Golden Boy Page 10

  ‘You eat …’ Halfie made a kissing-cum-sucking noise ‘ … lo go down.’ He pointed to his throat then mimed spitting the bits into the bowl.

  I put the beetle in my mouth and chewed it thoroughly, swallowing the mushy liquid of its innards mixed with my own saliva. It tasted slightly muddy, yet the overriding flavour was like the smell of stagnant freshwater ponds mixed with smoked fish. I spat the bits out, ate another just to show willing, accepted a toothpick holder and a bowl of jasmine tea, the contents of which were more than welcome. Every tooth in my head had a bit of bee-chew wedged against it. Expecting to be violently sick at any moment, I went to my room and sat on the bed to await the advent of regurgitated beetle and tea but it never came so, half an hour later, I went down to the hotel bar and ordered a cold Coke. In the cubby-hole, all the beetles had been consumed.

  4

  THREE LIVES ON THE EDGE

  IN THE FOURSEAS, WITH ITS PREDOMINANTLY NOMADIC POPULATION, only the staff, the whores, one other expatriate woman and her son, a European man who lived in a single room at the back of the hotel and my mother and I were more or less permanent over the winter of 1952.

  My father came back from Japan on the Fort Charlotte for Christmas, bearing gifts. I received a battery-powered wooden motor boat and a superb model of a Chinese junk with handsewn sails and windlasses that worked. The hotel did its best to become seasonally cheerful, with decorations in all the public rooms, gifts of bottles of VSOP brandy in each occupied room (including mine) and Christmas dinner of an American turkey and Australian roast potatoes, brussels sprouts and carrots. The Christmas pudding was brought in fiercely burning but was inedible: it turned out the cook had set it alight with paraffin instead of brandy. One kindly old Chinese, who did not speak English and was the night watchman and odd-job man, went around wishing everyone a ‘Happee Kiss-Mee’.

  My father’s return was not the happy occasion it should have been. After delivering his largesse, for which he demanded expressions of deep gratitude, he soon slipped into his old short-tempered ways which he had presumably had to keep in check whilst he was on board ship. He was enough of a sailor to know that one pain in the arse in a wardroom was enough to unsettle an entire ship’s crew.

  The day before the ship sailed back to Japan, we were invited aboard the Fort Charlotte for lunch. I was shown my father’s cabin, the wood- and brass-work polished, his clothes neat in the drawers, his bunk immaculately made. Lunch was taken in the wardroom with the Chief Engineer and the Captain, both of whom wore uniforms with gold braid. The meal was beef curry and rice to which were added ‘bits’ consisting of crisp-fried onion, croutons, diced cucumber and pineapple, grated coconut, currants, chopped tomatoes, mango chutney, hot lime pickle, poppadoms, chipattis and flaky Bombay duck which, I was surprised to discover, was not duck at all but dried fish. When it was over, we were given a tour of the ship which did not impress me. I had seen bridges and engine rooms before.

  Leaving the wheelhouse, my father muttered, ‘Show some interest. The Old Man doesn’t have to show you round.’

  I had an answer to that but wisely kept it to myself.

  Returning to Kowloon across the harbour on a naval launch, my father set upon me.

  ‘You are a rude little ingrate,’ he said irately.

  ‘What now, Ken?’ my mother wanted to know.

  ‘Martin,’ my father answered. ‘Taken all over the bloody show. Might just as well’ve left him behind.’

  ‘Well, Ken,’ my mother replied, ‘he did see it all on the Corfu. Let’s face it, unless you’re a marine engineer, one ship’s boiler looks very much like the next.’

  ‘Neither the Corfu nor the Fort Charlotte have boilers,’ my father retorted irritably. ‘Not in the accepted sense. They’re diesel driven. That’s what I mean. The two of you. Blind as bats to life’s opportunities. As inquisitive as a building brick. Curious as a dead cat.’

  For the remainder of the day, my father sulked. That evening, I asked my mother – foolishly in my father’s hearing – why the other men on the ship wore gold braid but my father did not.

  ‘Go to your room!’ he shouted at me. ‘Put your pyjamas on.’

  ‘I was only being curious,’ I defended myself.

  ‘Get out!’

