The Year of the Woman (12 page)

If she gave foolish advice, well one more girl would never be missed in Hong Kong. If she gave good advice, she would be favoured, until her good advice petered out.

It was so early in the morning KwayFay was almost asleep on her feet. She actually staggered, rising in her improvised shack on Mount Davis.

Aware of the trouble ahead, unable to rest from being pestered by Ghost Grandmother, she was worn out before she’d even started the day. She got her things, made a brief toilet and descended into the maelstrom of Central District before even the Motorola lights across the harbour knew what to do with the remains of the night.

She wanted to sit on the steps near the Wanchai Ferry Pier concourse, but the buses were already starting up at Eagle Centre terminus. She tried to marshal thoughts of getting the sack over that queer file business. She would lose her squatter shack, go back to being a street girl begging, rummaging in the night streets.

There was only one quiet place, familiar from her Cockroach childhood. A no-family boy was tragic, but a no-family girl was doomed. She used to pretend to have a family – three sisters, two brothers, a mother and father, such joy. Sometimes she had actually believed it! Invariably the wisp of self-deceit would vanish, and she would be back to digging in the offal bins, stealing from delivery vans and market barrows. She was one of three hundred thousand Cockroach Children in the Colony.

Tiring – she should still have been asleep – she made the sports ground in Gloucester Road before dawn, and wormed in from the Hung Hing Road waterfront. English sailors from Admiralty had often fed her, when a child, but no sooner did she learn to recognise one and
watch out for him he’d be gone on a ship to far away. One bought her a teddy bear, she remembered. She’d tried to eat it, taking an experimental chew of its arm, but it was only wool. She spat it out, enraged, and almost threw it away but soon saw the sailor’s cunning. It was sought after by market people. She sold it to a Hokklo hawker for seven dollars, and ate in Ah Hau’s Café of the Singing Birds in the Mologai for three days, real food in real bowls! Immediately she’d understood: the kind sailor knew that older children would steal her food. He’d given her the inedible teddy bear…
which could be sold when it was safe!

Thereafter, the cunning of the English seemed wholly admirable. They thought clever. She had been six or seven. That was before she even knew she had an age like everybody else. Ah Hau told her how old she was. She’d been so happy to learn that she was seven. Just like other children, she’d got her own age! A number! Later, Ah Hau explained she would become eight. She cried for two days at losing seven, which she’d thought would be her own for ever and ever, but learned it was called growing. Ever since, seven was her lucky number.

The stadium was empty. Early-early people ran round the grass perimeter. Nobody knew why; exercise folk came and went like weather, no reason or logic. Groundsmen also came with water hoses and
knelt-walked
the grass, peering at the green stubble. She’d tried to eat the grass when little and hungry, until a worker told her the head groundsman put poison down to make the grass grow better. She’d been so offended – why do such a thing? “The boss says so,” she was told, and she withdrew with reverence. Another cunning
trick. One day she might find the reason, become safe from poisons, hunger, getting caught. She did not eat sports fields after that.

A wan pallor showed in the East, the night not yet willing to go. She sat on a bench. A motor car approached, paused on Hung Hing Road, which was not allowed. A door slammed. Some early runner? No voices. Cool air enveloped her. She stayed motionless, the weight of her laptop computer cutting into her. Sometimes, she caught up with her work here, before the world began its cacophonous careering. She felt she was waiting for something to happen.

Day entered the arena. It came first as a mere night glow, slowly blotting the darkness, as if some secret child were shading the shadows with washes of different hues. In the gloaming, she heard two men walk by. She stayed still, to retain the feeling of magic, and they went on. Short cut to work?

Light stole in faster. Warmth came, and with it horrid high-heat humidity making her skin sticky. She heard voices at the gate nearby, a person wanting to come in and being told stay out. Maybe the groundsman with his grass poison? Soon, early runners and Shadow-Boxers would come with swarming day.

She saw movement on the empty field. Movement? Nobody could be there.

The daylight came almost with an audible rush out of the South China Sea. It was almost like hearing a gong’s intensifying reverberation, a resonance of light. You could love it, if it didn’t bring terrors of a job you
couldn
’t afford to lose.

It was Old Man.

He wore the
cheong saam
garb of ancient China,
high-necked
and tubular, black down to his feet. He wore leather thonged sandals and was Shadow-Boxing. She watched him. It was quite beautiful. This was how a grandfather would be, had she one.

