Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales

by Garry Kilworth

  Marcia went into the scanner cubicle a little nervously, though it is one of the newer devices produced by Walker and Quntan, in which the subject stands upright, rather than one of the more common horizontal coffin affairs of Stebling Inc. Steve chatted to the night watchman, while I took the reading, then when everything checked out, proceeded to take a facsimile of Marcia’s persona on disk.

  When I had finished with Marcia, I asked Steve to step into the cubicle.

  He stuck out his jaw.

  ‘Why? What do you want my personality for? I thought you considered it pretty shitty?’

  ‘Don’t make a fuss, Steve, I’m not going to hurt you.’

  This struck at the core of his manhood, as I knew it would. He went straight into the cubicle to prove he was not afraid of anything, even if his brother was a mad scientist.

  ‘Okay,’ he growled, from within, ‘but if I start growing hairs on the palms of my hands Pete, I’m coming looking for my little brother to eat.’

  It was all over by twelve, and we went for a final coffee at the Peninsula Hotel on Nathan Road, where the string quartet plays on a balcony above patrons surrounded by the ornate glitz and opulence of yesteryear.

  I saw them off at the airport the next morning, Steve grumbling at the taxi driver most of the way, because he wasn’t driving fast enough for him, and Marcia talking to me in that soft tone quite unlike the voice she used when talking in Tagalog to her fellow Filipinos. Steve was definitely more mellow now. In the old days he would have taken time out to snap at her, and ask me what I found so interesting in her ‘drivel’, but that day he simply gave her one or two side glances, not without a trace of fondness in them. They were to be gone for the whole of July and August, the terrible months in Hong Kong, when the temperature is over 33 Celsius most days, and the humidity in the high nineties.

  A week after they had left I began my experiment.

  The Chinese government had employed me as a lecturer on Animal Behaviour at the University of Hong Kong, but of course I was permitted, even expected, to carry out my own research. Any findings would of course be credited to the University as well as myself, thus gaining face for my Chinese employers.

  My specific interest at this time was animal aggression. What I wanted to do was to superimpose a placid persona on an aggressive wild creature, in order to study the reactions of the creature’s own kind, and to see whether there was any change in their behaviour towards the subject, and indeed whether the subject showed any signs of reverting to type.

  The creature I had chosen was a black drongo (Dicrurus macrocercus), a bird about the size of a jackdaw. It is a quarrelsome creature, known in India as King Crow, because of its habit of mobbing the much larger members of the Corvidae family. It fights amongst its own kind, for scraps of food, though there are no recorded combats ending in fatalities. The black drongo has an unusual cat-like hissing call, which is quite disturbing to other birds.

  I had three black drongos, caught on the Mai Po Marshes of what used to be the New Territories, when Hong Kong was a colony. The marshes, founded as a bird sanctuary in the last century by a man called Peter Scott, is a resting place for thousands of migrating birds on their way to and from SE Asia. The black drongo and hair-crested drongo are summer visitors however, and stay in the area for breeding. The other birds must breathe a sigh of relief when the drongos leave for other parts, at the end of the hot season.

  I chose a female for the subject (for no other reason than Marcia was a female) and called her Yat Ho, or Number One. The other pair were of course Yi Ho and Sam Ho—Two and Three. Marcia’s persona overlaid that of Yat Ho, and I introduced the subject back into the aviary, while my students put themselves in charge of the video cameras, ever eager to record experiments and pore over the results. They are a good bunch, this year. Some undergraduates spend much of their student life in the gaming halls of

  Wan Chai district, risking failure for the sake of glitz, but then many of them are from remote villages in the north, and the bleeping and pinging of the gaming machines in the neon lit halls acts like Sirens on them.

  At first, the expected happened. Yat Ho’s strange docile behaviour kept the other two birds at a distance. The unusual was distrusted, and it was doubtful whether they actually recognised and identified her as a drongo. It’s possible they thought she was some other kind of bird, and it puzzled them that she looked, sounded and smelled like one of them. They fought amongst themselves, and were wary if she approached.

