The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  KwayFay wondered if she could borrow enough to escape to Taiwan, except that would be hopeless, for where on earth was there beyond reach of the Triads? Nowhere.

  Nothing but misery today. She wondered for a moment who the defaulting ex-employee was, for she had never seen HC’s wife’s cousin, the fool who put them all in this terrible quandary. She shelved the question. He no longer mattered. That was Hong Kong’s way with failures.

  She left HC’s office, put a brave face on in front of everybody and resumed work in her pod while all the others gave her sly looks, signalling each other, guessing good or bad, lucky or unlucky.

  She said nothing, not even to Alice Seng, wondering when the bad men would come to ask their questions that she had to guess right.

  Chapter Three

  To a street urchin terror had been unavoidable. Now it was back. The more she thought the worse her plight seemed. She was sure HC Ho meant the Triads. Her boss was shaking with fear when she left the office buildings for her noon break. London’s Stock Exchange was barely alive at this hour, Japan as usual screaming alarms, its Nikkei Index on the wobble and KT in Statistics vomiting in the men’s room from panic, complaining he’d eaten something raw the night before.

  KT imitated Elvis Presley at the Club in Easy Street with some Wuhan tart called Grace, kidding himself he was a high flyer. With KT, every gripe was “something in the food”. Yesterday it was ngaw-paa, the beefsteak; today it would be gow-haa, the fat crab they flew to Kai Tak from Australia. Yet KT never even ate, depending for sustenance on bey-jao. Any old beer would do. He loved San Miguel, in the hopes that alcoholic elation would carry him to success. He’d been told “Drink more!” by a necromancer down the Lantern Market where his father sold sandals to tourists at twelve times the Hong Kong price. Quite honest, all office staff agreed, because twelve was the fabled magical Number Eight plus half that again, which only proved how fair extortion could be, when properly defined.

  She used to like KT, once had almost let him work into her on a date in a shabby cinema in Kowloon, then a near-erotic maul on some staircase – but that was when she was new to the firm. She’d been astonished the way he reached ecstasy groping her breasts. She remembered thinking, What on earth’s he doing that for? What was this breast business all about? Until then she’d thought breasts of no account, simply there like the Peak District or the Motorola sign reflected in the Kowloon side torpid waters of Hong Kong harbour.

  No, definitely no more KT. And no more submitting when HC did his heavy-breathing grope. She’d once had a share from one of Alice’s cousins – that was the way she thought of sex, a share of something for brief gain – and was amazed to find her palm filled with a creamy ejaculation in a cinema (re-run of The Sound of Music in Wanchai, the gazebo scene where Captain von Trapp kisses Maria). She’d used her handkerchiefs on that occasion, no less than ten cents for two down Port Stanley market, scandalous. The gruesome incident taught her to take two tissues in future, in case. For her, kissing was a problem. Anything oral she found far too laborious. Maybe you needed a bedroom behind a locked door, a building of high rent (not in Happy Valley, either) to carry kissing off? She knew from the blue films off Nathan Road – she’d seen seven; might she go for a lucky eighth, learn something? – what they did, but how did one lead into it? She didn’t trust virginity. You were dispossessed when you asked gods for things. You were no bargainer if you hadn’t been broken in. You started off cheap. A virgin, you were a no-sale person. Virginity was a nuisance, like an unwanted blemish, a sort of mole eyelid that was an irritant when you blinked, so best got rid of. She hadn’t, though she’d tried twice.

  She went to sit in Statue Square, boldly racing to a stone edge and hating the Philippino women who got in her way, thousands of them chattering like colourful starlings. The People’s Republic of China would soon make them all go home and good riddance…but only maybe. KwayFay liked differences. Except this new problem was a serious difference, a risk. Had she been talked into it by Ghost Grandmother? She couldn’t remember.

  It felt bad. Like when she’d realised with terrible finality that she, alone of everybody in Hong Kong, had no ancestors. Some Cockroach Children, skulking tribes of street scavengers, actually knew their own names, ages, parents even. She was so envious.

