Golden Boy Read online

  In a flash, the monkey was up the nearest tree. The music stopped abruptly and the plink-plonk man stood up to survey the situation. The monkey was out of reach, the tree too stout to bend and the remnant of the leash too short to be grabbed.

  At first, the musician tried to sweet-talk the monkey down, holding up a piece of a bun. The monkey just peered down through the branches. Not to be hoodwinked by this, it then slowly, strip-tease fashion, divested itself of its ludicrous costume, letting each piece drift to the ground where the musician collected them up, folding them as he might those of a child. His attention taken by this task, the plink-plonk man’s eye was briefly off the monkey which, holding on to its little cock, gave it a few masturbatory tugs before proceeding to urinate upon its erstwhile master.

  It was a moment or two before the musician realized what was happening. He unwisely looked up to be hit in the face by the full stream. This not surprisingly drove him into an irate frenzy, cursing the monkey at the top of his voice, throwing the clothing at it and then pelting the monkey with unripe olives, some of which it caught and returned with considerable accuracy, the hard fruit bouncing off the musician’s head.

  Tiring of this game, the monkey headed off down the street, swinging Tarzan-like from tree to tree, always keeping just out of reach of the musician who ran below, jumping up to attempt to grab the dangling leash.

  It was pure pantomime and, by now, had gathered a crowd far greater than any the plink-plonk man could ever have hoped to collect through his music. He ran along behind the escaping monkey, his face wet with urine, his fists clenched, pleading, cussing, cajoling and threatening the creature by turns. His swelling audience, meanwhile, hooted with laughter, shouted spurious advice and encouragement to the escapee.

  At the junction of Emma Avenue and Soares Avenue, a network of electricity wires spanned out from a junction box. The monkey, blithely swinging through the foliage, was unaware of the danger. The plink-plonk man saw it and tried in desperation to turn the monkey back. Enjoying its liberty, it ignored him. There was a violent blue flash accompanied by an equally brief high-pitched squeak. The lights in the shops flickered. A few bulbs exploded. The monkey was instantly immolated. All that was left was a charred corpse stretched between two wires, a drift of smoke and the acrid smell of burnt hair.

  The plink-plonk man sat on the curb, his feet in the gutter, and broke into tears. The crowd, now subdued, dispersed.

  I never saw him again.

  The single European man who lived in the cheapest room in the Fourseas was universally known as Nagasaki Jim.

  My mother emphatically warned me against him. So did Ching, Ah Kwan, Halfie and all the other hotel staff with whom I was friends. Even the manager, Mr Peng, who was usually aloof unless remonstrating with me for misbehaving, told me to avoid him.

  He was British, in his mid to late thirties, of average height with ginger-ish hair cut short and badly. His face and arms were freckled and he had watery blue eyes. Like the Queen of Kowloon, he also reeked of tobacco, alcohol and, not infrequently, opium. His clothes were always just the clean side of filthy although he laundered them himself once a week on the roof. He did not eat at the hotel but went every evening to a dai pai dong – always the same one – in Mong Kok.

  I knew this because I followed him there on several occasions, keeping to the shadows, stalking him as one might a wild beast.

  Indeed, he was like one. He could fly into a fit of anger at the drop of a chopstick, rushing at the object of his ire, his arms flailing. He seldom swore or shouted but breathed heavily. If he caught someone when in one of his rages, as I saw him do with one of the room boys, he would beat them about the head with clenched fists or slap them hard in the face. His assault over, he would speak rapidly and incomprehensibly in a high-pitched, faltering voice. Only later did I come to understand from my mother that Nagasaki Jim spoke Japanese in his raging.

  He did not spend his whole time in the Fourseas but, when he was there, he tended to keep to himself in his room, looking out of his door every so often to peer down the corridor. His actions were tentative, guarded, like a hermit crab periodically glancing out of its shell to check there were no predators about. Where he went apart from the Mong Kok dai pai dong and the shops in Soares Avenue, I never discovered. His life was a mystery, closed behind his hotel-room door.

  Over time, I gleaned the story of his past, as exotic and romantic and brutal as any of those of the other Europeans or White Russians who had run ashore in Hong Kong.

