The Year of the Woman (14 page)

“Never be Christian,” Ghost Grandmother told Kway.

“Why, Grandmother?”

“Christians believe in love. They don’t believe in madness. It limits them. Don’t believe wrong things.”

Where has this come from? KwayFay thought. Everything Ghost Grandmother told her lately was grievance or quibbles, like this Christian thing. Why not, when the Christians were western, and western owned every system in the world?

“They do not.” Grandmother was angry at KwayFay’s rebellious thought. “They think they own, but do not own.”

“They have computers, administration systems,” KwayFay said directly. If Grandmother heard her thoughts, she might as well come out with it.

“Death today, lazy girl,” Grandmother said contentedly. She’d dealt with love.

KwayFay almost shrieked, “Death? Whose? Is it mine?”

“You no death today,” Ghost said with contempt, as if death might be a performance beyond KwayFay’s
capabilities.
“You in Singing Bird Café. Bet on smallest sing bird or I cross, ignorant girl.”

KwayFay protested, “I do everything you tell me!” KwayFay cried in her sleep, weeping in fury.

“You disobedient granddaughter! Be silent to elder!”

“I must ask who, when you say death comes!”

“Mind own business!” Ghost cried sharply. “I tell-tell you!”

KwayFay had her own grievance, seeing she would
have no job to go to. She had no money for bribery. Perhaps it would be different when the People’s Republic of China came marching in with those drab suits and bicycles. Let the Chinese army try cycling up Nei Chung Gap, they’d soon see how useful their stupid bicycles were going to be, serve them right.

“They won’t bring bicycles,” Ghost said, still slyly eavesdropping.

“I won’t ever get a job.” KwayFay kept at it. “I soon starve.”

“Job tomorrow, death today.” Ghost cackled at the joke. “One piece space open after one piece space dead,
a
?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“And don’t be Christian.”

“I won’t, Grandmother.”

“Remember: believe in madness.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

That was the stupidest thing of all, KwayFay thought, covering her shoulders to keep warm. (How was it that shoulders always were coldest in bed in the morning, when feet were coldest in the evening?) And why did Ghost Grandmother talk sometimes in pidgin English, then ancient Cantonese straight from the fourteenth century or somewhere long ago, and other times in
vernacular
they’d pick up instantly in Kennedy Town or maybe even Stanley by the horrid Taoist temple where they still paraded some little girl on a great ornate
palanquin
? Mercifully, KwayFay could always understand whatever form of speech Ghost used.

Did Ghost mean a job for her, somewhere beyond the reach of HC’s venom? Ghost did not often make
predictions.

The other question was death. Whose death?

“Tomorrow learn Moon Cakes.”

“You haven’t taught me Moon Cakes!” KwayFay cried in alarm.

“You not listen!” Ghost shouted, grievances flying about the tiny shack so KwayFay couldn’t even think straight.

Had she been given a lecture on Moon Cakes and
forgotten
, or was it one of Ghost’s first talks when first she’d appeared to her?

“Grandmother!” KwayFay bleated in tears. “I good granddaughter!”

“Moon important women business. Then Amah Rock.”

KwayFay knew Ghost had gone when she heard
herself
emit a faint snoring sound. She felt warm again. Whose death? Whose job? Maybe neither would be
anything
to do with her. She could sleep. No use getting up as if she had to go to work.

Worst thing an unemployed person – a girl, so she was worthless anyway – could do would be to lie abed,
signifying
to the world her uselessness for the foreseeable future, a maggot-in-rice female. Hong Kong people laughed at unemployed girls. They could not even become criminals, as the saying went.

The man seated inside the door of KwayFay’s shack was desperate to smoke. He had a small gold cigarette case, but smoking would wake the sleeping girl whose
twitchings
and moanings were almost sexual. She was being tormented by some ghost. He knew that. He made a
mental bow to her small house god, with its red tinsel reflecting the feeble red glow. His gold case was made twenty years before, somebody said, in a shop in London where princesses went for rings and bangles. The trouble was, it clicked when he opened it for a Chesterfield, made in America where the best tobacco came from. The click would sound like a thunderclap in this confined space. The girl would wake up, maybe talk to Tiger Wong, as he was to be known from last week. Tiger Wong did not tell why his name changed. That meant some ghost had ruled it should be so. On account of this, the old man, Business Head of the great Triad, had ordered that this girl be protected from harm.

It would have been enough, the watching man thought, had new-name Tiger Wong ruled that one man must visit Mount Davis and tell the squatter camp to protect KwayFay. Then life would be easy: any harm to her, multiply by however much rage Tiger Wong felt if injury, harm, or bad luck befell her. Easy way, hard way. He shrugged mentally, watching KwayFay become more peaceable. The troubling ghost must have gone to
wherever
ghosts went for a rest.

