A Million People, Hadley Page 7

  And then the violence began. It was like a runaway train made of milk smashing into the back of stationary train made of rubber in a tunnel which had a door I managed to close just in time. It was an enormous and terrifying shock and I made a short, loud “woo” noise. A bit like a train, in fact. Good grief, it was sudden. I tried not to think about it. Lots of people were filling the public gallery now, looking towards the stage, hoping for words of wisdom, and one reporter sat next to me and he also started shaking his leg. I was furious. Being furious was one thing. But being furious and urgently having to go to the lav was another. Why had it only taken hold now? I had been fine that morning. I was out of my seat and marching along the orange carpet towards the exit. I kept my legs straight and my buttocks clenched. I imagined I looked like a World War Two air force veteran with wooden legs. I imagined I looked like I had a pool cue up my arse. I could have done with a pool cue up my arse, to tell you the truth. The pressure, the pressure.

  “Eh-up. Soomwoon’s in a hoo-reh.” Oh lord. It was Yorkshire Todd. He was sitting in the audience. In an aisle seat. What was he doing there?

  “No,” I said. “Please. Not now.”

  “I might as well tell ya. I foond a good roob.”

  “Please let me go. How did you know my name?”

  “No, I mean I found a right good massage.”

  “No, no.”

  “Aye. A real Yorkshire toob.”

  A Yorkshire toob. I didn’t know what he was on about and I didn’t care. I was out in the marble corridor within seconds and in the men’s room downstairs in seconds more, brushing aside a security guard.

  “Gentleman, you cannot use the facility,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” There was no could or couldn’t about it. I had to.

  “There is no facility.”

  “What?” I opened the door to the only lav going and there was nothing inside. Nothing.

  “There is no shit hole,” the guard said.

  “So what do I do?” I tried to keep my voice low.

  “You leave the court, cross the hallway, down the passage, rise the stairs…”

  “Rise the stairs? Wait…”

  “…turn left at the marble flowers and behove yourself to the left. There you can take a taxi…”

  “A taxi?” My voice was a high alto. Take a taxi? Are you fucking joking? I was about to behove myself right there and then. This man did not understand the urgency. The impending crisis. “What are you saying? I need to go to the bathroom, not the airport. Don’t you have a bathroom that works?”

  “Before the taxi stand is my meaning. There you can find a stationary and portable toilet.”

  It wasn’t going to move then. “Terrific. Many thanks.”

  This was going to be very close and I had to run. Or jog, at least. I started off, my shoulders heaving from side to side in a big arc. I trotted away, keeping my knees as close together as possible. If only I could be scared shitless again, as in the guesthouse. I tried to console myself by thinking that whatever happens now, one day I will laugh about it over a beer. Except don’t think of the beer! Don’t think of that nitro-glycerine still swishing around your bowels, leaving record high-water marks.

  There were the marble flowers. I behove myself to the left and there it was. One lav in a tiny Nissen hut. A squat toilet. I ripped open the door and my belt like a magician unveiling something magical. I ripped my trousers down over my knees, squatted and… fuck me the release! The overwhelming relief. And with the relief, the overwhelming stench! It was alien! Someone outside bellowed in Urdu, almost bringing the house down. I don’t speak Urdu, but I suspect he was saying something along the lines of: “Rescue me! For all that is precious and dear to me, what the fuck is that smell?”

  The humiliation. There came a horrible, screaming, wail, from further away, along the tones of: how is this possible? From what planet does this smell emanate? If I go anywhere near that room I will surely die. And to add to my despair, there was no paper. Just a small water jug. That wasn’t going to do the trick. Not even close. And there was all that absorbent paper in the courtroom and that made me even more furious. I looked at the pot of water again. It was like a teapot.

