The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  Linda saw the old man send the bet to her basket. For a moment her eyes met his. He did not look away. She gazed after the bet with hunger as it arrived at the croupier’s table, and saw it go onto the split line of four numbers.

  The roulette wheel went round. The bet was lost. She was still looking down at him. He smiled, and pulled out another wad of red notes, transfixing her. Red, a hundred dollars each. He summoned a girl, asked for another drink.

  “No gin, sir?”

  “Almond water only.”

  He observed a man arrive and settle in to the next table, and nodded a return greeting. The man was a famed owner of ships and ocean liners in Indonesia, a regular. It was all working well for Old Man today, in this new month of name changing. An omen?

  He accepted the drink, watching the ship magnate receive the house’s list of all the roulette numbers called since midnight. The casino provided that service for heavy rollers, the serious players. Some stationed their own employees to take down every number, every final lie of Fan Tan, every card played in casino poker, mistrusting the casino croupiers.

  Old Man thought it all ridiculous. What was the purpose of games of chance? None. It was a substitute for life, not life itself. As Tai-Tai Ho would soon discover.

  He beckoned and the girl was instantly at his side.

  “I want the woman your friend gave me a week ago,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. When?”

  “In one hour.”

  “Will you require a meal, sir?”

  “Afterwards.”

  “Yes, sir. In which hotel?”

  “The long place with the squeaky lifts, but not the suite on the same side as the temple by the waterfront. Find me a suite decorated in yellow.”

  “Yes, sir. Do you have messages, sir?”

  “Yes. Tell the man who will telephone here in twenty minutes that I shall be in Macao at the ferry before eleven o’clock.”

  “Eleven o’clock today, sir?”

  He told her sharply, “See to it!”

  “I am sorry, sir. Yes, sir.”

  He dismissed her with a mandarin’s gesture, knowing that Linda Ho would now be awed by his manner and the girl’s submissive retreat. Santiago would soon be on hand to explain these events, impress the stupid woman. Purpose served.

  Rising, he walked slowly away from the table. He would see this KwayFay soon and make a decision about his name after hearing what she had to say.

  If she gave foolish advice, well one more girl would never be missed in Hong Kong. If she gave good advice, she would be favoured, until her good advice petered out.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was so early in the morning KwayFay was almost asleep on her feet. She actually staggered, rising in her improvised shack on Mount Davis.

  Aware of the trouble ahead, unable to rest from being pestered by Ghost Grandmother, she was worn out before she’d even started the day. She got her things, made a brief toilet and descended into the maelstrom of Central District before even the Motorola lights across the harbour knew what to do with the remains of the night.

  She wanted to sit on the steps near the Wanchai Ferry Pier concourse, but the buses were already starting up at Eagle Centre terminus. She tried to marshal thoughts of getting the sack over that queer file business. She would lose her squatter shack, go back to being a street girl begging, rummaging in the night streets.

  There was only one quiet place, familiar from her Cockroach childhood. A no-family boy was tragic, but a no-family girl was doomed. She used to pretend to have a family – three sisters, two brothers, a mother and father, such joy. Sometimes she had actually believed it! Invariably the wisp of self-deceit would vanish, and she would be back to digging in the offal bins, stealing from delivery vans and market barrows. She was one of three hundred thousand Cockroach Children in the Colony.

  Tiring – she should still have been asleep – she made the sports ground in Gloucester Road before dawn, and wormed in from the Hung Hing Road waterfront. English sailors from Admiralty had often fed her, when a child, but no sooner did she learn to recognise one and watch out for him he’d be gone on a ship to far away. One bought her a teddy bear, she remembered. She’d tried to eat it, taking an experimental chew of its arm, but it was only wool. She spat it out, enraged, and almost threw it away but soon saw the sailor’s cunning. It was sought after by market people. She sold it to a Hokklo hawker for seven dollars, and ate in Ah Hau’s Café of the Singing Birds in the Mologai for three days, real food in real bowls! Immediately she’d understood: the kind sailor knew that older children would steal her food. He’d given her the inedible teddy bear…which could be sold when it was safe!

