Where do you go when it’s Christmas, but the sky is starless? Carnaby Street, apparently.
“Mum! Mum!” my sister pointed excitedly at the Christmas lights from her buggy, as mum patted her and laughed before saying to dad, “Poor Lia. She’s a real country girl.”
It’s strange how words turn into stepping-stones, and you don’t even know which shore they’re leading to until the sentence peters to an end. I found myself washed between two shores without a foothold, with Hong Kong on one side and England on the other.
In Harbour City, lit-up grottos and snowmen and penguins sprung from both ground and sky. Children, in their high, lyrical Cantonese, were half-convinced that the world became a Disney movie. I would too if I were their age. So would Lia. It’s strange how much of what I saw as ordinary – Christmas trees in shopping centres reaching over ten floors high, skyscrapers casting long stripes of green and red over the black harbour, glass bridges hundreds of meters up – would be stranger than flying pigs to her. But again, so much is beautiful in children’s eyes. Why wouldn’t it be? Everything is revolutionary to a spotless mind. She couldn’t turn her eyes away from the moon when she saw it for the first time.
I’ve seen the moon too many times to count, but I still think it looks the most ethereal when reflected in a cat’s eyes. After we sold our flat, we had a dinner or two with the couple that eventually made my room their cat’s. The cat was a slow-paced, wide-eyed thing. I wonder if he’s ever paced along my window’s edge and asked himself if he could make the jump to the world below. I loved that window – it was so wide and so tall that I always felt like a bird on a cloud when I pressed my face against it. Sometimes I almost felt divine. Twenty-five floors up, adults were nothing more than sluggish dots that moved among the masses of markets, roads, and grey malls that cut a borderland between the mountains and the ocean.
I wonder if cats stare at the moon with as much wonder as a child, and if his owners ever told him that the Ancient Chinese believed a woman who wanted too much was doomed to wander there for eternity. I wonder if the cat ever sees mid-autumn, Christmas, or the New Year being built below him, bit by bit, and feel left out.
I found myself drifting through the crowd. The Christmas lights took on a sickly glow. It’s strangely common for me to feel completely drawn inwards, navel-gazing and disconnected, even when people pass by me in swathes. When someone bumped into me and broke my trance, I looked up. I saw smiles everywhere, like smiling was the default, like smiling is the human condition, and it gave the world a strange, hallucinogenic air. Like everyone’s on some new drug that I didn’t know where to find. I felt disgust rise in my chest, but something else – something green, serpentine – wound around my neck. It pulled tighter than a noose when I saw rows of girls my age, arm in arm, as they went for drinks and laughed as they took photos of each other under the lights. None of them needed to wait for a text from morning, Hong Kong time.
I looked into the crowd again. This time, I saw someone who was alone – truly alone – with a certain self-consciousness, as if he was committing every LED on Carnaby Street to memory. He eventually looked down, and his eyes passed over us. I wonder if he saw a teenage girl, walking beside her parents, sister in buggy, and felt cold thorns punch through his veins in silence.
The LED rainbows, in simple arcs of light ranging from red to violet, cast gentle stripes of colour over Lia’s face. She smiled as her mind floated somewhere beyond stepping-stones and shores.
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