World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (28 page)

“Suzie, what is it? What's happened?”

There was another pause, then the tiny voice again.

“It's my baby,” she said. “My baby is dead.”

3

The Lovers

Chapter One

S
he was waiting on the corner of her street. She was standing out on the pavement, as if she did not notice the steady pelting rain, and her hair was plastered flat on her head and down the sides of her face, and hung on her shoulders in lank dripping rats' tails. The shiny drenched silk of her cheongsam clung to her body and round her legs, with the split skirt dragged open and nicked up round her thigh. Her white high-heeled shoes were sodden and spattered with mud. She looked as if she had just been fished out of a pond.

I ran up the center of the street toward her, my feet splashing and my wet shirt steaming with the warmth of my body from running. She had not told me anything on the telephone except that her baby was dead, and I still did not know what had happened. She did not move as I came up but stood there with her round little face expressionless and perfectly white.

“Suzie,” I said. “My poor Suzie.”

Her arms hung emptily at her sides. The rain trickled down her white face and dripped from her chin.

“My baby is gone,” she said.

“But what happened, Suzie? Was he ill?”

“No, my amah is gone, too.”

“You mean she's dead—your amah?”

“Yes, both gone.”

“Suzie, how awful.”

“Plenty of people are gone. Look.”

She nodded up the street toward her house on the corner of the first crossing. I saw that the street was blocked by a crowd standing in the rain, their heads and umbrellas and parasols in black silhouette against moving lights beyond. We started up the street. We pushed our way among the glazed eyes and silent faces. Beyond the crowd men were working with lights and flares, above the level of the street as though on some platform. We reached the front of the crowd, where there was a rope across the street, and I saw that the platform was a pile of rubble filling most of the crossing. Then all at once I noticed that Suzie's house had gone. The whole corner had completely gone and was open to the sky, and on either side were tiers of gaping rooms, some with beds and cupboards still in place, others with furniture hanging precariously over the torn-off edges of floors. I thought for a moment that a bomb must have fallen, it was so like a scene in wartime London.

“Suzie, what ever happened?” I said.

“The house fell down.”

“You mean there was some explosion?”

“No, it just fell.”

“But how?”

“Rain,” she said. “It just fell in the rain.”

She had left the Happy Room early this evening, because on account of the rain there had been nothing doing, and had arrived back to find the house gone. It had happened about half an hour before. Now survivors were still being brought out, but they were all tenants of the lower floors, and she held out no hope for her baby and amah, who must have fallen from the top. However, she would not leave until her baby's body had been found and she could be absolutely sure.

“Let's go and ask, Suzie,” I said.

We got under the rope. A Chinese policeman made as though to stop us but hesitated when he saw that I was European, and I hurried Suzie past before he changed his mind. We clambered over the rubble. The paper shop had completely vanished, and also most of the house over the coffin shop, but half the coffin shop itself was intact with the long coffins made of round hollowed tree trunks still neatly stacked inside. The excavations were being directed by Chinese and English police officers, and coolies were carrying away the rubble in wicker baskets. A body was carried past us on a stretcher but the face was mutilated and I could not tell if it was a man or a woman. There were so many bodies partially exposed in the rubble that they had to be taken in turn. The policemen worked methodically and without fuss as if they were used to doing this kind of work every day. A Chinese officer crouched over a body half-concealed under a piece of wood. He scraped away the rubble under the wood with his hands and felt for the heart. He said, “This one's still ticking over.”

An English officer said, “Half a jiff, John, and I'll be with you.” He was examining another half-exposed torso. “No, this one's had it.” He stepped back onto the Chinese officer's hand. “Sorry, John!”

“All right. Look, we've got to shift this piece of wood.”

“I believe it's part of that same blasted beam that's been holding us up over there.”

Another officer said grimly, “Pity the bugger couldn't have held up the house instead.” He wore the silver insignia of Commissioner. He stood looking deceptively relaxed, the water dripping from his peaked cap.

