Planet Lolita

by Charles Foran

  “There’s a bed with an end table,” I said, “and a chair with a belt dangling off it. She’s Hello Kitty as well—unless she was wearing that for me.”

  “Hello Kitty number one most popular,” Jr. Mam said.

  “You are evil person,” Gloria said. A tendon, visible only when she wept, popped in her neck, its own kind of scar.

  “Sexy,” the woman said, touching my belly. It was more like a poke, her fingernail leaving a mark.

  Yanking on the fabric, I covered up most of the exposed skin. “The top is too small,” I said.

  “This child is fifteen!” Gloria said.

  Jr. Mam’s eyes, alert and wary and possibly amused, shut down, their centres as black as calligraphy ink dots. I noticed a mole on her left nostril, complete with sprouting hair. Normally I’d have picked up something so hideous right away. “Massage only,” she said. “Good business.” Out came a cell phone. She speed-dialled.

  I knocked on door number three, the one with music.

  “Hello?” someone said.

  “Gao cho ah!” Jr. Mam said to me. Into her phone she spoke two words, “quai lai.” Come quick.

  “I can be her,” I repeated, the notion scarcely any clearer now, “but she has to be me too.”

  The door opened a crack and a head stuck out. She was blond, from a bottle, her teeth good and her eyes green. But HK$590 still seemed expensive.

  “Are you Russian?” I said, swallowing my disappointment.

  “Ukraine,” she replied.

  Fumbling with the latch on my purse, I showed her the apple. “You might as well eat it.”

  “No photo!” Jr. Mam said. “It’s an apple,” I said.

  Two men had entered the apartment—clatter, swoosh, clatter, swoosh, went the beads—and were closing in. I recognized them from the food market, including the one that had allowed his face to be swallowed by a dragon. In a second I’d be getting a closer look at his mistake of a lifetime. Was I making my own, right now? The thought was a stronger, sharper poke to the gut.

  In Cantonese Jr. Mam instructed them to grab my arms. When Gloria tried blocking their path the woman slammed her against the wall. “Filipino chau hai,” she said in English. “For you I get hundred dollar tops. Have to fuck all night to make any money.”

  The apple, which the Ukrainian hadn’t touched, fell from my purse to the ground, rolling towards the rear exit, as if attempting its own escape. But instead of helping another girl in distress—or making a break for it alongside the fruit, why not—the $590 prostitute closed her door.

  Still pinning Gloria to the wall, Jr. Mam turned to me with a dragon-toothed grin. “But you are Chinese ping gwoh. Sweet to taste.”

  “My real name is Sarah, from the Isle of Skye,” I answered. Not even debating whether I had the courage to do it, I pulled Gloria away from her. “Slap me again,” I said into my amah’s ear.

  Her eyes bugged out.

  “For real this time.”

  She hesitated.

  “Say I didn’t take my medicine today,” I whispered. “Say that I’m mal-brained.”

  Emitting an animal sound, half scream, half whimper, Gloria slapped me so hard that I lost my balance. “Stupid girl!” she said, not too convincingly.

  The gangsters, reeking of beer and tumours, had to prop Hello Kitty up, a doll with no control over her muscles. But although Jr. Mam grinned behind her mask at my humiliation, she wasn’t satisfied. Her gaze warned of what else she would be taking in revenge, and her stubby fingers dug into the flesh and bone at the nape of my neck. Using her nails as pincers, she snapped the cross from the chain and caught both before they fell. The pain was sharp but faded. The slap kept on hurting, as it should.

  “Now go,” she said.

  The men shoved us towards the rear door. “SeeSee, walk,” I heard Gloria say. “Don’t turn.”

  We climbed down the rickety fire escape to a back alley. A fluorescent bulb over an outdoor barber shop blazed so raw I covered my brow, certain the glass was about to shatter, and rain on a tarpaulin went pop! pop!, each shot a jolt to my spine. Buried into a wall was a food stall with a blowtorched duck hanging from a hook. The duck’s skin glowed like embers, its eyes twinkling reflected light. I decided to finish my aura sitting down.

  It was over before my bum found the low stool. The aura was done, and soon I would be too.

  “Food,” I said to Gloria.

  “Here?”

