A Trick of Light

by Deborah A Rogers

  “What’s wrong with that kid?” he says to a passerby.

  “Don’t make a fuss,” my father says quietly. “The airport police know all about this.”

  But I am wailing, unable to stop. He looks around. People are staring. A mother quickly steers her little boy away.

  “Come on,” he says taking my elbow. “Let’s go sit down.”

  He leads me to the upstairs cafeteria where he buys me a can of coke and a chocolate cream bun.

  *

  We are near the back of the half-empty plane. I am lying across the middle row of seats weeping into my tiny airplane pillow. My father watches me, between sips of vodka and coke, like he doesn’t know who I am.

  I think of home. I think about what I am leaving behind. Trent. The fresh air. School. Even the bad-tempered dog. I do not know when I will be back. My father could keep me in Hong Kong for as long as he wants. He could keep me there until I’m a fully grown adult.

  Somewhere over the South China Sea, I plead with him to tell me how long I am expected to stay.

  “They were going to put you in a girl’s home. We had no other choice.”

  Then I think of Fleur, and wonder if anyone has told her where I am.

  Sometime later, I wake to find my father shaking my shoulder. I look past him, out through the window: there is Kai Tak and beyond it, Hong Kong.

  Part II

  EXILE

  ΅

  Six

  WHEN I am a little girl, I go on shopping trips to Kowloon with my sisters and mother. There are beggars along Nathan Road. They shake plastic cups and shout Chinese words. Some are blind. Others have no legs or only half an arm. My mother tells me not to stare. The older Chinese refuse to sit next to us on the bus. My father says they are bitter at their mistreatment under old colonial rule.

  China Products is my favourite department store. It has a mothball smell and sells pink satin robes with red dragons embroidered on the back, and pretty beaded slippers, and cloisonné hairclips, and ornaments carved from ivory or cork. I spend my pocket money in the food section on dehydrated cuttle fish and dried prunes because they are sweet and sour and last a long time. My mother likes to buy linen table cloths, fine china and silver tea sets.

  On the weekends, when my father is off work, we sometimes go to one of the islands –Cheung Chau or Lantau – for a play in the water. My older sister likes to swim out to the raft anchored off shore and lie in the sun in her purple bikini. One time we go on a forest walk across Lamma Island and my father bends down to pick up a stick but quickly flings it away when he sees it’s a snake. Another time we go on a picnic to the New Territories and there are lots of monkeys in the trees, and one swoops down and steals my little brother’s glasses.

  We live in an apartment block called Scenic Villas in Pok Fu Lam. Our apartment is on the sixth floor and overlooks rice paddies and the ocean. I like to watch the workers in their coolie hats tend to their crops. Sometimes I wave but they never wave back.

  At night the police patrol the waters for Vietnamese boat people. Once we see some refugees sneak ashore then run up the terraces. But the police are waiting for them at the top.

  In my room, I have a little record player and I like to dance and sing along to my parent’s Rolf Harris records. Sometimes it gets very hot in our apartment but there are big fans on the ceilings to help cool things down.

  On Thursdays, a hawker comes to our back door and shows my mother bolts of cloth and clothes and handy things like mops. My mother buys me some frilly ankle socks and a Hello Kitty clip for my hair. I also have a Hello Kitty lunch box.

  Every Autumn there is a lantern festival. At night, people from the district, Chinese and Westerners too, meet up to light paper lanterns. There are dogs and fish and tigers and dragons and plain ones and fancy ones in all different colours. We walk the track snaking the hill, each carrying a lantern. When I look over my shoulder, there is a long necklace of swinging coloured lights and nothing else.

  One day my sisters are sent to boarding school in New Zealand because the older one is getting into trouble. There is a Chinese student at the polytechnic where my father teaches law. She has given him presents and a note telling him to meet her at the Star Ferry. So my mother leaves Hong Kong and never comes back.

  *

  At immigration my father and I do not have to wait in the visitors’ queue like tourists. Instead we are ushered through because my father is a government official and Hong Kong resident of nearly ten years.

