World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (33 page)

“‘Yes, I am sorry for what I did,'” translated the sleek complacent young interpreter—and for the first time I positively liked him, for fancying himself as an actor, he had put an expression of sincerity into his voice that in Suzie's had been so notably lacking. “‘I am very sorry.'”

It was then time for lunch and there was an informal discussion about whether the hearing should be continued in the afternoon or the next morning. Charlie Kwok said obligingly that he was indifferent, and that it was up to Haynes and the inspector. Haynes mopped his brow, and glanced up at the ceiling for the twentieth time to see if the fans were still working. He said that he had really hoped to spend the afternoon at his office. He did not mention that his office happened to be air-conditioned. However, the inspector had just remembered that tomorrow morning he had a case over in Kowloon. He could only manage this afternoon.

Suzie remained in custody during the break and I took Haynes to lunch at the Parisian Grill. He had chosen the P.G. himself because it was air-conditioned. It was also very expensive, but he had handled the case so well for us that I did not mind, and even suggested a bottle of wine to celebrate.

“Wine?” he said. “Good Lord, no! It makes you too damned hot.”

“Well, what's in store for us this afternoon?”

“We'll be through by three o'clock. We've just got to sum up, then after Kwok's found her guilty I'll put in a plea of mitigation. I'll say that she's a decent girl though a bit hot-tempered, and that she's now settled down with a regular boy friend of the highest integrity. Then Charlie will deliver a homily, tell her he's being lenient and hopes she's learnt her lesson, and fine her two hundred dollars.”

“You said three hundred before.”

“It's gone better than I hoped.”

An hour later we were back in court. And it all went as Haynes had predicted except in the last particular—Suzie was not fined two hundred dollars, but was sentenced to gaol.

V

It was not Haynes's fault that he had failed to anticipate this sentence. For he could not have done so without knowing why the hearing had been changed to an earlier date, and this did not become apparent until Charlie Kwok enlightened us in his homily.

“Recently we have been given a lot of trouble by girls who work in dance halls and bars,” he said, and he did not say it with a twinkle because he had left the twinkle behind at lunch. In fact it was almost as if Charlie Kwok himself had got left behind at lunch, and only the impersonal magistrate had returned; for he had acquired such an appearance of weighty authority that he seemed twice the size of this morning's twinkling little robin. “In the past we have been very lenient with them, and they appear to have got the mistaken idea that they can take the law into their own hands. And there are now so many cases of this kind waiting to be heard that we have brought some of them forward, to show other girls that such nonsense must stop. Now you, Wong Mee-ling, have inflicted a very serious injury on another girl, with a pair of scissors, and you are very lucky not to be standing in the High Court on a much graver charge. I do not even get the impression that you are sorry for what you have done. I take a very serious view, and since I do not think that a fine will teach you a sufficient lesson, I am going to send you to gaol.” He paused and wrote something, and said without looking up, “Three months.”

I could not grasp it for a minute. After the magistrate's remarks I had been prepared for a heavier fine, but not for gaol. And there was Suzie standing only a few yards from me in her blue cheongsam and looking so pretty. They could not really be going to take her away and lock her up in Laichikok. It couldn't happen.

The interpreter repeated in Shanghai dialect, “‘Three months.'”

Suzie frowned. She could not believe it either. She looked at the magistrate for an explanation but the magistrate was writing. One of the two Chinese policewomen in the dock said something to her. She did not hear. The two policewomen took her arms and marshalled her out of the dock. She looked round desperately for me but had lost her bearings and looked over the wrong shoulder. She stumbled over one of the policewomen's feet and nearly fell. Before she could recover herself and look round again she had been whisked away through the door.

I sat stunned. The magistrate rose from the desk on the rostrum. But he was the magistrate no longer—he had cast off the cloak of authority and reassumed the twinkling bird-like personality of Charlie Kwok, as deftly as one might remove bowler hat and overcoat and don a paper hat and false nose.

“Well, I'm off to the dentist,” he told the inspector. “Just for a scaling. Wife refuses to go out with me until I get all this black off. Of course it's smoking.”

The inspector said, “You haven't tried these new Red Spot cigarettes, sir? I'm told Red Spot don't stain the teeth at all.”

“Red Spot, eh? I'd be scared to touch them—might come out in a rash!”

He chuckled off through the door behind the rostrum. Haynes came over mopping his neck. He looked really shattered.

“Well, I don't know what to say,” he said. “I don't know what to say.”

