by Martin Booth
‘That’s not all, I’m afraid. You know you are anaemic: you also have, we are fairly sure, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. This is because the marrow in your bones is malfunctioning, to put it crudely. This may be the cause in part of your passing blood: you may have thrombocytopenia – internal bleeding. We need to test further to know this for sure.’
‘What does this mean?’ questioned Sandingham, though he was aware of the implications from the earlier briefing he had had from Gresham and Dr Stoppart.
‘You’ll likely fall prey to common illnesses and some not-so-common ones, too. Your resistance is lowered, and what resistance there is will be further reduced by your drug habit. Before you ask, I must say we are pretty sure. And there is no really useful treatment. There are some drugs we can offer you, but they are new and largely untried in the field, so to speak.’ He tugged the stethoscope from his neck and folded it into its black wooden box. ‘I’m really very sorry. It’s a sod of a thing to tell you at Christmas.’
‘You mean, at my last Christmas.’
It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact that Sandingham had absorbed and which he had, without proof, been expecting for several months.
‘Yes.’
‘How long?’
‘It depends. I can’t calendar it. Next month, possibly – that would be the earliest. Two years at the most, if you were lucky. You have a lot going against you.’ He looked straight at Sandingham. ‘Why don’t you chuck in your habit? It would help you.’
Yet Sandingham knew that it wouldn’t. It would make things worse. He made no reply.
As Sandingham dressed to leave, Gresham said, ‘You must keep in touch. We’d like to see you at least weekly. Today’s Friday. Boxing Day next Friday. Can I see you the Monday after Christmas?’
Sandingham nodded. ‘Why not?’
He went on foot to the Bowen Road station of the Peak Tram. There was little point in maintaining a low profile from what he now thought of as ‘Choy’s Boys’: if they didn’t kill him, the radiation would do the task for them. The only difference would be the pain: perhaps it would be best to let nature take her foul course than let some Chinese hood have his pleasure with sharpened bamboo strips and a razor.
He boarded the up-bound tram, giving his fare to the bespectacled Chinese ticket collector who stood at an angle of forty-five degrees to the tram cabin floor. As it passed the down-bound above May Road he saw Mr and Mrs Clayton Sellers, Jnr, sitting close to each other in the front seat. Blanche Sellers – was she ‘Junior’ too? he wondered – chanced a quick wave to him before grabbing on to the window frame again out of repressed panic. May Road was the steepest part of the track.
At the top station, below Mount Austin, Sandingham crossed the junction by the taxi rank and set off down Harlech Road. He walked as briskly as he could, but was soon out of breath and had to lean against a railing to rest. It dented his palm painfully, and he heard himself say, ‘For Chrissake, driver!’ in an exasperated voice.
His strength regained, Sandingham started off again at a more leisurely pace. As he strolled under the winter trees he let his past gather about him. Vague voices returned that he had not heard for years.
‘Iron railings on either side. Try not to decorate them with khaki … the British Army doesn’t survive on tea, tinned jam and powdered eggs … Very good, Bellerby … If your pecker stays aloft, your men’s will … Jay! We’ve got two hours…’
He halted at the fork in the road where the left took him either down to the old gun emplacement or along the north slope of High West and the rifle range. He looked down the mountainside to the Hill above Belcher’s.
‘Fancy a little snort for the road? Sit down, dear boy!’ chortled a voice in the wind.
The butts of the range were made of concrete and Sandingham took shelter in them from the drizzle that was seeping out of the fog a hundred feet higher up. On the ground, by the target frames, there was a small pile of spent copper bullets dug out of the rear bank of the range by children. He picked the bullets up, one by one, and tossed them to and fro in his hands.
* * *
Choy had been waiting for him at the entrance to the Star Ferry pier. As the crowd surged forwards down the steeply tipping gangway he took Sandingham’s elbow.
‘Allow me to help you down, Mr Sandingham,’ he said amiably. ‘A man in your state of health needs a helping hand.’
