Disarming a Ghost
I was in Amsterdam, sitting in the spill of tables from a noisy bar, settling into a round of drinks with my partner. It had rained over the past few days, but this evening was clear; the sun made a slow retreat, and the sky held its blue into the night.
Nearby, three boys were atop a bridge, dredging the canal with heavy magnets. When a bicycle’s frame slowly emerged from their lines, streaming with sediment, they painstakingly worked it towards the bank to the applause of the watching crowd.
Nine thousand kilometres away in Hong Kong, an emergency response unit was disarming a recently unburied ghost across the street from our apartment. We watched it unfold over a phone screen, glasses of Hertog Jan in hand.
In the eighty years since this lunchtime raid, the city has pushed back the coastline and filled in the industrial sites. The bomb had been sitting there the whole time. It waited through the surrender of Japan, the handover of ‘97, and the signing of my partner’s lease. It waited eighty years for a construction crew to wake it up.
On the phone screen, the view was unstable. The familiar scenes of our neighbourhood pixelated into blotchy low-res video: the familiar pink uniforms of the downstairs cha chaan teng workers, and the neighbours I saw every day in the lifts, now herded into buses bound for shelters.
Even after the bomb’s discovery, the city’s momentum proved difficult to arrest. Before the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) officers prepared to cut into its casing, the MTR kept running below. Beneath the suspended terror of 450 kilos of explosives, thousands of commuters were whooshing home for dinner, separated from history by a few metres of soil and concrete.
Today, construction at the site continues. The percussive thud of piling turns the neighbourhood into a giant speaker cabinet, shaking our potted plants and my espresso in its tiny cup. Up above, black kites ride thermal waves between the high-rises and the wooded hillsides of Mount Parker. They drift over the slopes that drape down to meet the pavement, observing. I watch them circle, scanning what’s below, just like the boys from their bridge above the canal.
But as the piling drives deeper, I wonder what else is waiting down there, holding its breath.
Originally published in Even Now.