A Trick of Light: A Hong Kong Memoir

By Deborah Rogers

It's 1987. Madonna is top of the charts. 'The Lost Boys' opens in cinemas. Fingerless gloves are in. It's also the year that I ran away from home and was sent to live with my expat father and Chinese stepmother in Hong Kong. It's the year everything changed, including me.

 

In the spirit of 'Riding in Cars with Boys', Deborah Rogers gives this remarkable account of a girl on the cusp of womanhood and a father losing himself in a downward spiral of alcoholism. It's a story about a father and daughter struggling to connect, and about finding love and kindness in unexpected places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deborah Rogers
• Release date: Jan 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780473263416

Deborah Rogers

Deborah Rogers is a psychological thriller and suspense author. Her gripping debut psychological thriller, The Devil's Wire, received rave reviews as a “dark and twisted page turner”. In addition to standalone novels like The Devil’s Wire and Into Thin Air, Deborah writes the popular Amelia Kellaway series, a gritty suspense series based on New York prosecutor, Amelia Kellaway. Deborah has a Graduate Diploma in scriptwriting and graduated cum laude from the Hagley Writers’ Institute. When she’s not writing psychological thrillers and suspense books, she likes to take her chocolate Lab, Rocky, for walks on the beach and make decadent desserts.

Book preview

For Kate

Before

MY FATHER is a restless man. When I am very young he sometimes rouses us from our sleep and bundles us into our old silver Chrysler for an out of town trip. We drive for hours in the dark. My two older sisters and I doze in our sleeping bags in the back seat, while in front my mother holds my baby brother in her lap.

Outside our window the sun rises over steaming paddocks, and sheep tear grass from the earth. Then my father slips Rod Stewart into our little cassette player and sings along to Tonight’s the Night or Maggie May and my mother taps her foot, and there’s the smell of peppermint gum as my sister tries to chew away her car sickness.

We go to see the snow at Mount Holdsworth. There’s a photograph of him. He sits at a picnic table in a tan leather jacket, smoked cheese sandwich in one hand, Rothmans in the other. His face is spilt with an enormous smile, as if the forest around him is somehow his.

Then one day he has an accident. He’s coming home late from work on a dark country road and runs right into them. Two young nurses. But it’s not his fault. They hadn’t been looking.

I want a blood test.

Breath test ought to do the trick, sir.

It wasn’t a request.

He is a solicitor and knows best. They take his blood and it’s fine. But one of the nurses goes blind, and the way my mother tells it, he is never the same again.

My parents met at the United Services pub in Christchurch in 1970. He’s not long out of the seminary, she’s a divorcee hairdresser with two little girls. I imagine their first meeting when they do the twist to Ray Columbus: my mother with her outrageous auburn beehive and my father in his corduroy flares.

There’s a great fuss when they decide to marry. My devout catholic grandmother won’t have it on account of my mother’s divorcee status and the two daughters who belong to another man. My father marries her anyway. Years later when we visit my grandmother in her tiny red-bricked flat, she calls me pet and feeds me chocolate biscuits while my two sisters get nothing and are forced to sit on the couch and watch.

We move to Hillcrest Street in Masterton when I am four. We have a little Maltese dog called Buttons. At first we put pink bows in her fur and take turns brushing her, but soon no one can be bothered and her coat becomes knotted and tangled with twigs. Sometimes when she defecates it sticks to her bum.

One winter’s morning I go into the lounge and there she is, stiff in a yellow puddle right on the spot where I open my Christmas presents. I run to the kitchen.

Something’s wrong, I tell my sister.

She goes to have a look and comes back sniffing. Go get Dad, she says.

My father digs a hole in the back garden. On the grass beside him, Buttons is wrapped tight like a newborn in a faded blue towel. The heat of our breaths frosts the glass as my sisters and I watch from the lounge. My father places Buttons inside the hole. He takes great care, using just one half-shovel of dirt at a time. When he finishes he comes inside. His left cheek is still wet where his sleeve missed the tears.

Afterwards, I linger near the spot and long to dig her up. But then my father has the accident with the nurses and his restless spirit erupts like a geyser.

I’ve got an announcement, he says one day. We’re moving to Hong Kong.

And that was that.

*

We arrive at night in 1978. I am six. Someone from the New Zealand Society of Expats has arranged for a driver to take us to a hotel and we are ushered into a waiting van. We race through the streets, weaving in and out of lanes filled with traffic. There are double-decker buses and glossy red taxis.

Is it always like this? says my father to the Chinese driver.

The man looks straight ahead and says nothing.

