Knife Box
It was Lanson Place. He sent the confirmation on WhatsApp together with a grinning, horned emoji. She replied with a smiling face, even though she was unhappy; and her disappointment only grew when they showed her the room.
It wasn’t even one of the nice suites she had seen on the hotel’s website. No, it was a so-called “Deluxe Room”, which meant that it was small and had no view; the only window opened over a messy cluster of high-rises.
In the past, they’d gone to the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, the Mira and the Rosewood. Once they had even been to Upper House. And now this.
She dropped the two bags — the blue overnight bag and the small pink leather handbag — on the chair. She unpacked the dress for work the next day, the make-up set, the toothbrush. Hotels provided toothbrushes, but she preferred to bring her own. She hung the dress in the wardrobe and brushed it with her hand to smooth out the wrinkles. After she’d done this for longer than necessary, she sat on the bed, took off her dress and slipped out of her shoes. She always wore high heels when she met him, and although she had picked a comfortable pair, her feet were sore.
Besides, he was late.
She’d rushed over from work in an Uber, worried she might make him wait. They were meant to meet at 7, and she’d arrived at 6:55. Now it was 7:15.
He was always late.
She’d texted him at 5: “See you at 7? Can’t wait xx”. He hadn’t answered, even though the two blue ticks next to her message proved that he’d seen it.
Why did he keep doing this? Wasn’t he aware how rude, how insensitive it was? It had clearly been a question; she had included the question mark on purpose, after much reflection. Still, he hadn’t replied.
It wasn’t as if he was bad at messaging, not when he wanted something from her. When he asked her to bring something to one of their dates, that something being invariably a bottle of spirits, he was a persistent and quick texter. No problem there. Not the Glenfiddich. I prefer MacAllan. How many years?
Oh, he was clear then, wasn’t he?
She sat cross-legged on the bed and picked at her nails. They were painted Smoky Topaz. At least that’s what the girl in the salon had called the colour.
It was 7:20. It was always the same. She was already upset when she sent the message, but she’d still tried to hit the right tone. That question mark — she’d agonised before eventually including it.
Was it too much to ask for, this minimal amount of effort? Not even effort, just politeness. Treating your lover like this, the lover you’ve been sleeping with for ten months, who never causes any drama, who squeezes toothpaste onto your toothbrush while you’re still snoring loudly in the Mandarin Oriental or the Island Shangri-la, or presumably even here in Lanson Place, shitty though it is — should you not have a modicum of decency and at least not make the contempt in which you hold said lover that clear?
It’s not like she didn’t accept that sometimes he was late because of his profession, as he always called it. She didn’t mind. But several times when he’d claimed that he’d been stuck in meetings she’d smelled booze on his breath and once, after he’d complained that “the bitches in Beijing” had kept him on a conference call that overran for two hours, his voice had slurred.
She looked at the overnight bag. She hadn’t yet unpacked the lingerie and the small leather sleeve. She ought to put on the lingerie — she’d bought it, after all, so she might as well wear it.
Her eyes fell on the reflection of her naked body in the dark full-size mirror on the far wall. She looked wan, even sickly. Her hair was flat, and there were bags under her eyes.
There were, in her opinion, different types of mirrors in the world — friendly and unfriendly ones. The mirrors in her home were friendly. She’d chosen them carefully, but this one — it was hostile.
Still, gaunt and drawn was preferable to fat like the Walrus, wasn’t it?
It was. Yet the shock of an earlier experience with a mirror lingered in her mind. That had been about a month ago, when they’d spent a night in the Mira in Tsim Sha Tsui. He’d been asleep already, snoring like he always did. When she’d looked at the mirror opposite the bed and seen her reflection in the streetlights that flooded in through the window, she’d seen folds of flesh that she would have sworn had never been there before. She looked away in horror.
Yes, fat was worse than old. That’s what he always said too. And she’d known even that night in the Mira that she wasn’t fat. But her flesh had changed. It sagged, as if she were made of wax and a cruel hand had held her too close to a flame.
