A Million People, Hadley Read online

  I Hoovered around the hardwood edges first, quite surprised at how much dust had collected in a narrow stretch between the wall and the floor. The Hoover was doing a great job getting to those hard-to-reach places. The suction was magnificent.

  “You bastard,” Todd said above the din. I looked at him briefly. He still had his eye on the fly’s head.

  I got the machine on to the carpet and it was drawing the pile deep into its heart, giving it a right old battering and letting it go as good as new!

  “This reall-eh is the Best,” Todd shouted over the noise of the engine. “Look at the action!”

  There was no security on the door. I had to take my chances. I just needed a couple of minutes’ head start. I already had my passport, a standard routine for correspondents in dodgy territory. And it didn’t get much dodgier than this. I could go straight to Islamabad airport and get on the next plane to anywhere. Or should I take a taxi back down to Lahore and take a plane from there? By that time, though, they could have sealed off all the airports. But would they really go to such lengths? For what reason? This was personal between me and the colonel, and Todd was just barmy. There were no issues of national security surely. My head was in a spin. I couldn’t decide.

  “’Ad-leh?”

  “Yes Todd.” The berk was holding his Barney against his chest.

  “When you’ve done with the Hoovering, I want you throw a duster around.”

  “Okay.”

  “I haven’t quite finished. After that, there is a sink load of washing up that needs to be done.”

  “A-hah.”

  “A-hah? Why do you say that?”

  “Where is the sink?”

  “It is round the corner in your private kitchenette. Turn right and it’s off the main corridor on the right. I want to hear the clatter of plates and saucepans, do you hear?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s more like it. You’ll find all you need in my basket. Now carr-eh on.”

  I started Hoovering again – and Todd started singing.

  “Now hands that do dishes can be soft as your face, with mild, green Fairy Liquid.”

  I was Hoovering under the bed now, amazed at how low the handle would go, almost horizontal, without the cleaning heads lifting off the carpet. The engineering was far ahead of its time. After that, I had pretty much done. It was time to do a bit of dusting. I stepped on the metal button and the Hoover moaned down an octave to silence. I would ride my luck. I was wearing a hospital shalwar kameez, a long, white cotton shirt over baggy, cotton trousers. I would forget my clothes. I would just grab my shoes and go. First a bit of dusting. I made a fuss of the broken Venetian blinds, so Todd could hear me at work. The blinds covered darkened windows. There was no natural light coming into the room. Todd wasn’t moving at all, just staring at the floor. Then I tried some silent dusting, to see how long he would go before registering. I went back to the blinds. I looked over. His eyes were shut.

  It was now or never. I opened the cupboard as gently as I could and took my shoes. I looked at my clothes and changed my mind. I lifted them gently down from the hangers, one of which banged against the wood. I stopped and looked towards the bed. No sign of arousal, thank the lord.

  I tip-toed out the door, looked right towards the “kitchenette” and left towards the staircase and freedom.

  “Dusting duties over, are they, ’Ad-leh?”

  I dropped my pile of clothes out of sight in the corridor and turned.

  “Pretty much, Todd,” I said. “I thought I’d get on with the pots and pans.”

  “Aye, and make sure you get ’em gleaming.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Who had been using pots and pans in my kitchenette anyway? The food I had had, a really nice chicken curry with dal, was brought in by a uniformed soldier from a trolley. I found the place and there was one saucepan that looked like it had been used to make some milky tea. I looked around and opened a couple of drawers. I opened a cupboard and found Todd’s clothes. I went through the pockets of his jacket. Cigarettes, tickets of some sort, a newspaper cutting in Urdu about Marina (her picture was at the top), a box of swimming earplugs and a big ball of cotton wool.

  I returned to my room (my room? Hah!) with a large aluminium tea tray under my arm and went to Todd’s bedside. He had his head under the sheet

  “Excuse me, Todd.”

  He came to the surface. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I can’t find the Fairy Liquid.”

  “The Fairy Liquid?”

  “Yes. For the pots and the pans. And this tray.”

  “You want to wash the tray?”

  I brought it out from under my arm and inspected it. It was round, large, sonorous and just the job.

  “I don’t think anyone has cleaned it in months,” I said. It was now or never. There was nothing in Todd’s ears. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist about these things.”

  At that second, the electricity failed. The room was in darkness. It would be at least ten seconds before the generator kicked in, maybe less in a hospital (though I wasn’t prepared to put money on it). I raised the tray above my head. I had to make a very fast decision – whether to bring the tray down on Todd’s head, or…

  I brought it down smack on the empty top of the nicotine-coloured metal chest of drawers next to the bed with a loud crack. The lights came on. I looked at Todd. His mouth was open as if I had indeed brought it down on his head. His eyes were closed and he had fallen back on the pillow. It seemed to have worked. But for how long? The lights went out again, presenting me with too good an opportunity to miss. I hit Todd’s head with the tray with a sonic boom. Perhaps that would wake him up? I started hitting him with the edge of the tray in the neck area. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do. Did I want him dead? A soldier came skidding to a halt at the door.

  “What was that altercation noise, please?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I dropped the tray. Didn’t mean to alarm anyone. The colonel’s aide appears to have nodded off.”

