nnwm8 - LKF

As E@L took Erica from bar to bar in Lan Kwai Fong, he felt embarrassed at the corny exhuberance on display, yet mildly proud of the decision he had made to leave australia and come to Asia so that he be in places like this. It was noting like where had come from, where she was now.  It made him feel like showing off, to give her a taste of what he was up to here, compared his limited social life in Colac and Sydney. He had been poorly paid, well, paid not enough for what he needed - and wanted-  and there little hope of financial advancement even through the pursuit of higher and higher qualifications and specialisation.  The job went only so far and then stopped. In academia, his income would be even lower, though his sense of achievement might have been higher.  But the satisfaction of intellectual success does not put children through private school or university and did not allow you to even go out for dinner more than once a month. He confessed that when he was in Sydney, the last few days of each pay period - they paid by month! - He was reduced to tomato soup and toast.  This is one of the great injustices of the world and others, E@L knew through his reading, had spoken of this much more eloquently than he could. The more important your work, the less you get paid, unless you are a doctor or a lawyer, and those professions were dropping radically as the money making opportunities in the financial world exploded thanks to the deregulation and speculation, and leveraging (whatever that meant, E@L had only a vague notion) Reagan had initiated. The only option for security for someone was to sell your soul, this was the portal to a new world, the opportunities opened and because the companies could make money from your talent you were rewarded.  Finally, you had money. Everyone was happy, there was bread, and here, E@L looked around, in Hong Kong, circuses.

The bemused Erica listened to his rant. Thought that he was probably kidding, or feeling guilty. Erica, instead was stunned and excited by the animation of the crowd, the shouts of happy rich people and the clinking of cheery bottles.  This is your life now? she asked him. Why would anyone give this up?

It is so far removed from the shit she was putting up with at home.  Those lousy boyfriends, liars and cheats, the kids, little shits, plus those budgets cuts, the never-ending workload that now stretched into unpaid overtime plus her weekends and overnight on-call.  No social life allowed, thank you, people don’t stop getting sick because you want to go for a drive and admire the view.  She knew what she would doing again and again, every twenty minutes for the rest of her working life: uncovering a new and unsuspected cancer, searching for another fetus to abort, looking for the insidious marks of death.  She smiled at these confession. It gave her a thrill to have someone listening to her and nodding. No-one back home understood. She was feeling good.

While E@L knew this pessimism about her work that was always in her, and too realised that everyone was dying, or should be dying soon given the results of their scan, it had never affected him in this way.  He enjoyed his old job.  He loved the 20min interaction, the brief conversations and even the smiles of understanding that he sometimes elicited.  He wanted to be liked and in these mini-friendships he did not have as much opportunity to fuck up.  Most of his patients were dumb as buckets shit however, scum from the dregs of the provincial, acultural city and his good nature and jokes were wasted on them.  They didn’t get his affability - fuck man, stop joking, I am sick, get serious about this. But he could never be serious for very long and so he persisted and occasionally made headway.  When, oh so rarely, a privately insured patient came into his hospital (most went to the clinic where Erica worked at the time) he had someone who used their intelligence to gloss over their problems and put on a happy positive face, because this positivity was halfway to cure, the misguided people had read in all their self-help books.  And usually there nothing to be found in the scans, they were healthy in body and competent in mind apart from few issues, like hypochondria. They were superficial, fleeting interactions but E@L relished the fact that these customers, he jokes not, were more intelligent, had more social skills and were more able to be friendly in return than the vast  majority of his other patients.  But being happy in your job, as E@L tried to be, and mostly succeeded, is not everything.  

Even being happy at being unhappy like Erica was not the answer either.  Sure, like E@L, she loved to complain.  The stupidity and baseness of other people amused her, or at least whinging about it did. 

The fact of the matter is that, unlike E@L, Erica was in fact faced with those perfectly healthy superficial people day after day.  Only those middle-class hypochondriacs went to private clinics, the genuinely ill people were in hospital and E@L had to face them every day.  So Erica’s dismal outlook could be judged as just a pretense and the truth was that she was merely bored.  Being so despondent made her, perversely, fun to be around.  What E@L used to complain of was the financial constraints of his career, what Erica complained of was the career itself.  They were opposite peas in a pod, one of them was a Mendelian throw back, but they complimented each other perfectly.

The smiled at the outrageous comments they had hit each other with in this dialogue. It was like it should be, aggressive and impassioned but never to be taken as insulting, it was giant sized teasing.

