Flamingo

A young man with a pimple-pocked face placed a grey plastic cup filled with iced lemon tea before me. I explained—or tried to, at least—that I had ordered milk tea, but he either did not hear me or did not care; either way, I was stuck with the lemon tea. It had four—no, five—slices of lemon, which I crushed with the plastic straw. A container filled with packets of sugar was on the edge of the table, and after having tasted the tea and deemed it both much too bitter and now much too sour, I tore up and poured in three packets. The sugar was not dissimilar to a waterfall of stars as it fell from the ripped-up edges of its paper housing.

The place was harder to find than the winning lottery ticket my mother claimed she had lost in a cupboard in nineteen eighty-nine, a hunt she had never given up, despite the number of cupboards in her house being of a limited quantity. When I entered the alley, I thought it was nothing more than a trash-filled shortcut to the parallel street, but there, on an army-green metal door on my right, were the characters my sensational knowledge of hanzi recognised as food and entry written on a piss-yellow piece of laminated paper. I was famished, and the prospect of drinking milk tea squeezed fresh through pantyhose excited me (until Pimple Boy served me lemon tea).

Anyway, there I sat with my drink when two twenty-something girls entered. Their hair was identical black fringes and they carried backpacks. They must’ve known the place was there, for otherwise, I don’t know what they were doing in that filthy alley. The table behind mine was free, and that is the one they chose. I waited for the waiter to bring me my satay beef noodles.

As I sipped my lemon tea—with a sweeter kick to it, thanks to the three packets of sugar that now lay scattered around the table as though a child had been with me—I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation of the two girls (they must’ve mistaken me for someone who does not understand Cantonese).

‘So, did you, like…do it?’ one said.

‘I did it,’ the other said. She sounded confident.

‘You’re unreal. I don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t believe it either, but I know it. Believe it or not, it’s the truth.’

‘Where did you…do it?’ she said, lowering her voice to just above a whisper and raising my curiosity.

‘I did it in the park. Didn’t wanna drag it too far, you know.’

‘Which one?’

‘It, of course.’

‘No, which park?’

‘Kowloon.’

‘You must show me!’

‘Calm down—of course, I’m gonna show you.’ The waiter came to take their order. 

‘It’s so pink, so pink and cute,’ she continued. ‘But you can’t tell anyone, got it?’

The other girl said nothing, but I assumed she nodded or otherwise blinked in affirmation.

‘What are you having?’ the secretive girl said. She shuffled through the pages of the menu.

‘Do you have it on you?’ the inquisitive one said, ignoring her friend’s question.

‘It’s in my pocket.’

I didn’t notice the waiter coming with my plate of satay beef until he placed it before me, and as he did, my stomach made a tiny rumble, excited for the thick, chewy noodles—but on the plate was a piece of toast, two industrial-looking sausages, and two fried eggs. Then he placed, next to the plate, a bowl of instant noodles in a thin, dreary soup. I explained to him, again; that I had not ordered this. But as he ignored me afresh, I thought something was wrong with his ears. Perhaps that was why he worked in that dodgy alleyway cha chaan teng. I gave him the benefit of my, rather large by now, doubt.

Disgruntled with my twice-over mistaken order, I forgot about the two girls sitting behind me and laid the grumblings of my stomach to rest. I added another packet of sugar to the tea and swirled it around with the straw. The sausages had a fishy aftertaste, and I ate only one of them, leaving the remaining sausage looking like a limp penis after a disappointing bout in the sheets on a humid summer afternoon. The noodles tasted like the cheap ones you buy in styrofoam cups, the toast was, well, toast, but the eggs were, on the contrary, fried to perfection.

I got up to pay my bills, and the girl behind me did the same. She put on her jacket and out from her pocket fell a heavy object; as the gentleman I am, I bent over and picked it up for her. It was a switchblade. I examined it in my hand and found the quality to be quite excellent—but I will admit, my expertise in switchblades is finite, so who am I to say such things? I handed it back to her in a flurry I deemed necessary when handling a weapon. She looked at me as though I had stolen it from her. Her friend tugged on her jacket, but we held our gaze. Our eyes conveyed to each other that we now shared a secret, but it appeared to me as though neither of us knew what that secret was. When the girl could resist her friend’s tugging no longer, they rushed out of the building without so much as a thank you, and my mind raced with combinations of what she could have used this blade for in Kowloon Park, and what she could have done there. Also, I wanted to learn what the secret between us could be.

So I followed them.

It was an afternoon heavy in humidity—ninety-three per cent and thirty-three degrees Celsius. I waited half a minute before I exited the café, so as not to raise their suspicions. They were already turning the corner of the gloomy alley by the time I did, but Kowloon Park was close and I knew, what with my Cantonese eavesdropping capabilities, this to be their destination. As soon as they were out of sight, I raised my gait to a canter, so as not to lose them to the pandemonium of the dense crowds on the narrow sidewalks of Tsim Sha Tsui. I turned the corner in the direction which they had turned and found a sea of black-haired heads looking all the same, of which my own bobbed above—perhaps I had lost them, but I still knew the direction, so I pushed through the rabble.

I came to the southern entrance to the park, where the incline was steepest—a ten-meter hike, a barrier of entry for the elderly. At the summit of the incline, I spotted the two girls again. They waved and flailed their arms in what looked to be an exciting tête-à-tête. The sweat already rolled down my temples and the backside of my cotton shirt was soaked by now, but I mustered forth the strength in my thighs and climbed the incline.

They continued through the park. I kept my distance, and to further cover up my “scents”, so to speak, I took on, to the best of my abilities, the air of a horticulturist. I examined the plants and the growth of their sprouts, but I must admit I knew next to nothing about what I saw. They were pretty enough, though, some of them.

