To her credit, Avril didn't take the p.i.s.s. I'd have been happier if she had. Have I reached the stage where people feel sorry for me?

'Got it. See you in Theo's office. I won't let anyone else touch your PC.'

The bus pulled into Discovery Bay harbour. The turbo ferry was waiting, as always. n.o.body needs to hurry the first bell is ringing now. The second bell will ring in 1 minute. The third in 2 minutes. The boat wouldn't leave for 3 minutes, and bus to boat took less than 60 seconds, if you have your pa.s.s ready, which we all do. That's a wide enough safety margin to drive a Toyota Landcruiser up. The bus doors hissed open, and the troops filed off, the bus rocking as they jumped, one by one.

Was she here, amongst us? Holding my hand? Why had I always a.s.sumed she stayed in the apartment all day? It's more logical she roams around the place. She likes attention.

Leave it, Neal. That's your apartment. Your 'home' life. You go there because you have nowhere else to live. Don't bring her to Hong Kong Island. She probably can't cross water. Don't the Chinese say something like that? They can't jump that's why there are steps into the holy places and they can't cross water. No?

Twenty paces to the ticket barrier. Well, I think the morning's crisis is lowering its revolver. The really incriminating stuff is locked lower down in the bowels of my hard disc, and Avril simply doesn't have the time to go prodding around at random. She doesn't have the motive. And she is too stupid. As the comings and goings of Account 1390931 became ever more complex, my security arrangements became ever more intricate, my lies more incredible as one near miss lurched to another. The truth is that Denholme Cavendish's yesmen don't want to know the truth that even people handicapped by an Etonian education must dimly be able to smell by now. Don't worry, Neal. Avril will be printing off her precious Mickey Kwan File. Guilan will be making a pot of coffee so thick you could fill cracks in the road with it. I'll fob Theo off with some b.o.l.l.o.c.ks about over-zealous auditors, and, like most superiors he'll be too proud to ask me the simplest questions. Theo will fob the Cavendish Compliancy Body off with some b.o.l.l.o.c.ks about capital tied up in double-hedging j.a.panese banks. They'll fob Jim Hersch off with some b.o.l.l.o.c.ks about the house being told in no uncertain terms that it needs to put itself in order during the next financial quarter, and he'll fob Llewellyn's master off by swearing that he is totally and completely confident that Cavendish Holdings is absolutely clean in regard to these rumours smeared by and here I have to be frank with you old boy by the Chinese, and we don't need degrees in Police Detection to know who's pulling the strings of the Hong Kong People's Police these days, do we, Comrade, eh? Eh? And hey presto, we'll all get our six-figure bonuses, five figures of which have already been spent and the rest of which will vanish into cars, property and the entertainment sector during the next eighteen months. You've done it again, Neal. Back from the brink. Nine lives? Nine hundred and ninety-f.u.c.king-nine more like.

Everything is in order, that's the second bell, Neal. That gives you 60 seconds.

'Neal? Why aren't you getting on this ferry?'

That feeling when vomiting is a certainty, and you wonder what you've eaten.

I don't have enough inside me to vomit, What's the matter? Is she making me stay? Tugging my arm?

No. It's nothing to do with her. I know when she's here, and she's not here now. And she can't make me do anything. I choose. I'm the master. That's one of the rules.

There was something more remarkable than her altogether.

Last night, Avril and I were preparing a briefing for Mr Wae the shipping magnate. The computer was f.u.c.king up my eyes, I hadn't eaten since a BLT at lunch, I'd gone through hunger and numbness several times as my stomach downsized. Around midnight I started feeling dizzy. I came down to this coffee bar just across the street from Cavendish Tower, and ordered the biggest f.u.c.koff triple s.h.i.tburger they did, two of them, and put ten sugar cubes into my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can't be natural, Neal. f.u.c.k Natural.

