The Year of the Woman (3 page)

“Put in a definite question, it answers.”

“Good, good.” Still he remained abstracted. “KwayFay, this person I’m thinking of. Some people say employ him. Others say don’t.”

“Is it important?”

“Of course it’s important, stupid girl!” he’d shrilled, then collected himself and tried to smile. It was a
gruesome
gern. “Yes. Very.”

“Shall I ask one of the modern data systems, HC?”

She rattled off the three names of the American
personal
selection programmes, then gave him South African and two English. At each, HC grimaced and explained. He’d used those. Each was dazzlingly
efficient
but only left you with the guesswork you started with.

“There is only one other,” KwayFay said, getting the drift at last. “Ancient Chinese. It takes,” she added in a fit of inventiveness, “twice as long as modern western ones. I installed it at my own expense on my laptop computer.”

“It’s in your computer?”

KwayFay did the embarrassed laugh she was good at. “Encrypted, of course.” Would HC offer to pay extra?

“Could you use it, test this person for me?”

“Yes.” She readied herself. “Please do not tell me his name or anything personal about him. Old Chinese
system
requires no guesses, just describe. Nothing else.”

In the crummy store room, he spoke about some
relative
. She listened as haltingly he’d described a young man.

She asked about the possible candidate’s forehead, breadth of skull, his eyes, shape of his mouth, ears,
anything
at all, much of it invented nonsense, until her head was spinning. Drying up, she coined desperate questions she hoped would sound mystical, like was his face
sometimes
very different depending on his moods? Did he
prefer different colours? She asked if this mysterious applicant had a lucky number, and other suchlike drivel. She lost track and found herself asking questions she’d already put. The young man was maybe in his close
family
. Nothing could be worse than next-of-kin trouble. She’d heard that, though secretly she longed for kin of her own. Such trouble must be wonderful. Why did
people
not know their plights were lovely?

An hour later she was allowed to work in solitude. Even urgent work was cleared away.

The office respected her for it. Clearly HC was on some investment fiddle. Maybe, the entire office thought hopefully, some new tax dodge would bring in a bonus for all! Her friends admired her. Alice thought KwayFay was going to get a salary rise.

At the console on that odd day, KwayFay dozed. Ghost Grandmother had come into her head out of the blue and told her how to learn to trust people.

“The Water Mirror is very ancient. Of course Cantonese, for all other provinces of China are
second-rate
. Canton Water Mirror is best.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” KwayFay had muttered inwardly on that fateful afternoon.

“Ancient Water Mirror teaches,” Ghost went on, her shrill voice making KwayFay’s head ring, “fourteen types of human beings exist. Therefore it is true. You learned how to use water mirror, lazy girl?”

“Yes, Grandmother. Fill bronze Kwantung bowl with water to knuckles. Rub wet fingers round rim. Water piles up in a great cone in centre, like a candle. Ask
question
of the balancing water. Look in water mirror, see answer.”

“Good. Some people are obvious: Ox, Deer, Crane, Dragon, Tiger, all those people are easy. It is in the
person’s
features. I’ve always liked the Chi Lin, because he borrows strength both from Crane and Dragon, and becomes at least Deputy Assistant Provincial Governor, with many banners.”

“Which is worst,
Ah Poh
?” KwayFay murmured in her office doze.

“You have three,” Ghost Grandmother said, pleased at being asked. “Snake persons are untrustworthy. The Eagle also; has ferocious temper.
Lu Ssu
, the bird
person
, even worse, for it has feminine features and walks too lightly for a man. Who can trust such a person? Only another
Lu Ssu
!”

“I’m unsure, Grandmother, never having divined a person before for my
bosi
.”

“Bad girl,” Grandmother whispered, because other workers were trying to walk near KwayFay, inquisitive to know what she was up to, dozing and mumbling when she ought to be slogging to save the firm income tax they could divide up among themselves. Her screen was covered with meaningless numbers. KwayFay always made them up, as a precaution whenever she felt a drowse coming on. “No borrowed English words when speaking to Grandmother. Say
See-Tau
or
Louhbaan
, proprietor, as Chinese speaker should.”

“Sorry, Grandmother. Which shall I tell him?”

“Snake,” said Ghost with a cackle.

Snake! Untrustworthy snake, for a promotion?

