Blue Lantern (6 page)

He pulled a paper from his pocket, a slip from a memo pad, covered with Helen Lau's writing. The formation of the letters showed a mood of ease, perhaps sensuality, curling precisely on the paper. He checked the date and time mentioned in the note; it had arrived quite unexpectedly. Helen had questioned him on the phone about when he would be free, without suggesting a rendezvous. She obviously liked to surprise him with calls at unusual hours, notes, and now this meeting. But here, at the Mandarin? Brodie saw his experience in Hong Kong as a tawdry round, which he might at last break out of through Helen, but he couldn't afford to move in such places as this.

Most of his first year in the Colony had been spent in hard training and study. The time passed, if not quickly, then in the time-warp of routine activity. Until he graduated, he was in the barracks six days a week. On the seventh, the class used to go in gangs to Wanchai to get drunk, and spend money on bar-girls. They were like soldiers on leave in a foreign city, and it had occurred to Brodie that in a way, they were soldiers in a foreign city. He had looked at the Colony as a film unreeling on a screen. He had joined the rivers of tourists and locals flowing through the streets and arcades, prowled the beaches and parks, seen in the distance the cramped and crumbling housing estates, and the elevated, gardened homes of the rich; absorbing the sights; but he had lived a life of barracks and bars.

Apart from other rookies and police, and a few civil servants, he had met only servicemen on leave from Vietnam or the New Territories, boozing like himself, and of course, Chinese girls, poor and pretty. That was why Helen Lau was such a find. It was difficult – Marsden would have said, impossible – that he was sitting in the lounge of one of the best known hotels in the world, waiting to meet a cultured Chinese woman doctor.

There were many handsome women in the room, and one was approaching his chair, smiling. He stuffed the note back into his pocket, trying to connect this image with the doctor in a white coat. She didn't even look Chinese at first, with her straight nose, pale skin, and no pronounced fold over the eyes; and she wore a blue cotton western dress with a white collar. She had small diamond studs in her ears. Her figure was curved but slight. He jerked to a stand, his voice dying in his throat while she tucked herself quickly into the chair opposite.

“Well, Inspector, I can see you've recovered.”

The dimpled smile. And she was at ease. He stumbled over how glad he was that they had met at last, still trying to relate this perfumed young creature to the doctor. She had ordered Chinese tea before he had a chance to realise that the waiter was hovering. Brodie asked for coffee. Helen added something in Cantonese, smiled at the waiter, and said they should treat him well.

“Why?” Brodie asked, at a loss to find a graceful way into conversation.

“Because he's attentive, and likely to be very poor.”

Brodie had no thought for the waiter. “Why has it taken so long for us to meet?”

It was not quite the question he intended, and it sounded petulant. She leaned back studying him. The dimples were there, but the voice was calculated. “I've had to think whether a respectable Chinese girl should be meeting a young inspector of police.”

“What's so odd about that?”

He knew acutely what was odd about it. She was a top professional, and he was an apprentice in a job despised by her people. But Helen didn't appear to be thinking of status or class or money, and she answered frankly, “Because my good reputation as a single girl might be sullied. People might assume I'm having an affair with you.”

“Why are we meeting at all?” Brodie asked, flustered.

He regretted the maladroit remark as soon as the words were out. A frown like a small cloud appeared on her brow and then vanished. She was appraising him, her eyes with their gold lights, searching inside him.

She took another unexpected tack as though she understood his insecurity. “You underestimate your charm, Mike. I think you're too good looking for a police officer. Maybe you ought to be an actor or an opera singer.”

He felt himself flushing. People occasionally flattered him about his appearance but he never had the confidence to believe them entirely. His mother, who came from Crail, had been dark-haired and sunken-faced; he only remembered her when her tuberculosis was well advanced. He always fantasised that his father, whom he had never met, must have been a fine Nordic fisherman, forced into the tiny port of Crail in a storm, who coupled with his mother in the night, and sailed before dawn.

Brodie's thoughts were fortunately interrupted by the arrival of their order. The waiter made a palaver of laying out the cups, pots and table napkins; Helen talked to him sotto voce, her attention on the ceremony. Brodie wasn't sure whether Helen was joking. He was at a loss to deal with her directness. He felt their roles were reversed. She was playing the male. When, with a bow and a flourish of his napkin, the waiter departed, Brodie admitted that he didn't feel very satisfied with his job.

