The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  Not a cent, this KwayFay had spent. The boss had decided that would be wrong. If the master said something was wrong and there really wasn’t anything wrong at all, it was down to Tang to prove Tiger Wong right, that there really was something wrong but it was concealed, so proving the boss was right. Folk who assumed otherwise were simply too dim to get it. Therefore those others were traitors. Which was why Tiger Wong was Triad master and others were not.

  Easy way, hard way.

  Tang had three men hanging about down on the road. He’d told them to wait by the little café shop where the fat woman slept every night. What they did while down there where she slept was their own business. He’d told them that, but remember no noise. Too much silence on that road, so no disturbances. The road was in sight, darkness or no, of the Hong Kong Coast Guard station at Green Island, across Sulphur Channel. They had telescopes, spent their useless time staring into the dark. Who knew what they saw? They were Government, had uniforms to prove it, and could blank off the whole of Mount Davis in a minute, police swarming everywhere. So no noise. No blood, either. Fuck the fat woman or whatever, but in silence.

  See Little Sister spends much money. Rule for the morning. A woman who didn’t spend? Impossible!

  He checked the time, one hour before dawn. He would have felt tired, even sleepy, if he’d have allowed himself. He thought with wry pleasure of the man who’d had to die down in that godown, Mister David the big shot. Tiger Wong, having changed his name on account of some spirit this girl knew about, hence all the fuss – Tiger Wong had visited, and spoken with the two men who’d killed the carpet shop man. Tang vaguely wondered what the man had done.

  Up the hillside somebody coughed, hawked phlegm up from a bubbling chest. Pollution was what made folk cough so much in Hong Kong, doctors said, but Tang thought doctors must be ignorant people, for everybody knew that Hong Kong people had cancers in the throat. In some it didn’t grow, if you were lucky.

  He hoped he hadn’t got fast-growing cancer in his throat.

  Morning must be here soon, for he heard more stirrings from the squatter shacks encrusting the hillside. He heard people clack down in their plastic sandals to the stand pipes, lazy bastards only going now instead of having gone the night before to bring water from the roadside. That would be a signal to his three men, who must be farting themselves awake and wanting something to eat. He wondered if they’d used the fat woman.

  His problem was this girl. How to make her spend? He must report success to Business Head Tiger Wong. He considered the problem without the slightest anxiety. It would have to be so. Failure was out of the question.

  Easy way, hard way.

  KwayFay heard the first shiftings of life on the mountain, the squish of water and the sound of coughing and spitting, the rushing clatter of folk suddenly discovering they could successfully imagine they were late. She stirred, opened her eyes. The shack was dimly lit by the first daylight, just black shadows and slight pallor. She had worried for some reason during the night that Ghost Grandmother was going to ask her something tonight, but couldn’t remember. She might remember later, with luck. She reached across and made a sign to the Kitchen God, seeing with relief that the little red light, one Hong Kong dollar for a battery that would last two months, still glowed protectively. Cheap.

  She felt for her handbag, and found it exactly where she’d placed it under her pillow, exactly at the correct angle. If only she could use some of the money inside, how marvellous life would be! She was so hungry. She had eight dollars of her own left, enough for a bowl down Causeway Bay. She might walk to Sai Ying Pun and catch the tram, save a few cents, see if there was cheap rice on the stall outside the Singing Bird Café where the old men brought their cage birds to compete. She felt like going there today. They bet on which bird sang most beautifully. She might try a gamble, bet a dollar on which singing bird would win. Her heart always over-ruled her common sense, though. She decided to back the tiniest bird, from sympathy. Invariably, they lost.

  In half an hour she was up and out, dressed in what she hoped didn’t look her only set of clothes, and was walking towards Sai Ying Pun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Linda Ho waited until she saw KwayFay leave. The girl came walking down the mountain track plain as day, quite unashamed at having to catch a bus! Like any ordinary labourer!

  Her lip curled. KwayFay was supposed to be unique, according to HC, able to manipulate the future. Could this really be so? Tai-Tai Ho examined the girl’s moving figure with mistrust.

  Foretelling events was an aspect of gambling that always troubled Linda. She watched the girl, thinking over the problem with anxiety. If KwayFay, she with the pretty curves and wearing the ugliest dress (surely the cheapest) in Hong Kong, repeat if she knew so much about the future, then why was she dressed in tatty scrubber’s clothes? Superb talents should serve gambling, in which case the bitch should have gone straight to Happy Valley or the new racecourse at Sha-Tin Heights, maybe borrow a few dollars for the first race, then double and treble in compound growth …

  She heard herself moan, not in envy at the pretty bitch in her shoddy attire, but at the thought of bookmakers’ wealth funnelling into her own handbag. She worked it out with lightning speed: Lay, say, a bet of a hundred dollars to win at, say, eight-to-five against, then an any-back and American Twist on a nine-to-two non-favourite, a combo on the third…

  The bus came. KwayFay climbed aboard. Linda watched the girl’s figure tense her clothes and grudgingly scored her a decent seven out of ten. All right, then, eight. Her legs weren’t the bulbous bowed calves you saw among Cantonese girls, now they had nothing to do except sit powdering their faces while they watched stocks and shares changing colours and numbers on a TV screen. They got paid far too much money for doing nothing.

