I said: ‘Is Mrs Oss here?’
Give him credit, he didn’t even blink.
‘Daphne, unlike you, gets seasick. The secret’, he said, leaning towards me, ‘is not to brace yourself. It applies to lots of things.’
Oss then subjected me to a thirty-minute interrogation about my journalistic background in the UK, including who it was I’d worked for, contacts and sources at papers and the Beeb, my view of the country’s economic fortunes and the Tories’ political prospects. It was charmingly done, but it was also as thorough a grilling as I’d ever had. The questions were asked in that British way that sets a test of intelligence and insiderish-ness as a precondition to taking you seriously. At the same time he did not stop being flirty – an odd mix. Finally he called it a day.
‘If you’ll excuse me for a brief moment, I have a work thing to get out of the way.’
He swayed backwards to the stern and joined a claque of men who looked like younger and less successful versions of himself. I wandered over to where Berkowitz was holding court.
‘Well,’ he said, clutching a glass of champagne, evidently his third or fourth. ‘That’s enough small talk. Dawn, you’ve been here long enough to have formed a view about this. So tell us – who’s your favourite Patten daughter?’
*
We sailed out to a beach at the back of Cheung Chau and moored a couple of hundred yards offshore. I talked to Oss and to Berkowitz and to the wife of a man called Mitchell who herself was called either Sonia or Sonja and had plans to start an art gallery specialising in openly fake French furniture and to another woman called Katy who said that she ‘wrote pieces for the London papers’ and then drifted away when I began to ask questions and avoided me for the rest of the day, and to a woman called Peta who was about twenty-five and was the daughter of a friend of Oss’s and was travelling around the world for three months before beginning a course as a mature student of photography at St Martin’s College. Some of us swam before lunch, others did more B & Y (boozing and yakking), talking of Cathay Pacific versus British Airways club class, about the old days when a flight to Hong Kong took twenty-one hours because planes didn’t overfly China or Vietnam, about the parts of London where the Chinese were buying up property and about the ads for London properties in the Hong Kong papers; we talked about a new restaurant in Macau called Lusophonia, where the designer came from Lisbon, the maître d’ from Kowloon, and the chef from Mozambique via Rio; we talked about the new Peak Tram terminal, about swimming pools, about which of the London papers was going through an off patch; there was an altercation about whether a visit to South Australia was as good as a visit to Tuscany but with fourteen hours’ less flying time; someone said that FILTH (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) was an acronym you only heard from tourists and newcomers who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the territory; there was gossip about the new chief executive of the Jockey Club (verdict: American – but who cares?), there was a conversation about the last time anyone present had actually bought anything from Lane Crawfords, there was talk about whether it was just us but weren’t people actually beginning to get a little bit tired of the China Club? We talked about David Tang, about water temperature as a predictor of typhoons, and about ways of retiring to France without paying French tax. We ate chicken à la king and cold roast beef and mozzarella-and-tomato salad and Thai peanut-and-noodle salad and chilled spicy tomato soup and air-freighted Pont L’Évêque and fruit salad and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey or Häagen-Dazs Double Chocolate ice cream. We drank gin and tonic and Virgin Marys with Worcestershire sauce and celery salt and Veuve Clicquot with or without freshly squeezed orange juice and Rothbury Estate Show Reserve Chardonnay and Guigal Côtes du Rhône and Hennessey XO Cognac and Lagavulin and Ty Nant water and coffee and peppermint tea and Tsingtao beer because Oss said that San Miguel didn’t taste as good as it used to when the brewery was owned by the Marcoses. We swam and a few of us waterskied and a few others sunbathed and a couple of people tried to windsurf, and a couple of other people said they would go below decks for a little lie down. My swimsuit got a couple of good reviews. At dusk the wind died and we could hear the laughter and the talking coming from other similar boat parties off the beach and the boats looked closer now because their superstructures were strewn with lights. And then as the stars were coming out we pulled up our anchor and headed back to Queen’s Pier. Life in the bubble.
Chapter five
About three months after the trip on Tai Pan, Michael came out to visit. I was as busy as hell and it was wildly inconvenient, but I couldn’t entirely blame Michael for the timing, since it wasn’t arbitrary: it was Easter. I had been home once since moving to Hong Kong, but circumstances had stopped Michael from making the return trip. The flurry of work following his exhibition hadn’t subsided, but had gone on so consistently that he was now confident – not that being confident about practical things was much of a Michael trait, but you get the gist – that he could take a couple of weeks off without everybody suddenly deciding that he was a bad photographer. I had been half looking forward to and half dreading his visit. The less optimistic part of me found itself dwelling on a heavy, cross, partly angry, partly guilty, and partly irritated sense that Michael was, to use a word that comes up often when British women talk about British men, useless. Meaning, among other things, that he was in love with his own doubts and difficulties, incompetent in practical matters, vain, clueless. Hong Kong had given me a strong appetite for the feeling that things (and people) were making progress, getting somewhere, going somewhere. This is a view that has consequences for old relationships.
