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Please welcome me, Fyodor Dustyevsky, the person who meant to be the real author of this blog, but E@L keeps jumping in... Bastard

Post T8

It was the middle of his life (assuming he lived to 92) and he was lost in meditation on the meandering walking path of Bowen Rd. The T8 that crashed through town last night had sucked window-panes from office towers, ripped the green cladding and bamboo scaffolding from elevated construction sites, torn down trees and stripped branches off and sent them scattering into cars and shop windows. There was no wind now, mid-morning. An arcade of jungle hung over this part of Bowen Rd, rooted in the hills overlooking Wanchai. Up here away from the damage downtown, the path looked more of a botanical combat zone, blocked like check-points by the occasional large branch, and it was ankle deep in strewn twigs and clumps of dark, wet leaves that hid ankle-turning land-mines of rocks that had slipped down the slopes onto the asphalt. The pungent smell of damp cellulose concentrated in the still air under the overhanging foliage, a thick, cloying, almost shit-like stink, but somehow pleasant and reassuring. And of course the humidity was stifling. Already, after the five minutes it took to get to the start of the walking path proper, he was drenched and sticky with sweat. There were no joggers risking the hazards left on the path this morning. He could walk alone for an hour or so and let his mind drift and maybe find in a few spots, with whatever chance he had, a pocket of breeze to cool his prickling skin.

Was this really the place he wanted to live? A suffocating island, a week of neglect away from being swallowed silently by the inexorable encroachment of its fecund greenery. See the ivy entwined about the bridges - wasn’t it only up to that pillar last time you looked? See the banyan trees launching out a precarious existence half-way up sheer brick walls with their roots tracing an ever thickening biological grout between the lines of the stones, a toehold on the city itself. Choked with pollution (usually - the storm had blown clear air in from the East), on the tip of the typhoon tail which lashes like a dragon up from the Philippines several times a season, and with language barriers on all sides that penned most of the expats into enclaves of incomplete and erroneous understanding in the Mid-levels (such as himself) or in Stanley or Discovery Bay..

Was this the good life? He felt drained of ambition, an agent from some foreign world here only to observe, with no-one expecting him to to anything except maintain his position and report in once in a while. Had he been spoilt by too much money, too much of what he secretly feared was inappropriate praise and bored due a chronic lack of challenge as he continued to work easily and safely in his comfort zone? They joke about merely turning up being most important part of the job, but for him it was very, very close to an unenviable truth.

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.


------

Wordcount: 2,194

Total: 8,523

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

NNRM6 - at work

Henry came over to the side of the double desk where E@L sat silently, concentrating on his laptop.  When E@L saw him, he swung his Herman Miller Aeron chair around to face Henry before he came too far into the custom designed semi-open format cubicle (E@L had actually met part of the design team by chance at one of Bruce’s parties - a fuzzy haired scatterbrain called Ruby who claimed to have given her boyfriend a blow job in the plane over from England), and, as if by accident, nudged his laptop screen as he did this, which kept the screen hidden form Henry. Online chess game.

“Next weekend’s lecture? You on it?” He couldn’t help but flash a glance at the slightly irregular quadrilateral perspective of the back of E@L’s laptop. “So, I gather some people you know from Australia will be lecturing as well.”

“Ah, yeah,” E@L replied. “It’s merely a precut product presentation from Boston, so I’m just jazzing it up a bit. No issue, it’s down, I mean done. Did you say people I know? ”

Henry drummed his fingers once on the edge of the panel on E@L’s cubicle. “It was in the email. I included a copy of the programme.”

“Oh, yeah” - one of Henry’s multi-color, multi-font emails, cc-ed to everybody in the company, often loaded with files of several megabytes. Henry had once sent out an email from the Big Boss in Frankfurt, which had been only sent to section heads, the brunt of which was not to reply all, or send on, emails to everybody especially any which included large attachments. Just the relevant people. Henry’s email was cc-ed to everyone who had received the original email, everyone in the Hong Kong office, even in the other divisions, and of course back to the Big Boss as well. Nothing was ever heard of it again. No doubt the Big Boss just put his Big Head in his Big Hands and groaned. E@L was of the suspicion the original , a kindly worded reprimand was aimed at Henry in the first place.

