Hiroshima Joe

by Booth, Martin

  From the far end of the railway tunnel to Sha Tin station was only a short distance of two or three miles, the track surveyed from on high by the Amah Rock, a boulder pillar on a peak behind Beacon Hill, shaped like a Chinese woman with a child in a sling upon her back. The legend had it that she had been turned to stone for stealing the child. As a punishment, she was petrified while trying to escape over the hills.

  At the station, Sandingham alighted and pondered which way to go. He had not planned to come to Sha Tin; he had simply gone there. Nothing had forced him except the confusion in his mind. If he crossed the road and followed a pathway up the hill, through a hamlet, he would come to the Temple of the One Thousand Buddhas. Taking that route, dogs would snap at him and the Chinese would stare in their hidden manner. He chose instead to take the road to his right, following the shore, walking by the small wooden houses and shops that formed Sha Tin fishing village, and then on to the open road. Beside him the sea lapped at the stone wall.

  He walked on towards Tai Po, eight miles away. He passed a roadhouse which was open, but he did not enter. After a mile he came upon a two-storey stone building constructed on the very brim of the shore. It was derelict, and he was glad. During the war it had been one of White Pig’s homes, his rural or weekend headquarters where, doubtless, plentiful supplies of Red Cross parcels had been stored and devoured by him, his Chink whores and his subalterns. Sandingham stood before the padlocked, rusty gate and hurled a stone through one of the glassless windows. It clumped noisily inside, the thud echoing.

  His head began to echo with the falling stone and he realised he was both thirsty and hungry. He was taken with a vague curiosity as to why he had caught the train out to Sha Tin. Just to toss a stone into an empty house?

  He retraced his steps to the roadhouse. On the parking space before it a number of cars were drawn up in the shade of several tall trees. One was a new Ford Consul, the bodywork painted in two-tone light and dark grey. Upon the front seat lay a leather case which he recognised as being from a superior pair of naval binoculars, the sort that would fetch a tidy sum from a pawnbroker. He tried the car door but it was locked.

  He pushed open the glass door to the café and, finding a table that overlooked the cove, sat down and surveyed the menu. When a waiter came he ordered a twelve-ounce bottle of imported Carlsberg lager for one dollar fifty.

  Across the bay the shore was in shadow, for the sun was lowering. Smoke drifted up from a distant village and flattened out into a streak of gossamer-like strands. The Amah Rock was clear-cut in black against the sky, sharp as a velvet Victorian silhouette. The tide was running and a fishing junk in half sail was sailing down the cove, close in to the shore. On the poop deck, Sandingham could see a young girl priming and filling pressurised Tilley lamps in preparation for the night’s fishing.

  The menu lay before him. It showed a photograph of the café with the legend underneath reading, ‘The magic Kiosk by the side of the magic Tide Cove’. Sha Tin Hoi, known in English as ‘Tide Cove’, was unique in having four tides a day. On the reverse side was a section printed in italics. Sandingham read it without reason, certain of the phrases catching his imagination.

  ‘This is the only place you can watch and feel a roaring train while you eat.’ A train pulling a row of goods trucks shunted along the tracks the other side of the road: it did not so much roar as chuff and hump and jangle. ‘Occasionally’, he continued reading, ‘you’ll be thrilled by the shooting Vampires smacking out of the blue.’ He looked up and down the cove but no twin-tailed jet aircraft appeared on cue, as the train had. ‘Your junior folks may enjoy fishing, fording, boating, ferrying, crabbing, clamming or simply playing around in the shallow mangroves. This is the place you’ll enjoy most! Please come again and save a trip to Miami or Geneva!’ He looked at the mud showing where the tide was rapidly ebbing, and imagined children clamming in it, albeit absent of mangroves. No child would be allowed to wallow in such mud. That was the preserve of very sick prisoners. He wondered if gulls nested nearby.

  ‘You tea an’ toas’, sir.’

  The waiter, with a ‘Dairy Farm’ crest on his jacket, slid a tray on to the table and started to pour out the first cup of tea from a pot.

