The tram passed Gilman’s garage at the corner of Johnston and Hennessy roads, and sped off towards Causeway Bay. Everything was quiet and Siu Fung told herself to be calm. Such strange ideas one has at times, she would have liked to listen to some music to lighten her journey. The Reynettes for instance, or even better the Beatles. Pure products of capitalism they were, tickets to their concerts at the Princess Theatre had been obscenely expensive – only the rich kids had been able to buy them – but one had to admit that the great global dialectic often produced some rather enticing contradictions. Well, she didn’t really know, she hadn’t gone into it too deeply. Yeung Tak was firmly against foreign music, but she felt he might be wrong about this.
So, the Beatles. She would have appreciated their company, but how could it be done on a tram? Hmm, if one were to invent an electric box (and after all why not?) in which songs could be stored on tiny microgrooves, a bit like a juke-box but much smaller in size? This thing would work on a battery, one could carry it around, and there could be headphones so as not to disturb other people. In this way one could quietly appreciate one’s favourite music on one’s own, in the street, on the ferry or on the bus. Yes, indeed, if she could make a suggestion to the workers’ association, it would be this: from now on refuse to produce the plastic flowers and other trashy objects of enslavement which come out of the factories in Hong Kong and end up in the dustbins of the whole world, and instead enforce the production of goods which are useful and attractive to the People, such as her music box.
She smiled at her reflection in the tram’s window. She would mention her idea to Yeung Tak later on. Let’s hope he won’t laugh, as he did sometimes when she told him what was going through her mind. However... A bad smell, like burning rubber, had just reached her nostrils. Where was it coming from?
She turned around. Her gaze found the conductor, standing in the aisle, who was staring nastily at her.
“There!” he shouted, pointing a finger accusingly at her satchel.
She jumped, panic-stricken at the sight of the thin wisp of smoke coming out of it.
“A bomb!” screamed a woman passenger.