David Muller was the product of an elite private school education and a large inheritance, which included The Hotel Raven, an eastern suburbs pub where the handshakes were firm and the smiles counterfeit. In the City of Churches, men such as Muller, who boasted a robust entitlement, were like moss: attractive but slippery. His pedigree went back like a Protestant settler Book of Genesis, who quietly moved the Aborigines off their land at gun point.

At 40, David’s life was good. He had members’ seats at the cricket and raced his 45’ yacht around the bay on weekends. Privilege also created a bully, who roamed the front bar and kitchen, looking for soft targets, which included pinching the barmaid’s arses.

I worked the kitchen cash register on Saturday nights and as a kitchen hand. I’d gone to the same school as David and had just finished an arts degree and used it as a flat plastic surface to roll joints on. Because I had not started a small business, climbed the corporate ladder, joined the so-called Liberal Party or squandered my intelligence in the public service, he treated me with contempt. It’s true, at the age of 23, I could have made more of my life, rather than asking customers if they wanted salad or vegetables with their schnitzels, but a little voice in my head said, ‘this is only now, only now.’ Betty, who’d worked as a kitchen hand for 12 years, didn’t hear that voice. She happily peeled the potatoes, made salads and was David’s eyes and ears.

Chester the chef was balding, overweight and with serious insecurity issues. “Not quite up to form tonight, Chester old mate,” David would bark across the counter at the end of the dinner service. “Glennis’s steak was tough. I need first class meals Chester, first class otherwise, you know…”

Glennis was 60 and an alcoholic, who propped up the front bar from 11.00am until closing time. She hadn’t ordered a meal in 20 years. Chester didn’t know that. He’d go quiet. Pull his head in and have a nervous cigarette by the bins before heading home to his one bedroom flat, in his clapped out yellow Datsun 120Y.

“He’s going to sack me, mate. I just know it. I’m cactus. What I’m gunna do?”

It was worse when David said nothing. Chester’s mind squirmed in dread of culinary disasters: bandages in the soup, toenails in the vegetables, tabasco on the icecream. Fear was his constant companion.

David’s wife, Patricia was beautiful. Even beautiful women said Patricia was beautiful. Middle aged men with pot bellies chatting in the front bar, would stop when she walked in. Their eyes filled with lust as she passed, then the talk would return to hedge funds, the futures market or the new BMW keyed by the little bastards in the car park. While genetics favoured Patricia, she had a tundra heart and a viper’s tongue.

On Yang’s first day as a kitchen hand, Patricia sneered, “keep the dog meat out of the salad chink.”

Yang was 16 years older than me and kept to himself.

xxxxxxx

Yang stood with 30 other Red Guard students outside the Engineering Faculty of Beijing University. They wore blue padded jackets, pants, black boots and carried wooden clubs. It was December and bitterly cold. A thin layer of ice covered the roads. The pungent smell of coal fires filled his nostrils. A truck supplied by the army idled on the corner. Two years ago, Yang was a student in the faculty and had talked to Professor Quo about the problems of building bridge foundations in alluvial silt. Much had changed since then. The Cultural Revolution was rooting out deviationists. The front door of the Faculty splintered under the axes as Yang and the Guards ran down the corridors yelling, “Long live Chairman Mao” and “Death to the Four Olds”. They pulled lecturers out of their offices and beat them. Some were dragged by their collars through the ice and hurled in to the truck.

Professor Quo’s door was open. Yang was about to knock but stifled the impulse. Four Red Guards stormed past him and tore up the books on the shelves. Professor Quo sat behind a large polished oak desk. Behind him hung a large picture of Mao, pictures of the Great Hall, The Forbidden City and the bridges he’d helped build after the Communists took power.

“You know why we are here, Quo?” Yang said.

Professor Quo smiled, pushed his chair back and walked to a window, which looked down on a quadrangle, where the students ate their lunches.

“Do you really think burning books, destroying ancient statues and beating up teachers, advances the cause of the revolution?”