At the end of the hour, HC fetched her into his office, closing the door on everybody.

“Well, KwayFay? Do I employ him?”

“I have answer,” KwayFay said carefully, searching his face. “I consulted ancient Chinese system. It says he is untrustworthy. Do not employ him.”

HC wrung his hands.

And now he came saying it had all gone wrong. KwayFay’s heart sang.

“You see, KwayFay,” HC said, swivelling helplessly in his chair, “the man is my wife’s cousin.”

“I understand, HC,” KwayFay said, merciless with her warm convivial smile.

“My wife’s elder brother wanted him to be a buyer above Sheung Wan. You know Ladder Street?”

The Mologai, KwayFay thought with apprehension. “You mean by the Man Mo Temple?”

HC actually winced. “He made mistakes. I incur
payment
.”

“I am sorry, HC.” She wasn’t. He’d gone against her advice.

“I didn’t heed what you said, KwayFay.” He looked up at her with sheep’s eyes. “I should have listened to you. You were right. The carpet emporium is bankrupt. I must pay.”

Fear chilled her. She was afraid to ask the only
question
that now mattered. He spoke on in a low moan.

“My backers made me confess I had had the right advice but disregarded it.”

Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he stared out at the traffic lights, moving his head every time they changed.

“They want your advice, KwayFay.”

“Who?” she asked blankly. Advice for what?

“I explained how correct you were, and how you arrived at the correct answer.”

“Who?” She was now badly frightened.

“Who knows how to use an ancient Chinese system nowadays, with things as they are in Hong Kong? Nobody, except phoney necromancers and tourist
hackers
in the Lantern Market by the Macao ferry.”

“I can’t,” she wailed. It was true. The People’s Republic of China was going to send armies to govern Hong Kong. The Handover would take place when Great Britain’s Treaty ended. Ghosts, spirits, Chinese traditions, were so much mumbo-jumbo. That was China’s decree. You would get the death penalty, or ridiculed into starvation.

“You can, KwayFay.” He’d gone quite pale. “Or the firm goes down. I haven’t enough to repay them. They were the backers of all my wife’s elder brother’s textile firms.”

“
Tai-Tai
Ho’s firms?” KwayFay said blankly. “Just for cloth?”

“It’s more than —” He stopped shouting and forced out, quieter, “It’s much more. And it’s not cloth. Don’t you understand?”

“No, HC.”

“Think,” he commanded harshly, checking his watch. He was always doing that because his motor was parked in a time zone in Ice House Street. He kept getting fined, every morning the same policeman. That’s what came of pretending he was a high-flying stock broker in Ice House Street’s stock exchange, when any idiot could follow the Hang Seng Index. Why not use the City Hall and pay the legit parking fee? Because he was a chiseller,
that’s why.

“To repay your debts, HC?” she asked, putting it as it was. Evasion was a rat in the rice.

“To keep our jobs, KwayFay,” he said harshly. “I had to tell them you can prophesy.”

“Me? Who?”

“Stop saying that!”

“
O
!” she said, meaning that she suddenly saw clearly, though she was shaking.

“Yes.” He felt in his pockets for another handkerchief but finally had to use his sleeve, his nape and face
running
with sweat. It was disgusting. Even squatter
children
never did that. She had only resorted to wiping
herself
in that way when a Cockroach Child. Even Christian nuns in their impossible thick garb only ever used a folded handkerchief to dab at their upper lip. “Yes, KwayFay. They want you to advise.”

“I can’t, HC!”

“You have to, KwayFay. It is like from an Emperor.” He faced her, would have cried real tears if he’d any body fluids left in him after so much melting into his crumpled stained suit, great Business Head that he was. “Guide them right. Understand?”

She nodded, throat too dry for speech.

“If you tell them wrong,” he went on, “they will think I’ve taken some bribe. Or they’ll assume I’m being vengeful, wanting them to make the wrong decision. They would…they would come for me. And for you!” He added the last with a kind of pathetic hope, we’re in this together, the way she imagined, so wistfully, that children spoke to each other when teachers brought them to the front of the playground for punishment.
She used to watch the English children, her face pressed to the wire mesh, at the school playground in Glenealy Infant School, wishing she was one.

KwayFay wondered if she could borrow enough to escape to Taiwan, except that would be hopeless, for where on earth was there beyond reach of the Triads? Nowhere.

