Planet Lolita (14 page)

“They won’t.” The kiss I planted on her cheek helped avoid any eye contact between us. Her return hug, pulling me so close that I smelled clove hair oil and fear in equal parts, did the same.

But in the elevator, having approved my outfit of jeans, zipped-up jacket, and a Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap—a recent gift from Cool Kwok, special-ordered from Canada—Gloria rallied. “Your parents fire me from job, I don’t care,” she said from behind SARS protection. “You never speak with me again, I don’t care. But I will use strong words and I
will
slap you, Xixi Kwok, if you go too far.”

“We won’t do anything dangerous,” I repeated.

“You promise?”

“I promise,” I said, even though I didn’t. Since I was see-through, easy to confuse with any other Asian girl, maybe I could step right into Mary’s room. To help her, or not. To understand her better, or not. Non-stop I’d been mulling over the offer I’d made during our FaceTime, trying to figure out less why I’d said that I could become her for a while than what I’d meant by those words.

And Gloria could sense my not totally promising. The lie, or the half-truth, might as well have been written across my forehead in easy-to-read Tagalog.

“I will slap you,” she said again.

“So slap me.”

Suddenly I wanted to FaceTime Rachel and run the plan by her. But we were already in the lobby, a taxi waiting outside the door.

“You won’t put this on.” She pulled a second mask from her purse.

“Sure I will.”

“Oh,” she said in surprise.

We kept to ourselves during the ride into Central. In the subway under the harbour I reached over and took her hand. Her palm was moist, and above the subway noises I detected the squeak of her grinding teeth. But I couldn’t ask why. If I did, she would repeat her worries, and I’d have to offer to cancel the search. I deliberately opened my purse.

“Why you bring apple?” she said, staring into it.

“In case I get hungry.”

“You okay wearing the mask?”

“It’s like breathing through a gym sock,” I answered. The fabric collapsed over my mouth with each inhale. When I tried using my nose alone, I sounded like Manga sniffing a lamppost.

Six stops later we were in Mong Kok, a neighbourhood I knew mostly by sketchy reputation. Everyone knew about the massage parlours and night markets, the
dai pai dongs
serving pig guts and sea beasties. As well, I had bonus insights, courtesy of East Island boys and their walls. Even before I posted the special page for Mary, they were bragging online about Saturday-night excursions to Portland Street, where they dared each other to take phone snaps of the signs taped in doorways. The signs advertised the prices of the girls for sale. East Island boys posted on why Filipinos were cheaper than Thais, and Hong Kong more expensive than mainland, and one claimed he had negotiated on the sidewalk with a woman about the cost of hand job or blow job, front or back door, per hour or overnight. But none admitted to entering any of those buildings, never mind to buying anything. Jonathan Rhys-Jones had confessed to me that he’d videoed the girl he thought might
be Mary for only seventeen seconds because the dark, and the rain, and the glare, freaked him out. He’d sprinted the three blocks to the subway station convinced Triad gangsters were close behind, ready to split open his skull.

Jonathan had filmed the girl leaving a food market on Shanghai Street, two streets over from Portland. The market was a city block closed to cars and covered along either sidewalk with awnings that served as drums for rain. The block was lined with no-class restaurants as baldly lit as public washrooms, and about as appealing. Along the sidewalks out front of each were fold-up tables with stools. On clear nights the tables could be pushed into the road, relieving the jam-up of tripe-slurping, bone-spitting diners, all simultaneously guzzling beer and smoking tumours. But a downpour forced everyone under the awnings, near the cauldrons of innards and baskets of twitching seafood.

The easiest route traced the uncovered spaces down the centre of the road. Rain rat-tat-tatted on our shared umbrella as I scanned table after table, seeking a cluster of girls dressed all wrong for outdoor dining in December. Picking out females wasn’t hard—the market was three-to-one male—and it was Gloria who nodded towards a table of eight young women in ankle boots and miniskirts, halter tops advertising breasts and midriffs. Purses in laps and SARS masks unclipped, they bent over bowls of noodles or picked at the carcasses of steamed fish, only the heads and tails surviving. Their faces and manners, squat figures and bad posture, reminded me of the mermaids on Tai Long Wan.

“Wait,” Gloria said when I veered towards them, the photo of Mary folded in my hand. “Next table.”

