Hiroshima Joe (44 page)

He went under the lime-green, neon-lit plastic arch into the hotel dining room and ordered the evening meal. The manager followed him in.

‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Mr Sandingham.’ He held out a white, sealed envelope. ‘This came in the post for you.’

It had a ten-cent stamp stuck on it and was postmarked in Tsuen Wan, on the way to Castle Peak. Sandingham slit it open with his bread knife. If only there could be half an ounce in it. A quarter of an ounce. There was no possible way he was going to get any unless it was from his old source.

Inside there was only a typed noted. It read, ‘One hundred dollars, please, Joe. By Saturday.’

*   *   *

It was a warm, South China autumn afternoon. Flies buzzed intermittently upon the windows and butterflies flicked lazily from one blossom to another in the rows of chrysanthemum pots in front of the hotel. Insects could foretell, as Sandingham understood, the coming doom of December just as birds had sensed the quicker advent of a stranger winter at another time in his life.

He spent the hours immediately after midday in his room, smoking a small amount of his last supply of opium. The withdrawal symptoms weren’t affecting him badly as yet. That would come, though, as he knew only too well. And when that happened it would be the end. Once in the grips of the shakes and fears he would be useless. A clinic would take him in, he would lose his opportunity to earn and the downward spiral upon which he had existed for so very long now would sharply accelerate and he would speed faster and faster towards the bottom. They would release him cured, albeit temporarily, but washed out and without a future. The addict’s eternal curse, he knew, was to be saved from his demons.

After smoking he left his room, with the window open and the small electric fan on full, and went to the first-floor lounge where he sat in one of the easy chairs and thumbed through that day’s edition of the
South China Morning Post.
Nothing attracted his attention for more than a few seconds until he came to a small paragraph in the centre pages which announced that the Japanese consulate general’s office in Hong Kong had been re-opened upon the arrival in the colony of the new representative of the Government of Japan, Mr Osamu Itagaki. He had presented his credentials at Government House and the office was now officially reinstated.

Sandingham let the paper drop to his lap and he looked blankly at the potted indoor palm that stood by the glass screen dividing the lounge from the landing.

Normality was returning. Eleven years after the fall of Hong Kong, the blowing up of the Bren-gun carrier and the death of thousands, the consulate was open again. It was all water under the bridge, spilt milk, the passage of years lapped up with unemotional thirst. The politicians were back in control. Visas would be issued, passports stamped, trade links strengthened. Those who had died had died for what? he pondered. Eleven years of undiplomatic ties. He felt the anger surge up within him and he fought against it. Partly, he struggled so that the softness of the opium would continue for as long as possible; partly, because he knew that to lose his temper was futile.

The lounge seemed stuffy now, as if an excrescence was seeping from the newsprint. He folded the paper into its wooden clip and opened the glass doors leading on to the balcony. The sun was as gently warm as an English summer’s day. He leaned on the parapet and thought of the two Australian officers he had had his contretemps with in the self-same spot. They would know he was right by now. If they were still alive.

A faint brrrmming sound reached his ears.

Glancing over the wall, he saw the boy below. Once again, he was playing with military Dinky toys in the hedge along the top of the bank to the driveway. Unlike the last occasion on which Sandingham had watched the boy bomb his models, this time the child was erecting a camp hospital. A new toy ambulance was added to the fleet of vehicles. It was guarded by the tank. A white postcard tent was hidden in the grass, its top decorated with a childish red cross.

The boy was engrossed in his game. With the hospital set up and well defended against brutish attack, he skipped to the other end of the lawn where a small airstrip existed on a manhole cover. From there, he took off and flew, in his hands and in his daydreams, a Hawker Hunter jet fighter painted in camouflage colours. He banked around the hedges, landed to refuel on the wall between the flowerpots, took off again and started a long bomb run on the card hospital.

Sandingham steeled himself. He wanted to shut his eyes but he could not bring the lids to close. He wanted to be blind and to see, both at the same time. The bombs, however, did not shake down from the sky. There were no explosions. The Avon cannon shells did not strafe the hospital or attack the tank. The ordnance was left intact.