“It wasn't your fault,” I said.

“I ought to have known there was something up. I ought to have guessed.”

“Can I see her before they take her off?”

“No, I'm afraid not. Only her solicitor—I can see her. I can give her a message if you want.”

“I might see her when they bring her out.”

“You'll only see the van.”

“I think I'll wait all the same. Will you tell her I'll be waiting?”

I waited with Gwenny at the gate outside the court. It was two hours before the van came, and then it came across the courtyard quickly and a policeman stood out on the road waving it on so that it did not have to stop. The windows were dark blue glass and we could not see inside, but we waved and blew kisses in case Suzie could see out. It swung out onto the road and disappeared. We walked down the hill into the town and turned along the quay. There was a queue of cars at the vehicle ferry and the police van was at the head, waiting to cross over to Kowloon. The ferry was just coming alongside. The cars from the ferry came up the ramp in quick succession. After the last car had come off, the van went forward down the ramp and disappeared into the covered deck. The other cars followed and a minute later the water began churning again. We stood watching as the boat moved off from the pier. I realized that Gwenny was holding my hand. We watched until the boat went out of sight behind an anchored merchant ship, then turned away in silence and walked up to Queens Road to the trams.

Chapter Five

T
he only girl at the Nam Kok who had ever been in Laichikok before was the heroin-smoker Big Alice, who had served a month for acting as go-between in supplying drugs to sailors. That night I asked her what it had been like, and she shuddered with disgust and said, “Terrible. It is a terrible place. You have to work all the time. If you stop work for one second they beat you up. Sure! They don't care if you die—they just beat you to death.”

“Beat up the women? They don't really, Alice?”

“Sure! Lots of women get beaten every day.”

Wednesday Lulu said, “I never heard that. I heard it is not bad in Laichikok, and nobody is beaten.”

“I have been there, haven't I?” Big Alice said. “I have been one month in that terrible place, and women died every day, and I came out with lice and crabs.”

Fifi grinned. “They're just honest. If you take something in, they give it to you back when you come out.”

I asked Alice, “How soon can I visit Suzie?”

“Tomorrow.”

“But she only went in today.”

“Yes, but you can go and see her tomorrow.”

Big Alice was very unreliable, and I was no more inclined to believe this than her stories of daily beatings-up. However, I rang the gaol to make sure and found out that it was true: the early visit was allowed so that women who had just been sentenced could arrange their domestic affairs. And so the next day I took a ferry over to Kowloon, then a bus out to Laichikok. After being kept waiting for a while at the gaol I was led to the visiting room and directed to a booth backed with wire mesh. Beyond the mesh was a narrow corridor patrolled by a wardress, then another thickness of mesh. Behind this stood a sad pale little figure with shorn-off hair and sallow unpainted face, wearing coarse gray smock and trousers several sizes too big.

I said, “Hello, Suzie.”

“Hello.”

Her mouth was dragged down at the corners. Her eyes welled with tears. In another booth a woman was howling. And I understood why most prisons did not allow visitors while the wound was still fresh.

“The girls all send their love,” I said. “They were terribly upset to hear what had happened, and we're all just counting the days until you come out.”

She could not speak. She could say nothing at all but stood there quite still with her arms at her sides and her mouth dragged down and the tears coming faster and rolling away down her cheeks. I went on talking but she did not open her mouth for fear of breaking down. I knew she could not bear the strain much longer, and presently I said, “Suzie, I'm going now, but I shall be thinking of you every minute,” and I turned and walked out of the booth without looking back. The time allowed for the visit was twenty minutes, but I had not been there more than five.

I was so upset by this visit that for days afterwards I could not work. When I tried to concentrate I would see only the pale round little face with the swimming eyes behind the layers of wire mesh. So after a week I decided to get away for a bit and I packed a sketchbook and a few old clothes in a valise and took the boat over to the island of Lantao, and climbed up to the monastery in the hills. Here the Buddhist monks provided accommodation and simple fare at small cost, and it was very peaceful after the town and cool because of the height. The monastery stood in a little vale with rice paddies in the bottom and a pagoda up on the hill at the end. The monastery courtyard smelt of incense from the temple where joss sticks burned on the altar among the dusty wooden images and offerings of fruit. In a room over the temple a monk squatted on a dais intoning prayers from an old manuscript. At the end of each prayer his voice rose to a climax and he pulled a rope and a beam of wood swung against the temple bell, and the deep voice of the bell went booming out across the paddies. I went up to the room and sat sketching him, but he never lifted his eyes from the manuscript or showed that he knew I was there. I also sketched the monks stooping in the paddies and squatting in the courtyard with rice bowls and chopsticks, and in the temple at their prayers.