Five men and one woman sat there, their dinners even more of a carnage fest. Four of the gangsters wore sunglasses, three chewed toothpicks, and one had the ugliest tattoo I’d ever seen.
A tail-to-horn dragon, inked in dark blue, disfigured his left cheek and neck. All five mobsters were either talking on phones or playing video games. The woman had a flat, fishy face—being a mamasan seemed as boring as being a sea bass—her long black hair tied with a clip and her lips blue-red, a ghost mouth imprinted inside her dangling mask. She had to be an escort, or a junior mam.

“What about those men?” Gloria said, her voice also fish-dead.

“I’ll talk to the girls.”

Stuffing my mask in my pocket, I approached the table, the photo pinned to my chest with fingertips. Originally I’d made a copy of the nice-Mary shot. But then I decided I’d better use the third image, because of where she lived and what she did. “Hi,” I said.

Only a couple glanced up.

“I’m Xixi Kwok,” I said in a fluttery voice. “I’m looking for her.”

“Funny hat,” one said of my Maple Leafs cap.

“It’s a hockey team.”

“Who she?” another woman asked.

“My friend,” I replied. “I need to speak with Mary. I owe her a
ping gwoh.
”

With a frown so abrupt it cracked her mascara, the woman who had asked about the baseball cap turned to the others, spit-firing Cantonese at them. Several more looked up then, and although I wished they’d focus on the photo, I tried not to flutter or shrink or appear cowardly under their scrutiny. To myself I said,
Don’t be a goat! You’re younger and prettier than all of them.
The gangsters at the next table sure scared me, especially the one with the tail crawling up from his shirt collar, the body, mostly wings, choking his neck, and above all the scaly head with flaring nostrils and snaggleteeth, a horn poking into his own eye, burn-scarring
his cheek. The mistake of a lifetime, I thought, way worse than Rachel’s arm.

Jr. Mam came over from her table to look at the photo. She got close, but not that close. Still, Gloria said, “No ma’am!” and slipped between us, like I was a movie star and she a fan with boundary issues. Gloria unclipped her mask, revealing her full Filipino identity. I had to pass the paper around her.

“You? Her? You?” Jr. Mam said, studying Mary.

“She’s a friend.”

“She is not,” Gloria said. “This child is inventing.”

Treating Gloria as though
she
were see-through, the woman examined me up and down, a quality dress that just didn’t seem priced high enough. “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe you’ll take me to her?”

“Come.”

“Come where?” Gloria said. “Xixi, this is mistake.”

But Jr. Mam had collected her bag, issued instructions to her crew, and was waving at us to follow.

“We stay here,” Gloria said.

“She knows Mary,” I said.

“We stay here, with so many people. It is safe. Safer,” she added, wiping rain from her cheek. Her hand shook like a sparrow clipped by a propeller and about to plunge.

I unzipped my jacket to show my shirt, too tight across the chest and belly button exposed.

“Hello Kitty!” Jr. Mam said.

Gloria’s mouth fell open. But had she seen the pajamas back at the apartment, she wouldn’t have let me out the door. Deceiving her had been my only option.

“See,” I said. “She does know her.”

I set off. Having no choice, Gloria caught up a half block later,
sharing the umbrella but not taking my arm. Jr. Mam crossed a road, cut through an alley, and emerged onto Portland Street. All of Mong Kok—or what little I’d seen of it—was lurid with neon signs climbing every floor of every building, ideograms and letters, drawings of products and outlines of women, in glowing, brain-distressing blue, red, gold, and green. But this street was twice as glowing and twice as lurid, even with only a few cars parked along the curb and a few men smoking in doorways. Jr. Mam stopped in a doorway with a grate pulled down over a storefront.

“Look,” I said. “They’re for real.”

Taped to a wall inside the entry were two cardboard signs. The first, shaped like an arrow and readable thanks to a naked bulb overhead, advertised the product.
Free Preview—many different countries girls—taste back excitement—less 50%.
The second, in both Chinese and English, provided nations and numbers:
Russian 590—China 260—Hong Kong 300—Malay Thai 190.
The arrow pointed up a set of stairs.

“No, no, no,” Gloria said. She grabbed my arm.

I shook her off. “Why do Russians cost so much?”

“You? Her? You?” Mamasan repeated in her Triad-lousy English. She studied the nasty photo again. She had clutched the paper in her fist, forgetting about the rain. Mary was half dissolved into ink.

“I can be,” I said.

Gloria backpedalled into the street.

“Massage,” Jr. Mam said to her. “All girls clean. No trouble.”

