Hong Kong Belongers
Memories of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong.Lyrical, wry, amusing, deceptively gentle, Simon Barnes’s second novel packs a powerful punch after it has crept up on the reader with the narrator’s fond reminiscences of expat life in pre-handover Hong Kong. The hazy and often hilarious memories of work and play in the heartstopping beauty and pulse-racing commercialism of the colony is suddenly flooded by darker memories of tragedy and loss, although Barnes, the most optimistic and delightful of authors, pulls the reader through to a warmly satisfying conclusion.
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1999
Copyright © Simon Barnes 1999
The Simon Barnes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The extract from the poem ‘Two Laments’ is reprinted from Chinese Poems translated by Arthur Waley (Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 30), courtesy of the Arthur Waley Estate.
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Source ISBN: 9780006511953
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007483242
Version: 2016-10-04
For Al and Les, with thanks, and for CLW, with eternal gratitude (again)
Contents
The past is another country: an aggressive, imperial power seeking constantly to invade and overwhelm the peace-loving present. Death is part of its nuclear arsenal, the midnight telephone a favourite tactic.
And so they were launched across space and through time, worries about the present – their daughters’ ability to cope with a stay at their neighbours’, the animals that were their livelihood – meeting in pitched battle with the unresolvable anxieties of the past.
Alan Fairs looked at his wife, marooned in a troubled doze at the window seat, about her neck the thin gold chain he had given her yesterday: her Christmas present, a Christmas not untouched by the shadow. He thought of the dolphin she had given him: carved on bone by an Eskimo, she said, a handsome little thing. She always gave him a dolphin, a tribute to the Christmas Day when they had met, a day not without its shadow.
He had twenty of these dolphins now, for she had marked their initial meeting with the first of these serial gifts. And now flying back: back in time, back to their meeting place, back to Hong Kong, back to Tung Lung, back to the past and its various moments of horror and shame: naked women; projectile vomiting; death by water – suddenly he found himself laughing silently. Laughing as the aeroplane grumbled on north and west to their destination, laughing at naked women and projectile vomiting, laughing at his own shame, laughing at Charles, who, wiping tears from his eyes, tears of laughter and agony, had said to him: ‘Sweet Jesus, what an indescribably sordid scene.’
Madness.
He saw without willing it, and with quite extraordinary clarity, the body of Karen Song. Sitting on his, or in fact his wife’s, cushions, drinking tea, both of them quite naked. He saw her reach for the tea, jasmine tea she had made herself, for he, also naked, was quite unable to do so. It was her voice that he had heard on the midnight telephone, half-cockney and wholly Chinese. Karen Song as was: Karen James now, of course, Karen James for nearly twenty years. He had never told James of their naked night: had never dared. The shame was too great.
The telephone had splintered the silence. That had once been a favourite phrase of Alan’s, for it was what James Bond’s telephone did when M needed him. And for once it was more or less appropriate: the silent night shattered by the insistent bell. And by about the fifteenth ring, Alan had made it across the warmth of the Christmas night, a sarong tied about his waist. He held the receiver like a weapon. But it was not M, with a summons to take on Smersh and Spectre: it was Karen Song, a call to take on an enemy more fearful than either. Sorry to wake you, she said. Got the time difference muddled, thought it worked the other way for New Zealand. That’s all right, Karen, good to hear your voice again. And sorry, Alan, but I’ve got bad news to bring you …
And, thirty-six hours later, he and his wife were roaring towards the jaws of the past.
‘How did he die?’ she asked as he held her, her face, lit only by the night from the open window, looking almost as it did that Christmas twenty years previously. In tears then, too, of course.
