A Million People, Hadley Read online

Because they are uneducated and know nothing about democracy. But no one took her up on it. She was too easy a target. And hang on, she had even told me in the car it was time to cut the shackles of feudalism. She used the very word. Why didn’t I throw that back in her glistening face? What was the matter with me? I wondered how many people had noticed that her voice was slurring just a tiny bit and her pupils were suspiciously large.

  Palakorn came up behind me and grabbed my shoulder. “That’s what she said in the car, that it was time to end feudalism. Why didn’t you take her up on it?”

  “It’s all semantics,” I said. Palakorn was one hundred percent right. I should have challenged her in front of the TV cameras. It would have gone all over the world.

  “Well, it’s not for me to tell you your job,” Palakorn said, “but it seems you’ve wasted a bit of ammunition.”

  “Palakorn,” I said, winging it. “Please have some faith in my judgement. If I had challenged her on that, everyone here would have the story. Now only I have the story – that she said she wants to sever the shackles of feudalism, and then promptly dismissed the term as a Western label. It makes her out as a lightweight. A piece of fluff. I can use this at my leisure.”

  Palakorn thought a while and then patted my shoulder. “Brilliant,” he said. And he was off again.

  Marina was talking now. “Let us not talk contrarily,” she said, handing her teacup to an aide. “I feel we should be bonding. The Western press has been good to me and I want to be good to you. When I do this…” She leant back, raised her arms above her head and rested her long, downward-pointing finger tips on the top of her head in the shape of a heart. “…I will be thinking of you all.”

  The journalists laughed politely. And her eyes caught mine for an instant, as they must have caught others as well. Still, it made me think – firstly, that she was fucking bonkers, and secondly, that she was somehow thinking only of me.

  The next day we arrived at the green, poetic, flawed and ancient city of Lahore where Palakorn and I were standing on a twenty-foot-tall election podium which we had reached by fork-lift truck, standing on the two metal prongs. The ladies and gentlemen of the press were waiting for Marina as the crowds grew below us. I leant on the balustrade and looked across at the charged body of humanity, passion and hope. Good lord. Balloons lifted flags into the sky. Hundreds of huge, green, red and white flags waved over bearded men’s heads. I estimated the crowd at 100,000 already. The place was filling up fast and the whole structure, lit up by gantries of spotlights left, right, front and back, insects flapping madly back and forth, was already gently swaying under the pressure of bodies pushing against those in front below. Grown men climbed on to one another’s shoulders, they climbed up precarious scaffolding and stanchions, they perched themselves or rooftops and in tall, spindly trees – all so they could wave flags and banners, worshipping someone who would do absolutely nothing to make their lives any better. No one who ran for office had anything other than self-interest at heart. Same the world over. That goes for you too, Marina.

  “We’ll be lucky if we get out of this alive,” Palakorn said. “When’s Gary turning up to any of these gigs?”

  “Fuck knows,” I said. I lit a cigarette. I thought about Makhdoom’s threat. Marina was to climb on to the podium by the fork-lift but there was a narrow staircase, declining sharply into heavy security, should she need to get away in a hurry. I crouched down in the corner and took a swig from my hip flask as two helicopters flew low overhead. I must stay away from her. I must not give the colonel any reason to suspect anything. Security men on the podium and on the ground were speaking furiously to one another on their walkie-talkies, looking at the sky. The colonel could get us both here. Kill two birds with one stone. Someone was hanging dangerously out of an aircraft, walkie-talkie at his ear. I looked down and into the glazed eyes of a handful of Marina’s supporters dressed in jeans and t-shirts and rubber sandals. Drunk and stoned on nothing, for nothing that happened tonight was going to have any effect. Go out and rob a bank, I thought. One teenage girl, a green veil covering most of her face, was twirling around in circles, carrying a sign that said: “U.S. liberals: Lay Off Malala.”

  Cheers erupted behind the podium and a few panicky crows took off from leafless trees. The focus of attention was out of vision, but it appeared that Marina had arrived.

