The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  He was an able man for all that and looked the part. His assistants Jane Kelvedon and William Barr worked with him and had done well so far. Only trivial matters, but law was law and principles remained inflexible whatever the worth of the issue. Jane, the brighter of the two, lived with a younger sister who “taught the flute to sailors”, as the South China Morning Post once blithely reported, ha-ha, so unless she stopped all that would have to go. Money didn’t matter much; law did. These two knew this. It held the key to defining criteria for what decisions remained.

  “Mr Min,” Gresham said, smiling, shaking the beaming man’s hand. “And Mr Wong! So good to see you!”

  “Kind of you to receive us at such short notice, Sir Robert.”

  Trust Hong Kong, Gresham thought with pleasure. Other nations could never get the hang of titles, but even Hong Kong beggars and hawkers got them right every time. He’d been called Sir Gresham, Lord Gresh, anything in the Middle East, bloody Yanks the worst and most uncomprehending of the lot. Good old Hong Kong. He began the joust immediately.

  “We have perused the documents, Mr Min. There are a few points that puzzle us.”

  Ah Min spread his palms. “And we too!”

  His beam was inflexible. Gresham guessed it stood for astonishment and dismay as well as a how-de-do. He would have to work it out, light on his toes with this man. Was he too a lawyer? Gresham glanced at Jane who smiled, getting the query and nodding yes, she’d looked him up. He guessed the man had a degree in law from Peking. He’d have heard if it was Sun Yat Sen University in Canton.

  “What points puzzle you, Mr Min?”

  The old man who called himself Wong did not smile. Features with the skin of an ochre-coloured prune, he simply listened. Could he speak English well? At all? Gresham had had no warning. He glanced at William who shook his head. No data on this man. Oh dear, Gresham thought, it was one of those, was it; no information, so the man could be anyone and up to anything. Was he at least registered in Hong Kong as a citizen, with a Hong Kong identity card under any name at all?

  William shook his head. Was that a no, or a dunno? William irritated Gresham. William Barr supported Liberal Democrats back home. Liberal Democrats were wet wallpaper trying to be Rembrandts, and their leader, that sandy git from Fife, was an itch hoping for a scratch. British politics were the pits.

  “How could the documents have remained in storage so long without decay, Sir Robert?” Mr Min said, beaming still.

  “The same thought occurred to us. To me,” Gresham amended immediately. Careless.

  Mr Min took up the litany. “One only has to see books and calligraphics on the street markets – where the trams turn, what, left is it? Before they reach Western Market, I mean – to see how Hong Kong’s vile humidity treats documents stored without air-conditioning!”

  “Indeed,” Gresham said, feeling slightly sickened. “What else puzzles you, Mr Min?”

  “The significance of Kellett Island, Sir Robert.”

  “Significance,” Gresham stated, leaning back in his chair and wishing the office were better appointed.

  You could be too spartan in colonial circumstances, but that was the effect of this Governor. Ridiculous of the man to clean his family’s own shoes of an evening, stupid bastard. Didn’t he know he was letting the side down? As bad as washing your own car. A dreadful appointment, quite dreadful. What on earth the Prime Minster thought he was up to putting the silly sod into this slot, God alone knew. Okay, losing his seat at the general election in sacrifice to the Conservative Party was one thing, but the common sense and practicalities ruling this last-remaining colony imposed dictates of their own. This Governor would blubber like a tart at the Handover ceremony, he guessed. Government staff were already taking odds of 3-1 that he’d do exactly that. “I too wondered about significance,” he said, ball in their court.

  “The size of it, for one thing,” he went on when neither spoke. “The fact that the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club has owned it for so long. And the proximity of the Admiralty, the Police Officers’ Club, the Typhoon Shelter at Causeway Bay …”

  Mr Min’s beam was inflexible, like a neon lamp irritatingly left burning during a fuel shortage. Maddening but unavoidable.

  The old man said nothing sitting there in his cheong saam, the material draped across his knees and his leather shoes black and dulled. Gresham wondered what he wore underneath. Quite like a priest’s cassock.

