A Million People, Hadley Read online

  “I can see the reflection in your eyes.”

  “Oh wow. Would they care to come in for some tea?”

  “What?”

  “Or something stronger, perhaps. They are on a dangerous bend after all. Trucks carrying pigs from China come round that corner at a fair old clip.”

  It struck me that I was talking complete nonsense. Like a love-struck Hugh Grant behind the blue door and in front of the fridge in “Notting Hill”.

  “They know how to handle themselves,” Marina said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “I just called to say,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the until-now really clean wall tiles. “I just called here to say thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For rescuing me the other night.”

  “It was my pleasure. Really. It was an honour to meet you.”

  “And it may be possible to see you in Pakistan, Hadley. May it be possible?”

  “Well…”

  “Shrubs sends in helpers and assistants for elections, surely? Why don’t you volunteer to be a helper?”

  A couple of things struck me as remarkable here: a few moments ago she had referred to me as a motherfucker and now she was saying she wanted to see me again. She had also remembered my name and the name of my company, unless she was being fed lines into some device in her ear by the two men on the road.

  “Please give the concept due consideration,” she said.

  “I will. Is there going to be an election?”

  “There will be an election and I expect I will be running as behoves the leader of the party. I am a Makhdoom. Ipso facto, I am most encouraged and likely to become the next part leader. Those efficient and able security men are picking me up at the end of your village. Please don’t see me out.”

  She put out her hand for me to shake, which I did. She stood looking me in the eyes for a good four seconds (I tried to count them later). She pulled her hand away slowly, her fingers reaching round my hand to my knuckles and giving them what seemed to be a bit of a stroke. And then, with a slow clatter of metal and heels and bangles swishing against porcelain tiles, she was out through the metal door and down two flights of stairs and into the sun-caked alleyway.

  “Bye,” I said cheerily from the roof. She didn’t look back. She went up four mossy steps and down four mossy steps, leant against a hundred-year-old stone hut full of kindling wood, lifted a shoe and inspected the heel and was off again, head down, until she reached the road and looked around for her car. Then she waved at someone, presumably the ISI guys, out of my line of vision, and then, only then, did she turn and give me a brief wave.

  “Bye,” I said to myself. She disappeared from sight. How strange, I thought. I hadn’t asked where she had vanished to that night, this woman so lacking in confidence and self-esteem. Ipso facto, indeed. And I hadn’t asked her about the ancient cricketer.

  I went downstairs, poured a large Scotch, lit a cigarette, turned up the music, walked through to the tiny bathroom, looked in the mirror – and beamed. Thinking back to that moment gives me the collywobbles. She could have looked back straight away and then got on with the business at hand of finding her car. That would have proved an attention span of a few seconds. But no. She had walked all the way to the road and then looked back. She had been thinking about me all the time I was looking after her as she climbed the four steps and climbed down four more. That is the mad logic of a man obsessed, if not in love. I can now, at a moment’s notice, summon the sights and sounds of that day, apart from the feeling of her stroking the back of my hand. Shadows on the alleyway from the sun behind the globe lights on my roof. The deafening cicadas from the flower farm. The girl in her black Hakka pyjamas playing with her dog. I can smell the chicken frying in the rusting iron wok next door with the woman’s clatter and a curse. I once had a wok like that. It broke into pieces like a biscuit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE GUNMEN APPEARED at the top of the hill in a line. Glints of sunlight on either their knives, stirrups or bridles gave them away in the few seconds before they started down in a cloud of dust, heading for the train. On flatter ground, their horses stepped up their canter into a gallop and they were gaining on the ancient steam engine called the Empress of India, which someone earlier had said was only “good for shunting”. The riders were approaching fast. I could hear their shouting over the noise of the train. The only hope was to reach the railway tunnel before the horses reached the train.

  “Oh, that’s a bit of luck!” someone shouted. “This is the Bindar Tunnel. It’s over two miles long!”

  I hit the pause button and stopped the passing flight attendant for another large gin and tonic. I was a bit brusque, I admit, but it was only a couple of hours before we landed in Islamabad. And she had ignored me twice before and I was keen to get back to “North West Frontier” and see if Kenneth More, Lauren Bacall et al could hold the bandits off. All I could remember about the 1960 film was the sinister Herbert Lom, a Dutch-Indonesian Muslim, who had tried to stick the Hindu prince’s hand into a fast-spinning water pump wheel which had made the slow-witted Kenneth More a bit suspicious.

  “You British never do anything until you have had tea,” Bacall said in one of the film’s less gripping moments when it reverts to stereotype. And, truth be known, I wasn’t up to doing much until that gin and tonic had arrived. The irony was that this was British India, and North West Frontier was now in Pakistan where I was headed. Except North West Frontier Province had since been renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which didn’t run off the tongue in quite the same way or evoke quite the same sense of history for a poncy Brit who had watched the movie when he was about six with his dad on a Sunday afternoon and thought it was the most exciting film he had ever seen.

  One of the key “takeaways” seeing it now was that the conflict was simple. Black and white. At least that was the way the movie made it out to be.

  “The rebels are Muslim,” a British consular official, Sir Poncy-Ponsonby, told his guests. “They are after the little prince who is a Hindu.”

