A Million People, Hadley Read online

  “No, no, please.”

  I tried to climb out of the hole but the thug pushed me back in with his foot. There was no way I was going to get shot in this fucking hole. I was more angry than scared, and my anger matched the growing roar of something heading towards us at speed. I turned to look but we were on a bend and it was now dark. Traffic without headlights. What a novelty. I couldn’t see anything. I tried again to raise my body above the parapet as the thug pulled out a pistol from his side pocket. The noise was upon us and instantly above my head and above the roar of the engine I heard a sickening thump of metal on flesh and bone before a screaming squeal of metal on metal. The aide had disappeared and I saw the dim tail lights of a tall, rickety truck weave a little before it headed on its way, tassels and bangles and other unnecessary accessories dangling and banging off the back. It was too dark to see Makhdoom’s Suzuki Mehran, but it was obvious it had been hit. A sideways glance.

  Silence. Then a moan. Then a rustling of trees to the right. I waited a few seconds before climbing out of the hole. It was as black as night. It was night, but still I was worried about being silhouetted against anything. For instance, I could see the lights of the truck on a bend a few hundred yards away across the valley now. I trod silently into the roadside grass and ducked down and tried to collect my thoughts. The moaning had stopped. I knew the ABC of first aid, something all shit-hot-shot foreign correspondents and flatulent desk editors get taught before they are allowed into hostile environments. Certainly the colonel and his aide had been pretty hostile. The ABC rules were to check first A for Airways, B for Breathing and C for Circulation. Or was it A for Arsehole, B for Bastard and C for Cunt? And then to turn the poor bastard on his side if he or she was in danger of throwing up and choking to death. I couldn’t care if the moaning man had choked. In fact, if he was lying on his side already, I would have been happy to turn him on to his back.

  I suspected it was the thug who had been hit. He had been standing in the road to shoot me and was now lying in a ditch having his eyes pecked at by a mongoose, I hoped. A bald eagle had flown off with his wig to use next nesting season and then thought better of it and spat it out from a height. But what had happened to Makhdoom? I didn’t want to use my phone as a flashlight, though it occurred to me I ought to call someone. But who? Sultan? I didn’t want him, or anyone, caught up in this. I would escape by foot. I was going to scarper down through the bush, hopefully meeting up with one of the jogging trails and not meeting up with the madly-in-love colonel.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I WAS BACK on the Margalla Road within twenty minutes. I hailed a passing Suzuki Mehran, jamming my knees into the back of the front seat, like supports under the wing of a single-prop plane, and headed for the Chateau Hill to get my stuff. I had to move fast.

  “Can you wait for me?” I asked.

  “How long?”

  “Five hours?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “No. That was a joke. Maybe five minutes? And then we head for the Mongolian restaurant.”

  The driver bowed his head, scraping the ceiling as he did so.

  I went through the ridiculous procedure of knocking on the gate, which I could have pushed open, and waiting for the security guard in his little box to put down his cup of tea and open up for me. I ran indoors, grabbed my key from behind the counter, ignored the manager and ran up to my room, making squishing noises and leaving wet footmarks on the stairs. I showered, dressed, throwing away my sodden shoes and trousers, packed within minutes and stopped still. That fucking noise had started again – a light tapping followed by the banging of the side of an empty van, then the kettle coming to a boil and then someone banging out a beat with his hands on a desk.

  “Enough,” I said.

  I pulled open the door and stepped out into the hall where the pool table was. Todd’s broken window was covered by board. Where was the noise coming from? You fucking bastards can’t scare me now.

  I opened the door to the next room angrily and noisily. Two men sat on each of the single beds facing each other. They were looking at me with wide open eyes. One had a small drum between his knees, one had a table, the third had a washing machine and the fourth an electric kettle. He touched it now by mistake and said “ouch”.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  The men looked at each other, then back at me.

  “We are in the process of forming a drumming and steam-hissing and singing band,” the man with the burnt hand said.

