Planet Lolita
Page 1
PLANET LOLITA
A Novel
CHARLES FORAN
Dedication
For Mary, Anna, and Claire
Epigraph
I’m see-through!
—Chihiro, Spirited Away
Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: Mary, Tai Long Wan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part II: The Big Mango
Part III: John B
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
Mary, Tai Long Wan
CHAPTER ONE
Here’s what happened.
“Wake up, Dad,” I said. “Mom, wake up too.”
“Xixi,” he said.
“Sarah,” she said.
“Parentals,” I said. “There’s something outside.”
“The ocean,” she said, “and isn’t it perfect, waking to the sound of waves?” Mom, lying on my right, brushed hair from my eyes. Though surprised, I did the same to her, forgiving her morning breath. Up close she smelled of herbal essence and kiwi, her skin oily from sleep and peeling along the shoulder from being gweilo. On my other side lay Dad, reeking of hair gunk and tumours and the vinegar snap of overnight sweat.
“I need a smoke,” he said.
“No you don’t,” she said.
“Maybe you should wait,” I said, not sure why.
Groaning and rubbing his shoulder, Dad sat up. “Whose idea of fun was this, camping in Hong Kong?”
“I had fun,” Mom said. “Kind of. Did you, honey?”
“Dad snored,” I answered.
“You think?”
“It was loud.”
“It was a string of firecrackers going off. Wasn’t I glad to be closest to the water. It drowned him. Almost,” she added.
“You wish,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to tell you both,” I said. “There’s something out there.”
“A-smoking I go,” Dad said anyway.
“Aren’t you going to put on your shorts?” she said.
But he had already unzipped the flap and wiggled out in his black boxers, pack of tumours and Zippo in hand.
“How about that,” we heard him say. Then, “Good morning, ladies.”
“Ladies?” Mom said.
By the metallic click of his lighter, I knew he was firing up a Marlboro Red, the only brand for Cool Kwok. “Leah,” he called to Mom, “we may need a lawyer.”
I made the first move.
“Put on your hat,” she said.
“I don’t burn like Peking duck,” I said. “You do.”
“Put it on.”
For the beach I had brought my straw bowler with the crown of blue ribbon and the three pins. Once I had slipped on my knock-off Vuittons, the lenses pink-tinted, and slid my phone into my pocket, I was one-two-three go.
I crawled out.
“Sketchy,” I said.
“Mermaids,” Dad said, “come to serenade us.” His smile was easy but his grip, when I took his hand, was not.
“Shit,” Mom said. To my offer of holding hands she made a Lawyer Leah face. Not a scoff, nor a smile.
I counted thirteen “mermaids” between our tent and the ocean, a few with their flippers still in the water. Neither parent could quite believe their old eyes, and squinted at the sight, as if it all might be a dream and them still sleeping. I had excellent hearing and vision and knew at once that the most remote beach in Hong Kong had been invaded. Remoteness made Tai Long Wan ideal for camping, Mom had read. The strands were accessible by two methods. There was a long, sweaty hike through a New Territories country park, or a short, terrifying speedboat ride from Sai Kung. Fifteen minutes ago I had awoken to a motor being cut, and the splash of feet and shush of giggles.
“Are they amahs?” I said. I was thinking a little of Gloria, who took care of me, but more of the maid armies occupying city parks and squares every weekend. Going on appearances and postures and uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, twelve of these women would have blended into any Sunday gathering in Kowloon or Causeway Bay. They were about the right age, early twenties or even older, totally grown-up. But Hong Kong amahs were mostly Filipino and Indonesian, along with a few Thai. Those ladies arrived on discount flights, their visas arranged by agencies and paid for by rich people. They didn’t wash ashore at dawn like Styrofoam cartons.
“Back inside the tent,” Mom said.
“Why?”
“We shouldn’t be here. Or they shouldn’t be. We definitely shouldn’t be here at the same time.”
