Hong Kong Belongers

Alan peered through the seven-foot-high mesh of the fence to what would soon be his home. He followed André round to the back of the building. Another door, and more stairs to climb. Halfway was a door, on which had been stuck a colour photograph of a sailing boat leaving behind it a long creamy wake. It also bore the legend ‘Cool Cool Cool!’

‘That’s me,’ André said. ‘But let’s find King.’ Up another flight of steps; there André knocked jauntily on a door. It opened. ‘Hello, King, here’s your new man. Pretty smart of me to find him, I think you’ll agree. Alan Fairs, John Kingston.’

John Kingston stepped onto the landing to meet them. He was tall, with a massive chest, and he moved with a strange deliberation, rather like a troll. It was as if his aim were to frighten, though not very severely, an audience of uncritical children. He fixed Alan with a challenging eye and said, basso profundo: ‘Welcome to the real Hong Kong.’

Alan took the proffered hand; received an expected bone-crushing. ‘Er, thank you.’

‘The people are real here. Do you feel a sense of privilege in being here? Do you feel that already?’

‘Well, I do as a matter of fact,’ Alan said, half ingratiating, half honest.

‘The people here are real.’

‘Yes.’

‘I call them noble savages.’

Alan felt momentarily at a loss. This would have been the case even without the dizzying sensation of the wheel turning full circle. He found himself babbling: ‘Great, yes, sure, I’m glad about that, because I haven’t met anybody noble in Hong Kong yet, apart from André, of course.’

Kingston received this in long, serious silence. After a while, he said: ‘Noble savages.’

André was suddenly beside him, pushing a beer into his hand. ‘Beer. Have a beer, King. I found it in your fridge.’

‘Thank you, André,’ Kingston said. ‘You are indeed a generous man.’ Kingston said this as solemnly as he had spoken of noble savages. Alan was having a little trouble with his sense of perspective. ‘Now. Alan. Come. Before anything else occurs, you must inspect your flat.’

‘All right. Though I am sure it will be perfect.’ Even a concrete shell would be perfect in such a setting. King led a beer-clutching procession back down the stairs and round the outside of the building. A gate, of metal bars, spike-topped and unlocked, guarded the way into the concrete garden. Kingston walked through, opened the door to the flat, and announced, ‘Seven hundred square feet,’ though whether in apology or boast Alan could not tell.

It was a concrete shell. It was perfect. The walls had been lightly painted with whitish paint. Four tiny rooms led off the main area. Two were bedrooms, one containing an actual bed, double, with a thin foam mattress. Alan walked around the flat. This did not take a great deal of time. A kitchen, with a Calor Gas stove on a tiled concrete shelf. A bathroom with a shower in it. ‘Water is sometimes a problem on Tung Lung, my friend,’ King said. ‘We use the Ng well here, of course. If it runs dry, we have permission to use the standpipe below the last flight of steps. That is connected to Chuen-suk’s well, and that never runs dry.’ And the concrete apron before the house, half of it shaded by the balcony above. On the far side of his fence, another tumble of the purple stuff; was it bougainvillaea? And a jumble of houses marching down the hillside before him, and beyond them the harbour of Tung Lung and beyond that the South China Sea. He turned inland, to a flat-bottomed valley floored with a chessboard of green fields. Allotments, really. Alan could just make out a man working on his little square of green, two watering cans suspended from a yoke that rested on his shoulders. He wore a pointed hat; he too lived in a Chinese scroll. Alan found that he could smell the sea.

‘I love it. If you’ll have me, I’ll take it.’

‘Yours for seven hundred dollars.’

‘Done.’

‘Then let us sign the lease. How are you off for furniture? I can sell you some electric fans, chairs and so on.’

‘Thanks. Though I’m a bit strapped for cash just now. At least, I will be once I’ve paid you a deposit.’

‘Pay me later, then. No hurry. I may be a landlord, but I am a landlord with a human face.’

‘A noble landlord,’ Alan said idiotically.

Kingston greeted this with a great hohoho, like the demon king. ‘I can see that this is going to be a very happy community,’ he announced. ‘A great future stretches before us.’

They returned to Kingston’s flat. After the bare expanse of the downstairs flat, the contrast was apparent. Kingston’s style of decoration was disconcertingly – Alan groped for a word – permanent. There was even a large photograph of a family group. This had been printed onto canvas, to make it look like a painting. It showed a pretty woman with an elaborate, slightly dated hairstyle, a pigtailed girl, a boy who looked like the illustration on the fruit gums packet. Kingston stood at the rear of the group, beaming in satisfaction.

