The Year of the Woman (5 page)

“Do you gamble, Little Sister?”

“No, First Born.”

“That is good. I would have to…find someone else.”

She swallowed, tried to look dependable and no
gambler
.

“Little Sister, we want you to make choices for us. Some people who are not yet in Hong Kong. I want to know which ones.”

“Which what?”

“We shall send for you.” Ah Min glanced at the
mirror
and paused. “You will decide which, among several girls. And if a man.”

“What girls for?” she bleated. “And if a man what?”

“That is all.”

“How long do I have?”

Ah Min’s beam did not change, but his eyes narrowed and she instantly realised her blunder. Wouldn’t ghosts and gods know instantly? Didn’t they fly, like the magic Goddess Tin Hau, over oceans to deflect typhoons away from Hong Kong and send them instead to damage Japan?

“You ask me what?” he said with quiet intensity.

“Who is the one who must come for the answer?” she said with quick invention. “What if an imposter asks for
the answers instead of you?”

His brow cleared. She was safe. “We shall send. You tell us directly.”

“Thank you.” She said, on a whim, “Can I come in a black motor, please?”

“
Yat-ding
, certainly. Anything else?”

He asked it politely, quite as if he’d provided her with afternoon tea, English style, in the Gloucester Tea Rooms over in Central.

“Thank you, no.”

He made a signal and the door opened instantly. A strange man slowly entered, one of great age wearing the traditional long black habit she only knew from old
photographs
. He was skeletal, his parchment skin a
varnished
integument. His skull was hairless, his features cleft by deep lines and his hands clawed into uselessness. The taipan leapt up, on guard. KwayFay also rose, not knowing what to do. Authority flowed from this old man, yet if he was so thin, attired so anciently, surely he must be some sort of prisoner? She warmed to him immediately.

“Why black?” the old gentleman whispered. She stared at him, nonplussed. “The motor car. You wanted black.”

“I do not know, sir.” Her power had flown. She had just been stupid. Her reply was in English. He nodded as if at some implied rebuke.

“You
guessed
it?”

“Yes, First Born.”

“Do you know all the old festivals, Little Sister?”

“Imperfectly, sir. I am still learning.”

He sighed. “I find that sad,” he announced in his whispery voice.

“First Born,” she asked, her voice tremulous at the risk she was taking by asking. “Which choice must I make first, and which second?” She felt the whole world go silent.

“Do it, Little Sister. Please.”

He inclined his head. It was over. She did not know how to curtsey or bow properly. She did neither.

The annoyed young man was waiting on the soiled landing. He let her out into the street and simply left her there to make her own way back to HC’s office. It took her the best part of an hour.

Defiantly she didn’t take a taxi, though the time she wasted crossing the harbour on the Star Ferry would make the whole day impossible. She would be lucky to finish half of her work. Tomorrow would be hellishly full of blame.

HC was waiting, pacing, when she finally walked up from the Star Concourse past the three dozing
rickshaws
, no tourists eager to photograph the idlers today and serve them right. Her boss saw her return but said nothing. He was useless for the rest of the afternoon, and never even came to ask what had happened.

She kept wondering about the age of the ancient man. He had spoken with “high-nose” quality, used ancient traditional suffixes fast going out of use in ordinary speech. He would have got along fine with Ghost Grandmother. Poor, poor old man, though. Once in authority, now a mere
foki
, or a prisoner. If he was their old relative, they ought to see he was properly fed,
instead of keeping him so thin. Usually, old grandfathers in Hong Kong looked after grandbabies, but probably Triads didn’t have many. They probably made him work in the kitchen, poor old thing. She’d liked him.

Trying to catch up, she set to work. Eighteen waiting calls, several from London’s sleepless brokers screaming where the hell, what the hell. None of her friends had done a single thing to help her, not even Lee Sik-King, who doted on her and could normally be counted on to do a hand’s turn. He merely used his university degree – B.Econ. (Hons) – skills to ease his own passage today, thank you very much. She smouldered, quickly settling down in the three hours remaining.

Just let Lee S-K come grovelling with his
postgraduate
smile, hoping for her to submit to yet another
pointless
maul while he shed into her Kleenex in his cousin’s near-derelict 10hp Standard car. Just let him, that’s all. She’d draw him on long enough to get him to pay for a meal, then leave him standing. She almost giggled at the pun but had no time for fun, gave her computer her code word and rushed in.