“I didn’t open the attachment yet, I mean the computer started upgrading Adobe Reader as soon as I clicked on the file, I mean why do they do that? I haven’t got back to it yet. I’ll check. My time hasn’t changed has it?”

Henry shrugged. “I thought you’d be on top of that.” He looked at E@L for a long second, smiled - finally - and said, “Queen to E2,” and walked back into his office and closed the glass door.

E@L whispered in a deadpan voice, HAL’s voice, “Thank you for an enjoyable game, Frank.”

He spun the chair back into its usual position and Carole, who shared his cubicle, sat directly behind him, knew what he was up to all the time, stifled a laugh. “I’d castle if I were you. For safety’s sake.”

~~~~~~~

Lotus Notes was a bear of an email system, monstrous, a monstrous bear, but it did had a useful instant chat feature which could not be monitored (or so every presumed) by the powers in IT. The chat screen was open when he moved the chess game out of the way and check Notes for the email which contained that programme of the upcoming meeting. He hadn’t heard its cheery tingle while he in that, um, meeting with Henry. Maybe Henry had heard, maybe that’s why he looked at the laptop. E@L was going deaf. It was Led Zeppelin concert it went to when he was fifteen. He like to blame it for his hearing loss as it gave hime a chance to remind everyone of what a cool guy he was back then. After the tenth time, it merely reminded them of his age.

Bruce had messaged him, Peter, Hesham and Carole on the chat. *Feathers.* That was all. It meant to meet at the small cafe - called Angel Wings - on the seventh floor as soon as.

E@L was about to ask Carole if she was coming but already the chat box tingled her excuse. You’re only sitting three feet from me, you could have just said, thought E@L. The modern age, computers, communication skills. He took the pass-key from the top of his in-tray at the open side of the desk where he stored it for safe-keeping. No, just so that he would see it as he stood up to leave the office, either to go *Feathering*, or to go to the loo. He only remembered to pick it up every, let’s estimate, fourth, maybe third time and had to come back and get it…

~~~~~~~~

E@L checked the PDF of the meeting for the weekend. His time was marked as what they told him, but he had experience at running conferences himself and expected the unexpected, which usually came through, as expected.

He recognized the name of an friend from Australia alright. The person who had taken his old job down in Colac, not his Sydney research position. Erica.

Erica. My god, the atheist exclaimed.

He remembered her well, a ginger-haired little thing back in those days. Of course he remembered her. They had gotten on very well at the conference he had organized in 1988, he had asked her to give as a full paper something based she had presented as a case -study in the monthly clinical session which included his hospital and the medical centre where she was working. She was only a second year student then, maybe 21. He got on well with bubbly people. They challenged him, he teased them, they teased back, it was fun. She asked to come over and seek his opinion about this and that part of her presentation. She kept asking him if it was ready, it he thought there were ways she could improve it. He didn’t want to tell it was just some shitty back-water regional meeting and that a dog scratching its balls on stage would get a polite round of applause.

He never thought deeply of the way she kept coming to see him at the time. He was still only in that part of the slow decline of the marriage empire of which he knew nothing. Sally’s affair with Ange was just starting. So he was married, and she wasn’t.

Then there was the national meeting in Brisbane. He was confused by that one.

The talk she had given at E@L’s regional meeting had nearly killed her with nerves, yet here her name was on the list for the meeting in Kong Kong. She was in MRI now, brought up by a different vendor to talk about some clinical cases - she seemed to have a thing for talking about patients, not machines.

In Brisbane she was married and he was not. But again they had hit it off. Colleagues spoke amongst themselves on how their personalities fitted together so well.

