by Jaslyn Law

Fifteen years old—old enough to be pulled to the door by the cosmic tug of Friday nights, but too young and scared to be able to go out and do anything. Hong Kong is no city for boys who haven’t learned how to make bad decisions. If I wasn’t going out tonight—or any Friday in the foreseeable future—I could at least grab a jacket and leave home.

A monsoon was coming and I bent into the hot wind as trees bent away from it. Buses and taxis and chauffeured black cars whined and putted past, their lights coloring the water that pooled and stank wherever the pavement dipped. The top of my head lead my progress up the hill, so I didn’t see the woman crossing my path until she was on the ground, the contents of her handbag rolling down the sidewalk.

I tripped over my feet and my apologies as I scrambled to retrieve the fallen items, trying to avoid looking at her long legs.

“Shit, my brand new Prada,” the woman cursed. “I’ll never get the stains out.”

I offered her a hand up and saw her face clearly for the first time. “Is it—Auntie Angela?” I spoke in English: I knew it was Auntie Angela—Auntie Angela who had always insisted I speak to her in English because that was the only language of any value, literally. She looked the same, even after eight years.  My impressions of her had always been tinted by the red of her spiky hair, her dark eyeliner, her protruding collarbones. My mother coined her in an acerbic three-word explanation—“She’s a socialite.” I had never heard the word before, but when my mother said that—“She’s a socialite”—I knew exactly what it meant, and I knew we did not approve.

Auntie Angela staggered to her feet and swayed on her stilettos, grabbing my shoulder for support. I caught whiffs of cigarette smoke, perfume, and what could only be alcohol. “Is that Miriam’s boy back from Eton? John? Haven’t I always told you it makes me feel old when you call me Auntie?” she peered into my face.

“No—it’s Sheldon—it’s Patricia’s son.”

“Oh, my actual nephew. I suppose you have to call me Auntie. And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see Patricia didn’t teach you any better than to run people over.”

I felt I’d betrayed my mother.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said, and she was, all over the sidewalk. I breathed through my mouth only and stared only at the apartment building before me. It stretched higher into the sky than any of the surrounding skyscrapers.

“As long as you’ve caught me in a situation of utter indignity, you might as well help me up to my apartment. I live here.”
I had no idea how my classmates managed to get into clubs or buy bottles of booze, much less how to deal with people once they’d consumed significant quantities of alcohol. Even if Auntie Angela had been sober, I would have had zero idea about how to deal with her. I hovered a hand over her shoulder and held her oversized red handbag in my other. Together we stumbled into the building’s lobby in a caricature of a pas de deux.

All ritzy apartment buildings place a uniformed concierge inside the front doors, ready to call a taxi for a tenant or eject suspicious looking persons. I prepared to explain my identity, but the concierge didn’t flatter me with a second glance. He turned to press the button for the lift.

Propped up against the elevator wall, Auntie Angela considered me. “Sheldon. God, what a truly terrible name. I told Patricia so, but she’s always had just the worst taste—names, clothes, men.” The scent of alcohol mixed with expensive perfume was exotic and surprisingly light. I imagined it moving through the air like smoke from the long cigarettes she always used to carry.

I abhor my name. “It’s not too bad,” I said, my defensiveness surprising me. The elevator passed from the twelfth to the fourteenth floor, propelling us to the thirty-third floor, into the urban canopy of Hong Kong, where all the city’s dramas unfold.

“How about Shel,” said Auntie Angela. “Shel. That’s a name that you could work. Feminine enough to be unthreatening, but the one-syllable nickname is always sexy. Sheldon, I christen you Shel.”

If I hadn’t roused any suspicion as an adolescent male accompanying an obviously intoxicated tenant clad in stockings with garter straps, I didn’t have a hope of working the name Shel.

The elevator doors opened and we spilled onto the landing. “Don’t you dare touch the walls,” she warned, fumbling with the keys. “They’re silk-paneled and water stains silk. I had Justin bring me all this silk from Bangkok.”

I supposed vomit would stain silk as well and that I was implicitly not supposed to let her touch the silk walls either, but she staggered down the passage to the bathroom before me and left some on the second panel.

“It’s been ages since I last saw you—I feel so old.” She threw herself before the toilet. I busied my eyes with the shadowed splendor of the apartment’s interior decorating and tried—unsuccessfully—to plug my ears with the distant sound of traffic.

