Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

The radio was turned off at once, followed by the hair dryer. Silence. I heard a woman in slippers come padding toward the door. I stepped back and smoothed down my hair, with the involuntary vanity that overcomes the john without his knowing it. The peephole darkened.

The eye was there. I hoped she could see me clearly in the fading light of the landing, in the graying light. But if she did, she didn’t open the door. She was thinking it over. Sometimes they will not open when they see a gwai lo . Our reputation precedes us. I stood there for some time and then I stepped forward again and pressed the bell. It seemed to make a god-awful noise that reverberated through the whole landing. The door snapped open and an ancient, skeptical face appeared.

“Yes?”

“I am here for my appointment.”

“Your what?”

“My appointment. I am Lord Doyle.”

“Lor’ Doyle? Who the hell is that?”

“I called on Friday,” I stammered. “To see Dao-Ming.”

“Dao-Ming?” she muttered, and her eyes widened.

Her hand held the door firm and she was not going to open it wider. The apartment partially revealed behind her was not a boudoir, could not have been the room of Dao-Ming. It was the disheveled room of an old lady, dour and half-lit and sourly scented.

“There’s no Dao-Ming here,” she said. “The girl who was here is gone. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“So you are one of her clients?”

“Yes — I mean, I was.”

“She hanged herself a few weeks ago. All her things were shipped back to China.”

I took a step back.

“It can’t be,” I stammered. “There must be a mistake—”

“No, I cleared up the room myself. There’s nothing left of hers here now.”

“And Dao-Ming—”

“Cremated at a temple in Kowloon. There was no one to pay the costs.”

“Her family—”

“How do I know? Girls like that come and go. They don’t have families.”

I tried to think of something to say, to prolong this conversation in the face of her growing irritation. And the door was closing—

“Not even one member of her family,” I cried.

“No one knew where she was from. Probably too poor to come to Hong Kong. Maybe they shipped her ashes—”

One of the other curtains had now parted and a prying face had appeared. What was the gwai lo doing on their landing talking in such heated tones? The old lady shrugged and the door began to close.

“But where can I find out?” I whispered.

“What’s there to find out? It’s over. Go home and find another whore.”

With this final flourish of annoyance, the door slammed shut.

I had to leave. I began to descend. At the first floor a few families were out on the landing eating at folding tables. I went past their knowing stares. The next flight of steps was narrower and more malodorous, and at the bottom of it the streetlights glared through the metal gate. I was halfway down them when I heard a door opening on the second floor and I stopped again. From far above, falling through cracks and chinks in the stairwell, a shaft of light fell downward until it struck the steps around me. I looked up. Surely someone had come through a door and was going to come down the steps. I went softly down to the gate and put my finger on the buzzer that would open it. Suddenly the street looked garishly anonymous, women standing full-lit in front of a huge furniture store next door, mentally mapping out their future kitchens and dining rooms, and around them commuters with pinched expressions hustling their way down Queen’s Road. The usual crush of a Hong Kong evening. I then turned and looked back up the steps and I could sense the person coming down the flight above it, but carefully, without sound, perhaps taking it step by step. I pushed the buzzer. A wave of terror rolled over me as the metal gate swung open and the perfume of passing women washed over me. I looked back for a moment before stepping into the street, and I saw someone turn the corner, a woman’s pumps and bare legs, a quickening pace. I went into the street and let the gate snap shut behind me. As I strode away I heard the buzzer ring a second time.

I now walked uphill on Queen’s back toward Pacific Place. I could have glanced behind me but I didn’t; I walked on as fast as I could, in a straight line, knifing through the wall of bodies, anxious to escape into the comfort of the great corporate space at the top of the hill. I decided not to take the elevators inside the mall and instead slogged up the steep path that runs around the side of the development. As I rose up this hill I looked back once at the traffic intersection by the small underpass where the pedestrians were massing by a red light. From out of the underpass a girl was walking, quite distinct among them, her long hair brushed forward over her face. She stopped with the others and there was something chillingly apart about her, about the way she stopped and looked up at me as I turned and trotted up the hill, sweating and panting and struggling with my own unfitness. When I got to the top I didn’t look back again. I rushed into the plaza where the Shangri-La and the Marriott stand and made for the Upper House again. I went straight up to the bar of the Café Grey, with its views over Victoria Harbor.

When I was truly alive — once upon a time — I loved this bar. It was my favorite bar in Hong Kong, and for some strange reason I have always felt safe here, anonymous, able to drink without interference. I love looking across the warehouses in Tsim Tsa Shui and the neon that says, or rather asks, What’s your number? Other of these mysterious signs spell the words Prudential or Still Growing . I look at the empty lots of construction sites lit by arc lamps. Cranes standing by the water’s edge, as if about to explode into meaning. The dark wood furniture, the pretty girls, the cocktails that would cost a welder a week’s wage. This was where I liked to get tanked. A wealthy man here can just fall into a suite designed by Andre Fu if he’s too drunk to walk.

I sat and got a cocktail with a ridiculous name and downed it in a minute. A wild fear still had hold of me, and I watched the new arrivals coming into the Café Grey from the corridor by the elevators. The girl with the mad hair did not appear, but what was to stop her from waiting for me downstairs in the lobby? I was sure for a while that I was being hunted. But it might have been the booze. I suddenly felt immensely alone. The room began to shrink. I gripped my banknotes, the last few I had hidden away, and they tumbled, somehow, onto the bar like confetti. The barman asked me if I was all right, but I hardly heard him. The girls were looking at me as if I had leprosy, as if I were about to die on the spot. I could see what they were thinking. An aging gambler on the rocks, capsizing minute by minute. A man with fear in his eyes, teetering on the edge of self-control. But then again it was maybe because I had lost so much weight and was by now little more than a skeleton. Either way, it was clear that they were anxious to get rid of me, that I did not fit in with their elegant and youthful atmosphere. At length a manager came up and said that I was looking a little ill. Would it not be better if I went home?

“But I want another drink. You’re a bar, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. But we have to look after our customers.”

“So I can’t order a White Russian?”

“I think it would be better if you didn’t, and went home instead. Really, sir. You are dropping money all over the place.” His eyes glanced over my shoulder to make sure that there was no kind of scene developing around us. “I cannot expose my staff in this kind of situation. And it would not be fair to you either. Can I call you a taxi downstairs?”