The Year of the Woman (4 page)

And made it just in time, leaving HC flummoxed. When she finally emerged he had left the office, to her relief.

That hadn’t quite been the end of it. He called her in next morning, a strange look on his face. Sweating, every split second adjusting the air-conditioning, doing
his irritating finger-snapping ritual and jumping when the phone went. He grilled her about her made-up
message
for almost an hour. It was weird. During the session some new Englishman, an arrival so recent his face was still not sun-scarlet, dropped in from an investment company beyond the Hang Seng Bank, and had gone away baffled by HC’s stutteringly inept answers. As he left, he’d given KwayFay a look that spoke volumes: And this Colony is a pre-eminent trader with blokes like your Business Head?

Several times during that puzzling interview, the
distressed
HC had gone over the phoney message. Distraught, she’d had to stick to her lie, agreeing that, no, it might not have been HC’s friend phoning himself. No, she’d never seen his friend. To keep the lie
consistent
– essential for lies – she stayed definite. No, the man gave no name. With so many people in and out bringing orders, requests, checking on Unit Trust sales halfway across the world, London brokers forever on the phone, investment urgency across International Time Zones, how on earth could she pick out one
memory
among so many?

In the end HC let her go, but he’d made mistake after mistake all week. Twice he’d hidden from unexpected visitors, scared out of his wits. He’d done exactly the same once, when the US dollar exchange rate changed. KT vomited all that week because the American Federal Reserve suddenly did a policy switch. It could be counted normal office behaviour.

Except now this man’s questions about her lie.

He was waiting.

“I needed to go to the bathroom,” she explained,
embarrassed. “HC stopped me. I was hurrying.” The man gestured, get to it. She babbled on, “I hadn’t time to stand and talk. I invented that somebody had phoned, said they would be late.”

“Who?”

“I told HC a man.”

She tried to quilt up a truth to fit the occasion, so the man would let her go. She narrated through HC’s
interrogation
. Ah Min listened. He must have had the
features
of a cherub when young, like babies on those
terrible
Christian Christmas cards printed in Taipei, so much drossy colour, so little fact.

“How did HC seem?”

“He was afraid, First Born.”

She embellished this a little, making much of HC’s edginess, how he’d been unable to sell a single thing to the Englishman from the finance company up Des Voeux Road. The younger man facing her recovered his composure, filled out and lost some toxins.

Ah Min said something she didn’t quite catch. The young man ingratiated himself by laughing too much at the remark, nodding and saying, “Yes, yes!” too many times.

“Do you know why HC was afraid?”

“No,
See-Tau
.”

Clever; KwayFay saw the manoeuvre almost as the man spoke. He must already know exactly what
questions
HC had asked her that morning. It was the knight’s move in chess. You tally up rectitude, answer by slow answer. How many stock-investment truths did one frank lie relate to? It was the vital question in
commerce
. She’d created a computer scheme for it once, and
been terribly disappointed to learn later some man long since dead had done it much earlier in England before computers were even invented.

She waited. Here it came.

“Did he not tell you?”

“No,
See-Tau
.”

“If you can not kill and cannot predict death, Little Sister, then how did you know that a man would be late for a meeting you did not know about?” He leant
forward
from the sofa, his shoes squeaking as they bent with his feet. She realised how troubled he was. And, in turn, she.

“I do not know, First Born. I made the message up. I had to go to the toilet urgently.”

“Why did you make up
that
message?”

“I do not know. HC mentioned a message, so I said whatever came into my head.” She looked from one face to the other. They were full of scepticism, the younger man’s hooded eyes disbelieving.

“And when you came out of the Ladies, HC had gone. Where to?”

“I do not know. The races? He once owned
something
at Happy Valley, somebody told me a share in a horse.” She knew never to volunteer information, but fright made her garrulous. “HC’s wife bets on horses.”

“Which?” The younger man clarified impatiently, “That day. Which race?”

“I don’t know!” KwayFay cried desperately.

Ah Min gestured for silence.

“You made up a lie?”

Over and over the same thing, their glances at the big wall-mirror more frequent still.

“Why lie? Why not the truth? Why didn’t you say you needed the toilet?”