Now the boy was the pilot, talking to the control tower which replied to him.

‘Hospital, George. I see a hospital. Over.’

‘Okay, Bert. Don’t bomb the hospital. Over.’

‘Righto, George. Banking to left. Over.’

The boy’s mouth spittled some static on the imaginary radio waves.

‘They’ve got tanks, George. Shall I shoot them? Over.’

‘No, Bert! Do not shoot tanks. Repeat, do not shoot tanks. You might hit the hospital. Over.’

‘Roger, George. Returning to base. Over and out!’

The soliloquy finished, the boy turned the jet for home at the other end of the lawn.

Sandingham returned to the lounge, sat in the chair and sank his head into his hands. If games were real, he thought, humans would be infinitely kind and good and just. But they weren’t.

After a minute or two he got up, left the hotel lobby and mounted the four steps from the covered porch to the lawn. Sandingham saw that the boy was occupied in excavating further defensive trenches around his hospital with his hands, scooping the earth out and piling it over a hidden bunker containing a jeep. He knelt on the damp grass by the lad.

‘Hello.’

The boy started, for he had not heard Sandingham approach. A look of quick terror flashed across his face.

‘Hello,’ he answered tentatively, looking around to ensure that no one was watching him talk to the mad man, the crazy guy, the
mok tau.

Sandingham pointed to the tank and guns.

‘Don’t you think that having guns there puts the sick men at risk? After all, if there were no guns there would be no need for the enemy to attack the hospital.’

‘No. Red Chinese and North Koreans don’t care about such things. They bomb anything. Everything needs guarding.’

‘But the last attack came to nothing. Not one bomb fell.’

The boy chose to ignore this observation. He had been a British pilot then, on a mission against the Communists. The politics were reversed now.

‘This is Korea, is it?’ Sandingham changed the subject and cast his eyes along the hedge.

‘Yes,’ the boy informed him, surprised an adult should take any notice of his playing. ‘The hedge is a forest and the bank is a hill going down to a river.’

Sandingham saw through the hedge that a trace of water was running in the storm ditch. The skull-headed gardener had been on his rounds.

‘This,’ the boy continued, indicating a line in the grass left by the hose, ‘is the border between north and south. This place where the hospital is is called “Ping Chong Sing”. The hospital is a MASH.’

‘What’s a mash?’

‘Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. It’s where wounded men go. So you were wrong. You said the sick men, but they’re not sick. They’re hurt.’

‘How many doctors are there in the tent?’

The boy gave him a guided tour of the hospital with its surgical ward, its operating tent, the ambulance (the back doors on it opened), the defences, the bomb shelters, the underground jeep hangar and the guards hiding in the ‘trees’ of the hedge, ready to snipe at the aircraft.

‘David?’

It was the mother’s voice.

‘Here, Beth.’

She came out of the shade of the hotel porch and on to the lawn, catching Sandingham standing up as she approached. There was a look of annoyance on her face. He wondered if he smelt of drink or dope or both.

‘Good afternoon,’ he greeted her. ‘Your son’s having a good game here.’

‘Yes,’ she replied with unforthcoming deliberation. To the boy she said, ‘Get your toys together, David. It’s time we caught the hotel bus.’

The boy collected his toys into a wicker basket and followed his mother into the building. In the street, Sandingham could hear the hotel Ford shooting-brake start up.

In the hedge remained a toy soldier. It was made of plastic and was a man in khaki battle-dress with arms extended, about to hurl a grenade. Sandingham put the figure in his pocket.

*   *   *

‘I’ve got your grenade thrower,’ Sandingham told him when next he contrived to meet the boy: it was the following day, and he was having his tea in the dining room.

‘Thank you,’ replied the boy. He sat across the white-clothed table. ‘Can I have him back?’

Sandingham took the toy from his pocket and returned it to its owner.

‘I’ve some other toy soldiers you might like to see. They’re in my room,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ repeated the boy, ‘but I’m not allowed to talk too long.’

To avoid confusion or the scotching of his idea, Sandingham stood up.

‘Another time, then.’

As he pushed the chair back under the table, the boy asked, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Joseph. But you can call me Joe. And you’re Davy.’

