Blue Lantern (15 page)

“What will happen to me?” she said with melting eyes. “My father will be helpless until he dies. I'm getting older. In five years or so I won't be able to do the same work. Is it so much to take care of the girl you love?”

He felt mean and crushed in the small bunkroom which smelt of incense. Love without money was a luxury Vanessa couldn't afford. She was only a step or two up the slope from Yulinda. He remembered Sherwin's remark about Vanessa misunderstanding his intentions, and tried to see his own responsibility. He traded on his attractiveness; that was his way. Women came to him. Even Helen Lau came to him. In her terms, Vanessa had already extended considerable credit to him. He
was
taking advantage of her.

“Mike, you're rich.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Sixteen hundred, now eighteen hundred a month. I told you.”

“You must be the lowest paid cop in the Force.”

“I don't take squeeze. I get my pay, that's all!”

Her seraphic belief that all cops took bribes angered him. She had a preoccupied calm as she painted her nails, holding her delicate hand out at intervals to view the effect.

He remained morosely quiet, sitting on the bunk. When Vanessa's fingernails were to her liking, she came to him, stood squarely in front of him, and opened her gown. His anger, and revulsion, and pity, turned quickly to coarse passion.

11

Brodie was alone, and late arriving at the Magazine Gap apartment of Harold Evans, the owner-skipper of the yacht which Brodie was to crew to Manila. Harold wasn't near the entrance, and Brodie was released into a crowd of unknown faces. He was early enough to find the party in a quiet phase. The two adjoining main rooms were packed with a hundred people. He had not thought of rejecting this invitation; it was a relief from the oriental world in which he was immersed. There would have been no point in asking Helen to join him; it was the kind of function she regarded as ignoble. As for Vanessa, he had resolved to distance himself from her.

A steward confronted him with a tray of drinks. He took one, and juggled with lighting a cigarette, an opportunity to look around without appearing to be lost. Everybody was engrossed in everybody else.
He
was supposed to be partying, not drooping like a ruffled pelican. He saw two women he recognized across the room, and prodded his memory for their names; Greta and Brigit whom he had met casually when Freddie Hudson had taken him to the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Ice House Street.

The crowd was mostly European, with some Chinese and Indian; and Portugese, the portmanteau word in Hong Kong for all the other possibilities; they were alike in their primping and preening, chatting with half a mind, while the other half covertly examined other possible mates. At parties, the search went on; each was looking for a more enticing curve of hip, a more distinguished flare in dress, a lighter-hearted look, a clearer eye, a bluer eye, a less made-up pair of eyes; someone who didn't drink so much, a man who didn't smoke, a sun-tanned girl, a man with a flat belly, a woman with melon breasts, a man over six feet, a woman under thirty; someone more mature, or more fun. The revellers were all stealthily examining and comparing, to make sure of getting the very best partner, and not have somebody else walk off with the desired person, without at least getting their telephone number. This was what parties were for.

Brodie elbowed through the crowd and reconnected with Greta who appeared to be with a man. He suggested he would ring her some time; incongruous words to a woman he didn't know, marinated to credibility in liquor. She was a lively blond Swedish girl who worked for Cathay Pacific Airways. He jotted down her St John's Road number before being eased away by the tide in the Sargasso Sea of bodies.

He drank until his eyes were red balls, and his voice unsteady; always on the fringes, exchanging a word while he supplied the light for a cigarette, or when somebody slopped a drink over him. He sat for a while at the bar, approving the bar-tender's fast fingered art, and then leaned over the balcony in the dark, trying to look at ease, while he grated at the inaccessibility of these attractive women. Tired of mumbling to other drunks, he explored the rooms. The throng had thinned; the hour was late by the time he got to the bedroom he had heard so much about. The rich carpet and hangings were pale pink; there was no other colour in the room save a few small etchings of nudes in silver frames on the walls. The nudes were Chinese boys. A soft light radiated from a hidden source on the circular bed. A few people explored the room. Greta and Brigit were there. A man pressed a button by the bed, and the bed started to jig rhythmically. A panel in the ceiling slid back to reveal a full length mirror. Harold Evans, a bachelor in his forties, Noel Cowardishly groomed, with an unnecessary cravat at his throat, came in and asked what they thought. A girl said it was revolting, but Brigit said she thought it was a marvellous place to get laid, and threw herself on the satin coverlet, opening her mini-skirted thighs. Harold Evans touched the button that closed the curtains around the bed.