Alan signed his lease, wrote a cheque for $1,400, deposit and first month’s rent, and received a second bone-crushing in recognition of the completion of a deal. ‘I’ll move in tomorrow or the next day,’ Alan said. ‘Just as soon as I have fixed up things with the landlord of my Mid-Levels place.’

‘What’s he got to do with it?’ André asked. ‘Does he owe you money?’

‘I think I owe him, actually.’

‘Then surely the only thing to do is to lug your stuff into a taxi and get the hell out? He’ll never trace you to Tung Lung.’

Alan could not help but think about this. Such a manoeuvre would, he reckoned, save him about $2,500. The thought went, and he was sorry to see it go. ‘André – can I be utterly frank with you? I don’t have the nerve.’

André looked for a moment deeply saddened, as if by a friend’s unwitting blasphemy. ‘My dear, it’s hardly the right way to begin your career as a freebooter.’

‘André, I was brought up to be honest – more or less, anyway. It’s a handicap. But keep faith with me; I’m sure I shall rise above it in time.’

Alan stood at the centre of a kind of refugees’ camp. Six vast striped plastic bags formed a circle around him: the contents of his flat in Mid-Levels. He had in his pocket a cheque for $1,000, returned deposit on the furniture.

The loading and unloading of the taxi had been accomplished, not without superhuman exertions. The carrying of the bags, two by two through the little gate beside the ferry turnstile, normally used for the passage of vegetables, had brought out resources Alan did not know he possessed. But the next stage, the carriage of bags to the ferry, seemed impossible. He could not even begin to think about the 176 steps.

The ferry arrived, and eventually opened its doors to admit new passengers. Alan made his first effort, and carried two bags on board. He fought his way back against the unstemmable tide of passengers to collect two more, in a state of blind frazzlement. He had just reached his encampment when he heard a voice call: ‘New neighbour!’

An impression of suit, size and extraordinary freshness of face. Alan was not quite in the mood for being bothered, but managed a flustered greeting.

‘Your gear?’ the stranger demanded.

‘Yes, I –’

‘Hold,’ he said sternly. He handed Alan a briefcase and a pink carrier bag. Then he squatted, and addressed the four bags rather formally. He inserted his arms through all the handles, straightened his back, and seized his own forearms in a grip of steel. He inhaled and exhaled through his nose, very noisily, about half a dozen times. Then he stood. Miraculously, the bags rose with him. He marched inexorably to the boat, benignly shoving passengers from his path with every step, tendons standing out from his neck like steel hawsers, breath roaring from his nose. Alan followed bearing his presumed neighbour’s briefcase, his own shoulder-bag full of valuable items, and the pink carrier bag. Condensation had formed, though not to his surprise, on its surface. With every appearance of relish, the neighbour lowered his preposterous load to the floor, back still perfectly straight.

‘Thank you,’ Alan said inadequately.

The neighbour rose with slow grace from his squat, and rotated his shoulders just once, so that the shoulder blades almost touched. Then he made a strange, rather papal gesture to the stairs that led to the top deck of the boat and a smile of rather unearthly beauty lit his face. ‘Beer!’ he said. Then he turned and absolutely sprinted up the stairs.

Alan followed more sedately, arriving on the top to find his neighbour sitting on the very back seat, both arms outstretched along its back in a crucifixion position. Alan passed him his two bags. The briefcase was placed on the floor, but from the carrier bag he produced two cans of San Miguel, passing one to Alan. Alan thanked him and reached for the ringpull. The neighbour at once placed a huge paw over Alan’s hand. ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Not until the ferry moves.’

He sat quite silent, after this, his own unopened can in his hand and a rather solemn expression on his face. Alan watched as the stragglers came aboard. The day was chill, and most people wore jackets on top of shirts. They crowded together towards the front, enclosed section of the boat, from love of crowds, from dislike of air. There was a clatter from below as the gangplank was raised. The engine roared, and the ferry pulled away with the usual exchange of referees’ whistles. Alan’s neighbour, roused from a species of trance, smiled his beatific smile, tore the ringpull from his can, tossed it over his shoulder into the wash of the screw behind them and then positively threw the can into his face. Alan watched, fascinated, as his throat worked convulsively, like a pump. At last, he lowered the can, and smiled again.

