Hiroshima Joe (7 page)

‘I’ve been all right. Very busy on Kowloon-side…’

‘You no got job?’ She was clearly incredulous but kept her voice low so that neither of them lost face with the other girls in the bar. It wouldn’t do, for either of them, if the girls knew she had a boyfriend of slight means.

‘No such luck.’

With her, as with no one else nowadays, he could be frank. Neither of them had any illusions about what they were and where they were fixed in the order of the universe. He was a tramp – or would have been had he lived in London – and she was a whore. His nemesis was poverty and his past: hers was fate and circumstance and an occasional dose of the clap. He counted himself lucky that he wasn’t starving while she saw herself as fortunate that she hadn’t contracted something worse.

‘You know, Joe’ – she sipped her drink again and pointed to it – ‘champagne a lo’d of buwshit.’

He laughed loudly and she joined in, playfully smacking his arm, glad to see him happy. Often, in the lonely hours after the US Navy Shore Patrol or the British MPs had emptied the bars of drunks and besotted members of their respective armed forces, she wondered what life would be like if she were not a Chinese bar-girl and he were an executive with Butterfield and Swire, or the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; or manager of his own Wan Chai bar. After all, a few of them were owned by Europeans or Australians, all of whom had Chinese wives or mistresses. But even in her dream she was unable to escape the image of the bars and he was unable to exorcise his past. She knew that the best she could wish for was that he would buy her out for an hour – or better, a whole night – and that they’d pretend.

Sandingham called out to the barman, ‘Gin and tonic. With lemon.’ He paused. ‘And ice.’

The drink arrived, accompanied by another beer; the barman had seen that Sandingham’s glass was empty. His initiative, as much as his clients’ thirsts, sold drink.

‘Joe, you ve’y good to me sometime.’ Lucy’s hand was on his knee and she moved it up his leg as she took her first sip of the real drink. Then, quietly, she asked him, ‘You got money tonight, Joe?’

‘Some,’ he replied.

Even with Lucy he was cagey about finances.

‘Enough? You got enough?’

He knew what enough was. Twenty-five dollars.

‘Just.’

‘Joe. You buy me out one hour. Please. I give you good time.’

Absent from her voice was the harshness of her profession. She wasn’t looking to have him, but to love him, love being rare for a bar-girl.

By now, all the other girls had arrived and settled in the bar, standing or sitting about. They were all in their late teens or early twenties and they chatted, giggled and gibed each other. They did not interrupt Joe and his partner. They knew how she felt about him.

He was silent, thinking of her in his detached way. He wasn’t looking at her, but at the candle. The flame was low now. It scorched the back of his eyes to look at it.

He had enough to take her out of the bar for an hour, or even for the entire night – it would cost him between eighty and one hundred dollars. His dilemma was whether or not he wanted her. He knew he desired her company, for she listened as he talked. But whether or not he desired her body was another matter.

‘Okay,’ he said finally.

She had been quiet, gently squeezing his thigh every now and again, avoiding the looks of the other girls who wondered why neither of them was talking.

‘Okay? What you mean, okay, Joe?’

‘I’ll buy you out for one hour. No. Two hours.’

‘You sure, Joe?’

He nodded. She left the cubicle and went to the barman who lifted the counter flap to let her behind the bar and out through a doorway in the rear. In a few minutes, she was back.

He drained his second beer.

The girls waved to Lucy as she left. She returned their waves. It was as if she wouldn’t see them for days, yet she’d be back by ten. By then, the place would be packed out.

‘It not far, Joe,’ she said as she took his hand and guided him along the pavement. As they went, he cast a glance or two at his surroundings: he had not been this way before. She obviously had yet another room to which to take her clientele, and he assumed that her change of venue must mark a change of pimp or in the ownership of the bar.

They crossed the street, went down a dim alleyway between two other bars and climbed a set of echoing wooden stairs in a narrow well. At the top was a landing and, from it, three doors led off into rooms. A single, fifteen-watt bulb glowed overhead and from behind one of the doors came the familiar clatter of mah-jong pieces and conversation. While Lucy took a key from a hidden pocket of her dress, Sandingham stood quite still, feeling his nerves shivering at the sound of the game through the door.

