by Tony Parsons
It is only a seven-minute journey between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, the shortest sea voyage in the world, one brief kilometre spent weaving between junks, barges, cruise ships, tugs and sampans. But it must feel like a long time when you are carrying a box that is almost as big as you are.
I stood up.
‘Excuse me? Do you want a seat?’
She just stared at me. I was really quite thin in those days. Not that I was Brad Pitt or anything, even during my lean period, but I wasn’t the Elephant Man either. I wasn’t expecting her to faint, with either desire or repulsion. But I expected her to do something. She just kept on staring.
I had assumed that she was British or American. Now I saw, with that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones, she could conceivably be some kind of Mediterranean.
‘You speak English?’
She nodded.
‘Do you want to sit down?’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But it’s only a little journey.’
‘But it’s a big box.’
‘I’ve carried bigger.’
That smile. Slow, though, and a bit reluctant. Who was this strange guy in a Frank Sinatra T-shirt (Frank grinning under a snap-brim fedora in an EMI publicity shot from 1958, one of the golden years) and ragged chinos? Who was this man of mystery? This thin boy who was, on balance, slightly more Brad Pitt than Elephant Man?
Her box was full of files, manila envelopes and documents with fancy red seals. So she was a lawyer. I felt a flash of resentment. She probably only talked to men in suits with six-figure salaries. And I was a man in a faded Sinatra T-shirt whose wage packet, when converted into pounds sterling, just about crawled into five figures.
‘I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman on the Star Ferry,’ she said. ‘Not these days.’
‘I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman anywhere,’ I said. ‘Not these days.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
‘No problem.’
I was about to sit down again when an old Chinese man with a nylon shirt and a racing paper shoved me out of the way and plonked himself down in my seat. He hawked noisily and spat right between my Timberland boots. I stared at him dumbfounded as he opened up his paper and began to study the runners at Happy Valley.
‘There you go,’ she laughed. ‘If you’ve got a seat, you better hold on to it.’
I watched her laughing her goofy laugh as we came into Hong Kong Island. The great buildings reared above us. The Bank of China. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The Mandarin Hotel. All the silver and gold and glass office blocks of Central, and beyond all of that, the lush greens of Victoria Peak, almost lost inside a shroud of tropical fog.
I was suddenly gripped by the fear that I would never see her again.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ I said, blushing furiously. I was angry with myself. I know women never say yes to anything if you can’t ask them without going red.
‘A coffee?’
‘You know. Espresso. Cappuccino. Latte. A coffee.’
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘The seat was good. The coffee—I don’t know. It’s a bit predictable. And besides, I’ve got to drop this stuff off.’
The Star Ferry churned against the dock. The ramp clanged down. The crowds got ready to bolt.
‘I’m not trying to pick you up,’ I said.
‘No?’ Her face was serious and I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not. ‘That’s too bad.’
Then she was gone, swept off in a tide of Cantonese with her cardboard box full of legal documents to the wharf and, beyond that, the business district of Central.
I looked out for her on the Star Ferry the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, expecting to suddenly find her smiling at someone she had struck with a large box of legal documents. Or—if I was very lucky—to strike me with her cardboard box. But she was never there.
Not that I had any slick new chat-up lines.
I just wanted to see that smile.
It was a Friday night and the penthouse bar of the Mandarin Hotel was crowded and loud.
I couldn’t really afford to drink up there on what they paid me at the Double Fortune Language School. Yet once in a while I liked to get the lift to the top floor of the famous old hotel and watch the sun go down over an ice-cold Tsingtao beer—the best beer in China. It was a special treat.
But tonight, as I sipped my beer at the bar, some goon from back home started spoiling everything.
‘As soon as the People’s Liberation Army march in, you watch everyone in Central head for the airport,’ he said. ‘And it will serve the buggers right. Hong Kong was a fishing village when we arrived and it will be a fishing village when we leave.’
He had a voice on him that cut right through me, full of private education and a lifetime of privilege and dumb words spoken with all the confidence in the world. His voice reminded me that not everything I hated about home had a bulldog tattoo.
‘Give this place back to the great unwashed and just watch them kill the golden goose,’ he said. ‘But of course the great unwashed will eat anything.’
I turned to look at him.
He was at a window table with some girl, trying to impress her. The girl had her back to me. I really didn’t notice her at first. I saw only him—a beefy young man in a pinstripe suit, fair-haired and fit from a diet of red meat and rugby and Church of England hymns. A slab of pure British beef, with possibly just a touch of mad cow disease.
Beefy was making no attempt to keep his voice down. The young Cantonese bartender and I exchanged looks as he poured me a second beer. The bartender—just a kid—smiled sadly, not quite shaking his head, and something about the infinite gentleness of his gesture pushed me over the edge.
No, this is too much, I thought, putting down my Tsingtao. It wasn’t just that Beefy was insulting the residents of Hong Kong. He was also doing the dirt on the special feeling that I got when I looked at all the lights. The barman’s eyes told me to leave it.
Too late.
‘Excuse me. Excuse me?’
Beefy looked up at me. So did the girl. It was her. And she shone.