At the weekend there was an influx of walkers—three English girls in government service, some Chinese students all anxious to air their English, and a silent middle-aged Englishman in old tropical battle dress and bush hat, with lost eyes, who looked as if he had mislaid his battalion in the last war and had been searching for it ever since. After supper he went off again for a lone walk, searching even in the dark, and the rest of us played Consequences by the light of hurricane lamps, calling each other by our Christian names and being very jolly together in the best youth-hostel way. We were still playing at midnight when the Englishman came back, but he would not join us and went to bed and in the morning was gone before dawn. The others shouldered their rucksacks after lunch and trailed off down the hill to catch the boat back to Hong Kong, and I was once more left alone with the praying monks and the scent of joss sticks and my memory of Suzie behind the wire mesh.

I stayed two weeks on Lantao. I would have stayed longer but I had not brought my paints and now I wanted to try and work again. So I returned on a Friday before the next weekend invasion.

When I got back to the Nam Kok there was a note from Haynes saying that he had been trying to get in touch with me. It was evening so I rang him at his home, and he said, “Well, I've good news for you. At least, it's bad in one way, but I think you'll be glad to hear it. They've put our friend at Laichikok in the prison hospital, where I believe they look after them pretty decently—so she'll be having a much better time of it than she would otherwise.”

He had inquired about her when visiting another client at Laichikok. She had been given a routine chest X-ray on entering the prison and been found to have a touch of T.B. She had been in the hospital ever since.

“But it's nothing serious?” I said.

“No, I gather they've caught it early. Well, in one sense it all seems to be turning out for the best, because she'd never have got into a hospital outside. They're all so full up, I believe they're harder to break into than a bank. They say the only way to get into a hospital in Hong Kong is to collapse in the street and get taken in as a casualty.”

Tuberculosis was rife in Hong Kong because of the overcrowding and I was not greatly surprised by Haynes's news. I had even wondered at one time if Suzie was infected because of a suspiciously persistent cough, and although she had protested that it was only the lingering effect of the chill that she had caught the night her baby had been killed, I had urged her to go to the government clinic for a free X-ray. Finally we had arranged to go together. But just then the cable had arrived from New York and the intention had been forgotten in the excitement of my departure for Japan. And after my return her cough seemed to have gone.

Now, reassured that it was nothing serious, I was more pleased by the news than otherwise. I preferred to think of Suzie in a hospital ward than in a cell or at work in some grim compound. (For although rationally I had discounted Big Alice's story of beatings-up, I had never rid myself of the ghastly vision it had conjured, in which I saw Suzie being kicked and beaten to the point of mutilation by huge tough black-uniformed wardresses, sisters-in-sadism of the human-skin lampshade-makers of Belsen.) I felt greatly relieved, and thought that probably by the time Suzie left prison she would be altogether cured of her T.B.

However, later that evening I received a nasty shock. For when I passed on the news to Gwenny she showed no surprise, and said, “Yes, I thought they would probably put her in hospital. But I did not like to say anything to you before because Suzie had made me promise.”

“Promise? Promise what?”

“Promise not to tell you she had T.B.”

“You mean she knew before she went into Laichikok? But how? She didn't have an X-ray?”

“No, she was told by the doctor.”

“But what doctor? You mean she'd been to see a doctor?”

“No, the doctor came to see her. She was so ill. It was while you were in Japan—after the business with Betty. We had gone to the cinema together, and when we came out the trams were very crowded, and Suzie said, ‘I can't bear to go in a tram. There is no air, and I shall choke.' There were no rickshaws so we walked back and she was very tired. I said, ‘Suzie, you need a cool drink,' and we went into the bar, and then she began to cough and I suddenly saw her hands were all red, and her dress down the front, and her lap. It was terrible. She was very weak. Wednesday Lulu and I helped her upstairs. I telephoned to a Chinese doctor and when he came he said, ‘You have bad trouble in your lungs. You have got tuberculosis. You should be in hospital. But that is impossible, so you must rest in bed and I shall tell you what medicines to get from the druggists.' Then Suzie told him that you were coming back soon, and that she was frightened you would catch the disease from her, and he said, ‘I will also prescribe a medicine to prevent the germs passing out of your mouth into your boy friend's. You must take it in water three times a day.' And after you came back it was often difficult for her to take the medicine without you knowing, so she would tell me, ‘Gwenny, you keep him talking on the verandah, while I take my medicine inside.'”

