Hong Kong Belongers

Cans served, Bill and Wally each helped himself to a sheet of lavatory paper and commenced the energetic cleaning of the can top. Alan, eyeing their every movement like a hobbledehoy at a banquet, followed them a beat behind. Satisfied, they pulled the ringpulls from their cans, tossed them lightly into the gutter and drank. ‘Thank Christ,’ Wally said. ‘Why do we live here, God fuck it?’

Wally always wore a safari suit: trousers that matched in colour an epauletted, patch-pocketed, quasi-military garment that was neither jacket nor shirt. Alan was to learn that he had three of them, and that he wore them each for two days at a time. One was salmon pink, one pistachio green, the third pale dogshit. They were safe and conservative Hong Kong clothes. Wally was a slight man with a belly that travestied pregnancy.

‘Got my flight fixed up for Christmas,’ he said. ‘A whole lovely bloody week in Bangkok. Thank Christ.’

‘What does one do in Bangkok?’

‘In Bangkok one gets fucking well fucked.’

Bill was quieter, bitterer. Wally spoke with a flamboyant, almost a romantic pessimism; in Bill, as time passed, Alan wondered if he would not sense despair.

‘Why do we live here, God fuck it?’ Wally asked again.

‘Anywhere.’

‘Soon be dead, anyway, thank Christ.’

‘Downtable sub on the Purgatory and Hell Gazette,’ Bill said. He was, Alan was to learn, a man of quite extraordinary professional competence. That afternoon, challenged by Wally, he had named the last three prime ministers of Belgium.

Alan knew sub-editing skills when he found them. He had done his time on local newspapers, subbed in Fleet Street and had contemplated seeking permanent employment within its fastness. But the combination of the end of a love affair and of his training prompted him to seek jobs abroad: Robert Simpson had offered him, sight unseen, a job on the Hong Kong Times on three months’ trial. Thus the great adventure had begun.

Wally knew his job too, though he attacked it with the same savagery he brought to conversation. He called Soviet dissidents ‘fucking troublemakers’; the Pope was always ‘Popeye’; stories about the local police gave him especial delight. ‘Listen to this: “A bullet was removed from his left kidney.” Good on yer, PC Wong. Shot the bastard while he was running away, didn’t he? “The suspect remains in critical condition.” Course he does. They took the poor fucker to Queen Elizabeth Hospital; no one gets out of that kip alive.’

Alan did not reply. Well, he told himself, Hong Kong was what you asked for; Hong Kong is what you have got.

‘Ah Christ, why do we live here, God fuck it?’ Wally asked, taking another mighty pull from his beer.

‘How long have you lived here, Wally?’

‘Twelve years, Christ help me. I must be mad. Been a Hong Kong Belonger for five years now.’

‘Belonger?’

‘After seven years you can apply for Belonger status,’ Bill said. ‘Did it myself a couple of years back. Regularises the visa situation, means you can vote in municipal elections. Not that anyone ever does. Just an administrative convenience.’

‘It’s the day they throw away the fucking key,’ Wally said.

That first expedition to the Country Club had been an initiation. Soon Alan was flinging his ringpull into the gutter without a backward glance, dining merrily and nightly on three cans of San Lig or Mig and a packet of peanuts. Remarkably good peanuts, which he would hull abstractedly, broadcasting the shattered halves into the street.

‘What were you rowing with Johnny Ram about?’ Bill had asked him on their last day at work, the night before Christmas Eve. There had been a slight, unseasonal chill in the air, and they had retained their air-conditioning-beating overgarments. Alan had bought himself a rather sporty top with a hood to wear in the office.

‘Letters page,’ Alan said. ‘Unbelievable stuff. I suggested to Johnny that we really ought to leave it out. He was of a different opinion.’

‘Opinion? Johnny? Do me a favour,’ Wally said. ‘Johnny doesn’t have opinions. Other people have opinions, other people being Simpson. Know how the letters page is run? Simpson skims the letters that come in and scribbles instructions on ’em. Then he passes them to Johnny and Johnny does what he’s told. What you were doing was asking him to walk into Simpson’s office and say, Simpson, you silly bastard, this letter is bollocks.’

‘Look at it this way,’ Bill said. ‘Can you imagine Moses going back up Mount Sinai with the tablets and saying, look, Jehovah, you silly bastard, can’t you see that this commandment about coveting your neighbour’s ox is bollocks? What was in the letter anyway?’

