World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399)

by Mason, Richard

  “Uh?”

  “Police.”

  He pulled out his wallet without removing his eyes from the floor boy, opened it, and tossed it on the desk. There was a cellophane partition inside, and behind it an official printed document. I gazed in astonishment. Ben’s authoritative manner was so convincing that for a moment I was almost taken in, and began to wonder if he was really engaged in some mission quite different from what I had supposed.

  Then I peered at the wallet more closely. The document was his driving license.

  The floor boy, however, gave it only one brief glance. He turned white about the gills.

  “Number Fourteen, sir,” he muttered.

  Ben repocketed the wallet and started down the corridor, followed by myself and the floor boy. The floor boy was dancing and tripping in agitation. In common with the manager and entire staff of the Nam Kok he lived in holy fear of the civil police.

  There was a murmur of voices through the ventilator of the room occupied by Fifi and Hank. An elderly amah with tiny slit eyes and huge prognathous mouth with gold teeth was entering the room that had just been vacated. She wore a blue jacket, black cotton trousers, white socks, and black felt slippers. She carried clean sheets over her arm. She threw the sheets on the bed and closed the door. No. 14 was two doors farther along. Ben raised his knuckles and knocked stoutly.

  “Police.”

  There was an outbreak of whispering inside, followed by sounds of panic-stricken activity. Ben tried the handle. The door was bolted.

  “I’ll give you ten seconds to open up.”

  The floor boy rapped anxiously on the door, holding his head close to the panel and giving agitated exhortations in Cantonese. I had given up all thought of intervening, except as a last expedient in the event of threat to human life. I stood by helplessly, and not without admiration for Ben’s suave performance.

  Ben looked at his watch. “Five seconds to go.”

  The door opened a few inches. Behind the crack stood a young man hitching at his trousers. He was squat and hefty, with broad shoulders, tattooed arms, a chest as furry as a gorilla’s, and a tiny upturned baby’s nose. Despite the nose, he looked a tough customer.

  Ben gave the door a violent kick. It swung back with a crash. Suzie stood by the bed in cotton brassiere and knickers. She was on the point of reaching for her cheongsam on the chair, but the crash of the door sent her scrambling back into the bed. She squatted with the sheet pulled protectively up to her neck. She caught sight of Ben for the first time, as he entered the room with myself and the floor boy behind, and a look of utter astonishment came over her face—a look so comically exaggerated that I could never remember it afterwards without a sputter of laughter. Her eyes, naturally elliptical, became as round as saucers. Her eyebrows rose in prodigious arches. Her jaw dropped. Her mouth fell open. It was straight out of stock—the stock of some ham actor playing melodrama in repertory.

  “Gee,” said the sailor.

  His voice was high and squeaky and soft as butter. It matched the turned-up baby’s nose and not the gorilla chest. It made him suddenly seem quite harmless.

  Ben said, “Get dressed and beat it.”

  “Gee, sir, we ain’t been doing nothing wrong.” He cleared his voice on a falsetto note and felt a bit braver. “I ain’t never heard of no law, sir, that said a feller could come bustin’ in when a feller was—”

  “Beat it.” Ben gave him a confidential wink. “This girl’s been peddling drugs.”

  “Gee!”

  Suzie at last found her voice. She began to scream abuse at Ben, alternating it with indignant outbursts of Chinese at the floor boy. Ben ignored her. He turned to the sailor who was hurriedly finishing his dressing, and asked, “How much did you pay her?”

  “Well, sir, I was on an all-nighter—”

  “How much?”

  “Hundred Hong Kong dollars, sir.”

  “She bloody rooked you.” He took out his wallet and handed the sailor a large pink hundred-dollar note.

  “Don’t you take it!” Suzie screamed. “He lies! He’s not a policeman—he’s my boy friend! You make him get out!”

  The sailor said nervously, “I ain’t gonna get mixed up in nothing. I just wanna keep my nose clean, see, that’s all.”

  “You’re scared!”

  She tried to urge him to battle. The sailor stood grinning uneasily like a huge absurd baby. He scratched the back of his head with one hand, and stared in disbelief at the hundred-dollar note in the other.

