Blue Lantern (14 page)

He turned from Nathan Road up Pearl Street. An old woman muttered to him about bad men, and pointed ahead. He thanked her, and went on, calculating that he could still retreat if the way to Chang's was blocked. He was startled by a noise behind him. A crocodile of children about ten years old, carrying red flags, their small voices hysterically shrill, were almost running after him. He crossed the road to allow them to pass on the other side; they shouted at him, and waved their tiny fists as they went. A column of marching men and women appeared from a side street a hundred yards behind Brodie; they were six or seven abreast, and spreading over the whole width of the road. They carried flags and posters and chanted; they drummed their fists on parked cars, and banged on doors and windows.

When Brodie came to the corner of O'Donnell Street he was able to look down a wide road of banks and hotels in the direction of Chang's. There was no sign of organised groups ahead. A few people moved furtively between doorways. A bus had been abandoned in the road. The threat of violence hung in the air as palpably as a pall of smoke. Brodie decided to go on.

He looked back at the marchers behind him; they were breaking windows now, and burning vehicles. Ahead there was more activity. A group of young people in white shirts and blue trousers were shaking their fists and dancing with agitation. Megaphones began to pour out a stream of abuse of authority. The strains of ‘The East is Red', a recording of massed choirs, was barely recognizable in the static from the speakers. Red charactered posters, lurid with their dragon-like writing, were plastered over the walls and windows of offices and shops, literally thousands of them, as far along the street as he could see.

Brodie could not approach Chang's without going though a maelstrom of activity. And he could not go back. The marchers were closer now. His gut wrenched at the danger. He looked for somewhere to hide in an alley. Scuffles erupted in the street ahead, as the crowd identified those who were not of them, dragging victims out of doorways and beating them. A white man with a shopping bag was knocked to the ground, his bright parcels spilling out. A white woman with thick ankles fled, wailing. A grey haired white man ran toward Brodie, a camera round his neck. A boy in pursuit snatched at the camera and the strap snapped. The boy crushed the camera with his foot. The man approached Brodie at a lope, purple faced; he followed as Brodie ran down a service alley. Brodie climbed a stairway to an unoccupied landing, and the man panted after him. The pursuers came into the alley, and seeing no activity retreated. Unobserved, Brodie could take stock of the scene.

Smoke and flames marked the progress of the rioters. They had found their weapons as they went, a hammer, a spade, a pole; they pounded and clawed and tore and burned. The noise rose to a crescendo as hundreds of agitators advanced. Windows were shattered and shops burned; doors smashed in; merchandise scattered in gutters. Brodie remained on the landing to let the danger pass. He saw sheets of plate glass fall like slabs of ice, splintering in the throng. He saw children with torches burning curtains. Bolts of silk and satin of many colours were unfurled and trampled; tables and chairs and couches and mirrors were lifted high, and then ground underfoot.

Torrents of water came from the opposite direction, frothing over the crowd. The wreckers slowed down. The megaphones choked. Through a haze of smoke and spray a black helmeted riot squad advanced, swaying like knights in armour, in line abreast with shields and sticks. A constant barrage of support came from behind them, over their heads; gas guns and smoke grenades. Riot guns slammed wooden pellets into the leaders of the crowd. The riot squad charged, cracking skulls, and sending the rioters crying, coughing, bleeding, and running.

Brodie asked the tourist if he could help. The man was collapsed in a corner without an eye for the carnage; he declined; his hotel was only a door or two along the road. In the lull, Brodie made his way along the two or three hundred yards to Chang's without attracting attention. He hammered on the door, was spied from inside, and admitted.

Inside the smoky bar it was business as usual. Cards were being played; music blared; the girls were serving drinks and chatting; there was little interest in or concern at what was happening outside. But Brodie went upstairs to view more of the riot. Yulinda drew the drapes back, and they saw that the battlefield was being rapidly deserted. The marchers who had not been wounded or taken into custody, had fled. The injured lay in the road; teams of medics moved from one to another. A column of police marched by; guards were being posted outside shops which had been broken open. Bodies were being stretchered to ambulances. Firemen hosed the interior of a burning building. The owners of some of the looted shops were picking disconsolately through their goods in the gutter.

