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  HADLEY

  Copyright © 2013 Nick Macfie

  ISBN-13: 978-988-19090-9-1

  First printing 2010

  Second printing 2013

  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]

  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)

  To Kyoung-yae, Emily and Hannah. Special thanks to David Milnes and Hong Kong.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I STARED ACROSS Hong Kong harbour from my twenty-third floor office desk, squinting at the sun glinting off a sleek, white dinghy tacking to starboard to avoid a Star Ferry. A single cumulus cloud bobbed above the distant Lion Rock as a drill somewhere in the building pierced my head. A Lion Rock-sized hangover bobbed over my eyes, clouding my vision of the desk-top TV and my two computer screens.

  My head was bobbing, my screens were bobbing. My whole life appeared to be bobbing. I pulled a waste-paper basket nearer with my foot, just in case the contents of my stomach bobbed. The noise came from above and below, dropping the lower-register sound of metal against concrete but taking on a shrill, constant, electronic, tropical-insect squeal. It didn’t hurt my hangover – it was my hangover, penetrating from all sides and screaming through cupped hands: When are you ever going to learn?

  Then it stopped.

  “Thank you.”

  Da-ding, da-ding, da-ding. Just feet away, a school bell rang and rang. I made an “ooh” noise and buried my head in my palms. My news editor, a chirpy cockney called Rodney Baxter, squirming in a cream turtleneck jumper, was priming himself for an announcement, puffing his lips in and out. The bell dangled on a leather thong from his wrist, giving an occasional, muffled dong.

  “Attention please!”

  Never again, I thought. The incense-filled bars of Wanchai could survive without me – for one night, anyway. On the TV news, a gorgeous Hong Kong celebrity who clearly had no business being on the news at all was saying anything that came into her head. “My body is unreasonably pleasurable,” she was explaining. “It grooves and it curves and curves.”

  But it was an intense-looking old man leaning against a taxi and smirking behind her who made me wince and my heart groove and curve all by itself. The man sported a ponytail and an earring, his piercing eyes were looking straight at the TV camera. And straight at me.

  “I know that man,” I whispered. I looked round to see if anyone else in the room had noticed me talking to myself. Schoolboy butterflies passed through my stomach. Why? What was going on? The man wasn’t paying any attention to the gorgeous girl. I swallowed. It was someone from years and years ago, back in England, but he wasn’t English – that much I knew. And whoever it was, it was definitely him, not someone who looked like him. Someone sinister. A teacher? I could remember sinister teachers, but this guy wasn’t one of them. Was it someone I interviewed on my first paper? Some ex-con who didn’t like my court reporting? I turned down the sound but kept watching the man. The extraordinarily beautiful Canto pop star/actress kept talking at a thousand words a minute.

  “Your attention please!” Clang, clang went the bell. I managed to look up, my head tilted to the left and seriously wounded. Next to my news editor, the chirpy Baxter, was someone who looked like Mao Zedong, or his widow. She even had a mole next to her nose.

  “I want to introduce you all to Candy Kam,” Baxter said.

  The Candy Man Can. Singer and song writer Tony Newley. Enough, enough. I caught the gist of what Baxter was saying. Candy Kam was preparing the groundwork for a movie. It was to be about western journalists in the Exotic East and she needed colour. That meant real reporters, real lives, but also some of the mystery of the Exotic East. Baxter kept referring to the Exotic East. Why would anyone want to hear what western journalists thought about the Exotic East? They knew nothing about it – Baxter least of all. The man on the television frowned as he examined his nails. Who was this guy?

  I know you, I thought.

  “Don’t be afraid to be stars,” Candy said. “I think you are all handsomest.”

  The assembled journos, only two of whom had done any real reporting in the last twenty years, did not register her comments. By any stretch of the imagination, none of them could be described as handsome. Butt-ugly would be cruel but it would be closer.

