The Fan Tan Players Read online

  Julian Lees was born and raised in Hong Kong. After attending Cambridge University he worked for ten years as a stockbroker with UBS and Société Générale. Since then he has written two novels: A Winter Beauty and The Fan Tan Players. Both novels have been translated into German and published by Random House Germany with a third set for release in 2011. The Fan Tan Players has also been published in Polish by Proszynski Publishers. Julian currently lives in Malaysia with his wife, Ming, his three young children, Augustus, Amber, and Aisha and his constant canine companion Boobert.

  THE FAN TAN PLAYERS

  Julian Lees

  First published in Great Britain and Ireland 2010

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 5725

  One High Street

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9WJ

  www.sandstonepress.com

  First published by Blanvalet Verlag, an imprint of

  Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH,

  Germany, in 2008 as DAS LIED DER STERNE.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this production may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  Commissioning Editor: Robert Davidson

  Copyright © Julian Lees 2009

  The right of Julian Lees to be identified as

  the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council

  towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-905207-49-7

  ISBN-epub: 978-1-905207-50-3

  Cover design by Gravemaker + Scott, Edinburgh

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  Dedication: To Gus, Mui-mui and Bay-mui

  Acknowledgements:

  A number of publications helped me with the historical and sociological aspects of this book. Of the many works I consulted, I would like to acknowledge my debt to George Wright-Nooth’s ‘Prisoner of the Turnip Heads’ and Philip Snow’s ‘The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation’.

  I am deeply grateful to my agent Kate Hordern for her undying encouragement, inspiration and support.

  To my parents, John and Sandra, for always being there for me. To Ming, my wonderful wife, for her understanding. To my three cheeky children, Gus, Amber and Aisha, for their love and laughter. And to Boobert for putting a smile on my face every morning.

  I would also like to thank Matt (Roland) Cross for planting the seeds of this story and to my old friend Johnnie Hardy for the many happy hours we’ve spent together on the banks of the Helmsdale River.

  PART ONE

  Spring 1928

  1

  Quasimodo Sunday was a spiteful day. With little to dull its power from the Luzon Strait to the Canton coast, the tropical storm roared off the South China Sea and hurtled across the Praya Grande. Whooshing across the face of the sheltered harbour, it flashed silver spears of lighting from keyholes in the sky. Marl white sheets of rain, like iron wires, cracked along the ground, drawing a net over the earth. Gutters overflowed and trenches grew fat with broken timber and shards of glass. Everything smelled of dank soil and uprooted trees. At noon, the solid mass of thunderheads had crowded the mouth of the bay, bedimming the shrine of the Sea Goddess, A Ma. By the time the temple stores shut, the pracas were a wilderness.

  When the sky boomed as it did during that spring day in 1928, the mail steamers from the Macao and Canton Steamboat Company remained in the typhoon shelters at the end of wharves; they bobbed their long, lean hulls to the crash of the waves with no other sound to be heard along the Avenida da Republica apart from the rain and thunder. Had it not been for the occasional hoot from a foghorn or the ringing of the storm warning bell in the Chapel of Our Lady Guia, few would have stirred from their preoccupations at all. But then, later that night, the pigs started wailing, and they kept wailing for hours. Not because the greystone walls of the Matadouro da Macao were collapsing nor because the abattoir roof was being dismembered by the wind. They squealed with terror because their pens were being overrun by invaders. Blood-eyed troops armed with sword-blade teeth. Rats. Great long files of them that broke like waves on a shoreline. They scrambled from darkened holes, out of the sewers and nullahs. The floodwaters had forced them out. There were thousands of them. And they blew through the streets like a hot firewind.