‘Some lunatic from one of the outlying islands. He said that the people who lived there were noble savages. I thought that was a bit stiff.’

‘So you subbed out the word “noble”?’ Wally said.

‘I said that no self-respecting newspaper would print such rubbish. I made him quite cross.’

‘Nevertheless, you made a valid point about the Hong Kong Times,’ Bill said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Par-marked it. Put “Noble Savage” in the headline, why not?’

‘The boy learns wisdom,’ said Wally.

‘I think I know the old bugger you mean,’ Bill said. ‘Always writing to the paper. One of those. Lived here since the fall of Shanghai. Dedicated man.’

‘They should send PC Wong over to his island to sort him out,’ Wally said. ‘Couple of slugs in the kidneys then over to the QE Hospital for the coup de grâce.’

Alan rose and purchased three more beers. They all tore, wiped, threw. Alan saw a sleek and graceful rat cross the street a few yards off, but knew enough not to pass comment. ‘Johnny really was rather cross,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t bear grudges, does he?’

‘I’d like to fuck Eileen Sung,’ Wally said. ‘Did you see her in the newsroom this evening? That arse of hers in those red trousers. Jesus.’

‘He won’t complain to Simpson about Simpson’s choice of staff,’ Bill said. ‘He won’t go out of his way to help you, but he won’t go out of his way to harm you. Either way it would be rocking the boat, and that is against everything that Johnny understands.’

‘Don’t rock the boat,’ Wally said. ‘They ought to print that on the front of the Hong Kong Times. Put it on the masthead, a bloody great banner supported by Simpson at one end and PC Wong on the other.’

‘I get worried every now and then,’ Alan said. ‘I’d be in serious trouble if I lost the job.’

‘Christ, you won’t lose it,’ Bill said. ‘You can sub. Besides, no one gets fired.’

‘What do you think this is?’ Wally asked. ‘A newspaper or something?’

‘Just keep your head down,’ Bill said. ‘The one thing Simpson doesn’t like is trouble. Promoted a step beyond his competence, just like Johnny Ram. Perfect way of making yes-men. What Johnny is to Simpson, Simpson is to the chairman. And the chairman is in the same situation vis-à-vis the board of Hong Kong Estates. And Hong Kong Estates owns the newspaper, as they own everything else around here. So – don’t rock the boat.’

‘I’ve had a change of heart about Eileen Sung,’ Wally said. ‘I’d like to bugger her.’

On Boxing Day Alan sat before another harbour with another bottle before him. The sun was going down and his legs were weary. This was because he had walked most of the length of Hong Kong Island. He had walked from the offices of the Hong Kong Times to Central, and there, turning right at the Great Orient Hotel, he had passed on to the Star Ferry Pier. He had then climbed a flight of steps that took him to Blake Pier. He had walked its length in order to contemplate the harbour, as a dismal ceremony of farewell, but he had found a dreadfully sordid café. So he took a seat, ordered a beer.

He had made his walk because walking keeps despair at bay. He had walked through Quarry Bay, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wanchai and Central, managing scarcely to think at all. Now, beer before him and the light beginning to fade, he inspected the boat-jams of Hong Kong harbour. Tangled together were various craft of the Star Ferry, the Jordan Road Ferry that carried motor cars, the ferries to Lantau, Cheung Chau, Lamma, Tung Lung, Po Toi. Alan watched, cut off from the world of purpose.

It was not the row about the Noble Savages letter that had got him the sack. It was the Gestapo. A few days before Christmas, Alan had subbed the report of a speech made by the chairman of the South China Bank, Sir Peter Browne, to the Rotary Club of Hong Kong. About three paragraphs from the end, the speaker had referred to the Hong Kong police and their ‘Gestapo tactics’. Pleased, Alan had seized on this, promoted it to the first paragraph, fitted the story around it, and used the word ‘Gestapo’ in a headline that had fitted to the last character. Nice, he had told himself at the time, bloody nice.

There had been a note on Alan’s desk when he returned to work on Boxing Day afternoon. Written on pink card, in fountain pen. See me. R. S. But Mr Simpson, what I did is just standard practice in Fleet Street. Mr Fairs, you do not seem to realise that we are not in Fleet Street. We are in Hong Kong. I happen to believe that a newspaper has a responsibility to the community. You clearly fail to appreciate that. It is my belief that you never will. Your professional standards, of which you make so much, are not ours.

