The Trophy Taker

Mann could swear he saw James shiver.

10

Glitter Girl was supposed to run – that was the game. It was always the same one. She was supposed to run and to hide and then he would come and find her.

She ran barefoot through the newly planted forest. The bark was rough beneath her feet and the spiky leaves scratched her face. She ran till her lungs burned, ready to burst. She ran till her legs wobbled like jelly. She knew she was running in circles and that there was no way out. When she could run no more she crouched in the vegetation and made herself as small as she could and stayed absolutely still. Listening hard, she prayed silently: Sweet Jesus, save me. I’ll be good – I promise. Save me, Lord … She didn’t hear a reply from Jesus. All she heard was, Ready or not … I’m comin’ …

11

In the skies over Hong Kong, on a packed plane from Heathrow, Georgina Johnson prepared to touch down. She was tired. It had been a long journey and she hadn’t slept at all on the plane. She looked around. People were returning to their seats to get ready for landing. One woman, sitting across the aisle to Georgina, had been doing her make-up for the last hour. All but two of the passengers were Chinese. Georgina had never seen so many Chinese people before. Sometimes, as a child, out shopping with her mother in their hometown of Newton Abbot, a medium-sized market town in Devon, she had seen small family groups of Chinese. There were never more than two noisy children at a time, happily chasing their parents’ heels or pulling on their arms. The family only had eyes for one another – protected in their Chinese capsule. As if the rest of the world were a dream that they could choose to step in or out of, but in which everyone else was trapped. Every morning Georgina’s mother, Feng Ying, walked the three miles from their home on the outskirts, into the town centre to the produce market next to the multi-storey car park. There she haggled and badgered the stallholders for the best vegetables, the cheapest meat. Then, content with her dealings, she allowed herself a social call – a brief visit to the Golden Dragon, the town’s only Chinese restaurant. It was situated above the multi-storey and looked down over the market. The Golden Dragon was owned by the Ho family, a family of Hong Kongese who had come over with just enough money to open a take-away, which, within a few years, expanded to a restaurant. For Feng Ying, the Golden Dragon provided an oasis in the pasty-white town of expanding new-builds where she had lived since the day her husband Adam Johnson had brought her to Britain. Where she’d lived alone, since the day her husband had not come home. He had left for no apparent reason. From that day she’d set about making do without him. She lived on the small savings that her husband had put into an account for her and she crocheted decorative pieces of linen, bedspreads and tablecloths for the upmarket handicraft shop in town. At times, when they needed her, when they had a large function which required her artistic eye at decorating and table setting, she helped in the Golden Dragon. But Feng Ying’s main job was to bring her infant daughter up as best she could. She was a foreigner in a country she barely knew but she found strength through her child. Every day she bundled her pink, washed and pampered baby into the pram and manoeuvred it into the outside world. She faced all life’s obstacles for this child and forged a bond between mother and daughter that was dependence and love entwined. Now Feng Ying was dead and Georgina must make it alone – something she had never imagined in her twenty-two years that she would have to do.

After clearing passport control Georgina collected her case and made her way through the new airport, a massive high-ceilinged hangar on Lantau Island. Pulling her heavy case behind her, she looked anxiously along the line of names written on cardboard held up by eager-looking drivers. Most were written in Chinese. It took her a few minutes before she saw hers. Georgina written in red felt pen on brown card and held up by a leathery-faced old man. He greeted her in Chinglish, smiling and nodding profusely as he picked up her case. Georgina tried to explain that it had wheels and that he could pull it along if he wanted. But he didn’t understand and it didn’t matter. He hardly struggled with the weight. Small and wiry he might have been, but he was definitely strong.

As they stepped outside, the bright sun slapped Georgina in the face and the heat wrapped itself around her like cling film. By the time they reached the taxi, less than a minute’s walk, she was sweating and couldn’t wait to find shade inside the cab.

The taxi driver’s name was Max, but it hadn’t always been. A teacher handed out the English names in class. He had been allotted the name Maxwell, which he later shortened to Max on the advice of an American tourist. Fong Man Tak was his birth name; he preferred Max.

Max was not altogether sure what age he was: there was no definitive documentation. But he had counted the years from when he was told by his mother that he had reached the age of eight. So now he thought he was sixty, and his mother was long dead.

