This abode has accessories you won't find in the stores
JULIE Mullally lives in a Sai Kung village so remote she has to fax detailed instructions to potential visitors, and so abandoned that during the week she is its only inhabitant. At weekends, her neighbour arrives but goes off canoeing in the sea which stretches in front of their doors. The rest of the time she is alone.
She moved in on the night of the handover. She was watching the ceremonies on television as she packed up her old home, also in Sai Kung, and at midnight she closed the door and set off for her new property. It is a good 20-minute walk from the nearest road and on a hot summer's day, this is a picturesque hike: there are splashing streams, squeaking bamboo thickets, crabs skittering across the path, butterflies the size of kites, and groves of milky mangroves and spiny bear's breech. Exactly the sort of scenario which is deeply unnerving on a pitch-black, rain-sodden night.
'I thought if it's going to affect me, I'll get it over with on the first night, otherwise it'll freak me all the time,' says Mullally. She piled her belongings, plus her cat, on a trolley and wheeled it down the path. She had an ancestral basket perched on top which fell down a bank and was never seen again; likewise the cat, which took one look at the house and bolted.
'There was no electricity that night. And the thunder is incredible here, it feels like it's in the house. So I was getting superstitious, I felt that I shouldn't be here. I felt that I'd moved into the Hammer House of Horror.' A year later, on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and passing breezes, this may well be the most idyllic spot in the SAR. There is a ruined, vegetation-cloaked church nearby, a grove of banana and pomelo trees, and a short trail down to a jetty with its gleaming, absolutely still, curve of water. Mullally has a tiny kayak and romantic visions of a bigger boat which she can sail into Sai Kung to do her shopping. That has not happened yet so she still has to transport everything - washing-machine, dryer, fridge, oven, food - down the path, using the little trolley.
The house is more than 100 years old and is built in traditional style with an open wooden staircase, which would originally have been a ladder, leading up to a gallery. There are a couple of narrow airvents, like medieval arrow slits, cut into the thick walls where the two replacement cats, Ben and Jessie, like to lie cooling their paws. In the kitchen, the original grain grinder, like a large pestle-and-mortar, is still set into the floor. 'Somebody said 'Why don't you varnish it and make it look smarter?' but it wouldn't have been like that in the past, would it?' In fact, she has done very little to change the essence of the house. Three old benches, which were in residence when she moved in, have been piled one on top of each other to make a bookcase. She has put a rug down on the stone floor. Two trunks, with a cloth and a sheet of glass on top, are her coffee table. A large Mullally painting, untitled and unfinished, hangs above a sofa, the blank corner of the canvas blending with the whitewashed wall. 'That's a masterpiece I had the audacity to hang,' she grins. 'I'd like to do about six on the theme of living here.' Although she paints, she is actually an artist of a different kind - a voice artist (or 'voice talent' as they say in that industry). She is a singer, she writes songs, she makes CDs for children who are learning English and she likes to work on her music late into the night. That is why she is living in such a remote area. In this corner of Sai Kung, apparently, no one can hear you sing. 'When I'm writing I make a lot of noise and knowing people can't hear me gives me so much more mental space.' Of course, there was the night a group of illegal immigrants turned up at 3am, and hammered on her door. They were not complaining about the racket, however. They were all women, some were pregnant, and they urgently needed to know where Hong Kong was. Mullally pointed them in the general direction of Sai Kung 'and then I sat inside all night quivering'.
She is more sanguine about the fauna of the area. She found a snakeskin one morning, which she keeps pressed inside her visitors' book and which looks, worryingly, like a python's cast-offs (and, as she observes, snakes shed their skins because they are getting bigger). Unhelpful people have told her it is possible the snake is residing in her roof. She points to the spot where there is a hollow up there and wonders if that is what has happened to the cats - five strays she has adopted have all disappeared. There is a selection of spiders in every crevice ('I looked up the black and yellow ones in a nature centre here and they said they bite but they're not poisonous'), toads behind the sofas and the occasional monkey on the roof.
She has no air-conditioner and fell sick shortly after she arrived, she thinks because of the mould. Now she washes down her walls with Lysol every other day. 'I think sometimes I smell of my house. I've worked with people and they've come back here and said 'Ahh, the smell of Julie . . .' Living out here I take a fragrance with me, an odd odour. I've lost a few clothes to it, and books go wobbly.' So why on earth does she do it? 'I get a kick out of leaving here, locking my doors, doing the walk back to the road, that gradual build-up in intensity to Central, the crossing at Pedder Street with all those people . . . and there's so much joy in the opposite process, stripping away the layers of Hong Kong, being struck in traffic, then reaching the park, then walking back here where there's no one. No one.'