“A mango candy would be nice right about now,” I said. I was shivering, in part from hunger and cold—neither of us had touched our dinners before setting off, and my jacket wasn’t waterproof—in part from seeing Mary’s face disappear so easily
on the page. In part, too, because the signs were suddenly throbbing and the puddles in the pavement were lit like outdoor pools with strobes buried in their floors. But I’d swallowed all three pills today, just as I had on Sunday.

“SeeSee, no,” Gloria said.

“I’m going with or without you.”

“But you said—”

“Need to see her room,” I said, climbing two stairs at a stretch. “Need to be inside it with her.”

I was halfway to the top when Gloria spun me around and slapped my cheek. The slap wasn’t hard but the sting, or the shock of it, was raw enough that I rubbed the skin. Far nastier was the cackle of satisfaction that puffed Jr. Mam’s SARS mask.

“You be good girl,” she said.

Gloria groaned but still followed. We tracked arrows taped to the floor of a corridor that reeked of cooking oil and fish sauce, and then climbed a shorter set of stairs to a red door without a number on it. Behind that door was a waterfall of beads and a coat rack. Passing through the clattery gate we entered a gloomy apartment made up of a living room cramped with couches and chairs, a galley kitchen fronted by a countertop of liquor bottles, and a corridor behind another gateway of beads. Asian movie stars grinned from the walls and gossip magazines were spread over a coffee table, Cantopop, perhaps sung by Mr. SARS suicide, Leslie Cheung, crooning from a CD player. Ashtrays were stuffed with filters, reminding me of ducks feeding butts-up in a pond, and the couch and carpet, lampshades and wallpaper, all reeked of cancer past, cancer present, and cancer future. While waiting for Jr. Mam to sit across from us I decided that Dad had to quit smoking. Only low-lifes, and traumatized girls, puffed tumours anymore.

“How old?” she said.

“I thought she was my age,” I answered, speaking in English for Gloria. “But when I talked to her on FaceTime I realized she’s probably twenty or twenty-one. Where’s her picture?” Glancing around, I saw a bin near the door, the paper crumbled on top of bottles and newspapers.

“Fifteen,” Gloria said. She had once more untied her mask. Jr. Mam, I noticed, kept hers on.

“Too young, lah,” Jr. Mam said.

“Is she here?” I asked. I knew she was—beyond the next gate, down a dark, narrowing corridor with, I imagined, rooms off either side. The MacBook she had used for FaceTime cost nine thousand Hong Kong dollars new. She must have borrowed money from the Russian.

“But pretty,” Jr. Mam said. When she reached out to rehook the hair that had fallen over my eyes—I was back to feeling strange, and having trouble speaking—Gloria smacked her hand in mid-air, much harder than she had with me. Weirdly, Jr. Mam’s mask filled with another cackle. She didn’t much mind who got hit, even herself.

“No buy, no touch?” she said.

“You make dirty movie here?” Gloria said.

“Whoa,” I managed.

“You make porn-he—porn-he-graphy?” my amah said with a choke.

“Is Mary sleeping?” I said. “She’ll be okay if I wake her up.” Rising, I made for the beads, ignoring the newborn colt wobble in my legs. Pornography too? I hadn’t thought of that, and wished Gloria hadn’t either. A mango candy wasn’t going to cut it any longer. I needed real food, and soon.

I was right about the corridor. Along each pinching wall were three closed doors, numbered one to six, with a seventh door at
the back, probably onto a fire escape. From behind one of them drifted the tinkle of pop music, not Asian. Jr. Mam and Gloria followed me.

“There’s a bed with an end table,” I said, “and a chair with a belt dangling off it. She’s Hello Kitty as well—unless she was wearing that for me.”

“Hello Kitty number one most popular,” Jr. Mam said.

“You are evil person,” Gloria said. A tendon, visible only when she wept, popped in her neck, its own kind of scar.

“Sexy,” the woman said, touching my belly. It was more like a poke, her fingernail leaving a mark.

Yanking on the fabric, I covered up most of the exposed skin. “The top is too small,” I said.

“This child is fifteen!” Gloria said.

Jr. Mam’s eyes, alert and wary and possibly amused, shut down, their centres as black as calligraphy ink dots. I noticed a mole on her left nostril, complete with sprouting hair. Normally I’d have picked up something so hideous right away. “Massage only,” she said. “Good business.” Out came a cell phone. She speed-dialled.