Typhoon (14 page)

Returning to the club ten minutes later he was struck by a sight so extraordinary that it took him several seconds to realize what was going on. As Joe passed the dance floor, pushing through a crush of men and bored hookers, he saw Isabella straddling Miles at the table, her legs squeezing his hips as she rocked and writhed in his lap. Of course it was not her, yet the shape of the woman, her long dark hair, her sinuous body encased in a dark blue
qipao
dress, was an uncanny double. Joe felt a surge of desire and jealousy. He sat down and stared at her back in a brief drunken trance.

“Joe, man! You’re back!” The girl turned. She was Chinese, exquisitely pretty, but with flat, wide features that seemed almost Turkic. Joe felt that he was hallucinating. Was this a Xinjiang prostitute in the act of selling herself to the CIA? He was by now so drunk and exhausted that little was making sense. “You gotta meet Kitty. Fuckin’ gorgeous. Kitty, meet Joe.”

The girl stretched out a long, slender arm which looked tanned in the low light of the club. Her touch was cold and Joe saw that there was no life behind her painted eyes, only the sad routine of seducing strangers and laughing at
gweilo
jokes. He wondered how Miles, or any of the other men in the club, could fail to see through the artifice as the girl smiled and tipped her head provocatively. Then he realized that they probably didn’t care.

“Hello, handsome,” Kitty said.

“Hello.”

She reached for a narrow champagne flute on the table and took a sip while holding Joe’s gaze. “Fuck wine,” they called it, a mixture of cold tea and flat Coca-Cola which sold for twice the price of a vodka and tonic. At the end of the evening the girl and the bar would split fifty per cent of the cost of the drink, with the rest going to the Triads. Kitty’s aim would be to draw another girl to the table, to see to it that Joe also bought her a drink, and then to replenish their glasses as often as possible before leaving the club towards dawn.

Sure enough, more or less as soon as Joe had sat down, a second, less attractive girl, with the paler skin and slightly finer features particular to northern China, dropped herself into Joe’s lap and began stroking his neck.

“My name Mandy,” she said.

“Hello, Mandy. Let me find you somewhere to sit.”

Miles grinned as Joe gently tipped the girl onto her feet, walked past the Texan and found a chair at a vacant table. He had a good deal of difficulty returning it through the crowds and was obliged to lift the chair over the heads of several people at the bar. Joe heard Miles stage whisper “Jesus” but did not mind being the central player in a brief comedy of British incompetence. If anything, he wanted to show by his actions that he was unsuited to this environment, that his presence in the club was by accident, rather than design. He sat down beside her, looked at his watch and tried to make conversation.

“Where are you from?”

He never used Mandarin unless it was necessary. There was always an advantage to being regarded as an outsider, even in a place like this.

“Mongolia. You know it?”

“I know it.”

Mandy was perhaps twenty or twenty-one and dressed so casually that she might have been at home, watching television in a Shatin apartment, doing some ironing or washing-up. Most of the girls in the club wore skirts or dresses, but Mandy was wearing faded denim jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Oddly, this made her more difficult to talk to. She was real. She broke the careful spell of the club. Joe could see in her expression that she did not regard him as a potential customer, nor that she particularly resented him for this. Perhaps she had given up on herself. Perhaps she was just grateful for the company.

“How long have you been here?”

“One month,” she said.

“Have you had a chance to see much of Hong Kong?”

“Not really.” Melancholy crept into Mandy’s exhausted eyes and he wondered how she had ended up working in such a place. Had she been tricked, or travelled willingly? Most of the women came because they had no choice. “No time for sightseeing,” she said. “All day sleep.”

He thought of her, crammed into a tiny, ten-bed Triad dormitory, probably just a few blocks away in Wan Chai, sleeping fitfully on a damp fleabitten mattress alongside other girls just like her who had left their families, their happiness, their self-esteem, thousands of miles away.

