Leaving the place an indolent hour or so later, I felt I could bounce over the traffic.
Marvelous, refreshed. And it was time I started sussing out this wonderful new world I’d fetched up in. As the neat policeman in his elegant pagoda-shaped box was about to signal me across the road, I nearly fell over this little Chinese kiddie on roller skates.
Except it wasn’t. It was my stumpy bloke, the leper, poling himself along with astonishing adroitness. I halted. Pedestrians torrented past. I crouched down, nearly gassed by the motor fumes and the thick oily stench of barrow stoves upping a gear for midday on-the-hoof appetites.
“Wotcher, Titch,” I said. “Remember me?”
He raised his eyes and gazed into me. Odd, that resignation, that ton of seen-it-all wisdom burning behind the dark, clouded look. His skin was patch-ily discolored and sort of mounded up into irregular blotches. He only came up to maybe my hip, if that.
“?” he said in a gravelly voice, one word.
“You charged me the wrong price for a few noodles,” I told him. “Here.” I tucked forty dollars into the neck of his vest and bought a tin of Cola from the bicycle hawker at the curb. I slotted it into his plank’s groove. “You okay?”
That slow inspection took me in. I could have sworn he almost understood what I was saying.
“One thing,” I said. All the time, crouched down that level, I was being nudged and kneed and unbalanced by the streaming pedestrians. “You’re the only Chinese I’ve seen so far without gold teeth. How come?”
“?” he said. But deep in his eyes a faint flash of humor showed, a hint of something different.
“Lovejoy?” Jim Steerforth was by me, looking a century younger. “Come on. Viewing day, Hong Kong side.”
“Now?” I stood up as the lights changed and the pagoda bobby wagged us to cross. “I thought—”
“You thought wrong, Lovejoy. Let’s go.”
I looked down to say so long to Titch but he was already off on his rollerboard, hunched and thrusting. “One other thing,” Steerforth said. “I saw you give notes and a drink to the leper. Charity’s fine, but don’t rock Hong Kong’s boat. Got it?”
“Right,” I agreed. I saw five more lepers on rollers on the way to the Star Ferry, none of them mine.
10
« ^ »
MY big day. Being a pushover’s the hardest thing on earth. It’s also a very uncertain state. Having always been one, I’ve learned that when in doubt, debt, or danger, acquiesce as best you can. Give in, no questions asked. My bathhouse experience taught me that in Hong Kong I was out of my league. Henceforth my compliance would be total. I agreed with everything Steerforth said, even laughed at his jokes. I was delighted when he said we would lunch with two lady friends. Our talk became animated.
“Bathhouses?” he answered me. “Yes, quite an institution. Better here than Singapore and Taiwan.”
“Is there no difficulty getting staff?” I asked, an innocent.
“Money,” he replied.
The ferry took us over the harbor to Hong Kong Island. Only a few furlongs, but fascinating. I owned up to that I’d thought “Hong Kong” was one discreet geographical blob, not a mass of islands and a peninsula. “Beautiful islands,” Steerforth joked, me laughing obediently, “and ugly Kowloon.”
As our ferry glided out between the junks and lighters, the depredations became obvious. Behind us, Kowloon Peninsula was crammed with buildings that seemed to struggle, teetering for toespace. The hills behind the level harborside were scalped like boiled eggs at breakfast, for gray-white skyscrapers and apartment buildings. It was a burgeoning building site, a prolific demented patch where mankind had subjugated the environment. Ahead, though, was prettiness of color and form. Green hills, skyscrapers in shapely clusters, smaller enclaves of white buildings dotting all the way up the mountains. In the distance, green wooded islands on an opal sea. Scenery under glass.
“To the right, Lovejoy, the Pearl River and China.”
A flock of junks with russet insect-wing sails stood out on the vague horizon. Steerforth was amused by my interest.
“Fishing junks?” His grin puzzled me.
“Some.” That reply took a long hesitation.
He approved of my reticence and indicated different buildings as we came into the wharf. I rather thought he overdid this, lecturing as if I were an idiot. We went left by the grandly dated Post Office. Restored to health, my interest was back.
“Diamond shops?” I was asking every few inches. “Gold shops?” I’d never heard of either, not as simple little shops of the sort we were passing. Some were minute, dinky little places hardly one doorway wide. Others were giant stores with stunning visual lightscaped windows.
“Hong Kong has shops for everything, Lovejoy. Pretty quiet so early. This,” he announced demonstratively, “is Big Horse Road, HK’s Rotten Row of olden days.”
Every inch of space was used. As the road narrowed, signs receded upwards and changed to the vertical. Businesses simply soared from ground level and hung out vaster, more fascinatingly illuminated shingles than competitors. We were still in a traffic tangle, but now the road curved. Shops crowded the pavements and became homelier. Vegetables, spices, grocery produce in boxes or hanging from shop lintels, meats adangle—as always, my ultimate ghastliness—and here and there among the crowds the alarming spectacle of an armed Sikh, shotgun aslant, casually sitting at a bank entrance. And markets everywhere. To the right, cramped streets sloped down to the harbor. To the left, as we meandered along the tramlines through sudden dense markets of hawkers’ barrows, the streets turned abruptly into flights of steps careering upwards into a bluish mist of domestic smoke, clouds of washing on poles, and climbing. Hong Kong had