  Then suddenly, as if working in concert, they began to attack and bully her, shouldering her out of the way of food, pecking, hissing, and treating her with disdain. Sam Ho was particularly vicious and treated Yat Ho with utter disdain, as if she were some kind of traitor to her kind.

  She did nothing. True to Marcia’s persona, she took everything they had to give her, and remained unmoved. The students were terribly excited by this, never having witnessed anything like it before in their golden days of learning. They could talk of nothing else but the drongos for the next six weeks, as Yat Ho continued to survive, simply by showing no reaction to the bullying—simply by being.

  I must have been pretty boring too, as a date. My girlfriend, Xia, a Han Chinese from the north, is normally fairly tolerant of my enthusing, but I think those first few drongo weeks strained even her elastic patience.

  Then something remarkable began to happen, which I should have expected, but which actually surprised me. The resilience of Yat Ho began to wear down the energy of the other two birds, especially Sam Ho, the main contender for bully of the season. She simply took what they had to offer in the way of violence, but when she remained seemingly unaffected by their aggressive behaviour, they gradually ceased to attack her. They still fought amongst themselves, but in their dealings with Yat Ho, they were almost nauseatingly friendly.

  ‘They even bring her bits of food,’ cried Penny Lau, one of my students, ‘and she takes the pieces as if she deserves them.’

  It was true. They were courting her friendship, trying to get her to like them, forgive them for their earlier treatment of her. I was fascinated.

  What on earth was going on here? I couldn’t get my notes on tape fast enough.

  One evening, about the seventh week, I was sitting outside the aviary on my own, idly watching my three drongos. The students had all gone out for the evening. It was a holiday, Liberation Day, and they were out celebrating. Suddenly, something horrible occurred in that artificial world behind the glass screen.

  Sam Ho was perched next to Yat Ho, their scapular feathers touching, when she turned and deliberately pecked though his right eye, into his brain. Sam Ho fell to the ground, fluttering and convulsing, but instead of flying off to some other part of the aviary, Yat Ho dropped on him like a hawk, and proceeded to peck the wounded bird to death. Yi Ho came up to find out what the fuss was all about, and Yat Ho fell on the second bird, who was killed even more quickly than the first. When she had finished her murders, Yat Ho calmly wiped her beak on the mossy branch of a tree, and took up her position on the original perch.

  I was of course stunned and shocked by this behaviour. This was something quite out of the scope of my studies, even amongst aggression in carnivores. There was a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could hardly believe that my bird was capable of such terrible violence. Black drongos might be aggressive, but they did not to my knowledge kill each other. The responsibility for those deaths resided with me. I had altered the normal relationship, by introducing unusual behaviour patterns into the equation.

  It was only in the taxi on the way home that another, more terrible thought still, came to mind: a nightmare in fact. There was another set of personalities in play, in a relationship that I had well-meaningly tampered with. That night I slept very little, and went through vast amounts of material, looking for reasons. I believed my concern was very real.

  The following day I took a rain check on my lunch date with Xia, and instead went to the Uni
versity canteen looking for Professor Chang Yip, the resident psychoanalyst. I sat down next to him and immediately launched into a description of the previous night’s events, telling him what I had set out to do, at the commencement of the experiment, and what had been the final result. He stared at me throughout my explanation, a blank expression on his face, as if he was wondering why the hell I was telling him all this.

  ‘My question to you, professor, concerns human behaviour. Is there a...a personality disorder that you are aware of, in which the subject is docile while under attack from an aggressive person, yet explodes in sudden violence when that aggression is no longer in evidence? I’m wondering whether, once the aggressor becomes docile himself and apparently vulnerable, the subject takes the opportunity to attack...?’

  Professor Chang shook his head and looked down at his half-eaten fried noodles and prawns.

