Hiroshima Joe (58 page)

Living almost entirely in his room was rather like existing in a more luxurious
eiso.
There was no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one with whom to share his troubles. On the Friday before Christmas, when the telephone rang, it made him jump and shake. He had not used it for more than two months. He let it jangle for a full minute before lifting the receiver. It was the hospital: an orderly had been instructed to ask after his health and to invite him to attend the doctors’ surgery that afternoon.

‘I’m afraid I can’t make it until after Christmas at the earliest,’ he lied.

‘Dr Gresham is most anxious to see you, sir. He asked me to say that if you were too ill to cross the harbour then he would be willing to visit you.’

Sandingham looked about his room. He was ashamed of it and would not want to display it to another European. But there was no escaping the fact that, one way or the other, the doctor would get to see him.

‘I think I can possibly make it. This afternoon? What time?’

‘Two-thirty, sir. And could you please bring a urine sample, sir?’

The festive atmosphere around the hotel bar did not impress or exhilarate Sandingham very much. He was struck initially by a sense of revulsion at its hearty seasonal
bonhomie,
then by a feeling of deep nostalgia. He shrugged this off as he pushed through the glass doors to the waiting hotel shooting-brake.

As the vehicle swung right along Waterloo Road a black Ford Prefect slipped out of a parking place and followed it at a discreet distance. This did not fool Sandingham. He had known it had been standing guard over him for three days.

‘Nat’han Low?’ enquired the driver.

‘Star Ferry,’ answered the American who was sitting with his wife next to Sandingham in the seat by the window. ‘And you, sir?’

Sandingham could trace no irony implicit in the ‘sir’ and guessed that its utterance was the result of a good mid-western upbringing rather than a hint of New York smart-assedness.

‘Star Ferry as well, please.’

‘Clayton Sellers, Junior.’ The American offered his hand and Sandingham shook it once. ‘My wife Blanche. We come from Omaha, Nebraska.’ Sandingham tipped his head to her. ‘You residin’ in the hotel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been here lawng? I mean, you live here in Hawng Kawng?’

The rhyme caused Sandingham to smile. Few things did these days, but this ludicrous man struck him as funny and, for that reason, Sandingham liked him.

‘Since the war, more or less.’

‘That’s a helluva time, sir.’

His wife chipped in, ‘Can you recommend any sights for us to see? We are just passing through, you understand. My husband is on business. He works for…’

She named a big corporation, but Sandingham missed it. The black Ford had come alongside the hotel bus at the traffic lights on Nathan Road. A man in the passenger seat was speaking rapidly to the hotel driver in the Shanghai dialect of which Sandingham was ignorant. The driver made a reply and the lights changed. He shuffled the steering wheel through his hands and the bus shooting-brake turned left. The Ford continued across the junction. Sandingham could tell the driver was worried.

‘What’s the matter, Ah Cheong?’ he asked in Cantonese so that the American couple could not understand.

‘That is a bad man. He speaks bad things.’

‘What sort of bad things?’

Ah Cheong cast a quick glance over his shoulder.

‘He says you a wicked man. He says I should not take you in the hotel bus again. I told him that I had to because you are a hotel guest. He said if I do that, he will make trouble for me and my family.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Ah Cheong. I’ll not use the bus after today. Not for a while.’

The driver looked relieved and thanked him. Sandingham put the problem to the rear of his mind.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Places to visit? How much time have you?’

‘Until January two. We fly out Pan American on January two.’

‘Ample time. You must visit Hollywood Road – they call it “Cat Street” – and the temple there. Then you must go out to Repulse Bay and to the floating restaurants in Aberdeen. You should do a tour of the New Territories, too. Don’t miss Kam Tin: it’s a walled village, centuries old. Have you been up The Peak?’

‘Not yet. We’re on our way there now. Going up the mountain railroad.’

‘It’s often best to travel up by taxi and down in the Peak Tram, as they call the mountain railway.’

In that way, Sandingham obtained his escort across the ferry and up to the hospital.

*   *   *

‘How have you been, Joe?’

‘Not so well. The shakes are worse and I’m off my food a bit. My throat’s a bit worse. It still hurts to pass water.’ He handed Gresham a beer bottle with an inch of urine in it. ‘Best soak the label off before leaving it around. Especially near Christmas,’ he joked.