I have never seen so many people. They are walking shoulder-to-shoulder along the footpaths. I stick my head out the window and wonder where they are all going. Above their heads, neon lights fizz and cling to the sides of buildings like parasites. There is no night because of them.

We pull to a stop and get out. I wait on the footpath like I’m told. I am so small and the buildings are so big. I seek out the comfort of my father’s hand; but he is elsewhere, pulling suitcases from the van.

Heat sticks to my skin. And my father is sweating like I’ve never seen before. It drips like rain from his forehead and his white shirt is glued to the pink of his back. He delivers the last of the luggage to the curb and turns to the driver to thank him, but the van is already gone, halfway up Nathan Road.

That first night I am awake for hours waiting for the city to go to sleep. But it never does. It just keeps moving and moving and moving.

I dream of home. I am looking for empty Coke bottles in the patch of bush near the netball courts. Then it is Easter and we are hunting for marshmallow eggs. I am chasing after my big sisters as they race around the house. There’s one egg on top of the picture frame and another on the windowsill. The bunny is clever, I think, to have done all this under our noses.

*

The next day the family walks up Salisbury Road. The juice of the city gurgles beneath iron grills in the gutters. The smell is like a thump on the back you aren’t expecting. And there is always the diesel, belching from the oversized buses and delivery trucks that stop and start along the road.

My favourites are the narrow alleyways that sprout from streets with names like Shanghai and Canton and Waterloo. They are crammed with all sorts of treasure. Soft toys, large and small, swing from hooks. Little battery-powered dogs bark and somersault in the air. There are carved sandalwood fans and picture playing cards and T-shirts and coasters and lighters and key rings and luggage. My sister stops to admire some earrings glinting under a light bulb. The stallholder selects a pair and holds them next to my sister’s ear.

How you like? he says.

My sister looks in the spotted mirror and beams, Mum, can I?

Go on, then.

Along the waterfront promenade, toothless men read flapping newspapers and smoke. Victoria harbour is busy with boat traffic and the sea is all peaks and valleys.

My father points to the green and white boats crossing paths in the water, See those two? They’re called the Star Ferry. We’ll go on one later.

On the other side of the harbour, the buildings are like blocks on a graph. One stands out more than the rest. It has portholes for windows.

That’s where I’m going to work, says my father.

Then he nods toward the lush green hill rising up behind the buildings, And that’s The Peak. We’ll go there too.

He laughs and I turn to him. He has a faraway look that I haven’t seen before. I turn back to the view and try to see what he sees. I search and search but cannot find it. Then my father laughs again but this time the sound is lost in the wind.

Part I

DEPARTURES

΅

One

1987. NIGHT. On my bed, fully clothed. Waiting. Outside, wind rises and shakes plums from the neighbour’s tree. One hits my window then dully thuds away. Fleur will be waiting at St Peter’s church. Under the eaves, in the shadows. The orange eye of her cigarette will burn bright then fade into an ashen cloud.

I get to my feet and listen. The dog walks up the hallway and into the kitchen. She stops to lap water from her bowl. In the room next to mine, my mother rolls over in bed and my stepfather snores through his teeth.

I thread my arm through the strap of my bag and move to the window. It’s a sliding window on rusting metal casters that sometimes squeal so I push one careful inch at a time. Soon the opening is wide. I pause there, looking out, the dark air fresh on my lips.

Then I throw a leg over and ease myself to the ground and I’m off up the drive, down the street, along the river, toward Fisher Ave.

I sit on the steps of the church. A street light slips through the rubies and emeralds of the stained-glass window. There is Mary and baby Jesus. Joseph and a lamb. I light a smoke and wait. Down the road a figure walks quickly, hugging the curb. Fleur.

Alright? she says.

Yeah.

She opens her bag and shows me the bottle of Double Brown.

Cool, I say.

And we carry on up the road and on to the school.

We walk heel-to-toe on top of the wooden benches outside the classrooms, and cup our hands to look through the windows. There’s a poster of Canada and an empty goldfish bowl with pebbles and a tiny pink castle. A poi with a red and black plait hangs from a hook.

I take a drink from the steel trough under the window and kick at the chalk marks on the concrete. Someone has thrown a skipping rope into the flax bush.

The school cat, Mr Bojangles, sits on the fence outside the office. His eyes track us as we walk across the playground. The caretaker has forgotten to lower the flag and the cord bats the steel pole like a sail. We pull at the rope to get at the flag but it does not budge. So we walk off and try the door of the school hall where there are packets of Chocolate Thins and Cameo Cremes in the cupboard under the sink out the back.

We did folk dancing in the hall when we were twelve. I danced with our teacher, Mr Barrington. He hooked his arm through mine and we skipped around in a wheel. When it was