  “We are looking in earnest for a singer,” the man straddling the washing machine said.

  I was in a hurry. I had no idea what to do or say. I had never been in this situation before.

  “Do you know you make a bloody racket?” I said. “All through the night, you do nothing but make a hideous noise.”

  “You cannot constrain the arts,” the man with the burnt hand said, “with bourgeois considerations such as the time of day.”

  “The time of night,” I said. “When most people are trying to sleep.” You could constrain the arts, I briefly considered, any time, any place, with a couple of pipe bombs.

  I closed the door gently, walked downstairs and paid the bill. I had been there too long already. I was in the back of the taxi in a jiffy.

  “The Mongolian restaurant and then the airport, please,” I told the driver.

  But it was too good to be true. The colonel could have had the airport covered within minutes of sleepy Todd waking up, guns at the ready. Again I wondered, should I ask the driver to take me to Lahore where I could get on any plane to anywhere? I looked at the driver’s face in the mirror. He looked old and wise, like a lion in a cutesy-cutesy, Hello Kitty cage for rabbits.

  “Driver?” His eyes registered me slowly. “I need to fly away from Pakistan, but I don’t want to fly from Islamabad.”

  He started to chew, looking at me every now and then as we passed a line of perhaps fifty Suzuki Mehrans lining up overnight for a tank full of compressed gas.

  “Are you a fugitive from our justice system?”

  “No, not all,” I said. Justice system? Don’t make me laugh. “To tell you the truth, it is my wife. I want to escape my wife who is flying out tonight too. From Islamabad.”

  “Escape your wife?”

  “Correct.”

  “I can help you escape.”

  I wanted to ask if he could be a bit more specific, shocking myself yet again with that English know-it-all sarcasm. I wanted to do the right thing and let him speak in his own time. I waited. And waited. But he didn’t say anything else.

  “Can you be a bit more specific?” I asked.

  He glanced at me in the mirror. Morose is as morose does. “How much money do you have?” he asked.

  “A bit. Not much.”

  “Where you want to go?”

  “Anywhere.”

  The driver raised his shoulders and turned left into an unlit side road, took a couple of turns and pulled up behind four taxis whose drivers were sitting on the curb smoking and talking. He got out and talked with them.

  “Terrific,” I said to myself.

  The five were huddled together now in a group squat. Every now and then one would turn his head to look back at me. I was not being smart. I was entirely at their mercy. My driver stood up and walked back to the car. He leant in his window.

  “Two hundred dollars and you have reservation on flight to Dubai. Time of departure: three hours.”

  “From where?”

  “Peshawar.”

  “Peshawar?”

  “Peshawar.”

  “Isn’t that awfully dangerous at this time of night?”

  The man stood up and said something slowly in Urdu to his mates, presumably translating what I had just said. They all had a good laugh. He leant back in the car.

  “You want Peshawar?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You pay for ticket at airport. You pay two hundred dollars to me.”

 
“Okay.”

  He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil. “You write full name on this.”

  The rule was never drive at night in Pakistan unless you had to. That was one rule. Another rule was never drive around Peshawar at night, even if you had to. It was now eleven o’clock and the flight was leaving at two in the morning. Peshawar was an hour’s drive, barring unforeseen events. I Googled the Dawn newspaper. No mention yet of any car accident in the Margalla Hills. No mention of any fatalities, or small soldiers with braces on their teeth.

  My phone rang.

  “Hadley?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Hadley, it’s David. David Creasel.”

  Bloody hell, the high commissioner. “Good evening, sir.”

  “Good evening. Where are you?”

  “Where am I? Good question, actually, sir. I am leaving.”

  “Good heavens. Are you in a fit condition? Colonel Makhdoom has just called me. I am afraid he is awfully upset.”

  So he was alive and kicking then. “Oh dear. Why is that?”

  “Hadley, you should be back in hospital. You need rest. You have been through an awful lot.”

