One for My Baby Read Online Free

what she was going on about. But I was genuinely impressed. She seemed like more of a grown-up than I would ever be.
    Most of her colleagues – those loud boys and girls braying in the penthouse bar of the Mandarin every night, ignoring the sunset over the harbour – had an amused contempt for Hong Kong.
    They saw a street sign for Wan King Road and howled about it for the duration of their stay, as though Hong Kong existed purely for their amusement. They collected and drooled over all the evidence of Hong Kong’s madness. And there was plenty.
    The local brand of toilet paper called My Fanny. The Causeway Bay department store – a Japanese store as it happened, but let that pass – where they sold truffles named Chocolate Negro Balls. The popular Hong Kong anti-freeze spray known as My Piss.
    And I laughed too when I first saw the ads for My Piss – I’m not saying that I didn’t. But the lipless wonders never stopped. Sooner or later you should forget about My Fanny and go look at the sunset, go look at the lights. But somehow the lipless wonders never got around to that.
    Rose wasn’t like the rest of them. She loved the place.
    I don’t want to make her sound like Mother Teresa with a briefcase. The Cantonese can be an abrasive bunch, and, confronted by a sulky taxi driver or a rude waiter or a pushy beggar, Rose was quite capable of feeling all the helpless frustration of any hot, tired expatriate. But the bad feelings never lasted for very long.
    She loved Hong Kong. She loved the people and – unusually for a woman with her job, her salary, her skin colour – she thought it was right that they were getting the place back.
    “Oh, come on , Alfie,” she said one night when I was going on about the special feeling, and how I didn’t want it ever to end. “Hong Kong might be a British invention. But it has a Chinese heart.”
    She wanted to find the real Hong Kong. Left to my own devices, I would have nursed a Tsingtao in Lan Kwai Fong and looked at the lights. Left to myself, I would have vegetated quite happily in the unreal Hong Kong, convinced that the special feeling was all I needed to know.
    Rose took me deeper. Rose took me beyond the lights. As she did so, she turned affection into something more. For Hong Kong. And for her.
    She took me to a temple behind Central where everything was red and gold and the air was choked with incense as little old ladies burned fake money in huge stone drums. Through the perfumed mist you could just about make out two brass deer gleaming on the altar.
    “For longevity,” Rose said, and when I think about Rose talking about longevity now, it makes me want to weep.
    Back in the days we thought would never end, she took me to places where I would never have gone without her. We had dim sum in a restaurant near my flat where we were the only gweilo . We walked the narrow streets between apartment blocks covered in TV aerials, potted plants and washing lines. She took my hand and led me down sunless alleys where toothless old men in flip-flops bet on two crickets fighting in a wooden box.
    And I met her from work and we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and a cinema where it seemed that every mobile phone in the audience never once stopped ringing. Everyone else I knew would have been maddened by the experience. Rose rocked in her seat with laughter.
    “Now this is the real Hong Kong,” she said. “You want to find Hong Kong, mister?” She raised her hand to the symphony of mobile phones. “ This is it .”
    Yet she loved doing all the British things. Every Saturday afternoon, after she had finished work – the shop expected her to work half a day on Saturday – we had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, looking out at Central on the other side of the harbour as we sipped our Earl Grey and tucked into our jam scones and noshed our little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Once or twice we even watched Josh and his hairy-arsed friends playing rugby and cricket.
    It