Slowly, befitting the most graceful of all rituals, he moved. It was a dance in the form of dedicated
spectacle
, but so personal and lovely it made her want to cry. He understood the meanings, she saw. He did them in order, as decided by the great Chang San-feng in his school at the Tigers Nest of Chung Nan Shan, the mountainous retreat where tigers roamed freely
hundreds
of years ago. Of course it was old long before.

Old Man understood all thirteen movements of the Great Ultimate Fist,
T’ai Chi Ch’uan.
Visiting
foreigners
always asked about it, especially Americans. They called it Tai Chi, but used the wrong tones so they were meaningless.

Old Man, though, knew all eight arm movements and the five essential leg movements. Wrinkled and thin, balding and skeletally old, but to him Shadow-Boxing was a way of life. KwayFay always told strangers no, she didn’t know anything about Tai Chi, reluctant to encourage western delusions. Unless they came as
disciples
, to think and learn-learn, they would never
understand
the hidden bliss of Shadow-Boxing.

One movement made her smile. Old Man went
gently
into Return to Mountain Carrying Tiger, slowing his vital circular motion then rotating to a different point of the compass. So vital to know these. He lived every stance, entering the imagery so deeply she could see the actual scene, the bare mountain, the stratified clouds.
She froze as he turned to a different compass point and descended to Find Needle in Sea Bed; she held her breath for him in case he ran out of air before he got back to the surface. She smiled at her folly, breathed more easily. He made it with balletic grace. She breathed again.

Had she been too silent when speaking to his guards, those young threatening assistants? They searched the stadium and grounds before Old Man Shadow-Boxed. They evicted street people, hitting them with brass knuckles, before admitting Old Man to do his silent
ritual
. He had spoken to her in Kowloon, that day they had taken her in a taxi. But the poor thing was their prisoner. She knew that much. What had he done?

The Japanese – her lip curled – stole Chinese
Shadow-Boxing
. They called bits they copied “Judo” and “
Jujitsu
”, as if that made them originals. Purloined from China, of course, they then marketed them. Such
silliness
, when Shadow-Boxing was free in Hong Kong! Every park, every open space, filled with Shadow-Boxers doing their dawn
T’ai Chi Ch’uan
. Feeble copies in other nations were only for making kick-and-shoot movies. Here, she was watching pure heart-warming
elegance
straight from the Celestial Empire.

“Now east,” she murmured.

Old Man slowly turned to the east, starting anew with such withdrawn reticence she wondered for a moment if he were about to begin the eighty-one leads-and-
counters
of the
Pa Kua
(as crude Mandarin northerners would call the Eight Trigrams; her nose wrinkled) of the Emperor Fu Hsi. No, for Old Man glided into a
different
sequence. Interesting! He must suffer a headache,
coming to Shadow-Boxing as a cure – for which it was of course perfect.

One thing puzzled KwayFay. As light improved, she saw on the ground before Old Man a small bouquet. Irises, with their sword-like leaves? Her brow cleared. Of course! He was commemorating the Double Fifth, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, when the mystic gift made to the Ghost Chu Yuan was, quite correctly, wrapped in iris leaves to symbolise spirit protection.

Other eastern countries, like the Japanese, knew no better. They gave swords to their little boys instead of lanceolate iris leaves, thinking only of killing. Like the English, barbarians.

Old Man must be fully relaxed now. She saw him enter a whole sequence. He became the
Golden Cock,
standing perfectly still on his left leg. He transformed into
Dragon-Swarm-Up-Pillar
. He became
Swallow Skims Pool
, then
Two Running Wheels
. He swooped so slowly she had difficulty seeing him move at all, as he changed into
Comet Chasing Moon
. She knew instantly, though, when he
Picked Moon Reflection From Water,
one of her favourites.

Tears dimmed her vision. He ended with a slow swirl, palms up and out as taught by the immortal Chang
San-feng
. He stood waiting. Two besuited threat-men walked to him. One picked up the bouquet. His warders were back.

KwayFay watched, afraid to move in case they hit her with their brass knuckles. They started towards the
forbidden
exit in Marsh Road.

The door opened as Old Man walked to it. His
minions
left first. Old Man paused as if hearing something,
and gazed back in KwayFay’s direction. She froze. He truly was the old grandfather man from that frightening interview in Kowloon, when she had learned she was to make two decisions, one choosing girls, one asking
yes-no
about some unknown man. Old Man moved away. He couldn’t have seen her in the gloom.

She was alone. She waited until she heard the motor start and drive off. Only then did she get up and stretched. She carried her things and deposited them in the centre of the space, looking round. Such luxury! Such freedom!

