Ghostwritten

Hong Kong

The moon, the moon, in the after...

There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. Every morning, without fail, no matter how much whisky I drank the night before or what time I finally got to bed. I’ve forgotten.

Fuck. That was a horrible, horrible dream. I can’t remember all the details, and I don’t think I want to. The office was being raided. Huw Llewellyn had stormed in, with the Chinese police and my old scoutmaster whose Volvo I once shat on, they were all on rollerblades, and in my haste to erase the suddenly numerous files relating to Account 1390931 I keep mis-typing my password. K-A-T-Y-F-R-B, no, K-T-Y, no, K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-W — no, and I’d have to start over. They work their way up the building, floor by floor, coffee cups were spilling in their wake, the electric fan swings its eye this way again, and unpaid telephone bills flutter through the air, bats at dusk... There’s a window open, and forty days and nights up the wind is vicious. The mouse on my computer sits there frozen, refusing to double-click. Was it any of this? Was what any of this? I’ve forgotten.

How many times have I dreamed of computers? I’d keep a dream diary, but even that might be used to help nail me one day. I imagine reporters printing the screwier ones, and prison analysts discussing the porn ones in supermarket aisles. I wonder who had the first computer dream, where and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.

Horn-rimmed Llewellyn. I’d only met him yesterday, and here the cunt was already gatecrashing my subconscious.

Fuck. The minute hand clicks again. The second hand glides around, reeling in my life surely as a kite string when it’s time to go home. Fuck. I’m eating into my morning time safety margin. Another morning feeling as shattered as I felt the night before. My face feels cracked and ready to fall off in Easter-egg bits. And to cap it all I’m going down with another bout of ’flu, I swear it. Hong fucking Kong and I spend half my life walking around feeling like a steamed dumpling. Easter must be around now. Come on, Neal, you can make it as far as the shower. A hot shower will do the trick. Bollocks. Some speed would do the trick, but it’s all snorted away.

I haul myself out of bed, stepping on a cold waffle and a plate. Fuck! She’s coming today, I think, she’ll clean it up. At least there’ll be some food waiting when I get back. Something Chinese, but at least I won’t have to face another waffle.

Into the living room. There was a message for me on the answer machine. Luckily I’d remembered to switch on the Sleepeasy mode before I’d gone to bed, otherwise I’d have got even less sleep than I did. I swiped all the crap on the sofa onto the floor, jabbed the ‘Play’ button, and lay on the sofa...

‘Rise and shine, Neal! This is Avril. Thanks for disappearing last night. Remember you’ve got the meeting with Mr Wae’s lawyers at 9.30, and Theo wants a full briefing beforehand, so you’d better get here by 8.45 sharp. Get the coffee perkin’. See you soon.’

Avril. Nice name, silly slag.

Don’t get too comfortable there, Neal. One, two, three, up! I said ‘up!’ Into the kitchen, chuck the old filter into the overflowing bin, fuck, it’s gone everywhere, ho-hum sorry, maid, fresh filter, fresh coffee, more than the recommended dosage thank you very much, click ‘on’. Trickle your thickest juice there for your Uncle Neal my baby, that’s the way. I’ve forgotten. Open the fridge. Half a lemon, three bottles of gin, a pint of milk that expired over a month ago, dried kidney beans, and... waffles. God is still in heaven, I still have some waffles left. Waffle in toaster. Back to bedroom, Neal. There’ll be a white shirt hanging in the closet, where she hung them up every Sunday, every one the skin of a gwai lo, shagged and fleeced. I’ll be so fucking angry if she’s yanked them off the hangers again... She’ll do anything for attention.

No, it’s okay. Hanging in a neat row. Boxer shorts, trousers, slung over the chair where you left them last night. The cheap, tubular, chair. I miss the Queen Anne one. It was the one thing in this apartment older than me. One more bit of Katy gone. Grab a vest, a shirt, your jacket, something’s missing — belt. Where’s my belt?

‘Okay. Very fucking funny. Where’s my belt?’

The air conditioner droned from the living room.

‘I’m going into the living room right now. Unless I find my belt on the arm of the sofa, I am going to go fucking ballistic.’

I went into the living room. I found my belt on the arm of the sofa.

‘Just as fucking well.’

I remembered that I had got dressed without my shower. I stunk, and there was a meeting with what’s-his-face from the Taiwan Consortium this morning.

‘You plonker, Neal,’ and nobody disagreed. When you call yourself a plonker nobody ever disagrees with you. The shower would cost me the rest of my safety margin. Unless the morning routine — ‘routine’ — went like clockwork, I would miss that crucial ferry, and have to start fabulating some impressive excuses.

I clicked off the air-conditioner. ‘It’s only fucking May. You want to freeze me to death? Who would you have to drive round the bend then, hey?’

In the bathroom I found she’d been up to her usual tricks with the soap bottle. Katy always bought those pump-action containers of liquid soap, and so did the maid, which was all well and good until she discovered what fun it was to hammer the pump up and down. It was all over the walls, in the toilet bowl, on the floor of the shower cubicle, probably — yes — under where I’d just lain my shirt. Smeared trails everywhere like jerked-off semen.

‘Very fucking amusing. Are you going to clean up this mess?’

Funny, she never touched any of the toiletries that Katy had left behind. It was only ever my stuff. Why didn’t I just chuck that woman-stuff out? I still had a box of tampons in the cabinet. Two boxes. Heavy flow, light flow. The maid never touched the tampons — I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, like the babies not wearing nappies, and just crapping through that bum-flap wherever and whenever. The maid suffered no qualms about working through the talcum powder, skin moisturisers and bath pearls, though. Why should she feel any qualms, if she didn’t about anything else?

The shower deluged my head. Soak, shampoo, rub, rinse, conditioner, finger up a smearage of the pumped-out body soap, lather, rinse. I gave myself a full two minutes. Bathe now, pay later.

Towelling myself dry, I suck in my gut, but it doesn’t make much difference these days. Neal, when did that thing start growing on you? Stress is supposed to make you lose weight. Doubtless it does, but a dietary credit of ninety per cent waffles, fruit pastilles, cigarettes and whisky must outweigh the stress debit. You look pregnant. ‘Ow!’ I flinch. If Katy had got pregnant... would anything be different? Would you have got out while you could, or would you have more to worry about? Is it possible to worry more than I do and not... not just die from it? I don’t know.

Something was burning! Fuck, the iron!

No, I hadn’t switched the iron on. That’s waffle-smoke. Fucking great. No fucking breakfast. Take your time, Neal, it’s a waffle past redemption. A Waffle Too Far. When is a waffle not a waffle? When it’s a piece of fucking charcoal, that’s when. I’d just have to heap the sugar into the coffee, I suppose. Liquid breakfast. Into the living room. A trickle of black was coming under the door, and I thought it was blood. Whose blood? Her blood? Nothing would surprise me in this apartment any more. Then I saw it was dark brown. Fucking great. I’d used two filters instead of one, and we know what happens when you do that, don’t we, Neal?

Into the kitchen. Off with the coffee machine, off with the toaster, off with his head. Fancy a nice glass of water for breakfast, Neal? Why thank you, Neal. No clean glasses. Okay, a bowl of water. Splendid. ‘Bon appetit, Neal.’ I surveyed my culinary empire. It looked like Keith Moon had been a house-guest for a month. No it didn’t. Keith Moon would leave it cleaner than this. Sorry, Maidie. I’ll make it up to you later. ‘You’ll fucking well make sure I will, won’t you?’

Put on your tie and get to work, Neal. Mustn’t keep the slitty-eyed moneymakers waiting any longer than you probably will. What a morning, I hadn’t even looked out of the window to see what the weather was doing. I looked on my pager: dry and cloudy. No umbrella, then. That Asian non-weather. I’ve forgotten. I already knew the view: bare hillside, dulled by mist, and the lethargic sea.

I clicked off the air-conditioner. Again. I leave the alarm clock radio on for her, like my mum used to for the dog. From the bedroom I hear the business news in Cantonese. I don’t know if she likes it. Sometimes she switches it off, sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she re-tunes it.

‘Try to behave,’ I said, squeezing into my laced-up shoes, grabbing my briefcase and picking up my clutch of keys.

Katy always answered, ‘I hear and obey, oh hunter-gatherer.’

She never answers.

Going, going, gone.

The elevator was on its way down. Thank God. Otherwise I’d miss the bus to the ferry. The doors opened. I squeezed into the all-male space, half-yellow, half-pinko-grey, but all the same Financial Zone Tribe. We couldn’t afford to live here if we weren’t. The space smelt of suits, aftershave, leather and hair-mousse, and something lingering. Maybe badly ducted testosterone. Nobody said a word. Nobody breathed. I turned around, so that my dick wasn’t facing another moneymaker’s dick, and saw the door to my apartment: 144.

‘Not good,’ Mrs Feng had said. ‘“Four” in Chinese means “Death”.’