  “How many people do you reckon now?” I asked Palakorn. He didn’t hear me. The podium was getting knocked from each side now. I fell on to a bench for the press. The cheers had risen into a constant wall of noise. I saw Marina now, standing in the back of a pickup truck, all lights, cameras and faces turned towards her.

  Her aides and police beat a path before her – her supporters were getting beaten as she approached the fork-lift. Whacked across the ankles, the back, the neck. I saw four men fall lifeless to the ground. Then, safety. Marina and a handful of grey-haired party officials were on the lift and rising. The arc lamps picked her out. Her forehead shone with sweat and the force of nature. She was completely alive. She was on fire. However crappy and corrupt Pakistani politics was, however much she was in love with herself, there was no faulting her bravery.

  She reached the top, beaming and waving. Everyone was pushing towards her, and I was being swept along with the flow. I wanted to keep as far clear of her as possible but now I was almost in front of her. She caught my eye and beamed some more. She took off her large sunglasses, pressed forward and leant towards my right ear, away from the crowd. She had to shout against the noise.

  “In England, there isn’t anywhere near this passion.” She leant herself against me in the briefest of hugs.

  She drew back and beamed into my eyes again. I beamed back. I had nothing to say. Her pupils were like plates. She leant forwards again.

  “In England, you have elections every five years.” She pulled back briefly and then went back to my ear. “In Pakistan, my people are not knowing if there will ever be a next one.”

  “Yes,” I said, adding quickly: “Be careful of your husband.”

  “A million people, Hadley,” she shouted. She hadn’t heard me.

  She turned to the front and raised her arms. The cheers went up, louder than anything I had ever heard. They weren’t so much cheers as a collective, primaeval roar. I went to the edge of the podium and looked down. The people looked mad. They were madly in love. They were pleading and screaming “Ma-reen-ah! Ma-reen-ah!”

  She put her sunglasses back on and tapped the microphone in front of her, making a knocking noise that echoed back from the squat, straggling street buildings that surrounded the crowd. She spoke about something, probably nothing, in Urdu, prompting wailing and gnashing of teeth. After about fifteen minutes, she slipped into English. It happened so fast, it took me a while to realise and I missed the first bit. And I wasn’t catching every word against the roar of the crowd.

  “…serfdom a thing of the past. He is a man vital to efforts across the world to put women first, as it should be here in Pakistan. He, and he only, was my inspiration growing up as a young girl in Islamabad. His wisdom, his sense of humour and, of course, his promise that he would never give me up…”

  Who was she talking about? Her father? Her fucking husband? Presumably it wasn’t Rick Astley.

  “…And when he says his heart begins to break when he’s considering a proposal to let me go, even today I get indelible goose bumps.” Oh lord, no. “I think, oh my lord, you have a master plan to let me go? I don’t think so, Mister hot singing Englishman with the quiff.”

  “Ma-reen-ah! Ma-reen-ah!” the crowded shouted. They hadn’t a clue what she was on about. No one had. Only a few faces look puzzled. The girl with the Malala poster was now using it as a bat to hit a ball thrown by a girl the same age.

  “Didn’t you once say, when I was an innocent teenager, that you were never going to give me up, never going to let me go?” Marina asked. As stoned as any hippy henge, she raised her arms and broke into song. “It would
take a strong, strong man…”

  The crowd was wild with delight. She was singing to them! What was she saying? It didn’t matter! She was so in love with her people, she cared so much that she was singing to them! But this was surely the end of her political career. Girls in rural villages had been stoned to death for singing pop songs. Pakistan’s army-backed press were going to have a field day. Loopy, liberal, promiscuous, Christian, gin-sodden, female, showing her face and singing Rick Astley. What a combination.

  No one appeared to give any signal, but her strong, strong security guards were suddenly in motion. One switched off the mike with another booming click and three were leading Marina away. She wasn’t struggling. I looked down at the crowd who were still shakin’ and rockin’ and screamin’. I tried to follow Marina who was being led to the back staircase. A security guard put his hand out to stop me and another asked where I thought I was going.