  I went.

  Ten minutes later, he entered my room. I was bent over a chair and hit twice across the buttocks with the flat of my mother’s silver hairbrush.

  ‘That’s for your bloody insolence,’ my father said spitefully as I wiped my tears away and rubbed my running nose against my pyjama sleeve.

  I had hit a raw nerve.

  One afternoon early in January, my mother took me to Tsim Sha Tsui. She was going to Hing Loon to collect a ruby and gold pendant she had ordered and I was to have a new pair of shoes. It was a cold day, the wind had an edge to it and I wore a thick pullover.

  As usual, we boarded the number 7 bus across the road from the Fourseas and set off. As it slowed for the last stop before turning left down Nathan Road, a face surrounded by rats’ tails of dishevelled, filthy grey hair appeared at the window next to me.

  I instantly recognized it. It was that of an old European woman who lived in a cockloft – a sort of semi-permanent shanty – on the flat roof of a tenement block in Liberty Avenue. I had often seen her wandering the back streets of Mong Kok, scavenging from restaurants, buying (or stealing) fruit from stalls and eating at the cheapest dai pai dongs where she swore volubly in fluent Cantonese at the coolies beside whom she sat. Most shop and stallholders kept an eye open for her, shooing her away with a broom or stick as if she were an alley-cat or pi-dog. I saw one or two Buddhists who were honour-bound to give alms to the poor taking pity on her but almost everybody else was hostile.

  She ran along the side of the bus as it slowed, banging her hands on the panelling. I broke into a sweat. This old woman knew me, in a manner of speaking. Whenever she saw me in the street, she would run towards me, an animated pile of old rags that stank of urine, sweat, rice wine, tobacco, opium and garlic. And, on occasion, shit. I avoided her and fled but, with an alacrity one would not credit her with, she would stagger after me, shouting, ‘Alexei! Alexei!’

  The bus stopped, she boarded it and headed straight for me and my mother. On the way down the aisle, the conductor accosted her for her fare. She snarled at him, muttered incomprehensibly and elbowed him into an empty seat.

  As the bus set off, the woman stood next to my mother, swaying to the motion of the bus and alcohol.

  ‘Gif me one thousan’ dollaire!’ she demanded, holding out a filthy hand.

  My mother looked over my head and out the window.

  ‘Ignore her, dear,’ she instructed me, sotto voce.

  I was only too glad to obey. Any second now the old crone was going to recognize me.

  ‘Gif me fife hundred dollaire,’ she insisted, holding her hand out close to my mother’s chin. Her nails were split, the skin of her hand ingrained with dirt. Her face was made up but badly, the lipstick smeared around her mouth, rouge heavy on her cheeks, the remainder pancaked with powder in which was etched a map of sweat, the contours highlighted by grime. Over her shoulder hung an expensive leather bag in good condition, almost certainly a recently filched acquisition. On her feet were a pair of common Chinese felt slippers.

  My mother ignored her.

  The bus stopped.

  ‘Gif me two hundred dollaire!’ the old woman insisted, her voice growing louder.

  ‘Would you mind going away?’ my mother said through gritted teeth. We were becoming the object of much curiosity from the Chinese passengers and she was getting embarrassed.

  ‘Gif me one hundred dollaire!’ the crone insisted, her voice louder still and even more insistent.

  My mother opened her handbag on her lap, unclipped her purse and removed some dollar bills. The old woman snatched at them and, as she did so, dropped something wrapped in pink lavatory tissue into the handbag. At the next bus stop, she got off a
nd swiftly disappeared, pushing her way through the pedestrians, moving with the gait of a practised drunk. We carried on to Tsim Sha Tsui and went into Tkachenko’s. When it came time to settle the bill, my mother opened her purse. In with the coins was the tissue paper. She took it out, felt it, unwrapped it, studied the contents for several minutes, replaced it in her purse and paid the bill.

  When we entered his emporium, Mr Chan was sitting behind his counter reading the newspaper. He stood up, welcomed my mother, poured us each a Coke and produced the ruby pendant set in rose gold my mother had commissioned from him. He tutted disapprovingly at it. Rose gold had a high copper content. The Chinese preferred 24 carat, 99.99 fine gold which was brassy and looked almost fake.