Old Man went to sit in his high room. His six
lieutenants
stood waiting. He sipped almond juice. KwayFay was the name of a Chinese dancer, married a Ming emperor.

“Let her live,” he said finally. “She must make choices, then I decide. And Ah Min?”

“Yes, master?”

“Ask doctors if she is mad.”

“Yes, master. Which doctors?”

“The right ones.”

Ah Min flinched, and retreated clutching his ledger, still frantic, still beaming.

The lieutenants dispersed. Old Man sighed. His
problems
seemed insurmountable today.

That evening she avoided Mount Davis Road’s
Wall-Building
ghost by accepting a lift from Alice’s brother WC Seng. He was married and drove a small Volkswagen that roared even when not moving. It stank of petrol and had no springs to speak of. He chewed flavoured cachous and claimed an extra income but even Alice
didn’t
know where from.

He drove her down Belchers Street so she could stop and buy two-day rice, cheap because it was old. He never stopped talking. KwayFay knew he fancied her. Several times he’d asked her out. She refused.

“I like Pok Fu Lam,” he rabbited on during the drive. “Except Bonham Road past the university’s a pig. And those Middle School kids! Never still. They should be taught traffic. My friend’s kids go to Chiu Sheung Middle School. You know how much the fees are? Go on, guess.”

“I know,” KwayFay answered, because she looked everything up about money. As a Cockroach Child she used to sit outside the air vents trying to overhear
lessons
.

He laughed without pause, a waft of scented cachou unfortunately coinciding with her inhalation. She turned away, her rice on her lap.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” he laughed.

He thought he had a gay, cavalier laugh, caught from some sword-and-staircase movie. He never went to Cantonese pictures, thinking them dated.

“Yes.”

“There is? What?”

“HC’s friend was delayed at the races. Nobody talked of it in the office, but they all knew why.” She sighed, to prompt him. “I’m so slow on the uptake.”

“I know.” He turned to avoid a hawker pedalling his impossibly laden bicycle then had to wait while the
market
traffic disgorged up Smithfield. “They all park down Smithfield,” Seng laughed bitterly. “If I tried that, I’d get police stickers all over my windscreen. They bribe to get away with it.”

“I wish I did,” KwayFay sighed, shifting her catty of rice on her lap in a way she knew to be alluring.

“HC’s friend died.”

“Died how?”

Seng laughed his abandoned laugh. “Doesn’t matter if you’re dead, right?”

Another line from some Yankee film. She looked at him, her eyes as hooded as a Chinese girl could make them. She practised this endlessly, once bribing a hateful friend along Robinson Road to hire an old black-
and-white
American video for an evening so she could see Gloria Swanson hood her eyes at a man to vamp him. It worked, but only for Gloria Swanson.

“You know everything,” she said, unsmiling.

“Traffic accident!” Seng laughed sincerely this time, as was customary in Hong Kong at any disaster.

Her heart constricted. “Really dead? It must have been in the papers and I missed it,” she said.

She never bought a newspaper. She had a natty little radio powered by two Duracell batteries. She’d been so proud of her plastic radio, having bought it from a street hawker – haggling for two days – until she discovered that it came given free with subscriptions of
Time
.
Teachers’ common rooms sold them to
fokis
down Connaught Road.

Sometimes she left it on all night, very low volume, to deter marauders who robbed shacks in the dark hours. Squatters were reluctant to raise the alarm and attract attention to their illicit presence among the mountain nullahs.

“He was run over in Mong Kok, Kowloon side.” Seng hawked up phlegm and sniffed. Scented cachous never stopped his constant bubbling litany. It made her feel ill. He told her that he’d installed air-conditioning in his motor but it wasn’t true. Why did men boast about things obviously unattained? A woman never would. “A lorry backed over him from Argyle Street. Seen the
traffic
there? Worse than Hong Kong side.”

“Here will do,” KwayFay said, sooner than she should have.

“Are you sure?” he asked, startled. “Walk uphill, from here?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” She started to open the door so he had to pull in by the bus stop. Behind, the curving road overlooking the Sulphur Channel was already dark. “My friend will be waiting at the flower stall.”

There was no friend. The flower stall shack showed a bare electric bulb, opaque plastic covering signifying it had closed.

