The Trophy Taker - Lee Weeks

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eye at decorating and table setting, she helped in the Golden Dragon. But Feng Ying’s main job was to bring her infant daughter up as best she could. She was a foreigner in a country she barely knew but she found strength through her child. Every day she bundled her pink, washed and pampered baby into the pram and manoeuvred it into the outside world. She faced all life’s obstacles for this child and forged a bond between mother and daughter that was dependence and love entwined. Now Feng Ying was dead and Georgina must make it alone – something she had never imagined in her twenty-two years that she would have to do.

      After clearing passport control Georgina collected her case and made her way through the new airport, a massive high-ceilinged hangar on Lantau Island. Pulling her heavy case behind her, she looked anxiously along the line of names written on cardboard held up by eager-looking drivers. Most were written in Chinese. It took her a few minutes before she saw hers. Georgina written in red felt pen on brown card and held up by a leathery-faced old man. He greeted her in Chinglish, smiling and nodding profusely as he picked up her case. Georgina tried to explain that it had wheels and that he could pull it along if he wanted. But he didn’t understand and it didn’t matter. He hardly struggled with the weight. Small and wiry he might have been, but he was definitely strong.

      As they stepped outside, the bright sun slapped Georgina in the face and the heat wrapped itself around her like cling film. By the time they reached the taxi, less than a minute’s walk, she was sweating and couldn’t wait to find shade inside the cab.

      The taxi driver’s name was Max, but it hadn’t always been. A teacher handed out the English names in class. He had been allotted the name Maxwell, which he later shortened to Max on the advice of an American tourist. Fong Man Tak was his birth name; he preferred Max.

      Max was not altogether sure what age he was: there was no definitive documentation. But he had counted the years from when he was told by his mother that he had reached the age of eight. So now he thought he was sixty, and his mother was long dead.

      Max had been a taxi driver for the last thirty years, and most of the time it brought him a modest income. Taxis were thick on the ground in Hong Kong so he had to work long hours to make it worthwhile.

      Georgina peered silently out of the window. She was mesmerised by the cars all around her. She hadn’t envisaged Hong Kong looking quite so un-British. She’d thought, as a former British colony, that somehow it would mirror London in miniature. Or perhaps it would look like a Victorian seaside town with mock Tudor B&Bs, maybe with a dilapidated pier. She didn’t know quite which, but she certainly hadn’t expected it to look so completely different. It seemed to her to be a futuristic alien world of skyscrapers.

      She tilted her head at the window and stretched her eyes upwards. ‘Gods,’ she thought, the skyscrapers were like gods’ legs: perfected from glass and chrome, glinting gloriously in the sunshine. There were so many different kinds: some were honeycombed like rectangular wasps’ nests; others were skeletal, jutting skyward as bony white fingers. And the strangest thing of all were the building sites that bridged the gaps between the buildings like gums between teeth.

      All the time Georgina studied her new environment, Max studied her in the mirror. He was fascinated by her cascading curls and her pale, luminescent beauty. It was not the first time he’d had a foreign girl in his car. Many girls had sat where she sat now. They were strange, unearthly creatures, the Western girls. They didn’t seem real to Max. They were images from a film: plastic, false. Sometimes Max thought about the other girls, the ones who had ridden in his cab. He wondered where they’d gone.

      One of the girls who’d sat in the back of Max’s cab, where Georgina was sitting now, had not gone far. Part of her now resided in a drawer of a mortuary fridge. The rest of her was still waiting to be found.

       12

      Max turned the cab into a narrow street – typical of the ones found just a stone’s throw from the main tram line on Johnson Road. The road was so narrow that the washing hung from poles, jutting out from the overhead balconies and meeting in the centre of the street, hanging down like heavily laden tree branches, providing a canopy over the busy street. They trapped smells and dust, but afforded some welcome shade in the heat of the day.

      The cab pulled up outside the mansion block on a side street in Wanchai.

      Georgina thanked Max, took her case from him and wheeled it into the building. She checked her piece of paper, the one that Mrs Ho had written the address on, in both Chinese and English: fourth floor, apartment 407. She took the lift – a small oppressive space that only had room for her and her case. As she wheeled the case out onto the fourth-floor landing, she paused outside the apartment door to gather her thoughts. She had come a long way to reach this point. She hoped it would prove worth it. She took a deep breath, rang the bell and waited.

      A young woman in a dressing gown opened the door. She looked like she’d just got up. She wore no makeup and her hair was a mess. Her face was as rounded as a full moon, while her nose was small and flattened, emphasising the largeness of her visage. Her eyes were set slightly wide apart, and then there was the mouth, like Georgina’s, a family trait – lips that formed an almost perfect circle topped by a cupid’s bow.

      The woman grinned. She had a gold crown just behind one of her eyeteeth.

      ‘You got to be Georgina, right?’ Her voice was loud, deep and brackish. The words had a hint of American, but the accent remained pure Hong Kong staccato.

      Georgina nodded. ‘Ka Mei?’

      ‘Yeah, thaz me. Call me Lucy – English name more easy. Come in, please. Let me help you.’

      She pulled Georgina’s case in and ushered her forward into the dimly lit flat. Immediately in front of them, as they entered, was a small lounge area. Beyond that was a fifties-style Formica breakfast bar. Behind it there was a one-ring cooker, a microwave and a decrepit water heater that appeared to cling to the wall by its fingernails. There were two rooms on the left, and a bathroom ahead. Lucy pulled Georgina’s case into the middle of the lounge.

      ‘Sorry. I expect you later. But no worries, huh?’ She patted Georgina on the arm. ‘You very pretty girl – so tall.’ She laughed. ‘Ka Lei!’ she called. ‘Come, meet your cousin …’

      There was a screech from the bathroom and a young woman came flying out. She looked quite different from her sister. She was taller, but much slighter. Her features were also long and thin, accentuated by her hair that fell from a centre parting and divided into two shiny black sheets falling either side of her face. She was so excited. She had been on a high ever since they had known that Georgina would be coming.

      She barged past her sister (falling over Georgina’s huge suitcase, which filled the tiny lounge) and threw open the bedroom doors. Ka Lei squealed with delight as she pulled her cousin out of the room and dragged her around the tiny flat, pointing things out as they went. There was always something else she absolutely must show her.

      ‘Here is our bedloom,’ shrieked Ka Lei, as she dived into the first open door and jumped onto the bed in the centre of the room.

      Lucy came behind her, scolding but smiling. Georgina squeezed past the bed to look at the view from the oversized windows, more out of politeness than anything else. All she could see was the side wall of the adjacent building. By pressing her face against the pane and looking up she would have been able to see a corner of sky, and, looking down, people’s heads would have been just visible below. But she didn’t; she stood politely, staring through the never-been-cleaned glass at the blacked-out windows of the building opposite, which was so near you could almost reach out and touch it. Georgina was used to looking out of the window and seeing fields. Now she knew what it was to feel claustrophobic.

      They eventually collapsed onto the bed in what was to be Georgina’s room. It was identical to the sisters’: the same two lazy bamboo blinds hanging lopsided against the oversized panes, the same wallpaper peeling from the wall and the same air-conditioning unit droning away in honour of Georgina’s

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