Authors: Martin Booth
‘Then do it,’ Sandingham offered. ‘Go ahead. I shall scream you did it. But so what? Go on then, Mr Choy. Kill me.’
He spoke loudly and a few Europeans sitting nearby, laden with bow-tied Christmas packages, stole a glance in his direction. He heard one person exclaim, ‘Oh, really! These white Russians. Pickled at four.’
‘You see, you are a cast-off of your kind. And now you are not to be touched by Chinese people. Soon you will die. In my time, not in yours. You’ll have poison in your food; maybe some heroin mixed into your opium – I know where you bought your last supply: that man is dead now – or a knife will stab you in the street. Even in your hotel room. See?’
Choy slid an expensive calfskin wallet out of his well-tailored jacket and flipped it open. From the stamp pocket protruded a brass key. It bore the same trademark as the hotel door locks.
‘The skeleton,’ Choy explained, though he need not have bothered. Sandingham was well aware what it was.
The ferry bumped against the piles of the Tsim Sha Tsui pier and the passengers rose to leave. The deck tilted under the weight of the people standing around the gangway.
‘Bus or taxi, Joe? Take the bus. Maybe the conductor will let you fall from the step. Take a taxi. A Kowloon taxi? One of the orange and red ones? Maybe the driver will not go to Waterloo Road but to a hillside behind Kai Tak. Near to Sai Kung. It is very lonely over there. Little traffic. Or you can walk. But it is a long way, and it will be dark before you enter your hotel.’
At the taxi rank, Choy vanished into the crowd. Sandingham queued as if to catch a cab. A rickshaw coming along to the ferry concourse conveniently collided with a private car. A crowd quickly gathered to watch the slanging match and Sandingham escaped into the columned portico of the railway station. He purchased a ticket to the station near the hotel and, in this way, got home safely. It was, as Choy had reckoned, now dark.
He sneaked into the hotel through the rear tradesman’s entrance and was about to climb the back stairs to his floor when he heard music issuing from the front lobby. Curious, he went along one of the ground floor corridors, through the tiny garden courtyard where the trees were now bare.
The decorations were lit. The oriental Father Christmases blinked on and off, the paper lanterns were illuminated and the tinsel shimmied like a shoal of landed fish. The lobby was packed with children. In the centre, by the bar, was a juggler dressed in classical Chinese costume. Upon his head was a pork-pie hat of black silk with a pom-pom on it. His jacket was embroidered with dragons and clouds in azures and turquoises and jade greens. He was tossing, as high as the ceiling, five cups and a orange. Behind him was a Chinese band with a wailing flute, a zither and a small drum.
The juggler passed the cups to an assistant and bowed, then gave the orange to a boy in the front row. Sandingham noticed that this was David.
His act over, the juggler waved on a man with a rosewood xylophone. The musician started to plink out his melodies, parodies of European jazz band tunes and current popular songs from the radio. He was accompanied by a small grey monkey with eyes like bloodshot berries, that pranced and tumbled in time to its master’s music. To complete the show, the little primate was dressed in a tricorn hat, elasticated pants of canary-yellow silk and a tiny brocade jacket. It carried a classical Chinese sword constructed of wood and papier mâché which it smacked on the floor and bit. Around the monkey’s waist was a collar, to which was secured a length of thin chain. The children laughed uproariously until tears of merriment ran down their cheeks.
Standing by the dining room entrance, Sandingham saw nothing amusing in the monkey’s cavorting and tomfoolery. It was trapped by its japes, despite its fine clothes, in a spiral of living and dying that was as sordid as his own.
As he turned to go up the main staircase Sandingham saw Heng studying him and he eased his way towards the manager, pressing through the standing parents behind the children.
‘A party for the guests’ children,’ the manager said. ‘The owners thought it a good idea.’
‘Very good indeed,’ Sandingham agreed. It was, after all, Christmas.
‘But you don’t like it?’
Heng knew what he was thinking, Sandingham realised. The worldly old codger had him summed up in one.
‘The juggler – what I saw of him – was excellent. But I can’t avoid feeling sorry for the monkey.’
