In the meantime I’ve been shopping (mostly for furniture, but with the prices here I may not have bought my last pair of Jimmy Choos!). Our period stuff from back home wouldn’t have fitted in here, so we’ve farmed some of it out to friends and stuck the best pieces in storage. This time I’m going for a streamlined look with Asian influence: dark wood and bright cushions and locally sourced artworks. Our photos and books are still in transit but when they arrive we will have our little home. Oh and Meggs - I miss my kitty cat dreadfully and have just got a couple of quotes from companies which can organise his relocation. I was reluctant to commit to this until I’d reassured myself that our outdoor terrace was big enough to accommodate him, but he’s such a lazy indoor cat he probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway.
Isabel is settling in well. I haven’t yet found her a place in a kindergarten and may not at this late stage, but have filled in an application for next year at the Discovery Bay International School. In the meantime I’ve enrolled her in ballet classes and found a playgroup where we can mix with the other mums and kids. I’m constantly agog at her ability to adapt and make new friends. I’m pretty sure, even at age four, that I never had the confidence of my daughter.
Like most of the expats I have hired an amah to help out a few days a week, and, yes, she’s a Filipino, called Myrna. She’s a few years older than I am, a divorcee, and has two children who live with her mother back home in The Philippines. She sees them about once a year. I can’t imagine being separated from my child like that but that’s the sacrifice these women have to make to support their families, incomprehensible as it is to most spoilt Westerners. Myrna is good looking, like most of her race. I hired her before I’d heard the rumours of the bonking businessmen but if Tony is having any carnal thoughts about her he’s keeping them well hidden; I don’t think he’d ever be that stupid. I left Issy in her care the other day so I could go shopping in Causeway Bay. (Isabel has clearly taken after her father, recently declaring she doesn’t like the noise and ‘yucky smells’ of the city.) I cut short my expedition, thinking my young daughter may have been becoming anxious without me, but when I walked through the door she looked up from the story-book she was reading with Myrna and said crossly, ‘Why are you back so soon?’ I think might be on to a winner here.
Issy met this little girl called Chelsea at her ballet class and as a consequence I have now become best friends with Chelsea’s mother, an imposingly efficient English woman called Lily. Actually I didn’t have much say in the matter. Lily decided I was going to be her friend and that was that. She lives nearby in a bigger place in Headland Village, visits me at least once a day, calls me twice more and has pretty much taken over the running of my life. It’s like having a same-sex stalker.
I don’t want to sound unkind, however, because she really has been very sweet. Lily and her family have been here two and a half years so she knows all about the best places for kids in Hong Kong. It was through Lily’s recommendation that I found Myrna. Lily has four children aged under eight herself - two boys and two girls - and motherhood is clearly her vocation. She’s a pretty woman but the classic jeans, jumper and sensible shoe type. No adornments, no make-up, and she is clearly letting her hair grey naturally. I might consider that at age sixty but not any time before. Whenever we go on outings her children all arrive, immaculately kitted out, with neat little packed lunches in colour-coded plastic lunchboxes. She recently started bringing a lunchbox for Isabel as well! Perhaps I should feel insulted but I don’t feel she ever intended this to be a slight on my parenting skills. I think she just wants to add Isabel and me to her brood.
Mind you once I met her husband Roger it became clear to me why Lily had thrown herself into mothering. Roger is a banker. Think rhyming slang. Still, it’s too obvious for a nickname - no challenge there. You may not know it but apparently two and a half years’ residency in Hong Kong can make you a world authority on the place and on all Chinese history and culture since the Zhou Dynasty to boot. When I mentioned I’d been looking around for work, he tactfully advised that Hong Kong was a ‘global city’ and thus no-one would look at me with my Australian (read Hicksville) university qualifications and experience. He is particularly patronising to women: his wife, me and especially Lorinda, their live-in Filipino housekeeper. I think he is exacting revenge on all the girls who knocked him back for dances and dates before he acquired his only discernible asset - a high six figures income.
Women never cease to perplex me with their choice of partner. What possibly could she see in him? Lily doesn’t strike me at all as the gold-digger type and it certainly couldn’t be his looks that attracted her. You’d go far to find a man as unpleasant looking as Roger: oily dark hair that he is constantly trying to stick behind one ear even though it’s clearly too short for that, pasty skin and those little round wire glasses that I suppose are meant to make him appear intellectual but only succeed in making him look affected. And he’s fat; ‘corpulent’ is the word that immediately comes to mind. If you can’t disguise your girth under a dark business suit you know you’ve reached serious fatty boombah territory. He’s clearly indulged in too many long lunches with his Hong Kong banking set, has Roger.
Listen to me. I’m starting to sound like my husband: judging people on their looks. The thing is Roger’s less than sterling appearance would be forgivable if he was a nice person; but he’s not - end of story.