  “Noodles,” I said to the man standing behind the duck. He wore a stained apron over a filthy undershirt, a slit in his N-95 mask allowing him to smoke on the job. “No beasties.”

  He stared at me.

  “No meat,” I corrected in Cantonese.

  “Haven’t you heard of SARS?” he said, the tumour stick a sorcerer’s wand.

  “We’re tourists.”

  “You should buy a mask.”

  “You should serve noodles.”

  Across the table, Gloria stared at me, her mouth back to being dead-fish open.

  “Don’t cry,” I said.

  She struggled.

  “Let’s buy mango candies after this,” I added. “Or a fresh mango.”

  The man delivered bowls of chow mein noodles with bok choy. “Give the cigarette to the duck,” I said to him. “It could use a few smokes.” I selected a chipped ceramic spoon from one container and plastic chopsticks, their tips grooved with teeth marks, from another.

  Gloria found her voice. “Must clean these first,” she said, bending her head towards her purse.

  The ground was opening up. “Peking smoking duck,” I said. “Sounds yummy.”

  “Handi Wipes,” she said.

  Having slurped broth and supped noodles, I pinched a bok choy flower between the chopsticks. “Baby socks. Green ones.”

  She tore at the packet with her teeth.

  “It wasn’t so bad, for a first time,” I said, touching my cheek. “Didn’t hurt that much.”

  “Let me clean!”

  “I miss being a kid. I miss my family. Don’t you?”

  I slurped, and supped, and pinched another baby sock. Getting it—what was coming, and couldn’t be stopped—Gloria asked what she should do.

  “Stay with me forever,” I replied. “Never go away.”

  She threw enough money on the table to buy an entire duck.

  “Girls bring condoms to school just to show off,” I said as we hurried out to Argyle Street to flag a taxi. “Real ones. They peel them open in the bathroom and wave them at each other, giggling and squealing. How stupid is that?”

  No ground beneath these running shoes. Only a trench, a chasm, black and bottomless. One more step and down I’ll plummet. One more step and—

  CHAPTER SIX

  December 19, 20—

  *Eye of viral storm

  *837 infected, 29 dead

  “Our daughter said those things?”

  “Technically, she texted them. Sorry, Xixi,” Dad said. “Sorry to be doing this in front of you.”

  Me (to him): Better than me hiding in Rachel’s old room

  Checking his screen, he nodded, his smile closer to a wince. Dad sat on one couch, Mom on the other. In between them I curled in an armchair, chin on my knees.

  “‘Am I fuckable yet?’” Mom said, quoting the text I had sent to Rachel. “And then you asked Gloria how many holes you have for sex?”

  Me (to her): Rachel told you? Gloria told you?

  Her phone buzzed.

  “There’s no chance I will read your message with you sitting right here. I see you texting it! You’re not invisible.”

  Me (to her): I thought I was

  “Sarah!” she said, ignoring the incoming texts. “Are you truly still not getting it, darling? The implications of the video sent to my iPhone earlier this morning are terrifying. These people are now stalking you, and threatening to abduct you if you won’t stop. I had no choice but to involve the police. Even your father, who would much prefer to keep his head buried
in the sand, or elsewhere, agrees. Right, Jacob?”

  Me (to her): Why stay with him, if he’s such a jerk?

  “Give me that phone,” Mom added.

  “Leah, don’t.”

  Me (to him): Isn’t she a bitch now?

  “Kiddo,” he said. On any other day his expression might have made me regret my words, want to trigger a Cool Kwok grin. But not this morning. Not when she—they, Leah and Jacob, still the official parenting team—had just ruined Gloria’s life. Ruined her life and, by extension, my own.

  “What did she say?” Mom said.

  “We should get Rachel on the laptop,” he said. “She might be able to talk to her. What time is it in Toronto?”

  Me (to her): I called you a chau hai

  Buzz.

  Me (to him): 9 pm in TO

  Buzz.

  “Stop it!” Dad said without either checking his text or asking, and finding out, that I had called my own mother a “smelly cunt” in Cantonese. An awful term, one I didn’t know that I knew.

  Mom sprang up from her couch. “The phone,” she said, coming towards me. “It has to go. I said so last week. I mean it today.”

