The Year of the Woman (2 page)

KwayFay’s dream was to take her time going to work. Hopeless, considering the frantic journey.

Her choice was frankly shaming: Mount Davis Road, the long uphill walk to the helter-skelter bus. It ran downhill through Sai Ying Pun, past the university where students wore thick glasses and wouldn’t take their examinations on any day they saw a stout
individual
– “fail-low” sounding uncomfortably close to the Cantonese for “fat man.” (And, she thought acidly,
they
were the Crown Colony’s
intellectuals?
) Or, those swaying clanking tombs of wreckage that were trams past the teeming godowns to Central District.

It was a choice of degradations.

Consider them:

The walk along Mount Davis Road (where the
Wall-Building
Ghost plotted to get you at its mercy, creepiest ghost ever) eventually took you by the little garden
centre
overlooking the coal merchants that clung to the cliff face over Sandy Bay. You passed the steep Cape Mansions and St Clare’s Girls’ School. KwayFay had longed to study there (in fact anywhere), but, being only a street child among scavengers, had worked from the age of six as a water carrier. She paid a clever rich schoolgirl “roof-top money” to teach her after hours. The girl who took KwayFay’s precious three Hong Kong dollars said education was claptrap. KwayFay heard three incomprehensible lessons, then used the money she stole for food instead.

Or she could catch the 6B bus that idled at Felix Villas waiting for the downhill sprint through Kennedy Town
market, thence along the waterfront to the hopeless
tangle
of Des Voeux Road and yet more clanging trams as far as Princes Building. Destination! There, the slogging misery of her computer travail waited, ready for her to clerk its mad imaginings called Investments and National Currencies.

The other route was even crazier, a long slow walk to Pok Fu Lam, catching the bus by the Chinese Christian Cemetery for the swirl down Pokfulam Road among the madly angled schools (why so many there? and most of them Christian, God help Hong Kong). Then the crazy chase below the Mologai, that sinister district of evil memory that didn’t need ghosts to become wicked.

Very well, Ghost Grandmother, KwayFay reminded herself to say, in case the ghost demanded to know what she’d been thinking on the way to work:
The Mologai is Hong Kong Island district of lepers and whores, of Triads and Hongs and other secret societies, thieves galore who crowd each other to death and worse. There!

KwayFay worked at the Brilliant Miracle Success Investment Company. The office stood on the sixth floor because the owner HC Ho and his hopeless
gambling
-addicted wife who called herself Linda, English fashion, could not afford the lucky eighth. Eight of
anything
was lucky. The sixth floor was dire, which was the reason the Brilliant Miracle Success Investment Company was gunge. KwayFay smouldered with rage about it. She didn’t dare tell Grandmother Ghost because she’d never let her forget she worked as a slave to incompetents, men of no name,
mo meng
, chief
duck-egg
being Business Head, the proprietor HC Ho.

KwayFay alighted from the lift, lip curling in disdain. What was the good of working for a Business Head, that all-important
See-Tau
who owned and hired and fired and, on occasions, mauled, yet who was too thick to really go after money and make the firm boom? The air conditioning was functioning, with its coughing and whirring, thank heavens.

Used to her cramped tin shack, the office cool was luxury after the impossible heat of the morning journey into Central. She reached her alcove – HC called it a pod, thinking the word trendy, which showed him up for a fool.

She set up her own laptop – no telling anyone what that instrument had cost her, and no thinking it either in case Ghost Grandmother got wind of
that
little
purchase
. Mr HC Ho and his eagle-eyed wife
Tai-Tai
Linda Ho and the rest would know she arrived, by some
miracle
always on time. She went to the Ladies and there had a decent wash. The luxury of endless water, from a tap where she didn’t have to pay some eagle-eyed wart with a knife! Hoodlums collected money for a Triad,
bragging
with tattoos and smoking English cigarettes to show they had connections.

In a loo cubicle she dressed in the work outfit she always carried with her. Two layers of plastic wrappers, then a plastic shopping bag and, next to the clothes against the all-seeping humidity of Hong Kong, her one cotton towel. Different shoes, a decent
saam
, not too revealing because of the swine HC Ho. She bagged her rubbishy travelling clothes and emerged looking quite like a beautiful butterfly, though not too proud because some ghosts had thousand-league eyes, including one
she didn’t care to name because it made her shiver.

And stepped into the direct gaze of
See-Tau
himself, waiting outside the Ladies checking how long she’d been in the toilet. He did that.

“
Jo san
, HC. Good morning.”

“Morning, KwayFay. I want you for a minute.”

“If it’s about the American Denver-Blorkence prospects, they’re done. I only need to format them out.”

She had finished them on her laptop. Her one perk was charging her battery in the office, though only when HC was at his noonday grope in the store cupboard with MaiLing or some other girl wanting a favour. Otherwise he would make her pay for the electricity, HC being a right pirana. She lied that she bribed the local Mount Davis Triad’s fixer for one light bulb and a yard of flex in her shack. In the way of some lies (but only some) it wasn’t altogether true, though it stopped him charging her a dollar a minute like he had fined KT Man, a Hong Kong University economics graduate too mean to buy new shoe laces. Instead, KT inked office string and tied his shoes like that.

“Good, right.”

HC’s spectacles were bottle thick, his balding head shining with sweaty anxiety, damp spreading from armpits into his waistcoat. She followed him to his office, embarrassed by her plastic shopping bag. Shame never lacked fame; she was so obviously a clerk from the squatter areas, the plastic shopping bags her hallmark.

He sat wringing his hands, looking out into Des Voeux Road and Statue Square. He seemed desperate for help. She chose to make him sweat all the more.

“If it’s about centralising those South-East Asian Tracker Funds, HC, I kept the data.”

“KwayFay. That personality profile. Remember?”

“A while back? Yes,
See-Tau
.”

“That clothing shambles in Sheung Wan?”

KwayFay nodded. She hadn’t been invited to seat
herself
, even though she suddenly knew this would be a big moment. She stared at this liquidising oaf and felt a glow. With a fortune in cosmetics and clothes she’d
conquer
the world, the whole globe being for ever western. Why else did those unspeakable Japanese girls, always on TV, pay surgeons to do away with their eye folds so they’d look American, at a cost of four thousand US dollars for the two eyes? They took advantage, and were to be despised, spending money like water. She refused to feel that twinge of envy.

“
A
!” she said, suddenly remembering. “I apologise, HC. How is he getting on?”

She was conscious of two other clerks walking past at a slow stroll. She could see them through the door glass, working out what HC had her in for. Promotion and sacking was always in the air. HC had twelve employees in the company, making fourteen to be paid from the trickle of money that came from selling guesses about investments. Firms ought to know better than buy HC’s blunders. He was driven by his wife Linda’s need to gamble in Causeway Bay, a right
do-toh
, gambler. She would gamble her last catty of rice.

“It’s been a disaster, KwayFay.”

HC crumpled. KwayFay watched him sag.

“No!” she gasped, as if overcome by the fool’s plight, whatever it might be.

“True.” He swivelled in his chair. He spent all his time staring wistfully at great motors that stormed eastwards to Wanchai and Causeway Bay. She knew why, as did
Tai-Tai
Linda with her gimlet eyes and pinched
gambler’s
mouth. “I have to pay money because of it, KwayFay.”

This was serious, she thought with a thrill. HC
never
paid money. Risk made her pleasure exquisite, except it was the risk of losing her job. Sex was nothing to the excitement of seeing her boss in anguish. At least, not the sex she’d had so far, which wasn’t much.

“Remember the profile you did for me?”

“I remember.” She had mostly forgotten, but who could admit such a thing? She remained standing, her plastic bag now a definite weight. Her fingers would make a slow start today. They often got cramp after an hour’s clicking and tapping. It wouldn’t happen if she could afford better food. “I should have done better, HC,” she said in pretended shame, her way of goading him to more revelations.

“No, KwayFay.” Tears shone in his eyes at the thought of lost money. “I should have listened to you.”