“It must be a mile long, sir,” the younger officer said. “We'll have to free the ends.”

The Commissioner said sharply, “Use your saw. What's your saw for? That chap's alive—get him out quick.”

“Yes, sir. Hey, where's that clot with the saw . . . ?”

The Commissioner relaxed again. I went up to him and asked, “Have you got any babies out, sir?”

“Six.” He was watching them choose the spot for the saw cut.

“Can we look at them?”

He glanced round, saw Suzie, gave me a mildly curious look, then decided he had no time to concern himself with us.

“Under the tarpaulin,” he said, and returned his attention to the sawing.

We scrambled back down the rubble. A stretcher was being lifted into an ambulance. It contained a young man who was muttering and crying out incoherently like someone in a nightmare. His trousers were ripped and the rain was splashing on his private parts. His face had the drained-out whiteness of death. Along the street were several tarpaulins, collecting pools of water where they sagged between the bodies. A Chinese policeman nodded toward one, indicating the babies. I lifted the tarpaulin, tipping off the pools of water which came flooding back round the bodies and over our feet. There were six small corpses, all but two with faces mutilated beyond recognition. The smallest was naked and lay face down and its two buttocks were together no larger than my fist. There were two about the same size as Suzie's baby but one was a girl. Suzie stooped beside the other, lifted the hand, and examined the fingers and palm. She could not see properly because of the light. She laid down the hand and examined a foot. She suddenly bent closer, as if in recognition, then examined the hand again. An English police officer came up carrying a flashlamp and escorting a Chinese girl in cotton trousers. He saw Suzie and turned the lamp onto the child for her. Suzie immediately put down the hand and shook her head. The Chinese girl looked at the corpses and began to smirk and titter. The officer shone his lamp along the row and each seemed funnier to her than the last. I asked the officer if any children had been taken to hospital.

He said, “One girl, but I doubt if she made it.” The girl in cotton trousers burst into fresh titters. He glanced at her, and then said to me, “Nerves. I used to think they were all callous bloody bastards, these Chinese—but it's just nerves. You wouldn't think it, but that girl's heart is bloody near breaking.”

He shone the torch for us while we looked under the other tarpaulins for the amah, but we could not find her. There were only twenty-seven bodies so far, and four survivors in hospital, and he reckoned that there must be a good hundred casualties altogether. He said that a house had also collapsed this afternoon over in Kowloon: it had been the same as this, old property earmarked for clearance in 1939, but the war had broken out to prevent it. And then after the war the influx of refugees, doubling the population almost overnight, had prevented clearance again until new housing could be completed.

Later, as we stood watching again at the edge of the rubble, I suddenly remembered about Suzie's savings, which she had kept in a tin under her floor.

“Yes, I know,” she said tonelessly, when I reminded her.

“But how much was there, Suzie?”

She shrugged. “I forget.”

“There must have been an awful lot, with all you managed to save when you were with Rodney.”

“Yes, I think about five thousand dollars.”

“My God, that's more than three hundred pounds!”

“Yes, gone.”

“It might turn up,” I said.

“Not with all those coolies.” Her voice was still toneless and indifferent. “Anyhow, that money was just for my baby. If my baby is finished, I don't need that money.”

“Well, let's go and look.”

I led her to the place where personal possessions found in the rubble were being collected under guard. There was a pile of old battered cooking tins, remnants of furniture, a few old shoes and clothes, and one clock that by some miracle was still going, though it would not continue to do so much longer out in the rain. The guard let us search through the pile, but we could not find Suzie's tin. She shrugged indifferently: the loss of the money meant nothing to her beside the loss of the baby, and I do not think it had particularly occurred to her that she had lost everything she possessed in the world except the soaked clothes she was wearing. She had even lost the handbag and umbrella that she had been carrying when she had returned from the Happy Room.

She had begun to tremble from shock or chill. Her teeth were chattering and her face and lips looked icy. I said I did not think it was any use staying, but she refused to leave.

