He says, ‘I can come back in two weeks.’
‘For good?’ I clarify.
‘For the weekend,’ he offers hopefully.
‘Then why did you say you had good news and that you were coming back in two weeks?!’
‘Because it is good news, Han. I’ll see you in two weeks. It’s not that long.’
‘I’ll say it’s not. It’s only two days.’
‘I mean till I come back. To. Visit.’ He’s speaking like I’m a child.
‘It’s fourteen long days,’ says I, the child. Our conversations lately have been fraught with confusion. We never used to misunderstand each other. It’s the distance. And it’s Li Ming’s fault. I’m not sure how, but it is. ‘How’s Li Ming?’ Funny how when I speak, green-eyed monsters come out.
‘She’s fine. But I think the project’s getting to her. It’s the long hours. They’re getting to all of us. It’s worse for her though, because she’s leading the project. She’s been very stressed. She actually even yelled at me yesterday. That’s not like her at all. She’s usually very sweet. You’ll see. She’s coming back the same weekend I am, so you’ll get to meet her.’
‘Why would I want to meet her?’
‘Because she’s my boss? And you’ve been obsessed with her since I started the assignment?’
‘I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed…’ I have a healthy interest in the woman my boyfriend is spending every waking hour with. That’s not obsessive. It’s prudent.
He chuckles. ‘Come on, Han. You asked me to take her picture the other day. Isn’t that obsessive?’
‘Well, I just… I… I’m simply curious about your colleagues. That’s perfectly natural.’
Yeah, perfectly natural for a freaky weirdo. I am obsessive, but only because I’m so in love with him. Of course I’m terrified of losing something this incredible. Who wouldn’t be?
‘You haven’t asked for stats on the rest of the team,’ he points out.
‘I’m starting at the top?’ I know I sound ridiculous. Sam knows it too, which is why he’s turned my admittedly odd request into a joke. Otherwise he’d have to face the fact that he’s dating a psychopath. ‘Oh Sam, I know I sound crazy. It’s just hard being apart. It’s making me insecure.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, Han. I keep telling you that. Li Ming is only interested in me as far as my job is concerned. She’s not a threat. She’s really sweet and nice, that’s all. And this isn’t forever, you know. The assignment should be finished in a couple of months. Then I’ll be back with you. Trust me, the time will go quickly. It probably already has, with your job, and searching for the new apartment. How was your day today?’
I know he’s just trying to sound as normal as possible, as if we were able to see each other without the use of aerodynamics. ‘I don’t think Mrs. Reese and I are going to become best friends,’ I tell him. ‘And thank you so much again for the flowers. They were the perfect way to end my first day. I’m looking at them now.’ In reality they’re about twenty-four hours away from self-composting but I can’t bring myself to throw them away. Every time I’ve seen them this last week they’ve reminded me that Sam is thinking of me.
‘Well, hang in there, Han. Josh likes you, and he’s your boss, not the old bat. I’ve been thinking about your job, you know, and how diligent you’ve been to find it. I know it wasn’t easy… you’re really a strong woman, Han, you know that? I admire you. I guess I have since your party in London. Even if you did have a death theme for someone with terminal cancer.’ He snorts at the memory. ‘You really worked hard to make a success of that job, in spite of Felicity. You’re gonna be great at the job, I know you will. And I’ll be back in just a couple months for good. Think how nice that will be, living in the same city. We’ll go on dates as much as you want. We’ll make spectacles of ourselves. And it’ll just be a few more months.’
‘Promise?’ Too late to take the word back. I hate sounding so needy. ‘I mean, that’ll be great. Goodnight, sweetheart, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
Just as I hang up, Stacy crashes through the door, laden with grocery bags. ‘Here.’ She hands me a card. ‘It looks like it’s from your parents. How’s Sam?’ She’s ever alert for his transgressions to justify his suspected rat-hood.
‘He’s good. He’ll be back the weekend after next.’
‘For good?! That’s great news. Finally.’
‘No, just for the weekend.’
