A Million People, Hadley Read online

Marcus looked up. “You would, right?” He leered around the desk. “I mean, Marina Makhdoom.” No one said anything. “I mean, you wouldn’t say no.”

  “Wouldn’t say no to what, Marcus?” Fagin asked.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You have to learn to shut the fuck up when no one wants you to speak,” Fagin said. “You have to learn not to be a ginger fuck.”

  “Fuck off, Fagin,” Marcus said, turning to me. “Hadley, you won’t believe this, but there was this girl last week.”

  A tawdry, ginger dope fuck and he was right. I wasn’t going to believe him.

  “Leave me alone, Marcus.’

  “There was this girl,” he said again. “In KL. You won’t believe what she said.”

  “What did she say? Did she say hello? Was she a waitress? Did she ask you what you wanted to drink?”

  “Don’t be a prat. You’ll never guess.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to encourage him. Be my servant, the man had said on the phone. What was that all about?

  “Hadley?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll never guess what she said to me.”

  “You’re right. I’ll never guess. No point trying.”

  “Go on. Take a guess. I was in KL. For the election. Only got back this morning. She followed me out of the office to the lift. She looked me in the eye and said it.”

  “All right, what did she say?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Which floor please?”

  “What? No. Be serious. She said it in a whisper, making sure we were alone.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Sotto voce like, if you know what I mean.”

  “What did she say, Marcus?”

  “She said… she said: ‘Any time, any place.’”

  Marcus looked at me, waiting for me to react.

  “Any time, any place?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What did she mean?”

  “What?”

  “She was talking about the wi-fi? The reception?”

  “No, you prick. She meant…”

  “What?”

  “Hadley, what do you think she meant?”

  “She was talking about her smart phone,” Fagin said.

  “No. She meant I could… you know. Any time, any place.”

  “Well did you?”

  “Well no, actually.”

  “So how do you that was what she meant? That’s not a very good story.”

  “Oh fuck off. You just want to put everyone down, don’t you, Hadley? You want to crush every initiative.”

  “This was an initiative? Yours or hers?”

  “Get fucked.”

  “Any time any place.”

  But I was interested to find out who she was. I mean, if she had said that to Marcus, the world’s most dysfunctional person, maybe … I called up the Shrubs online staff directory.

  “Marcus, sorry man,” I said. “I was just taking the piss.” I called up the Malaysia directory. I called up the “colleagues” page and clicked “large icons”. I was skimming through pictures of all the women in the KL office. There was a complete beauty called Isabella in TV.

  “Who said it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Who said ‘any time, any place’ to you in the Kuala Lumpur office?”

  There was a cutie in the pictures department called Mei-mei who was looking at the camera through lowered eye-lashes. An intern on the reporting side looked foxy, but way too young. For me or Marcus.

  “Why do you ask?” Marcus asked.

  I smiled. “I mean, it’s such a good line. I just wanted…”

  “You want to meet her.”

  “Don’t be silly, I just wanted to know…” Come to think of it, the bureau chief was hot too. Her name, according to the caption, was Bernard Botsford.

  Baxter came out of his office looking smug. He came up behind Marcus and put his hands on the sunken shoulders as Marcus sat up straight and replaced his keyboard on the desk.

  “This man,” Baxter said loudly, now patting both Marcus’s shoulders and beaming at the other deskers. “This man is hopeless, lonely and sad. A complete waste of space. Keep up the good work. All of you.”

  Just a little snippet of conversation on the desk. Probably not a fair representation, but not far off. Baxter wasn’t finished.

  “As for you, Hadley, I want you to pop down to Shek O with pix and TV. We have a story on our hands.”

  “Marina?”

  “What?” asked Baxter.

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” said Marcus.

  “Fuck off, Marcus,” I said. “What’s the story, Rodney? Anything about Marina Makhdoom?”

  “What makes you think it’s anything about Marina Makhdoom? You’re writing a story about her. You’ve got her on the brain.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “What’s the story?”

  “The protests. There’s a new Occupy Central protest zone, except it’s not in Central.”

  “It’s on the beach?”

  “Exactly, my old China. Take TV and pix. Some prick also called up to say there are crops circles sprouting up all over the shop.”

  “Crop circles?”

  “In all the rolling wheat fields, apparently.”

  “Is this prick a reliable prick?”

  “Haven’t a clue. But I want you to check it out all the same. The Hong Kong file is looking a little thin. You could do with some fresh air. And if you run into Marina Makhdoom, please don’t be shy about asking her what she is doing and why she is giving everyone the run-around.”

  So there I was on my way back down to rural Shek O – twice in three days – when the last time I had visited before that was about two years earlier. But Shek O wasn’t rural in the sense of crops. There were no rolling fields of wheat or sorghum, that was the point. Baxter was being heavily sarcastic. There were the hills and a glorious greener-than-green golf course for the super rich with little hump-backed bridges across streams. The only things that rolled were the expats off the hundred-miles-per-hour double-decker buses at the art deco terminus after a night making a fool of themselves in the bars of Wanchai.