  We step outside into the heat then into the air-conditioned cool of the airport bus. I take a seat near a window and the bus takes off along the motorway. Gone are the mounds of autumn leaves in Somerfield Park, the frosty breaths of the soccer players too. Instead there is one apartment block after another and a broken, sunless sky. Up high, building tops are smeared with traffic soot. Washing-lines jut from barred windows and laundry hangs motionless in the filthy air.

  Soon we are in Causeway Bay. The bus lets us out and we walk up Hoi Ping Road to my father’s apartment block, Sunning Court. He has lived here for many years and now I will live here too.

  Downstairs there’s a bar with Carlsberg sun umbrellas and small baskets of unshelled peanuts. A French restaurant is across the road, next door to an automobile showroom where I once saw a yellow Lambourgeni.

  We take the lift up to the fifteen floor. There is no thirteenth floor because the Chinese believe it is bad luck, so the lift goes directly from twelve to fourteen.

  We reach apartment 1504 and step inside. My father’s tastes are very distinctive. There is a modest water feature in the lounge and a large, back-lit, picture of the Chinese countryside hangs on the wall. He has a fully-stocked bar with bamboo bar stools and bottles of vermouth, vodka, bourbon and a box of cigars. There is also a little cocktail-making book with a topless woman in a martini glass on the front. In his bedroom, above his bed, hangs a red velvet painting of two naked ladies in a passionate embrace.

  My father likes to collect cassette tapes, videos tapes and books. He has them stacked in large, four tier bookcases that stretch out along the apartment walls. His favourite cassette tape is “One night in Bangkok”. He has been to Bangkok many times and knows it very well.

  He records movies from the TV. He cuts out the title and synopsis from the TV guide and glues them to the video tape cover. One day my little brother and I try to count them but give up at two hundred and fifty three. My father keeps them in alphabetical order. Apocalypse Now. Bonnie and Clyde. Deer Hunter. Taxi Driver. The Dirty Dozen. We cannot afford a VCR back in New Zealand.

  Celia has made us a bacon and egg sandwich on toasted bread. I am angry at Celia. I am not here for a holiday. Chung Si hovers shyly in the background but I do not want to play.

  “I’m tired,” I say.

  Celia has made up the spare room. There are boxes of my father’s junk like an old typewriter and slides of the moon landing. Beneath some old magazines, in the second to last drawer of the dresser, is an A4-sized family portrait of my sisters, brother, mother, father and me. The wardrobe is empty apart from the pink cheongsam Celia wore when she married my father.

  He comes into the room and pulls a phial of pills from his pocket.

  “I’m not taking that,” I say.

  “It’s Halcyon. To help you sleep.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Your Aunt Brenda had some left over.”

  He drops a single, blue pill into my palm. There is a little H stamped on one side.

  “Take it now, where I can see you,” he says.

  I put the thing in my mouth and swallow. He nods, satisfied.

  “And don’t lock the door.”

  Seven

  I SLEEP FOR a night and a whole day.

  When I wake, I forget where I am. This past month I have slept in so many places. Behind bushes, the backseat of cars, a three star motel, Trent’s poorly sprung bed. I nearly call out, but then hear the hum of the air condit
ioner and Chinese cartoons.

  My head is so heavy, I can barely lift it from the pillow. The sheet has coiled its way around my middle as if I am a fractured arm. On a chair near the window my unzipped suitcase overflows with things from back home, useless things like a clock radio, a sweatshirt I haven’t worn for three years, a jewellery box I never use. It’s as if whoever packed the suitcase doesn’t really know who I am, like a long lost parent taking wild guesses about what my favourite colour might be, whether I like Pepsi or Coke, or am Team Madonna or Team Lauper.

  There are no pictures on the wall, no paintings either, just dull, barren plaster. If I had a pen, I could graffiti the wall like the school toilets back home or make slash marks to keep count of the days, months and years.

  Before long I drift back to sleep. I wake when my father comes home from work. He stands there in his good shirt and loosened tie and drops one more blue pill into my hand.

