Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

I got to the last “station” and stood there under the white lights watching the young couples come up the escalators hand in hand, wondering if once I had looked like that, thin and tensile, with a girl on my arm and a look of waspish affluence. Western boys and Asian girls, children of banks and insurance companies and press agencies, couples forged by a crossroads in history. They were aliens to me, another species altogether. I gripped the wet rail and let the rain spatter my face. The shakes came on again. Where did I go from there, suspended between sky and water and laundry? The thought of suicide, invitingly voluptuous. I’d only have to slip over the railing and drop into the chasm where the pools of water were forming. Like tossing a paper airplane and letting gravity take over.

I walked back down on slippery steps. I found Hollywood Road and the bars were filled with Englishmen standing oblivious in the rain just as they do in London, beers in hand, mildly oafish and good-natured, but then I lost heart and I didn’t know what I was doing and I thought: I have to get to Kowloon, I have to get over the bay to Kowloon and have tea at the Intercontinental that I can’t pay for, but I’ll find an excuse and they’ll let me off . It would help me clear my head and calm down. So I turned and headed back to the water on the brink of paranoia. A thousand bucks won’t buy you tea and scones in Hong Kong.

Seabirds had scattered all over the buildings near the water, and the sky was almost black with the underbelly of a typhoon that was still hundreds of miles away. I rode over at rush hour. It was a short walk to Salisbury Road. The Intercontinental had long been my sanctuary of preference. After winning at Hong Kak in the old days I used to come here with Adrian Lipett and his girls and down their signature Dragon cocktails while that insufferable bore told us how the nine dragons of Kowloon were reputed to be able to pass silently through glass and therefore passed through the glass-walled Lobby Lounge on their way to a dawn dip in Victoria Harbor. Happy times. The lounge was quiet now, the windows streaked with rain. The darkness of the day made the quietly lit tables intimate. I sat by the glass and ordered an Earl Grey with some toast, and then, getting bolder, a fresh-squeezed orange juice.

It was then that I realized how hungry I was after the night I had just spent. My eye strayed to a buffet that had just been opened for the hotel guests. It was extraordinarily expensive, but of course one never pays up front and so I decided it was worth the risk. As I was getting up, the waitress came over and asked if I would like a champagne orange juice to start my day (I looked a little crumpled but it was a suit all the same). I said without hesitation how nice that would be. It was folly but since I was gambling with the next hour and its events already, I thought that I might as well aim high. I went to the buffet and loaded up a plate with sushi, fresh clams, croissants, grapefruit, and a small dish of oeufs Savoyards . I took them back to the window and wolfed them down. I was ravenous. I went back for another load and on the way ordered a second champagne orange juice, then a third. I knew that the bill was mounting up, but I had suddenly ceased caring. As I ceased caring, I ceased calculating the margin by which I wouldn’t be able to pay. I ordered coffee and a brandy. It was now about nine o’clock and the lounge was half filled with men reading the Asian Wall Street Journal . The rain intensified. Gradually the harbor view began to disappear. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. Where did I go from here? I was walled in with steel and glass, by propriety and by security personnel. My options were limited, to put it mildly. True, I could slip quietly away by walking confidently to the elevators and leaving a newspaper opened at the table, indicating that I wished to return. But there were uniformed staff around the elevators and that would probably not work. I could give a room number and sign the chit and hope that it would not be recognized. Asian hotels train their staff meticulously, however, no doubt with precisely these eventualities in mind. It was a calamitous risk. Alternatively, I could fake a heart attack in the middle of the room. That would work, up to a point. But the fakery would be easily exposed within the hour and the medical services would liaise with the hotel about the unpaid bill. Unwise. That left outright flight via a back door and exit stairs. Not classy, but effective. It was the one thing that might take them by surprise. As I walked back out to the lounge I tried to plan it all before I executed it, but my mind was fogged and I could not work out the details. A fourth champagne cocktail was waiting for me on the table, obscenely amicable, and instead of running for it I just sat and gulped it down. And I was still hungry. I ordered some blinis and caviar à la carte.

Caviar is more expensive in Hong King than anywhere on earth, except perhaps those joints in Moscow where foreigners cannot go. I saw the girl totting me up by the bar, but a gwai lo is rarely second-guessed. When they arrived the next fizz was on the house.

I ate the sugary biscuits that came with the coffee and my head, unexpectedly, did not clear. I was beginning to shake, the fingers first, then the hands, and then the whole arms. The waitress came over with the check and laid it discreetly next to the flowerpot on the table. Her makeup was perfectly applied, the look in the eye like an ink pot that shines for a moment as the stiletto nib is withdrawn. When she had turned I flipped open the folder and saw that it was double what I had on me. I closed it and sat back, thinking that I had at least an hour sitting there watching the rain before they pressed the issue. The hour passed, and then as I had suspected the waitress came back.

“Sir,” she said. “Would you like to settle up?”

“No, I wouldn’t like to settle up just yet.”

“Would you like something else?”

I thought.

“What about another champagne cocktail?”

She glanced back a little nervously at the bar, where an older woman presided as The Collector.

“Well, sir, you would need to settle up this bill before ordering another drink.”

“Oh I would, would I?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about you bring me another champagne cocktail and I’ll settle up then?”

“I don’t think we can do that, sir.”

“Oh, why is that?”

“When a bill is issued we have to see it paid before the customer can continue.”

I could see there was no such rule.

“I see,” I said.

I made as if to reach into my pockets and brought up the wrinkled, still wet thousand dollars. She stood above me looking down, tensely smiling, her fingers fidgeting, while I unrolled the thousand bucks.

I was not sure if she could see how short I was, and I fudged the matter by nodding and pretending to make for the other pocket and hoping she would go away. She did not.

“Just a minute,” I murmured.

The Collector had stirred and was looking over at us intently. A businessman a few tables away lowered his paper to watch us.

“Do you take cards?” I blurted out.

“We take them all, sir.”

But I didn’t have one. I laid the filthy notes on the table and there was a ripple of unease. The girl flinched. For a moment she looked up at the violence of the rain against the window. The Collector put down a glass and watched even more intently. The Lobby Lounge of the Intercontinental was not accustomed to such disgraceful scenes. They were probably not sure how to proceed. The waitress cocked her head. She seemed to be wondering if she should smooth out the notes on the table or count them for me. It was certainly embarrassing in the extreme in Asian terms. I had already lost face. It was at that very moment, however, that I became dimly aware of someone walking toward us, a kind of human radiance approaching my squalor from behind, a measured step in high heels, the glow of the feminine.