Hiroshima Joe (2 page)

Sandingham stepped off the tea chest and continued around the corner of the hotel. The ground-floor windows were guarded by wavy, wrought-iron grills. He frowned. He hated bars and these bars in particular for, at the rear of the hotel, they protected the storerooms.

The alley beneath his room window was narrower than the other passageway and he had to squeeze along, stepping gingerly over broken glass. He was not afraid of cutting himself but he knew from personal experience that glass makes a distinct, loud crunch when stepped on, especially in a confined space.

At the end of the alley he came to the top of a grass bank, twenty feet wide, ten feet high and overlooking the arc of the hotel front drive. Cautiously he put his head around the corner of the building.

The main entrance was deserted, like the rest of the hotel. He could see the marble steps leading up to the foyer clearly, the small door that revealed steps leading down to the hotel garage beneath the front lawns. He ducked under a bush and inched forward, using a hunched, squatting technique, to the foot of the papaya tree. Here he paused.

Near him he could hear muted voices coming from the open window of one of the downstairs front suites; the sound of lovers in the early morning. He heard a man’s cough, then the quiet whisper of a woman.

The tree was younger yet also higher than he had expected. Stretching his arms up he found he was still some four feet short of the bottom-most fruit. He looked around.

Another wall, five feet high, separated the hotel frontage from the garden of the next building, a block of flats. This wall was made of concrete covered with plaster that had cracked in the summer heat; like the rear wall, it had three strands of barbed wire running along it.

He held one of its metal stancheons and lifted himself on to the wall, placing a foot on each side of the wire, which he used to keep his balance as he edged precariously along to the tree. Here the fruit was hanging level with his face, but several feet away from the wall. Judging the distance carefully, he let himself fall outwards to the tree. He hugged the trunk tightly as it swayed away from the wall, then returned to its original upright position. With one hand he grabbed the ripest papaya and twisted it. Its stem bent, then snapped. He carefully dropped the fruit to the ground, where it bounced under a bush.

He lifted one leg clear of the wire and was about to lift the other, to swing himself on to the tree trunk, when the young tree juddered and again took him away from the wall. This time it did not straighten but started to bend dangerously and he thought it might break. The leg of his trousers caught on the wire and ripped down the seam from the knee to the turn-up. He swore inwardly, and pulled hard. The wire released him, but one barb dug into his ankle as he broke free.

The tree shuddered and two more papaya came loose, one hitting him on the shoulder before falling into the bushes below. He slithered down the trunk, searched for the ripe fruit on all fours. It was nowhere to be seen.

Puzzled, he looked over the bush. The papaya had slipped through the bushy undergrowth, rolled down the bank and hit the concrete drain at the side of the drive. Bouncing over this, it had struck the concrete driveway and split open. Its sections had then rolled down the slope of the drive and out into the gutter of the main road.

He heard a swishing sound. The main foyer doors had been opened. The night clerk had obviously heard the fruit falling on the drive and come out to investigate. He glanced right then left. An unripe papaya had toppled after the ripe one and was now rolling crazily, like a rugby ball, down the drive. The clerk, a fresh-faced Chinese man in his early twenties, walked briskly after the fruit and stopped the papaya with his foot. He looked up the bank.

No one there.

Once in safety around the corner of the building, Sandingham stopped to regain his breath. Another sound, above his head – no more than a bird might cause – made him look up.

From a window on the second floor peeped the face of a boy. He was a European, blonde haired and with blue eyes, and it was obvious that he had seen everything. Their eyes met. For twenty seconds the boy looked at the man and the man at the boy. The boy’s eyes were wide with wonder at what a grown man was doing, at the crack of dawn, before most adults were awake. The man’s eyes were squinting with fear as he tried hard to think how he could avoid the beating that would inevitably follow.

In the end he did nothing, said nothing; just went back down the alleyway, around the rear and in through the metal door, slipping the deadlock into its closed position. On his way back upstairs he found that two of the food boxes had already been opened. From them he took three tins of pineapple cubes and two of tomato juice. His scrounging trip, after all, had not been entirely in vain.

