Jade Woman

36

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EXILE’S sometimes not, if you follow. Sometimes it’s sanity. I learned this at Tai O.

The village is straight out of a poem. This thought only came to me on the tenth day of exile, during my morning ritual. It was only a walk in my round coolie hat, to the high-stilted tin shacks, then as far as the ferry, turn round at the coffin maker’s, back past the chemist’s shop. I mean, a huddle of Chinese houses (one mine), a temple with ski-lift corners, a sandy strand, the shallowest cleanest river trickling all silvery into the blue sea, green scrubby hills rising high behind. Quiet. No cot-hopping for Lovejoy in Tai O.

For two days I didn’t even know where I was. Leung and Ong simply dumped me in this little house at night and vanished. Later I asked an English tourist from a bus and he showed me his map. “I came from Silvermine Bay,” he said, “and it took forty-five minutes…” Tai O, on Lantau Island. A big island, maybe twenty miles long. And of course I was at the wrong end. A walk to the northern tip would put me in sight of the New Territories north of Kowloon, but the two-mile swim would be beyond me.

I got in the habit of going to watch the Hong Kong ferry sail, at twenty to one and evening at seven. It frightened me badly by not sticking to schedule and only arriving once, my third day of exile, but I guessed that was Sunday.

Two tourists came that day into the mighty Po Chu Hotel, but I stayed clear, as Leung and Ong had ordered.

No painting, no books. The newspaper man by the ferry only sold Chinese editions.

Each evening I had one good meal, avoiding rice wine. Thinking nervously of sharks, I flopped in the river mouth twice a day. I watched the local ferry—a tiny flat sampan journeying recklessly the twenty yards to a minute island. Two old dears pull the ropes.

I got to know them pretty well, they were cackling and laughing with me each morning.

And one dawn, really wild, I went to and fro a few times on it but the excitement got to me. I returned to waiting for the number 1 bus from Silvermine Bay to haul in. The only antiques around were three salt pans worked by an old bloke and his sons. Several other pans were disused.

After I’d been there a week, a tourist made my day. He came up and asked me the way to the monastery. I didn’t know we had one but pointed inland, logic being what it is.

He may be wandering around yet. But the incident proved I’d lost my city edge. By now I must look like a beach bum, an idler.

With the mornings yawning by, you’d think I’d be notching minutes off on a stick.

Wrong. The less you do, the less you want to do. A couple of mornings I found I’d even forgotten to shave. Occasional thoughts of my hectic existence in Hong Kong flitted by—of my lovely Marilyn, the perfect and all-powerful Ling Ling, the women I’d, er, escorted for a price. But that was all. I drank an ale or two, ambled forlornly from the duck farm to the women making shrimp paste, between the stilt houses and the silted-in sampans. I had a game of mah-jongg with the coffin maker, got beaten all ends up.

Life was one long riot at Tai O, but I was scared how it would end.

Then one day the Hong Kong ferry did its hiccup, doing only one journey. Which set me wondering. Third time. I started calculating, and a hotness came over me. Sixteen days? Seventeen?

The auction had been and gone days ago. And Lovejoy lived! I hunted for a stray newspaper on the waterfront. Sometimes tourists discarded them. I found half of a Post, three days old, saying the usual rubbish. Nothing about me, the Song Ping exhibition, auctions. I felt numb, downcast. What now? I’d obeyed orders—except for one little bit. Surely wasn’t the deal that, now it was all over, I should return to my studio in Hong Kong and turn out more works of art?

That night I wrote a letter. Nothing secret, perfectly ordinary, stamp and everything. I addressed it to Phyllis Surton, told her where I was, asked her to come over on the ferry. I posted it in the public box during a night stroll. I woke next morning to find it pinned inside my doorway.

Which meant that exile can be total, with life running out. From that moment on all peace ended. I began to hate the calm place, with its sand and sea and smiles. For the first time I was really afraid. They had me on ice. Or they’d forgotten me.

For the first time, too, I took stock, sitting terrified on the ground by the old women’s rope ferry for company. The Triad would have recorded my every movement in the studio, probably watched me and Marilyn on camera. Certainly they’d have recorded my techniques. And it was their own printers, publicity people, auctioneers, who must by now have pulled off the sale and established Song Ping as the Chinese wonder. The scam guaranteed them fortunes forever.

So I was superfluous.

And my last message to Steerforth, trying to get somebody in trouble. Pathetic. In despair it seemed they were just holding me until they’d proved that the same worked.

Then I’d be vanished without a ripple. The decision would be taken at the weekly meeting in that superb hotel. It would take half a nod from Ling Ling, a regretful smile from Dr. Chao, and the goons would come… Weary and defeated, I knew the world was ending. I’d now never be able to cash in on the Van Arsdell theory, that Boadicea actually did produce her own coinage (underpriced still—those ancient Brits made staters of 60 percent gold). And would all the second-level London auction pundits complete their secret buy-outs of the provincial firms before their supersecret launch into Europe next April? I’d never know.

They wouldn’t catch the number 1 bus from Silvermine Bay. No. Sea. They’d come in a great yacht or one of those decorated party-goers’ junks.

Dr. Johnson was wrong. Knowing you’re about to die doesn’t concentrate the mind wonderfully. It blanks it out: feel all emotions simultaneously, you feel none; add all colors to make white. I should know.

For several more days I sat there watching the bay at Tai O. I hardly ate. I went unshaven. I even gave up watching for sharks in the ankle-deep river when bathing.

And I thought of nothing, just shuffled about carrying that leaden mass of fear in my belly from dawn to dusk, then lying awake in the darkness. I didn’t try to escape or beg anybody for help.

They came about the twenty-sixth day, in a big white yacht.