Beneath the window of the bar, placards were piled on the ground. “What do they say?” Brodie asked.

At first, Yulinda pretended not to hear. When Brodie asked again, she said, with a weak grin of embarrassment, “I can't read the characters.”

An elderly Chinese who had followed them, translated. “That one says,
Freedom from capitalism
and the other,
Drive out the imperialist lackeys.
”

A young constable was just adding another placard to the heap, but pointing it out to his colleagues, and grinning.

“How about that one?” Brodie asked.

The Chinese man smiled, “Yes, it should amuse the police. It says
Seize the pistols of the running dogs of capitalism.”

Brodie remembered Sherwin's remark. The police were like dogs within the walls but not in the house. On his occasional walks in the New Territories, he had stumbled across the ferocious, yellow-fanged beasts that guarded the peasant houses; violent and cowardly. Brodie thought that in the minds of the people, the police must be like that.

After they left the window, Brodie sat at the bar drinking lager, until Yulinda was free to join him. Vanessa had often talked about Yulinda.

Yulinda was not related to Vanessa, although they both had the same family name, and joked that they were kin. Yulinda's family lived in the squatters' shelters on the hillside by Vanessa's apartment. Vanessa used to take a short-cut through the shelters to the bus stop. The shelter-dwellers were generally shunned by the not-quite-so-poor like Vanessa's family. However, Vanessa made small gifts to some of them, including Yulinda's family. Hence their acquaintanceship began. Vanessa did not know then that Yulinda was a whore, although she said it wouldn't have made any difference. Now, Yulinda was a hostess; she had not climbed far, but it had been difficult.

Yulinda liked to be recognized by regulars at the bar and be friendly with them, but this only went a certain distance; and Brodie understood that. So many years of selling her charms, and her body, had taught her that what was not a commercial transaction was likely to be an imposition on her. The lesson had hardened like a shell; Brodie could observe it. When Yulinda had been taken in by a man, she felt much worse that any woman outside her business, because she had not only been duped, but cheated financially. What she had given she could have, and should have, sold.

There were so many attractive men who expected something for nothing; Brodie knew that he and Marsden were in that category. Yulinda had learned to recognize these men, and not to gratify them and become another notch in their belts. She knew all the seducer's tricks, from promises and flattery to crude bargaining and dud cheques. To those disingenuous Romeos who recoiled at the idea of buying her, she said she was a working girl, and didn't have much time left. It was true that she wasn't old; she was thirty-three. And while there were some customers who preferred mature women, the premium was on youth. Sleeping during the day, and working at night in filthy air had not aged her as much as the remorseless neurotic traffic of whoredom; that scored lines on the heart which could eventually be seen beneath the skin.

Above all, Vanessa said Yulinda would liked to have had a child but she could never have provided for it. Vanessa in contrast was more physically desirable, and had therefore been able to make a living on the sidelines, without putting her whole body into regular trade. Brodie could see that the way the two women regarded each other was quite distinct. To Yulinda, Vanessa was a fortunate and successful person, a little spoiled by her vanity. Having a baby was something she had indulged in without too much thought of the disadvantageous consequences. To Vanessa, Yulinda was a less fortunate friend.

Yulinda put a hand on his arm. “Mike, be kind to her. You've run out on her. She loves you. Go and see her. Make up.”

“Vanessa made a great play about telling me everything about herself, but forgot to mention the baby.”

“Vanessa is young. She doesn't want to lose you. She would have told you eventually. She's beautiful, too, Mike. Don't you want her?”

The words kindled his desire. He did want her. The purity of his feelings for Helen were no armour against his desire for Vanessa; but the baby stuck in his throat. Slightly drunk, he said, “You're very attractive you know, Yulinda.”