  I’d been attacked by another adult not long before, and instinctively sank deeper into the chair, the phone buried in my belly. Manga yip-yipped at the threat of violence.

  “Out of the way, Manga,” she said.

  “FFUUCCKK,” I said.

  In mid-stride she veered away and crossed to the balcony doors, where she stood deliberately shielding her face. “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this,” she said. “Nor what I can do to stop everything from turning more and more to shit.”

  “Let me try,” Dad said.

  My belly buzzed, not from cramps or fear.

  Dad: Do you remember last night?

  Me: Some of it

  Dad: Gloria said you had a seizure after eating noodles

  Me: We were in a taxi in the Cross-Harbour Tunnel. My tongue was burnt and I didn’t know why

  Back and forth we texted, clickety-click, our words beaming up to some satellite near the moon, bouncing off, and landing right back in the same room in apartment 2201, 26 Old Peak Road, Hong Kong. Out the window the slope glowed bok choy from all the rain. Or it glowed baby socks.

  Dad: What about the massage parlour? Do you remember climbing those stairs?

  Me: I met a Russian girl. She cost $590. So far, 29 people have died from SARS and 837 are infected. I don’t think we’ll get as high as the last time

  Dad: Was she the one who stole your cross?

  Me:??

  Dad: Gloria said a woman ripped the cross from your neck

  I checked the dent between my collarbones. When I looked up at Dad, he shrugged. Amazing, not to have noticed the cross and chain were gone. My fingers climbed my left cheek.

  Me: She may have hit me

  Dad: The Russian? That’s assault

  Me: Did I find her? Mary … Did I apologize?

  Our eyes met. This time, knowing how much it meant, he added a sad smile. “Sorry, SeeSaw,” he said.

  Mom flinched at the kindness in his voice.

  Dad: What about before you entered the building, the women at the table in that outdoor restaurant? And the one in charge?

  Me: I watched the video. And I remember most of it—before the doorway. Thai girls cost just 190

  Dad: The police have identified the location

  Me: I still don’t think Mom had to send them the video

  Dad: They demanded it. Anyway, the gangsters have posted YOUR photo on YOUR Facebook wall. The photo the mamasan took on the beach, plus our address below. You know this, right?

  Me: I saw

  Dad: We should have contacted the authorities weeks ago. And confiscated your computer and phone. Now it’s too late

  Me: Did you have to, Dad?

  Dad: You mean Gloria?

  I turned off my phone. “Did you have to?” I said from the centre of the room, equally distant from them both. “Kwok-MacInnes parentals … did you?”

  “We had to,” he said.

  I told them I’d wait in my cell until the interrogation. “Come, Manga,” I said to my last remaining friend. Dad was already by the balcony door, scrolling through our exchange for her to read—everything I said and did, even in my own bedroom, was being recorded, taped, and posted on YouTube, Facebook, and exploitedasianteens.com—before I was out of sight.

  Afraid to FaceTime Rachel and catch her having sex with Yellow Peril, formerly Head Tax, and warned by Leah to leave Gloria alone, likely so we couldn’t get our stories straight—dumb, since I couldn’t remember chunks of mine—I retreated to Facebook. In the last twenty minutes another twenty-seven people had liked “Finding Mary” and nine more had talked about this. Two comments had been added since my photo was posted earlier this morning. One was from Kimberley in Phuket. Super-cute Asian teen! she wrote for everyone to read. But she also texted me privately: U posted yourself, Xixi? Bad idea to give the address. From Manchester, Jonathan Rhys-Jones posted on the page as well. She’s worth it, he wrote. Intending to be sweet, no doubt, but the comment came out creepy. Poor Jonathan.

  Looking at Mary, looking at myself, I wasn’t sure anymore about her, about Facebook, about me. The seizure in Mong Kok had been different, the chasm the deepest and darkest so far. Half a day later, had I climbed all the way back out? Bok choy baby socks and a smoking Peking duck, a tongue scalded by noodle soup and a cheek stinging from a slap, a cross stolen and an apple rolling down a corridor—I couldn’t sort out events or say why certain images still burned in my mind. I couldn’t be certain I knew what I knew now because I remembered it, or had been told, or had watched the video sent to my mother’s latest Apple product. It was no good, having a mal-brain. I couldn’t be trusted, or trust myself.

