Blue Lantern by Gil Hogg

for Manila, aren’t you?”
    â€œSure.”
    But Boxing Day was a long time ahead, and they eventually agreed that the only immediate solution was for Brodie to borrow the apartment of an absent friend, if he could. Brodie ended the conversation frustrated, but excited. He started to make careful enquiries amongst his colleagues, and he began to realise that his chances were not as remote as he had thought. Expatriates had generous rights to leave, and were usually inveterate travellers, anxious to get out of the Colony for a while. There was hope.

8
    Brodie would have liked the Vanessa of his first meeting on the beach to remain as an image, quickly dashed in light colours on a blank canvas; no background. But his successive meetings with her produced actual colours and shapes, and they were necessarily different from what he might have imagined.
    On their second or third night out, eating noodles under the orange lights, Vanessa began to talk about herself. She began to emerge as the daughter, the sister, usurping the image of the passionate girl on the beach who dined, and later slept with him on that first night. Eventually, she invited him to her apartment, and gave more substance to her words. She said she wanted to be very frank with him; she would tell him everything.
    The Chans lived on the tenth floor in a two-room apartment of a building in a cramped corner of Sham Shui Po. The exterior walls of the block were raw concrete, pitted with scaffolding marks. The structure looked unfinished. A tiny balcony in the apartment held two flower pots, and a caged canary. One room was lined with bunks, bearing bundles of clothing and personal possessions in the daytime. At night, the bundles were placed on the floor when the bunks were occupied. The other room had a flimsy folding table, folding chairs, and a thinly upholstered couch. On the couch there was a mat embroidered with a tiger; on the wall above, an outdated calendar with a coloured picture of Yee Lin the famous Cantonese film star who committed suicide. A twelve inch black and white television sat in one corner; in another, the family’s cooking implements were piled around a spirit stove. There was little room to move. The walls dripped with moisture; the Chans had no water tap or lavatory; they had to go down a windowless corridor to a communal washing area. By the dexterous use of plastic buckets, they provided their water, washed, and removed their slops.
    The apartment was occupied by Vanessa, her father and two younger brothers. One of the boys had a goldfish bowl on a side table; beside it was a red cardboard shrine with a candle. An orange, and a few paper flowers in a vase, had been offered to the shrine. The odour of burning joss sticks overlay the smell from the communal toilets. One of the children, very fat, aged about fourteen, was the messenger boy and cook. The father, a peaceful old man said nothing. Frail, he sat near the balcony, nodding. He was sixty but looked ninety. Brodie recognised the emaciated body and dreamlike state of a heroin addict. Vanessa had lived with this fact for a long time and did not conceal it. The fat boy fetched his father a packet each day. Every few hours the father chased the dragon over a piece of silver foil, heated by a candle; these needs were at his elbow on the table. Vanessa said he was a good man. It seemed absurd to Brodie that technically he ought to arrest both the boy, and the father.
    Vanessa began her story. She had named herself at the School of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart; she was sixteen when her mother died. Her uncle, Starboard Chan paid for her education, and he now paid for her two brothers; and her father’s drug needs. She had not had to take anything very seriously until the day she came home from school, and found her mother prostrate and vomiting. She saw in her mother’s eyes the gravity of the illness. She could not get help from her father who dreamed by the balcony