“You said, when we first met, that it was worthwhile work. I should have thought it was,” she said, handling the cup and the napkin delicately.

He was being pressed to talk on a subject where his ideas were confused. “I said I was assured it was worthwhile.”

“And it isn't? Why?”

The shadows behind Marsden and Sherwin and Parker defied explanation in a few simple words. “Hong Kong's difficult to get used to.”

She gave her dimpled laugh. “Well, you're a foreign devil, and this is China.”

He was sure she was joking with the cliché, but implying that there was a thread of truth in it. “Does this mean there's a barrier between us?”

“No. The difference between us is a space, not a barrier; a space that can be filled with understanding. It certainly doesn't mean we can't be friends.”

He would have interrupted and asked what she meant by friends, his own thoughts drenched in sexuality, but she went on.

“I'm a Christian. My family have been so for a hundred years. We were converted in Amoy by missionaries from England. I've had a lot of English education, but I'm Chinese. Chinese are very different, even Christian Chinese.”

“In what way different?” Brodie asked, oafishly.

Helen sighed, and then said patiently, “Many people base their lives on personal ego satisfactions. The Chinese take a longer view and seek a middle way.”

“Big generalisations,” Brodie said, feeling he had to redeem himself, but only plunging deeper into a bog. “I don't see much evidence of a middle way in Hong Kong, or in mainland China, from what I know of the Cultural Revolution.”

“If you ask simplistic questions, you have to expect big generalisations,” she replied carefully. “Hong Kong is a British trading post. Mao is a passing storm.”

Brodie moved his head in acknowledgment. He couldn't understand why they could talk so frivolously on the telephone, and yet at this first meeting he was unintentionally antagonistic, and their conversation mired in cultural differences. They were silent for a moment.

“We should go out for an afternoon, perhaps to the beach,” Brodie said.

She closed her eyelids slowly, and said coolly, “We'll see.”

He thought for a moment that she was exasperated with him, and going to refuse.

“Do you have a car?”

“No, but I can borrow one.”

“You could take me for a ride to the Peak if we go out, I'd like that,” she said simply.

She looked at her watch and announced that she had to go. Without saying more than ‘Goodbye', or waiting for him to get up, she rose and walked toward the doors of the lounge. Soon her figure was lost in the crowd. He looked round frantically. He wanted to walk with her, but he had to stay and pay the bill, and the waiter was nowhere in sight. He checked his watch. She had been with him for about twenty minutes.

5

Mike Brodie slept late on his day off. When he awoke he thought about his encounter with Helen Lau at the Mandarin; her calm in the face of his awkwardness. Perhaps he had damaged the delicate filaments of emotion which had begun to form between them. The colour seemed to drain from his vision of her, and his thoughts turned to Vanessa. He hadn't forgotten Vanessa's invitation to visit the Lotus; it had been received by him as a mere possibility, and continued to tingle at the back of his mind. Almost in reaction against the edginess of dealing with Helen, he looked to the relief of Vanessa's unexacting company. He decided to go to the Lotus that night.

He spent an hour in the gym, had lunch in the mess, studied criminal law in the afternoon in his room – part of the training programme – and had drinks in the early evening with the barflies in the mess. Later he showered and shaved, put on the same summer suit he had worn to the Mandarin, and a fresh white shirt with a blue tie. Then he changed the blue tie for the red paisley he had worn to meet Helen, wanting in some way to link the two events.

The Lotus was in the busiest part of tourist Kowloon; it had new woodwork chiselled to look old, veneers moulded over its rafters to represent oaken beams, lanterns with coloured glass, dim cubicles with bead curtains, and pretty hostesses. The Lotus contrived to look both eastern and western, and could sustain any banal compliment a diner might utter. The purple smocked girls floated between the tables in their pudenda-length skirts. The Lotus was a game prairie for Andy Marsden.

Brodie was shown to a seat by a girl he did not recognise at first as May. She welcomed him as if he was an expected guest, and excused herself to call Vanessa without any request from him. Vanessa approached with businesslike calm, but when she was close, her interest was like a gentle magnetic field.

“It's been a long time, Mike. I thought you weren't going to bother.”

