“No Miles, I’m just not you.”
Joe again tried to release his grip but Miles only squeezed harder. Finally Joe lost his temper. “Let it go,” he said.
“Why? What are you going to do?”
What he did was very simple. In a single abrupt movement, Joe pulled his entire body away from the table, taking Miles and Kitty and four glasses of fuck wine and vodka and tonic with him. Kitty screeched in Chinese like a scalded cat as Miles, realizing that they would both fall, quickly released his grip. The commotion silenced a small section of the club as Joe turned from the toppled table and walked directly through a parted sea of bewildered customers, stunned that he had so quickly lost his temper. Behind him he could hear Miles saying, “Let him go, just let him go,” in Mandarin and he felt a sickness in his gut. It was as if twenty-four hours of frustration and resentment had exploded inside him like an ulcer.
He expected to be stopped by bouncers on his way out but nobody stepped into his path. He climbed the steep stairs and emerged onto the street. On the corner of Jaffe Road he stopped and spun slowly through an almost complete circle searching for a cab, the fresh Hong Kong air, the diesel and the dust and the salt of the South China Sea sobering him up until he felt almost calm. He looked at his arm and saw the sunburn imprints of Miles’s hands beneath the hairs on his wrist. A taxi stopped at the lights and he stepped into it, travelling home without a word to the driver. When his mobile phone rang after five minutes, he ignored it, assuming that Miles was calling to make peace. Talk to him tomorrow, he told himself. Sort it all out in the morning.
16
Isabella was dreaming about Miles Coolidge. This is the entry in her diary:
Very weird. We were at a beach house, possibly New England? I was standing next to Miles on a curved staircase while Joe went swimming in a pool outside with about four Chinese businessmen, all of them wearing white-collared shirts. It was hot and everyone’s drunk. In full view of the other guests, Miles suddenly leans towards me and kisses me.
Then we walked up the stairs into a room where someone had laid out multi-coloured pills and lines of blue (?!) coke on a huge white sheet. There were lots of people in the room but Miles was kissing my neck and my back all the time. Either the shock of him doing this, the pleasure and surprise of what was happening, or the noise of Joe coming home woke me up.
Isabella was sitting up in bed when Joe walked into the room.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I’ve just had the weirdest dream.”
“What about?”
“Can’t remember.” It was easier to lie.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Joe picked up a bottle of mineral water from the floor and stumbled as he passed it to her.
“You’re pissed,” she said.
“Very.”
She looked at the clock. “Where have you been?”
“Miles. I’m finished with him. Last time we go out.”
“Did you have an argument?” Isabella stood up and padded past him into the bathroom. She was wearing a blue silk pyjama top and a pair of white cotton knickers. “You really stink, Joe.”
He checked this by inhaling a mouthful of stale tobacco from his shirt and jacket, taking both of them off so that he was standing bare-chested in the centre of the room. “Yeah. A fight. I lost my temper in a club.”
“Which club?” Isabella was sitting on the loo.
“In Wan Chai.”
She knew what that meant. “What kind of place?”
“The kind of place Miles likes. The kind where he can feel up girls from Ulan Bator.” It was a cheap shot. He had never before betrayed Miles’s confidence, but wanted Isabella to think better of him for not being part of his world. The tactic didn’t work.
“God,” he heard her say, running water at the basin. “He’s so lonely. He must be so unhappy if he’s doing stuff like that.”
The remark was like a prophetic indication of Isabella’s desire to change Miles, to save him from himself. Joe couldn’t think how to reply.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“Did you feel up any girls from Ulan Bator?”
“What?” She was drying her hands. The tone of the question had been mischievous rather than disapproving. “Of course not,” he said.
“Really?” Isabella came back into the room and saw that Joe was now standing in his boxer shorts, hanging his suit near the window. Her pyjamas were unbuttoned almost to the waist and she came up behind him, her hands touching his stomach. “Did you want to fuck one of the girls? Were you jealous of Miles? Is that why you had a fight?”
He turned and his eyes went to the dark brown freckles at the crown of her breasts. He kissed them, saying nothing, falling to his knees and pushing her onto the bed. The scent of Isabella’s skin was a paradise which he breathed and tasted, as if it would free him from all of the stress and the madness of Wang and Lenan and Miles. But in the half-light of their bedroom, as he moved inside her, Isabella suddenly became Kitty and Kitty became Isabella and Joe’s head swarmed with guilt. For the first time between them he lost all trace of her as they made love, and he could sense that she knew this. Adrift in the warmth of the woman he adored he went through the motions of a drunken, head-spinning fuck before collapsing in a funk of guilt and booze.
The diary entry continues:
It was as if he wasn’t with me. For the first time it felt ordinary and boring and I just wanted it over. Then I started thinking about what had happened with Miles. I started thinking about the dream.
17
Miles woke the next morning at 8 a.m., pitched out of an all-too brief sleep by the same Sanyo radio alarm clock which had served him well for the previous thirteen years. Purchased in a West Berlin shopping mall in the winter of 1984, it had survived a three-year posting to Germany, a one-year stint back at Langley, four post-Cold War summers in Luanda and a period in Singapore during which he had contracted dengue fever and been nursed back to health by an Indonesian beauty therapist named Kim. Miles was a heavy sleeper and needed to maximize the volume control on the alarm clock in order to be sure of waking up. Today, RTHK Radio 3 was playing The Verve’s “Lucky Man,” a song Miles enjoyed, but the suddenness of the opening bars acted upon him like an electric shock. He rolled out of bed and moved to a sitting position, turning down the volume on the radio and holding his head in his hands. Through open curtains Miles Coolidge could see fog enshrouding the Peak. Kitty, he recalled, had left at 5 a.m. There was an empty highball glass on the floor at his feet, a discarded condom, an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes and an unopened bottle of warm white wine on the bedside table. When Miles drank heavily, he made sure to consume at least a litre of water before going to bed, the only effective preventative measure against a hangover that he had ever encountered. He made his way slowly to the shower, adjusted the nozzle setting to “Massage” and blasted his scalp in a shuddering jet of scalding water. Afterwards, naked and dripping water on the spiral staircase, he walked slowly downstairs to the open-plan kitchen and sitting room, where he retrieved three Panadol Extra from a drawer in his desk, juiced four oranges and made a mug of instant coffee which he drank while scrambling eggs. Americans, he had been repeatedly told, drank filthy coffee, and Miles was oddly proud of this, regularly importing vast cans of Folger’s Instant into Hong Kong after trips back home to the States.
By midday he had cleared his in-tray at the consulate, jogged along Bowen Road and sat in the steam room at his local gym expunging the poisons of the previous evening: the tequilas of Samba’s, the vodkas of Luard Road, the lines of coke aggressively snorted from Kitty’s flat, soft belly at 3 a.m. Yet the fight with Joe preyed on his mind. Miles realized that he had behaved unpleasantly in the club. He knew that Joe would be angry. Their friendship was a delicate web into which the American frequently pushed a fat, obnoxious finger, but he cared enough about Isabella to make amends. Joe, after all, was the link to the woman he craved.