by Julia Jones
“Couldn’t you like tell them that I’m my mum’s interpreter or something?”
Nothing she had said made any difference. He was to be sent back to England on the first available ferry and meanwhile he was not permitted to leave the port area. If June didn’t guarantee his compliance they would consider taking him into custody.
She switched to asking what steps had been taken to arrest the captain and crew of the Pride of Macao? The immigration authorities said that was a matter for the police but when the police came they were unenthusiastic. Attempted Ramming didn’t seem to be on their list of criminal offences. When June pointed to the Tiger’s knife they re-photographed it and took everyone’s fingerprints. Then they wrapped it in some sort of plastic and took it away. June insisted on making an official witness statement but Skye couldn’t tell them what she’d seen and Donny was quite relieved that they didn’t ask him. He wasn’t sure what he would have said about Gold Dragon shooting the Tiger in the stomach with that flare.
Strong Winds’ voyage was over. As soon as Donny had been deported June and Skye would hurry to Rotterdam hospital by train. The harbour authorities advised them to move the junk to a more secure berth. This was two basins further in, through lock gates and three sets of lifting bridges. It wasn’t going to be cheap – they didn’t dare think about who would pay – but she’d be safe there while the lawyers argued about her status and her skipper battled for survival. Donny wondered whether Strong Winds would feel abandoned amongst the cluster of GRP yachts and small motor vessels. There was an impressive museum ship there, the Mercator, but she’d stuck her bowsprit to the skies and fallen asleep, knowing that she’d never go sailing again.
June vented her frustrations in a furious telephone call to Joshua. Then they had tidied Strong Winds as best they could. They hauled down her flags, closed the stopcocks, turned off the electrics, then locked the cabin doors and checked the mooring warps one last time before leaving to meet the Ramsgate ferry. Skye and Donny packed their clothes and Donny had all his schoolbooks weighing down his rucksack.
Was there anything he could leave behind? He’d finished rereading We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. This time it had depressed him. John-in-the-book had managed everything, virtually unaided, whereas Donny couldn’t see that he’d been much help to anyone. June was so experienced it had been natural for her to take command and Skye had steered as if she’d been lashed into the chains since birth. No surprise father had leapt from his ship to save them (that was his favourite bit in the story) and now he was being sent back to Erewhon Parva vicarage while the others went on to Rotterdam.
He heaved the book out of his rucksack. Then, on an impulse, he decided to lay it in the berth where Gold Dragon should have slept. A pledge for her return.
“Something for Ellen to read in hospital ... what a good idea,” June smiled, taking the book from him and packing it. Donny couldn’t quite get his face to smile back.
He was haunted by his last glimpse of his great-aunt. She’d looked so fragile, strapped to her stretcher, then hauled away into that whirling, clattering, machine. And who was that strange bloke who had asked her whether she owned the campfire kettle or the swallow flag? The swallow flag had come from her sister, Eirene, Skye’s mother. He wasn’t sure about the campfire kettle. Was that Granny’s?
When June was about to lock up the junk Donny dived back in to the cabin. He grabbed Secret Water from the ship’s bookshelf. He knew it was his great-aunt’s special favourite (apart from Missee Lee) and he hadn’t had any time to ask her what it had been like, that last weekend, revisiting the actual location. He’d read the book as quickly as he could, then send her a proper letter sounding really interested. Maybe he’d copy her some maps.
“I can’t believe you didn’t discover what happened to the Pride of Macao.” Xanthe sounded accusing as she swung her book bag off her shoulder and let it fall on the dining-hall floor with a thud. She was officially on study leave but she’d chosen to come and work in the school library instead of staying at home. She and Maggi hadn’t said much but the others knew that the Ribieros had had a terrible argument when June had telephoned from Belgium. She’d accused Joshua of cowardice in resigning from his job, especially for doing it without telling her. The girls agreed with their mother and were extra-outraged that neither of their parents had given them any hint what was going on when it was them who’d have to change schools and leave all their friends if their father took a job abroad.
Mr Ribiero was staying at home that day to think about application letters. Xanthe said she didn’t trust herself to be in the house with him.
“What chance did I have to do anything?” Donny protested. “I wasn’t allowed to leave the port and then I was marched onto that ferry as if I’d committed some sort of crime.” The ferry didn’t normally take foot passengers but the police had ordered them to make an exception in his case. He wasn’t allowed to move from the saloon and everyone treated him as if he was some sort of delinquent. Rev. Wendy had met him at Ramsgate and driven him back to Suffolk in her little car. She hadn’t said much. “I thought the coastguard might have tracked her on the radar but I think she was too busy trying to sort us out. Getting the helicopter and all that. The police did say that it was an offence Pride of Macao not waiting to offer help when Strong Winds was in distress.”
“They didn’t understand the problem at all?”
“When your mum said we were under attack by pirates? No. I don’t think Belgium’s that sort of place. Or they don’t think it is.”
“To be fair I wouldn’t have expected to find pirates in Suffolk either,” said Maggi.
“Not till I met you and your family. Fancy a pasta salad, Anna?”
