Kowloon Tong Read online

  "Ah Fu hasn't been to work for a week."

  Hung's mask was his expression of facing a high wind, cheeks sucked in, eyes narrowed to slits, giving nothing away. It was the making of poker faces in which the Chinese were expert.

  "So we're wondering," Bunt said to the unhelpful man.

  "Obviously she is feeling poorly. She is home."

  "Her flat-mate hasn't seen her and she's very worried. So am I."

  "And me."

  "Good. Because you were the last person to see her," Bunt said.

  He got up from his chair. Hung sidestepped as though to obstruct him, but Bunt pushed past him and walked the length of the room to the window. When he looked out and saw his building, he became so absorbed in the harmony of straight lines that linked this window with his windows that he had to reach for the wall and steady himself on a cabinet.

  "Careful," Hung said, taking a step towards him.

  Bunt had snagged his fingers on a shelf, having reached through the cabinet door. There was no glass in the door. The crockery was gone from inside. Fewer knickknacks cluttered the shelves. A silver spoon, a painted tin cat, and a brass bell, that was all. Where was the porcelain? Where was the glass?

  He was standing on a dusty carpetless floor, with bare walls, the glass missing from the cabinet door and from the face of the stopped clock. It was strange and spare, a Chinese apartment that was an experience of China.

  Hong Kong people seldom entertained at home, but when they did they gloated over their appliances and their toys: they were spenders, they hated treasures, they loved gadgets. As refugees they valued portable property most of all, things they could stuff into bags and flee with. But Hung's drab place was what Bunt had always imagined China to be like: fiercely frugal, stinking of cabbage and fried noodles and cheesy feet, where people sat upright in hard chairs in their underwear.

  "Ah Fu left the restaurant with you."

  "Did you observe us leaving?"

  Bunt hesitated, and before he could think of anything to say Hung was attacking.

  "See?" Hung said. "You are very much mistaken."

  Bunt was on the point of telling him that Mei-ping had seen them leave in a taxi, but he thought better of it. Better to keep her out of it.

  "Perhaps Ah Fu visited her family in China."

  "She was afraid of going there. She wanted to emigrate to Canada."

  "That's it then," Hung said. "She has left for Canada. She is young. Young people are not always reliable."

  "She worked for me," Bunt said. "She was never absent, never late."

  Hung had not stopped smiling, though it was his windblown expression, squinting into a gale.

  "Who is inquiring about her?"

  "I am."

  "But you said 'we're wondering.'"

  Bunt stared at him.

  "Please sit down," Hung said.

  Instead of doing so, Bunt put his hands on his hips and said, "If she's missing, it's a matter for the police."

  "That is not a good idea," Hung said. "The police would only make trouble."

  It annoyed Bunt to hear Hung say the very words he himself had said to Mei-ping.

  "Trouble for you."

  "Trouble for us."

  "Something might have happened to Ah Fu," Bunt said, and took a step closer to Hung, who did not move.

  Hung said, "In the course of a police inquiry they would look into your business. Your records and mine. They would discover that we have started a new company in the Cayman Islands and that money was being transferred in a manner that was highly questionable. You see?"

  But Bunt was already protesting. "I don't have to sell to you!"

  Still talking calmly, Hung said, "And your mother might find that dreadfully inconvenient."

  Bunt was silenced. He hated that tone, its arrogant presumption, hated it most because he was sure that Hung was right. His mother's Chinese nature said, Don't get involved.

  The way in which Hung had peeled the chicken feet and picked out the stringy tendons and gnawed at the yellow shanks; the slant of his lips as he stuffed his mouth with chicken breast and spoke of trussing the birds with string; the I want to eat your foot and the tantrum over the bitter melon; the abruptness with which he had poked a piece of cheap jade into Ah Fu's mouth—it all came back to Bunt as he faced Hung, and the logic in it was like a warning prelude to a violent crime.

  When you saw all these images on a Chinese scroll, you would know without seeing the corpse that a murder had been committed.

  "Your mother would want you to mind your own business."