  At the heart of the seafront, the restaurant in the Hotel Riviera, famous for its frescoed ceilings and spicy African Chicken, was overcome with panic. Pandemonium broke out. Voices clashed, bellboys feinted, elderly Macanese ladies shrieked with fright. Shouts of ‘‘Aiyaa!’’ and ‘‘Gow Meng!’’ reverberated from the top floor suites all the way down to the basement cellars. Some guests, gambling over a game of fan tan, raced about helter-skelter, open-mouthed with animal fear in their eyes. Others leapt onto settees, lifting their flapper dresses, baring their white thighs and tearing at their feather boas. The rats had come crashing through the verandah doors just as the coolie boys were laying strips of towelling into the shutter frames. They sprang from the brass hatstands, onto the art-deco dining tables, atop of Edwardian chiffoniers – knocking down boaters and cloche bonnets, smashing Baccarat crystal, upending plates of curried crab and bowls of brandada de bacalhau. They scuttled into the chambres privees, in and out of giant Vuitton steamer trunks, up jazz suit trouser legs and down silk jacquard curtains. They tore at the lemon enamel hairbrushes, at the sterling silver vanity bottles, at the alabaster rouge pots and dressing table jars. Then, like leaping fish, they were gone, hurling themselves off the balconies into the main street below.

  Shortly before nine o’clock at night, the rats reached St Lazaris Church. By ten o’clock, the rat-pack had overrun the north of the city.

  In the poorer parts of town, near the Kun Lam Temple, the rodents shot from under the shadows of the shanty huts, darting into homes, up cocklofts, hiding behind wardrobes and under workbenches. They carried the stink of rotted meat and faeces; weeks-old piss matted to the hairs on their spines. Clawed toes, brown as rust, scraped against doors; long-nailed hands dug into soft, barren walls. The vibrations of their feet passed over houses. Click, clack, click. Upon rooftops, onto drain pipes. Click, clack, click. The rats scurried up the cheekbones of buildings, pressed their snouts under shophouse floors, dangled from telegraph lines. Dogs barked, roosters crowed, women, young and old, screamed. An hour later, Macao, the tiny, dilapidated Portuguese colony, just about connected to the southern tip of the Chinese mainland, thirty-four miles west of Hong Kong, was overwhelmed; the grand old lady of the China coast had been stormed: the grey horde poured in.

  By the Largo da Sien there was frantic activity on the cobbled square. It was nearing midnight and a band of wild-eyed rat catchers, covered in oilcloths, directed their dogs with calls and clicks of their tongues. ‘‘Hai! Hai!’’ they shouted as the mongrels went speeding into the darkness, yelping and growling in the distance. The men had set almost fifty baited traps in isolated places; rectangular boxes, three feet deep and about a foot wide made of wood and wire net. They’d filled them with sour bean curd. Each trap had numerous openings on the sides with the wire inverted so that when a rat entered it was impossible for it to escape. The ratters were in the process of setting down more when a bonfire roared to life in the centre of the square. A boy, no more than twelve, stood with his back to the wind, tossing the cages of squealing vermin into the dome of fire, pulling the cages out moments later with an elongated hook. Soon the air, thick with the stink of roasted meat, mingled with the dogs’ whinnyin
g and the ratters’ shouts. Every fifteen minutes two men dragged a sled loaded with wire cages into the square – a hundred or so rats each time. The process went on through the night.

  For a further seven hours the rat catchers carried out their macabre work, until daybreak came and the people of the besieged city began to emerge from their homes to acknowledge the wreckage. All along the praya they witnessed the detritus from the storm: telegraph poles bowing their heads, stripped trees with toothpick arms, their branches like broken ribs, metal roofs bent and distended, folded in on themselves, beaches strewn with graveyards of candle-white fish, the short slapping sounds of the surf regurgitating gurgling carcasses of belly-bulging cows, the thousands and thousands of sandflies, the ash-mountains of dead rodents. Everything smelled of wet, mouldy earth and burned animal hair.

  Behind the city the storm sewers continued to flush surplus rainwater through 30-inch underground pipes, draining all manner of debris into the catch basin that ran through to the sea. It was here that a pale hand emerged. Creeping, sliding, it edged forward like a stiff-limbed crab through the surf. Fingertips wrinkled and waterlogged, the hand tumbled about, twisting with the violent artificial tidal flow. On occasion it recoiled as the heavy wrist-rope caught on some scrap, only to surge forward again once the tangling was freed.

