The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  “Gambling’s fine,” the driver said from his window. “Losing isn’t.”

  They chuckled as if at the wittiest saying.

  KwayFay could not believe that, a short while since, she had been standing in the small streets by the harbourside watching the marionette Flag Cloth Opera. She stood waiting for them to tell her what to do, badly wanting to ask how they came to follow the assassin.

  “Little Sister,” the driver said soberly. “Check your clothes for blood. If you need new clothes, there is money. Buy.”

  “I cannot be late tomorrow!” she wailed, fear of normal events returning.

  The man returned to the car and got in, slamming the door.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” he told his friend.

  “It’s orders.”

  “Listen, Little Sister,” the driver said reasonably. “It will not matter if you are late as long as you get rid of any stains. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she wanted to say no.

  “Get going,” the other commanded. “I can hear police sirens in Pok Fu Lam.”

  She too could hear the distant wah-wah. The car pulled from the kerb and she was left looking at its dwindling tail lights. She turned and began to climb the narrow steep path, her ankles folding from weariness.

  The squatter shacks showed oil-lantern lights, except hers was in darkness. She approached it slowly, realising she had left no water in her tin. She felt delirious, and almost laughed, with so expensive a watch in her handbag. The silly amusement almost turned to weeping as she entered, fumbling with the wire. Her key was still in place.

  “KwayFay?”

  She screeched and almost fell from fright, but it was only Li ChangShih, an elderly lady who lived by hawking in Kennedy Town market. She sold fish, to keep her brother in the leper colony on Hay Ling Chau, sometimes running errands and carrying messages among the squatters. She had a narwhal tusk and kept it by her door god to ward off predators. She had only three teeth, she was proud of telling KwayFay, but they were perfect. She had a cousin, a policeman who was imprisoned for obtaining money squeeze which he had declined to share with his superiors.

  “Ah Li!” KwayFay said, relieved.

  “I stayed until you came,” the old lady said.

  “Good. Thank you, Tai-Tai.”

  It was polite to address her as married, for once she had been Chang until she was wed. Her husband lived in the Walled City, where police were ignored.

  “I am to tell you nobody has been inside your house.”

  “Thank you, Tai-Tai.” KwayFay paused, then asked the question she knew was doomed to fail for want of answer. “Who told you to do that?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did they not speak to you?”

  “Nobody has spoken to me today.”

  Mrs Li knew everything, including how much the Apple Seller Lady was worth in Tai Kok Tsui, in Kowloon side.

  “Thank you, Mrs Li.”

  KwayFay heard the old lady clop up the rough path. She sat in darkness and let tears fall, hearing the occasional child outside shouting, stones clattering. The children were playing the Cockroach Game, chanting, shrieking with laughter. KwayFay told herself that one day she too would laugh, but now look at her; lost, not knowing who was a friend, who would let her live.

  Days, not too long ago, when she had almost cried herself to sleep from loneliness, now seemed like paradise, where all the gods were friendly and she could sleep. Solitude outdid fear, best of all when terror roamed the street where she ought to be able to walk, come and go.

  The watch was inaudible. She fumbled for her handbag, opened the clasp and took the watch out. It illuminated in the darkness. It had a smaller hand, presumably Greenwich Mean Time, so essential in Hong Kong’s financial houses.

  Then she felt a wad in her handbag. It felt thick and convincing. A dense wad of used notes. She felt something else. A lighter, cigarette lighter? Something she had never possessed in her life, except once when, aged nine, she stole one from a café table in Hung Hom. It was heavy. She struck the lid with a thumb and yelped at the sudden flame. It was adjustable. Gas? It stayed on. She placed it carefully on the floor beside her trestle cot, awed by its dazzle.

  The note wad was in her other hand. She unclipped the silver pin. They were mostly red, high denomination, a bundle any thief would kill for.

  Therefore the thief had been told to kill and rob her. As a test of her veracity? The two men had wanted reassurance that she would not disclose anything. Yet she honestly had seen nothing of them before.