Max had been a taxi driver for the last thirty years, and most of the time it brought him a modest income. Taxis were thick on the ground in Hong Kong so he had to work long hours to make it worthwhile.

Georgina peered silently out of the window. She was mesmerised by the cars all around her. She hadn’t envisaged Hong Kong looking quite so un-British. She’d thought, as a former British colony, that somehow it would mirror London in miniature. Or perhaps it would look like a Victorian seaside town with mock Tudor B&Bs, maybe with a dilapidated pier. She didn’t know quite which, but she certainly hadn’t expected it to look so completely different. It seemed to her to be a futuristic alien world of skyscrapers.

She tilted her head at the window and stretched her eyes upwards. ‘Gods,’ she thought, the skyscrapers were like gods’ legs: perfected from glass and chrome, glinting gloriously in the sunshine. There were so many different kinds: some were honeycombed like rectangular wasps’ nests; others were skeletal, jutting skyward as bony white fingers. And the strangest thing of all were the building sites that bridged the gaps between the buildings like gums between teeth.

All the time Georgina studied her new environment, Max studied her in the mirror. He was fascinated by her cascading curls and her pale, luminescent beauty. It was not the first time he’d had a foreign girl in his car. Many girls had sat where she sat now. They were strange, unearthly creatures, the Western girls. They didn’t seem real to Max. They were images from a film: plastic, false. Sometimes Max thought about the other girls, the ones who had ridden in his cab. He wondered where they’d gone.

One of the girls who’d sat in the back of Max’s cab, where Georgina was sitting now, had not gone far. Part of her now resided in a drawer of a mortuary fridge. The rest of her was still waiting to be found.

12

Max turned the cab into a narrow street – typical of the ones found just a stone’s throw from the main tram line on Johnson Road. The road was so narrow that the washing hung from poles, jutting out from the overhead balconies and meeting in the centre of the street, hanging down like heavily laden tree branches, providing a canopy over the busy street. They trapped smells and dust, but afforded some welcome shade in the heat of the day.

The cab pulled up outside the mansion block on a side street in Wanchai.

Georgina thanked Max, took her case from him and wheeled it into the building. She checked her piece of paper, the one that Mrs Ho had written the address on, in both Chinese and English: fourth floor, apartment 407. She took the lift – a small oppressive space that only had room for her and her case. As she wheeled the case out onto the fourth-floor landing, she paused outside the apartment door to gather her thoughts. She had come a long way to reach this point. She hoped it would prove worth it. She took a deep breath, rang the bell and waited.

A young woman in a dressing gown opened the door. She looked like she’d just got up. She wore no makeup and her hair was a mess. Her face was as rounded as a full moon, while her nose was small and flattened, emphasising the largeness of her visage. Her eyes were set slightly wide apart, and then there was the mouth, like Georgina’s, a family trait – lips that formed an almost perfect circle topped by a cupid’s bow.

The woman grinned. She had a gold crown just behind one of her eyeteeth.

‘You got to be Georgina, right?’ Her voice was loud, deep and brackish. The words had a hint of American, but the accent remained pure Hong Kong staccato.

Georgina nodded. ‘Ka Mei?’

‘Yeah, thaz me. Call me Lucy – English name more easy. Come in, please. Let me help you.’

She pulled Georgina’s case in and ushered her forward into the dimly lit flat. Immediately in front of them, as they entered, was a small lounge area. Beyond that was a fifties-style Formica breakfast bar. Behind it there was a one-ring cooker, a microwave and a decrepit water heater that appeared to cling to the wall by its fingernails. There were two rooms on the left, and a bathroom ahead. Lucy pulled Georgina’s case into the middle of the lounge.

‘Sorry. I expect you later. But no worries, huh?’ She patted Georgina on the arm. ‘You very pretty girl – so tall.’ She laughed. ‘Ka Lei!’ she called. ‘Come, meet your cousin …’

There was a screech from the bathroom and a young woman came flying out. She looked quite different from her sister. She was taller, but much slighter. Her features were also long and thin, accentuated by her hair that fell from a centre parting and divided into two shiny black sheets falling either side of her face. She was so excited. She had been on a high ever since they had known that Georgina would be coming.