  Leah called me back to her courtroom for another grilling. Two police squeezed onto one of the couches. Though Senior Inspector Kerr stood when I entered, Constable Chu did not. Kerr was gweilo, pasty and balding in a slept-in suit, his face mashed by wrinkles but his green eyes twinkly. Chu was local, uniformed in a beret, a blue shirt with epaulets, cargo pants, and black boots. The belt around her waist holstered a handgun and cuffs, a baton to her knees and a canister of spray, not for hairstyling.

  My arms went out, wrists already cuffed. “Take me, not Gloria,” I said. “I can’t be trusted.”

  “You must be young Sarah,” he said in a Scottish accent. “I recognize you from the video.”

  They belonged to the Organized Crime and Triad Unit. He was a dinosaur, he explained, one of a dwindling number of pre-Handover hires still on the force. She was an exemplary junior officer, present this afternoon on account of the sensitive nature of the matter. Senior Inspector Kerr kept pinching at his SARS mask while he spoke, as though to let his words slip up and over the fabric. I liked him immediately.

  “You sound like Shrek,” I said.

  “Sarah,” Mom said.

  “Kwok Xixi,” I corrected her.

  “I feel a bit ogre-ish in this bloody thing,” he said.

  “Please take the masks off,” Dad said. “Everyone,” he added, cutting Leah with a look.

  “Small mercies,” the policeman said. First he wiped his brow with his N-95. Then he stuffed it into his coat pocket.

  Constable Chu kept her condom on, the better to give me the evil ninja glare.

  “Not wearing a mask on the streets of Mong Kok last evening certainly made you easy to identify,” Senior Inspector Kerr said. “That’s now part of our problem.”

  “You scared people,” the female officer said.

  His frown carved extra wrinkles into his cheeks. “Thank you, Constable. But I’m thinking more of this lass’s face suddenly being so well known, on account of the YouTube.”

  “There’s a video as well?” I said.

  “It appeared in the middle of the night.”

  “They also posted the picture of me on the page I made for Mary
,” I said, coming clean.

  “We’re aware.”

  “It showed our address. I took it down.”

  “The posting was up long enough, I’m afraid. They could come calling anytime.”

  “They’ve had our address for six weeks,” Mom said.

  “Oh?”

  “Off my phone.”

  “They stole your phone?”

  “I lent it to them,” she said in a voice so hushed I wondered if she needed to close her eyes.

  “This may be different,” Senior Inspector Kerr said. “The girl your daughter has been trying to contact appears not to be an ordinary sex worker. She might be a favourite of a senior Triad boss. The one time you actually met,” he said to me, “on that beach in the New Territories, did you notice anything different about her?”

  “She was the same as the others.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Dad said. “Now that I think about it.”

  “Now that you think about it?” Mom said.

  “Regardless,” the policeman said, “it’s best to keep a wide distance between yourselves and this particular lady.”

  Dad said, “Xixi, how is it that neither you nor Gloria noticed someone trailing behind you with a camera last night?”

  “Everyone carries a phone in Hong Kong, usually right in front of their faces. And it was dark, and rainy, and I was scared,” I said, admitting it to myself.

  “I blame her amah,” Mom said. “Her former amah.”

  “She made a mistake, aye,” Senior Inspector Kerr said. “Lucky for you, nothing terrible happened because of it.” He went on to tell us how “his crowd,” on learning from “the family maid” that the girl in the photo, the one identified only as Mary, might have been in the massage parlour involuntarily, and would be swiftly relocated in the aftermath of our visit, had had no choice but to call in a special tactical unit, one specializing in abductions. How “that crowd” had sprung into action and raided 1303 Portland Street earlier today but found nothing incriminating, including any prostitute matching the photograph or answering to the name. And how, in consequence, my circumstance as a “well-meaning but muddled, misguided wee lassie” had deteriorated to such an extent that my security in Hong Kong could no longer be guaranteed. As such, my departure for a safer locale should be imminent, and be preceded by what amounted to temporary incarceration right here on Old Peak Road. “Quite the posh address,” he added for no obvious reason.