She beckoned him and he went behind her into a small, airless room. It contained an old mahogany wardrobe, badly scratched and dented, a wooden chair, a tiny table and a wide bed with blue cotton sheets on it. There was little space for anything else in the room. On the wall over the head of the bed was nailed a wooden box, painted bright pillar-box red and, in the centre of it, a gold and red varnished household god. In front of his fierce face a joss-stick holder sprouted two sticks of incense, both of them snubbed out halfway down. The room smelled of sandalwood. A lamp was by the bed and Lucy switched it on, at the same time reaching up to extinguish the centre light, a powerful bulb in a green plastic shade. The brightness flicked off and the room became gentler. The distempered walls looked less harsh in the yellow glow from the lamp.

She sat on the bed and took off her shoes. Then she stood and tugged the zip at the side slits of her cheong-sam upwards so that both her thighs were bare to the waist. She was wearing nothing under the dress. In the traditional style, the bodice of the dress was fastened up one side, to allow for the suckling of a child, had she had one. This she unbuttoned and let slip over her skin. Her breast beneath was as sallow as the rest of her body, and as soft. He reached for the brown ring around her nipple, but she brushed his hand aside and, slipping his jacket off, she undid his shirt. Bare to the waist, he sat on the bed removing his shoes and socks, careful at the same time to thrust both socks into one shoe to hide the money. She saw him do this and realised what his action meant. He did have money, a good deal of it, and it was in his right shoe, jammed into the toe.

‘You wan’ to taw’k fu’st?’

‘I’m very tired,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been well these past weeks.’

He did not look as well as he had on his last visit to the bar. She saw that, even in the half-light. She did not know what was wrong with him but she made quite certain, by studying his features and actions, that it was not TB. A dose of VD was something she accepted with stoical resignation, a hazard of the job. But tuberculosis was something else altogether. Sulphur drugs and a course of injections would clear the clap, but months in a hospital out by Aberdeen harbour would be required to rid her of TB, and the degeneration the disease caused would ruin her looks and therefore her livelihood. Her fears were allayed, however. He hadn’t coughed, nor did he look empty enough of flesh and soul to be tubercular.

‘You chase too many dragon,’ she scolded him, taking his large, rough hand in both her smaller ones and tightening on it.

‘It’s not that,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not been to Ah Moy’s for long while. Several weeks. It’s not chasing dragons.’

‘You shou’d see you doc-tor. He fix you up. My doc-tor fix me up okay last month.’ She sensed he was thinking of this, and added, ‘Right now, I clear pass. No clap.’

He laughed again, quietly.

She let his hand go and deftly unfastened his fly buttons, at the same time gently rubbing his groin to help him desire her. He pulled his trousers off and lifting the front flap of her cheong-sam she lay back upon the bed. He could see her outlined against the thin blue sheets as if on water. In the faint light of the room the bush of hair just below her waist gleamed darkly and he moved towards it as she let her hands slide around his neck. As her fingers ran down his chest, she could feel every bump of his sternum, every ridge of his ribs. On his stomach, just as she started to delve her long fingers into the waistband of his underpants to pull them lower, she felt a rough, dry patch of skin the size of a dollar bill. It puzzled her and she thought about it as he moved to get himself inside her.

*   *   *

‘How much?’ he asked, as he dressed himself and she dried the sweat off her legs with a towel.

‘Eight dollar.’

He hadn’t been any use on the bed, but that was not her reason for cutting the price. Business was business where that was concerned.

He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to nine.

‘I thought it was twenty-five bucks an hour?’

‘Mistah Wong take eight dollar for one hour,’ she told him. ‘You just pay him money. I fuck you for free.’

He regarded her in silence. It had been a long time since anyone had given him anything. He tried to remember the last occasion, and couldn’t.

With his foot, he pulled the shoe over and bent down. He knew his money was safe for he hadn’t let himself doze off. He thrust two fingers into the toe and pulled out the wad of crumpled notes.

‘Where you get so much?’

‘I stole it,’ he replied bluntly. ‘There’s more’ – he patted the lining of his jacket – ‘but I need that to pay my rent at the –’

He stopped. He didn’t want her to know where he lived.

‘I go now,’ she said, not noticing. ‘You leave room. Jus’ close door and it lock okay.’