“How long will you stay here?” he asked. They were talking over a dance track in which a man was cackling like a jackal. Mandy could not seem to come up with an answer. Part of Joe’s work on snakehead gangs involved preventing the trafficking of Chinese girls to brothels in the UK, but he knew that somebody like Mandy would simply be rotated from club to club in the local area, west to Macau, north to Shenzhen, until age or illness finished her. Kitty, with her looks, might be a bit different. The lucky ones sometimes found husbands. It was the way of things.

“You guys OK?”

Miles had emerged from another cloying embrace with Kitty, whose
qipao
rode up briefly above her knees.

“Fine,” Joe told him.

“Didn’t you buy your chick a drink?”

Joe had deliberately not done so because he had resented handing over HK$200 to the cashier for their vodka and tonics. SIS was meant to be fighting these arseholes, not supporting them. But a glass of fuck wine for Mandy would at least earn her fifty or sixty bucks. Thirty pieces of silver to salve his conscience. Joe made a gesture of sincere apology and was on the point of going to the bar when Miles waved at one of the barmen and indicated that he would pay for another round.

“You gotta forgive my friend,” he said to Mandy, shouting over the music. “Englishmen. They got no manners.”

Joe ducked the insult and lit a cigarette. He was suddenly tired again and regretted allowing Miles to order him another drink. No good could come from staying in the club any longer. He was going home.

“This is my last one. Then I’m off.”

“Oh relax.”

“Seriously. It’s time for me to go.”

“Seriously,” Miles repeated, imitating him as the music shifted from house to a slow, corny ballad that Joe recognized from his days at Oxford. “I Believe I Can Fly.” Miles began mouthing the words while his right hand slid around the taut silk waist of Kitty’s
qipao
, her mouth once again nuzzling into his neck. They both started giggling. As if she was feeling left out, Mandy now reached across and put her hand tentatively on Joe’s leg.

“I’m OK,” he said, though she failed to understand. He felt that it would be rude physically to lift her hand from his leg so instead shifted backwards in his chair, dropping it like a rag doll.

“You like R Kelly?” she asked, oblivious to this. It was some time before Joe realized that she was talking about the song.

“Not really,” he replied. Miles emerged from his embrace and shouted “Relax” across the table, as if he had been watching and listening all the time.

“I am relaxed,” he said. “I’m just tired. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“So what? You’re twenty-six years old. Enjoy yourself, man. You got someplace else you’d rather be?”

The question coincided with the arrival of their drinks. Miles reached into his back pocket and retrieved a silver money clip from which he peeled off a series of hundred-dollar notes, a process that Kitty and Mandy watched in a state of near-hypnosis.

“Tell me,” he said, as the cashier walked away. “Do you even know what it’s like to fuck a Chinese girl?”

Joe could only laugh, bewildered at his tactlessness. He looked across at the girls, wondering if they had understood the question, although neither of them seemed to be paying much attention. “On second thoughts,” he said, “I’m taking off now.”

“Why?”

“Because I–”

But Miles did not let him finish. For a second time he said, “Tell me, have you ever fucked a Chinese girl?” and Joe tried to kill the exchange with a look. “Have you?”

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“What is it? You don’t like Asian pussy?”

“Let it go, Miles.”

The American took a first sip of his drink and rested his hand in the small of Kitty’s back.
I believe I can fly
. A prince in his domain. “You want me to tell you about it? Is that it? You can really
move
them, you know?”

“Miles . . .”

“And they
love
it, don’t ever lose sight of that. Chinese chicks
love
Western guys. When I take Kitty home tonight, she’s gonna have herself a great time. I’m paying her, I’m supporting her family, where’s the harm? People like you need to take your Christian moral heads out of your ass and start to see what’s really going on.”

“If you say so, Miles.”

“Why if I say so? Do you feel sorry for them?”

“I don’t feel
happy
for them.”

“Do you feel sorry for
me
?”

This last question carried a sting. The tone of the conversation had abruptly shifted. It appeared as though Miles expected a serious answer.

“You’re gone,” Joe said, but it was not enough.

“Answer me.”

“I’m going home.”