On the programme, her surname, previously hyphenated to Wilson-Smith - how dull is that? he had teased her at the Brisbane meeting - was now merely Wilson. Of course she was no longer married. Of course, he had heard something about her from someone, somewhere, at some time or other since the Brisbane meeting.

It would be great to catch up.

....


Wordcount: 1234

Total: 4599

* Previous sections are way too autobiographical (not that this one isn't) and characters are much too recognisable. This will be sorted later.

nnwm5 - E@L's love history

Almost all, hey, no ALL of my social acquatinances (friends if you like) were either through Lee or through work. Before Lee moved in, and before my small but successful American company was swallowed by the Eutropean Cosmo-incompetent Medical Company there was only Henry. Henry was the one who had offered me the job in Hong Kong. I had known him for years back in Melbourne when we attended the Victorian Group Clinical Meetings, he or I maybe would give a talk, mine always verbose and divergent from the topic, his from the point of view of his pathology training, pithy and relevant. These meting developed in a camaraderie between us as he was a friendly outgoing bloke. Like me he had marriage trouble and perhaps this did some cementing. He told of a short-term incarceration in a marriage where the wiofe had screwed everybody except him and then she screwed him over in the divorce, even though she was in the wrong. Marriage can be like that. I’ve seen it a few times now, it always distresses me and makes me irrationally, some would say rationally , angry. Fucking bitches. But I was not misogynous. Only pissed at women who cheated, actually not so much cheating as those who lied. Henry having taken this beating was much more affected. He was charming and hid this pain, and he (often) made moves on girls in the meetings or in the labs where he worked. I’d like to say if, but it was always when his hidden attitude became more clear to them and they would nullify their dalliances, he would switch to dislike and outright derision. He would tell me what bitches they were, what personality flaws were destroying their chances of ever finding a good match, what amazing things they had wrong at work as well. He never went half-way on this.

But in Hong Kong he settled all this. He had calmed down. It was interesting to have see this transformation. I guess I saw it as evidence that was hope for me. Not as I said that I was misogynist, but more that I was so low in self-esteem after two cases of being deither divorced or dumped buy the women I had given my heart to.

First there was Sally, my wife - I keep saying “my first wife” like there has been, or if you like going into semantics, was ever going to be, another. Sally had just drifted away from me and Byron. She certainly loved Byron and liked me, there was animosity at first, no anger, just regret. Before our shotgun wedding we did not know each other. It was a long time ago, we where still not agnostic enough at this time, let aalone the atheism that later drove our families away, to follow the sensible plan and end the pregnancy before anyone foun out, and so we married way too young and before . Rule for you kids out there: don’t. Her long held dream of studying law was rising to the top. It became her main topic of conversation. Her friends were all lawyers, she cultivated this. One of her these friends, a woman called Ange, was the eminince gris in her life, insinuating all sorts of things about how she was in another intellectual league than me - and she was - about how she was not fulfilling her destiny, about the chain I was, holding her back on the path on her freedom and independence. I suppose I had better blame Ange for my first broken heart. When Sally said she was sorry, kissed me on the cheek, crying both of us had started crying and promised to cone back in the next week and grab her stuff, then moved in with Ange, the penny dropped, I wasn’t aware of all this background subterfuge at the time, not until they started fucking openly. They had actually been tribading, double-dildoing or whatever it was that lesbians do - like lebian porn wasn’t Sally favorite, mine too, and she had a few ideas and no doubt some skills - in secret and for a long time. Cheating, lying.

Ange only lived around the corner so Sally had unlimited access to Byron, as while I was angry, my heart was empty and I did not have vengeful thoughts, I didn’t to stop that relationship. Of course as I was working full-time by then anbd had to cover a lot of weekends and nights on call, she would either take Byron over or sometimes sleep in the spare room with us. I felt drained by the whole affair. Of course there was Woody Allen’s Manhatten - we both loved the slapstick of his early stuff, but this a favorite too #cue irony music# - where his wife, Meryl Streep leaves him for another woman, that’s how I felt. The divorce went smoothly, and later when Byron was going to University and she was high flying in New York with Ange, we sold the house.