Alan said thank Christ for that, and marched out slamming the door. No he didn’t. He sat on Blake Pier wishing he had. Instead, he had begged for a last chance, thinking of rent, debt, the distance from home. Pride had gone. Simpson asked if he would vacate the building. Now, please.

And so the great Hong Kong walk; the great Hong Kong adventure in ruins. He turned and looked bitterly at the tallest of the tall buildings on the waterfront, the one with round windows which, Wally had informed him, was known to the Chinese as the House of a Thousand Arseholes. Along the length of the pier, teenage Chinese couples embraced unrestrainedly, Blake Pier being a good deal more private than their homes.

What would he say when he got home? Didn’t work out. Couldn’t get on with the place. Journalistic standards appalling. Walked out of the job after six weeks, matter of self-respect. And they would all say in the pub after he had gone – all those who would never dare to make such a journey themselves – well, he couldn’t take it, could he, scuttling back home with his tail between his legs. Shall we give him a couple of shifts anyway? Oh, come on, hardly the type, is he?

Below, a motor-junk approached the pier, its seesawing deck loaded with large waste-paper baskets full of vegetables; choisum and pak-choi. He heard a voice chanting out some request or order – everything in Cantonese sounded like an order – concluding the sentence with a long aaa clearly audible above the grumble of the engine. Master that sound and you have mastered street Cantonese. The junk’s captain, if it were he and junks had captains, stood stocky and strong in a white singlet as the deck danced beneath him. He shouted again at a man hidden from view, perhaps on the lower level of the pier. Another merchant, no doubt. Buying cheap and selling dear: passage for choisum and pak-choi; passage too, perhaps, for more exciting cargoes, for brandy and American cigarettes, bears’ paws, tigers’ penises, pharmaceuticals. Or people. Perhaps even now a crop-haired, frightened boy crouched beneath the dancing deck, sick with both fright and motion, escaping from China to this promised land. In the morning he would make his run for freedom. The land of opportunity. The junk tucked snugly into the pier and was lost from view.

Alan ordered more beer and gave himself up to self-pity. He felt it was expected of him. But even as he did so, cursing Simpson, his luck, the woman who had left him in England, he knew that he was only going through the motions. He did not, in his dismay, permit that thought to come to the surface, but it lay beneath, awaiting its moment. Yes. Tie already rolled and in his pocket, strolling at his ease, a flâneur, through the unmalicious shoving of his fellow islanders. Stopping to buy a beer from the fat proprietor. And Alan knew that he could activate that destiny: in a single moment he could do it. The café would have a telephone, and no objection would be made to his using it, calls being free. André, I’ve been thinking over what you were saying yesterday …

Alan drank his beer and watched the light fade and the lights of the buildings and the advertisements come on one by one. At last in darkness he walked back to the Mid-Levels and took the lift to his flat on the fifteenth floor.

How early could you have a drink? This was not a question to be dismissed lightly. He had dined the previous night off a six-pack of San Mig and a packet of peanuts, and had played patience until the beer was finished. One o’clock was all right, surely? Well, twelve. The pubs opened in England on Sunday at twelve. On weekdays they opened at eleven, and this was a weekday. He did a deal with himself: a beer after he had spoken to the editor of the China Gazette. This was the competition, if such it could be called, to the Times, a newspaper that expressed the spirit of opposition by seeking to outdo its rival in fuddyduddyness. Alan bravely rang the number. The editor would be in at two.

By five past two, Alan had finished the second beer of the day. The first didn’t count and the second was necessary. He had learnt that no vacancy of any kind existed on the China Gazette. He had run the gamut of Hong Kong newspapers.

The telephone splintered the silence. It was Bill. ‘Bad luck, lad, I know, yes, Simpson’s a bad man. Look, I don’t know what your plans are, but there’s a friend of mine who produces a shitty little magazine that circulates free to businessmen. Sells editorial space, that kind of carry-on. It’s not exactly journalism, but nor is working for the Times is it? Know anything about business?’

‘No.’

‘That’s all right, nor does Reg. I know he’s looking for an assistant, by which he means someone to do the dirty jobs while he goes to the bar and to Bangkok and so on. Want his number?’

It took Alan a couple of tries to say thank you, yes please. Then, after Bill had rung off, he dialled the number without giving himself a moment to think.