“I wait for my baby,” she said.

“Suzie, I'll wait,” I said. “You go and shelter in a shop or somewhere, and get warm.”

“No, I shall wait.”

“All right, I'll see if I can get some brandy to warm you up.”

I went off down the street that was being kept clear for police trucks and ambulances. The shops were closed, but some shopkeepers stood watching in their doorways. I could not get any brandy but I found a clothes shop and bought a big man's sweater, and took it back to Suzie and helped her put it on in the doorway. She did not really know what she was doing because her attention was fixed all the time on the rubble, and she did not notice that the sleeves were too long, so I rolled them up for her. The rain was driving into the doorway and I looked round for somewhere else she could stand to keep the sweater dry. I remembered seeing an abandoned rickshaw near the tarpaulins, so I went to find it and dragged it back over the edge of the rubble, and set it down facing the scene of operations. It had been tilted down on the traces so that no rain had blown under the hood and the seat was dry. I led Suzie across from the doorway and made her get in, and then fixed the mackintosh sheet over her knees. She did not speak a word. She sat there without moving, except for the slight chatter of her teeth, with her eyes following every stretcher that was carried down from the flare-lit rubble. I was also feeling very chilled myself and I walked around and climbed up and down the rubble to try and warm myself up, and I kept looking back and seeing Suzie's little round white face watching from under the rickshaw hood.

Presently an announcement was made from a police loudspeaker car, in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, that no more survivors were expected to be found. Unclaimed bodies, and the bodies of those whose relatives did not wish to make private arrangements, would be buried at public expense. Facilities would be provided for identification by relatives in the morning, and although excavations would continue, people were advised to go home.

I went back to Suzie and urged her to take this advice. But she shook her head.

“I wait for my baby.”

Another hour went by, and then I was suddenly shaken out of my stupor of chill as I recognized the body of the old amah carried past me on a stretcher. It seemed too much to hope that the child's body had fallen in neat proximity and would be discovered next; but only a moment or two later, as I was crossing to tell Suzie about the amah, I saw her rise from the rickshaw and start towards another stretcher that was being carried from the rubble. It was as if she had been prompted by some instinct, for she could not possibly have seen from the rickshaw what the stretcher contained. I joined her as she stopped and watched it carried past. On it lay the corpse of a baby. The body was so tiny, just a little mutilated object in the center of the stretcher, that it seemed absurd for two hefty males to be engaged in carrying it. Its face was a mess of raw flesh stuck with bits of rubble and quite unrecognizable. It had lost an arm.

Suzie followed the stretcher without taking her eyes from the baby. The rain had stopped half an hour ago and the row of babies' corpses lay uncovered. The stretcher was lowered and its burden placed alongside the others. Suzie crouched beside it. The English officer shone his torch unsuspectingly on the mess of the face, which in the white concentrated beam of light all at once achieved a startling, almost unreal, clarity of color and detail, like some varnished, overrealistic painting of still life. He quickly pointed the torch away, and held it so that only the edge of the beam was on the body and the face was in shadow. Suzie lifted the hand and spread the tiny fingers. Then she put it down and felt for the other hand. She could not find it. She looked puzzled, like somebody who has lost something only just laid down. She began to roll the body carefully, searching for it. The officer touched her on the shoulder. He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Gone.”

Suzie stared at the baby as if she could not believe the hand had gone. The baby must have a hand. Then she noticed the torn empty shoulder from which the arm had been wrenched. She contemplated this for a moment then turned her attention to the feet. She examined each foot in turn and afterwards both together, holding her hand under the heels. She laid them carefully down.

“Yes,” she said. “My baby.”

She got up and began to walk away.

“Excuse me,” the police officer said. “I say, hang on one minute! Hey, young lady!” Suzie stopped and looked round. “How about burial? You want to look after it yourself?”

“No,” Suzie said. “Finish.”