“No worries,” I said to Gloria as they passed beneath us. “They’re busy planning exit strategies.”
“We can go home now?”
Yes, please, I thought to myself, because being this kind of daughter kept my tummy knotted. But then an image brought actual bile into my throat. Might Jacob Kwok also be secretly protecting himself against airborne diseases with a SARS mask? Leaving exactly one member of the Kwok-MacInnes family vulnerable, if not already infected. The girl too spacey and mal-brained to get it when adults were keeping things from her.
“Yummy Pinoy food,” I said. “Remember?”
For the first time ever, there was no queue at the taxi stand on Pedder Street. We walked to the top cab and opened the door. But the driver, staring at my maskless face, waved us away, saying “no business” in Cantonese.
I slid in first. “251 Jaffe Road, m’goy,” I said.
When he scowled into the rear-view mirror, I fired him my best Lawyer Leah glare.
“Gao cho ah!” he complained. You got to be kidding me! in English, more or less.
“Gao cho ah yourself.”
“Your father?” Gloria said. “You want to check him too?”
I concentrated on sending a text.
Me: Anything weird going on?
Mom: Just another day of chaos and collapse. Why?
Me: Are Vijay and Amitav still in Hong Kong?
Mom: Sanjay Seran’s boys? Why do you ask?
Me: What exactly IS tiffin?
Me:??
Mom: I shouldn’t be back that late
Me: Whatever
The ride from Central to Wan Chai took six minutes, the streets near-deserted on a Thursday afternoon. I paid, two twenty-dollar bills for a twenty-four-dollar fare, and told the driver to keep the change. He came around the side of the car with a spray bottle and rag, wiping the back seat while we stood on the sidewalk.
“Gao cho ah!” I said.
“Enough,” Gloria said.
She started across Jaffe Road to number 251, the slummy head offices of Pearl Jeans, floors 4–7. My grandfather owned the building, floors 1–24, and rented his son the space for free. I told her to wait.
“You want to see if he is also wearing a mask?” she said, a good guess. “We go inside and find out.”
“Let’s have a drink first. I’m thirsty.”
“Where?”
Across from the office was an indoor dai pai dong, the variety of no-star restaurant serving pork fat on rice, and noodle soup with fish balls. Eleven years in Hong Kong, and I’d never set foot in the place. We sat at a window table with a bottle of soy and a tube of toothpicks already provided.
“Not a restaurant for girl who shops Dior,” Gloria said, pronouncing the brand as “door.”
“We’ll just sit.”
“I have Handi Wipes.” She dug into her purse.
If other customers, masks pushed down around their necks to eat, weren’t staring at us from the start, the sight of a helper Handi Wiping a glass of iced tea got their attention. I kept the hat and glasses on, and corrected my slouch—to avoid contact with the seat.
“So …?” she finally said.
“Leslie Cheung jumped off a hotel during the last SARS crisis. He was a Cantopop immortal, almost … I don’t really remember him. They’re asking celebrities to please not kill themselves this year. Miriam Tsang said her parents think I already have SARS, because I won’t wear a condom. I called her mom and dad stupid … Does my father have values?”
“Give your hand.”
She squeezed it and, with her mask off to sip the tea, showed me Excelsis-Major, the entire constellation on view when she smiled.
“Chelsey Chung is basically gone for good,” I said, “and other girls are posting departure dates. Kelly took a photo of her plane ticket and keyed I’m out of here! in the caption. Isn’t that dumb? Wait!” I slipped from her grasp. “I figured out how to do this.”
Me: Wazzup, Cool Kwok
Dad: Hey XX
Me: So who was Leslie Cheung?
Dad: A famous singer and actor. People say I look like him
Me: Why did he suicide off a hotel?
Dad: I’d forgotten about that. It got pretty crazy last time … U ask because?
Me: Someone jumped off a building in Jaffe Road a few minutes ago. A friend put it on Facebook. See anything?
Dad: Hold on
Gloria asked me who I was texting. I was about to tell a lie when she slumped in her seat. “Girl, don’t move,” she said. “Your father.”
