Kowloon Tong (20 page)

Still staring, she was a thin boy on the edge of her chair. She had not moved her hands. Bunt took the position of her hands to mean yes.

They were checked in by the clerk at Reception, who wore the blazer and the Imperial Stitching badge. She attempted to read his poor handwriting.

"Neville Mullard," he said.

"And that's a double," the woman said.

When had they stopped using the word "wife"?

"Our bags are being sent on," Bunt said.

"I will tell Ollie to watch for them."

Near a potted palm and an old framed map, Ollie stood at attention and saluted. He too had a blazer badge from Imperial.

Their room faced the sea. Bunt opened the curtains wide and saw that Mei-ping was seated in an armchair looking out. He turned off the bedside light and was soothed by the way the room was illuminated by the colored lights of Macao. Bunt stood behind Mei-ping's chair with his hands resting on her shoulders. He meant to reassure her. After a few moments he made a suggestion using the pressure of his hand, and helped her up. He led her to the part of the bed that was in shadow.

Mei-ping lay clothed on the coverlet, her small hands folded on her chest, staring at the veils of light that flickered on the high ceiling. Bunt did the same. Parallel, silent, stretched out, they were like marble effigies of a knight and his lady on a tomb he had seen once on a visit to England, in a church not far from Uncle Ron's house in Worthing. He had been so small he'd had to get inside the chapel enclosure and stand on tiptoes to see them properly. He had always remembered that they were clothed, that they wore headgear—the man a helmet, the woman a bonnet. He had been impressed by the position of their feet, the toes turned upright. It remained for him a marble image not of death but of marriage, sliding through life side by side, and until now he had never believed he would know such horizontal harmony and happiness.

The only noise tonight was the tooting of ships' horns, and then a motorbike bumping along on the Portuguese paving stones, and his own breathing. No sound came from Mei-ping. There they lay, and the lights that shifted on the ceiling also lit the two of them. Mei-ping's thin dress clung to the flat planes of her body and showed her pretty bones. Bunt sensed again that she was warm: though their bodies were not touching, the heat reached him.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. It meant everything.

The trance took over, and he could still taste the wine with the word "love" in it, as though the wine were a rare form of ink from which beautiful words were written on his flesh. Blood was another sort of ink: different words.
Yes,
he thought,
I am drunk.

"I am so happy."

He seemed to be sitting outside the passage of time, unaffected by it, in a zone without clocks. He knew he was changed for good. His posture was a vow—flat on his back, hands held as if in prayer, face and toes upturned. Hers too. She missed her friend, but she would be happy when she allowed him to do as he wished. He saw himself with her again in the English house, a rainy day, looking out at the dripping trees. Mei-ping was not saying anything but she was happy. There were no other people in the house, there was no one in the garden, no one in the hills. Big logs were alight in the fireplace.

"Say something."

"I was sad on the boat, because I saw something," she said.

"What did you see?"

"Lantau Island. The village of Gou Chou Chew," she said. "I was there."

"Living there?"

"Just stopping," she said. "My family is from Huizhou, on a river, something like fifty miles from Shenzhen. Cannot go into Shenzhen without a pass. Instead we go to Nantou, the port. West of Shenzhen."

The names meant nothing to Bunt. He said, "How old were you?"

"Ten years ago," Mei-ping said.

Fifteen years old. He saw her clearly, skinny and small, in loose cotton clothes, wearing slippers, a kerchief tied around her head, a plastic satchel, the kind they all had.

"My auntie took me to a house in the village. She found a snakehead and paid him some money—almost a thousand—for a fisherman's permit. Then, we waited. There are PLA guards in the daytime but not at night. We looked for a boat."

A foghorn sounded in the harbor of Macao, and it was so distinct it seemed to come from a ship tucked under the hotel.

"We found a fisherman who said he would take me. Anyone can travel on a fishing boat with a permit, but only the snakeheads sell them. There were other women on board, many of them were pregnant. They wanted to go to Hong Kong for a better chance."

Mei-ping's face was so smooth and so beautifully lighted it seemed to be carved from ivory. Even if she had not been speaking, Bunt could have gone on looking at her, marveling at the fineness of her features.