  “The Harbour Tunnel from underneath Salisbury Road in Kowloon,” Gresham said, thinking, cut to the fucking chase, man, for Christ’s sake, or we’ll be here all day.

  “Ah, yes. That too. It seems the area to be considered is far larger than the present extent of Kellett Island would suggest, Sir Robert.”

  “Does it, Mr Min?”

  “I am as uncertain as your good self, Sir Robert. The implications are difficult to define.”

  “But if they were precisely delineated, Mr Min, I should hope for an effective compromise, or at least the start of negotiations.”

  “That too seems possible, Sir Robert. Or would be, in different circumstances.”

  Here we go, Gresham thought miserably. We’ve already lost and the swine is still playing catchee-mousee. He was heartily sick of this job. His brother was retired in Stourbridge learning watercolour painting Tuesdays and Thursdays, had a fine handsome woman on the sly for afters. Guess who’d live longer.

  “Different circumstances, Mr Min?” he put in, more to complete the taped recording than any hope of deflecting this beaming bastard’s next move.

  The palms spread again. “The Lease expires soon, when Hong Kong will return to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China. So little time left! Negotiations often proceed at snail’s pace, far too slow for the issue to be resolved in session after session.”

  “Do you have a suggestion, Mr Min?”

  The old man’s silence was getting on Gresham’s nerves. Very soon he would commit the unforgivable and speak to him outright. The thought made him almost redden with embarrassment, but mercifully he’d eliminated that silly tendency in his first month as a diplomat. Twenty years on, it was a non-starter.

  “I was hoping that perhaps you, Sir Robert, might make some proposal leading to a solution, of a kind. Without wanting to prejudice your case, of course.”

  The two smiled benignly at each other, the issue settled. Gresham tried to match the visitor’s radiant beam but couldn’t come anywhere near. They rose together and shook hands.

  The visitors left immediately and without another word.

  An hour later, Gresham was ushered in to see the Deputy Governor. He flung his file down on the mahogany desk and dropped into the leather armchair.

  “Well?” the Deputy Governor growled.

  “The transcording’s in your outer office being put to type, sir. The buggers won’t move. They know the implications. If we don’t deal immediately, they’ll let the cat out of the bag. China’s probably already got wind of it. The consequences…”

  “I know the consequences, Bob. Don’t give me consequences. What will they settle for?”

  “Par value, plus rental from somewhere near 1844, give or take. They’d be mad to take less. They probably know what Great Smith Street’s found.”

  “Hmph.” The Deputy Governor stared at his desk. “Better get down to nuts and bolts, then. Make a show, cut them in on the costs as a rental allocation. You know how to make do. The usual American dollar accounts elsewhere. Is it knighthood time?”

  “No, sir. That would be a stigma, seeing who’s going to come marching down Waterloo Road.”

  “Right, right.”

  They went to tea to discuss the least they could get away with.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  She tried reading the financial news from Japan and the United States, but politics got everywhere. Instead, she spent her break at the Peak Tram Terminus, Western tourists and sightseers from mainland China thronging the sloping queue. She looked enviousl
y on. One day, she would ride it to the Peak, and there have a wondrous supper among flowers and music in the cool. She had seen an advert for the restaurant there, while waiting for yet another re-run of The Great Waltz in the original 1938 scratchy-voice version Hong Kong could never get enough of.

  The heat enveloped her. She listened to a chanting crocodile of Glenealy School children coming from some celebration at St John’s Cathedral opposite. It melted her heart to hear the little ones singing. How she’d wanted to be one of them! She felt like weeping for no reason. She leant back against the pedestrian rails. She was sitting on the top step of the concrete flight leading down to the gardens. Here, brides and their grooms came to be photographed in their finery. Their favourite places were the Tea Museum and the doorway of St John’s Cathedral. Sometimes a cascade of several brides, all in bridal gowns and folderols, were visible above the carp pools in the steep vegetation, a lovely sight. She dozed, and in spite of only having half-an-hour that nagging voice screeched in her ear.

