Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales

by Garry Kilworth

  The man in civilian clothes spoke, and I knew then that he was a Filipino.

  ‘Mr Steven Bordas?’

  Steve turned his head, wiping his chin with his napkin at the same time.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am Sergeant Callita. You are under arrest...’

  I must have heard any words that followed, but their memory is lost in the buzzing of shock that overcame me. Steve looked at me and gave me a tight smile, which said, we both knew that one day I would do something like this.

  I grabbed the Filipino policeman’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s not his fault, it’s mine.’

  It was so clear to me now, now it was too late. Yat Ho had not killed because of the change in the other two drongos, but because of the unnatural suppression of her own aggression. I had overlaid her real personality with a placid one, effectively sealing it off. The drongo persona had bubbled underneath, unable to find a safety valve to relieve the pressure, and finally she had exploded. I should have been comparing Yat Ho with Steve, not with Marcia, having done the same thing to my brother’s natural aggression.

  He had murdered Marcia!

  Steve was taken away and I called to him that I would get his lawyer on the phone. He waved his hand over his shoulder, as if he did not really care what I did.

  I sat in the restaurant, stunned by what had happened. Poor Marcia, I thought. Poor sweet innocent Marcia. I had been instrumental in her death, as they say, by experimenting on my own brother. It was a terrible thing to do. I was determined that it should all come out at the trial. I would defend my brother with the truth. Poor Steve.

  While these thoughts were running through my head, Marcia walked into the room, saw me and waved. She crossed the floor and took a chair opposite me.

  ‘Something terrible’s happened,’ she said, as I sat there open-mouthed, staring at her. ‘Steve told me to stay in Manila, but I caught the next flight out, after his. There are policemen after him...’

  ‘I know,’ I said in a shaky voice, ‘they’ve arrested him. But what’s he done?’

  She told me then and though Steve was still in a lot of trouble, I heaved a sigh of relief. It was bad, but not as bad as I had first envisaged, thank God.

  They had been in a waterfront bar and Steve had had too much to drink. Marcia went to phone a taxi, to take them back to the hotel. When she returned, all hell had been let loose. It appeared that Steve had suddenly exploded in a fit of violence and had proceeded to lay about him without warning. The clientele of that particular bar were no angels themselves and dockers, fishermen and wharf rats began to pile into the mad gweilo with boots, fists and one or two knives. Steve retaliated in kind, stepping up his attacks on the opposition, cracking heads and throwing the smaller Filipinos around like dolls.

  Chairs were broken, jaws were broken, mirrors were broken. There were three unconscious bodies strewn about the floor and Steve was swinging a bottle at a fourth, just as Marcia entered. The barman had pulled out a revolver and was screaming to Marcia in Tagalog that she’d better get her boyfriend out of there, or he was going to blow the fucking madman’s head off. Marcia managed to bundle Steve through the door and into the taxi, whereupon he collapsed in moody silence in the corner of the cab. The next morning they heard that the police were after him, for drunkenness, assault, and various other criminal charges.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve got to help him.’

  Steve stood trial in Hong Kong, there being a Far East Area Criminal Court in Kowloon. His lawyer picked off the various charges against him, but he still ended up with ‘Assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm’. He was sentenced to a year in the Far East Central Jail, of which he would serve about eight months the lawyer said.

  So now I sit in my cell, with three other convicted felons for company. I couldn’t let Steve serve his sentence: I’m doing it in his place. While Steve was out on bail we extended our illegal activities to swapping psyches. I am now in Steve’s body and he in mine. It’s really only fair that I do his time for him, when the whole thing was my fault anyway. I’m tempted at this point to quote the words at the end of A Tale of Two Cities—‘It is a far better thing I do now. . . ’—but I can’t remember the whole bit.

  I’ve taken a year’s sabbatical from the university and Steve has taken my body to Thailand with Marcia for a long holiday. She was a little confused at first but doesn’t seem to mind, so long as I don’t care and Steve is happy. We’ve explained to her what we’ve done and have assured her that everything is fine with both of us.