Jacob Kwok had emerged from the front door of 251 Jaffe, slipping on his Ray-Bans to filter the sun. He glanced first up, and then down, the street, seeking ambulances and police cruisers, TV cameramen and reporters, excited Hong Kongers with their Androids and iPads raised over their heads, snapping pictures and making videos and then posting, YouTubing, tweeting, Tumblring, and Instagramming the images and footage. Not for a second did he think to glance across at the dai pai dong he’d never stepped inside either. What happened next made me yip-yip and wag my Manga tail. Cool Kwok flicked his Zippo to light a tumour without needing to unclip any SARS mask from his movie-star face. Because he could tell the difference between a tsunami and a wave. Because he loved his Xixi doll.
“Now we can go have some sweet rice and cassava cakes,” I said. “This tea is yuck.”
“Wait.”
Embedded in the ground floor of my grandfather’s building was a nightclub with a prison facade of brick and a metal grate over a wooden door. A Wan Chai institution, according to websites, known for its two purple and yellow neon signs of a dangling tongue—one above the door, the other jutting into the street—Sticky Fingers didn’t open until most businesses closed. I could count ten bars and clubs on Jaffe Road alone, and had been told that after dark women in miniskirts and leather boots stood on the sidewalk outside number 251, luring men with cheap drinks and “special ladies.” Dad once explained that Wan Chai wasn’t where the “real action” was anymore, but underage boys from East Island claimed they’d received lap dances from dancers wearing thongs.
And today, though it was barely two o’clock, a woman in a halter top and leather skirt raised the grate from the inside, likely because my father had rung the buzzer next to it. On recognizing Jacob Kwok she beamed, her own smile confirming a Filipino, and crossed her arms over her breasts, which Rachel once told me meant a girl was interested. He said something that made her laugh, and then, worse still, cover her mouth with a finger fan—another sign. Next, the woman lifted my father’s glasses up onto his skull and touched, maybe by accident, his cheek. He ran a fingertip along her plump bare arm, its shade the muddier brown of Mindanao, where lots of special ladies came from.
“Gloria?”
“We must wait now.” Her voice was thick.
“We shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.”
“Did Dad do something when Rachel was my age?” I asked, the words ahead of any thoughts. “Something bad?”
“I am family helper,” she answered. But she couldn’t lie to me any better than I could lie to her.
“Rachel won’t tell me.”
“Fifteen is too young to find out. For you, or for her.”
We were smearing SARS over the back seat of another taxi driven by another surly driver when he texted.
Dad: You sure about the jumper? No one saw anything
Me: Maybe it was a joke
Dad: A sick one
Me: I’m fifteen, Dad!
Dad: Sweet sixteen the day after Xmas. You’ll be a young lady then. We’ll make it special
“If we have to leave Hong Kong because of the epidemic,” I said to Gloria, “I want us to fly together to Luzon, so I can meet Miguel and Jesus.”
“Yes?”
“We’ll hang out together. I’ll take Jesus to his soccer games, if you’re busy, and maybe help Miguel buy clothes that aren’t so gangster.” When she frowned—we still hadn’t spoken abo
ut his Facebook photo—I kept talking. “There’s no way I’ll fly to Canada. I don’t know anyone there, except Rachel and my grandparents, who are, like, a hundred. Mom and Dad won’t mind if I go with you instead.”
“SeeSee,” she said, sniffling.
“They won’t.”
Mr. Clark died the next afternoon. Facebook, which I’d gone onto to check the numbers for “Finding Mary,” exploded with the news. Chelsey reported it from California, and Kimberley Tsoi, travelling to her parents’ holiday home in Phuket, shared with all 849 of her friends from the departure lounge at Chep Lap Kok. Wanting to hear her voice, I called Mom. Four messages I left with her, along with two texts, saying that I was upset and needed to tell someone about the hugs Mr. Clark gave every morning at East Island, how he smelled of candied ginger and sounded like God would—if God ever had to pretend to have a human voice. Rachel had gone to Montreal for the weekend with Head Tax boy and Dad was back in Shenzhen, being lap-danced by a skag. Mom finally deposited two messages onto my phone, curt with lawyer busy. “Is this just about Eric Clark,” she said in the second one, “or is there something else?” She then texted sorrysorry three times in the following twenty minutes, none of which deserved more than my silent pity. At 9:37 that evening she knocked on the bedroom door.
