nnwm7 - the conference

E@L’s talk went smoothly. Erica’s went very well. Both received a respectful reception and Erica had a few questions she answered with ease. After their presentations, they were back out in the exhibition area. It just before the afternoon break, and there was a spread of creamy sponges already laid out under cling wrap. It didn’t take long before they chatting easily, having made themselves coffee under the noses of the waiters who weren’t going to help them until the official break, making sure they were able to get some cakes other the suspiciously pink or green ones. E@L was feeling warm, the air-con not quite strong enough for once, so he placed his soft leather briefcase on a chair and draped his suit jacket over it. He rolled up his sleeves with two folds, automatically, as he was accustomed to do since he began working with patients in hospitals. Erica laughed at E@L’s small jokes about Hong Kong, he smiled at her exhuberent denunciation of what was happening in the hospitals under the state government. Budgets were continuing to shrink since he had left yet the demand for more services kept growing. We’ve all been Jeff’d she said.

E@L felt his pleasure at Erica’s company growing, thickening, becoming firm. She flashed her teeth in smile after smile, waved her head so her henna rinsed hair flung about her face. She touched his arm as she spoke (she was talking about her sex life now) and he felt himself fade away, her words disappeared, her face, the room, the universe itself was swallowed into a void temporarily and all he was aware of was the sensation of her flesh on his flesh . He disappeared.

Slowly he faded back and she was still on about her most recent boyfriend. E@L has started this fade only recently, a sign of suppressed desperation, or memory, or nostalgia. Once or twice when a woman he liked (was fond of, vaguely sexually interested in) touched him in anything like an affectionate way (usually a married woman, a friend and always Platonic , on her side at least) his brain went fuzzy, the world closed down into only this one tactile sense.

He was a jockey and gambled chronically. He had stolen money from her, first from her purse and then form her bank account, enough to put her back behind the eight-ball when it came to looking after the kids - a daughter , ten or eleven and a mischievous, she said, boy of eight. She laughed at this, she was not one to let such a set-back dampen her spirit. E@L enjoyed talking girls with spirit like Erica. He would open up straight away, he didn’t need those first few beers to loosen his tongue. Faced with self-confidence and sassiness he relaxed and let the banter flow. He became self-confident himself. He was no longer concerned about rejection. When someone was comfortable with him and accepted the (what he thought was) amusing way he would complain about the quirkiness of things in Asia, commenting and taking the piss out of the habits and customs he was unfamiliar with yet always turning it back on himself, he felt terrific. He lost himself, he lost the awareness of his large unattractive body. He forgot how ugly he was, how bald, how jowly, how protuberant (significantly, frighteningly, ridiculously) was his belly, how his pudenda swallowed his penis taking two inches off not very much more, except when, like now, which is a not so frequent a time, the endothelium did its job and a little blood was diverted.

The doors to the auditorium opened and E@L said he had to duck back to his company’s booth, it was directly opposite that of the company that had sponsored Erica. She thought she’d better head back too. Thier hands, E@L only now realised they had been holding hands ever since that first touch, rose, their arms straightened biometrically symmetrical and geometrically correct as they moved away apart and her fingers slipped out of his.

One of the other speakers, an older gwailo who lectured in Hong Kong somewhere about something, (it was not directly in his field so E@L forgot almost immediately) approached with the head of the local society, a Professor from the University Hospital which was hosting the event, along with another Professor, also a gwailo, a famous pioneer whose texts E@L had studied assiduously year many years ago. Erica was now politely chatting with a couple of tiny female Canontese Doctors off her companies booth, next one of the circular tables the has distributed around the area for placing used plates and coffee cups.

The big-wigs thanked him, politely asked some technical questions to which they knew the answers better than he did, shook his hand and then moved on. The older lecturer looked at E@L for a second longer, scratched his neck and tilted his small head to the side, blotched skin, mpb, attmpts at a whispish comb-over as if he were mulling something over. Taking E@L by the elbow, he led him aside eside and began some small talk, asking where he was from, how long he had been here, that sort of introductory stuff. Three years, eh? He’d been there seventeen, enduring the insufferable summer humidity and its typhoons and black rain, and then there were the dry chill winters. The reverse of normal, right, no rain in winter, everything dries out, rains oall summer Fucking tropics.