“You are guilty of the Four Olds. You teach old ideas, embrace old culture, old habits, and old customs”

Professor Quo laughed. “I’m almost 80. That’s old. I fought the Japanese and then the Americans in Korea. I enjoy the beauty of the old culture,” he said pointing to the picture of the Forbidden City, “but only a fool thinks imperial China will return. Your other accusations are imbecilic. As for old habits, I stand guilty. I’ve been trying to give up smoking for years.”

Yang brought the club down hard across the old man’s head.

“You joke with me! You will learn new skills!”

Yang dragged him down the stairs to the truck. Steam and fumes spewed from the exhaust. Inside, 12 lecturers and senior administrators shivered together in the cold.

“Time to harden up those soft lily-white hands,” a guard yelled. “Send us a post card, traitors.” The guards laughed and lit cigarettes.

Yang tucked his red scarf in to his collar and watched as the truck drove away. He’d just sent an old man to his death. His mother and father taught him to to respect his elders. If his parents betrayed the revolution, would he do the same? He looked at the empty Faculty of Engineering building. Who would teach now?

Yang caught the bus to Tiananmen Square to meet his girlfriend, Li Jing, by the Monument to the People’s Heroes. A giant picture of Mao hung on a red background from the Gatehouse. Yang believed in Communism, in Mao and he passionately believed in justice and retribution. He’d turn his parents in without question.

xxxxxxx

Yang worked at The Hotel Raven for six months when Betty saw him steal a bunch of carrots and two potatoes. She knew he and his wife shared a room in a boarding house in the city with unemployed migrants and alcoholics. They cooked their meals in the share kitchen and ate in their room. She told Patricia and David.

“Empty your rucksack, Yang,” David said.

Yang looked at Betty and shook his head.

“Empty the rucksack, Chairman Meow,” Patricia said. She’d just returned from the spray tan salon, where they hadn’t got the colour right. Her skin was the yellow hue of a serious liver complaint. Yang shook his head. “Fuck this,” she said, picked up his rucksack and emptied the contents on the steel preparation bench.

Out fell the carrots and potatoes, chewing gum, a bike pump and a bright red neck scarf.

“Looks like we have a food thief,” David said. “I give this bastard a job and this is how I’m repaid”

“You’re only paying him $7.00 an hour,” I said.

“What’s it to you shit-for-brains?” Patricia said. “You can barely operate a cash register”

“I need food for my wife.” Yang said. “She has bad flu and I need to make her soup. I will pay you”

“Most people know I’m a fair man but fuck it,” David said. “Tonight’s your last shift. Clean the bar after closing and then piss off.”

Betty went back to chopping the parsley. Yang put the food back in his rucksack and held the red scarf in his hands.

“I’m sorry, Yang,” I said. “I should have said something. What are you going to do?”

“It is alright. I find new job. When I left China I had big dreams. I was an engineer but now I am a thief. These are tests and I will pass them.”

xxxxxxx

Yang had just turned seven as he and his mother searched the forest for bird eggs but there were no birds. They’d been declared, ‘public animals of capitalism’ because they ate the harvest grain. They’d been killed and eaten. No one called it a famine. Officially it was the ‘Three Years of Difficulties’, now in its seventh year. His grandmother and two cousins were dead. His father roamed the streets of Tianjin begging for food. When they couldn’t find vegetables, they cooked grass and leaves. Yang ribs stretched tight against his skin. His mother’s face was sunken and haggard.

“Mother, surely Chairman Mao will send us rice and chicken soon,” Yang said.

“Of course, darling,” she said. “Otherwise we will have to eat Chairman Mao.” They laughed and sat together looking out across the valley.

