The Backpacker (33 page)

ONE

After we set fire to the sheep shed and walked back into Batlow, there wasn't much to do but wait until the next day and try to get a lift up to Sydney. It turned out to be much more difficult than we'd ever imagined, so rather than hang around, running the risk of being spotted by Jack or one of his cronies, we decided to buy a bus ticket to get us to the city. It cost more than either of us had wanted to pay, but Rick came up with a solution.

The cheques that Jack's wife had issued as our final payment, for seven and eight dollars, had been hurriedly filled out (no doubt she was eager to see the back of us), leaving room between the words, ‘seven' and ‘dollars' for us to put in a ‘ty'. The amount in words would therefore read ‘Seventy' dollars on mine and ‘Eighty' on Rick's, and we easily put an extra zero in the box to make it all add up. The bank in Batlow knew our faces well, since we'd been cashing cheques for that amount every week for months, so there shouldn't be any problems. I didn't really like the idea of cheating anyone, but felt that it was more than justified considering that we'd been diddled out of what was rightfully ours. We sat in the pub and accurately forged Joan's handwriting, then went into the bank and cashed the cheques without a hitch.

Rick wanted to try to hitch a ride but I was so nervous, almost running out of the bank, that I went straight into the ticket office and booked us onto the next bus out. Before nightfall we were in Sydney.

We were the first customers in the travel agent when the woman opened the shutter at nine o'clock the next morning, and, according to her, the only people she'd ever seen waiting, cash in hand, for a seat on the next available flight out.

‘What, tonight?' she exclaimed, rolling up the front shutter of her shop and looking back wide-eyed.

‘Yes, tonight. If that's the next available flight.' I pulled out a wad of notes.

‘Cash!'

‘Yep.'

Rick and I followed her into the shop and pulled out all the money from our pockets, counting it out on her desk, while she went to one side to put the kettle on. ‘Well, I don't know,' she said, spooning some coffee granules into a cup, ‘I haven't even opened the safe yet, and... ' she turned and saw the money. ‘Umm, OK then.'

It broke my heart to hand over that money. The cost of the ticket left me with a hundred dollars. ‘One hundred dollars,' I said to Rick as we left the agent, holding up the remaining cash in one hand and a ticket voucher in the other. ‘After five months ofive
ry
hard work that's all I've got to show for it.'

‘But we're heading to Hong Kong, John; the land of milk and honey.' Rick spread his arms wide. ‘In a month's time you and me'll be millionaires!'

‘You said that in Thailand.' I quickly stuffed the money back into my pocket, afraid that it might vanish or blow away in the breeze, ‘And look what happened to us there!'

‘This is different.' He held his plane ticket coupon up to the sky, angling it this way and that to catch the light. ‘Hong Kong's just waiting for people like us.'

‘Poor people you mean?'

‘Entrepreneurs.'

We both laughed, and I asked, ‘What about Chinese girls, what d'you think they'll be like?'

‘Huh. Only the most beautiful women in the world, everyone knows that. You've seen those Bruce Lee films haven't you? A bit old now, but the birds are fantastic.' He put the coupon methodically into his pocket, trying not to fold or dent the edges, and winked. ‘Suzie Wong and all that stuff. All walking about in those long sexy silk dresses.'

‘Ooh, yeah: the harbour full of junks, bamboo houses, rickshaws... I remember the books we had in geography class at school, they always showed pictures of Hong Kong with British policemen and Union Jacks flying every where. It looked pretty good.'

‘You liked India, well Hong Kong is like that, only with a little more law and order. You know: things work properly, buses run on time, but it's still Asia.'

We continued walking and talking, and went down to the harbour to get a final, lasting impression of Australia. Our flight wasn't due to depart until midnight so we spent the rest of that day wandering around the Opera House, chatting and dreaming about being seduced by dozens of Chinese girls as soon as we stepped off the plane in Hong Kong. We were so consumed by our thoughts, and the talk of the wonders that awaited us, that when, months later, someone asked me what the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House were like, I couldn't recall ever having seen them.

