Blue Lantern, page 5
“You said, when we first met, that it was worthwhile work. I should have thought it was,” she said, handling the cup and the napkin delicately.
He was being pressed to talk on a subject where his ideas were confused. “I said I was assured it was worthwhile.”
“And it isn’t? Why?”
The shadows behind Marsden and Sherwin and Parker defied explanation in a few simple words. “Hong Kong’s difficult to get used to.”
She gave her dimpled laugh. “Well, you’re a foreign devil, and this is China.”
He was sure she was joking with the cliché, but implying that there was a thread of truth in it. “Does this mean there’s a barrier between us?”
“No. The difference between us is a space, not a barrier; a space that can be filled with understanding. It certainly doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”
He would have interrupted and asked what she meant by friends, his own thoughts drenched in sexuality, but she went on.
“I’m a Christian. My family have been so for a hundred years. We were converted in Amoy by missionaries from England. I’ve had a lot of English education, but I’m Chinese. Chinese are very different, even Christian Chinese.”
“In what way different?” Brodie asked, oafishly.
Helen sighed, and then said patiently, “Many people base their lives on personal ego satisfactions. The Chinese take a longer view and seek a middle way.”
“Big generalisations,” Brodie said, feeling he had to redeem himself, but only plunging deeper into a bog. “I don’t see much evidence of a middle way in Hong Kong, or in mainland China, from what I know of the Cultural Revolution.”
“If you ask simplistic questions, you have to expect big generalisations,” she replied carefully. “Hong Kong is a British trading post. Mao is a passing storm.”
Brodie moved his head in acknowledgment. He couldn’t understand why they could talk so frivolously on the telephone, and yet at this first meeting he was unintentionally antagonistic, and their conversation mired in cultural differences. They were silent for a moment.
“We should go out for an afternoon, perhaps to the beach,” Brodie said.
She closed her eyelids slowly, and said coolly, “We’ll see.”
He thought for a moment that she was exasperated with him, and going to refuse.
“Do you have a car?”
“No, but I can borrow one.”
“You could take me for a ride to the Peak if we go out, I’d like that,” she said simply.
She looked at her watch and announced that she had to go. Without saying more than ‘Goodbye’, or waiting for him to get up, she rose and walked toward the doors of the lounge. Soon her figure was lost in the crowd. He looked round frantically. He wanted to walk with her, but he had to stay and pay the bill, and the waiter was nowhere in sight. He checked his watch. She had been with him for about twenty minutes.
5
Mike Brodie slept late on his day off. When he awoke he thought about his encounter with Helen Lau at the Mandarin; her calm in the face of his awkwardness. Perhaps he had damaged the delicate filaments of emotion which had begun to form between them. The colour seemed to drain from his vision of her, and his thoughts turned to Vanessa. He hadn’t forgotten Vanessa’s invitation to visit the Lotus; it had been received by him as a mere possibility, and continued to tingle at the back of his mind. Almost in reaction against the edginess of dealing with Helen, he looked to the relief of Vanessa’s unexacting company. He decided to go to the Lotus that night.
He spent an hour in the gym, had lunch in the mess, studied criminal law in the afternoon in his room – part of the training programme – and had drinks in the early evening with the barflies in the mess. Later he showered and shaved, put on the same summer suit he had worn to the Mandarin, and a fresh white shirt with a blue tie. Then he changed the blue tie for the red paisley he had worn to meet Helen, wanting in some way to link the two events.
The Lotus was in the busiest part of tourist Kowloon; it had new woodwork chiselled to look old, veneers moulded over its rafters to represent oaken beams, lanterns with coloured glass, dim cubicles with bead curtains, and pretty hostesses. The Lotus contrived to look both eastern and western, and could sustain any banal compliment a diner might utter. The purple smocked girls floated between the tables in their pudenda-length skirts. The Lotus was a game prairie for Andy Marsden.