‘Hello, new neighbour. I’m Charles Browne, the man upstairs. Browne with an E.’

Alan said his own name, and they shook hands. The clasp was gentle, unKingston-like.

‘You are going to like Tung Lung,’ Charles said.

‘Have you lived here long?’

‘Tung Lung? Or Hong Kong?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘Hong Kong, all my life, or twenty years. Tung Lung, ever since I went to the bad, or about two years. Here’s how!’ He raised his can once again and drank with the same primeval ferocity as before. He tossed the can, presumably now empty, over the back of the boat. He took another from his pink bag and opened it. ‘Your beer all right?’

‘Yes, great, thanks.’

‘I mean, you do drink?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, not a single beer and that’s it for me thanks, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’

‘No.’

‘In fact,’ Charles said, more or less beseechingly, ‘you drink quite a lot.’

‘Well –’

‘And get drunk and throw up and go to bed and it spins and get up next morning feeling shithouse and then have a drink to feel better.’

There was an expression of touching eagerness on Charles’s face. Alan could not bear to disappoint him. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Well then. Time for another beer, isn’t it?’

Alan made a quite heroic effort. He lifted his can, half full, and finished it in a series of frantic swallows. Tears pricked the back of his eyes and he wondered for a second if the shock of the chill and the bubbles would effect an instant purgation, even as he wiped his mouth with feigned relish. He threw his can overboard and took the new one.

‘Good man!’ Charles said, with restrained violence.

Alan opened his new can and consigned its ringpull to the deep. He took a semireluctant sip. ‘Are there many Browne-with-an-Es in Hong Kong?’ he asked. ‘I came across that name once or twice when I was working for the Hong Kong Times.’

‘Course you came across the name. My old man owns the bloody place.’

‘What bloody place?’

‘Hong Kong, of course.’

‘He can’t actually own all of it, can he? I expect you’re having me on.’

‘Well, sucks to you, because he does. More or less, anyway. My old man happens to be the chairman of the South China Bank.’

Once again, the wheel spun full circle before him. ‘Golly,’ Alan said. ‘That’s quite a grown-up job, really.’

There was a split-second pause, during which Alan thought he might have caused serious offence. Then Charles threw back his head and gave a dramatic howl of laughter. ‘Grown-up!’ he said. ‘My old man’s got a grown-up job!’ He laughed out of all proportion to the merits of Alan’s remark, rocking forward, resting his forehead on his beercan, finally emerging, wiping his eyes. ‘So that’s what’s wrong with the bastard,’ he said. ‘He’s got a grown-up job!’

‘I had a grown-up job last week,’ Alan said. ‘But I got fired.’

‘Is that why they sacked you?’ Charles asked. ‘They discovered you weren’t a grown-up?’

‘That must be it.’

‘André hasn’t got a grown-up job,’ Charles said. ‘I don’t think King has one either. He acts as if he has one, but I think he’s only pretending.’

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, me? I’ve got a grown-up job. I have a very grown-up job indeed. But shall I tell you how I handle it?’ He turned with sudden elephantine staginess to Alan, and whispered hoarsely and penetratingly: ‘I do it very, very badly.’

It was impossible to tell how serious he was, or even if he was serious at all. ‘Is that a good idea?’ Alan asked.

The response startled him, because it came as a bellow, one that turned the heads of the passengers ranged before them, all engaged till then in noisy conversations of their own. ‘Course it’s not! It’s a bloody appalling idea. They give me hell. Browne, you bastard, they tell me, you’re not shaping up. Do the job properly or we’ll sack you and then you’ll be sorry. We’d sack you today if it wasn’t for the fact that your old man owns Hong Kong.’

‘Jolly good,’ Alan said.

‘What do you mean, jolly good? Don’t talk wet, it’s bloody awful.’ Charles started laughing again. He wiped his eyes briefly, and eased up his laughter a little. ‘Now. Listen to me. I have a plan. It’s a good plan, so pay attention. The ferry stops. We get off it. We take your bags to Ah-Chuen’s. That’s the café by the harbour run by the fat bastard. We drink beer. Then we take the bags up to your flat. Then we have a beer at my place. Then we go down again and have supper, say, a bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. Then, we sit about drinking beer. How does that sound in general terms?’

‘It sounds perfection itself.’

