Blue Lantern (19 page)

Sherwin blushed, and the girl giggled. The crowd clapped and whistled, and called for Sherwin. He was isolated on a patch of open floor as the audience moved away from him. He was more tough-looking than when he arrived in the Colony, but he had lost weight in recent months, and his suit hung hollowly on his shoulders.

“Obviously I can't say I'm sorry to be leaving the Force. It's not for me. But I'm sorry to be leaving some of the people I've known here. Thank you for the generous gift. I'm not so much of a puritan that I can't appreciate her. It's a memory that will outlast a clock or a book. Thank you.”

Sherwin received an ovation. The men jumped on the tables and chairs, and sang ‘For they are jolly good fellows' and both Sherwin and Carol were showered with confetti.

At about one in the morning, Parker announced that the bride and groom were about to leave. Paul and Carol went upstairs amid amusement and a few cheers. Eventually the hostesses were sent home or taken upstairs, and a core of drinkers remained at the bar; they agreed it had been – still was – a magnificent evening.

“She's a lovely piece.”

“A superb ass.”

“A bit too good for Paul.”

“A novice.”

“Probably a virgin.”

“That girl? You gotta be joking.”

“No, Paul, you bloody fool.”

“What do you think Sherwin's doing now?”

“Reading from the Scriptures.”

“Teaching her a few notes on his recorder.”

“Pity the bedroom isn't wired.”

“Shall we go up and have a listen?”

“Leave him alone,” Brodie said.

But a few crept unsteadily up the stairs, and tried to get near Sherwin's door quietly; they trod on each other's fingers and toes. Brodie followed them to the top of the stairs, and said loudly, “Leave him alone!”

Suddenly the door opened, and Sherwin, still fully dressed, was on the threshold, outlined in the light. “Go way, you nosey buggers,” he said calmly.

There was a sobering tone of authority in Sherwin's words, and the men looked foolish as they descended to the bar.

On one of the peaceful nights when most people were cautiously indoors, and warned not to go out, Brodie met Helen Lau at a fish restaurant in Aberdeen. Helen chose the place, convenient for her as she had just attended a medical committee meeting nearby. There were only three or four guests in the restaurant, and it was nine in the evening, when the tables would normally have been full. Helen ordered; small dishes of prawn and crayfish with rice, mange-tout and cashews. One side of the restaurant was along the edge of a jetty, and they could see through the transparent plastic shelter, across the channel, to a dark mass of moored junks, with their flickering lanterns burning like candles in sepulchres.

“You aren't nervous about coming out at a time like this? Brodie asked, as they settled into their seats.

“No. I sense this is a friendly place. It's an opportunity for us.”

“Without being seen.”

Brodie was always restive about the secrecy attached to their meetings, but Helen ignored it.

“Yes, you ought to be pleased, Mike. Chairman Mao is helping us.”

“Does it worry you? What could happen?”

“I don't think much will happen. It's a tremor from the mainland.”

“The Government has had a shock.”

“When China is ready, it will ask for Hong Kong, and take it.”

“You're sure China will ask?”

“Why not? How long can Hong Kong survive without water, and food trains from Canton?”

“And Taiwan?”

“Maybe Taiwan is more like an old mole on your skin; it's benign, so you tolerate it.”

“This is the Cultural Revolution?”

“It will pass. You can't have a real cultural revolution without erasing the works of all the scholars in our history, and Mao doesn't have the power to do that.”

For a while they ate in silence.

“I sometimes wonder where
we're
going,” Brodie said.

He knew he should rest, but he had the urge to pick at the relationship like an itching scab, to try to make something more of it than he was able to understand.

Helen smiled artlessly. “As I've said before, Mike, you're beautiful and I enjoy you. Isn't that enough?”

“Just sensual pleasure?”

She seemed amused, as though he was being childish. “No. We have an affinity. There is always the possibility of something more.”

“Like a public relationship, even marriage?”

“I guess I thought so, or I wouldn't have started.”

“But you don't think so now?”