Nothing but misery today. She wondered for a moment who the defaulting ex-employee was, for she had never seen HC’s wife’s cousin, the fool who put them all in this terrible quandary. She shelved the
question
. He no longer mattered. That was Hong Kong’s way with failures.

She left HC’s office, put a brave face on in front of everybody and resumed work in her pod while all the others gave her sly looks, signalling each other, guessing good or bad, lucky or unlucky.

She said nothing, not even to Alice Seng, wondering when the bad men would come to ask their questions that she had to guess right.

To a street urchin terror had been unavoidable. Now it was back. The more she thought the worse her plight seemed. She was sure HC Ho meant the Triads. Her boss was shaking with fear when she left the office buildings for her noon break. London’s Stock Exchange was barely alive at this hour, Japan as usual screaming alarms, its Nikkei Index on the wobble and KT in Statistics vomiting in the men’s room from panic,
complaining
he’d eaten something raw the night before.

KT imitated Elvis Presley at the Club in Easy Street with some Wuhan tart called Grace, kidding himself he was a high flyer. With KT, every gripe was “something in the food”. Yesterday it was
ngaw-paa
, the beefsteak; today it would be
gow-haa
, the fat crab they flew to Kai Tak from Australia. Yet KT never even ate, depending for
sustenance
on
bey-jao
. Any old beer would do. He loved San Miguel, in the hopes that alcoholic elation would carry him to success. He’d been told “Drink more!” by a necromancer down the Lantern Market where his father sold sandals to tourists at twelve times the Hong Kong price. Quite honest, all office staff agreed, because twelve was the fabled magical Number Eight plus half that again, which only proved how fair extortion could be, when properly defined.

She used to like KT, once had almost let him work into her on a date in a shabby cinema in Kowloon, then a near-erotic maul on some staircase – but that was when she was new to the firm. She’d been astonished the way he reached ecstasy groping her breasts. She remembered thinking, What on earth’s he doing
that
for? What was
this breast business all about? Until then she’d thought breasts of no account, simply there like the Peak District or the Motorola sign reflected in the Kowloon side
torpid
waters of Hong Kong harbour.

No, definitely no more KT. And no more submitting when HC did his heavy-breathing grope. She’d once had a share from one of Alice’s cousins – that was the way she thought of sex, a share of something for brief gain – and was amazed to find her palm filled with a creamy ejaculation in a cinema (re-run of
The Sound of Music
in Wanchai, the gazebo scene where Captain von Trapp kisses Maria). She’d used her handkerchiefs on that occasion, no less than ten cents for two down Port Stanley market, scandalous. The gruesome incident taught her to take two tissues in future, in case. For her, kissing was a problem. Anything oral she found far too laborious. Maybe you needed a bedroom behind a locked door, a building of high rent (not in Happy Valley, either) to carry kissing off? She knew from the blue films off Nathan Road – she’d seen seven; might she go for a lucky eighth, learn something? – what they did, but how did one lead into it? She didn’t trust
virginity
. You were dispossessed when you asked gods for things. You were no bargainer if you hadn’t been broken in. You started off cheap. A virgin, you were a no-sale person. Virginity was a nuisance, like an unwanted
blemish
, a sort of mole eyelid that was an irritant when you blinked, so best got rid of. She hadn’t, though she’d tried twice.

She went to sit in Statue Square, boldly racing to a stone edge and hating the Philippino women who got in her way, thousands of them chattering like colourful
starlings. The People’s Republic of China would soon make them all go home and good riddance…but only maybe. KwayFay liked differences. Except this new problem was a serious difference, a risk. Had she been talked into it by Ghost Grandmother? She couldn’t remember.

It felt bad. Like when she’d realised with terrible finality that she, alone of everybody in Hong Kong, had no ancestors. Some Cockroach Children, skulking tribes of street scavengers, actually knew their own names, ages, parents even. She was so envious.

Alone, she watched people emerge from offices. They risked life and limb to cross the road as Tram No. 70 to Shaukeiwan intimidated hordes of pedestrians with its ting-tinging and growling clamour. It was a scene made for barbarism, as befitted a British Crown Colony
established
back in the 1840s by scruffy sailors wading ashore in Repulse Bay. Yet it was brilliant, for Hong Kong owed nothing yet owed everything, and also owned nothing yet owned everything. Why else could America, that omnipotent giant, come cap-in-hand, begging this dot of a place to restrict its manufactures because the USA suffered? Hong Kong laughed a lot at things like that.

