The Harbour

by Francesca Brill

  Mrs Li began rocking back and forth, chanting an age-old song for mercy, her voice scaling heights as she begged. Lily clutched the edge of the tablecloth as if it could save her. It slipped softly over the varnished table, bringing utensils clattering to the ground. Stevie understood that they were all playing out an ancient ritual.

  The ringleader, still shouting, stepped up to the table and swiped at it with his gun. The jug of water tipped over, spilling on to Mrs Li. She fell to her knees, still rocking back and forth, now knocking her forehead against the table in a rhythmic percussion to her prayer. The soldier brought his gun down on her head. The crack on her skull echoed through the yard but she did not falter in her song. Stevie wondered why he had to shout like that. On and on. Maybe it was the only thing he had to keep himself on course? Maybe if he stopped shouting he would stop in his tracks, look about him and withdraw, puzzled at his own behaviour and apologise for having disturbed them. Maybe this was the same reason Mrs Li kept on singing – it sustained her survival. As long as he was shouting he existed, as long as she sang so did she.

  The shouting man circled the table. Lily kept her eyes down and was quite still. He paused briefly behind her before catching Stevie’s eye. This seemed to invigorate him. He lunged at her and his grasp on her neck was painful. His fingers were dry and rough. She felt the edge of his sleeve rubbing against her collarbone. There was an overwhelmingly rancid smell of stale clothes and fermentation, sharp at the back of her throat. With the gun he knocked the bowl out of her hands. Soft white grains rained on to the table like cherry blossom. The bowl rolled on the ground. Stevie noted with bizarre satisfaction that it did not break. Then she was being propelled across the yard, the pressure on her neck making it hard for her to swallow. She could see the other men approaching the table. One of them kicked the old lady so that she fell on to her side. Her chanting continued, quieter now, a background noise. Stevie felt the fingers on her neck tighten. The man was pushing her through the open door into the sleeping quarters.

  An alarming and urgent thought gripped her. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said and put her finger to her lips. The man grunted, disconcerted but not diverted from his goal. She was insistent. This was a vital command. ‘Don’t wake the baby.’

  Understanding the gist of this, he looked around and saw Hal’s basket. Stevie’s voice was low.

  ‘You mustn’t wake him up. He’s sleeping.’

  She really meant it. Not disturbing Hal had become the only imperative. The foul breath of this man must not in any way come close to the fresh newness of her son. The man muttered and looked her in the eye for a moment. She saw something that shocked her beyond anything else. He didn’t care. Like an animal there was nothing he could understand except satisfying his aroused appetite. In that moment she understood – the rules of life were changed.

  The soldier suddenly let go of her neck and grabbed her wrist instead. He had seen the glimmer of something shiny. Inserting his clumsy fingers inside her sleeve he pulled at the silver chain of her charm bracelet. Stevie put her hand over his and helped him – trying to undo the clasp.

  ‘Yes, look it’s lovely. Wait, don’t break it. Let me.’ She managed to catch the tiny silver trigger with a nail and the chain was released. It slipped off her wrist, dropping and coiling on the floor. The man squatted to examine his prize. The charms were delicate in his filthy palm: the kitten playing with a tiny red ball in memory of the Siamese cat who had slept on her pillow all through her childhood, the leprechaun cross-legged and clutching his knees, a wicked smile between the saucer ears. It had been given to her on her first day of high school for good luck. The galloping horse that she had bought for herself the first time she won at the races, a motor scooter from the boy who’d thoughtlessly taken her virginity, an alarm clock with its arms set at five past six, a wake-up call from her best friend at college who had spent years trying to get her out of bed in time for class, a swan with an s-shaped neck, a vain attempt on her mother’s part to encourage Stevie to feel more like a swan than the ugly duckling she knew her to be, and the silver coffee pot from her father in tribute to her inability to master rudimentary cooking skills. Shiny little markers of her progress through life.

  Another grunt and the chain was in his pocket. Just as his eyes rested on her again there was an angry yell from the yard and the dry crack of a gunshot.

  The man dropped to his knees and crawled quickly to the door. From where she stood in the room Stevie could see a scuffle in the yard. The shouting of the soldiers took on a different tone. It was purposeful and aggressive and there were Chinese voices now. One of the Japanese soldiers was lying in the dust and another was being held from behind, a gun hard at his temples.

  With a lurch of hope, Stevie recognised the familiar figure of Chen together with another young man. In their loose peasant clothes they had the double advantage of surprise and of not being blind drunk.

  ‘Come out and let me see you. Come out.’ Chen’s order, though in Cantonese, brought Stevie’s assailant out into the yard, his hands up, his feet dragging. Stevie could hear Chen and his comrade shouting but she ran over to Hal’s basket and stood guard over him, his sleep determined and amazingly uninterrupted. She was more alert to his quiet snuffling than to the yelling and fighting outside. Soon she was aware the skirmish had abated and there was only Lily’s sobbing to be heard, underscored by the haunting, fragmented sound of the old lady’s song.

