Hiroshima Joe (16 page)

He would never lift a gun. There would always be food and the love of the boys and the men, and the admiration of the girls and the women, and no one would be there to censure him. There would be waxy pink orchids hanging from the branches and the milk of green coconuts to drink. There would be no gin or rum. There would be opium, of course; that was natural.

In his heart of hearts, though, he knew that it wouldn’t – couldn’t last. Some son of a bitch would come along with a need to mine tin, plant ordered ranks of rubber trees, excavate the opals with a dredger, fell the mahogany trees, shoot the monkeys (for food, perhaps, as the Japanese had done in Hong Kong during the war) or enslave the people with a desire for trousers, nylon stockings, wristwatches.

At other times, he saw himself not as a willing and accepting refugee, an acolyte of peace and simplicity, but as a castaway, suffering the purgatory of deliberate rejection or cursory dismissal.

‘Excuse me.’

Sandingham turned to one side.

‘I say, excuse me.’

An Englishman dressed in tropical whites was struggling to lift a heavy suitcase on to a rickshaw. The rickshaw-puller was raising the shafts of his vehicle horizontal in the hope that that might tilt the case backwards, but it was too heavy.

At first, Sandingham thought the man wanted him to move along. That was not uncommon. Then he understood that, in this instance, the man was actually asking for assistance.

‘Could you help me in with this, do you think? God alone knows what my wife’s got in it – can’t think! And I can’t find a free baggage coolie anywhere.’

Saying nothing, Sandingham took a firm grip on the underneath rim and hoisted it on to the seat of the rickshaw as the owner of the case worked it from side to side. It took only a few moments. He noticed the passenger’s name on the ‘Wanted on Voyage’ label: ‘Grover – Mr & Mrs: Cabin B16.’

‘Thank you so much,’ said the man.

He did not offer a tip: Sandingham thought that, had he been Chinese, the man would have dipped into his pocket for a ten-cent coin. Because he was white, he didn’t.

The rickshaw pulled away from the kerb and the European settled himself into another in order to follow the luggage. Lifting the case had made the man stickily hot and he removed his jacket. Sandingham watched but said nothing. As the man went off, Sandingham stooped quickly and picked up the paper that he had seen slip from an inside pocket. He hoped it was a banknote, possibly in sterling. That would have been more use than a Hong Kong dollar. Although it looked too stiff, the colour of the ink and size suggested that it might be a ten-shilling note. It wasn’t. It turned out to be much, much more valuable: a visitor’s boarding pass for the
Canton.

There was only one way to exploit the pass and that would require a change of clothes. Even as a European, he was not going to get past a sharp-eyed P&O gangway officer, someone experienced in sorting out hangers-on from genuine sender-offers, dressed as shabbily as he was at present. He took a number seven bus travelling up Kowloon peninsula in the direction of the hotel, quickly washed, shaved and changed into a jacket and fairly well-ironed pair of trousers, then caught another bus back to Tsim Sha Tsui. At the dock gate he flashed the flimsy card pass to the policeman on duty and was waved through. At the head of the gangway, he showed the pass to the ship’s officer.

‘Who are you seeing off, sir?’

‘Mr and Mrs Grover. B16,’ Sandingham answered, looking the man full in the face.

The officer looked down his passenger list to check, then said, ‘Thank you, sir. If you’ll turn left at the head of the stairs and follow the notice to B deck. Visitors will be required to go ashore by eleven p.m., sir.’

It was cooler in the ship than on the dock where the stones and tarred wooden planks reverberated with the stored heat of the day. The lowering sun pierced the windows of the deck lounge as Sandingham walked out of the door and up the companionway to the starboard boat deck. A hot breeze soon removed from him the pleasant effects of the ship’s blower system.

The boat deck gave him an elevated view of the panorama of Hong Kong which he knew so well from street level, but not from sixty feet up. Standing beneath one of the lifeboats, he watched the green Star Ferry craft plying across the harbour with their tall, thin funnels like stovepipe hats and their circular white lifebuoys hanging from the railings of the upper decks. There was a gentle swell on the surface of the sea that complemented the green slopes of Mid-Levels above Victoria. He found himself trying to pick out familiar buildings on Hong Kong-side – the Hong Kong and Shanghai and China Bank buildings were easy. So was Government House. The block of flats below Macdonnell Road was not so easy to place, even though he could see plainly the Peak Tram line, by which it stood, slicing up the mountainside: there had been another building erected in front of the one for which he was searching.