  “I have been through quite a lot, sir. Yes. I have a broken tooth. Which is why I’m scarpering. The colonel tried to kill me, as it happens.”

  “I fear that you don’t know what you are saying. Can you at least tell me where you are?”

  I put my hand against the phone and told the driver which way to go. “The ring road,” I said. “Approach the airport from the south.” That would avoid the “shooting target” patch where, according to Sultan, the Taliban rang ahead when they saw a plum prize of a Western company’s fancy SUV.

  “Hadley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are taking a ring road? Where are you taking a ring road to? I know of no ring roads. You can’t escape, old chap. You do realise that, I hope.”

  “Sorry, sir?” Whose side was he on, for fuck’s sake?

  “Look, I have a friend of yours with me. And a friend of mine. Perhaps he can convince you to come home and clean up a bit and we can have a few drinks and have some fun.”

  “Have some fun?”

  “I’m transferring the telephone to him now. Please hold on, dear fellow.”

  I heard a rustle and swish of material and a clunk and what appeared to strained, muted expletives between two men.

  “’Ad-leh?” Oh for fuck’s sake. “Why do you treat me so cruelleh, ’Ad-leh?”

  I hung up and turned off the phone.

  We drove along the familiar highway, once missing a goat by yards, once missing a car reversing in the fast lane with no lights because he had missed a turn. I saw the chimneys of the brick factories against the flat, moon-lit horizon. And there was the Pearl-Continental on the right, which meant the driver had failed to take the ring road and was headed in the crazy, hubbub of downtown Peshawar. What was wrong with everyone in this country?

  “Why are we going this way?”

  “A swifter route.”

  Immediately we were caught behind a donkey and cart, and being overtaken by the brightly painted buses. Pillion passengers on motorbikes were giving me a good look as they squeezed by in the street light. How come the place was busy this late? I assumed everyone would be at home in bed.

  “Put this on,” the driver said, passing back a fawn-coloured woolly hat worn by almost everyone. I did as I was told and crouched down even further in the back of the cab which was making me crouch anyway.

  A beggar boy selling cigarettes leant in the front window and said something, gesturing back to me with his thumb. They laughed and the boy ran off.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “No, sir, it was nothing.”

  “Please, I want to know. He was talking about me.”

  “No, really.”

  “What did he say?”

  The driver sighed and gripped the top of the steering wheel as if bracing for a collision. “He asked me, why does that English, how you say, penis? Why does that English penis wear hat and look like dick?”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes. I ask him how he know you English. He said because you look like dick.”

  I kept silent until we reached the airport and paid the driver the two hundred dollars.

  “That is for the reservation,” he said. “Another hundred for me.”

  “But you said two hundred.”

  “Please, another hundred for me.”

  I paid him. There was no time to lose, assuming I did really have a reservation. But I was confident. The place hadn’t been cordoned off and wasn’t crawling with overweight soldiers. And I was in an airport, which for me has always meant hope and surprise.

  I ORDERED A LARGE WHISKY about half an hour after takeoff and was cheered to see my Pakistani neighbour do the same. In fact, I said cheers. The Emirates flight attendants were being kept pretty busy down both aisles with requests for alcohol, row by row. Not so much as when the cat’s away as when the mice are away. Happiness at last. Relaxation. An attendant walked past and offered me a newspaper.

  “Splendid,” I said.

  I opened the Dawn and turned to the foreign pages.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”

  It was a Shrubs story and it was wrong. It was about me, but it wasn’t. It was about someone else. I couldn’t tell. I was totally confused. But I could tell you the writer, just by the shoot-from-the-hip style. It was my old mate Fagin.

  Any marina in a storm, pakistan beauty tells drunken sailor hong kong (Shrubs) – Pakistani poster child politician Marina Makhdoom left a Hong Kong club in the early hours of Sunday in the arms of a drunken Norwegian sailor, apparently set on ending her political career, Shrubs can confirm.

  “Any marina in a storm,” she told him breathlessly before the couple left the main bar at Rick’s Cafe and headed out into the cold morning air, a reliable source and witness to the conversation said.

