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cheek. “Medicine. For toothache.”
    “Medicine . . . ?” The porter (whose name was Jimmy Tsui) frowned. “You use up all your medicine already?” Only the night before, he’d pointed Hayden in the direction of the pharmacy round the corner.
    “It’s not strong enough,” explained Hayden. “I need something much much stronger —do you understand?”
    “Sooo . . . you want drugs?”
    “Not just any drugs,” insisted Hayden. “ This drug. I want to know where in Hong Kong I can go to get some of this—look, here, this miracle Chinese dental treatment, see?” Why was everything so complicated?
    Between Hayden’s ravaged jaw and the magazine article, enlighten-ment gradually dawned on Jimmy Tsui. He jabbed a finger at the magazine and rattled off a musical burst of syllables. It might have been a brand name; it sounded pithy and to the point, uuan-shan-dhol. Hayden tried it out himself: “Wang-chang . . . wan-shang-dole? Is that this? The miracle thing?”
    “Miracle, yes . . . ” The porter nodded hard, his eyes saucer-wide in the wonderment of understanding. “You want—ask man about this?” He indicated the article, its illustration of a human head scanned by MRI into skull-like abstraction, all fangs and empty eye sockets. “Man who will sell you medicine . . . for this ?” He pointed gingerly at Hayden’s mouth.
    “God, yes! Do you know anywhere I can get it? I can go up to five thousand Hong Kong, maybe seven . . . ”
    At long last, the porter seemed to have grasped it. “I know good doctor, yes, he got—all what you want! My shift—over, fifteen minutes! We take taxi into Mong Kok, you and me!” He tapped a finger against his nose, then laughed a trifle nervously as Hayden followed suit. Almost weeping at the prospect of relief, Hayden made to shake his hand, but the porter was already excusing himself, slipping backwards through the door in a deferential bow.
    And so, soon after midnight, Hayden found himself crossing the harbour in the company of Jimmy Tsui. The taxi injected them directly into the rush and clamour of the Mong Kok strip, close by Sim City and the soaring Grand Tower. Even at this hour the bright sidewalks were chock-full of pedestrians jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, streets glittering and congested like the chutes of the pachinko machines in the slot parlours, all played out to a chorus of tinny chipmusic leaking from headphones and shop doorways. Above their heads neon advertisements flickered the length of Shantung Street, pulsing through the pollution layer, making rainbows on the oily tarmac underfoot. The night smelled of spent fireworks and overheated motherboards.
    Jimmy tugged at his sleeve, once, twice. “Not far now! Follow me!” Hayden did his best to keep up with the porter as he dodged and shouldercharged across the road. Once he caught sight of himself in an unlit window: the surgical face-mask with which Jimmy had thought-fully provided him—“Best you wear this—keep mouth hidden!”—made him look like the mad doctor in a Frankenstein movie. It was all in the eyes, he decided, before hastening on to follow Jimmy down a narrow entranceway between two buildings.
    The walls on either side leaned in so close there was barely room for Hayden and Jimmy to walk line abreast. Optimistically, or else suicidally, a gang of kids came rollerblading at breakneck speed towards them: Hayden flattened himself against the graffitied concrete as they whizzed past, one hand raised to guard his face. Up ahead Jimmy had come to another right turn; he waited for Hayden to catch up before gesturing theatrically and exclaiming, “This Night-town! You in Night-town now!”
    Night-town took the form of another, wider alley running parallel to the strip. Each of the commercial premises stripside seemed to have its corresponding—probably unlicensed—counterpart round the back: some were simple stalls of wood-strut and canvas, while others were breezeblock