A Million People, Hadley Read online

“Yes, delighted,” Makhdoom said. “As always. My eternal thanks.”

  The Englishman turned to me.

  “I am so sorry, Hadley, my fine fellow, you must excuse my tardiness in introducing myself when you must be so dazed and confused.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know where I am. I haven’t been smoking. The dentist is a heavy smoker.”

  “Well, let me introduce myself first, if you don’t mind, eh? I am David Creasel, the British high commissioner. We have had a bit of a security scare, but you are safe now.”

  “How is Marina?”

  Creasel put his left thumb in his right nostril and made an oafish face and blew out sharply of the left nostril. It was like taking snuff in reverse. “Perhaps you would like to explain, Colonel?”

  “My wife is very safe, thank you for asking, Mister Arnold,” Makhdoom said. “She is a little shaken, but she is fine.”

  “Why are you holding a mallet in your left hand?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

  “Now, now there, Hadley,” Creasel said. “You are very confused. The colonel is a jolly famous dentist. He wants to see if there is any permanent damage.”

  “He said I had a louche mouth.”

  “I should fetch the doctor,” the colonel said. He left the room.

  “I am not making this up,” I said. “I need protection from him. I admit I am a little confused. Why is he walking around with that mallet? Is he a carpenter?”

  “You were very lucky,” Creasel said, sitting in a tatty leather armchair under a revolving fan and crossing his legs. He gave his right nostril another feel. “The stage fell in such a way that most of you chaps on top slid most of the way before coming to an abrupt halt.”

  “Slid?”

  “You were on the podium with Marina Makhdoom. Someone threw an explosive device, I am afraid. The stage fell and you tumbled off it with a few bumps and burns and bruises. Your bottom is worse for wear, I should suspect. A bit rosy, perhaps?”

  “Rosy? My bottom is rosy? What are you talking about? I don’t feel any pain. Certainly there is nothing wrong with my teeth. I don’t need to see a dentist. Was anyone killed?”

  “I am afraid there were casualties, yes. At least a dozen on the ground and two security men on the podium. None of Marina Makhdoom’s people was hurt, nor any journalists.”

  “Sir.”

  “You can call me David.”

  “The colonel did it.”

  “Now, now, there. You have no such evidence.”

  “I know it. Mark my words. And Marina was talking and then … she was talking nonsense. I know I have been drugged. I feel… squiffy.”

  “Well, she appears to have had a turn of some sort. She is seeking rest and attention in Hong Kong.”

  “But the colonel, sir. Sir David. He’s not what he seems.”

  “He has a reputation for being a bit of a card, it’s true.”

  “No, he’s not a card. The other day he threatened to kill one of us by election day.”

  “One of us?”

  “Not you. He meant me or Marina. She must be a huge embarrassment, of course. Her political career in tatters. But don’t think of him as a card. He is dangerous. He thinks…”

  “Yes? What does he think?”

  “He thinks there is something going on between me and Marina.”

  “Oh good gracious. Does he, indeed?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous, but yes. He thinks I’ve been giving her one.”

  “My dear chap, I know you are a bit dizzy, but let’s not resort to the talk of the gutter, eh?”

  “He’s strapped me in. Look. Why would he strap me in? He gets off on the jealousy, you see.”

  “Gets off on the jealousy? I would hazard a guess that he has strapped you in for your own comfort. May I suggest you get some well-earned rest?”

  “He hates the English.”

  “Now, now, Hadley.”

  “I have been very respectful to his wife. But he said I was beyond the pale. He probably thinks you’re a toffee-nosed git.”

  The high commissioner shifted in his chair and folded his legs. “I have known the colonel, and his charming wife, for many years,” he said. “I believe our friendship is genuine and deep-rooted. It is certainly supported by evidence.”

  “He thinks I deep-rooted her.”

  “Oh now, really,” Creasel said, rising from the chair. “I am going to get the doctor. Ah, emergency over. Here come the dentist and the doctor. How splendid. Where’s the colonel’s handsome aide?”

  Handsome aide? Did he mean loopy Todd? Good lord. And what on earth was splendid about any of them?

