SO, THIS IS WAR. Before, he would have called it driving. He’s taking a lorry full of cable drums to Causeway Bay, along with five or six Chinese workers squatting in the back. In the seat next to him is Kevin Evers, who apparently knows what to do with the cable, or what to tell the workers to do. It is now chaos back at HQ, phone and radio squawking endlessly. The airport was bombed just hours ago, with the loss of some twenty-five aircraft, and the tension is rising. Will has been told to deliver the drums and get back on the double. Evers is nervously jabbering away.
The roads at least are empty of vehicles, although there are plenty of people still on the streets. A woman beats a man with a large burlap bag, striking him with her small hands, screaming, as he shakes her off and runs. The looting has already begun.
And, hard to believe, a few days ago he was at a party in a dinner jacket, sipping champagne and exchanging barbed jokes with Trudy and her crowd.
In Causeway Bay, he finds the building where he’s to drop off the drums and they’re unloading the lorry when the siren wails again. Everyone scurries inside, the whiz of air and the loud reverberation of the explosion. The ground shudders. Evers breathes loudly next to him. When they ring back to HQ, they’re told to stay as bombing will probably intensify, park the lorry in a safe place, and billet at a flat on Montgomery Street. With a stubby pencil he writes down the number on a grimy piece of paper smudged with oil: 140. It sounds familiar.
When they venture there, they ring the doorbell and find a frightened amah who lets them in and reaches into her tunic to unearth a wrinkled envelope. When they open it, they find a rather poignant note:
To Whoever You May Be,
Welcome to our home. We hope you will make yourselves comfortable in this difficult time. We are an English couple who moved to Hong Kong some seven years ago and enjoy it immensely, so we hope this is not the last chapter. We have moved as directed upwards, and hope that our flat provides you with safe shelter. In the spirit of wartime, we ask that you be courteous to our amah, mind the furniture, and refrain from smoking.
Sincerely, Edna and George Weatherly.
“Aaah,” says Will suddenly.
“What?” Evers asks, lighting up a cigarette and giving Will one as well, for good measure.
“Nothing.” It is just that he knows them. He’s met them before, and been here for a drink. This was when he first arrived, in the weeks before he met Trudy, before everything, as she would never know people like the Weatherlys. They were very good people, respectable, and coming to Hong Kong had been their great adventure. From a small village in the Cotswolds, they still had a wide-eyed wonder at the vastness of the world and marveled that they had ended up in the Far East. He had met them at a small English shop in Causeway Bay, buying tea, a few weeks after he had arrived, and after striking up a conversation, they had invited him over. Nice people. He never saw them after he started up with Trudy. Different speeds.
They toss a coin for the bed, and Will gets the floor.
“You could sleep in the old bird’s bed.” Evers nods toward the small room the amah has in the back.
“I’m not that hard up,” Will says lightly. “She’s had a rough time of it too, without me taking her room.”
“Just thinking of you, mate.” Evers shrugs. “Do you think she could rustle up some supper? ”
Will rummages in his pack. Trudy, still Chinese enough to be obsessed with food, had made sure he had some tins in his rucksack although he had deemed it unnecessary. “I have bully beef and some carrots.”
The amah is happy to have something to do. She holds up a cup of rice and cooks it with the meat and vegetable, and then they eat-she taking a bowl to her room, and the two men in the dining alcove, with the radio turned on, disembodied voice crackling on with news of the war.
“The bridges at the northern frontier have been blown up to prevent the advancement of Japanese troops…” Later, someone who was there will tell Will of the surreal scene-the British assiduously setting up their explosives in plain sight of the Japanese, who were just as diligently building another bridge to swing across once the destruction had happened, the two sides studiously ignoring each other, neither questioning the inevitability of what the other was doing, nor trying to stop it. “Doesn’t that just sum it all up,” this man, a policeman, said. “Thoroughly demented.”
All through the night, the flat shudders and is lit with the fire of bombs. Will hears Evers, his rapid breath, neither of them asleep.
In the morning, Evers washes himself thoroughly.
“Don’t know the next time I’ll be able to do this,” he says, toweling off with one of the Weatherlys’ linens and tossing it in the corner. “Do you think breakfast is in the offing?”
“Do you think of anything else but food? ”
“What else is there to think about, mate? Times like these, you get to the basics-what you eat, where you shit, finding a place to sleep. It’s what keeps you sane.”
They call HQ to see what to do next. Nobody knows a thing.
“Just stay there for now,” a voice barks at them. They hear clattering and men shouting. The line clicks off.
“Good to know they’re on top of the situation,” Evers says.
“We’re the civilians. I’m sure the top guys know what’s going on.”
“One would hope.”
They decide to go out. Montgomery Street is empty, being primarily an enclave for European expatriates who have all fled to higher ground or to China. The few storefronts-a bakery, a shoe repair shop-are closed up and dark inside. The windows are already dirty from the soot and dirt kicked up by the bombs, but through one, Will can see a rotting egg tart, its glistening yellow surface slowly being invaded by green mold. A fly lands on top and starts making its way across the mold, twitching its antennae. An airplane whines overhead and Will flinches instinctively.
When they go back to the flat, the amah is gone, her room as clean as if she had never lived there.
“Nothing to do here,” Evers says. “I think we should try to get back to HQ. It’s going to drive me mad staying here doing nothing.”
They gather their belongings and pick their way in the gathering dusk through the streets. Refuse has started to build up on the curbs and a low, persistent stench rises from the road. They see a car speed up as it approaches them, and in it a Chinese man averting his gaze. They are in sight of the lorry and Will remarks that the doors are open when they hear it. Evers’s head cocks up to the whining sound, and Will watches him watch the first bomb come down and destroy a building not fifty feet away. It is as if it is in slow motion. Evers yells, “Watch out!” and dives for the ground. Will follows and he feels the earth open up and fall below them, his body dealt an enormous crushing blow, ears ringing and eyes stinging, and then in the next moment-the next moment of clarity-they are crawling toward the shelter of the lorry, the closest thing there is. In the back of his mind, as the ground is pounded and shaken by the intensifying chaos, Will notes the lorry has been picked clean. The tires are missing and the open doors reveal a missing steering wheel. Evers is shouting something else, something about this being civilian territory and why are they bombing, but Will can’t hear the rest because he is thinking that the tires are missing and that it is hard to move forward with the ground shaking like this, and then all is white.