  “This is a hospital,” he said unnecessarily. “He is reposing in your bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Having a sleep, I am supposing.”

  I looked down at Todd, where he was reposing as the soldier was supposing.

  “I think that’s correct,” I said.

  “He looks very thoughtful when reposing. As opposing to when he is wakeful and… careless.”

  “That’s a very good assessment,” I said. “He is a careless man.”

  The soldier, each hand holding the door jamb, looked around the room briefly and then up at the ceiling. “We have to be on the alert for improvised explosive devices,” he said.

  “Of course. Thanks for getting here so quickly.”

  “It is my duty, sir.”

  “Funnily enough,” I went on, “talking about duty, the doctor suggested I get some fresh air and perhaps walk in the streets a while. Would you please show me the way?”

  I FOUND A SUZUKI MEHRAN and asked the driver to take me to a

  Mongolian restaurant and guesthouse I knew where the Ethiopian owner made wonderful kimchi and had a supply of Black Label. I rang Baxter in Hong Kong to tell him where I was and that I was lying low with yet another stomach bug. No one else knew. I would pick up my stuff from the Chateau Hill later.

  “But Hadley, we haven’t had any stories out of you! When do you plan to file?”

  “I have a great story. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Well, when will we see it?”

  “Not long now, I reckon.”

  What story did I want to give him? What story could I safely write anyway? Right then, I just wanted to escape.

  “But I know nothing about it,” Baxter said.

  “Rodney, believe me when I say the walls have ears. Allow me a little leeway. Please. I have to lie low.”

  “Lie low?”

  “For a while.”

  The security people had tracked m
e down to my village home in rural Hong Kong easily enough. How long before they found me in their own backyard? I had to get out in the open and sit quietly somewhere and think things through.

  I spent the afternoon watching cricket under the hills. Crows flew low over the wicket and settled on a rusting mower that had lots of dry chains and appeared at least a hundred years old. They took off, back the way they had come, and landed on the dilapidated scoreboard. I sat on a bench and relaxed. A few people were jogging round the pitch, the women not daring to show an inch of ankle. Even the few men wearing shorts were wearing very long shorts.

  “You are walking in a wrong directing (sic),” a white sign next to the jogging track said. “Please walk anti-clockwise and cooperate with other walkers.”

  A man was sitting high on a large, green roller dating back to the late nineteenth century, rolling a piece of grass which wasn’t part of the pitch. Four goats were grazing beside the pavilion. The players were pumped up and screaming encouragement at each other. “Nice ball, nice ball, nice ball, nice ball, nice ball!” a young man on the near boundary was shouting in a crescendo, again and again, ending with a high-pitched: “Good bowling!”

  “Well fielded,” another fielder said plummily to his mate at deep silly point. I briefly thought of Mian Langhari taking pleasure in beating the English at “Lordth” and realised I was biting my nails. What was going on? Why was I in Pakistan? What did these people, and I meant Marina, her sadistic husband and his barmy Yorkshire aide, want from me? The stress was beginning to take its toll. I was staring at a cloud formation over the hills that looked like a woman in a burqa running away from a puppy.

  My next thought was that the hills were tumbling. No, they weren’t. I could see them, dark in the lowering sun. So Islamabad had been struck by an earthquake. No it hadn’t. The pavilion to my right was stable and still. The white-flannelled cricketers were still playing cricket and the goats weren’t looking at each other and saying “what the fuck?”. I was on my back on the ground and nothing was making sense. All of these frantic mind games took place in a millisecond before I realised what was going on. The ancient roller had flattened the left-hand, iron upright of the slatted bench with me its next target and there was no one driving the bloody thing. The pitted rolling mechanism was less than a foot from my sprawled legs and gaining. I dragged myself backwards, my elbows taking the grasshopper position, and I felt the iron brush my extended right toe. I dragged myself back some more and rolled to the side and watched the machine flatten what was left of the bench into the grass. A couple of the cricketers ran over to see if I was okay as the rolling machine continued its path towards the goats. One man jumped up and pulled a few levers and pushed a few buttons until the thing stopped.

  “Are you okay?” he shouted.

  “I’m fine. What happened?”

  “Someone was driving it over there,” one cricketer said, pointing to the far boundary. “And suddenly it was over here. Sans driver.”

  That was about the size of it. I didn’t know quite what to say.

  “Did you see where the chappie went?” another cricketer asked.

  But no one had. “The irresponsible fellow had obviously forgotten to turn off the keys,” one said. Right.

  I said thank you, bade my farewells and headed for the Margalla Road. So much for staying out in the open. The plan now was to get a taxi back to the new guesthouse, where no one knew I was, and bolt myself in my room. My legs were a little shaky. A car, another Suzuki Mehran, pulled alongside. Colonel Makhdoom rolled down the window with stiff turns of the handle.

  “Get in, Mister Arnold.”

  “Hello Colonel. It’s fine, thank you. I want to walk.”

  “I won’t ask again.”

  “I need the exercise. You look very big in that car.”

  “So be it.”