  Alone, she watched people emerge from offices. They risked life and limb to cross the road as Tram No. 70 to Shaukeiwan intimidated hordes of pedestrians with its ting-tinging and growling clamour. It was a scene made for barbarism, as befitted a British Crown Colony established back in the 1840s by scruffy sailors wading ashore in Repulse Bay. Yet it was brilliant, for Hong Kong owed nothing yet owed everything, and also owned nothing yet owned everything. Why else could America, that omnipotent giant, come cap-in-hand, begging this dot of a place to restrict its manufactures because the USA suffered? Hong Kong laughed a lot at things like that.

  She was hungry. Already her hour was eroded by silly thoughts. She allowed herself six Hong Kong dollars a day for food, nearly a whole American dollar! She’d brought a plastic bottle of water, having filled it in the office. No costly Coca Cola for KwayFay, despite her need.

  The hot rice street vendor was a scarecrow. He moved swiftly on his bicycle with the elastic bounce of the coolie under loads slung on a bamboo yoke. She admired his knack, pedalling baskets of hot food on poles, among dense traffic.

  She queued, third in line, her stomach churning unpleasantly at the aroma from his steaming baskets.

  Today, he had the ubiquitous jap-seuy, the equivalent of the English bubble-and-squeak. Tempting, but money was always a problem.

  She asked for plain boiled rice in a foil box. It would do. She carried her own chopsticks, and ate the food leaning against the end post in Statue Square, her place having been stolen by numerous Philippino women. Not wanting to be shamed, surreptitiously she brought out a piece of foil and unfolded it, placing her secret strip of boiled green vegetable on the rice, to make a lunch she could be respectably seen with.

  Then she noticed the man.

  He was standing smoking a cigarette at the corner as if waiting for someone. Taxis dashed, wheels shrilled, trams clanked, pedestrians rushed, but the shrivelled man looked steadily in her direction. Face of a walnut, clothes of a star, watches to die for glittering on each wrist, stones of higher reflectivity than diamond showing he was at least partly phoney yet composite, in the way of shopping malls financed by different companies without a common theme. He was calm, absurdly so. Oddly, people avoided him. Usually, Kennedy Town to Quarry Bay, you were hard put to walk a step without being nudged, elbowed, shoved, impeded. Not this man. He stood in ominous serenity, as if the populace conspired to leave him alone.

  Perhaps they felt an emanation of threat? She noticed a young clerk bump into him and immediately withdraw with nodded acceptance. Obeisance? The man drew on his cigarette. The ash stayed intact! He wore sunglasses that made hollows of his eyes. He wore a hat, almost unique except for tourists off some cruise ship at the Ocean Terminal.

  He looked at her, still as a stork. Waiting for her to finish her meal, perhaps? Were Triad threat-men so polite?

  KwayFay drank from her bottle, replaced the cap, slipped it into her bag and wrapped her chopsticks away. The foil container she always took back to the office, making sure it was seen, as defiant proof that she’d eaten a meal more expensive than any hawk-eyed observer might assume. It showed them that she was doing quite well for herself, thank you. Even if she had no man, she could eat like the rest. She moved off, deciding not to see the spy, and was almost in the building when he touched her elbow.

  “Come, Siu-Jeh.” He said Little Sister as though she were a shop assistant and he about to buy something. “I give you a lift.”

  “Me?”

  “The taxi can only wait so long.” He was so calm. How did people be calm?

  “See-Tau is expecting me at work.”

  “We expect you more.”

  “I might get t
he sack.”

  “Impossible.” So calm, that “impossible”. Others would know this man represented others who were calmer still.

  For a moment she stood in the rescuing bliss of air-conditioning, then reluctantly went back into the street. She felt little desperation, just her familiar sense of loss. A taxi was parked and held up a tram, several bicycles, a column of motors. All waited with unusual serenity, so weird. For her? No, for this calm man.

  He extinguished his cigarette. She settled in the worn leather seat. He sat away from her and didn’t need to tell the driver the destination. They drove to the Vehicular Ferry.

  “You take me to Gao Lung, across to Kowloon?” she asked timidly, wanting friends – had she any, for events on this scale? – or anybody to see her, take the taxi’s number, stop the ferry because of a dai-fung, typhoon, coming across the South China Sea.

