you lived here long?’
‘Tung Lung? Or Hong Kong?’
‘Both, I suppose.’
‘Hong Kong, all my life, or twenty years. Tung Lung, ever since I went to the bad, or about two years. Here’s how!’ He raised his can once again and drank with the same primeval ferocity as before. He tossed the can, presumably now empty, over the back of the boat. He took another from his pink bag and opened it. ‘Your beer all right?’
‘Yes, great, thanks.’
‘I mean, you do drink?’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, not a single beer and that’s it for me thanks, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’
‘No.’
‘In fact,’ Charles said, more or less beseechingly, ‘you drink quite a lot.’
‘Well –’
‘And get drunk and throw up and go to bed and it spins and get up next morning feeling shithouse and then have a drink to feel better.’
There was an expression of touching eagerness on Charles’s face. Alan could not bear to disappoint him. ‘Oh yes.’
‘Well then. Time for another beer, isn’t it?’
Alan made a quite heroic effort. He lifted his can, half full, and finished it in a series of frantic swallows. Tears pricked the back of his eyes and he wondered for a second if the shock of the chill and the bubbles would effect an instant purgation, even as he wiped his mouth with feigned relish. He threw his can overboard and took the new one.
‘Good man!’ Charles said, with restrained violence.
Alan opened his new can and consigned its ringpull to the deep. He took a semireluctant sip. ‘Are there many Browne-with-an-Es in Hong Kong?’ he asked. ‘I came across that name once or twice when I was working for the Hong Kong Times.’
‘Course you came across the name. My old man owns the bloody place.’
‘What bloody place?’
‘Hong Kong, of course.’
‘He can’t actually own all of it, can he? I expect you’re having me on.’
‘Well, sucks to you, because he does. More or less, anyway. My old man happens to be the chairman of the South China Bank.’
Once again, the wheel spun full circle before him. ‘Golly,’ Alan said. ‘That’s quite a grown-up job, really.’
There was a split-second pause, during which Alan thought he might have caused serious offence. Then Charles threw back his head and gave a dramatic howl of laughter. ‘Grown-up!’ he said. ‘My old man’s got a grown-up job!’ He laughed out of all proportion to the merits of Alan’s remark, rocking forward, resting his forehead on his beercan, finally emerging, wiping his eyes. ‘So that’s what’s wrong with the bastard,’ he said. ‘He’s got a grown-up job!’
‘I had a grown-up job last week,’ Alan said. ‘But I got fired.’
‘Is that why they sacked you?’ Charles asked. ‘They discovered you weren’t a grown-up?’
‘That must be it.’
‘André hasn’t got a grown-up job,’ Charles said. ‘I don’t think King has one either. He acts as if he has one, but I think he’s only pretending.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, me? I’ve got a grown-up job. I have a very grown-up job indeed. But shall I tell you how I handle it?’ He turned with sudden elephantine staginess to Alan, and whispered hoarsely and penetratingly: ‘I do it very, very badly.’
It was impossible to tell how serious he was, or even if he was serious at all. ‘Is that a good idea?’ Alan asked.
The response startled him, because it came as a bellow, one that turned the heads of the passengers ranged before them, all engaged till then in noisy conversations of their own. ‘Course it’s not! It’s a bloody appalling idea. They give me hell. Browne, you bastard, they tell me, you’re not shaping up. Do the job properly or we’ll sack you and then you’ll be sorry. We’d sack you today if it wasn’t for the fact that your old man owns Hong Kong.’
‘Jolly good,’ Alan said.
‘What do you mean, jolly good? Don’t talk wet, it’s bloody awful.’ Charles started laughing again. He wiped his eyes briefly, and eased up his laughter a little. ‘Now. Listen to me. I have a plan. It’s a good plan, so pay attention. The ferry stops. We get off it. We take your bags to Ah-Chuen’s. That’s the café by the harbour run by the fat bastard. We drink beer. Then we take the bags up to your flat. Then we have a beer at my place. Then we go down again and have supper, say, a bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. Then, we sit about drinking beer. How does that sound in general terms?’
‘It sounds perfection itself.’
‘And we’ll roll the dice a bit, of course. You play yah-tze?’
‘No. I’m not terribly good at games, cards and so forth. Always lose at poker and stuff, never seem to have a card.’
Charles held up a hand in a stately gesture of reproach. ‘Have no fear, neighbour. Yah-tze requires no skill, no thought, no mind. It’s almost impossible to lose much money at it, because it is the longest, most boring game in the world. That’s why we love it; that’s why we play it all the time. You need never fret about life when the five dice roll across the table.’
‘Then I long to learn,’ Alan said.
Charles tossed his second can into the sea and produced a third, opening it with calm certainty. ‘Then here’s to us. Here’s to Tung Lung. Health, wealth and long life.’ With his can he caught Alan’s own a glancing blow. And drank.
The telephone splintered the silence. Alan ceased typing and got up from his desk, a massive metal thing rather like M’s. King had supplied it to him on indefinite loan. He passed through to the main room of his flat. The telephone stood on a smallish table by the window. Alan seized it. ‘Hello?’ he said, looking approvingly at the South China Sea. He could see the triple-decker ferry moving out towards Cheung Chau, also a small craft near the shore from which a pair of noble savages did the rounds of their fish traps.
‘Colin Webb, Business PanAsia.’
‘Oh, hello –’ was it too early in the relationship to say Colin? – ‘there.’
‘Thanks for coming in last week, Alan. Sorry not to get back to you before, but you know how it is.’
‘No worries, Colin.’
‘I was looking over your list, some smart ideas. I particularly like the eccentric businessman. I’d like you to go ahead on that one.’
Pleasure