“Eight years now, isn’t it?” She looked up from the toilet bowl. “It’s not that I have anything against you, Shel. Of course it’s not you, not really.”

“No—I mean… I know.” I felt a little bit sick myself and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the little chunk of vomit clinging to the imported silk, silk that had come from Thailand just to impractically panel a passage to Auntie Angela’s bathroom. All I knew about Bangkok I knew from my mother: it was dirty, there were a lot of forward whores with venereal diseases, and the looms there spun the most beautiful silk.

“What do you know?” Her voice narrowed to a dangerous point; she held it, threatening, between my ribs. “Tell me what you know.”

I knew my mother looking like she’d just stopped crying, and from behind walls my father’s sharp, “Patricia, can’t you just deal with the fact that she doesn’t care about you at all? You know she only cares about clawing her way to the top.” I remembered the last time I saw Auntie Angela: it was eight years ago and she took me to high noon tea at the Shangri-La as she did every week. She didn’t get me a bag of chocolates from the waitresses she knew by name, but sat tapping her foot, ignoring me completely. I sat as still and as quietly as possible, waiting for her to notice my goodness—or at least to notice me enough to launch into a monologue the importance of improving my English. She didn’t speak at all until my mother came to pick me up. She sprang to her feet and pulled her away and whispered furiously with her before clattering down the stairs, yanking a box of cigarettes out of her handbag as she pushed through the doors. She left her umbrella.

“No—I don’t know anything—I just know it’s none of my business—it has nothing to do with me.”

“That’s right,” she said forcefully. “It’s everything to do with your mom and your dad and this dysfunctional, dysfuctional family.”

I thought my immediate family seemed pretty functional, on the whole.

“Shel.” She sat cross-legged in the middle of her expensive tile, in her expensive clothes, looking like a ravaged movie star—still glamorous, despite the vomit. Her gaze was clearer and steadier now. “A sweet kid, really. Don’t worry. Girls will start to like you soon. You have very serious eyes. You have my father’s eyes; deep, intelligent eyes. I have those eyes. Margaret does too. Patricia never did. You won’t tell Patricia you saw me.”

“Of course not.” She didn’t have to tell me.

“Good boy. And I suppose the thing to do now as the rich aunt is to hand you an obscene stack of money and send you on your way.” Her eyes focused on my face again. “But you look an awful lot like Patricia, aside from the eyes, and I won’t give her anything, nothing at all.”

She played a rhythm on the toilet bowl with her fingernails.

“There’s—I think a spot—on the wall,” I said.

“I’ll have to repanel them. Ochre would be nice. I’ll have to tell Justin.”

“Well—goodbye, Auntie,” I said, hovering at the end of the hall.

“Goodbye, Shel,” she said from the floor.

The elevator dropped through storeys and storeys of blinking, flashing city. Shel. I christen you Shel. I passed the concierge, who didn’t bother to look up from his paperback. I thought I might like it if I were able to come back. I thought I’d like to learn more about Shel and my intelligent eyes and the girls who would like me and silk walls all the way from Bangkok. I thought I’d like to know what bad decisions people made on Friday nights, only I looked like my mother.
I wanted to go back eight years to the Shangri-La and pitch a tantrum.

Thirty-three floors up, the lights were on in just the one unit. “Oh, it was no problem taking care of you.” My voice shrilled, high and sarcastic. “No thanks needed, really.” My friends would tell me I was acting like a girl if they could hear me, and anybody else would think I was insane if they saw me. I stuffed my balled fists back in my pockets for the walk home, hoping the occupants of the looming glass high-rises around me were looking up at the ominous, moonlit cloud cover instead of down at the street.

“Where were you?” My mother asked this every time I walked in, automatically, tonelessly, without expectation—knowing full well I didn’t have the courage to make bad decisions.

I looked her in the eyes, noticed how they were not like mine, how they were flatter, how they were smaller, how common and bland they were. My hands were shaking with a strange energy; I trembled with it.

“Nowhere.” The belligerence of the word felt dangerous, powerful on my tongue.

My mother lowered her magazine and stared at me. “Shel—” How could she know, she couldn’t know, I was overexcited, it was only her stammer—“Sh—Sheldon. You do not speak to me in that tone. I don’t care where you were; you are grounded.”

As my voice rose in practiced incredulity, as it began complaining about the unfairness, as her voice and mine competed for volume, I grasped for comfort in the argument I knew she would win, in my mother assuring me—I was Sheldon, and I was grounded.