Hong Kong Belongers. Simon Barnes

Series of colds and flu and coughs. Just took to his bed, she said. And sort of faded away.’

      ‘He died of a broken heart,’ she said. ‘I always wondered how Dad was going to cope with 1997. Now I know.’

      She had discussed the matter, a trifle obsessively, over the course of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as people with a sudden grief must. She talked of 1997, and how Hong Kong’s return to Chinese hands was the final invalidation of the dead man’s troubled life. Alan had objected that the handover did not take place for another six months, but she said that it had clearly been impossible for him to live into a calendar year that bore that ominous number: 1997: it was the rejection of himself by the people he had called his people.

      Noble savages! Alan remembered the dead man’s orations on the subject, and the trouble the phrase had once made for him. My people are noble savages, Alan. And then he had given Alan the keys to a new life, a new freedom, and one he had never thought to end, settling into his Chinese village, an aggressive imperial power himself, and embarked on a course of delighted folly which he believed no 1997 could ever end.

      ‘What did you do out there?’

      A question his neighbour Brett had asked him. They had gone to Brett’s for Christmas lunch, the usual barbie beside the pool. Alan, who never minded an excuse not to drink, had offered to be the abstemious one and to bring the horses in that evening, while his family stayed on. Brett, neighbourly and perhaps wanting a break from his own party, had driven him the few minutes between their next-door places. He watched Alan’s calm, quiet handling of the beasts. Afterwards, he had accepted a beer, and listened to Alan’s tale of sudden death and his wife’s need to return to Hong Kong for the funeral.

      ‘Are you going?’

      ‘Wish I could. Can’t afford the fare.’

      Brett snapped his fingers, a normally irritating habit of his. ‘Tell you what. I wanted to do a Hong Kong piece in the paper, 1997 and all that. Why don’t you go out there and write it? Can’t afford expenses, but I’ll pay for the piece, and that should cover most of your costs.’

      Brett was editor of the local daily newspaper; Alan did two days a week chief-subbing the Sunday edition. It was an unusual arrangement that allowed Alan to spend most of his time with the horses.

      ‘That’s a kind thought, Brett.’

      ‘What did you do out there?’

      ‘Now you’ve got me.’ But he talked a little about it: the year of madness, the island of folly.

      ‘Don’t you miss it? The thrill of the mysterious East and all that?’

      Alan gestured to the extensive fields, the line of horses, heads nodding over the doors. ‘Try meeting the payments on this lot,’ he said. ‘That can get pretty thrilling.’

      ‘I thought it was a pretty good living you made.’

      ‘Nope. Not really much of a livelihood. Not a bad life, though.’

      Brett, not being English, took a moment to realise that this was understatement. ‘Yeah, I see. Your own spread.’

      ‘Our own island.’

      Hardly drunk at all, Alan Fairs raised his glass to wish a happy Christmas to the junk that was puttering gently into the harbour. ‘Happy Christmas, junk,’ he said softly, glorying in his solitude.

      The junk bore no batwing sail, but that would have been too self-righteously picturesque. It was enough that the boat was shaped like a Spanish galleon, and that it swung its high square backside away from him. It was enough that the island of Tung Lung rose up behind it: its high and pointy hills. Until today, Alan had assumed that such hills were a graphic convention, a precious affectation of the painters of Chinese scrolls. Now he could see that it was a question of pedantic accuracy.

      ‘I am sitting here, drinking beer in a Chinese scroll,’ he said to himself. He drank a little more, for the glory of the thought.

      He had journeyed here from the island of madness, or Hong Kong. In less than an hour he had passed from the great harbour and its endless castles of glass, to this other place, this toy harbour, its jolly bouncing boats and steep little hills crammed with elven dwellings.

      He had resolved to turn down all Christmas invitations in search of a proud self-sufficiency. In the event, no invitations had come, but this had ceased to cast a shadow over his day. He had lunched, beerily, alone and in perfectly Chinese splendour, at a restaurant on the far side of the island of Tung Lung. He had handled both chopsticks and the occasion with some élan, he thought. Afterwards, he had walked, somewhat dizzily, over the spine of the island, up the pointy hills and down the other side, until he had reached the island’s second village. Here, he would soon be catching a ferry home – home! – to the island of madness, and his rather hateful flat in the Mid-Levels.

      But he was in no hurry to make this retreat, for here on Tung Lung he felt like a conqueror. A red and white butterfly, the size of a bat, flapped about by his feet before dipping down to where the Christmas bounty of flowers bloomed out of sight. At a table beside him two young Chinese men played cards with cries of triumph and dismay, unmoved by the exoticism of their home. One man, grey-haired – unusual in the Chinese who dye their hair an iridescent black at the first hint of time’s passage – sat in regal dignity, served Coca-Cola by the fat proprietor with understated deference. A scent of dead and dying fish was wafted towards them in little spurts, on occasional gusts of wind.

      Alan turned his attention to the boats in the little harbour. The junk had moored at the small jetty on the far side, half a dozen more motor-junks were tied up together in the middle beside a cluster of portly sampans, on one of which a man in a black shirt worked with absorption. And alongside that, a strange craft, apparently two plastic canoes linked by a trampoline, the whole thing an offensive shade of yellow. Alan speculated on an unseaworthy experiment, lashed together by some eccentric, dashing Chinese youth from the village. Yet again he sipped, savouring warm air, chill beer, the little harbour, his glorious Christmas self-sufficiency: above all the sense of distance from Hong Kong. By making this brief journey to this outlying island, he felt he had achieved some kind of tenuous control. He placed his left ankle on his right knee, a very subtle form of self-celebration. It was the James Bond Position: Bond had once been photographed thus, in ‘the sort of position only an Englishman would adopt’. Alan, on a dangerous mission overseas, was in control and, unshaken, was drinking San Miguel beer.

      Smirking a little at this fancy, he became aware of a steady procession taking place behind him. He turned in his chair, looking back to the café from which he had bought his beer. Between him and the tubby young giant of a proprietor, who was lounging against the wall of his establishment, a tidal flow of people moved with single-minded determination along the larger jetty. Alan inspected them with fascination: island-dwellers moving out to Hong Kong for the evening; Hong Kongers returning home after a too-brief day of exile. Many seemed young, schoolchildren, most of them clutching ferocious double-pointed spears three feet in length. Alan pondered their use without coming to any firm conclusion: perhaps Hong Kongers carried them as protection against the wild Tung Lung natives. Among these returning exiles, little motorised carts buzzed about dangerously, trolleys powered by loud Rotavator engines, guided with languid gestures by the young men who clasped the long, elegant handlebars with the pomp of Hell’s Angels. The people shoved hard, but without active malice.

      A dismal hoot sounded from across the waters, and Alan turned to see the ferry approaching: dingy; white; two-storeyed. It bore on its funnel the letters HYF, for Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry Company. This, according to his plans, was the boat that was to take him home, returning exile himself. He watched with disfavour as the boat came to a halt by the simple means of ramming the jetty wholeheartedly. It then performed a series of infinitely fussy forward and backward movements, with snarling engine and repeated distant blasts of the whistle. It took an astonishing length of time. Then all at once the tide turned: the incoming wash of islanders returning home. Home: again the word pricked at Alan’s heart.

      He watched a stream of girls, dazzling nymphs all. Stragglers