She decided on more self-abasement, show him what he’d missed by not taking her advice. “I ought to have made a better summary.”

HC swivelled some more. He couldn’t even make up his mind which way to do that, right or left, and him the
See-Tau
. She watched him with contempt, on her face a sorrowing smile. Showing compassion was woman’s work,
ge
!

“Remember what I said when you told me?”

“You are so kind, HC.” She wondered whether to
make her eyes go all misty, like that favoured English actress did in that desert film with such superb effect, the ugly conniving bitch. Or would it be over the top?

“You said he was a scoundrel. I should have listened.”

“I hope I did not presume,” she said meekly. She’d recently read a Jane Austen book, interminable dull phrases stodging up endless pages, where they never cut to the chase but waffled on with hardly a mention of money in the entire book. One or two of the yawnsome authoress’s catch-phrases actually caught. KwayFay always found herself trying them out.

“No, KwayFay. I am frankly impressed.”

She murmured, eyes downcast but still tempted by misty, “
Yao sam
.” You have heart. That was a laugh. Praise idiots, listen to the wise, as ghosts always said. Good Cantonese advice.

“You saw my dilemma, KwayFay.”

Now she remembered. She had power! She thought it over.

The problem that odd day had been a datum default, something KwayFay took personally because data records were her province. She had shrieked down the phone at the Philippines office, causing much laughter among colleagues who had overheard with their bat ears. As humble keeper-of-information clerk, KwayFay still smarted over it.

“All very well laughing like fools,” she’d told her friend Alice Seng bitterly when it was all over, “but they criticise me when the share prices go crazy and there’s no projection on a stock.”

“Sorry.” Alice was still laughing over their
heung pin
tea. “Your face! You looked like you could kill her!”

“I could, easily,” KwayFay said bitterly. The fuss died down.

She did not mind talking of death as much as other Cantonese. She never told people she talked to Ghost Grandmother. They would think her mad. She’d get sacked, and have to go back to scavenging along Hong Kong’s waterfronts and thieving, as she’d done ever since being a little no-family girl running wild.

She now knew over thirty rituals, thanks to Ghost Grandmother, each painstakingly learned by heart over restless nights. The more she learned the less scared she became, which was truly odd because as a little girl she’d been timidity itself, the butt of all the other Cockroach Children’s ribald jeering.

That day was when HC had entered her pod,
polishing
his spectacles and sweating, asking for KwayFay to come to the reserve office. It was a place for storing records, old computer systems and notes about
employees
. It was also a place for HC’s clumsy fondles, given half a chance.

In there, though, on that strange day there had been no funny business, just a frightened bleat for her advice. It had astonished KwayFay.

“You clerk all our data, KwayFay. You store systems.”

“Yes, HC.” What else would a lowly data storage clerk do? She did not know many men who were also cretins, for all men did something vigorously weird, that being the way of the male gender. She gazed at HC almost with admiration for being a world-record fool.

“Even when the others throw data out?”

This was the office joke. “Yes, HC. I store all.”

Had she done wrong? More importantly, were English tax officials in Government breathing down his neck? Was he hoping past data was crumbled, and no facts left for Government accountants to pick over?

“Keeping records is good!”

She bridled. If he was about to start joking like the others…

“Is it some American system, the one you use?”

She went guarded, in case she’d inadvertently blamed some shifty friend of his or, worse, some gambling lady friend who went to Happy Valley Races with his sow of a wife.

“I have those also. And Chinese.” She laughed
apologetically
, as most locals did at things ancestral, so
hopelessly
dud in this modern world, putting her hand over her mouth to cover her teeth. “Old Chinese systems.
Ho gau
.”

He cleared his throat. Puzzled, she watched him for clues.

“Do your records say what decisions to make?”

“Yes, HC,” KwayFay said firmly, sealing her fate. What else could she say? “Some are extremely reliable,” she added, hedging a little in case he doubted her value.

“Are they!” His gleaming head nodded eagerly. She felt a new strength, giving him the answers he wanted. “Old Chinese give definite yes or no?”

“Indeed, HC!”

“What sort of questions, KwayFay?”