  “Gee, sir! I never heard of no American cop giving a feller his money back for a lay.”

  “Hop it.”

  The sailor went off sheepishly, looking at the money and scratching his head. Suzie continued her tirade against Ben. She needed her hands for gesticulating and the sheet had fallen to her knees.

  “What you think I am? Your slave girl? I’m nobody’s slave girl! You got no right to come into this room—my boy friend paid for this room all night!”

  Ben said, “Shut up.”

  “No! You shut up! Get out! Go to hell!”

  Ben advanced towards the bed. He made an unhurried grab at her. Suzie’s spate of invective was interrupted and she struggled violently. She wriggled free and escaped across the bed. Ben leaned over without effort and caught her ankle. He dragged her back across the bed like a lizard by its tail. She looked quite tiny beside Ben’s large looming figure. She kicked and lashed about with her arms. He pinioned her arms, and she twisted her head and dug her teeth into his hand. He forced her head back, his hand dripping blood where she had bitten it, and rolled her onto her face. He leaned over her on his elbow, securing her with his weight under the angle of his arm, and raising his free hand, he began to spank her.

  He spanked her long and hard. Suzie yelled blue murder. The screams must have resounded throughout the Nam Kok. But it was only after it was over, and Suzie lay there crying like a child, that I glanced round and saw the tier of astonished gaping faces in the doorway—the faces of the gold-toothed amah, three sailors, and Fife, Wednesday Lulu, and Gwenny Ching.

  II

  It was an hour later. The three of us were seated in a little restaurant in Hennessy Road that specialized in Pekin food. We had ordered a single plate of pin-pan, a kind of Chinese hors d’oeuvres, most of which Ben had polished off single-handed while Suzie and I, who were neither of us hungry, had sat sipping tea and nibbling at melon seeds.

  Ben said, “I’m not an expert on Chinese cooking. But on the whole I prefer Pekin style to Cantonese.”

  The conversation had also been largely a single-handed effort on Ben’s part. He courteously pretended not to notice Suzie’s sullen lack of response. He was still behaving with perfect aplomb—the skipper who, after carrying out the unpleasant duty of punishing a recalcitrant officer, now considered the offense expiated and the incident closed. Never might the Royal Navy have been prouder of him.

  “More tea?” he asked Suzie, but she shook her head. He glanced with a faint smile at the handkerchief wrapped round his hand where she had bitten him. “That’s going to take a bit of explaining. I’ll just have to keep it covered, and say I got it caught in a door.”

  Suzie glanced at the hand surreptitiously. She looked anxious. Then she remembered that she was still supposed to be sulking; for although she no longer felt like sulking, her pride demanded that she keep it up. And she tried not very successfully to look pleased she had hurt him.

  “How’s the time?” The skipper jerked up his cuff. “I say, I must get cracking!”

  Suzie watched him rise, longing to know whether or not she had been relieved of her duties, but too proud to ask. Ben paid the bill and we followed him out to his car. He got into the driving seat, slammed the door, leaned his elbow out of the open window.

  “I’ll have to buzz off
—leave you two to get back under your own steam.”

  He withdrew the elbow, started up. Suzie could bear it no longer. She said, trying hard to sound indifferent, “You want me tomorrow?”

  “Want you tomorrow?” Ben regarded her with an appearance of blank astonishment. (Really frightened the life out of the young puppy! Silly mugwump doesn’t realize he’s indispensable to the ship!) “Certainly I want you tomorrow. Why not?”

  “You’re not angry with me?” She could hardly believe it.

  “No, we’ll forget it. But you’re to keep out of that bar in future. Right out of it—understand?” And he put the car in gear and shot off.