‘You can’t spend all of your life avoiding Four,’ Katy had protested.

‘True,’ said Mrs Feng, closing her sad eyes. ‘But there is another problem.’

‘Which is?’ said Katy, giving me a half-smile.

‘The elevator,’ said Mrs Feng, opening her sharp eyes.

‘We’re on the fourteenth floor,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me we can’t use the elevator.’

‘But it’s directly opposite your own door!’

‘So?’ Katy was no longer smiling.

‘The elevator doors are jaws! They eat up good luck. In this place you shall have none.’

I looked up, and saw myself looking down through smoked glass, from amongst the tops of my unmoving heads. Like I was spirit-walking.

‘You’re also on Lantau Island,’ she had added as an afterthought.

Ping, went the bell.

‘What’s wrong with Lantau Island? It’s the one place in Hong Kong where you can pretend the world was once beautiful.’

‘We don’t like the currents. Too much north, too much east.’

Ping, went the bell, ping, ping, ping. First floor. Ground floor. Whatever. The bus was waiting. We all ran across the road and boarded it, the James Bond music blaring in my head. I thought of little boys boarding a pretend-troop transporter in a game of war.

Standing room only on the bus, but I don’t mind. It reminds me of being crushed on the Dear Old Circle Line back in Dear Old Blighty. The cricket season will be starting now. That’s why I like this bus. From the moment I get on it until the moment I enter the office, everything is out of my hands. I don’t have to decide anything. I can zombify.

Until, that is, some fucker’s cordless phone drills through my ear-drum. That is so annoying! Answer it. Answer it! Deaf-o, answer your fucking telephone! What are you all looking at me like that for?

Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realise they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

I answer it, allowing the electrons of irrelevance to finish their journey along wires, into space and back into my ear.

‘Yeah? Brose speaking.’

So, now every last jackass on this bus knows my name is Brose.

‘Neal, this is Avril.’

‘Avril.’ Who else? She had probably slept over in the office. She was still hard at work on the Taiwan Portfolio when I left last night stroke this morning stroke whenever it was. Jardine-Pearl had a posse of lawyers working on this one. Cavendish had me, Avril and Ming, who couldn’t manage the lease on our — I mean my — apartment without fucking it up and getting me right royally rogered on the deposit. The Chinese are bad enough, estate agents are even worse, but Chinese Estate Agents are Satan’s Secret Servicemen. They should be lawyers, but they probably make more cash doing what they do. Fuck, the Taiwan Portfolio! On top of everything else I had to worry about, I had this maze of details, small print, traps. It was probably good Avril was on this case, but fuck, she got on my tits sometimes. London had sent her in January, and she was so piously keen. Me, three years ago.

‘Sleep well?’

‘No.’

Avril probably wanted me to apologise for leaving early last night. This morning. One a.m. Early, right. She could fucking forget it.

‘I’m phoning about the Mickey Kwan File.’

‘What about it?’

‘I can’t find it.’

‘Oh.’

‘So where is it? You had it last night. Before you went home.’

Fuck you, Avril. ‘I had it yesterday evening. Six hours before I went home.’

‘It’s not on your desk now. And it’s nowhere in Guilan’s office. So it must be in your office somewhere, because I haven’t touched it since yesterday afternoon. Might you — might it have been misfiled? Could it have been put under something, again? In a drawer somewhere?’

‘I am on a bus on Lantau Island, Avril. I can’t quite see my office from here.’

I thought I heard somebody sniggering behind the wall of suits, ties, and faces pretending not to listen. Sniggering like a loooooooooony. Maybe it was just a sneeze.

Avril was a walking experiment in humourlessness. I should nickname her ‘Spock’. ‘I don’t understand you sometimes. Yes, I know you can’t see your office from there, Neal. I know that very well. But in case you’ve forgotten — again — Horace Cheung and Theo want a progress report on the Wae Folio in 52 — no, 51 — minutes. You are not here, because you are still on a bus on Lantau Island. You will not get here for another 38 minutes, 41 minutes if you haven’t had breakfast and have to stop for doughnuts. Mr Cheung is always 10 minutes early. This means I have to complete said progress report by the time you waltz in through that door. As I need the Mickey Kwan File to do this, I need it now.’

I sighed, and tried to think of a withering response, but I was all out of wither. I must be going down with this ’flu that’s doing the rounds. ‘What you say is all true, Avril. But I honestly, really, truly, madly, deeply don’t know where the file has got to.’

The bus lurched to and fro. I caught a glimpse of tennis courts, the international school, the curve of a bay and a fishing junk in the tepid Asian white.

‘You have a copy on hard disc, don’t you?’

I was suddenly very awake. ‘Yes, but—’

‘I’ll download the file off your hard disc, and whip off a copy on my printer. It’s only about twenty pages, yeah? So just tell me your password.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Avril.’

A pause while Avril thought. ‘I’m afraid you can, Neal.’

I remembered watching a rabbit being skinned, where, or when I couldn’t remember. The knife seemed to unzip it. One moment a dozing Mr Bunny, the next a long rip of blood, from buck teeth to rabbity penis.

‘But—’

‘If you’ve downloaded any Swedish dominatrix hard porn pix from the internet, I promise your secret is safe with me.’

No matter how quietly I tried to speak, ten people would hear me. ‘I can’t tell you my password like this. It’s a security breach.’

‘Neal, you probably haven’t noticed, in fact I know you haven’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone home last night, but we are on the verge of losing this account. The Dae Folio is worth $82 million. Dutch Barings and Citibank are both singing under their balcony every night, and they sing more sweetly than we do. If we don’t have the Mickey Kwan gains to offset the upsets in Bangkok and Tokyo, we’re history. And D.C. is going to know exactly why — I’m not going to take the rap for this. You might be happy spending the rest of your life managing a McDonald’s in Birmingham, but I want a little more out of life. Now tell me your password! You can change it when you get to work. Your “security breach” is going to last 49 minutes. Come on! If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?’

Absolutely Fucking Nobody, that’s who I can trust. I pulled my jacket over my head and held the phone in my armpit. Quasimodo Brose. ‘K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-E-S.’ Don’t tell her not to snoop. That would make her snoop. ‘There. Happy?’

To her credit, Avril didn’t take the piss. I’d have been happier if she had. Have I reached the stage where people feel sorry for me?

‘Got it. See you in Theo’s office. I won’t let anyone else touch your PC.’

The bus pulled into Discovery Bay harbour. The turbo ferry was waiting, as always. Nobody needs to hurry — the first bell is ringing now. The second bell will ring in 1 minute. The third in 2 minutes. The boat wouldn’t leave for 3 minutes, and bus to boat took less than 60 seconds, if you have your pass ready, which we all do. That’s a wide enough safety margin to drive a Toyota Landcruiser up. The bus doors hissed open, and the troops filed off, the bus rocking as they jumped, one by one.

Was she here, amongst us? Holding my hand? Why had I always assumed she stayed in the apartment all day? It’s more logical she roams around the place. She likes attention.

Leave it, Neal. That’s your apartment. Your ‘home’ life. You go there because you have nowhere else to live. Don’t bring her to Hong Kong Island. She probably can’t cross water. Don’t the Chinese say something like that? They can’t jump — that’s why there are steps into the holy places — and they can’t cross water. No?

Twenty paces to the ticket barrier. Well, I think the morning’s crisis is lowering its revolver. The really incriminating stuff is locked lower down in the bowels of my hard disc, and Avril simply doesn’t have the time to go prodding around at random. She doesn’t have the motive. And she is too stupid. As the comings and goings of Account 1390931 became ever more complex, my security arrangements became ever more intricate, my lies more incredible as one near miss lurched to another. The truth is that Denholme Cavendish’s yesmen don’t want to know the truth that even people handicapped by an Etonian education must dimly be able to smell by now. Don’t worry, Neal. Avril will be printing off her precious Mickey Kwan File. Guilan will be making a pot of coffee so thick you could fill cracks in the road with it. I’ll fob Theo off with some bollocks about over-zealous auditors, and, like most superiors he’ll be too proud to ask me the simplest questions. Theo will fob the Cavendish Compliancy Body off with some bollocks about capital tied up in double-hedging Japanese banks. They’ll fob Jim Hersch off with some bollocks about the house being told in no uncertain terms that it needs to put itself in order during the next financial quarter, and he’ll fob Llewellyn’s master off by swearing that he is totally and completely confident that Cavendish Holdings is absolutely clean in regard to these rumours smeared by — and here I have to be frank with you old boy — by the Chinese, and we don’t need degrees in Police Detection to know who’s pulling the strings of the Hong Kong People’s Police these days, do we, Comrade, eh? Eh? And hey presto, we’ll all get our six-figure bonuses, five figures of which have already been spent and the rest of which will vanish into cars, property and the entertainment sector during the next eighteen months. You’ve done it again, Neal. Back from the brink. Nine lives? Nine hundred and ninety-fucking-nine more like.