Gresham chuckled and said, ‘What are you doing over the holiday?’

‘The usual, I suppose. Stay in my room, have a drink or two. Listen to the radio. Be a Queen’s speech this year.’

‘It’s a lousy time, Christmas, when you’re single. I remember it from when I was a medical student. My parents were killed in the war so I had no family.’

Sandingham made no reply.

Shuffling through the medical papers on his clipboard, Gresham added, ‘And chase a dragon?’

‘Probably. Yes – chase a dragon.’

Lying on the couch, the white sheet under him, seemed to accentuate Sandingham’s illness. His legs, with their rough sore patches, appeared more starkly diseased against the blue-white of the hospital linen. His hand shook more visibly and his thinning hair was somehow thinner with the overhead spotlight shining through it. Gresham picked up Sandingham’s right hand and pressed the fingernails. The quick was white and remained so after the pressure was released.

‘That hurt?’

‘A bit. Not a stabbing pain. More a throb.’

The doctor held an ophthalmoscope to Sandingham’s eye, the thin pin-beam of light making Sandingham dizzy. He tightened his fist on the rim of the couch.

‘The light bother you?’

‘Yes. Strong light has been affecting me for some months.’

‘Let me see … sit up, will you?’

Sandingham sat up and dropped his legs over the edge of the couch: they did not reach to the ground and he felt like a child in too high a chair. Gresham felt under his jaw, under his arms and around his sides. He prodded his liver. He pulled Sandingham’s eyelids down and studied the faintly pink mucosa. He took his pulse. He depressed Sandingham’s tongue with a wooden spatula and peered into his pharynx with a pen torch.

‘Glands bothering you?’

‘I don’t think so. I have noticed blood passing out with my faeces.’

Gresham weighed him, wrapped a sphygmometer around his arm and pumped up the rubber bulb. The mercury column rose and bobbed in its tube. Gresham made notes.

‘Your diverticulosis – the blood in your faeces – how long has this been happening?’

‘A while. I can’t be sure.’

‘As long as your easy bruising?’

Sandingham’s arms and shins were mottled with bruises in various stages of discolouration. Around them his skin had a shiny white pallor to it which was flaking.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

He scratched at his thigh, a dust of himself gathering under his nails. He sucked them clean.

‘I seem to have dandruff all over,’ he remarked.

The doctor made no comment but pressed into his back and listened to Sandingham’s lungs through a stethoscope. When he pulled the black nipples of the instrument from his ears his face was grim.

‘I’ll not beat about the bush, Joe. I don’t think it is fair for me to do so. I’m going to lay it on the line, as the Yanks say. I could try to fool you, but you know and I know that is wrong and I think I should spell it out to you. Frankly, I’ve bad news and Dr Stoppart will confirm it.

‘Your samples have been tested here but we’ve also had some of them flown back to the UK for analysis and a second opinion. They have better testing facilities there than we have here.

‘It’s not dandruff you have but a kind of skin cancer. There is no cure for it, but we can slow it down with a new ointment from the USA. We’ve got some of that…’ He picked up a tube from his desk. It had yellow and black printing on the label. ‘… And want you to use it. It’s still experimental in that it’s going through clinical trials. You’re one of them, a guinea pig, so I need you to be on hand for testing in the future. Will that be okay?’

Avoiding Gresham’s eyes, Sandingham said that it would. Leung’s private army permitting – but that he did not add. A murder charge on top of all this was not something to relish.

‘That’s not all, I’m afraid. You know you are anaemic: you also have, we are fairly sure, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. This is because the marrow in your bones is malfunctioning, to put it crudely. This may be the cause in part of your passing blood: you may have thrombocytopenia – internal bleeding. We need to test further to know this for sure.’

‘What does this mean?’ questioned Sandingham, though he was aware of the implications from the earlier briefing he had had from Gresham and Dr Stoppart.

‘You’ll likely fall prey to common illnesses and some not-so-common ones, too. Your resistance is lowered, and what resistance there is will be further reduced by your drug habit. Before you ask, I must say we are pretty sure. And there is no really useful treatment. There are some drugs we can offer you, but they are new and largely untried in the field, so to speak.’ He tugged the stethoscope from his neck and folded it into its black wooden box. ‘I’m really very sorry. It’s a sod of a thing to tell you at Christmas.’

‘You mean, at my last Christmas.’

