The Year of the Woman (17 page)

“Thank you, Grandmother.”

“Death stays the far side of Hong Kong. Two in Philippines, one Singapore. Good,
a
?”

“Yes, Grandmother.” KwayFay almost woke from relief. The deaths were accounted for!

“You should eat old rice when your period is bad, lazy girl. They sell it in Kennedy Market, by the last
water-pipe
.
Never pay more than twelve cash a half-catty, you hear?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

The catty, the local weight of food, would be
eliminated
when the Chinese mainland marched in, KwayFay knew, but cash – Imperial China’s copper coins with a square hole in the centre – had long since vanished except on barrows in Eastern Street for tourists to
marvel
at. KwayFay would have sulked, had she dared. Three months before, Ghost Grandmother had made her learn the money tables, driving her mad, night after night the chant, “Nineteen cash make one old English penny; a thousand Imperial Chinese cash make one tael, four thousand five hundred and sixty Chinese cash make one English pound …”

Long gone before KwayFay had appeared out of nowhere, of course. She wondered if she herself would become a querulous crone making some poor mite lose sleep learning stupidities.

“Sixteen taels make one catty,” KwayFay chanted inwardly, dozing against the wall in Ah Hau’s café. “One-and-a-third English Imperial pounds weight to the Chinese Imperial Catty …”

Slowly she roused. The place was suddenly full of caged birds, every table occupied with bamboo cages, the birds excitedly calling and singing. All except two were minah birds, sparky black eyes alert and feathers shining.

Some old men had to unfold canvas seats to sit down. Ah Hau had a stock of discarded folding seats, rescued from the waste bins outside the antiques emporiums on Hollywood Road of a night. She had helped him stitch
the torn green canvas with sailor thread got from the ship chandler in Sheung Wan where they collected the waste bins in the great barges during the dark hours. He had eighteen, he’d once told KwayFay with pride, as many as St Stephen’s College! She didn’t believe him, false praise being cheaper than truth and more
rewarding
.

This way, with the eight
dang-ji
, little bamboo stools he already had, he could seat most of the bird fanciers who came of a morning for tea and maybe a small amount of rice and green vegetables. Ah Hau also served locusts in bamboo and net cages, but this KwayFay hated because each of the cricket cages and locust
containers
meant something horrid would happen. She had to go. Her squeamishness always caused immense
hilarity
among the old men, who shouted advice after her, making jokes about women.

There was no way Ah Hau could delay it, though. The singing birds were fed by way of reward. Some old men kept to the ancient way of feeding their birds for having sung so beautifully, lifting out a particularly plump locust or cricket with their own chopsticks and placing it lovingly into their singing bird’s open beak, there to be snapped and ingested. The other birds went silent with envy as the winning bird ate the live crickets and grasshoppers. No singing then, only jealousy.

She felt ill at the thought, though the old men had not even yet settled down. Some were outside under the Cola awnings while another arrival was still shouting his greetings through the window and finding a place to sit with his riotous black minah bird.

Ah Hau served her a glass of water. This was his trick,
to show she was a genuine customer. He’d done this for years ever since she was little, and the old men knew it.

“You want anything else, Little Sister?” Ah Hau asked, quite as if she’d just finished breakfast.

“Nothing else, thank you, First Born,” she said, and everybody relaxed. Honour was satisfied. Face intact.

“My bird did a double-trill with a paradiddle and a flam,” claimed one old gentleman, adjusting his
cheong-saam
.

“Go on, then,” another said, amid laughter. “Again!”

“It did, I promise.”

“Then go
on
. We’re waiting.”

This one wore a suit with an oily tie and no shirt, and had managed to grow three or four long chin hairs quite as if he were a mandarin. He had toes as gnarled as
walnuts
, the nails piled on each toe as if trying to grow upward in ugly slabs.

There was a gust of laughter at this, the lot of them, inside the café and outside on the steps, swaying and laughing and coughing, some of them hardly managing to breathe from showing how ridiculous they thought the old man’s claim.

“Minah birds can’t do a paradiddle.”

