Jade Woman

9

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BATHHOUSE day. Me and Steerforth breakfasted differently—me on toast and tea, him on air and water. He looked like death. I’d washed my clothes in the early dawn. They’d dried hung outside the window in an instant, probably why hanging washing out on upstairs poles was the local tradition. I’d showered—much rather bathe any day—and felt quite fit. I’d slept with my money in my sock.

Traffic herds were already snarling as we walked twenty yards along the street, tennish.

The air was cooler. All this is not to suggest tranquillity. A stroll in Hong Kong is a furnace of people, peddlers, everybody haggling.

“Here, Lovejoy.” Steerforth was coughing steadily on his fourth cigarette of the day. “In you go. See you about one.”

“Three hours?” A bath only takes five minutes. “Where’re you off?”

“Another bathhouse down the road. Be back at the flat.”

The price was marked on the window. An actual glass front, opaque designs in red. I nodded uneasily. “Look. Is this some local custom? Only…”

“It’s the only way to acclimatize, Lovejoy.”

Well, as we were partners of a kind, I’d play along. In and out in a few minutes, then a stroll. I was in for a shock.

Not boasting or anything, but I’m pretty clean. Okay, I admit my clothes are off-the-peg. My jacket was a gift from Janie. And most of my gear’s from birds who, hooked on appearances, get a rush of blood to their fashionable little heads about shirts, shoes, and that. They start tarting me up till I feel a right daffodil. I once had this bird who was obsessed with suits, which, as far as I’m concerned, are a waste of space. God, she was an epidemic. She bought me so many gabardines and worsteds I had to start giving the damned things to jumble sales. Typical. There’s something very wasteful in their nature. Anyhow, the point I’m making is I’m clean in spite of not being your true-life Carnaby Streeter. Bath every morning and I never let my jacket get so far gone that it pongs of armpit. Any bird will tell you that. My only critic is—was—Lydia, who forever complains I never get my bed organized. But who does? Ever seen a bed yet that stays tidy under stress?

A little bloke in trousers and a singlet held the bead curtain aside, docking his cigarette, as I entered all unaware I was in for ultimate shame. Hong Kong was about to give me a lesson: How to survive women washing you for two hundred minutes and come out smiling.

“Mister.” The lackadaisical bloke had a head of lank hair, nothing on his feet. He made me empty my pockets into a cashbox. Its key was tied round my wrist, like a hospital tag.

“Change,” he commanded with a gold-toothed grin, shoving me through some curtains.

I undressed, reflecting that so far the little leper was the only Chinese I’d noticed without a faceful of gold or platinum, though I hadn’t yet seen him laugh.

A hesitation occurred about then, because here I was naked as a grape and no towel or…

The curtain was switched aside. A pair of girls reached in and yanked me out. They were talking Cantonese, not even bothering to look. I went red, tried to stand with my hands strategically crossed. They wore white silk knickers and nothing else. “Listen,” I began, but they tugged me down the corridor and into a mausoleum place with a big stone table covered by matting. Chrome containers steamed on the walls. A couple of sparse chairs, a table with a mound of white towels. I’d seen friendlier kitchens.

“Look, miss.” I backed away. “I only came in for a bath. Hang on—”

Not a blind bit of notice. Talking animatedly, they flipped me onto the stone plinth. It didn’t hurt but their swiftness filched my breath. A hose pipe sloshed me wet, then they slung blobs of foamy soap over, laughing. It was a hectic business. One each side, they started lathering me, their breasts bobbing and ponytailed hair becoming soap-flecked as they whaled in. “Er, please,” I tried helplessly, soap everywhere. I tried to do it for them but they stopped that quite reflexly and slapped and rubbed on. Effortlessly they flipped me on my side, lathering away. I felt like a haddock. Another girl slipped in to join the team. She walked with that quick waggle that women somehow convert into a smooth gliding motion, carrying plastic buckets on a wooden yoke. I tried gasping apologies, asking to leave, but she started ferrying pails of water from the steamers, different heats, sloshing them over me between soapings. I moaned under the force of it. She really chucked the stuff like you do onto a car. They talked loudly, ignored me. It was all happening.

By the finish they were as soaped as me, four worms in froth. Just when I’d learned the sequence—head-to-toe soap front, left, back, right, a six-bucket rinse, resoap—I was shoved upright and dragged in a babble through a bamboo curtain.

And splash down into warm water, with my original pair still rabbiting and the rinser standing on the tiled surround of a miniature plunge. A rapid altercation over whether I was properly rinsed, then I was slithered like a seal across the tiling and plopped into a freezing cold mini-plunge, the rinser girl exhorting as we went. Suffering now; they made me stagger to a third but hot plunge, steam rising to obscure the sight of the merry trio’s breasts bobbing around. By then I was ready for a day’s rest, but unbelievably it was more soapings with still fiercer slammers from the girl with the buckets.