  I worked for Shrubs News Agency and the Asia-Pacific hub was the sleek office to which under-paid reporters from Afghanistan to New Zealand sent their stories. It was a hive of activity. Squabbling TV producers, overweight picture editors and, in my section, fifteen scruffy but colourfully dressed sub-editors who were meant to rewrite stories if necessary, question the sourcing, sharpen the first paragraph, add context, hone everything down and, with a touch of a button, send them to newspapers, TV and radio stations, banks and big-time investors across the world.

  I lifted my head from my hands slowly to survey my section of the hive. An old Scottish sub known only as Fagin was reading the instructions of the popcorn machine which sat on his desk. A Canadian sub, talking to himself, was spraying blue paint on to what looked like a marijuana plant. An Englishman, Rupert, hands in pockets, was looking at the ceiling, humming and shaking his legs violently.

  “Candy is looking for real-life journalists to play parts in the film,” Baxter said. “Real life. She’s particularly interested in anyone who’s been in the Exotic East for a while.”

  The TV news had finished and the man leaning against the taxi had gone. A game show had begun. My whole life felt like a game show.

  “You are all my material,” Candy said. “Please behave.”

  Someone dug me in the ribs: “Opportunity knocks, old timer.”

  Old timer. Thanks for that. An old timer behaving in the Exotic East. What could be less exotic than sitting at a desk and subbing? Subbing was short for sub-editing and from time to time involved bouts of sobbing. The work could be remarkably pedantic and many would say it was the most boring job in journalism, the equivalent of being a linesman at a football match, ticking people off with a smile on your face, afraid of abuse. Watching life go by from the sidelines, but every now and then managing to attract everyone’s attention by making a bad decision. Exotic was not a word usually associated with the Shrubs Asia-Pacific desk.

  But the desk job meant I had regular shifts and regular hours to spend in the bars feeling sorry for myself at the grand old age of thirty-nine. My career, I would tell the girls, stretching self-indulgence across the harbour and back, was no longer brilliant. Now the girls had begun to ask: Well, when was it, Hadley? Never mind that now. Never mind brilliance. A mystery, a new game, had begun. I was being stalked by a man in his sixties.

  Two days after seeing the man on the news, I took a packed Star Ferry from the main island of Hong Kong to the Kowloon peninsula. Tourists leant over the railings, dodging the plastic storm sheets and bashing their camcorders into one another as they zoomed in on the harbour, a passing fire boat, a picturesque junk with a fake sail, the looming, green Peak which looked down on the business district of Central. Six or seven adults were zooming and snapping away. At the stern, a man with a ponytail was facing inwards and his camcorder was trained on me. An instant later, he had turned and was pointing the camera at the Convention and Exhibition Centre.

  The building looked like a Sydney
Opera House that someone had gently crushed with the palm of his or her hand. I did not move and by the time the ferry had reached Kowloon-side, the man had disappeared into the crowds. That same night, I saw him on one of the matchbox-shaped trams which ran the length of the island, skirting the Wanchai bar district. The man, clearly a public transportation buff, was standing in the packed aisle a few rows in front of me, tapping the low roof with a newspaper and whistling a Burt Bacharach song, bending to look out of the open window. On closer inspection, he was definitely in his sixties, and looked alert. On the prowl. I felt sure he was someone I had met on my first newspaper in the flat, sugar-beet growing Fens in eastern England. I tried to push through the packed commuters but was too late: the man escaped into the crowd and the tram set off again with a nice, familiar “ding ding” of its bell.