  Bunt saw it clearly: the glass had been smashed in the struggle, the clock flung to the floor, the cabinet tipped over, the carpets rucked up. And when Ah Fu became desperate Hung had lashed out and hurt her, cracked her skull perhaps, and she had bled all over the white shag carpets. The evidence was not in the room, the evidence was missing—that stark neatness was the proof that a bloody crime had been committed. The same was true of China. The look of the apartment was the spare look of China, a place that had been scoured and simplified by chaos—upheaval, terror, mass murder, war. Hong Kong had a peaceable clutter, just an accumulation of worn or out-of-date things, like a massive attic.

  "Someone will ask," Bunt said.

  "Only a busybody."

  "Plenty of them in Hong Kong. It's not China, you know."

  "Ah Fu is where she wants to be." Hung stared at him. "It is wrong to interfere in people's private affairs."

  "If a person's dead of natural causes it's private," Bunt said. "If she's been killed it's everyone's business."

  "I think your mother would disagree."

  With the sudden adroitness with which he had offered Bunt tea at an awkward moment, Hung said, "Do you remember that I told you that Wendell in the Pussy Cat is a Eurasian?"

  "Yes," Bunt said, surprised by the obliqueness of the question.

  "Wonderful. Wendell is your brother. Half-brother, I should say."

  "That's a lie!"

  Bunt had backed towards the door, where he heard a radio—Cantonese gabbling, loud music, the sound of phones ringing and traffic toiling in the busy road below. How dare Hung say that to him!

  Yes, Hong Kong was harmless clutter, but the Chinese were brutes, and China in Bunt's imagining looked spare because so much had been broken. All the crockery in China had been smashed, flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which the country was famous. All the bloodstained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors' portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment.

  "Someone might go to the police."

  "That would be a mistake."

  Bunt said nothing. He was glad to go.

  11

  WHEN HE GOT HOME from Hung's and did not see his mother anywhere in the cottage, he thought she might be dead.

  So many years of unvarying routine had made the slightest change a shock for Bunt. He was uneasy without a program; he could not improvise. He counted on morning tea brought on a tray by Wang at six, of breakfast itself at seven, the tram or the car at eight, arriving in Kowloon Tong at nine, coffee and biscuits at eleven, lunch at one, tea at four, the Pussy Cat at five-thirty, Cricket Club on Wednesday, Mei-ping for sex, his mother always waiting for him.

  "Don't you get fed up when everything's the same?" Mr. Chuck had once asked him.

  "I'd be terrified if it weren't."

  Perhaps that had influenced the old man's decision to bequeath his share of Imperial to Bunt. It was Mr. Chuck's fault that lately—since his death—so much had changed. All the funeral arrangements, and the business with Monty; his sole ownership of Imperial Stitching; Hung.

  Wang had become ever more silent. He jogged more, as though punishing himself—Bunt saw him hobbling up Peak Road. Jogging was one of those outdoor activities that told everything about the person doing it. When he had given up smoking, Bunt had been told to try it, and so he
had scrutinized the punished-looking people going up and down the Peak. Jogging was a frenzied dance of revelation—goggling eyes, hollow cheeks, blush patches on thighs and arms, wobbly joints. They always looked on the point of surrender. All the joggers' ill health and anxiety showed in their odd, slow hopping. Anyone could see that Wang was suffering.

  Meals were not always on time. Bunt was frequendy late. The deal with Mr. Hung seemed to have improved his mother's tastes. She had begun to have a pair of kippers with breakfast, and smoked salmon instead of paste sandwiches with her tea. And now the disappearance of Ah Fu. Chaos.

  "Mum?"

  The fear in his own voice frightened him. Bunt looked around the empty house, turning on lights with his face averted, as though he expected to see his mother's body on the floor. To impose order, to claim his house, he made a pot of tea and sat with it, wringing his hands, disturbed by the memory of his visit to Hung's. Mei-ping would ask him about it. He thought of calling her. No, it was better, simpler, to explain it to her in person. That was another change in his life: he had begun to want to see her—not only for sex, he needed her in a different way. He wished he had good news for her.