One big plus about living in Hong Kong is that you get a bonus New Year at no extra cost: the Chinese or, more correctly, Lunar New Year. The lunar calendar is based on the moon’s orbit around the earth, so the date of the Lunar New Year isn’t fixed. It’s a lot more of an elaborate celebration than our New Year back home, which is really nothing more than an excuse for a piss-up, a few fireworks over the Harbour Bridge and some resolutions that rarely make it past mid-January. The Lunar New Year also features fireworks, but there is also a Lantern Festival and big street parade with the traditional drums, lion and dragon dances. People decorate their homes with flowers and red paper lanterns and ribbons, exchange gifts, get together for family banquets, and cook special festive foods such as turnip cakes and dumplings. The Lunar New Year actually falls quite late - February 18 to be precise - in 2007. The upcoming year is to be the Year of the Pig, or more specifically, the Year of the Fire Pig.
Anyway, at Lily’s insistence a group of us parents from dance class are going for a Chinese banquet to ring in the Year of the Pig a few days in advance. Tony and I, as resident newbies, are the guests of honour. Roger has made a booking at ‘the best Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong’, one that apparently ‘no-one else knows about’. That’s all happening next week.
So, all in all, things are going okay. Tony has almost finished his training and will be joining the regular roster soon, back doing what he likes best: ferrying passengers around the world on his favourite aircraft, employed by a global airline, living the childhood dream.
He is really happy. Such an elusive concept for most of us - happiness - but if it turns up you are duty bound to grab it and wallow in it like there’s no tomorrow. My husband is right in there right now.
I think it will be some time before happiness finds me again, but life is calm at the moment and I’m finding that calmness has its consolations. I wonder how the Year of the Fire Pig is going to unfold for us all.
20
The Year of the Fire Pig
In preparation for the New Year’s celebrations I decided to read up on predictions for the upcoming Year of the Fire Pig.
Some things sounded pretty promising: for example, with respect to Tony’s career, ‘the tourism and transportation sectors will flourish’. Predictions for our personal life proved less helpful: ‘The Year of the Pig is seen as a good year for marriage and having children, but some couples may separate before the year is out.’
So according to the zodiac Tony and I could either have another child or a separat
ion in the upcoming year. Either was possible. Another alternative is that the whole Chinese astrology thing is ‘bollocks’, as I heard a young English guy on the ferry say the other day.
Two nights ago, Wednesday, was the much anticipated occasion of our Chinese banquet with Lily and Roger and the whole ballet class crowd. After hearing my character description of Roger, Tony wasn’t at all keen to spend the evening with him. ‘Can’t we get out of it?’ he said when he emerged from the bedroom that afternoon. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep all day and I’m feeling like crap.’
Bloody men - it wasn’t like he hadn’t had enough warning. ‘No, it would be totally rude to cancel at this stage. You can catch up with your sleep tomorrow. Roger’s a dick but I don’t want to offend his wife, who is actually very nice. Remember this is Chelsea’s mum we’re talking about.’
‘Oh all right, but don’t expect me to be much company.’
‘Just try and block out most of what he says and nod your head every now and again. He loves the sound of his own voice so he probably won’t even notice.’
Roger insisted on doing the ordering for the entire table. I’m sure he deliberately ordered every dish which contained an endangered species. I kept waiting to be set upon by a group of frenzied animal liberationists. We had shark’s fin soup, and abalone and sea cucumber and whole fish and suckling pig and one dish that contained something that looked alarmingly like thin slices of a large animal’s penis (not out of the question that this would be on the menu) that I was later informed was pig’s trotter. I bravely tried everything on offer except the roast baby pigeon. I kept thinking about them pooping around Hyde Park fountain and got creeped out by their little carcasses, which earned me a sneer of condescension from our host. He kept trying to get the waiter to fill up everyone’s wine glass at every occasion too, in an attempt to get us all drunk. I explained to him with what I hoped was witheringly obvious sarcasm, ‘it might be alright for you to turn up to work half-pissed tomorrow but I have a responsible job to attend to, looking after my child.’
As luck would have it, Roger closed right in on Tony and droned on to him all evening, only interrupting his monologue occasionally to pass judgement on the menu, ply us with alcohol and helpfully comment to my husband, ‘I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes - first 9/11 and then SARS, and now the way oil prices are heading, well…It’s clearly an industry with its best days behind it.’ Tony’s face looked pinched with annoyance but he kept his mouth shut and I admired his forbearance in avoiding a punch up. I kept trying to catch his eye all night to commiserate, but he didn’t look in my direction very much at all.
As we were boarding the return ferry I spied a couple of seats away from all the others so I grabbed his hand and careered towards them, apologising to Lily as I went past, ‘I get a bit motion sick so we’re going to take those seats down the front.’ Relieved to have twenty-five minutes’ breathing space from Roger, I plonked down in the seat and whispered to Tony, ‘Sorry about that.’
‘About what?’
‘The whole evening - having to be ear-bashed by Roger the pompous prick. I’ll try and spare you in future.’
‘It’s okay. I did what you said and didn’t listen.’
‘What about all that crap he was going on with about the airline industry? Here’s me thinking you were about to kill him. What’s with you tonight? Have I done something to annoy you or something?’
‘No, no…just tired,’ he said, but he was definitely not there with me. He draped an arm around my shoulders, but even that seemed a distracted gesture. I gave myself a figurative smack in the head for not making that appointment with the couples’ counsellor I’d been recommended.