Everything is in order, that’s the second bell, Neal. That gives you 60 seconds.

‘Neal? Why aren’t you getting on this ferry?’

That feeling when vomiting is a certainty, and you wonder what you’ve eaten.

I don’t have enough inside me to vomit,

What’s the matter? Is she making me stay? Tugging my arm?

No. It’s nothing to do with her. I know when she’s here, and she’s not here now. And she can’t make me do anything. I choose. I’m the master. That’s one of the rules.

There was something more remarkable than her altogether.

Last night, Avril and I were preparing a briefing for Mr Wae the shipping magnate. The computer was fucking up my eyes, I hadn’t eaten since a BLT at lunch, I’d gone through hunger and numbness several times as my stomach downsized. Around midnight I started feeling dizzy. I came down to this coffee bar just across the street from Cavendish Tower, and ordered the biggest fuckoff triple shitburger they did, two of them, and put ten sugar cubes into my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can’t be natural, Neal. Fuck Natural.

I watched the cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the street. In the distance a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down. I watched the neon signs intone their messages, over and over. There was a song playing, that Lionel Richie hit from years ago, about the blind girl. A real weepie. I’d lost my virginity to that song under a mountain of coats at a friend’s party in Telford. Fuck knows what I was doing in Telford. Fuck knows what anybody is doing in Telford.

This kid and his girl came in. He ordered a burger and cola. She had a vanilla shake. He picked up the tray, looked around for a seat which wasn’t there, and caught me watching him. He came over, and in nervous English asked me if they could share my table. It wasn’t Chinese English. Chinks would normally die rather than sit with one of us. Either that or they’ll just pile in without acknowledging that you’re even there. So I nodded, tapping the ash from my cigarette. He thanked me gravely, in English. ‘Sankyou very mochi,’ he said.

She was Chinese, I could tell that, but they spoke in Japanese. He had a saxophone case, and a small backpack with airline tags still attached. They could barely have been out of high school. He needed a good long sleep. They didn’t hug or cloy over each other like a lot of Chinese kids do these days. They just held hands over the table. Of course, I didn’t understand a word, but I guessed they were discussing possibilities. They were so happy. Sex twitched in the air between them, which made me think that they hadn’t done it yet. None of that lazy proprietorship which settles in after the first few times.

Right at that moment, if Mephistopheles had genied his way from the greasy ketchup bottle and said, ‘Neal, if I let you be that kid, would you pledge your soul to the Lord of Hell for all eternity?’ I’d have answered, ‘Like a fucking shot I will.’ Nipkid or no Nipkid.

I looked at my Rolex: a quarter past midnight. What life is this?

I was wrong about the sky. It’s not dreary white... when you look you see ivory. You can see a glow, there, above the mountain where the sun polishes it pearly and wafer thin.

And the sea isn’t blank, there are islands out there, right at the edge.

Soft brush strokes on a fresh scroll hanging in Mrs Feng’s room, four floors above us.

Ahem. May I remind you, Neal, that you have credit card bills that would make Bill Gates twitch? That your divorce settlement will gouge out most of the money you thought was yours? That lawyers with fingers in the kinds of pies yours are in simply do not miss appointments with Mr Wae. These Taiwanese shipping magnates eat breakfast with politicians powerful enough to make skyscrapers appear and disappear.

Ten seconds before the third bell and the barriers come down! Worry about your existentialist dilemmas during your lunch hour — right, when did I last have a lunch hour? — whenever — but get on that fucking boat right now! I am not telling you again.

A man gallops down the walkway from the shops. Andy Somebody, I know his face slightly from my Lantau polo club period. Not that you can find a single fucking pony on the whole fucking island. His Ralph Lauren tie is flapping like a live snake, his shoelaces are undone, my, Andy Somebody needs to be careful. He might fall and break his crown, and ill Jill’ll hill crumbling after.

‘Stop that boat! Wait!’ My, my, Andy Somebody is Lawrence of Olivier.

Is this how she observes me? This indifference, laced with mockery?

The Chinese barrier guard, most likely the bus driver’s brother’s half-twin stepcousin-in-law flicks his switch and the turnstiles close. Andy Somebody’s flight through the air ends gripping the bars, and he represses the howl of a demented prisoner. ‘Please!’

The Chinese barrier guard makes the faintest gesture with his head at the ‘Boat Departures’ board.

‘Let me through!’

Barrier Guard swishes his head, and he goes back to his coffee booth.

Andy Somebody whinnies, fumbles for his mobile phone, and manages to drop it. He walks away speaking into it to Larry, inventing excuses, and pretending to laugh.

The turbo ferry pulls away from the jetty, and buzzes away into the distance.

I don’t understand you sometimes.

Katy insisted that I didn’t see her off at the airport. Her flight was in the afternoon, it was a manic Friday. My desk at work had become a canyon floor between two unstable formations of contracts. And so the day she left we had taken the bus before my usual one and drank a cup of coffee at the jetty café. That café, there. In the window seat Andy Somebody has pulled out his laptop computer and is hammering the keyboard as though he’s trying to avert a thermonuclear war. Sitting hunched like that is going to knacker his back. Nope, he doesn’t know it, but Andy’s sitting at the very table where Katy and I staged our Grand Farewell.

It was not a Noël Coward Grand Farewell. Neal Brose and Katy Forbes brought you a much unlovelier performance. Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us. I suppose we talked about airport layouts, watering plants, what Katy was looking forward to once she got back to London. It was like we’d met the night before, fucked in a Kowloon hotel, and had just woken up. In fact, we hadn’t had sex for five months, not since finding out.

Fuck, it was horrible, horrible. She was leaving me.

It is what we didn’t say that I remember best. We didn’t mention Mrs Feng, or her. We didn’t mention whose ‘fault’ — fuck, haven’t thousands of years of infertility come up with a better word than ‘fault’ — it was. Katy was always capable of mercy. We had never discussed therapy, clinics, adoption, procedures, that umbrella of ‘ways around it’, because neither of us had the will, and we didn’t now. I guess. If nature couldn’t be fucked to knit us together, we sure as hell weren’t going to be. We didn’t mention the word ‘divorce’, because it was as real and near as that mountain there. We didn’t mention the word ‘love’. That hurt way too much. I was waiting for her to say it first. Maybe she was waiting for me. Or maybe it was that we had left those days and nights for the starry-eyed beepy muppets born seven or eight years after us. Those kids in the coffee bar last night. They were who love was for. Not us old fucks over thirty. Forget it.

The bell for the ferry had rung. On this spot, right here, this pinkish paving slab I’m standing on right now. I know it well because I walk around it every day. Here was where I thought I should embrace her and maybe kiss her goodbye.

‘You’d better get on your ferry,’ she said.

Okay, if that was how she wanted it.

‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Nice being married to you.’

I instantly regretted those words, and I still do. It sounded like a parting shot. She turned and walked away, and I sometimes wonder, had I run back to her, could we have found ourselves pinballed into an altogether different universe, or would I have just got my nose broken? I never found out. I obeyed the ferry bell. Ashamed, I didn’t look for her on the shore as the ferry pulled away, so I don’t know if she waved. Knowing Katy, I doubted it. It took me about 45 seconds to forget her, anyway. On page 5 of South China Business News, ten lines of newsprint mugged my attention. A new Sino-American-British investigative body, the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, had just raided the offices of a trading company called Silk Road Group. It was not well known to the general public, but it was very well known to me. I, personally, as per instructions received, had ordered the transfer of $115 million, the Friday before, from Account 1390931, to the Silk Road Group.

Oh... fuck.

There was nobody but me.

The road from the jetty and the harbour village led to the Polo Club. Flags hanging limp today. After the Polo Club the road became a track. The track led to the beach. At the beach the track turned into a path, winding along the shore. I’d never taken the path any further, so I had no idea where it might lead. A fisherman looked up, his gnarled fingers knotting a net, and our eyes met for a moment. I forget, outside my Village of the Short Lease Damned, people actually live out their whole lives on Lantau Island.

Dad used to take me fishing at weekends. A gloomy reservoir, lost in Snowdonia. He was an electrician. It’s honest work, real work. You install people’s switchboards for them, connect their lighting, tidy up cowboy and DIY botch jobs so they don’t burn their houses down. Dad was full of a tradesman’s aphorisms. ‘Give a man a fish, Neal, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for life.’ We were at the reservoir when I told him I was going to do Business Studies at Polytechnic. He just nodded, said, ‘That could lead to a good job in a bank,’ and cast off. Was that the beginning of the path I’m still on? The last time we went fishing was when I told him I’d got the job with Cavendish Hong Kong, and a salary three times that of my ex-headmaster. ‘That’s grand, Neal,’ he said. ‘Your mother will be proud as punch.’ I had hoped for more of a reaction from him, but he had retired by that time.