  *

  There are tiny gasps between the long stretches of sleep when I must leave my room to go to the toilet. I do not talk to anyone. Chung Si backs down the hallway if she sees me coming. Sometimes Celia asks if I want something to eat.

  I do what needs to be done then get back to my bed before I become too awake. Usually I can trick myself into thinking the toilet stop was part of a dream and I am soon asleep again. Even when I am not sleeping, I am thinking of sleeping, and it is not long before I begin to fidget for my daily dose.

  *

  One night I ask for two pills instead of one, but my father refuses. Perhaps he thinks I will hide them in the pocket of my cheek or between the flesh of my bottom lip and teeth.

  The measly, single pill does not work anymore. So I lie there all through the night, not sleeping, but not fully awake.

  I have crazy thoughts. I imagine I know who shot JFK. I travel to the future to get the answer, not backwards as you might think. In the future, I also learn how to speak the language of insects, and on my return hear the cockroaches through the air conditioning vent organising to attack me when I am asleep.

  *

  Someone is learning to play the piano in the apartment above. Sometimes they play well. Other times they are very uncertain, like the stop and start of a frightened breath.

  I find a transistor radio in one of the drawers and tune it to the BBC. My favourite songs are “With or Without You” and “Sign of the Times (mess with your mind, hurry before it’s too late).” I put the radio under my pillow and pretend it is singing directly into my ear.

  When I lie on my side, I can see out the window. We are fifteen floors up so what I see is mostly rooftops of other buildings. On one rooftop, there is a man who does Tai Chi in the morning. He pushes his open palm outward in tight, measured movements, first with his left hand then with his right. Nearby birds bounce on a washing line and hold their heads at angles, watching his dance.

  At night, I see two bright moons very far away. They are the floodlights of the Happy Valley race course. I imagine horses thumping round the track, tiny jockeys in brightly coloured satin, torn betting slips on the ground.

  I begin to dream of falling out that window. I see myself somersaulting through the air like a turning wheel, stretching my arms out like wings, then pressing them tightly to my sides, before shooting headfirst to the ground like the nose-tip of a rocket.

  I check the windows. But they are locked tight with a hex key. I cannot smash them because they are double-glazed to withstand tropical cyclones.

  So I return to bed and will my heart to stop beating instead.

  *

  Outside my door, everyday life goes on without me. There is a set routine. At 6am my father rises for work. He takes a shower and washes his wiry, Elliot Gould hair with anti-dandruff shampoo, shaves, brushes his teeth with Darkie toothpaste.

  He goes to the kitchen, pours himself a large glass of OJ from a carton of Mr Juicy, then walks into the lounge, where Chung Si is watching cartoons on her belly. He ruffles her hair or tickles her ribs or gives her a fright.

  “Don’t do that, Terry!” But she is only pretending.

  He clicks his briefcase shut, but doesn’t bother with the combination lock, and pats his breast pocket for his pack of Rothmans then heads down to catch a cab.

  He returns around six and suggests they go out for a meal, maybe Indian, where he will have the lamb Vindaloo so spicy sweat weeps from his pores. If he feels like Chinese, it will be The Jade Garden, where he will order many dishes like barbequed pork, fried rice and maybe chicken’s feet. It’s here that he’ll watch the waitresses, dressed in ankle-length cheongsam, glide between the tables and flash their slender thighs.

  If he is feeling homesick, he will suggest The Excelsior because they have rock oysters from New Zealand. He may also have the peppered steak followed by a small but satisfying plate of hazelnut pralines. My father tips very well.

  Eight

  WHEN MY MOTHER returns to New Zealand after the incident with the Star Ferry girl, my father gets a new job with the Securities Commission and he, my brother and I move into the Hong Kong Hotel to wait for an apartment to come free. He says the hotel is one of the best in the city. It has a large swimming pool and three different restaurants and a bar. In the lobby toilet, there is a Chinese lady who hands out small white towels, then points to a silver dish for tips.