Tony didn’t speak again until we straggled off the ferry at the other end. We couldn’t avoid the walk back home with our hosts, but by this time Roger was feeling ‘off’ from all the wine he’d drunk and no-one seemed inclined to talk.
We’d organised for Myrna to stay overnight and she and Isabel were both asleep when we arrived home. Tony walked straight to our bedroom while I checked on Issy. As I retrieved her favourite teddy from the floor and tucked it in next to her I was struck by the first real twinges of anxiety I’d had since we’d arrived. Was I imagining it or was a barrier being erected again?
I entered our bedroom trying to will myself to talk to him: communication, communication - it was all about communication and it was clearly my responsibility to push it. I was just about to open my mouth when he walked over to me, took me in his arms in a tight clutch, and said, ‘I’m sorry about being a bore tonight. But I do love you, you know. I am so happy to have my girls here.’
He had told me he loved me. Unprompted. Something he’d never done before. I think he was trying to reassure me but it had the opposite effect.
He held me way too tight, you see. So tight it almost hurt.
He was afraid he was losing his grip on me.
And why would he be worried about that?
I left our ensuite door open as I removed my makeup and in the reflection of the mirror I saw him do something else he had never done before. He put his mobile phone inside the drawer of his bedside table, rather than on top beside his reading lamp.
I know it took us both a long time to fall asleep - we each lay there quiet and still, pretending to the other that we were.
I must have dropped off at some stage but woke up just after 3am with a gagging feeling in my throat. Something in the combination of the banquet and the wine and ferry trip had clearly not agreed with me. I made it to the bathroom on time and heaved my guts up into the toilet bowl several times. I leant my hot head on the cool porcelain, amazed that the noise hadn’t disturbed Tony. He was snoring softly, clearly out like a light. Deeply asleep. I had my chance.
I opened the drawer to his bedside table, congratulating myself as I did so for choosing a top-of-the-range design; it moved seamlessly on its thread, quiet as a mouse. I padded downstairs to our kitchen, bare feet on bare boards. I drank several glasses of water to clear the taste from my mouth. Then I looked at the phone. It was off. He never turned his phone off. I pressed the on switch. Have you ever noticed how long it takes to switch on a mobile phone? When you’re engaged in espionage it seems an eternity. Finally…the battery was fully charged and the phone set to silent mode. A few seconds later a light flashed, indicating he had a new message. No…twenty-two new messages in fact - ten voicemails and a dozen texts, all from the same number. I checked the latest text, sent only a few minutes earlier. It said: U cant keep avoiding me. please can we talk.
I pressed the return call number. A female voice answered. The accent was Chinese, the manner eager: ‘Hello.’
‘This is Eleanor Cooper speaking. I am wondering who you are and why you are sending text messages to my husband at three in the morning.’
Her tone changed with this. It was now clipped and efficient, with a hint of defiance. ‘I’m glad you called. My name is Wendy Wong and I think you should know that I have been your husband’s girlfriend for four years.’
Wendy. So the mystery was solved.
But four years - was this part true? Isabel had not long turned four. If this woman was telling the truth my husband had not just had a brief affair. He had been involved with her for over half of our married life.
‘Why should I believe you?’ I said.
‘Because it’s true.’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid.’
‘It is true. He had a mobile phone that only I could call him on and our own email account so you would not find out. He was going to leave you and marry me when his daughter got big enough.’
‘You could be making this all up,’ I said, although my denial was just a façade. I think I knew it was true from the moment she spoke.
‘I still have my emails. You could read them.’
No thanks, I didn’t want to read them!
My husband slept on, unaware that his marriage had just ended.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve heard enough. What I need to do now is talk to my husband.’
‘He will deny it but it’s true. Remember I have the emails.’
The Eleanor of a few years earlier would have rushed upstairs to confront him in a tearful rage, but she’d long since departed the scene. Besides, Myrna was asleep in our house and neither she nor Isabel needed to be witness to that. I took down Wendy’s number, deleted all her messages, turned the phone off again, snuck it back in his drawer (still he slept) and went downstairs again to make myself a cup of tea. Then I sat and thought.
Tony came downstairs about 6am to look for me. His hair was tousled from sleep and he was clad only in boxers and a t-shirt but I observed he was still clutching that phone. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Why are you up so early?’
‘I’ve been vomiting my guts up. Something on the menu last night didn’t agree with me.’
‘Really? I thought I would have heard you then.’
‘I came downstairs so as not to disturb you. I feel okay now, anyway.’
‘I bet it was the seafood. I felt like I was going to have a heave at one stage, too. I’ve never understood why they make such a fuss about abalone. It’s all a big wank as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, I’m wide awake now so I’m going to head out for some exercise and try and catch up on my sleep later. Can you make me some toast while I get ready.’
‘Okay.’
No, I didn’t poison it. I let him think that things were normal, even if I was more subdued than usual. The only thing that might have given me away was when he came up behind me at the table to give me a quick hug and a kiss goodbye. I couldn’t help the flinch.
Happily Ever After? Page 25