  “We’re off to the coast to see some crop circles,” I said to the young visuals team waiting for me in the lobby. “Isn’t it a nice day?”

  We took the same route Marina and I had taken that Saturday morning, over the hill and down into the dead-end village, the shops now alive with wedding dresses and red meat under red lampshades. There were one or two protesters walking the opposite direction to us, dressed in yellow, one or two carrying the trademark yellow umbrellas, but when we reached the village, there was nothing. One or two protesters at the Thai restaurant, that was all.

  “So was there a big turnout?” I asked one girl.

  “No big turnout,” she said. “We think we were mistaken.”

  So I called the desk and said the protest lead was all bollocks and went instead to the house of the family which had raised the alarm (the only family to have raised the alarm) about crop circles. This was a lovely part of the job. The main story is out of the way, either written or a bust like today, and you had a couple of hours to spend drinking or wasting your time with a silly 200-word story about crop circles.

  The family lived in a tall, narrow, white house, built like a tug, behind the bus station in the main street where someone had written “how old were you when you found out that Santa Claus was real?” in chalk. The man was Macau-Portuguese, at a guess, and was wearing shorts and t-shirt and smoking a roll-up. He had a big smile and glassy eyes, raising alarm bells with me and my young pictures and TV colleagues. I heard the TV woman mumble something rude in Cantonese under her breath. I turned and winked at her. Why I winked, I had no idea.

  “We saw a circle in the hills, and then on the golf course and then on the beach,” the man said, drawing hard on his cigarette.

  “On the beach?”

  “Lik
e a line, a series of lines in the sand? Totally heavy.”

  “You saw lines in the sand and thought they were crop circles?”

  The man looked to his wife for support. “They were animal crops. In the sand,” she said. “Circles in the crops.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t listen to her,” the man said. “She’s barmy. But it was the golf course that convinced me.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Circles that could not have been made by nature.”

  “Go on.”

  “They were green, but totally awesome. A different green to the grass all around.”

  “Perfect circles!” the woman shouted from the kitchen. “Explain that!”

  “Hadley,” the TV camerawoman said.

  “What is it?”

  “Can I have a word?”

  “What is it?”

  “What do you fucking think?” She turned to the man and asked slowly: “Is the grass very short in these crop circles?”

  “Praise the lord. You’ve seen them too?”

  “I think so. And have you seen little flags in the middle of them?”

  “Markers of some sort, we thought. Though markers in what dimension, we have no clue,” the man said. “There. Your friend bears witness.”

  “Hadley, let’s go.”

  “So you called us all the way down here to say you’ve seen greens on the golf course?” I asked.

  “It is not a game with which I am familiar,” he said. “But the circles are still there. If you turn right at the…”

  “And they just sprang up overnight?” I asked.

  “We never said they had just sprung up,” the man said. “They have been there a long time. And each time my wife and I passed them, we felt we were in the presence of something larger than ourselves.”

  “Yup, you got that bit right.”

  “We were afraid of what they portended.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, I can tell you. They portended a wasted trip down to Shek O and they portended us leaving right now.”

  “I have some other news.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Oh yes. But perhaps that won’t interest you either.”

  “Well try us.”

  The man looked towards his wife again. She came through wiping the back of her neck with a towel.

  “Marina Makhdoom. The Pakistani woman. So many stories about where she might be and how she may have left her husband.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we’ve seen her in the village.”

  “You have?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Well, she was with a famous Pakistani sportsman, we are told. A player of cricket.”

  “Cricket?”

  “It is not a game with which I am familiar.”

  “Like golf, you mean. What was she doing? Was it Ian Botham?”

  “Calm down, Hadley.” This was the TV woman again. She was in her mid-twenties but behaving much in a much more grown up fashion than me. I realized that straight away.

  “Who?” the man asked.

  “Would you recognize his name if I said it?” I asked.

  “He was Pakistani too,” the woman said. “They looked like they were very close.”

  “Freddie Flintoff,” I said.

  “Hadley, he was Pakistani,” the TV woman said.

  “He was older than her,” the man said.

  “Saleem Malik. Javed Miandad.”

  “Very good looking,” the woman said. “Smoldering.”

  “Imran Khan!”

  “Hadley, calm down.”

  “Older than Imran Khan,” the woman said. “I know who Imran Khan is.”

  “Older? It’s not possible!” I said.

  “I mean a very, very famous cricketer. More famous than Imran Khan. Mian someone.”

  “Mian Langhari?”

  “That’s him.”

  “But the man must be seventy,” I said.

  “Well, they were very lovey-dovey,” she said.

  “He’s old enough to be her father!”

  “Hadley, calm…”

  “Where did they go?” I was talking to the man.

  “Well that’s the funny thing…”

  “What’s so funny?”

  The TV camerawoman punched my arm hard.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But please tell us where you saw Makhdoom and Langhari.”

  “We followed them from the beach,” the woman said. “We were going to say hello. We were going to tell them about the crop circles.”

