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‘And we’ll roll the dice a bit, of course. You play yah-tze?’
‘No. I’m not terribly good at games, cards and so forth. Always lose at poker and stuff, never seem to have a card.’
Charles held up a hand in a stately gesture of reproach. ‘Have no fear, neighbour. Yah-tze requires no skill, no thought, no mind. It’s almost impossible to lose much money at it, because it is the longest, most boring game in the world. That’s why we love it; that’s why we play it all the time. You need never fret about life when the five dice roll across the table.’
‘Then I long to learn,’ Alan said.
Charles tossed his second can into the sea and produced a third, opening it with calm certainty. ‘Then here’s to us. Here’s to Tung Lung. Health, wealth and long life.’ With his can he caught Alan’s own a glancing blow. And drank.
PART II (#ulink_e796d19f-8ab9-57a0-bb31-ab05b9e01cd9)
The telephone splintered the silence. Alan ceased typing and got up from his desk, a massive metal thing rather like M’s. King had supplied it to him on indefinite loan. He passed through to the main room of his flat. The telephone stood on a smallish table by the window. Alan seized it. ‘Hello?’ he said, looking approvingly at the South China Sea. He could see the triple-decker ferry moving out towards Cheung Chau, also a small craft near the shore from which a pair of noble savages did the rounds of their fish traps.
‘Colin Webb, Business PanAsia.’
‘Oh, hello –’ was it too early in the relationship to say Colin? – ‘there.’
‘Thanks for coming in last week, Alan. Sorry not to get back to you before, but you know how it is.’
‘No worries, Colin.’
‘I was looking over your list, some smart ideas. I particularly like the eccentric businessman. I’d like you to go ahead on that one.’
Pleasure flowed through Alan. Here he was, being commissioned to write a story for the top business magazine in Hong Kong, and yet he was watching a sampan and wearing a sarong. A sarong? Well, why not? The temperature was in the eighties and air conditioning was for non-island-dwelling wimps.
He put the phone down and adjusted the sarong. He hadn’t quite got the folding right yet, it tended to slip without warning. André, who had donated the sarong to Alan – it was bright red and copiously flowered – said he had spent half a lifetime watching the sarong-clad women of various Asian nations in the eternally disappointed hope of seeing the sarong slip unexpectedly from their golden bodies. Alan wore the sarong as his island work uniform, with a khaki army surplus shirt worn unbuttoned above it.
It was time – no, it wasn’t time for a beer, don’t be stupid, it was time for another cup of coffee to celebrate the glories of the commission. Let’s see, two thousand words at sixty cents each was, well, more than a thousand anyway, well, it was $1,2.00, wasn’t it? And there was the story on the trams for Hong Kong Life. And the story about the Peak for the Hong Kong Airlines magazine Josun! And there was the regular work, the subbing and rewriting for Reg at HK Biz. And it was all going to add up to, well, er, definitely more than he would have made had he been working for the Hong Kong Times. My God, a milestone had been passed. A triumph. Surely that was worth – no, it wasn’t. It was barely eleven o’clock. He filled the kettle and put it on his two-ring stove. It leapt into life at the merest touch of a match, and so it should have done. He had purchased a new cylinder of Calor Gas the previous day. He had paid an additional five dollars so that the cylinder might be carried up the 176 steps to his door. The task was accomplished by a pair of ancient women who suspended the cylinder from beneath a bamboo pole for portage.
The kettle boiled and Alan poured boiling water onto brown powder, adding a splash from a carton of UHT milk. He must get round to making proper coffee. But anyway, a proper coffee break was in order.
He took the mug of brown liquid to the door, which stood open as usual. Outside, in his concrete garden, he had set out a few plastic chairs and a table. To one side an inflated airbed lay perishing slowly in the sun. He sat on one chair, placed his feet on another. From the village below, he heard the sound of power tools in operation. Building, always building. But even from his seated position, he could see the chessboard field below. A slight figure, in jeans rolled to her knees, was working one of the patches. Was it the beautiful schoolgirl that André had introduced as Priscilla? He would marry Priscilla and live for ever on choisum and pak-choi and beer. But he was winning, was he not?
Voices rose suddenly in the Ng estate below and beyond his flat: the Ng clan had several ancient women about the place, and a number of unexplained females of all ages – whether retainers, meddling half-retired servants or poor relations, Alan did not know. One of these, the youngest but by no means young, a woman of some character, with a certain faded beauty, he knew was called Chai. They were given to energetic quarrelling, of which the only word Alan could understand was ‘Aiyaaaah!’ This, he thought, could mean anything at all save the possibility that it was the speaker’s own fault.