  ‘I don’t understand why you ask me this? What have birds got to do with the psychoanalysis of people?’

  ‘It’s just something I’m interested in,’ I replied. ‘It’s not really relevant to my studies, but I would like to know.’

  ‘Birds are not people,’ were his final words, and then he got up and left, leaving the remainder of his lunch.

  I should have guessed what would happen. In a university with no tenures the staff are suspicious of one another, and they like to keep things close to their chest. There is a lot of politics, always in the wind, and people are insecure. You can be indispensable to the faculty one term, and out on your ear the next. So if someone from another department comes to you with a request, suggestion, idea, anything, you listen, but give nothing whatsoever in return.

  I remained very worried about the situation in the Philippines. Steve, once terribly aggressive, had been tamed by me. When he was in the scanner cubicle the night before he left with Marcia for the Philippines, I had superimposed the personality of a dove over his own. He was now, to my way of thinking, vulnerable. He had in effect been transformed from a drongo to a dove, and I wanted to make sure that everything was all right, for Marcia’s sake as well as my brother’s.

  In the evening, I telephoned Steve. It took three attempts, but I finally had him on the line.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked, guardedly.

  ‘Me? Couldn’t be better, why?’ he said in a pleasant voice. ‘Anything happened?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing really. I just hadn’t heard from either of you, and... well, I heard something about rebels in the north.’

  Steve laughed.

  ‘There’s always some trouble with the north, you know that. Look, I’m due to meet someone, Pete—business, you know. Was there something specific...?’

  ‘No. Maybe I could have a word with Marcia, before I ring off. Is she there?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Mind your own goddamn business,’ I said with mock aggression. He laughed again and the next voice that I heard was Marcia’s.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Marcia, how—how do you feel?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Good, good. How’s Steve? How are you getting on with him over there?’

  She said in that calm voice of hers, ‘Well, the Philippines must be good for him. He’s so nice to me. I can’t believe it really...’

  ‘You don’t mind that?’

  ‘Of course not,’ still no real expression in the tone.

  ‘You don’t find it... irritating, or anything?’

  There was a long pause, then, ‘No. Look, Peter, I have to go. Steve ’s calling me from the lift. Bye.’

  ‘Marcia...?’

  She had hung up on me.

  I bit my nails. Well, they sounded all right, I supposed. Steve was docile of course, but otherwise okay. And Marcia? I just didn’t know. Yat Ho had exploded all at once, without warning. How could I tell? Marcia might wake up in the middle of the night and realise that this aggressive beast who had tormented her in the past was now at her mercy, look down at his eyes, vulnerable, exposed. She might get out of bed, find a pair of scissors, and plunge them...it just did not bear thinking about.

  How could I tell her that it wasn’t Steve I was worried about, but her—that there was a potential murderer, locked up in that sweet personality she showed the world? How could I explain she had a demon inside her, waiting for the moment when Steve no longer psychologically presented a frightening formidable monster to her, but instead revealed the pathetic creature underneath, the real Steven, who required reassurance, support, love. How could I tell her that there was a strong possibility she would then regard him as her victim?

  Two months ago, when Steve introduced me to Marcia, I had formed an alliance with her. Steve was at that time heading for all sorts of trouble. He was up on an assault charge, for punching a toilet attendant in a hotel for splashing his trousers with water. There were complaints at his club about his behaviour after he had been drinking, and people were asking for him to be thrown out. There was some business about a scrape with a Porsche car, the owner maintaining that Steve had bumped him from the rear on purpose, presumably because he had overtaken Steve ’s Mercedes on the Waterloo Road.

  All this reflected on me and my position at the university, and I hit on the idea of taming him, calming him down. Of course, I would never have got him to the doctor, and even if I had, he would have refused any treatment. So I hit on the idea of overlaying his persona with that of a dove, which would encourage the exposure of his real butter-soft self underneath. I didn’t want Steve suspecting anything, so I planned to get him into the laboratory by using Marcia as an excuse.