‘David’, he was corrected. ‘Why do they call you “Hiroshima Joe”?’

Sandingham was caught off guard.

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘Everyone. They call you that.’

‘It’s because I was there once. Long ago. In the war.’

‘Oh…’

The boy was obviously disappointed not to have had the name explained or at least expanded upon. In this way, he might just as well be called ‘Bombay David’, because their P&O ship had stopped there on the way out and he had stood in the Gateway to The East on the waterfront and gone to the hanging gardens where the tower was that the dead people were put on so that the vultures could eat them.

*   *   *

In the garage below the hotel, the childen of the guests used to gather after school or in their spare time to chat or play. Mr Heng was annoyed by this, fearing the cars would be scratched or some child would be run over, but he had difficulty in catching them.

The main attraction of the place was not the cars but the fact that one end of the garage was sub-let to three young Chinese men who repaired cars there, serviced guests’ vehicles, maintained the hotel bus and took in outside work. Their area was always littered with the used parts of cars, razor sharp and springy turnings of steel from their lathe, replacement bits, tools and multi-coloured cotton waste, and the air under the bare strip lights permanently carried the pungent scent of hot engine oil and hydraulic fluid. The children collected what scrap they could like magpies.

David’s speciality was ball bearings. He was fascinated by their weight and shining steel coats. They rolled truer than glass marbles and, dropped from a height – say, his mother’s first-floor balcony – on to concrete, they bounced like rubber, especially the small ones. His prize was one specimen nearly an inch in diameter.

Tucked away behind a Dodge, talking in broken English to the mechanic whose head and shoulders were under the sump of a jacked-up car, he saw Sandingham weaving his way through the parked vehicles.

‘Hello, David. What are you up to?’

It was an innocent question and betrayed the fact that he knew the boy was in the garage without the company of his peers who were flying paper darts from the lounge balcony and getting into trouble for it.

‘Ah Chow is going to give me a present because I’m helping him while Ah Foong is out.’

There was a clunk under the car, something dropped on to the concrete and a Chinese voice swore to itself.

‘Davit! You han’ me big ren-ch, pleas’.’

An open palm appeared by the front wheel. The boy placed a monkey wrench in it.

‘T’an’ you.’

The hand withdrew and re-appeared.

‘You wan’ dis one?’

In the fist was a ball race three inches across and dripping light oil.

‘Yes, please!’

His reply was near ecstacy. He took it.

‘Thank you very much.
M koi.
’

The boy sat on the bumper of the black Dodge and spun the race in his fingers. Oil flicked on to his bare knees and he wiped them clean with a tuft of cotton waste. Sandingham leaned against the next car. He didn’t talk to David, but merely looked at him.

Bob must have been like this once. Poor Bob who was years dead yet not dead at all. As long as there is memory of something, then a part of that something must still exist.

For several nights, Sandingham had lain awake, half-drunk, and dreamed of Bob. In his thoughts, the boy and Bob had become synonymous. One was the other. Now, as he watched the boy entranced in his wheel bearing, he could see his lover once more, untainted by war or fear and unstained by blood or sweat. There was a similarity between the boy and the much-creased photo Sandingham kept under the chipped glass top in his room. It wasn’t age or even physical appearance. It was the naivety of youth, the unmarked experience of undamaged innocence. It was this that made him love the boy, though he had never consciously felt that way for a child before. Not that he could recall.

As he left the garage, he saw that the Chinese mechanic had marked the calendar over the workbench up to date. It was Saturday.

*   *   *

When next he saw David, the boy was sitting on his own in the lounge. He was sobbing and his face was moist. A dribble of saliva hung on his lip and he sucked it in. He sniffed and blew his nose. Sandingham wanted to hug the boy, caress him, kiss his tears. Of course, he did not dare and instead sat next to him, his heart pounding with the shared ache.

‘What’s the matter, David?’

The boy looked at him then bent his head to stare at his shoes. He held out a manilla envelope.

Sandingham accepted this and saw that it was addressed to ‘David’ and the address. No surname. He opened it and took out a buff sheet of paper with a typed message upon it; the names and places and the date were filled in by indelible pencil.