“But why on earth didn't she tell me about it, Gwenny?”

“She was afraid to upset you. You were already upset because she had stabbed Betty with the scissors, so that you could not work properly, and she was afraid that if she upset you any more you would not work at all. She said you were very bad-tempered when you could not work, and did not love her as much as when you worked well. Besides there was nothing you could do.”

“I could have tried to get her into some hospital for a start—or at least seen that she got proper treatment instead of taking useless Chinese drugs.”

“I don't think they are useless. They cost so much money they must be good. The medicine for making her germs safe cost eleven dollars an ounce and she took one ounce every day.”

“Good Lord, how awful!”

“And she was ashamed of being ill. She said that sometimes when you told her she was beautiful she would feel very ashamed and think, ‘But inside I am ugly, because I am sick and cough blood.' That is why she would not marry you.”

“Gwenny, if only I'd known!”

“Anyhow, I am sure that now she is in hospital she will soon get well.”

Two weeks later I paid a second visit to Laichikok and found that Suzie was indeed looking wonderfully well—better than I had ever seen her look before. The hospital ward was a light airy white-painted room that except for its barred windows and grille instead of a door was a good deal more cheerful than many a public hospital ward outside. Suzie was sitting propped up in bed with a picture magazine. Her hair had that pretty fluffiness and sheen that it always acquired after a shampoo, and she looked pink-cheeked and well-scrubbed, and extremely pleased with herself.

“Suzie, you look marvelous!” I exclaimed, laughing with relief—for until that moment I had been dreading another scene like the last, and fortifying myself against the possibility of more tears. “I wish I was allowed to kiss you.”

“Oh, that's all right. I fixed it. I told that woman you were coming.” She airily indicated the Chinese wardress as though she was some menial. “I told her you were a big man and would want to kiss me. I told her, ‘You just look the other way.'”

I duly embraced her. The wardress looked a bit uncomfortable and pretended that something had caught her attention out of the window.

“Yes, she is very nice, that warder-woman,” Suzie said condescendingly.

“And what's the doctor like?”

“Half-caste woman. Very nice.”

“It all sounds too good to be true. Is everybody nice?”

“No, one warder-woman is very nasty. Sometimes she works in here. She says, ‘I know all about you, Wong Mee-ling. I know you used to go with men. Yes, you were a bad girl—dirty!' And then you know what she does?”

“What?”

“Tries to hold my hand.”

“Hold your hand? What for, if she thinks you're dirty?”

She looked very complacent. “She's in love with me.”

“Good Lord!” I laughed. “And what do you do about it?”

“I tell her, ‘Shoo! Go away! I came in this hospital to get better—and you just make me sick!'”

“Well, there's nothing like putting the wardresses in their places. And what about the Governor? Do you talk to the Governor like that?”

“Oh, yes. Chinese woman governor—very nice.”

“Well, I'm sure!”

“She came in here once, so I told her, ‘Good morning! You've got a very nice monkey-house!'”

“Suzie, you
are
in a frivolous mood!”

“Yes, I told her, ‘I like your monkey-house. I will stay a few days longer if you don't mind?' She said, ‘Sure, Wong Mee-ling, you stay as long as you like, and if that warder-woman gives you any trouble just let me know.' I said, ‘Thank you, I like your monkey-house very much, and you make a very nice Number One Top Monkey!'” She giggled with childish mischief.

“Suzie, it's marvelous to see you like this again.”

“I'm happy today. My boy friend has come. I told that warder-woman, ‘He'll come, don't you worry. He won't forget.' But I was scared you might forget. Then I should lose face.”

“Well, I've got a bone to pick with you. I'm very angry with you for not telling me you'd been ill while I was in Japan.”

“Ill? Who said I was ill?”

“It's no good, Suzie. I know all about it.”

She was very reluctant to admit the truth and tried to shrug it all off as unimportant; however, assuming that I knew about it already, she let slip that she had actually had another hemorrhage in prison. It had occurred on her second day, immediately after my visit, and had no doubt been brought on by the emotional ordeal; and it was for this reason that she had been sent into hospital, and not because of the X-ray as Haynes had told me. But now she assured me that she was practically cured, and that by the time she left prison her full health would be restored.