“Sorry about Mr. Clark,” she said from the hallway. “Honestly. And sorry we didn’t connect all day.”
“You were busy with your exit strategy.”
She turned the knob. “May I come in?”
“Stay there,” I said. Rising from the bed, I yanked a gym sock up to my elbow, then unlocked the door and stuck the arm in the crack between it and the frame.
“‘Sup,” I said, my four fingers forming the roof of a mouth, my thumb the floor.
Nothing.
“I’m the SARS sock puppet. Call me Sticky. What’s your name?”
“I’m exhausted, Sarah. Please …”
“Sarah’s not here,” I said. “Talk to Sticky Fingers instead.”
She sighed so forcefully that Manga yipped in agreement about the overall sadness of life. “Decisions are being made, darling, about your future, our future—about everything. Do you want to be part of the conversation or not?”
“Do they keep calling?”
“Who?”
“The bad guys. The Triad gangstas.”
“Are you …”
“I’m not having a seizure. I’m not having my period again yet. I’m the SARS sock puppet, and I’m listening, Leah.”
“I need to see your face.”
Inside the sock I made a fist with ears. “You’re looking at it. Time for another tiffin?” I said, doing my best imitation of Sanjay Seran. It came out closer to Father Romesh.
“What …? What in the world …?”
“How could Mr. Clark die? I loved him.”
Her second sigh dissolved into a burbly shudder, like the tide pulling back from a pebble beach. “They keep calling,” she said. “On my latest phone, with my latest number. They tell me the name of your school and the address of our club. They talk about a photo we shouldn’t possess. They also say it’s dangerous for you to lean over railings.”
“Railings?”
“I think that’s what the man said. Could they not find someone with better English to issue their threats?”
Who’d been the real spy in the Landmark Building? My sock puppet ears drooped, and my sock puppet palm turned sweaty.
“And this is the week your father decides to tour his Shenzhen factories again? Un-fucking-believable.”
“He’s gone to talk to the guys who know the guys who are holding Mary hostage,” I said, making it all up. “And who may want me as well. People want you, don’t they? Lawyer people in the Landmark Building. And people in Wan Chai definitely want Dad,” I said, seeing the special lady cross her arms and finger-fan her laugh.
She was silent.
“Mom?”
“How can this be happening?” she said.
“It’s okay,” I replied. I didn’t want her asking more about the photo, or demanding, no excuses, to examine my profile. They still hadn’t sent me a friend request. I still didn’t know if I would friend them regardless. Every time I left the apartment now—not often, and never on my own—I made sure to shut the computer down. Nor did I want Lawyer Leah wondering why the bad guys believed it was dangerous for me to lean over railings.
“Gloria has a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and I’m a manga heroine. Sailor Moon forever!” I said, issuing the Sailor Moon salute, though it may not have shown through the sock. Being a Sailor Moon soldier wouldn’t have kept me from plunging to the floor of the Landmark, the screams of Gloria and the Indonesian helper echoing through the atrium.
For a second I didn’t trust myself to speak without betraying a sudden fear for my own safety. That was new, and unsettling. Luckily, Mom filled the silence. “Eric Clark was a sweet man. He loved you, loved each and every child at the school … I’m only trying to do what is right for you, and for all of us. I hope we can speak face-to-face in the morning,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”
She must have bolted down the hall and across the living room to the master suite. Following two, at most three seconds behind her, I watched the bedroom door close with a force that warned against knocking. I veered into the kitchen for a few swigs of OJ, not a visit with my amah. Only Gloria’s muffled sobbing, and the fact that she didn’t call my name no matter how noisily I rattled bottles on the fridge arm, made me knock on her door, and open it, and insert Sticky Fingers, though I wouldn’t call the puppet by that name with her.