  He said nothing. Was being calm boring? She envied him his tranquillity. Perhaps it was all show, just as a woman, dressed for an occasion and looking serene, might feel her heart thumping as her reception neared.

  They crossed the harbour and in Kowloon took a series of turns. She tried seeing where the detours led: hateful Jordan Road itself, where she had stolen food so often when six, seven, eight years of age. Then Nathan Road with drifters looking for girlie bars that would charge them $800 for entry and another $1,000 for a girlie to sit with and drink the coloured waters, to report back home that they’d had a good time.

  Tsim Sha Tsui, with its charging pedestrians and streams of motors and buses, shops glittering like one giant elongated crystal, seemed to be the destination. The taxi turned in behind Chungking Mansions, the cramped tourist ghetto of which the whole world knew, at 30, Nathan Road, dormitories with cockroach-infested landings stacked off malodorous stairwells. The streets grew more louring, shoddier. Twice the taxi ignored one-way signs, oncoming vehicles meekly backing away. The man twice took out a cigarette and each time put the smoke away unlit. The taxi driver never once checked the rear-view mirror, another first.

  “Here, Little Sister.”

  She alighted. The narrow street was new to her. Had they re-crossed Nathan Road, to finish up near the Bird Market? Or near the huge tented Jade Market, where she might be able to get an apple, some orange juice? She felt quite dizzy.

  The man didn’t pay the taxi. It drove away with a screech of tyres as if yelping at its liberation.

  He led into a hallway. Two grubby vendors shifted their cardboard panels of Rolex and Swatch lookalikes, eyes downcast as the man walked past. He made a gesture to a small bicycle, move it, and a hawker dragged it outside. KwayFay edged past up the stairs. The man was fidgety now, clicking worry beads and humming under his breath. He was afraid. KwayFay knew fear. Cockroaches scuttled. The place stank.

  A door opened on the second landing. Two men were seated in a pleasant room. A troubling aroma of antiseptic made her eyes water.

  “Sit down.”

  There was only one chair. KwayFay placed herself in it, clutching her handbag with its chopsticks, empty foil, her dollars for tomorrow’s street meal.

  The two men were so different. One was a transparent threat-man, tense, young and full of aggression. The other was hugely fat, middle-aged, his features shiny with a constant beaming grin she instantly distrusted. He hugged a black ledger. They wore western suits. The bulbous man had appalling teeth, all corrugations and brown stubs, and wheezed as he spoke.

  “I am Ah Min. Have you heard the name?”

  “No, Sin-Sang.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Mh ho yisi.” She truly had no idea. HC’s garbled explanation had told her nothing, but was this anything to do with HC?

  “Ghosts? I know nothing about ghosts.”

  Except of course for Ghost Grandmother, and that was beyond human conversation. The mad thought crossed her mind that some Triad man might be a relative who shared her nocturnal lessons with long-dead Grandmother. Like listening in on a broadcast? Yet this older man looked vaguely Shanghainese, as did many from the east side of Central District on Hong Kong. “Little Shanghai”, the indigenous Cantonese called that place of sandwiched families and horizontal forests of washing projecting on bamboo poles from windows. She had no Shangainese relatives. Who had? she thought nastily. No Cantonese would admit to it anyway.

  “But you guess —” the younger man began angrily, only to pale in terror as the other lifted a hand. Silence was prolonged. The senior almost looked at him but didn’t turn his head.

  The younger man mumbled an apology, using the pay-yan term for himself to show humility.

  “Profound apologies, Min Sin-Sang.”

  The boss waited to some satisfying count on an inner scale of horror, then addressed KwayFay. Both men kept glancing at a vast wall mirror to their left as if at an invisible observer.

  “Can you kill?”

  KwayFay felt her cheeks go grey and could not speak.

  “Let me be clear. Can you predict death?”

  “No, See-Tau.”

  “You told HC of a man who would be late.”

  “Late?” KwayFay bleated in panic. Had she? Who? She’d thought she was here because of someone in a carpet warehouse.

  “For Happy Valley, the horse races. HC went to meet a friend. They were to gamble. You told HC that you’d taken a message from his friend who was going to be late.”

