* * *
To get us out of Shanghai, Ellis traded a can of petrol for a spot on a farmer’s truck coming back from the market—then cut our unlucky savior’s throat with her straight razor outside the city limits, and sold his truck for a load of cigarettes, lipstick and nylons. This got us shelter on a floating whorehouse off the banks of the Yangtze, where she eventually hooked us up with a pirate trawler full of U.S. deserters and other assorted scum, whose captain proved to be some slippery variety of old friend.
The trawler took us up- and down-river, dodging the Japanese and preying on the weak, then trading the resultant loot to anyone else we came in contact with. We sold opium and penicillin to the warlords, maps and passports to the D.P.s, motor oil and dynamite to the Kuomintang, Allied and Japanese spies to each other. But our most profitable commodity, as ever, remained people—mainly because those we dealt with were always so endlessly eager to help set their own price.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror now, tall and silver-haired—features still cleanly cut, yet somehow fragile, like Sir Laurence Olivier after the medical bills set in. At this morning’s signing, a pale young woman with a bolt through her septum told me: “No offense, Mr. Darbersmere, but you’re—like—a real babe. For an old guy.”
I smiled, gently. And told her: “You should have seen me when I was twelve, my dear.”
That was back in 1943, the year that Ellis sold me for the first time—or rented me out, rather, to the mayor of some tiny port village, who threatened to keep us docked until the next Japanese inspection. Ellis had done her best to convince him that we were just another boatload of Brits fleeing internment, even shucking her habitual male drag to reveal a surprisingly lush female figure and donning one of my mother’s old dresses instead, much as it obviously disgusted her to do so. But all to no avail.
“You know I’d do it, Tim,” she told me, impatiently pacing the trawler’s deck, as a passing group of her crewmates whistled appreciatively from shore. “Christ knows I’ve tried. But the fact is, he doesn’t want me. He wants you.”
I frowned. “Wants me?”
“To go with him, Tim. You know—grown-up stuff.”
“Like you and Ho Tseng, last week, after the dance at Sister Chin’s?”
“Yeah, sorta like that.”
She plumped herself down on a tarpaulined crate full of dynamite—clearly labeled, in Cantonese, as “dried fruit”—and kicked off one of her borrowed high-heeled shoes, rubbing her foot morosely. Her cinnamon hair hung loose in the stinking wind, back-lit to a fine fever.
I felt her appraising stare play up and down me like a fine grey mist, and shivered.
“If I do this, will you owe me, Ellis?”
“You bet I will, kid.”
“Always take me with you?”
There had been some brief talk of replacing me with Brian Thompson-Greenaway, another refugee, after I had mishandled a particularly choice assignment—protecting Ellis’s private stash of American currency from fellow scavengers while she recuperated from a beating inflicted by an irate Japanese officer, into whom she’d accidentally bumped while ashore. Though she wisely put up no resistance—one of Ellis’s more admirable skills involved her always knowing when it was in her best interest not to defend herself—the damage left her pissing blood for a week, and she had not been happy to discover her money gone once she was recovered enough to look for it.
She lit a new cigarette, shading her eyes against the flame of her Ronson.
“’Course,” she said, sucking in smoke.
“Never leave me?”
“Sure, kid. Why not?”
From Ellis, I learned to love duplicity, to distrust everyone except those who have no loyalty and play no favorites. Lie to me, however badly, and you are virtually guaranteed my fullest attention.
I don’t remember if I really believed her promises, even then. But I did what she asked anyway, without qualm or regret. She must have understood that I would do anything for her, no matter how morally suspect, if she only asked me politely enough.
In
this one way, at least, I was still definitively British.
* * *
Afterward, I was ill for a long time—some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the visceral shock of my deflowering, I suppose. I lay in a bath of sweat on Ellis’s hammock, under the trawler’s one intact mosquito net. Sometimes I felt her sponge me with a rag dipped in rice wine, while singing to me—softly, along with the radio:
A faded postcard from exotic places . . . a cigarette that’s marked with lipstick traces . . . oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .
And did I merely dream that once, at the very height of my sickness, she held me on her hip and hugged me close? That she actually slipped her jacket open and offered me her breast, so paradoxically soft and firm, its nipple almost as pale as the rest of her night-dweller’s flesh?
That sweet swoon of ecstasy. That first hot stab of infantile desire. That unwitting link between recent childish violation and a desperate longing for adult consummation. I was far too young to know what I was doing, but she did. She had to. And since it served her purposes, she simply chose not to care.