Hadley, page 3
“No.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“No. It was an accident. He was trying to clean it up.”
Candy was keen to be heard. “Did you yell, screaming ‘police, police’?”
“No. I don’t remember that. The point is, I was on top of the world. I was on the other side of the world. People gob in this town, more loudly and carelessly than this guy. He just happened to hit me. If he hadn’t hit me, it would have gone in the gutter. I wasn’t angry. I was just part of what happened. Spitting isn’t meant to be offensive. It can be meant to be offensive, but generally it isn’t. Well, it is in Beijing sometimes. But that’s another story. It’s very cold in Beijing.”
“Okay, let’s move along. What about the love? The girls, I mean.”
I was now completely at ease. And expansive.
“Imagine, if you will, Wanchai without the towers. Without the hotels you’re staying in. Imagine a street lined with bars, without the Filipinas and Thais you see today. There are scores, I mean scores, of Chinese girls. Actually, mostly women. Older women. Wearing blowsy ballroom gowns, billowing gowns, and huddled together, well past their sell-by date.”
Sell-by date. I hadn’t used language like that in years. But this was the movies.
“Imagine, at the end of the strip, next to an English-style pub packed at 5 a.m. with Triads and suits who can’t bear to go home to their wives. Imagine a bar called the Mermaid. Black curtains at the front. Inside, a long bar with just enough room for bar stools. At the end an altar to a bright and painted god, stuffed with incense sticks, oranges and monopoly money. Personalised match boxes, black and purple, with a picture of a mermaid sitting in a glass of champagne. These are details.”
“Very sad,” said Candy.
“No. Not very sad. Just…”
“No, please. Very sad. You are adult man. You like Hong Kong as British colony, but Hong Kong always part of China. No more like this.”
Candy was wrong. Hong Kong hadn’t changed. The bars stayed open until daylight arrived along with the clang and growl of the trams, the steam from the dim sum stalls and the newspapers delivered to street hawkers piled high on the backs of bicycles. This time of day was too late for tourists, except for the repeat visitors who came each year for the cricket sixes and rugby sevens, recidivists at sixes and sevens, on which days I would avoid the strip altogether. I was also put off by the swaggering U.S. Navy, who once a month would overload the bars, drink a lot and be disarmingly nice. When the Yanks were in town, with their heaving chants in the clubs – “East Coast! East Coast!, West Coast! West Coast!” – I found refuge at the Honest Bar. It was the lone survivor on Kam Tin’s own Suzie Wong strip, joined by a string of coloured lights, which had thrived in May’s day thanks to the nearby British garrison. The soldiers had gone, the barracks, block after block, stood empty. May, a young Cantonese girl who had always smiled when she saw me, had also gone. Village schools in Nissen huts, corner shops, car parking spaces marked ‘mums only’, had all been abandoned. Most of the Kam Tin bars had closed because of the drop in business and the rest were burnt down by Triads, according to the local press. Around the corner from the Honest Bar was a sixteenth century Chinese village fort with stone walls eighteen inches thick, and everyone who lived behind them had the same name.
I was on my fifth large Black Label and flushed. I was sitting at the bar, staring at myself in the dance floor mirror (never one for reflection ha ha) which had sprigs of plastic holly around the edge from Christmases past. I recalled the audition that afternoon and tried to sum it up in one word.
“Fuck.”
At the side of the dance floor was a pile of boxes of Carlsberg and next to them, propped up against the wall, was a dusty Remington typewriter. It had been there for as long as I could remember.
“Maria, Maria, don’t be so contrary.”
“You give me a part in your film, I’ll be hospitalised.”
“Hospitable.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“What?”
I flashed back again to the audition and shuddered. That script. That northern accent. And what bloody riots?
“It’ll begin with a panoramic sweep of the harbour, with a voiceover,” I said. “No. Worse than that. It’ll be a sweep of the bars in Wanchai, with the same voiceover.”
“What’s a voiceover?”