She got off the bed and walked to the overnight bag. She wanted to get away from that cruel mirror. But how could she wear the lingerie now that she had thought of her melting flesh? She should do more exercise. He’d said that he “encouraged” her to go to the gym. Not because of her appearance, he’d said, he loved her appearance, no, for her health. But it was not a problem of exercise. It was a problem of hostile mirrors.
Why was that mirror there anyway? So the guests could watch themselves fuck? Was that what Lanson Place was — a more expensive love hotel, like those terrible, tawdry places in Kowloon Tong and Mong Kok?
What did that make her? A social escort? A cheap hook-up that was no longer good enough for the suite in the Conrad, where he’d taken her for their first night? They had lain in bed and looked at the beautiful harbour view together.
What was this anyway, this thing with always staying in hotels? Yes, she had accepted it as, in its way, inevitable. She still lived with her mother — her brother and sister had long ago married and moved out. And of course there was the situation, as he politely called it. Still, how lovely it would be if they had a flat of their own! A small love nest — was that too much to ask? She’d suggested it to him, not directly of course, but if he’d got the hint he’d shown no sign. She was so sick of hotels! She’d never liked them. It had been okay with them only because they’d been nice hotels. And now this — Lanson Place.
It wasn’t even that she couldn’t afford her own flat, although it wouldn’t be as nice as the one he had in Kennedy Town — she’d never been there, of course, what with the situation, but he’d shown her pictures of a gleaming marble bathroom and a full-sized kitchen with an oven. Her flat would be small and squalid, and not on the Island. It would be in Sheung Shui or Sham Shui Po or somewhere like that. She still felt, in some inchoate way, like a stranger on the Island, as if he were the local and she a tourist.
She took off her underwear, taking care not to look into the mirror. She picked up the leather sheath, felt the weight of the object inside, and put it down again.
She knew that her thoughts about the Island made no sense. She was the local and he the expat, not the other way around. It was clichéd – such a stereotypical match. A British man with an expensive watch and thinning reddish hair, huffing and puffing over a supine Asian body. A married man. She was a walking stereotype, the demure Oriental woman playing the — what? The social escort! Pleasing him, the Western coloniser, for lack of a better word. It was nauseating. It was a humiliation.
It hadn’t felt like that when she lived in the UK for her studies. What she remembered most from back then was how free she’d felt. At last she’d been away from her mother who, when she didn’t nag her, spent long afternoons locked in her bedroom with soft sobbing coming from the other side of the door. She loved her mother, but how wonderful it had been to be away! True, it hadn’t been one of the red-brick colleges in London that she’d originally targeted. It was crappy little High Wycombe, but at least she’d been close to London, really just outside, and in her last year she’d even lived in Brentford.
How wonderful that last year in Brentford had been! She’d had a boyfriend then, a fair-haired English boy who had been good to her, who had always appeared somewhat puzzled that she had chosen him. She was a good-looking woman who knew how to present herself to men, and Asian women had been popular over there, in that country full of walruses. Men had spoken to her on campus, the streets, even the Tube. But after a little bit of fun and exploration she’d picked the fair-haired boy, and it had been good. She’d liked him, perhaps even — she thought of this with a mixture of reluctance and longing — loved him. And he had loved her, this puzzled, fair-haired boy from Peckham.
She’d never told him that she loved him, and he’d never said it to her, but she’d seen it in his eyes more than once. He was one of those English boys who were raised in what he called the upper lower middle class, whatever that was, to be awfully polite in such matters and never to inconvenience his girlfriend with declarations of love.
She walked back to the bed and put down the lingerie. He’d told her to buy it — well, not told her exactly, but he had shown it to her on his phone and said, “that one I really like”.
The fair-haired boy would never have done something so crude.
She inspected it. The bra didn’t cover the nipples and the panties were crotchless. It was so tacky. No La Perla or Aubade for him — no, he was an Ann Summers man through and through. Actually, not even Ann Summers, but cheap Chinese-made lingerie made from low-quality synthetic fibre. Many of these English men liked things plasticky and fake, like in the glossy magazines UK newsagents hid on top shelves, the ones teenage boys bought in secret. It was as if these men got stuck when they were 15 and never grew up.
