The lemon-yellow house stood head and shoulders above those around it. Two houses, in fact. Semi-detached. How odd. Two front doors, a shared front yard, a garden of concrete. ‘My place,’ André said, pointing to the left middle floor. ‘Charles lives next door to me – you’ll meet him soon enough, a great man in his way. You’re underneath me; the flat next door to you isn’t finished yet. Yours was only finished last week. King has the entire top floor; he knocked it through, done a neat conversion job. So he has the roof, and he’s made a nice little garden up there.’
Alan peered through the seven-foot-high mesh of the fence to what would soon be his home. He followed André round to the back of the building. Another door, and more stairs to climb. Halfway was a door, on which had been stuck a colour photograph of a sailing boat leaving behind it a long creamy wake. It also bore the legend ‘Cool Cool Cool!’
‘That’s me,’ André said. ‘But let’s find King.’ Up another flight of steps; there André knocked jauntily on a door. It opened. ‘Hello, King, here’s your new man. Pretty smart of me to find him, I think you’ll agree. Alan Fairs, John Kingston.’
John Kingston stepped onto the landing to meet them. He was tall, with a massive chest, and he moved with a strange deliberation, rather like a troll. It was as if his aim were to frighten, though not very severely, an audience of uncritical children. He fixed Alan with a challenging eye and said, basso profundo: ‘Welcome to the real Hong Kong.’
Alan took the proffered hand; received an expected bone-crushing. ‘Er, thank you.’
‘The people are real here. Do you feel a sense of privilege in being here? Do you feel that already?’
‘Well, I do as a matter of fact,’ Alan said, half ingratiating, half honest.
‘The people here are real.’
‘Yes.’
‘I call them noble savages.’
Alan felt momentarily at a loss. This would have been the case even without the dizzying sensation of the wheel turning full circle. He found himself babbling: ‘Great, yes, sure, I’m glad about that, because I haven’t met anybody noble in Hong Kong yet, apart from André, of course.’
Kingston received this in long, serious silence. After a while, he said: ‘Noble savages.’
André was suddenly beside him, pushing a beer into his hand. ‘Beer. Have a beer, King. I found it in your fridge.’
‘Thank you, André,’ Kingston said. ‘You are indeed a generous man.’ Kingston said this as solemnly as he had spoken of noble savages. Alan was having a little trouble with his sense of perspective. ‘Now. Alan. Come. Before anything else occurs, you must inspect your flat.’
‘All right. Though I am sure it will be perfect.’ Even a concrete shell would be perfect in such a setting. King led a beer-clutching procession back down the stairs and round the outside of the building. A gate, of metal bars, spike-topped and unlocked, guarded the way into the concrete garden. Kingston walked through, opened the door to the flat, and announced, ‘Seven hundred square feet,’ though whether in apology or boast Alan could not tell.
It was a concrete shell. It was perfect. The walls had been lightly painted with whitish paint. Four tiny rooms led off the main area. Two were bedrooms, one containing an actual bed, double, with a thin foam mattress. Alan walked around the flat. This did not take a great deal of time. A kitchen, with a Calor Gas stove on a tiled concrete shelf. A bathroom with a shower in it. ‘Water is sometimes a problem on Tung Lung, my friend,’ King said. ‘We use the Ng well here, of course. If it runs dry, we have permission to use the standpipe below the last flight of steps. That is connected to Chuen-suk’s well, and that never runs dry.’ And the concrete apron before the house, half of it shaded by the balcony above. On the far side of his fence, another tumble of the purple stuff; was it bougainvillaea? And a jumble of houses marching down the hillside before him, and beyond them the harbour of Tung Lung and beyond that the South China Sea. He turned inland, to a flat-bottomed valley floored with a chessboard of green fields. Allotments, really. Alan could just make out a man working on his little square of green, two watering cans suspended from a yoke that rested on his shoulders. He wore a pointed hat; he too lived in a Chinese scroll. Alan found that he could smell the sea.
‘I love it. If you’ll have me, I’ll take it.’
‘Yours for seven hundred dollars.’
‘Done.’
‘Then let us sign the lease. How are you off for furniture? I can sell you some electric fans, chairs and so on.’
‘Thanks. Though I’m a bit strapped for cash just now. At least, I will be once I’ve paid you a deposit.’
‘Pay me later, then. No hurry. I may be a landlord, but I am a landlord with a human face.’
‘A noble landlord,’ Alan said idiotically.
Kingston greeted this with a great hohoho, like the demon king. ‘I can see that this is going to be a very happy community,’ he announced. ‘A great future stretches before us.’
They returned to Kingston’s flat. After the bare expanse of the downstairs flat, the contrast was apparent. Kingston’s style of decoration was disconcertingly – Alan groped for a word – permanent. There was even a large photograph of a family group. This had been printed onto canvas, to make it look like a painting. It showed a pretty woman with an elaborate, slightly dated hairstyle, a pigtailed girl, a boy who looked like the illustration on the fruit gums packet. Kingston stood at the rear of the group, beaming in satisfaction.
Alan signed his lease, wrote a cheque for $1,400, deposit and first month’s rent, and received a second bone-crushing in recognition of the completion of a deal. ‘I’ll move in tomorrow or the next day,’ Alan said. ‘Just as soon as I have fixed up things with the landlord of my Mid-Levels place.’
‘What’s he got to do with it?’ André asked. ‘Does he owe you money?’
‘I think I owe him, actually.’
‘Then surely the only thing to do is to lug your stuff into a taxi and get the hell out? He’ll never trace you to Tung Lung.’
Alan could not help but think about this. Such a manoeuvre would, he reckoned, save him about $2,500. The thought went, and he was sorry to see it go. ‘André – can I be utterly frank with you? I don’t have the nerve.’
André looked for a moment deeply saddened, as if by a friend’s unwitting blasphemy. ‘My dear, it’s hardly the right way to begin your career as a freebooter.’
‘André, I was brought up to be honest – more or less, anyway. It’s a handicap. But keep faith with me; I’m sure I shall rise above it in time.’
Alan stood at the centre of a kind of refugees’ camp. Six vast striped plastic bags formed a circle around him: the contents of his flat in Mid-Levels. He had in his pocket a cheque for $1,000, returned deposit on the furniture.
The loading and unloading of the taxi had been accomplished, not without superhuman exertions. The carrying of the bags, two by two through the little gate beside the ferry turnstile, normally used for the passage of vegetables, had