I watched the cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the street. In the distance a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down. I watched the neon signs intone their messages, over and over. There was a song playing, that Lionel Richie hit from years ago, about the blind girl. A real weepie. I'd lost my virginity to that song under a mountain of coats at a friend's party in Telford. f.u.c.k knows what I was doing in Telford. f.u.c.k knows what anybody is doing in Telford.

This kid and his girl came in. He ordered a burger and cola. She had a vanilla shake. He picked up the tray, looked around for a seat which wasn't there, and caught me watching him. He came over, and in nervous English asked me if they could share my table. It wasn't Chinese English. c.h.i.n.ks would normally die rather than sit with one of us. Either that or they'll just pile in without acknowledging that you're even there. So I nodded, tapping the ash from my cigarette. He thanked me gravely, in English. 'Sankyou very mochi,' he said.

She was Chinese, I could tell that, but they spoke in j.a.panese. He had a saxophone case, and a small backpack with airline tags still attached. They could barely have been out of high school. He needed a good long sleep. They didn't hug or cloy over each other like a lot of Chinese kids do these days. They just held hands over the table. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but I guessed they were discussing possibilities. They were so happy. s.e.x twitched in the air between them, which made me think that they hadn't done it yet. None of that lazy proprietorship which settles in after the first few times.

Right at that moment, if Mephistopheles had genied his way from the greasy ketchup bottle and said, 'Neal, if I let you be that kid, would you pledge your soul to the Lord of h.e.l.l for all eternity?' I'd have answered, 'Like a f.u.c.king shot I will.' Nipkid or no Nipkid.

I looked at my Rolex: a quarter past midnight. What life is this?

I was wrong about the sky. It's not dreary white... when you look you see ivory. You can see a glow, there, above the mountain where the sun polishes it pearly and wafer thin.

And the sea isn't blank, there are islands out there, right at the edge.

Soft brush strokes on a fresh scroll hanging in Mrs Feng's room, four floors above us.

Ahem. May I remind you, Neal, that you have credit card bills that would make Bill Gates twitch? That your divorce settlement will gouge out most of the money you thought was yours? That lawyers with fingers in the kinds of pies yours are in simply do not miss appointments with Mr Wae. These Taiwanese shipping magnates eat breakfast with politicians powerful enough to make skysc.r.a.pers appear and disappear.

Ten seconds before the third bell and the barriers come down! Worry about your existentialist dilemmas during your lunch hour right, when did I last have a lunch hour? whenever but get on that f.u.c.king f.u.c.king boat right now! I am not telling you again. boat right now! I am not telling you again.

A man gallops down the walkway from the shops. Andy Somebody, I know his face slightly from my Lantau polo club period. Not that you can find a single f.u.c.king pony on the whole f.u.c.king island. His Ralph Lauren tie is flapping like a live snake, his shoelaces are undone, my, Andy Somebody needs to be careful. He might fall and break his crown, and ill Jill'll hill crumbling after.

'Stop that boat! Wait!' My, my, Andy Somebody is Lawrence of Olivier.

Is this how she observes me? This indifference, laced with mockery?

The Chinese barrier guard, most likely the bus driver's brother's half-twin stepcousin-in-law flicks his switch and the turnstiles close. Andy Somebody's flight through the air ends gripping the bars, and he represses the howl of a demented prisoner. 'Please!'

The Chinese barrier guard makes the faintest gesture with his head at the 'Boat Departures' board.

'Let me through!'

Barrier Guard swishes his head, and he goes back to his coffee booth.

Andy Somebody whinnies, fumbles for his mobile phone, and manages to drop it. He walks away speaking into it to Larry, inventing excuses, and pretending to laugh.

The turbo ferry pulls away from the jetty, and buzzes away into the distance.

I don't understand you sometimes.