  I share a bedroom with my little brother on the tenth floor. My father has the room next door all to himself. Every day I must get myself and my brother to and from Kowloon Junior School even though I am only nine. It is a very long way on the bus, and at first I am scared but then I get used to it.

  My mother used to brush my hair very hard every day and it would hurt; now I do not brush my hair all the way and it gets knots underneath. Sometimes our mother telephones us. When I ask her if she is coming back, all she says is —

  “Be good for your father.”

  The hotel Amah looks after us until my father gets home from work. She lets me go out on my own. Sometimes I look at the shops in Ocean Terminal and maybe buy some lollies from See’s Candies or stationary from the book shop. Occasionally, there are Chinese puppet shows in the foyer and I sit cross-legged at the front, the only western child there.

  I do not understand what the puppets are saying in their whiny opera voices, but I can tell when they are happy or angry or sad. I love to watch their pretty, embroidered robes ripple in silken waves as they move from one side of the tiny stage to the other, and their peony headwear with its trembling antenna and delicate drops of beads.

  I can tell when the show is nearly over because the music speeds up until it is a wild mash of zithers, xylophones and cymbals. The sound makes my heart race: it is annoying and exciting at the same time.

  Other days I wander the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui. There is always something interesting to see, like the tiny shrines outside the shops, which have sand-filled jars on little alters with bunches of pink joss sticks jutting out. On the way to school in the mornings, I see the shopkeepers light the incense to bring good fortune for the day. I watch as the fragrant smoke ribbons through air and the sticks die in wire-thin columns of ash.

  There is a man I call half-foot. From morning to night, he sits on a little red stool behind newspapers and magazines laid out on the footpath. He does not wear proper shoes, only one plastic scuff on his left foot and nothing on his right. His right foot is more like a fist without fingers, a lump that ends just after the heel. Once he sees me looking and holds up his foot, and gives it a kiss. He does not have many teeth.

  As well as half-foot, there is the white-whiskered man who sells watch straps, cotton, and nail clippers on the side of the road. He has the longest finger nail I have ever seen. It is on the little finger of his left hand and sticks out like a sharp and steely miniature sword. I wonder why he does not cut the thing off then see him use it to pick out a tiny battery from the back of a watch.

  There are old ladies too. Some in coolie hats work on building sites. They carr
y baskets of broken rock on shoulder poles and sweep away grit with stiff bamboo brooms. There is one woman as old has my nana who comes out after dark to unfurl a length of cloth on the marble steps of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. On it she places a row of plastic combs, then calls out ‘two for five dollar!’ over and over.

  The hotel bell boys like to practice their English on me so when I speak to them, I do it very slowly. They pat my blonde hair and say very beautiful. They are always smiling, laughing and joking. Sometimes they give me a piece of fruit from the baskets they take up to the top floor suites, and they clap and cheer when I do a good dive in the pool or hold my breath underwater for a long time.

  There is one called Eddie. Every day he comes to my room to check the tiny fridge which my father says is out of bounds. I sit on my bed and watch Eddie count every item and check it off against a list. When he sees everything is there, he says ‘no problem’.

  After my father gets home from work, we wait until my brother is asleep and go out for dinner. Some nights we go to the Spice Market, which has a large buffet of international food and I choose what I want and may also have a ginger beer.

  Other times we don’t go out. Instead we stay in his room while he has a drink and talks about poems he likes or good movies he’s seen. He tells me about how when he was seventeen, he found his father dead in the living room chair. He also says that he and my mother will get back together and that she is just ‘cooling off.’

  I miss my sisters and mother. I think of them every day. I wonder why my mother never took me and my little brother with her when she left. Sometimes my little brother calls out for her in his sleep. He asks me if we will live in this hotel forever.

  I begin to take things from the little fridge even though I know I am not allowed. Eddie does not always check every day and I am sure he will not notice if only one chocolate bar is gone. When he doesn’t, I take more. I get inventive. I glue the metal tab on the Coke back into in place so he cannot tell the liquid is gone. I fill the empty Toblerone triangle boxes with tiny bits of my brother’s Lego.