  ‘I ordered a beer,’ Sandingham complained gruffly.

  ‘Oh!’ The waiter looked shamefaced. ‘Ve’y sorwy, sir!’ He studied his order pad. ‘I get you beer now.’

  He removed the tray and took it off to its rightful table. Sandingham’s eyes followed him so that his glare of annoyance could be felt for longer in the small of the receding back. In this way, he saw the boy who lived in the hotel.

  He was sitting with his parents and watching the sailing junk. Sandingham studied the family group. The mother was in her early thirties, blonde and slim with a lightly tanned skin and blue eyes. She wore a flowery print skirt and a cotton blouse. The father was of roughly the same age, a well-built man with dark hair and sunglasses with green lenses. His trousers were light fawn and his short-sleeved shirt was white with shoulder tabs. His shoes were highly polished and he wore an expensive gold wristwatch on a gold-band bracelet. The shirt betrayed his job to Sandingham: he was a naval officer.

  The boy took after his mother in looks and there was a faintly feminine delicateness about him, especially in his thin wrists and long eyelashes. They were only a few feet away and Sandingham was able to eavesdrop easily.

  ‘Coke all right?’ The father pointed to the green bottle in front of the boy, from which protruded a wax paper straw.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Daddy.’ Pause. ‘I like it when it’s cold. It has a different taste somehow.’

  Sandingham’s attention returned to the junk.

  ‘When will you…?’

  ‘Thursday, Beth. Could be late afternoon. More probably early evening. We’ll be stored up by then anyway, so you could come on board for lunch. Thursday’s curry puffs.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘You’ll be at school.’

  ‘Can’t I? I’ll be ever so good. Promise.’

  ‘Can you be?’

  The father tousled the boy’s fair hair and pretended to punch him on the arm.

  ‘Yes.’ He was emphatic.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do you have on Thursdays?’

  ‘Let me see…’ The mimickry of adults, then, ‘Swimming, Maths and English in the morning. RI in the afternoon.’

  ‘I thought you liked swimming. And English.’

  ‘How was his report, Beth?’

  ‘Good in most things. Above average in sport. He still can’t swim all that well.’

  ‘You’ll want to swim if you want to go in the Navy.’

  ‘Grampy couldn’t.’

  ‘He certainly could. He was a diver.’

  ‘Divers don’t swim,’ the boy retorted with puerile logic. ‘They sink with lead weights on their belts and have to get pulled up by a rope.’

  ‘Touché!’

  ‘I don’t see why not. It’s not as if it’s often.’

  ‘Thank you, Beth,’ the boy said. The gratitude was evident in his voice. To his father he then asked, ‘Can I go on the bridge?’

  ‘We’ll see what Captain Rodgers says. But don’t you ask him. He’ll be exceedingly busy.’

  ‘Exceedingly busy,’ reiterated the boy, nodding as if with knowledgeable agreement.

  Beth: how unusual, Sandingham thought, that the boy should call his mother by her Christian name. He had done that himself as a lad – his mother was always ‘Fanny’ to him, her nickname with his father. It gave him a shared bond with the boy and he wished there were some way to communicate with him. Sandingham wanted that so very much. He plotted quickly how he might accomplish it. Then he dropped his planning. What he had in mind at that moment would have him run to a worse fate than the unfortunate stone amah on the hills above.

  The beer came and the waiter poured it into a tumbler. Sandingham drank deeply and with the pleasure of relief. The cold
lager assuaged both his thirsts. His hunger faded.

  Before he had finished his second beer, the boy and his parents stood up to go. He watched them leave the café, enter the twin-coloured Ford and back out into the road before driving off. As the car swung round, Sandingham became conscious of the boy looking at him through the car window.

  * * *

  ‘Mr Sandingham!’

  Damn, thought Sandingham. He had hoped to avoid him.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Heng.’

  ‘Good evening. May I have a word?’