“Look, KwayFay,” he laughed. “How about I drive you to Jardine’s Lookout, maybe a meal at the Peak one day? Just us, eh?”

“I’ll think about it.” She hesitated. That would not be enough of a rejection for this persistent goono for whom she’d hooded her eyes, giving him the free
benefit of so much study. “I’m busy lately. Good night.”

He racked the window up and drove off with a cheery wave. She heard his roguish laugh even over the guttural roar of the engine, and with relief started up the slope – Victoria Road was so steep, climbing out of town. She needed to think.

No doubts now: her boss’s friend had been killed. Okay, she told herself grimly, accidents happened. But HC’s fear had all but paralysed him. After the news, he’d crumpled. Had this friend been involved in some financial scheme that displeased the Hongs, the great Triads who ruled where even police could not go?

The important question was, had HC delivered KwayFay to the Triads in part payment for something she didn’t yet know? Or had he remembered one of her offhand excuses and represented it as a magical
recommendation
?

It was evil. She almost stopped walking at the terrible thought. The heat was sapping, making rivulets of sweat down her back and sticking her collar to her hair. HC had made her responsible for his fiddles. She had no
illusions
about the man. He would see a way out and take it, congratulating himself on a brilliant escape even though it landed her in trouble.

She would make fewer offhand remarks in future, then he’d have no way out. Serve him right. Her
immediate
hope was to save herself. She could drop HC in it later, find a way. How many pardons did Triads give before making some lorry reverse over you in Sham Shui Po? She’d once seen a lorry crash in Nelson Street, not far from Argyle, and a woman had been knocked
unconscious
against a parked motor, to bleed profusely while
throngs had assembled to chat admiringly at the
carnage
. It gave her nightmares for months.

Mount Davis Path was steeper than Victoria Road. She had to take her time, her thighs aching and shoes beginning to hurt. The rice proved a problem, causing her to walk aslant. She stumbled in runnels as the path wound up in impossible turns. When she finally reached her hut she saw her water had been stolen, the can
completely
dry. Someone must have taken it as soon as she’d gone to work. Two bare-bottom urchins were playing
chai-mui
, the children’s guessing game, played with the fingers opened or held up. How often she had played like that!

“No cat walked in today,” she sighed, “so no luck.” A cat straying into your home brought luck. If only.

Wearily she replaced her shoes with the worn sandals that she’d left carefully by the god at her door, the red cord tied to the god’s base to prevent theft. She
suspected
Ah Fee, a woman who worked in the Chinese Legation houses on Mount Davis, very grand dwellings so old that they were made by the first English who’d come on their warships before anybody could
remember
. Ah Fee was a thief, despite having three sons who worked in the godowns and imported opium. So why was their mother a scivvy and a thief, dwelling in a squatter shack on a hillside? A family thing, she thought with sorrow, something she would never know.

KwayFay got her can and carried it to the stand pipe, a hundred yards down the path she’d just climbed. Luckily the queue was only fifteen people, mostly ancient grandfathers and little children, each with a tin or a plastic bucket, waiting in turn to get water from the
one tap. People hardly talked, except mentioning the likelihood of a
dai-fung
, a typhoon from the Philippines. She found her laptop burdensome, slung forever over her shoulder. And her plastic shopping bag of clothes she had to carry as well, because in the dusk any one could steal and be away up among the shacks or down to Kennedy Town before she even saw him go, or maybe reach Heung-Gong-Jai, that “Little Hong Kong” the world’s tourists knew as Aberdeen Harbour.

She struggled back up the slope, lifted aside the tin sheet and went inside. She took out her radio and set it there, struck a match and lit her oil lamp, almost in tears at its suspiciously light weight. Sly fingers had leeched out half her paraffin while she’d been at work. Third time in four days. She wondered whether to see Safe Oil Man, who came past Victoria Road. They said he was Hakka really, though he spoke like a native Hong Kong Cantonese. He supplied oil to save you having to carry it home from Kennedy Town. It cost extra but his oil never got stolen, because he paid squeeze to Triad knives. They knew who stole what, and took revenge.

It was a question of payment, as in life. Could she afford extra to Safe Oil Man? If she didn’t pay, it would mean forever hauling heavy cans of paraffin oil up from Kennedy Town. They didn’t like people carrying great tins on the buses. The 5B drivers wouldn’t allow her, especially the ones marked Felix Villas. Another dilemma, when she already had too many to cope with.