  Nagasaki Jim was said to be the heir to a famous British biscuit manufacturer but the family had disinherited him save for a small monthly stipend. He had joined the British Army at the outbreak of war and, by 1940, was stationed in Hong Kong with the rank of Captain. When the Japanese overran the colony on Christmas Day 1941, Nagasaki Jim was taken prisoner and incarcerated in the Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp.

  Life in the camp was harsh in the extreme. Food was insufficient and barely edible. Diphtheria, dysentery and cholera were endemic and medical supplies exceedingly scarce. Escape was virtually impossible: of the few who managed to get away, most were rounded up, hideously tortured then shot or bayoneted to death on the seashore, in full view of the mustered lines of their comrades.

  In September 1942, the Japanese prepared to take a draft of 1,800 Allied prisoners to Japan to use as slave labour in their war effort. The men, along with 2,000 Japanese soldiers returning on leave, were loaded aboard a cargo vessel, the Lisbon Maru. The prisoners were accommodated in the locked-down holds, the Japanese soldiers making do with the main deck spaces.

  Early on the morning of 1 October, an American submarine called the USS Grouper came across the ship off the Chusan Islands. Seeing all the Japanese troops on board, it was assumed to be a troopship. The submarine torpedoed and sank it. The Japanese battened down the hatches. Hundreds of PoWs drowned in the holds. Some succeeded in getting out but were machine-gunned in the water by Japanese gunboats. In all, 846 perished. Nagasaki Jim was not amongst them.

  Along with other survivors, he was trans-shipped to Japan and put to work. Conditions in the mines and factories were worse than they had been in Sham Shui Po but he still survived and was somehow to end up near Nagasaki when the Americans dropped the second atom bomb on the city on 9 August 1945. It was said Nagasaki Jim was near the city and not only saw the bomb fall but witnessed its horrific aftermath. This experience, I was told, turned his head.

  When prisoners-of-war in Japan were repatriated, he wound up in Hong Kong and, upon his discharge from the Army, did not return to Britain. Quite why was unknown.

  Of course, I knew little of this at the age of eight and yet I was well aware that Nagasaki Jim had more than a few loose screws: as my mother put it, he only had one chopstick. I was street-wise, too. What with Princess Anastasia and various deranged beggars who wandered the streets – not to mention the crazy hotel gardener with his pruning knife – I knew there were boundaries in life and roughly where they lay. Yet if, playing in the hotel corridors, one of us strayed in the direction of Nagasaki Jim’s abode, one of the hotel staff would run towards us and admonish us.

  ‘You lo go dis place. Dis Nagasaki Jim place.’ A finger would sternly shake in our faces. ‘You lo go! You savee? Lo go!’

  One day in the spring of 1953, I was playing cowboys and indians with friends along the corridors of the Fourseas. Or cops ‘n’ robbers. Whichever. The salient point was that I was carrying a cap gun six-shooter and strayed towards Nagasaki Jim’s place, intending to dodge down the stores-packed staircase to the floor below and come up on my enemies from behind. There were no hotel staff about: they were attending the monthly staff meeting with Mr Peng in the dining room.

  Just as I drew level with Nagasaki Jim’s door, it opened. I was not a yard away from it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said pleasantly. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied cautiously. If needs be, I was ready to ru
n.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he went on and, not awaiting an answer, added, ‘That’s a nice gun you’ve got. Would you like to see my gun?’

  Were I a year older, the innuendo and ambiguity of this question would not have been lost on me, but I was eight and a half and a bit.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He disappeared into his room. There was the sound of a scuffling about in drawers.

  ‘Come in,’ he called amicably.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ I answered. My seventh puerile sense was tingling like a high-tension cable.

  Nagasaki Jim came to the door and knelt down, his face level with my own.

  ‘Here you are,’ he announced and, from behind his back, he produced a British Army .38 service revolver. The gunmetal shone with a parade-ground lustre. The wooden butt was as polished as my grandmother’s dining-room table.

  All my fears of Nagasaki Jim evaporated at the sight of this wondrous object. It was the first time I had ever been close to a firearm with the exception of the rusting Turkish rifles in my grandfather’s garden shed, a heavy brass First World War Verey pistol he let me play with and the guns in the car in Singapore.