Henry’s wife was a beauty and a model, she was chased by many, no wonder she slept around. I met her once, dark-skinned and slightly imperious. Not my type but obviously others disagreed. Henry had no idea how her caught her. Or why she accepted. But he counted it as a high point in his life, he was young, and so soon, such was height he fell from, a slough of despond took him down until he rose up to the mountains of misogyny. I liked him, he hid this, it was only later I found out, talking to some of his ex-colleagues, innocent talk until their disgust with him became evident, but I like everybody. Except people who cheat and lie. And Henry never did that to me.

However, the breakup with Sally had the effect of damping my romantic ambitions. Like Woody Allen I felt unmanned. Seriously. Marianne didn’t worry about so much about my performance anxiety. After the first few attempts, things seemed to work again, I guess it was trust concerns that held my hippocampus back from para-sympathetic action, and that stopped the required vasodilation, but it didn’t stop the affair.

This was years later , well after Sally had left. Marianne was also a friend from the Clinical Meetings. I was Chairman and editor of the newsletter by this time, and she was recently divorced. I think once at a meeting a long time before, way earlier than her divorce, so long ago that I was still Sally, in fact Sally was with me that night, it was a social function, it was unusually for Sally join me in these things, but tonight she did, Marianne made a pass at me. At least, looking back I think it was a pass. She denied this when I asked her about it. She’d probably forgotten, she was probably tipsy, if not outright pissed.

After Marianne’s divorce (her husband took the vibrators for his secretary whom he had been fucking for years) she made a move again me agin. She found out I was divorced, no I was chronically separated, and we hit it off, I had always liked her, so why not. She made it clear that this was going to be a private dalliance and not a boyfriend girlfriend this, just friends with benefits, although she never said that, the term wasn’t in vogue, but didn’t listen to that. She was more cultured than Sally - Sally’s was a raw intelligence - we went to movies with subtitles, she showed me how and why to eat sushi, it was delicious. Later in Japan, I go to Japan often with the Cosmo-bureaucratic Medical Company, I saw that she was nowhere near 100% on this how part.

Wordcount: 1304

Total: 3365

nnwm3 - money matters

I used to sit in my room saturday nights.  Especially at the end of the month.  I'd picked up a copy of Money in Bangkok.  My screen was running hot.  It was smy social life to a large extent.  If Henry was out of town, Belle would be back in her apartment.  I didn't go out without them usually, it was too sad.  So instead I was obsessive about entering each item on my credit card statements, keeping everything is its classification.  The expenses from travel, the reimbursements for my travel expenses. I loved to look at Your Assets chart once I'd finished, that made me happy.  Money is good, I like it.  It was never a big deal before, in fact I didn't like, because I had to spend, and when I spent it, as I had to, it was the absence that hurt, because all I ever did was pay off my credit cards and fix up my car with the tax rebates each year. There was always something wrong with the car each year that sucked almost all, if not more than, my tax rebate.)  tHe day I sold my car and the guy who bought it handed over the money in cash, ten grand, even though his wife was concerned that the air-con worked and not so upset that the rear left window had no power, there was ten grand in my hand.  That felt good, even though next day I would have to  give seven of it to the credit co-op who had financed the car five years ago. It was only the automatic payments that forgot me through those repayments and I had paid over half of the money back, plus interest of course seven per cent, not too bad I guess.  If I didn't have the money in my hand I wouldn't spend it.  Like I ever had any money in my hand.  Put a kid through private school on a single income with a car that keeps breaking down and a house that keeps falling apart, even though it is a good part of town, you'll see what I mean about not having any cash.  I lived on my credit cards, like everybody does these days, hence the global economy being screwed am I right?  It is invisibly flush with invisible cash, cash that doesn't have physical presence, except when they ship it to China.  And here I am in China and I have lots of money and as I look at the screen , each month see that I am getting more money.  I am ahead of those bills, Byron is in University on a scholarship - actually he was on scholarships at the private school as well, partly because of his academic skills and partly because he was the best cricketer in the competition.  Having money makes you like money. When I was poor I hated money, now that my chart is rising, I am becoming quite fond of it.