She barged past her sister (falling over Georgina’s huge suitcase, which filled the tiny lounge) and threw open the bedroom doors. Ka Lei squealed with delight as she pulled her cousin out of the room and dragged her around the tiny flat, pointing things out as they went. There was always something else she absolutely must show her.

‘Here is our bedloom,’ shrieked Ka Lei, as she dived into the first open door and jumped onto the bed in the centre of the room.

Lucy came behind her, scolding but smiling. Georgina squeezed past the bed to look at the view from the oversized windows, more out of politeness than anything else. All she could see was the side wall of the adjacent building. By pressing her face against the pane and looking up she would have been able to see a corner of sky, and, looking down, people’s heads would have been just visible below. But she didn’t; she stood politely, staring through the never-been-cleaned glass at the blacked-out windows of the building opposite, which was so near you could almost reach out and touch it. Georgina was used to looking out of the window and seeing fields. Now she knew what it was to feel claustrophobic.

They eventually collapsed onto the bed in what was to be Georgina’s room. It was identical to the sisters’: the same two lazy bamboo blinds hanging lopsided against the oversized panes, the same wallpaper peeling from the wall and the same air-conditioning unit droning away in honour of Georgina’s arrival.

All three sat on the bed.

Ka Lei reached for Georgina’s hand. ‘We hope you happy here … wit us,’ she said.

Georgina felt too overwhelmed to answer. It was all so strange. So many new things to take in. She looked around her. Had she left England for this – this scruffy, dark and damp-smelling apartment? Then she looked back at Ka Lei, sitting on the bed, waiting expectantly, smiling at her, and she knew it didn’t matter what the flat was like – she had found her cousins and they were happy to see her.

‘Ayeee …’ Ka Lei looked at her watch. ‘I late … muz go … I wor until ten o’clock, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Georgina mimicked, laughing.

Lucy moved forward to usher her sister out. She spoke sternly to her in Cantonese about being late. Georgina found she could understand quite a lot of what they said. The years of listening to the workers in the Golden Dragon had meant she’d absorbed a lot of the language without realising.

Ka Lei grabbed her bag, kissed her sister and her cousin, and flew out of the door amid uncontrollable shrieking. Her energetic presence diminished with the descending elevator.

Max was heading home. He lived with his brother and his father. The old man would be waiting for him now, dozing in his chair, waiting for the sound of his son returning. Max had been so exhausted before he picked up the young woman but now his mind was alert, jumping. He craned his neck to look up at the sky. A storm was coming. The electricity in the air charged Max’s weary old brain. Now he had the girl to think about too. He would not sleep today.

13

Lucy went behind the breakfast bar to make tea.

‘See Ka Lei later. She a student nurse. Works at the government hospital not far from here. One more year be qualify. Very good girl.’

As Lucy busied herself making tea, Georgina took the opportunity to study her. Lucy wasn’t pretty. Her looks were brash, hard. Georgina felt a small pang of disappointment. Lucy looked very different from her mother, whose beauty had been subtle and soft. Then she was cross with herself. She hadn’t come all this way to find fault with her cousins.

‘So funny, when you write me, huh? My sister and me, we talk juz couple of weeks ago. We say: we wonder how old you are and if we ever meet you. Funny, huh? We never thin you come Hong Kong. It’s pretty strange, huh – meeting like this for firs time? How you fine us?’ Lucy asked.

‘My mother left a list of people I should contact …’

Georgina felt sadness surge. She swallowed hard and tried to stay focused, not think about her mother for just a few seconds. She was jumpy and tired. It would be too easy to get over-emotional.

Lucy placed her hand on Georgina’s arm. ‘Very sat, about your mommy … very sat.’ She turned back to wait for the water to boil.

‘She had been ill for a long time. Four years,’ Georgina said in hushed tones, more to herself than anyone else, as Lucy had her back to her and was busy washing cups.

Georgina thought about those years. She had nursed her mother through two relapses. She’d never really expected her to die. She never thought her mother would ever leave her. She wondered how she had survived those early days, after her mother’s death. At the time she had felt so completely lost. She had gone back to work. The bookshop was just as she’d left it. Iris, her co-worker, was still wearing the same brown court shoes and pink blouse as she had always done, and the same coral lipstick that clung to the edges of her front teeth. Nothing was different, except Georgina.

Iris had never been good with emotions. The sight of Georgina’s distress had made her uncomfortable.