“Him. Torment. He’ll be saying: ‘Her name was May’, spoken low and rising, as if you were talking to a girl who’d locked herself inside a cupboard.”
What had happened to May, I wondered again. Always sitting with her straight back, so polite and charging so much money to go home with grey, ghostly customers – much more than any of the other girls. And then, as she was passing through the velvet curtains behind some overweight, middle-aged suit, there would always be that last glance over her shoulder and a bright smile and flash of the eye-lids for me. Every time. Every time. And I would repay it with a weak, remorseful wince, sitting still at the bar and ordering another drink. A bright smile one way, almost a scowl the other. Hopeless. I had asked mama-sans about her again and again over the years and they had just shrugged their shoulders.
“Who’s May?” Maria asked. “What are they doing in a cupboard?”
“No one’s in the cupboard. It’s just the way you say the name. Low and rising. He’ll say: ‘She had long, straight hair. On the Star Ferry. Of an evening. And she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.’ Dear oh dear.”
“Do you go in the cupboard?”
“I expect so. But the point is, Maria – the point is, this film is going to be woeful.”
“No, you are going to be this word. You are going to be in it, right?”
“Yes, yes. Maybe. I gave so much of myself. My inner self. But there’s a limit to what I can do. To save it. To save it from itself.”
“What’s the story?”
“I don’t believe they know, Maria, to tell you the truth.”
“You don’t know truth. You lazy bullshit.”
“May will probably be in it. At least Torment will think it’s May. But it won’t be May. Listen to this. It will be her twisting twin from China!”
“Shut up.”
“And he’s never met him. Her.”
“Who’s never met her?”
“She’s never met him. Because he had an incurable disease! But the man, this bully of a man, while he was fighting off the Triads, in the riots, the third that day, lost his notebook and banged his head in the FCC and got his memory back. And he remembered that before Magnus became a shit-hot foreign correspondent, he got a first class degree in tropical medicine. He remembers the Quad, the windy cloisters, the echoes in the studies. And he recognizes the symptoms!”
“It sounds exciting,” said ah-Fei, the sixty-year-old manager who hated me like he hated all loud, red-faced gweilos.
“It sounds bullshit,” Maria said. “That’s that movie ‘Tootsie’ You piece of shit. You’re copying all your shit and bringing it in here.”
“Maria?”
“What?”
“You’re beautiful.”
For twenty-eight-year-old Maria, it must be pointed out, language was her first line of defence to fend off wandering hands and affections, a trick she had picked up as a young girl in Manila. But she found it difficult to distinguish between the customers, especially in her Wanchai days, so she used bad language all the time. She saved the worst for me.
I was panting. I pointed at Maria and squinted like Bill Clinton.
“I can name, and I can bet money on it, eight, no less than eight, stars of that movie. Tell me I can’t.”
“Who cares?”
“Eight. No more, no less.”
“You piece of shit. Dustin Hoffman.”
I raised my hand and counted off one on my thumb.
“That’s one. Go on.”
“What do you mean go on? You’re the one who said he could name these people. Now you ask me. John Travolta.”
“John Travolta? What’s the matter with you?”
“Dustin Hoffman,” said a man taking a seat at the end of the bar, a cigar clamped between his teeth. “Jessica Lange, Charles Durning, Geena Davis, Dabney Coleman, Teri Garr, Bill Murray. How many is that? Sydney Pollack. That should do it.”
I realized my mouth was hanging slightly open and gently twisted, as if I had suffered a stroke. I stared at Joe but had nothing to say. I realised I had not stopped thinking about Joe, lingering somewhere in the back of my mind, since he had reappeared in my life. I also realised that I had been followed for more than just a few days and wondered about the likelihood of the relationship ending in violence.
“Who are you?”
“John Travolta was nowhere near that film, thank God,” Joe said, putting his hand out to Maria. “Hi, I’m Joe.”
I watched them shake hands. This man isn’t interested in you, Maria, I thought. He isn’t staring at your legs or at your bum. He is only interested in me. He has come all the way out into the New Territories, off the tourist track, to see me. He is a strange, and possibly dangerous, dingbat.