The lecturer, E@L had misplaced his name as well as everything else about him (he never saw him again), was serious about these, and was glad to have this chance to let some anger and frustration burst from his chest he’d been gestating this alien for a while. You like it at first, but there’s fuck all to do in Hong Kong. Seriously, you go to the Big Buddha, to the Peak, and then what? Fuck all. It is a small island, OK the New Territories are there, fucking jungle and Chinese immigrants taking advantage of the handover, that’s all there is up there. Instant cities, shocking building codes. They built one lot and had to tear it down again, you know that? fucking lying cheating contractors only sank the pylons less than halfway, kickbacks on the steel you know. Bastard could have killed hundreds, thousands, you know how they squeeze them in? The spittle was flying, he had an axe to grind all right. It’s because they let all the western engineers go home after the tunnels were built and the Chek Lap Kok airport was openend. If it wasn’t for Wancahi, looked like a conspirator and E@L was his partner in anarchy, he’d go insane.

Why Wanchai? asked E@L who new it only as a place of old-China-hand bars and Mexican, Western or Chinese For Tourists restaurants. He very rarely went there. Sure there are a few dubious looking places, where girls tried to drag in behind the curtains, sordid stuff, who knows what went on in there? E@L had seen this in Seoul in Bangkok, in Sydney even. (In a Kings Cross joint, at a buddy’s farewell party tour, E@L had watched one the strippers walking through the audience, naked, asking who wants to fuck me, will anybody fuck me, and she finally took our farewell boy, urged on by E@L and the others, up on stage but he couldn’t get an hard-on even with, or because of, the crowd cheering him on.) Surely there’s nothing different, nothing new, nothing to top those places here.

The lecturer’s eyes began to loose focus. He knew what went on behind those David Lynch curtains, in that other world, that was certain. He stared into the distance over E@L’s shoulder, and his face relaxed. It was spooky, like he was looking at Banquo’s ghost, but happy to see him. Have you been to Wanchai, I mean rally been there? E@L shrugged and shook his head, looked for Erica to come and rescue from this sad, filthy old man. Fuck, it wasn’t for Wanchai… I love Wanchai.

That’s nice , thought E@L, there’s a good story he could tell. But he felt a strange emotion, halfway between disgust and sorrow for the lecturer. He was reminded of the secondary character, who was the actor, Michael Wilding, in The World Suzie Wong, a married man who was risking his marriage, the love and respect of his kids, all for a few cheap fucks. For a girl who ultimately didn’t care about him. The whole Expat story is there, in that book and in that film. There’s hardly any more that needs to be said about it. It astounds E@L that people can be so stupid. The human race, it all comes down to copulation: Fucking makes the world go around.

Maybe it was the medications he was on that dulled his libido, he’d been on them for years now, chronic neuritis. Maybe it was a religious upbringing that couldn’t be expunged, despite his rejection of religion, the denial of the existence of any gods whatsoever. That trip to Kings Cross was, apart from a few meals at the Bourbon and Beefsteak, his only visit. He retained the inner judge, the finger-wagging superego, the inner prude, the inner Catholic, god’s wrath. He had come out of the strip joint feeling, tainted, aware of the extreme tawdriness of life. Sure, he liked to fuck, to get blow-jobs and to give pleasure as well, but he had never understood the meet-market. Married at 18, he didn’t need to learn how to play that game. Hid marriage had plenty of sex in it, interesting sex, apart from the last few years, and, once he got over his inevitable performance anxiety (write off the first night), with his next few girlfriends it was, eventually good, but he backed off anything like what they call edge play these days. [Eek! to be sorted out severely]

They skipped the function dinner and E@L took Erica to Lan Kwai Fong instead, to dinner at C. It was Friday night, full of suits, and Erica was stunned by the crowd milling and drinking up and down the small circuit of bars.

Wordcount - 1,730

Total - 6,329