Katy insisted that I didn't see her off at the airport. Her flight was in the afternoon, it was a manic Friday. My desk at work had become a canyon floor between two unstable formations of contracts. And so the day she left we had taken the bus before my usual one and drank a cup of coffee at the jetty cafe. That cafe, there. In the window seat Andy Somebody has pulled out his laptop computer and is hammering the keyboard as though he's trying to avert a thermonuclear war. Sitting hunched like that is going to knacker his back. Nope, he doesn't know it, but Andy's sitting at the very table where Katy and I staged our Grand Farewell.

It was not a Noel Coward Grand Farewell. Neal Brose and Katy Forbes brought you a much unlovelier performance. Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us. I suppose we talked about airport layouts, watering plants, what Katy was looking forward to once she got back to London. It was like we'd met the night before, f.u.c.ked in a Kowloon hotel, and had just woken up. In fact, we hadn't had s.e.x for five months, not since finding out.

f.u.c.k, it was horrible, horrible. She was leaving me.

It is what we didn't say that I remember best. We didn't mention Mrs Feng, or her. We didn't mention whose 'fault' f.u.c.k, haven't thousands of years of infertility come up with a better word than 'fault' it was. Katy was always capable of mercy. We had never discussed therapy, clinics, adoption, procedures, that umbrella of 'ways around it', because neither of us had the will, and we didn't now. I guess. If nature couldn't be f.u.c.ked to knit us together, we sure as h.e.l.l weren't going to be. We didn't mention the word 'divorce', because it was as real and near as that mountain there. We didn't mention the word 'love'. That hurt way too much. I was waiting for her to say it first. Maybe she was waiting for me. Or maybe it was that we had left those days and nights for the starry-eyed beepy muppets born seven or eight years after us. Those kids in the coffee bar last night. They were who love was for. Not us old f.u.c.ks over thirty. Forget it.

The bell for the ferry had rung. On this spot, right here, this pinkish paving slab I'm standing on right now. I know it well because I walk around it every day. Here was where I thought I should embrace her and maybe kiss her goodbye.

'You'd better get on your ferry,' she said.

Okay, if that was how she wanted it.

'Goodbye,' I said. 'Nice being married to you.'

I instantly regretted those words, and I still do. It sounded like a parting shot. She turned and walked away, and I sometimes wonder, had I run back to her, could we have found ourselves pinballed into an altogether different universe, or would I have just got my nose broken? I never found out. I obeyed the ferry bell. Ashamed, I didn't look for her on the sh.o.r.e as the ferry pulled away, so I don't know if she waved. Knowing Katy, I doubted it. It took me about 45 seconds to forget her, anyway. On page 5 of South China Business News, South China Business News, ten lines of newsprint mugged my attention. A new Sino-American-British investigative body, the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, had just raided the offices of a trading company called Silk Road Group. It was not well known to the general public, but it was very well known to me. I, personally, as per instructions received, had ordered the transfer of $115 million, the Friday before, from Account 1390931, to the Silk Road Group. ten lines of newsprint mugged my attention. A new Sino-American-British investigative body, the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, had just raided the offices of a trading company called Silk Road Group. It was not well known to the general public, but it was very well known to me. I, personally, as per instructions received, had ordered the transfer of $115 million, the Friday before, from Account 1390931, to the Silk Road Group.

Oh... f.u.c.k.

There was n.o.body but me.

The road from the jetty and the harbour village led to the Polo Club. Flags hanging limp today. After the Polo Club the road became a track. The track led to the beach. At the beach the track turned into a path, winding along the sh.o.r.e. I'd never taken the path any further, so I had no idea where it might lead. A fisherman looked up, his gnarled fingers knotting a net, and our eyes met for a moment. I forget, outside my Village of the Short Lease d.a.m.ned, people actually live out their whole lives on Lantau Island.