It struck her then that she loathed him. She hadn’t been fully aware of this until she thought about the fair-haired boy. He would never have expected her to prance about in gaudy, cheap lingerie.
Oh, how she hated him, with his ill-fitting suits and his croaking voice with its stupid Wolverhampton accent! She hated how smug he was, how he spoke softly yet managed to boast at the same time about his job as an in-house lawyer at some bank or fund or whatever. She hated the way he booked these hotel rooms without checking if she was okay with them.
His meaty butcher’s hands, with their red, dry skin. The wrinkles and folds on his neck that made him look prematurely old. The look in his eyes, that said I can find another one at any time. His mouth didn’t say it, but his eyes did. And his sneer.
The way he spoke to her. Oh, High Wycombe, that’s the place I always passed through. On his way to Oxford, to Keble College, where he read (people at Oxford didn’t study, they read, studying was beneath them) his bigshot history degree. Today we learn how Britain conquered the world. Tomorrow we learn why Britain deserved its colonies. He passed through High Wycombe once more on his way to London to become a solicitor, and now he was undoubtedly passing through Hong Kong, and passing through her too.
The way he walked, broad-legged like an ape, each step a mighty declaration, a conquest of territory, a colonisation. Thwomp. Thwomp. Down came the leather shoes, handmade on Bond Street. Thwomp.
He was so full of himself he couldn’t even see her. As if the universe were filled only with him. He was the Big Bang: all things emanated from him and revolved only about him.
Without even being conscious of her actions, she had slipped into the lingerie. By accident she caught a glance of herself in the mirror, a dull sheen on the red fabric in the halogen light. The underwear flattered her; yet there were the sagging folds that had not been there a year ago and had begun an apparently inexorable conquest of her body.
How had she ended up like this, dressed in tacky underwear from Taobao? The fair-haired boy had been bowled over by the fact that she was in his life at all; her mere existence had astonished him.
It had been her mother, or rather her father. A sudden heart attack while bobbing in the flat waters of Clearwater Bay. Her mother had been on the phone crying, and she had cried too. How could she stay in Brentford, how could she not come back and take care of her mother in her grief? How could she have known that that grief would mutate into a dreadful, crushing depression that would never again release her mother from its clutches?
The fair-haired boy had briefly stopped being puzzled and had cried too, first because of her father, and then because she broke up with him.
Yes, it had been because of the long distance. No, that had not been the only, or even the major reason. To be with a puzzled boy who cried easily, who was a bit soft, a bit wet — was that really what she needed and most of all, what she deserved? She knew her effect on men, after all. She’d been popular in the UK, popular enough to have a boyfriend and still a bit of fun when the boyfriend had already been in the picture (but not much! she assured herself, forgiving herself immediately).
She could do better, couldn’t she? Better than the fair-haired boy. After all, when she’d told him about her father’s death, instead of being strong, instead of being her rock, instead of being there for her, what had he done? Cry, that’s what. She knew that these days men shouldn’t have to follow gender stereotypes (she’d taken a gender studies class once, and it had been full of talk on such matters), but she could not help but feel put off, even disgusted if she was honest. She was the one who was supposed to be allowed to cry, not him.
Yet once back in Hong Kong, she had found that things were different, that they were tougher. There were lots of attractive girls. Many of them — she did not like to admit this to herself but knew it in some primal part of her mind — were as hot as or even hotter than her. There were fewer men, too, or rather fewer eligible men for all these girls, and the men who were there — the ones with good jobs and cocky looks in their eyes — those men were not looking for anything serious right now, or not over the break-up, or, in one case, ethically non-monogamous, which had sounded to her like no more than a fancy term for fucking around.
It was a trick of the light, a bad mirror. But then — it was true. She was getting older! Not that he could tell. 29, she’d told him. Just shy of the big birthday. How she hoped he’d never find out the truth — 35! What a dreadful number. The end of youth. Middle-aged now. A middle-aged office lady, an HR professional.
