomes the john without his knowing it. The peephole darkened.

  The eye was there. I hoped she could see me clearly in the fading light of the landing, in the graying light. But if she did, she didn’t open the door. She was thinking it over. Sometimes they will not open when they see a gwai lo. Our reputation precedes us. I stood there for some time and then I stepped forward again and pressed the bell. It seemed to make a god-awful noise that reverberated through the whole landing. The door snapped open and an ancient, skeptical face appeared.

  “Yes?”

  “I am here for my appointment.”

  “Your what?”

  “My appointment. I am Lord Doyle.”

  “Lor’ Doyle? Who the hell is that?”

  “I called on Friday,” I stammered. “To see Dao-Ming.”

  “Dao-Ming?” she muttered, and her eyes widened.

  Her hand held the door firm and she was not going to open it wider. The apartment partially revealed behind her was not a boudoir, could not have been the room of Dao-Ming. It was the disheveled room of an old lady, dour and half-lit and sourly scented.

  “There’s no Dao-Ming here,” she said. “The girl who was here is gone. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “So you are one of her clients?”

  “Yes—I mean, I was.”

  “She hanged herself a few weeks ago. All her things were shipped back to China.”

  I took a step back.

  “It can’t be,” I stammered. “There must be a mistake—”

  “No, I cleared up the room myself. There’s nothing left of hers here now.”

  “And Dao-Ming—”

  “Cremated at a temple in Kowloon. There was no one to pay the costs.”

  “Her family—”

  “How do I know? Girls like that come and go. They don’t have families.”

  I tried to think of something to say, to prolong this conversation in the face of her growing irritation. And the door was closing—

  “Not even one member of her family,” I cried.

  “No one knew where she was from. Probably too poor to come to Hong Kong. Maybe they shipped her ashes—”

  One of the other curtains had now parted and a prying face had appeared. What was the gwai lo doing on their landing talking in such heated tones? The old lady shrugged and the door began to close.

  “But where can I find out?” I whispered.

  “What’s there to find out? It’s over. Go home and find another whore.”

  With this final flourish of annoyance, the door slammed shut.

  I had to leave. I began to descend. At the first floor a few families were out on the landing eating at folding tables. I went past their knowing stares. The next flight of steps was narrower and more malodorous, and at the bottom of it the streetlights glared through the metal gate. I was halfway down them when I heard a door opening on the second floor and I stopped again. From far above, falling through cracks and chinks in the stairwell, a shaft of light fell downward until it struck the steps around me. I looked up. Surely someone had come through a door and was going to come down the steps. I went softly down to the gate and put my finger on the buzzer that would open it. Sud
denly the street looked garishly anonymous, women standing full-lit in front of a huge furniture store next door, mentally mapping out their future kitchens and dining rooms, and around them commuters with pinched expressions hustling their way down Queen’s Road. The usual crush of a Hong Kong evening. I then turned and looked back up the steps and I could sense the person coming down the flight above it, but carefully, without sound, perhaps taking it step by step. I pushed the buzzer. A wave of terror rolled over me as the metal gate swung open and the perfume of passing women washed over me. I looked back for a moment before stepping into the street, and I saw someone turn the corner, a woman’s pumps and bare legs, a quickening pace. I went into the street and let the gate snap shut behind me. As I strode away I heard the buzzer ring a second time.

  I now walked uphill on Queen’s back toward Pacific Place. I could have glanced behind me but I didn’t; I walked on as fast as I could, in a straight line, knifing through the wall of bodies, anxious to escape into the comfort of the great corporate space at the top of the hill. I decided not to take the elevators inside the mall and instead slogged up the steep path that runs around the side of the development. As I rose up this hill I looked back once at the traffic intersection by the small underpass where the pedestrians were massing by a red light. From out of the underpass a girl was walking, quite distinct among them, her long hair brushed forward over her face. She stopped with the others and there was something chillingly apart about her, about the way she stopped and looked up at me as I turned and trotted up the hill, sweating and panting and struggling with my own unfitness. When I got to the top I didn’t look back again. I rushed into the plaza where the Shangri-La and the Marriott stand and made for the Upper House again. I went straight up to the bar of the Café Grey, with its views over Victoria Harbor.