‘Have you no other family?’ she’d asked. ‘No one? Are you sure? You must have some relatives?’

‘I have two cousins in Hong Kong but I’ve never met them,’ Georgina told her.

‘Maybe you should take some time off and go and visit them, Georgina. Hmm? I can cope here. I have to take on some temporary staff nearer to Christmas anyway. I’ll take on somebody now, to cover for you, just until you get back. How’s that?’

Then Georgina had sat down on one of the unopened boxes in the storeroom. ‘I don’t know what to do any more.’ She had put her head in her hands. ‘I feel as if I don’t belong here, without my mum.’

‘You may find what you’re looking for in Hong Kong, Georgina.’ Iris had knelt down beside her and smiled kindly. ‘Who knows? You can only try. Life is a challenge. Sometimes it just throws up loads of shit at us, for no reason. It makes no sense at the time, but it makes us stronger, makes us grow. You need to grow, Georgina. You are twenty-two years old. You’ve been in this shop for five years now. You came in here with all sorts of plans. You were going to go to university. You were going to travel. You had a boyfriend. What happened to Simon?’

‘It just didn’t work out.’

‘You did a marvellous job looking after her, but it’s time for you to live your life now. It’s time to find your wings and learn to fly.’

It made Georgina smile to remember how Iris always erred towards the theatrical. But it had stirred something within her, and that afternoon she’d gone to see the Hos. They sat at a table overlooking the market. Mrs Ho stayed with her while Mr Ho went to fetch her some of her favourite wonton soup. When he returned, Georgina told them she was thinking of going to Hong Kong.

‘Good idea,’ Mr Ho had replied.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Mrs Ho had retorted angrily in Cantonese. ‘How will she cope out there, on her own? Look at her! Skin and bone!’

Mr Ho had stood his ground. ‘But she’s not coping here, is she? Better go where she has some family to look after her. New start for her.’

Mrs Ho had scowled at her husband, turned back to Georgina, and spoken to her in English.

‘You better stay here, Georgina. You have friends here, don’t you?’

Georgina pushed the wontons around her soup.

‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘Most of my friends went to university when I stayed here. I have you and Mr Ho. I have Iris. That’s it, really.’

‘Better stay here with us then, huh?’ It had broken Mrs Ho’s heart to see her so sad.

Then Georgina put down her spoon and looked past Mr and Mrs Ho, down to the market below where the stallholders were shutting up shop, and for a second she thought she saw her mother. She looked away quickly.

‘They are my cousins. But I’ve never met them. Do you think they would even want to see me?’

‘Of course they would want to see you, Georgina. Why wouldn’t they? But maybe it’s not such a good idea to go there right now.’

‘But I think, perhaps, I should.’ For a few seconds she felt the sadness, which seemed to be cemented to her heart, crack and fall away and hope begin its return.

Mr and Mrs Ho had looked from one to the other. Then Mrs Ho had shrugged and smiled resignedly. Reaching over, she’d brushed Georgina’s hair away from her face and kissed her cheek.

‘Okay then. Maybe you should go,’ she had said with a sigh. ‘Maybe you should go to Hong Kong, Georgina, and find your family.’

And now, for better or worse, Georgina had found them.

14

‘I’m gonna make you some tea, okay?’

‘Yes … sounds good … thanks.’ Georgina yawned and sat down heavily on the stool.

‘I hope I’m not stopping you from going to work, Lucy. I’ll be fine here by myself, honestly.’

‘Hey, no worry, right?’ Lucy handed her tea in a chipped cup. ‘Working later.’ She smiled, turned away and began busying herself. ‘Good, huh? Give me more time to get to know you, huh?’

‘So you work when you want to?’

‘For sure!’

Lucy turned away from Georgina and searched for something in a cupboard. ‘And what kind of work do you do, Lucy?’

There was a pause, as Lucy pondered the question that she knew she would have to answer sometime. She stopped and turned and met her cousin’s gaze.

‘I work in nightclub.’

‘You’re a singer!’ Georgina exploded. ‘How cool!’

Lucy laughed. ‘No … but my mommy was a singer, did you know that? Ah! Juz a momen. I remember something I want to show you.’ Lucy slipped out from behind the breakfast bar and shuffled into the bedroom. She stood on a chair and pulled down a box. ‘Georgina, come see what I have here,’ she called as she carried on rooting through the box’s contents and pulled out an old tattered photograph. She held it aloft to show Georgina as she walked in behind Lucy. ‘See anyone you know?’