  After my phone call with Steve and Marcia, I went back to the lab, where Yat Ho awaited me. I placed her under the scanner and removed the superimposed persona, then put her back in the aviary with two more drongos.

  She quarrelled with them, fighting over perches and food, but there were no combats resulting in injury or death. I stayed there for twelve hours, studying the creatures, and in the end went home convinced that she had returned to her old self, a nasty bickering bird like all the other black drongos in the world, but with no desire to kill.

  There was no change in the situation over the next two days, and I waited on hot bricks for my brother and Marcia to arrive back in Hong Kong.

  The day arrived when they were due in from the Philippines and I drove down to Lantau airport to meet them with a churning stomach. Was Steve all right? Was Marcia still the sweet lovable woman she had been on leaving Hong Kong? Was I in fact being unnecessarily stupid in thinking that the behaviour of a bird might reflect the behaviour of a human being? Perhaps Yat Ho was just a strange drongo, given to bursts of violence anyway? Animals and birds have their mental problems too. My mind was like a maelstrom, spiralling the thoughts round and round, and dredging them back up again.

  I waited at the bottom of the ramp in the airport concourse, for my brother and his girlfriend to appear. The airport was, as usual, monstrously crowded with thousands of Chinese milling around waiting for relatives and friends, amazingly managing to avoid touching each other—a personal contact they dislike intensely—though I would have had difficulty in sliding a piece of paper down the spaces between them. My heart was beating against my ribs, and for the first time in many years I was smoking again. I glanced at the labels on the suitcases, as passengers came down the ramp, for Philippine Airlines’ labels, and soon they began filtering past me.

  Then suddenly, there they were, amongst the sea of black heads, at the top of the ramp. The relief flooded through me, and I kicked myself for being so paranoid. What an idiot. To think that a sweet girl like Marcia was capable of killing someone! Now that they were home, safe and sound, the idea seemed ludicrous, even heinous. I vowed never to tell them of my fears.

  I signalled, made myself visible to Steve, then went to take a place in the queue for taxis.

  Steve reached me, just as I was coming to the head of the queue. Marcia was nowhere to be seen. I had assumed, because she
was so small, she had been down below the crowd

  We shook hands and I said, ‘Didn’t I see Marcia?’

  Steve shrugged and smiled.

  ‘She wanted to stay on for a few days, to see some relatives.’

  That sounded reasonable. Her family were out on one of the many smaller islands, while she and Steve had been staying on the main island.

  On the taxi drive to Steve’s club, where he intended to leave his suitcase and have a meal, I studied my older brother. He seemed calm and relaxed, and in quite a good frame of mind considering he had been through the stress of travel.

  Still, so long as there was no harm done, what did it matter now?

  He seemed distracted, however, so I did not press him with questions, until we were actually sitting down to a meal in the club dining-room.

  ‘How was the trip?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, fine.’

  He played with his table napkin as I spoke, rearranging it carefully on his lap, although this had been done once by the waiter.

  ‘No problems, business-wise?’

  ‘No, everything went according to plan.’

  ‘And Marcia? She enjoyed the break?’

  He nodded.

  ‘She seemed to.’

  The soup arrived at this point, and I ceased probing. He certainly looked well enough, but there was something about his manner which worried me. He was too distant, even for someone who was a little jet-lagged, and I wondered if his business had really gone well. Then a thought struck me. What if Marcia had attacked him, and he, being a strong male, had prevented her from injuring him? Perhaps my concern for his safety was justified after all, but he had successfully protected himself from the kind of deadly attack I had witnessed from my black drongo, Yat Ho.

  I was about to say something, when three people walked through the door. One was a small olive-skinned man with a blunt chin and determined look. He was flanked by two uniformed Hong Kong policemen: an inspector and a sergeant. They spoke to a waiter, who pointed towards our table. The trio then made their way through the diners, to stand behind my brother.