In the stadium centre, she did the slow actions Old Man had left incomplete. She repeated
Return
To Mountain Carrying Tiger
successfully without being
bitten
, when she sensed someone. Old Man was standing watching. She screamed and almost ran, but he was alone.

“Little Sister,” he said slowly. “You add one
Shadow-Boxing
ritual to mine. Why?”

Her breath recovered. She felt ashamed in such drab clothes. “Tiger is king of all land beasts, as dragon rules all sea beasts. They decide
Fhung Seui
.”

“Tiger,
ne
? You saw me?”

“Yes, First Born. Your Tiger ritual was…beautiful, but not finished. I finish it for you before your warders took you back. Forgive me.”

“Warders?” he asked.

“You should have gone on, First Born.” She was appalled by her temerity and stammered, “Make
White Tiger,
as in side chapel in Pei Ti Temple on Cheung Chau. You would do it like original.”

“An old man like me? Do ritual of a god general from
the Yin Dynasty?”

“As
White Tiger Wong
. Why else does the tiger have four stripes on its forehead? Also means prince,
ne
?”

“Tiger Wong?”

“Yes, First Born. Tiger Wong.” He seemed almost to smile. She was astonished: why did a prisoner smile? At what? She realised that his imprisonment had driven him mad.

“The tiger eats men, Little Sister, and so enslaves
spirits
as slaves for ever. You think I should be such a
creature
?”

“Of course, First Born!” She opened her handbag and pressed her foil pack of old rice into his hands. “You are too thin. Please eat today. Ask warders to heat it for you.”

He stared at the kitchen wrapper. The girl might
converse
with spirits, but was clearly insane from her
privations
as a Cockroach Child.

She looked about. His guardians were nowhere to be seen. An idea took her.

“Run, First Born!” she urged with quiet desperation. “Run! They won’t see you! I’ll lead them in the opposite direction, as decoy!”

He looked at her, mystified. “Run? Where? Why?”

She saw how hopeless it was. He had given up all hope of escape. Had he no family, to bribe his guards? The poor, poor man!

“I go,
Sin-Sang
?”

He nodded, and watched her walk away and wriggle out of the stadium under the wire. His question was answered. He had his new name: Tiger Wong. He would announce it to the whole Triad.

Linda Ho stared at the young man along the pillow. She was amazed at her fortune. Sunlight shafted across the hotel bedroom from Nathan Road, the traffic sounds below drumming through the hot afternoon. Air-
conditioning
whirred. She could hear people shouting, amahs and
fokis
, along the corridor as they moved from one room to another, calling for this number of new sheets, that pile of laundry, clattering distantly.

She’d never been worked like that in her whole life. It was a revelation. He had insulted her, beat her. She had cried out in ecstasy as he had thrust in. He made her
gallop
, twist, leap almost like a porpoise. He forced her to turn and mouth at him even as he had lashed with his open hand. He was an animal, bestial – she now knew how bestial – and made her bleed.

He was beautiful. Her skin was sore, for he’d shoved her along the bed. The words he’d made her come out with! She felt subjected, humbled, ashamed – except his shaming proved the route to an emotional flight she had never experienced.

She wondered what his animal sign was. Would that girl know, the one whose genius with ghosts would bring in limitless wealth?

Tentatively, she touched his face. His eyes flickered open. He smiled – such a smile! She thought of her
husband
and felt only contempt. Had HC ever created such passionate soaring bliss? Never.

“Thinking, Linda darling?” Santiago said.

“My husband,” she said simply. Best to be frank. “He is hopeless. I would have been a Los Angeles
millionairess by now if it wasn’t for him.”

He lifted the sheet aside, exposing her breasts and body as far as her waist, eyeing the flesh, his gaze
moving
slowly over her skin until she almost began to feel, actually feel, his sight touching. It was a sight caress, an almost incendiary heat of a gaze. The stare slowed halted at her nipples. They tingled.

“Why? What did he do?”

“More what didn’t he do!” she cried, wondering if it was time perhaps to stroke him. Or had he something different in mind?

“What didn’t he do, Linda darling?”

This man loved women. His sympathy showed. She wished she had shaped herself more, kept in trim, show how splendid she could look given the right clothes, the correct amount of money.

“Tell me, bitch,” he said lazily.

She was thrilled. There was that English film star Deborah Something, wasn’t there, living with a movie director who, rumour told, ordered her about in terms of abuse. He called her “Cunt” even when they had company. “Come here, Cunt,” he’d say, “Bring me a drink, Cunt!” And when Linda asked the reliable friend who’d reported this, “What on earth does she say? Isn’t she offended?” The friend replied, “She loved it!” Linda understood. She now felt she belonged to someone who knew love from bestiality to romance. Were they the same thing, merely differing words for passion?