“People don’t say that.”

“But they do. In films, cinemas, offices and factories all over Hong Kong. It’s normal.”

“I just lied. I don’t know. I’m sorry if I did wrong. I needed —”

“Tell me about choosing employees.”

This time KwayFay knew exactly and told him
everything
, how HC had come to believe in her silly old Chinese guessing scheme.

He listened attentively and this time the younger man had the sense not to interrupt. She didn’t like men’s eyes to be so intent that their gaze never wandered to her legs or her shape. The one called Ah Min was inert to gender. To such a man, events were only affects. Which meant she was in the presence of craziness, like zany old Cantonese films without consequence. She was among madnesses, not knowing where one ended and the next began. Her head swam. She began to feel ill.

She told of every guess she had ever made to do with investments, employees. Scraping the barrel, she explained schemes she’d coined for HC to ruminate over, suppositions she’d told him as truths, half-truths, near-untruths, fibs to which she’d felt briefly partial and fables she’d dredged up from sheer imagination simply to get her boss HC out of the way while she got on.

“Get on with what?”

“Work,
Sin-Sang
.”

“What work?”

“London brokers are terrible people, First Born. They give you no time to do what they’ve rung about. They all
use the same words.”

“What words?” They quivered with excitement.

“Like when you say the Hang Seng hasn’t come in yet because of GMT and the USA time zones. They say
Work round that
, as if we can do it before everybody else. It’s an office joke. We say to each other,
Don’t shunt it
, okay? And we laugh.”

She paused. They didn’t know humour, despite the fat man’s constant beam. Without gender, without humour. Maybe they knew more about guesses that came right – or went wrong – than anybody in Hong Kong? She felt stifled.

“Do you speak to ghosts?” Ah Min asked.

“Me? No! Of course not!” She saw it was a trick, to condemn her. She would die because of this interview, when Communist China came in at the Handover and the English left.

“How do you know what lies to tell?”

“I don’t. I just say anything so things are straighter.”

“Straighter?”

“Children pretend fairy stories, don’t they? And superstitious folk go up to Amah Rock or burn a red candle in doorways. The usual.”

“Do you?” they both asked together. The younger man looked abashed for intruding.

“No. Well,” she embellished quickly because of her fear, “you know the gods. All the time. Anything, about anything.”

“You do? About anything?”

“Of course. Everybody does, but pretends they don’t.”

She was conscious of a rap on her soul, almost a blow
that shifted her in her seat. She looked round. Nobody. Yet she distinctly felt a buffet and her momentary recoil was seen by the two men opposite. She rubbed her arm. It hurt. Static electricity, she’d heard, did that.

“No,” she corrected, retrieving her handbag. She had dropped it. “I’m sorry. I was wrong to say that.” The taipan, for such Ah Min surely was, nodded to forgive. “I know traditions. Perhaps most,” she added daringly.

“Most what?”

“Old customs, from the Middle Kingdom, in the Celestial Empire. It is my hobby.”

“How?”

“I learn them, though I am not a good student.” She added that, in case it was Ghost Grandmother who had clouted her.

“Who from?” He leant forward, squeak, creak, knees a-shine. “Hong Kong is changing. Superstition is gone. Traditions have died. Apart from the
dai-hok
, the
university
. And they know nothing; I sent to ask them.”

“My grandmother.” She winced for another clout, but none came.

They showed keen interest, the taipan looking with meaning at the other man, who readied himself to spring away on a mission.

“Where is she?”

“She is dead, and I am very sorry.” That proved safe. “She was very clever, and knows everything.”

Knew? Does know? KwayFay became flustered by tenses. Ghost Grandmother had struck her several times before now, of course, that being what grandmothers did to granddaughters. Everybody knew that. But she had never before hit her in open company and the taipan
had definitely noticed something. Once, when KwayFay had failed in obedience, Grandmother had beat her unmercifully, leaving KwayFay weeping until dawn. It had been for such a small thing. Grandmother had taken umbrage when KwayFay, completely done for after a harrowing day of kaleidoscopic exchange rates and
computer
glitches, had fallen asleep while Grandmother was teaching her the list of primary festivals. KwayFay had smarted across her shoulders and legs where Ghost had whacked her. In the morning she had woken with sunken eyes and a skin like a rattan mat. All because she had sleepily mumbled that the Double Ninth day of
celebration
was
Chunq-gao
instead of what Grandmother wanted to hear,
Chunq-yeurng
.

