Red Phoenix

  ‘Did you have fun, sweetheart?’ he said.

  Simone studied me, her little face very serious. ‘Emma, you said I’ll have a party too. Will it be like that?’

  ‘No,’ I said with a laugh. ‘Nothing like that. We’ll invite about six or eight of your friends over, you can all play in the living room, and we won’t have an entertainer.’

  ‘What about the food?’ Simone said, eyes wide. ‘Like that?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have some little snacks.’

  ‘Good,’ Simone said. She tipped the contents of the treat sack onto the floor. There was a mountain of sweets, some expensive toys and a large amount of costume jewellery.

  ‘It was one of them, wasn’t it?’ Leo said.

  ‘They rented the entire YMCA in King’s Park,’ I said to Leo. ‘The whole centre.’

  ‘Which one is that?’ Leo said. ‘I don’t remember a YMCA there.’

  ‘It’s a new one. Behind QE Hospital. It has tennis courts, a few climbing walls, a big roller hockey rink, an indoor sports hall. Huge.’

  ‘And they took it all?’ Leo said. ‘How many kids did they invite?’

  ‘Must have been more than sixty.’

  Leo was speechless.

  ‘We went into the gift room to put our gift on the table, but it had overflowed onto the floor. The room was packed full of presents for this little girl.’

  ‘I don’t want that many presents,’ Simone said without looking up. ‘I want to have a party and play with my friends.’

  ‘They had the staff of the Y pull out the rollerskating gear so the kids could have a skate. But they didn’t have enough equipment. Lots of the kids missed out. The parents stood around and watched—you know what it’s like.’

  ‘Yeah, parents and grandparents bring the kids. You have to look after them too. And the little brothers and sisters and cousins.’

  ‘Then they did rock climbing, but of course they were all too small to make any progress up the wall. And the Y didn’t have enough staff, so I belayed as well.’

  Leo gestured towards my T-shirt. ‘So that’s what happened.’

  I glanced down. My T-shirt was absolutely filthy on one side, from the rope rubbing as I’d belayed for the kids. ‘Yeah. I had to lift them up the wall; they couldn’t do it by themselves.’ I stretched my shoulders. ‘My arms are killing me.’

  ‘What did they eat?’

  ‘It was catered—big professional firm. None of the kids liked the food. And they had two entertainers. Magicians. But the kids ignored them—they’d all seen the shows before.’

  ‘I’ve seen one of those guys do those tricks three times now,’ Simone said irritably. She took some of the candy and threw it into her little wastepaper basket next to the door. ‘He was boring. Daddy can do much better things than that.’ She had a sudden idea, charged over and threw herself at me. ‘Hey! At my party, can we ask Daddy to do some stuff with water? He can pretend to be a magician! That would be so cool!’

  I gave Simone a huge hug. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, sweetheart.’

  ‘So it was a typical Hong Kong birthday party,’ Leo said as he pulled himself up from the floor.

  ‘Absolutely the most typical one I’ve ever been to,’ I said. ‘They must think it’s some sort of competition or something.’

  ‘What did the birthday girl think?’

  ‘I don’t think she had very much fun at all,’ I said. ‘She spent most of the time crying.’

  ‘How long to my party, Emma?’ Simone said.

  ‘About three weeks, sweetheart,’ I said. I gave her a squeeze. ‘We need to make invitations.’

  Simone jumped up and threw her arms above her head. ‘Yay!’ she squealed. She jumped around the room. ‘Party for me! Friends for me! I love having friends!’ She threw herself at Leo and he hoisted her to sit on his hip. ‘When’s your birthday, Leo?’

  ‘I’m too old to have birthdays,’ Leo said, grinning and holding her close.

  ‘Remember? We had a cake for Leo, and he was all cross with us, and we had to get your dad to order him to stay and blow out the candles?’ I said. ‘And then we made him go out with all of his silly friends?’

  ‘Some of your friends are funny, Leo,’ Simone said into Leo’s grinning face, ‘but I liked them.’ She turned to me, still in his arms. ‘When’s your birthday, Emma?’

  ‘Not telling,’ I said.