Back in his room, he lowered the venetian blind – although there was no way anyone could see in without a long ladder – rummaged in the chest of drawers, found a rusting tin opener and prised open the top of a can of pineapple. He ate the contents with his fingers and drank the sweet syrup straight from the tin, cautious not to cut his lips.

He hid the other cans in the hollow pedestal of the wash basin and flattened the empty one with his foot. Once it was out of shape, he wrapped it in newspaper and put it in the wastepaper-basket. He stood for an instant, indecisive. It was not worth the risk of the roomboys finding it, so he took it out again and placed it in a drawer, planning to dispose of it later in the day.

It was after doing this he sensed his ankle was wet, tacky with blood. Tugging off his trousers, shoes and socks, he lifted his foot into the wash basin and ran cold water over the cut. It was not as deep as he had feared it might be. The water stopped the bleeding long enough for him to take from under the mattress a strip of clean cloth hidden there, wrapped in newspaper for just such an emergency. This makeshift bandage tight, he lay back on his bed, crudely stitched the rent in his trousers and dozed.

*   *   *

‘Mistah Sandin’am. You wake up please.’

He grunted and turned on to his side, facing away from the roomboy who stood on the parquet floor by the bed, looking down at him.

‘Mistah Sandin’am. I do you room now. You please ge’ up.’

Sandingham sat up and felt, as he did so, a twinge in his ankle. He looked blearily at the man standing over him. He wanted only to sleep longer, a desire in him that was deeply rooted and one which he always found inexplicable, even to himself. Lying-in was a luxury of which he had been for so long deprived that now, with it accessible, he treasured it.

As if anticipating his first words, the roomboy said, ‘It ha’f-pass ten. It time for you to ge’ up.’

Sandingham swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached to the alarm clock for confirmation. It still showed 2.09. Daylight filled the room, so it was obvious that dawn had come and gone: it was not afternoon, for he would have sensed that, and, besides, the roomboys always did their rounds in the morning. He reasoned all this quite clearly in the half-concious state into which he had sat up.

‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ll be out in five minutes. Do the next room first.’

The roomboy, who had turned aside upon seeing that the man was semi-naked, said nothing in reply. He was used to it. He simply left. Sandingham could hear him clattering a metal dustpan and broom outside, followed by the jangle of a bunch of brass keys.

His ankle hurt him. He rubbed it and the pain increased. The makeshift cloth bandage had slipped during his sleep and now he was rubbing the material of his trouserleg against raw flesh.

With difficulty, for he was stiff in every joint, he lifted his foot into the sink once more and bathed the wound with warm water, rubbing the hard, hotel-courtesy soap into it. This increased his pain but he knew it would stop any infection. He tried to remember how he had come by the cut and then it came back to him: barbed wire. Had he really tried to climb over the wire? No; he had merely swung on it. But why? Then he recalled the papaya and the birds eating seeds.

Stiffly, he lifted his foot out of the basin and let the grimy water run away. Then, under a clean flow from the tap, he rinsed and wrung out the bandage before tying it back around his cut.

The knots of the damp material held better and he tightened them firmly. Even twisting the cloth to wring it out and then to tie the knot caused his fingers to ache. He ached so much these days, especially in the mornings. Sometimes his head ached as well, a sly throb that was not centred on his brow or at the back of his head, like a migraine, but which came from the very core of his skull, the deep tissues of the brain. This morning, however, he noted with a certain detachment that the headache was absent.

He relieved himself in the small toilet that adjoined his room. His urine was richly yellow, almost amber, and it smelled bad again. Some mornings it was almost clear, a pallid stream that burned as it flowed; on others it was like today.

As the flush operated, he checked behind the cistern. It was loosely mounted a quarter of an inch out from the wall and into this crevice he had stuffed a tiny parcel, wrapped in several layers of silver foil taken from expensive cigarette packets that he had found off and on in the ashtrays of the hotel. It was safe. So far, no one had found it. He took it out and sniffed it. There was a faint scent working its way out through the foil, a scent that could have been a delicate mixture of sandalwood oil, rosewater and exotic herbs, had it not been a third of an ounce of opium.

