Very weird. We were at a beach house, possibly New England? I was standing next to Miles on a curved staircase while Joe went swimming in a pool outside with about four Chinese businessmen, all of them wearing white-collared shirts. It was hot and everyone’s drunk. In full view of the other guests, Miles suddenly leans towards me and kisses me.
Then we walked up the stairs into a room where someone had laid out multi-coloured pills and lines of blue (?!) coke on a huge white sheet. There were lots of people in the room but Miles was kissing my neck and my back all the time. Either the shock of him doing this, the pleasure and surprise of what was happening, or the noise of Joe coming home woke me up.
Isabella was sitting up in bed when Joe walked into the room.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I’ve just had the weirdest dream.”
“What about?”
“Can’t remember.” It was easier to lie.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Joe picked up a bottle of mineral water from the floor and stumbled as he passed it to her.
“You’re pissed,” she said.
“Very.”
She looked at the clock. “Where have you been?”
“Miles. I’m finished with him. Last time we go out.”
“Did you have an argument?” Isabella stood up and padded past him into the bathroom. She was wearing a blue silk pyjama top and a pair of white cotton knickers. “You really stink, Joe.”
He checked this by inhaling a mouthful of stale tobacco from his shirt and jacket, taking both of them off so that he was standing bare-chested in the centre of the room. “Yeah. A fight. I lost my temper in a club.”
“Which club?” Isabella was sitting on the loo.
“In Wan Chai.”
She knew what that meant. “What kind of place?”
“The kind of place Miles likes. The kind where he can feel up girls from Ulan Bator.” It was a cheap shot. He had never before betrayed Miles’s confidence, but wanted Isabella to think better of him for not being part of his world. The tactic didn’t work.
“God,” he heard her say, running water at the basin. “He’s so lonely. He must be so unhappy if he’s doing stuff like that.”
The remark was like a prophetic indication of Isabella’s desire to change Miles, to save him from himself. Joe couldn’t think how to reply.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“Did you feel up any girls from Ulan Bator?”
“What?” She was drying her hands. The tone of the question had been mischievous rather than disapproving. “Of course not,” he said.
“Really?” Isabella came back into the room and saw that Joe was now standing in his boxer shorts, hanging his suit near the window. Her pyjamas were unbuttoned almost to the waist and she came up behind him, her hands touching his stomach. “Did you want to fuck one of the girls? Were you jealous of Miles? Is that why you had a fight?”
He turned and his eyes went to the dark brown freckles at the crown of her breasts. He kissed them, saying nothing, falling to his knees and pushing her onto the bed. The scent of Isabella’s skin was a paradise which he breathed and tasted, as if it would free him from all of the stress and the madness of Wang and Lenan and Miles. But in the half-light of their bedroom, as he moved inside her, Isabella suddenly became Kitty and Kitty became Isabella and Joe’s head swarmed with guilt. For the first time between them he lost all trace of her as they made love, and he could sense that she knew this. Adrift in the warmth of the woman he adored he went through the motions of a drunken, head-spinning fuck before collapsing in a funk of guilt and booze.
The diary entry continues:
It was as if he wasn’t with me. For the first time it felt ordinary and boring and I just wanted it over. Then I started thinking about what had happened with Miles. I started thinking about the dream.
17
Miles woke the next morning at 8 a.m., pitched out of an all-too brief sleep by the same Sanyo radio alarm clock which had served him well for the previous thirteen years. Purchased in a West Berlin shopping mall in the winter of 1984, it had survived a three-year posting to Germany, a one-year stint back at Langley, four post-Cold War summers in Luanda and a period in Singapore during which he had contracted dengue fever and been nursed back to health by an Indonesian beauty therapist named Kim. Miles was a heavy sleeper and needed to maximize the volume control on the alarm clock in order to be sure of waking up. Today, RTHK Radio 3 was playing The Verve’s “Lucky Man,” a song Miles enjoyed, but the suddenness of the opening bars acted upon him like an electric shock. He rolled out of bed and moved to a sitting position, turning down the volume on the radio and holding his head in his hands. Through open curtains Miles Coolidge could see fog enshrouding the Peak. Kitty, he recalled, had left at 5 a.m. There was an empty highball glass on the floor at his feet, a discarded condom, an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes and an unopened bottle of warm white wine on the bedside table. When Miles drank heavily, he made sure to consume at least a litre of water before going to bed, the only effective preventative measure against a hangover that he had ever encountered. He made his way slowly to the shower, adjusted the nozzle setting to “Massage” and blasted his scalp in a shuddering jet of scalding water. Afterwards, naked and dripping water on the spiral staircase, he walked slowly downstairs to the open-plan kitchen and sitting room, where he retrieved three Panadol Extra from a drawer in his desk, juiced four oranges and made a mug of instant coffee which he drank while scrambling eggs. Americans, he had been repeatedly told, drank filthy coffee, and Miles was oddly proud of this, regularly importing vast cans of Folger’s Instant into Hong Kong after trips back home to the States.
By midday he had cleared his in-tray at the consulate, jogged along Bowen Road and sat in the steam room at his local gym expunging the poisons of the previous evening: the tequilas of Samba’s, the vodkas of Luard Road, the lines of coke aggressively snorted from Kitty’s flat, soft belly at 3 a.m. Yet the fight with Joe preyed on his mind. Miles realized that he had behaved unpleasantly in the club. He knew that Joe would be angry. Their friendship was a delicate web into which the American frequently pushed a fat, obnoxious finger, but he cared enough about Isabella to make amends. Joe, after all, was the link to the woman he craved.
With this in mind, Miles called Joe’s cellphone at around one o’clock, adopting a tone of contrition which might almost have been heartfelt.
“Joe, man. Listen, buddy, I’m sorry for what happened last night. I was being a dick.”
Joe was coming down the steps of the MTR station at Yau Ma Tei having discovered that there were only twelve apartments-not nineteen-at number 71 Hoi Wang Road, and that nobody in the building had ever heard of Professor Wang Kaixuan. He had shown an elderly Chinese lady, who informed him that she had lived on the ground floor since 1950, a photograph of Wang taken by one of Barber’s men in the early hours of 10 April. The woman, who was widowed and smelled strongly of White Flower oil, shook her head, insisted that she had never seen such a person, then invited Joe inside and fed him green tea and Khong Guan biscuits for half an hour while recalling, in vivid detail, stories of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.
Joe walked back up the stairs to street level, absorbed Miles’s apology, and placed his hand over the receiver so that his reply could be heard above the noise of Nathan Road.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. The polite, conciliatory part of his nature had already kicked in. “It’s me who should be apologizing to you.”
