The flotilla headed back for shore. As the Geminis chugged along, the Burmoils unfortunately began to fill with water and started to pop under the surface one after the other. We were quickly down to two or three Burmoils. The sheer weight of the propeller began to pull down on the rear of the Geminis and lift the bows up into the air, threatening to tip them over at any moment. The shout went up: 'Cut the ropes!'
Ginge, who was steering my boat, cut what he thought was the main rope. Unfortunately, he had not noticed that there was another rope attached to the propeller leaf whose other end was coiled loosely in the bottom of the boat. The heavy hemp rope snaked out and snapped tight around my upper leg.
As I struggled against the muscle-tearing pull of the rope, a mental picture of Geordie, the jungle survival expert, flashed into my mind. 'You are only as sharp as your knife,' he used to say in his heavy Newcastle accent. I reached for my diver's knife, fitted to my leg. The blade glittered in the sun as I hacked away at the hemp. The pain in my thigh was becoming unbearable. I could just feel my hip-joint beginning to dislocate as I cut through the final strands. The relief was immediate. The propeller leaf plummeted to the depths of the ocean. As it disappeared, I don't know which was more painful: my thigh or the thought of the thousands of pounds sterling lying on the ocean floor!
The OC turned a blind eye to the escapade. He knew it was going on, but after all, it was good training – something for us to focus our minds on, instead of aimlessly paddling around looking for fish. However, there was no way he could ignore what was about to happen in Hong Kong.
* * *
'Let's go for a boogie at BMH and work up a thirst,' said Clint as he stuffed his rugby kit into a battered holdall.
'Work up a thirst! I must have lost a gallon of sweat this afternoon. I need an ale transfusion quick. I'll be fainting from dehydration.'
'You can get a drink at the disco.'
'I'm not into discos. I've got some serious drinking to do.'
'Me too. But we can go down town later. Think of all those gorgeous nurses, those black-stocking beauties just waiting for us. Right little ravers, no inhibitions. They're seeing naked bodies all day long. It builds up the passion, especially in this heat. Can't you just feel those wellpractised hands getting to grips with you already? They can give me a bed-bath any time they want.'
'Hey, Clint, remember I'm a married man!'
We were in the changing rooms, Buffalo, Clint and I, discussing the evening's entertainment. Buffalo and Clint were inspectors in the Hong Kong police. They'd co-opted me into their local league rugby team. That afternoon's match had been particularly hard, but we'd just scraped a win. I was feeling the effects of the humidity; having been in Hong Kong only three weeks, I was still not fully acclimatized. The thought of several hours' dancing did not exactly fill me with excitement. However, as I did up my last shirt button, I resigned myself to the BMH detour.
We finally left BMH around midnight and to my relief headed for Tsim-Sha-Tsui, a bustling shopping, bar and restaurant district situated in the shadow of the mountain known as the Peak, which towers like a high-swell wave crest over the trough of Hong Kong city. We were aiming for the renowned Bottoms Up bar to get on with the real business of the night: beer and men's talk.
As we turned into Hankow Road, I looked up eagerly to see if I could spot the entrance to the bar I'd heard so much about. A flashing neon ticker tape of matchstick Chinese script showered right down to street level. The occasional English sign emphasized the cosmopolitan nature of the city: 'Golden Dragon Company – Wholesale and Retail', 'Jimmy Sung – Tailor', 'Golden Fountain Restaurant'. The road itself was lined with high-class boutiques, their window displays expensively draped and spotlit to attract passers-by, who even at this hour were thronging the pavements. The trademarks of Sony, Omega and Nikon assailed window-browsers from all sides.
In spite of the neon snowstorm, the sign for the Bottoms Up bar stood out a fair distance down on the right-hand side of the road. Boxshaped, the sign had a thick black border engraved with white Chinese writing. The centre was a rich purple colour. It featured a prominent white bottom cleverly designed to resemble a heart.