  A moment later a pale-elbowed arm appeared, followed by a head. The waxen, beardless face was stiffly cocked to the left shoulder. Lips, ground shut from contractions, were blue, refusing to open; the throat, swollen like a yellow marrow, was choked with a string of rosary beads. The stubble on the back of the corpse’s neck, where a razor had pruned the hair, swayed like tiny weeds, almost fluffy. There was a shard of broken glass imbedded in the flesh of the neck and the bottle-green skin of the sinewy chest was covered in cuts: dog-toothed scars where rats had gnawed through the muscled pectorals.

  The water surged again, forcing the rest of the torso through the mouth of the pipe. The body tumbled. Teeth rattled as the head wrested from left shoulder to right. Eventually, the legs materialized, followed by the knees, chewed and glazed with brushstrokes of pink. A foot flopped out, white as milk; no shoe attached, no flesh, no tendons. Just stark bone.

  2

  Nearby, looking through the teeming rain, from a spray of light in a basement, a tiny face came to a window and stayed there, looking out through the smoggy glass. The Slavic eyes, blue like the colour of the sea, stared into the darkness like mesmerized buttons. A wicker hoarding belonging to Sun Wing Fotografia was being blown across the sky. It was an advertisement display showing a folding camera with rack-and-pinion focusing, and for a time the tear-bright eyes watched it fly over the ruined facade of the old cathedral, over the labyrinth of passageways that made up the heart of the old city. In the manner of a giant bird it glided and curled across the stuccoed houses with the balustraded balconies, making shadows across the Edwardian-style parlours recently wired for electric light, then fanned out its tail and pitched forward over the Rua Central, descending in a slow tight circle towards the harbour.

  The monsoon raindrops tapped on the glass. The young woman remained in front of the window and blanched only fleetingly when something silhouetted and grey pressed past the window only to cut crookedly up a drainpipe. She smoothed her dark hair over her ears and touched the tight skin along her jaw; the pane was black enough to reveal her reflection. The window showed a girl in her late twenties; her face slender, beautiful, slightly frowning. She had eyes so blue they could have been cut from the sky. Exertion had added colour to her cheeks and brought a fullness to her lips. She rubbed the back of her shoulders and dipped her head, revealing an elegant expanse of neck and a shingle haircut that gave her a bob at the front and very short hair at the back. Big and doleful, her eyes returned to the puddles of water that had collected on the floor and with a towel she began mopping up the mess. The water felt cool on her bare toes; she fastened the hem of her low-hipped skirt above the knees – an outfit she usually wore when practising the Charleston in her room – and mouthed the lyrics to a popular American song, removing a ring from her right hand. This was not her normal idea of a Monday morning, but it was something that had to be done.

  Against the near wall was a rosewood washstand with a copper basin. The girl turned up her sleeves and got to work. On her left was a zinc bucket. Bits of dirt floated in it. She wrung out the towel and shoved it under the window frame where the wet pools were forming. She was dabbing dry the tiny cracks in the casement when she heard footsteps on the landing. Instinctively her fingers sought the ancient scar-tissue that ran along the flesh of her right arm and she began to roll down the sleeves of her blouse.

  Another young woman appeared in the doorway of the linen room at the top of the steps. Her hair was also bobbed, and she wore a loose cotton dress that went straight up and down. In her hand she carried a copy of Diario de Lisboa and a moving-picture magazine. She sported rayon stockings with back-seams and her beige shoes were low heeled with a closed toe. The waistline of her dress was dropped to below the hips, giving her a tomboyish look that was made even more masculine by a flattening brassiere. She would have resembled a man almost entirely had her eyebrows not been plucked and pencilled with thin arches. The wood creaked under her weight as she made her way down the stairs. Having negotiated the slippery floor, she immediately busied herself with work, sorting through a basket of pillowcases, sheets and bolsters. She had a little rouge on her bow-shaped lips and, as the fashion of the time dictated, her lower lip was left unpainted, which made her oily Mediterranean skin appear even oilier.