Truth be told, fishing bored me. I’d rather be watching the footy on the box. But Mum insisted that I went with him, so I did, and now I’m glad I went. Even today, the word ‘Wales’ brings back the taste of tuna and egg sandwiches and weak, milky tea, and the memory of my dad looking out over a murky lake walled in by cold mountains.

Her coming was the hum of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it. I didn’t know how long cupboards had been left open, air-conditioners switched on, curtains twitched open, before I became conscious of her. Living with Katy postponed it. Katy thought I was doing what she was doing, I thought Katy was doing what she was doing. She didn’t come in the dramatic way they do in the movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelt out with the fridge magnet letters. Nothing like Poltergeist or The Exorcist. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late. Little things: hidden objects. The honey left on top of the wardrobe. Books turning up in the dishwasher. That kind of thing. Keys. She had a penchant for keys. No, she’s never been an in-your-face house-guest. Katy and I joked about her even before we believed in her: Oh, it’s only the ghost again.

In the end, however, I think she affected the three of us deeper than any amount of smashed vases.

I do remember the day that hum became a noise. It was a Sunday afternoon, last autumn. I was at home for once. Katy had gone shopping at the supermarket down in the village. I was vedging out on the sofa, one eye on the newspaper and one on Die Hard 3 dubbed into Cantonese. I realised there was a little girl playing on the carpet in front of me, lying on her belly, and pretending to swim.

I knew she was there, and I knew there was no such child.

The conclusion was obvious.

Fear breathed on the nape of my neck.

Half a building blew up. ‘We’d better get some more FBI agents,’ said the stupid deputy who didn’t trust Bruce Willis.

Reason entered, brandishing its warrant. It ordered that I behave as though nothing untoward was happening. What was I going to do? Go screaming from the apartment to — where? I’d have to come back at some point. There was Katy to think about, too. Was I to tell her that a ghost was watching us morning, noon and night? If this drawbridge was lowered, what else would come in? I forced myself to pretend to finish the article, though it could have been written in Mongolian.

Fear was handcuffed, but it could still yell at the top of its lungs, There’s a fucking ghost in your apartment! A fucking ghost, you hear me?

She was still there, swimming. She was on her back now.

I had to lower the paper. Would it mean I was mad if she was there, or if she wasn’t?

What did I know about her?

Only that she wasn’t threatening me.

I folded the newspaper and looked at where I had thought she was.

Nobody, and nothing. See? said Reason, smugly.

Neal, said Neal, you’re cracking up.

I walked resolutely towards the kitchen.

Behind my back I heard her giggle.

Fuck you, said Fear to Reason.

I heard the lock being jiggled, and Katy’s keys echoing in the hallway outside. She dropped them. I walked over to the door and opened it for her. She was bending down, so she couldn’t see my expression, which I’m glad about.

‘Phew!’ said Katy, smiling and straightening up.

‘Welcome home,’ I said. ‘I say. Is that champagne?’

‘Champagne, lobster and lamb, my hunter-gatherer. You’ve been asleep, haven’t you? You’re all groggy.’

‘Uh... yeah. Don’t tell me I’ve missed your birthday again?’

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

‘I want to feed you up, so you make lots of sperm and get frisky. I’ve decided that I want a baby. What do you think?’

How Katy.

I was in a ramshackle yard, walled in by falling-down fisherman’s cottages. Paths forked off and forked off some more. A black dog eyed me with its one eye, looking at what I am. I wished it were on a chain. What are the odds of that dog having rabies? Enough of their masters certainly seem to. A woman stood up from behind a cabbage the size of a small hut. She said, ‘You going to the Big Buddha yes?’

I saw myself, blundering in her yard. A foreign devil with mud round his ankles, shoes from Pennsylvania, a silk tie made in Milan, a briefcase full of Japanese and American gadgetry worth more money than she saw in three years. What must she think?

‘Yes,’ I said.

She pointed with a blunt vegetable down one of the paths.

‘Thank you.’

At first the path was clear, but as it went deeper into the wood it grew more ambiguous. Leaves, stems, shoots, nodules, thorns, thicket. A common dirt-coloured bird that sang in emerald and opal. Dry grass. Soil, stones, loose rocks, worms moving underground.

I’m not thinking about it. The day was just beginning to warm up.

I heard a helicopter, and imagined Avril and Guilan leaning out with a headset and binoculars. Avril would be speaking into a camera like a radio station’s traffic reporter. I giggled. Something jumped and thumped in the undergrowth. I froze, but heard nothing more. There’s a thought. Are there snakes on Lantau Island?

Thirty-one days hath September,

April, June and November.

And fuck the rest...

Insects buzzed around my head, thirsty for sweat to drink.

It’s time to bring in the maid.

Fair’s fair, she was Katy’s idea from the start. I never wanted one, didn’t choose her, and for the first six months — until this winter, I didn’t even see her. I never even met the maid until Katy was back in Britain. There was a circle of men at Cavendish who were into hiring maids willing to do more than fluff pillows and take the kids to school and back. Most of the men at Cavendish’s hired Filipinos, because they had no permanent residency, and so had to be more compliant. They also know that the more accommodating they were, the more likely they’d be handed on when their master left Hong Kong.

Maybe Katy had heard these tales in the wives’ club. Maybe that was why she chose a Chinese maid. I was surprised when Katy told me she wanted one. Katy came from an upper-middle-class Cambridge family, but from a firmly lower-middle-class income bracket where you traded on your family’s name and tightened your belt to put the kids through good schools. We met at a law firm in London, for fuck’s sake, not the House of Lords.

But here we were, out in the colonies. Well, the ex-colonies. I was disappointed that she’d been swayed by the Wives’ Club. But then, as Katy pointed out, I wasn’t the one who had to clean up my mess. I couldn’t argue when Katy pointed out that after she got pregnant, she’d have to take it easy. I suspected Katy was on a culture-bridging kick, and had chosen penetrating the Chinese psyche as a hobby.

If that suspicion had been correct, then for Katy it badly backfired. All Katy got from her hobby was grief, which she then passed on to me, the moment I was through the door. Katy gave her presents, but she took them without saying a word. Katy said she was surly, inscrutable, and kept dropping mile-wide hints about how her starving family in the mainland needed more money. Katy suspected she was working at a hostess bar for more money at night. Katy couldn’t be sure, but she thought a pair of gold earrings had gone missing. Looking back, I wonder if that was the work of our host daughter?

‘If you’re not happy with her, sack her.’

‘But how about her starving family?’

‘It’s not your problem! You’re not Lady Bountiful.’

‘Spoken like a true lawyer.’

‘You’re the one who’s whinging about her morning, noon and night.’

‘I want you to speak to her, Neal.’

‘Why me?’

‘I’ve tried, but women only respect men in this culture. They respect men in this culture. Just be assertive. I’ll give her this Saturday off, and ask her to come on Sunday. Make sure you’re here.’

‘But they’re your earrings.’

That had been the wrong thing to say.

When I managed to calm Katy down I asked her what I was supposed to say.

‘Tell her that there are certain standards we wish her to meet. Say that perhaps we weren’t clear enough when we first hired her.’

‘Maybe she’s just a lazy bitch. What makes you think I’ll have any effect?’

‘The Chinese psyche: if you let her know who the master is, they listen. She looks at me like I’m a piece of dogshit. Theo’s wife was telling me about it, she had the same problem. It doesn’t even matter if she doesn’t understand everything. They can tell from the tone of your voice.’

And the next Sunday I met the maid. So you see, Katy brought us together.

I had expected a cleaning lady. Maid meant maid. I guessed she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. She was in a black and white uniform, and black tights. The material must make her skin sweat. She listened insouciantly, while I ran through my patter, avoiding eye contact for most of the time. Her hair was luscious, her skin dusky. After 30 seconds of being in the same room, I knew that she and I would end up fucking each other, and I knew that she knew it too.

And from then on, even on the nights when Katy and I had sex three times to get her pregnant, I would close my eyes and see the maid underneath me.

The path rose sharply behind the Trappist Monastery, up into the purplish morning. Soon the tree-line was far below. I never knew there was so much sky here! I took my jacket off and slung it over my shoulder. I was still carrying my briefcase.

I got to an outcrop and sat down. My heart was twanging like a double-bass. Should I take some of those tablets? The doctor who does the Cavendish people, a Chinese quack, just said, ‘Take three of these every day and you’ll be all right.’ I said, ‘What are you giving me?’ He said, ‘A bottle of pink ones, a bottle of green ones, and a bottle of blue ones.’ Cheers, Doc. Maybe I’ll give the medicine a miss.

Alchemy was changing the sky. The sun was burnishing the leaden dullness to silver. In turn the silver was shrouding blue. It was going to be a nice day after all.

A nearby furry rock lifted its head, blinking. It looked at me sorrowfully and mooed. I hadn’t been this close to a cow I wasn’t eating since... who knows? Wales, for all I knew. Hong Kong glistened in the distance, through the haze. Skyscrapers, construction, clamouring upwards like trees in a jungle.