‘Oh. Well, I guess that’s something. Nice of him to visit at least.’ She frowns. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh yeah, I’m fine.’ I grin. ‘Great! It’ll just be for a few more months. Then he’ll be back for good. And he’s doing really well in his job, so this assignment is excellent.’ I sound like an eighth-grade cheerleader but I just can’t bring myself to tell her how I’m really feeling. I don’t want to risk another I’m-worried-about-you talk like we had her first night here. I want my confidence in Sam to be unshakeable, not to have evil little whispers in my ear making me doubt him. Sometimes friends don’t realize the power of their words.
‘Oh, good lord.’ I’ve just opened Mom’s card. It reads: ‘Enjoy your freedom. You deserve it.’ I show Stacy. ‘She’s subtle.’ I tuck the card back in the envelope.
‘Well, Han, you should enjoy your freedom. I’ve told you that.’
‘Or, even better, I could enjoy the fact that my boyfriend is coming in two weeks. Anyway, thanks for going to the store without me. What’s the milk situation?’
She sighs under the weight of Hong Kong’s dairy peculiarities. ‘Okay. Remember the blue one that tasted funny? I think it was soy milk. I just checked and it was in a different section from this one.’ She brandishes a carton with a cow on it. ‘Plus, as you can see, it has a cow, so it has to be regular milk, right? Want to taste?’
‘After the last one? Let’s do it together.’ Milk doesn’t taste like milk here. And the surprise to the taste buds isn’t a pleasant I-was-expecting-milk-but-got-cupcakes sensation either. Bread doesn’t taste like bread, either, but at least it only tastes of Styrofoam.
Hong Kong’s food stores are truly an adventure in foreign palates. Pushing my miniscule cart through narrow aisles, I didn’t even recognize everyday foodstuffs. Anyone who’s had a self-catering holiday abroad knows the disorientating feeling of staring blankly at rows of boxes or bags without having the faintest idea what they are. Sometimes there are helpful drawings, but they’re mostly a mystery. Might be sugar, might be flour. It’s not a mistake you want to make as you stir your morning coffee.
Our supermarket has more varieties of rice than I’d ever imagined possible, yet there’s virtually no cheese. And the milk, well, I spent a long time staring at cartons labelled ‘milk beverage’ or ‘milk drink’ with lots of Chinese lettering. So far we’ve failed to find milk that tastes like it came from a cow.
‘Those flowers reek, Hannah. You’ve got to get rid of them. Seriously, I’ll buy you new ones. Oh, by the way, Chloe called yesterday. Sorry, I forgot to tell you. It’s on the machine.’
‘Thanks.’ It’s not the first time Stacy forgot to tell me about Chloe’s calls, but I don’t want to fight over it. I guess there are some things we both gloss over. ‘Have I got time to call her now?’
‘Not really. The guys said it’ll take a while to get to the Buddha. We can take the MTR to Lantau, but then there’s a bus. We’re meeting them in half an hour in Central.’
By ‘the guys’ she means her colleague Stuart and his identical twin brother Brent. In just the few weeks since they met, Stuart has already become Stacy’s favorite work playmate. I met them a couple days ago and they are just as nice and fun as Stacy said. Being ginger, neither sibling holds any romantic potential whatsoever, so they’re in the running to become our safe best friends. That means there’s no risk that they’ll suddenly come down with a case of the wish-I-could-kiss-yous.
Within two hours we’re on a hilly Lantau road with our fates in the hands of
a bus driver who thinks he’s driving for Team Ferrari. To be fair, he’d have more time for the road if his pesky mobile didn’t demand all his attention. We had a little fright when its ring sent him diving into the bag wedged under the brake pedal, but the damage from sideswiping that lorry wasn’t too bad. This is one of those bigger-vehicle-bigger-headline situations. There are at least fifty victims on the bus. It catches air as we crest another hill. Stacy has even stopped talking. ‘Isn’t he going to slow down?’ she finally entreats.
‘He must know what he’s doing,’ Brent reasons, in a rather bouncy Somerset accent that sounds as if his words are on elastic bands. ‘He drives this route all day.’ He’s seated nonchalantly while I dig the stuffing out of the seat back with my fingernails.
‘That’s not an established fact,’ I say. ‘How do you know this isn’t his first day?’
‘Is he driving like it’s his first day?’ Stuart thinks he’s joking but since he’s brought it up...
