Hiroshima Joe (43 page)

He need not have concerned himself. He was unable to purchase any at all. The sight of a European in a squatter area, unless he were wearing a police uniform or carrying a clipboard in the company of other civic officials, was about an unusual as a bacon sandwich at a bar mitzvah, as Norb once used to say. And whatever is unusual is generally unwelcome. His scuffed shoes and shabby jacket and trousers, his cheap wristwatch and frayed collar, the usual signs of the down-and-out, up here showed him to be a man of some substance and position, and men of position do not ask for an ounce of opium without having an ulterior motive beyond actually needing the stuff.

He was despondent as he reached the end of the track on Waterloo Road. He was more than reluctant to dip into his last-chance cache. He knew that he had to get some from another source. Where, was the problem. He was certain that Leung would have put it about that he was not to be supplied.

The only alternative was drink: that would dull the craving for a while. But there again, booze cost money.

There were times when he cursed opium. Yet there were times when he blessed it, too. He had first taken it to dull the physical pain of his wracked body, in the immediate post-war years. Later, he realised to his relief that it also reduced his mental agony, the memories he could not exorcise even by the deepest gin- or scotch-induced sleep. Opium was a good servant and a fair master – except when he was without it, when it became a cruel god.

Fortunately, only two days previously, he had succeeded in stealing a wallet and a Leica thirty-five mm camera from a tourist in Hanoi Road. The money was not plentiful – the man carried mostly traveller’s cheques – but the camera had fetched thirty-two dollars in a pawnshop off the northern end of Shanghai Street. That his hotel rent was due again soon appeared of little consequence; his nerves took precedence over his roof.

He looked right then left down Waterloo Road. The mid-afternoon traffic was light. To his left, in a haze of heat rising off the metalling of the road, he could see the bridge of the Kowloon-Canton railway. Leung and his band of merry saboteurs had blown that during the war.

On an impulse, Sandingham turned that way, crossing the road by Victory Avenue and walking slowly up Peace Avenue. To his left was the embankment of the railway line protected by a wire fence and a sloping, narrow expanse of dry grass, stunted trees and wind-lifted litter.

Peace Avenue: looking about him as he stepped along the pavement, he wondered if the peace it celebrated was worthwhile. Urchins played in the gutter. A mangy dog rooted through some garbage left by an alley. At the tiny square that terminated the adjoining Liberty Avenue an old woman was sitting on a wooden box with her grandchild, eating boiled rice and cabbage from a bowl she held in her hands. Around her on the road lay the bones of a small fish she had spat out. As he passed her, she emptied a cup of tea leaves into the gutter. Above and all around the square, washing hung out on poles from metal-framed windows. The newly laundered garments dripped into the street and on to unwary passers-by. Chinese opera blared out from a third floor balcony.

‘Peace’ was this semi-squalor. After the war there had been a hope that a new world would rise phoenix-like from the damage. The phoenix was a Chinese mythical bird related to the dragon, born of fire and breathing the fire of redemption and renewal. After every war, throughout history, there has been hope: and, after every war, the selfishness and power hunger of politicians and the greed of businessmen has quickly commandeered and sequestered whatever was bright in that hope and used its means for their own ends. What remained was an old lady eating a plain meal in the street.

The Leungs of the world, thought Sandingham. The inevitable bloody Leungs.

Like a long-distance runner, he paced himself with an amalgam of those words – theleungs, theleungs, theleungs …

At the end of Luen Wan Street he climbed the steps to the small station. A notice informed him that a train would be along soon.

Within five minutes he was comfortably seated, looking out of the carriage window at the expensive suburb of Kowloon Tong. Here there were houses – not blocks of flats or tenements – each with its small, neat garden. The train stopped at a signal, and Sandingham watched a gardener watering plants with a red rubber hose while, behind, an amah hung out lace underwear on a line strung between two posts. This was where, in suburban comfort, the greedy adventurers and selfish profiteers lived with their families.

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.