  ‘Would you like to hold it?’

  He held the revolver out to me by the barrel, took my six-shooter and put it on the floor between us.

  The .38 was much heavier than I had expected. I could not hold it up to aim, even with both hands. The metal was warm and smooth and smelt of gun lubricating oil. Whilst my hands were occupied with the revolver, Nagasaki Jim leant forward and, hooking his index finger under the leg of my shorts, said, ‘Show me your winkle and I’ll buy you a gun like mine.’

  Letting the revolver go, I was off like a startled hare. Naive I may have been, stupid I was not. As my mother would have put it, I was not as green as I was cabbage-looking.

  With the fluidity of a rat, Nagasaki Jim was up and after me. He threw my six-shooter at me but it missed and hit the wall ahead of me, smashing into pieces. I kept going, to be saved by two hotel guests turning a corner into the corridor. Nagasaki Jim retreated into his room like an earthworm down its burrow.

  I did not report this incident to my mother for the same reason that I had kept tight-lipped concerning the whereabouts of the Queen of Kowloon. However, I did tell Ah Kwan. That night, he and three other room boys let themselves into Nagasaki Jim’s room on a pass key and lay in wait for him. When he returned from the dai pai dong, they gave him a sound working over.

  Two months later, under threat of eviction for non-payment of rent, Nagasaki Jim hanged himself.

  5

  FIRECRACKERS, FUNERALS AND FLAMES

  IN 1953, CHINESE NEW YEAR FELL OVER THE END OF JANUARY AND THE beginning of February. Dependent upon the lunar calendar, the date varied from year to year. All that could be counted upon were the keen northerlies which blew down across China from the steppes of Siberia, the skies blue and more or less cloudless, and the astonishing spectacle of the festival. Friends advised my mother to leave the Fourseas for the duration of the main festivities, and we were invited to the bungalow at Mount Nicholson, but my mother declined. She wanted to be in the thick of it.

  Over the weeks leading up to the festival, firecrackers had been on sale in practically every shop. Even the fruit shop owner sold them. Mostly, they came in square cardboard boxes the size of a paperback book, sealed with a label printed with images of laughing children letting them off and crude drawings of demons or dragons. In the boxes, the fuses were plaited together so the individual firecrackers had to be shaken loose from what was otherwise a short string of them. Always coloured red, they varied in size from those not much fatter than a thick pencil lead and about an inch long – and named by us tom thumbers – to others three inches in length and thicker than a cigarette.

  I bought a box of fifty cigarette-sized crackers for a dollar and, with several of the other expatriate children who lived in the hotel at the time, went up on to the hill to let them off. We put them in holes in the ground or under rocks, lighting them with a small joss-stick. When they exploded, they made the holes bigger and one rock as big as a football split open. We had also taken an empty Coke bottle with us as a finale. I held the firecracker in the mouth, lit the fuse, dropped it in the bottle and ran. The others stood at a safe distance. There was a muffled sort of thoomp! behind me, quickly followed by a searing pain in my upper leg. I looked down. Blood was beginning to ooze out of a cut in my thigh as neat as a surgeon’s incision. I staggered back down the hill, my sock becoming glutinous with the stream of blood running down my leg. I was scared but, within a few moments of reaching the hotel lobby, the porter had staunched the flow. My mother arrived, decided I did not need stitches and bandaged me up. In an hour, I was being taught by Halfie how to let off a tom thumber whilst holding it.

  Although tiny, these firecrackers packed a punch sufficient to blow a five-inch-wide, two-inch-deep crater in the earth of a pot of the chrysanthemums that decorated the hotel front lawn. It was easy once you realized that the gunpowder was concentrated in the middle of the firecrackers. If you held one by the base, gripping it between two fingernails, you could light it and let it explode with no danger – so long as you kept your eyes closed. The first I held as it went off left a tingling feeling in my fingers. The second hurt but machismo demanded I did not show it and lose face. Thereafter, we embarked upon tom thumb fights, hurling them at each other. No-one was hurt. It was good seasonal fun.