Wordcount: 500

Total: 2061

nnwm2 - Lee gets some signatures

WE all signed up. I used the money from the sale of my house. After 4 years in HK, sure, I had a lot in the bank already, but this was extra, unexpected as Sue and I had divorced years ago but never got around to getting rid of the house until the beginning of the year. So why not do something a little bit risky, with the chance of a rewards in the form of a monthly dividend. Money back in 12 months and all profit form then on in according to Lee. The Aussie dollar was rising again as well. I am not a risk taker, but I am a sucker. Lee was such a convincing salesman, fridges to Eskimos, that level of skill. He had the knack, the attitude, the smile and charm, fuck him, to convince you with practically anything. He was so calm as he took our life-savings, he was brimming with his magnetism. He exploded with confidence and we got splattered by he shrapnel, and believed him...

- The bucket factory I have in Hangzhou, making a bit of money sure. But you know, I watch, lazy as all hell. It takes ten workers to make one bucket. We pay nothing, but that's the going rate, but ten times for each bucket. (He had just returned from what I thought was a holiday in America, turned out he was shaking some trees in Mexico.) In Mexico, I could get the a bucket made in the same time, using only three workers. The pay there is shit as well, so it would still work out cheaper for each bucket, three times nothing compared to ten times nothing...

He laughs at this, ironic about the irony. He has something to do with water heaters as well. If he is trying to impress us, he doing well. His ability to squeeze and squeeze your goodwill was the best I've ever seen and I've seen some adept car salesmen over the years.

- You know, we have a factory in Shanghai, when I say we... I'm not in it deep, but it's enough. Ride the coattails. Have you been to Shanghai and Beijing recently. Any big city there, even Shenzen. They are rampant, they are crazy with apartment blocks. It's modern they think. Plus they can kick the locals off, bulldoze the thousand year old slums, seriously, but that's not my problem. And each of those places needs hot water yeah? And the Olympics coming up! It's even more crazy. If we get another contract the big guys (someone from Australia, he said) are bound to become millionaires overnight. I'm not in their league, but you never know. But that's not cash flow. It's cash flow that keeps your head above water, pays the bills. That's were you guys are coming in into the bar, people are just throwing money at money. It's hard not make a shitload really quick, and that's why I emphasize the dividends. Because there will be bills.

Wordcount: 502

Total: 1561

nnwm1 - Lee's pitch

Lee has always been 'the man', certainly as long as E@L has known him. This past year. He's got these ;lawyers and bankers and they are eating out of his large strong hand (a rugby player's hand). He's talking tham all into this and that, drinks as they go, they're flying with this guy, but this is not a drugs town, no it's not that, it's just girls and party and drinks till sun-up and no excuses. and they consider him the mnan. Constitution like iron, he can take an hepatic beating and rise an hour or two later, off to the office to save the works from not making a profit, or whatever it is he says he does, that E@L doesn't get.

BBQs on my rooftop place - it's not what you think, no penthouse, laugh, just a mossy series of tiles roughly horizontal and a BBQ on roof level- just above the flat. And some chairs and one of the most amazing views on earth. You've got all the big building of HK - IFC2 just finished, Cheung Kong, Bank of China, HSBC - well that's not so big but its's cool and it's where Lee works. They're just there, across HK park. Lee would get a few of guys up for an impromptu BBQ on a week-night, why the fuck not, watch the twilight drip away and the wait for the neon show to sparkle with a few G&Ts to ease the not insubstantial pain of being fucking rich. Well not Lee and certainly not me, but these guys. And I'm not sure how rich these guys were, but people in HK like to show face, even gwailo.