  Her reply to them had been truthful. They believed she was standing by them, loyally determined to reveal nothing to that wayward street thief. They implied their bosi would be pleased. They’d said she had money for clothes. This must be it.

  Was this another test? Tears flowed faster. How to survive a test, when one didn’t even know why it was being set? And how to answer unknown questions?

  She undressed thinking of Mrs Li, who had patiently sat guard on her shack. All Hong Kong was conspiring. KwayFay simply could not comprehend. She placed the bag with her laptop inside under her pillow and slipped under the single sheet.

  Instantly she fell asleep, praying Ghost Grandmother would leave her alone tonight.

  Chapter Seven

  “Welcome, sir.”

  Ah Min hated walking more than a few paces. The doctor had the sense to use a Queen Mary Hospital consulting room, ground floor, but this put the Triad lieutenant at a disadvantage. He had to traverse the two corridors, and was wheezing when he entered. The doctor’s instruments and screens chilled him. It shouldn’t have been in some charnel house.

  He sat uninvited and remained silent, beaming while his breathing stabilised. The doctor fussed.

  Dr Choy was a prattler in pin-stripes. The senior neurologist in the Medical Faculty at the Dai-Hok, university, was only marginal value to the Triad, hardly worth a retainer. Ah Min watched the man make quips, rearrange papers on his desk. Ah Min had overcome all adversities in life, and risen to be the treasurer of the Triad, the feared “Society of Three Harmonies”. It had been a hard road, progress marked by deaths and violence. Now, smarting with outrage, he was sent to obey the Triad master’s instruction to consult this dealer in calamities. Illnesses were for the weak. A doctor’s existence must surely be contaminated by ailment? He regarded the man with contempt. The neurologist was anglicised Cantonese, a human being in which two degradations combined. Voluntary indoctrination, but at what sacrifice?

  “You listened to the tapes,” Ah Min said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Has she a madness?”

  Dr Choy sat, tipping his fingers. Tapes of KwayFay’s ramblings lay on his desk.

  “One is of her sleep-talking, I take it? Two from her work place?

  The man had been told that. Ah Min had not come to be patronised.

  “She talks,” Choy added quickly, “to somebody. There are faint squeaks.” Ah Min waited, scorn in his beam. “Perhaps —”

  Perhaps, possibly, maybe. They were serf words. “Is she mad?”

  “There are three possibilities.” Choy gathered himself as if about to spring, crouching forward in his swivel chair. “She is tricking herself – common among hysterics. Or simply dreaming. Or imagining someone she once knew and does not consciously recall.”

  “Are these madness?”

  “Not in the medical sense, no.”

  “Which of the three is it?”

  “I cannot tell from tape talk.”

  “Which?” Ah Min’s beam hardened. “Tell me. One.”

  Dr Choy swallowed. “Perhaps the last, sir?”

  “No perhaps.”

  “The last,” Choy said. He might be safest with that.

  Ah Min rose and left without a word. Western medicine was contemptible.

  Linda Ho had a flaming row with her husband, the one she had planned with such pleasurable anticipation.

  HC dismiss
ed the two serving amahs when he finished his evening meal, and sat with the TV turned off as if waiting for some axe to fall, uncommunicative.

  “No name!” she shrieked, pointing at him as he sat there like a stuffed fool. She no longer cared if the servants heard. “Mo meng.”

  “Not now,” he said.

  To her it sounded like begging. He hadn’t even the strength to fight back and put her in her place. A worm of a man. HC would never have charmed at the race track, not like the suave gambler who’d won such a vast amount of money. That man was a winner.

  And look what she’d got, a fool.

  “Not now?” she screamed. “You make me look a fool at the racecourse! My friend flaunted her winnings. I’m made to look a foki, a serf, a peasant. Am I a Hakka woman from the street diggings? You are too mean to provide me with enough money to place a decent bet!”

  “He was killed,” HC said listlessly.

  “You never listen!” she wailed, flinging cushions. “You don’t care!”