‘And we’ll roll the dice a bit, of course. You play yah-tze?’

‘No. I’m not terribly good at games, cards and so forth. Always lose at poker and stuff, never seem to have a card.’

Charles held up a hand in a stately gesture of reproach. ‘Have no fear, neighbour. Yah-tze requires no skill, no thought, no mind. It’s almost impossible to lose much money at it, because it is the longest, most boring game in the world. That’s why we love it; that’s why we play it all the time. You need never fret about life when the five dice roll across the table.’

‘Then I long to learn,’ Alan said.

Charles tossed his second can into the sea and produced a third, opening it with calm certainty. ‘Then here’s to us. Here’s to Tung Lung. Health, wealth and long life.’ With his can he caught Alan’s own a glancing blow. And drank.

PART II

The telephone splintered the silence. Alan ceased typing and got up from his desk, a massive metal thing rather like M’s. King had supplied it to him on indefinite loan. He passed through to the main room of his flat. The telephone stood on a smallish table by the window. Alan seized it. ‘Hello?’ he said, looking approvingly at the South China Sea. He could see the triple-decker ferry moving out towards Cheung Chau, also a small craft near the shore from which a pair of noble savages did the rounds of their fish traps.

‘Colin Webb, Business PanAsia.’

‘Oh, hello –’ was it too early in the relationship to say Colin? – ‘there.’

‘Thanks for coming in last week, Alan. Sorry not to get back to you before, but you know how it is.’

‘No worries, Colin.’

‘I was looking over your list, some smart ideas. I particularly like the eccentric businessman. I’d like you to go ahead on that one.’

Pleasure flowed through Alan. Here he was, being commissioned to write a story for the top business magazine in Hong Kong, and yet he was watching a sampan and wearing a sarong. A sarong? Well, why not? The temperature was in the eighties and air conditioning was for non-island-dwelling wimps.

He put the phone down and adjusted the sarong. He hadn’t quite got the folding right yet, it tended to slip without warning. André, who had donated the sarong to Alan – it was bright red and copiously flowered – said he had spent half a lifetime watching the sarong-clad women of various Asian nations in the eternally disappointed hope of seeing the sarong slip unexpectedly from their golden bodies. Alan wore the sarong as his island work uniform, with a khaki army surplus shirt worn unbuttoned above it.

It was time – no, it wasn’t time for a beer, don’t be stupid, it was time for another cup of coffee to celebrate the glories of the commission. Let’s see, two thousand words at sixty cents each was, well, more than a thousand anyway, well, it was $1,2.00, wasn’t it? And there was the story on the trams for Hong Kong Life. And the story about the Peak for the Hong Kong Airlines magazine Josun! And there was the regular work, the subbing and rewriting for Reg at HK Biz. And it was all going to add up to, well, er, definitely more than he would have made had he been working for the Hong Kong Times. My God, a milestone had been passed. A triumph. Surely that was worth – no, it wasn’t. It was barely eleven o’clock. He filled the kettle and put it on his two-ring stove. It leapt into life at the merest touch of a match, and so it should have done. He had purchased a new cylinder of Calor Gas the previous day. He had paid an additional five dollars so that the cylinder might be carried up the 176 steps to his door. The task was accomplished by a pair of ancient women who suspended the cylinder from beneath a bamboo pole for portage.

The kettle boiled and Alan poured boiling water onto brown powder, adding a splash from a carton of UHT milk. He must get round to making proper coffee. But anyway, a proper coffee break was in order.

He took the mug of brown liquid to the door, which stood open as usual. Outside, in his concrete garden, he had set out a few plastic chairs and a table. To one side an inflated airbed lay perishing slowly in the sun. He sat on one chair, placed his feet on another. From the village below, he heard the sound of power tools in operation. Building, always building. But even from his seated position, he could see the chessboard field below. A slight figure, in jeans rolled to her knees, was working one of the patches. Was it the beautiful schoolgirl that André had introduced as Priscilla? He would marry Priscilla and live for ever on choisum and pak-choi and beer. But he was winning, was he not?

Voices rose suddenly in the Ng estate below and beyond his flat: the Ng clan had several ancient women about the place, and a number of unexplained females of all ages – whether retainers, meddling half-retired servants or poor relations, Alan did not know. One of these, the youngest but by no means young, a woman of some character, with a certain faded beauty, he knew was called Chai. They were given to energetic quarrelling, of which the only word Alan could understand was ‘Aiyaaaah!’ This, he thought, could mean anything at all save the possibility that it was the speaker’s own fault.