  I checked my pockets. No tissues, no hanky, no hanky-panky, that was for sure, just a fancier-than-usual notebook with hard, shiny paper as absorbent as steel. This would not do. I don’t want to go on. I’m not going to go into details. Suffice it to say I left that godforsaken place with no notebook and the cleaner, when he eventually dared enter after tracking down chemical-gas-protective clothing and a mask, would have seen a pyramid of paper in the corner and said in Urdu the equivalent of: Sweet. Baby. James.

  I RETURNED TO THE GUESTHOUSE to shower and looked forward to a large gulp from the bottle in my case.

  “Ah, you have interrupted your work day to come back to see men at work?”

  The manager was behind the counter and his mates were sitting in the same seats. Where were the women? What were they doing? Another productive day in Islamabad.

  “Yes, hi,” I said. “I’ve come back for a shower.” Why I felt the need to give them an explanation was beyond me.

  “That’s great, sir,” the manager said. “We are here should you need anything more. Anything in the way of refreshment?”

  “No, thanks. I am fine.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  But I wasn’t fine. I felt awful. The scotch didn’t help at all. I felt so bad that I suspected I had a bout of food-poisoning. Nothing to do with the Sparkhayes at all. I lay on my bed and slept, only to wake in the middle of the night. I was feverish and lonely. It is the only time I feel lonely – when I am sick and realise no one knows or can do anything about it. I looked at my watch. It was nothing like the middle of the night. It was one in the morning. I had hours of this shit before I could call the office and say I would take the day off.

  And then the banging noises began again. I could not lift myself off the bed. I dozed and woke and dozed and dreamt. I was too sick to be scared. I woke again when the kettle was hissing at its highest.

  The next day I had a light breakfast of toast and coffee delivered to the room and slept again.

  “The night, sir,” the waiter said. “Was it more peaceful?”

  I didn’t have any energy. “No, not at all. I’m sorry. I’m tired and don’t feel very well,” I said.

  I slept all day. I woke in the evening feeling enlivened and took a quick slug of scotch. Yes. The guesthouse was a five-minute walk from the Kohsar market, a friendly shopping area popular with expats with an excellent English-language bookshop and good coffee, backing on to the big gardens of houses where diplomats and journalists lived. I would eat there and see how I felt.

  I showered and changed and stepped outside the guesthouse, waiting for the guard in his box to put down his tea and open the gate to the street. I could have easily done it myself and it would have been much quicker, but then the guard would have nothing to do all day. Outside on Aga Khan Road, where pretty purple flowers dotted the grass between the two double lanes, a line of the same tiny taxis was waiting, their burly drivers with their big heads looking at me balefully. It’s not my fault you drive cars which are fifteen times too small for you, I wanted to say. It’s not my fault that life for some people is shit. Two men on the pavement came up from each side and asked if I wanted a taxi. I explained that I just wanted to walk up to Kohsar market to get some food and look at the books.

  “That is a long walk,” one said.

  “It’s five, ten minutes at the most,” I said.

  “Ten minutes. In this climate?”

  I didn’t know what kind of climate he was talking about, but the evening was mild, a light, ice-crystal cirrostratus cloud formation covering the sun. It was heavenly.

  I started northwest up Street 14 and was crossing the road by a modest-looking Sony centre when one of the tiny taxis pulled up alongside me. It was one of the baleful men.

  “Yo
u get in, Mister Englishman.”

  “No, thanks. I want to walk.”

  “No, thanks, Mister Englishman. You get in.” I ignored him and kept walking and he followed along the kerb. “You want pretty girl?” he asked.

  Hang on a minute. No one had ever propositioned me like that in Islamabad. And if they had, I would have been worried. I was worried.

  “What?”

  “There’s a place.”

  Oh, there’s a place, is there? “I just want to walk,” I said politely. After all, this could have been some Islamist militant with a big knife in his dashboard. At least a knife that could fit in the dashboard of the tiny car, a Suzuki Mehran, a whining, lawnmower with a flat, angular 1970s design I had only ever seen in Pakistan. It was black with a lime-yellow roof.