“Maria, I don’t know who this is, or what he is doing here, or why he is following me around town.”
“Yeah, right. In your dreams, shit-for-brains.” Maria turned away.
“So I guess she does a lot of church work, this Maria?” Joe said. “Flower arrangements, meals on wheels, that kind of thing? Maybe the occasional movie review for the Christian Science Monitor?”
“Why are you following me?” I asked.
“Hadley and I met a long time ago,” Joe said, raising his voice in Maria’s direction. “He was a reporter on a local paper back in England. He liked my car. An American car. He thought there was a story in it.”
“Hadley’s a piece of shit.” Maria said.
“I wouldn’t go that far, my dear.”
“I thought you were film producers,” I said.
“Right.”
“And you said you weren’t.”
“Your memory is very good,” Joe said, looking at Maria, who lifted her eyes skywards and walked away. “She’s a pretty girl. Make someone a fine wife. I can see you two have a thing. Don’t be so English. I hope she isn’t doing middle-aged men for money. No offence.”
“Is that what you’ve come here to say?”
Joe dipped his head, a gesture I immediately remembered from the house near the silk farm in the Fens, and frowned. Joe was animated but sober. A scar, which I assumed was from an attack, not an operation, ran down the side of his neck. I slowly put my drink on the bar, trying to control a slight shake in my hand.
“I don’t mean to be self-righteous,” Joe said. “Because if you were to change your mind, she’s a pretty little thing. I could easily court her myself.”
“Court her? What kind of language is that? You must be seventy.”
“Woo her. Win her over. I know I’m not as young as I used to be, but I can still turn a few heads. It’s the demeanour and the confidence, something you know nothing about, which is why you’ve turned from that nice, fresh-faced, inquisitive young man into an old grouch. I’m here because I need your help. Sorry about all the cloak and dagger stuff. I was just sizing you up.”
“How do you need my help? Why? The last time I saw you was twenty years ago.”
“But we never forget, you see. Our firm. We take notes and we follow up on things. We see jobs through.”
“Well I see through you. I’m going now. Really great catching up after all these years.”
Joe stood up. “Same here. Good to see you again. Here’s my card.”
I looked at the inscription.
GUARDIAN CONTRACTS INC
JOE STEIN
MANAGER, ASIA/PACIFIC
“What are guardian contracts?”
“Nothing you will find online. We can talk later. Call me. Now you’re in the movies, and knowing how much you like the movies, I am sure you can help me.”
“I’m not in the movies. I’ve just had an audition for a bit part. And you are a disturbance.”
“You’re in the movies,” Joe said. “That’s why I’m here. I’ve got to go. But just want to give you some advice. Tip of the day: hold back that hostility. For now. You can put it to good use later. We’ll get together soon.”
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN I STARTED out in the newspaper business back in the Fens, I was struck by an ailment. The symptoms were yawning lapses in concentration. Black holes which could be measured by minutes or hours and which generally destroyed the job at hand. The problem surfaced in about my third week on the Sotobech Sentinel. I had gone to a parish council meeting in some god forsaken village made up of caravans and barns full of swedes, a revolting, mushy, orange vegetable that people only seem to eat at school. I was keeping pace with a councillor’s complaints about dangerous dykes when my head turned to the window and my mind turned to a court reporter on a rival paper called Sabrina, who had textbook Pitman New Era shorthand, slender, piano-playing fingers and sumptuous red nails. Suddenly there was a huge commotion in the hall. The councillor, named Thomas, had sat down and fellow council members were banging their fists on the table shouting “shame, shame”… I hadn’t a clue what was going on and there were no other reporters to ask for help. Certainly no Sabrina. When the meeting finished, the councillors were all so angry, no one would stop to explain what had happened. So it was left to me to call Mr Thomas himself the next morning to get some quotes and write up the story before I left for Wisbech Crown Court and the continuing case of the sulking Sotobech salesman stabbed with a sugar beet.
