LITMIR.BIZ

      On Boxing Day Alan sat before another harbour with another bottle before him. The sun was going down and his legs were weary. This was because he had walked most of the length of Hong Kong Island. He had walked from the offices of the Hong Kong Times to Central, and there, turning right at the Great Orient Hotel, he had passed on to the Star Ferry Pier. He had then climbed a flight of steps that took him to Blake Pier. He had walked its length in order to contemplate the harbour, as a dismal ceremony of farewell, but he had found a dreadfully sordid café. So he took a seat, ordered a beer.

      He had made his walk because walking keeps despair at bay. He had walked through Quarry Bay, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wanchai and Central, managing scarcely to think at all. Now, beer before him and the light beginning to fade, he inspected the boat-jams of Hong Kong harbour. Tangled together were various craft of the Star Ferry, the Jordan Road Ferry that carried motor cars, the ferries to Lantau, Cheung Chau, Lamma, Tung Lung, Po Toi. Alan watched, cut off from the world of purpose.

      It was not the row about the Noble Savages letter that had got him the sack. It was the Gestapo. A few days before Christmas, Alan had subbed the report of a speech made by the chairman of the South China Bank, Sir Peter Browne, to the Rotary Club of Hong Kong. About three paragraphs from the end, the speaker had referred to the Hong Kong police and their ‘Gestapo tactics’. Pleased, Alan had seized on this, promoted it to the first paragraph, fitted the story around it, and used the word ‘Gestapo’ in a headline that had fitted to the last character. Nice, he had told himself at the time, bloody nice.

      There had been a note on Alan’s desk when he returned to work on Boxing Day afternoon. Written on pink card, in fountain pen. See me. R. S. But Mr Simpson, what I did is just standard practice in Fleet Street. Mr Fairs, you do not seem to realise that we are not in Fleet Street. We are in Hong Kong. I happen to believe that a newspaper has a responsibility to the community. You clearly fail to appreciate that. It is my belief that you never will. Your professional standards, of which you make so much, are not ours.

      Alan said thank Christ for that, and marched out slamming the door. No he didn’t. He sat on Blake Pier wishing he had. Instead, he had begged for a last chance, thinking of rent, debt, the distance from home. Pride had gone. Simpson asked if he would vacate the building. Now, please.

      And so the great Hong Kong walk; the great Hong Kong adventure in ruins. He turned and looked bitterly at the tallest of the tall buildings on the waterfront, the one with round windows which, Wally had informed him, was known to the Chinese as the House of a Thousand Arseholes. Along the length of the pier, teenage Chinese couples embraced unrestrainedly, Blake Pier being a good deal more private than their homes.

      What would he say when he got home? Didn’t work out. Couldn’t get on with the place. Journalistic standards appalling. Walked out of the job after six weeks, matter of self-respect. And they would all say in the pub after he had gone – all those who would never dare to make such a journey themselves – well, he couldn’t take it, could he, scuttling back home with his tail between his legs. Shall we give him a couple of shifts anyway? Oh, come on, hardly the type, is he?

      Below, a motor-junk approached the pier, its seesawing deck loaded with large waste-paper baskets full of vegetables; choisum and pak-choi. He heard a voice chanting out some request or order – everything in Cantonese sounded like an order – concluding the sentence with a long aaa clearly audible above the grumble of the engine. Master that sound and you have mastered street Cantonese. The junk’s captain, if it were he and junks had captains, stood stocky and strong in a white singlet as the deck danced beneath him. He shouted again at a man hidden from view, perhaps on the lower level of the pier. Another merchant, no doubt. Buying cheap and selling dear: passage for choisum and pak-choi; passage too, perhaps, for more exciting cargoes, for brandy and American cigarettes, bears’ paws, tigers’ penises, pharmaceuticals. Or people. Perhaps even now a crop-haired, frightened boy crouched beneath the dancing deck, sick with both fright and motion, escaping from China to this promised land. In the morning he would make his run for freedom. The land of opportunity. The junk tucked snugly into the pier and was lost from view.

      Alan ordered more beer and gave himself up to self-pity. He felt it was expected of him. But even as he did so, cursing Simpson, his luck, the woman who had left him in England, he knew that he was only going through the motions. He did not, in his dismay, permit that thought to come to the surface, but it lay beneath, awaiting its moment. Yes. Tie already rolled and in his pocket, strolling at his ease, a flâneur, through the unmalicious shoving of his fellow islanders. Stopping to buy a beer from the fat proprietor. And Alan knew that he could activate that destiny: in a single moment he could do it. The café would have a telephone, and no objection would be made to his using it, calls being free. André, I’ve been thinking over what you were saying yesterday …

      Alan drank his beer and watched the light fade and the lights of the buildings and the advertisements come on one by one. At last in darkness he walked back to the Mid-Levels and took the lift to his flat on the fifteenth floor.