The worst thing was not knowing what temperature the next thumping cascade would be, a freezing deluge or a hot torrent. I gasped a wild protest that I’d be honed into extinction but that only made them fall about laughing. Actually it was more embarrassing than anything because with three women sliding about me, a certain inevitable change took place. They weren’t discountenanced.

The last act brought the shame and showed how filthy I really was. The trio finally splashed wetly aside, making way for three more birds, one carrying two steaming cylinders.

“Can I go, please?” I said breathlessly, worn out and looking for a towel, escape. Surely I was spotless by now?

“Towels.” The cylinder girl pulled out scalding-hot wet towels. She used wooden tongs.

“Here, love,” I bleated. I was knackered. Now she looked set to boil me to death.

“That’s not hot, is it? Because—”

Her two assistants moved in slick precision. Each wrapped a hot cloth round a forearm, suddenly leapt on me and scraped their towels along my entire length, driving down on me so the heat and friction caused me to yelp in anguish. I was wriggling, anywhere to escape these semi-naked assassins, when I saw. Both girls were discarding their towels to replace them with fresh ones from the steaming cylinders.

And the used towels were black as mud.

All that filth had been scraped off me. Me. After ten soapings, umpteen rinses, all that dirt?

Whimpering but observing, I lay back. And would you believe, the new towels scraped another dollop of gunge off me. Black again. And again. Front, sides, back, the same chattering crew honed layers of crud from my skin with those steaming fluffy towels wrapped round their forearms. God, I was mortified. I didn’t keep count but it took a third cylinderful of scalding cloths before the black yuck gave way to gray, then finally white.

Not another murmur out of me after that. A zillion rinsings, and I was led submissive into a bedroomy place for them to towel me dry. They left me on a long clean bed in a screened alcove with the telly on. A tray of tea and miniature cakes was fetched by a bonny bird who insisted on staying to pour. She seemed to like watching the idiot box, though it was only news and weather. I didn’t ask her to leave.

Sometime later I said my thanks. “Any idea how much all this’ll cost?” I asked. It was on my mind, that and filth,

“No cost,” she said, lovely oval eyes on the screen. “On house until Brookers Gelman people gone.” She sniffed delicately at my skin. “Too much orange blossom in last soaping, no?”

“Who’s Brookers Gelman?”

“Linda stupid Shanghainese girl,” she said candidly, eyes back on the screen, some old Eastwood shoot-out. “Cow. Always bad perfume mixer. Next time I bathe you. Number-one perfume mixer.”

Leaving the place an indolent hour or so later, I felt I could bounce over the traffic.

Marvelous, refreshed. And it was time I started sussing out this wonderful new world I’d fetched up in. As the neat policeman in his elegant pagoda-shaped box was about to signal me across the road, I nearly fell over this little Chinese kiddie on roller skates.

Except it wasn’t. It was my stumpy bloke, the leper, poling himself along with astonishing adroitness. I halted. Pedestrians torrented past. I crouched down, nearly gassed by the motor fumes and the thick oily stench of barrow stoves upping a gear for midday on-the-hoof appetites.

“Wotcher, Titch,” I said. “Remember me?”

He raised his eyes and gazed into me. Odd, that resignation, that ton of seen-it-all wisdom burning behind the dark, clouded look. His skin was patch-ily discolored and sort of mounded up into irregular blotches. He only came up to maybe my hip, if that.

“?” he said in a gravelly voice, one word.

“You charged me the wrong price for a few noodles,” I told him. “Here.” I tucked forty dollars into the neck of his vest and bought a tin of Cola from the bicycle hawker at the curb. I slotted it into his plank’s groove. “You okay?”

That slow inspection took me in. I could have sworn he almost understood what I was saying.

“One thing,” I said. All the time, crouched down that level, I was being nudged and kneed and unbalanced by the streaming pedestrians. “You’re the only Chinese I’ve seen so far without gold teeth. How come?”

“?” he said. But deep in his eyes a faint flash of humor showed, a hint of something different.

“Lovejoy?” Jim Steerforth was by me, looking a century younger. “Come on. Viewing day, Hong Kong side.”

“Now?” I stood up as the lights changed and the pagoda bobby wagged us to cross. “I thought—”

“You thought wrong, Lovejoy. Let’s go.”

I looked down to say so long to Titch but he was already off on his rollerboard, hunched and thrusting. “One other thing,” Steerforth said. “I saw you give notes and a drink to the leper. Charity’s fine, but don’t rock Hong Kong’s boat. Got it?”

“Right,” I agreed. I saw five more lepers on rollers on the way to the Star Ferry, none of them mine.