  A-hah. Now I understood! But you would have thought all gathered in the room at the time, key players in the affairs of the region one way or another, including Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall, would have known that. Basic background information. Or was there a sub-plot? Were they all suffering from dementia?

  Getting the Pakistan election gig turned out to be easier that I had expected. I thought I would have to let Baxter in on a bit of the stuff about Marina, how I had found her and how she had suggested I go to Pakistan to help out. But in the end there was no need.

  “I’ve been thinking about my future,” I had told him in his office overlooking the harbour. “I would like to turn my attention to the tea industry.”

  “Tea?” he asked. “You want to write about tea?”

  “I have a feeling it would be very pleasant. Interesting and less stressful.”

  “Have you entirely lost your mind? Tea? No one just writes about tea. You would have to write the tea market reports, which is a job for an intern. Look, the Pakistan elections are coming up. Why don’t you reinforce for a couple of weeks and see how you feel when you get back?”

  You fill in forms on the plane before landing in Islamabad which never get collected by the pot-bellied officials, all men, who greet you on arrival. It’s a dead giveaway, a time-consuming and vital sign of the health of Pakistan’s economy: poor and deteriorating and pushing women aside. Benazir Bhutto Airport is about the same size and has the same technical advantages as the airport in Casablanca. The movie, I mean. I have never been to Casablanca and have no idea what the real airport is like. Perhaps it is totally wired, gleams like crystal and is run by women.

  I was picked up by our young office driver, Sultan (emphasis on the second syllable), who didn’t like Brits but thought I was okay. He liked the fact that I didn’t shout at him as apparently Gary, the Islamabad bureau chief who hadn’t been writing many stories recently, an
d his predecessor had.

  “How is Gary?” I asked.

  “Mister Gary is always out meeting sources.”

  “He must be very busy. Can you take me to the Margalla Road?”

  “Sure. Can. But now it is very dark.”

  “That’s okay. Can we drive by Marina Makhdoom’s house?”

  “Sure. No problem. Maybe there will be a light in her room. Like a beacon.”

  “A beacon?”

  “A beacon of hope. For Pakistan.”

  We took a scrappy highway into town, passed a tell-tale queue of at least a hundred taxis waiting in line to fill up with gas which seemed to get scarcer by the year. The drivers would be there for hours, pushing their cars forward by hand to save fuel as they inched closer. Five men wearing the traditional, white, baggy shalwar kameez were playing cricket under a streetlight on a broad section of road, using bricks as stumps. We headed up the road towards the white Faisal Mosque with its four, pencil-like minarets, negotiating two security checkpoints where sleepy soldiers waved us through. We turned right on the Margalla Road, the forested foothills of the Himalayas on the left and the rich, mostly ugly, cement houses set back from the road on the right, many with the nameplates of doctors on the front gates under towering trees.

  Sultan slowed as we passed Marina’s family home. All the lights were off. Two guards sat on stools outside the metal gate, their backs bent as they stared out at the hills.

  “All sleepy,” he said.

  “It would appear so.”

  He took me to a guesthouse called Chateau Hill, Shrubs avoiding the top hotels for security reasons. Reinforcing staff used to stay at the Islamabad Grand with its high teas of hummus and pita bread and grim basement bar, but that all ended when a truck bomb exploded outside the front door, killing dozens and splintering trees on the other side of the road which are somehow still standing.

  We turned down the tree-lined Ataturk Avenue, no more than a picturesque lane on the way to the Grand, which had no street lights. And suddenly a mammoth truck, with no headlights, was in our path, swerving at the last second to pass us. I remembered this about Pakistan. Electricity, whether from a grid, a foul-smelling generator or a 12-volt car battery, was used frugally, if at all. Blackouts happened every day, for hours at a time.

  The guesthouse was a large building set back from Aga Khan Road with the same tall metal gate and guards. Next to the gate, in between Chateau Hill and the next house, was an electricity junction box about chest high and a foot deep. Actually these boxes are all over the city, varying in size but always in the same state of disrepair. Its door had been forced open and left dangling from a hinge. The wires had been ripped out violently, the meters smashed. It was if it had been attacked by crazed, naked Hollywood zombies.

  Inside the hall, a man stood upright behind a tiny counter. Three men sat upright on hard wooden chairs doing absolutely nothing. The upright standing man was handsome in a quiet, self-effacing South Asian way, with swept back grey hair.

  “Hello, there,” I said. “I believe you have a reservation for me? Shrubs.”

  He slapped down my key, a big, clunky affair with a wooden attachment six inches long, on the counter. He must have been holding it all the time. He looked a bit pissed off, truth be told.

  “Room twenty-one,” I said. “And where might that be?”

  The man raised his eyebrows and looked up the stairs briefly.

  “Your company instructed us to reserve a room at the rear of the building. What with all these bombs going off everywhere.” He waved his fingers in front of his face and made an “I’m so scared” face.

  “Right,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The room was large and poor. Two minutes after entering, when I was unwrapping my secretly stowed bottle of scotch they hadn’t caught at the airport, a man burst through a door I had assumed was a cupboard. He was carrying an ironing board under his arm. He bowed and left without saying a word.

