Hong Kong Belongers - Simon Barnes

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Horse, New American Restaurant, Ocean Bar, Seven Seas Bar. Alan walked, striving to give no more than a casual glance at the photographs, outside the topless bars, of glorious ping-pong ball breasts.

      The Two Brewers stood between a tattoo parlour and a restaurant decorated with the wind-dried corpses of chickens. To open the door was to pass, as through the looking-glass, into the Home Counties. The sort of dingy pub you find by the railway station. There, beer and a copy of Hong Kong Business on the bar before him, in safari suit (electric blue) and behind a small paunch, Reg. Two strange white tufts of hair sprang from his head, behind his ears. They looked like powder puffs. Reg looked like a saloon-bar golfer, half a pint of cooking and a Scotch egg please, landlord. Odd to think that his favoured, apparently unashamed, leisure pursuit was not golf but whoring.

      ‘So you’re a friend of Bill’s, what a good sort he is, terrible shame of course but there you are, that’s Hong Kong. But he knows his job and he says you’re OK, and that’s good enough for me. Worked at the Times myself, of course, years ago, never could get on with Simpson, set up on my own and here we are.’

      Reg was not a man to deal with any subject briefly, but several beers later, hands were shaken on a decision. Alan was to work for Reg five afternoons a week for two thousand dollars a month. ‘Flexible as you like, old chap, so long as we get the work done. I need a dogsbody, to tell you the truth, and some of the work will be an awful grind. But if you can put up with that, I’m more than happy to have you on board.’

      Alan could. He was invited to start the following Monday. Did he need an advance?

      Back on the fifteenth floor, head slightly fuzzy after his interview with Reg, Alan stood at his window with the telephone in his hand. He could see the harbour between the two buildings that rose up in front of him, the moving lights of the shipping, the still lights of Kowloon on the far side. He grasped the instrument like a weapon, Bond setting an assignment in motion. ‘Hello. This is Alan Fairs, remember we met –’

      ‘Alan, my dear. How perfectly splendid. Are you coming out to see us again? How is the Hong Kong Times?’

      Alan did not feel it necessary to hide things from André. ‘Rather why I’m calling you. I’ve just been sacked.’

      ‘I knew you were the right sort for us. I have an instinct. But my dear old thing, how perfectly rotten all the same. Being sacked always depresses me for hours. But, Alan, could it really be that you are coming to join our glorious community on Tung Lung?’

      ‘Is the flat still free?’

      ‘Yours for seven hundred bucks a month.’

      ‘Done.’

      ‘Naturally you must sign some bits of paper and shake hands with your new landlord. Let me see. Tomorrow I can make the four thirty ferry home from Central. Why not catch it too?’

      Home. ‘All right.’

      ‘And your life in Hong Kong can begin.’

      It was now four thirty-five. The ferry hooted and growled restlessly, and then moved fussily away from the jetty. André had clearly missed it. Alan would have to wait to see if he arrived on the following ferry. Well, he would do so at the café beneath the banyan tree, drinking beer served to him by the fat proprietor. No hardship. Or perhaps André wouldn’t be there at all. The whole deal was about to fall through. Perhaps André was not the infinitely plausible person he seemed, but a fey, untrustworthy rogue. Alan felt a pang of fear at this thought. Future Hong Kong life was feasible only in terms of Tung Lung rent.

      Then, like a miracle, André’s head appeared at Alan’s feet, rapidly rising in the stairwell. The rest of him followed: another beautiful suit, another beautiful smile of greeting.

      ‘I thought you’d missed it.’

      ‘Not me. I don’t miss ferries. But come, we must sit at the back.’

      He led the way to the last bench, the only one that was open to the world. A sprightly wind whipped in off the harbour; André smiled quietly to himself as he felt it against his face. He sat, removed his tie, wound it around his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he placed his attaché case on his knees, caused it to open with a double detonation and produced from it two cans of San Mig. Cold, naturally. They opened, drank.

      ‘So, my dear, how does it march?’

      Alan explained a little. André listened with interest. The connection with HK Business News amused him. ‘Done some work for old Reg myself, in my time. Usual standby, selling advertising space, selling editorial space, too, if it comes to that. No false pride, old Reg. Made rather a little killing, actually, in Singapore.’

      ‘Really? Oh well, I’ll pass on your regards.’

      ‘Wouldn’t do that, my dear. Had a bit of a falling-out. The killing wasn’t actually for him, you see. But shall I tell you an important fact? In this town, the one thing you never run out of is clients.’

      ‘Mags, you mean?’

      ‘Well, I meant it more generally, actually, but it is certainly true of magazines. One mag folds, another two spring up. Same in every other business. Drives some people crazy. But we who keep light on our feet rather like it that way.’

      Alan, more interested in his own affairs than in André’s summary of Hong Kong life, returned doggedly to the subject closest to his heart. ‘Do they take copy from outsiders, then?’

      ‘My dear, you are living in a freelance’s paradise. You’ll make a great living, have loads of fun. Get some travel under your belt, get around Asia a bit. That’s the thing. Why not start your own magazine? I’ll sell the advertising space, editorial space too. We’ll make a fortune.’

      It was not until the ferry cut its speed and made its laborious approach to the Tung Lung ferry pier that André turned to the business in hand. ‘I’ve pretty well settled everything with your new landlord. We’ll go straight up and see him, if that’s all right with you. He’s got a lease all ready.’

      ‘Chinese guy?’ It seemed worth asking.

      ‘Lord, no. Well, born in Shanghai, but the son of Baptist missionaries. All English blood, but rather Chinese in some ways. Plus catholique, in fact. Name of John Kingston, lived on Tung Lung for about twenty years. Unusual chap. You’ll like him.’

      Alan looked out over the surrounding land, the awaking mountains. It was as if he had received a light blow on the chest: the smallest tap, little more than the brushing of Oddjob’s finger, but a touch performed with such acute, well-nigh surgical skill that it was enough, for one half-second, to suspend the processes of life. I am to live behind this toy harbour, before this green mountain. I am to live in a Chinese scroll.

      ‘Ready for a climb?’ André asked. ‘You’re going to live in the highest house in the village.’

      André led the way past the café and the banyan tree, and past a tiny, almost a doll’s house, branch of the South China Bank. Beside it stood a fly-thronged collection of wide, flat, woven baskets, from which arose the scent of the death of a thousand sea beasts: the ambient odour of Tung Lung. ‘Shrimp-paste factory,’ André said airily. ‘One of Chuen-suk’s money-spinners. Here’s where we start to climb.’ They turned left off the main path and concrete steps rose up before them. Though winter and the temperature barely turning past 70 degrees, Alan felt sweat burst from him. After a while, begging a halt, he asked, mouth-breathing fiercely: ‘How many more?’

      ‘About halfway. You’ll soon be used to it. Look on it as Nob Hill. Worth climbing 176 steps for. Catch the breeze in the summer, which is pretty good news, on the whole.’

      Alan looked around him. A shower of inky blooms hung over a mesh fence; before it danced a butterfly, orange, black-veined. It looked like a stained-glass window. ‘Onwards,’ André said. ‘Onwards and upwards.’

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