  As he put the pendant and matching chain into a small brocade bag, my mother took the pink tissue out of her purse and placed it on the counter.

  ‘What is this, Mr Chan?’ she asked, adding, ‘It’s probably paste.’

  He unwrapped the tissue and tipped a colourless stone on to the counter, rolling it about on the glass top with his finger. He then picked it up with a pair of tweezers, held it against a bare light bulb in a desk lamp and placed it in a velvet-lined tray.

  ‘Is a good quality diamung,’ he said. ‘Little bit damage, no too much. Can recut, make maybe t’ree, four nice stone. For ring maybe for you?’

  ‘How big is it?’ my mother wanted to know.

  ‘Maybe two-half carat,’ Mr Chan replied.

  For a moment, my mother was silent before asking, ‘How much is it worth?’

  ‘Is damage,’ Mr Chan repeated, ‘but maybe fife t’ousan’d dollar.’

  My mother stared at him. At the current exchange rate, the sum approximated to £312.

  For the next fortnight, my mother caught the same bus at the same time every day in the hope of coming across the woman again and either returning the stone to her or giving her the fife hundred dollaire she had demanded. It was the highest sum to which my mother could go. She never saw the woman again. The diamond was duly re-cut and my mother had the resulting three stones set in a ring as Mr Chan had suggested.

  I, of course, could have told my mother exactly where to find the old woman, but I did not for fear that, had she discovered some of the more insalubrious haunts I frequented, my freedom to roam would have been severely curtailed.

  The Chinese in the streets called the old crone the Queen of Kowloon. Bit by bit, I came to know her story, or what it was perceived to be. The truth would be somewhere near it.

  She was a White Russian, the wife of a high-ranking army officer who was also possibly of minor nobility. When the Bolshevik Uprising occurred, he was killed and she headed east with the White Russian diaspora. After some time, she reached Shanghai, settling there and making her living as a courtesan and piano teacher. She became the mistress of a Chinese gangster or warlord – the story varied on this point and may have been a romantic fictional episode – and lived very comfortably for a while. Then war intervened again and she moved on, drifting ashore in Hong Kong in the mid-thirties. In those days, she lived comfortably if frugally in a tenement apartment where, once again, she gave piano lessons. However, it was not long before she took to the bottle and pipe which were the start of her decline into beggary.

  Her looks now gone, she no longer had any steady source of income. Or had she?

  From time to time, she appeared at pawn shops in Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei with pieces of jewellery, valuable gems and the occasional gold coin, most of them of tsarist origin. Her tenement was burgled several times and thoroughly turned over, as once was she, but the thieves found nothing despite knocking down internal walls. Clearly, her stash was hidden elsewhere, so the thieves began to tail her but she was as sly as a leopard. Years of living on the edge had honed her senses to feline acuity. All that anyone could deduce was that, at irregular intervals, she disappeared for hours at a time into the foothills behind Kowloon.

  What had happened to her during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was unknown. Those who stayed behind and suffered the atrocities never saw her. Some thought she ran for neutral Macau, others that she had a Japanese ‘protector’ although that was unlikely as, by 1941, she could no longer have been a beautiful woman. Some thought she ran a bordello for Japanese officers but that was improbable as they had rounded up any women as and when they wanted on the street.

  In later years, as her mind began to slip and opium fumes befuddled it, she claimed to be Princess Anastasia, who had survived the assassination of the Russian Royal Family, but no-one believed her. She still came up with jewellery but at less frequent intervals and the local Chinese just tolerated her rantings in the street, her foul mouth and her stench.

  One day, a month or two after my mother’s reluctant audience with the Queen, I was trapped by her in a dead-end alley. She advanced on me slowly, her every step measured as if she were tiptoeing from stone to stone across a river. All the while, she was muttering incomprehensibly. Finally, not two yards away, and certainly close enough for me to be swathed in her odour in the windless alley, she stopped and studied me closely.

  ‘Why do you run, Alexei?’ she asked in English.

  ‘My name’s not Alexei,’ I replied.

  She smiled at me. Her teeth were grey. For a moment, a shard of the beauty she must once have been shone through her decrepitude.

