‘When we’re back on the Scourge, I’ll challenge Chief Yang to a duel and win,’ boasted Turtle Li. ‘Then I’ll be head of the Red Flag Fleet. ’Tis the prophecy of the seagull with the ruby eyes!’
What a relief it was when one by one they lay down their opiummuddled heads and slept. Turtle Li was the last to go.
‘Anyone’s getting done for this,’ he slurred as he stabbed his finger at me, ‘it’s you, Tanka boy. .’
Then he was out cold, gone from the here and now.
In the gloom at the back of the cave, your eyes blinked in the dark.
XIV
I watched them by the light of the dying fire. Though they were strewn lifeless as bodies from a shipwreck, I watched to make sure they were properly out. Then, shuddering at the risk I was taking, I tugged Turtle Li’s dagger out of the scabbard on his belt. At the back of the cave, you were wriggling on your side. Nervous you would wake the bandits, I crawled over and hacked through your bindings with Turtle Li’s cutlass, breathing deeply to steady my shaking hands. You ripped off your gag and gasped. Then you grabbed Ah Jack’s head in the sack and hobbled over to the sleeping bandits. You reached for Ah Chen’s flintlock and limped out of the cave.
Silently we hobbled through the mud up the Pearl River Bay. You were using the broken, splintery oar as a staff and had thrown the flintlock in with Ah Jack’s head and slung the sack over your shoulder. Under the cloudy and drizzly night sky we went as fast as our legs could go, Tanka fisherboy and Red-haired Devil, knowing the more distance between us and the cave of sea bandits the better.
Grieving over Ah Jack, you didn’t say a word as I led the way over the mudflats to the other British devils in Wangpo. But fleeing from the Scourge had lifted my spirits, and my heart had quickened with the eagerness to go back to Ma Qin’s wash boat and show them I was alive. First and Second Sisters would shed some tears to see me again, and Ma Qin would tell me off for getting captured by sea bandits. ‘How was I cursed with such a fool for a son!’ she’d scold. ‘No more seafaring for you, Ah Qin!’ Then I would work as a porter in Canton harbour and forget the Scourge and lose my sea-ruffian ways. I’d do my duty as first-born son and look after Ma Qin and my sisters, and never leave the Pearl River again. I’d had enough of the sea for this life, no matter what the Sea Goddess had foreseen.
We hiked through the mud of the Pearl River Bay until sunrise, when we stopped to catch our breath. We could see Wangpo in the distance and, though you were soon to be with your British-devil kin again, you looked miserably at the sun rising over the sea and shimmering on the waves. ‘Are you thirsty, Ah Tom?’ I asked, wondering where we might find some drinking water. You did not respond but dropped the sack you’d been carrying on the muddy ground, reached in and pulled out the flintlock. Then you spun around, and pain cracked in my skull as you hit me with the butt. You cocked the gun and upped the barrel level with my chest.
‘Get back,’ you hissed. Your eyes were possessed by fury, your finger on the trigger. Clutching my head, nearly blinded with pain, I stumbled back a step.
‘What is it, Ah Tom?’ I asked. ‘What have I done?’
You glared and nodded at Ah Jack’s head in the burlap sack. ‘Jack was a good man. Now I have to tell his wife and children that he is dead. That his head was cut off on a pirate ship and his remains are in the South China Sea.’
‘Chief Yang ordered me to,’ I cried. ‘I didn’t want to. I had no choice.’
You shook your head in disgust, and I saw no trace of the kind and decent Ah Tom I’d met seven years ago in Fanqui Town. Not much difference between a civilized man and a savage. A few days at sea and a skirmish with bandits can turn the former into the latter. Even the likes of you.
‘Get back,’ you sneered. ‘You Chinamen are all the same.’ Then you pulled the trigger of the gun.
24. Bruises
THE RUSH-HOUR CROWDS disappear into the subway; the masses, shrieking into cell phones, treading on heels and fighting their way through the scrum. Stalled in traffic, Wang watches them, his head throbbing with the engine. There’s no harmonious society, he thinks, only the chaos of people with crooked teeth and no manners, trampling on each other.
Deciding to call it a day, Wang turns off the for-hire sign and moves with the traffic down Workers Stadium Road. Near the exhaust-blackened iron and concrete of Long Rainbow Bridge, Wang hears screeching brakes, the crunch of metal and a woman’s scream. One by one the cars ahead of him stagger to a halt, and the drivers slam out and hurry over to the intersection. Wang stays behind the wheel, not wanting to run and stare. But it isn’t long before the strange anxiety of missing out has him abandoning his car like everybody else.
A crowd of fifty or so has gathered beside a 707 bus, people at the back standing on toes and straining for a better view. Wang can’t see much, but a report of the accident makes its way through the crowd. The 707 knocked into a cyclist and sent him soaring through the air, to land metres away from the crumpled metal of his bike. The boy’s head has cracked against the asphalt, and those who can see him are certain he is dead. Wang can’t see the cyclist, only the driver of the now-empty 707, a fiftyish man with a deathly pale face, his thin wail of protest rising above the crowd. He flew into me! He wasn’t looking where he was going! The driver pleads his innocence as though the bystanders are the jury at his trial, and he must prove he is not culpable there and then. But the jury are not convinced. ‘He was driving like a maniac,’ an old man near Wang remarks. ‘He should be locked up.’ Others grumble in agreement.
The epidemic of staring infects more people on their way home from work. Some turn their heads as they walk by, looking casually at the blood-splattered scene without breaking their stride. Others push to the front of the crowd, one man holding up his cell phone to photograph the dead cyclist and his mangled bike. ‘Seventy per cent of people in China are immoral,’ Baldy Zhang had once joked to Wang. ‘The other thirty per cent are screwed over. That’s a fact from the National Bureau of Statistics.’ Watching the jostling crowd, Wang almost believes Baldy Zhang’s statistics, and he goes back to his taxi, wondering if he is part of the seventy per cent too.
When he’s back behind the wheel, the driver of the BMW on his right slams on his horn without letting up. Hooonnnnkk. The honking gets on Wang’s nerves, and he leans out of the passenger-side window and yells, ‘Hey! Cut that out!’ The driver, a teenager in a baseball cap, glances at him, glances away. He blasts the horn again. Hoooonnnnnkk. Leaving the keys in the ignition, Wang gets out. The driver looks up nonchalantly at Wang’s approach. His window is open and, through the heat and traffic fumes, Wang smells new leather upholstery and the perfume of the girl in the passenger seat, who is batting her mascara-clogged lashes at him. Wang sees the contempt in the BMW driver’s eyes. That the scruffy, middle-aged taxi driver isn’t worthy of his respect.
‘What’s your problem?’ the teenager asks.
‘You,’ says Wang. ‘Stop honking on your horn.’
‘Why?’ the boy pretends confusion. ‘There’s no law against it, is there? It’s not illegal.’
Wang points to the intersection. An ambulance has now pulled up, paramedics bringing out a stretcher as several policemen herd the crowd away.
‘Someone has been knocked down and killed,’ Wang says. ‘Show some respect, will you?’
The boy shrugs, his conscience unmoved. The death of a man twenty metres down the road is of no consequence to him, beyond the inconvenience of a traffic jam.