  “So, Hadley. Just the ticket,” Creasel said. “I must take my leave.”

  “No, don’t go.”

  “Ha ha, indeed. Give this man some more drugs. And here’s wishing you a quick recovery and bon voyage.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Be a brave old chap, eh?”

  He shook my hand, said “gentlemen” to the young, balding doctor and the colonel, and was gone.

  “Now Mister Arnold,” the doctor said. “We’re going to have you out of here in no time.”

  “And here’s a friendly face to expedite your recovery,” the colonel said. The doctor laughed and the colonel showed me his braces. Without taking his eyes of me, he shouted: “Enter!”

  A man slid round the door jamb into the room, a playful smile on his face.

  “Eh-up ’Ad-leh.”

  Oh lord.

  “Do you wish to attend to some dental work, now, Colonel?” the doctor asked. “Or can we let him rest?”

  “I’ll just take a little look.”

  “All right, then.” And then to me. “I will be leaving now. I’ll be back to see you before, you know…”

  No, I didn’t know. “Doctor, please don’t leave.”

  “You’re in good hands, Hadley.”

  The doctor left the room. And the colonel walked towards me. He gave the mallet to Todd.

  “I hope you will let me inspect for damage, Mister Arnold,” the colonel said as he put on rubber gloves. “I am seriously most interested. Please open wide.”

  I did as I was told, small tears emerging in the corners of my eyes. The colonel prodded around and pushed here and there. Then he inserted his thumb and pushed a bit harder on my top teeth.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I said when he had removed his hand.

  “I would beg to differ, Mister Arnold. You have a nastily chipped canine.”

  “Where?”

  “Open wide.”

  I did as I was told. The colonel put a prod against one of my back teeth. I kept having to swallow, each time making a short, dry gagging sound. I saw Todd hand something to the colonel who in one swift move tapped the mallet on the prod.

  “Right there,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, pulling my head away. “You’ve just broken my tooth!” I hadn’t felt any pain but there were bits of shrapnel in my mouth. “Why did you hit my tooth with a mallet?”

  “I am exorcising the excoriated enamel.”

  “Oh no you’re not.”

  “Oh yes I am.”

  “I don’t know what you are saying. But you just broke one of my teeth.”

  And then thwump, Todd to the left of me and the colonel to the right slapped metal arm brackets over my wrists. My feet were pulled back as if by rope and I was immobile.

  “You must trust us,” the colonel said. “Todd is my very efficient security aide. You must obey his commandments.”

  “Aye, ’Ad-leh. Not so much commandments as requests, like.”

  “You have damaged one tooth and I am going to make it right for you,” the colonel said. “I need to entrain a lower portion of the tortial bell…”

  “What?”

  “For which I suggest you accept a ready offer of an anaesthetic.”

  “Anaesthetic? Why?”

  “For the entrainment.”

  “
Look, I don’t need any entrainment. I don’t even think there is such a word. Except in a Van Morrison song. You must let me go. I am a foreign correspondent and you cannot get away with this behaviour.”

  “You are foreign matter who thinks he can make a cuckold of me.”

  “I have not made a cuckold of you. You must let me go.”

  “I shall let you go, eventually. But do not consider the option of writing any schoolboy fantasy story about me, or my aides, or, indeed, my wife with her loose Christian morals. Open your mouth.”

  Again, I did as I was told. I couldn’t bear the alternatives. I stared wildly, running my fingers under the cold, metal lips of the armrests. Makhdoom reached up and adjusted the light on his head. He was making slight gasps. His face was set in an ugly grimace. He dropped his prod in the metal tray and took a syringe from Todd, held it up to the light and tapped it. It was a big, glass affair, a type I remembered from my childhood, with a fat needle that was usually more painful than the procedure to follow. Though in this case, I was willing to hedge my bets. Had he knocked all the bubbles out? Or was he going to really hurt me and give me an embolism and the bends to boot? The colonel was looming now. I was trying to pull away. I tried to bang my head from side to side, but Todd held me back in a vice. In he came. I could smell the coconut oil on his hair, tobacco on his moustache.