Greta had disappeared. Brodie stalked through the rooms where the remaining guests were slumped on couches in the half-dark, and hastened out of the apartment with the music and laughter prickling like sand in his ears. He walked down Magazine Gap Road to the city in hot air burred by the din of crickets. He walked and walked until, in the dawn, his frustration had been scuffed away like his shoe leather. He dozed in the morning sun on a bench in Statue Square.

The bombs were appearing everywhere; on a bus, in a hotel lobby, on the deck of a ferry; anywhere where they would cause maximum disruption. Most were hoaxes, but there were enough explosions to make it plain that the campaign was in earnest. It was an assault, directed against the army and the police, which became a spectator sport. On a warning, streets were cleared by the police and buildings evacuated. A mob would collect at a safe distance. The army or police squad would arrive. Sandbag shields would be placed. Whether the bomb was going to be remotely detonated or not, it was necessary for a man in armour to lumber forward with a probe. If he had a paper bag to tackle, he loosed the top of the bag gingerly. If it was a box, the lid would be raised. Everybody held their breath. It wasn't unusual for the traffic to be held up for an hour while a squad dealt with a sack of vegetable peelings.

Brodie and his squad did their duty as a disposal unit two afternoons a week, in addition to their night patrol duties. Brodie had learned the various types of explosives and detonators, and a lot of theory about how to disarm the package, which was impractical when you were probing it. He had heavy gloves, a fibre shield, a helmet with special goggles. He looked like a mechanical man when he appeared to do his work, and the crowd gathered to watch behind the police cordon; they watched from balconies and windows in safety and silence, everybody waiting for one unspoken thing – the explosion that would blast him to pieces. Brodie hated and feared the work. The admiring glances of his men were no consolation, as he girded himself to take the last, lonely, two or three hundred paces to the bomb. He didn't want to be a hero, but he couldn't be seen to falter.

Brodie was at Andy Marsden's apartment after one of his bomb squad duties. They sat in Marsden's lounge, in front of the picture windows, and watched the craft moving on the harbour, and the clouds tumbling over the Peak. He had never enjoyed a gin so much, or felt he needed one, until after one of these duties. He let the alchohol creep into his capillaries and sooth him. He revealed the deadweight of his thoughts while Marsden fussed with the drinks tray.

“Flinn's pressing me.”

Marsden wasn't perturbed. “If you agree to his proposal he'll get you off the bomb squad. You can't blame him using all the leverage he has.”

Although resentment seethed in Brodie, the liquor softened his resistance. He had begun to think that going with Flinn had advantages. Removal of a shadow over his career prospects, money for Vanessa, and freedom from the hellish uncertainties of bomb disposal. He bundled these thoughts aside, and mentioned that he might call Greta.

Marsden was contemptuous. “I've been up to St John's Road myself, ages ago. No doubt there's a different kennel of bitches there now, but the same type; lazy, scruffy, not bad looking when they were a bit younger, but now as hard as boot-leather, and on the make, getting laid by everybody and getting nowhere.”

“Greta's the first good-looking western girl I've met since I left Glasgow. I'm not worried about the morals of her friends, or even hers, at this stage.”

“How's Vanessa? She's a damn sight better looking, and more loyal than those St John's Road women. And clean.”

Brodie finished another uncounted gin-and-tonic, gulped rather than tasted, and considered whether Marsden was speaking from first hand knowledge. The harbour and city had receded into shadows, pin-pricked with coloured lights. The fallen sun was beginning to flare on the clouds from behind the Peak.

“The baby, and all the whining about being hard up puts me off.”

“You're a simpleton, Mike. If you're going with Vanessa, why not give her money?”

“I can't afford it.”

“The St John's Road cows wouldn't put it as candidly as Vanessa. You could blow a couple of hundred bucks on one of them in one night. But that would only be the start. There'd be presents, flowers, weekend vacations. St John's Road will cost you a bloody fortune compared with a few bucks for Vanessa.”