‘Fuck off!’ Sandingham muttered. He shook his elbow free and promptly stumbled. The gangway was at such a clumsy angle he had difficulty finding his step on the slats. He felt momentarily dizzy as he sat heavily on a bench.
Once on the ferry, Choy sat down next to him.
‘You are very sick. You need to see a doctor.’
After his earlier statement on the gangway Sandingham had wondered if Choy had managed to bribe or threaten his way into the Bowen Road hospital records, but his speech now suggested that he wasn’t in full control of the facts.
‘I may have something that might cure your illness,’ Choy continued. ‘Look.’
In his hand he was carrying that morning’s edition of the Hong Kong Standard; wrapped in it was a thick-handled bowie knife, the steel blade of which glinted along its cutting edge. Sandingham felt an involuntary shudder course through his body.
‘Consider this, Joe.’ Choy’s voice was low yet crystalline with menace as he bent slightly to Sandingham’s ear. ‘If I were sitting where you are, and you were here, even with all these people about us, I would need only to strike the palm of my hand against this to push it through your clothing and into your stomach. Then I could toss it away into the harbour. Do you know the bottom of Hong Kong harbour is thick with mud? It would sink from sight forever. Then I would shout for help. I would get away as soon as the ferry arrived on Kowloon-side. But you, Joe? In your health, you would not live long with your stomach torn.’
‘Then do it,’ Sandingham offered. ‘Go ahead. I shall scream you did it. But so what? Go on then, Mr Choy. Kill me.’
He spoke loudly and a few Europeans sitting nearby, laden with bow-tied Christmas packages, stole a glance in his direction. He heard one person exclaim, ‘Oh, really! These white Russians. Pickled at four.’
‘You see, you are a cast-off of your kind. And now you are not to be touched by Chinese people. Soon you will die. In my time, not in yours. You’ll have poison in your food; maybe some heroin mixed into your opium – I know where you bought your last supply: that man is dead now – or a knife will stab you in the street. Even in your hotel room. See?’
Choy slid an expensive calfskin wallet out of his well-tailored jacket and flipped it open. From the stamp pocket protruded a brass key. It bore the same trademark as the hotel door locks.
‘The skeleton,’ Choy explained, though he need not have bothered. Sandingham was well aware what it was.
The ferry bumped against the piles of the Tsim Sha Tsui pier and the passengers rose to leave. The deck tilted under the weight of the people standing around the gangway.
‘Bus or taxi, Joe? Take the bus. Maybe the conductor will let you fall from the step. Take a taxi. A Kowloon taxi? One of the orange and red ones? Maybe the driver will not go to Waterloo Road but to a hillside behind Kai Tak. Near to Sai Kung. It is very lonely over there. Little traffic. Or you can walk. But it is a long way, and it will be dark before you enter your hotel.’
At the taxi rank, Choy vanished into the crowd. Sandingham queued as if to catch a cab. A rickshaw coming along to the ferry concourse conveniently collided with a private car. A crowd quickly gathered to watch the slanging match and Sandingham escaped into the columned portico of the railway station. He purchased a ticket to the station near the hotel and, in this way, got home safely. It was, as Choy had reckoned, now dark.
He sneaked into the hotel through the rear tradesman’s entrance and was about to climb the back stairs to his floor when he heard music issuing from the front lobby. Curious, he went along one of the ground floor corridors, through
the tiny garden courtyard where the trees were now bare.
The decorations were lit. The oriental Father Christmases blinked on and off, the paper lanterns were illuminated and the tinsel shimmied like a shoal of landed fish. The lobby was packed with children. In the centre, by the bar, was a juggler dressed in classical Chinese costume. Upon his head was a pork-pie hat of black silk with a pom-pom on it. His jacket was embroidered with dragons and clouds in azures and turquoises and jade greens. He was tossing, as high as the ceiling, five cups and a orange. Behind him was a Chinese band with a wailing flute, a zither and a small drum.
The juggler passed the cups to an assistant and bowed, then gave the orange to a boy in the front row. Sandingham noticed that this was David.