She got her pan from its twisted wire just above the house god. The god’s battery was failing, depending for reflected red light upon a crumpled piece of tinsel. She wanted a real red lamp with its electric light showing
true devotion, so rendering all her belongings
sacrosanct
, but who could afford that? Ah Fee could, for one, KwayFay thought bitterly. She dropped enough two-day rice in the pan for her evening meal.

The way you cooked it, as everybody except
non-Chinese
knew, was to pour out the rice. Wash it four times until the white stopped coming out, then give it a quick final rinse. Put in just enough new water to reach the second joint of your finger. Heat it on your dismally slow lamp’s tepid flame. Taste the rice grains between your incisors. When soft, it is cooked. Simple! Yet even in Hong Kong people got it wrong and served hard rice. Unbelievable. Ghost Grandmother was always on about it.

She took down her chopsticks from their string on the shack roof, and brought out a twist of green cabbage and a sliver of fish (one Hong Kong dollar extra on the price) and placed it on a level stone above the rice pan in a piece of foil the fish man had thrown in free, though tomorrow he would charge for both. He did this day and day about.

The rice water she would use as a drink later, and then be set for the evening. She would think her way through the impossible hazards HC had placed her in. It would then be time for bed and sleep.

To pick the best of girls…for what? Who? She must simply guess two answers, and be right. Was it to do with money? Bets on an English horse race, that drove the young Hong Kong men crazy with dreams of wealth so they stared at TV screens in Causeway Bay all night long? She was so tired. Hers was not much of a life.

Dully she sat in her shack and watched the rice pan.
Her mind was empty except for wraiths, each as
amorphous
as mists that faded from the East Lamma Channel before the dawn sun became hot. She was so tired. She thought of Seng, Alice’s brother. He might possibly lend her some money to escape to Taiwan. Except the Triads knew everything. They would stop her at the
airport
. She could go down to the Taiwan ship and try to slip aboard, but the Taipei authorities recorded everyone from Hong Kong, being in the grip of the Kuomintang. You might be a suspicious right-wing political Koumintang character, or communist from China
mainland
.

Her chopsticks were easily cleaned of ghekko dust. She did this in a little hot water from the rice dipped out on her spoon, and felt her food. Ready.

Wearily she ate, wondering what to do. Barely ten o’clock yet she decided to go to bed. It would not do to be late tomorrow, with this problem hanging over her head. She needed to see what HC was going to do, ask, reveal, beg. Her ghekko chuckled and scurried up the shack wall.

It didn’t remind her of Seng, because he did nothing useful. At least the ghekko caught flies.

“Wake up, lazy girl!”

“I am awake, Grandmother.”

“Awake?” Ghost Grandmother shrieked in her
grating
voice. “They hear you snoring in Hay Ling Chau!”

KwayFay shivered, trying to pull up her one blanket over her at the sudden mention of the Isle of Happy Healing, so beloved now of western tourists. They
didn’t
know the place was the colony’s original leper island,
shunned even by the Japanese during the War, though its festivals had now returned, to please tourists for money.

“Tonight, snoring girl, I am restful.” Silence, then accusingly, “Your water stolen today!”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“No cat walked to your door today, then!”

“I said that to myself when I realised,” KwayFay said miserably.

“Or a hen sat on your roof. That brings bad luck.”

“What must I tell you tonight, Grandmother?” Get it over with, and sleep.

“Why do you go in the
cheh
, the car of that fool man?”

Which KwayFay thought a bit much, for Alice’s brother after all found KwayFay very desirable. Better not argue.

“I do not like to come down Mount Davis Road, Grandmother.”

“Why not?”

KwayFay was sure Ghost Grandmother was laughing. She didn’t dare become petulant.

Now she truly was laughing. KwayFay could hear her wheezing.

“The Wall-Building Ghost is there.”

“Old Cantonese name, as is proper?”

To the scathing rebuke KwayFay muttered, “
Kuei Tang Chiang
, Grandmother, but – this one doesn’t build only at night. It’s there at dusk, sometimes even in broad daylight!”

KwayFay heard Ghost’s sharp intake of breath. “How sly! That is unfair and cunning! You did well to see that trick.”

“Thank you, Grandmother.” KwayFay thought proudly, see? Grandmothers don’t know everything.