It is strange to think that I should be left a house and land and have so little money to spend. Just two years earlier my life had fallen into disrepair when I lost most of my possessions to a consistently-poor hand. They were days of decrepitude which I shall not suffer to commit to memory but for the rule that I shall never again enter a gaming-house or cockpit. This entry shall be a lasting testament to my resolve.
Day count to Anton, day 2 of 5,475 days.
38
MAY 1860
ALL GAMING HOUSES along Kiau Keng Kau stank. It didn’t matter which one you got into. Everything reeked of greed and vice, of sweaty feet and belched breaths. Outside one of them, a gharry stopped and the horse blew a snort. A man alighted, robed in blue silk and a black Chinese cap. He had a thin neck and a moustache that hung past the corners of his mouth. Inside the gharry sat another man of a fair, scholarly appearance—thoroughly Chinese but dressed as a European—in a dark jacket and top hat. He pointed to the murky interior of the gaming house and in it went the moustached man.
The floor teemed with throngs of pigtailed gamblers sweating in the humidity and at the outcome of their stakes. On a straw mat a game of pai gow was in progress, illuminated by kerosene lamps that hung from rafters blackened by soot.
Aldred, mildly inebriated on cheap Chinese wine, perched himself on a stool and played on credit, drowned in the delusion that he might win himself a sufficient fortune to pay his debts. Through the air muddied in opium smoke he struggled to make sense of his hand, his sight alternating between the tiles, his exhausted mind incapable of conjuring any form of strategy. The croupier was a skeletal, bucktoothed man who wore his pigtail around his forehead—an appearance that belied cunning ingenuity. Pokerfaced, he waited for Aldred to reveal his last few tiles before breaking into a gangly grin and declaring the round a croupier’s win, and Aldred’s fourth loss in a row.
“Ee mm see dng lang lah! Bey hiao sng!” said the croupier to everyone else but Aldred. It drew a round of wild, riotous laughter. Aldred comprehended that remark, though he amazed himself in his ability to snub the humiliation. It had to be the wine.
Life had dealt him bitter blows. In the years leading to his mother’s death a debilitating disease struck his family’s nutmeg plantation and withered the fruits before they had time to ripen. All the other blighted plots on Mount Harriet had been divided and sold. Aldred’s plot was the only one that stood in the way of a new barracks compound which the colonial administration had been planning for years.
He turned to cultivating gambier. When those crops also failed he succumbed to the draw of gambling. The goons and dealers, having sensed the rawness in him, tried talking him into deals that would allow them to siphon his latent wealth and bleed him dry. Their plan was to indulge him in vats of wine, only to fail in their attempts to out-drink him. Aldred was always the last to leave the table, sober as ever, and often before an eclectic assemblage of swooned drunkards. The Ghee Hin Kongsi was clever enough to have lured Aldred into one of the many gaming houses it operated. The triad achieved success in bleeding him out on the tables; by the time he left the pai gow game, he had already chalked up a debt large enough to rival the price of his family plot.
A scrawny sharp-faced man approached Aldred as he was hovering over a fan-tan table. “You no pay, no borrow more money,” said he in a short, reedy voice.
“I don’t need more money,” said Aldred, ignoring the man and watching the croupier separate little glossy black buttons four at a time until one was left. It roused the gamblers to a cacophony of cheers and moans.
“You don’t want more money also must pay,” the sharp-faced man insisted.
Aldred swatted at him like he would a fly. “I’ll give you something tomorrow,” he said, thinking that perhaps he could find an old vase or an infant’s ankle chain somewhere that he could pawn.
Two larger thugs converged on him and he caught the stink on them. He stood ready to bolt when the moustached man in blue silk took him unexpectedly by the arm and said something in dialect to the thugs and tucked them back into the gloom.
A triad headman? Aldred thought he looked too wimpy for one.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the man in excellent English.
Aldred shook his head and continued allowing his arm to be held.
“My name is Hoo and I have a proposition for you.”
He listened, ready to accept any odds.
“We’ll have a round of fan-tan between you and me,” said Hoo. “No backers. If you win I’ll settle your debts.”
“And if I lose?” Aldred blurted a little too impatiently.
Hoo half-smiled and twitched an eye at his success in securing Aldred’s interest. “If you lose,” he said, lifting his chin, “I’ll still settle your debts, but you’ll have to sign an agreement legally ceding your land to me.”
“A portion of my land,” Aldred counter-offered.
Hoo shook his head wryly. “It’s the best offer a man like you can get. Refuse it and you’ll be ceding your land to them.” He nodded at a bunch of Ghee Hin thugs crouching in an unlit corner like a pack of carrion vultures.
The man was right. For one trapped and sinking in quagmire it would be inconceivably inane to refuse a lifeline. Aldred reasoned he could persist in his convictions and perish, but that was foolish because they would seize his land anyway once they had murdered him for failing to pay his debts.
Hoo did not wait for Aldred to respond; the look on his face must have been all the reply he needed. “After you.” He made a broad, gracious sweep of his arm.
Aldred was offered the first stake, and he had thought hard before betting on odd—a choice that naturally left even to Hoo. They stood side-by-side before the croupier, this time a stumpy man who sported rings of dirt in the folds of his sweating neck, and waited.
The croupier dug his bowl into a sack of buttons and capped it on the table. He then lifted the bowl and began separating them into groups of four. Aldred didn’t have to wait long; by the time they got to the last thirty buttons he already knew the outcome. Hoo, smiling, gestured to an aide and sent him out to fetch something. Aldred, his elbows on the table, ran his hands dejectedly around his stubble as if seeking comfort from it.
In time the aide returned and presented a rolled document with a wax seal already in place. Its script was small, calligraphic and profuse.
“Your debts are paid.” Hoo set it before Aldred. “Now it’s time to honour your end of the deal.”
Someone gave him a steel-nib pen already dipped in ink. Only a scribble stood between him and destitution. He allowed himself to slip into a reverie, and everything froze in the revelation of a great and unpardonable error. Unable to recover from the pangs of his loss he absently scribbled his name.
“A man of your word.” Hoo beamed as he blew at the ink.
As Hoo made his way out with the document Aldred tailed him like a zombie would its voodoo master. He felt ill. The guilt of a broken oath had turned into a blade that took pleasure in lancing itself leisurely into his pounding heart.
Once outside Aldred was surprised to find Hoo conferring with someone wearing a red tunic, sash and the shako cap of an army officer. From his waist hung a sabre adorned with tassels of golden threads. There was silver embroidery on his collars.
Hoo handed the rolled-up document to him. “As agreed, the price still stands.”
Inexplicable to even himself, Aldred flew at them, gnashing and snarling like a wild, rabid creature, his hands clawing at the document which was by then beyond his reach. A host of sweaty arms wrestled him to the ground, and the officer boarded a gharry with Hoo and carted away into the night.