One for My Baby (33 page)

“What about Rose? You suddenly forget about her?”

“I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never stop loving her. I’ve learned that you can honour the past and you can remember the past. You can even love it. But you can’t live in it.”

“So you’re here to claim your future?”

“That’s right.”

“But it doesn’t work like that.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. You might be ready to get serious, but I’m not. If you really care about someone, you let them follow their dreams. And then maybe one day they come back to you. If it’s real. If it means anything.”

“So you think you might come back to me?”

“We were never really together, were we?”

“Do you think – when you’ve got your degree and you’ve met lots of interesting people and you’ve made friends with some hot young French guys – that you might miss me a little bit?”

“I miss you already.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Bad timing.”

“That’s it? Just bad timing?”

“I’ve got to go, Alfie.”

And she does. I watch her disappear into the crowd of students, all those shining young faces looking forward to the future as though it is their personal property.

She doesn’t even look back.

But I don’t feel bad. It’s strange. My heart seems to weigh nothing at all. I feel something like my old self.

Because I know that even if I never see her again in my life, Jackie has returned to me something that I believed was lost forever.

She has given me back my faith.

And you’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?

forty

Just over a year later I drop a couple of Hong Kong dollars in a scarred metal slot and pass through the turnstile, joining the crowds waiting for the Star Ferry.

The original cast are all present, if slightly altered in ways that I can’t quite define. There are the young Chinese businessmen of Central in their white shirts and dark ties, speaking Cantonese into tiny mobile phones. The office girls with their shining black hair and miniskirts and Prada bags. The old men with their racing papers, frowning as they check the form at Sha Tin and Happy Valley. And me.

Hong Kong has changed, too. Not the way it looks, although the way Hong Kong looks is forever changing as land is reclaimed and buildings are demolished and new skyscrapers are raised. It’s something in the tropical air. This place just doesn’t feel British any more. Hong Kong is a Chinese city now. Brash, confident, unsentimental about the past. It’s not my inheritance any longer. If it ever really was.

Yet I love it still. Even if it is not mine to love, I love it. I can’t help it.

I go upstairs to the cavernous waiting area and watch the old green-and-white Star Ferry that I am about to catch chunking into the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui, and I see the soaring steel-and-glass skyline of Central in the distance, the green hills beyond and Victoria Peak looming above it all.

As I walk onto the Star Ferry I get that old feeling – the excitement and sadness mixed. That old feeling of belonging and knowing in your heart that you will never belong.

Soon they are about to pull up the gangway, and I get a feeling of mild panic. I know it’s stupid but I wait to see if Rose will make it to the Star Ferry just in time, if she will come running up the gangway just before they raise it, and I know that she will be breathless and beautiful, carrying her large box of legal documents to an office somewhere in Alexandra House.

But of course Rose doesn’t appear at the last minute. That’s not going to happen. They pull up the gangway without Rose appearing, and I know – know with total certainty for the first time – that I must make the rest of my journey without her.

And then I see her. The young woman in her two-piece business suit. She is just about holding on to a large cardboard box, desperately balancing it on one thigh, trying not to drop it in the middle of the crowded Star Ferry. She is bending forward slightly as she wrestles with the box, her black hair tumbling over her face. I stand up, and for just a moment, it feels like I am addressing a ghost.

“Excuse me? Miss?”

It is only when she looks up at me that I see she is Chinese. And very real. Young, around twenty-five or so, although by now I have known enough Asian women to be aware that their ages are often impossible to guess.

“Do you want to sit down?”

For a second or two she stares at me through her gold-rimmed glasses and then she suddenly smiles, concluding that I am quite harmless.

“Thank you,” she says, the accent West Coast American. Educated in the States? Possibly. Although she could have got that accent without ever going further west than Kowloon.

She sits beside me. There’s room for both of us if I shuffle up a bit and she perches right on the edge of the aisle seat with the big cardboard box resting across our knees. It is full of documents, files, ledgers.

“You a lawyer?”

“No,” she says, still smiling. “I’m an accountant. Well – training. How about you? Tourist?”

“No. I’m a writer.”

“Really?”

“Well – trying.”

“Trying?”

“I want to write a story about this place. Sell it – I don’t know – somewhere. But I know this is the place I want to write about.”

She smiles with what looks more like civic pride than politeness.

“So you like Hong Kong?”