‘He’s driving like it’s his first day behind the wheel. Any wheel. Plus, there’s construction. Look, it’s only one lane.’ Concrete barriers divide the already narrow road, protecting the digging equipment from maniacal bus drivers. A well-used guardrail runs alongside the edge of the road and a temporary stop light signals the entrance to this slalom course. The light is red. The bus carries on. Clouds float level with the guardrail.
‘Did he just run the light?’ Even Brent looks a little nervous now.
‘I think he did.’
‘Maybe the light doesn’t work.’
‘Or maybe it does, and there’s a bus coming the other way.’
We all squint into the hazy distance, but the hairpin turns make it impossible to see more than a couple of hundred yards.
Kapunk! Something bounces off the side of the bus. Or, more accurately, the bus bounces off the side of something, ricocheting from the barrier towards the guardrail, and the abyss beyond, while the less continent passengers soil themselves. ‘Yeeaahh!’
We come to rest a little way up the road. I swear I see the driver take a swig out of a bottle in his bag. It looks a hundred proof.
‘All right me lover?’ Brent grins, like he’s waiting for our exclamations of praise for planning this adventure just for us.
‘I think so.’ Aside from my fingertips, which are knuckle-deep in the seat back, there doesn’t appear to be any damage.
Stuart twists around to address Stacy, who’s wedged between me and the window. ‘You all right?’
She’s hyperventilating.
‘Hoo. Hoo, yeah. I’m okay, hoo.’ Women in labor sound less distressed. ‘Isn’t there another way to get to the monastery?’
‘Brent?’
‘Sure, we could have taken the gondola.’
There’s a gondola? As in a nice, slow, safe, not-driven-by-maniac mode of transport? ‘Is there a stop close by?’
‘Nah, it’s back where we got the bus.’
‘Stace,’ I say. ‘Do you want to lie down for a minute?’
‘Okay.’ Docile as a lamb, she lays her head in my lap. Now I know she’s not all right. Stacy’s not the type to show weakness.
‘Here, buckle up.’ I don’t want my best friend bouncing around like popcorn in the pan when we start moving again.
‘How can you not be scared?’ I ask Brent, who looks like he’s about to have a quick nap. I’m really warming to him. He’s remarkably easy-going, and reminds me a little of my housemate, Adam, from London. Adam is the kind of big, cuddly man who women want to be friends with, the type who suffers under the curse of the nice-guy syndrome. Always a best friend, never a lover. Brent has the advantage of a runner’s build (which would be yum if it wasn’t covered in ginger fur), but his happy, open face tells you that he is nice-guy afflicted. He wouldn’t be bad-looking if he didn’t have quite so much forehead, but Mother Nature can be cruel. His eyes are a pretty light blue but his face is a little too delicate for a man. It’s his pointy nose and very archy eyebrows. Plus, his accent makes him sound simple. As endearing as this is in a friend, few women want to hear it when being smutty-talked in bed. His brother, sharer of chromosomes, is identically challenged. They’re only differentiated by their bellies; Stuart has one and Brent doesn’t.
‘Nah, I’m not frightened. I have faith that I’m not going to die on a back road in Hong Kong. So I don’t worry about things like that.’ He shrugs.
‘You’re a fatalist then? You believe there’s a time and place, and you’re not going to go before your number is called?’ I’d love to have that kind of faith. Being a lapsed Protestant and a devout worrier, there’s no chance.
‘And that’s the truth,’ he states with a nod.
Their accents will take getting used to. And they keep calling us lover, which I assume is just a figure of speech in the West Country, not a declaration of intent. ‘What makes you think your ticket’s not going to be punched on the ride back?’ I ask.
His smile briefly falters. ‘Well, I just don’t. It doesn’t do any good to worry, does it? Might as well live your life as you’d like to. Otherwise you’re just biding time.’
‘Like reading magazines in the waiting room,’ I propose.
‘That’s right. I’d rather just turn up when my appointment is called.’
The driver’s unusual application of brakes makes Stacy bolt upright. ‘Are we there?’ She’s much more chipper with the risk of suicidal plunge behind us.
‘It seems so.’ Seven thousand stairs meander to the top of the hill. They have painful journey written all over them.
‘Do we have to climb all the way up?’ I ask. ‘I can see it fine from here. Big Buddha, very nice. I’ll get a photo.’ In the dim distance, practically ringed with clouds, Buddha sits smugly watching tourists hyperventilate towards him.
