Hainan Dao

Book I Chapter 03

As we climbed up the stairs, I asked Anna how she was, whether her old skin allergies were still giving her problems. She told me things were fine. She also told me that Dylan was just here, that I had just missed him. He had left on an early flight out just yesterday.

That’s funny. What was he doing in Hong Kong? I thought most of his business took him to Europe now. Mentally, I shrugged.

***

The first thing I did the next morning, was to wake up and stay in bed. Well, I had to. I had gone to bed the evening before at seven o’clock, completely exhausted. Now, as I woke up, thoroughly refreshed, I checked the clock and it said 2 AM.

I fiddled around for another four hours before I made my first telephone call. I rang up a travel agent I knew, a family friend, and asked her to book me a flight out to Hainan Island. She said fine. I could leave on Friday of the same week. Good, I said. That’ll give me a little time to adjust.

When the sun finally came up, I found that the weather had turned cloudy. I left the house, with an umbrella tucked beneath my arm. I took the subway across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island, and then transferred via a taxi to the Christian Cemetery. I bought flowers from the shop set up conveniently near the entrance, and trudged up the hundred and fifty odd steps to where my parents rested together beneath the ground.

I stood in front of their grave and tried to picture again in my mind, that day when I was kneeling at my father’s deathbed in the hospital. I played back, over and over again, the words that he had shouted at me between his fits of violent coughing. Glancing around me, I remembered the people at the funeral, now a hollow piece of imagery floating around me like teased off pieces of candyfloss, riding upon the eddies in the hillside air. A legion of mourners, all dressed in black. The sun beating down on us from overhead. The sweat trickling down the back of my neck, as I listened to the preacher spill out his thoughts and tell everyone what a great man my father had been.

I heard footsteps from behind me. I turned around. A figure appeared from out of the early morning fog. An old man. An old man, all bent over, wearing a huge sun hat weaved in straw, and a large bottle held in his hand. He smiled as he approached.

“Tso sun, nei ho.” (Good morning, you are well.)

“Good morning, you are well,” I replied.

He stopped in front of me and craned his neck back to peer up into my eyes. “Mr. Chan?”

“Yes.” I frowned. “How did you know my name?”

“I…” His eyes happened to fall on the pictures on my parents’ headstone. “Oh! My apologies…!” He bowed. “I had mistaken you.”

“Oh?”

He chuckled. “I had thought you were your father. The two of you are so alike…”

I coughed. “Are you the groundskeeper here?”

“…father and son. So much alike. He used to come here in the morning as you do now…” He turned to the headstone. He smiled with his eyes closed.

“Sir?” I reached out and touched him on the shoulder.

He turned his face toward me and his mind drifted back to the present. “Hm?”

“You are the groundskeeper.”

He nodded.

“I would like you to take special care with this plot.”

He nodded profusely. “As I have always done! Just as your father had bid me do.”

“That’s good.”