My cordless telephone rang and triggered an instant relapse.

Fuck, what have I done! Please God let me wake up! Please!

The cow mooed dolefully. Fuck. Fuck. Double Fuck to the power of Fuck squared. I am a lawyer living in a world where ‘thirteen’ means ‘thirteen million bucks’ and I am bunking off work like a schoolboy skipping double maths! The Taiwanese! Think! What excuse is serious enough, plausible enough, and yet too implausible for it to be a lie? Kidnapping? No, a heart attack? Avril knows I’m on medication. A seizure? Think! Serious, violent, incapacitating vomiting, then why aren’t I on the boat, I’d need to pay a doctor, I’d need a receipt, and a reliable witness—

Answer me! Answer me!

I clicked ‘answer’, and said, er...

Neal, isn’t it about time that you decided what constitutes a crisis?

Er... Nothing. I listened to Neal’s heart. It sounded like a percussion grenade in a neighbouring valley.

‘Neal? Neal?’ Avril, sure enough. ‘Neal, where are you?’

A large fly landed on my knee. A gothic tricycle. My relapse was over.

‘Neal? Can you hear me? Chaing Yun’s here. He’s being very polite, but he’s wondering what is so important that you are late for this meeting. And so am I. And so will Jim Hersch. And if Chiang Yun isn’t important enough to warrant your valuable time, Mr Gregorski from St Petersburg has already phoned you twice, and it’s not even 9 a.m.’

I looked at my Rolex. My, my, how time had flown. The cow frowned. I smelt its shit near by.

‘I know you’re there, Neal. I can hear you breathing. This had better be good. This had better be jolly good. Because nothing short of a capsized ferry is going to save you this time. Neal, you hear me Neal? Okay, look Neal, if you’re unable to speak, then tap the phone twice now, all right?’

Aha! Doubt was creeping in to her contempt! I chuckled. Avril the ever-resourceful. Avril will go far will Avril.

‘Neal! This is not funny! You are royally messing up one of the biggest contracts we’ve ever seen! One of the biggest that has ever been heard of ! I’m going to have to tell D.C. You can’t seriously expect me to take the flack for this!’

Ah, shut the fuck up. I clicked the thing off and placed it on the warm rock.

A buzzard circled, and there was an anvil-shaped cloud.

You never see them coming. They lurk in the overlooked and undusted places. They grow to huge proportions, and all along you don’t even dream about them, not in their true form. And then one day a chance meeting happens, a glimpse of that you didn’t know you wanted, and a latch is raised...

Avril tried my beeper. Jesus, I was armed to the teeth with telecommunications devices. Like John Wayne unholstering himself after a hard day slaughtering Hispanic bandits with bad teeth, I unclipped it. I clicked open my briefcase. There was the Mickey Kwan File — whoops — and Huw Llewellyn’s calling card. I put in my beeper and cordless phone. I stood up, took a big under-arm swing, and hurled it into the void. It drew an elegant parabola, I could still hear my beeper, a costly, mewling kitten. The briefcase hit the mountainside running, and spun down the slope in terminal leaps... in big beautiful wheels, fast enough to kill on impact, like Mama Lion, like a tumbler, like a lemming, like Piggy from The Lord of the Flies.

My briefcase hung for a moment in the morning sun, weightless.

Then it plummeted like a gannet into the sea.

It seemed Katy had forgotten to cancel the maid.

The first week after Katy’s departure I came home one night to find my washing done, the dishes washed up and neatly stacked, the toilet and the bathroom cleaned, and the windows polished. She’d even ironed my shirts, bless her sour-plum little Chinese nipples.

I certainly wasn’t going to cancel that. Weekdays, I had to plan in my Filofax when I was going to shit. Seriously.

The maid didn’t take long to work out that Katy had gone.

She came one Sunday morning. I was lying on the sofa watching Sesame Street. I heard the keys, and she entered as if she owned the place. She was not wearing her apron.

She locked the door behind her, walked over to me as though I was inanimate, knelt on me, and started massaging my cock with one hand. Big Bird, Ernie and Bert were singing a song about the magic ‘E’ that makes the ‘A’ say its name. I tried to kiss her but she shoved my face back with her hand, and kept it there, her hand coiling me tighter and tighter. She pulled off my T-shirt, and pushed my trousers down with her foot. Athletic girl. She pinched the skin between my balls, like a ring through the nose of an ox, led me to the bedroom, and laid me down on Katy’s side of the bed. She slid out of her pants and knelt on my rib cage. I started unbuttoning her, but she made a tsu-tsuuuu noise, slapped me and dug her fingernails into my scrotum until I capitulated. Then she spoke, for the first, and almost the last, time.

‘Say: you want me, you don’t want Katty Bitch.’

‘Yeah, I do.’

‘Say!’

‘I want you, I don’t want her.’

‘Say. Katty Bitch is bitch trash, I am real woman.’

I can’t say that.

Still keeping my testicles hostage, she pulled off her top with one hand, and unclipped her bra. I heard her giggling in the other room. Her nipples rose and darkened like something in a tale.

‘She was a bitch. Trash. You are a real woman.’

‘You would give money. You would give her stuff. All of it. A present.’

‘She took a lot back with her.’

‘She left much things. Mine now. Say it.’ Her hand slid up my shaft, tighter and tighter.

‘It’s yours now.’

She put my hand onto her breast. ‘Say: You stronger than me.’

‘You are stronger than me.’

Formalities, rituals and contract-signing over, she lunged down on me. For a fraction of a second I thought about contraception, but the warmth and wetness and rhythm nudged me further and further away.

Once I tried to get on top, but she bit me and elbowed me and rolled me back over.

Afterwards the fan droned on our bodies. Nothing left of all that fire but the smell of low tide. I felt... I don’t know what I felt. Maybe I felt nothing. The theme music of Sesame Street played itself out.

She got up, and sat down at Katy’s dressing table. She opened the drawer, and took out a coral necklace, and fastened it around her neck. Slenderer than Katy’s.

I wanted her again. This was costing me more than money, so I may as well push for maximum value and damn myself properly. I got up and fucked her from behind, on the dressing table. We broke the mirror.

Sex with the maid became a drug. Once pricked, I was addicted. I thought about her at work. When I got back in the evening, my erection would start even as I inserted my key. If I could smell Katy’s cologne in the entrance hall, it would mean she was waiting. If not, well, if not, I’d have to make do with whisky. Hugo Hamish and Theo at the office tried to persuade me to go drinking at Mad Dogs a few times, thinking I was cut up about Katy, but the truth is, she didn’t cross my mind that often. She was living in another compartment, and I didn’t have to encounter her unless I went looking for her. The maid was different: she came looking for me.

When I got home one night and saw Mrs Feng’s shoes in the entrance I realised trouble had come visiting. Mrs Feng and Katy were sitting at our dining-room table. They had that speak of the devil look. The final verdict on Neal Brose had just been handed down.

‘Neal,’ Katy said in her headmistress voice, which came out when she was nervous as fuck but wanted to seem in control. ‘Mrs Feng’s been telling me about our visitor. Sit down.’

I wanted a beer, I wanted a shower, I wanted steak and chips, I wanted Manchester United v. Liverpool on satellite TV.

‘Listen to Mrs Feng! Before you do anything.’

The sooner this was over, the sooner I could get on with my evening.

Mrs Feng waited for me to sit down and stop fidgeting. The way she looked at me made me feel a suspect at an identity parade. ‘You are not alone in this apartment.’

‘We know.’

‘She is hiding now. She is a little girl, and is afraid of me.’

I could quite see why. Mrs Feng’s eyes were smoked glass. When she blinked I swear I heard doors hiss.

‘There are three possibilities. For centuries, unwanted childrens were left on Lantau by night, to the mercy of the winter nights and the wild animals. She could be one such ancient. But these rarely reside in modern buildings. A second possibility is, she was one of the undesirables rounded up by the Japanese when they occupied Hong Kong during the war. They were brought to Discovery Bay, ordered to dig their graves, up where Phase 1 was built in the seventies, and shot so they fell back into the holes. Perhaps she had stolen some bauble. The third possibility is that she is a... I don’t know the English word. She is the child of a gwai lo man and a maid. The man would have left, and the maid flung the girl off one of these buildings.’

‘Modern mothercare.’

‘Neal, shut up!’

‘A boy would bring disgrace, but a baby girl, worse than that. It often happens, even when the parents are married and both Chinese, if they are not rich. The dowries can cripple a couple’s married life. I believe that she is one of these.’

Why were they both looking at me? Was it my fault?

‘There’s something else,’ Katy said. ‘Mrs Feng says she’s drawn to men. You.’

‘Do you know what you’re sounding like?’

‘Mrs Feng says she sees me as a rival, and for as long as we’re here, I’ll never be able to have a baby. We’ll have to leave Lantau. It can’t follow you over water.’