It was 2.00am by the time I finally made it out of there and through the door of the Red Mill Inn. This was a conventional late-night drinking den. It was the early hours of the morning and as the conversation wore on and the sporting exploits grew in stature with each alcohol-infused repetition, my concentration began to wander. I gazed around the bar, then momentarily tensed, consciously halting the drift of my mind towards weariness-induced torpor. Something wasn't quite right. I didn't feel comfortable. There was something in the atmosphere of the bar that seemed to convey a vague sense of danger, some unstated aura of threat – not especially aimed at me or Clint or Buffalo, just generalized, floating around the room, seeping through the air like a gas escape. It was as if all it would take was a misinterpreted gesture, an ill-timed comment or a glance in the wrong direction, and the casual strike of a match would trigger the explosion. I was sure the feeling had not been there before we came in. Something or someone had precipitated it since we'd arrived.
More alert, I scanned the room seeking clues. Everything seemed normal – normal that is, for a late-night bar in the early hours of the morning in downtown Hong Kong, a bar peopled by a potent racial mix drawn from the Portuguese, Chinese, British and Filipino subcultures. The general bar area seemed quiet enough; just two neatlooking Chinese men sitting by the door talking softly and a sprinkling of other nondescript faces scattered around in ones and twos.
After a while the general calmness began to allay my fears. It must be my hyperactive imagination, I thought as I did a mental search-anddestroy mission inside my body to locate and unwind the tension-cramped muscles. By the time Susi Soriano appeared and I had recognized her as a nightclub hostess and singer from the Speakeasy Club, a seedy downtown drinking den that Clint, Buffalo and I had recently started to frequent, all notions of latent hostility had completely evaporated. I felt I needed some female conversation. Nothing more, just friendly conversation. It gets lonely when you are separated from the wife.
'Hello Susi, got the night off?'
'Yes, that's right.'
'Come and join us for a drink.'
'No thanks. Not just now. I'm with my sister.'
'Better still. Bring Chai over too.'
'Maybe later.' And with that she disappeared into the toilets.
We continued drinking, but the sight of Susi had made me restless. Not one to be put off easily, I decided to see if I could persuade Susi and Chai to be more sociable. I wandered over to where they were sitting in a semi-private booth. The two sisters were sitting with a group of Portuguese men. They were obviously engrossed in something more than social pleasantries, so I decided to leave them alone for a little while longer. Ten minutes later, I thought I would try again. I went right up to where they were sitting and gestured. Susi glanced up and nervously gestured for me to go away. The nervous look did not register with me and I simply thought she was playing hard to get. One more drink and then I would go right up to their table. I turned and headed back for the empty stool at the bar next to Clint.
As I had my back to the booth area, I didn't see the three characters behind me whisper something urgent, get up, move their chairs swiftly to one side and head for the steps by the jukebox. The first I knew of anything being wrong was when the unmistakable sound of breaking glass cut through the bar and jolted the place into high tension. Instinctively I spun round, and saw the lead character of the three, tense-armed, gripping a broken bottle held menacingly low and pointing directly towards me.
Clint swivelled round, saw the bottle, leapt off his stool, jutted out the index finger of his right hand and shouted, 'Police! Put the bottle down!'
The three paid no attention whatsoever and continued to advance. At this point Clint went for the guy with the bottle. He evaded the first threatening swing of the vicious, jagged we
apon, grasped the man's wrist in a vice-lock, forced the bottle to the floor and threw him against the jukebox. As he crashed spreadeagled into the machine and slumped to the floor, a wild screech and scratch followed by a rumbling sound emanated from the loudspeaker and then, incongruously amid the mayhem, the soft romantic ballad began to play again a few bars further on. Out of the corner of my eye I could just see Clint putting the boot in to finish off the job, when the man's companions both grabbed bottles from the nearest empty table, broke off the bases with a practised flick of the wrist and advanced to within striking distance of Buffalo and me.