It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact that Sandingham had absorbed and which he had, without proof, been expecting for several months.

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘It depends. I can’t calendar it. Next month, possibly – that would be the earliest. Two years at the most, if you were lucky. You have a lot going against you.’ He looked straight at Sandingham. ‘Why don’t you chuck in your habit? It would help you.’

Yet Sandingham knew that it wouldn’t. It would make things worse. He made no reply.

As Sandingham dressed to leave, Gresham said, ‘You must keep in touch. We’d like to see you at least weekly. Today’s Friday. Boxing Day next Friday. Can I see you the Monday after Christmas?’

Sandingham nodded. ‘Why not?’

He went on foot to the Bowen Road station of the Peak Tram. There was little point in maintaining a low profile from what he now thought of as ‘Choy’s Boys’: if they didn’t kill him, the radiation would do the task for them. The only difference would be the pain: perhaps it would be best to let nature take her foul course than let some Chinese hood have his pleasure with sharpened bamboo strips and a razor.

He boarded the up-bound tram, giving his fare to the bespectacled Chinese ticket collector who stood at an angle of forty-five degrees to the tram cabin floor. As it passed the down-bound above May Road he saw Mr and Mrs Clayton Sellers, Jnr, sitting close to each other in the front seat. Blanche Sellers – was she ‘Junior’ too? he wondered – chanced a quick wave to him before grabbing on to the window frame again out of repressed panic. May Road was the steepest part of the track.

At the top station, below Mount Austin, Sandingham crossed the junction by the taxi rank and set off down Harlech Road. He walked as briskly as he could, but was soon out of breath and had to lean against a railing to rest. It dented his palm painfully, and he heard himself say, ‘For Chrissake, driver!’ in an exasperated voice.

His strength regained, Sandingham started off again at a more leisurely pace. As he strolled under the winter trees he let his past gather about him. Vague voices returned that he had not heard for years.

‘Iron railings on either side. Try not to decorate them with khaki … the British Army doesn’t survive on tea, tinned jam and powdered eggs … Very good, Bellerby … If your pecker stays aloft, your men’s will … Jay! We’ve got two hours…’

He halted at the fork in the road where the left took him either down to the old gun emplacement or along the north slope of High West and the rifle range. He looked down the mountainside to the Hill above Belcher’s.

‘Fancy a little snort for the road? Sit down, dear boy!’ chortled a voice in the wind.

The butts of the range were made of concrete and Sandingham took shelter in them from the drizzle that was seeping out of the fog a hundred feet higher up. On the ground, by the target frames, there was a small pile of spent copper bullets dug out of the rear bank of the range by children. He picked the bullets up, one by one, and tossed them to and fro in his hands.

*   *   *

Choy had been waiting for him at the entrance to the Star Ferry pier. As the crowd surged forwards down the steeply tipping gangway he took Sandingham’s elbow.

‘Allow me to help you down, Mr Sandingham,’ he said amiably. ‘A man in your state of health needs a helping hand.’

‘Fuck off!’ Sandingham muttered. He shook his elbow free and promptly stumbled. The gangway was at such a clumsy angle he had difficulty finding his step on the slats. He felt momentarily dizzy as he sat heavily on a bench.

Once on the ferry, Choy sat down next to him.

‘You are very sick. You need to see a doctor.’

After his earlier statement on the gangway Sandingham had wondered if Choy had managed to bribe or threaten his way into the Bowen Road hospital records, but his speech now suggested that he wasn’t in full control of the facts.

‘I may have something that might cure your illness,’ Choy continued. ‘Look.’

In his hand he was carrying that morning’s edition of the
Hong Kong Standard;
wrapped in it was a thick-handled bowie knife, the steel blade of which glinted along its cutting edge. Sandingham felt an involuntary shudder course through his body.

‘Consider this, Joe.’ Choy’s voice was low yet crystalline with menace as he bent slightly to Sandingham’s ear. ‘If I were sitting where you are, and you were here, even with all these people about us, I would need only to strike the palm of my hand against this to push it through your clothing and into your stomach. Then I could toss it away into the harbour. Do you know the bottom of Hong Kong harbour is thick with mud? It would sink from sight forever. Then I would shout for help. I would get away as soon as the ferry arrived on Kowloon-side. But you, Joe? In your health, you would not live long with your stomach torn.’