They drank gins and tonic here, white wines there, whatever the manufactured ambience of the particular bar demanded and thought this hilarious. They moved up the hill to where a raucous rock band was squeezed in the window of a miniscule bar, half facing in, half facing out. They were a bunch of lawyers who hated the law and were playing 80’s and 90’s covers with the gusto and seriousness the songs hardly deserved, apart from a few. E@L bought San Miquels for himself and Erica from the bar next door as they were $5 cheaper (they didn’t have to pay for the band, just a perpetually ignored DJ who did it for the love and fee drinks).  He must dance, E@L told her, they’re playing INXS.  She laughed, she always knew he was a party animal!  Oh yeah, he is, he laughed and nearly stumbled on the cobbled slope of the hill, not a new sensation.  Maybe E@L in his turn was playing up to her estimation of him.  Or maybe he wasn’t.  Could this really be him, finally.  The quiet days of moping around by himself  was not really him.  His shyness and the inability, he professed to her, to be the one cut the ice when approaching people was an attitude that belonged to someone else.  He didn’t think about this too much, but E@L knew it was better to be having fun  than not, and here he was, having fun.  Soul sold for opportunity to have this fun.

She didn’t believe him at all. Here he was, this was the person she had met at conferences where he was out to party, to exorcise the pent up frustration of working and working and working - he never took his son on holidays, he had to work locums almost every time he accrued some leave, in order to stay one step ahead of the school fees, the banks and loan agents.  Instead he sent his son off with Sharon’s parents, who had no significant debts.  They loved to go bush-walking in summer and skiing in winter. Conferences were E@L’s holiday, his chance to let what was left of his crazy hair down - he had grown it just enough to pull it back into a pony-tail one year. So she had only seen a different E@L, not the one who once lived with his son, even a few beers after work never heard of, as he had to come home and feed him, keep him company, get him to do his homework - an hereditarial futility - keep him amused with interminable games of corridor cricket - the ball a polygonal, nominally spherical,  wrapping up of masking tape - and make sure he went to bed on time.  Nor did she know the E@L who lived in Hong Kong, the chronic masturbator, the obsessed Money data entry maniac, the wanderer in the tall city, the vertical city, the walker of the lonely paths, the one who couldn’t survive now without his domestic helper The wonderful life -saving Mouse.  

The unmistakable scent of impending rain blew in a slightly warmer breeze that came up from the lower end of the Fong.  E@L said that they’d better get going before the taxis melted.  She raised her eyebrows, what the fuck was he talking about?  Taxis in Hong Kong are made of fairy-floss, they melt in the rain. Their red lights drop down, a certain sign that they are about to dissolve.

So entranced, so bewitched, she saw that she had the chance to make love with him, after all those years after all those bungled attempts against, what E@L was to find out was his wide-eyed obtuseness, what she thought was his lack of respect for her blatant wantonness back at that Brisbane conference.   It seemed natural now for them to go back to his apartment and leave her hotel room untouched. She had always wanted this to happen.

Quickly he walked her up the FCC and just before the rain hit, before the drunken bankers back-slapping and laughing would realise they were getting drenched, they found a taxi coming down Hedgehog Rd. 

They had an excellent view of the storm through E@L large window.  Lightning was crackling into the rods on the banks and business towers.  Look at this. E@L and turned off the lights in the room.  They sat for a minute awed by the spectacle.  E@L felt awkward, panicky, he knew what was coming and wondered if the afternoon’s erection would return or had all the relevant amino acids been depleted.  They began kissing, instantly the kisses kisses were sloppy hard, tongues and teeth bashing against each other.  Erica was undressing as they wrestled on the couch.  The rain was pummeling against the windows, E@L had the risk of further water damage in the back his mind, the place, nicely positioned in the edge of the mid-levels was completely porous, and her clothes, a light coloured female business shirt, a demure professional skirt, lacy bra and g-string panties were off. A brilliant bolt of lightning x-rayed the room, very close, she was writhing on his fully dressed lap, naked and on her back, the boom of thunder rattled the apartment and her flattened breasts and her belly were glistening with beads of sweat.  Fuck me, she said, oh god fuck me.     

And to his mild astonishment, he did.

~~~~~~~

Early in the morning his dreams of Roman Emperors were interrupted with what seemed in the dream to be the coliseum crashing, but in fact came from the living room. E@L stirred and opened his eyes. He lay for a minute. Did he imagine it? Erica was too exhausted after her damn good sex last night and slept on. What should he do, was it a burglar? There was a call from the other side of the door. Sir Pilip, sir Pilip, come out. E@L jumped up and ran to the door and into the living room, he was only in tee-shirt, and The Mouse, in pajamas, was surveying the debris in front of the window where black sodden debris lay over the television, the plants and parquetry. Water was pouring in, though the storm had evidently passed and it was no longer raining. The ceiling at the front of the room had collapsed because the drainage of the part of the roof where two the air-conditioner compressors were placed was blocked as he had always anticipated and warned the landlady about and E@L had no pants on.

Erica has awake now and came out, still naked, to the door. The Mouse appeared even more startled by her presence than by the disaster. Then she realized that Mr Pilip had no pants on, and she barely suppressed a horrified scream as she ran back back to her room.

E@L looked at the mess. Fuck. Better get all the towels. Better put some clothes on.


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Wordcount: 2,194

Total: 8,523