  ‘October twenty-third,’ Leo said. ‘Next Thursday.’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said fiercely.

  Leo grinned. ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Leo, can we go into your room and talk for a minute, please?’ Simone said, suddenly serious.

  ‘Don’t either of you dare!’ I shouted at them.

  ‘Still don’t know what you’re talking about, Emma,’ Leo said as he lowered Simone and took her hand. ‘Come on, Simone.’

  Simone glanced over her shoulder at me. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about either, Emma.’ She tugged Leo’s hand. ‘Come on, Leo, we need to talk.’

  I got out of the lift on the eighth floor to go to my energy work class. It was unusually quiet. Normally the first years would be chatting and laughing in the room, but as I walked towards the door the hall was completely silent. I wondered whether I had the time wrong as I opened the door.

  Fortunately they had the brains not to jump out and yell ‘surprise!’ at me; I probably would have taken all of them out with energy without even thinking. They stood around a large table with a monstrous birthday cake on it.

  I spun to leave but Leo was way ahead of me. He grabbed me, lifted me completely off my feet before I had a chance to struggle, turned me around and put me in front of the cake.

  Then they all began to sing goddamn ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.

  Simone ran to me with her arms up. I lifted her and sat her on my hip. ‘Happy birthday, Emma!’ she yelled right into my ear.

  ‘You will thoroughly keep for this, Leo,’ I growled softly.

  ‘You did it to me,’ Leo said with a huge grin.

  ‘Don’t put Simone down,’ John said, and charged over to me, wrapped his arms around both of us, and gave me a huge kiss right on the mouth.

  Damned if they all didn’t cheer and clap. Even Simone squealed with delight.

  I looked around. My energy work students were there. Meredith, Liu, most of the other Celestial Masters and all of the human ones. Most of the demon staff from the top floor. Michael and Rhonda, standing together. The White Tiger, standing behind Rhonda with a huge grin. Jade and Gold, both of them grinning like idiots.

  ‘You will all keep,’ I said loudly.

  ‘Now who’s over the hill?’ Leo said with delight, gesturing towards the cake with the big ‘30’ on top.

  ‘All of us!’ I shouted, and squeezed Simone tight.

  ‘Put her down, Emma, I have a gift for you,’ John said.

  ‘I have everything I could possibly want in the whole world,’ I said as I lowered Simone. ‘You don’t need to give me anything.’

  John gestured, and one of the demons handed him a wrapped cylinder. He presented it to me with both hands, a small bow and a huge grin.

  I wondered if I should open it immediately Western-style, or hold on to it and open it privately later, Chinese-style.

  ‘Western-style,’ John said, reading my mind. ‘Open it. They want to see.’

  I carefully pulled off the red wrapping paper. It was a scroll; it had wooden dowels at the top and the bottom, and a red silk ribbon for hanging. I held the top dowel and let the scroll carefully fall.

  It was a single character. The character si; made of a field above a heart, done in John’s elegant flowing hand.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Leo said into my ear.

  ‘Thought. Contemplation. Remembrance. I will see it and remember.’ I turned the scroll around so that they could all see, and they went quiet.

  ‘Could somebody get me a tissue, please?’
I choked.

  ‘That was a bad present, Daddy,’ Simone said. ‘You made her cry.’

  ‘These are tears of happiness, Simone,’ I said, my voice thick. ‘I’ll have this on the wall in my room for a long time.’

  ‘Good,’ John said. ‘For a moment there I thought I’d made a huge mistake.’

  ‘You don’t have any bad ideas, John,’ I said. ‘Only good ones.’

  Leo helped me put the scroll up in my room later. He banged a nail into the wall, high enough for the scroll to clear the floor.

  ‘Don’t know why he didn’t wait until next year,’ Leo growled. ‘It’s a big birthday for you, this one. This is a really depressing gift.’

  ‘No, it’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘But don’t you realise?’

  ‘What?’

  I sighed with exasperation. ‘You’ve been living in China longer than I have, Leo. You haven’t learned anything.’

  ‘What?’ Leo said impatiently.

  ‘Everything they say and do has hidden layers of meaning. Everything is symbolic.’ ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘Immortals are renowned for their ability to see the future.’