“And yet here we all are,” Dad said.
“Sarah,” she said to me, “what did you just do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you—I think she just waved to one of them,” she said to him.
“No, I didn’t.”
“A furtive Asian-girl wave. She tried hiding it from us.”
“Is that a crime?” Dad said.
The girl I’d waved to, an open-palmed, fanning wave—“furtive,” according to my mother—stood out. First, she had on a dress, blue with white straps, and though it was shapeless and cheap she wore it well, thanks to her model posture and leggy legs. Second, in order to keep her distance from the far worse fashion around her she was allowing the ocean to caress her ankles, her knees knocked together. Third, she wasn’t only the tallest and prettiest but was also A-cup and hipless, not much in the way of bum. Though she noticed me looking, she didn’t wave back.
“What’s that older one up to?” Mom said. She was talking about a different mermaid who had emerged from the pack. Squat and bow-legged, with a sweat bib across her chest and an inner-tube belly, she made any amah in a Hong Kong park seem a regional beauty queen by comparison.
“Making a call,” Dad answered.
Twice already the woman had punched in a number, her face scrunched to read the keypad. Both times she then raised the phone—pink, plastic, the kind of China knock-off on sale in Chungking Mansions, minus a SIM card—over her head.
“She’s contacting her local connection, isn’t she?” Mom said. “Triad.”
“Mos def,” he said.
“They aren’t speaking Putonghua,” I said, meaning Mandarin, or real Chinese.
“Inside the tent, Sarah. I already asked.”
“A dialect,” Dad said, “from one of those pirate cities along the coast towards Fujian.”
“The pickup will happen shortly,” she said. “They aren’t walking off this beach.”
“Why drop the girls from one boat, only to collect them in another?”
She ignored his question. “We can’t be here when they arrive, Jacob. We can’t.”
“Will they care?”
“They’ll care about Sarah.”
“What does that mean?”
Mom was suddenly blocking my view of the water, and the girl in the blue dress. “Here she comes now—the Boss Lady.”
“I’m not properly attired,” Dad said. But he looked Cool Kwok in the boxer shorts, and knew it.
As the Boss Lady approached, waddling through the sand, Mom finally joined the hand-holding chain. Her palm was buttery, probably in fright. Boss Lady had a pig nose and chicken lips, a forehead of greased hair. Little about her was easy on the eyes. Even less was feminine.
“Good morning,” Mom said, stepping forward to meet her.
“Jousahn, Mom,” I corrected. “She doesn’t speak English, obviously.”
“Jousahn,” the woman
replied. She said something about her cell phone, holding it out. Amazed that she could talk without opening her mouth, I caught maybe half the words but none of the meaning. Her fingernails were painted with quarter-moons of dirt.
“What’s she saying?” Mom asked. “And why is she saying it to Sarah?”
Being six inches taller, I could look over Boss Lady and see whether the girl was still watching, and noticing that I wasn’t showing fear.
“She can’t get a signal on her phone,” Dad said. “She doesn’t think it’s broken.”
“Tell her to look at me.”
“What?”
“Tell her.”
Dad translated. Pursing her lips tighter—her teeth probably resembled kernels of canned corn left in the sun—the woman shrugged.
“We can’t get a signal either,” Mom said to her. To my surprise, she held up her iPhone, sleeker and more lawyerly than any Android. “It’s one of the reasons we decided to camp here. That, and the guarantee of solitude.”
While Dad struggled to translate this, Boss Lady stared at the phone, as if she were starving and it a delicious treat. He knew, I knew, and Mom quickly knew too. By showing off the quality Apple product, she’d blown it. Realizing we had no choice, he pointed to the hill at the southern end of the beach, the one we had climbed down yesterday. “Yours should work up there,” he said in his so-so Cantonese.
“Kimberley Tsoi called my phone when we were on the trail,” I said in English. “Remember?”