The girls made a left turn towards the area of the park that hosts a small, manmade saltwater lagoon filled to the gunwales with a flamboyance of bright red—almost pink—flamingos. As I peered at these flamingos while I walked, I failed to notice that the two girls, the subjects of my pursuit, had stopped to lean over the railings. They pointed at the flamingos, and in a fluster, I ended up passing right by them—I hoped they did not recognise me. I took on the cape of the horticulturist anew, this time examining the ivy draping down over the rock formations by the path circling the flamingo’s habitat.

They walked again, and to my ivy-ogling surprise, they came and stopped right next to me. They examined the rock. I flustered and turned my cheek. What happens if they recognise me? I thought. They carried concealed weapons, after all. But when I peeked back, they were gone—vanished, as though the rocks had gobbled them up. At this, I raised my eyebrows and curiosity got the better of my wisdom. I ran my hands over the rock in the place where they had stood; the nooks of it were clammy with condensation from the high humidity, as though the rock sweated just the same as me.

My hand got stuck in that rock. Not in a crack or something, but inside of it. I pulled and tugged on it, grabbed my arm with my free hand and pulled some more, but the more I struggled, the more the rock seemed to pull me in. Now it had swallowed me up to my elbow, and soon after, it pulled on the hairs under my armpit. At this rate, it would swallow me whole. Realising my fate, I took a deep breath—who knew how much oxygen would be inside a rock? I struggled and fought to keep my feet on the familiar ground outside. I even shouted for help, but to my chagrin, no one seemed to hear—a by-now defining trait of my day. Out of angst, I pressed my eyes shut as hard as I could, for as long as I could, and I relegated myself to a position of being swept away by the rock’s tide. I was a nestling, waiting for my turn at parental feeding, for some much-needed regurgitated nutrition. Before I knew it, it had swallowed me down to the shoes on my feet.

So there I was, inside the rock, and it was dark. It was as though I stood in a cave’s entrance, except the entrance was gone; behind me was nothing but a solid wall. A tunnel lay ahead of me, and around the bend, further down, came some trails of light and the faint sounds of giggling girls. On the wet ground, along the tunnel’s floor, feathers of a deep pink lay scattered about, like a trail of inedible breadcrumbs. Not knowing what else to do, and having no other way to go, I followed that trail and waited by the bend from beyond which the light came. I leaned my back on it and stuck out my ear.

‘Oh, my God! It’s so cute!’ said one girl—I believed it to have been the voice of the inquisitor.

‘I know, right? I named it Ploddy,’ said the other girl—switchblade-babe, I presumed.

Ploddy…. What a name! I thought.

Then came what I can only describe as a scream taken straight out of the seven rings of hell, a scream so concussive in its blasts that it forced me to grasp my ears with my hands—tearing the buggers off would have been a more pleasant way to spend my time. It sounded like the scream of a bird, but the cave’s walls flung the sounds back and forth like they were playing a game of tennis with a thousand players and a thousand balls where each ball was louder than the one that came before it. Reverb took on a whole different meaning for me after that concussive experience.

‘What the fuck!’ said the inquisitor. She let out a small scream of her own. ‘Make it stop!’

‘I—I don’t know how!’ screamed switchblade-babe now.

Still grasping my ears, I turned the corner and plodded through the cacophony. There were the two girls—they looked at me as though the sight of my presence besieged their eyes in much the same ways the screams of the flamingo flapping about between them besieged their ears. We, all three of us, stared at each other in mad confusion—that’s when I saw the switchblade lying an arms-length in front of me in a small puddle on the craggy floor.

I gathered the courage needed to release my right ear from the saving grace of my muffling palm; then I reached down, as fast as I could, for the knife. I pressed its release switch, and with a zing, the blade popped out. I had no time to think about it further, what with the screaming bird and the ogling girls, so I made a movement somewhere between a jump and a lunge and stabbed the flamingo straight in the neck. The blade went through without any resistance.

The screaming stopped. A dark orange, almost red eye spied me from the flamingo’s head; the black pupil in the middle looked like a moon passing in front of a sun, but now it had stopped there and it would stay there, eclipsing what had been beneath.

Again my eyes locked with switchblade-babe’s. Her lips were thin, but her cheeks looked soft and plump and for a moment I forgot about the bird and thought only of what it would feel like to plant a kiss on those cheeks. Was the secret between us still there?

Then the girls ran—again without so much as a thank you (these people!)—and they left me with a dead flamingo at my feet and a switchblade in my hand. I wiped the blood off the blade and switched it back to its inoffensive state. It had a pleasant weight to it, a weight I appreciated in my hand, and the polish on its wooden handle reflected my face.

Having a moment’s peace in this forsaken cave, I took in the surroundings; feathers were everywhere. The bird must have been in genuine distress. I felt sad for it. It had not deserved to die, but the screaming had to stop. I am no ornithologist (although I can pretend to be one), but, to the extent of my knowledge, flamingos are not cave-dwellers. Perhaps that is why it screamed.

In the corner of the room lay a grocery bag filled with apples; one apple had wedges cut from it. It seemed the girls had been feeding the bird. I put the knife in my pocket and, knowing there was nothing more I could do for this flamingo, went back the way I had come. The wall was still there, shutting the outside world off, but as I felt it with my palm, it spat me out as fast as it had sucked me in.

The sun had set, and the flamingos in their habitat seemed unperturbed—you could not tell that one of their members was missing, and I hoped and prayed to some gods that no one had reported incidents of any horticulturists acting strange in the park. The two girls were out of sight; they must have run as fast as they could.

I carried around this lingering feeling of knowing that I would never find the truth behind the secret I shared with that girl; it nagged at me. I still craved milk tea squeezed right through the pantyhose, but I didn’t know where to get it.