  Then, aware that he was thinking of Mei-ping when his mother might be dead, he was ashamed and remorseful, and he guiltily blamed Mei-ping for his distraction.

  A moment later he heard a car in the lane, saw from the window it was a taxi, and then his mother was hurrying into the house, laughing like a drain.

  "Where have you been?"

  It hardly mattered, because here she was, breathless and happy, looking slightly tipsy, yet he was angry with her for having frightened him and wanted to scold. He knew he sounded like her on a bad night.

  "Having a flutter," she said.

  "I was worried sick. I thought something terrible had happened."

  "Don't be such a nancy. 'Something terrible.'"

  "People disappear, you know," he said. A catch in his throat prevented him from saying more. "What sort of flutter?"

  "How many sorts are there, Bunt? Use your loaf."

  "There's all sorts of punters, Mum, and you know it."

  He was trembling. He seemed furious, taking issue with her in her sloppy logic, but his anger was all fueled by the fear that she might have been dead.

  "Now that you mention it, I suppose so," she said. But she was flippant, still smiling. "I was at Happy Valley, wasn't I?"

  He had so many clear memories of all their confidences at Happy Valley that just the mention of the place helped to ease his mood. Yet he had never known her to gamble in the middle of a week and certainly not to talk about it in this way. She seemed to be boasting.

  "You won," he said. He did not say more, he did not even phrase what was in his mind, but his partially formed thought was in the nature of, When has she ever lost?

  "Told you I had a bit of luck, didn't I?"

  Another wide smile rearranged her face, drew up the bags of her cheeks, distorted her features like surgery, made her squint like a goblin.

  Never mind the boldness in gambling large sums—they must have been large, otherwise she, normally a timid punter, would not have made such a meal of it—where had she gotten the money?

  Then he remembered. And I already gave one to your mother —the fifty thousand Hong Kong dollars. So the check Hung had given her as a sweetener she had already cashed, and had used it betting on the horses.

  "And I might hare off to Sha Tin tomorrow if the going is good."

  Mei-ping was waiting for him at his office door. Her face was set in a stare of interrogation. Sometimes she had no eyes, or they were small and dark and teasing, but this morning they were lighted with serious concern and they penetrated to his heart. She wanted answers.

  Trying to brush past her, Bunt said, "I've got some paperwork to attend to."

  He felt nothing but fear. He wanted to hide. Yet she believed his lie.

  "Miss Liu?" he called out, and as soon as he spoke her name, he heard Miss Liu's chair being kicked back and saw the woman herself at the door. His old horror of improvisation made his mind go blank, but in his panic—thrashing for something to say—he remembered talking to her about the flag, and her saying that Mr. Woo had not shown up, and this brought forth the sight of Mr. Woo's name among the missing persons on the list posted in the police station.

  "Mr. Woo, is he still off work?"

  "Still off."

  "What is Mr. Woo's name?"

  "Name Frank."

  "His full name, including his Chinese name, Miss Liu, if you please."

  "I will just check up."

  He noticed that Mei-ping had not moved. "You see how busy I am?"

  Mei-ping lowered her eyes, but she stood her ground. The Chinese were not confrontational, they did not have a lot to say, but they could be stubborn.

  "I've got so much on my plate," Bunt said. "My mother's gambling again."

  He tried to make it sound like a serious affliction.

  "Did you see Mr. Hung?"

  It saddened him that no matter how contemptuous she was of the man, hating his bullying manner, and even suspecting him of murder, still she went on calling him mister. But that was perhaps an important thing about the Chinese, their ability to render certain words meaningless.

  "I saw him yesterday. I went to his flat," Bunt said. "That's what I want to tell you about when I have a free minute."

  She peered at him as though trying to see hope in his eyes, any promise, anything bright, leaning slightly like someone at a fence, looking harder and deeper.

  "It's going to be all right," Bunt said.