  “We were walking up from the Thai restaurant on the corner, on the road to the point,” the man said. “We turned a corner and they had simply disappeared.”

  “What do you mean they simply disappeared?”

  “I mean just that. We turned a corner, by the run-down house with boarded-up windows and the posters and signs for ice from the Thai restaurant. They had vanished.”

  Pulling a second disappearing act, with a very old man to boot. I had read somewhere that Langhari had to get up twice in the night to wee.

  I LIVE IN TAI PO in the New Territories, next to a flower farm, away from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong island and the braying expats who work for banks and spend all day complaining about their maids. I had moved just a couple of weeks earlier from the outlying island of Lamma, with its glorious beaches, ugly power station, dodgy hippies, frowning journalists and the grave of an English croupier. Propped up in my ancient Mercedes, I followed an open-topped truck carrying all my belongings to my new home. There in front, flickering in the sunlight through the arching trees overhead, were my custom-made rattan filing cabinet, my rattan sofa with the curved corners and arm chairs with the white cushions and a fold-down rosewood desk. I was following my sitting room at speed down a narrow country lane which ran along the side of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Extraordinary.

  The house was similar to my place on Lamma, but this one had two usable roofs surrounded by waist-high walls with lights in each corner. It was perfect for barbecues, but who was going to travel all the way out to see me? No one. Let’s be honest. I was a long, long way away from the Hong Kong most people knew (even the people who lived here) in a tiny village surrounded by misty brown hills and graves on one side and kumquat and peach blossom trees on the other.

  I stood on the lower roof, about ten-foot square, and looked across hundreds of pots of kumquat trees, four foot tall and perched on bamboo shelves. Chinese buy them for good luck in the run-up to the lunar new year (the orange kumquats, which shine like bright blobs of paint when seen from the road, look like gold and symbolise wealth). They would all be gone within a few weeks – all except those, now lying on their sides, that were so small, spindly and frail that they didn’t symbolise wealth so much as serious ill health. Death, even.

  In the middle of the flower farm, about a hundred yards away, was an old, one-storey house with a tin roof, its whitewashed walls green with lichen and damp. A girl dressed in black, wearing a broad-rimmed Hakka hat, was playing with a puppy tied to a window latch on a long piece of string. I cracked open a beer and lit a cigarette and watched. Ancient China alive, oblivious and happy in bustling twenty-first century Hong Kong.

  Someone knocked at the door two floors down, for fuck’s sake. Just as I was alone, relaxed and about to get happily drunk. I looked over the roof wall and down at the alley.

  Marina Makhdoom was sitting on the concrete doorstep with her back to the building. I didn’t say anything. I stood back from the wall, mouthed fuck to myself and pumped my right fist gently in the air. What was she doing here, a million miles from anywhere diplomatic and city-like?

  I skipped downstairs to the bathroom and gargled with mouthwash. I skipped to the next room, the kitchen, and took a swig of Black Label to disguise the smell of peppermint. I skipped downstairs again, to the ground floor, happy as could be, answered the door and tried really hard to lo
ok surprised.

  “My goodness. Mrs Makhdoom?”

  She was standing up, a cigarette now in her hand, and she turned and… didn’t give me a smile.

  “Let me pass,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  She climbed the first flight of stairs, walked left through the hundred-square-foot living room, with the rattan furniture and Bose speakers right now playing John Prine’s “Oldest Baby in the World”, and turned left again up the second flight to the roof.

  “Please do come right on in,” I said as I struggled to keep pace. Every time I say something like that, I realise it is dripping in English sarcasm, and I hate myself for using it on the other side of the world. But there you are.

  I turned through the thickly painted red door and saw her standing, her hands pressed down on the hip-high wall like a snooker player, looking down at where she had been sitting seconds earlier.

  “Don’t do it,” I said. It was a joke.

  She turned, a wild look in her eye, her hair a trifle… wild, and pointed her cigarette at me.

  “If you’re wondering how I found you, Pakistan has an intelligence service second to none.”

  Her first line of normal conversation and it was a plug for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, though second to none didn’t sound like a very good score. One below zero. Things weren’t looking up.

  “That must be very reassuring,” I said. “If you ever get lost.” She didn’t say anything, but leant her head on one side like a Labrador. “But why do they keep tabs on me?” I asked.

  “Because you are a journalist and you have been to Pakistan many times. And they would have seen you take me away from that bar.”

  “It was hardly an abduction. They were watching you?”

  “Yes, of course. Then they were watching both of us. I called them. A contact. I just asked: where does the motherfucker live? And here I am.”

  “I see. Are they watching us now? I mean, are they watching you and the, um, motherfucker?”

  “Behind me, across the fruit farm and the flowers, there is an elevated highway, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s on a curve and there is no stopping allowed.”

  “That is true.”

  “And yet there are two white SUVs pulled up and two men looking over the concrete wall at us with binoculars.”

  “Goodness,” I said again, using a word I rarely use twice in the matter of a minute. “How did you do that? How do you know?”