“Knew,” she completed lamely. The huge fat man’s beaming face unnerved her. “Her cleverness is forever in my mind.”

It was getting harder. The younger man was impatient to be off killing somebody or extracting Hong Kong’s famed squeeze from shopkeepers and hawkers down Nathan Road, anywhere near a ferry.
Where water, there water!
Cantonese folk muttered the old saying gleefully, the slang word for money being water, that passed through the fingers however carefully you tried to retain it.

“You go to the temples?” the taipan asked, frowning.

“Yes,” KwayFay said firmly. She didn’t go regularly, only when she’d made mistakes at work and didn’t want them found until she could get in on Monday.

“Will it work for me too?”

She stared. What a question this was! A man could do anything, being male. Females couldn’t, of course, being
female. And a taipan could do anything without
squaring
it with anyone, for he was the business shark.

“Would what?”

Ah Min was in difficulties. He gestured dismissal, and the other left with a painstaking lack of noise. Why did he sulk so? Men were a problem, but their business was beyond her, very like HC’s incomprehensible deals that never came off. Not like women, who were enemies to each other whatever their degree of kindred. Sure, you laughed with Apple Woman on Mount Davis because she was Hakka, of the Guest Family People who did all manual labour around the Colony, but that was only because Apple Woman insisted on shoving her wheeled barrow up and down hills when she was secretly rich. She was female so you had to watch her, laugh as long as you like.

“If somebody wanted somebody prayed to.” He paused. “For. About. Would that work?”

“By me?” And to his nod she said defiantly, “Yes. In Hell.” She used the English word for the Hereafter – Heaven, Purgatory, Limbo, those places being more or less synonymous. Ghost Grandmother had lengthy explanations for that, all as tiresome as each other.

“Good.” He seemed reassured. “If I had to choose among several people, could you do it? Or tell if
somebody
was to be trusted?”

She was unsure what he was asking.

“Like you did before, in HC’s shop?”

Shop? HC would fire any employee who spoke so derogatorily about his wonky business. She regarded the man with new admiration. One who cared so little about others deserved respect.

“I will try, if you say.” She knew her place.

“What do you need?”

Guesses needed nothing. Guessing was simple. You suddenly opted for something that came into your mind, or you didn’t. Then you, what, asked Ghost Grandmother if the guess was right or not? She forgot how it had worked that time. A random flick of her pen? Her head ached. What if she’d annoyed Ghost and Ghost deliberately told her wrong? But Ghost was her only relative, so on KwayFay’s side.

“I have to ask.” The best she could do.

He became almost reverential, nodding that he
understood
her status in relation to the Powers Out There. She began to hope that she would get back to work safe.

“How long does it take?”

He
was asking
her
? In a world where China and Great Britain were doing a deal honouring the Treaty of Nanking and the later Peking Conventions? This strong man, whose motors streaked unimpeded through Tsim Sha Tsui, where even police motorcyclists braked to avoid delaying a taxi he’d hired? To that wisp of hope, she felt something slyly add itself. Was it a little dose of authority? She’d never experienced genuine power. It was fascinating.

“I never know.”

“Can you tell me what happens?” he asked humbly.

“I am sorry.” She tried to work out a formula to tell him no. “I wait until I am told.”

Told? She wondered why she’d said that. Nobody ever
told
her what to guess when HC came bumbling in with his stupid questions about what to buy, who to send to Singapore, if so-and-so was to be trusted. She
simply…well, guessed, often in a temper, more usually laughingly picking somebody who’d make most trouble for the odious creep. It was luck. Anybody could be lucky. She often wondered if HC bribed some god or other to stay flukey. He’d be bound to do it on the cheap, though, and that would irritate them. You didn’t short-change gods. No, HC was just lucky and asked her the right questions.