We looked at each other and grinned. Excitement was turning the blood in our veins into fizzing soda pop. I had not really thought this out. I was acting on a mix of impulse and impatience, Yuki. We had ironed and starched our white cotton summer uniforms and had used lots of spit and bacon grease from our breakfast trays to put an astonishing sheen on our black leather shoes. We had had our flat-tops trimmed. I had remembered the advice given to me in boot camp by the chief petty officer in charge of recruits to make sure every millimetre of my genital gifts was scrubbed and pure. My new friends were roughly the same age as I was. They would therefore be around seventy-five years old now. Do Gunther and Oscar remember, I wonder, that day in Wan Chai, where the fable of Suzie Wong – the goddess with the slit skirt and golden legs – began?
‘You like nice girl?’ the pirate asked. We nodded yes.
‘Wan Chai have very nice girl. You go to the Hall of Flowers. Very nice. Many, many nice girls there. You drink, you go to Mermaid Bar. Very nice. You very nice young men. Many girls like you, for sure!’
We looked at each other and grinned again, Yuki. ‘I just know this will be such a wonderful day,’ Oscar said gleefully. He checked to make sure his rubber was still in his pocket. It was. He reached in, pulled it out, and gave it to me. ‘Souvenir,’ he said. ‘You may need this. Me, I don’t want it.’
Gunther was still looking over his shoulder. We were not being pursued. Then he looked at the Hong Kong skyline. In those days there were only a few high-rise buildings. A haze heavy with heat and moisture made the tops of the tallest buildings invisible. He was nervous, or spooked, or something. He looked again over his shoulder. Maybe he wanted to swim back to the ship. ‘I guess we going to make it, yah?’ he asked, in his uncertain English. ‘I don’t know how to swim!’
‘I can’t swim either,’ I said. ‘They told me in boot camp I had a large head and heavy bones. The only way I could pass the swimming test was to do it on my back, half underwater, round the pool. And then they had to pull me out with a long pole with a hook at the end as if I was a tuna.’
We were about ten minutes away from the landing at Wan Chai. I could already see the frenzied neon signs of the bars and saloons and dance halls on the waterfront. Bar Neptune. Bar Mermaid. Bar Lucky. Bar Happy. In one of those places, I thought, a beautiful and accomplished girl – a university student of cello or of ballet, I hoped – was going to take my virginity on this day of destiny. The girl was probably already feeling the first thrill of arousal and anticipation. Should I let her know, I wondered awkwardly, that this was my first time? Maybe not. But maybe I should.
‘Oscar,’ I said, ‘do you think . . . ?’ And then I stopped. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
Oscar looked at me confidently, like any gang member would, I guess, when it came to backing up his compañeros. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Not to worry.’
I looked down into the water, where refuse of all kinds bobbed and floated. Fishtails. Bits of noodles. Scraps of Chinese-language newspapers.
We were only yards away from the shore. I saw a smile on your face reflected in the water, Yukiko. Or maybe it was not really a smile. If it was a smile, it was the type that appears on the face of a Cambodian apsara, carved many centuries ago to be enjoyed by men forever. You were smiling, and then you looked as if you were going to ask me a question. You wanted to know whether I had remembered to write to you. Yes, excited though I was about going ashore, I had scribbled a short note. I said something like: ‘We have arrived in Hong Kong. I have liberty today so I will go ashore with some friends. I will be careful about the robbers you mentioned. I am sure I will have a good time.’ I had signed it, ‘Love from Paul’. In earlier letters I had just signed my name. But now I added the word ‘love’. I did so not knowing whether I should be truthful or whether I should be polite, and I did not know whether you were my ‘only’ and whether the loyalty I felt to you was supposed to be complete, or whether our relationship somehow strangely permitted sex with someone other than you, given the fact we had not kissed or had sex, even though there was desire. Thus perplexed, and with no one to turn to for advice on a matter as confusing and personal as this, I enclosed another of my poems with the letter, which I hoped would reassure you that I was thinking about you all the time, even when I was about to step ashore with a rubber plus a souvenir rubber at Wan Chai.