His act over, the juggler waved on a man with a rosewood xylophone. The musician started to plink out his melodies, parodies of European jazz band tunes and current popular songs from the radio. He was accompanied by a small grey monkey with eyes like bloodshot berries, that pranced and tumbled in time to its master’s music. To complete the show, the little primate was dressed in a tricorn hat, elasticated pants of canary-yellow silk and a tiny brocade jacket. It carried a classical Chinese sword constructed of wood and papier mâché which it smacked on the floor and bit. Around the monkey’s waist was a collar, to which was secured a length of thin chain. The children laughed uproariously until tears of merriment ran down their cheeks.
Standing by the dining room entrance, Sandingham saw nothing amusing in the monkey’s cavorting and tomfoolery. It was trapped by its japes, despite its fine clothes, in a spiral of living and dying that was as sordid as his own.
As he turned to go up the main staircase Sandingham saw Heng studying him and he eased his way towards the manager, pressing through the standing parents behind the children.
‘A party for the guests’ children,’ the manager said. ‘The owners thought it a good idea.’
‘Very good indeed,’ Sandingham agreed. It was, after all, Christmas.
‘But you don’t like it?’
Heng knew what he was thinking, Sandingham realised. The worldly old codger had him summed up in one.
‘The juggler – what I saw of him – was excellent. But I can’t avoid feeling sorry for the monkey.’
‘You know what it is to be tied up, Mr Sandingham. Maybe not by a chain or by rope, but…’
Looking into the manager’s eyes for a moment, Sandingham thought he recognised a flash of sympathy, a spark of friendship that was not suggested or forced by the season.
‘Yes, Mr Heng. During the war…’ His sentence too tailed off.
‘And now also, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’
Sandingham knew that, by the end of the week – by Christmas Day – he would be in debt again for the rent. It was already overdue.
* * *
The step had been slick with a sudsy water that the floor amah had failed to mop up. Running to his room late on the Wednesday morning, David had slipped and fallen awkwardly on his left arm. The roomboy on duty, Ching, who was the one to see him safely over the road to school, heard his fall and the short yelp that went with it. He comforted David, sat him up on the rubber mat that ran down the length of the corridor and called for his mother. She thought his arm was broken, called the doctor and half an hour later, David – much to his joy – was rushed to Kowloon Hospital in a Daimler ambulance. The X-rays showed no fracture. A severe sprain was diagnosed and David was released with his arm in a white cotton sling.
‘Will it mean I have to stay in bed for Christmas?’ he asked the casualty doctor fearfully. He did not want to ruin his mother’s Christmas nor lose out on the festivities and the trip to the Fishers’, not to mention the telephone call to his father in Korea.
‘No, young man. I don’t think so. Just you stop in bed for the remainder of today, get some rest and get up tomorrow. But keep your arm in the sling and don’t use it. Can you unwrap your presents single-handed? I expect so.’
He was taken the short distance back to the hotel in a taxi. His mother helped him into his pyjamas and put him to bed at four o’clock. The day was fading and he did not feel so out of place. To cheer him up, his mother gave him one of his presents early.
‘It’s just a little one,’ she informed him, ‘to take away the pain.’
He duly succeeded in removing the wrapping with one hand. Inside was a cardboard box with a battle scene printed on it. He lifted the lid to discover one of the presents he’d hoped for and had included on his list: a machine-gun crew. There were three soldiers and what David assumed was a Vickers machine-gun. One of the soldiers was sitting with his legs bent up: he was the firer. A second knelt by his side: he was feeding the belt into the gun. The third was opening an ammunition box. They were dressed in khaki and mounted on a square of stiff card on to which was outlined a hill, trees and a shell-burst in the sky.
‘I like them,’ he thanked his mother. ‘I like them very much.’
He lay on his side and positioned the gun crew in a foxhole punched in his pillow, inches from his face. That close up, they looked real, almost alive.
‘It won’t hurt so much in the morning, David. Now you get some sleep. I’ll come in during the evening with some supper for you. Would you like a warm milk? Ching can get you some.’
‘Yes, please. And some digestive biscuits. And some salted cashews.’ After all, he thought, it was worth trying it on.