  “Now this may hurt a little,” the colonel said.

  There was, surprisingly, just a gentle sting. He knew what he was doing! How extraordinary. I wanted to thank him, but could not speak. Such is the gratitude of the victim, overcome by the smallest act of kindness from the torturer.

  “Let’s give it a couple of minutes to take effect,” he said.

  But why all this adherence to protocol when all he wanted to do was hurt me? He wasn’t worried about my teeth, that was for sure. But he was back in my mouth, poking around. I could feel the steel probe in his hand sticking to the tooth in places as I watched an orderly push yet another stretcher loaded with lead bars along the corridor outside.

  “There’s a bit of entrainment here,” the colonel said, turning to swap his probe with another, thinner, stick-insect like gimlet. “I am going to stick this instrument into the entrainment and push a little. As far as it will go, in fact.”

  “Ooorph,” I said.

  “I want to make sure the anaesthetic has taken effect. Here we go. It may hurt a little. One, two, three…”

  In the tiniest fraction of a second, I had ripped both armrests off their mountings and tears had launched themselves out of my eyes on to my shirt. My first thought was of an electric chair, and something going disastrously wrong with the voltage, or wattage or ampage or something, and everyone above me looking at each other as if to say what do we do now?

  “I do apologise,” Makhdoom said. He had picked up the anaesthetic phial. “Use before 1947, it says. Independence. Partition. How did I not see this?”

  He disappeared behind me. My mind was racing. It was running the whole gamut of deliberately administered pain through the centuries. I thought of sixteenth century Spanish Catholics in the pretty city of Ronda just an hour from the Costa del Sol. I thought of Ben Hur on his slave boat. I thought of trying to make head or tail of “Twelfth Night”. Funnily enough, I didn’t think of Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in “Marathon Man” and dentist Olivier asking: “Is it safe?”

  The colonel came back into vision with another syringe but did not say anything. He injected the back right-hand side of my mouth, again with the gentle sting. He stepped back and looked at me disgustedly.

  “The operation begins now,” he said.

  Then Todd spoke to the colonel, making some kind of a plea. The colonel spoke fast in Urdu to Todd in response. Todd pleaded again and the colonel raised his voice in a long reply and slapped Todd on each cheek. Makhdoom took off his white jacket and the light on his head, leant towards me and undid all the straps and contraptions.

  “He’s all yours,” he said to Todd. And then to me: “I am assured that my aide has some unfinished business with you of which I am honour-bound to let him partake.” What the fuck? “I ought to tell you, Mister Arnold, a bit about Todd’s background. As a child, he was forced to be a servant to a Pashtun warlord in the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif who went by the name of Felix the Cat.” Todd was looking bashful, as well he might, staring at the ground and playing with the linoleum with his right foot. “Then he was sent packing to one of your indescribably corrupt public schools at which he was forced to serve tea to prefects in their beds while wearing nothing but a woolly hat.”

  “I don’t want to hear this shit,” I said. “Let me out of here.”

  “Ah, but you must let me finish. Things took a turn for the better. After school he joined a firm of lawyers…”

  “Accountants,” Todd said, still looking at the floor.

  “My apologies. Accountants, again in England, at which they forced him to clean the lavatories wearing nothing but…”

  “Ballet shoes.”

  “Ballet shoes.”

  “I don’t hold any grudges, ’Ad-leh,” Todd said. “I just like to see the tables turned for once, like. For people to be my servant, but in a most respectful manner.”

  Makhdoom left without so much as a goodbye, closing the door gently behind him. He was leaving me to Todd? What on earth did he want to do to me? The right side of my head was numb. The right side of my body was numb. Todd’s head came into vision, a big smile on his face.

  “Eh-up,” he said.

  I waved my left arm in anger, knocking a plastic glass from the basin, and kicked my left leg weakly. What had the colonel done to me? I was at this nutcase’s mercy. Again I kicked and waved limbs on the left, but it was mere floundering.