  Jail is quite interesting really, if you haven’t got a lifetime to serve, but Far East prisons are tough places. You need to be a hard man to survive in here. Obviously Steve, the old Steve, would have been in his element, being an instinctive bully. His aggressive attitude and pugnacious personality would have ensured he was left well alone.

  However, Steve isn’t in here—I am. I am fairly timid by nature and in these circumstances a natural victim. I doubt I could survive on my own. The oriental thugs in here would destroy a mild gweilo like me in very little time at all, these Chinese triads and Vietnamese gangsters. So I borrowed another personality before I came in: superimposed it upon my own. It seems to work. I can scrap with the best of them, steal their food before they rob me of mine, intimidate them, put them in their places, establish a pecking order with me at the top. They fear me for my inherently fierce nature, my vicious character, and either stay out of my way or suck up to me.

  Why not? Someone’s got to be the king pin, so why not me? With the help of an overlaid persona, of course—that of the most belligerent black drongo I could find, Yat Ho.

  BONSAI TIGER

  Anyone who met Dylan Tom, my irascible house cat, will know what sparked this story. Dylan would let you stroke him once, then he would turn and sink his teeth into your hand. He was not a bad a cat. He just hated being fussed. Dylan live 19 years, often sleeping in open drawer of my desk while I worked. Strangely, I miss him.

  ‘Breaking up is so hard to do. My computer had come up with that when I had asked heaven that morning whether I would ever get over her.

  It confessed it was a line from an old song, an ancient song, probably. Yet, like all simple, trite sayings, it was so true. Breaking up with Krystina was killing me. I was so depressed I wanted to murder her and the bloody new boyfriend. I hadn’t even met him. When I tried to imagine the two of them together, he was like some phantom twerp in the shadows behind her, tall and weedy, good at nothing, cynical.

  Krystina and I met for the last time in our favourite rice-wine bar on Reynold’s Path, overlooking the river. I watched the water traffic skimming the wavelets on the other side of the smoked glass with moody eyes, hoping she was noticing how miserable she had made me.

  She had noticed.

  ‘Stop being so full of self-pity,’ she said, coldly. ‘It’s history.’

  ‘History is further back than two weeks,’ I replied bitterly, though I added with some spirit, ‘It’s only history to you because I’m the one being dumped. When I suggested we split up last year you told me it made you feel sick to your stomach. You reminded me that we had both said it was Forever. Some short Forevers around here, that’s all I can say.’

  Her eyes were like those balls of light-blue ice barmen eject into drinks. ‘Well, what did you ask me here for?’

  I shrugged. ‘I thought—I just wanted to talk it over. We’re still friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said, fiddling with her shoulder strap. ‘I think it’s best we should break clean and not see one another again.’

  ‘We always agreed that we’d stay friends,’ I gasped. ‘That we’d go on seeing each other, for lunch or whatever, even though we might have fallen out of love.’

  ‘That was before I met Mendal. Now I don’t think it’s workable. I think you need to move on. I have. I’ve grown. I’ve gone beyond what we had together.’

>   ‘You bitch. Are you suggesting I was a stepping stone to something better?’

  Her mouth twisted and I think she was about to say something really nasty, something that would have crushed my heart like a ripe plum thrown under the heel of a Spanish flamenco dancer, but then she changed her mind. Instead she offered a word of advice.

  ‘Look, Dean, I don’t want to say things that will hurt you. Have you thought of doing something to take your mind off things? What about going on holiday. The Far East? You’ve always liked Indo-China and jungles full of animals. Or better still, get yourself a pet. You can love that all you want and it won’t leave you like one of us rotten bitches.’ She said this tongue in cheek of course. ‘What about one of those new bonsai pets? I’m sure it’ll help. Now, I’ve got to meet Mendal at the theatre. You look after yourself, Dean, and...’ I knew she was about to say ‘keep in touch’ but she thought better of it. ‘...you just hang on in there.’