She decided to tell him, this lovely Santiago whose iron muscles and inflexible desire had shown her where she must go.

“I have a perfect betting system,” she told him. There,
it was out.

“What happened?” He licked his lips, eyes into hers. She shivered.

“HC won’t listen.”

“Doesn’t he understand figures?”

She wouldn’t have him making excuses for that dumbo.

“Understand figures?” she cried, shivering again as he licked her nipple. “Boss of an investment company? He’s supposed to know figures!”

“Some people don’t, Linda darling.”

“I could make fortunes if only somebody would help me to reach out!”

“I knew you were a kindred spirit, Linda darling. You feel it too?”

There! she thought with triumph. He’d confessed to exactly the same feeling of togetherness. It was destiny.

“I knew it, Santiago.”

“It’s a pity your husband can’t see your talent, Linda darling! Can your scheme accept a partner, Linda
darling
?”

She raised her head from the pillow to see him better.

“I love a lady who has the courage of her
convictions
.”

“You’d do that? For me?”

“I don’t know how to say this, Linda darling,” he said, averting his eyes. “But I’ve never felt like this before. You so attractive, and I’m just an idler who spends his inheritance on racecourses and idle living.”

“Inheritance?” she said quickly.

“It’s from land and farms in South America. I came here years ago and fell in love with the place. I learned
Cantonese, private teachers of course, from Bonham Road.”

That explained his idiomatic Cantonese. It had been one of her worries.

“I come six months of every year; the motor racing in Macao, the gambling. Nothing serious, a few hundred thousand here, a little there.”

She swallowed at the sum. No wonder he was so casual at Happy Valley. As they’d shared a drink before they started to make love, he’d mentioned some cruise line his family owned.

“Doesn’t your husband know the pleasure he might get from having a flutter?” And Santiago laughed with his perfect white teeth.

“He knows nothing.”

“I love women,” he sighed, admiring her. “Especially now I’ve found the one I want to be with.”

“Do you mean it?” she asked in wonder.

He looked his amazement. “Of course! Look, Linda darling. I’ve made all the overtures. I begged you to meet me here, didn’t I? I don’t see any harm in it, Linda darling,” he added seriously. “Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“I was drawn to you the instant I saw you. Isn’t he a gambler, a
lan-do-gwai
? Gambling’s what investment people do, Linda darling.”

There it was again, that faint frisson of worry at the unrelenting term of endearment. She shook the thought off, though it was unsettling. She would have to get used to worship.

“You would think so,” she said, sullen with
resentment
, past grievances creeping in. She felt she could talk
to Santiago, whereas she couldn’t even confide in her friend Betty. One word to her and this would be all over Hong Kong in an instant.

“Maybe he has a gambling scheme of his own, Linda darling.”

His hand had strayed, oh so casually, down her abdomen. She was still moist, but her thighs parted.

“How unlikely that is, Santiago!” she cried.

That name was a mouthful, with its unfamiliar slide in the middle. She supposed it was possibly Portuguese, Great Britain and that country having been friends for four centuries and always bonded across the Pearl River, Hong Kong and Macao being so close.

“Wouldn’t he help you? It seems strange not to use a priceless woman to her maximum potential.”

“You’re so different, Santiago,” she murmured. His hand was working, slowly but with a steady beat that drew her along, made her stir in synchrony.

“Don’t tell me your scheme! Keep it to yourself, Linda darling.”

His voice sank to a low huskiness. His eyes closed, his tongue flicking from side to side.

“I shan’t,” she said, breathless. “Unless you want to come in with me, Santiago.”

“My love,” he said in that lascivious gravelly voice she was coming to know. “My lovely darling Linda.”

“What are you going to do?”

He simply threw her up so she suddenly found herself sprawling on all fours, his arms round her so tightly she could hardly breathe. His teeth sank into her shoulder with such force she cried out.

“I’m going to do what I want,” he told her through
clenched teeth. She felt blood flow down her shoulder and saw blood drip down from her breast. “We are one now, Linda darling.”

“Darling!”

“Linda darling, it’s your right, your privilege to win for a change.”

“Yes!” she cried.

“Can you feel this?”

She knew what was coming, tried to open herself by thrusting back against him to lessen the ache of the first thrust in but only partly succeeded. He rode her back, feet raking on her calves as he reared on her, clasping and leaping.

This was her man for ever. They were one. Her life and her dreams were about to be fulfilled.