She wasn’t guilty — he’d lied too! She’d rifled through his wallet that night in the Mira. He’d lain in bed spread-eagled, mouth open, making sounds like a defective steam-engine and she’d pulled his Hong Kong ID card out of his wallet. 48, not 39. An even bigger lie than her. But unlike him, she’d never believed it. He had too many wrinkles, his skin was too flabby, his sparse chest hair too grey.
Yet she’d looked at the frog-faced picture on the ID, and when she’d seen him snoring on the bed it had felt like the first time she’d seen him without a façade. Without the expensive suit, casually slung over the back of the sofa, without the watch, coiled like a snake on the bedside table, without the Bond Street shoes that had been flung in a fit of exuberance into a corner of the room — how pathetic he looked! How old, just a few years away from those Western sex tourists who sipped on pints of Stella in the bars of Wan Chai — Victoria’s, Churchill’s, The Old China Hand Pub — ogling and groping Filipina maids moonlighting as — what? Social escorts? All of them named Jholynn or Maribel or Marylou, all of them offering themselves for the price of a meal at Caprice, no, not even Caprice, more like Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Not her. She wasn’t like them. Unlike them she had class, she had style, she had a degree in HR Management from Buckinghamshire New University.
No! She wasn’t desperate. She was the one who had broken things off with the fair-haired boy — not only that, she’d cheated on him. He’d cried like an idiot but he’d never found out what she’d really done.
It was him, it was all him! With his wide-arsed English wife who was 35 — her age! — but looked 50, her body fat and flabby since the birth of the twins. On the photos he’d shown her, the wife had sagging bulldog jowls on the sides of a downward-pointing mouth, and a flab of fatty skin that dangled from her chin and that — he’d said in a malicious voice — his Austrian friend called a "Goder", which apparently was a word in Austrian for the type of flab that hangs from your chin and wobbles back and forth.
Yet it was not the Goder that constituted what they both called the situation. Or at least not just the Goder. No, the situation was the flabby wife lying in bed all day crying (like her mother? No, she assured herself, definitely not like her mother) but not taking care of anything, not even the children, although they had a helper and a nanny and the wife didn’t work. It was all him, as he always told her, he had to do everything and pay for everything and she wouldn’t even shag him in return, not that he’d want to, with her looking like a walrus, and the Goder and all that.
So that was the situation. That was why he’d always been so clear that he wanted to leave her, the walrus lying in bed crying and stuffing herself with Lay’s crisps and the Goder swinging back and forth. At first, she’d believed him: it was only a matter of time. He’d kick the Walrus out and she would be the one he chose. Oh, of course she’d never said this. She’d played it cool, had said that she was not looking for anything serious, that she wanted to have fun and that she had no expectations. She’d said it so many times she’d almost come to believe it.
But then they’d been in the Island Shangri-la the week after their terrible stay in the Mira, and there had been a plastic bag with a large black box inside. A present for the Walrus, he’d explained, a set of ten beautiful ceramic knives with black handles and pearly-white blades. He’d opened the box and shown them to her. She couldn’t tell the difference between them. She could barely cook, despite her time in the UK. In Hong Kong she either ate out or, more frequently, although she never told him, her mother cooked for her.
He said that the Walrus had wanted the knives for cooking, that she was concerned the twins didn’t eat enough healthy, balanced meals (how did this square with his venomous claims that she cared about nothing and only lay in bed snacking on Wotsits? She ignored this question); so he’d bought them for her birthday.
It was not that she compared the price of the knives with the presents he had given to her. No. But she’d gone to Sogo the next day and found the same set, and the number on the sticker had been surprisingly large. They were fancy knives, handmade by an Italian ceramics master. The price flitted through her mind, over and over.
It was in moments like these that she felt he was showing off his big expat job with its big expat salary. How clear he made it that he was better than her. She’d told him that she’d come back to Hong Kong for her career, that she’d received an amazing offer covering the Greater China region for a big corporation. In reality, she’d been unemployed for nearly a year after her return.
She tottered back to the overnight bag in her high heels and tacky red lingerie, and took out the leather sheath.