I mean she really shone—the sunset, made spectacular by toxic fumes pouring from the factories of southern China, was throwing the last of its technicolor light across her face.
It lit her up.
Beefy was as blond as she was dark, they looked like some kind of couple, perhaps in the early days of an office romance. At least in Beefy’s tiny mind.
‘What?’ he said. Rudely.
‘Look at you,’ I said. ‘I mean, just look at you. They give you a company flat and a Filipina maid and you think you’re some kind of empire builder. Who are you this week, pal? Stamford Raffles? Cecil Rhodes? Scott of the Antarctic?’
‘I’m sorry—are you insane?’ he said, uncertain if he should laugh out loud or punch my lights out. He stood up. A big bastard. Plenty of contact sports. Hairs on his chest. Probably.
‘Calm down, Josh,’ she said, touching his arm.
You might have tagged him a chinless wonder but you would have been dead wrong. He was all chin. His kind always are, in my experience. All chin and nose. His noble snout and jutting chin seemed to compress his mouth into a thin, imperious, mean little line.
If anything, he was a lipless wonder.
‘We’re guests in this place,’ I said, my voice shaking with something that I couldn’t quite identify. ‘Britannia no longer rules the waves. We should remember our manners.’
His lipless mouth dropped open. And then he spoke.
‘How would you like me to teach you some manners, you awful little man?’
‘Why don’t you try it?’
‘Maybe I will.’
‘Maybe you should.’
‘Oh, shut up, the pair of you,’ she said. ‘You’re both going home one day.’
Going home one day? Going home? That had never occurred to me. I looked at her and I thought
—home.
Then I looked at Josh. And after staring each other down for a bit, Josh and I felt like idiots and realised that we weren’t going to beat each other up. Or, rather, that he wasn’t going to beat me up. She finally shoved him into his chair. Then she smiled at me with that goofy grin.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We should remember our manners.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Rose.’
I took her hand.
‘Alfie Budd,’ I said.
I even shook hands with old Josh. The three of us had a drink and, as Josh and I avoided eye contact, I told them about my job at the Double Fortune Language School. She told me about their law firm. Josh kept consulting his watch. Overdoing it a bit, I thought. Deliberately showing me—and her—that he was bored beyond belief.
But she smiled at me—that smile, those teeth, those baby-pink gums, effortlessly taking possession of my heart—and I felt it, I really felt it.
That somewhere in this world there really was a home for me to go to.
This is the way it starts. You look at someone you have never met before and you recognise them. That’s all. You just recognise them. Then it begins.
Rose suddenly slapped the table.
‘Oh, wait a minute,’ she laughed. ‘I remember you.’
It shouldn’t have worked. Her friends all thought she was too good for me and her friends were right. Rose was a Hong Kong Island girl. I was a Kowloon side guy.
She had a career. I had a job. She had dinner in the China Club surrounded by big shots. I had Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong surrounded by my fellow small fry. She came out to Hong Kong with a window seat in Club Class. I had an aisle seat in Economy.
At twenty-five, Rose was already a success. Seven years older than her—and starting to look every day of it, what with the humidity and the Tsingtao—I was still waiting for my life to start.
She lived in a small but beautiful apartment on Conduit Road in the Upper Mid-Levels under the shadow of Victoria Peak—ex-pat heaven. Security was a 24-hour Gurkha. I had a room in a shared flat in Sai Ying Pun, rooming with a couple of my colleagues from the Double Fortune, the BBC guy from Gerrard Street and the Wing Chun man from Wilmslow.
Our place was one of those fire-trap rabbit warrens with walls so thin you could hear the family down the hall watching Star TV. Security was a sleepy Sikh who came and went as the mood took him.
Rose hadn’t drifted out to Hong Kong, not like me. She was a corporate lawyer who had been sent out for a year by her London firm—she called it the shop – to cash in on a market that, in the last year of British rule, was booming like never before.
While I was struggling to pay my rent, behind the closed doors of Central fortunes were being made. Hong Kong was screaming out for lawyers and every day more of them came through the fast track of Kai Tak Airport.
Rose was one of them.
‘I would still be making the tea in London,’ she told me on that first night after Josh and I decided to have a drink instead of a fight. ‘Getting my bum pinched by some fat old man. Out here, I matter.’
‘What is it you do exactly, Rose?’
‘It’s corporate finance,’ she said. ‘I help firms raise money with share issues for Chinese companies. Initial Public Offerings. Fire-fighting, they call it.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Brilliant.’
I had absolutely no idea what she was going on about. But I was genuinely impressed. She seemed like more of a grown-up than I would ever be.
Most of her colleagues—those loud boys and girls braying in the penthouse bar of the Mandarin every night, ignoring the sunset over the harbour—had an amused contempt for Hong Kong.
They saw a street sign for Wan King Road and howled about it for the duration of their stay, as though Hong Kong existed purely for their amusement. They collected and drooled over all the evidence of Hong Kong’s madness. And there was plenty.
The local brand of toilet paper called My Fanny. The Causeway Bay department store—a Japanese store as it happened, but let that pass—where they sold truffles named Chocolate Negro Balls. The popular Hong Kong anti-freeze spray known as My Piss.