  ‘One day, you will be the Tsar,’ she prophesied.

  I looked round her to see if I might make my escape. She glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘Are they coming?’

  Terrified, I shook my head.

  ‘If they come,’ she went on, wagging her index finger at me in an admonishing manner, ‘you will tell me. Yes?’

  I nodded, having no idea who might be coming – thieves, the police, a man from the Lai Chi Kok mental asylum …

  ‘I liff herre.’ She pointed vaguely to the sky and, stepping forward, stroked my hair before I could do anything about it. She then moved past me, her rags brushing against my face. I sprinted for the Fourseas and, to my mother’s consternation, for it was the middle of the afternoon, immediately ran myself a bath and shampooed my hair twice. It was one thing to have the Chinese touch my golden hair for luck. They were clean. She was a different matter altogether.

  A week or so later, I joined a gang of Chinese boys pelting her with gravel from the railway line. I felt no pity for her. She had defiled me.

  In 1952, The Bank of China building on Hong Kong island was the tallest in the world between Cairo and San Francisco. As for the remainder of Hong Kong, most buildings were over fifty years old. The streets of Kowloon could have changed little in that time, the arcades bustling with shoppers then as they had at the time of the Q’ing empire when men really did wear their hair in waist-length cues and pirates were executed by the sword on the beach in Kowloon Bay.

  True, Hong Kong was just beginning its metamorphosis into one of the financial powerhouses of Asia, but it was still essentially a very Chinese city with bicycles and a non-interventionist British administration.

  Men in pigtails may have vanished but little else had changed. Rickshaws were commonplace. Coolies carried extraordinarily heavy loads on bamboo poles over their shoulders. Conical rattan hats were widely used whilst the Hakka women wore hats with black cloth fringes like curtains hanging from the rim. People ran like hell across the street through fast-moving traffic to shake off the demons they believed were perpetually following them: sometimes, someone walking along the pavement would suddenly dart into an alley, slip into a shop or board a departing bus at the last minute, in the hope of giving the slip to these malevolent supernatural entities. For the same reason, many Chinese assiduously avoided having their photo taken for fear the demons would see the picture and be able to track them down. Unlicensed street hawkers sold sweetmeats, sugar cane, melon seeds and wah mui. These were plums soaked for several days in sea water then dried in the sun. When one sucked them, they puckered the inside of one’s cheek, the s
alt and the fruit sugars mingling together. Others carried braziers on poles, selling roasted peanuts or chestnuts, slices of hot roast pork with the crackled skin still on the meat, cut from a whole pig such as I had seen cooking in the Ho Man Tin squatter area.

  These were everyday sights in the streets around the Fourseas. What were much less frequent were itinerant street entertainers. Few had survived the war years and the advent of Radio Hong Kong, but one who did was the plink-plonk man: and I was there for his final act.

  My mother based his moniker upon the rosewood xylophone he played. His pitch was in Emma Avenue, directly behind the Fourseas, where he occasionally appeared to place his instrument on the pavement under the shade of the trees, squatting on his haunches behind it. After striking a few of the keys as if tuning up, but in fact to alert those in the buildings around to his arrival, he invariably launched into a Chinese classical arrangement of ‘Tipperary’. Once this was over, he opened a wooden box he carried over his shoulder from which pranced a small monkey dressed in the clothing of a Ming dynasty mandarin. To prevent any escape, the monkey was tethered to the box by a long leather leash.

  The plink-plonk man’s second tune was usually a rendition of the Japanese song known in English as ‘Rose, Rose, I love you’ followed by ‘Marching through Georgia’ in an arrangement possibly conceived for a Cantonese opera. He finished with an embellished version of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.

  As he played, his monkey cavorted about in a haphazard jig that bore no rhythmical relationship whatsoever to the music, while people threw down ten-cent coins from windows and balconies. At the end of each tune, the plink-plonk man pitched a hard olive on to the balconies or through the windows of those who had tossed down money and at the end of the whole performance, musician and monkey collected up the coins.

  All went well until one day when, halfway through ‘Marching through Georgia’, the monkey finally managed to bite through its leash. I was on the opposite side of the road and watched the whole drama unfold.