TWO

‘Sir. Excuse me sir.' Rick looked away from the window with a start. ‘Would you put your seat belt on please sir, we'll be landing shortly.' The pretty Chinese stewardess smiled and leaned across me, pressing a button on Rick's armrest, bringing his seat upright and went away.

The plane banked gently on our side and we both fought to get our faces up against the plastic window. ‘Fooking hell.'

‘What can you see?' I asked eagerly, trying to look over his shoulder.

The back of his head shook. ‘Buildings. Really horrible buildings.' He turned away from the window and stared at me. ‘Is this a direct flight?'

‘Let me see.' We changed seats. The early morning sun was shining its dull, polluted rays on to what looked like a ten-storey shanty town. Rust-stained concrete tenement-style blocks of flats stretched as far as I could see, in a wretched mass. It reminded me of pictures I'd seen in school textbooks of Hiroshima after the atom bomb had been dropped, where the buildings on the outskirts of the city had just about remained standing. I couldn't see any people, but as we descended it was possible to make out the lines of washing, row after row strung like dirty bunting on poles from every window. It looked as though a squadron of aircraft had flown over the city and carpet-bombed it with millions of tons of laundry.

‘This can't be Hong Kong,' I said incredulously, still glued to the scene below. ‘Where are all the bamboo houses, the junks?'

Behind me Rick was talking to a stewardess. ‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘is this a direct flight to Hong Kong, or are we going via somewhere else?'

She seemed a bit taken back by the stupidity of the question. ‘We're landing in Hong Kong now, sir,' I heard her say assertively. ‘
Please
fasten your seat belt.'

Rick and I turned to each other at exactly the same time and shrugged. ‘This is it!'

Neither of us spoke until we cleared customs and went outside to catch the bus into town, we were so shell shocked by the overwhelming oppressiveness of the drab concrete cityscape. Rick wiped a trickle of sweat onto his T-shirt as we boarded the air conditioned bus. ‘Jesus, it's fooking hot. And humid. Wow!'

‘Fi'e dollar!' The bus driver looked angry and stabbed the money slot with his finger. ‘More fi'e dollar.' I put in another five dollar coin in and he brushed me away aggressively with his hand.

‘Welcome to Hong Kong,' I mumbled, and put my bag on a rack. We were still in Asia, weren't we?

The bus doors slid shut with a gasp of hydraulics and we moved off. A woman's recorded voice immediately welcomed us to Hong Kong in three languages (no doubt designed to dispel any lingering worries tourists may have that they had in fact landed in the wrong place). The English I understood, the second one sounded very aggressive, and the third, Mandarin, sounded like a record playing backwards. Every five minutes along the route the driver pushed a button and the voice started again, and every time we had to stifle our laughter at the Mandarin segment.

The streets were jam-packed with people to the point where there was no longer any space on the pavement and they were two or three abreast on the road. Cars, trucks and buses revved up clouds of black diesel fumes that mixed with the hot sticky air and hung like a dead weight. Young pedestrians dressed immaculately (and inappropriately for the suffocating heat) in Western-style suits held tissues over their mouths to avoid being choked under the blanket, while old men hanging around on street corners coughed up small blobs of yellow phlegm which they projected, like spoonfuls of mayonnaise, onto over-filled rubbish bins.

Nobody, I noticed, walked with a normal gait; everyone shuffled in little pigeon-steps, unable to get into a proper stride. They were like old lags whose legs have been in prison irons for so many years that, even when released they still can't get used to stretching them. I suppose years of walking along while being sandwiched between two people has much the same effect.

In amongst the boiling hot traffic, a butcher wound his way around the stationary vehicles, pushing a trolley that was loaded high with plucked chickens. The small trolley wheels hit a pothole and one of the wobbling poultry fell off onto the road. As he stooped to pick it up, the truck in front edged forward, unleashing its exhaust right onto the meat. He put the stray bird back on with the others and turned off into a nearby restaurant.