  She left me then. My heart was as black as sin. I felt ugly. I felt wasted. I felt destroyed. I paid for my coffee and then went out into the neon-jazzed night, to ride the flickering street back to my apartment. On the way I passed a hole-in-the-wall pet mart. What the hell, I thought, she could be right? Maybe a pet would help? At least it would give me something else to worry about, other than my pitiful self.

  I went across to the mart outlet, thinking of a little puppy or a miniature kitten, and came away with a bonsai tiger.

  It was in a secure cage, of course. I held it up under the pearl street lights. It was perfect. Diminutive, but perfect. About the size of a sewer rat, it paced up and down the cage, stopping occasionally to stare out, not at me, but at some distant land beyond. Its stare went right through me. There was no expression in its face, nothing I could read in the tiny bright eyes like sequins buried in the black and yellow fur.

  A marvel of genetic engineering, my bonsai tiger was a real wild beast from a far off place, an exotic half-shadow creature which could hunt and kill as well as any full-sized big cat, albeit its prey would be of proportions suitable to its own length, girth and breadth.

  Under the opal light it yawned with its small mouth, revealing two rows of sharp white teeth and a little red tongue. My perfect little tiger then flopped down, cat-like, and curled its tail over its legs. It was beautiful. My new pet was beautiful—and already I was beginning to forget the horrible empty ache inside me.

  ‘What was her name?’ I joked with my pet, as we skimmed along. ‘I don’t remember, do you?’

  Once at home I put my tiger on a shelf below the stacks of computer manuals. Actually, to be more accurate, it was a female, a tigress, but the world was swiftly erasing gender nouns, so tiger was fine.

  ‘Sheba,’ I said. ‘A name fit for a queen. That’s what you are, my Lilliputian Queen Sheba of Blackhill Street.’

  Sheba looked up, as if acknowledging her new name.

  ‘Excellent. We’re going to be a cool couple. Krystina will be proud of me. I’ll just look her in the eye when we meet, accidentally of course outside some bar or night club, and say, “I’m living with Sheba now. She’s great. We get on terrifically well,” and witness her surprise at how so together I am— how I still love her of course, evident only in my demeanour and the way I hold my head—but how I’m bravely getting on with life without her.’

  My computer made a noise like a wet fart. They’re not supposed to do that, but they do. They do lots of things they’re not supposed to. I think it’s the only way bored programmers get their rocks off.

  Sheba, however, let out a tiny roar—I thought of approval.

  The voice at the mart had said to feed her steak. I was having fillet of lamb for dinner. I cut off a small corner and pushed it through the steel bars of the cage. Sheba pounced on it and began to rip pieces off it with her teeth. It was fascinating. Nature in the raw. Those geneticists were geniuses. To be able to make tiny elephants, tigers, lions, panthers, crocodiles! Never again would there be endangered species. We had all the codes now, we could make the animal whenever we wanted it. Some of the extinct creatures had been revived. There were even miniature mammoths and dinosaurs on the way. Sabre-toothed tigers. Mini plesiosaurs and in aquarium tanks. Cycad jungles.

  Jungles! Now there was an idea. Why not get a rainforest or a jungle for my pet? Why not indeed? I phoned Krystina. She was in a theatre lobby with people milling round her. As soon as she saw my face she said, ‘I’m changing my number.’

  I tried to catch a glimpse of the girl-stealing Mendal, but couldn’t be sure which of the skinny males in the picture was him. Krystina had said he was ‘sensitive’ which meant he was a geek. She had implied she had gone up the evolutionary scale, the chain of being, from Neanderthal to Modern Man. It was my belief she’d found a codfish that talked.

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ I said. ‘I’m only ringing to say I’m fine with everything. I’ve...’ but she had switched off. When I tried again the voice said, ‘This number is unobtainable at present, please try again later.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ I shouted, taking it out on the synthesiser. ‘Bloody bollocking bollocks.’

  ‘Testicles,’ said my computer smugly, programmed to answer definite questions or give the definitions of repeated words. ‘Nonsense, a muddle, a mess. In American slang, to make a botch of.’