Which reminded him. He finished his coffee and went inside to call Reg, grabbing just in time at his sarong. ‘Looking good, old boy. Cleared up a hell of a lot yesterday. Good of you to stay late. It will be off to the typesetters any minute now. No, no, no, I’ll lock up, don’t dream of coming in. Not even sure about tomorrow. Let’s talk after I’ve gone through the post. Call me about ten.’
‘Thanks, Reg.’
‘No, no, thank you, old boy. Never known what it’s like to be ahead of myself before.’
After a few more gratifying amiabilities, they rang off. How splendid. The way was clear for the first step in the piece on the eccentric businessman. Alan took a perfunctory wash beneath the dribbling showerhead; it’s like little boys pissing on you, Charles had said. Surely the Ng well wasn’t running dry again.
Alan dressed in cotton jeans, twenty bucks the pair in the place behind the tramstop in Wanchai, and an almost respectable shirt. Combed his hair, removed the loose hairs from the teeth without looking to see how many. Did that show how relaxed he was, or how worried? He put on a pair of black cotton kung-fu slippers bought from China Products, and left the flat. Closed the door behind him, as a security measure, but did not lock it. He did not even know where the key was. Hadn’t seen it for weeks.
He walked around the side of the house and climbed the stairs. As he walked past Cool Cool Cool!, he tapped the poster, as was now his superstitious habit. This was to remind him that never, no matter how drunk, would he again venture out into the South China Sea with André and his ghastly boat. He climbed the last flight, and knocked on the door. King’s voice called out in Cantonese bass, presumably bidding him welcome. So Alan let himself in.
King was sitting on one of the sofas; opposite him, the far side of a low glass table, a Chinese man. ‘Ah, my young friend. You know Mr Ng, of course. And Ah-Hei.’
‘Of course.’ Mr Ng, possessor of that most wonderful of Cantonese surnames, was a man he saw regularly, and nodded to. As well as the estate next door, he owned Ng’s restaurant, down in the village, where Alan ate two or three times a week with his island companions, any time they felt like aiming above the traditional bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. It was a place decorated with the single-mindedness that all Chinese prefer when it comes to eating: no frivolous distractions. The principal decoration was a series of tanks containing still-swimming dinners. Mr Ng himself was another aspect of décor: he was invariably to be found, sitting on a high stool behind a desk, clacking at an abacus and calligraphing mysterious signs into a huge ledger. Business was business and food was food, and Ng’s restaurant was a temple. Ah-Hei was another aspect of décor. He had a shimmering black mane of hair, and looked like the hero of a martial arts film. This was because he was a martial arts hero: a real one. He was a genuine kung-fu adept. Charles said he had once seen Ah-Hei deal with a tableful of belligerent Chinese revellers: ‘Fastest thing on two legs I have ever seen. Looks stupid on the movies. But that bastard is real.’
Mr Ng had smartened himself up for this visit to King. He wore a clean white shirt instead of his usual dirty white singlet. Even so, his outfit probably cost even less than twenty dollars; Alan guessed that he could put his hands in the pocket of his China Products trousers and pull out enough cash to buy a Mercedes. He smiled at Alan; one large and unmissable gold tooth. ‘You like my restaurant.’
It was not a question. ‘Oh yes, very much. Nice place.’
‘You drink much beer in my restaurant.’
Nor was that. Praise, admiration, or perhaps a neutral acceptance of the differences between races. It was all profit, anyway, and boozing gweilos hardly made more noise than feasting Chinese. ‘Nice place,’ Alan said lamely.
‘Ve’y nice place.’
Alan turned to King. ‘Er, something I want to discuss with you, but it’ll keep.’
‘A moment, my friend.’ He and Mr Ng then embarked on a conversation in Cantonese with much guffawing from Mr Ng. No, he really would start to learn the language properly. Buy a book. Buy a tape. No, fall in love with a beautiful Cantonese girl. Alan examined King’s family photograph, idly speculating on the sexual potential of the pigtailed daughter. Perhaps she was now grown up, beautiful, available, ready to fall in love with him at first sight, to tumble into his bed in a wild whim of passion. King and Mr Ng shook hands, not without warmth. Then Mr Ng turned to Alan, and bestowed on him a final blessing from his golden mouth.
‘You come to my restaurant tonight, drink much beer, hahaha.’
‘Hahaha,’ agreed Alan. Ah-Hei got to his feet, still without offering a word, and walked cat-footed after his master.
‘You moving into the restaurant business, then, King?’ Alan asked, when they were alone.