Dad used to take me fishing at weekends. A gloomy reservoir, lost in Snowdonia. He was an electrician. It's honest work, real work. You install people's switchboards for them, connect their lighting, tidy up cowboy and DIY botch jobs so they don't burn their houses down. Dad was full of a tradesman's aphorisms. 'Give a man a fish, Neal, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for life.' We were at the reservoir when I told him I was going to do Business Studies at Polytechnic. He just nodded, said, 'That could lead to a good job in a bank,' and cast off. Was that the beginning of the path I'm still on? The last time we went fishing was when I told him I'd got the job with Cavendish Hong Kong, and a salary three times that of my ex-headmaster. 'That's grand, Neal,' he said. 'Your mother will be proud as punch.' I had hoped for more of a reaction from him, but he had retired by that time.

Truth be told, fishing bored me. I'd rather be watching the footy on the box. But Mum insisted that I went with him, so I did, and now I'm glad I went. Even today, the word 'Wales' brings back the taste of tuna and egg sandwiches and weak, milky tea, and the memory of my dad looking out over a murky lake walled in by cold mountains.

Her coming was the hum of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it. I didn't know how long cupboards had been left open, air-conditioners switched on, curtains twitched open, before I became conscious of her. Living with Katy postponed it. Katy thought I was doing what she was doing, I thought Katy was doing what she was doing. She didn't come in the dramatic way they do in the movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelt out with the fridge magnet letters. Nothing like Poltergeist Poltergeist or or The Exorcist The Exorcist. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late. Little things: hidden objects. The honey left on top of the wardrobe. Books turning up in the dishwasher. That kind of thing. Keys. She had a penchant for keys. No, she's never been an in-your-face house-guest. Katy and I joked about her even before we believed in her: Oh, it's only the ghost again.

In the end, however, I think she affected the three of us deeper than any amount of smashed vases.

I do remember the day that hum became a noise. It was a Sunday afternoon, last autumn. I was at home for once. Katy had gone shopping at the supermarket down in the village. I was vedging out on the sofa, one eye on the newspaper and one on Die Hard 3 Die Hard 3 dubbed into Cantonese. I realised there was a little girl playing on the carpet in front of me, lying on her belly, and pretending to swim. dubbed into Cantonese. I realised there was a little girl playing on the carpet in front of me, lying on her belly, and pretending to swim.

I knew she was there, and I knew there was no such child.

The conclusion was obvious.

Fear breathed on the nape of my neck.

Half a building blew up. 'We'd better get some more FBI agents,' said the stupid deputy who didn't trust Bruce Willis.

Reason entered, brandishing its warrant. It ordered that I behave as though nothing untoward was happening. What was I going to do? Go screaming from the apartment to where? I'd have to come back at some point. There was Katy to think about, too. Was I to tell her that a ghost was watching us morning, noon and night? If this drawbridge was lowered, what else would come in? I forced myself to pretend to finish the article, though it could have been written in Mongolian.

Fear was handcuffed, but it could still yell at the top of its lungs, There's a f.u.c.king ghost in your apartment! A f.u.c.king ghost, you hear me? There's a f.u.c.king ghost in your apartment! A f.u.c.king ghost, you hear me?

She was still there, swimming. She was on her back now.

I had to lower the paper. Would it mean I was mad if she was there, or if she wasn't?

What did I know about her?

Only that she wasn't threatening me.

I folded the newspaper and looked at where I had thought she was.

n.o.body, and nothing. See? See? said Reason, smugly. said Reason, smugly.

Neal, said Neal, you're cracking up.

I walked resolutely towards the kitchen.

Behind my back I heard her giggle.

f.u.c.k you, said Fear to Reason. said Fear to Reason.

I heard the lock being jiggled, and Katy's keys echoing in the hallway outside. She dropped them. I walked over to the door and opened it for her. She was bending down, so she couldn't see my expression, which I'm glad about.

'Phew!' said Katy, smiling and straightening up.

'Welcome home,' I said. 'I say. Is that champagne?'

'Champagne, lobster and lamb, my hunter-gatherer. You've been asleep, haven't you? You're all groggy.'

