Her husband was referring to a score of cracked saucers and chipped enamel dishes clustered at the gate of the rear courtyard that Nina had made her refuge. This little enclosed ting yun was bordered with purple azaleas and scented orchid shrubs, and she had tried to convince herself that their exotic fragrance overburdened the rancid market smells and reek of sewage from the street.
Their new quarters were rooms in a colonial villa leased to them by a foreign correspondent temporarily reassigned; in the bedroom a whiff of burnt incense hung in clammy air.
Within hours of her arrival in Hong Kong, there had been ignited within her an unknown but very living passion for the salvation of the feral cats that roamed the alleys behind the villa.
She felt charity enter into her soul and at once saw her task to be their defence against a skilled adversary who each day preyed on the starveling frantic-eyed creatures.
‘Sei baht poh!’ the street sweeper had shouted fiercely the first time she’d fed the cats to lure them into her little compound.
‘You damned bitch!’ His speech was oddly thickened.
Nina soon learned to fear the gaunt cat-catcher, a municipal worker in a uniform of dark blue dungarees and billowing long shirt whom the market stallholders called Sei-ngaan Lou.
But not until over a week had passed did she learn from other wives at the Garrison Club that the grim sweeper was notorious in the district for his defiance of the Dogs and Cats Ordinance, and profited from the vagrant cats he collected by selling their meat to certain outré restaurants, whose menus included lung-fu-dou. Some of the husbands claimed to have eaten Cat and Snake Soup with relish, and sickening descriptions of the delicacy caused shudders of revulsion to run through the Bridge players at the club.
Nina declined invitations to Bridge parties extended by the expats. Although Neville and Nina were a celebrated couple, they were a team bound together in harness merely by a notional yoke. Even under Neville’s merciless tutelage, she had never quite grasped the Rule of Twenty for evaluating opening bids.
Whenever Neville sought her out in the garden she would be wearing a half-concealed frown of preoccupation, her lips moving in silence, as day long she nursed her growing tribe of cats, her feelings expressed only by an enigmatically wistful smile.
‘You asleep or daydreaming?’ was her husband’s invariably brusque demand.
When he was angry, Nina told herself, she retained nonetheless a substratum of self-belief. A residue of truth.
‘The cries of the feral cats are sounding continually in my heart,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and I feel a great need to forget myself and to please them alone.’
Sei-ngaan Lou, Old Snake Eyes, wore an expensive pair of Polaroid cat-eye sunglasses with fake snakeskin frames, no doubt once the property of an inattentive tourist, which evidently accounted for the street sweeper’s name.
‘We’re not of the same world, you and me,’ she was heard to murmur as the emergent shadow of the cat-napping sougaailou fell across her threshold, and she closed the courtyard gate on him to pen in her mewing strays. These native cats from the streets, she was certain, exhibited an Edenic cattiness unlike any breed she had ever known.
Their miaows clawed at her mind.
Moreover, wasn’t Cantonese so much more vivid in its expressiveness once you knew the word for ‘cat’ was maau?
‘It’d take too long to explain,’ she mumbled when Neville demanded facts from her, as if facts could explain her peculiar malaise. He shook with rage and could barely control himself.
‘He has a right to be angry,’ she thought, ‘but he does not have the right to despise me.’
Shortly afterwards she found herself immersed in a lurid scandal when late one night, prowling an arcade lined with lingerie shops and apothecaries for herbal medicine, she encountered Snake Eyes laying a trail of scraps.
Shreds of crab and morsels of barbecued pork were tracked by sprinklings of powdered fish meal.
Nina followed the powder trail to the point where pent up resentments suddenly detonated in a great blaze of recriminations.
In an access of fury Nina summoned the strength to grapple with Snake Eyes and wrench him to the ground.
His trademark sunglasses lay smashed on a kerbstone.
She saw his eyes for the first time. The face of a sick man, with eyes wide open and blood-shot, in which she read a fear of life no different from her own. His thickness of speech, she discovered, was due to an absence of teeth.
Their fumbling struggle brought down strings of naked light bulbs festooned above the market stalls.
The old man was overcome with shame and wept.
For her own part, she resigned herself to the knowledge that another opening bid in a game of incalculable odds had failed.
The colony turned their backs on her.
‘Indecorous,’ was the word Neville chose.
He gave her a mild sedative and put her on the first homeward plane out.
It was as though she had desecrated her marriage. Like a cat peeing on a shrine.
From Listen Close to Me by Catherine Eisner (2011).
Section 22. Hong Kong’s Dogs and Cats Regulations.
Slaughter of dog or cat for food prohibited. Onus of proof
(1) No person shall slaughter any dog or cat for use as food whether for mankind or otherwise.
(2) No person shall sell or use or permit the sale or use of the flesh of dogs and cats for food.
(3) Any person who is found in possession of the carcass of any dog or cat or any part thereof in such circumstances as would reasonably give rise to a belief that such dog or cat was being or had been slaughtered or sold or used for food in breach of this regulation shall be guilty of an offence against paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, unless he is able to satisfy a magistrate that he has not in fact committed any breach of paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be.
Section 23. Hong Kong’s Dogs and Cats Regulations.
Penalty
Any person who contravenes regulation 22(1) or (2) shall be liable to a fine of HK$5,000 and to imprisonment for 6 months.
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