  “They killed him.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t been tempted to …”

  His words finally struck and she faltered, standing there breathing heavily. She was a dumpy woman, unable to create that devastating look of affluence so necessary to a Hong Kong woman. All her friends said that behind her back. With sufficient money she could…

  “Killed?”

  “Your cousin David, YeePak Huang.”

  “Killed?” she repeated. Something was wrong with the words he was saying.

  Cousin David, manager of their carpet warehouse? He couldn’t be dead.

  “They killed him. The phone call.”

  “During supper?” There had been a call earlier.

  “The police said it was in Wanchai.”

  “Who?” she asked stupidly. An accident, surely nothing more sinister than that. Not David, so young, vibrant, certain to make something of himself.

  “Your cousin.”

  She sank slowly to the sofa, holding a cushion, her next missile.

  “A tram? A motor car?”

  “Murdered.” HC did not turn. He talked into space. She remembered now; he had eaten his meal like an automaton.

  “Was there a ransom demand?” Now it bit, the terrible calamity this worm of a husband should have prevented.

  Ransom was Hong Kong’s tactic, to abduct a person and demand ransom equal to a third of his wealth. Businessmen were the prime targets. The police were frantic about it, but ransom was the Colony’s way.

  “Yes. One thousand dollars.”

  “One …?”

  A breathtaking insult. Nothing! It also meant that David was already dead or in his last bout of torture when the ransom demand was announced. That too was the Colony’s code of insult, to abduct then send in a ludicrously paltry demand. It was always a great source of amusement to Hong Kong. People would walk along laughing, crooking a little finger to show derision, the other hand covering the mouth as they laughed. The same tactic – abduct, demand, return on payment – had been exported with great success to the Philippines and elsewhere abroad.

  “Things frighten me.”

  “What things?” Her voice rose, quickly quietened because this the amahs should not hear.

  “There’s a girl in the office. KwayFay. She knows spirit talk.”

  “She what?”

  Linda stood, the better to glare down at him, wanting to assault him, this idiot telling her such fantastically unacceptable things. Did he not know that the days of Hong Kong as a Crown Colony were to end soon, by treaty, and that The People’s Republic did not allow such thoughts? Spirits, ghosts, necromancing, were not ideologically correct. They were political treachery. There couldn’t be such a girl. Pretend, yes. Real, impossible!

  “I never should have given him the job,” HC said dully.

  “He was a good man, with a sound business sense! My sister —”

  “I knew he’d screw up. I asked the girl if I should.”

  Back to her crescendo: “I told you to appoint him. So you check with some trollop?”

  “I wanted to do right. No!” he almost shouted. “I didn’t! I wanted to do what was safe!”

  “Safe? You talk safe?” She saw an amah about to enter and kicked the door on her. “You ask some bitch should you do what I tell you?”

  HC passed his hands wearily over his brow, wishing that he had never abandoned cigarettes. He was down to one surreptitious smoke a day, his incompetent staff his only colluders.

  “The point is —”

  “The point is you listen to a harlot instead of me!”

  She almost launched herself at him, but the amahs would only hear. Then the news would be all over Hong Kong. Newspapers, English and Chinese alike, had stringers reporting salacious filth every midnight to their sleazy offices in Causeway Bay.

  “You were wrong. KwayFay was right. They killed David because he would not deliver payment on your gambling.”

  “They…?” She managed to repeat the terrible news, making it authentic. “Who are they?”

  “Some Triad, some Hong, who knows? They hold your – our, my – loans.”

  HC explained, choosing words carefully and speaking slower than he had ever done. He felt desperate to pursue his investment schemes. They had seemed so orderly until now.

  “I tried to pay off your gambling debts to the Mong Kok lender. He phoned today. He will lend no more money. David stole the repay money. The lender has sold your debts.”

  “Sell debts?” she squeaked, never having heard of the manoeuvre. Cousin David went out of her mind, because this was important. This was gambling.