‘Top-hole,’ said Reg unexpectedly. ‘Excellent. Let’s discuss it right away. Beer after work, you know the Two Brewers in Lockhart Road?’

Alan spent the afternoon playing patience, an attempt, not as effective as walking, at keeping both hope and despair at bay. Then he took a taxi to the heart of Wanchai, and walked along Lockhart Road, a narrow gully above which hung an endless procession of Damoclean neon signs: Crazy Horse, New American Restaurant, Ocean Bar, Seven Seas Bar. Alan walked, striving to give no more than a casual glance at the photographs, outside the topless bars, of glorious ping-pong ball breasts.

The Two Brewers stood between a tattoo parlour and a restaurant decorated with the wind-dried corpses of chickens. To open the door was to pass, as through the looking-glass, into the Home Counties. The sort of dingy pub you find by the railway station. There, beer and a copy of Hong Kong Business on the bar before him, in safari suit (electric blue) and behind a small paunch, Reg. Two strange white tufts of hair sprang from his head, behind his ears. They looked like powder puffs. Reg looked like a saloon-bar golfer, half a pint of cooking and a Scotch egg please, landlord. Odd to think that his favoured, apparently unashamed, leisure pursuit was not golf but whoring.

‘So you’re a friend of Bill’s, what a good sort he is, terrible shame of course but there you are, that’s Hong Kong. But he knows his job and he says you’re OK, and that’s good enough for me. Worked at the Times myself, of course, years ago, never could get on with Simpson, set up on my own and here we are.’

Reg was not a man to deal with any subject briefly, but several beers later, hands were shaken on a decision. Alan was to work for Reg five afternoons a week for two thousand dollars a month. ‘Flexible as you like, old chap, so long as we get the work done. I need a dogsbody, to tell you the truth, and some of the work will be an awful grind. But if you can put up with that, I’m more than happy to have you on board.’

Alan could. He was invited to start the following Monday. Did he need an advance?

Back on the fifteenth floor, head slightly fuzzy after his interview with Reg, Alan stood at his window with the telephone in his hand. He could see the harbour between the two buildings that rose up in front of him, the moving lights of the shipping, the still lights of Kowloon on the far side. He grasped the instrument like a weapon, Bond setting an assignment in motion. ‘Hello. This is Alan Fairs, remember we met –’

‘Alan, my dear. How perfectly splendid. Are you coming out to see us again? How is the Hong Kong Times?’

Alan did not feel it necessary to hide things from André. ‘Rather why I’m calling you. I’ve just been sacked.’

‘I knew you were the right sort for us. I have an instinct. But my dear old thing, how perfectly rotten all the same. Being sacked always depresses me for hours. But, Alan, could it really be that you are coming to join our glorious community on Tung Lung?’

‘Is the flat still free?’

‘Yours for seven hundred bucks a month.’

‘Done.’

‘Naturally you must sign some bits of paper and shake hands with your new landlord. Let me see. Tomorrow I can make the four thirty ferry home from Central. Why not catch it too?’

Home. ‘All right.’

‘And your life in Hong Kong can begin.’

It was now four thirty-five. The ferry hooted and growled restlessly, and then moved fussily away from the jetty. André had clearly missed it. Alan would have to wait to see if he arrived on the following ferry. Well, he would do so at the café beneath the banyan tree, drinking beer served to him by the fat proprietor. No hardship. Or perhaps André wouldn’t be there at all. The whole deal was about to fall through. Perhaps André was not the infinitely plausible person he seemed, but a fey, untrustworthy rogue. Alan felt a pang of fear at this thought. Future Hong Kong life was feasible only in terms of Tung Lung rent.

Then, like a miracle, André’s head appeared at Alan’s feet, rapidly rising in the stairwell. The rest of him followed: another beautiful suit, another beautiful smile of greeting.

‘I thought you’d missed it.’

‘Not me. I don’t miss ferries. But come, we must sit at the back.’

He led the way to the last bench, the only one that was open to the world. A sprightly wind whipped in off the harbour; André smiled quietly to himself as he felt it against his face. He sat, removed his tie, wound it around his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he placed his attaché case on his knees, caused it to open with a double detonation and produced from it two cans of San Mig. Cold, naturally. They opened, drank.

‘So, my dear, how does it march?’

Alan explained a little. André listened with interest. The connection with HK Business News amused him. ‘Done some work for old Reg myself, in my time. Usual standby, selling advertising space, selling editorial space, too, if it comes to that. No false pride, old Reg. Made rather a little killing, actually, in Singapore.’