He felt no animosity towards Tiger Wong, for the Triad master was there to give orders. Explanations were frivolous and not to be thought about. Easy way, hard way. They were all the same in the end, bearing no
relationship
to consequences. If the outcome of a given rule was success, good. If failure, then payment was due from whoever had been ordered to carry it out at the time of failure.

Easy way, hard way.

The watcher’s name was Tang. He came from the
harbour at Tai Po, over beyond Kowloon at Tolo Harbour. He almost chuckled at the memory of how as a boy he’d played the game of Giant Striding Earth in the market there. How they used to laugh! Giant Strides is what Tai Po’s original name meant in the old language, folk said, so naturally it was right to stride with
enormous
steps, which is the proper way to avoid snakes and tigers who then can’t keep up with you because they’re easily tricked. They always think you’re moving fast, when in fact you’re not. Dumb fucking snakes, dumber fucking tigers. There must have been lots of wild animals about Tai Po back then before the trees were chopped down.

Not that his boss, now to be known as Tiger Wong, was simple, no. Tiger Wong could never be tricked. He said this girl was immediately to spend much of the money she had been given. And she had not yet spent a cent. Failure loomed ahead for somebody. Sanction would follow. He wondered nervously if it would be his.

This girl was a puzzle, or would have been if he had allowed his mind to wander into puzzlement, something he dared not do. She had a load of money, the exact amount specified by the boss, and hadn’t even bought food for herself. She was hungry. Tang knew she’d had barely a mouthful the previous day, drinking water to allay the pangs the way everybody used to. If you were starving you ate grass back in Tai Po, until the amahs came out cutting grass for the horses before they raced. Here in Hong Kong Island, no chance of that. In any case, the spirit of some hillside might think, hey, what’s that fucking thief doing stealing my fucking grass? Then you’d be for it.

He checked the money was still in her handbag. How stupid women were, thinking because there’s a clip by the zip, it would be hard for a thief to steal the contents. Beyond belief. It wasn’t stupidity, it was an invitation. He’d done his first robbery when four, bribing a cousin to run away from the tourist bus as if she had stolen the money and not he. Easy way, hard way. His cousin had gone like the wind, while he’d knuckled his eyes in his little plastic sandals in Tai Po Market where the tourist buses always pulled in by the old folks’ home nobody was to admit was there because Chinese families didn’t leave their old folks to rot. Tourists had said what a dreadful shame, that little girl stole money right from under the seats of the tourist bus. She’d been using her little friend to distract attention. Tang got the sense of the words though not understanding a single one. He’d cried and the tourist women had given him two American dollars, a lot back then before he’d earned enough to get a woman, and decide how to be treated.

Not a cent, this KwayFay had spent. The boss had decided that would be wrong. If the master said
something
was wrong and there really wasn’t anything wrong at all, it was down to Tang to prove Tiger Wong right, that there really was something wrong but it was
concealed
, so proving the boss was right. Folk who assumed otherwise were simply too dim to get it. Therefore those others were traitors. Which was why Tiger Wong was Triad master and others were not.

Easy way, hard way.

Tang had three men hanging about down on the road. He’d told them to wait by the little café shop where the fat woman slept every night. What they did while down
there where she slept was their own business. He’d told them that, but remember no noise. Too much silence on that road, so no disturbances. The road was in sight, darkness or no, of the Hong Kong Coast Guard station at Green Island, across Sulphur Channel. They had
telescopes
, spent their useless time staring into the dark. Who knew what they saw? They were Government, had uniforms to prove it, and could blank off the whole of Mount Davis in a minute, police swarming everywhere. So no noise. No blood, either. Fuck the fat woman or whatever, but in silence.

See Little Sister spends much money. Rule for the morning. A woman who didn’t spend? Impossible!

He checked the time, one hour before dawn. He would have felt tired, even sleepy, if he’d have allowed himself. He thought with wry pleasure of the man who’d had to die down in that godown, Mister David the big shot. Tiger Wong, having changed his name on account of some spirit this girl knew about, hence all the fuss – Tiger Wong had visited, and spoken with the two men who’d killed the carpet shop man. Tang vaguely wondered what the man had done.

Up the hillside somebody coughed, hawked phlegm up from a bubbling chest. Pollution was what made folk cough so much in Hong Kong, doctors said, but Tang thought doctors must be ignorant people, for everybody knew that Hong Kong people had cancers in the throat. In some it didn’t grow, if you were lucky.