Brodie was shown to a seat by a girl he did not recognise at first as May. She welcomed him as if he was an expected guest, and excused herself to call Vanessa without any request from him. Vanessa approached with businesslike calm, but when she was close, her interest was like a gentle magnetic field.
“It’s been a long time, Mike. I thought you weren’t going to bother.”
She was wearing a plain black, calf length cheong sam, high collared, long sleeved, distinguished as a manageress from the lurid uniform of the other girls. Brodie explained the limitations of his night duty. A waitress approached them, and he felt constrained to order a drink, but held back.
“Why not eat here, the food is gorgeous,” Vanessa said.
“I don’t want to sit on my own, and I’m not that hungry.”
He hadn’t come to eat. She must have known that.
“I can only talk to you for a moment. I can’t sit down. I can only stop by,” she said with a coy smile.
“Frankly, I can’t afford a place like this.”
He let caution go. He would have been more reserved about his means, but for her remarks at the beach.
She gave him a quizzical look. “Andy can.”
“Well, I can’t” he said harshly.
“Never mind, never mind,” she replied softly. “We’ll go out somewhere afterwards – it’ll be after one before I’m free. Come back for me, promise?”
The streets were pulsing with trade; spotlights glared on the desirable merchandise in the ivory shops, the silk shops, the pearl shops. Everything was cheap, people said; suits, carpets, vases and hideous oil paintings of junks, daubed by teams of painters in factories, high up in the tenements. American women, uncorseted in the heat, with corn-crake voices, called their lagging husbands. The husbands were peering into alleys, while the wives were drawn like magpies to the window-displays of gold brooches, diamond rings, and jewel encrusted watches.
Brodie was virtually steered by the crowd into the foyer of the Peninsula Hotel. He bought a paperback thriller at the magazine stand, and sat down in a comfortable armchair out of the main traffic. Shoppers of all races swirled through the brightly lit space, past the secretive smiles of the blue-coated Sikh doormen. The walls exuded glutinous music; porcelain-faced girls worked expressionlessly behind the counters, selling perfumes and postcards and necklaces. Young boys came into the foyer in bright coloured jackets, with cravats at their throats and ruffled wrists; they had piles of dark hair and suggestive eyes; they disappeared into the darkness of a bar, to emerge later with broad-chested Americans in checked shirts, or executives with rimless glasses and smooth suits.
At one o’clock, Brodie left the Peninsula, turning down Leighton Street, where other practitioners of the flesh trade were working without cravats or ruffles. He passed a stall selling pornographic books, and in the glare of a kerosene lamp, saw a pimp move on to his trail. He continued his stride, fending the man off with a few words, as he fended off the others who took up the pursuit afterwards.
Vanessa had changed from her managerial dress and mood. She wore a short print frock with her hair released to fall below her shoulders. Outside the Lotus she took his arm unaffectedly. Her touch thrilled through the material of his sleeve. They stopped at a café. Brodie had a beer, and Vanessa a lemonade. She talked about Wendy and May and her family. They asked questions and heard each others answers, but hardly understood in the chatter around them. Brodie felt no awkwardness in the confusion. The talk was a façade for the fondling in their minds.
For Brodie, Vanessa was not filled out with the agonies of a past, or the anxieties of a future; she was deliciously, now. She was within the aura of desire which he emitted; he could hardly resist reaching out his fingers to touch her intimately. Free of the ironies, and the nuances of meaning, which hindered his communication with Helen, Brodie and Vanessa drifted together – but in separate sampans. If anybody had overheard the pauses, the unanswered questions, the broken sentences, the syntactical oddities of Brodie’s talk with Vanessa, they would wonder how there could be a scene of any intensity; but the intensity was there in their glances, the timbre of their voices, the gesture of their hands, and the inclination of their bodies. Attraction smouldered in the shadow of incoherence, where each of them could have separate illusions.