  “What choosing?” Grandmother sounded fretful, but when wasn’t she? KwayFay was in no mood to listen. She wished, not for the first time, that she could dream like English folk, and wake up knowing it was nothing to be concerned about. Instead, Chinese knew that dreams were fact, ignore them at your peril. No wonder English people were so calm. Americans were calm because they were all millionaires, the English because they ignored dreams.

  “Calm?” Ghost screamed with laughter. “They are so busy being Hero-Country folk – Ying-wok people – they have no time left for real dreaming. It isn’t sensible, silly granddaughter!”

  “No, Grandmother,” KwayFay whimpered.

  “Tell now: what choosing?”

  “I don’t know yet, Grandmother. I thought I had already done it at Lamma Island. Remember? I told you.”

  “Easy!” Grandmother said with derision. Then, full of tricks, said casually, “Did you learn the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, in full?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “Oh.” Ghost was disappointed! “And Hakka funeral ceremony?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.” KwayFay said it with pride, wishing she could have spoken the English command for dismissal; she had heard it once. A visiting London dealer had said, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jim!” A brilliant remark, full of power. She had wanted to say it to somebody ever since.

  “In full?” More dejection! KwayFay was even more pleased.

  “In full, Grandmother.” The time she had spent in the Hong Kong Library at City Hall excavating the myriad details! She had been exhausted for two days afterwards. That was ghosts for you.

  “This choosing. Tell.”

  “I think it is choosing girls for something.”

  Grandmother shrieked a laugh.

  “Then you must pretend it is Moon Festival. Go to Amah Rock tonight.”

  KwayFay wailed, “I shall be frightened, up there alone, Grandmother!”

  Two passersby saw the dozing girl twitching and tutted, guessing she was yet another young person drugged in broad daylight.

  A car honked and KwayFay woke, startled to find herself near Cotton Tree Drive, looking across at the Peak Tram Terminus. She saw the time, and got up and ran to work.

  Soon after five – the day hell, with Business Head ranting and, Alice said, “going into one” – KwayFay caught a taxi. It was only a phrase she had picked up from her disastrous brother, meaning a fit of weeping or berserk distress. KwayFay never believed Alice’s tales; her friend was death on Futures and With-holds. Alice’s help was always trouble.

  On the way, she glimpsed a horrendous accident. A heavy Mercedes Benz motor crushed a small child against the wall of a narrow street. The contour roads above Central District were notoriously meandering, the edges being simply stone walls in some places. The child had been standing on a skate-board, and was rubbed, simply rubbed slowly against the stones by the huge car. His arm hung in a mess of blood from his shoulder. The driver of the splendid motor got out and harangued the mother, then angrily drove away. He made no attempt to give money, or telephone for help.

  “Did you see that?” KwayFay exclaimed to the taxi driver. “We should stop and help!”

  “He is a Business Head, and a diplomat.”

  “The man is Chinese!”

  “So?” The taxi driver shrugged, and would not stop, simply drove on along Bowen Road. “He can’t be touched. Diplomats can do anything.” He lit a cigarette one-handed. “You think they pay parking fines? Or debts? Or get themselves arrested when they batter prostitutes in Causeway Bay and Nathan Road?”

  “Yes!” she cried, because she did. Police arrested people. They’d arrested her when a child for stealing three plums from a hawker’s barrow.

  “You’re wrong. He will already have forgotten it happened.”

  Dismayed, she heard out the taxi driver’s litany of complaints against wanton diplomats, and alighted in a mood of dejection. She tried to put the incident out of her mind, but it kept recurring. She wondered if Old Man’s captors had the power to punish the man in the big motor, who had shown more concern for his car’s radiator than the unconscious child.

  The hillside was steeper than she remembered. She was tempted to stay with the taxi and return to Central, but she had come too far. And what would she tell Grandmother?