She was hungry. Already her hour was eroded by silly thoughts. She allowed herself six Hong Kong dollars a day for food, nearly a whole American dollar! She’d brought a plastic bottle of water, having filled it in the office. No costly Coca Cola for KwayFay, despite her need.

The hot rice street vendor was a scarecrow. He moved swiftly on his bicycle with the elastic bounce of the coolie under loads slung on a bamboo yoke. She admired
his knack, pedalling baskets of hot food on poles, among dense traffic.

She queued, third in line, her stomach churning unpleasantly at the aroma from his steaming baskets.

Today, he had the ubiquitous
jap-seuy
, the equivalent of the English bubble-and-squeak. Tempting, but money was always a problem.

She asked for plain boiled rice in a foil box. It would do. She carried her own chopsticks, and ate the food leaning against the end post in Statue Square, her place having been stolen by numerous Philippino women. Not wanting to be shamed, surreptitiously she brought out a piece of foil and unfolded it, placing her secret strip of boiled green vegetable on the rice, to make a lunch she could be respectably seen with.

Then she noticed the man.

He was standing smoking a cigarette at the corner as if waiting for someone. Taxis dashed, wheels shrilled, trams clanked, pedestrians rushed, but the shrivelled man looked steadily in her direction. Face of a walnut, clothes of a star, watches to die for glittering on each wrist, stones of higher reflectivity than diamond
showing
he was at least partly phoney yet composite, in the way of shopping malls financed by different companies without a common theme. He was calm, absurdly so. Oddly, people avoided him. Usually, Kennedy Town to Quarry Bay, you were hard put to walk a step without being nudged, elbowed, shoved, impeded. Not this man. He stood in ominous serenity, as if the populace
conspired
to leave him alone.

Perhaps they felt an emanation of threat? She noticed a young clerk bump into him and immediately withdraw
with nodded acceptance. Obeisance? The man drew on his cigarette. The ash stayed intact! He wore sunglasses that made hollows of his eyes. He wore a hat, almost unique except for tourists off some cruise ship at the Ocean Terminal.

He looked at her, still as a stork. Waiting for her to finish her meal, perhaps? Were Triad threat-men so polite?

KwayFay drank from her bottle, replaced the cap, slipped it into her bag and wrapped her chopsticks away. The foil container she always took back to the office, making sure it was seen, as defiant proof that she’d eaten a meal more expensive than any hawk-eyed observer might assume. It showed them that she was doing quite well for herself, thank you. Even if she had no man, she could eat like the rest. She moved off, deciding not to see the spy, and was almost in the building when he touched her elbow.

“Come,
Siu-Jeh
.” He said Little Sister as though she were a shop assistant and he about to buy something. “I give you a lift.”

“Me?”

“The taxi can only wait so long.” He was so calm. How did people be calm?

“
See-Tau
is expecting me at work.”

“We expect you more.”

“I might get the sack.”

“Impossible.” So calm, that “impossible”. Others would know this man represented others who were calmer still.

For a moment she stood in the rescuing bliss of
air-conditioning
, then reluctantly went back into the street.
She felt little desperation, just her familiar sense of loss. A taxi was parked and held up a tram, several bicycles, a column of motors. All waited with unusual serenity, so weird. For her? No, for this calm man.

He extinguished his cigarette. She settled in the worn leather seat. He sat away from her and didn’t need to tell the driver the destination. They drove to the Vehicular Ferry.

“You take me to
Gao Lung
, across to Kowloon?” she asked timidly, wanting friends – had she any, for events on this scale? – or anybody to see her, take the taxi’s number, stop the ferry because of a
dai-fung
, typhoon, coming across the South China Sea.

He said nothing. Was being calm boring? She envied him his tranquillity. Perhaps it was all show, just as a woman, dressed for an occasion and looking serene, might feel her heart thumping as her reception neared.

They crossed the harbour and in Kowloon took a series of turns. She tried seeing where the detours led: hateful Jordan Road itself, where she had stolen food so often when six, seven, eight years of age. Then Nathan Road with drifters looking for girlie bars that would charge them $800 for entry and another $1,000 for a girlie to sit with and drink the coloured waters, to report back home that they’d had a good time.