‘Come on, Hannah, don’t be lazy,’ Stuart cajoles as we leave the bus. ‘Think how lovely it’ll be when we get up there.’
Lazy? I’m not lazy. It’s hot. Stairs and I are not firm friends. We’ve almost died once already. I don’t want to add stroke risk to my day. ‘Sure, okay, let’s go.’ I’m hardly going to let our new best friends think I’m lazy, am I? Besides, I can tell these are men who believe that rubbish about the journey being part of the adventure. Stuart is clearly the leader among the twins, although he’s more a benevolent dictator than a Chairman Mao. He was probably born first and his two-minutes-younger brother lives happily under his regime. I know exactly how Brent feels. After all, I’ve gladly followed Stacy’s lead most of my life. It’s comforting to have someone you trust take control. She’s already staked her friendship claim on Stuart, having planted that flag firmly between his eyes on the day they met in the office. It is fun having them to play with. And they’ve worked here since graduation, Stuart in business and Brent in architecture. So we’ve got real, live, know-their-suey-from-their-wonton tour guides.
Twenty minutes of breathlessness later, I’ve proven to myself that a giant Buddha close up is just a more in-focus giant Buddha.
‘Isn’t that a nice view?’ Brent enquires. After a climb that would give Edmund Hillary a nosebleed, he isn’t even winded. I guess the fact that Hong Kong is the world’s most humid StairMaster keeps one in shape. It really is remarkable how tenacious those first colonizers were. I’d have taken one look at the steep mountainsides and set sail for Bali.
‘Yep,’ I manage between breaths. The twelve-foot high bronze attendants surrounding the big man are very pretty too, each kneeling, serenely offering up a gift of some kind. I admit they’re almost worth the deodorant lapse. Quietly I count the statues, savoring the few local words I’ve learned. ‘Yut, yee, sam, say, erm…’
‘Mmm,’ Brent says. ‘That’s the word for five, not erm. And luckh! Have you been learning Cantonese?’
‘Oh, just a few phrases. I figured it’s the polite thing to do.’
‘Go on then, can you keep counting?’
‘Yut, yee, sam, say, mmm, look, chut, bot. oh damn,
I know it... Sep, gau!’ I announce triumphantly as a few people turn to acknowledge my efforts.
‘Oh no, Hannah, that’s not what you mean! Oh me lover. Oh dear.’ He laughs. ‘Nine, is gow, not,’ he lowers his voice. ‘Gau. Ten is sup, not sep. Maybe it’s best not trying to say nine anymore. If you have to, just say it in English.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Wet cock.’
‘Oh Jesus.’
‘It’s not your fault. It’s a very tonal language. You have made my day though!’
No wonder those girls are giggling behind their hands. Apologetically I smile, sending them into another fit. ‘Moving swiftly on, please,’ I say as seriously as possible. ‘Do you do a lot of these excursions?’
‘Nah, just when new people come to town. We tend to stay in Central and drink instead.’
‘Good, then we can be friends.’
‘Not a fan of nature? I’d never have guessed.’
Given that we’ll never have first-hand exposure to one another’s reproductive systems, there’s no reason to lie. ‘You’d never think it to look at me.’ I gesture to my inappropriate dress. ‘But I’m not really a nature girl. I’m not crazy about hills either.’
‘You’ve moved to the wrong city! Though everyone takes the escalator so we don’t much notice. Your new flat will be on Robinson Road, right? Then it won’t be too bad for you. Speaking of your flat, Stacy says you’re moving at the weekend. Stuart and I could help you move if you like. We’re just up the road.’
After Stacy’s co-workers warned her that it was impossible to find a decent apartment, I didn’t have high hopes. So possibly our standards are lower than the norm – we weren’t competing for a family apartment, or one with a pool, concierge or underground garage, and we didn’t mind living in a building older than last season’s shoes. We chose our new place in an afternoon. It’s close to the corporate apartment so we could relocate using a wheelbarrow. ‘Thanks, that’s really nice, though it’s not far, and it’s furnished so we’re just moving our clothes.’
The Expat Diaries: Misfortune Cookie (Single in the City Book 2) Page 8
