Marker arrived at the Quarry Bay flat with a bottle of wine in one hand, a bouquet of lilies in the other and a packet of condoms in his pocket. The latter two made him feel about seventeen years old, which was not an age he looked back on with any great fondness.
Rosalie’s eyes lit up when she saw the flowers, and as she stretched up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek he smelt the familiar perfume. ‘Come through,’ she said, leading the way. She was wearing a sleeveless dress in deep indigo, and her long black hair danced on her back as she walked. It was the first time he had seen it down for three years.
The savoury-sweet smell of oriental food was coming from the kitchen. The living room seemed unchanged, though perhaps the TV was new. The pale-grey futons, the carved wooden table and the neat bookcase all looked the same; the large Chinese watercolour and the Turner print still faced each other across the room. On the one side tranquil trees and pool, on the other a raging sea squall. He remembered thinking that they represented the two sides of her heritage, staring at each other in bemusement.
‘Go out on the balcony,’ she called from the kitchen. ‘I’ll bring the wine.’
He went out through the sliding glass doors and leaned against the balustrade. A mile to the north the airport runway ended in mid-bay; two miles to the west the building blocks of Kowloon started rising towards the New Territories. The sky was overcast, but who needed stars when humankind had supplied its own thousand points of light? All those lives, he thought. All those worries and moments of pain. All that contentment, all the moments of joy.
He sounded like his father on Shakespeare.
He heard her footfall and turned to find her smiling at him, a glass of wine in either hand. He took one, then the other, placed both on the balcony table and turned back towards her. With what seemed perfect timing their arms moved to encircle each other, and their lips met in a gentle, unhurried kiss.
‘I wanted to do that three years ago,’ he said.
She looked in his eyes, as if she was searching them for truth.
He smiled and they kissed again, harder this time, and longer, leaving each other breathless. Her nipples were pressing against the dress, and he lightly brushed one with the palm of his hand.
She ran the palm of hers against the swelling in his trousers.
‘Dinner will keep,’ she said softly, before taking his hand and leading him back into the flat.
9
Marker shared the early-morning ride back to Stonecutters’ Island with about a dozen Marines in varying states of dissipation. Friday night furloughs in Hong Kong obviously hadn’t changed that much – if the drink didn’t get you then something else would.
It was a beautiful morning. The day’s blanket of wet heat had not yet fallen across the city, and the air was clear and almost cool. He could still see her face at the door as he left, feel the last kiss on his lips. I’m in love, he thought.
An adjutant let him into the CO’s office with ten minutes to spare before the expected call from Colhoun. He sat in the swivel chair, gently turning to and fro, mulling over the previous night. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so good about making love with someone. It had seemed so easy, so natural.
As if they were made for each other, he thought, wincing at the cliché. But it really had felt like that. Like he had finally come home . . .
The phone rang, startling him out of his reverie.
Marker knew the news was bad from Colhoun’s tone.
‘I’ve been getting nothing but red lights all day,’ the CO confirmed. ‘The MoD’s sympathetic in theory, but no one’s willing to put a head above the parapet. The FO’s South-East Asia people are keen to see progress with the anti-piracy campaign, but they don’t have much of a say any more. The Hong Kong people almost had a fit when I just hinted at the possibility of action in Chinese waters. It looks like our only hope is the Intelligence network, so I’m seeing a couple of people in London this evening. If we can get an OK from the Joint Intelligence Committee, then no one else need know. But I’m not optimistic.’
Marker sighed. ‘So you’ll call again tonight?’
‘As soon as I know anything. You and the lads can have a day off. Enjoy the sights.’
‘OK, boss.’ Marker hung up. He didn’t want to think about an immediate recall – not now.
Given the news of their free day by Marker over breakfast, the three other members of the team took the launch across to Kowloon, walked through to the bottom of Nathan Road together, and then went their separate ways. Cafell walked south and turned left on to Salisbury Road, looking for the New World Shopping Centre Mall, which, according to Marker, housed the Chinese Arts and Crafts Bazaar. He found it without difficulty, and spent half an hour browsing through the paintings, seal carvings, calligraphy and dolls, wondering what Ellen would like best.
She would prefer materials to the finished goods, he decided. Some different papers, a set of watercolours, calligraphy pens and inks. Another half hour and he had gathered together a traditional Chinese arts DIY kit of awesome proportions. It cost him most of a week’s wages, but then there hadn’t been many places to spend money on the Ocean Carousel. And he was pretty certain she would love it.
Leaving the air-conditioned bazaar for the steam bath outside was a traumatic experience, but the view from the Waterfront Promenade was almost worth it. Cafell walked slowly east, dodging joggers with sweat-banded foreheads and the occasional roller-blade enthusiast. To his right the waters of the harbour played host to moving boats of every known type and size, and the non-stop wailing of horns, bells and what sounded suspiciously like gongs floated across the water like a maritime symphony. On the other side of the harbour the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Central and Wan Chai clustered beneath the grey-green haze of Victoria Peak.