‘Really? Oh well, I’ll pass on your regards.’

‘Wouldn’t do that, my dear. Had a bit of a falling-out. The killing wasn’t actually for him, you see. But shall I tell you an important fact? In this town, the one thing you never run out of is clients.’

‘Mags, you mean?’

‘Well, I meant it more generally, actually, but it is certainly true of magazines. One mag folds, another two spring up. Same in every other business. Drives some people crazy. But we who keep light on our feet rather like it that way.’

Alan, more interested in his own affairs than in André’s summary of Hong Kong life, returned doggedly to the subject closest to his heart. ‘Do they take copy from outsiders, then?’

‘My dear, you are living in a freelance’s paradise. You’ll make a great living, have loads of fun. Get some travel under your belt, get around Asia a bit. That’s the thing. Why not start your own magazine? I’ll sell the advertising space, editorial space too. We’ll make a fortune.’

It was not until the ferry cut its speed and made its laborious approach to the Tung Lung ferry pier that André turned to the business in hand. ‘I’ve pretty well settled everything with your new landlord. We’ll go straight up and see him, if that’s all right with you. He’s got a lease all ready.’

‘Chinese guy?’ It seemed worth asking.

‘Lord, no. Well, born in Shanghai, but the son of Baptist missionaries. All English blood, but rather Chinese in some ways. Plus catholique, in fact. Name of John Kingston, lived on Tung Lung for about twenty years. Unusual chap. You’ll like him.’

Alan looked out over the surrounding land, the awaking mountains. It was as if he had received a light blow on the chest: the smallest tap, little more than the brushing of Oddjob’s finger, but a touch performed with such acute, well-nigh surgical skill that it was enough, for one half-second, to suspend the processes of life. I am to live behind this toy harbour, before this green mountain. I am to live in a Chinese scroll.

‘Ready for a climb?’ André asked. ‘You’re going to live in the highest house in the village.’

André led the way past the café and the banyan tree, and past a tiny, almost a doll’s house, branch of the South China Bank. Beside it stood a fly-thronged collection of wide, flat, woven baskets, from which arose the scent of the death of a thousand sea beasts: the ambient odour of Tung Lung. ‘Shrimp-paste factory,’ André said airily. ‘One of Chuen-suk’s money-spinners. Here’s where we start to climb.’ They turned left off the main path and concrete steps rose up before them. Though winter and the temperature barely turning past 70 degrees, Alan felt sweat burst from him. After a while, begging a halt, he asked, mouth-breathing fiercely: ‘How many more?’

‘About halfway. You’ll soon be used to it. Look on it as Nob Hill. Worth climbing 176 steps for. Catch the breeze in the summer, which is pretty good news, on the whole.’

Alan looked around him. A shower of inky blooms hung over a mesh fence; before it danced a butterfly, orange, black-veined. It looked like a stained-glass window. ‘Onwards,’ André said. ‘Onwards and upwards.’

More leg-weary than he had been since his epic walk from Quarry Bay to Central, Alan reached the top. A narrow concrete path led onward, mercifully now along the level. ‘We use Calor Gas for cooking,’ André said. He seemed unaffected by the climb. ‘For an extra five dollars they deliver it. Best deal on the island. Two old ladies do it.’ Alan didn’t actually believe this. André led him to another flight of stairs, no more than a dozen steps. Straight ahead stood a huge pair of iron gates, beautifully ornamented and painted green. They were flanked by two bulging-eyed, door-guarding lions. Through the chain-link fence on either side, Alan could see a shaded green garden, and set within it three separate, small but majestic houses. ‘Old man Ng’s place,’ André said. ‘Richest man on the island.’ He turned his back on this vista of expensive living, and gestured to another dwelling. He announced, not without pride: ‘Here we are.’

The lemon-yellow house stood head and shoulders above those around it. Two houses, in fact. Semi-detached. How odd. Two front doors, a shared front yard, a garden of concrete. ‘My place,’ André said, pointing to the left middle floor. ‘Charles lives next door to me – you’ll meet him soon enough, a great man in his way. You’re underneath me; the flat next door to you isn’t finished yet. Yours was only finished last week. King has the entire top floor; he knocked it through, done a neat conversion job. So he has the roof, and he’s made a nice little garden up there.’