  “He was clearly the worse for wear, but she seemed sober and knew what she was doing,” the source said.

  The whereabouts of Makhdoom, already criticised by many in her Muslim-majority country for being a Christian, has been the subject of speculation, on and off, since she left the family home in Lahore, Pakistan, and went walkabout for a few days back in January.

  Marina herself recently flew to Hong Kong for some well-earned R&R after appearing to suffer some sort of nervous collapse at an election rally last week in which she started spouting best-forgotten Rick Astley lyrics from the 1980s.

  The Pakistani Consulate said only two days ago that she was well on her way to recovery and focusing her attention on her campaign, but that campaign appears to be in freefall.

  It was full of Faginisms: “Best-forgotten Rick Astley lyrics.” What a patronising fucker. What on earth was a “Pakistani poster child politician”? Who was the “reliable source”? And “Pakistan beauty”? Seriously? Her campaign “appears to be in freefall”? Said who? Since when did Shrubs go in for editorialising?

  Any marina in a storm. That was my line. I told her about it on the beach. She wasn’t impressed. She used those words again? I pressed the button for another drink.

  “Marina Makhdoom,” my middle-aged neighbour said, looking at the undated picture in the newspaper of her dancing in a London club three years earlier. “She must make up her mind whether to be the saviour of Pakistan or its shame.”

  I gently tore out the article, put it in my pocket. I changed planes in Dubai and got into Hong Kong around midday the next day. And as soon as I opened the red, metal door of my Tai Po home, I knew that I had had an uninvited guest.

  The door opens on to stone steps leading up to a tiled hallway and at the top of the steps was something that shouldn’t have been there. I live like a slob, with someone coming in just a couple of hours a week to clean up, but I generally leave the passageways clear. I could also smell a faint musk that wasn’t mine or anyone’s I knew. I stood at
the open door, not quite sure what to do. The something was the corner of a blue box. Which blue box? There were wire-mesh screens to stop anything coming in even if I had left a window open. There was a tiny banana plantation behind the house, but the nearest trees were twenty feet away. At the front, there was a six-foot gap over a path and open drain to the ancient, one-storey house in front, with the view of a flower farm over the black tiles. This was the route Marina had taken. At the side where I was standing, there was another path, where I had seen her waiting at my door. On the opposite side, there was a pile of logs stacked against a wooden hut. In short, there was no access, with all the windows closed, except through the metal door where I was now standing, staring up the stairs. Like a berk. I decided to be bold.

  “Is there anybody there?”

  A bird flew out from under one of the curved red tiles. The green metal door of my Hakka neighbours opened behind me. The large, old woman carried a chicken under her arm. She grimaced at me, sat at a plastic stool and cut the bird’s throat with one easy motion with a knife. The animal was shaking as if very cold as blood spilled into the open drain and ran downhill towards the flower farm. This woman rarely spoke to me. She rarely spoke to anyone. Her husband drove a green New Territories minibus and he rarely spoke to anyone either. When he came off shift, he would peel off his shirt and cough and spit several times as he made his way along the damp path from the road and toss his beer can into the woodpile.

  In halting Cantonese, I asked the woman if she had seen anyone enter my flat. I had still not stepped inside.

  “There is there isn’t person come see me ah?” I asked, using a grammatical structure which works much better in Chinese than in English.

  Her answer was concise and to the point.

  “Fucking crazy ghost person.”

  Okay, thanks. She was talking about me, not anyone who may have come to visit me. I was white, so I looked like a ghost. Simple, really. I looked back up the stairs, hoping there weren’t any crazy ghost persons up there.

  I started up, my eyes on the corner of the blue box which I now saw originally contained two hundred and fifty tubes of “anti-inflammatory cream for scaly orifices such as ears, knees”. I hadn’t bought the cream. It was just a box I had picked up at Park ’n’ Shop to carry the gin home in my Mercedes.