Yang crept out of the house after his family had gone to bed. He walked two miles to where the local party officials corralled 50 cattle, ready to be trucked to Beijing. He pulled out a pen knife and gently cut open a small vein in the neck of one of the beasts. He pressed his lips to its flesh, drank and carefully wiped the blood away. He had been drinking cattle blood for a month. In the morning he awoke to his mother crying. His father was dead.

xxxxxxxx

The bar emptied at 11.00pm and the staff had left as Yang mopped the floor. Patricia sat on a bar stool with salt encrusted lips from her sixth margarita. Her mini skirt rode over her thighs as she crossed her legs. David counted the night’s take.

“Pretty good. Enough for a new spinnaker,” he said.

“That’s all you think about,” Patricia sneered. “That bloody boat.”

Yang kept his head down. The light of the full moon poured in the front windows. He didn’t know how to tell Li Jing he’d lost his job. He would make her soup and tell her in morning. He remembered going to a festival in August in Beijing on a full moon. The Cultural Revolution was over but times were still hard. They drank rice wine and danced under the stars.

Patricia watched Yang mop the floor. She swivelled her legs towards him.

“Hey, Ying and Yang, you missed a bit over here,” she said.

Yang looked quickly at her and dropped his eyes instantly to the floor.

“Hey David, this bloody chink just copped an eyeful of my crotch,” Patricia snarled. “Bloody randy bugger. If he had his way, I’d be putting out in some opium den”

David stopped counting the money and walked from behind the bar. “Is that true you little shit? A thief and a pervert. Get out of my hotel now!”

“I see nothing. I just do work,” Yang said. “You pay me now and I finish cleaning and go”

“Nah, bugger it. I’ve had a gutful of you.” David strode over to Yang, grabbed him by his collar and marched him to the front door.

“Give him a little reminder, Dave, a little reminder,” Patricia yelled.

David’s punched the back of Yang’s head. A glancing blow. David hadn’t thrown a punch since he was 15. Yang quickly spun around and drove his fist in to David’s stomach and the palm of his hand in to his nose.

“What the fuck? You can’t do that to my husband”

Yang hauled David to the kitchen and pushed him in to the walk-in refrigerator. He ran back to the front bar, ripped the phone from Patricia’s hand, grabbed her by the hair and pushed her on top of David. He took a cooked chicken, slammed the door, locked it and set the thermostat to 2 degrees centigrade. Yang knew I would be in to prepare for lunch at 9.00am in the morning. The owners would spend a chilly night together.

Patricia slammed her fists against the refrigerator door. “We’ll fucking freeze to death in here you moron. Let us out! David needs an ambulance. For Christ’s sake, can’t you take a joke?”

Yang put the chicken in his rucksack with the vegetables. He turned the lights out, put his blue jacket and red scarf on, got on his bike and rode in to the moonlight. He would make Li Jing the soup. She was all he had.

xxxxxxx

I slept in and didn’t arrive at hotel until 10.00am. The mop bucket hadn’t been emptied but thought little of it. I unlocked the fridge and found Patricia and David entwined in each other’s arms. Like a sleeping lover’s tryst, except their skin was grey and they had ‘bug’ eyes. Their hands were bloodied from hammering the door. The refrigerator was airtight. They’d run out of oxygen.

Ji Ling had gone back to sleep after breakfast and Yang was reading a Raymond Chandler novel to improve his English, when he heard footsteps come up the old wooden stairs. The knock was loud and awoke Ji Ling. Yang opened the door and two men in suits held identification badges. They walked in uninvited.

“Are you Yang Chen?” the older man said.

Ji Ling pulled the covers up to her neck. “Yang, who are these men? What do they want?”

“Mr Chen, I would like you to come down to the police station,” the older detective said, “and answer some questions”

“My wife, she is sick. I cannot leave her”

“I’m afraid there’s no two ways about it”

“The hotel owners, they make charges?” Yang said. “The man hit me. I defend myself”

The younger detective looked at the Chandler novel and the empty food bowls. He’d never seen a room so devoid of hope.

“The car’s waiting, Mr Chen. I’ll get a female police officer to check on your wife later”

Yang put his head down and walked slowly down the stairs to the police car. The plane trees were bare and a vapour trail pasted high in the sky, had started to shred.