“No, you’re not.” Lifting his hand from Kitty’s back, Miles leaned forward and pinned Joe’s forearm to the table, preventing him from standing up. His grip was strong and purposeful. “You do, don’t you?”

“Do what?”

“You do feel sorry for me.” Joe instructed him to let go but Miles wasn’t hearing. The music returned to thumping house and the American had to shout above it to be heard. Joe could see in his eyes that he was obliterated by alcohol. He had witnessed this in Miles only once before. “You think you’re better than me and better than these girls.” He was swaying slightly in his seat. “You’ve been brought up in that typical fucking British way to believe that sex is wrong, that desire is guilt, that the best thing you can do in a situation like this is just patronize everybody and slip out the back. You’re a fucking coward.”

“No Miles, I’m just not you.”

Joe again tried to release his grip but Miles only squeezed harder. Finally Joe lost his temper. “Let it go,” he said.

“Why? What are you going to do?”

What he did was very simple. In a single abrupt movement, Joe pulled his entire body away from the table, taking Miles and Kitty and four glasses of fuck wine and vodka and tonic with him. Kitty screeched in Chinese like a scalded cat as Miles, realizing that they would both fall, quickly released his grip. The commotion silenced a small section of the club as Joe turned from the toppled table and walked directly through a parted sea of bewildered customers, stunned that he had so quickly lost his temper. Behind him he could hear Miles saying, “Let him go, just let him go,” in Mandarin and he felt a sickness in his gut. It was as if twenty-four hours of frustration and resentment had exploded inside him like an ulcer.

He expected to be stopped by bouncers on his way out but nobody stepped into his path. He climbed the steep stairs and emerged onto the street. On the corner of Jaffe Road he stopped and spun slowly through an almost complete circle searching for a cab, the fresh Hong Kong air, the diesel and the dust and the salt of the South China Sea sobering him up until he felt almost calm. He looked at his arm and saw the sunburn imprints of Miles’s hands beneath the hairs on his wrist. A taxi stopped at the lights and he stepped into it, travelling home without a word to the driver. When his mobile phone rang after five minutes, he ignored it, assuming that Miles was calling to make peace. Talk to him tomorrow, he told himself. Sort it all out in the morning.

Isabella was dreaming
about Miles Coolidge. This is the entry in her diary:

Very weird. We were at a beach house, possibly New England? I was standing next to Miles on a curved staircase while Joe went swimming in a pool outside with about four Chinese businessmen, all of them wearing white-collared shirts. It was hot and everyone’s drunk. In full view of the other guests, Miles suddenly leans towards me and kisses me.

Then we walked up the stairs into a room where someone had laid out multi-coloured pills and lines of blue (?!) coke on a huge white sheet. There were lots of people in the room but Miles was kissing my neck and my back all the time. Either the shock of him doing this, the pleasure and surprise of what was happening, or the noise of Joe coming home woke me up.

Isabella was sitting up in bed when Joe walked into the room.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I’ve just had the weirdest dream.”

“What about?”

“Can’t remember.” It was easier to lie.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Joe picked up a bottle of mineral water from the floor and stumbled as he passed it to her.

“You’re pissed,” she said.

“Very.”

She looked at the clock. “Where have you been?”

“Miles. I’m finished with him. Last time we go out.”

“Did you have an argument?” Isabella stood up and padded past him into the bathroom. She was wearing a blue silk pyjama top and a pair of white cotton knickers. “You really stink, Joe.”

He checked this by inhaling a mouthful of stale tobacco from his shirt and jacket, taking both of them off so that he was standing bare-chested in the centre of the room. “Yeah. A fight. I lost my temper in a club.”

“Which club?” Isabella was sitting on the loo.

“In Wan Chai.”

She knew what that meant. “What kind of place?”

“The kind of place Miles likes. The kind where he can feel up girls from Ulan Bator.” It was a cheap shot. He had never before betrayed Miles’s confidence, but wanted Isabella to think better of him for not being part of his world. The tactic didn’t work.