She pulled the knife out. Its blade was also pearly-white. It was from the same brand; unlike the Walrus, she’d bought it with her own money. It was very sharp. She’d tried to cook with it, just once, and the flesh had dropped off the chicken drumsticks like ice cream melting off a cone. Ceramic knives were fragile, but cut sharper than steel.
When had she decided? She didn’t know, but now the idea was here, had perhaps been present ever since he’d shown her the knife box — no, even earlier, since that dreadful night in the Mira. How old they’d both been revealed to be, how far down the road. There was much less awaiting them in the future than they had already had. When she’d seen the brazen truth on his ID, something inside her had been set into subterranean motion.
The next day, after years of silence, she’d written to the fair-haired boy, unsure even to herself what she was expecting. He had replied with a picture of his two children, young and sweet, and also twins.
It didn’t matter. She knew what she had to do.
While he was sleeping, frog mouth open, making his gross choking sounds. A decisive stab into that noisy throat, the brilliantly sharp edge of the blade sinking into skin, gristle and bone all the way to the spinal cord (was that where the spinal cord was? She’d seen it in a crime show once but wasn’t sure). Would he scream? Could he scream with a ceramic knife buried inside his throat?
Or maybe the chest. To ram it into his smug, puffed-up ribcage. The way he always pushed it out! The I can find a new one chest. The blade was sharp, and if it found his heart it would cleave it in two.
But there was bone there, wasn’t there? There were ribs that would impede the passage of the blade, that maybe would — if her aim was poor, if the angle was wrong — even shatter the fragile pearly-white blade. What if the knife broke like a vase and she felt his red butcher’s hands close around her neck? The way he looked at her sometimes, especially when she compared the way he treated her to the Walrus — surely he’d thought about it.
No, better the throat! It was easier and she needed it to be easy so she wouldn’t lose heart. In important moments she always lacked courage — when she came back to the UK, when she didn’t tell him he had to leave the Walrus or it would be finished — so it had to be easy. She held up the knife so the yellow glow of the bedside lamp cast a matte sheen on the white blade.
He’d attacked her! That’s what she’d say. She was a petite local girl and he a beefy, blundering expat. The bored, suspicious cops wouldn’t care, she was sure of it! Who would care about a gweilo who had attacked her, a local? She’d say that he’d placed his butcher’s hands around her long neck and squeezed the pearly white, unblemished skin on her 29-year-old looking body.
The rage inside her grew as she turned the knife over in her hand. It was hot, explosive like a volcano. She could never sustain it for long, was incapable of the cold, methodical acts of vengeance that spurned wives and enraged mistresses plotted in the Korean soap operas she was fond of watching. No, her rage was like lava. Normally it simmered and roiled inside her, but then —
8 p.m.! Still he was missing, still probably in the Salted Pig with that disgusting, wayward Austrian friend of his, the one who came up with words like Goder.
It was his fault — all of it was his fault. His fault she was in this hotel in porn actress lingerie, face painted like a clown, waiting by herself until he deigned to spend a little time with her. His fault she was single — because in reality that’s what she was, wasn’t it? His fault he was trashing his family by having an affair, his fault for making her complicit. His fault she couldn’t find anyone else, because she was attached to him, his fault the fair-haired boy was gone from her life and someone else now lived in the flat in Brentford while she was back in smelly, overcrowded Hong Kong playing nurse to her ailing mother. If only he gave her what she wanted — love, comfort, security. Why did he refuse? Why did he stay with the Walrus?
It’s not like she didn’t know by now that he wouldn’t leave the Walrus. But he told her he couldn’t even get it up with the Walrus anymore. With her, he could perform no problem, and she always reassured him how awesome the sex was, how much she loved it, that she was in fact a sex kitten. In reality she faked almost all her orgasms, and most of the time didn’t feel like having sex at all. It was a chore, always had been, even with the fair-haired boy (there had been exceptions, back in London. They had been surreptitious and messy and dark and wild, and she preferred to keep them out of her mind).