Brodie and Vanessa strolled through the streets toward Mongkok, taking a cab some of the way to avoid the crowds. He regretted his remark about the food at the Lotus; it made him seem mean. He would have treated Vanessa to a restaurant meal, but they passed only eating houses for the poorest. Vanessa stopped at a street barrow where noodles were sold for a few cents. The foki worked over the steaming vats with a precision and style which would have done credit to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Filling the bowls, his fingers glanced through an upper shelf of mounds of cabbage, and onion, and thin sliced beef; he added a pinch of spices. A ladle danced in the foki’s other hand, casting liquid arcs of noodle soup into the bowls. A brief finale on the chopper to slice a boiled sausage, and the two bowls were ready, steaming, brim-full, with fragments of mint and coriander floating on top. And then the foki took a bow, laughing, laying out more bowls for customers, enjoying approval. Brodie remembered the waiter at the Mandarin; both were performing artists.
Brodie and Vanessa sat on wooden stools on the footpath, in the gas-light, sipping the delicate-tasting soup. Then they walked silently to the station under the orange sky, hand in hand, and hurried through the stark corridors, past the duty sergeant who looked the other way.
Vanessa surveyed the bed-sitter quietly. “It’s a nice room Mike. So white and efficient. And a little shower-room too. It looks as though you’ve just arrived, or you’re packing.”
“Funny you should say that.”
“Are you sure I’m allowed to be here?”
“Women aren’t allowed, but it’s a rule like so many others, always broken.”
Brodie and Vanessa enjoyed each other without restraints or demands or conditions, sailing close on peaceful water. At four am, Vanessa insisted she had to go. He would normally have given a girl a taxi fare, but perhaps because he liked her so much, he pulled on slacks and a t-shirt, and went with her in the cab. When he returned, it was five am. He slipped out of his clothes and sat on the end of the bed, naked, eating potato crisps, drinking a cold beer and thinking of Helen Lau.
He and Helen were trying to build an understanding with words, and the meaning of every word counted in the structure like a brick in a wall. Wrong words, inept words, thoughtless words, all became part of the structure, cracked, damp, crumbling bricks.
At three o’clock in the morning of the following day, the station was alive as usual; lights burned; waxed floors shone, buffed with a polisher which always seemed to be working somewhere; clerks bent over desks; a typewriter clattered; voices rasped on the two-way radio. It was the hour when the brightness in the station seemed at its most intense. Cantonese voices rose and fell; footfalls echoed on the tiles; papers rustled like wire scraping metal; and the wall-clocks in every room clicked away the seconds.
Brodie, alone in the report room, was completing the papers on a rash of arrests he had made that night. He heard the squeak of heavy shoes, and a laboured breath behind him.
“You’ve been busy – again, Mike.”
Brodie swung round to the man who administered the work of the station. Senior Sergeant Flinn was tight in his khaki uniform, his black belt like a band on a beer barrel. He had the pouched jaws and lardy chin of a glutton.
“Are you complaining, Barry?”
“Y’ makin’ work for yourself,” Flinn growled.
“I don’t get you.”
“Come and see me when you’ve finished.”
Flinn was regarded with a mixture of awe and uncertainty by those at Brodie’s level. He spent freely, generous to his colleagues. In the office he was all-pervasive, day and night, but quiet in his manner. He was in his mid-forties, unmarried, and lived with a Chinese woman. He had been in the Force for fifteen years, and it was said that he aspired to no more than his position as a senior sergeant. In an indirect way, Flinn controlled the station as Sergeant Lam controlled Brodie’s squad. Flinn was an intermediary between the commissioned officers, most of whom were ethnic whites or Portugese, and the Chinese constables and noncoms. He knew the men, and he made himself as much one of them as a westerner could. He spoke fluent street Cantonese, but like most on the streets, couldn’t read a Chinese newspaper. Flinn’s mastery of administration brought with it a kind of authority. He probably knew more about the relationships between the staff above and below him than any other person at Mongkok. He was reputed to be able to have a commissioned officer transferred or have his duties changed. He could make an officer’s path easy or difficult, by holding or moving him. Postings and promotions were dependent on confidential reports, and although Flinn did not write them, he saw them, and was crucial in providing information for them.