‘Dr Chan forwarded a slightly more plausible reason for the non-appearance of a Brose-Forbes junior, don’t you think?’ Fuck, that came out wrongly.

‘So, you’re saying it’s all a figment of my imagination.’

‘No. Occasionally, there is a presence here. But stratospheric rents on Central and Victoria Peak are a rather more concrete reality. The Chinese are the first to forget their sacred fucking feng shui when money’s making the suggestion. Forget it, Katy. We can’t afford to move. And there is no way we’re moving in with the Triad and the Plebs and the Immigrants down in Kowloon. You’d have a baby there and they’d chop it up and desiccate it for medicine.’

Mrs Feng watched us. I could swear she was enjoying this.

‘Mrs Feng,’ I said. ‘You know everything there is to know. What should we do? Call an exorcist?’

My sarcasm was dead on arrival. Mrs Feng nodded slightly. ‘In ordinary circumstances, yes, there are a number of specialist geomancers I could recommend. But this apartment is so very unlucky, I believe it is beyond redemption. You must move.’

‘We’re not moving. We can’t move.’

Mrs Feng stood up. ‘Then you will excuse me.’

Katy stood and made ‘won’t you stay and have some more tea’ noises, but she was already passing through the doorway. ‘Beware,’ she warned without turning around, ‘of what is at the other end of the door.’

While I was trying to work out what the fuck that was supposed to mean, Katy stood up and went into the spare bedroom. I heard her lock it.

Madness, fucking madness. I got myself a beer, and lay on the sofa, too tired to make myself some food. Thanks, Katy. You’ve had all fucking day to make something. So what if there is a fucking ghost?

I never knew there were so many fucking locks in this place.

The boy and the girl in the café last night, I keep seeing them.

Katy and me. What happened to Love?

Well, Love went to bed. It fucked, over and over, until it got sore-knob bored, quite frankly. Then Love looked around for something else to do, and it saw its lovely friends all having lovely babies. So Love decided to do the same, but Love kept having its periods, same as ever, however much it inseminated itself. So Love went to an infertility clinic, and discovered the truth. As far as I know Love’s stiff is there to this very day. And that, boys and girls, is the Story of What Happened to Love.

I want to go back to the coffee bar and tell them. ‘Listen to me, both of you, you are ill. You’re not seeing things how they are.’

Who are you to tell anyone they are ill, Neal?

Katy had phoned that evening. The maid had left two minutes before. I was just climbing into the shower, still sticky. How do women manage to time these things? She spoke to my answering machine. She was drunk. I let her speak to it, listening in, standing stark bollock naked in the living room, smelling of multiple sex with the maid Katy had hated.

‘Neal, I know you’re there. I can tell. It’s five in the afternoon here, dunno what that makes it there, eleven I suppose.’ I didn’t know what the time was either. ‘I’ve been watching the Brits get slaughtered at Wimbledon... Wanted to say hello I s’pose, dunno why I’m phoning really, I’m well, thanks, how are you? I’m well. I’m flat-hunting. I should be closing on a little flat in Islington this time next week. The pipes are noisy but at least there aren’t any ghosts. Sorry, that’s not funny. I’m doing a lot of P.A.ing for Cecile’s Temp Agency, just to keep my hand in. Vernwood’s left for Wall Street. Some hotshot fresh from the London School of Economics has been given his desk. I was wondering if you could get the Queen Anne chair shipped back sometime, it’s worth a bob or two, you know. Spoke with your sister last week, bumped into her in Harvey Nic’s funnily enough, quite by chance... She said you’d just extended your contract by another eighteen months... will you be coming back at Christmas? Might be nice to meet up, I just thought, y’know, but then again you’ll probably have people to meet and all that... And some of my jewellery is still in your apartment. We wouldn’t want that maid getting her hands on it and running back to China, eh? I don’t think I ever got those keys back from her. You’d better change the locks. I’m okay, but I need a holiday. About forty years would do me. Well, if you’re not too tired when you get in give me a call, I’ll be watching the doubles finals for the next couple of hours... Oh, and your sister said to tell you to call your mother... Your dad’s pancreatic thingy has come back... ’bye then...’

I never got round to returning that call. What would I say?

A grave. Its back to the mountain, its face to the sea. The sun was high and pestilent. I took off my tie and hung it on a thorny tree. No point trying to read the name of the grave’s occupant. There are thousands of these Chinese hieroglyphs making up the world’s clonkiest writing system. I knew five: alcohol, mountain, river, love, exit. I sometimes think, these hieroglyphs are the real Chinese, living down through the centuries, hiding their meanings in their similarities to outwit the foreigner, by and large immune to tampering. Mao himself failed to modernise his language.

I’d followed the path down from the last peak. There’d been a brackish stream, a bush of birds, a butterfly with zebra stripes on wings wide as side-plates. I’d lost the path once or twice, and it had come back to find me once or twice. It reminded me of the Brecon Beacons. I grew up when I realised that everywhere was basically the same, and so were the women.

This time there was no way on. A false trail. I’d have to backtrack, through the maze of thorn bushes and couch-grass. I sat down and looked at the view. Another extension to the new airport was being built out there on reclaimed land. Little bulldozers played in the glistening silt-flats. Sweat trickled down my wrists, my chest, down the crack between my buttocks. My trousers clung to my thighs. I should be taking my medication about now, but all that was in a briefcase in the bottom of a bay somewhere.

I wondered if anyone had been sent to come and get me. Ming, probably. Avril was no doubt busy probing deeper into my hard disc, with Theo Fraser at her shoulder? Where might that lead? All those e-mails from Petersburg, all those see-no-evil-hear-no-evil seven-and eight-figure transfers of funds to out-of-the-way places?

Unless you’ve lived with a ghost, you can’t know the truth of it. You assume that morning, noon and night, you’re walking around obsessed, fearful and waiting for the exorcist to call. It’s not really like that. It’s more like living with a very particular cat.

For the last few months I’ve been living with three women. One was a ghost, who is now a woman. One was a woman, who is now a ghost. One is a ghost, and always will be. But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.

Katy and I had come back from some stupid Cavendish party. We’d come into the lobby together, I checked our mailbox, putting down my briefcase. There were some letters. We got in the elevator, ripping open the envelopes. Halfway up I realised I’d left my briefcase down in the lobby next to the mailbox. When we got to the fourteenth floor, Katy got out, and I went back down, got my briefcase, and returned to our floor. When the elevator doors opened I saw Katy still outside the apartment, and I knew something was very wrong.

She was white and trembling. ‘It’s locked. It’s bolted. From the inside.’

Burglars. On the fourteenth floor? They must still be in there.

It’s not burglars, and we both knew it.

She had come back.

I don’t know how I knew what to do, but I took out my own keys, and rattled them a few times. Then I tried the door.

It swung open into the darkness.

Katy didn’t speak to me, even though I know she was awake for most of the night. Looking back, that was the beginning of the end.

So I backtracked.

A bus full of curious people drove past, packed as usual. Fuck, the way that the Chinese will just stare at you! So rude! Have they never seen a sunburning foreigner in a suit out for a midday walk before?

The sun! The smack of a boxing glove. I was parched. The helicopter came back. The sides of the valley hummed and swished. I should have come here months ago. It was waiting, and I’d done nothing but truck to and fro from the office, on that turbo ferry across the River Styx.

What kind of place did the maid live in? In Kowloon, or the New Territories somewhere? She’d get a bus or a streetcar from the port, and get off far beyond where the decent shops finished. The same sort of place Ming lives in, I suppose. Down a backstreet, its walls crowded up to fifteen floors with dirty signs for sweatshops and stripclubs and money changers and restaurants and God knows what. Nothing more than a rafter of mucky sky. The noise, of course, would never stop. The Chinese brain must be equipped with a noise-filtration device, that allows them to only listen to the one band of racket that they want to hear. Taxis, cheap little ghetto blasters, chanting from the temple, satellite TV, sales pitches floating aloft through megaphones. You’d go down an alley, there’d be the smell of grime and piss and dim sum. People would be hanging about in doorways needing new shirts and a shave, selling drugs. Up stairs — the elevators in those kinds of places never work — and into a tiny apartment where a family of seven bicker and watch TV and drink. Strange to think I work in the same city. Strange to think of the little palaces up on Victoria Peak. That’s probably where the Japanese kid is getting over his jet lag now. His girl bringing him lemon tea on a silver tray. Or more likely, her maid bringing in the lemon tea. I wonder how they had met. I wonder.

There are so many cities in every single city.