‘Ng is an old friend of mine. We have done business together for many a year. His restaurant is only one of his interests. He owns the well, for example. Water is power on Tung Lung, Alan. Ng is also in property; he owns this place, among many others. He sub-lets much of the market-gardening land in the valley. He has a share in most of the fishing boats.’
‘And he owns the shrimp-paste factory outright, doesn’t he?’
‘No, that is Chuen-suk.’ Alan remembered the silver-haired Coca-Cola drinker at the waterfront café. ‘Chuen-suk and Ng are big rivals. Chuen-suk has the better well, and that means greater power. But my partner, Ng, is the more enterprising man, with more diverse interests. A big man, Alan, a big man on Tung Lung.’
‘Oh,’ Alan said. ‘I didn’t realise you were in partnership.’
‘In some aspects. In property, a little, but mainly we work together on import-export.’
Oh. ‘Actually, it was business that I wanted to talk to you, King.’
‘What else does anyone ever want to talk about in this town?’ This was brought out with a rhetorical flourish, as if it were something of a mot. Alan laughed, remembering from somewhere a line about it being almost as good being a hypocrite as a liar: the same warm feeling inside. And, allowing the smile to remain on his face, he made his proposal: suggesting that King be the subject of a ‘portrait’ in Business PanAsia. He had not expected difficulty, relying on King’s habitual readiness to oblige. But he was surprised by King’s flattered delight. Alan felt a comfortable frisson of the journalist’s endless source of power: the promise, or threat, of publication.
‘Tremendous, Alan. I’d be happy to be a “portrait”. When would you like the ordeal to commence?’
‘Right now, if by any chance you are free.’
‘For you, Alan, I am always free.’ So Alan ran downstairs to fetch a notebook, and returned to find King at the fridge liberating a pair of cans. ‘Would the roof be a suitable place for this inquisition?’
‘Admirable.’ So they climbed the island’s final flight of stairs. Table and chairs stood beneath a canopy of vine; other plants grew around in heavy glazed pots, decorated with Chinese characters or bamboo leaves. Below them the harbour, the fields to one side. Priscilla, if it were she, had gone. At sea, the twelve o’clock ferry was heading towards its berth. Alan could see the flow of people moving towards the jetty through the narrow streets, the wheeled motor-carts vying for the leading positions for loading and unloading.
‘To business, my friend. Shoot. As they say.’
‘Well, er, what is your main line of business?’
It was a question that gave deep delight. King smiled to himself for a long time, looking out across the sea, for all that there were no noble savages in sight. At last he replied, ‘Love, Alan. Love.’
Alan wrote ‘love’ in his notebook.
‘Now I can see that I have surprised you. Business is supposed to be a matter of oppositions. Enmity and hatred. But that is not how I work, my friend. I say this: there is only one sort of good business, and that is when both parties walk away as winners.’
King spoke as if listening to him speaking at length was an experience all serious people should undergo at some stage in their lives. He started, fulsomely, with his childhood in Shanghai, the Baptist school run by his father. ‘I learnt love in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.’
His father had died shortly after the fall of Shanghai and their enforced move to Hong Kong. ‘Of a broken heart, Alan. I was sixteen, and never went to school again. There was nothing anyone could teach me.’
By the age of twenty-four, he was a millionaire. ‘Import-export. Contacts with China, always contacts with China. Hong Kong was ever the financial pore through which the Chinese dragon breathed.’ Alan hesitated over the shorthand outline for dragon.
The enmity of his partner, who was involved in the Triads – ‘for the love of God don’t print that, Alan’ – had seen King reduced to nothing. But by the age of thirty he had built up a second fortune. ‘Like Hong Kong itself, I diversified into manufacturing. Plastics. The joy of plastics, Alan.’ He bought a house on the Peak, married a beautiful Australian woman. ‘On the wall downstairs, the two women of my life: Monica, my lovely wife; Jacinta, my lovely daughter.’ For a second Alan wondered if King had read his mind as he’d mused over the pigtailed photograph. ‘You see them pictured below with the man destined to become my business partner and, ultimately, should we be saved, my boss. My son, Byron.’
‘Nice names,’ Alan said. After all, you had to say something.
‘They are all, alas, in UK,’ King said. ‘A matter of education. God, Alan, I miss them. Every day of my life, I miss them. A temporary thing. We remain a devoted family. I love my wife, and shall I tell you something else? I still fancy my wife. Twenty years we’ve been married, and when she was last here we were like two teenagers in love. Taking baths together. A honeymoon.’
‘And the kids?’
‘Fine children, Alan. Jacinta is now nineteen, and no longer in pigtails. Beautiful, wilful, headstrong, intelligent. Byron is sixteen, though most people take him for twenty-one. A remarkable boy who makes his father very happy. But where was I, Alan, in this history lesson?’