  The night was still upon them. Stevie, sitting on the step of the sleeping room, listened to Chen as he talked. His companion, Ping Wei, a thick-haired boy with a goofy smile, sat quietly on his haunches nearby. She took a drag of the raspy throat-burning cigarette he’d lit for her. It was a Pirate, the cheapest brand, and in former days she would never have dreamed of smoking one. It was for rickshaw men and street vendors. Now it was all that was available and she smiled as she thought of how war brought a certain democracy to bad habits as well as to everything else. They whispered though nobody could hear them. The remaining Japanese soldiers had melted into the night. Chen and Ping Wei had dragged the dead man’s body out into the alley beyond the compound gates. Lily and Mrs Li lay inside the house, curled up against each other, recovering through the balm of sleep.

  ‘The streets are dangerous, even for us. Men like those, they are hungry and have been too long fighting. They’ve forgotten.’

  Stevie glanced into the yard where the marks left by the soldier Chen had shot were clear – a gash in the earth from where he fell led to the gate where he was heaved out.

  ‘Who is us?’

  Chen nodded towards the gently smiling Ping Wei. ‘We work with others. We have ways of passing information and also supplies. We have plans and we won’t let Hong Kong be forgotten in the bigger story.’

  ‘Ah, the communistic society beckons and will take over the world.’

  Chen smiled, the gap in his front teeth made him look even younger than he was.

  ‘I hope so. The rest of the world can make up its own mind but it is the future for China.’

  ‘You’re very sure.’

  ‘I am. And I can assure you I am far from alone.’

  ‘I’m kind of envious of your conviction but I’m too damn adolescent and contrary to ever quite follow the thinking when the thinking is proscribed, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Believe me I do know, but there’s something going on that is maybe hard for you to understand. Let me put it like this, there are times when independent thought is a luxury and for the sake of all the great mass of people it’s necessary to follow a line.’

  Stevie frowned. ‘I guess so. That’s the nature of revolution.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But what I don’t understand is why you comrades are risking your lives to help us defeated capitalists?’

  ‘Perhaps this will help explain.’ Chen took a deep breath. ‘Yu Bao was twelve years old. Japanese soldiers came to her house and cut her face with their knives so that her daddy would
do what they said. She remembered all sorts of details: how the soldier who held her smelt very bad. How they made her father touch her little sister in her private place and then made him put a bottle inside her and how she was crying and how her mother tried to stop them so one of the other men split her mother’s head open with a sword.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘There’s more.’ He took another pull on his cigarette, the light burned brightly. ‘If you have the stomach for it.’

  Stevie gave a small nod, her instinct to bear witness overcoming her feelings of repugnance.

  Chen’s voice was harsh as he whispered the litany of horror to her in the semi-darkness. ‘She told us there were five of them, five of these animals. Her father was made to lie on top of her little sister but he chose to suffocate his own daughter rather than hurt her. The soldiers were so incensed by this that they stabbed Yu Bao with their bamboo sticks and then they cut her father all over with their swords, at which point she passed out. When she woke up again the house was an inferno. They had set fire to it.’

  Stevie was shaking her head.

  ‘We found her in the burned-out remains of her family house, half-dead from the injury caused by the bamboo stick that had been forced into her vagina.’

  He inhaled the last of his cigarette and flicked the butt across the courtyard. ‘She died in hospital.’ He glanced at Stevie but she had covered her eyes with her hands. ‘So maybe you can see that your idea of whose side we comrades might be on is a disappointingly simple point of view. Sorry to be so blunt, but it is.’

  Stevie uncovered her eyes, liking him now more than ever. ‘Yes, I do see.’ They were silent for a moment before she nudged him gently. ‘By the way, what happened? You seem so reasonable. You’re supposed to be a wild revolutionary. You ought to look out, in a minute I won’t trust your credentials.’

  ‘Wu Jishang told me that you were surprisingly reasonable too.’

  Stevie felt a physical lurch somewhere near her heart. ‘Jishang.’

  ‘My cousin.’

  ‘Where is he? How is he?’

  ‘Alive.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  Chen shrugged. There was a moment of silence. Ping Wei had picked up a twig and was drawing patterns in the ground with it. He looked like the young boy he was and not the man capable of so recently killing another. She could hear the creak of the twisted tree’s branches in the courtyard as she struggled with the realisation that she couldn’t know how Jishang was, that she couldn’t know how anybody was. Declan, Harry, Phyllis – hell, even the manager of the Peninsula Hotel ballroom whose announcement had stopped the music; everybody was lost in the darkness.

  Chen picked up a small stone from the ground and tossed it from one hand to the other. Without looking at her he said, ‘There’s something you could do for us.’ She waited. The stone traced its arc a few more times before he went on. ‘They’re putting the officers in a camp at the Argyle Street barracks. Some things need to be delivered there. We would show you how.’

  She felt suddenly cold. Argyle Street. That’s where they had taken Harry.

  Chen’s voice was level, casual even.

  ‘Soldiers imprisoned in Argyle are allowed to receive food parcels. The object would be hidden in the food. I have to be honest, it’s a risk. If you were to be found out, nobody could do anything for you. You must understand this.’

