The Ballad of a Small Player (24 page)

I sat and got a cocktail with a ridiculous name and downed it in a minute. A wild fear still had hold of me, and I watched the new arrivals coming into the Café Grey from the corridor by the elevators. The girl with the mad hair did not appear, but what was to stop her from waiting for me downstairs in the lobby? I was sure for a while that I was being hunted. But it might have been the booze. I suddenly felt immensely alone. The room began to shrink. I gripped my banknotes, the last few I had hidden away, and they tumbled, somehow, onto the bar like confetti. The barman asked me if I was all right, but I hardly heard him. The girls were looking at me as if I had leprosy, as if I were about to die on the spot. I could see what they were thinking. An aging gambler on the rocks, capsizing
minute by minute. A man with fear in his eyes, teetering on the edge of self-control. But then again it was maybe because I had lost so much weight and was by now little more than a skeleton. Either way, it was clear that they were anxious to get rid of me, that I did not fit in with their elegant and youthful atmosphere. At length a manager came up and said that I was looking a little ill. Would it not be better if I went home?

“But I want another drink. You’re a bar, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. But we have to look after our customers.”

“So I can’t order a White Russian?”

“I think it would be better if you didn’t, and went home instead. Really, sir. You are dropping money all over the place.” His eyes glanced over my shoulder to make sure that there was no kind of scene developing around us. “I cannot expose my staff in this kind of situation. And it would not be fair to you either. Can I call you a taxi downstairs?”

“No need, young man.”

“Do you live in Hong Kong?”

“No, Outer Siberia. But I can walk home.”

He motioned to one of his waiters.

“Can you take the gentleman downstairs and make sure he is all right? Call him a taxi and charge it to the house.”

I slid off my stool and staggered to the elevators, shadowed by the nervous waiter. We went down in an awkward
gloom. As we came out into the plaza he asked me about the taxi and I declined.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“I’m going to clear my head and walk around. Don’t worry about me.”

I went back down to Queen’s Road and walked along it for some time in the direction of Jardine’s Bazaar. It was still rush hour and the crowds had not thinned out. The parks were open and I wandered into one, the shadows massing across it, and lay down on one of the benches. The trees here, banyans or figs, I could not tell, closed out the sky and I was able to doze even in the thick of the noise and bustle, and soon in any case the streets died down and a quiet returned. I slept then and some hours must have passed.

Homeless people are discouraged in Hong Kong’s neat and prosperous parks, but no one came to rouse me and send me on my way. The night became mellow and easygoing, and I slept into the early hours, dreaming in my way of all the things that I didn’t dare to think about. The moon rose between the gleaming and implacable towers, and in the park I opened my eyes and thought of the tropical forest that this island must once have been. An island of fig trees like these, magnificent with fruit and monstrous roots. And as I woke slowly, almost unwillingly, I was aware of a hand placed upon my forehead and someone sitting next to me, quietly waiting for me to rejoin the world. It
was like that moment at the Intercontinental, which now seemed so long ago, when I had understood finally that the supernatural is real after all. The hand was like a poultice, damp and cold but reassuring, and the form contained neatly in its elegant silk clothes was almost maternal. We said nothing, and indeed, looked at from the point of view of eternity, there was nothing to say anyway.

Also by
Lawrence Osborne

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD