The ramp clanged down and the crowd charged onto the Star Ferry in typical Cantonese style. I watched her wrestling with her cardboard box and noted that her face was round, serious, very young.
Her eyes were too far apart and her mouth was too small. But you would have believed that she was beautiful until she smiled. When she smiled-quick to apologize after smacking some Chinese businessman in the back with her box-the spell was immediately broken. She had this bucktoothed grin that stopped her from being any kind of conventional beauty. Yet something about that gummy smile tugged and pulled at my heart in a way that mere beauty never could. She was better than beautiful.
I found a seat. And seats were going fast. She stood next to me, smiling self-consciously to herself as she clutched her box and the ferry pitched and heaved beneath her, surrounded by the raven-haired crowds.
It is only a seven-minute journey between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, the shortest sea voyage in the world, one brief kilometer spent weaving between junks, barges, cruise ships, tugs and sampans. But it must feel like a long time when you are carrying a box that is almost as big as you are.
I stood up.
“Excuse me? Do you want a seat?”
She just stared at me. I was really quite thin in those days. Not that I was Brad Pitt or anything, even during my lean period, but I wasn’t the Elephant Man either. I wasn’t expecting her to faint, with either desire or repulsion. But I expected her to do something. She just kept on staring.
I had assumed that she was British or American. Now I saw, with that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones, she could conceivably be some kind of Mediterranean.
“You speak English?”
She nodded.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“Thanks,” she said. “But it’s only a little journey.”
“But it’s a big box.”
“I’ve carried bigger.”
That smile. Slow, though, and a bit reluctant. Who was this strange guy in a Frank Sinatra T-shirt (Frank grinning under a snap-brim fedora in an EMI publicity shot from 1958, one of the golden years) and ragged chinos? Who was this man of mystery? This thin boy who was, on balance, slightly more Brad Pitt than Elephant Man?
Her box was full of files, manila envelopes and documents with fancy red seals. So she was a lawyer. I felt a flash of resentment. She probably only talked to men in suits with six-figure salaries. And I was a man in a faded Sinatra T-shirt whose wage packet, when converted into pounds sterling, just about crawled into five figures.
“I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman on the Star Ferry,” she said. “Not these days.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to offer your seat to a woman anywhere,” I said. “Not these days.”
“Thanks anyway.”
“No problem.”
I was about to sit down again when an old Chinese man with a nylon shirt and a racing paper shoved me out of the way and plonked himself down in my seat. He hawked noisily and spit right between my Timberland boots. I stared at him dumbfounded as he opened up his paper and began to study the runners at Happy Valley.
“There you go,” she laughed. “If you’ve got a seat, you better hold on to it.”
I watched her laughing her goofy laugh as we came into Hong Kong Island. The great buildings reared above us. The Bank of China. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The Mandarin Hotel. All the silver and gold and glass office blocks of Central, and beyond all of that, the lush greens of Victoria Peak, almost lost inside a shroud of tropical fog.
I was suddenly gripped by the fear that I would never see her again.
“Do you want a coffee?” I said, blushing furiously. I was angry with myself. I know women never say yes to anything if you can’t ask them without going red.
“A coffee?”
“You know. Espresso. Cappuccino. Latte. A coffee.”
“Come on,” she said. “The seat was good. The coffee-I don’t know. It’s a bit predictable. And besides, I’ve got to drop this stuff off.”
The Star Ferry churned against the dock. The ramp clanged down. The crowds got ready to bolt.
“I’m not trying to pick you up,” I said.
“No?” Her face was serious and I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not. “That’s too bad.”
Then she was gone, swept off in a tide of Cantonese with her cardboard box full of legal documents to the wharf and, beyond that, the business district of Central.
I looked out for her on the Star Ferry the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, expecting to suddenly find her smiling at someone she had struck with a large box of legal documents. Or-if I was very lucky-to strike me with her cardboard box. But she was never there.
Not that I had any slick new pick-up lines.
I just wanted to see that smile.
It was a Friday night and the penthouse bar of the Mandarin Hotel was crowded and loud.
I couldn’t really afford to drink up there on what they paid me at the Double Fortune Language School. Yet once in a while I liked to get the lift to the top floor of the famous old hotel and watch the sun go down over an ice-cold Tsingtao beer-the best beer in China. It was a special treat.
But tonight, as I sipped my beer at the bar, some goon from back home started spoiling everything.
“As soon as the People’s Liberation Army march in, you watch everyone in Central head for the airport,” he said. “And it will serve the buggers right. Hong Kong was a fishing village when we arrived and it will be a fishing village when we leave.”
He had a voice on him that cut right through me, full of private education and a lifetime of privilege and dumb words spoken with all the confidence in the world. His voice reminded me that not everything I hated about home had a bulldog tattoo.
“Give this place back to the great unwashed and just watch them kill the golden goose,” he said. “But of course the great unwashed will eat anything.”
I turned to look at him.
He was at a window table with some girl, trying to impress her. The girl had her back to me. I really didn’t notice her at first. I saw only him-a beefy young man in a pinstripe suit, fair-haired and fit from a diet of red meat and rugby and Church of England hymns. A slab of pure British beef, with possibly just a touch of mad cow disease.
Beefy was making no attempt to keep his voice down. The young Cantonese bartender and I exchanged looks as he poured me a second beer. The bartender-just a kid-smiled sadly, not quite shaking his head, and something about the infinite gentleness of his gesture pushed me over the edge.
No, this is too much, I thought, putting down my Tsingtao. It wasn’t just that Beefy was insulting the residents of Hong Kong. He was also doing the dirt on the special feeling that I got when I looked at all the lights. The barman’s eyes told me to leave it.
Too late.
“Excuse me. Excuse me?”
Beefy looked up at me. So did the girl. It was her. And she shone.
I mean she really shone-the sunset, made spectacular by toxic fumes pouring from the factories of southern China, was throwing the last of its technicolor light across her face.
It lit her up.
Beefy was as blond as she was dark, they looked like some kind of couple, perhaps in the early days of an office romance. At least in Beefy’s tiny mind.
“What?” he said. Rudely.
“Look at you,” I said. “I mean, just look at you. They give you a company flat and a Filipina maid and you think you’re some kind of empire builder. Who are you this week, pal? Stamford Raffles? Cecil Rhodes? Scott of the Antarctic?”
“I’m sorry-are you insane?” he said, uncertain if he should laugh out loud or punch my lights out. He stood up. A big bastard. Plenty of contact sports. Hairs on his chest. Probably.
“Calm down, Josh,” she said, touching his arm.
You might have tagged him a chinless wonder but you would have been dead wrong. He was all chin. His kind always are, in my experience. All chin and nose. His noble snout and jutting chin seemed to compress his mouth into a thin, imperious, mean little line.