  The girl carried a laptop slung over her shoulder. Ha! So she was a thief, had stolen one of HC’s computers! She must pay!

  The bus pulled away. Linda was glad she could alight at last. She left the car, and started to climb the path towards the shacks. In only a few paces she was sweating and tired. The girl had seemed so brisk, but then of course the conniving bitch had been descending, not going up. Linda had no idea of direction, but the footpath did not branch until she reached the first shacks.

  An old lady was swaying up the path ahead of her. Linda came slowly upon the figure, which was dressed in the black traditional garb of jacket and trousers with a cane hat. She carried a rough yoke made from an old broom handle, plastic water buckets hanging from each end. She wore plastic sandals, and foolishly carried her pattens of thick wooden blocks tied with their leather loops about her neck. Linda was amazed at the old woman’s stupidity. Fine, to save a few dollars by declining to bribe for a stand pipe of her own on the hillside, but to carry her heavy pattens? It showed how foolish the poor really are, Linda reasoned. They made their own misery, doubtless to earn sympathy from moneyed folk who’d done the decent thing, worked and saved to live a decent independent life instead of being wastrels. The poor slaved cunningly at being poor. Poverty was a trick to con the wealthy.

  The old woman made to enter a shack made of corrugated tin. No doors, no windows, just a box pegged to the hillside by means of pieces of dowel round the edges, presumably to stop the hovel from slipping when torrential rains made the slope a ski-run of mud.

  “Where is KwayFay’s place?” Linda deliberately omitted courtesies.

  The old woman stopped, slowly rotating her whole body, the yoke swinging the buckets so one container slopped.

  “KwayFay gone.”

  “Where does she live?”

  The old woman was Hakka, not Cantonese proper, a “guest family” person, one of those who had come to Hong Kong hundreds of years ago from the interior. They were still a race apart. Linda recognised this with distaste. The woman should be out working on the roads like all the other Hakka women, instead of idling on a hillside. No wonder she had nothing.

  “She live te
n places up.”

  Linda walked on, counting. The shacks were arranged as steeply as if on a staircase. Little children, mostly bare, came to stare. One or two women emerged to see her pass. She wished she cut a rather better figure, but the heat was already unbearable. Her heels were torment. She had deliberately selected shoes to enhance the smallness of her feet.

  Ten? Had the old Hakka woman said ten?

  There was only one hovel there, two steps to the right on a rough area of granite outcropping in front of a box of corrugated iron. Someone, presumably KwayFay, had reinforced the walls with pieces of wood, but the whole structure was already on the tilt. Marks in the powdered laterite showed where the makeshift hovel had moved under its own weight during the rains. One day it would simply slide down, accelerating until it struck the shacks below. That would be another tragedy enabling the South China Morning Post to invent yet more garish headlines. The Colony averaged five or six similar horrors every year, always attended with considerable loss of life.

  Linda knocked to save face, for two women and several children were watching. She made a show of listening, and entered. The door was simply a fold of rusting tin pivoting on wire wound ineptly through two holes.

  She stood as her eyes accustomed to the gloom. One window, with a piece of plastic fastened over the aperture. She looked through. She was unsure whether to let the girl know she had visited, but thought of the evident familiarity of the other people on the hillside. No doubt the old Hakka woman would tell the girl as soon as the bitch arrived back.

  A House God, its red light barely alive, stood by the door. Linda acknowledged its presence to herself, which was all one needed to do to placate an Immortal, unless you were after a special deal. A truckle bed was folded against the tin wall. A bucket stood by, partly filled with water and covered with a small weighted piece of netting against flies, with two small bowls. There was a groove showing where the girl must stand to…to what? Linda stepped across and felt along the top ledge of the metal wall, but there was nothing. KwayFay must store something there. Nobody, not even the dreamy girl in her terrible wrecked shoes and awful shoddy dress, would have been so foolish, inviting thieves to reach in through the window during the night and steal whatever she kept on the smooth ledge.

  So KwayFay was careful. Or merely cunning? Linda cast around, found nothing, then looked out. There stood a suited man, thin, wearing a cross-striped tie of many colours. He wore a trilby, as if from some old-fashioned film, the sort they always showed in Causeway Bay. People still flocked. Linda looked away from the thin man’s flat gaze. She was disturbed, but not overmuch, for her hired car was down on the road almost opposite Green Island and it would be noticed. Her visit was probably known to all the hundred thousand squatter people – that was how many lived here on the hillside. Another tenth of a million here or there was nothing to Hong Kong, carefully miscounted for every Colonial Government Annual Report, to satisfy the China Republic’s arrogance.

  The man had not changed position when she glanced a second time. She let him see her. Taking out her pen and notepad – no gambler was ever without those two essentials, she carefully made a note and tore the page out. She wanted a stone to weigh the paper down. He smoked his cigarette, motionless. She’d never seen anyone except a gambler stand so still, quite like a…well, a hunting bird, she’d have thought if she was of a fanciful turn of mind. Perhaps a money collector for the Triads who allowed the Government’s stand-pipe water system to operate unhindered?

