A Million People, Hadley Read online

  A MILLION PEOPLE, HADLEY

  Copyright © 2015 Nick Macfie

  ISBN-13: 978-988-82735-7-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [email protected]

  A Million People, Hadley was written during Nick Macfie’s tenure as a Reuters journalist, but Reuters has not been involved with the content or tone of this book, which are the author’s responsibility alone.

  Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd (Hong Kong)

  In memory of my father

  Also by Nick Macfie

  Hadley

  Kiss Me, Hadley

  CHAPTER ONE

  A CHINESE TEENAGER wearing a yellow tee-shirt lay on his back in the middle of one of the busiest streets in Hong Kong, his arms and legs making a star and his trousers riding up his ankles. He was staring at a starry sky and not moving as someone round the corner played the sax like Kenny G, a tune at once baleful and dull. I heard raised voices. The music stopped. Someone shouted “fuck off” and something metallic skidded across the road.

  There were two strange things about that night: one that the sky was starry and two that there was no traffic. Students had been protesting on the streets for three weeks demanding democracy. The police had used tear gas to try to break them up, here on Nathan Road, and then had helped them clean their eyes with bottles of water. Only in Hong Kong. Look, America: no guns. Look, Thailand: no bombs or snipers dressed in black hiding on rooftops. Look, China: no extra-judicial detentions with scores taken away in unmarked vans with darkened windows never to be seen again. No tanks and no soldiers. No blood of hundreds, if not thousands, seeping between the paving stones. Look: brilliant, alive Hong Kong.

  “Hey, friend, have you seen my horn?” a man asked.

  It was Kenny G, or someone that looked just like him. I examined the ringlets that fell flat and lifeless from the centre parting. I had had a few drinks. It could have been anyone.

  “Your horn? No. I’m sorry.”

  “No sweat man. Everything’s mellow.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But some of these guys are unmellow.” He flailed his arm in the direction of pockets of tired protesters, sitting or lying in the road between lines of tents, and a handful of police. I wasn’t sure which guys he thought were unmellow. “I must be going,” he said. “I’m looking for my instrument.”

  He dusted himself down for no apparent reason. Or had he had a fall? Had someone hit him? He headed north towards Jordan and stopped to talk to a group of students, presumably about his instrument. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I had come out of the pub to have a look at what was going on, to make sure everything was mellow in fact, and now I was heading back – a few blocks south and a long block east to Rick’s Cafe, to be precise.

  Everything was also unmellow at Rick’s. There is something about my face, in bars in the early hours of the morning, that sometimes makes fellow expats want to beat the shit out of it. Until midnight, everything goes really well. And then the eyes turn towards me. The lawyers and the bankers and the hedge fund managers are somehow jump-started and hot-wired out of their drunken torpor, and they come at me, usually at a slight tilt, with a “why you…” and then lunge. They never get beyond “why you”. It’s not a question. It’s a threat. But for me, it is a question. Why me? I’ve stood in front of the mirror trying to figure it out. Is it possible people mistake me for a miserable, sanctimonious prat? That’s as close as I can get. I can’t see the big picture. The wood for the trees.

  I was drinking with a Christian missionary who was about four large gin and tonics ahead of me and pontificating about the protests.

  “The students will never win anything,” he said. “China will never budge on how the elections are run.”

  “I reckon they’ve already won,” I said.

  “Certainly China can never win without God on its side.”

  Oh lord. He started punctuating key points with little staccato pats on my knee. Fuck off. I stopped paying attention and he turned to some tourist on his other side.

  At the far end of the basement bar, on the other side of the missionary, were three British lawyers and I could see the wood for the trees straight away. These three were pompous and corrupt and had long, effeminate moustaches which they rolled between their fingers like Plasticine. I was minding my own business, nursing a beer and not doing anything to annoy them as far as I could tell (they were at the other end of the bar, for heaven’s sake!) It’s possible I looked a little tired after a hard and long day, but that was all.

  They were whispering between themselves now, their moustaches skipping up and down and in and out like flags. One of them broke away unsteadily and headed in my direction. He ran his hand along the bar to keep himself stable.

  “What did you just call me?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What did you just call me? I heard you from over there.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “You called me a cunt.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Don’t remember that.”

  And then it came. “Why you…” The prick was at my throat. What had I done? Maybe he could read my thoughts. “You bastard,” he said. “You fucking bastard.”

  I was making an “aaargh” noise like a chain on a deck, staring at the ceiling, watching feeble Mexican hat-and-tortilla-shaped lights go round and round. I tried to peel his hands away, but he was in earnest. He was trying to kill me.

  Then one of his mates – I swear this is true – leant over and asked me if I ever wondered why window panes, in temperate climates, didn’t crack in the winter when it was hot inside and freezing outside. I looked at the man’s eyes, at his mate’s eyes, at the lights going round and round.

  “Aaargh,” I said.

  “Don’t you,” the man went on. “Don’t you worry about the integrity of the glass?”