“Not all that hungry, thanks. I wonder where she is now.”
“Who?”
“Pride of Macao. Hispaniola as was. She’s obviously got some good hiding place wherever it was that we couldn’t find her. But you’d have thought that she’d have been spotted coming back into the harbour. I mean there’s obviously radar and there’s all those Port of Felixstowe webcams and you’d think the coastguards and harbour authorities and immigration people here would be pretty hot shot, wouldn’t you?”
“Except for any of them who are being bribed or intimidated or just plain fooled by Flint.” Donny was having two big-breakfast panini with salad, beans and pasta topping. He only wished the school’s healthy eating policy would allow him to add chips as well. Except then he’d probably end up as gross as the fat policeman. “There must be some who do what he says or they wouldn’t have managed to set up that ambush for Strong Winds. It would have been really early morning again when she did come back. If she did. Could have slipped past if there was someone looking the other way.”
“We’d have kept watch on the river ourselves if you’d told us.”
“Sorry. Other things on my mind. Don’t get at me, okay?”
“That helicopter winch-man sounds cool.” Maggi was changing the subject.
“Deus,” agreed Anna.
“Don’t you mean dude? Or ‘well fit’ as you and Mags might say when you’re prowling the streets of Ipswich getting your shopping fix.”
Xanthe was so grumpy today. Maybe it was pre-exam stress. Now she was getting at her sister for saying, at least twice during the past three months, that she’d rather go into town with Anna on a Saturday afternoon than be out on the river in the freezing cold doing extra capsize drills.
“At least we’re half way sociable,” said Maggi. “You never look long enough to see whether someone’s male or female. You’re too busy trying to work out where you can tack across them or take their wind.”
“Anyway,” said Anna, “I meant to say deus. I mean, this guy could well be cool but from what Donny’s been saying, he’s at least over thirty. So, maybe not. I meant deus as in deus ex machina, a god out of a machine. They used to have them in Greek and Roman plays. They’d come down from a pulley or something suspended over the s
tage and, like, rescue the heroine or change the course of a battle or something. He’s a helicopter winch-man. I mean, neat or what?”
“You’ve been swotting again,” Donny accused her. He really hated it when he thought of her taking that scholarship to her new posh school. “You should get out more, Anna. Get a life.”
She pressed her lips together and went to buy a smoothie from the vending machines.
“Your mum was amazing, by the way,” he said for the millionth time to Maggi and Xanthe when everyone had finally got their food and the atmosphere had lightened up a bit.
“Obviously,” said Anna. “But if you hadn’t been there they wouldn’t have had any warning at all about the Pride of Macao.”
“Or what Dad was about to do,” added Xanthe. “Lily-livered surrender monkey.”
“But there’ve been more infection-related deaths from his department than anywhere else in the hospital,” said Maggi. “And neurosurgery shouldn’t carry that type of risk. I mean it’s not like it’s a medical ward where people might come in being infected already. Well they might, I suppose, but Dad’s been doing extra-thorough pre-op tests and they’re not.”
“It’s got to be the cleaning.”
“Pura-Lilly!” Xanthe spat. “Even the name stinks.”
“But if Gold Dragon’s really taken out the Tiger ...?”
“No Tiger, no Pura-Lilly ...?”
“You wish,” said Anna. “It won’t just be him you know Remember how my mum said she got suckered into working for him. It was Toxic. As it is, the whole situation, poisonous.”
Maggi was still thinking about her parents. “Maybe, when Mum comes home, they’ll have one of their long after-supper forget-to-turn-the-lights-on conversations and we can make out we’ve got work to do and leave them to it?”
“Maybe,” said Xanthe, gloomily, “if they’re talking at all after those things she said to him yesterday.”
Donny didn’t like to think of the Ribieros having that bad an argument. “Is Rev. Wendy okay?” he asked Anna. “She hardly said a word all the way back in the car last night. Not as if she was cross. She just seemed slightly out of it.”
“She was probably bothered because she wasn’t chairing the Mothers’ Union AGM or something. There’s some Diocesan Mission thing for the flood victims in Indonesia.”
Anna chucked her bottle into the recycling bin. “You’re going to want to go back to Oostende. Or Rotterdam. Do you fancy a quick trip to the library and we’ll go on-line to see what you need to do to get yourself a passport?”
“Thanks. And tonight I’ll search the camper van to find my birth certificate. I’m sure to need that.”
“Biometric prints, more likely. And money.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hoi Fung
Xiamen International Port, March-April 2007
“It’s okay,” said the chef. “I know your father’s not with the police. I don’t know anything about your family. I wanted my customers to leave.”
He spoke with such a heavy accent that it was difficult to understand. Min hadn’t said anything. He was too busy eating. When the bowl of soup was empty, the chef gave him a plate of noodles together with some of the fish balls Min had heard sizzling. Sweet spicy noodles. Min felt them curled contentedly inside his stomach.
“Thank you,” he said. The chef hadn’t even asked him to pay extra.
“The last time I cooked noodles for a boy with an appetite like you I was far away from China.”
“Where is your home, sir?”
