The Trophy Taker Read Online Free PDF

she could. She was a foreigner in a country she barely knew but she found strength through her child. Every day she bundled her pink, washed and pampered baby into the pram and manoeuvred it into the outside world. She faced all life’s obstacles for this child and forged a bond between mother and daughter that was dependence and love entwined. Now Feng Ying was dead and Georgina must make it alone – something she had never imagined in her twenty-two years that she would have to do.
    After clearing passport control Georgina collected her case and made her way through the new airport, a massive high-ceilinged hangar on Lantau Island. Pulling her heavy case behind her, she looked anxiously along the line of names written on cardboard held up by eager-looking drivers. Most were written in Chinese. It took her a few minutes before she saw hers. Georgi - na written in red felt pen on brown card and held up by a leathery-faced old man. He greeted her in Chinglish, smiling and nodding profusely as he picked up her case. Georgina tried to explain that it had wheels and that he could pull it along if he wanted. But he didn’t understand and it didn’t matter. He hardly struggled with the weight. Small and wiry he might have been, but he was definitely strong.
    As they stepped outside, the bright sun slapped Georgina in the face and the heat wrapped itself around her like cling film. By the time they reached the taxi, less than a minute’s walk, she was sweating and couldn’t wait to find shade inside the cab.
    The taxi driver’s name was Max, but it hadn’t always been. A teacher handed out the English names in class. He had been allotted the name Maxwell, which he later shortened to Max on the advice of an American tourist. Fong Man Tak was his birth name; he preferred Max.
    Max was not altogether sure what age he was: there was no definitive documentation. But he had counted the years from when he was told by his mother that he had reached the age of eight. So now he thought he was sixty, and his mother was long dead.
    Max had been a taxi driver for the last thirty years, and most of the time it brought him a modest income. Taxis were thick on the ground in Hong Kong so he had to work long hours to make it worthwhile.
    Georgina peered silently out of the window. She was mesmerised by the cars all around her. She hadn’t envisaged Hong Kong looking quite so un-British. She’d thought, as a former British colony, that somehow it would mirror London in miniature. Or perhaps it would look like a Victorian seaside town with mock Tudor B&Bs, maybe with a dilapidated pier. She didn’t know quite which, but she certainly hadn’t expected it to look so completely different. It seemed to her to be a futuristic alien world of skyscrapers.
    She tilted her head at the window and stretched her eyes upwards. ‘Gods,’ she thought, the skyscrapers were like gods’ legs: perfected from glass and chrome, glinting gloriously in the sunshine. There were so many different kinds: some were honeycombed like rec t angular wasps’ nests; others were skeletal, jutting skyward as bony white fingers. And the strangest thing of all were the building sites that bridged the gaps between the buildings like gums between teeth.
    All the time Georgina studied her new environment, Max studied her in the mirror. He was fascinated by her cascading curls and her pale, luminescent beauty. It was not the first time he’d had a foreign girl in his car. Many girls had sat where she sat now. They were strange, unearthly creatures, the Western girls. They didn’t seem real to Max. They were images from a film: plastic, false. Sometimes Max thought about the other girls, the ones who had ridden in his cab. He wondered where they’d gone.
    One of the girls who’d sat in the back of Max’s cab, where Georgina was sitting now, had not gone far. Part of her now resided in a drawer of a mortuary fridge. The rest of her was still waiting to be found.

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    Max