  I started off down the street and looked back to see if I could cross. What I saw was a thug with a jet black wig swept diagonally across his forehead get out of the back of the car. I ran across the road, not really looking to see if it was safe. Yet another Suzuki Mehran passed at speed, honking its horn. Actually it wasn’t really going at speed and the honking was more like a gargle, but I was still lucky not to have been run over. The colonel’s thug waited for the car to pass before crossing the road at his leisure. The colonel’s driver sped up the road and did a u-turn a hundred yards ahead and parked a dozen steps in front of me. The thug had me in a bear hug and marched me to the car and into the tiny back seat. It was an awful squash.

  The car headed into the hills above the cricket pitch, manoeuvring a series of hairpin bends with all the grace of a cement mixer. Everything was passing us on blind corners, one an open-top truck with about ten colourfully dressed men hanging off the back. Three women on a motor scooter overtook at speed, looking across at us, and one back at us, with disappointment etched into their brows.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  From this height, the city was flat with one or two noticeable landmarks – the Faisal Mosque below us and the Rawal Lake to the left and a sprinkling of high-rises, among them the world’s ugliest building, the Saudi Pak Tower. We passed an outside restaurant called the Monal, with kebab barbeque smoke partially blocking the view of the city, and were then flanked by fir trees on the right and a sharp drop to earth-roofed huts and tiny, green wheat fields on our left. Lines of washing were stretched over swept, dry mud. The car pulled off the road, the earth-roofed huts below, and parked between small boulders that had fallen through the fir trees on the steep bank on the other side of the road.

  “You will get out here, Mister Arnold,” the colonel said.

  He opened his door and climbed down, raising his arms and stretching. The thug next to me gave me a push towards the door. I did as I was told.

  “You will follow me, please.”

  The driver stayed in the car. The colonel walked first, followed by me with the bewigged thug taking up the rear. The colonel stopped and kicked something on the ground. He was scratching at something with his foot, occasionally looking up and down the road to make sure no one was coming. He said something in Urdu.

  The something he was scratching at was a concrete manhole cover about eighteen inches in diameter. I was suddenly so homesick. I breathed in deeply to disguise a giant blub. The thug walked forward with a crowbar in his hand. This had all been planned. He worked it around the edge of the cover then prised the thing away. It was about five inches thick and obviously heavy. I looked into the hole, not quite believing that anyone could perpetrate such horrible violence on me. From a pool of water at the bottom to the top was at least three feet. It was impossible to tell how deep the water was.

  “Get in, please,” the colonel said.

  How could I break this spell? How could I get them to realise that this was a cruel thing to do? To me, of all people. To this affable Englishman travelling with them in these majestic hills.

  “Stroll on, Colonel.” I tried to make light of it, to make him see that he had to be joking. “I mean, do me a favour. I’m not going in there.”

  The thug picked me up and dropped me into the hole like a stone. I had no idea if there was an inch of water at the bottom or two feet. Or twenty feet for that matter. So I had no idea when to brace for contact, a sure recipe for a broken ankle at the least. I stuck my feet against the circular wall to slow my descent, which threw my right shoulder hard against the wall, and I struck bottom within a second without any searing pain. I was standing in about a foot of water, my head peeping over the top of the manhole at road level, looking up at the face of Colonel Makhdoom silhouetted against the now darkening sky.

  “I can pick you up in the street with impunity, Mister Arnold. I can drop you in a hole. Do not be under the misapprehension that I cannot do more.”

  I fought my way through the negatives to arrive at what he meant: Next time he would kill me.

  “I’m with the press,” I said. It didn’t come
out as confidently as I had hoped. I choked on “press”.

  Makhdoom looked at the sky. He looked down at me and in one swift move, he undid his fly and pulled out his dick.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realise you were a gentleman of the press.” He was waving his prick in circles now but nothing was happening. “Next time I shall have much more respect. Onward Christian bloody soldiers.”

  I tried to duck out of the way, but the narrow hole only allowed me to duck my head. And then… nothing came. I looked up at him. He was standing looking angrily at his penis which in turn was looking morosely at me. What’s that word when you can’t piss in front of other people? The urinary equivalent of impotence, thank the lord? Camera-shy. That was it.

  “Another thing about Westerners, Mister Arnold,” he said, putting his dick away. “They fornicate, make decadent films about fornication. And they think they can teach us about society and morals.” He hadn’t finished. “Have you ever been in love, Mister Arnold? It is not at all comfortable, especially when you are in love with a beautiful woman. A Christian woman to boot. You lose all reason. You go mad, actually. Love is madness. Love is strange.”

  There was a smug, phony band in the nineteen-seventies called Doctor Hook with mullet haircuts who were as soapy as Fairy Liquid. The colonel had stolen some of their lyrics. What a sop.

  “I have done nothing wrong with your wife,” I said. “She embraced me out of jubilation, in the excitement of the election campaign.”

  “Oh, is that the case?” he said, showing his chainsaw braces on his teeth. “She embraced you out of jubilation.”

  “Correct, Colonel.”

  Makhdoom looked at me, briefly at his thug of an aide, briefly at his watch, and then back at me. He spat slowly in the dirt and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Shoot him,” he said.

  The colonel turned and walked towards the car.