  The first day of the fortnight-long, but not continuous, festival was quiet. All the shops in Soares Avenue were shut. The hotel room boys who were my friends gave me lai see and I returned the compliment, having been tipped off to do so. Lai see was a small red paper packet containing a small amount of money. It was not so much a gift as an omen of good luck and prosperity for the year ahead. I was warned by Ching not to swear, not to mention death, illness, bad luck or anything of that ilk, even in passing. Our amah refused to take anything but Chinese New Year’s Day off, despite my mother’s protestations; yet she did accept a thirteenth month’s salary as was common practice.

  On the second day, the celebrations started in earnest.

  Across the road from the rear of the Fourseas was a pro-Communist secondary school which occupied a triangular plot between Emma, Julia and Soares Avenues. Every morning, the pupils gathered in the school yard behind twelve-foot-high stone walls like those of a prison and sang patriotic songs about labouring in the fields, striding ahead for liberty, equality and fraternity under the red flag and in the footsteps of Mao Tse-tung. The accompaniment was provided by a phonograph with a set of well-worn records.

  Shortly after dawn, the school staff had hung strings of firecrackers over the walls. In all, there must have been two hundred of them, the walls looking as if they had suddenly been festooned with vermilion ribbons. And these firecrackers were by no means the little bangers such as might have graced a British Bonfire Night party. These were the size of a grown man’s index finger, the fuses woven together around a core of hessian twine. What was more, they were grouped in threes down the twine. The aim was not to provide a display but to create as much noise as possible to drive off devils, demons and the pantheon of other supernatural ne’er-do-wells which every Chinese believed occupied every spiritually inhabitable niche.

  I went into the street to watch. One of the teachers appeared at the corner with Soares Avenue, another at the corner with Julia Avenue. Both held large joss-sticks, the smoke drifting away on a keen breeze: it was cold enough to wear a padded jacket. There was no-one else in the street. A whistle was blown in the school yard. The teachers ignited the end of the first string of firecrackers, moving immediately on to the next. After a brief fizzle, the explosions began in the first string, then the second, then the third … In a matter of seconds, my head was filled with the report of the explosions. They echoed off the walls of the buildings as they might have off the sides of a canyon. The air went blue with smoke, and the acrid smell of gunpo
wder was suddenly inescapable and almost choking. A dense blizzard of paper blew along the street, thicker than snow. The explosions continued uninterrupted for at least twenty minutes.

  I re-entered the hotel with a blinding headache but a feeling of elation. This had been an exhibition of raw power, the elimination of demons, the establishment of good fortune and the cleansing of the underworld.

  Over the next few days, Kowloon sounded as if it were a war zone. In some places the streets were inches deep in fragments of acrid-smelling paper. The traffic stopped to allow fifty-foot strings of firecrackers to explode down the front of the taller buildings. Some of these, every two or three feet, contained an extra large firecracker the size of a tin can which went off with an ear-splitting detonation. Gradually, the firecrackers died down and a semblance of peace returned. On either side of many shops and doorways, new red scrolls with black writing upon them were pasted over the previous year’s, presaging good fortune.

  When I visited the temple to Kwun Yum (or Kwan Yin), the goddess of mercy, it was doing brisk business. The temple was always in semi-darkness, even on the sunniest day. At the rear of the altar, mysterious in the half-light of guttering red-wax candle flames and a few bare, low-wattage light bulbs, the deity’s effigy sat demurely, with attendant gods to either side, leering through the twilight. The altar was hung with an embroidered cloth in imperial yellow, red and gold. From the tarnished brass incense burner rose a column of smoke.

  In front of the altar was a throng, mostly of women and children, making offerings, praying or casting fortune-telling sticks. Amongst the offerings being made, mostly of fruit and food, was money. I was amazed to see otherwise poor-looking women dropping fistfuls of banknotes into a brass cauldron of hot embers. In a flare of flame, they were incinerated to a drift of ash rising on the hazy heat of the fire below. It was not until a partially scorched note escaped the fire that I came to see the currency. It was not dollars issued by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank but Hell’s Banknotes in vast denominations – $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000. This was celestial, not terrestrial, cash.