There will be police, a court, a Chinese prison cell too. They will show no mercy even though I’m a westerner. They will make an example of me instead. They will make me suffer for what was done to them under old colonial rule.
My mouth goes dry like a plank of roughly sawn timber. It takes all my effort to put one foot in front of the other and go to the checkout. The man is here, trailing me closely.
Then it’s my turn. The checkout woman looks up. There is nothing I can do except pull the Rolos from my pocket, put them on the counter and wait for the hand, the hand that will clamp down on my shoulder and steer me through the staring shoppers and out toward the police van.
But nothing.
It must be some sort of trick but the lady is waiting so I pay for the Rolos. I head for the exit, expecting the hand, but it doesn’t come. When I reach the door, I look over my shoulder. Monobrow man is leaning against a rack of magazines, arms-folded, sharp-eyed, straight-mouthed.
I never steal again.
Fifteen
THIS MORNING my father said we will go out for tea to The Pine and Bamboo, which is not my favourite because the peanuts on the table are not roasted but boiled so get caught in my teeth. I think the dinner is his way of putting the troubles between Celia and me behind us, but I would rather stay home and eat baked beans.
By seven o’clock, he still hasn’t come back from work. Celia pretends not to look at her watch.
“He could be caught at the office,” she says.
When he still doesn’t arrive by nine, she puts Chung Si to bed then slips a tape in the VCR to record Miami Vice because my father hates to miss an episode.
We watch Tubbs and Crocket leap from speedboats and pull guns on Armani-suited drug dealers. The pockmarked Lieutenant Castillo yells at his detectives for crossing the line again. Celia’s stomach growls. When mine does the same, I say –“I’m going to bed. You shouldn’t wait up, he doesn’t deserve it.”
“I won’t.”
But when I wake in the morning, she is there, fully clothed, asleep on the couch.
*
I get home from school and see that Celia is helping Chung Si with her homework. I think about the horrible things I said to her. I do not really believe she was one of the women my father had an affair with. He did not even know her back then.
“What does my name look like in Chinese?” I ask her.
I wait for her to ignore me, but instead she takes a sheet of paper and carefully draws a character. It looks like a fancy gate on its side.
“You try.”
She gives me a pen and I copy the little boxes and flicks but it ends up looking like a strange spindly insect.
“Very good,” she says.
“I was born in the year of the rat,” I say. “I don’t want to be a rat.”
“Rat is good,” she says. “Intelligent and hard working, but with a temper.”
“What about you?”
“I am Rabbit, kind but gossipy. Chung Si is monkey which makes her clever and very strong willed.”
Later, when I am alone in my room, I unfold the piece of paper and practice writing my Chinese name until I get it right.
*
On Tuesday the weather is very bad. Wind tears at the gymnasium roof, working its way under loose flaps and tugging at nails. The rain sounds like stones against glass. We can barely hear the thud of the basketball or the squeak of shoes on the floor.
Number 3 Typhoon signal is up, which means a tropical cyclone could be on its way. I pray it goes to number 8 because they will shut the school. We are in the changing rooms when a teacher runs in, wet hair plastered to her forehead.
“Eight!” she says.
So we pack up and go home.
Celia is pulling everything away from the windows when I get there.
“Check the locks,” she says.
I test each window. They are all rusted shut. I don’t think they have ever been opened.
Chung Si is in the windowless hallway clutching her Snoopy dog. The building sways.
“Aiya,” she murmurs, pulling her lips into a downturned arch.
“It will be okay,” I say.
“I’m worried about your father,” says Celia.
We have not seen him for two days.
“I have called his work, but there is no answer.”
Then there is a rattle of keys at the door and in he walks, shaking drops from his coat.
“They’re predicting a 10,” he says.
I expect Celia to stamp her foot and demand an explanation for the missing days but nothing is said.
I look out the window. Rain is in tails and whips at the glass. The sky is growing dark. Below us, the street is desolate apart from a drenched man with one arm hooked round a pole of a street sign. His inside-out umbrella flies skywards.
“Get away from the window,” says my father.
He goes to change his clothes and I help Celia drag mattresses into the hallway. She turns on the radio. The warning has been lifted to number 10. When I peer round the corner into the lounge, it is black outside.
There’s a loud crash and my father runs into the hallway. He’s just leapt from the shower, his bare chest slick and cotton shorts damp.
“Bloody window blew out!”
We rush to the master bedroom. Wind shrieks through a hole in the wall where the window used to be. My father is pulling everything away – the tv, video, chest of drawers – to the other side of the room. The wind is tight and fierce and I think he will be sucked out and carried away. A pillow is pulled from his grasp and disappears into the howling night.
“Get back!” he shouts.
He hauls the double mattress onto its side and slams it across the gap, it quivers and jolts as if it is alive, but the wind finally stops.
We go back into the hallway and bed down for the night. None of us sleep. The building rocks back and forth and I am worried it will snap in half. Then, sometime after midnight, there is a hush.
“Is it over?”I ask.
“The eye,” says my father. “The storm will come back.”