  I went easy on the scotch, knowing that when that was gone, it was just dodgy wine and beer in dodgier bars and restaurants at risk of attack by frenzied Islamist militants. I did that “ooh, scary” thing with my fingers like the man at the desk. I sent emails to the Pakistan bureau chief and the Hong Kong desk saying that I had arrived and watched some CNN. Before going to bed, I opened the door to the first-floor hall which had a pink pool table and a door out to a balcony. No one there. I went to the head of the stairs and looked down. No one there. Complete silence.

  I bolted my door, locked the scotch away in my case, washed the glass and went to bed, reminding myself to spray some deodorant around the room in the morning to get rid of a night of whisky breath. The air-conditioner was noisy but consistently so and I was falling asleep when I heard tapping. Was it on the door, on the wall, or in that cupboard which the man had come out of and which I had not investigated? I sat up. It was a light tapping at first, and then a louder banging as if someone was hitting a wooden pole gently against an empty cement mixer. When that stopped, there was the sound of a kettle boiling and then someone banging out a beat with his hands on a table top.

  I had been in dangerous situations before. I had been shot at in Afghanistan and waited for a bus at midnight in Stoke Newington. There was always a certain frisson when visiting Islamabad, because, beautiful as it was, there was no telling when it was going to turn ugly. I had no idea what was going through the minds of the silent staff of Chateau Hill, for instance.

  My phone rang.

  “Hadley?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Gary.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Welcome to Islamabad.”

  “Thanks. It’s good to be back.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yes. When Benazir was elected.”

  “Oh right. Fucking decades ago. Well look, there’s a party tonight at a Belgian diplomat’s place. Plenty of booze.”

  “Wow. It’s two in the morning.”

  “It’ll go on all night. Sultan can drive you.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take a rain cheque. Next time. It’s already five in the morning Hong Kong time.”

  “Wuss.”

  The line went dead.

  “Welcome to Islamabad,” I said into the darkness.

  I turned on the light and the noises came again. In the same order. I was going to have to look in the cupboard. That sounds silly, but there had been a man in there not such a long time ago. Who knew who was still in there? Maybe that was his home. Maybe the man had returned via a back entrance. Maybe the cupboard was not so much a cupboard as a vast holding area for Islamist terrorists waiting for the infidel English journalist to fall asleep. And then they would come out, one by one, with giant, gleaming meat hooks in their hands and…

  I approached the cupboard. Don’t be such a baby.

  I opened the door and lit my cigarette lighter. It was bigger than a normal cupboard, for sure. The size of a garden shed. But there was no one inside. There were coils of hosing, half used cans of paint, a sewing machine and two sacks of rice. Not so scary then. I closed the door and went back to bed.

  The noise started again. The light tapping, the banging of a tumbler dryer, silence for a while, then the hissing kettle and someone drumming a beat on a table. I would sleep for five minutes and wake up. Why don’t you go and try to find out its source? Because it was four in the morning and I was scared, that’s why.

  But of course, in the light of day, thinks look much brighter. I had breakfast alone, with the young waiter, his head bowed, managing to take my order without saying a word.

  “Excuse me,” I asked as he was walking away. He turned. “I couldn’t help notice there was an awful lot of noise last night. Coming from the next room, perhaps?”

  The waiter pointed upstairs.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said.

  He bowed and turned away. The grey-haired manager arrived a minute later. He seemed in a much better mood this morni
ng. Maybe he had had some fantastic sex in the night. That could explain some of the noises. But sex with whom?

  “Good morning, Mister Arnold. Has there been some disturbance in the night?”

  “Well, yes, I am afraid there has.” I was so tired.

  “Let me take this opportunity of saying how sorry I am. What example of disturbance?”

  “Well, I am not too sure. A lot of banging.”

  “Banging, you say?”

  “Yes. Did you hear it?”

  “I can’t say that I did. It sounds most serious. But I seldom spend the night on the premises.”

  “Did you spend last night on the premises?”

  “Oh yes. First class. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  “Missed what for the world?”

  “Last night.”

  Lordy, lordy. “But did you hear anything?”

  “Was it the banging of hands? Like this?” He beat out a slow rhythm on the table.

  “No, it was more like this.” I beat out a faster rhythm, more like a drum roll.

  “It is possible the water geyser was playing up. But I heard nothing.”

  “Well, it went on all night.”

  “Let me just say this, sir. If it happens again…” He pulled out a pen from his jacket and was writing on the napkin. “… call me on this number. No matter what time, I will come to your room for assistance.”

  “You’ll come to my room?”

  “No matter what time. And we can investigate together.”

  “Well, I hope there won’t be a need for that.”

  “But I am here if the need is great. Any time, any place.”

  “Oh don’t you start.”

  “Start what?”

  “Nothing, sorry. I was thinking out loud. It’s just an expression.”

  My phone rang. It was our Thai photographer, Palakorn, known in the business as “the snappers’ snapper”, that’s how good he was. I had never worked with him. Marina was electioneering in Peshawar and he wanted to go ASAP. The snappers’ snapper was picking me up in five minutes.