'Uh... yeah. Don't tell me I've missed your birthday again?'

'No.'

'Then what?'

'I want to feed you up, so you make lots of sperm and get frisky. I've decided that I want a baby. What do you think?'

How Katy.

I was in a ramshackle yard, walled in by falling-down fisherman's cottages. Paths forked off and forked off some more. A black dog eyed me with its one eye, looking at what I am. I wished it were on a chain. What are the odds of that dog having rabies? Enough of their masters certainly seem to. A woman stood up from behind a cabbage the size of a small hut. She said, 'You going to the Big Buddha yes?'

I saw myself, blundering in her yard. A foreign devil with mud round his ankles, shoes from Pennsylvania, a silk tie made in Milan, a briefcase full of j.a.panese and American gadgetry worth more money than she saw in three years. What must she think?

'Yes,' I said.

She pointed with a blunt vegetable down one of the paths.

'Thank you.'

At first the path was clear, but as it went deeper into the wood it grew more ambiguous. Leaves, stems, shoots, nodules, thorns, thicket. A common dirt-coloured bird that sang in emerald and opal. Dry gra.s.s. Soil, stones, loose rocks, worms moving underground.

I'm not thinking about it. The day was just beginning to warm up.

I heard a helicopter, and imagined Avril and Guilan leaning out with a headset and binoculars. Avril would be speaking into a camera like a radio station's traffic reporter. I giggled. Something jumped and thumped in the undergrowth. I froze, but heard nothing more. There's a thought. Are there snakes on Lantau Island?

Thirty-one days hath September,April, June and November.And f.u.c.k the rest...

Insects buzzed around my head, thirsty for sweat to drink.

It's time to bring in the maid.

Fair's fair, she was Katy's idea from the start. I never wanted one, didn't choose her, and for the first six months until this winter, I didn't even see her. I never even met the maid until Katy was back in Britain. There was a circle of men at Cavendish who were into hiring maids willing to do more than fluff pillows and take the kids to school and back. Most of the men at Cavendish's hired Filipinos, because they had no permanent residency, and so had to be more compliant. They also know that the more accommodating they were, the more likely they'd be handed on when their master left Hong Kong.

Maybe Katy had heard these tales in the wives' club. Maybe that was why she chose a Chinese maid. I was surprised when Katy told me she wanted one. Katy came from an upper-middle-cla.s.s Cambridge family, but from a firmly lower-middle-cla.s.s income bracket where you traded on your family's name and tightened your belt to put the kids through good schools. We met at a law firm in London, for f.u.c.k's sake, not the House of Lords.

But here we were, out in the colonies. Well, the ex-colonies. I was disappointed that she'd been swayed by the Wives' Club. But then, as Katy pointed out, I wasn't the one who had to clean up my mess. I couldn't argue when Katy pointed out that after she got pregnant, she'd have to take it easy. I suspected Katy was on a culture-bridging kick, and had chosen penetrating the Chinese psyche as a hobby.

If that suspicion had been correct, then for Katy it badly backfired. All Katy got from her hobby was grief, which she then pa.s.sed on to me, the moment I was through the door. Katy gave her presents, but she took them without saying a word. Katy said she was surly, inscrutable, and kept dropping mile-wide hints about how her starving family in the mainland needed more money. Katy suspected she was working at a hostess bar for more money at night. Katy couldn't be sure, but she thought a pair of gold earrings had gone missing. Looking back, I wonder if that was the work of our host daughter?

'If you're not happy with her, sack her.'

'But how about her starving family?'

'It's not your problem! You're not Lady Bountiful.'

'Spoken like a true lawyer.'

'You're the one who's whinging about her morning, noon and night.'

'I want you to speak to her, Neal.'

'Why me?'

'I've tried, but women only respect men in this culture. They respect men in this culture. Just be a.s.sertive. I'll give her this Sat.u.r.day off, and ask her to come on Sunday. Make sure you're here.'