“When?”
“Could be half an hour, could be three.”
We look outside the window. The sky is lighter than before even though it is late. Some of the mirrored windows on the building next door are smashed. Inside, I can see upturned desks and chairs and filing cabinets and floor lamps poking through the glass. An uprooted tree has shattered the windscreen of a parked car.
My father checks his bedroom. Without the suction of the wind to hold it up, the mattress has fallen on its side. Soggy-paged books are scattered all over the floor. A bedside lamp has fallen off the table and lies broken in two. My father removes his precious red velvet painting of the two naked ladies from above the bed and secures a square of hardboard over the window gap.
When he’s finished, he turns to us.
“Let’s try to get some sleep,” he says.
I half-doze, faintly aware of the storm kicking up again. In the morning, when it’s over, 10 people are dead, 12 missing, and over 300 hundred injured. It is one of the worst cyclones in Hong Kong history.
Sixteen
WHEN I AM five, my family go to the neighbour’s pool for a swim. My mother lies on the sun-lounger, shiny with oil. Next to her, my naked baby brother happily kicks the air. Under the tree in the shade, my father reads the Sunday paper and scratches his calf with his big toe.
I am not allowed in the pool without an adult so I must stand at the water’s edge as my sisters’ splash each other and dive for rubber rings.
“Watch her, Terry,” calls my mother.
My sisters are breathless with fun as they jump on beach balls and make them pop out from under their bellies. I decide I should have a go too, adult or not. I leap onto the red and white ball but it shoots away and I sink like a stone.
It is not what I expect and I claw at the water but cannot get traction. I am sucked further and further down and my knees soon
scrape the rough concrete bottom. Then, here is my father’s arm, wrapped around my chest, hauling me up. I can feel his heart beating into my back. We push up through the water and break the surface.
Someone is coughing, crying. Me.
My father kisses the side of my face, his breath warm in my ear.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I got you.”
*
On the nights when my father does not go out, he likes to play card games. He teaches me and Celia 500. We bet with each other. Celia is very good and often wins the pool. There is a Chinese version of 500 and Celia teaches us that. Sometimes we play until 2 o’clock in the morning and I am very tired the next day for school.
My father tells us funny stories while we play. He tells us about a time when he woke up from a nightmare and thought there was a fire and ran out of the apartment in his undies and the door locked behind him. He had to go downstairs half-naked to get the spare key from the security guard but the guard wasn’t there, so my father came back upstairs and tried to sleep outside the apartment door. He couldn’t sleep though because he needed to go to the toilet, only there wasn’t any place to go, so he was forced to use the long upright ashtray near the lift. When he was finished, he went back to his apartment door and curled up and tried to sleep but couldn’t because he was too uncomfortable and cold, so he knocked on the apartment door across from his, and luckily a man answered and let him sleep in the spare room for the night.
But lately the card games and funny stories are getting less.
Seventeen
SCHOOL CONTINUES in a monotonous flat line. I hate all my classes apart from politics where we have been learning about the democratisation of developing nations and the abolishment of slavery. Today there is swimming which I also dislike. I refuse to participate so sit on the sidelines while the rest of the class has a lesson. I say I forgot my togs, but the real reason is my fat thighs.
I watch the class with their stupid goggles and canary yellow rubber swimming caps, throwing one arm over another. There’s Thomas Pike playing the fool and chubby Georgia all breathless and red-faced and Samantha with the unbelievably long legs. She is a knock-out and will one day be a model. She is also into heroin and likes to go clubbing on the weekend.
It is very hot and I can feel sweat dripping between my thighs. The water looks cool and refreshing, but there is still that matter of my oversized thighs. Another girl sits next to me. She has short blond hair and an open face.
“God I need a fag,” she says.
I decide that she could be my sort.
“I know a place,” I say.
“Yeah?”
We wait until the teacher’s back is turned then duck out the gate. The girl follows me up the stairwell and I fling open the door to the roof. She stands there and looks around with hands on her hips.
“Nice,” she says.
Sarah comes from Wales. Her father is an accountant and has transferred to Hong Kong for a six month secondment.
“And then there’s Dishmop,” she says, “my mother.”
Sarah likes Frankie goes to Hollywood and Crowded House.
“You should come over to mine,” she says.
“Sure.”
That night I tell my father that I am going to a friend’s house after school tomorrow. He glances at Celia like he doesn’t believe me.
“What’s her name?”
“Sarah.”
“Where does she live?”
“I don’t know. I was going to catch the bus home with her.”
He considers this for a moment.
“Alright,” he says.
I call Sarah and tell her I can come.
“Fab!” she says. “Bring your Prince tape.”
Sarah lives in a brand new apartment block near the Tai Tam hills on the twenty-second floor. Downstairs there is an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a gymnasium and a squash court. The apartment is huge with a large lounge, dining room, massive kitchen and four bedrooms.
Sarah’s mother says hello. She has a head full of curly ginger-blond hair just like a mop.
“Would you like some afternoon tea?”