You will be a ribbon
Caught in the hair of spring
And you will sing and I will see you
Tied, fluttering, and weary
Bright among the black branches
Sighing, fainting there.
Yet I will not hesitate to free you,
To trespass upon such unknown times
That free spring’s burnished hair
From bright ribbons,
Killing winter
And loving summer’s heated pride.
It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. There was an incredible barrage of loud Cantonese exclamations from the wharf, where rickshaw men were jostling to give sailors rides. We three headed straight for the Mermaid Bar, which was jammed with sailors and Marines from several nations, mostly in good humour, but sometimes not. I felt an arm sliding round my waist and I turned to look into the eyes of a small girl in pigtails and blue jeans, who would not let go of me even when I wanted to sit down. I could not hear what she was telling me at first. There was too much noise in the bar, and the jukebox was cranked up so loud the floor was shaking. I don’t know what it is like now for sailors, Yuki, but back then we were not conscious of or even privy to the notion that this was female slavery and that sex with women for money was exploitation. The girl with a python embrace was calling me ‘my honey’. She was trying to drag me into a dark corner. Oscar and Gunther were laughing at me. She was laughing too. ‘Come, my honey. Come!’ she said. ‘I know you like me.’
At that moment, an older sailor cut his way through the crowd and yelled, ‘Cynthia. It’s me. Your honey. Your money honey!’ She threw herself into his open arms and curled up against his chest. A look of incredible contentment spread across the sailor’s face as if he had just been admitted to paradise.
I zigzagged back to my friends and got in the back of the booth they had secured so I could watch the action but not be hauled off into the shadows again.
Oscar was talking to two squirming girls who looked as if they were trying to escape his clutches. ‘You gotta love the navy,’ he said. ‘They told me once that the navy is nothing but a bunch of rum, sodomy, and the lash.’ Many years later I came across that exact expression again, spoken by none other than Winston S. Churchill in a biography about his younger years when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.
I really wanted to see the Hall of Flowers. I had heard about this place before. What a beautiful name for a whorehouse, I thought. Beautiful. In fact, the name was so in keeping with the kind of language used in the sex instruction book given to me by Chaplain Peeples that I wondered whether a clergyman had given this establishment that name in gratitude (for who knows what). The Hall of Flowers. The Hall of Flowers. It was so exquisitely suggestive of a carnal paradise. I made a mental note to tell you all about this in ten days, when the Shangri-La dropped anchor for the last time in Yokosuka.
So we left the Mermaid Bar and passed in front of the grimy little Luk Kwok Hotel on Gloucester Road, where location crews were already filming street scenes for The World of Suzie Wong. (The hotel was redubbed the Nam Kwok in the film.) A tall Englishman, dressed in a rumpled light tropical suit, was talking to one of the members of the film crew. He had a long sombre face shaped like the figure 8. The fingers of his right hand were stained brown with nicotine. I heard a murmur going through the crowd of spectators, some of whom were pink-faced British residents of Hong Kong who had been drinking heavily.
‘That’s him,’ I heard a voice say. ‘Yes, that’s him. Ian Fleming. Mr James Bond. He’s been doing one of his books here. Nice chap. Really nice chap. He drin
ks one bottle of the best gin every day! Holds the world record for drinking consecutive vodka martinis. Fourteen. Just like that.’
We continued on until finally, up a wet, dank alley near the Wah Hong Healthy Center Spa and lots of other businesses stacked on top of each other five and six stories high and painted pink and gold and red, with names like ‘High Class Beauty Parlour’ or ‘Romance Club’ or ‘Model Dancers’, we came across the Hall of Flowers. It was not easy to see the small painted sign because of the dense arrays of laundry drying on bamboo poles projecting from each balcony. But this was indeed the Hall of Flowers, Yuki. I knew it was because I had been told by the same chief petty officer who strongly recommended clean genitals that a giant Sikh would be standing at the doorway with an elephant gun. Of course, I did not believe him at the time. But sure enough, there was the Sikh wearing a dark blue turban and khaki shorts and holding a massive shotgun in his hands. He gave us the glance of an eagle about to kill a rat or a mongoose about to bite into the neck of a cobra. His terrifying eyes were set impossibly deep in his face, and his skin had the patina of copper.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ he said in an unexpectedly soft and gentle voice. ‘You will be wanting to see the young ladies?’