  The hotel manager led him across to the corner settee by the bar. There was no one about; the bar had yet to open.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Sandingham, but I have to ask you for another payment of your rent. I must ask you to give it to me within a week.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘At least two hundred and fifty dollars.’

  ‘Can I give you some now, on account?’

  Mr Heng was surprised, but did not show it. He decided a bird in the hand was, with Mr Sandingham, worth at least a flock in the bush.

  ‘Certainly.’

  Sandingham reached into his pocket and took out one hundred dollars rolled in a rubber band.

  He had had the most astonishing luck. Coming down Soares Avenue he had found the roll of bills lying in the gutter. At the time he had marvelled at the way Lady Chance did sometimes smile on poor, benighted bastards like himself. Fortune was with him, he felt, if only very temporarily.

  Mr Heng took the notes, counted them out and issued Sandingham with a receipt. This should keep him going, Sandingham calculated, in equal debt but no deeper, until nearly Christmas. He still had no dope, but he did have a roof for a while.

  He went under the lime-green, neon-lit plastic arch into the hotel dining room and ordered the evening meal. The manager followed him in.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Mr Sandingham.’ He held out a white, sealed envelope. ‘This came in the post for you.’

  It had a ten-cent stamp stuck on it and was postmarked in Tsuen Wan, on the way to Castle Peak. Sandingham slit it open with his bread knife. If only there could be half an ounce in it. A quarter of an ounce. There was no possible way he was going to get any unless it was from his old source.

  Inside there was only a typed noted. It read, ‘One hundred dollars, please, Joe. By Saturday.’

  * * *

  It was a warm, South China autumn afternoon. Flies buzzed intermittently upon the windows and butterflies flicked lazily from one blossom to another in the rows of chrysanthemum pots in front of the hotel. Insects could foretell, as Sandingham understood, the coming doom of December just as birds had sensed the quicker advent of a stranger winter at another time in his life.

  He spent the hours immediately after midday in his room, smoking a small amount of his last supply of opium. The withdrawal symptoms weren’t affecting him badly as yet. That would come, though, as he knew only too well. And when that happened it would be the end. Once in the grips of the shakes and fears he would be useless. A clinic would take him in, he would lose his opportunity to earn and the downward spiral upon which he had existed for so very long now would sharply accelerate and he would speed faster and faster towards the bottom. They would release him cured, albeit temporarily, but washed out and without a future. The addict’s eternal curse, he knew, was to be saved from his demons.

  After smoking he left his room, with the window open and the small electric fan on full, and went to the first-floor lounge where he sat in one of the easy chairs and thumbed through that day’s edition of the South China Morning Post. Nothing attracted his attention for more than a few seconds until he came to a small paragraph in the centre pages which announced that the Japanese consulate general’s office in Hong Kong had been re-opened upon the arrival in the colony of the new representative of the Government of Japan, Mr Osamu Itagaki. He had presented his credentials at Government House and the office was now officially reinstated.

  Sandingham let the paper drop to his lap and he looked blankly at the potted indoor palm that stood by the glass screen dividing the lounge from the landing.

  Normality was returning. Eleven years after the fall of Hong Kong, the blowing up of the Bren-gun carrier and the death of thousands, the consulate was open again. It was all water under the bridge, spilt milk, the passage of years lapped up with unemotional thirst. The politicians were back in control. Visas would be issued, passports stamped, trade links strengthened. Those who had died had died for what? he pondered. Eleven years of undiplomatic ties. He felt the anger surge up within him and he fought against it. Partly, he struggled so that the softness of the opium would continue for as long as possible; partly, because he knew that to lose his temper was futile.

  The lounge seemed stuffy now, as if an excrescence was seeping from the newsprint. He folded the paper into its wooden clip and opened the glass doors leading on to the balcony. The sun was as gently warm as an English summer’s day. He leaned on the parapet and thought of the two Australian officers he had had his contretemps with in the self-same spot. They would know he was right by now. If they were still alive.

  A faint brrrmming sound reached his ears.