When I first came to Hong Kong, before Katy joined me, I was given one day’s holiday to get over jet lag. I felt fine, so I decided to use it exploring the city. I travelled the trams, jolted by the poverty I saw, and walked the overhead walkways, feeling safe only amongst the business suits and briefcases. I took the cablecar up to Victoria Peak, and walked around. Rich wives were strolling in groups, and maids with the children, and teenage couples walking arm-in-arm looking at all the other teenage couples. There were a couple of stalls mounted on wheels, the sort of set-up my father used to call market barrows. They sold maps, peanuts in their shells, and the bland salty snack things that Chinese and Indians are so fond of. One of them sold maps in English, and postcards, so I bought a few. Suddenly a pile of cans next to the stall moved and barked something in Chinese. A face caked in grease and creased with age emerged and looked at me with loathing. I jumped out of my skin. The stall-holder laughed, and said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s harmless.’

The garbage man growled, and repeated the same words, slowly, and louder, at me.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s begging.’

‘How much does he want?’ A stupid question.

‘He’s not begging for money.’

‘What’s he begging for?’

‘He’s begging for time.’

‘Why does he do that?’

‘He thinks you’re wasting yours, so you must have plenty to spare.’

My tongue was parched. I hadn’t drunk for hours... since that bowl of water at breakfast. Usually, I only ever drank coffee and whisky. An old farmer was burning something that popped like firecrackers. Bamboo? Grainy mauve smoke drifted across the road. My eyes were watering. I was under a vast tree that fanned out across the sky and hid it incompletely as words will hide whatever is behind them.

Red roses grew wild up the brick wall crumbling back to sand. A roped-up dog went hysterical as I walked past. A flurry of fangs and barks. It thought I was a ghost. Futons, airing. A Chinese pop song. Godawful and tinny. Two old people in a room devoid of furniture, steam rising from their teacups. They were motionless and expressionless. Waiting for something. I wish I could go into their room and sit down with them. I’d give them my Rolex for that. I wish they would smile, and pour me a cup of jasmine tea. I wish the world was like that.

I watched the cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the night road. In the distance a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down. I watched the neon signs intone their messages, over and over. The Japanese kid and his girl had disappeared fuck knows where, and Lionel Ritchie had dissolved in his own saccharine bathtub. My second burger had gone cold and greasy, I couldn’t finish it. A version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was playing, unbelievably sung in Cantonese. I should be getting back to Mr Wae’s briefings or Avril will start the Sacred Martyr Act. One more song; and one more mega-sugar coffee, then I’ll go back like a good boy. It was ‘Blackbird’ by The Beatles. I never listened to this one properly before. It’s beautiful.

‘Neal Brose?’

A Welsh voice, unknown and familiar. A short, Mr Mole-ish bloke, with horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Yeah?’

‘My name’s Huw Llewellyn. We met at Theo and Penny Fraser’s New Year Party.’

‘Ah, yeah, Huw... Sure, sure...’ I didn’t know him from Adam.

‘Mind if I pull up a pew?’

‘Sure... If you can say that about moulded plastic seats bolted onto cast-iron frames. You’ll have to forgive my frazzled memory, Huw. Who are you with?’

‘I used to be with Jardine-Pearl. Now I’m at the Capital Transfer Inspectorate.’

Fuck. Now I remember. We’d talked about rugby, then business. I’d dismissed him as a born compromise candidate. ‘Poacher turned gamekeeper, eh?’

Huw Llewellyn smiled as he unloaded his tray, and wriggled out of his corduroy jacket, with leather pads on the elbows. So fucking Welsh. A veggieburger and a styrofoam cup of hot water, with tea bleeding out of its bag. ‘People usually say “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”’

Dad used to say that. ‘I’ve read about your raids on — who was it? Silk Road Group?’

‘Yep. Would you pass me a sachet of ketchup, please?’

‘I’ve heard some interesting rumours about them money laundering for Kabul’s biggest drug exporter. Is it true? Go on, I won’t tell a soul.’

Huw bit into his veggieburger, chomped a few times, smiling, and swallowed. ‘I’ve heard some interesting rumours about Account 1390931.’

Fuck. I suddenly wanted to vomit my shitburger. I laughed lightly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Fuck. That’s exactly what liars say.

Huw squeezed the tea-bag with a plastic fork. ‘Go on, I won’t tell a soul.’

‘Is it a bicycle combination lock?’

‘No, it’s a Cavendish Holdings Account that only you have the keys to.’

He had upped the stakes. ‘Is this a fishing expedition, or do you have a warrant for my arrest?’

‘I prefer to see this as a friendly chat.’

‘Mr Llewellyn, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

‘Mr Brose, I know far more about Andrei Gregorski than you. Believe me. You’re being set up. I’ve watched him do it before. Why do you think neither his name — nor Denholme Cavendish’s name — appears on not one single document, not one single computer file? Because they like you? Trust you? You are their bullet-proof vest.’

How much did he know? ‘It’s just a hush-hush hedge-fund for—’

‘I don’t want to watch you zip yourself up in lies, Mr Brose. I know your personal life is in tatters. But unless you co-operate with me, by the weekend things are going to take a sharp turn for the worse. I am your last way out.’

‘I don’t need a way out.’

He shrugged, and swallowed the last morsel. He’d put that away without me noticing. ‘Then our friendly chat has come to an end. Here is my business card. I strongly recommend a change of mind, by tomorrow noon. Goodnight.’

The door swung. I was left looking at the wreckage of my shitburger.

I went back into Cavendish Tower, but changed my mind in the lobby. I asked the nightwatchman to wait five minutes, then tell Avril I’d gone home. I waited twenty minutes at the harbour for the next ferry, looking across the black water at all the shining skyscrapers. Back on Lantau Island — just as a precaution — I emptied three quarters of my account from the bank’s cash machine, in case my cards got frozen. There wasn’t another bus for 30 minutes, so I walked back to Phase 1 through the chilly night.

She was waiting in the apartment. The air-conditioner was belting out frigid air.

‘For fuck’s sake, I’m sorry! I had a lot of work!’

Resentful silence.

‘I’ve got a lot on my mind! Okay? I’m going to bed.’

I hid the money in a shoebox at the bottom of Katy’s dressing table. I’d think of a better hiding place before the maid came. She might be a necessary drug, but she was still a thieving bitch.

I came to a shrine, and the sound of running water. There was a fountain guarded by two dragons. Hygiene be fucked, I was thirsty. I drank until I heard the water sloshing about in my belly. At least I wasn’t going to die of dehydration. I wanted to dunk my arms and face into this cool, clear water, so I unstrapped my Rolex, perched it on the nose of a dragon, stripped off my shirt, and immersed as much of my torso in the fountain as I could. I opened my eyes under the water, and saw the underbellies of wavelets, with the sun beneath.

Where now? There was an easy path and a steep path. I took the easy one, and twenty metres later arrived at the cess pit. I came back to the dragons and started climbing sharply. I was feeling much, much, better. As though my body had stopped fighting the ’flu, and was submitting to its will.

The path steepened. At times I had to use my hands to scramble up. The trees were growing dense, scaly and damp, the pinpricks of light that got to the path sharp and bright as lasers. I took off my jacket and gave it to a blackberry bush. It was already ripped. Maybe a passing monk or escaped refugee will take a shine to it. The air was busy with out-of-tune birds and their eyes.

Time lost me.

I looked at my Rolex, and remembered that I’d left it on a dragon’s nose.

Grabbing a root to pull myself up, it came off in my hand and I tumbled down the path a few yards. I heard a crack, but stood up right as rain. I felt fabulous. I felt immortal.

Higher up loomed a rock as big as a house, but I scaled it like a teenager, and was soon surveying my domain from the top. A slow-moving 747 made its stately descent, skinning the afternoon with its jagged blade of noise. I waved at the people. The sun glints off the tail. She is with me, waving too, jumping up and down. It’s good to make somebody feel good, even if she doesn’t exactly exist.

‘She likes me.’

The maid was standing in front of the mirror, naked, holding up Katy’s summer frocks against her body. If she liked it she’d try it on. If it fitted, she’d put it into Katy’s Louis Vuitton bag. If she didn’t, it joined the others on the reject pile.

I was floating, anchored to the bed by the deadweight of my groin. ‘Who likes you?’

‘The little girl.’

‘What little girl?’

‘Your little girl. Who lived here. She liked me. She wanted sister to play with.’

The wind blew the curtains gently. These Chinese are fucking crazy.

The last time Katy called, she wasn’t drunk. I took that as a bad sign.

‘Hello, Neal’s Answerphone. This is Katy Forbes, Neal’s separated wife. How are you? You must be rushed off your feet, considering how Neal has forgotten how to pick up receivers and dial. I want you to tell Neal that I am now the proud owner of a palatial residence in north-east London, that we’re having the rainiest summer since a very long time ago, and all the cricket is being rained off. Tell him that I’m having sessions with Dr Clune twice a week, and that they are working wonders. Tell him that Archie Goode is going to be my lawyer, and that the divorce papers should get to him by the end of the week. Tell him I’m not going for his jugular, I just want what’s rightfully mine. Lastly, tell him it would prepare the ground for an amicable settlement if he gets off his lazy arse and ships me home my Queen Anne chair. He knows it’s the one heirloom I give a damn about. Goodnight.’