"I was with the fisherman. He was steering the boat, and it was very rough. Wind and waves. The mouth of the Pearl River is like the ocean. The boat was moving side to side and I could see nothing in the darkness. I was afraid we would be stopped. The captain said, 'What is wrong with you?' and I told him I was afraid. He said, 'I will tell them you're my daughter.' He laughed and came near me and touched me."

She stopped speaking for a moment, as though trying to gain courage to continue. Soon she resumed.

"No one had ever touched me before that."

Bunt said, "Did you scream?"

Shaking her head, more in sadness than to indicate no, she said, "I asked him, 'Do you have a daughter?' He said nothing, so I knew the answer was yes. I asked him, 'Would you want a man to do this to her?'"

The purity of what she said moved Bunt. He could see it, the two figures contending in the wheelhouse of the fishing boat.

"He was so ashamed," Mei-ping said. "In the early morning we came near some land. We jumped into the water—it wasn't deep. We were met by a snakehead. He took the rest of my money. I was so sad to have no money. Then I met Ah Fu. She had come on the same boat, but she was with the pregnant women. We helped each other. That was on Lantau Island, near Gou Chou Chew village. I was so sad when I saw it today."

That was as much as he could bear. He did not want to know more, not tonight. It upset him to hear her mention the fisherman making a pass, and the dignity in her reply.

Bunt raised himself up on one elbow and looked beyond Mei-ping to the window. Just past the shadow of the bluff below the hotel were the lights of the casinos. In this light he checked his watch. It was not yet eleven. An hour or more they had lain here, yet it was enough: now he knew he loved her.

"Let's have a flutter," Bunt said.

She said yes, though she probably did not know the word. In the taxi he placed his hand on hers. He could feel the pressure of her fingers responding to his, and he was delighted.

Five or six tall blond women in black leather jackets were standing near the row of taxis at the Lisboa Hotel, where Bunt and Mei-ping got out. The taxi driver took an interest He smiled. He had some gold among his teeth. He said, "Russians!" The women were fox-faced and pale. They simply stood while the smaller Chinese people bustled around them. They had gray eyes and sword-like bones showing in their legs and high-heeled shoes. So single-minded were the Chinese passing among them, intent on entering the casino to gamble, that hardly anyone seemed to notice them.

"I feel sorry for them," Mei-ping said in a whisper. "They are not happy."

Bunt did not want to know why. He steered Mei-ping inside the Lisboa and watched her face fall as she entered the inner lobby of the casino.

The gamblers were grubby punters, and few were Hong Kong people—probably not from Macao either. They were mostly hard-faced Chinese, with dirty hands and spiky hair, from over the border—Zhuhai people, Cantonese stall holders and hawkers, butchers, factory hands, hustlers, even farmers. Many of them looked as if they had just chucked a hoe or a pitchfork aside, let go of a wheelbarrow, walked out of a cabbage field. Even their clothes were dirty and torn. They smoked heavily.

They had thick, doubled-over wads of money, held together by rubber bands, the sort of wide rubber bands they used to bind chickens' legs when they carried the birds to market. They shouted, they spat, they dumped chips on the tables. They stacked their chips in tottering towers so that croupiers could easily rake them into a drawer. They made gambling seem no more than a sudden irrational discarding of money, people ridding themselves of filthy hundred-dollar notes and grunting as they flung them aside.

Mei-ping looked on without any expression, but when Bunt glanced at her she smiled—at last. It was the longest period of time they had ever spent together, and though he had it in his mind to make love to her, he had hardly touched her. Yet in this vulgar Portugee clip joint in Macao, in the dense cigarette smoke, among the Russian whores and frenzied gamblers, Bunt felt only sweetness towards Mei-ping, and sweetness towards the world. He saw that love had to be generous. He wanted to make love to Mei-ping, but not only that. He wished for her to be happy. He loved her for her nervousness, for the way she cared about her friend, for her distraction and her helplessness and her history, for the way she accepted his attention. She was a fifteen-year-old who had sailed from China alone in a fishing boat and had waded ashore at Lantau Island. She was better than he was—stronger, more decent, much nicer.

"Let's win some money."

"Yes."

"Then go back to the hotel."

"Yes."

"Yes" was the most beautiful word in the language, and in his happy stupor of love it filled him with joy.

Blackjack was a game he understood. He bought five hundred dollars' worth of chips and wandered among the tables watching games in progress—cards being dealt, chips stacked and swapped and raked, and then taken away with a clicking sound that was so final. Bunt slid onto a stool and placed his bet, signaling to the dealer that he wanted to play. He had chosen a table where several other women in black sat with their heads bowed, like a coven of witches.