  The integrity of the glass. Do I worry about it? At two in the morning. With someone trying to kill me. Not really. The slippery lawyer released his grip and was dancing up the stairs and gone in seconds.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” one of his mates shouted, another prat with a moustache.

  He turned and headed for the stairs and that’s where it got even more interesting. A woman in jeans, white tee-shirt and, for no good reason I could think of then, large, dark sunglasses was crossing his path to her table. What did the lawyer do? Stand back and let her pass? Apologise for being a prat? Apologise for his moustache? Not a bit of it. He raised his right arm and pushed her aside. So hard that she fell over a table, knocking people’s drinks to the floor. And he didn’t even turn back. He bounded up the stairs, his spindly bottom shaking between expensive worsted cotton. Another great night out for members of the bar in the heaving clubs of Hong Kong. Rick Astley was singing “It Would Take a Strong, Strong Man” on the sound system.

  Customers were looking down at the woman but doing nothing to help. The Glaswegian manager was calling the bouncers to see if they could stop the lawyer at the top of the stairs fleeing into the hub-bub of the narrow, bustling Hart Lane (Hut Dut Dou in irresistible Cantonese), packed at that time of the morning with fey-looking gangsters, club girls with purple lipstick and tiny handbags, the occasional, sacked Western wannabe war correspondent and foolish lobster-coloured Englishmen in suits clutching briefcases and walking like crabs.

  “My sunglasses,” the
woman said. “I’ve lost my sunglasses.”

  The customers were looking casually around for the glasses as I bent down to see if she was all right. I let my eyes stay on her face. The light was dim but I knew who she was and she knew I knew.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine.” She offered a quick, regal smile. “Just a little embarrassed. But that fellow. What a fucking dickhead.”

  Such eloquence. She was appealing for help. At least that’s how I read it at the time after a handful of warehouse-strength gin and tonics, a couple of pints of Carlsberg and close to thirty cigarettes. In the tiniest fraction of a second, I noticed a man, probably South Asian, sitting at a table behind the woman and staring at me coldly. He was wearing sparkly ear rings.

  “Would you like me to get you out of here?” I asked her. The question was loaded with inside knowledge, poignancy and integrity. She lifted and fluttered those famous big brown eyes. I took it for a yes. The customers were still looking for the sunglasses. “Come on then,” I said. “Let’s hit the boulevard.”

  Let’s hit the boulevard? What? I helped lift her from the floor, holding her head to my shoulder and hiding her face. The not-entirely-lithe thirty-six-year-old body was warm and smelt of roses. I was, temporarily, the bodyguard. At the top of the stairs, I guided her left, heading for the car park opposite the Mariners’ Club where I kept a twenty-year-old Mercedes. She put her left arm around my waist and buried her head in my chest.

  Marina Makhdoom had her head in my chest, for fuck’s sake. Marina Makhdoom, tipped by some who knew about these things to be prime minister of Pakistan one day, following in the footsteps of Benazir Bhutto, despite being a Christian in a Muslim-majority country. She was tipped to take over the mantle, as journalists liked to say. Not me. I didn’t like to say that. I didn’t know what a mantle was, except that Dracula had one. Couldn’t be anything like a mantelpiece, that much I knew. It wouldn’t make any sense. Marina Makhdoom was the daughter of a general who was being held under house arrest in Karachi without charge. He had been accused in various newspapers of plotting a coup against Bhutto’s government back in the early nineties, of corruption involving an aerospace deal with France, of blasphemy and of colluding with the Taliban, who were seeking to install an Islamist state. And of course of being a closet Christian. I knew this much because I dealt with Pakistan stories on a daily, albeit shallow, basis. The government had refused to give a reason for holding him.

  And for every unsubstantiated story about her father, there were five for his Western-educated younger daughter, most involving late-night parties, alcohol and affairs with unscripted men when she was married to the feted Colonel Usman Makhdoom, an army dental surgeon, no less, whose name sounded Scottish but wasn’t. The latest story was that she had gone missing from the marital home in Lahore. But she got away with it, ironically, because she was a Christian. Some found her a fascinating side show, a peep show, and blamed all her depravity, if there was any, on her faith. Others thought she was a devil.

  I had a story on my hands, anyway. I had her on my hands. What was I going to do? I mean, now we had hit the boulevard.

  Makhdoom was not classically beautiful, but she had huge eyes that always looked like she had been crying. Wet was the word. She had huge, wet eyes which were always asking for attention. They invited you in. Literally. You could see yourself reflected elliptically in the brown irises (or dilated pupils) as you were talking to her. You were trapped like a goldfish in a bowl. I would find all this out later, but I thought it would be good to give a picture of her early in the piece. She was smallish and running ever so slightly to fat. But her skin was clear and kissable and her legs, as my dad would have said, were shapely. (But dad, that just means her legs have a shape! Fuck off, son) She had sensuous lips, glorious white teeth and dimples, low in the cheek, when she laughed. Mostly because of that, and her faith and the fact she never wore an all-enveloping veil, she received regular death threats from the Taliban and militant groups no one had heard of. She had as much chance of becoming prime minister as of being blown up. I knew little about her husband the colonel at the time except that he was much shorter than Marina, always travelled with a dozen bodyguards carrying big guns and once killed a man on a horse in a row about a goat. And that he once must have had ambitions in the dental field.

