Girl had run out of places to hide and he had found her. The more she struggled against the rope around her neck, the tighter it became. In the end, only her body continued the fight. Her mind said:
Let me go … Let it be quick … And please, sweet Jesus, let someone find my body …
Strangely enough, her last thoughts were of Darren, in the days before he’d started hitting her. In the days of disco balls and hot, salty, stolen kisses, fevered embraces and love that should have been forever. She had never truly managed to hate him. She still loved the man she wished he could have been.
Now her photo stared out from the wall, with the others, and her index finger bobbed in a jar of formaldehyde, just like the one her grandma kept pickles in. In certain lights it still glittered.
Tonight he would start his hunt again.
Lucy stumbled off the Macau ferry in a daze, right at the start of the morning rush hour. The bright sun stabbed at her eyes and the car fumes caught in the back of her throat. The walk home was tortuously slow. All she could do was keep her head down, shuffle along the crowded pavement, and pray that soon she would find some respite from the raw guilt she felt. One minute her heart beat so fast she couldn’t breathe, and she thought she would pass out; the next it slowed down so much that she thought she must be walking in a dream.
Lucy was in shock, in mourning. She had squatted in the gutters of Macau and aborted all her dreams, and not just hers … All the years she had protected her sister from harm and kept her off the streets, made sure she could follow her dream and become a nurse. Now all those dreams would be shattered. Both their lives would be ruined if she couldn’t think of a way to pay back what she owed – a triad debt was a family debt. The pain of retribution would be shared. In fact, Lucy knew that it would be Ka Lei they would come after first, just to teach Lucy a lesson.
After an hour of shuffling along pavements she finally reached home. She turned the key to the apartment door as quietly as she could and crept inside. There was not a sound in the stagnant gloom of the flat except the plonk plonk of the leaky kitchen tap. Ka Lei had already gone to work and Georgina was still asleep. Lucy listened to the droning of the air-conditioning unit coming from her cousin’s bedroom.
She tiptoed into her room and sat on the edge of the bed, scared to move, frightened to make a sound in case she woke Georgina and then she might have to tell what she’d done. She couldn’t do that. She definitely couldn’t do that.
As the hours passed she stared at the blacked-out windows of the adjacent building, seeing nothing, reliving the events of the previous evening. The light in the room changed hue. Shadows lengthened and altered shape. Somewhere outside, the sun arced in the sky, the earth turned, the universe existed, the day completed its rota. Inside the room Lucy went over the process of self-recrimination countless times. She relived the events that had led to her destruction over and over until she became quite exhausted by the process. She hovered above herself and watched herself lose and lose again. Why had she continued? She knew why. She just couldn’t leave, not then, not when she was so down. She just needed to stay in the game, like she always did. It had happened that way so many times before: lose a lot, win a lot more. She had always come out on top – but not this time. Lady Luck had stabbed her in the back last night. Now Lucy must find a way not just to bear it, but to end it.
Gradually, over the course of the following day, the shock subsided, until, by reworking the events in her mind, they changed shape and became something of far less consequence. She began to reassess the situation. She had survived worse – she would survive this. But now her survival was out of her hands. Lucy had unwittingly made a pact with the devil.
She waited in the Dressing Room for two hours before her name was called. She knew when she followed Mamasan Linda past the dance floor that they were heading to Chan’s favourite seat. She knew he would be watching her walk the length of the club, his eyes fixed on her. She knew she had to try every trick in her book to make this work.
‘Hello, Ka Mei, how’s things?’ His cold eyes fixed on her face.
It was the first time Chan had ever called Lucy by her Chinese name. It did not bode well. She was momentarily startled into letting her guard down. In the half-light she could see he was sneering rather than smiling. She looked downwards at her lap, trying to compose herself. Stick to the plan, she told herself, just as rehearsed: slightly submissive, slightly flirty – humble yet brave. She had been over this meeting a hundred times in her head.
Chan was sprawled in his usual place, and as Lucy sat down he extended one arm so that his hand rested on the nape of her neck.
‘Good evening, Mr Chan,’ she said, and waited for an answer. She felt the electricity in his fingertips commute to a burning sensation as he rubbed the same spot at the base of her neck repeatedly. He was a tightened band that threatened to snap at any moment. ‘I have been a bit worried, Mr Chan,’ she said, tilting her head sideways to look at him.
‘Worried?’ He played along, and carried on stroking her neck. ‘Worried about what, Ka Mei?’
Lucy summoned up all her courage. She locked her gaze on his. ‘About the money I owe you, Mr Chan.’
Chan nodded his head slowly, deliberately, like a judge considering the gravity of the situation before passing sentence.
‘Yes, Lucy. You did borrow a lot of money. I hardly remember how much it was now.’ Lucy caught a glimmer of hope and looked up from her lap to see him still nodding. ‘But it was more than is prudent for a girl in your position.’
She would do the ‘what a silly girl I’ve been’ act if that’s what it took.
‘I do have some money to return to you, Mr Chan.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘But I do not have it all … at the moment.’
Chan raised an eyebrow.
‘How much do you have for me … at the moment?’
‘I have thirty thousand dollars. My savings, everything.’ She pleaded silently, trying every trick in her extensive book to find that deeply buried corner of Chan that cared.
Chan switched from nodding his head to swinging it from side to side. ‘Not really enough, is it, Lucy?’
Lucy felt the fluttering of panic begin in her gut. Chan slipped into his soliloquy:
‘You know you borrowed a lot of money from me, and not just from me, from the Wo Shing Shing. And you say to me, “Sorry, Mr Chan, I can only afford to repay you a measly thirty thousand dollars at the moment”, when you owe ten times that amount. Do you think that is fair?’
Lucy shook her head, feeling the blood drain from her face. The actual sum she had borrowed was being inflated as she sat there. Suddenly it seemed insurmountable. She hadn’t reckoned on such calculated cruelty. He couldn’t really expect her to pay all that, could he?
‘So, Lucy, what do you think I should do?’
There was a pause and Lucy returned to staring at her lap and shaking her head miserably.
‘Have you no one to help you?’
Lucy was puzzled. What could he be driving at? He was waiting to spring a trap on her, all her instincts told her so.
‘I know that your sister – Ka Lei, isn’t it? I know that she works at the hospital. She relies on you, doesn’t she, Lucy?’
Lucy’s eyes flitted back and forth across his face, searching desperately.
‘You live with your sister, don’t you? She’s young, isn’t she?