  ‘That would explain why they’re so goddamned serene all the time,’ Leo said. He hung the scroll on the nail. ‘They know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘It’s hard to tell how much they know; none of them will talk about it. You know there’s some things that none of them will talk about. But the symbolism of this gift is obvious.’

  We stepped back to admire the scroll.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Leo said. ‘Not to me, anyway.’

  ‘He thinks he won’t have the chance to give it to me for my next birthday,’ I said as calmly as I could.

  Leo was silent.

  ‘We have to get Simone up to speed.’ Leo still didn’t say anything. He turned and went out.

  I didn’t turn around when I heard the tap on the door a couple of days later, just called out, ‘Come on in.’

  Michael poked his head around the door. ‘A friend of mine’s dropped by, Emma, and wants to know if we can go to the mall together.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Michael,’ I said. ‘You know you won’t be safe by yourself and just one other. Go with a group, or take either Leo or myself to guard you.’

  Michael sighed. He obviously hadn’t wanted to tell me. ‘It’s Na Zha.’

  ‘Damn.’ I pushed myself away from my desk. ‘You know how I feel about him.’

  Michael shrugged. ‘Come on, Emma, he’s okay, he promises to behave. We just want to go and look at the new software in the shops. No trouble, promise.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Outside the living room window.’

  I stormed out to the living room. Michael was right: Na Zha floated outside the living room window, poised on his fire wheels. He saw me coming and grinned.

  He moved back about three metres, then rode the fire wheels right through the window without doing any damage whatsoever to the glass. He landed lightly on the carpet without the wheels; he’d already been in major trouble once with John for singeing the carpet.

  ‘Yo,’ he said briskly. ‘How about it?’

  He looked about seventeen. He wore a pair of jeans that were more than four sizes too big for him and floated somewhere down around his hips, with his designer underwear plainly showing and the bottoms crumpled and torn. His T-shirt was black, sleeveless and much too small for him. He wore a black baseball cap back-to-front. His sunglasses and sports shoes were the most expensive on the market. An MP3 player was slung around his neck, rap metal blaring loudly from the tiny headphones. He was the image of the rich, rebellious, spoilt Hong Kong teenager.

  I swallowed my feelings as I carefully saluted him. ‘My Lord Third Prince.’

  Na Zha grinned evilly at me. ‘Lady Emma.’ He shrugged. ‘Come on, we’ll be fine, no trouble, I promise.’

  ‘You’ve just given me your word, Na Zha,’ I said. ‘No trouble.’ I sighed with resignation. ‘I suppose it’s all right. Back by ten, okay? Michael’s half human, he needs his rest.’

  ‘Sweet,’ Michael said.

  ‘There’s a great mall in Bel Air. Wanna go?’ Na Zha asked Michael.

  ‘Bel Air Gardens in Sha Tin? There’s not much over there,’ I said.

  ‘Not Sha Tin, LA,’ Na Zha snapped impatiently.

  ‘No way!’ I shouted, and both of them glanced at me. ‘I said back by ten, and I meant ten tonight! You two will stay here in Hong Kong where I can call Michael. Do you have your phone, Michael?’

  I don’t need a phone any more, Michael said, straight into my ear.

  ‘When the hell did you learn to do that?’

  The Dark Lord taught me last week.

  ‘That’s all well and good, Michael, but you know I can’t do it, so I can’t call you if I need you. So take your phone, okay? And you two talk out loud when you’re near me, or there’ll be serious trouble.’

  Michael nodded. Na Zha put his hand on his hip, exasperated, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Festie?’ Michael said.

  ‘Whatever.’ Na Zha turned and jumped through the glass of the living room window. The fire wheels materialised under his feet. He summoned a cloud for Michael.

  ‘Michael, please don’t get into any trouble. If you do, your mother will kill me,’ I said wearily. ‘A little restraint goes a long way, you know?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Emma, we’ll behave. There’s a new game out, we just want to check it out,’ Michael said. Na Zha gestured towards the cloud. Michael ran straight through the glass of the window and landed on the cloud. ‘Hey,’ Michael called as they left. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Just don’t make me come down there and get you,’ I told their backs as they flew away.