Yulinda pulled back her shoulders and let her breasts rise proudly. “Vanessa is my friend,” she said.

Brodie had a few more drinks, and Yulinda extracted the promise she wanted from him. When he left the bar, his head was full of the perfume of Vanessa's silken skin.

Yulinda must have telephoned her success to Vanessa, because when Brodie arrived she was waiting, carefully made up. The rooms were very neat. The father and the children were not there. The baby was in the main room.

“I've had a dreadful fever,” she said, but there was no sign of it.

She could not hide her radiance. She drew him to her bed. “It's all right now, Mike, but we must be quick.” She let her dressing robe drop on the floor and lay on the bed. Brodie stripped off his jacket, shoes, trousers, and necktie with fumbling fingers. He had no time for his shirt or socks. He pulled aside the faded flower-patterned sheet.

As the pounding of Brodie's blood subsided, the gurgling sounds of the baby in the next room penetrated. He and Vanessa had little to say to each other. Brodie sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He started flicking through the pages of an outdated women's fashion magazine, listening to the baby's persistent calls for attention. He was thinking of the moment when he could exit decently.

Vanessa rose, and attended to the baby, and then came back and seated herself on a stool before a small mirror on the wall. She combed her hair. Brodie could hear the comb crackling through the long, straight, near-black tresses which reached down her back.

“Do you like Gary?” she asked.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Gary's not an it. Don't you think he's lovely?”

“No I don't. Look, I know enough already. You had a baby by an American serviceman. You thought you were doing the right thing. There's nothing else to explain.”

“I loved him. He was a US sailor.”

She spoke without embarrassment, as though it was a reassurance to him, rather than an irritant. “He promised to marry me and take me to California. He loved me too.”

Her naïve words soured him. He was at least third in the line of sexual conmen who had sampled Vanessa, four if Marsden was in the count.

She flicked her head to make her hair fall over one shoulder. Her hand swept down to confirm the grooming. She approved herself in the mirror. “Here's his letter, see?”

She lifted a billfold from her purse and extracted an airmail envelope with worn edges, and then dropped pages from the envelope on the bed beside Brodie. He did not want to read, but his eye could not avoid the uppermost page of the soiled papers, the schoolboy handwriting in blue ball-point, and the opening line,
My Little Sweetie-pants.

“Do you want to make me sick?” he said, brushing the papers away.

Vanessa watched the pages flutter to the floor. She picked them up protectively. Brodie realized that to her, the letter was a pure declaration of affection; the nuance of deception which must have been in the letter, did not impinge on her; nor was she conscious of the aggravation she was causing Brodie.

“I love you, Mike,” she sobbed.

“Then why carry that filthy letter with you day and night?”

“You're jealous,” she smiled slightly.

He thought it might be charitable to admit jealousy, while all he felt was revulsion. “I don't want to hear about the past.”

Vanessa's simple sincerity – or was it naïveté – bore her along. “I tried to get in touch with Al. I wrote to his commander, and to the US Consulate. I needed money for Gary. I needed an amah to look after him while I went to work.”

She brought the child's crib into the room. Gary mooed, and stuck his fingers in his mouth. Brodie tickled him as he might a new born kitten. He had never touched such a young child in his life. The little white face crinkled up in a cry. Brodie had a perspective of the long journey the child would have to make, and the lack of preparation he was going to get for it. Vanessa took the crib back into the main room.

“You'll probably never understand,” she said when she came back, picking up a buff to polish her fingernails. “Please help me.”

“I'll …do what I can.”

Vanessa came over to the bed and kissed him. “Thank you.”

“I'll get hold of somebody at the Consulate, and get the full story about catching up with the guy.”

“I've already done everything like that.”

“Do you have proof of paternity?”

“No. Al didn't mention Gary in his letters.”

“What a love-match!”

“Mike, all I want is you. I've given you everything I have. I have nothing except your love. I worry for the future. I can't go on giving.”

“And getting nothing in return?”