“We’re not twelve,” says Sarah.
Sarah’s bedroom overlooks the swimming pool. Below us children splash in the sparkling water and their Amahs run after them with fluffy white towels. Sarah turns on her stereo and we listen to a mixed tape.
She does not like Dishmop very much. When she was back home in Wales, Dishmop banned Sarah from seeing her best friend, Naomi, because they skived off school and met up with some lads. Dishmop said Naomi was ‘boy crazy’ and forbid them to hang out together.
I tell Sarah that when Fleur and I were twelve, we bunked school to drink some alcohol I stole from my mother’s liquor cabinet. We stayed at my house all day because no one was home and turned up the stereo and sang along to Jefferson Airplane’s “We built this city on Rock and Roll.” But someone told Fleur’s mother so I was banned from seeing her. Fleur’s mother said I was a bad influence even though the alcohol was Fleur’s idea.
Sarah lights a cigarette and says mothers the world over are bitches. She hangs an arm out the window so the smoke will blow away. She tells me her parents said if she behaves she might be able to go to Wales for a holiday to see Naomi.
“That’ll never happen to me,” I say. “Besides Fleur has probably got a new best friend by now.”
*
Sarah and I talk on the phone every night even though we see each other at school. She tells me her little sister, Lara, has been sneaking into her room and trying on her best blue mascara. This makes me think of my little brother and how when I was ten, my father said my brother was so thin it looked like he’d been in a famine, and that I was so fat, it looked like I caused one.
“That isn’t very nice,” says Sarah.
I tell her that my mother says my brother has hollow legs.
“He likes to go running and once he ran all the way up the Port Hills from Cashmere and down into Governors Bay and then onto Living Springs. My stepfather had to go and pick him up.”
“I hate running,” says Sarah.
“Me too.”
*
Life is much better now that I’m friends with Sarah. We meet up between classes and go for a smoke in the stairwell or on the roof. Sarah likes to drink diet coke. She buys it from the vending machines dotted around the school. We do not have vending machines back in New Zealand.
She brings her camera to school and we take photos of each other during lunch. There’s one were she is yelling “Don’t!” because she wasn’t ready for the photo yet. She has a can of diet coke in her hand, and in the background, there’s a packet of menthol Salom cigarettes on the stairs.
And sometimes I learn interesting things in class, but never in maths. For instance, I learn all about democracy and corruption in the Philippines. The teacher tells us about Marcos and his square-faced wife, Imelda, and how they fleeced citizens to throw extravagant parties, buy golden toilets seats and designer shoes.
When I ask Annie about Imelda, she shrugs.
“It’s not so bad. She is like a royal person and a royal person must look nice.”
*
Sarah and I are planning to run away to Manila. I save my pay from The Old English Teahouse. She saves her $50 dollar a week allowance. We are not sure what we will do when we get there. We know there is an American Army base, so maybe we can find an American GI to look after us. The only problem is my father still has my passport and I don’t know where it is.
Eighteen
THERE IS A war movie my father wants to see called Platoon so we go on Saturday. The pictures in Hong Kong are very different from back home. Here, Chinese faces, not Western, stare up at the screen in the half-light. There are Chinese subtitles and smoking is allowed. Sometimes you have to bat away the fog to see the screen.
There is a picture theatre in Causeway Bay. It is a little rundown and I once felt something sprint over my foot. In
Platoon, there is an evil Captain with a scar on his lip and a young man far from home. The solider writes letters to his grandmother. I have not written letters for a long time.
I turn to look at my father. He is into the movie, into the jungle, into the line of fire right along with Bravo Company, 25th Infantry division. Tomorrow he will buy the soundtrack. He collects the soundtracks of every film he likes. He will sit and sip his vodka and listen to the music and remember the movie. His favourite is Chariots of Fire about the Christian and Jewish runners. He does not run himself.
Later that week, my father brings home some brochures and lays them on the table. There are cover shots of a red sunset in Africa, a white sand beach in Miami, pyramids in the Middle East.
“Where would you like to go?” he asks.
Soon it will be the end of the school year even though it is only June. In Hong Kong expats “go abroad” for the holidays. I overhear them moaning in the cafeteria.
“We are going to Italy, again.”
“God, Rome is so boring.”
I look my father straight in the eye.
“New Zealand,” I say.
“Not yet.”
“On the way back?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t want to go anywhere.”
*
It is the night before our big overseas trip and my father and I are still up. He is very excited. I am excited too, but try not to show it. For the first leg of the journey, it will just be him and me. We are going to Israel, Rome and Greece. Then we are meeting Celia and Chung Si in London and flying to LA, New York, Hawaii and Japan.
He tells me he cannot believe that a poor kid from Christchurch – with six siblings and a mother on a widow’s pension – could be so lucky. Travelling is his most favourite thing to do; in a different century he might have been an explorer.
My father looks at me over the rim of his glass.
“The Jewish sports team was shot at the Munich Olympics the year you were born,” he says. “Everyone watched it on the TV.”
A Trick of Light Page 6