  When I was truly alive—once upon a time—I loved this bar. It was my favorite bar in Hong Kong, and for some strange reason I have always felt safe here, anonymous, able to drink without interference. I love looking across the warehouses in Tsim Tsa Shui and the neon that says, or rather asks, What’s your number? Other of these mysterious signs spell the words Prudential or Still Growing. I look at the empty lots of construction sites lit by arc lamps. Cranes standing by the water’s edge, as if about to explode into meaning. The dark wood furniture, the pretty girls, the cocktails that would cost a welder a week’s wage. This was where I liked to get tanked. A wealthy man here can just fall into a suite designed by Andre Fu if he’s too drunk to walk.

  I sat and got a cocktail with a ridiculous name and downed it in a minute. A wild fear still had hold of me, and I watched the new arrivals coming into the Café Grey from the corridor by the elevators. The girl with the mad hair did not appear, but what was to stop her from waiting for me downstairs in the lobby? I was sure for a while that I was being hunted. But it might have been the booze. I suddenly felt immensely alone. The room began to shrink. I gripped my banknotes, the last few I had hidden away, and they tumbled, somehow, onto the bar like confetti. The barman asked me if I was all right, but I hardly heard him. The girls were looking at me as if I had leprosy, as if I were about to die on the spot. I could see what they were thinking. An aging gambler on the rocks, capsizing minute by minute. A man with fear in his eyes, teetering on the edge of self-control. But then again it was maybe because I had lost so much weight and was by now little more than a skeleton. Either way, it was clear that they were anxious to get rid of me, that I did not fit in with their elegant and youthful atmosphere. At length a manager came up and said that I was looking a little ill. Would it not be better if I went home?

  “But I want another drink. You’re a bar, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. But we have to look after our customers.”

  “So I can’t order a White Russian?”

  “I think it would be better if you didn’t, and went home instead. Really, sir. You are dropping money all over the place.” His eyes glanced over my shoulder to make sure that there was no kind of scene developing around us. “I cannot expose my staff in this kind of situation. And it would not be fair to you either. Can I call you a taxi downstairs?”

  “No need, young man.”

  “Do you live in Hong Kong?”

  “No, Outer Siberia. But I can walk home.”

  He motioned to one of his waiters.

  “Can you take the gentleman downstairs and make sure he is all right? Call him a taxi and charge it to the house.”

  I slid off my stool and staggered to the elevators, shadowed by the nervous waiter. We went down in an awkward gloom. As we came out into the plaza he asked me about the taxi and I declined.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “I’m going to clear my head and walk around. Don’t worry about me.”

  I went back down to Queen’s Road and walked along it for some time in the direction of Jardine’s Bazaar. It was still rush hour and the crowds had not thinned out. The parks were open and I wandered into one, the shadows massing across it, and lay down on one of the benches. The trees here, banyans or figs, I could not tell, closed out the sky and I was able to doze even in the thick of the noise and bustle, and soon in any case the streets died down and a quiet returned. I slept then and some hours must have passed.

  Homeless people are discouraged in Hong Kong’s neat and prosperous parks, but no one came to rouse me and send me on my way. The night became mellow and easygoing, and I slept into the early hours, dreaming in my way of all the things that I didn’t dare to think about. The moon rose between the gleaming and implacable towers, and in the park I opened my eyes and thought of the tropical forest that this island must once have been. An island of fig trees like these, magnificent with fruit and monstrous roots. And as I woke slowly, almost unwillingly, I was aware of a hand placed upon my forehead and someone sitting next to me, quietly waiting for me to rejoin the world. It was like that moment at the Intercontinental, which now seemed so long ago, when I had understood finally that the supernatural is real after all. The hand was like a poultice, damp and cold but reassuring, and the form contained neatly in its elegant silk clothes was almost maternal. We said nothing, and indeed, looked at from the point of view of eternity, there was nothing to say anyway.

  Also by Lawrence Osborne

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