Sandingham stood up and kissed her on the cheek. He thought then how beautiful she was. He handed her twenty-five dollars but she took only ten and gave the rest back to him. He saw, to his astonishment, that she was crying. She stood up on tiptoe and quickly kissed him back, like an innocent girl with her first love. Then she left and he heard her stepping quickly down the wooden stairway.

He finished dressing, put twenty dollars behind the joss-stick holder in front of the household god and left.

As he walked past the bar on the way to the tram stop he could hear the shouts of sailors inside. Soon, he knew, Lucy would be back in that tiny room, her legs spread out on that same bed with another man thumping his belly on hers.

As the tram juddered over a set of points at the bottom of Garden Road he thought to himself how much more bearable, somehow, life would have been in those bleak years, had he known that she was on the outside, waiting and thinking, counting the weeks off for him.

*   *   *

It was past ten when he reached the hotel. The manager was sitting on a stool at the far end of the green marbled bar with a milk shake before him. He was talking to a Chinese man several years his senior. Sandingham went up to them.

‘Excuse me, Mr Heng. May I see you for a moment, please?’

‘Good evening, Mr Sandingham. I trust you have had a good day?’ Somehow he made the pleasantry sound genuine.

‘I have your rent. Rather’ – Sandingham saw the irony of the distinction – ‘I have my rent.’

They went to the hotel desk and Sandingham took the money out of his pocket – he’d transferred it there from his shoe – and received a receipt for the full amount. He sensed Heng was curious.

‘Gambling,’ he lied. ‘Wonderful people, the Chinese’ – he spoke as if to a European – ‘will gamble on anything. I won this on a cricket fight.’

‘Really? Where?’ Heng knew Sandingham was lying, but played along. He spoke as a European, too.

‘North Point,’ Sandingham said, ‘or beyond. Near the tram terminus in Shau Kei Wan.’

‘Sai Wan Ho,’ said the manager. ‘They do a lot of that there.’

He had not been through that part of Hong Kong Island in twelve months, but it was better to humour his guest. At least he now had the rent securely in the cash-box and would feel neither the wrath of the owners nor the acute embarrassment of having to evict Sandingham.

It was not a long walk to Ah Moy’s hideaway in Mong Kok. On the way Sandingham stopped at a kerbside food stall to eat a bowl of fried rice with cubes of diced fish, peas and cabbage in it. It was inexpensive and nourishing and, laced with soya sauce, was tasty. He ate with the gusto of a Chinese, holding the rice bowl in his left hand and scooping the rice and watery gravy into his mouth with split bamboo chopsticks. A few passers-by noticed and gave him a second fleeting look, but most ignored him.

He was careful in his approach to Nam Tau Street. He leaned on the wall at the corner with Canton Road for over five minutes pretending to read from a street library. Such places, well patronised by people who could not afford to purchase books, always drew a crowd. On the windowless end wall of a building hung an array of Chinese paperback books and comics and, for a very small fee – five cents, perhaps – one could read a book for a set length of time. Every now and then the ‘librarian’ collected the fees. Even this late at night there was a throng of readers who provided Sandingham with the camouflage he needed.

Satisfied that he was not being watched, he walked slowly along the pavement, keeping close to the shop fronts and, at an appropriate moment, ducked into a doorway. A corridor ran down to a staircase.

At the head of the stairs was a door. He knocked on it seven times. In Cantonese, a voice asked for his name. He answered
‘gweilo’,
a derogatory word for Europeans but the nickname by which he was known. He wasn’t overly concerned by the rudeness of this password. He was the only European who visited here. Such a precaution was necessary.

Four bolts slid back and the door opened several inches on a chain. Reassured that the visitor was alone, the door-keeper removed the slider on the links, opening up so that Sandingham could quickly enter. As soon as he was in, the door was promptly slammed, chained and re-bolted.

In front of Sandingham stood a diminutive Chinese woman dressed in baggy black trousers and a white smock top. She looked like a child’s amah in a well-to-do civil servant’s house on The Peak.

She remained silent but held out her hand. Sandingham gave her Leung’s piece of paper and thirty dollars. Still without speaking she led him into a room about twelve feet square. Along two walls, up to the ceiling, were rows of bunks without mattresses, eight in all. They were lined with base-boards, and each had a hessian pillow on it.