Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“I couldn’t possibly order anything more on you. I really couldn’t.”

“Oh go on, I don’t care. I’m flush.”

The word flush came out in English, as if there weren’t a Chinese equivalent.

“All the same,” I said.

“Go on, like I say I don’t care. If you’re hungry.”

“I might,” I stammered.

She beckoned to the waitress, who was incredulous.

“The gentleman would like something else. What about pancakes?”

“Excellent idea,” I said without shame.

“With fruit?” the girl asked.

I nodded.

“And yogurt.”

“Very well, sir.”

Dao-Ming ate a gingersnap, holding it with two fingers. She spoke with a controlled, understated voice that seemed to have found its ideal pitch. The tense nervousness I remembered in her was gone.

She went on:

“I stopped playing a while back. I was losing and it made no sense. I never really liked it anyhow. I always thought it was a waste of time.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

A few moments of silence later, she said, “Have you ever been to Lamma?”

I said I had been there a couple of times.

“It’s more than just seafood tourist traps, you know.”

It was an island a half hour from Victoria Harbor by slow boat.

“Are you headed back to Macau now?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I’ve no plans in particular.”

“Well then,” she said. “Come to Lamma for the day. It’s where I’m living now.”

“A boring place for a girl to live.”

I could, I thought. It was a way out. Lamma—

“And do what?”

“Whatever you want. You don’t have to pay me.”

“I didn’t intend—”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to pay me. Come as a friend.”

“I might,” I said.

“I want to show you my house.”

If you’d called , her voice seemed to suggest, I would have shown it to you a long time ago. But you didn’t call .

She leaned forward and there was a friendly nonchalance in the way the offer turned into an inviting pout, a widening of the eyes, and I thought, Yes, it might be quite pleasant after all, a few days in Lamma while I extricate myself from my mess and decide what to do . The sexual offer was muted, but it was there. It wasn’t relevant now that I was down and out and almost dead.

All that morning, in fact, I had expected to be dead by midday, and as that hour approached I found myself to be alive, continuing onward toward yet another opened door, and I began to wonder on the statistical odds that had placed Dao-Ming in the Lobby Lounge at the very moment I was trying to pay my bill. Millions to one against. We took the ferry to Wan Chai in the downpour and waited for a boat to Lamma.

The city disappeared behind mists. The terminal with its arrested fans, its posters for Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Kindergarten, its stalls selling Tim Tam bars and cans of green tea. We talked while standing on the jetty, unnerved by the high waters, and she said she had been wounded by my disappearance but that she understood that gaming was the principal activity of my life. That, and not having relationships with casino girls like herself. All the same, it was rare that she liked a man, let alone a client, though she was not surprised that a man like me would ignore her. It was to be expected, she added, that a man like me also needed help. She understood that. I was sick and I needed help.

But all the same, she said, there was that irrational expectation that she could defy the odds. Life wasn’t all money and rank, and she could help a sick man who needed it.

We went into the boat. It rocked already, even so close to the shore. The crossing was going to be uncomfortable and nobody was going to join us. The outside chairs soaked, the inside area air-conditioned, chilly.

She said nothing and we sat at the back of the boat, where the windows were fogged with salt.

You’re sick , I thought to myself, and you don’t even know it. You’re in terminal decline .

The crew scowled; the ropes were unlashed and the boat cast off, the motors drowning out the sound of voices. It swung around.

“I’m selfish,” I was saying in a low voice close to her ear, “a pure egotist. I admit it. I know how selfish I am.”

“That’s not it.”

I had no idea how long we had spent together by now. I was surprised to see that the light was dimming even further. Had the afternoon passed? We swept out of the harbor and into the choppy waters beyond. At the end of Hong Kong island the brutal apartment towers rising up against dark green hills, Easter Island idols of vast size, a million windows dropping down sheer to the water. The boat pitching and her face pale. She gripped my knees.

Halfway across, the sea calmed a little and the birds dispersed. It rained violently. Rocky islands rose out of the mist. She admitted finally how bitter she had been that I didn’t call.

“You’re right,” I said miserably. “I should have called.”

“I didn’t expect you to call. I’m just pleased to see you again.”

She took my hand, and there was a reconnection that I didn’t deserve. Or perhaps I did deserve it.

The boat was now moving with more assurance, and ahead the jetties of Lamma could already be seen. Isolated houses perched on top of the island hills, the water shacks buoyed on blue floaters and the glint of bamboo woods sweeping up hillsides. The village of Yung Shue Wan. The primitive so close to the hypercomplexity of Hong Kong.

The ferry pulled into the jetties area and we saw that the closest restaurant had begun to light its red lanterns. She got up a little impatiently and headed for the front of the boat. The rain had driven off any onlookers and the jetties shone like stone. We ran to the safety of the awnings, where the restaurant staff stood in their aprons hustling people in. There was a wide terrace covered by the same awning but open to the sea and riled with wind. The multitude of overhead fans were motionless. A footpath ran between this terrace and the restaurant itself, where tanks of bamboo clams and bread crabs sat under blue lights. The bay glimmered beyond the terraces and above it three vast chimneys from a power plant. A small beach between the restaurants, daunted by the chimneys, and across the bay the forest coming down to the water and hesitating among shacks and rubble.

We went along the path, through other establishments, and then out onto a basketball court overlooking the water. A small Taoist temple with the usual muddled, cozy dark red interior. Beyond the basketball court a path curved around a dried-out canal and we walked along it, running our hands over the blue railings, indifferent to our soaked hair. It led up to the village of Ko Long, the sign for which stood at the bottom of a long flight of cement steps and a banyan tree.

Her house at the top, with a downward view of a swamp of wild bamboo and sugarcane. It was a two-level tile villa that had probably been a vacation cottage, though now it was winterized. The terrace was cluttered with dead leaves and a metal rake, a flat roof and painted gutters, shutters facing the swamp and a modest square garden that she had let go to ruin. From there we could see the line of the jungled hills, and beyond it the huge blades of a wind turbine turning, a single blade visible for a moment, moving clockwise, and then disappearing.

She paused with the key for a moment before inserting it into the door, and I thought it had occurred to her that this was not perhaps the good idea she’d thought it was. Perhaps it had finally occurred to her that I was not the lord she’d hoped I was. That I was merely the hustler and fraud I’d always claimed to be. We went into the front room and I saw the tatami mats and the neat shelves and the lacquered boxes, the pillows and electric fans and the kettle. It was modest and self-contained, a room of her own and nothing more. It was cramped, borderline dingy, but it had those touches. It must have cost a fair amount in that location, and Dao-Ming had clearly renovated it herself to make it conform to her tastes. She lived mostly on the upper floor, from where the floor-to-ceiling sliding windows offered a view that ended with another island. The bamboo blinds were rolled up on strings. There were no images on the walls.