  Glancing over the wall, he saw the boy below. Once again, he was playing with military Dinky toys in the hedge along the top of the bank to the driveway. Unlike the last occasion on which Sandingham had watched the boy bomb his models, this time the child was erecting a camp hospital. A new toy ambulance was added to the fleet of vehicles. It was guarded by the tank. A white postcard tent was hidden in the grass, its top decorated with a childish red cross.

  The boy was engrossed in his game. With the hospital set up and well defended against brutish attack, he skipped to the other end of the lawn where a small airstrip existed on a manhole cover. From there, he took off and flew, in his hands and in his daydreams, a Hawker Hunter jet fighter painted in camouflage colours. He banked around the hedges, landed to refuel on the wall between the flowerpots, took off again and started a long bomb run on the card hospital.

  Sandingham steeled himself. He wanted to shut his eyes but he could not bring the lids to close. He wanted to be blind and to see, both at the same time. The bombs, however, did not shake down from the sky. There were no explosions. The Avon cannon shells did not strafe the hospital or attack the tank. The ordnance was left intact.

  Now the boy was the pilot, talking to the control tower which replied to him.

  ‘Hospital, George. I see a hospital. Over.’

  ‘Okay, Bert. Don’t bomb the hospital. Over.’

  ‘Righto, George. Banking to left. Over.’

  The boy’s mouth spittled some static on the imaginary radio waves.

  ‘They’ve got tanks, George. Shall I shoot them? Over.’

  ‘No, Bert! Do not shoot tanks. Repeat, do not shoot tanks. You might hit the hospital. Over.’

  ‘Roger, George. Returning to base. Over and out!’

  The soliloquy finished, the boy turned the jet for home at the other end of the lawn.

  Sandingham returned to the lounge, sat in the chair and sank his head into his hands. If games were real, he thought, humans would be infinitely kind and good and just. But they weren’t.

  After a minute or two he got up, left the hotel lobby and mounted the four steps from the covered porch to the lawn. Sandingham saw that the boy was occupied in excavating further defensive trenches around his hospital with his hands, scooping the earth out and piling it over a hidden bunker containing a jeep. He knelt on the damp grass by the lad.

  ‘Hello.’

  The boy started, for he had not heard Sandingham approach. A look of quick terror flashed across his face.

  ‘Hello,’ he answered tentatively, looking around to ensure that no one was watching him talk to the mad man, the crazy guy, the mok tau.

  Sandingham pointed to the tank and guns.

  ‘Don’t you think that having guns there puts the sick men at risk? After all, if there
were no guns there would be no need for the enemy to attack the hospital.’

  ‘No. Red Chinese and North Koreans don’t care about such things. They bomb anything. Everything needs guarding.’

  ‘But the last attack came to nothing. Not one bomb fell.’

  The boy chose to ignore this observation. He had been a British pilot then, on a mission against the Communists. The politics were reversed now.

  ‘This is Korea, is it?’ Sandingham changed the subject and cast his eyes along the hedge.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy informed him, surprised an adult should take any notice of his playing. ‘The hedge is a forest and the bank is a hill going down to a river.’

  Sandingham saw through the hedge that a trace of water was running in the storm ditch. The skull-headed gardener had been on his rounds.

  ‘This,’ the boy continued, indicating a line in the grass left by the hose, ‘is the border between north and south. This place where the hospital is is called “Ping Chong Sing”. The hospital is a MASH.’

  ‘What’s a mash?’

  ‘Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. It’s where wounded men go. So you were wrong. You said the sick men, but they’re not sick. They’re hurt.’

  ‘How many doctors are there in the tent?’

  The boy gave him a guided tour of the hospital with its surgical ward, its operating tent, the ambulance (the back doors on it opened), the defences, the bomb shelters, the underground jeep hangar and the guards hiding in the ‘trees’ of the hedge, ready to snipe at the aircraft.

  ‘David?’

  It was the mother’s voice.

  ‘Here, Beth.’

  She came out of the shade of the hotel porch and on to the lawn, catching Sandingham standing up as she approached. There was a look of annoyance on her face. He wondered if he smelt of drink or dope or both.