  She folded the paper and slipped it into the corner join of the truckle bed. Another possibility was that he ran a franchise, purchased from the Triads, and was watching over the shacks of those who paid protection money of ten Hong Kong dollars a day. She was sure he hadn’t been there when she’d arrived.

  She had written, KwayFay, I wish to meet you. You will learn something to your advantage. No signature, but she gave her cell phone number. The old woman would provide KwayFay with her description. As long as the silly bitch didn’t ring during supper, or when Linda was meeting the young handsome man, it would be fine. The slut of a girl wouldn’t be able to resist the offer Mrs HC would make, for a little crystal gazing.

  The hill proved difficult going down, with those elegant but inconvenient heels. She drove to the garage off Hennessy Road in Causeway Bay and returned the car, reclaiming her deposit. HC’s plastic card did its wonder, and she was then free to find a taxi near where the trams turned in Wong Nai Chung Road.

  In KwayFay’s shack, the short suited man found the note, pocketed it, and left without trace.

  Linda Ho told the taxi driver she wanted the money place off Granville Road in Kowloon. He almost hesitated, but she tapped the back of his seat angrily. Here was an imperious lady, and she was prepared to make a fuss if he declined.

  Ten minutes later, and he dropped her off behind the Carnarvon Road branch of the Hang Seng Bank, giving her a quizzical look as she alighted and went down Cameron Lane. She entered the first narrow alley to her right. There stood the moneylender’s Santiago had recommended.

  One breath – she never showed fear at vitally important times, knowing all could be lost at the slightest trace of anxiety – and she entered the money house. No sign on the door, none above in garish neon light, just a small white card discreetly placed. As she went in the chill of air conditioning enveloped her, making her shiver at the delicious cool. It seared her lungs. She stood for a moment at the assault on her senses, of the red and gold room in which she found herself.

  The red glow changed slowly in waves, gold flashes seeming to ignite the walls then recede into a dark scarlet. No furniture, everything stark and the colours violent all about. A door opposite stood ajar.

  She crossed. An ordinary counter was there, a gentleman waiting politely for her to approach.

  He greeted her with grace. An old man in formal but antiquated attire, his long slender robe was almost priest-like, the high collar loose about his thin neck. He wore spectacles and managed a few chin hairs. His fingernails were tidily cut, with the exception of those of his little fingers which were prodigiously long, quite a foot in length. A traditionalist, then, one for whom menial labour was anathema.

  “Tai-Tai,” he greeted her gravely.

  “I want to borrow, if you please. I have my husband’s card.”

  “No need, Tai-Tai.” He smiled, his voice a thin reedy sound of a distant flute working against the wind. “You have honoured many previous loans in Hong Kong. We are still proud to serve you.”

  For just an instant, Linda felt a vague disquiet. Still proud? Suggesting a possible change in the offing? She almost bridled but kept control. There was no real cause for worry. Every loss she had suffered – almost all from unfair accidents, unfortunate weather or disastrously incompetent jockeys, unlucky rolls of dice or impossible sequences of cards – every single one had been honoured. She always told HC to pay on the nail, for an unpaid debt was death, literal death. She would be barred from every racecourse, every gaming casino, in all South-East Asia. That would be death.

  “I was recommended to come here by a gentleman I…”

  Was it correct to mention that she’d just met, bumped into, some punter at the horse races, and he, seeing her losses, had told her of this place? Would the old gentleman think her too forward, and refuse her loan?

  “I understand, Tai-Tai,” the old man said. “We allow only the best terms, and are particularly generous when the honoured lady wishes to go on using her profit. There will be no complaint from us.”

  “How kind,” she said. “Yao sam.”

  “Thank you for saying we have heart. Many money-lenders, banks even, are cruel to the point of extortion when a fair-minded lady wishes to increase her capital.” He smiled in silent appeal. “Is it not reasonable to borrow, to increase? To speculate in order to accrue? So great fortunes are won, Tai-Tai. I am only too pleased you have chosen our humble establishment.”

  “I was thinking of a small sum,�
�� she began.

  He demurred, shaking his head.

  “Tai-Tai. If I may, please accept more than you need. Would it not be unthinkable, were you to fail at the last hurdle because you underestimated the extent of your coming success?”

  Those were the very words the young man Santiago had spoken! She remembered them exactly! “The sad thing,” Santiago had said, pocketing his wadge of money, his winnings, “is underestimating your coming success. How many times,” he’d added with a sigh, “have I made that mistake! Each time you fail to trust your instincts, you miss a fortune!” Then he had smiled quite like a film star, and went on, “I don’t make that mistake any more!”

  His very words, now burned into her brain. You fail to trust – so you fail completely! She saw it all so clearly. Lack of confidence had been her real adversary, trust in the life she could have, not merely pennies.

  Look at it another way. Fail to trust your instincts, then you failed in life! If only she’d trusted her instincts, she’d have won a fortune. It was the gambler’s loss, to win small and lose much. But to win a single giant bet was to reclaim all your previous losses! It was so logical! Her reasoning was beautiful in its accuracy.

  “What limits do you set, See-Tau?” she asked, her throat dry.