He found a seat and let his eyes feast on the scene. Almost out of sight behind the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, he could just make out the abandoned buildings of HMS Tamar, where his father had been stationed in the fifties. His father, who had served in the Navy for over thirty years and never seen action.
The SBS was not like anything else, Cafell thought. Except perhaps the SAS. Barring another Falklands, the members of these two units were the only British military personnel who were likely to see action in the old sense of the word. He supposed the poor bastards on secondment to the UN in Bosnia were seeing action of a sort, but then so were the rows of ducks in a fairground shooting gallery. And all of the UN jobs which came the Navy’s way were pretty low-risk affairs.
No, he had to face it – the SBS was about the only way for a sailor or Marine to get killed these days. Looking back on it, he still thought it some kind of a miracle that none of them had died in Haiti the previous summer.
He had nothing to prove at any rate, not to himself or anyone else. He had been brave or stupid enough – and he didn’t think he would ever know which – to take the sort of risks which a married man and a father ought not to take voluntarily. He wasn’t hooked on danger, wasn’t interested in it for its own sake. And there were other places to indulge a love of the sea than in the SBS.
It would soon be time to move on, he thought.
Since this was his first trip to Hong Kong, Finn did what most tourists do, and took a trip on the Star Ferry. From the island terminal he wandered up Harbour View Street, watching the activity around the piers, and then turned left up the hill with the vague notion of finding the Peak railway. Hollywood Road looked interesting, so he turned left again, and strolled slowly along, looking in the shop windows and watching the women walk by. There were some real beauties, he decided.
The one he had paid for on the previous evening had been a disappointment. He wasn’t at all sure why, but he had expected more from a Chinese woman. Maybe it was a combination of the slit dresses and coy faces, but he had been looking forward to something really exotic. The woman had been good-looking enough, even when the booze wore off, but there had been nothing special about the way she fucke
d. The most exotic thing about her had been the abacus she used to tot up her services.
He wondered if the phrase ‘missionary position’ had been invented by disappointed missionaries in China, and then remembered Ingrid Bergman in Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Finn sighed out loud. One of these days he had to visit Sweden.
On leaving the others Dubery had walked north up Nathan Road. Reaching Temple Street, he thought he recognized the brothel, but a busy market filled the roadway and it was hard to tell one building from another. Not that it really mattered – he didn’t want to go in, he just wanted to see her again, fully clothed, looking normal. If he could see her as a human being, and not as the sad eyes and glistening naked body which haunted his daydreams, then perhaps he could start to pull himself together.
He had finally phoned Helen that morning, and she had picked up the difference in his voice, as he had known she would. She had kept asking if he was OK – she knew something had happened.
He had dropped hints of a close escape at work, and felt even more guilty when she flooded him with sympathy.
A car horn suddenly blazed in his ear, and he realized he had stopped in the middle of the street. A Chinese man leaned out of the window, showing gold teeth as he shouted, and Dubery was engulfed in thick black exhaust smoke.
This is ridiculous, he thought. One more walk down the street and he would head back down Nathan Road. At least the girl had made him wear a condom, or God only knew what he might have taken home. And then he would have had to own up . . .
He knew he could never tell her, and his heart sank at the thought of this secret which would always be between them.
Soon after breakfast on Saturday morning Colhoun finally reached the end of the road. He had a less than perfect idea of how far up the chain of government his request had gone, but a Foreign Office Junior Minister named Manning had somehow ended up with the task of making the refusal official.
‘We’ve considered your proposal very carefully,’ Manning told him, with about as much sincerity as a spokesman for the Bosnian Serbs. ‘But, as I’m sure you can understand, this is a particularly sensitive moment in Sino-British relations, and we simply can’t afford to put at risk all the diplomatic efforts of the last few years. It wouldn’t be fair to the people of Hong Kong.’
You bastard, Colhoun thought.
The unctuous voice rolled on. ‘And your boys seem to have already done a great job. Now that we are aware of the people who are responsible, I’m sure all the interested parties can do more on the preventive side. Re-routing of ships, more armed guards and deck lighting, a tighter watch on cargo information – you know the sort of thing.’
The bastard had done his homework. Colhoun wanted to argue that ships using Hong Kong had no choice but to pass through Chinese waters, that reams of official advice on how to deter and deal with piracy had already been issued, but he knew there was no point.
He could recognize a bottom line as well as the next man. There was obviously more money invested in Hong Kong’s stability than there was in the maritime insurance companies.
* * *
It was ten to six in Hong Kong when Marker took the call from London. He stared out across the harbour at the darkening sky as Colhoun gave him the bad news. ‘You’re all due a week’s leave,’ the CO concluded. ‘If you want to take it there I’m sure we can arrange something.’
Marker went for a stroll around the base, feeling both angry and depressed. It seemed as if Cafell and Finn had risked their lives on the Ocean Carousel for nothing. The pirates would make good their losses, regroup, and soon be back in business. He could understand Whitehall’s reasons for not wanting to upset Beijing, but that didn’t mean he agreed with them. The future of Hong Kong’s people was worth considering, but he refused to accept that there should be a safe haven anywhere on earth for people who murdered an entire ship’s crew.