Brodie signed off his papers, placed them on the duty officer’s desk, and went into the small office where Flinn hunched over empty in-and-out trays. A clean scribbling block and a sharpened pencil lay before him on the blotter; a few files with anonymous spines were on the shelf behind him; all the rest was wood and linoleum and white paint. He picked the fingernails of his fat hands with a paper-knife.
“Siddown, Mike. We need to talk.”
Brodie tried to understand why Flinn should be displeased – and why the man was at his post at this hour. Nothing around Flinn suggested that he had been working. His deeply cratered, you’re lying to me eyes, were alert.
“What’s the matter, Barry?”
Although Flinn was massively superior in influence, he was nominally Brodie’s junior in rank, so Brodie felt comfortable being familiar. He found Flinn faintly repulsive, but he had no reason to dislike him.
“Let’s talk over lunch. Day after tomorrow. Meet here, twelve thirty.”
Flinn made the invitation sound like an order, and in a way it was an order. Brodie was immediately uneasy, although lunch sounded friendly. Flinn showed no feeling. Years in the east had taught him impassivity. He was not regarded as clever, but the few ideas in his head had evidently been honed into effective tools which made him formidable.
“Have I done something wrong?”
Flinn had seen plenty of rookie inspectors like Brodie, and he perhaps liked to see a new boy on edge, sweating for a couple of nights; it might be more effective than just talking.
“We need to straighten out a few things about your work, that’s all.”
“What things?”
Brodie had a stab of irritation. He’d been as meticulous as he could be about his duties. He hadn’t stinted in taking trouble, or giving time. He’d learned the book and followed the book. He thought he’d been doing well.
“Lunch, Inspector Brodie. Day after tomorrow,” Flinn said with disdain.
6
On a sultry afternoon with thunder rumbling in the distance, Mike Brodie and Andy Marsden walked down Lo Shek Street in Kowloon. Marsden had assured Brodie that that they would visit a genuine massage establishment dedicated to the art. He had given the assurance because Brodie complained that the massage parlours were really brothels. They passed a number of shops advertising every possible variety of massage, and claiming amazing benefits for the health, as well as entertainment. Marsden ignored the touts, and led the way to conservative office-like premises with frosted windows and a brass plate on the door. Inside, the tiled lobby had potted palms, a glass cubicle containing a receptionist, a list of prices on the wall, and whiff of chlorinated steam in the air. A white-jacketed male attendant escorted them to a deserted locker room, and handed over the keys. The place seemed long established; the damp wooden duckboards had absorbed the cheesy tread of years of bare feet.
Marsden began to undress, and returned suddenly to a subject which had been preoccupying both of them. “You know, your friend Sherwin is crazy to have filed a report.”
“I suppose he feels he has to react honestly,” Brodie said, selecting a locker.
Marsden paused, watching Brodie. “It’ll do no good. You either conform here, or leave. It’s no use trying to crusade. Look about you, Mike.”
Marsden waved an arm around the stifling locker room, and embraced the whole crowded island and peninsula.
“You have to bend to fit into this environment. You have to accept things you wouldn’t accept in Pall Mall or Sauchiehall Street. If you don’t want to accept, you have to ignore. Europeans have been making a good living here for a hundred and fifty years. They don’t get into a sweat about conditions.”
Brodie nodded uncertainly, and followed Marsden along a passage, rank with a contest between the odour of the male, and disinfectant. Brodie touched Marsden’s arm and stopped him, the two of them naked, facing each other, one fair and shining, the other dark and hairy. Brodie felt an intimacy between them as Marsden’s black eyes softened on him.
“Would you take the money, Andy?”
Marsden raised his eyelids expectantly. Then he smiled. “Mike, you disappoint me. I thought you were …going to say something personal.”