He hoped he hadn’t got fast-growing cancer in his throat.

Morning must be here soon, for he heard more
stirrings
from the squatter shacks encrusting the hillside.
He heard people clack down in their plastic sandals to the stand pipes, lazy bastards only going now instead of having gone the night before to bring water from the roadside. That would be a signal to his three men, who must be farting themselves awake and wanting
something
to eat. He wondered if they’d used the fat woman.

His problem was this girl. How to make her spend? He must report success to Business Head Tiger Wong. He considered the problem without the slightest
anxiety
. It would have to be so. Failure was out of the
question
.

Easy way, hard way.

KwayFay heard the first shiftings of life on the mountain, the squish of water and the sound of coughing and spitting, the rushing clatter of folk suddenly discovering they could successfully imagine they were late. She stirred, opened her eyes. The shack was dimly lit by the first daylight, just black shadows and slight pallor. She had worried for some reason during the night that Ghost Grandmother was going to ask her something tonight, but couldn’t remember. She might remember later, with luck. She reached across and made a sign to the Kitchen God, seeing with relief that the little red light, one Hong Kong dollar for a battery that would last two months, still glowed protectively. Cheap.

She felt for her handbag, and found it exactly where she’d placed it under her pillow, exactly at the correct angle. If only she could use some of the money inside, how marvellous life would be! She was so hungry. She had eight dollars of her own left, enough for a bowl down Causeway Bay. She might walk to Sai Ying Pun and catch the tram, save a few cents, see if there was
cheap rice on the stall outside the Singing Bird Café where the old men brought their cage birds to compete. She felt like going there today. They bet on which bird sang most beautifully. She might try a gamble, bet a
dollar
on which singing bird would win. Her heart always over-ruled her common sense, though. She decided to back the tiniest bird, from sympathy. Invariably, they lost.

In half an hour she was up and out, dressed in what she hoped didn’t look her only set of clothes, and was walking towards Sai Ying Pun.

Linda Ho waited until she saw KwayFay leave. The girl came walking down the mountain track plain as day, quite unashamed at having to catch a bus! Like any
ordinary
labourer!

Her lip curled. KwayFay was supposed to be unique, according to HC, able to manipulate the future. Could this really be so?
Tai-Tai
Ho examined the girl’s moving figure with mistrust.

Foretelling events was an aspect of gambling that always troubled Linda. She watched the girl, thinking over the problem with anxiety. If KwayFay, she with the pretty curves and wearing the ugliest dress (surely the cheapest) in Hong Kong, repeat
if
she knew so much about the future, then why was she dressed in tatty scrubber’s clothes? Superb talents should serve gambling, in which case the bitch should have gone straight to Happy Valley or the new racecourse at Sha-Tin Heights, maybe borrow a few dollars for the first race, then double and treble in compound growth …

She heard herself moan, not in envy at the pretty bitch in her shoddy attire, but at the thought of
bookmakers
’ wealth funnelling into her own handbag. She worked it out with lightning speed: Lay, say, a bet of a hundred dollars to win at, say, eight-to-five against, then an any-back and American Twist on a nine-to-two
non-favourite
, a combo on the third…

The bus came. KwayFay climbed aboard. Linda watched the girl’s figure tense her clothes and
grudgingly
scored her a decent seven out of ten. All right, then, eight. Her legs weren’t the bulbous bowed calves
you saw among Cantonese girls, now they had nothing to do except sit powdering their faces while they watched stocks and shares changing colours and
numbers
on a TV screen. They got paid far too much money for doing nothing.

The girl carried a laptop slung over her shoulder. Ha! So she was a thief, had stolen one of HC’s computers! She must pay!

The bus pulled away. Linda was glad she could alight at last. She left the car, and started to climb the path towards the shacks. In only a few paces she was
sweating
and tired. The girl had seemed so brisk, but then of course the conniving bitch had been descending, not going up. Linda had no idea of direction, but the
footpath
did not branch until she reached the first shacks.

An old lady was swaying up the path ahead of her. Linda came slowly upon the figure, which was dressed in the black traditional garb of jacket and trousers with a cane hat. She carried a rough yoke made from an old broom handle, plastic water buckets hanging from each end. She wore plastic sandals, and foolishly carried her pattens of thick wooden blocks tied with their leather loops about her neck. Linda was amazed at the old woman’s stupidity. Fine, to save a few dollars by
declining
to bribe for a stand pipe of her own on the hillside, but to carry her heavy pattens? It showed how foolish the poor really are, Linda reasoned. They made their own misery, doubtless to earn sympathy from moneyed folk who’d done the decent thing, worked and saved to live a decent independent life instead of being wastrels. The poor slaved cunningly at being poor. Poverty was a trick to con the wealthy.