“Guangdong Province. I was born into a nest of sea scorpions in Bias Bay. I am a ship’s cook.”
“But you have not chosen to go home?”
Min had been about to quote one of his grandfather’s favourite sayings, “falling leaves return to their roots,” but he realised that this might seem discourteous. Those scars made it impossible to tell how old the chef was really.
“No. But we are not discussing me. It’s you. What are you doing here? This city may be your home, I don’t know, but the port is no place for a boy. You should be in school. Or possibly at work?”
“I have only just arrived in Xiamen. I’m staying with my cousin. I need to find my mother and I can’t think how to do it.”
“She won’t be here in the port.”
“She’s in England. She can’t come back to us because she owes money to the gong-tou. I want to go to her.”
Min covered his mouth with his hand but it was too late, the words were out.
The chef frowned. “The Country of the Ghosts can be a dangerous place for those who owe money. My name is Hoi Fung. You should listen to my advice.”
“I am Chen Min. I am eager to find help.”
The chef looked hard at Min and then he laughed, a sudden, wide, rumbling laugh. “So, if my advice is don’t go, stay here in your own country, finish your education or see what you can do to get a job, you’ll thank me politely and go away. But if I tell you how to hide yourself in one of these metal boxes: if I help you spend three or four weeks in the stinking dark, sick and frightened and hungry, to reach a country where you’re unwanted and illegal; a country where your own countrymen will exploit and enslave you as they’ve exploited and enslaved your mother, then you’ll give me a big grin and do anything I say!”
Min wished that he could speak Cantonese. Hoi Fung’s deep voice expressed such an extraordinary mix of passion and kindness but his words were so difficult to understand. Min’s native language was a form of Hokkien but his Mandarin was clear and formal, a good student’s speech. At this moment it seemed safest to say nothing. Just look straight up into the chef’s brown eyes and smile. There were laughter lines travelling from the corners of those eyes as well as the terrifying scars and a complicated criss-crossing of wrinkles.
“The boy who helped me escape was a boy your age. It would be better if we can help your mother to come home.”
“I’m not sure exactly where she is and I don’t know how much money she owes.”
“But I have a good friend in the Country of the Ghosts. Ai Qin knows many people and can pass messages secretly. I’ll take you on as my kitchen boy – some of that money from your red envelope will buy you an entry permit from the gate staff – and you can fill your stomach with soup and noodles every day while we wait for news.”
Min began to thank him but Hoi Fung was frowning again.
“Let them think that your father’s a policeman. I can send you round the port to do deliveries but you don’t want people asking too many questions. You’re not a good liar so you must learn not to speak. I don’t have friends here and I don’t want them.”
“I can use my cousin’s bicycle. I make a delivery and then I pedal away quickly. We’ll do more business too.”
Min enjoyed working for Hoi Fung. The food was very good. It was cheap and it was always hot. They fixed a plastic box to the handlebars of Chen Kai’s bike. It had a tight-fitting lid and polystyrene packing for insulation. Min got to ride all round the port and whenever he started a new area the chef offered a special deal to the foremen and other officials so they didn’t have to pay. If anyone asked Min any questions he looked awkward and didn’t answer. People suspected he might be some sort of spy so they took the good hot food and were glad when the delivery bike was gone.
Hoi Fung sent a message to England. He didn’t tell Min how this was done. He still had guanxi, connections, he said.
Spring came to Xiamen as they waited for Ai Qin’s reply.
It was the wrong answer. Or, more exactly, it was an answer from the wrong person.
Hoi Fung was lying on the ground. There were men surrounding him. Kicking, punching and shouting. All in Cantonese. Min couldn’t understand what they were saying. He’d just got back from a delivery. The container café had been trashed: food tipped out, tables and chairs overturned. Any customers had disappeared.
One of the men had a knife. He was slitting through Hoi Fung’s white chef’s trouser
to the leg beneath. He cut the straps of the leg and pulled it away. Then he threw it into the path of a loaded straddle carrier.
Sixty tonnes of heavy machinery ground the limb to splinters.
“Stop it!” Min shouted and rode towards them. One of the men turned and sprinted at him. Pushed him off the bike so violently that he hurtled through the air and landed hard on the packed earth. They slashed the bike tyres and kicked the chef some more. Then they ran off, shouting threats.
Hoi Fung stole from the Tiger in the Land of the Ghosts and this is the Tiger’s revenge. Or it is the beginning of revenge. Hoi Fung owes money and the Tiger wants it back. If he doesn’t get it the attackers will take the other leg, the living one.
The Tiger is a gong-tou, a gang-master. His name is Zhang. Hoi Fung offered to buy the debt of one of his workers. An Englishwoman. Her daughters gave him the money but he didn’t hand it over. The woman escaped and so did he.
The Tiger was very angry. He used his own guanxi. He sent messages to triads and snake-heads all along the coast and they had found the chef.
“You’d better give the money to them,” Min advised anxiously. “The snake-heads and the money-lenders know everyone. They know the criminals and the police as well. You can’t fight them on your own. They’ll ruin your business and ... they might do worse. You can earn more. I’ll still help you.”