At first, though, it wasn’t too bad. You might even say it was good. As soon as I set eyes on him, as he came blinking through into the arrivals hall at Kai Tak with his suitcase, bag of duty-free and a ludicrously out-of-place Aran sweater over his shoulders, I felt a rush of pleasure and sexual anticipation that made me realise (a) how horny I’d been and (b) how much I had been burying the feeling of missing him. Sometimes when you’ve spotted someone you’re looking for and they haven’t yet spotted you, you see them fresh, and this is what happened with Michael, as he shoved his floppy hair to one side and shifted his weight from one hip to the other scanning the hallway and looking like he was thirty-five going on fourteen in his jeans and his skinniness.
‘Michael!’ I called out. ‘Over here!’
‘Baby!’ he said as he came loping towards me, his whole face smiling, perhaps as surprised at his own uncomplicated pleasure as I was. ‘Darling!’
And I thought, phew, it’s all going to be all right.
*
But it turned out to be a little harder than that. The strange thing was the severance between the physical aspect and everything else. I’d never felt so strongly before that my body was going off and doing its own thing, leaving me to fend for myself. With my body it was sex: yes; good; thank you; more please; leave me alone (this last remark addressed to my brain). The first evening and night, for instance – with Michael admittedly desynchronised by jet lag and an eight-hour time difference – we did it four times. I don’t think we’d managed that since we first started going out. It was great. From my body’s point of view it was shaping up to be the best two weeks of all time. But my brain seemed not to want to go along for the ride. After the first thirty-six hours or so, drugged as I was with sex and with the simple pleasure – I admit – of having company, someone around all the time, irritation and impatience started to build like magma underneath an earthquake fault-line.
I’d been completely unaware of this subterranean build-up until the Sunday after the Friday when Michael arrived. He said he wanted to go for a walk, so I obliged him. We went down the hill, towards one of Hong Kong’s most amazing spectacles, the Sunday gathering of Filipina amahs around Statue Square, spilling out towards Legco, the park, the exchange. You hear it long before you see it, a high fluttering sound, a cross between a roaring and a twittering, like thousands of birds, like no other human
sound you’ve ever heard. The noise made by ten thousand Filipinas all talking at the same time isn’t like a crowd event, a march or a rally or a sporting match, since they aren’t concentrating on an external entity but on each other – eating and sharing picnics, exchanging news and reading letters from home, listening to music, shopping at the impromptu market that features carefully targeted goods (like big, cheap folding suitcases, ultra-cheap towels and T-shirts), swapping photos, but all, mostly, talking, all the time. In Hong Kong you get used, without really noticing it, to the fact that everyone is always speaking Cantonese, which tends to sound like a constant argument, whereas in Statue Square on a Sunday you are suddenly in a space where everyone is speaking the exotic twittery sound of Tagalog. Michael didn’t say much, but he had his silent, taking-it-in look.
Then we went up to the Peak Tram to have dinner in the Peak Café, a thirties sort of upmarket shack with views out over the back of the island towards the South China Sea. It’s a nice spot and a great trip up in the groovy green tramcar with its permanently cross Chinese driver, climbing a thousand feet in a few minutes, at angles which, at one point in particular, make you feel as if you’re going straight up in the air. Michael behaved as if I’d taken him to Madame Tussaud’s or some other strictly-for-tourists clip joint.
‘I should have brought my camera,’ he said, which for half a second I thought was a comment about how spectacular the view was – and then realised was a sneer. I said:
‘I suppose a picture-postcard view like this is unworthy of a serious artist like yourself.’
That just came out. I hadn’t planned to say it. Back in England I probably wouldn’t have – I would have bared my teeth and smiled, while inwardly biting my lip and making a mental note to be unimpressed next time Michael tried to show me something. He looked startled.
‘Where did that come from?’ he said. It was halfway through the first course before we were back on speaking terms.
That set the pattern for the whole of his visit. On our walking-and-eating trip to Lamma Island, our trip to see the new Ricky Lam film, a day spent on the beach at Shek-O, a day out on somebody’s boat with cronies from the magazine, a day spent taking the tram from Kennedy Town to North Point and then walking back via clothes and camera shops and a dim sum joint, a day travelling around the New Territories by public transport; not to mention most the time we spent hanging around the flat when not actually having sex, which remained fine: at all these times and in all these places it was the same. Irritation jumped off me like static. I also could not help noticing the possible signs of another influence in his life. Michael was wearing slightly more expensive clothes, not to mention Calvin Klein underpants; and once, at dinner chez Berkowitz, when the conversation turned to Hong Kong’s tax system, he did something unprecedented – he spontaneously offered a political opinion. The next day we made a disastrous expedition to the People’s Republic, in the form of an overnight trip to Shenzen, where we got lost and, unable to make anyone understand our request for directions, wandered around in the beginnings of panic until we were rescued by a landmark we had seen on the way out of the hotel – a winking neon sign for Versace jeans. We slept on opposite sides of the bed.