The old woman made to enter a shack made of
corrugated
tin. No doors, no windows, just a box pegged to the hillside by means of pieces of dowel round the edges, presumably to stop the hovel from slipping when torrential rains made the slope a ski-run of mud.

“Where is KwayFay’s place?” Linda deliberately
omitted
courtesies.

The old woman stopped, slowly rotating her whole body, the yoke swinging the buckets so one container slopped.

“KwayFay gone.”

“Where does she live?”

The old woman was Hakka, not Cantonese proper, a “guest family” person, one of those who had come to Hong Kong hundreds of years ago from the interior. They were still a race apart. Linda recognised this with distaste. The woman should be out working on the roads like all the other Hakka women, instead of idling on a hillside. No wonder she had nothing.

“She live ten places up.”

Linda walked on, counting. The shacks were arranged as steeply as if on a staircase. Little children, mostly bare, came to stare. One or two women emerged to see her pass. She wished she cut a rather better figure, but the heat was already unbearable. Her heels were torment. She had deliberately selected shoes to enhance the smallness of her feet.

Ten? Had the old Hakka woman said ten?

There was only one hovel there, two steps to the right on a rough area of granite outcropping in front of a box of corrugated iron. Someone, presumably KwayFay, had reinforced the walls with pieces of wood, but the whole
structure was already on the tilt. Marks in the powdered laterite showed where the makeshift hovel had moved under its own weight during the rains. One day it would simply slide down, accelerating until it struck the shacks below. That would be another tragedy enabling the
South China Morning Post
to invent yet more garish headlines. The Colony averaged five or six similar
horrors
every year, always attended with considerable loss of life.

Linda knocked to save face, for two women and
several
children were watching. She made a show of
listening
, and entered. The door was simply a fold of rusting tin pivoting on wire wound ineptly through two holes.

She stood as her eyes accustomed to the gloom. One window, with a piece of plastic fastened over the
aperture
. She looked through. She was unsure whether to let the girl know she had visited, but thought of the evident familiarity of the other people on the hillside. No doubt the old Hakka woman would tell the girl as soon as the bitch arrived back.

A House God, its red light barely alive, stood by the door. Linda acknowledged its presence to herself, which was all one needed to do to placate an Immortal, unless you were after a special deal. A truckle bed was folded against the tin wall. A bucket stood by, partly filled with water and covered with a small weighted piece of netting against flies, with two small bowls. There was a groove showing where the girl must stand to…to what? Linda stepped across and felt along the top ledge of the metal wall, but there was nothing. KwayFay must store
something
there. Nobody, not even the dreamy girl in her
terrible
wrecked shoes and awful shoddy dress, would have
been so foolish, inviting thieves to reach in through the window during the night and steal whatever she kept on the smooth ledge.

So KwayFay was careful. Or merely cunning? Linda cast around, found nothing, then looked out. There stood a suited man, thin, wearing a cross-striped tie of many colours. He wore a trilby, as if from some
old-fashioned
film, the sort they always showed in Causeway Bay. People still flocked. Linda looked away from the thin man’s flat gaze. She was disturbed, but not overmuch, for her hired car was down on the road almost opposite Green Island and it would be noticed. Her visit was probably known to all the hundred
thousand
squatter people – that was how many lived here on the hillside. Another tenth of a million here or there was nothing to Hong Kong, carefully miscounted for every Colonial Government Annual Report, to satisfy the China Republic’s arrogance.

The man had not changed position when she glanced a second time. She let him see her. Taking out her pen and notepad – no gambler was ever without those two essentials, she carefully made a note and tore the page out. She wanted a stone to weigh the paper down. He smoked his cigarette, motionless. She’d never seen
anyone
except a gambler stand so still, quite like a…well, a hunting bird, she’d have thought if she was of a fanciful turn of mind. Perhaps a money collector for the Triads who allowed the Government’s stand-pipe water system to operate unhindered?

She folded the paper and slipped it into the corner join of the truckle bed. Another possibility was that he ran a franchise, purchased from the Triads, and was
watching over the shacks of those who paid protection money of ten Hong Kong dollars a day. She was sure he hadn’t been there when she’d arrived.

She had written,
KwayFay, I wish to meet you. You will learn something to your advantage
. No signature, but she gave her cell phone number. The old woman would
provide
KwayFay with her description. As long as the silly bitch didn’t ring during supper, or when Linda was meeting the young handsome man, it would be fine. The slut of a girl wouldn’t be able to resist the offer Mrs HC would make, for a little crystal gazing.