Tsim Sha Tsui, with its charging pedestrians and streams of motors and buses, shops glittering like one giant elongated crystal, seemed to be the destination. The taxi turned in behind Chungking Mansions, the cramped tourist ghetto of which the whole world knew, at 30, Nathan Road, dormitories with
cockroach-infested
landings stacked off malodorous stairwells. The
streets grew more louring, shoddier. Twice the taxi ignored one-way signs, oncoming vehicles meekly
backing
away. The man twice took out a cigarette and each time put the smoke away unlit. The taxi driver never once checked the rear-view mirror, another first.

“Here, Little Sister.”

She alighted. The narrow street was new to her. Had they re-crossed Nathan Road, to finish up near the Bird Market? Or near the huge tented Jade Market, where she might be able to get an apple, some orange juice? She felt quite dizzy.

The man didn’t pay the taxi. It drove away with a screech of tyres as if yelping at its liberation.

He led into a hallway. Two grubby vendors shifted their cardboard panels of Rolex and Swatch lookalikes, eyes downcast as the man walked past. He made a
gesture
to a small bicycle, move it, and a hawker dragged it outside. KwayFay edged past up the stairs. The man was fidgety now, clicking worry beads and humming under his breath. He was afraid. KwayFay knew fear. Cockroaches scuttled. The place stank.

A door opened on the second landing. Two men were seated in a pleasant room. A troubling aroma of
antiseptic
made her eyes water.

“Sit down.”

There was only one chair. KwayFay placed herself in it, clutching her handbag with its chopsticks, empty foil, her dollars for tomorrow’s street meal.

The two men were so different. One was a
transparent
threat-man, tense, young and full of aggression. The other was hugely fat, middle-aged, his features shiny with a constant beaming grin she instantly distrusted.
He hugged a black ledger. They wore western suits. The bulbous man had appalling teeth, all corrugations and brown stubs, and wheezed as he spoke.

“I am Ah Min. Have you heard the name?”

“No,
Sin-Sang
.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“
Mh ho yisi
.” She truly had no idea. HC’s garbled explanation had told her nothing, but was this anything to do with HC?

“Ghosts? I know nothing about ghosts.”

Except of course for Ghost Grandmother, and that was beyond human conversation. The mad thought crossed her mind that some Triad man might be a
relative
who shared her nocturnal lessons with long-dead Grandmother. Like listening in on a broadcast? Yet this older man looked vaguely Shanghainese, as did many from the east side of Central District on Hong Kong. “Little Shanghai”, the indigenous Cantonese called that place of sandwiched families and horizontal forests of washing projecting on bamboo poles from windows. She had no Shangainese relatives. Who had? she thought nastily. No Cantonese would admit to it anyway.

“But you guess —” the younger man began angrily, only to pale in terror as the other lifted a hand. Silence was prolonged. The senior almost looked at him but didn’t turn his head.

The younger man mumbled an apology, using the
pay-yan
term for himself to show humility.

“Profound apologies, Min
Sin-Sang
.”

The boss waited to some satisfying count on an inner scale of horror, then addressed KwayFay. Both men kept glancing at a vast wall mirror to their left as if at an
invisible observer.

“Can you kill?”

KwayFay felt her cheeks go grey and could not speak.

“Let me be clear. Can you predict death?”

“No,
See-Tau
.”

“You told HC of a man who would be late.”

“Late?” KwayFay bleated in panic. Had she? Who? She’d thought she was here because of someone in a
carpet
warehouse.

“For Happy Valley, the horse races. HC went to meet a friend. They were to gamble. You told HC that you’d taken a message from his friend who was going to be late.”

“I did?” She struggled back over the office’s chaotic entanglements. To her relief something came to mind.

“Ah, yes, First Born. I remember.”

It had been three months before. She had been
working
through a London broker’s instructions about a Tokyo transfer through Sydney, Australia, when she had come on suddenly, her menses as ever taking her by
surprise
. She’d made a run for the loo. HC interrupted her flight with some diatribe – if this man rings take a
message
, if that person calls say I’m out, HC’s usual
nonsense
.

She remembered telling HC a lie, swiftly invented.

“Somebody rang just now, said he’ll be late.”