Descending by a different companionway, Sandingham walked slowly towards a first-class lounge and sat down at a small, highly-polished table in the middle of the room. He looked around.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the interior light, he saw that the lounge was sumptuously furnished with leather chairs and round card tables, the rims of which were raised in order to prevent objects from sliding off in choppy seas. There were carved wells for glasses at each of the four players’ seats. The walls were panelled with walnut veneer sections and there were paintings screwed on to the wood. They were of a series depicting scenes from the various ports of call at which the ship stopped on her Far East run – Port Said, with gilli-gilli men producing eggs from passengers’ ears; Bombay, and a snake charmer performing at the foot of the gangway; Singapore, and the ship surrounded by sampans selling curios; Hong Kong, and, inevitably, a portrait of the ship against the grandeur of The Peak at sunset.

A steward approached him.

‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’

‘Dry martini,’ Sandingham ordered and the steward left, to return a very short time later with the cocktail on a silver tray.

‘One and seven please, sir.’

‘Can I sign for it?’

‘It is policy to ask for drinks to be paid for in currency when alongside, sir.’ He paused then added tactfully, ‘It avoids later embarrassment. However … may I have your cabin number, sir?’

Sandingham gave it as B16. The steward left and Sandingham, to be on the safe side, moved to another table in a corner by a window from which he could note the steward’s reactions when he came back in. Sandingham was experienced enough to be able to tell a man’s mood by a mere glance at his face. He had had the best occupational training in the world for that: prisoner.

He need not have worried. The steward had checked the passenger list, being too busy to telephone the cabin and confirm the facts. He now simply asked him for his name and, on hearing it, allowed him to sign. After all, if this were one of the Grovers’ spongeing friends, then they could accept paying for his drink.

The lounge was empty apart from Sandingham. Passengers and their guests came and went, but most were congregating to drink out on the deck, where the evening was growing cooler and balmier.

He stirred the green olive around in the martini. There was no hurry to drink the cocktail. And he could have another.

When the olive had soaked up as much as it could of the alcohol, he put it in his mouth on the end of the cocktail stick and sucked its sourness into his throat where it stung pleasantly. Sitting there, he could have been in another life in another place. His fingers twirled the tiny aluminium stick that was shaped like an arrow. In the flights were the initials ‘P&O’ and, on the other side, the name of the ship.

He ordered another drink and the steward served this without questioning the signing of the chit. He also put down before Sandingham two small glass bowls, one full of salted cashews and the other containing small, vinegared gherkins.

What heights of decadence, luxury even! It had been years since Sandingham had last tasted cashew nuts. They were never served in his hotel where the bar food consisted only of peanuts, over-salted and soggy with oil.

A plump European woman in her mid-sixties entered the lounge and sat down heavily at the table next to him. Sandingham watched her from the corner of his eye, studied her heavy make-up and loose-fitting blouse, the pink of her painted toenails sprouting through the openings of her high-heels and the faint blue rinse of her grey hair. The steward came in and she ordered a pink gin. Sandingham let his mind drift away from her, back into the luxuriousness of drinking in the evening, for free, in such cool comfort.

‘Are you going all the way?’ she suddenly asked in a scratchy voice, breaking into his reverie.

‘What!’ he exclaimed, surprised by her sudden words. He was accustomed to be being disregarded. Then, to be less conspicuous by his rudeness, he added, ‘I beg your pardon?’ somewhat brusquely, in keeping with his supposed class status.

‘All the way. Are you going all the way?’ She saw his incomprehension and added for clarity, ‘All the way to UK. To Tilbury. Or are you getting off
en route?
’

‘Port Said,’ he answered, out of the blue. ‘I’m getting off at Port Said.’

‘Fascinating little town,’ she commented, accepting his information in a patronisingly colonial manner. ‘Quite fascinating. The first one sees of the East coming out, I think. I don’t count Algiers and the Casbah, do you? After all, they speak French there. And as for Alex! Well, there they are positively bi-lingual. English and French. And Arabic, of course. Hardly a burnous to be seen these days. Most of them wear tropical suits!’ She made a noise like a pony sneezing. ‘Alexandria! My husband was there in ’35…’

Sandingham drank on. The martinis were making him drowsy and that was fatal. A sleeping drunk attracts attention; a drunk
compos mentis
does not; people ignore alert drunks. He strove to pay attention to the harridan’s meanderings: they would keep him conscious if he concentrated. She could serve that purpose, at least.