  ‘‘Covered in mould!’’ said the girl with the arched brows. She tossed her magazines to the floor, throwing open pages that revealed images of the newly designed Graf Zeppelin airship. She removed a dark cotton slip from the basket; it looked like it was streaked with moss. ‘‘This weather! Merda! How we’re expected to live with damp seeping from the walls and clothes that never dry I’ll never know. And now the mail steamers are stranded. I’ve been waiting to send letters home for days to let them have our change of address.’’

  The young woman at the window smiled politely but did not reply. Instead she kept her head down and squeezed another cupful of water into the tin bucket. She continued humming her tune. There was a slight blush to her cheeks and a small beauty mark on her chin. A few freckles were sprinkled beneath her blue eyes and her hair came to crescent points, kissing her cheeks. She had graceful gestures which matched the elegance of her knife-pleated, low-hipped skirt.

  The girl with the painted eyebrows remained silent for a few moments, then announced, ‘‘May I introduce myself? My name is Izabel Perera,’’ she said, drawing in a deep breath and speaking quickly. ‘‘We moved into the top floor flat last week. We’re from Barreiro, just south of Lisbon. It took us thirty-two days to get here. We made seven ports of call en route including Algiers, Aden, Bombay and Colombo – what a filthy place Bombay is, decrepit and full of flea-bitten people. We came on the Peninsular-Oriental Line – spent most of the time on the sundeck, writing letters and sipping beef tea. Nice cabins and very clean, but the food!’’ She made a face. ‘‘Sausages, red cabbage, grilled liver! Not nearly enough fish. The fish in Barreiro is wonderful. Barreiro is wonderful. Have you ever been? It’s about six miles from Lisbon and is right on the sea. There’s a lovely church square and a red-roofed town hall and beautiful little white houses that look onto the quiet port. I have a big family there, many cousins. I miss them terribly, especially my brothers and sisters and my cousin Anna.’’ There was a short pause as she took another breath. ‘‘My husband is in the fabric export business. His office wanted him to start buying Shantung and Chinkiang silks and, because Canton is regarded as the centre of the silk-trading world, we ended up in Macao. What’s your name, by the way?’’

  The girl at the window took a few moments to digest the astonishing amount of information. Eventually she said, ‘‘Nadia. My name is Nadia Shashkova.’’

&
nbsp; ‘‘Are you the new maid?’’

  Nadia, conscious of her bare feet, smiled. ‘‘No … my uncle’s the landlord here. We run the tobacconist across the road and rent out these rooms. The previous owner forgot to mention the indoor swimming pool when we bought the place. It happens every time we get a bad storm. Have you met my Uncle Yugevny?’’

  ‘‘No, my husband, Carlos, negotiated the rent.’’ She looked hard at Nadia. ‘‘You are not Portugues?’’

  ‘‘Russo,’’ Nadia conceded.

  ‘‘But you speak Portuguese. …’’

  Nadia squeezed another cupful into the bucket. ‘‘I learnt it at school. Took me a while to master all the swear words.’’

  Izabel laughed at this, causing her olive cheekbones to redden to a carmine velvet. ‘‘Meu Deus. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude, calling you a servant and complaining about the damp walls. In Portugal we are so used to the dryness. Sometimes we don’t see rain for months. It’s been raining here since we arrived.’’ She watched over Nadia like a protective pombo hen as water gurgled from the cracks in the window hinges. ‘‘Please, let me help you with that.’’ Izabel grabbed a dry towel, and hitching up her loose cotton dress, squatted on her haunches.

  ‘‘No, there’s really no need.’’

  ‘‘I insist,’’ said Izabel. A rivulet of water swelled around her polished beige shoes. She started mopping, glancing at Nadia through her eyelashes. ‘‘I like your dress. It’s the cat’s meow!’’