The odour made him want it. He started to unwrap the foil but then stopped. Discipline: one could only stay alive by discipline. Hadn’t Willy always said that? And lived by the motto? And died by it, tied to a wooden cross on a beach? Besides, the roomboy was nearly through with the next room and this was his emergency cache, not one for a morning’s indulgence. He returned it to its hiding place, noting that the overhanging cistern lid still effectively hid it from view both from above and each side. Roomboys were hardly likely to lie on the ground behind the cistern and look up to catch the dull glint of the foil. To be safe, though, he took the opium out again and wrapped the foil in a sheet of lavatory paper to mask the possible gleam.

‘You can do my room now,’ he said as he left it; the roomboy was closing the door of the adjacent room. He spoke with what he hoped was dignity.

The roomboy replied politely, ‘T’ang you, Mistah Sandin’am,’ but he knew the truth about this shabby customer. He was one who seldom paid his room charge, never tipped, seldom ate in the hotel restaurant but was more likely to be found at food stalls in the streets of Mong Kok. The roomboy had seen him one evening, seated at a food stall in Tung Choy Street, eating plain rice with some green vegetables and a sliver of fish. It was probably all the man could afford.

Trying not to limp, Sandingham walked down the corridor through the floor lobby to the main hotel staircase. The floor captain ignored him: he was busy defrosting the refrigerator in which the guests kept soft drinks and perishable luxury foods which they ate in their rooms.

Sandingham glanced at the interior of the fridge with the expert eye of one trained in scrounging, his mind at once registering what there was that might be edible should he later have the luck of discovering the floor desk nearby unattended.

The stairs took him down to the hotel lobby. When he had reached the mock marble floor of the hotel entrance, he paused and surveyed what he could see. To his right was the door to the establishment’s restaurant with a lime-green plastic surround to it that was back-lit by neon strips at night. Across from that, beside the door to the ground floor corridor, was the bar. Behind it, the inverted bottles of spirits, glasses, chrome shakers and ice buckets and other paraphernalia of cocktails glittered in the coarse glare from a row of concealed electric bulbs. The barman was wiping the green marble top with a duster. Opposite, and to his left, was the round curve of the hotel reception desk with the staff seated behind it – the girl clerk who handled registration, the two Chinese clerks who prepared the bills, operated the telephone switchboard, sorted the mail and took reservations in halting English, and the manager. Immediately to his left, under the stairs, was a cubby hole in which the porter by night, and the bell-hop by day, lived while awaiting work. Ahead of him was the hotel’s main entrance, two glass doors with large metal handles in their centres bearing the initials of the hotel and its crest. Outside, sunlight blazoned off the front lawn and off the rows of porcelain plant pots containing chrysanthemums and asters: these lined the low front wall which, in turn, overlooked the street below. A taxi, a Morris saloon painted red with canary yellow Chinese characters on the doors, was just driving off. The bellboy, a Chinese lad about twelve years of age, wearing a white uniform with a matching pork-pie hat, was standing on the steps leading up to the glass doors. He was counting a tip.

The manager swivelled in his chair to talk to the register clerk. Then he stood and crossed the office space behind the desk to consult the register itself.

He was a tall man, much taller than the rest of the Chinese staff, and spoke the local Cantonese with a misplaced accent. Sandingham understood this local dialect and he knew a strange accent when he heard one. The manager’s height and intonation indicated clearly that he was from northern China. Since the Communist take-over vast numbers of well-to-do northern Chinese had flocked south and those unable to afford passage to Malaya, the Philippines or the USA had settled as refugees in Hong Kong. Those who had been well educated, especially in mission schools or overseas, had been able to obtain reasonable employment. The rest had come to form the basic labour force of the colony.

Mr Heng, the manager, was an impressive figure of a man and not just because of his height. He was in his late forties, strongly built, with close-cropped grey hair. His head was squared off on top, the shape exaggerated by his haircut, and he wore gold-framed bi-focals. He was always dressed in a smart charcoal grey or light blue suit. Sandingham coveted those suits. The man’s hands were large and although his voice was quiet he had an awesome temper. The staff of the hotel respected or feared him. He was not one of them. He was like a mandarin lording over his albeit small domain.