“You’re pretty,” the woman said to me in her language. Then she spoke further to Dad.
“What did she say?” Mom said. Her cheeks were now ruddy, the legacy, she had explained umpteen times, of being a “MacInnes of the Isle of Skye.” If applied using rouge, the blush highlighted her Gollum eyes and distracted from the lines crossing her cheeks. If natural, it was a humiliation, making her feel and look, she said, like a helpless child.
“She wants me to walk with her to the top of the hill so she can make a call,” Dad explained. “She’d like me to bring our phone, which is a superior model, as she can now clearly tell.”
“No chance.”
“She’s asking nicely, Leah.”
“No chance, Jacob.”
“She thinks Xixi is a knockout.”
Mom glared at me, like it was my fault. I arced on my toes, not easy in sand, to locate the girl in the dress. “I’m not that pretty,” I said, comparing us. I wished I had a mirror, for a check. Also a brush for my hair, in spite of the straw bowler.
“I’ll walk her up the hill,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Bring some water,” I said.
“I don’t need advice from a fifteen-year-old.”
Even Boss Lady arched a brow.
“Tumour?” Dad said to her, offering the pack.
“Sorry,” Mom said, pulling me in for a hug. I didn’t soften against her, didn’t release myself into her arms, the way I did with him. But I did fetch a bottle of water.
“Should I know your name?” she said to the woman. “No, wait, I don’t think so. What do I want to know about these girls? Nothing. And what do you want to know about my family? Nothing again. Now let’s go,” she added with her own bossy wave of the hand.
We watched them etch tracks along Tai Long Wan. One set was tidy—super-fit Leah stepped lightly, her markings birdlike—but the other resembled the churnings of a dog with sloppy paws. Ten minutes to the south lay the headland they would have to climb, a craggy rock jutting so far into the sea that it severed the beach in half. Out over the water a smeared sun was coming up. Soon it would be high and hot, ready to boil brains unprotected by hats and burn the skin of foreign ghosts, even those wearing SPF 60 sunblock.
“Why’s Mom so tense?” I said.
“Lawyer talk. Pay no attention.”
“Are we in trouble with bad guys?”
“Not that I can see,” he said, slipping on his Ray-Bans. “And you are a knockout, Xixi Kwok. Asian Vogue, front cover.”
“And you’re a Big Daddy-O, even in boxers.”
He gave his left buttock a pat. Then, guessing correctly, he glanced over at the twelve mermaids. A few giggled and covered their mouths with fingers, how Asian girls do. All were watching him, definitely with more interest than worry.
“Bet you they’ll smoke my cigarettes,” he said.
“They must be hungry. And thirsty.”
“We should help.”
“Can we?”
“Offer whatever we have.”
Back in the tent I found five more bottles of water, three apples and pears, plus an unopened box of six granola bars. Transferring Mom’s digital camera and Dad’s phone out of a knapsack, I filled it with the food. His real shorts were folded up in a corner, the belt still attached. I asked if I should bring them.
“Let’s give these ladies something to smile about,” he said.
“Mom won’t like it.”
“She won’t have to know.”
Hand in hand, we marched to the edge of shore. The wet sand, and then the ocean, tickled my feet, a nice feeling.
The women didn’t just smile at us. Though obviously tired, they tried smoothing T-shirts of wrinkles and wiping sand off jeans. I had guessed their ages correctly, but been too hard on their looks. Most were attractive enough, with wide, single-lidded eyes and fairly clear skin.
“Jousahn, leng neoi,” Dad said. Calling them “pretty ladies” tripped wider smiles and flirtier giggles. I didn’t like how they clustered around us, grabbing at Marlboros and driving their arms into the knapsack. I didn’t like how they liked him.
They asked questions in their dialect. “She’s my daughter,” he answered in an even worse mangle of English and Cantonese. He gave my age and height—“so tall, lah,” they said—and admitted that, yes, I was a half-half, although he was convinced I had inherited mostly from his side. When they laughed some more, I decided to go talk to the girl in the blue dress. She was keeping her distance.