She pushed the bowl away as though the food was indigestible, and took time to rest her chopsticks. “When you start a relationship you don't know where it will end. You want to look across the chasm. I don't mean any particular chasm between us, I mean the chasm between any two people who might become partners.”

“And you've confirmed it's too far to jump?”

She was silent again, weighing her words. “You shouldn't press me on that; it's a question that will answer itself in its own time.”

“Have you done this often – with gwailos?”

The gold light died in her eyes, and her gaze dropped down, out of engagement with his, down to his chest, to the cheap oilcloth on the table with its crab pattern.

“Your silence is eloquent,” he said, unable to contain the words.

She sighed, looked up and let her hand fall on his. “Mike, you're miles off limits. Don't make assumptions. And don't think you can rummage around inside my head for any particular piece of information you want. Nobody on earth can do that.”

He pushed his plate away. “I'm sorry. You make such a play of respectability, and not being seen with a lowly police inspector, I naturally wonder about your experience.”

“You have to listen to what I've said, Mike, not to what you've imagined. My respectability would be gone if I was seen to be on affectionate terms with a handsome young Scotsman. It has nothing to do with police inspectors, lowly or otherwise, and nothing to do with my other experiences in life.”

“OK, you're an experienced woman, not a Chinese maiden.”

He was conscious that he was wounding like a wife-beater, his own pain only assuaged by more violence.

She remained gentle, but lifted her hand from his. “You seem determined to be nasty. I never claimed to be a virgin or an innocent. I'm a doctor of medicine. I've lived and studied in two countries abroad. I've seen a lot. But in my eyes, and those of my family and friends, I am a Chinese of good repute who will marry well.”

“Repute, not reality is what concerns you.”

“Repute is part of reality, Mike. We all have private bits to our lives. We're entitled to choose the public image we want to project. I have no guilt about us, but it's private. I don't want to advertise it, and I don't intend to. I wanted the experience with you because it might have been so much more that a short period of sexual love.”

“You're disappointed in us?”

“I've reached out to you because I want to live my life to the full. I accept you as you are. And you'll have to accept me. You're seeing me as a possession, not as a friend. It makes my love for you very painful.”

Brodie had heard a hallway of doors closing against him, and now he was perversely slamming them himself. “I suppose your husband has already been chosen.”

Helen had withdrawn to a chilly frankness. “In a sense he has, although neither of us is bound in any way.”

“Who is he?” Brodie demanded hoarsely.

For Brodie, the scene was happening on two disjointed levels at the same time. One, where he could see everything and regret it; and the other where he blurted out his fevered responses, unable to control his tongue.

“You want to know? Very well, then. A man known to me and my family for many years. A Chinese doctor. A good man, and a Christian.”

“Why does he wait?”

She looked at him in disappointment. “You think along the most vulgar lines. He waits for me to be sure.”

“Meanwhile, Helen, you play round with me.”

“You put a slightly disgusting slant on everything. Two people have to be ready to enter a Christian marriage. It's a permanent union Mike, capable of growing; not a Roman candle which fizzles out soon after the wedding night.”

“So you're not sure you'll marry this man?”

“I'm not sure whether I can make the commitment to him. That's why I'm with you.”

“Then there's hope for us?” he concluded doggedly, ignoring his own offensiveness, and wanting to ask what the Chinese doctor was like in bed, and other cruel questions which burned on his lips.

She didn't answer.

14

The next day, the rioting started again, and in a few hours the city was as tense as it had ever been. Brodie struck unexpectedly long and arduous emergency duties. It was nearly seven in the evening by the time he had retired from manning a cordon in Nathan Road. The two vehicles of his temporarily enlarged squad were parked on a stretch of footpath at the beginning of Humphreys Avenue, guards posted front and rear. He was to await orders.

Although the weather was cooling, the day had been hot. Truculent mobs had drifted through the streets blocking them in places. Buses had been abandoned, but taxi drivers were doing a furious last minute business, judging that the risk outweighed the danger. The police were restrained, quietly breaking up big concentrations of people, and only occasionally resorting to tear gas. But an air of malevolence hung over Kowloon; everybody was waiting for the storm to strike.