  “I’m with the press,” I said.

  “You’ll fucking pay for this.”

  The crowd below was pushing hard against the podium as if trying to bring it down. Where was the reason in that? They were her supporters. For fuck’s sake. They were rocking it and I heard something metallic and important shriek under the pressure. Marina’s aides were beating a path down the narrow staircase as supporters tried to climb up. More bloody madness. They were making slow progress. The fork-lift was climbing and descending as fast as it could, which was very slowly, taking just four passengers each time, holding on to each other for dear life.

  “I want to break free,” I said to no one.

  I felt my phone vibrate in my jacket pocket.

  “Hello?”

  “Be my servan-ter!”

  Oh fuck off, Todd. I looked across the crowd. Could there really be a million people there? How did she know? It wasn’t important. There were thousands directly below us, that much I did know, and the podium was really rocking now. I was trying to imagine the physics of it. The whole thing was covered in cloth and carpet and it was impossible to know how much of this pushing and shoving it could take. Was it made of steel or wood?

  A huge, sudden roar. It made me put my hands to my ears. Everyone else had their hands to their ears and we were toppling over in slow motion. Like the carpet was being pulled from under our feet. I thought of the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when they’re dancing on a retractible stage covering an indoor swimming pool and some punk mischief-maker starts to retract the thing and one by one the dancers fall into the pool. I was sitting down now and couldn’t understand why I had fallen over. I was slipping and the carpet was burning my bum and the palms of my hands. I was thinking of the carpet in our living room when I was a kid, black with ugly splodges of white, yellow and blue.

  Rick Astley. Any time, any place. Be my servant. This wasn’t a dream. This was falling for real. The real McCoy. The slippery slope. Curtains.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I WOKE TO FIND MYSELF strapped to a dentist’s chair. Everything around me, the walls, the ceiling, the enamel finish on the basin to my left, was the colour of nicotine. My first thought was not what on earth was I doing here, but rather how retro everything was. Very nineteen-thirties, if not earlier. The dentist’s chair looked like a jukebox with limbs, all the chrome bits pocked with rust. Why was I strapped in? Must be for my own safety. But why was I at the dentist’s?

  My phone rang in my jacket pocket. I could reach it with my right hand but couldn’t bring it to my ear. I put it on speaker.

  “Hadley?”

  “Yes. Who is this please?”

  “Thank god you’re all right.”

  “Yes, thank god. Who is this please? I’m at the dentist’s.”

  “It’s Rodney, Hadley. Palakorn told us all about it. He said you were in the hospital and that you were fine. Why are you shouting?”

  “You are on speaker, Rodney. I don’t know where I am. They’ve put a strap around me. Why would they do that?”

  “Probably so you don’t fall over.”

  “Why would I fall over? I am so drowsy and confused.”

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  A man wearing blue surgical scrubs put his head round the door, put his finger to his mouth and disappeared.

  “A man just put his head round the door and told me to be quiet,” I said. “It’s because I have you on speaker. So I am talking a bit more quietly now.”

  “Hello, Hadley, are you there?”

  “Hello, Rodney. Yes, I am here. But I am unable to put the phone to my ear. Because of the straps. What time is it?”

  “It must be ten in the morning your time. Hadley, do you remember what happened?”

  “It’s coming back to me. An explosion. The thing collapsed. The stage. Isn’t it good, Pakistan wood?”

  “Hadley, hang in there. You are going to be fine.”

  “Yes, I’m fine thank you. Why am I at the dentist’s? I think that was the hygienist who put his head round the door.”

  “Okay, well good luck with that. I will talk to you later in the day.”

  “Don’t go, Rodney. I have to tell you things. But I mustn’t shout.”

  Colonel Makhdoom appeared at the doorway, dressed head to toe in white, a chrome light on his forehead, a cigarette between his lips and a mallet in his right hand.

  “Perhaps we could talk later,” Baxter said.