  Thereafter, the cunning of the English seemed wholly admirable. They thought clever. She had been six or seven. That was before she even knew she had an age like everybody else. Ah Hau told her how old she was. She’d been so happy to learn that she was seven. Just like other children, she’d got her own age! A number! Later, Ah Hau explained she would become eight. She cried for two days at losing seven, which she’d thought would be her own for ever and ever, but learned it was called growing. Ever since, seven was her lucky number.

  The stadium was empty. Early-early people ran round the grass perimeter. Nobody knew why; exercise folk came and went like weather, no reason or logic. Groundsmen also came with water hoses and knelt-walked the grass, peering at the green stubble. She’d tried to eat the grass when little and hungry, until a worker told her the head groundsman put poison down to make the grass grow better. She’d been so offended – why do such a thing? “The boss says so,” she was told, and she withdrew with reverence. Another cunning trick. One day she might find the reason, become safe from poisons, hunger, getting caught. She did not eat sports fields after that.

  A wan pallor showed in the East, the night not yet willing to go. She sat on a bench. A motor car approached, paused on Hung Hing Road, which was not allowed. A door slammed. Some early runner? No voices. Cool air enveloped her. She stayed motionless, the weight of her laptop computer cutting into her. Sometimes, she caught up with her work here, before the world began its cacophonous careering. She felt she was waiting for something to happen.

  Day entered the arena. It came first as a mere night glow, slowly blotting the darkness, as if some secret child were shading the shadows with washes of different hues. In the gloaming, she heard two men walk by. She stayed still, to retain the feeling of magic, and they went on. Short cut to work?

  Light stole in faster. Warmth came, and with it horrid high-heat humidity making her skin sticky. She heard voices at the gate nearby, a person wanting to come in and being told stay out. Maybe the groundsman with his grass poison? Soon, early runners and Shadow-Boxers would come with swarming day.

  She saw movement on the empty field. Movement? Nobody could be there.

  The daylight came almost with an audible rush out of the South China Sea. It was almost like hearing a gong’s intensifying reverberation, a resonance of light. You could love it, if it didn’t bring terrors of a job you couldn’t afford to lose.

  It was Old Man.

  He wore the cheong saam garb of ancient China, high-necked and tubular, black down to his feet. He wore leather thonged sandals and was Shadow-Boxing. She watched him. It was quite beautiful. This was how a grandfather would be, had she one.

  Slowly, befitting the most graceful of all rituals, he moved. It was a dance in the form of dedicated spectacle, but so personal and lovely it made her want to cry. He understood the meanings, she saw. He did them in order, as decided by the great Chang San-feng in his school at the Tigers Nest of Chung Nan Shan, the mountainous retreat where tigers roamed freely hundreds of years ago. Of course it was old long before.

  Old Man understood all thirteen movements of the Great Ultimate Fist, T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Visiting foreigners always asked about it, especially Americans. They called it Tai Chi, but used the wrong tones so they were meaningless.

  Old Man, thoug
h, knew all eight arm movements and the five essential leg movements. Wrinkled and thin, balding and skeletally old, but to him Shadow-Boxing was a way of life. KwayFay always told strangers no, she didn’t know anything about Tai Chi, reluctant to encourage western delusions. Unless they came as disciples, to think and learn-learn, they would never understand the hidden bliss of Shadow-Boxing.

  One movement made her smile. Old Man went gently into Return to Mountain Carrying Tiger, slowing his vital circular motion then rotating to a different point of the compass. So vital to know these. He lived every stance, entering the imagery so deeply she could see the actual scene, the bare mountain, the stratified clouds. She froze as he turned to a different compass point and descended to Find Needle in Sea Bed; she held her breath for him in case he ran out of air before he got back to the surface. She smiled at her folly, breathed more easily. He made it with balletic grace. She breathed again.

  Had she been too silent when speaking to his guards, those young threatening assistants? They searched the stadium and grounds before Old Man Shadow-Boxed. They evicted street people, hitting them with brass knuckles, before admitting Old Man to do his silent ritual. He had spoken to her in Kowloon, that day they had taken her in a taxi. But the poor thing was their prisoner. She knew that much. What had he done?