  I stormed back to my room and returned to the spreadsheets. Oh well, at least I knew there was no chance of a demon getting him when he was with that little…gentleman.

  John must have known that Simone and I had arrived for breakfast in the dining room the next morning.

  Come and see me in my office after you’ve eaten, Emma.

  I picked up my tea and opened the newspaper. I froze completely.

  Simone saw my face. ‘What’s the matter, Emma?’

  I didn’t reply. I was reading the front page. There was a huge colour photo and a headline: LOCAL BUSINESSWOMAN ARRESTED. It was a photo of Kitty Kwok. My old boss from the kindergarten. She took up most of the frame. She was wearing huge designer sunglasses and scowling away from the camera, obviously being escorted by plainclothes police.

  The bottom fell out of my stomach. Walking behind her, grinning right at me over her left shoulder, was our favourite demon, Simon Wong.

  I read the copy.

  Local businesswoman Kitty Kwok Ho Man Yee was today arrested in connection with what police have described as ‘illegal activities’. Sources say that she has been arrested as part of a money-laundering cleanup operation. There are suggestions that she has been using her chain of kindergartens to fund underworld activity.

  Miss Kwok’s husband, Cedric Ho, died in a mysterious boating accident in 1985, leaving her extensive corporate and property investments. A coroner’s inquiry ruled the death of the tycoon ‘death by misadventure’.

  As well as the kindergarten chain, Miss Kwok has extensive agricultural holdings in China, and is a major shareholder in Tautech, a bioengineering company with laboratories in China, Australia, Hong Kong, the US and Europe.

  Miss Kwok refused to comment.

  I dropped the newspaper and cast around for the Chinese one. It was still on the table. I could only understand about one character in five, but that didn’t matter. There were huge glossy photos all over the front page. The Chinese newspapers were always very good about having big, spectacular, and often explicitly gory colour photographs with every story.

  The Chinese-language newspaper had large colourful photos of the raids on the biotechnology labs in Dongguan. People in white lab ja
ckets being herded into vans, and cages of animals and birds being loaded into trucks.

  The bottom photo showed the interior of the lab. It wasn’t the shiny clean laboratory expected in the West; it was a large dirty room with peeling green paint and rusty window frames. It was full of aquariums. The aquariums didn’t have any water in them; they were full of snakes.

  ‘I have to go and talk to your dad, Simone,’ I said absently. ‘If you need anything, ask Monica.’

  I didn’t even knock on his office door. I went in and flopped into a chair opposite him.

  ‘You still have it in your hand,’ he said mildly.

  He was right. I threw the newspaper onto his desk.

  ‘She gave you my number in the first place,’ I said.

  He didn’t reply, but his eyes blazed.

  ‘She lured you away at that first charity thing, so he could have a go at me,’ I said.

  He remained silent and unmoving.

  ‘She kept ringing me after you made your pledge, John. She kept asking me to go to her house.’

  ‘Before then,’ he said. ‘She called you even before we went to Guangdong.’

  I remembered. ‘Yeah.’

  He remained motionless.

  ‘How can you stay so calm?’ I shouted. ‘She was working for him!’ I ran my hands through my hair. ‘She planted me here!’

  ‘I don’t think so, Emma,’ he said. ‘I really did ask her if she knew of a good English teacher. She gave your number to other people, didn’t she? She was rather proud of your ability. Every time I saw her, she took full credit for your talent as a teacher.’

  I leaned across the desk to speak intensely. ‘When did they first know who you were?’

  He leaned back and retied his hair. ‘Michelle let it slip, at a charity function. She complained to Kitty that I always wore black, despite her best efforts to make me wear other colours. I think that’s when they put it together. That was not long after we were married and I moved down here.’

  ‘So she knew who you were when she sent me here,’ I said. ‘She was a total bitch to me at that first concert. Then she turned all sunshine and butterflies, asking me to go and visit her.’

  ‘I like that, “sunshine and butterflies”. I must remember that,’ he said, amused. ‘One Two Two had just left the Mountain after learning there for two years.’