  We reached my car. Marina stood up straight and looked at me.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she asked.

  “This is my car. I can take you home.”

  “Why?” She was squinting. “I’ve lost my sunglasses.”

  Oh, right. “I could call for a taxi if you would prefer.”

  “But you know who I am.” She wasn’t making sense. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Any port in a storm.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Me. Any port in a storm. I don’t know how to…”

  I waited and waited. “You don’t know how to what?”

  “Please wait. I don’t know how to navigate. To be honest, I don’t what I am doing here. If I am cognisant of such a situation, in usual circumstances, I tend to chart a course to relieve me of my burdens. For any port in a storm. Take me for a drive.”

  No hint of a please there, from a ridiculously verbose woman who went to Roedean and the University of East Anglia no less, but never mind. I opened the door and watched her climb in, my eyes on the shapely legs. I went round to the driver’s seat and got in and wondered where I should go. Any port in a storm. Just that loaded quote would assure me of the front page of all major newspapers around the world. Why would she tell me that? Didn’t her PR people warn her against free speech? And what was she doing in my car? This was surreal. Any marina in a storm. Opposite the Mariners’ Club to boot.

  I wound past the Sheraton and the mirror-glass buildings of Tsim Sha Tsui East, past small groups of protesters with their yellow umbrellas straggling home after a day blocking major arteries in Kowloon, and through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel which took us to Hong Kong island, supposing that that would be where Marina was staying.

  “Take me to the beach.”

  “To the beach? It’s almost three in the morning.”

  “Take me to the beach.”

  There’s nothing like adult discussion to clear the air, when each side listens and considers.

  “All right, then.”

  I took the Eastern Expressway, skirting Causeway Bay, North Point, Quarry Bay, once home to the waterside offices of the South China Morning Post, and followed the signs to the south of the island. We drove past shops on the ground floor of skyscrapers which in just a few hours would be selling rattan furniture, wedding dresses and red meat laid out on trays under red lamps. Not all in one shop, you understand. In lots of different shops, which all held endless appeal for this Cambridgeshire lad who had made Hong Kong his home fifteen years earlier. We started up the hill of Chaiwan Road, with schools, government offices and a fire station with the bauhinia flag flying on the right, past blocks of flats, pink in the moonlight, on the left. I turned right on to Tai Tam Road, with narrow, lichen-covered concrete steps leading up into thick foliage, the Hong Kong Observatory high above, set appropriately against the stars. The narrow two-way road rose into dense, sweet-smelling vegetation, over hundred-year-old stone bridges spanning brooks and along steep edges falling into lush bracken below. The road started down, views of graves on the distant hillside to the left. Little paths with steep concrete steps ran up and down to isolated villages. Then bigger paths appeared – drives to mansions to the left and right, homes to some of the wealthiest people in the world, one or two of whom proudly announced their names on tidy, white signs. We were in Shek O, a sleepy, dead-end village where rich Chinese and poor Westerners lived cheek by jowl.

  I turned right at the roundabout outside a Thai restaurant and parked next to the beach, near a Spartan-looking mini-golf course featuring the Temple of Heaven and other Chinese wonders. It was here, years ago, I made lov
e to a Filipina bar girl, next to the lifeguard hut, and halfway through she threw up. She said something hadn’t agreed with her.

  Marina and I got out of the car without talking and walked on to the sand. She took off her shoes.

  “Who are you?” she asked. She sat down and patted the sand, asking me to sit too. Telling me to sit. This was Marina Makhdoom, sitting next to me, just a few feet from the gently lapping waves. What was going on? “What is your occupation?”

  Should I tell her the truth? It could be the end of very short relationship.

  “I’m a journalist,” I said, looking up at the dark, steep grass hills which rose on the right of the bay.

  “First class,” she said. “Who with?”

  “Shrubs news agency.”

  “Jubilation. So my little secret is no longer a secret.”

  “Which little secret is that?”

  “Take among many choices. The newspapers have been saying I’ve left my husband.”

  “Yes. He’s a dentist.”

  “What? Well none of it is true. I love my husband in perpetuity. I just need some time to think.” I turned briefly and caught her wet eyes. “Are you going to write all this down and issue a story?” she asked.

  I had a top story on my hands. In the palms of my hands, even. “I just want to help you,” I said.

  “Yes. You have already. Thank you. I am not even cognisant of your name.”

  “Hadley.”

  “I see. Well, Hadley, you know who I am. Why do you wear such heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles?”

  “I’m sorry you don’t like…”

  “Are you trying to look more intelligent than you really are? You look like a mountebank. Have you ever been to Pakistan?”

  “Many times.”

  “I see. Have I had the pleasure of your acquaintance before?”

  “No. I would certainly remember if I had met you, but I haven’t. I know where you live, though.”

  She put her hand against her heart. “Is that the threat of the obsessed?”