The key to understanding Neal Brose is that he is a man of departments, compartments, apartments. The maid is in one, Katy is in another, my little visitor in another, Cavendish Hong Kong in another, Account 1390931 in another. In each one lives a Neal Brose who operates quite independently of the neighbouring Neal Broses. That’s how I do it. My future is in another compartment, but I’m not looking into that one. I don’t think I’ll like what I’ll see.

Weird thing was, the maid was right. When I came back and the maid was there, the atmosphere in my apartment was palpably different. Muted Sibelius rather than Thunderous Wagner. If she’d been real, I imagined her sitting under the table, chattering away to her dolls. She’d leave us alone, and the curtains would stay where I left them. Maybe I’d hear the kiss kiss kiss of her feet running across the marble floor in the living room.

If the maid wasn’t there, there’d be this air of reproachment and neglect. It was the same when I went away on business — I went to Canton once, a right fucking shithole it is too — and when I got back she was so pissed off with me that I had to stand there apologising to the thin air.

The path stopped climbing, and crested the ridge. I saw Buddha’s head above the camphor trees, almost close enough to touch. That was one Big Buddha. Platinum, spun on a wheel of deep blue. The trees were dream trees, now. A shadow cat, a cat shadow.

My skin buzzed. My immortality was ebbing away. In this sun it must be turning to bacon. I think I had broken a toenail, I could feel something wet and warm in my shoe. I could feel my organs sag against each other, still functioning, but slowing like tired swimmers.

Why is the moon up there, up above you, Lord Buddha? White, blue, roaring in its silent furnace of sunlight. The moon, the moon, in the afternoon.

I stepped into a once and future century. People, coach tours, a car park, souvenir stands, advertisement hoardings, people crowding around ticket booths — only the British and the Slavs know how to queue — motorbikes... Here and not here. They were on the wrong side of a wall of bright liquid. A babble of languages from the room next door.

Lord Buddha’s lips were full and proud. Always on the verge of words, yet never quite speaking. His lidded eyes, hooding a secret the world needs.

The moon was in on the joke. New, old, new, old. If I met the old garbage man now, I’d say, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any spare time to give you. Not even a minute. Not even a spare ten fucking seconds.

I wondered if that Japanese kid was playing his saxophone in a bar somewhere, over in a bar in Central or Kowloon. I would like to hear him. I’d like to watch his girl watching him. I would like that very much. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. I’d like to talk with them, and find out how they met. I’d like to ask him about jazz, and why John Coltrane is so famous. So many things to know. I’d like to ask him why I had married Katy, and whether I was right to sign and return those divorce papers. Was Katy happy at last, now? Had she met someone who loved her, someone with a respectable sperm-count? Would she be a tender, wise mother, or would she turn out to be a booze-soaked saggy fuck in her middle age? Would Huw Llewellyn nail Andrei Gregorski, or would Andrei Gregorski nail Huw Llewellyn? Would Mr Wae the shipping magnate take his business elsewhere? Would Manchester United win the premiership? Would the Cookie Monster’s teeth fall out? Would the world be over by Christmas?

She brushed near by, and blew on the back of my neck, and a million leaves moved with the wind. My skin was so hot it no longer seemed my own. A new Neal inside the old opened his eyes. Platinum in the sun, blue in the shade. He was waiting for my old skin to flake off so he could climb out and walk abroad. My liver squirmed impatiently. My heart was going through its options. What’s that organ: the one that processes the sugar?

What led me here?

My dad would describe Denholme Cavendish — Sir Denholme Cavendish — as a man educated beyond his intellect. ‘Now, Nile.’ D.C. pursed his lips together in the manner of the old general he believed himself to be. The traffic of Barbican, twenty floors below us, punctuated the pompous old fuck’s dramatic pauses. ‘A key question to understanding the role we’re projecting for you in Hong Kong is this: What is Cavendish Holdings?’

No, D.C., the key question is: What answer do you want to hear?

Play it safe, Neal. Let him feel intellectually on top. And don’t tell him he’s too fucking stupid to get my name right. ‘A top-line legal and investment corporation, Sir Denholme.’

Good. He had an insight coming on. ‘We’re a corporation. A top-line corporation. But that’s not all we are, Nile, my word no. We are a family! Isn’t that so, Jim?’

Jim Hersch smiled his ‘you’ve put your finger on it!’ smile.

‘Sure, we have our family squabbles. Jim and I have had some fine old cat-fights in our time, haven’t we, eh, Jim, eh?’

Same smile. ‘Sure have, Sir D.’ You smooth American fuck, Hersch.

‘You see, Nile? No quarter given to yesmen at Cavendish! But we pull through in the end, Nile, and let me tell you how! Because we understand the value of co-operation. Mutual reliance. Mutual trust. Mutual assistance.’ He lit his cigar like Winston Churchill and gazed at the portrait of his grandfather who gazed back. I wanted to snigger. The man was a walking cliché. How could this fuck-for-brains run a law firm with offices in five continents? The answer was obvious: he only thought he ran it. ‘Playing the Asian markets requires a certain... how did I put it to Grainger, Jim, the other day?’

‘I believe you said “flair and verve in the strategising stages”, Sir D.’

‘Flair! And verve! That’s it, you see, Flair! And verve! In the strategising stages! Now in London, New York, everyone knows what’s what. The playing field is even, the goalposts are fixed. But Asia is the last wild frontier, eh? The bandits of corruption live in the Chinese hills, and make lightning raids! Regulators? Forget ’em! Paid off. Every last man. No, for our townships to prosper in Asia, we have to play by their rules, but play better! I’m talking about originality in capital-manipulation! About reinterpretation! You have to recognise the real but invisible goalposts when you see them! And use whatever means are at your disposal to score. You with me, Nile?’

‘One hundred per cent, Sir Denholme.’

What was the old fuck on about?

‘I want to add a special account to your Hong Kong Portfolio. It’s for an ally of mine. A Russian chap, based in Petersburg, you’ll meet him one day. You’ll be hearing from him soon enough. A splendid fellow. Chap by the name of Andrei Gregorski. A real mover and shaker. He’s done a few favours for us in the past.’ He leaned forward over the desk, tapping his cigar into an intricate ashtray inlaid with jade and amber, and etched with lotus flowers and orchids.

‘He’s asked me to set up an account for his operation with our Hong Kong branch. I want to put you in charge of it.’

‘What do I do with it?’

‘Whatever he tells you to. However much, wherever, whenever. Child’s play for a trooper of your experience.’

We’d come to the clincher.

‘I think I can manage that, Mr Cavendish.’

‘Keep it hush-hush. Just between you, me, Jim and grandfather here, eh?’

I get it. The old fuck’s asking me to bend the law.

‘One thing matters and one thing only.’ I’d always assumed it was his leather chair that creaked, but now I wondered whether or not it was really him. He prodded each word at me with his cigar. ‘Do — you — have — the — balls?’ The blackheads on the tip of his nose urgently needed squeezing. ‘Eh? Eh?’

I’m a financial lawyer. I bend the law every day.

‘They were firmly attached when I last used them, Sir Denholme.’

D.C. was deciding whether or not he liked my answer. Then his laughter ignited, sending a projectile of saliva hurtling between my eyebrows. Jim Hersch smiled too, a photo smile of a manager in a local newspaper. And I was smiling the same smile, too.

Do I go back further?

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn’t want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying ‘No dogs or Chinese’, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behaviour, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early 21st century and forcing the White House to legalise heroin. And saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we’re at it, okay? Thanks very much.’ Hong Kong became the trading hub of the biggest, most populated continent in the world. This led to one big burping appetite for bent financial lawyers.

Or is it not a question of cause and effect, but a question of wholeness?

I’m this person, I’m this person, I’m that person, I’m that person too.

No wonder it’s all such a fucking mess. I divided up my possible futures, put them into separate accounts, and now they’re all spent.

Big thoughts for a bent little lawyer.

My forehead kissed the tarmac, soft as a sleeping daughter. I keeled over into foetal position. A lurching tide of voices sloshed the hull of my hearing. What the fuck is going on?

Now I understand what this insane fucking day has been about!

Hilarious!

I am fucking dying!

No doubt about it. Now it’s happening again it’s all coming back to me.

Thirty-one years old, and I am fucking dying!

Avril’s going to be so fucked off with me. And when D.C. hears, well, I think I can safely kiss my six-figure bonus goodbye. How will Katy take it? That’s the clincher. Dad?

Hilarious...

She comes through the wall of legs and torsos. She looks down at me, and she smiles. She has my eyes, and the maid’s body, in miniature. She gives me her hand, and we pick our way through the crowd of gawpers, the shocked, the titillated, and the gum-chewing. What can have happened to fascinate them so on such an afternoon?

Hand in hand we walk up the steps of the Big Bright Buddha, brighter and brighter, into a snowstorm of silent light.