  The taxi meant more expense and less food. She started the climb towards Wang Nai Chung Gap, site of the Amah Rock. Once before, she had come with some other street children, for one of them had been ill with blood-spitting disease and they went to ask Amah Rock to make her well, but their little accomplice had sunk into torpor and was taken away. Her name was Ah Geen. She too had been eight, the age KwayFay guessed for herself. One day, she might try to find out if the Rutonjee Sanatorium had given spindly little Ah Geen charity medicine and made her better. She might have got to America and married one of the Warner Brothers! It did happen, in movies.

  The climb was two-and-a-half miles, but she was too frightened of the consequences to turn back. The taxi man had wanted paying off, and she’d not had enough money to tell him to wait, so she was on her own. She had the necessary provinder, to pretend Ghost’s silliness about the Moon Festival, so far away in the year it was ludicrous to be doing this. She took off her valuable shoes and walked in her bare feet.

  The path ran from the back of what was once the Military Hospital but was now Island School, with bits let off to charities and other daftnesses, and ascended the central peak of Hong Kong. She struck over a small bridge across the deep ravine, unnerved at being so far from anyone. You were never farther than, say, three paces from a hundred folk. Now, here she was climbing away from civilisation among the lantana bushes she loved – always there, always trying to flower with their yellows, oranges, pinks, reds, and their green leaves. So loyal, she felt they sometimes might deserve a god of their own. She halted for breath, worrying that the lantana bushes might actually have such a thing, and mentally apologised in case some god was already frowning at her impertinence.

  The water below formed a lovely waterfall. She gazed, not going on until she felt it had been shown the right degree of respect, for she had heard its sound was full of music. She tried listening, but no music came, only the delicious sound of splashing clean water. Maybe that was the music? She smiled at the fantastic idea and walked on.

  Eventually the track narrowed, becoming nothing more than a slender path, ever steeper, until she could only progress by clutching the overhanging foliage. Disturbed clouds of butterflies rose, mostly little yellowish creatures. Why was none of them down in Pedder Street or Sai Ying Pun, where free colour was needed? The ground became slippery and craggy as if the powdered laterite was trying to revert to the hard stone outcrops from which it originated. She was breathing hard by the time she came to a huge stony crag, surmounted by a hunched stone figure. It looked quite like one of those English guardsmen the London poster showed in Kai Tak Airport, but as she approached it she could t
ell it was a woman, a baby on her back.

  This was Amah Rock.

  She climbed the steps and sank with relief onto the stone seat. It was worn by former visitors, traditionally young lovers swearing fidelity in betrothal. The rock, so like a young fisherwoman carrying her babe slung in a binding cloth, was famed throughout the Colony.

  Its story was that the woman’s husband, a fisherman centuries before the English came with their Raj, had been lost at sea. As days passed, fearing for his safety, she climbed this sacred place to keep watch for his vessel. It did not come. Fiercely loyal, she remained there, kept by her devotion until she turned to stone. The Immortals pitied her, for they knew he had been lost in a Dai-Fung on the ocean. They lifted her soul and that of her baby into the heavens, where she was reunited with her drowned husband, to live among the Immortals for ever. KwayFay’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed at the stone, imagining how the fisherwife’s soul had been encouraged from her dead form, and how the baby’s soul too had been teased carefully out of the granite by the Immortals to fly into the stars to eternal joy. No wonder Amah Rock was the place for the Wedding Walk, the stroll of Hong Kong’s betrothed.

  She sat in the shelter of the rock slanting above her stone seat. Three cracked earthenware bowls held the stumps of many burned incense sticks and scraps of Spirit Flags – paper bearing pious characters wishing for fidelity and progeny in generations to come.

  From the gathering dusk she guessed it was eight o’clock. She decided to make her preparations first, then rest until it was time to do her ritual, which would give her the answer to the Triad people. For a moment she wondered why she never had any doubt this would happen just as Grandmother said, but she quickly put the thought from her. There could be no doubt. Doubt was for people, certainty for ghosts.

  Perhaps this was tonight’s lesson, the realisation that people had lost the art of sorrow, in their rush to gratification? Living was an art, as Grandmother seemed to understand. All the folk KwayFay knew craved instant satisfaction. Tired, she began to prepare for the Harvest Moon.