  Suzie and I stood staring after the car in silence. I could feel the radiation of her joy. We began to walk along the empty street. The pavement was littered with bits of paper, old cigarette packets, discarded fruit rind. Between two shops a woman and two children lay asleep on sacking. Round them were stacked all their household possessions: tins, cooking pans, wooden boxes. The woman clutched an old cornflake packet tied with string. We walked on past shuttered shop fronts, past a cinema, past more homeless sleepers nursing their little claims of stone pavement from passing feet. We entered the flood of light from a modern shopwindow: banked with shoes, it bared its breast to the empty pavement, the silent roadway. We paused, momentarily hypnotized by its unreality, by its absurd refusal to admit that it was night and that everybody had gone to bed.

  I said, “That reminds me, Suzie. I need some new shoes.”

  “Yes,” she said absently.

  “Or sandals might be cheaper. How d’you like those?”

  I pointed into the dazzling Aladdin’s cave of footwear. As a rule Suzie held strong views about what I wore, and she had admonished me to buy nothing without her approval; but now she gave only a brief vague glance towards the sandals. I do not think she even saw them. “Yes, very nice,” she said automatically. And then with a sudden giggle, “He hurt me, you know! That spanking really hurt!”

  “I bet it did.”

  “It hurt to sit down in that restaurant. I wanted to ask for a cushion, then I thought, ‘No, that will show him how much it hurt—and I will lose face!’”

  “Do you really like those sandals?”

  She said rather impatiently, “Yes, I told you—very much.” And then, “Yes, he’s really strong, that man. Woosh! Woosh! Plenty of muscle!”

  “Well, you always said so.”

  “But I made a mistake about him before. I thought he had only a small heart. But I think he must have a big heart—because I cheated him, I did a very nasty thing, but he said, ‘That’s all right, we just forget it. I forgive you.’ He must have a big heart to say that.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “‘Just forget it, Suzie.’ I think that is very beautiful. It was beautiful to say that.”

  We walked on, out of the light again, back into the shadows, Suzie’s arm brushing against mine. But she was walking in another world; a world where I could not follow. I had ceased to exist for her. I could have slipped away down a side street and she would not have noticed. Or cared.

  I felt a dull ache over my heart.

  But it’s nonsense to feel hurt, I thought. That strong-arm stuff always goes down with the simple type of girl. See them falling in swoons at the cinema over Tarzan: their ideal man. It’s exactly what you’d expect with her lack of education, her illiteracy. And frankly, if that’s the sort of girl she is, who cares? I shan’t pay her the compliment of feeling hurt. . . . The ache was worse. I think it was the first time I had really been jealous of Suzie.

  Chapter Four

  Thereafter Suzie kept strictly to the rules of the game. She had been speaking nothing less than the truth when she had said that if she respected a man she would not dream of deceiving him; and now that she respected Ben, I do not think that anything could have shaken her fidelity—nothing, at any rate, short of a guarantee for her baby’s education at the best school in Hong Kong, followed by three years at Oxford and a starring role in a Hollywood film.

  And the spanking had become one of the proudest events of her life. For in the water-front world, where girls were shared and recommended to friends (“You can’t go wrong with Typhoo, mate—she does you real proud. . . .”), a boy friend who jealously demanded fidelity, and who in order to enforce it would descend on the Nam Kok by private car, impersonate a policeman, throw out a sailor, and turn a girl over his knees, had the romantic appeal of Prince Charming, Gary Cooper, and the heir of the Tiger Balm Millions rolled into one.

  And now Suzie would tell me, “You know, last night I stayed awake just to think about Ben. I thought, ‘If I got to sleep I may dream about him or I may not—so I had better stay awake to make sure.’” And she would say, “I wonder if I am in love with him? What do you think, Robert? You think I am in love?”

  “Of course, head over heels.”

  “Yes, I think so,” she would nod pensively. And then add with satisfaction, “And I hate his wife! I hate that woman very much, so I must be in love!”

  She had even made herself believe, on the strength of odd remarks of Ben’s, that one day he might divorce Elizabeth and marry her; and she asked me endless questions about London, so that when he took her to England she would not shame him with her ignorance.

  “Suzie, I shouldn’t count on it too much,” I told her. I had come to terms with my jealousy by now, and hated to think of the disappointment that must follow such extravagant hopes.

