Lawrence Osborne: The Ballad of a Small Player

“No need, young man.”

“Do you live in Hong Kong?”

“No, Outer Siberia. But I can walk home.”

He motioned to one of his waiters.

“Can you take the gentleman downstairs and make sure he is all right? Call him a taxi and charge it to the house.”

I slid off my stool and staggered to the elevators, shadowed by the nervous waiter. We went down in an awkward gloom. As we came out into the plaza he asked me about the taxi and I declined.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“I’m going to clear my head and walk around. Don’t worry about me.”

I went back down to Queen’s Road and walked along it for some time in the direction of Jardine’s Bazaar. It was still rush hour and the crowds had not thinned out. The parks were open and I wandered into one, the shadows massing across it, and lay down on one of the benches. The trees here, banyans or figs, I could not tell, closed out the sky and I was able to doze even in the thick of the noise and bustle, and soon in any case the streets died down and a quiet returned. I slept then and some hours must have passed.

Homeless people are discouraged in Hong Kong’s neat and prosperous parks, but no one came to rouse me and send me on my way. The night became mellow and easygoing, and I slept into the early hours, dreaming in my way of all the things that I didn’t dare to think about. The moon rose between the gleaming and implacable towers, and in the park I opened my eyes and thought of the tropical forest that this island must once have been. An island of fig trees like these, magnificent with fruit and monstrous roots. And as I woke slowly, almost unwillingly, I was aware of a hand placed upon my forehead and someone sitting next to me, quietly waiting for me to rejoin the world. It was like that moment at the Intercontinental, which now seemed so long ago, when I had understood finally that the supernatural is real after all. The hand was like a poultice, damp and cold but reassuring, and the form contained neatly in its elegant silk clothes was almost maternal. We said nothing, and indeed, looked at from the point of view of eternity, there was nothing to say anyway.