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.
10
« ^ »
MY big day. Being a pushover’s the hardest thing on earth. It’s also a very uncertain state. Having always been one, I’ve learned that when in doubt, debt, or danger, acquiesce as best you can. Give in, no questions asked. My bathhouse experience taught me that in Hong Kong I was out of my league. Henceforth my compliance would be total. I agreed with everything Steerforth said, even laughed at his jokes. I was delighted when he said we would lunch with two lady friends. Our talk became animated.
“Bathhouses?” he answered me. “Yes, quite an institution. Better here than Singapore and Taiwan.”
“Is there no difficulty getting staff?” I asked, an innocent.
“Money,” he replied.
The ferry took us over the harbor to Hong Kong Island. Only a few furlongs, but fascinating. I owned up to that I’d thought “Hong Kong” was one discreet geographical blob, not a mass of islands and a peninsula. “Beautiful islands,” Steerforth joked, me laughing obediently, “and ugly Kowloon.”
As our ferry glided out between the junks and lighters, the depredations became obvious. Behind us, Kowloon Peninsula was crammed with buildings that seemed to struggle, teetering for toespace. The hills behind the level harborside were scalped like boiled eggs at breakfast, for gray-white skyscrapers and apartment buildings. It was a burgeoning building site, a prolific demented patch where mankind had subjugated the environment. Ahead, though, was prettiness of color and form. Green hills, skyscrapers in shapely clusters, smaller enclaves of white buildings dotting all the way up the mountains. In the distance, green wooded islands on an opal sea. Scenery under glass.