At another butcher-shop, a man was blow-torching a dead pig. The carcass was hung up from a beam while the man circled it with the flame, blasting off the hairs in a blizzard of sparks. All these first impression we witnessed from the comfort of our air-con bus, like watching a film on a giant TV screen.

The two Scottish girls at the orchard had given us the names of a few guest houses, or at least the building that housed them, and half an hour later we jumped from the bus at what looked like the correct stop.

I checked the name of the road on the map against the one on the street sign, and we turned the corner into the busy main street, joining the flow of bodies. To stop meant becoming a boulder in the fast flowing river; thousands of people slammed into us and piled up, or slid either side in the slipstream and carried on out to sea.

‘Should be around here somewhere.' A droplet of sweat splashed onto the sheet of paper, causing the ink to run. I wiped it off and lost half of the word. ‘Chungking Mansions,' I said as soon as I noticed the decrepit block beside us, and pointed. ‘This looks like it.'

‘Here?' Rick exclaimed.

I nodded. ‘That's what the girls wrote: "Chungking Mansions".'

There was a huge crowd on the steps leading up to the entrance, all pushing and shoving to see into the window of the adjacent shop. I pushed through the crowd to see what was so interesting and found that it was displaying the latest mobile phones. The look on the faces of the people in the crowd was one of complete and utter longing; the same way children look into a pet shop window at a cute puppy. We pushed past them into the entrance of the building and found ourselves in an old, mixed-use shopping arcade. We were instantly pounced upon by dozens of Indians, offering everything from tailored suits to ‘the best Punjabi food in town'. Amongst other things we were also offered accommodation.

‘Use stairs,' said the Indian boy, pulling me by the hand into a dimly lit stairwell, ‘lift no good, wait one hour, many people.'

‘What floor is your guest house on?'

He coughed out a word that sounded suspiciously like fifteen.

‘Fifteen!' Rick shouted, ‘You're kidding?'

‘Early, sir, not too hot. Have shared shower in hotel for your washing selves.'

We slogged and panted our way up to the top floor of the building, weaving our way along open corridors piled to the ceiling with rotting rubbish and went into his ‘hotel'. Basically it was a private flat that had been sub-divided into dormitories: one for females and two for males. The one we were shown to was twelve feet by six and had eight beds (four bunks) crammed into it. When the door was opened it banged against the foot of the nearest bunk, waking the occupant, and to get between the two rows of beds I had to turn sideways. I had to hold my nose; the smell of stale sweat and damp socks was so overpowering. Rick looked crestfallen, and dropped his bag onto the floor, nearly crushing a skinny cat that was licking at a stain. We looked at each other in despair before shaking our heads and walking out to find another.

The Indian boy wanted to show us to another hotel that belonged to his brother, so we went along to that one but it was even worse. After that it was the turn of his uncle's place on the seventh floor. It turned out to be nothing more than a bed in the corner of a rat-infested kitchen, and then we went to his friend's special rooms (‘Shh, illegal, no tell other people!'), but that was just a large room full of Pakistani refugees and, though they seemed very welcoming, we declined.

Another hour or so went by in which we looked at every other illegal guest house in that building and the building next door, before we swallowed our pride and returned to the first one we had been shown.

‘We'll get used to it,' I squeaked through pinched nostrils. ‘We only need to sleep here, we'll spend the rest of the day out looking for work.'

‘Which one do you want,' Rick asked, sliding between the metal frames of the bunks, ‘top or bottom?'

‘Don't mind.'

He threw his bag onto the bottom bed and sat down with a huff. My bed was so close to a pipe that ran across the ceiling that I couldn't sit up, and to get onto the bed I had to climb up and wriggle sideways.

‘"Quaint bamboo houses. Rickshaws. Junks".' I slithered to the edge of the bed and hung my head over, ‘I hope you're right about the girls.'