Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

“What?” he said. Rudely.

“Look at you,” I said. “I mean, just look at you. They give you a company flat and a Filipina maid and you think you’re some kind of empire builder. Who are you this week, pal? Stamford Raffles? Cecil Rhodes? Scott of the Antarctic?”

“I’m sorry-are you insane?” he said, uncertain if he should laugh out loud or punch my lights out. He stood up. A big bastard. Plenty of contact sports. Hairs on his chest. Probably.

“Calm down, Josh,” she said, touching his arm.

You might have tagged him a chinless wonder but you would have been dead wrong. He was all chin. His kind always are, in my experience. All chin and nose. His noble snout and jutting chin seemed to compress his mouth into a thin, imperious, mean little line.

If anything, he was a lipless wonder.

“We’re guests in this place,” I said, my voice shaking with something that I couldn’t quite identify. “Britannia no longer rules the waves. We should remember our manners.”

His lipless mouth dropped open. And then he spoke.

“How would you like me to teach you some manners, you awful little man?”

“Why don’t you try it?”

“Maybe I will.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Oh, shut up, the pair of you,” she said. “You’re both going home one day.”

Going home one day? Going home? That had never occurred to me. I looked at her and I thought-home.

Then I looked at Josh. And after staring each other down for a bit, Josh and I felt like idiots and realized that we weren’t going to beat each other up. Or, rather, that he wasn’t going to beat me up. She finally shoved him into his chair. Then she smiled at me with that goofy grin.

“You’re right,” she said. “We should remember our manners.” She held out her hand. “I’m Rose.”

I took her hand.

“Alfie Budd,” I said.

I even shook hands with old Josh. The three of us had a drink and, as Josh and I avoided eye contact, I told them about my job at the Double Fortune Language School. She told me about their law firm. Josh kept consulting his watch. Overdoing it a bit, I thought. Deliberately showing me-and her-that he was bored beyond belief.

But she smiled at me-that smile, those teeth, those baby-pink gums, effortlessly taking possession of my heart-and I felt it, I really felt it.

That somewhere in this world there really was a home for me to go to.

This is the way it starts. You look at someone you have never met before and you recognize them. That’s all. You just recognize them. Then it begins.

Rose suddenly slapped the table.

“Oh, wait a minute,” she laughed. “I remember you.”

It shouldn’t have worked. Her friends all thought she was too good for me and her friends were right. Rose was a Hong Kong Island girl. I was a Kowloon side guy.

She had a career. I had a job. She had dinner in the China Club surrounded by big shots. I had Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong surrounded by my fellow small fry. She came out to Hong Kong with a window seat in club class. I had an aisle seat in economy.

At twenty-five, Rose was already a success. Seven years older than her-and starting to look every day of it, what with the humidity and the Tsingtao-I was still waiting for my life to start.

She lived in a small but beautiful apartment on Conduit Road in the Upper Mid-Levels under the shadow of Victoria Peak-expat heaven. Security was a twenty-four-hour Gurkha. I had a room in a shared flat in Sai Ying Pun, rooming with a couple of my colleagues from the Double Fortune, the BBC guy from Gerrard Street and the Wing Chun man from Wilmslow.

Our place was one of those firetrap rabbit warrens with walls so thin you could hear the family down the hall watching Star TV. Security was a sleepy Sikh who came and went as the mood took him.

Rose hadn’t drifted out to Hong Kong, not like me. She was a corporate lawyer who had been sent out for a year by her London firm-she called it the shop-to cash in on a market that, in the last year of British rule, was booming like never before.

While I was struggling to pay my rent, behind the closed doors of Central fortunes were being made. Hong Kong was screaming out for lawyers and every day more of them came through the fast track of Kai Tak Airport.

Rose was one of them.

“I would still be making the tea in London,” she told me on that first night after Josh and I decided to have a drink instead of a fight. “Getting my bum pinched by some fat old man. Out here, I matter.”

“What is it you do exactly, Rose?”

“It’s corporate finance,” she said. “I help firms raise money with share issues for Chinese companies. Initial public offerings. Fire fighting, they call it.”

“Wow,” I said. “Brilliant.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was going on about. But I was genuinely impressed. She seemed like more of a grown-up than I would ever be.

Most of her colleagues-those loud boys and girls braying in the penthouse bar of the Mandarin every night, ignoring the sunset over the harbor-had an amused contempt for Hong Kong.

They saw a street sign for Wan King Road and howled about it for the duration of their stay, as though Hong Kong existed purely for their amusement. They collected and drooled over all the evidence of Hong Kong’s madness. And there was plenty.

The local brand of toilet paper called My Fanny. The Causeway Bay department store-a Japanese store as it happened, but let that pass-where they sold truffles named Chocolate Negro Balls. The popular Hong Kong antifreeze spray known as My Piss.

And I laughed too when I first saw the ads for My Piss-I’m not saying that I didn’t. But the lipless wonders never stopped. Sooner or later you should forget about My Fanny and go look at the sunset, go look at the lights. But somehow the lipless wonders never got around to that.

Rose wasn’t like the rest of them. She loved the place.

I don’t want to make her sound like Mother Teresa with a briefcase. The Cantonese can be an abrasive bunch, and confronted by a sulky taxi driver or a rude waiter or a pushy beggar, Rose was quite capable of feeling all the helpless frustration of any hot, tired expatriate. But the bad feelings never lasted for very long.

She loved Hong Kong. She loved the people and-unusual for a woman with her job, her salary, her skin color-she thought it was right that they were getting the place back.

“Oh, come on, Alfie,” she said one night when I was going on about the special feeling, and how I didn’t want it ever to end. “Hong Kong might be a British invention. But it has a Chinese heart.”

She wanted to find the real Hong Kong. Left to my own devices, I would have nursed a Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong and looked at the lights. Left to myself, I would have vegetated quite happily in the unreal Hong Kong, convinced that the special feeling was all I needed to know.

Rose took me deeper. Rose took me beyond the lights. As she did so, she turned affection into something more. For Hong Kong. And for her.

She took me to a temple behind Central where everything was red and gold and the air was choked with incense as little old ladies burned fake money in huge stone drums. Through the perfumed mist you could just about make out two brass deer gleaming on the altar.

“For longevity,” Rose said, and when I think about Rose talking about longevity now, it makes me want to weep.

Back in the days we thought would never end, she took me to places where I would never have gone without her. We had dim sum in a restaurant near my flat where we were the only gweilo. We walked the narrow streets between apartment blocks covered in TV aerials, potted plants and washing lines. She took my hand and led me down sunless alleys where toothless old men in flip-flops bet on two crickets fighting in a wooden box.