  “Baby please don’t go.”

  “Not a good line. Take care, Hadley.”

  “But…”

  The colonel took the phone from my hand and hung up. It promptly rang again. I stared at him. Reluctantly he gave it back.

  “Hadley?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Gary.”

  “Oh Gary.” I was choking up a bit. “I’m so glad to hear from you.”

  “Why are you shouting? Look, I don’t have much time. Can I give you a couple of paragraphs over the phone?”

  “What’s that Gary? Can you give me what? Can you help me, is that what you are asking? I need some help.”

  “For fuck’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Can I give you a couple of graphs. I’m at the central bank.”

  “A couple of graphs on what, Gary? I’m so confused.”

  “On the rupee. The central bank’s issued a statement on the third tranche of the IMF loan. They’re livid. They’re thinking of buying up billions worth of government bonds. It’s quantitative easing, Pakistan style.”

  “Is it, Gary?”

  “What? Are you ready?”

  “Not really, Gary. I’m at the dentist’s.”

  “What?”

  “And the dentist is holding a mallet.”

  “What the fuck are you on about?”

  “I think you may have missed quite a big story, Gary. There was an explosion, you see.”

  “An explosion?”

  “Yes. And I don’t know what quantitative easing means. In the big picture, I don’t think your story is very important. I am with Colonel Makhdoom, who is very important. I am a bit woozy, but he is holding a mallet…”

  The colonel took the phone and turned it off. He clicked the side button to red, turning it to mute, and placed the phone and the mallet on the counter. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, lifted his foot on to a metal pedal and pumped. I was rising to the vertical.

  “Before I look inside your mouth,” Makhdoom said. “have you had any recent problems with your teeth? I did give you ample warning.”

  The seriousness of the situation was dawning on me through whatever had put me to sleep. The man was a qualified dentist, I knew. But why was he smoking? Dentists don’t smoke. He put his cigarette in an ashtray propped up between the drill bits.

  “People generally think: ‘I am not going to tell you if I have any problem with my teeth. It’s up to you, the dentist, to find if there is a problem. Why would I make it easy for you to hurt me?’ Is that how you feel, Mister Arnold? I did warn you.”

  “Nurse,” I said.

/>   “Now, now, Mister Arnold, there is no nurse. You know that. I don’t need a nurse for what I am going to do inside your louche mouth.”

  “You don’t have the certificates.” What was I saying? I had been drugged. More bits and pieces were coming back to me. Marina. Where was Marina? I was at the campaign rally. There was an explosion and I fell and kept falling.

  “What certificates might they be? Marriage certificates? I have a marriage certificate. It says I am married to my wife. To the woman you embraced. In front of the whole country.”

  “What have you done to her?”

  “I did warn you. But one thing at a time, Mister Hadley Arnold.” He picked up the cigarette.

  “What are you doing to me? Why am I strapped down?”

  He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, squinting against the smoke, and held up a pair of tarnished forceps that looked like sugar tongs.

  “Please,” I said. “I fell over. But there is nothing wrong with my teeth.”

  “You fell and you took quite a knock.”

  There was quite a knock at the door and another man put his head round and slowly entered.

  “Hello, Hadley. Can I come in?”

  The man didn’t wait for me to answer. Obviously English, wearing a blue blazer and beige slacks, he approached the foot of the bed. I was confused but never more pleased to see a fellow countryman, even if he looked like an inbred royal berk. He had no chin and his front teeth stuck out over his lower lip. His nose was shot purple with broken blood vessels.

  “I say, welcome back to the land of the living,” he said and I could smell the whisky straight off. “Ah Colonel, I did not see you there. How is our patient? Has he been smoking, the naughty boy? Should we expel him from the sanatorium?”

  What the fuck was he on about? The colonel stepped forward and shook hands with him, holding the mallet in his left hand behind his back.

  “Your Excellency,” he said. “It is an honour as always.”

  “Well I wish it were under happier circumstances, Colonel, but delighted your wife, our dear Marina, is safe.”