Mei-ping stood behind him. He could feel the pressure of her body against his back. Only since early that evening had he learned to love the closeness of her body and gain strength from it. He watched the clean playing cards being slipped smoothly from the shuffler box by the dealer, who was a woman with the sort of fingers that were useful in a firm that did stitching and weaving. He knew the physical traits that marked a good worker—the deft fingers, the good posture, keen eyesight and concentration, the hand-eye coordination. Any of these dealers, he knew, would have been productive factory workers.

He folded three times. Then, on his fourth hand, he was dealt a six, a ten—he turned the cards slowly, peeking first, as the other players did, keeping their heads down. Should he fold again? He knew what he needed, but it was a long shot. Yet gambling was not gambling when it was safe, only when everything was risked, all for love. And so he put all his chips in a stack and tapped his fingers to indicate
Hit me.
The card was slipped facedown from the shuffler and pushed towards him. He turned it over: a five.

"Yes!"

An instant later, from the coven of black-clothed witches, he heard, "Bunt?"

It was his mother, sitting in the midst of the women, all the rest of whom were Chinese, yet she greatly resembled them. She had just lost the hand on his turn of the card, and her pillar of chips was being swiftly removed. Bunt had not seen her, nor she him. But she knew his voice, that strangled cry of triumph.

Collecting his winnings, three stacks of red chips, he said, "Mother, this is Mei-ping."

"Fancy that," she said, and coughed into her fist. "I'm about done, Bunt. Let's catch the next jetfoil back to Hong Kong."

"We were going to stay a titch longer." He thought of the room at the Bela Vista, the bed, the high ceiling, the view of the harbor.

"Don't be silly, Bunt. Take my bag, there's a good chap." She had already turned to go. "Stop faffing around and come along. You too, duckie."

Mei-ping stared at her, and then followed.

T
HE INTERIOR
of the jetfoil, as it shook across the water to Hong Kong in the dark, was damp and foul-smelling—odors of smoky clothes and sea fog, the treacly hum of engine oil—even the loud and vibrating hull reeked of its crusted iron, a foul aroma of rust like old fruitcake. From time to time a passenger would loudly clear his throat and spit. To the Chinese, the visible world was a spittoon.

Bunt shut his eyes, refusing to look at where the thing landed. The jetfoil held in its stale air the passengers' bitter emotions too—their anger, their low temperature, their sour frowns of defeat, of having been cheated, which was a kind of sickness. Nearly all of them stank with a sense of grievance and loss. Gamblers on their way home, parched and hung over, all of them losers.

This whole experience of cadaverous jammed-in people was akin in Bunt's mind to spending an hour in a mass grave. His mother, asleep, gave the appearance of being dead—and of having died violently—her head lolled and her legs splayed and her arms and hands twisted, positioned as though she had just been murdered while fending off her attacker.

Bunt was miserable. The sight of Mei-ping staring at the bulkhead only made him more disconsolate. Was she reading the sign fixed to the bracket? It gave instructions for a possible accident, with life-jacket particulars lettered in two languages:
In Case of Emergency,
and then some business about
Muster Stations.
In every corner the most innocent-seeming detail seemed to speak darkly of the Hand-over. Not only the emergency sign and the muster stations; what about that placard in front of his mother advertising
Speedy Chinese Take-Away^

"What's wrong?" Bunt asked, but hopelessly, because he knew.

Still staring, Mei-ping said, "I have nowhere to go."

Deeper than their sudden departure from Hong Kong, which was just cruel, her grief was Hong Kong dog, a fever of almost fathomless woe. It was the knowledge that the way forward was indistinct, in part because the Hong Kong person had no visitable past. One of the imperatives of living in the colony was that everyone tried to concoct an escape route, whether it was a foreign passport or a relative in Canada or a marriage of convenience. Mei-ping's despair was not so much that she found it hard to imagine her future, it was—more painfully—that she could not go back. She could not return to China. She had fled on the fishing boat; somehow she had survived the fishing captain and the snakeheads. China was a hole: no one ever went back for fear of being buried alive. Hers was the worst of the Hong Kong dilemmas: she could not go forward or back. And her apartment was now dangerous.