So we are sitting there, the light is going down. Spears of xenon are piercing whatever planets fly above the BoC. Sharks teethes, threatening, on IFC2 - fuck that is a big building. The boring grid of simple lights on Lai Kai Shing's box, enough energy wasted to raise small african nations out of the electrical stone age, prick. I'm looking at Lee. Paiul from KPMG, Iain from [law-firm] and Scott from The Antarctic - joking there, he's a legal eagle too. We're all looking at Lee.

- Well, yeah it's not really been tried, at least not in Wanchai. Let's bring some of the life LKF down here. There's not enough kids, kids spend money. They can get here early, they've somewhere to go. You know it's not until LKF shuts down, what is it, 1am, 2 am, that anybody comes down to Lockhard Rd. It would be a new thing, give the kids a cool place to go.

- What's wrong with LKF, asks Paul. It's just a step away form all the banks.

- That's what wrong with LKF. Bankers. Suits. Shit, there's gotta be more to a Friday night than martinis after work, oops don't lose your briefcase as you loop around the Fong, that sorta stuff. I mean the teachers and, well, basically anyone who's not a banker hates the place, certainly by about 7 when we are all there. People who don't carry briefcases after work or university on Fridays.

- So I'm the problem? laughs Paul. He really does think it's funny, Lee mocking him. He knows he deserves to be mocked. Lee's always taking the piss.

- No, seriously. Think about it. Not everyone wants to hang with suits. I don't mean no-one, but there must be a at least enough people to fill another the of bar.

- So you've done some serious work on this or not, asks Iain, a lawyer's mind.

- Demographics, yep, all done. Most of the people who don't go to LKF, it's too crowded, maybe too noisy, they go up the escalator. They go the Murhpy's or to Stauntons, somewhere in to SOHO. But that's not enough. There aren't any real bars there. It's all F&B, emphasis on the F. Not enough on the B. It dies down real quick, the people are there a few beers then dinner, but then they get lost.

- So how will your place sort this?

- Simple. It's an obvious gwailo bar, open. You got the Coyote girls, you've got the laybacks.

- So you're you going to throw away good tequila for nothing down everyone's throats. Paul is still laughing.

- Don't you get it? Of course you get it. It's shit tequila, not good tequila and it cost fuck all. But it suckers people in. They buy one for themselves, they shout their group. We are competing against Big Al's jello-shots here. so we have to break the cycle. We have the lure, the coyote girls and the hook, the free layback. We'll get people coming here instead of Staunton St. Then they'll hang around. The free party goes for 10 mins every hour. OK, say, I'm thinking, but I'm open to suggestions, you guys being the shareholders, ten minutes dancing, five minutes of free playbacks, go through a bottle, big deal, you see? You have to pay to get another layback, right? So, would you? You have peer pressure, it's psychology. You have gorgeous girls with tits half out, it's hormones.

Silence.

He's done this pitch before. He milks the silence, squeezes it nipples, takes a suck.

- You'll be getting your money back in ten months, Joe and I have done the prospectus. (Joe is the finance guy, he's sorting out our investments, he lives in NYC). I'll come to each of you. We will look at it privately. But think about it. Tits. Free drinks. Speaking of which. E@L, give The Mouse a buzz, tell her to bring up some more tonic. Another bottle of red?

Jut as he says this the laser show starts. On the biggest buildings. You scans ee the one from Kowloon too, coming over the top. It always amazes, they did it for dome CHOGM or something. Lee would know, I have no idea.

Then when he uncorks the next red, fireworks start, it's 8 already. Blooming crackling (a few seconds delay) soft hued transparent cloud of cordite (?) and fumes drift across the lights of Central. It just keeps kabooming. This is HK, we have too much fuckig money. We are happy to spend, but we don;t like losing it.

