The Harmony Silk Factory

A CHINESE SPARROW HAWK has begun visiting the woods behind the house. No one has seen it but me. It comes at the quietest times of the day, when I am the only person about. Just after dawn, when the last wisps of sea mist have faded away, it hovers against a pearl-grey sky, shivering tentatively in the chilled breeze. In the afternoons, when everyone else is ensconced in a geriatric siesta, I watch it dart between the trees, wheeling furiously between the casuarinas, or flashing its wainscot-coloured wings as it speeds across the paddy fields. Sometimes I spot it perched silently on a bough, deep in the foliage, staring at me with huge yellow irises. I smile at it and nod a greeting. It knows I am an ally, and so it reveals itself only to me. For only I know that it is responsible for the recent and oh-so-terrible decimation of the local brown shrike population.

“Do you think it could be a mongoose?” Gecko trilled anxiously. Speculation had been rife in the days following the initial discovery of a few brick-red shrike feathers lying on the patio where those annoying creatures feed on morsels of food left for them by Gecko and the others. A list of suspects was drawn up: civet cats, snakes, flying foxes, dogs, rats — even the cook’s cat, which was finally exonerated on the grounds that its age and girth prevented it from venturing past the kitchen doors.

“Ah bollocks,” said Brother Rodney, a burly Australian who likes to think of himself as rather more worldly-wise than he is. “It’s a bloody shite hawk,” he said.

“How charming,” I said. “What exactly is a ‘shite’ hawk?”

“One that shits all over the place,” he said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You get great big colonies of them this time of the year, out in those islands across the Straits. Yep, thousands of them, shit-ting all over the place. Bloody awful. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Some islands get turned into a huge shite pile, nothing but shite as far as the eye can see.”

I stood watching flocks of birds winging their way wearily across the Straits. This is where they complete their long, lonely journey, all the way from Manchuria and Siberia. Some of them travel the extra distance across to Sumatra (where they will certainly not be bothered by the likes of Gecko), others remain here. Why? I don’t suppose anyone will ever know the mysteries of migration. I have always loved the idea of being a migrating bird, a hawk or some other raptor, riding the warm thermals across the vastness of continents, all of Asia under my wings. I would follow my prey south, ready, like my little shite hawk, to swoop at any moment. There would be no plan for my journey, no map, no coordinates. And yet I would find my way, guided by forces too powerful and ancient for me to discern; I would simply follow my destiny.

Alvaro set up a rota to keep watch over the bird feed. The idea was firstly to identify the culprit and secondly to prevent the repetition of such terrible crimes that we all hate, you know.

“I’m not volunteering,” I said. “I have other — better — things to do. The garden, in case you’ve all forgotten, is still in the making. There’s plenty of work for me. Why don’t you people just accept the workings of nature? Some things die, other things live. Predators and prey — it’s a long-standing arrangement. Man needs to establish a rapprochement with Mother Nature.” The plan, of course, did not work. No one could stay awake for the duration of the watch, and nothing was seen. Once, Gecko thought he saw a python at the end of the garden. But the monsoons are upon us now, and the rain, when it comes, falls in sheets, blurring the vision and turning every shape into a ghostly spectre. He could not be sure.

Erring on the side of caution, I crept into the kitchen and stole little pieces of raw chicken from the refrigerator. I took these to the woods and laid them out on the highest bough I could reach. I wanted to make sure that the sparrow hawk does not go away.

JOHNNY WAS ILL-TEMPERED and sullen from the very start of the journey. He would not be cheered up, not even by me. By the time we reached the Formosa Hotel he was entombed in his own silence.

“Is he ill?” Snow asked me after he had gone ahead to their room. For a brief moment, I found myself alone with her in the gloomy foyer. We stood apart from each other like two chess pieces marooned on their own tiny squares of the chequerboard floor. “I don’t know,” I said, lowering my voice to match her hushed tones. The whispering hid the slight tremor that had crept into my voice. Perhaps she trusted me at last. She looked at me with a faint smile of conspiratorial concern. Before I could prolong this moment of intimacy, however, Kunichika appeared. “May I take your things upstairs?” he asked her, lifting her case before she had time to acquiesce.