I didn’t feel the bullet that entered my leg, but when I tried to turn a corner the turn went wrong, and I slipped on washed tiles and found myself hanging onto the low green barrier that separated pier from water. I heard feet behind, saw blackness below, and with absolute certainty, tipped myself over the side of the pier, head-first into the water.
How long does it take a stranger to forget?
A minute?
Hold your breath for a minute.
Ready?
Go.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve
If you had time to inhale, your cheeks are puffed up with air, pushing against your lips from the inside out, so you can see, at the bottom of your vision, the curve of your own expanded face.
Thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five
Your cheeks begin to ache from the pressure.
The first bubble of air breaks from your nostrils.
Your mouth deflates.
Your diaphragm rises.
Your throat tightens.
As you exhale, you feel your lungs shrinking down to wet envelopes in your chest.
Forty-nine fifty fifty-one
Trachea, collapsing.
Face, collapsing.
Chest, collapsing.
Heart, collapsing.
How long to forget?
I hold myself beneath the pier, hands pressing against it to keep me under.
I am the cold.
I am the darkness.
I am the sea.
I am the sea.
Respiration. Muscle, lungs. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neuron disease, the body shuts down from the limbs inwards, eventually autonomic function in the lungs begins to fail, breath fails, life fails, life on a respirator, life trapped, frozen, death from suffocation, death from drowning, ice buckets and the internet, drowning for an emperor’s emeralds in Hong Kong, I am the sea, I am the sea, I am…
My body broke the surface of the water, and I was relieved. I did not control its action, my legs kicked, my arms pulled, and I gasped down air, felt my nose explode with it, my head explode, my eyes popping from their sockets with it, and looked up.
My pursuers were gone.
The police were called.
Someone had fired a gun on Hung Hom Pier, so the police arrived, white cars, blue shirts, polite and organised. Someone gave me an orange blanket and a carton of sugary drink. I said, “I think I scratched my leg,” and it took a while for a paramedic to cut back my trousers and reply with the calm of a professional, “I do believe you have been a little bit shot, ma’am.”
Then they put me on a trolley and took me to an ambulance, and a plain-clothed police inspector asked me what I knew, how much I remembered.
“Almost nothing,” I replied. “I heard shooting and felt a pain in my leg and I ran, and I guess I must have slipped and fallen because next thing I know I’m in the water and the people have gone.”
“Did you see how it started?”
“No, officer, it was all very confusing.”
The inspector forgot about me quickly enough; the paramedics were attentive enough to get me to hospital, and the efficiency of paperwork and queueing systems saw the bullet removed by a junior surgeon under local anaesthetic. They said I could go in a few hours, and I stole a pair of crutches, a handful of painkillers and antibiotics, and let myself out as soon as the bandage was secure.
The shooting made the evening news.
I saw a picture of my own face, captured on CCTV, as I ran away and plummeted into the water. It looked like an alien, someone fearful and unknown, and, as no body had been found and no one matching my description could be remembered, a manhunt was underway for a possible victim in the sea. There was no footage of the hold-up itself, but the suspects’ faces were caught, grainy and looking the wrong way, as they fled the chaotic scene. My bag was in their hands; my work stolen.
That night, sitting in a warm painkiller glow in a hotel room overlooking the bay, I compiled a file for Luca Evard. I gave him correspondence between myself and the buyers, detailed physical descriptions of my assailants, details of the jewels that had been stolen and the agreements surrounding the heist. Most of all, I gave him the number of my mobile phone, hidden at the bottom of my stolen bag, and hoped it wasn’t too late.
Nine hours later, the man who’d held a gun on me was arrested. He’d tried to sell my phone to a second-hand store in Mong Kok, an act of greed — unforgivably stupid. The store-owner, when suddenly faced with fifteen heavily armed police on his porch, had given up the customer’s details in a flash.
They found him in his underpants, joyfully wired on cocaine, watching tennis in a flat near Sham Mong Road. He lived with his mother, who tried to attack one of the arresting officers with a mop when they took her son away, before being informed of the nature of his crimes and declaring, “His father always set a bad example!” and asking if the police could help have him cut out of her will.
Within three hours, the rest of his confederates were in custody, but none were willing to give up their employer. I trawled my records, seeing if there was anything I could find which might help incriminate him, and pulled a blank.
Five hours later, Luca Evard arrived in Hong Kong, looking for the woman who’d vanished over the side of the pier.
I found him on Tsim Sha Tsui as the sun went down, sitting on a bench, watching the sea. Behind, the lights of the city were beginning to burn: Philips and Hyundai picked out in blue and red, white Hitachi and green hotels, a competition in neon and LED. I sat down on the opposite end of the bench, and started reading.
The book was called The Lemon and the Wave and was a mostly bizarre account of a brutal murder in northern Italy, written in a hectic, breathy style by its author, R. H. It wasn’t my thing, but it had been a book by Luca Evard’s bed in Brazil, and now I sat next to him on the bench as the daylight faded and the white light of the promenade took over, and leant back so he might see the cover.
He looked, and looked away, then looked again, and now looked at me, and hesitated. His head tilted down, and he thought perhaps of speaking, of asking me my name, of approaching the beautiful woman who sat by him on the bench. But that second passed, and he seemed as though he might stand so I lowered the book and said, in English, “Do you have the time?”
He did.
I closed the book, slipped it into my bag, stood up, leaning on just one crutch to support the weight of my wounded leg. He, having begun the process of standing, stood too, and looked at me again, and wanted to speak, and turned, and began to walk away. I limped after him, heading away from the pier, towards the hotels, and when his speed threatened to take him away from me I said, “Excuse me, are you American?”
He stopped, turned, smiled — no he wasn’t.
“Sorry, I realised when I spoke — speaking in English, I mean, you don’t look like you speak Cantonese, but you might, sorry, that’s presumptuous, but I shouldn’t assume, but it’s… anyway, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“You weren’t rude, ma’am.”
I smiled again, a last-ditch effort, urging him come on, come on, come on! He smiled back, turned to walk away.
I cursed inwardly and swore to track him to the hotel, meet him in the bar, over supper, put the damn book between us, or maybe a cutting about the Hung Hom Pier, or something, anything, to pull his attention.
Then he stopped, and said, “Are you able to walk, ma’am? Do you need assistance getting to a taxi or a bus?”
I leant a little more on my solitary crutch, smiled, said, “No, thank you; I had an accident at work, but I’m fine, really, it’s not as bad as it looks.”
“All right,” he murmured, unconvinced, and again turned to go, and again stopped himself, looked back. “Forgive me, the book you’re reading… Do you… did you find it in Hong Kong?”