We nodded, vigorously.
‘You have the required condoms?’
Gunther and I pulled condoms from our pockets and waved them. In fact, I pulled out two condoms. I hastily handed the souvenir rubber to Oscar, who was still staring up at the man as if he was never going to move a muscle again.
‘Yes. I see you have come equipped,’ the Sikh said. ‘You are gentlemen. Very good. Very good.’
He turned and whistled sharply.
Out from the shadows popped a tiny child about eleven or twelve years old. She wore cotton pyjamas with a pattern of forget-me-nots on them. She had bare feet. She took my hand.
‘I will show the way,’ she said in precise, British-accented English.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, as we began to ascend the stairs in the vast antique building with whitewashed walls clad in moulds of many colours.
‘I am Cloudlet,’ she said.
I did not quite understand what she said. ‘You are what?’ I asked. ‘Claudette?’
‘No. I am Cloudlet. You know, like a tiny cloud floating across the sea.’
‘Really? Your name is Cloudlet? But why? How did you get that name?’
‘I am not a sing-song girl,’ she said. ‘I am much too young. I am your guide. But all girls in the Hall of Flowers have special names. For example: Pine. Simplicity. Bright Pearl. Green Fragrance. White Fragrance . . . When we start working here the owner gives us a name from his favourite book.’
‘Oh. And what book is that?’
‘It is The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai,’ the little voice said. ‘The owner says it is a very famous book much loved by men. But I am too young to read it and also I am a girl. Good girls should not read those kind of books. But a young man like you should read that book, I think . . . Maybe it is not in English. Do you read Chinese?’
‘Read Chinese! Oh, no. I am sorry. No. I wish I could.’
‘That is very good,’ Cloudlet said, shaking my hand. ‘Very good. Yes, please learn Chinese right away.’
She told us, now that we had climbed three sets of stairs to a hallway heavily perfumed with jasmine and patchouli, that there were ten doors ahead of us, each with a large black number appearing on a white enamelled plaque. Behind each door was a ‘one-woman brothel’, so named because although whorehouses were illegal, it was not illegal for individual women to sell sex.
This was the kind of story I could not tell you back then, Yuki. You told me I needed to grow up and I suppose I thought that this was one way of doing it. Did you know I was a virgin? I feel embarrassed now because I do not know the answer.
Gunther was assigned to number 4. Oscar was given number 6.
The child turned to me. ‘You,’ she said, ‘will have a very special room. It is number 10. I decide which number goes with which customer. I have been trained. I look at the man’s face. I read the face. You have a number 10 face. Come with me, please.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Number 10? In Japan that means it is very bad. It is the worst possible thing. In Japan, number 1 is the very best.’
‘That may be,’ said the displeased child. ‘But here at the Hall of Flowers, number 10 is Heaven. And I can see that you are a virgin. It is written in your face. V-I-R-G-I-N! V-I-R-G-I-N! I got top marks for spelling at Catholic school. Virgins are very important to Catholics. My English is good, I think.’
Indeed, Cloudlet’s English was good. Not only was it precise and daintily spoken, she was a profound child: small, yes, but also strangely and prematurely adult. I was startled. I felt like an idiot. My face turned bright red, and I brushed it with my hand several times, wondering whether I could erase what Cloudlet had seen there. Gunther was looking anxiously back at me over his shoulder. He paused in front of door 4. He knocked. The door, covered with mysterious stickers and red and gold good-luck charms, creaked open, and a thin naked arm shot out, grabbed Gunther’s sleeve, and pulled him inside with a whoosh, followed by a series of high-pitched giggles.