‘Living in millionaires’ row on the Peak.’
‘I merged my business with a larger concern. Things hotted up. I was on the move constantly: Singapore, KL, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan. Busy beyond belief, stressed beyond belief, powerful beyond belief, rich beyond belief. And then one day, do you know what I said?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I said “fuck it”. I walked into a board meeting one morning, and told them all. I said “fuck it”.’
‘And how did they respond?’
‘They begged me to stay. Naturally. But I said “fuck it”, and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. And so what do you think I did?’
‘You moved out to Tung Lung and founded a business based on the principle of love.’
‘My friend, you are very wise. And do you know what, Alan? I prosper. I really do.’
The beauty she possessed was so perfect, so profound, that it constricted Alan’s breathing. With a vast effort of will that did him great credit, he found a voice, and asked if he might be admitted to the editor of Business PanAsia. She performed this small miracle for him, and bestowed on him the gift of a smile. Love beat him lightly about the head and neck.
Colin Webb greeted him, and then insisted on reading, while Alan watched in fidgeting silence, every one of the two thousand words he had written.
‘Virry nice, Alan. Virry, virry nice.’ You could hardly tell that he was Australian. ‘I had a feeling this piece was going to be nice. So I was planning to ask you to write something else for me.’ Soon, Alan was accepting a commission for a cover piece. Hong Kong as manufacturing base: the shift to quality. ‘Talk to a lot of people, Alan. Put a lot of work in. I want three thousand words, and I’ll pay seventy-five cents a word for this one.’
Alan, much made up by this, decided to speak to the receptionist on the way out. Hello, you’re very beautiful. You’re rather tall for a Chinese girl, aren’t you? I suppose marriage is out of the question? My God, he was a genius. ‘Hello, er, I wonder if you could tell me the best place to find a taxi around here.’
A white blouse opening in a narrow V. Hair a raven’s wing, iridescent black, falling straight and simple to her lovely shoulders. My God, this really was love. ‘Best place is in front of Fragrant Harbour Hotel. On the waterfront, you know?’
‘Won’t the hall porter be cross?’
‘You give him a dollar, he won’t be cross.’
Alan made a creditable attempt at a winning smile. ‘I’m still new here. Don’t know all the dodges.’
‘How long have you been in Hong Kong?’ The great conversational gambit of the territory.
‘Maybe six months.’
‘You like?’
‘Very good.’
And suddenly, her face was illuminated with delight – almost, Alan thought, with love.
‘Sophie, my dear, how beautiful you are looking today. Alan, what a pleasant surprise. Dean, I believe you are employing the finest journalist in Hong Kong, and I am quite certain that you have the most beautiful receptionist.’
The receptionist spoke one word. ‘André.’
André was standing by the reception desk, one hand in a pocket, with a man, severely rather than elegantly suited, who had the finicky-tough air of a Mormon proselytiser. ‘Dean, have you met Alan Fairs, the journalist? No? Alan, this is your publisher, Dean Holdsworth.’
‘Glad to know you, Alan,’ Dean said, in flawless American. ‘You’re doing the June portrait, right? Look forward to reading it.’ This was a very creditable feat of memory. He shook Alan’s hand with every appearance of warmth. ‘André, if I might have a further moment?’
‘By all means, Dean, by all means. Alan, if you care to wait, we might share a taxi.’
‘All right.’
André followed Dean into his office. Alan did not have to rack his brain for a new conversational gambit. Sophie was now ready, in fact eager, for conversation.
‘You know André?’ she asked.
‘Neighbour of mine.’
Her eyes grew a little bigger. Were they rounder than was usual for a Chinese girl? Or had he never looked quite as closely before? ‘You live on Tung Lung?’ she asked reverently.
‘Yes.’
‘Very beautiful.’
‘Yes.’ A beat later, he decided that he had missed an opportunity.
‘I like to live there one day.’
Alan could think of no rejoinder that did not indicate absolutely helpless desire. They talked a little of the ferry service, and whether or not the restaurant on the far side of the island, where Alan had eaten his Christmas lunch, was better than Ng’s. Then a door opened and jovial voices rang out in the corridor.
‘Well, André, all I can say now is have a good trip.’
‘Consider the target already met, Dean. Consider it obliterated.’
Dean continued to escort André to the door, evidently a mark of considerable favour. ‘Great, André. Just great. Send my regards to the Great Orient.’
‘I shall indeed. Sophie, thanks, as ever, for everything. Goodbye, Dean. I shall call you to touch base on arrival. I have all the documents. Goodbye.’ They shook hands, not without warmth, and Dean wished him good luck as he returned to his office.