“Who is this?” she said.
“Put on your glasses.”
“Not tonight.”
“Put them on!”
She complied.
“Hi there,” I said through fabric. “I’m Sanjay Seran.”
“You are SeeSee Kwok, very silly girl.”
“Why Gloria so sad?” I said, crossing to her bed. The joke was from the old days—Why SeeSee so sad? she used to ask, offering a sad clown face—but the expression in her eyes made me regret it. Crumpled on her side table was a pile of tissues. On the floor lay my old laptop, its screen blue.
She shook her head.
“Did you talk to Miguel and Jesus tonight?” She nodded.
“Everything ho-kay back home?”
Everything wasn’t ho-kay in Batangas City. In a single quavering exhale, delivered while ironing her pillowcase with her hand, Gloria explained. Miguel Pacquia, aged fourteen, had been suspended from school the day before. When she Skyped him earlier in the evening he told her he had quit entirely and was moving out of his grandmother’s apartment, which Gloria paid for, to go live with friends. He also called her a name. She begged him to pray with her, to ask the Lord for guidance, but he just stepped away from the screen—and his only real parent.
“Miguel is a good boy,” I said.
“I cannot say what he said.”
“Don’t.”
“He call me a ‘fucking cunt.’ Sorry—you should not hear such words.”
“I hear them, Gloria.”
“These boys are caught watching dirty movies on school computers,” she said, now pounding the pillow with her fist. “Three boys, his best friends. To me, he say, ‘No big deal, I am watching porn since I was eleven.’ ‘Porn’ he call it, like he is grown-up.”
“Isn’t he too young to quit school?”
“He is in a gang. Lots of boys with no fathers and mothers who are away join them …”
“He’s a good boy,” I repeated. But in my head I was saying, What a punk. Also, I’ll hang out with Hey-zeus only, who is still sweet, and better not be into porn yet.
I had a better idea than flying to the Philippines with Gloria. “If we get evacuated, you’re coming with us.”
She stared at me.
“I can’t be without you, Gloria. I need you.”
“My son …”
But he called
you the c-word! “He needs you too, of course,” I said.
We hugged, and though my nostrils flared—she hadn’t showered, hadn’t rubbed her shoulders with Tiger Balm—I was soon holding her, a mother with her child, to contain her sobbing at what her punk son had done.
CHAPTER FIVE
December 13, 20—
*Infected port
*497 infected, 12 dead
I was in the room again. Better, it was live inside my computer, and so inside my bedroom. The same camera showed the same interior—the bed, the table, the chair—except for two details. Next to the lamp was a bottle of liquor, the sort that men poured out in small glasses, and hanging off the chair was a belt with studs and a buckle the size of Dad’s wallet. Lamplight cast the liquor the colour of seaweed snacks at 7-Eleven, and light from the camera glinted off the studs. Though the frame was once more empty, I had no doubt about what was going to happen this time. I waited, my own image in the bottom corner, a girl playing with the cross around her neck, zipzipzip.
A woman was thrust into the chair, a hand releasing her arm only once she stopped squirming. She wore a SARS mask and Hello Kitty pajama tops that, being two sizes too small, outlined her fuller breasts but equally bony shoulders.
“Mary?”
Her expression, hard to read with just her eyes showing, revealed more puzzlement than fear. She didn’t know what she was being asked to do, or why. Her hair was frizzy with static, as though she’d been forced to pull the pajamas down over her head, despite them not fitting.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said. Talking wasn’t easy with my heart beating hard and fast and my throat suddenly dry.
She crinkled her eyes. They were beautiful—that much I remembered accurately—but everything else was different from five weeks ago. My gaze drifted to the bottle, and the belt, still partially visible. Five weeks of having sex with men had vanished teenage gawkiness and sparkle, leaving an adult of twenty or older, heavy with the same grown-up worry and aloneness that I often detected in my parents. As well, she seemed irritated about nothing, or everything—another adult quality.
“I have those PJs,” I said in English. “They must not make them any bigger.”
Planet Lolita Page 8