“There’s nowhere like it in the world. There’s never been anywhere like it. There never will be again. It’s where all the world meets, isn’t it? This is where it all gets mixed up.”

“Your first time here?”

“Oh, I’ve been here before. But it feels like a long time ago now.”

Two old Cantonese sailors, stick-thin and impassive, unchanging through the ages, untie the ropes holding us to Kowloon, the tip of the Chinese mainland, and the Star Ferry pulls out into the harbour.

Seven minutes. That’s all it takes to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island on the Star Ferry. Seven minutes. It always makes me feel a little anxious, that perfect ride, because it is over so quickly. Just seven minutes. There’s hardly time to take it all in.

I suppose you just have to make the most of it. Enjoy it while you can.

“Who do you usually write for?” the girl asks me.

“Me? Nobody. Well, myself, I guess. I haven’t sold anything yet. And nobody’s asked me to write about Hong Kong. It’s just something I feel I have to do. You ever get that feeling?”

She laughs. “All the time.”

“You’ve got to have a little faith, haven’t you?”

“Oh yes. You’ve got to have a little faith.”

We fall silent and I turn my face to the open window, the fierce tropical heat cooled by the breeze of open water, and I watch the traffic in Hong Kong harbour. The old Chinese junks with their barefoot sailors. A cruise ship as big as a small town. Tugs, dredgers, the police in their motor launches, the newer ferries, painted in louder colours than the low-key white-and-green livery of the Star Ferries.

The Star Ferries feel as though they are part of old Hong Kong, like statues of Queen Victoria and expatriates drinking cocktails on the roof of the China Club and Sunday afternoons spent cruising on the company junk. That lost place, my old Hong Kong, that’s where the Star Ferry seems to belong.

But maybe that’s wrong, because you can still see them shuttling between Kowloon and Hong Kong, bustling between rest and work, between the past and the future; they are still out there, all the green and white sister ships of this one,
Day Star
and
Morning Star
and
Shining Star
and all the rest of them, all the dancing stars of Hong Kong. Still out there.

And I think of my nan, and the souvenirs she kept of other people’s holidays, and George Chang, moving by himself on the other side of the world to the silent song inside his head, and my father living alone in his rented flat, going right back to the start. And I think of my mother with the new man in her life, the Kiwi who is definitely no fruit, and Jackie and the French boy who wanted to marry her, and I think of Plum learning to be happy inside her own skin, that lesson we all spend a lifetime learning.

And as I watch that heartbreaking Hong Kong skyline of glass, silver and gold, I think of my lost wife and the time that will never come again, and that’s when I have to turn away from the girl beside me, so that she will not see what is written all over my face.

It’s funny. You love something and then one day it’s suddenly gone or changed or lost forever. But somehow that doesn’t stop your love. Maybe that’s how you know it’s the real thing. When it doesn’t come with conditions and get-out clauses, when it doesn’t have a best-by date. When you just give your love, and never stop giving it, and know that you never will. That’s when it is real. That’s when they can never touch it or spoil it or take it way from you.

All too soon we are at the other side. It goes so fast, this brief ride. A short, sweet journey that is always over too soon. The girl gets up to leave. We smile at each other and I wonder what she is doing tonight. I know that there will be some handsome young man waiting for her somewhere in this town, and I am happy for her.

“Good luck with the writing,” she says. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

The girl hefts her big cardboard box in her thin arms, gives me one final smile, and soon she is lost among the impatient throng.

I turn my face to the open window once more. And suddenly I see the two of them moving through the lunch time crowds of Central. Jackie and Plum.

They are loaded down with their shopping bags, cameras swinging around their necks, laughing together about something.

I smile to myself. When you see them at moments like this, unaware that they are being watched, they always look closer than sisters, and more than mother and daughter. They look like best friends.

There they are now, Jackie and Plum, making their way to meet me where the Star Ferry docks on the other side. They haven’t seen me yet. But they will soon. And as I watch their faces move through that great lonely crowd of people who I will never know, as I watch Jackie and Plum until they disappear into the ferry terminal where we have arranged to meet, I wonder how I ever believed that you can have too much love in your life.

Then the Star Ferry is rolling beneath my feet as it is secured to Hong Kong Island, so I join the crowds waiting for the gangway to be lowered, all of us eager to be on our way now, and I can feel a sense of silent anticipation in the air, like someone finally turning for home, or a baby waiting to be born.