Georgina sat on the bed beside Lucy. She took the photo from her and studied it. It was an old black and white print of a man and woman and two girls, all in traditional Chinese dress. They were posing in front of a painted backdrop: tranquil water and weeping willows. Georgina turned it over – there was writing on the back: December 1950, Hong Kong, and some Chinese script. Turning it back, it was her mother’s smile she recognised first, then the shape of her face. Feng Ying was the smaller of the children, holding on to her elder sister Xiaolin’s hand, and she was staring into the camera with her head tilted to one side.

‘Nice picture, huh?’

Georgina nodded, transfixed by the treasure she held in her hands. ‘So beautiful.’

‘I’m gonna get you a copy, okay?’

As Georgina looked up and nodded her appreciation, Lucy saw that her cousin’s eyes were watery. She jumped up. ‘More tea! We need more tea!’ And she scurried back out to the kitchen. ‘Chinese tea, the best! Do you like it?’ she called.

Georgina didn’t answer: she was transfixed by the photograph. Lucy came in again, carrying a tray. ‘Long time ago, this picture, huh? You know this picture was taken when our family first moved here to Hong Kong. See! There is father, mother, and two little girls. My mommy and yours, see? When our family came from mainland China, long time back … they had big hopes then, but …’ she shrugged ‘… didn’t work out so good, huh? But your mom, she did fine,’ Lucy continued. ‘She was good in school … learn a lot … worked in a bank. Really good how she manage to get that kind of job.’

‘She met my dad in that bank.’

‘Yes! Very lucky. My mommy not so lucky.’ Lucy shrugged. ‘Maybe she not so clever …’

Lucy poured out more tea. Georgina was still looking at the photo. ‘Have you got any more photos?’

‘No, shame, I have very little of our family. Now not many of us left, huh, juz the three of us now.’

‘Lucy, I am very grateful to you for letting me stay. But what about you and Ka Lei? You have to share a room now?’

‘No problem. We always share.’

‘My room is always empty?’

‘An American girl had your room. I don’t know where she is now.’ Lucy rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nice girl, very pretty; blonde hair, long nails.’

He liked her nails. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her. He liked women who looked after themselves. He had made her paint her nails especially, on that last day before he chased her through the forest. He’d made her paint them in stars and stripes, like the American flag. She had painted her nails with expert precision, each stripe was perfectly in line. In the centre of each nail she had painted one red star and sprinkled it with glitter. He smiled to himself, satisfied. Now he would always know which finger was hers.

15

Max lived in Sheung Sai Wan, Western District. It was an area that, despite its name, was the least westernised district of all Hong Kong. It was also the place that the British had first settled in, then hastily fled from when malaria came biting at their heels. Industries in the area were small and family run. Life was as it used to be. Profits were small and everyone had something to sell. Traditional skills and oriental sundries crowded the cobbled alleyways. Bolts of silk that were rolled from one-hundred-year-old spools. Chinese calligraphy that was carved into ornate ‘chops’ made from ivory and jade. Snakes had their gall bladders removed and presented to the purchaser to drink, before being placed back in their wooden box – gall-bladderless. But Western District’s days were numbered: new developments were poking their bony fingers out of the living decay and time-debris. The Fong family – Max, his brother Man Po and his father – lived on Herald Street. It was one of the broader, quieter roads at the lower end of the district. Most of the buildings on Herald Street had a shop front. Some shops were still in full use, merchandise spilling out and obstructing the pavement. Others had rusted-up metal shutters and decrepit doorways that had been a long time silent. There was a peaceful, dusty old quiet about Herald Street, but there was also a permanent smell of decay there: rotting, fermenting vegetation, cultivated by years of neglect. The Fong family lived in a four-storey building situated three-quarters of the way along the street. They had had a thriving business once. Father Fong had been a well-respected doctor. He had held his practice on the ground floor of the house, and the shop front had served as the dispensary. Queues had formed from the shop entrance and continued down Herald Street on most days, with people waiting patiently to see him. He was so respected that it was widely accepted he could perform miracle cures, and his notoriety spread in both Chinese and Western circles.