  I kept on walking, faster now, a high, white wall to my left overhung by shooting twigs of a bush the other side which caught my hair. The driver changed down to second with a crunch and a curse and leapt twenty yards up the road and stopped. The big man climbed out, walked round the front of the car and on to the pavement and stood his ground.

  “Get in the car, please, Mister Englishman. There’s a place with girls.”

  “Well, so you keep saying. What kind of place?”

  “You can drink, you can dance. I get commission. You will like.”

  It was a lovely evening and I was feeling much better. I could have done with some food first, but…

  “I’ll give it a shot,” I said. “You’d better not be messing me around.”

  The man patted the roof of his car once and hard, as if to say: Gotcha.

  We drove on to the Margalla Road, dodging a herd of goats, past the cricket ground and jogging track and past Marina’s home. I couldn’t see any sign of life in the upper windows, the only ones visible over the high wall.

  “Marina Makhdoom home,” the driver said.

  “Yes.”

  “I also Christian.” The driver showed me the cross around his neck in the mirror. “Thy will be done as it is in heaven. You will like pretty girls.”

  We turned left at the giant mosque at the foot of the hills, then into a series of turns in and out of leafy avenues. The driver stopped.

  “You get out here please. I don’t have time.”

  Say what? The giant kidnaps me, drives me halfway across the city to some alleged bar and then tells me he doesn’t have the time?

  “This is great. You want me to walk to my destination? You’re a taxi driver, but you don’t have time to drive your taxi?”

  “It is over there,” he said. “Right side. By that big tree with the larks. It’s the Korean restaurant and golf shop. On dead leafy street.”

  I could see a big tree, but larks? I paid him two hundred rupees and he did a fast, noisy three-point-turn and sped back the way he had come, leaving a cloud of totally unsexy-smelling burnt compressed natural gas in the air. I walked up the silent, dirt driveway next to the big tree. There was no restaurant sign but there was a bag of golf clubs propped up against the wall next to the front door. I had that incredibly familiar and welcome sensation in the chest before entering a house of fun. My heart was bubbling.

  I knocked. The door opened and another giant of a man bowed to greet me.

  “Is this the Korean restaurant?” I asked.

  The man stepped back and bowed again and ushered me in with his arm. He didn’t answer my question. Bizarre.

  “You are most welcome,” he said at last.

  Next to him, in a line, were three middle-aged women all dressed up in flowering saris and bangles and gold, all smiling at me, their hands held out to greet a Westerner none of them had seen before. I glanced into the huge room with big, building-like furniture, dark wallpaper, naff chandelier and heavy drawn curtains. There were about ten old women sitting on sofas looking at me through their glasses, smiling and frowning at the same time. I went down the line shaking hands.

  “Hello, I’m Hadley. Hello, I’m Hadley. Hello…” It dawned on me that there might have been a mistake. This was some sort of family gathering. A fiftieth wedding anniversary perhaps. Or could it have been a funeral and they were just being too gracious to tell me to fuck off and leave them alone in their grief?

  “This isn’t a Korean restaurant,” I said to the room.

  No one disagreed. No one said a thing.

  The man who had ushered me in clapped his hands. The old women climbed stiffly out of their enormous sofas and shuffled past me through high double doors to the back of the house.

  “Come along, come along, you crumbly old women,” the man said. “Don’t be a dawdling.”

  Don’t be a dawdling was it now? What a rude man. And now the room was emptying, the three old maids in a row had vanished and the man was walking backwards, pulling the double doors to behind him. I was all alone.

  “Please don’t leave me,” I said to no one, mock-theatrically you understand. “Not in this big spooky house.”

  “But you are not alone, Hadley.”

  I turned quickly. Marina was standing at the double doors. She was wearing a shalwar kameez over jeans, her hair done up in a bun.

  “Oh my word,” I said.

  “Oh my word. I like that.”

  “You do?”