And I laughed too when I first saw the ads for My Piss—I’m not saying that I didn’t. But the lipless wonders never stopped. Sooner or later you should forget about My Fanny and go look at the sunset, go look at the lights. But somehow the lipless wonders never got around to that.
Rose wasn’t like the rest of them. She loved the place.
I don’t want to make her sound like Mother Teresa with a briefcase. The Cantonese can be an abrasive bunch, and, confronted by a sulky taxi driver or a rude waiter or a pushy beggar, Rose was quite capable of feeling all the helpless frustration of any hot, tired expatriate. But the bad feelings never lasted for very long.
She loved Hong Kong. She loved the people and—unusually for a woman with her job, her salary, her skin colour—she thought it was right that they were getting the place back.
‘Oh, come on, Alfie,’ she said one night when I was going on about the special feeling, and how I didn’t want it ever to end. ‘Hong Kong might be a British invention. But it has a Chinese heart.’
She wanted to find the real Hong Kong. Left to my own devices, I would have nursed a Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong and looked at the lights. Left to myself, I would have vegetated quite happily in the unreal Hong Kong, convinced that the special feeling was all I needed to know.
Rose took me deeper. Rose took me beyond the lights. As she did so, she turned affection into something more. For Hong Kong. And for her.
She took me to a temple behind Central where everything was red and gold and the air was choked with incense as little old ladies burned fake money in huge stone drums. Through the perfumed mist you could just about make out two brass deer gleaming on the altar.
‘For longevity,’ Rose said, and when I think about Rose talking about longevity now, it makes me want to weep.
Back in the days we thought would never end, she took me to places where I would never have gone without her. We had dim sum in a restaurant near my flat where we were the only gweilo. We walked the narrow streets between apartment blocks covered in TV aerials, potted plants and washing lines. She took my hand and led me down sunless alleys where toothless old men in flip-flops bet on two crickets fighting in a wooden box.
And I met her from work and we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and a cinema where it seemed that every mobile phone in the audience never once stopped ringing. Everyone else I knew would have been maddened by the experience. Rose rocked in her seat with laughter.
‘Now this is the real Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘You want to find Hong Kong, mister?’ She raised her hand to the symphony of mobile phones. ‘This is it.’
Yet she loved doing all the British things. Every Saturday afternoon, after she had finished work—the shop expected her to work half a day on Saturday—we had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, looking out at Central on the other side of the harbour as we sipped our Earl Grey and tucked into our jam scones and noshed our little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Once or twice we even watched Josh and his hairy-arsed friends playing rugby and cricket.
It was fun to do these typically British things not because they reminded us of home but because we had never done any of them at home.
Cricket, rugby, sandwiches with the crusts cut off—who knew about these things? Not me. And not Rose, whose non-partisan accent disguised the fact that she came from a pebble-dashed semi in a modest corner of the Home Counties. Nothing had been given to Rose. She had earned it all with education and hard work.
‘So where exactly did you lose your Essex accent?’ I asked her once. ‘University?’
‘Liverpool Street Station,’ she said.
In Asia we found both the real Hong Kong and a Britain that we had never known.
Rose loved all of that.
And I loved her.
It wasn’t difficult. The only difficult thing was working up the courage to
call her after she gave me her business card in the bar of the Mandarin. It took me seven days. Right from the start, she mattered too much to me. Right from the start, I could not imagine my life without her.
Because she was beautiful, smart and kind. She was curious and brave. She had a bigger heart than anyone I have ever known. She was good at her job but her sense of worth didn’t depend on that job. I loved her for all those reasons. And I loved her because she was on my side. She was on my side without conditions, without get-out clauses. It’s very easy to love someone when they are on your side.
Once, when we were all on the roof of the China Club, Josh said this interesting thing—probably a first for old Josh—after a few too many Tsingtao.
‘If Rose met God, she would say: why are you so nasty to Alfie, God?’
He said it in this shrill, girlie voice and everyone laughed. I smiled, trying to be polite to the blockhead. But my heart beat a little faster. Because I knew it was true.
Rose was on my side in a way that nobody had ever been on my side. Apart from my parents. And my grandparents. But they were sort of obliged to be on my side. Rose was a volunteer. She cared about me. Those kids in the park—the cheddar gang—would laugh at the idea of a woman like that caring about a man like me. But she really did. I’m not making it up.
And by loving me, she set me free. Free to be myself.
There was a dream I had once had in London—the dream of trying to be a writer—that I had never really had the guts to pursue. Rose made me believe that, if I was prepared to put in the hours, I could do it. I could become a writer one day. She saw not only the man I was, but the man I could be. By loving me, she made me believe that my dreams could come true.
That’s why it is all so difficult now.
That’s why I have to force myself to carry on today.
Because for a little while back there, I had it perfect.
The old Chinese man has finished his slow-motion dance.
As I jog past him for the second time—well, by now it’s actually more of a slow shuffle than a jog—he looks at me as though he has seen my face a thousand times. As though he recognises me, too.
He speaks to me again and this time I understand exactly what he’s saying. It’s not breed at all.