‘Biscuits yes, nuts no. A sprain is one thing. You being sick is another.’
She closed the door and he heard the lock snap home.
* * *
It was dark on the stairs. The light-bulb must have blown on the landing above. Sandingham gave no thought to the coincidence that the bulb below had also seemed to have burnt out.
He felt his way downwards and reached the first of the food boxes. It contained cans of peaches. If he took more of these the missing quantity would be noticed, so he passed his hand over this to the next box which held tins of Carnation milk. He took two of the smaller size and wedged them into his pocket. Omitting the next two cartons, he slid his thumb under the flap of the third and lifted out a tin of clear vegetable soup. From lower still, he removed three flat tins of sardines and, by mistake, a tin of potatoes. He shoved the tins into his shirt.
There was a sound above him on the stairs: someone had opened the landing door. He held his breath and did not move, knowing he was secure from discovery if he did not give himself away. It was too dark for him to be seen. He heard the door close with a swish of its hydraulic hinge. He waited. No other noise happened.
Carefully, to be on the safe side, he edged up the stairwell. There was no light to guide him apart from an exceptionally faint glow through one of the small, grimy, frosted-glass windows facing the back street.
He halted, and listened. He could hear something. It was a far ticking, which he decided was emanating from somewhere towards the front of the building.
The flurry of a soft garment and the zizz of something being thrown came to his ears as two quite separate entities. He dropped his head. A light metallic object clattered down the stairs behind him. A second later a powerful torch shone momentarily in his face. The bright burn of the reflector hung in his retina and made him giddy. Aim restored, the torch was clicked off and another light object was hurled at Sandingham. However, as soon as the torch had gone out, he had flattened himself into the wall. When he did not tumble on to the cartons and boxes, and the torch was switched on again, he was ready.
His attacker, he estimated, was about fifteen steps above him, next to the door to the landing above. He shut his eyes and hurled himself upwards, his feet slapping on the concrete. He grabbed the man around his knees and twisted him sideways. The tins next to his chest gouged dents in his skinny ribs. The other, not to be overbalanced, got a firm hold of the doorknob with one hand and as best he could lashed out at Sandingham with torch and feet.
Letting go of his assailant’s knees wi
th one arm, Sandingham flailed with his free hand at the torch, felt it slap into his palm, closed his fingers on it and wrenched it free. He heard it roll against the wall in the darkness.
A fist as bony as if it were devoid of flesh began pummelling his skull, forcing him to loosen his tackle-like hold. He thrust his hand into his pocket and wrenched out one of the tins. He swung his arm back, hoisted himself up on his feet and brought the tin down on the point of darkness he assumed hid the man’s head. The tin connected.
The man let go of the door handle and slumped to the floor. He was not unconscious as Sandingham hoped and his feverish scrabbling suggested he was searching for the torch.
The next moment Sandingham was booted on the thigh and went down. He struggled rapidly to his feet and kicked back at the darkness but his foot only hit the wall. As he was knocked down once more with a vicious punch, he found the torch. Spinning it in his hand until the rubber stud was under his thumb, he pressed and the light scorched out to show the skull-like face of the hotel gardener: the first of Choy’s inside men. He had evidently known of Sandingham’s thieving excursions down the back stairs, learning of them when lying in his sleeping corner at the roof door, and had used one of these to lay his ambush.
Keeping the man confused with the beam, Sandingham struck out with his foot at the man’s groin. The gardener grunted as the air was pushed from his lungs and he doubled over. Sandingham brought his knee viciously into the lowering face. There was a mouse-like squeak as the gardener’s nose broke. The gardener flailed his arms, clutching at his face: he lost his balance and fell on to the steps in a groaning heap.
In his room, Sandingham locked the door and levered the bedside table against it. Nowhere, he now knew, was safe.
* * *
David sat in the armchair by the french windows of the lounge, gazing out at the balcony. It was bare of the potted chrysanthemums and kumquat bushes of the summer. The grey sky did not even hint at it being Christmas Eve. On the parquet tiles by his chair was the machine-gun crew guarding a Bedford army lorry.