The hill proved difficult going down, with those
elegant
but inconvenient heels. She drove to the garage off Hennessy Road in Causeway Bay and returned the car, reclaiming her deposit. HC’s plastic card did its wonder, and she was then free to find a taxi near where the trams turned in Wong Nai Chung Road.

In KwayFay’s shack, the short suited man found the note, pocketed it, and left without trace.

Linda Ho told the taxi driver she wanted the money place off Granville Road in Kowloon. He almost
hesitated
, but she tapped the back of his seat angrily. Here was an imperious lady, and she was prepared to make a fuss if he declined.

Ten minutes later, and he dropped her off behind the Carnarvon Road branch of the Hang Seng Bank, giving her a quizzical look as she alighted and went down Cameron Lane. She entered the first narrow alley to her right. There stood the moneylender’s Santiago had
recommended
.

One breath – she never showed fear at vitally
important times, knowing all could be lost at the
slightest
trace of anxiety – and she entered the money house. No sign on the door, none above in garish neon light, just a small white card discreetly placed. As she went in the chill of air conditioning enveloped her, making her shiver at the delicious cool. It seared her lungs. She stood for a moment at the assault on her senses, of the red and gold room in which she found herself.

The red glow changed slowly in waves, gold flashes seeming to ignite the walls then recede into a dark
scarlet
. No furniture, everything stark and the colours
violent
all about. A door opposite stood ajar.

She crossed. An ordinary counter was there, a
gentleman
waiting politely for her to approach.

He greeted her with grace. An old man in formal but antiquated attire, his long slender robe was almost priest-like, the high collar loose about his thin neck. He wore spectacles and managed a few chin hairs. His
fingernails
were tidily cut, with the exception of those of his little fingers which were prodigiously long, quite a foot in length. A traditionalist, then, one for whom menial labour was anathema.

“
Tai-Tai
,” he greeted her gravely.

“I want to borrow, if you please. I have my husband’s card.”

“No need,
Tai-Tai
.” He smiled, his voice a thin reedy sound of a distant flute working against the wind. “You have honoured many previous loans in Hong Kong. We are still proud to serve you.”

For just an instant, Linda felt a vague disquiet.
Still
proud? Suggesting a possible change in the offing? She almost bridled but kept control. There was no real cause
for worry. Every loss she had suffered – almost all from unfair accidents, unfortunate weather or disastrously incompetent jockeys, unlucky rolls of dice or impossible sequences of cards – every single one had been
honoured
. She always told HC to pay on the nail, for an unpaid debt was death, literal death. She
would
be barred from every racecourse, every gaming casino, in all South-East Asia. That would be death.

“I was recommended to come here by a gentleman I…”

Was it correct to mention that she’d just met, bumped into, some punter at the horse races, and he, seeing her losses, had told her of this place? Would the old
gentleman
think her too forward, and refuse her loan?

“I understand,
Tai-Tai
,” the old man said. “We allow only the best terms, and are particularly generous when the honoured lady wishes to go on using her profit. There will be no complaint from us.”

“How kind,” she said. “
Yao sam
.”

“Thank you for saying we have heart. Many
money-lenders
, banks even, are cruel to the point of extortion when a fair-minded lady wishes to increase her capital.” He smiled in silent appeal. “Is it not reasonable to
borrow
, to increase? To speculate in order to accrue? So great fortunes are won,
Tai-Tai
. I am only too pleased you have chosen our humble establishment.”

“I was thinking of a small sum,” she began.

He demurred, shaking his head.

“
Tai-Tai
. If I may, please accept more than you need. Would it not be unthinkable, were you to fail at the last hurdle because you underestimated the extent of your coming success?”

Those were the very words the young man Santiago had spoken! She remembered them exactly! “The sad thing,” Santiago had said, pocketing his wadge of money, his winnings, “is underestimating your coming success. How many times,” he’d added with a sigh, “have I made that mistake! Each time you fail to trust your instincts, you miss a fortune!” Then he had smiled quite like a film star, and went on, “I don’t make that mistake any more!”

His very words, now burned into her brain. You fail to trust –
so you fail completely!
She saw it all so clearly. Lack of confidence had been her real adversary, trust in the life she could have, not merely pennies.

Look at it another way. Fail to trust your instincts, then you failed in life! If only she’d trusted her instincts,
she’d have won a fortune
. It was the gambler’s loss, to win small and lose much. But to win a single giant bet was to reclaim all your previous losses! It was so logical! Her reasoning was beautiful in its accuracy.