One apple remained. I brought it to where she stood almost to her knees in the sea. Her dress, I now noticed, was soaked, not only along the hem but across the chest, probably from jumping out of the boat. The water, up to my knees as well, contained a pull, a tug towards the real ocean. I loved the sensation of it, the embrace and maybe danger.
“Ping guo,” I said in Mandarin.
“Ping?”
“Apple. It’s the same in Mandarin or Cantonese, isn’t it?”
“Ping gwoh,” the girl said. She held the apple before her, but did not bite it.
“Okay.”
She had a sunflower-seed face, like I did, black hair and gaze, an oval mouth and naturally bruised lips. Her skin was bronze, as if already warmed by sunlight, and her hair shimmered, also from light, the mysterious kind cast over statues in churches. If her eyes were cloudy, it was from being cold and wobbly after a sea journey. Up close, her body, bare from the shoulders, was the opposite of a statue—a long-stemmed rose. She had a stem neck, protruding collarbones, shoulders with the same raw petals as my own.
“I’m Xixi Kwok,” I said in English. “I like your dress.”
She squinted, her way of asking.
“My mom calls me Sarah,” I replied. “But I prefer Xixi. Eat the ping gwoh. You must be starved.”
Saying it, I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing since last night. My tummy grumbled.
She took a bite, flashing perfect teeth. Apple skin went crunch and apple juice sprayed. Offer me a bite, I said silently, and I’ll take it. She stared at the fruit, as though surprised by the sweet taste, worry lines drawing her brows closer.
“Are you sick from the boat ride?” I said, trying to understand.
Crunch, another bite.
“I know I’d be barfing.”
Crunch, she was a third of the way through. Are you sure you’re okay? I nearly said. “You’ll like it here,” I said instead. “Great food, although
the street stalls serve pig guts, which are disgusting, and amazing shopping, especially for knock-offs. And don’t be frightened by the masks people are wearing. They’re afraid of another epidemic, like when I was little. Two hundred and ninety-nine people died that time. I remember the number from the newspaper. Which is weird,” I added. “Why would a kid remember 299 dead and 1,755 infected? Dad says Hong Kongers are always on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown.”
The girl nodded, but only because I stopped babbling. Then she dropped the core into the water and looked elsewhere. Over at my father, to be exact, still in his boxers and still flirting with the leng neoi. “That’s him,” I said. “Cool Kwok. His iPod isn’t all Dad rock. Some of it’s pretty good.”
Her gaze was back on me. On my neck, because of what I do when I’m nervous. Run the cross along its chain, back and forth, zipzipzip.
I babbled on. “It was a First Communion gift,” I said, pinching the cross between my fingertips. “I wish it was the Virgin Mary. Not crucified, but a—what do you call it—pendant with her and the baby. Not that there’s any Jesus either. Just the cross. I went to Sunday school for a year to get ready for communion. We lived in Stanley then.”
Finally, she spoke. I heard her say a name.
“Mary?” I said. “That’s so funny. We were talking about her.”
She squinted again.
“But it’s your English name, right? What do your parents call you?”
After a pause to chew her lower lip—I did the same when I wasn’t sure how to answer—she repeated it. Mary, and Mary only, she called herself.
I loved this! The two of us talking and maybe becoming friends, staying in touch long after the beach.
“I’m on Facebook,” I said. “Are you?”
She kept chewing. Her lips were thicker than mine, something boys apparently liked.
“I’ll probably need a last name to find you,” I said, switching to Cantonese to make sure she understood. “Or you could find me.”
Suddenly Dad was squeezing my arm. Mary retreated a step, nearly stumbling. Even Manga the Mutt, who yip-yipped at his own image in mirrors, wasn’t scared of Jacob Kwok. But she seemed to be.