  Later I went to bed to dream of judgement days, but was kept awake by snuffling noises and the sound of straw being shuffled from one end of the cage to the other. The next morning Sheba’s cage smelled a little high, so I changed the bedding. I lured her into a small compartment at one end of the cage with some raw liver, then changed the drawer containing her bed and faeces. It was all quite simple. I’d never had a pet before, but these bonsai animals were like having gerbils. There was little do except enjoy the ownership of a live creature.

  Bonsai actually means ‘bowl cultivation’ in Japanese and of course originally referred to dwarf trees, but you know how words alter their meanings over time, especially when they come from another language. (Sophisticated originally meant ‘artificial’ but soon came to mean having the worldly wisdom characteristic of a fashionable life.) When the genetic labs starting producing tiny wild creatures for the commercial market they had to think of a marketable name. ‘Shrunken beasts’ didn’t have the right ring to it, so they settled on ‘bonsai pets’.

  Naturally, the bonsai tiger only distracted me for a few days, then I descended into misery once again. I felt absolutely fucked up. And, of course, when you’re fucked up, there’s the extremely likely possibility of getting fucked up further, because you are so wrapped up in your own private hell you forget to do things that should definitely be remembered.

  I forgot to feed Sheba.

  Arriving back at the apartment after stalking Krystina and her Cro-Magnon (he wasn’t that Modern after all and had threatened to smash my face in if I didn’t stop following them) I found the cage on the floor. It had burst open. Three shelves had come down with it and there were computer manuals all over the floor plus a vase and my two soapstone carvings. My guess was that the tiger had become so hungry she had thrown herself at the bars of her cage in a frenzy and had brought the shelves down. The heavy manuals had crashed down on the cage and broken it open, allowing Sheba to escape.

  ‘Shit!’ I said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘Faeces, excrement; the act of defecating; a contemptuous term for a person... ’

  ‘Shut up, you stupid machine!’

  ‘... rubbish, nonsense; marijuana or heroin.’

  There was a pause before the computer spoke again, with censure in its drone.

  ‘I hope you realise hard drugs are illegal and soft drugs do your brains in.’

  Bloody programmers. They ought to be made illegal.

  The first thing I did was to glance around the room, to see if she was anywhere to be seen. She wasn’t. Assessing the situation I came to the conclusion that the apartment was escape proof. There was no chimney, no open windows, a
nd there weren’t any chutes. There was no way she could get out.

  I went into the kitchen and found the rubbish bin knocked over and its contents spilled all over the kitchen floor. Any edible scraps which had been in that bin had been devoured. At least she had probably assuaged her hunger. That was good, wasn’t it? But where the hell was she?

  ‘Sheba, Sheba, Sheba,’ I called in a ‘kitty-kitty’ voice.

  ‘A biblical land corresponding to Sabaea in present-day Yemen, South West Arabia; an unbeaten racehorse during the first four years of this century; a Las Vegas drag queen whose lewd act included a live anaconda; a kind of sugared muffin made in Bhutan... ’

  She didn’t come of course. I went into the bathroom. A bar of soap lay half-eaten on the floor. Hell, when had I last fed her? I cleaned everything up then began a serious search of the four rooms. I couldn’t find her anywhere. Maybe she had managed to get out somehow? There was nothing for it but to go to bed and have another look in the morning. Maybe she would be out looking for food. I started to think how I would catch her. Put some meat in her cage? That sounded right.

  In the middle of the night there was a terrible fight in the living-room. I heard crashing and banging, then a thin high-pitched scream which hurt my ears filled the apartment for several minutes. When I got up the courage I went through the door and switched on the light. I almost threw up. There was blood all over the carpet, halfway up the cream-coloured curtains I had fought with Krystina over, smeared down one wall, and smudged on the sofa. In the middle of the room was a pile of putrid-smelling, smoking innards, draped across a broken lamp. Right at my feet, in the doorway, was the severed head of a large rat.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I cried out loud. ‘I didn’t know we had any rats in here! How did rats get into a modern building?’