- Cheers, says Lee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1059 words

Invite From Lee

A call from Lee, beers, how about tonight? E@L agreed without any qualms because he is used ot other people driving his social life. in fact, being such a fatalist (read fucking lazy), he encourages people to run his nights and weekends, for the anxiety makes his heart tighten at the prospect of organizing something, not a war, but drinks, a party, and nobody came - he would be flushed with shame (made manifest in a further retreat into himself, conversing with his pessimistic internal narrator, his self-awareness, solipsism ) so he avoids making decisions and waits for offers to flow in from people who seem to enjoy his company, although he doesn't understand why. Because he is fat, because he is bald, because he pops out ridiculous, what, bon-mots? of sarcasm at crucial times in conversation, some of which make drunk people laugh? Ah that's it, because he is a clown, as he was told back when he was a student radiographer. He doesn't feel particularly clownish most of the time. Make 'em laugh when I am with people. Make me cry when I'm alone.

He meets Lee in Devil's, a bar that is open to Lochard Rd in front, convenient plan - more and more bars like this, primarlily for expats of course, are opening, so that drinkers can stand on the footpath, even spill onto the street if Wanchai is busy, say when the 7s is on, or a yank boat in town, even merely a crucial football game broadcast on TV, and they have to push through the bottleneck of a doorway. They must it want o become more like an Kwai Fong, to attract the suits and banker-wankers. Plus ambience, fresh air in which to smoke, traffic to harass, hookers at the BMDs across the street to wave at. But it's not busy tonight, it's flat, you can tell as the hookers have given up, accepting that fact that whoever is sitting at Devils is there to consume beer, not spend money on an assisted ejaculation, at least not yet.. Maybe later though.

Lee has one of those A4 envelopes that have the string to tie the flap closed with; uh-oh.

They can sit where they want or even at the bar. There is none of that stepping across to the bar, a step back towards a table [an upended wine barrel], half a step back to the bar awkward waltz that I sometimes get into when I am not certain who has the honour of choosing seats. Lee just grabs a chair at the front-most table, at the edge of the footpath. A smiling waitress follows us to the table, Lee smiling too, she hovers almost embarrassed [has Lee fucked her?], Lee asks how things are going, of course he knows her name - Maria - he asks about George, the manager, is he here? Maria nods.

"Yes, Mr Lee, he's in the back."

Lee is still smiling, "Give us two pints now Maria - Kilkenny OK, E@L? - and a kiss later, promise?"

She giggles and swings around head back as if she was in charge and says, "If you are good poy, Mr Lee," she purrs in her strong accent (Cebu? Angeles? Who the fuck cares?)

"Good? Is that all? You know I'm great - give us that kiss now!" But Maria has skipped back into the bar and dropped back into her waitress, non-coquette, role.

"Great arse. I'm going to set-up that bar I told you about," he said. He was confident as usual, his ginger hair combed back, his jaw - I hate to describe it as square, but it was rock-solid square, centre-dimpled - clean with a only a hint of the days growth (ginger also, easy to get away with) his eyes, hooded and steady, but his smile pulled down to an I'm-fucking-serious-about-this-jack expression.

Marie brought the beers. Lee pinched her on that great arse and we clinked glasses and I took a long swallow while he just wet his lips.

Lee could to talk to almost anyone about sport. He knew more of the details of the Sha-Tin and Happy Valley horse-racing than a strapper would, and he'd have more inside knowledge as well, not to mention what was happening in the Grand National or the Melbourne Cup that year. He had an encyclopedia of English and European football (as he called soccer) chipped into his head. You name it; international rugby, Australian Rugby Union and Rugby League, every international cricket team and its in-form batters and bowlers, American basketball, football and baseball. In short he was astounding. He could chat with anyone about their favorite and challenge the knowledge of the biggest, smuggest, die-hardest fan. He could quickly turn their enthusiasm into a over-whelming sense of friendship, using conversations that targeted their strong points without diminishing his own strength. In a few minutes they would be on his side, in another few, the most surly thug was an eternal friend who would lop off one of their limbs at his bidding.

He also knew music. Mostly seventies junk, but a good smattering of the new romantics and other new wave sub-genres of the eighties that didn't make it to the nineties or the noughties, and with this he could entertain older women, the zombie divorcees, in situations were he was playing wingman. But he also said things like, "Local girls like Canto-pop, I like Canto-pop", or "Girls like Kylie Minogue, I like Kylie Minogue" His awareness of these styles put his targets at ease, and again, they quickly relinquished resistance. How he kept this cornucopia of trivia organized in his mind was unknowable to other mere humans.