  “It says a lot about you.”

  “It does?” She was walking towards me.

  “You, as a man, are not so attractive. In looks, I mean. But you have this way about you that excises the self-conscious pretence.”

  “Wow.” What was she talking about?

  “I noticed it the first night I met you. It was just a look, but it spoke volumes. A certain innocence.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that if I played my cards right, this innocent was in here. What was going on?

  “Have you any idea how attractive a liberal Western man is, no matter how ugly, to a Christian woman from a conservative Pakistan family? It is literally magnetic. It is an exciting opportunity to break free.”

  “Marina.” What was I going to say? I was at a loss for words. “You want to break free?”

  “The lord knows.”

  “I am sorry, Marina, I am totally confused.”

  “I am so sorry. I am sure you will be especially wanting to know where you are and why you are here.”

  “Yes, I would like to know that.”

  “I told you before, Hadley. There are networks of security and intelligence. And of course not just in Hong Kong.”

  “But the taxi. The driver…”

  “He used a line we thought would make you get in the car.”

  “We?”

  “I have a team.”

  “And what made you think I would fall for the bait?”

  “Don’t be so foolish. That is the most innocent part.”

  “And what about all these people in the house?”

  “This is their abode. They welcomed you in. I have an apartment in the rear quarters where we shall go now if you like. I have alcohol. Would you like to see my rear quarters? Would you like some alcohol?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I would. I wouldn’t mind something to eat first though. A Marmite sandwich or something.”

  “A Marmite sandwich? My, how British. There shall be ample opportunity for disparate refreshments.” She looked around to make sure everyone had gone. “I also have this.” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out one of her industrial-piping-sized spliffs. “Perhaps today you will be in the mood.”

  She turned on her heels. I followed Marina through the tall double doors into a hall with a large table in the middle, a dark kitchen off to the right, with a refrigerator that looked like a small, upended caravan with rounded edges. Marina saw something to the left, gasped, stopped in her tracks and put her right hand across her heart.

  An old man was leaning against the lowest stair banister, his hair quaffed back, his arm extended up the steep balustrade, a packet of Gauloises in his hand along with a gold lighter, a smile on his face which wobbled up and down
as he chewed whatever he was chewing. He was wearing sunglasses in his hair and a grey suit over a stylish, cotton white shirt with no collar or tie. I thought it must be the golf pro or someone I could nod to and Marina and I would be on our way to smoke that enormous joint and get super-friendly. But I realised I knew the man. It took a few seconds before I realised I was standing in front of Mian Langhari, the same Mian Langhari the daft crop circle people had spotted with Marina in Hong Kong. He once scored a double century at Lord’s and I had been there to see it! That was about thirty-five years ago. He was way too old for Marina, anyway. Surely. But he was, still was, very good looking. He was sneering at me. I resisted the urge to take out my notebook and ask for an autograph.

  “Marina.”

  That was all he said in a husky, deep voice. The voice, actually, of a man with emphysema. He casually pushed himself up from the banister and walked past me in the direction Marina and I had been headed. What was going on? This was so unfair. He was wearing a powerful, exotic perfume which for some reason made me think of the pyramids. He opened a door, walked into another dark room without so much as a glance back at us and closed the door behind him. I looked at Marina. She still had her hand over her heart and was looking towards the door Mian Langhari had just ambled through like a fucking Egyptian cat. What was she doing? What was the look on her face? Terror? Huge disappointment? Love? Overwhelming lust? What did he have over her?

  “Marina?”

  That was all I said. My voice lacked Langhari’s total command, but at least it didn’t bubble with phlegm.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Why? I mean, why is he here? Do you have a date?” She was still looking at the door. “Marina?”

  “I’m sorry, you will have to go.”

  “Go?”

  “Yes. I had forgotten. I had an appointment. A date. I have to go. Extremely regrettable planning. I am so sorry. You can try the kitchen for your sandwich.”