  The Japanese – her lip curled – stole Chinese Shadow-Boxing. They called bits they copied “Judo” and “Jujitsu”, as if that made them originals. Purloined from China, of course, they then marketed them. Such silliness, when Shadow-Boxing was free in Hong Kong! Every park, every open space, filled with Shadow-Boxers doing their dawn T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Feeble copies in other nations were only for making kick-and-shoot movies. Here, she was watching pure heart-warming elegance straight from the Celestial Empire.

  “Now east,” she murmured.

  Old Man slowly turned to the east, starting anew with such withdrawn reticence she wondered for a moment if he were about to begin the eighty-one leads-and-counters of the Pa Kua (as crude Mandarin northerners would call the Eight Trigrams; her nose wrinkled) of the Emperor Fu Hsi. No, for Old Man glided into a different sequence. Interesting! He must suffer a headache, coming to Shadow-Boxing as a cure – for which it was of course perfect.

  One thing puzzled KwayFay. As light improved, she saw on the ground before Old Man a small bouquet. Irises, with their sword-like leaves? Her brow cleared. Of course! He was commemorating the Double Fifth, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, when the mystic gift made to the Ghost Chu Yuan was, quite correctly, wrapped in iris leaves to symbolise spirit protection.

  Other eastern countries, like the Japanese, knew no better. They gave swords to their little boys instead of lanceolate iris leaves, thinking only of killing. Like the English, barbarians.

  Old Man must be fully relaxed now. She saw him enter a whole sequence. He became the Golden Cock, standing perfectly still on his left leg. He transformed into Dragon-Swarm-Up-Pillar. He became Swallow Skims Pool, then Two Running Wheels. He swooped so slowly she had difficulty seeing him move at all, as he changed into Comet Chasing Moon. She knew instantly, though, when he Picked Moon Reflection From Water, one of her favourites.

  Tears dimmed her vision. He ended with a slow swirl, palms up and out as taught by the immortal Chang San-feng. He stood waiting. Two besuited threat-men walked to him. One picked up the bouquet. His warders were back.

  KwayFay watched, afraid to move in case they hit her with their brass knuckles. They started towards the forbidden exit in Marsh Road.

  The door opened as Old Man walked to it. His minions left first. Old Man paused as if hearing something, and gazed back in KwayFay’s direction. She froze. He truly was the old grandfather man from that frightening interview in Kowloon, when she had learned she was to make two decisions, one choosing girls, one asking yes-no about some unknown man. Old Man moved away. He couldn’t have seen her in the gloom.

  She was alone. She waited until she heard the motor start and drive off. Only then did she get up and stretched. She carried her things and deposited them in the centre of the space, looking round. Such luxury! Such freedom!

  In the stadium centre, she did the slow actions Old Man had left incomplete. She repeated Return To Mountain Carrying Tiger successfully without being bitten, when she sensed someone. Old Man was standing watching. She screamed and almost ran, but he was alone.

  “Little Sister,” he said slowly. “You add one Shadow-Boxing ritual to mine. Why?”

  Her breath recovered. She felt ashamed in such drab clothes. “Tiger is king of all land beasts, as dragon rules all sea beasts. They decide Fhung Seui.”

  “Tiger, ne? You saw me?”

  “Yes, First Born. Your Tiger ritual was…beautiful, but not finished. I finish it for you before your warders took you back. Forgive me.”

  “Warders?” he asked.

  “You should have gone on, First Born.” She was appalled by her temerity and stammered, “Make White Tiger, as in side chapel in Pei Ti Temple on Cheung Chau. You would do it like original.”

  “An old man like me? Do ritual of a god general from the Yin Dynasty?”

  “As White Tiger Wong. Why else does the tiger have four stripes on its forehead? Also means prince, ne?”

  “Tiger Wong?”

  “Yes, First Born. Tiger Wong.” He seemed almost to smile. She was astonished: why did a prisoner smile? At what? She realised that his imprisonment had driven him mad.