“Mine can! I heard it only last night.”

“Make it sing it again then.”

“And a flamadiddle? No bird’s ever done that!”

“Mine does!”

The bird fanciers used the English words from the drum school out in the English soldiers’ barracks,
applying
them to the birds’ trills, mixing the terms they felt came nearest. This was how they went on each day,
challenging
the others to believe or to disprove their claims.
If KwayFay ever came to love anyone it would be these old men with their fantastic claims to have the most marvellous singing birds on earth, and Ah Hau who ran this cockroach infested café with its shop-soiled Kitchen God poster.

The aroma of the food, rice and vegetables, made her almost faint from hunger. When had she last eaten? This was becoming serious. She drank the water, but even the first swallow felt so bulky inside her that she almost gagged. She felt the weight of the money in her handbag, wondered if she might at least borrow – only borrow, for heaven’s sake – a little for a meal, but that was too
perilous
a step to take. She rose, with a single dollar.

“Please bet on the smallest bird,” she said quietly to Ah Hau.

“Very well, Little Sister.” He took the dollar.

“It will sing beautifully today.” It looked a scrawny little thing, yellow feathers torn, evidently a refugee from the hungry kites circling the main harbour.

“Thank you, Little Sister.”

“Good morning, First Born,” she said back, and left the place. The old men approved, for they continued talking loudly over the exchange.

She set off down the slope towards Des Voeux Road. Down there, she might catch a tram down Connaught Road West, make Central District before noon, and get her final payment. It would be withheld, of course. HC was venomous to those who failed him. Maybe he would give her an insultingly trivial amount of money that would make the whole office smile. Nobody could give a smile like the Chinese, or hide it so successfully that the world would see, so doubling the disgrace. Shame
was a pure industry in Hong Kong, the product of two great colliding empires. One empire would have been bad enough. Here, two had colluded, their beautiful
rituals
empowering their subjects to rise to the very height of social elegance. The dispensing of shame was its
epitome
.

Only a few steps, and she wished she hadn’t stirred from Ah Hau’s café. At least there she’d been in shade, with water.

A man was standing by the tram stop in Connaught Road when she got there. It was Tiger
Sin-Sang
, the old man. He wore the same ancient long
cheong-saam
as when she had last seen him in the Sports Stadium. Plainly still a captive hoping for escape. Two threat-men stood near him.

“
Jo san
, Little Sister.”

“
Jo san
, First Born.”

“You have not eaten, Little Sister.”

“No. I am not hungry, First Born.”

He considered this. A taxi slowed, honked its horn, then accelerated swiftly away with a screech of tyres. KwayFay noticed terror on the driver’s face, his right elbow lodged on the window retracting instantly as he hunched down. She looked into the face of the old man with surprise. A taxi driver, afraid? Then she noticed the suited threat-men had moved to the kerb. His captors, never far away.

She said, “The taxi man was afraid, First Born.”

He gauged her innocence and knew it for simplicity. “Was he really?”

“Yes. Why was that, First Born?”

“I will ask him if I meet him again.” The old man’s
expression clouded. “You have not eaten. You entered the Café of the Singing-Bird near the Mologai, yet there too you did not eat. This is correct?”

“Yes, First Born. I will have something later.”

She felt foolish and made as if to walk by, deciding to walk into Central. He pursed his lips. The threat-men’s arms unfolded. She froze.

“Little Sister, this is not like starving yourself, as women do? I do not know the words for it. Staying
hungry
and making yourself ill?”

“Certainly not!” she said indignantly. “I am …”

She could not reveal her hunger, say how she’d almost keeled over from having had nothing.
I am poor
would not do, to this august old-
cheong-saam
gentleman ancient enough to be her…great-great-grandfather?

“It is religion?”

He waited. She noticed the pedestrians – always very few along Connaught Road West, never more than one or two every twenty paces or so, since they’d redesigned the waterfront – were avoiding the pavement. Several, even as they’d been talking, stepped into the road and crossed over, a perilous hazard in the new roadway, or entered a side street to climb inland to another level where there were no trams at all.