We were, I suppose, bound to have a big fight. I held out until the second week, congratulating myself on not having bitten Michael’s head off by then; instead I mixed physical demands with occasional impatience, carping and whingeing – so attractive, don’t you find? I could, however, feel a major eruption coming on. So it was a good joke that the person who did finally snap was Michael; an especially good joke since for all practical purposes he never had a temper to lose.
What happened was I woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning with a cranium-splitting toothache. Well, I say I ‘woke up’, but it was more as if I was woken – as if the toothache built up a sufficient head of steam, decided it had become adequately painful, and then jolted my shoulder saying, wake up, time for your pain. It was at the back of my mouth on the left side, next to where my wisdom teeth would have been, if they’d come through. The pain was both immensely sharp and specific, on one precise point, and also dull, like an ache; it was two different sorts of pain wrapped around each other. I tottered to the bathroom, ran some cold water over the side of my face, gargled over the sore spot with brandy, took two Nurofen, and went back to bed to wake Michael.
‘Call a dentist,’ was his ultra-helpful suggestion.
‘If I had a fucking dentist do you think I would be in this state in the fucking first place?’
‘There must be a dental hospital or a twenty-four-hour clinic somewhere, mustn’t there?’
‘How do I know?’
Michael then got up and went into a Superman routine with the phone book and with a guidebook that he had brought out with him (and which, to tell the truth, I had been secretly irritated by: why did he need a guidebook when he had me?). He eventually came up with a number for the dental hospital. By this time, however, the pain had mysteriously but thoroughly subsided, going away as quickly as it had come on.
‘I think I’d best leave it till morning,’ I said. ‘There’ll be some junior doctor on, he’ll probably pull all my teeth out just as soon as look at me. Best to wait for the senior chaps.’
Rather than correctly diagnosing cowardice, Michael merely got back into bed, turned the light off, and fell asleep. Five hours later, I again came awake with fire-alarm abruptness, woken by the exact same pain. I sat straight up in bed, gave Michael an elbow and said:
‘It’s come back.’
He made a certain number of mmph, mmph noises, and then went into the next room to call the hospital. About two minutes later he came back into the bedroom bringing a blushing Conchita in his wake. Monday was one of her days. The combination of six-foot-two Caucasian male in a too-small pink ruched woman’s dressing gown, and a five-foot Filipino female in flip-flops, jeans, yellow T-shirt, and rubber gloves, was quite something. Michael had on his man-of-action face.
‘Er, Michael,’ I said. I like to think that under normal circumstances, if my teeth hadn’t been hurting quite so much, I would at this point have made a joke about not being in the mood for a threesome.
‘Conchita is a dentist,’ said Michael.
‘What?’
‘Conchita is a dentist. That’s what she trained to be in Manila. Tell her what’s wrong.’
‘It’s true, Miss Stone,’ said Conchita, who was smiling and looking embarrassed. She was taking off her gloves and moving towards me.
‘Just describe the symptoms,’ said Michael. I moved over to let Conchita sit on the edge of the bed and said to Michael with an edge, ‘Could you excuse us please?’ I explained about the shooting pain, the Nurofen, the sudden and welcome going-away, the equally sudden and very unwelcome coming-back.
‘Is it always in the same place?’ asked Conchita, who was by now peering into my mouth. Dentist Conchita had, when compared with permanently smiling cleaning Conchita, a mild but immediately noticeable severity and briskness.
‘Same place.’
‘You still have your wisdom teeth?’
‘Aargh. They haven’t come through.’
Finally Conchita said:
‘Okay, is one of two things. Maybe is your wisdom tooth, but I think maybe you too old for that now. More likely is another tooth somewhere else. Sometime tooth is sick here’ – she pressed down on the bed by my feet, ‘but pain comes here’ – she pressed near my head.
‘So what should I do?’
‘Go to tooth hospital,’ said Conchita, who by this point was putting her gloves back on. ‘They do X-ray.’
‘Right.’
‘Sorry I can help no more.’
‘No, that’s great.’
‘Tooth pain always worse at night-time,’ she said on the way out.
I dressed slowly, like someone who had suffered a defeat, and came through to the sitting room.
‘I’ve called a cab,’ Michael said tightly. ‘I’ll com
e with you and wait.’
We had the row in the cab on the way home, ninety minutes, an X-ray, and a tentative diagnosis of an infected tooth later. Conchita had been right in that the culprit seemed to be an abscess in the right molar, with the pain showing up elsewhere.
‘Okay, so what the fuck is going on?’ I said to Michael. ‘It’s my head that feels like it’s exploding, and it’s you that sits there like I’ve done some unforgivable evil deed. The smell of burning martyred flesh is so strong that it’s nearly taking my mind off this sodding tooth.’
This, by the way, was a lie. I was by now feeling no pain. I had been given some hospital-strength analgesics by the nice Chinese dentist, with more to take over the next couple of days until the antibiotics kicked in.
Michael was on a slow burn; he looked pale and quiet and it took me a few moments to take in that he was as angry as I had ever seen him.
‘How long do you think it would have been before you realised?’ he said as we crawled up Magazine Gap Road behind a number 15 bus.
‘Michael, what the fuck are you talking about?’
Fragrant Harbour Page 5