  “I did?” She struggled back over the office’s chaotic entanglements. To her relief something came to mind.

  “Ah, yes, First Born. I remember.”

  It had been three months before. She had been working through a London broker’s instructions about a Tokyo transfer through Sydney, Australia, when she had come on suddenly, her menses as ever taking her by surprise. She’d made a run for the loo. HC interrupted her flight with some diatribe – if this man rings take a message, if that person calls say I’m out, HC’s usual nonsense.

  She remembered telling HC a lie, swiftly invented.

  “Somebody rang just now, said he’ll be late.”

  And made it just in time, leaving HC flummoxed. When she finally emerged he had left the office, to her relief.

  That hadn’t quite been the end of it. He called her in next morning, a strange look on his face. Sweating, every split second adjusting the air-conditioning, doing his irritating finger-snapping ritual and jumping when the phone went. He grilled her about her made-up message for almost an hour. It was weird. During the session some new Englishman, an arrival so recent his face was still not sun-scarlet, dropped in from an investment company beyond the Hang Seng Bank, and had gone away baffled by HC’s stutteringly inept answers. As he left, he’d given KwayFay a look that spoke volumes: And this Colony is a pre-eminent trader with blokes like your Business Head?

  Several times during that puzzling interview, the distressed HC had gone over the phoney message. Distraught, she’d had to stick to her lie, agreeing that, no, it might not have been HC’s friend phoning himself. No, she’d never seen his friend. To keep the lie consistent – essential for lies – she stayed definite. No, the man gave no name. With so many people in and out bringing orders, requests, checking on Unit Trust sales halfway across the world, London brokers forever on the phone, investment urgency across International Time Zones, how on earth could she pick out one memory among so many?

  In the end HC let her go, but he’d made mistake after mistake all week. Twice he’d hidden from unexpected visitors, scared out of his wits. He’d done exactly the same once, when the US dollar exchange rate changed. KT vomited all that week because the American Federal Reserve suddenly did a policy switch. It could be counted normal office behaviour.

  Except now this man’s questions about her lie.

  He was waiting.

  “I needed to go to the bathroom,” she explained, embarrassed. “HC stopped me. I was hurrying.” The man gestured, get to it. She babbled on, “I hadn’t time to stand and talk. I invented that somebody had phoned
, said they would be late.”

  “Who?”

  “I told HC a man.”

  She tried to quilt up a truth to fit the occasion, so the man would let her go. She narrated through HC’s interrogation. Ah Min listened. He must have had the features of a cherub when young, like babies on those terrible Christian Christmas cards printed in Taipei, so much drossy colour, so little fact.

  “How did HC seem?”

  “He was afraid, First Born.”

  She embellished this a little, making much of HC’s edginess, how he’d been unable to sell a single thing to the Englishman from the finance company up Des Voeux Road. The younger man facing her recovered his composure, filled out and lost some toxins.

  Ah Min said something she didn’t quite catch. The young man ingratiated himself by laughing too much at the remark, nodding and saying, “Yes, yes!” too many times.

  “Do you know why HC was afraid?”

  “No, See-Tau.”

  Clever; KwayFay saw the manoeuvre almost as the man spoke. He must already know exactly what questions HC had asked her that morning. It was the knight’s move in chess. You tally up rectitude, answer by slow answer. How many stock-investment truths did one frank lie relate to? It was the vital question in commerce. She’d created a computer scheme for it once, and been terribly disappointed to learn later some man long since dead had done it much earlier in England before computers were even invented.

  She waited. Here it came.

  “Did he not tell you?”

  “No, See-Tau.”

  “If you can not kill and cannot predict death, Little Sister, then how did you know that a man would be late for a meeting you did not know about?” He leant forward from the sofa, his shoes squeaking as they bent with his feet. She realised how troubled he was. And, in turn, she.

  “I do not know, First Born. I made the message up. I had to go to the toilet urgently.”

  “Why did you make up that message?”

  “I do not know. HC mentioned a message, so I said whatever came into my head.” She looked from one face to the other. They were full of scepticism, the younger man’s hooded eyes disbelieving.