  “The tiger eats men, Little Sister, and so enslaves spirits as slaves for ever. You think I should be such a creature?”

  “Of course, First Born!” She opened her handbag and pressed her foil pack of old rice into his hands. “You are too thin. Please eat today. Ask warders to heat it for you.”

  He stared at the kitchen wrapper. The girl might converse with spirits, but was clearly insane from her privations as a Cockroach Child.

  She looked about. His guardians were nowhere to be seen. An idea took her.

  “Run, First Born!” she urged with quiet desperation. “Run! They won’t see you! I’ll lead them in the opposite direction, as decoy!”

  He looked at her, mystified. “Run? Where? Why?”

  She saw how hopeless it was. He had given up all hope of escape. Had he no family, to bribe his guards? The poor, poor man!

  “I go, Sin-Sang?”

  He nodded, and watched her walk away and wriggle out of the stadium under the wire. His question was answered. He had his new name: Tiger Wong. He would announce it to the whole Triad.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Linda Ho stared at the young man along the pillow. She was amazed at her fortune. Sunlight shafted across the hotel bedroom from Nathan Road, the traffic sounds below drumming through the hot afternoon. Air-conditioning whirred. She could hear people shouting, amahs and fokis, along the corridor as they moved from one room to another, calling for this number of new sheets, that pile of laundry, clattering distantly.

  She’d never been worked like that in her whole life. It was a revelation. He had insulted her, beat her. She had cried out in ecstasy as he had thrust in. He made her gallop, twist, leap almost like a porpoise. He forced her to turn and mouth at him even as he had lashed with his open hand. He was an animal, bestial – she now knew how bestial – and made her bleed.

  He was beautiful. Her skin was sore, for he’d shoved her along the bed. The words he’d made her come out with! She felt subjected, humbled, ashamed – except his shaming proved the route to an emotional flight she had never experienced.

  She wondered what his animal sign was. Would that girl know, the one whose genius with ghosts would bring in limitless wealth?

  Tentatively, she touched his face. His eyes flickered open. He smiled – such a smile! She thought of her husband and felt only contempt. Had HC ever created such passionate soaring bliss? Never.

  “Thinking, Linda darling?” Santiago said.

  “My husband,” she said simply. Best to be frank. “He is hopeless. I would h
ave been a Los Angeles millionairess by now if it wasn’t for him.”

  He lifted the sheet aside, exposing her breasts and body as far as her waist, eyeing the flesh, his gaze moving slowly over her skin until she almost began to feel, actually feel, his sight touching. It was a sight caress, an almost incendiary heat of a gaze. The stare slowed halted at her nipples. They tingled.

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “More what didn’t he do!” she cried, wondering if it was time perhaps to stroke him. Or had he something different in mind?

  “What didn’t he do, Linda darling?”

  This man loved women. His sympathy showed. She wished she had shaped herself more, kept in trim, show how splendid she could look given the right clothes, the correct amount of money.

  “Tell me, bitch,” he said lazily.

  She was thrilled. There was that English film star Deborah Something, wasn’t there, living with a movie director who, rumour told, ordered her about in terms of abuse. He called her “Cunt” even when they had company. “Come here, Cunt,” he’d say, “Bring me a drink, Cunt!” And when Linda asked the reliable friend who’d reported this, “What on earth does she say? Isn’t she offended?” The friend replied, “She loved it!” Linda understood. She now felt she belonged to someone who knew love from bestiality to romance. Were they the same thing, merely differing words for passion?

  She decided to tell him, this lovely Santiago whose iron muscles and inflexible desire had shown her where she must go.

  “I have a perfect betting system,” she told him. There, it was out.

  “What happened?” He licked his lips, eyes into hers. She shivered.

  “HC won’t listen.”

  “Doesn’t he understand figures?”

  She wouldn’t have him making excuses for that dumbo.

  “Understand figures?” she cried, shivering again as he licked her nipple. “Boss of an investment company? He’s supposed to know figures!”

  “Some people don’t, Linda darling.”