But he knew almost nothing about Australian Rules football, the only public sport I knew anything about, not that that was much. Lee's charms therefore were useless against me. My fair-weather support for the Cats, and not the enormous gaps in any obsessive grasp of their statistical history that Lee could not test, were like a shield of steel! [Batfink.]

However I still liked him. All the time he was my flatmate, he had been charming, friendly and fucking useful. He could fix a wayward TV, video or CD player, sort out a computer pilot error issue, tame internet router recalcitrance. His Tagalog comments always amused The Mouse and often sent her to her cupboard giggling and embarrassed. I had no idea what he had said. Whatever it was, she tolerated the succession of girls he brought to his room, and if there was a pair of high-heels (or two, on one infamous night, three) by the door, would demurely step away from his room at the time she had designated for tidying up. We never once had a fight, hardly even a disagreement. He made it seem that we were cut from the same stuff.

Lee was serious.

"Good for you," I said.

"We're looking for investors for this. [He and five other banker friends whom I know on a nodding, 'let's get blowjobs at the Dragon-Club' basis] We've got most of the money, but you're a buddy, I want you in on it."

"For a bar in Wanchai?"

He looked at me steadily with a neutral expression that slowly eased into a small grin.

"Yep," he said.

"Triads?"

"Sorted. Two of the boys have connections... [Lawyers, drug-runners, coppers, Chinese businessmen, who knew?] We can get away with this with a minimum. I won't be like here." He leant forward. "George is barely breaking even with the cash he has to fork out, even though it's not a hooker bar. We've spoken to George, to 'Bulldog' [Brian] at Barking Dog, all the guys. Discretely of course. It's a done deal."

"When is this happening?"

"We've already put an offer in for the place on the corner." He nodded at a dismal place diagonally across the intersection. It was an gray stone building, the doors and window frames painted a dark uncertain colour, with windows opaque and interior lights dim. It was meant to be an Olde English Pubbe, but no old Englishmen went there, only a smattering of young Chinese, likely lookouts for the Triad overlords of Hong Kong. Or just young Chinese. It needed something to improve its money making potential, that was plain.

"What do you think of a coyote bar?"

Coyote. Bar. These words together created a phrase that was new to me. What the fuck is a coyote bar, I thought at first. Wild dogs? Westerns and cowboys? The movie Coyote Ugly of a year or two before had slipped through my must-see fingers.

"Girls dancing on the bars, giving lay-backs, all that shit." Lee said. "It's going to be ab-so-lutely fantastic. Give this part of town a lift into legitimacy."

I nodded, twisted a lip at the side. I knew what girls were, I knew what laybacks were, having have a few at way back in time at ChinaJump, before it closed down after The Great Darkness Descended - the handover - and all the Brits went home a year later [work visas were extended for only 12 months, in case you forgot].

The idea of another 'normal' bar was appealing, I must admit. There were still a shortage of places in Wanchai where younger people, non-hooker seekers could congregate. Carnegies still held the top-spot for legitimate expat outrage, for non-zombie females and civilian guys, but it was targeted at older expats and tourists, and therefore it was sprinkled with hookers in mufti. [Have I spoken about Carnegies before? If not, we'll talk later. You haven't really been to HK unless you've danced on the bar at Carnegies. I was a regular.] you could bring your parents to Carnegies and show them what an innocent fun time you were having in Asia. The same could not be said about the bars on either ide.

"Cool," I said. My beer was finished already. Marie was signaled. I held up a single finger as Lee's pint was still three-quarters full. She nodded.

Lee pulled out papers. Some were layout diagrams, some were typed notes. Obviously a prospectus, well obvious to someone who seen a prospectus before, but as this was my first, I tried to not prove my ignorance and so I said nothing. Or I said, "Fascinating," which is my code word for what-the-fuck.