Читать книгу Hong Kong Belongers - Simon Barnes - Страница 7

The past is another country: an aggressive, imperial power seeking constantly to invade and overwhelm the peace-loving present. Death is part of its nuclear arsenal, the midnight telephone a favourite tactic.

And so they were launched across space and through time, worries about the present – their daughters’ ability to cope with a stay at their neighbours’, the animals that were their livelihood – meeting in pitched battle with the unresolvable anxieties of the past.

Alan Fairs looked at his wife, marooned in a troubled doze at the window seat, about her neck the thin gold chain he had given her yesterday: her Christmas present, a Christmas not untouched by the shadow. He thought of the dolphin she had given him: carved on bone by an Eskimo, she said, a handsome little thing. She always gave him a dolphin, a tribute to the Christmas Day when they had met, a day not without its shadow.

He had twenty of these dolphins now, for she had marked their initial meeting with the first of these serial gifts. And now flying back: back in time, back to their meeting place, back to Hong Kong, back to Tung Lung, back to the past and its various moments of horror and shame: naked women; projectile vomiting; death by water – suddenly he found himself laughing silently. Laughing as the aeroplane grumbled on north and west to their destination, laughing at naked women and projectile vomiting, laughing at his own shame, laughing at Charles, who, wiping tears from his eyes, tears of laughter and agony, had said to him: ‘Sweet Jesus, what an indescribably sordid scene.’

Madness.

He saw without willing it, and with quite extraordinary clarity, the body of Karen Song. Sitting on his, or in fact his wife’s, cushions, drinking tea, both of them quite naked. He saw her reach for the tea, jasmine tea she had made herself, for he, also naked, was quite unable to do so. It was her voice that he had heard on the midnight telephone, half-cockney and wholly Chinese. Karen Song as was: Karen James now, of course, Karen James for nearly twenty years. He had never told James of their naked night: had never dared. The shame was too great.

The telephone had splintered the silence. That had once been a favourite phrase of Alan’s, for it was what James Bond’s telephone did when M needed him. And for once it was more or less appropriate: the silent night shattered by the insistent bell. And by about the fifteenth ring, Alan had made it across the warmth of the Christmas night, a sarong tied about his waist. He held the receiver like a weapon. But it was not M, with a summons to take on Smersh and Spectre: it was Karen Song, a call to take on an enemy more fearful than either. Sorry to wake you, she said. Got the time difference muddled, thought it worked the other way for New Zealand. That’s all right, Karen, good to hear your voice again. And sorry, Alan, but I’ve got bad news to bring you …

And, thirty-six hours later, he and his wife were roaring towards the jaws of the past.

‘How did he die?’ she asked as he held her, her face, lit only by the night from the open window, looking almost as it did that Christmas twenty years previously. In tears then, too, of course.

‘More or less of a slight chill,’ Alan said, ‘from what Karen told me. He’d not been well for a few weeks, but nothing serious. That’s how it seemed, anyway. Series of colds and flu and coughs. Just took to his bed, she said. And sort of faded away.’

‘He died of a broken heart,’ she said. ‘I always wondered how Dad was going to cope with 1997. Now I know.’

She had discussed the matter, a trifle obsessively, over the course of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as people with a sudden grief must. She talked of 1997, and how Hong Kong’s return to Chinese hands was the final invalidation of the dead man’s troubled life. Alan had objected that the handover did not take place for another six months, but she said that it had clearly been impossible for him to live into a calendar year that bore that ominous number: 1997: it was the rejection of himself by the people he had called his people.

Noble savages! Alan remembered the dead man’s orations on the subject, and the trouble the phrase had once made for him. My people are noble savages, Alan. And then he had given Alan the keys to a new life, a new freedom, and one he had never thought to end, settling into his Chinese village, an aggressive imperial power himself, and embarked on a course of delighted folly which he believed no 1997 could ever end.

‘What did you do out there?’

A question his neighbour Brett had asked him. They had gone to Brett’s for Christmas lunch, the usual barbie beside the pool. Alan, who never minded an excuse not to drink, had offered to be the abstemious one and to bring the horses in that evening, while his family stayed on. Brett, neighbourly and perhaps wanting a break from his own party, had driven him the few minutes between their next-door places. He watched Alan’s calm, quiet handling of the beasts. Afterwards, he had accepted a beer, and listened to Alan’s tale of sudden death and his wife’s need to return to Hong Kong for the funeral.

‘Are you going?’

‘Wish I could. Can’t afford the fare.’

Brett snapped his fingers, a normally irritating habit of his. ‘Tell you what. I wanted to do a Hong Kong piece in the paper, 1997 and all that. Why don’t you go out there and write it? Can’t afford expenses, but I’ll pay for the piece, and that should cover most of your costs.’

Brett was editor of the local daily newspaper; Alan did two days a week chief-subbing the Sunday edition. It was an unusual arrangement that allowed Alan to spend most of his time with the horses.

‘That’s a kind thought, Brett.’

‘What did you do out there?’

‘Now you’ve got me.’ But he talked a little about it: the year of madness, the island of folly.

‘Don’t you miss it? The thrill of the mysterious East and all that?’

Alan gestured to the extensive fields, the line of horses, heads nodding over the doors. ‘Try meeting the payments on this lot,’ he said. ‘That can get pretty thrilling.’

‘I thought it was a pretty good living you made.’

‘Nope. Not really much of a livelihood. Not a bad life, though.’

Brett, not being English, took a moment to realise that this was understatement. ‘Yeah, I see. Your own spread.’

‘Our own island.’