“Religion?” She had no knowledge of Catholics, but supposed he meant them. They had a weekday when they didn’t eat, wasn’t that so? And Mohammedans also, they were vague in her mind. “No, First Born. I am busy.”

“Then you shall eat at the Peninsula Hotel, in Salisbury Road. You will be booked in. No need to give your name.”

“I have …”

“The money in your handbag, Little Sister.” His eyes bored into hers. She almost stepped back in alarm. How did he know she had money in her handbag? “It is a gift. It is yours. Please eat well. I am told you spend nothing. Now you shall spend many dollars on attire.”

He was lost for words, evidently trying to work up to descriptions of dresses and shoes. His eyes pecked, like those of a bird, at her feet, her hem, her waist, arms, shoulders, as if choosing without knowledge.

“A gift?” She knew never to stammer. Ah Hau had said ladies did not stammer, for a woman who could not speak was ruined. “It cannot be.”

“Cannot?” He frowned. She felt an ice on her cheeks. She lowered her voice to a whisper so the threat-men would not hear, and said, “Is it a message to someone?” He looked at her. “Yes,” he said.

“Would it help you if I did as you say?”

“Yes.”

She thought. Maybe the message was in the numbers on the money. “How much?”

“You must spend several thousand.”

“Nobody can give so much, First Born. It is…it is thousands.” She whispered, “The money in my handbag seems all red notes.” At his continued silence she explained with reverence, “A red note is one hundred Hong Kong dollars.”

“Is it?” A puzzled smile, but this time warm.

“There are two brown notes, and one yellow, First Born.”

“Are there?” More amusement.

She was fearful of a sudden. What if it wasn’t a gift
after all? His concern had abated as soon as she
mentioned
the larger denomination notes.

“The brown notes are five hundred dollars, Little Sister,” he said slowly. “The yellow is a one-thousand.” Three men, in smart suits, did not move, just looking away. Why was this? She had supposed these watching people to be his warders, but now…“Have you not counted the money?”

“No, First Born.”

“Why not?”

“It seemed…impolite.”

“Always count the money you have, then you know exactly what you can do.” He seemed curious. “After you have dressed in new clothes, after you have eaten, then you must return to your place of work. Understand?”

“First Born, I have no way of repaying it.”

“Never repay a gift, Little Sister.”

“I am afraid. My …”
Ghost
Grandmother would not approve?

How could she say something like that? He would think her mad, like the women in those crazy movies from India they were always showing down in Wanchai, where hundreds of actors danced with their fingers gone wrong.

“Your who?” He looked over his shoulder. The men sprang into life and closed in. “Your who?” he asked again.

“I think of my old grandmother. She might not have approved, my taking money from your guards, for no reason.”

“Where is your grandmother?” He spoke to the
attentive trio in a voice cold enough to chill the air. “You reported she had no relatives.”

“She has none, First Born,” one said.

Old Man said directly to KwayFay, “You have no
relatives
.”

“I mean, if my grandmother were still here, alive, she might not approve.”

He smiled, nodding. “I like that. You think of your ancestors. That is good. I am pleased.”

The men faded, resumed their stances on the
pavement
, looking for all the world as if they were studying some distant view.

“Thank you, First Born.” For what?

“Count the money, Little Sister. Eat dinner in the Peninsula, buy clothes. Then go to…to work.” He almost smiled as he spoke his last word, but the smile did not quite reach and he moved away. “Here is your tram, Little Sister.”

There was no tram in sight, but a large black
limousine
approached from the direction of Shek Tong Tsui and stopped.

The old man walked away. The driver was a youth who looked fourteen, grinned at her with a mouthful of gold teeth.

“Little Sister?”

“Me?” She looked around, but the old gentleman had vanished. Only one of the three suits remained there, watching her implacably, hands clasped, his trilby too large and his tie a flamboyant red. He was ugly, a tiny body under a wide face and eyes that looked dead.

She wondered if she ought to go to HC first, explain that she had had a sudden change in fortune, but the
youth seemed suddenly to age as he scowled.