“Maybe, but Greta has a lot of appeal.”

“You wait. If you go with one of them, in a matter of weeks you'll get the bum's rush in favour of a big dick in town from New York, his pockets stuffed with greenbacks – unless you can keep up the spending. I know you want to be loved for yourself, Mike, but you'll find out that they don't do it that way at St John's Road.”

“You had a bad time there?”

“I learned fast.”

“Maybe I need to learn.”

“How much do you spend on Vanessa?”

“Hardly anything. A bowl of rice. A movie.”

“Take Flinn's offer, and pass it on,” Marsden suggested, and poured another gin from the gallon flagon, sloshing tonic into the glass until it had a bluish sheen, ice and lemon forgotten.

“Do you take money?” Brodie asked, wanting the man who seemed to be unfrazzled by anything to
talk
about the subject.

Marsden didn't seem displeased. He put down his glass on the Japanese oak low table, gestured to the room, eyes as blank as if blinds had been pulled down. “Don't even ask, Mike, feel.”

Brodie sagged in his chair. The sky swirled orange and yellow, as though a furnace behind the hills was being damped down for the night. The windows of the apartment seemed to have no glass in them, and he was suspended in a darkening void above the city.

At last, Marsden returned to his favourite subject. “You know Mike there's always a charge, a cost, a fee, a payment, within marriage or without; it's the first law of sexual dynamics: absolutely free fucking is impossible; it's against nature. It's a wonder that Newton, who was so sodding clever, didn't formulate it before the law of gravity. If you're getting cunt for the cost of a bowl of noodles, you're racking up a debt which will have to be paid.”

Brodie floated in a fiery sky.

Marsden belched, and crawled across the floor on his hands and knees, with the gin bottle. He held the bottle up to the little light which remained in the room; no more than an inch of liquid slopped in the flagon. And there was no tonic left.

“We can take the gin neat, or with water, or orange juice … The main thing is not to get trapped by those dirty bitches at St John's Road.”

Brodie awoke, his body taut. His head pulsed. He tried to work out where he was. He was naked, uncovered, on his back, stiff as a plank. Without moving, he unstuck one eyelid. A polished mahogany dresser with ugly brass handles appeared in his view. He heard a sound of distant traffic. The lemon light of dawn seeped between the drapes. He smelled aftershave lotion, dulled by sweat. A naked body was beside him on the bed; the unmistakable stickiness of skin on skin; lips pressed against his cheek softly; the fingers of a hand on his thigh.

“You're awake?” Marsden croaked, a stale breath brushing over Brodie's face.

“Jesus!” Brodie exclaimed, sitting up with a suddeness that rocked the bed. “My duty! I've clean forgotten my goddam duty!”

The dark, sleep-mellowed eyes watched Brodie as he frantically reached for his clothes. “I called you in sick at the station, silly.”

Over the months, Brodie had let Marsden pile up assumptions. He had felt powerless to take the elementary steps toward defining himself to Marsden. He had allowed Marsden to build an image in his own likeness. It was almost too late to say, ‘That's not me; you've misunderstood'. And in the meantime, the shiny eyes waited, taking sufficient satisfaction from an inner scene which Brodie could only guess.

They showered, and had breakfast together on the balcony, cereal and Buck's Fizz, and when the orange juice ran out, Champagne, the best, Marsden insisted, Krug. Below them, the city breathed stertorously, coughed itself into life under a quilt of smoke. And Brodie for once felt part of it. He had now lost the sense of the points he should make to Marsden about his sexual predilections, and all concern about making them. He was elated and drunk; it was eleven in the morning.

Brodie made an excuse and left after breakfast. On the walk back to Mongkok he cleared his head sufficiently to contemplate what he should do about Marsden. He couldn't find in himself the slightest pulse of sexual interest; he would be a fake, and an incompetent fake, if he tried to please Marsden. He wasn't repelled; he had no sexual aversion to Marsden; the warmth of friendly feeling that he did have, had permitted him to drift. Should he try for the sake of experience? No, he could see he would be exposed if he went forward; and he was going to be exposed inevitably when he retreated.