  The South China Morning Post, which I considered the most exotic masthead in the business, ran a Sunday feature about a movie which was to be directed by Adolf Lee, famous in Hong Kong for a string of low-budget kung fu flicks. Adolf had also directed a couple of recent hits in the West including ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, the story of a Chinese Elvis impersonator who lived in Birmingham, Alabama. The other was ‘Burt the Bellhop’, a slow, black and white film about a California hotel seen through the eyes of a bearded bellhop from Canada. With a couple more large Black Labels inside me than the co-pilot, I had seen the tail end of ‘Burt the Bellhop’ on a plane. It was awful. The Post said there was speculation about a number of actors playing the lead part of the foreign correspondent, including Sean Connery, who was way too old for it – but then they had hauled in Michael Caine to play the journo in ‘The Quiet American’ a few years back and he was close to seventy at the time. Nothing about the story was known, but the venture already had clout. The working title was ‘I Love Hong Kong’, which also happened to be the slogan of one of the local political parties.

  The paper said the press speculation was off the mark and that the film, according to inside sources (as opposed to outside sources who knew nothing about it) would most probably star Hong Kong’s own Panda Koo, the very same celebrity on the television talking about her pleasurable body, acting alongside ‘up-and-coming young British actor Chris Torment’.

  The whisky I was drinking as I read this at my local bar shot out of my nose. The pain was overwhelming. I was sitting at the Honest Bar in Kam Tin, in Hong Kong’s still partly rural New Territories on the far side of Lion Rock. It was surrounded by croaking frogs and duck farms pouring shit into streams and car-wrecking yards leaking battery acid. I scowled as I dabbed my nostrils with a beer mat.

  I had been at school with Torment in England – Halfords, a grim, second-rate public school on the boggiest and windiest side of Sotobech in the Fens. At school, Torment had wanted to be an actor. He had also wanted to be a commando. He had an artistic and military bent and he used to beat the shit out of me. Maria, a long-legged Filipina in cut-off jeans and the star of the Honest Bar, sat painting her toenails behind the counter. Her bottom was like an apple. She listened to my ear, nose and throat outburst.

  “You eat shit and die, Hadley. Why you making a noise like an elephant?”

  “I’m sorry. Went down the wrong way. Lordy, lordy.”

  Eat shit and die was a term of endearment. Not the title of a book about punctuation.

  “You drink too much and your face flushes.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, stop.”

  I LAY ON THE FLOOR of my office, studying the underside of my boss’s rosewood desk, at the end of a hard late shift and a few hours on the town. I had slept there many times, but never allowed myself the time to have a good look, and I despaired at what little effort had been put into making a piece of furniture which from afar looked terrific and from up close smelt nice. The red varnish, which covered the swirling dragons and Chinese characters on the top and front, came to an abrupt halt where the ‘sifu’ master carpenter had assumed that no one would bother to look. The rosewood had switched to a two-ply affair with pencil scribbling, arrows and a nasty smear which looked like blood. I tapped the wood, avoiding nails that no one had bothered hammering in. It made a thin, hollow noise – not surprising, as it was the underside of a drawer, but it was tacky and carelessly made nevertheless. It was a bit like the news agency, doing things on the cheap because it thought no one would take a closer look. I turned my head on my briefcase and studied the woodwork again, the bit that went down next to the knee. More smears of blood (what went on under here?).

  “You awake, Hadley?”

  I turned my head to the light. I saw A4 paper folding on to the floor from two noisy, old-fashioned printers. There were coffee stains on the patches of grey carpet which, like stripes on a lawn, were exaggerated by being viewed at ground level.

  “Nurse?”

  “No nurse here,” said ah-Jeung, the copy girl. “All nurses in hospital busy giving injections and doing good works.”

  I twisted my neck as much as it could stand and saw the television screen showing an old black-and-white Cantonese movie.

  “Hadley, you awake?”

  “What’s the matter? You’ve got a story?”

  “You say to wake you, to watch CNN and the BBC. But you always sleep.”

  I climbed up from the floor and stretched. “And why you wear such clothes?” ah-Jeung asked.

  I looked down and frowned. I was wearing white cricket flannels with a red stain down the side of the crotch.

  “Why you have big red mark?” ah-Jeung asked.

  I didn’t have a clue. “These aren’t my trousers,” I said gormlessly. “These are cricket trousers. I don’t understand.”

  “But why you have big red mark? Right in the front?”