  “But Ben has promised. He has told me often, ‘Suzie, I want to show you London. You will look so pretty in London with your Chinese skin! Yes, one day I will take you, and show you everything, and we will get married in—’ I forget where, but it was some big old famous church where the Queen got married in.”

  “Westminster Abbey?”

  “Yes, Westminster Abbey! He says, ‘We will pretend you are a Chinese princess.’”

  I was sure that these had been no more than Ben’s idle musings as he lay replete on the bed at lunchtime in the little Chinese hotel, and that he had not intended her to take them seriously. I pointed out that it might be very difficult for him to get a divorce. But she gaily reassured me, “Oh, don’t worry, Ben knows all the big people in Hong Kong. He only has to tell the Number One Top Englishman, ‘Good morning, Mr. Governor, my wife is no good; I want a divorce,’ and the Number One will say, ‘Very good, I will ask someone to fix it while we have some lunch.’” And she held up the book of London photographs, which now fascinated her more than ever, and pointed to a picture of a beefeater at the Tower of London. “Look at that man—how fat! I will tell him when I go to London, ‘Hey, you’re too fat, you eat too much!’” She twinkled happily, then suddenly started back from the book with an “Ouch!” of pretended pain.

  “Good Lord, Suzie! What’s the matter?”

  “This beefeater just told me, ‘You’re too cheeky!’ and stuck me with that spike!”

  She still came to visit me every day but obediently kept clear of the bar; for although she had pleaded with Ben to repeal his harsh edict, which deprived her of so much enjoyable gossip with her girl friends, Ben had firmly refused. However, to keep her out of mischief in the evenings he had granted her permission to work at a new dance hall in the Central District. This had a mixed Chinese and European clientele and was more or less respectable, since no obligation was placed on the girls to extend favors off the dance floor. Suzie loved dancing, and would go along most evenings, making ten or twelve dollars for enjoying herself—or a good deal more if she was bought out and taken to dinner. However, she never accepted a dinner invitation without first making it clear that there would be nothing else doing, and she never allowed a patron to run her home in his car. She had learned by experience that, by the time you had convinced him that you meant what you said, it was less trouble to take a tr
am.

  The dance hall was called the Astoria. And it was through Suzie working at the Astoria that, to my eternal regret, Rodney Tessler came into our lives. Or at least into my life—since Suzie was too wrapped up in Ben to be much aware of him.

  It began exactly as it had begun with Ben, with a late night telephone call from Suzie—this time from a restaurant in town where she had been taken to dinner. Her partner, I gathered, was proving difficult to shake off, despite her usual clear warning beforehand: he had turned quite nasty, and she had no good to say for him, except that he was intelligent and “good class,” and also passionately interested in painting. This had transpired during dinner, when she had told him about me. She thought he was a painter himself, she was not sure. Anyhow he had begged to be brought along to meet me and see my work; and if I was agreeable she would be delighted, since it would give her a chance to slip out on him.

  I hesitated, and then said doubtfully, “All right, bring him along.” I rang off in a state of some perturbation. So far nobody had seen my Nam Kok pictures except Ah Tong and Suzie, and a few other girls and sailors, whose praise had never failed to delight me, but whose adverse comments had always been easy enough to dismiss—“After all, they’re just Philistines.” I hastily looked through my finished pictures. A few minutes ago I would have found no difficulty in persuading myself of their merit; I could even have believed that in one or two I had soared to the most breath-taking heights of artistic achievement. But now, seeing them through the eyes of a hypercritical stranger, all my self-confidence abruptly vanished, and they became distorted by my fears into a pathetic collection of meaningless daubs.

  Oh God, I thought miserably, I wish I’d never said he could come. And I hurriedly hid the worst of them, and arranged the others in the most effective order for display, though in apparently casual disorder to conceal evidence of such nervous preparation.

  Twenty minutes later, a knock on the door—and Suzie entered with a young man whose crew-cut hair indicated an American. He wore a gabardine suit of expensive but unassuming English cut, a silk shirt with small embroidered monogram on the pocket, a neat spotted bow tie, and suede shoes. He looked about twenty-five or -six.