  But he was not thinking of the flat at all, or of Hung. Having seen the flat, the significant changes, he had the gloomiest picture of the fate of Ah Fu. He could not say this to Mei-ping at the moment, but he was thinking: Ah Fu may be gone, but never mind—you've got me. And perhaps Ah Fu has not gone.

  Miss Liu put her head out the door and said, "Francis Mau Yung Woo."

  No, Ah Fu was gone.

  "What is the matter?" Mei-ping said, seeing his face change.

  "Nothing," he said, but thought, Everything. And for the first time after hearing the shocking assertion, he felt there might be some truth in what Hung had said about the barman Wendell in the Pussy Cat being his half-brother.

  Mei-ping believed the worst about Ah Fu. He could tell, as she left to go back to work, from the angle of her small shoulders.

  Instead of having lunch at his desk he went to the Pussy Cat and hid, drinking a beer and trying to read the South China Morning Post. Nearly the entire front page was devoted to the Chinese take-away. He drank some more, and seeing a large photograph of a lovely fox-faced woman, he scanned it for information about her in the caption—perhaps her name, her nationality, some clue to why he liked looking at her face—and read, There is no beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

  "What's that all about!" he said, suddenly cross for having been thwarted—all he'd wanted to know was the woman's name.

  He threw the paper down and sat against the side of the booth, letting the loud music deafen him and concentrating on the dancers. It was another example of his growing sense of chaos. He had sometimes gone to the Pussy Cat in the middle of the working day, but when had he sat watching the topless Filipinos without any intention of leaving?

  He craned his neck to get a glimpse in the bar mirror of Wendell, who was frowning at the races on television.

  From behind Bunt the mama-san said, "You look just like your father."

  Hearing that, his sense of desolation was complete.

  One of the dancers, he saw, was Baby. She was dancing badly, smiling in the mirror, unsteady in her high heels. She had a lovely body, full breasts and slender legs and a soft, puppy-like face that made her seem simple and credulous. It also reminded Bunt of her on all fours on the carpet of the blue hotel, smiling back at him and saying, "Let we make fuppies."

  After the music stopped she joined him, now wearin
g a dress. "You like my new dress?" she asked. "It is my best color."

  It was too dark in the booth for Bunt to be able to see it. He touched the silky cloth—it was a Chinese synthetic—and said, "What color?"

  "Furple."

  "Of course," he said. He was still holding the soft sleeve of the dress, reflecting on its origin. "What are you going to do next year when the Chinese take over?"

  "Maybe we Filipinos just go away, back home."

  When he said "you," she understood it to mean every Filipino person in Hong Kong.

  "You like it there?"

  "Of course I hate it." She had a wonderful toothy smile. "The Peelipeens is shit."

  "Why do you say that?"

  He found this so restful, drinking beer in the middle of the day in a darkened bar, talking nonsense to an uncritical listener.

  "Because it is my home," Baby said. "But other people they like it. Foreigners like it. You will like it."

  "I'd like to go there."

  He considered this in an idle way, inventing a life, hypothesizing his moves, from arriving there and meeting someone like Baby, to raising children and perhaps starting a business. He got that far and then became obscurely anxious—was it the children or was it everything he had heard about the Philippines, the danger and the dog-eating and the disorder? All he could imagine with any conviction was sitting in a bar in Manila doing what he was doing now, drinking beer and talking nonsense to a pretty girl.

  "Come to Manila," Baby said. "I will be you wipe."

  "I'm crazy," Bunt said. He knew he was riot crazy. He felt he might be difficult. "You don't want me."

  "Nobody be perpeck," Baby said. "I like crazy. My friends are crazy."

  Bunt said nothing. She seemed friendly and forgiving, but she was ridiculous and she was making him ridiculous. He did not know why he was hiding from Mei-ping, but it helped to be here—now at least. Tormenting him with her silliness, Baby made him think only of the virtues of Mei-ping.

  "You staying here next year?"

  "I don't know," Bunt said.

  "My mummy knows the Chinese," Baby said.