Oscar rubbed his hands joyfully. ‘Now,’ he exclaimed. ‘Now!’ He knocked at number 6. A thin voice came drifting out of the room like a puff of smoke – ‘Yesssss? Yesssss, please,’ the voice said – and again a hand appeared and pulled the eager Oscar, who was grinning so hard there were tears in his eyes, inside the room. There was a muffled crash. There was something that sounded like a bounce or a bump. And then there was silence.
Cloudlet gripped my hand more tightly and led me to the end of the hall to number 10. The child insisted that she be the one to knock on the door. She spoke in English. ‘Madame,’ she announced. ‘A guest for you.’
Ooooh, I thought, my heart almost flying apart. Madame! Madame! Actually, I thought that would be a perfect form of address for you, Yukiko! Yes. I liked the sound of that and I was sure that Commander Crockett and maybe even Chaplain Peeples would be impressed.
The door opened slowly. Very slowly. I heard the shuffle of feet away from the door. I could smell cabbage being boiled and maybe a hint of onion. Some kind of highly emotional piano concerto was playing, almost drowning out a voice that I will never forget. ‘For me, a guest?’ the voice said. The voice sounded Russian. The music sounded like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, maybe. A homosexual composer! My father had always derided Tchaikovsky for that and for being ‘too emotional, like a girl’. Now my heart was panicking. Russians! Communists! Spies!
‘Is he a very nice young man?’ the voice asked.
‘Oh yes, Madame,’ Cloudlet said with a little dance. ‘I am holding his hand. He is a virgin, guaranteed.’
‘Come inside,’ the Russian voice demanded. ‘Let me see this virgin man.’
I pushed the door open. Silk gossamer scarves in many colours were hanging from the high ceiling. They dangled all the way to the carpeted floor. To get to the sofa near the window I had to bend this way and that. The scarves felt like cobwebs.
‘A spider,’ I thought. I was alarmed. ‘Another spider!’
I separated the scarves in front of the shape reclining on the velvet cushions of the ornately carved sofa. There, in the sunlight, was a woman in her forties or fifties in a billowing lime-green nightgown with a series of bright peach ribbons down the front. The nightgown was swollen with her enormous breasts. The woman’s green eyes glinted in the merciless light. Her dyed blonde hair was spread out on the sofa behind her head as if she were a corpse floating in a cold, cold pond. She extended an arm in my direction, nodded her head to me, and then lifted her hand for me to kiss.
‘I am Veronika,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I will take care of you. Sit down with me. Close your eyes. Dream.’
I did not close my eyes because they were fixed on a series of sepia-toned photographs taken sometime long, long ago. The portraits were h
anging on the wall behind the old cast-iron bed whose mattress was so high off the floor I would have had to climb up there even though I was six feet tall. The women in the photographs wore large hats with ostrich feathers and were dressed in long high-necked gowns with very tight bodices. They had imperial looks on their thin faces. The men wore uniforms from another age bearing clusters of medals. Their faces were arrogant. They had waxed their long moustaches. Some of them wore monocles. The women in the photos sat on chairs and the men stood behind them, rigidly at attention, as if they had abducted these women from looted palaces.
‘My ancestors,’ Madame Veronika said. ‘My uncles and grandfathers. My mother and aunts and grandmothers. We are White Russians. We fought for the czar against the accursed Bolsheviks. Now we live in exile in this shithole of a place. A shithole! And to think we were counts and countesses!’
There was sudden colour in her otherwise pale, pale face, as if she had suddenly applied rouge to the layer of talcum powder dusted all over her body.
She rose to full height in front of me. She was taller than I was. She pulled me towards her. Her nightgown was floor length as if she had dressed to go to a ball. There was no warmth in that body. I did not get the same rush of mad heat and musk from her that I did when you were close to me, Yuki-chan. There was no sweat, no moisture at all on this body. She was using her long fingers to pull my sailor’s jumper over my head.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 17