‘… Port Said in ’45. And the Canal. Full of wrecks. Bombed boats. Awful. Took us hours. My husband said it would have been quicker on bloody camels.’ She drank her gin and angustura bitters. ‘Do you know Port Said well?’

‘I’m in business there.’

‘Really? How interesting! I love those urchins who dive for coins thrown overboard. They keep the money in their mouths, I’m told. Their mouths! I ask you. And the gilli-gilli men – how they pull live chicks and eggs from one’s ears. And one doesn’t feel a thing. Not a thing…’

Jesus, thought Sandingham, she actually thinks those yellow puffball chickens come from westerners’ earholes. He wondered if she realised they could lift a purse or a passport from a pocket with just as much facility.

‘What line are you in?’

‘Curios, antiques, antiquities. That sort of thing.’

‘In that case, I have something of interest to show you.’

He watched, dumbfounded by a mixture of her actions and the martini – the steward had served him with yet another – as she plunged her hand into the space between her sagging bosoms. As she tugged her blouse askew he noticed that her make-up ended just below the start of her cleavage: he felt an instant repulsion ripple through his flesh.

‘Here it is,’ she uttered finally, triumphantly, yanking a thin gold chain free of the frilly top of her slip.

She opened her hand to reveal a small, light blue, oval dot that at first he thought was a small aquamarine or turquoise, dirtied by contact with her talcumed flesh, then took to be a gawdy locket.

Beckoning his face closer, she held it out to him.

‘What do you make of that?’

‘It’s a scarab,’ said Sandingham, recognising the little beetle set in a gold clasp. ‘Egyptian.’

‘Scarab! Oh, really! You can’t know much. It’s not a scarab at all; it’s a cowroid. Made of faience.’

‘It seems scarab-like to me. But then I’ve left my close-up spectacles in my cabin.’

‘It has a fine set of hieroglyphs on the reverse,’ she boasted, reciting from memory,
‘Suten but nub ankh.
“The King of Life is Gold.” My husband bought it in Blanchard’s Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Long before the war. Do you know Blanchard’s?’

‘He is my uncle. Was.’ This untruth rolled out as fluently as the rest. He was an expert liar. He had had to be. He prayed that Blanchard, whoever he was, was dead. The past tense might give him away. Her next sentence calmed his fear.

‘How fascinating! Well, I’ve other things I can show you on the voyage. While away the time.’

Sandingham could not take his eyes off the little Egyptian charm. He knew enough to be well aware that such things were sought after and collected: Francis Leung would pay well for it.

‘Might I see it for a moment? It does seem a fine specimen. Rare these days. Cowroids.’

Without demur, she unhooked the catch of the chain and handed it to him. He looked at the jewel and tried to guess its worth.

The steward approached and requested Sandingham to sign for the last martini.

‘Another, Mr Grover?’

‘Please. And a pink gin for…’

‘Mrs Forsyth,’ she said, nodding her head to one side by way of introduction. ‘Betty Forsyth. Cabin C76.’

Cheaper part of the ship, thought Sandingham. A lower deck. A widow in straitened circumstances going back to Britain to sponge off her son and daughter-in-law.

‘Grover,’ he said. ‘B16.’

The drinks came and he continued to finger the talisman.

‘The war is going rather well,’ she said to change the subject, keeping conversation going.

‘The war?’

‘Korea. There was a most encouraging report in the
South China Morning Post
today and I heard it repeated in the BBC World Service at noon. A big push…’

‘No war goes well,’ Sandingham muttered, interrupting her. ‘War is a foul thing, a disease upon the nature of men. A wart upon the cheek of humanity that we are forced to kiss as if we love it. War is a degradation of the spirit.’ She was blushing slightly: he could tell by looking at the narrow pouches below her eyes where the sweat had worn thin her face cream and powder. ‘War is an abomination, a stinking, filthy thing. It is a turd excreted by the anus of the human soul.’