Which reminded him. He finished his coffee and went inside to call Reg, grabbing just in time at his sarong. ‘Looking good, old boy. Cleared up a hell of a lot yesterday. Good of you to stay late. It will be off to the typesetters any minute now. No, no, no, I’ll lock up, don’t dream of coming in. Not even sure about tomorrow. Let’s talk after I’ve gone through the post. Call me about ten.’

‘Thanks, Reg.’

‘No, no, thank you, old boy. Never known what it’s like to be ahead of myself before.’

After a few more gratifying amiabilities, they rang off. How splendid. The way was clear for the first step in the piece on the eccentric businessman. Alan took a perfunctory wash beneath the dribbling showerhead; it’s like little boys pissing on you, Charles had said. Surely the Ng well wasn’t running dry again.

Alan dressed in cotton jeans, twenty bucks the pair in the place behind the tramstop in Wanchai, and an almost respectable shirt. Combed his hair, removed the loose hairs from the teeth without looking to see how many. Did that show how relaxed he was, or how worried? He put on a pair of black cotton kung-fu slippers bought from China Products, and left the flat. Closed the door behind him, as a security measure, but did not lock it. He did not even know where the key was. Hadn’t seen it for weeks.

He walked around the side of the house and climbed the stairs. As he walked past Cool Cool Cool!, he tapped the poster, as was now his superstitious habit. This was to remind him that never, no matter how drunk, would he again venture out into the South China Sea with André and his ghastly boat. He climbed the last flight, and knocked on the door. King’s voice called out in Cantonese bass, presumably bidding him welcome. So Alan let himself in.

King was sitting on one of the sofas; opposite him, the far side of a low glass table, a Chinese man. ‘Ah, my young friend. You know Mr Ng, of course. And Ah-Hei.’

‘Of course.’ Mr Ng, possessor of that most wonderful of Cantonese surnames, was a man he saw regularly, and nodded to. As well as the estate next door, he owned Ng’s restaurant, down in the village, where Alan ate two or three times a week with his island companions, any time they felt like aiming above the traditional bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. It was a place decorated with the single-mindedness that all Chinese prefer when it comes to eating: no frivolous distractions. The principal decoration was a series of tanks containing still-swimming dinners. Mr Ng himself was another aspect of décor: he was invariably to be found, sitting on a high stool behind a desk, clacking at an abacus and calligraphing mysterious signs into a huge ledger. Business was business and food was food, and Ng’s restaurant was a temple. Ah-Hei was another aspect of décor. He had a shimmering black mane of hair, and looked like the hero of a martial arts film. This was because he was a martial arts hero: a real one. He was a genuine kung-fu adept. Charles said he had once seen Ah-Hei deal with a tableful of belligerent Chinese revellers: ‘Fastest thing on two legs I have ever seen. Looks stupid on the movies. But that bastard is real.’

Mr Ng had smartened himself up for this visit to King. He wore a clean white shirt instead of his usual dirty white singlet. Even so, his outfit probably cost even less than twenty dollars; Alan guessed that he could put his hands in the pocket of his China Products trousers and pull out enough cash to buy a Mercedes. He smiled at Alan; one large and unmissable gold tooth. ‘You like my restaurant.’

It was not a question. ‘Oh yes, very much. Nice place.’

‘You drink much beer in my restaurant.’

Nor was that. Praise, admiration, or perhaps a neutral acceptance of the differences between races. It was all profit, anyway, and boozing gweilos hardly made more noise than feasting Chinese. ‘Nice place,’ Alan said lamely.

‘Ve’y nice place.’

Alan turned to King. ‘Er, something I want to discuss with you, but it’ll keep.’

‘A moment, my friend.’ He and Mr Ng then embarked on a conversation in Cantonese with much guffawing from Mr Ng. No, he really would start to learn the language properly. Buy a book. Buy a tape. No, fall in love with a beautiful Cantonese girl. Alan examined King’s family photograph, idly speculating on the sexual potential of the pigtailed daughter. Perhaps she was now grown up, beautiful, available, ready to fall in love with him at first sight, to tumble into his bed in a wild whim of passion. King and Mr Ng shook hands, not without warmth. Then Mr Ng turned to Alan, and bestowed on him a final blessing from his golden mouth.