She was wearing a plain black, calf length cheong sam, high collared, long sleeved, distinguished as a manageress from the lurid uniform of the other girls. Brodie explained the limitations of his night duty. A waitress approached them, and he felt constrained to order a drink, but held back.

“Why not eat here, the food is gorgeous,” Vanessa said.

“I don't want to sit on my own, and I'm not that hungry.”

He hadn't come to eat. She must have known that.

“I can only talk to you for a moment. I can't sit down. I can only stop by,” she said with a coy smile.

“Frankly, I can't afford a place like this.”

He let caution go. He would have been more reserved about his means, but for her remarks at the beach.

She gave him a quizzical look. “Andy can.”

“Well, I can't” he said harshly.

“Never mind, never mind,” she replied softly. “We'll go out somewhere afterwards – it'll be after one before I'm free. Come back for me, promise?”

The streets were pulsing with trade; spotlights glared on the desirable merchandise in the ivory shops, the silk shops, the pearl shops. Everything was cheap, people said; suits, carpets, vases and hideous oil paintings of junks, daubed by teams of painters in factories, high up in the tenements. American women, uncorseted in the heat, with corn-crake voices, called their lagging husbands. The husbands were peering into alleys, while the wives were drawn like magpies to the window-displays of gold brooches, diamond rings, and jewel encrusted watches.

Brodie was virtually steered by the crowd into the foyer of the Peninsula Hotel. He bought a paperback thriller at the magazine stand, and sat down in a comfortable armchair out of the main traffic. Shoppers of all races swirled through the brightly lit space, past the secretive smiles of the blue-coated Sikh doormen. The walls exuded glutinous music; porcelain-faced girls worked expressionlessly behind the counters, selling perfumes and postcards and necklaces. Young boys came into the foyer in bright coloured jackets, with cravats at their throats and ruffled wrists; they had piles of dark hair and suggestive eyes; they disappeared into the darkness of a bar, to emerge later with broad-chested Americans in checked shirts, or executives with rimless glasses and smooth suits.

At one o'clock, Brodie left the Peninsula, turning down Leighton Street, where other practitioners of the flesh trade were working without cravats or ruffles. He passed a stall selling pornographic books, and in the glare of a kerosene lamp, saw a pimp move on to his trail. He continued his stride, fending the man off with a few words, as he fended off the others who took up the pursuit afterwards.

Vanessa had changed from her managerial dress and mood. She wore a short print frock with her hair released to fall below her shoulders. Outside the Lotus she took his arm unaffectedly. Her touch thrilled through the material of his sleeve. They stopped at a café. Brodie had a beer, and Vanessa a lemonade. She talked about Wendy and May and her family. They asked questions and heard each others answers, but hardly understood in the chatter around them. Brodie felt no awkwardness in the confusion. The talk was a façade for the fondling in their minds.

For Brodie, Vanessa was not filled out with the agonies of a past, or the anxieties of a future; she was deliciously, now. She was within the aura of desire which he emitted; he could hardly resist reaching out his fingers to touch her intimately. Free of the ironies, and the nuances of meaning, which hindered his communication with Helen, Brodie and Vanessa drifted together – but in separate sampans. If anybody had overheard the pauses, the unanswered questions, the broken sentences, the syntactical oddities of Brodie's talk with Vanessa, they would wonder how there could be a scene of any intensity; but the intensity was there in their glances, the timbre of their voices, the gesture of their hands, and the inclination of their bodies. Attraction smouldered in the shadow of incoherence, where each of them could have separate illusions.

Brodie and Vanessa strolled through the streets toward Mongkok, taking a cab some of the way to avoid the crowds. He regretted his remark about the food at the Lotus; it made him seem mean. He would have treated Vanessa to a restaurant meal, but they passed only eating houses for the poorest. Vanessa stopped at a street barrow where noodles were sold for a few cents. The foki worked over the steaming vats with a precision and style which would have done credit to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Filling the bowls, his fingers glanced through an upper shelf of mounds of cabbage, and onion, and thin sliced beef; he added a pinch of spices. A ladle danced in the foki's other hand, casting liquid arcs of noodle soup into the bowls. A brief finale on the chopper to slice a boiled sausage, and the two bowls were ready, steaming, brim-full, with fragments of mint and coriander floating on top. And then the foki took a bow, laughing, laying out more bowls for customers, enjoying approval. Brodie remembered the waiter at the Mandarin; both were performing artists.