Max had been a taxi driver for the last thirty years, and most of the time it brought him a modest income. Taxis were thick on the ground in Hong Kong so he had to work long hours to make it worthwhile.

Georgina peered silently out of the window. She was mesmerised by the cars all around her. She hadn’t envisaged Hong Kong looking quite so un-British. She’d thought, as a former British colony, that somehow it would mirror London in miniature. Or perhaps it would look like a Victorian seaside town with mock Tudor B&Bs, maybe with a dilapidated pier. She didn’t know quite which, but she certainly hadn’t expected it to look so completely different. It seemed to her to be a futuristic alien world of skyscrapers.

She tilted her head at the window and stretched her eyes upwards. ‘Gods,’ she thought, the skyscrapers were like gods’ legs: perfected from glass and chrome, glinting gloriously in the sunshine. There were so many different kinds: some were honeycombed like rec t angular wasps’ nests; others were skeletal, jutting skyward as bony white fingers. And the strangest thing of all were the building sites that bridged the gaps between the buildings like gums between teeth.

All the time Georgina studied her new environment, Max studied her in the mirror. He was fascinated by her cascading curls and her pale, luminescent beauty. It was not the first time he’d had a foreign girl in his car. Many girls had sat where she sat now. They were strange, unearthly creatures, the Western girls. They didn’t seem real to Max. They were images from a film: plastic, false. Sometimes Max thought about the other girls, the ones who had ridden in his cab. He wondered where they’d gone.

One of the girls who’d sat in the back of Max’s cab, where Georgina was sitting now, had not gone far. Part of her now resided in a drawer of a mortuary fridge. The rest of her was still waiting to be found.

12

Max turned the cab into a narrow street – typical of the ones found just a stone’s throw from the main tram line on Johnson Road. The road was so narrow that the washing hung from poles, jutting out from the overhead balconies and meeting in the centre of the street, hanging down like heavily laden tree branches, providing a canopy over the busy street. They trapped smells and dust, but afforded some welcome shade in the heat of the day.

The cab pulled up outside the mansion block on a side street in Wanchai.

Georgina thanked Max, took her case from him and wheeled it into the building. She checked her piece of paper, the one that Mrs Ho had written the address on, in both Chinese and English: fourth floor, apartment 407. She took the lift – a small oppressive space that only had room for her and her case. As she wheeled the case out onto the fourth-floor landing, she paused outside the apartment door to gather her thoughts. She had come a long way to reach this point. She hoped it would prove worth it. She took a deep breath, rang the bell and waited.

A young woman in a dressing gown opened the door. She looked like she’d just got up. She wore no makeup and her hair was a mess. Her face was as rounded as a full moon, while her nose was small and flattened, emphasising the largeness of her visage. Her eyes were set slightly wide apart, and then there was the mouth, like Georgina’s, a family trait – lips that formed an almost perfect circle topped by a cupid’s bow.

The woman grinned. She had a gold crown just behind one of her eyeteeth.

‘You got to be Georgina, right?’ Her voice was loud, deep and brackish. The words had a hint of American, but the accent remained pure Hong Kong staccato.

Georgina nodded. ‘Ka Mei?’

‘Yeah, thaz me. Call me Lucy – English name more easy. Come in, please. Let me help you.’

She pulled Georgina’s case in and ushered her forward into the dimly lit flat. Immediately in front of them, as they entered, was a small lounge area. Beyond that was a fifties-style Formica breakfast bar. Behind it there was a one-ring cooker, a microwave and a decrepit water heater that appeared to cling to the wall by its fingernails. There were two rooms on the left, and a bathroom ahead. Lucy pulled Georgina’s case into the middle of the lounge.

‘Sorry. I expect you later. But no worries, huh?’ She patted Georgina on the arm. ‘You very pretty girl – so tall.’ She laughed. ‘Ka Lei!’ she called. ‘Come, meet your cousin …’

There was a screech from the bathroom and a young woman came flying out. She looked quite different from her sister. She was taller, but much slighter. Her features were also long and thin, accentuated by her hair that fell from a centre parting and divided into two shiny black sheets falling either side of her face. She was so excited. She had been on a high ever since they had known that Georgina would be coming.

She barged past her sister (falling over Georgina’s huge suitcase, which filled the tiny lounge) and threw open the bedroom doors. Ka Lei squealed with delight as she pulled her cousin out of the room and dragged her around the tiny flat, pointing things out as they went. There was always something else she absolutely must show her.

‘Here is our bedloom,’ shrieked Ka Lei, as she dived into the first open door and jumped onto the bed in the centre of the room.

Lucy came behind her, scolding but smiling. Georgina squeezed past the bed to look at the view from the oversized windows, more out of politeness than anything else. All she could see was the side wall of the adjacent building. By pressing her face against the pane and looking up she would have been able to see a corner of sky, and, looking down, people’s heads would have been just visible below. But she didn’t; she stood politely, staring through the never-been-cleaned glass at the blacked-out windows of the building opposite, which was so near you could almost reach out and touch it. Georgina was used to looking out of the window and seeing fields. Now she knew what it was to feel claustrophobic.

They eventually collapsed onto the bed in what was to be Georgina’s room. It was identical to the sisters’: the same two lazy bamboo blinds hanging lopsided against the oversized panes, the same wallpaper peeling from the wall and the same air-conditioning unit droning away in honour of Georgina’s arrival.

All three sat on the bed.

Ka Lei reached for Georgina’s hand. ‘We hope you happy here … wit us,’ she said.

Georgina felt too overwhelmed to answer. It was all so strange. So many new things to take in. She looked around her. Had she left England for this – this scruffy, dark and damp-smelling apartment? Then she looked back at Ka Lei, sitting on the bed, waiting expectantly, smiling at her, and she knew it didn’t matter what the flat was like – she had found her cousins and they were happy to see her.

‘Ayeee …’ Ka Lei looked at her watch. ‘I late … muz go … I wor until ten o’clock, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Georgina mimicked, laughing.

Lucy moved forward to usher her sister out. She spoke sternly to her in Cantonese about being late. Georgina found she could understand quite a lot of what they said. The years of listening to the workers in the Golden Dragon had meant she’d absorbed a lot of the language without realising.

Ka Lei grabbed her bag, kissed her sister and her cousin, and flew out of the door amid uncontrollable shrieking. Her energetic presence diminished with the descending elevator.

Max was heading home. He lived with his brother and his father. The old man would be waiting for him now, dozing in his chair, waiting for the sound of his son returning. Max had been so exhausted before he picked up the young woman but now his mind was alert, jumping. He craned his neck to look up at the sky. A storm was coming. The electricity in the air charged Max’s weary old brain. Now he had the girl to think about too. He would not sleep today.