‘You know what it is to be tied up, Mr Sandingham. Maybe not by a chain or by rope, but…’
Looking into the manager’s eyes for a moment, Sandingham thought he recognised a flash of sympathy, a spark of friendship that was not suggested or forced by the season.
‘Yes, Mr Heng. During the war…’ His sentence too tailed off.
‘And now also, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’
Sandingham knew that, by the end of the week – by Christmas Day – he would be in debt again for the rent. It was already overdue.
* * *
The step had been slick with a sudsy water that the floor amah had failed to mop up. Running to his room late on the Wednesday morning, David had slipped and fallen awkwardly on his left arm. The roomboy on duty, Ching, who was the one to see him safely over the road to school, heard his fall and the short yelp that went with it. He comforted David, sat him up on the rubber mat that ran down the length of the corridor and called for his mother. She thought his arm was broken, called the doctor and half an hour later, David – much to his joy – was rushed to Kowloon Hospital in a Daimler ambulance. The X-rays showed no fracture. A severe sprain was diagnosed and David was released with his arm in a white cotton sling.
‘Will it mean I have to stay in bed for Christmas?’ he asked the casualty doctor fearfully. He did not want to ruin his mother’s Christmas nor lose out on the festivities and the trip to the Fishers’, not to mention the telephone call to his father in Korea.
‘No, young man. I don’t think so. Just you stop in bed for the remainder of today, get some rest and get up tomorrow. But keep your arm in the sling and don’t use it. Can you unwrap your presents single-handed? I expect so.’
He was taken the short distance back to the hotel in a taxi. His mother helped him into his pyjamas and put him to bed at four o’clock. The day was fading and he did not feel so out of place. To cheer him up, his mother gave him one of his presents early.
‘It’s just a little one,’ she informed him, ‘to take away the pain.’
He duly succeeded in removing the wrapping with one hand. Inside was a cardboard box with a battle scene printed on it. He lifted the lid to discover one of the presents he’d hoped for and had included on his list: a machine-gun crew. There were three soldiers and what David assumed was a Vickers machine-gun. One of the soldiers was sitting with his legs bent up: he was the firer. A second knelt by his side: he was feeding the belt into the gun. The third was opening an ammunition box. They were dressed in khaki and mounted on a square of stiff card on to which was outlined a hill, trees and a shell-burst in the sky.
‘I like them,’ he thanked his mother. ‘I like them very much.’
He lay on his side and positioned the gun crew in a foxhole punched in his pillow, inches from his face. That close up, they looked real, almost alive.
‘It won’t hurt so much in the morning, David. Now you get some sleep. I’ll come in during the evening with some supper for you. Would you like a warm milk? Ching can get you some.’
‘Yes, please. And some digestive biscuits. And some salted cashews.’ After all, he thought, it was worth trying it on.
‘Biscuits yes, nuts no. A sprain is one thing. You being sick is another.’
She closed the door and he heard the lock snap home.
* * *
It was dark on the stairs. The light-bulb must have blown on the landing above. Sandingham gave no thought to the coincidence that the bulb below had also seemed to have burnt out.
He felt his way downwards and reached the first of the food boxes. It contained cans of peaches. If he took more of these the missing quantity would be noticed, so he passed his hand over this to the next box which held tins of Carnation milk. He took two of the smaller size and wedged them into his pocket. Omitting the next two cartons, he slid his thumb under the flap of the third and lifted out a tin of clear vegetable soup. From lower still, he removed three flat tins of sardines and, by mistake, a tin of potatoes. He shoved the tins into his shirt.
There was a sound above him on the stairs: someone had opened the landing door. He held his breath and did not move, knowing he was secure from discovery if he did not give himself away. It was too dark for him to be seen. He heard the door close with a swish of its hydraulic hinge. He waited. No other noise happened.
Carefully, to be on the safe side, he edged up the stairwell. There was no light to guide him apart from an exceptionally faint glow through one of the small, grimy, frosted-glass windows facing the back street.
He halted, and listened. He could hear something. It was a far ticking, which he decided was emanating from somewhere towards the front of the building.