He stopped at the edge of the dock and sat down with his back against a bollard, knowing that the end of the operation was not the real reason for his sense of frustration. One week’s leave and he would be on his way back to England. In the meantime he and Rosalie would be forced into decisions that he didn’t think either of them were ready for.
He knew she was fond of him, and the previous night there had been a passion in her eyes and her physical responses which seemed to indicate a great deal more. But loneliness could confuse anyone’s feelings, and he knew she had been lonely.
He thought he was certain of how he felt about her, but he had been just as sure about someone else. Sitting on the edge of the dock, watching the lights across the harbour sharpen against the gathering darkness, he could still remember feeling that Penny was the only woman he could ever really love. And after the first time it was never quite the same. He was too old to pretend that one love was more real than another; he couldn’t do what some of his friends had done, and rewrite his own history to keep the myth of a ‘one and only’ alive.
Still, one thing at least seemed clear. With the Communist take-over on the horizon there was no chance of him living in Hong Kong. So would she come to England? He realized with surprise that they had hardly talked about what she intended to do in 1997. And he had to admit, he found it hard to imagine her anywhere else.
It was fully dark now, the waters of the harbour awash with their nightly carpet of neon reflections. In an hour he was supposed to be meeting her.
He strode back to the barracks, showered, changed, and left a message for Cafell and the others containing the gist of his conversation with the CO. He told them he would be staying another week, and that the three of them should each decide when they wanted to return to England, and get Fergie to book them flights accordingly. Cafell and Dubery would be on the first plane, he guessed, eager to see their better halves. Finn would probably stay around for a week of tourism and debauchery, though not necessarily in that order.
Marker took the launch across to Kowloon, and as the wall of lights loomed above the approaching quays he found himself wondering how anyone would willingly exchange this for the suburban delights of downtown Poole.
She was waiting for him in the Horse and Groom, sitting at the same table, one glass into a bottle of Merlot. There seemed no trace of reserve or inner retreat in the warmth of her greeting, but it soon became apparent that there was a remarkable shortage of conversation topics which didn’t touch on the future, and she seemed every bit as anxious to avoid talking about that as he did.
She suggested a film, and he readily agreed. Zhang Yimou’s most recent was showing at the Cine Art House in Wan Chai, and for almost three hours they watched a brilliant but profoundly depressing story of urban punks in the new get-rich-quick China. Marker found it hard to imagine why anyone would want to stay and share in such a future, but then he remembered all the friends of his parents who had sworn to leave England if the Tories won again in 1983. And again in 1987. And yet again in 1992. They were all still there. Home was home, even with the enemy in power.
On the subway train home their conversation about the film inevitably edged towards a discussion of the future – China’s, Hong Kong’s, hers and theirs. ‘Let’s not talk about it, not tonight,’ she said, as they ascended the escalator at Quarry Bay.
‘Suits me,’ he said, pulling her towards him.
They kissed their way up in the high-rise lift, and once inside her apartment left a trail of clothes from the front door. He pulled her towards the bedroom; she pulled him harder towards the shower cubicle. They lathered each other with soap, and kissed some more as the streaming water rinsed it away. She put her arms round his neck, let him lift her up by the buttocks, braced her feet against the wall behind him, and felt him slide inside her.
About ten miles to the south-west, on the bridge of the twelve-thousand-ton dry-cargo liner Indian Sun, Captain Giuseppe Berti drained the last drop of brandy from his glass, stretched his shoulders and yawned. Through the window he could see the three giant derricks amidships, and beyond
them the white forestay light of a ship lying at anchor. Off the port bow, some two miles away across the black water, the hilly outline of Lamma Island was just about visible against a starless sky.
With a dawn start in prospect it was time for bed. About half the twenty-seven-man crew was already on board, and the rest would be arriving over the next couple of hours. In years gone by Berti had worried about last-minute no-shows, dreading the prospect of having to sail without a full complement, but all of his current crew had proved their trustworthiness through more than a year of round trips, and if half of them were willing to shell out the cost of a water taxi so that they could enjoy one last evening on the town then he had no objections. After all, for the next four weeks their only excitement would come courtesy of the ship’s VCR.
He yawned again, but didn’t move away from the bridge window. The sense of excitement which accompanied a new voyage had grown dimmer over the years, but it was still there, lurking in the corners of his mind like a reluctant smile. Four weeks of a routine that he knew off by heart, four Sampdoria results which he would hear through the crackle and hiss of the BBC World Service.
He was not looking forward to their passage through the Singapore Straits and Phillip Channel, even in daylight. Tomorrow, once they were underway and clear of the coastal islands, he would discuss the drill with his officers and then talk to the rest of the crew.
And, speaking of the devil – as the English would say – he could hear the drone of an approaching water taxi. Or even two.
Berti strode across to a side window and looked down. There were three speedboats bobbing in the water off the port bow, and several uniformed men were already ascending the lowered stairway. The flag of the People’s Republic was fluttering in the stern of each boat.
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