“Mr Thomas?”
“Dr. Thomas. This is he.”
“Sorry. Doctor.” (This is he?) “This is Hadley Arnold from the Sotobech Sentinel. I’m a new reporter here. I was at last night’s parish council meeting and I was wondering if you would care to expand on the… business at hand as I am sure it would be of interest, of real importance, to our readers. After all you did stir up quite a commotion…”
I sat smiling, twiddling my pencil, confident of a great story unfolding. I was also aware of the news editor listening to the phone call. This made me nervous. There was silence on the other end of the line. Then:
“This is Dr. Thomas. This is he.”
For some reason, I could not let on to my news editor that Thomas hadn’t caught a word. I ruled out a re-introduction. I felt it would reflect on my abilities as a reporter, especially after not having got the story the night before and not having it written up ready for the news editor that morning. So instead of starting again more loudly, I plunged into an abyss.
“I see,” I said, scrawling fictitious notes. “That’s really interesting.”
“Who is on the line? What’s going on?”
“You don’t say.” I was writing “somebody please help me” in my notebook.
“Look, who is this? I warn you that I am a parish councillor and a magistrate.”
“And so you’re pushing ahead with your plans, then. When you’ve got the green light. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You bastard.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I’m hanging up now and may consider calling the police. Do you hear me?”
“Planning permission for a sugar loft and a beet liquidiser. With ancillary buildings. Good heavens, that’s extraordinary.”
My heart was beating fast. “No please, it’s my pleasure. It was great meeting you last night, by the way.”
“I’m doing it now. I tell you I’m furious. I’m hanging up now.”
Another morning, I had set out for Stand Backwash Fen to cover the launch of an express bus service to Half Past Fen. The plan was to get on board and speak to passengers and hear them say what a boon this service was. It was called the Fen Express. I arrived with ten minutes to spare. I sat down and had a cup of tea with a Fen official who was explaining the timetable when I got to thinking about what a funny word “fen” was, and that the adjective, “fenny”, if there was one, would be even funnier. I had started thinking about Fen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when I realised the Fen Express had left without me.
I jumped aboard another bus going in the same direction, hoping to board the Fen Express at its destination, Half Past Fen, but the Fen Express was so fast that my bus passed it heading back to Stand Backwash Fen. What a rush!
I managed to counter these lapses by trying to concentrate on what I saw, not what I heard. Filling in the colour. That was what I had been doing that time I met Joe. It all came back to me at my twenty-third floor desk in Hong Kong in the middle of a story about a man with no intestines climbing Mount Everest. I had to leave the room. My heart was beating furiously.
I took the lift down to the marbled foyer, paced up and down and lit a cigarette. The assignment, all those years ago, was the kind every reporter liked, except at that point in my career, I had never heard anyone on the weekly Sotobech Sentinel (circulation: twenty thousand) ever call them assignments. I had wandered leisurely around the ‘Great Expectations’ film set, my jacket hooked over my shoulder and notebook in hand. There was no hard news to worry about. It was a matter of walking around with a smile, nodding at people and saying “wotcha”, trying not to trip over cables and keeping away from the stars, who were far too busy to talk to the press. Soak up the atmosphere, find a nice peg and write eight hundred easy words.
Precious few real stars appeared to be involved in ‘Great Expectations’, but it was of interest to Sotobech readers because it was happening on their patch and the actor playing Pip as a grown-up was local boy Chris Torment. Suspecting that I had chosen the perfect career, I spent a carefree afternoon watching them do the scene in which the convict, Magwitch, is caught in the marshes, with the younger Pip looking on. Torment wasn’t involved. There were a dozen people all fretting over something and no one managing to say or do anything without running a hand through their hair and frowning to their left. But what caught my attention were the three Cadillacs. American military cars, Jeeps and the like, were common in the area because of the air base. But Cadillacs? And men in black suits leaning against them? It was a good peg for my story.