  “It is common. Factoring, sharing, split indebtedness, commission halving, the usual.”

  She drew back to appraise him, never having seen him like this. Helpless, yes. Defeated, certainly. But sure of these strange words, suddenly revealing that he knew things she had thought beyond him?

  “You did not pay my borrowings off, like always?” She felt enraged. “What sort of a husband lets his wife’s debts be bought and sold like cheap street linen?”

  “A husband with debts.”

  HC admitted it with sorrow. Saying it like that made it suddenly highest priority for action. He thought of KwayFay.

  “You too have debts?” she yelled.

  The nerve of it! He had debts, when she was in hell?

  “Investments have done poorly. The London FTSE index and the Nikkei a month ago were off. The Dow Jones —”

  “Why you talk of these things?” she howled, in tears.

  “I hated giving your cousin the Emporium. I asked KwayFay. She said don’t. You kept on saying give him the managership, he would do brilliantly. So I did.”

  “They killed him?”

  Linda thought in shock how furious her sister would be. Monica had always wanted to get back at HC and Linda, ever since Linda’s father died and his money was shared with a little bias, but whose fault was that? Advantage existed to be taken, ne? You saw a good bet and went for it, or you were a fool. Just like life.

  “I told David to pay a tenth of the gross to the Mong Kok lender. They have weekly collectors. Paying interest only buys time.”

  “A tenth a week?” Linda screamed.

  She immediately thought of her untried gambling scheme, perhaps a roll-up with twists on the side, three races, just perfect as long as the odds could be guaranteed more than 13-8. Or, she worked out with her mouth watering, there might have been enough to bribe some jockeys to obey a gambler’s inspired guess. She could have raked in an absolute fortune! Instead, HC had been paying out her money to that stoat of a money lender! Typical of HC, one waste after another.

  “We owe them more than the Emporium is worth.”

  “It is ours!”

  “It was. Not now. When I began the firm, I used a collateral loan. They claim it. We still owe the whole sum, need to pay weekly interest.”

  “What did he do with the money? Where is it?”

&n
bsp; “Falsified the accounts. For me. For them.”

  “This girl knew Cousin David?”

  “No. She dreamed her answer. She does that.”

  “She dreams? And you listen to some tart’s fucking dreams instead of me?”

  “That’s the trouble, Linda. I didn’t listen to her. I did as you said.” He glanced about the apartment as if tallying its worth. “She knew you would lose at Happy Valley. I heard her mutter. She described the jockey’s colours, everything.”

  “She knew my bets …?”

  “I tried to give her a gift of money, sort of back pay. She refused it. I heard her speaking to herself later before your horses had even run.”

  “Does she learn from the computer?” Linda knew nothing of computers, but held them in awe. “She refused a gift of money?”

  “She dreams.”

  HC sat looking out at the brilliance of Hong Kong harbour. It dejected him now. Only days ago it had seemed a lovely jewel filled with promise.

  “Spirits are not understood these days. We shall soon be forbidden to observe all ancient customs in the new Hong Kong.”

  Linda thought hard. A girl who dreamed of horses losing could also dream the winner, ne? “You must not tell anyone.”

  “I have said nothing. She is always right. She decided about a new Pacific currency out of the blue. She decided one way, the banks predicted the other. She was right. The international banks were wrong.”

  “Then she sleeps with Triads,” Linda concluded.

  “No. She is poor, a girl of no family.”

  “You sure?” More than one girl had advanced her prospects by taking the route of a Flower Girl. It was a well-trodden path.

  “She lives among squatter shacks.”

  “Would she help us?”

  HC stared at his wife, astonished.

  “She hates me,” he said simply. “I abated her wage, to squeeze a little money for…debts.”

  “Wait!” Linda Ho said. “There is chance here! If this girl dreams horses that win …” There! It was out.

  “No more horses,” HC begged. “No more gambling.”

  His wife eyed him. No more gambling? Gambling was life!

  “She was taken from work yesterday to some place. I saw from the window. The driver was one who called at the Emporium.”