Simon Barnes - Hong Kong Belongers

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, me? I’ve got a grown-up job. I have a very grown-up job indeed. But shall I tell you how I handle it?’ He turned with sudden elephantine staginess to Alan, and whispered hoarsely and penetratingly: ‘ I do it very, very badly. ’

It was impossible to tell how serious he was, or even if he was serious at all. ‘Is that a good idea?’ Alan asked.

The response startled him, because it came as a bellow, one that turned the heads of the passengers ranged before them, all engaged till then in noisy conversations of their own. ‘Course it’s not! It’s a bloody appalling idea. They give me hell. Browne, you bastard, they tell me, you’re not shaping up. Do the job properly or we’ll sack you and then you’ll be sorry. We’d sack you today if it wasn’t for the fact that your old man owns Hong Kong.’

‘Jolly good,’ Alan said.

‘What do you mean, jolly good? Don’t talk wet, it’s bloody awful.’ Charles started laughing again. He wiped his eyes briefly, and eased up his laughter a little. ‘Now. Listen to me. I have a plan. It’s a good plan, so pay attention. The ferry stops. We get off it. We take your bags to Ah-Chuen’s. That’s the café by the harbour run by the fat bastard. We drink beer. Then we take the bags up to your flat. Then we have a beer at my place. Then we go down again and have supper, say, a bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. Then, we sit about drinking beer. How does that sound in general terms?’

‘It sounds perfection itself.’

‘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.

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.