  “I hate to see you in distress,” Todd said. “But at least we are here together.” He leant back against the counter, raised his head, looked at the ceiling and sighed. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “But we still haven’t reached any sort of common ground, have we? You refuse to meet me halfway. You put me through the mill again and again.”

  Trouble down’t mill. If only he could drown down’t mill pond. He stepped outside the door and within a minute was back carrying a basket and pulling some contraption with squeaky wheels into the room, the cigarette in his mouth. It was an old stand-up Hoover. It had a black, perpendicular, deflated bag above a tiny, steel sucking device shaped like the head of a fly with one, large, beige, bulbous eye. So it seemed to me at the time, anyway. It had a curved, corrugated, black Bakelite handle and was probably the most hi-tech piece of machinery in the building.

  “Now I know you’re drugged up something proper,” Todd said. “The colonel warned me. He said it would take a few minutes to wear off and you would be fit as a fiddle. My intervention has saved you some real pain at the hands of the colonel, I reckon.”

  I looked at Todd and I looked at the Hoover. Todd was leaning on it now, playing with the cord.

  “I think by now you have a sneaking suspicion of what’s going through my mind,” he said. “How you can say ‘thank you’ to Yorkshire Todd.”

  I flapped my left arm once. I just wanted this man to go away somewhere and explode. Just like, I only now remembered, that Hoover had exploded in the Peshawar church.

  “When you’re ready, and there’s no hoor-eh,” he said, pushing the Hoover closer to me. “But I’d be ever so grateful if you could run this around for me. There’s nothing so very troubling about that, is there? The room is particularly dust-eh and I am a little done in.”

  I looked at Todd and back at the Hoover. I could feel a heavy tingling on the right side of my body. The anaesthetic was wearing off. Todd hadn’t finished.

  “I am just going to pop out and freshen up and get into the appropriate attire. Then I am going to slip into that bed over there while you … well, while you do for me. With the Hoover.”

  Todd left the room. I could feel my right leg now. I could move it. I tapp
ed the right side of my head and it gave a sensory version of the ringing of a deep bell. I was getting back together. I rose from the supine to sit in the dentist’s chair. I looked back at the bed that Yorkshire Todd had his heart on climbing into as soon as he came back. Good lord, what was the matter with him? I stood up and walked gingerly over to the Hoover and leant on it for support. There was a picture on the back of the black bag, a Christmas ad, no less. A white American woman, wearing a tight-fitting pink dressing gown, was kneeling by the side of the same model Hoover with a big, red Christmas bow tied to the handle. She was obviously overjoyed at her husband’s generosity. “Give her a Hoover and you give her the Best,” it read. How could that be? What were they talking about?

  “Oh bless!”

  Todd had returned. He was wearing striped pyjamas and carrying a purple Barney dinosaur under his arm. He ran and jumped on to the bed and was under the covers within a few seconds.

  “You know what this means to me, don’t you ’Ad-leh?”

  “I don’t understand anything,” I said.

  “Plug it in please.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Plug the fucker in. In the wall.”

  Was I strong enough to lift this thing and clock the git over the head? Hang on, maybe the colonel had left his mallet.

  “’Ad-leh, you must plug the cord in over there by the door. Then you can run it around. And you will see a little bag clipped to the handle. Yes, that one. It contains an extension and some accessories. There is one that is very good for getting down the sides of chairs and under antimacassars and such. But never mind those for now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll plug it in now.”

  “If you will, please.”

  “I won’t worry about the accessories for the moment.”

  “Correct.”

  Todd snuggled down as if about to be read a bedtime story, pulling the sheet up to his chin. There was one thing clear in my head: nothing would make me return to that bed tonight, even if it had been stripped of its linen and boiled in gin. One way or other, I was out of there. My clothes were in the cupboard with my shoes. At some point I had to gather them and make a run for it.

  I plugged the Hoover in and walked back to the machine and stepped on the metal switch. The thing roared slowly to life, the black bag swelling and dust rising to my nose without my even having moved the bloody thing. Todd clapped his hands twice, his eyes on the head of the fly, a really stupid, childish grin on his face.