Brodie was settled in the front seat of his Land Rover dozing. Humphreys Avenue was nearly deserted. A few cautious shop proprietors had put up shutters, but some shops were still open. No white faces were visible. Stall owners, whose wares usually sprawled out across the footpaths, had moved them, and their folding chairs, into the alleys. Shadows swelled and dulled the colours. The approaching night seemed cleaner. Brodie drifted fitfully in and out of sleep. The messages on the radio reflected movements of the army and police forces which Brodie didn't try to follow. His driver was wide awake, still as a lizard.

The driver shook Brodie's shoulder, and he came back to full consciousness. It was dark; a shower of rain had spotted the windscreen with coloured lights. The driver was apologetic. Trouble. A flood of people were moving down the road. Brodie pulled on his riot helmet, and climbed on the nose of the Land Rover to get a view. The light was good enough with the streetlights for him to make out a broad column of men carrying placards, shouting slogans. Over the top of the buildings he could see flames, and columns of smoke lit by Verey lights. He could feel the disorderly forces massing around him, but he could see no violence. He noticed that two cars had entered the street from a side road. One, a taxi, backed up quickly to the intersection and retreated. The other, a private car, was submerged in the mob.

Brodie reported the crowd concentration to control. He pulled down the visor on his helmet, and took a plastic shield from behind the seat. His men waited in line beside the vehicles, helmeted, nursing crowd grenades and gas guns. Fifty yards ahead the road was packed with people. The beleaguered car was a sleek ivory coloured Mercedes saloon. The driver was leaning on the horn, trying to clear a space. In reaction, fists drummed on the car's body panels. The driver desperately tried to back up, and the car surged in reverse, with screams from the crowd. Brodie could see the driver, a young white man, trying to wave the people away. The girl beside him was blonde, her eyes frozen, and her mouth petrified in a small circle.

The mob beat the shiny lacquered shell of the car with sticks. Brodie could hear the girl screaming. He fitted a respirator under his helmet and with his men, began to force a path to the car. When he was yards away, the girl's door of the car was flung open. She was dragged out, and shouldered out of sight. The rioters began to rock the chassis. The driver struggled to get out, but every attempt was frustrated by the crowd. The car was raised on one side by many hands, and crashed over on its cab. As Brodie and his men tried to drive the assailants away, a petrol bomb was pushed through the broken windscreen. A sudden deep boom shook him; the interior of the car exploded in flames. Flags of fire waved from the broken windows. Men outside poked at the writhing driver, a snail in a flaming shell.

Brodie's men cleared a space around the wreck with tear gas, and the tormentors were finally routed, catching blows from sticks or gun barrels as they ran, their wild throats roaring. Sergeant Lam injected foam into the interior, soaking the fiery theatre, but it was far too late. The driver had been incinerated. The malcontents had fled. The peaceable part of the crowd had retired twenty yards to watch.

Half a dozen bodies were lying injured on the ground, some the victims of Brodie's squad He went to look for the girl, and found her in a back street, sobbing. He pulled her to her feet like a doll. In a composed state she would have been a stylish young woman. Her dress was filthy, her legs and face scratched, but even goggling with fear, she had a soft and scented attraction. He let her walk to the ambulance on her own. She was a woman of a class he seldom encountered; the kind who dined at the Peninsula or Gaddis, and danced all night at the Scene.

Brodie, his men and a para-medical team removed the driver from the wreck, limb by limb; the body fell apart like over-cooked chicken; all that remained of what Brodie guessed was the prosperous Far Eastern executive of a western corporation, with the carapace of his Mercedes 300SL.

The affair with Greta was a knee-jerk reaction. She was there. She was appealing. It was a relief, or rather Brodie thought that it would be a relief. Even though she was surrounded by grime and repulsive people, she had an independence and spirit that was infectious. But after a first night spent clawing at each other for their personal satisfactions, Brodie and Greta had watched each other moodily in the morning, like disaffected neighbours in their separate gardens.