  Found out? This was insane. What exactly was he asking of her? What about Hal? What would happen to him? What might happen to her? She flinched with the remembered smell of that disgusting man so recently upon her. She knew that the romance of Chen’s request, the possibility of adventure, would have been irresistible to her before. And she was tugged back by the memory of Harry shouting that it was not just about her any more. But in the very act of being careful she rebelled. What did it matter that it was crazy? Who was she if not the fearless woman of her own making? The girl who flung convention on its quivering back with the force of her will? Was the fact of being a mother a life-sentence of caution and petty-minded fear? This would be her chance, finally, to do something for Harry. She remembered something that Harry had told her and, as she turned to Chen, Hal cried out from inside – a small dreamy wail.

  ‘Have you heard of a group, a sort of network, who are helping people escape?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I thought maybe you – it doesn’t matter.’

  She dropped the end of her cigarette to the ground and got up to soothe her child, her great love and at the same time her great burden.

  Chen smiled his young boy smile again. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, you’ll never make a career in espionage.’ He stepped close, eyes level with hers. ‘When Major Field and the others first talked about setting up a network in case of an occupation I thought they were crazy. How could white men come and go without being seen? Impossible. But they weren’t crazy. We come and go as their eyes and ears. There are more of us than you might think.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. It was agreement enough.

  After Chen and Ping Wei had gone Stevie, satisfied that Hal was lost in sleep, slipped under her blanket. She lay her head on the blue raincoat that deep inside contained her previous identity.

  Chapter Twenty

  January 1942

  During the first few weeks of the Japanese Occupation there was an eerie veneer of normal life. Stevie had been amazed to see copies of an English language newspaper called the Hong Kong News being sold on street corners. Published daily, it gave a sickening impression of a distorted normality. Along with advertisements for familiar venues, a daily Japanese language lesson and an overall jaunty tone, it contained laughably blatant propaganda.

  That morning, as she stood at the table, impatient to be alone for a few minutes, a headline had caught her eye. She looked up from the paper, shaking her head. ‘You saw the mess they made of Lane Crawford the other day?’

  Lily squinted at the needle she was trying to thread. ‘I couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a shelf with anything on it.’

  ‘Right. Well, apparently the pillaging is an invention of the British propaganda machine. Oh and Lane Crawford isn’t Lane Crawford any more. It’s the Matsuzakaya.’

  Lily rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll never stick. They’re trying to call the Peninsula something else too.’

  Lily leaned over her shoulder and pointed at an advertisement. ‘The snack bar at the Hong Kong Hotel is serving tempura.’ She went back to her skirmish with the needle and thread. ‘Are you going to wrap the tins as well as the fruit?’

  ‘I thought I would, yes.’

  ‘Don’t use the whole lot, save some sheets for lavatory paper.’

  ‘Best thing for it.’

  They exchanged a smile. Stevie tore off a sheet and began to wrap one of the tins arrayed in front of her.

  ‘At last.’ Lily held up the needle, finally threaded. ‘The light’s terrible in here.’ She stood up and headed for the door.

  As soon as she was out of the room Stevie fumbled in her pocket for the sharp piece of metal that Chen had given her and, putting it carefully on the table next to the tub of lard, she checked over her shoulder to make sure she was unobserved. The tub was deep enough for her hand to sink in up to her wrist. The white sticky fat oozed between her fingers. She ducked her head further under the washing line that was strung across the kitchen. A nappy kept edging into her line of vision and she was irritated. The lard smelt sour. Her stomach churned. An odd side-effect of being constantly hungry was that all sorts of smells made her nauseous. This was not a good thing in a city that no longer had refuse collection and in which everywhere there were putrefying corpses becoming compost, trapped under the ruins of their homes.

  She leaned over the table and dug the small radio part deep into the blubber. Then pulling her fingers out, she spread the fat over the top, smoothing it as best she could.

  The pram had arrived that morning. It had been left just inside the gate and bee
n greeted with amazement by Lily and Mrs Li. There had been much debate as to the provenance of such a fine gift. It had in truth seen better days, designed for a uniformed nanny to trot around the Serpentine in Hyde Park, high-handled and very springy. It was most decidedly not a rough terrain vehicle but Stevie, knowing that it had come from Chen, had acted both delighted and surprised. Then she had announced that she had a great idea: she would take the pram with a food parcel for Harry to Argyle. Neither Lily nor Mrs Li could understand why she would take such a risk but Stevie had worn down their objections in the end. It was just as well they had no idea of the true nature of the expedition. A food parcel was one thing, smuggling radio parts into the camp was quite another.

  At the last minute Lily was reluctant to let Stevie and Hal go alone but Stevie, thinking fast, had passed on the quickly invented rumour that there might be potatoes coming in that day and Lily was persuaded to head for the market instead. Stevie didn’t like the subterfuge but knew that if anything went wrong, the less Lily knew the better.

  Hal was wrapped in her grey sweater and surrounded on both sides by the baskets of food. She had put everything she could find in them: a packet of tea, a loaf of not-quite-stale white bread, two tins of sardines, a fat tomato and some peaches she had harvested in the night from a neighbour’s tree. While Lily and Mrs Li had practised pushing the pram across the yard, Stevie, in the kitchen, had hidden the tub of lard under the sardine tins in one of the baskets.