The flurry of a soft garment and the zizz of something being thrown came to his ears as two quite separate entities. He dropped his head. A light metallic object clattered down the stairs behind him. A second later a powerful torch shone momentarily in his face. The bright burn of the reflector hung in his retina and made him giddy. Aim restored, the torch was clicked off and another light object was hurled at Sandingham. However, as soon as the torch had gone out, he had flattened himself into the wall. When he did not tumble on to the cartons and boxes, and the torch was switched on again, he was ready.
His attacker, he estimated, was about fifteen steps above him, next to the door to the landing above. He shut his eyes and hurled himself upwards, his feet slapping on the concrete. He grabbed the man around his knees and twisted him sideways. The tins next to his chest gouged dents in his skinny ribs. The other, not to be overbalanced, got a firm hold of the doorknob with one hand and as best he could lashed out at Sandingham with torch and feet.
Letting go of his assailant’s knees with one arm, Sandingham flailed with his free hand at the torch, felt it slap into his palm, closed his fingers on it and wrenched it free. He heard it roll against the wall in the darkness.
A fist as bony as if it were devoid of flesh began pummelling his skull, forcing him to loosen his tackle-like hold. He thrust his hand into his pocket and wrenched out one of the tins. He swung his arm back, hoisted himself up on his feet and brought the tin down on the point of darkness he assumed hid the man’s head. The tin connected.
The man let go of the door handle and slumped to the floor. He was not unconscious as Sandingham hoped and his feverish scrabbling suggested he was searching for the torch.
The next moment Sandingham was booted on the thigh and went down. He struggled rapidly to his feet and kicked back at the darkness but his foot only hit the wall. As he was knocked down once more with a vicious punch, he found the torch. Spinning it in his hand until the rubber stud was under his thumb, he pressed and the light scorched out to show the skull-like face of the hotel gardener: the first of Choy’s inside men. He had evidently known of Sandingham’s thieving excursions down the back stairs, learning of them when lying in his sleeping corner at the roof door, and had used one of these to lay his ambush.
Keeping the man confused with the beam, Sandingham struck out with his foot at the man’s groin. The gardener grunted as the air was pushed from his lungs and he doubled over. Sandingham brought his knee viciously into the lowering face. There was a mouse-like squeak as the gardener’s nose broke. The gardener flailed his arms, clutching at his face: he lost his balance and fell on to the steps in a groaning heap.
In his room, Sandingham locked the door and levered the bedside table against it. Nowhere, he now knew, was safe.
* * *
David sat in the armchair by the french windows of the lounge, gazing out at the balcony. It was bare of the potted chrysanthemums and kumquat bushes of the summer. The grey sky did not even hint at it being Christmas Eve. On the parquet tiles by his chair was the machine-gun crew guarding a Bedford army lorry.
Sandingham pulled the glass door open and entered the lounge. He was careful to leave the door ajar so that the roomboy on duty could see that he meant no mischief.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘What have you asked Santa Claus for?’
David did not turn round. He had seen Sandingham enter through his reflection in the glass before him.
‘There’s no such person as Santa Claus. Your father and mother – and grandpa and grandma and people – buy you presents and your parents give them to you. And,’ David added, a little scornfully, ‘you can’t say “Happy Christmas” yet because Christmas’s not until tomorrow.’
Sitting himself in the chair across the room, Sandingham leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. The pressure of his arms hurt his legs, which had pained him continuously since the fight with the gardener the night before.
‘I have a present for you.’
He offered a small package to the boy.
David’s first inclination was to refuse it. He was very wary of Sandingham now and had taken to heart the warnings he had received from his mother, Ching and the other hotel staff. The more he considered the outstretched gift, though, the more he realised that it would be churlish to refuse. Besides, he was inquisitive and eager to discover what was in it. If he told his mother he had received it, it would be all right. Then it occurred to him that he could not reciprocate.
‘I’ve nothing to give you,’ he apologised. ‘So I shouldn’t accept anything.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Sandingham replied. ‘I think I’ve got all I want.’
David took the package.
‘What have you done to your arm?’ Sandingham inquired.
‘Sprained it. Can you please start the paper off?’
He handed the gift back and Sandingham tore the string away and peeled back the paper from one end.