It was in her mind, constantly — every time she replied with a heart emoji to his goodnight messages, every time she sent him a happy face when he made a booking — each time in a slightly cheaper, slightly less upmarket hotel than before (yes, she’d told him she didn’t care which hotel as long as they were together, she didn’t mind — but he should know, he should book something nice despite her words, to show that he treasured her). Even when he did take care of her, when she was able to let go and drift on her feelings like a cloud — even then it was still there.
The Walrus. The mistress. The cheap hotels.
The box with the ceramic knives.
Tonight was the night. Tonight, it had to happen! He’d been drunk more often, drunk and coarse, and not too long ago he’d slapped her. She’d been crazy, complaining about the Walrus and the restaurant he’d taken her to, and he’d had too much MacAllan and slapped her. It hadn’t been very hard, and he’d apologised, shocked and wide-eyed, and then they’d had the best sex they’d had in ages and for once she hadn’t even had to fake her orgasm.
She was still holding the blade in her hand when the soft chime of the doorbell sounded. Quickly she slid the knife into its sheath and placed it in the overnight bag. She hurried to the door in the nipple-free bra and red crotchless panties, almost tipping over in the Louboutin heels he had bought her when they had first started dating.
It was 8:13 p.m. when she opened the door, her Sultry Violet painted lips stretched in a welcoming smile.
#
At first they didn’t hear the beep beep beep of the alarm clock. They’d been drinking a lot. The girl always told him he drank too much, but she was the one who always ended up paralytic. It didn’t bother him; in fact, he liked it. She was sweet then, and looked at him with flushed cheeks and wide, dazed eyes.
He got up, took a shower and packed his travel bag. He’d told Claire that he’d had to go to Guangzhou, and he’d been careful with his packing. Once he’d forgotten his passport on the bedside drawer. She hadn’t seen it (hadn’t wanted to see it?), but he had been horrified how close he had come to the edge of an enormous abyss. Since that day he’d been careful, even leaving print-outs of hotel bookings lying about the flat for Claire to find. He was confident that she’d never even heard of Lanson Place, but he never stayed in the same hotel twice, just to make sure.
Still, this morning he was cheerful. He loved Claire. It’s not that he didn’t. And he liked the girl too. At times it had occurred to him that perhaps he could love her as well, but he had quickly dismissed the idea. Loving two people at the same time — such a thing was impossible, or at the very least too much trouble.
By the time he stepped out of the shower she had already changed out of the lingerie. Her long hair was still damp.
She smiled at him. "Good morning, darling," she cooed.
She flattered him. A 29-year-old, almost 20 years younger than him, who had no expectations, who wanted to enjoy life, and enjoy it with him. His whole life he’d only known people wanting things from him, had never felt that he could just — be. Not for any benefit he provided, but just for who he was, for the sheer pleasure of existence. How refreshing was this type of relationship, based on romance and sex and not some greater expectation. She was such a sweet girl; she’d once again got up before him and squeezed toothpaste onto his brush. And the sex was great. Claire had always been so reserved.
Yes, the girl was attached to him, he knew it, and yes, she was not entirely happy that she wasn’t his main partner. He did not blame her, although she did get annoying and emotional when she was drunk, and a few times he had come close — very close — to losing his temper. And yes, she looked a little older these days. Yes, he was back on dating apps, his face carefully obscured, but he was happy, happy to enjoy this carefree romance and, when it had run its course, to let it go, to kiss it as it left him, like watching a beautiful bird take flight from his hand.
He was ready to leave before her. He told her he needed to dash. She smiled, and at the door she stood on tiptoe to give him a little kiss and said see you soon.
The humid air engulfed him as he emerged into the morning heat and bustle of Causeway Bay. He took a deep breath. There was time for a quick coffee before work. Then, refreshed by a successful night, he would be ready to start a new day.
After many turbulent years in seven countries spread over three continents, Gregor Windstill has settled down in Hong Kong. He has had many lives, including a flirtation with academia and a brutish one night stand with journalism, and is now marinating in the unctuous goo of corporate life. His day job requires him to pretend to be a mature adult; his true self, and with it his deepest love, are reserved for storytelling.
You can find him on Substack at the following link:
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