  “It’s where you rub the ball… well, not you.” I swore to myself I would clean up my life. Become a responsible veteran wire reporter. “It’s where the bowler rubs the ball. Shines it on one side… It’s very difficult to explain in non-cricketing terms.”

  “What’s non-cricketing mean? I think you drink too much beer. I think you are a little bit alcoholic.”

  The trousers were a mystery. I tried to retrace my steps since leaving the office, a stone’s throw away from velvety girlie bars and sleaze, at about midnight wearing a respectable pair of blue Marks & Spencer chinos. Something along the way had made me decide to abandon the trousers in favour of a pair of cricket flannels with a red stain down the crotch. I looked again at the stain. It was the colour of lipstick. Now I was really frowning. Memories clicked in, one by one, but nothing untoward. The usual banter with the girls, making the mama-sans laugh, the smell of incense in the doorways and of cheap but nice perfume out back, the wet tile floors and the cramped men’s room, the smell of fried tofu coming through the vent. I was at ease at the long bars, buying the girls shots of Sprite at 250 times the rate in the real world outside.

  “You so sweet, Hadley. You so nice,” the girls said.

  “You bar-fine me, Hadley. Mama give you a good price. I make you feel good.”

  But I couldn’t really afford to bar-fine them. Across the street, a stooped Chinese woman with jagged teeth tried to get me up a flight of dark concrete steps. Not for the first time. What for? I knew what for. But who in their right mind would consider the option? The women standing around waiting for their prey, once snared by the old crone with the teeth, were all pushing sixty. Under a dim, naked bulb, the concrete steps rose steeply into blackness, oblivion. To go up there alone would be foolhardy, but with an eighty-year-old bag or one of her middle-aged goodtime girls? Who would do it?

  A British detective, for one. He was a surly regular on the strip and we were on nodding terms. I had walked on two steps after fending off the crone when I heard her accost someone else. I turned and saw the officer of the law, his head hung low, walking up the stairs to negotiate some nodding terms of his own.

  Escorted by a woman in front and behind, both with a sudden spring in their step, he looke
d like he was being led to the guillotine. If the ancient woman’s teeth were anything to go by, the guillotine was not far off the mark.

  “Hadley!”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  I tried to watch the news. I hadn’t touched a cricket bat in thirty years and I didn’t know anyone who played cricket. That was my point. What had happened to my trousers?

  I sat at my desk and switched on the screens. Bangladesh had filed an overnight update to a ferry disaster. As ever, tragic and bizarre. I groaned. Never mind the trousers. Bangladesh copy would do it every time.

  The reporters in Dhaka were always being reminded by the desk to weave in background and put everything into context. Assume the reader knows nothing about Bangladesh. Make him want to read on. Fat chance. The subs read on in Bangladesh stories just to see how and where the background – always cut and pasted from previous stories – was sloshed in like wet cement. More often than not, it was in a quote. The story on my screen was no exception:

  “Two overcrowded ferries collided early on Friday on an enormously mighty river in Bangladesh killing at least 100 people, police and survivors said.

  “‘It is terrible,’ said one woman in the water after the enormous and mighty collidings. ‘I blame the huge and mighty river, which winds through this impoverished, flood-prone country of 147 million people and opens into the sea at the major port of Chittagong, 130 miles southeast of the capital Dhaka.’”

  My first act of malice was to insert ‘poverty-stricken’ in front of ‘Bangladesh’ (at the same time thinking that even when I did play cricket, I was never a bowler). My second act was to slip in the words ‘basket case’. Then I spiked the bloody thing and had a cigarette on the fire stairs. I was considering quitting my job and branching out into something new and useful, when the answer to the most important question of all raced back like a cocker spaniel with a sloppy ball. The answer to a crossword clue comes when you stop thinking about it. The best headline (‘laughing all the way to the banquet’, a night earlier, about China’s new and burgeoning middle class) comes when you are working on another story.