As they had paid no heed to Clint's warnings, I decide to throw the system out of the window and go solo. I reached into my back pocket for the insurance policy I always carried with me in case of trouble – a First World War trench-fighting knuckleduster issued to British troops for hand-to-hand combat. A lovely piece, worn smooth by age, I'd obtained it from my brother-in-law who runs a military museum. Years before, while serving with the Royal Engineers in Germany, a mate of mine had been jumped by a gang of Italian Gastarbeiter thugs. They put their knives into him and he never walked again. I was determined that no one was going to turn me into a vegetable at any cost, and I carried the knuckleduster with me everywhere I went. Now it was about to come into its own.
I felt for the reassuring hard touch of the metal and drew the weapon out into the open. I jammed it into my hand, pointed it directly at my would-be assailants, flexed my fingers conspicuously and snorted in a cold, rock-steady voice, 'Right! Let's have you, lads.'
As they came forward I struck the nearer one full in the face. He went down. I swung my arm back and caught the other on the side of the temple. He dropped his broken bottle and went down. A fourth person, later identified as Didier Peres, a well-known drug-pusher, then came from the booths area and lunged at me with a crude form of rugby tackle. He was very quick. Before I could strike him with the knuckleduster, he grabbed me around the throat and pushed me into the bar, sending two or three stools clattering to the floor. At the same time his considerable strength enabled him to turn me around so that I was facing towards and was bent over the bar. He then thrust his hand up to my throat and held me in a windpipe pinch. The pain was excruciating, as if I were being gripped by a rabid Dobermann. The precise positioning of the thumb and index finger had all the hallmarks of a professional street fighter. It was the throat equivalent of getting your hand jammed in a bank's time-locked safe door when all the staff have gone home for the weekend.
My position was now serious. By shaking forcefully from side to side, I managed to free my knuckleduster arm and swing it around. Peres was bent low into my shoulder, so the duster cracked him on the top of the head. To my dismay, the blow had no effect except to make him tighten his grip on my throat. By now my eyes were beginning to blur; the bottles behind the bar were swimming. There was a heavy thumping in my head and a high-pitched whistling in my ears. I was desperate. I had to do something quick. By now I was having trouble breathing. I could feel my temples beating to bursting point. I was virtually paralysed. I frantically scoured my brain for a solution, going on fast-forward through all my years of training. A flash of inspiration! I had to try it! It could be my last chance. I worked up my left hand, grabbed hold of Peres's thumb, snatched it away from my throat and put it straight into my mouth. I bit down as hard as I could until I felt the solid resistance of the bone. Peres, taken by surprise, squealed like a stuck pig, released his stranglehold and ran out of the bar.
I looked around. Clint was still over by the jukebox slugging it out with someone who later turned out to be a Portuguese-American sailor on forty-eight-hour shore leave. Clint swung his arm, the man crashed backwards, smashing the glass cover on the jukebox, and the music was silenced for good. Buffalo was arguing with the barman about using the phone to call for help. The barman refused, saying, suspiciously, that it was out of order. So Buffalo dashed out to phone from the restaurant across the street. At this point I decided to get out of the bar as quickly as I could. I was on a sensitive job and didn't want complications.
I pushed past another character who tried to stop me. He dropped like a ton of muck as I cracked him with the duster. I was staring freedom in the face when suddenly I was jumped from behind at the door. We rolled around, the momentum carrying us straight through the door and into the street. As we continued to roll around on the pavement, a crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. Suddenly someone ran out of the gathering, kicked me straight in the face as I wrestled with my assailant, then mingled back into the crowd.
Undeterred, I continued the struggle. I heaved the man over and managed to get on top of him. Just when I thought I had the situation under control, he put his hand up, gripped my testicles and twisted them violently beneath the thin material of my lightweight tropical trousers. It blew my mind. The anger exploded in my brain. There was only one answer to this. I grabbed his hair with my left hand and rapped him across the forehead with the knuckleduster, splitting the skin from eye to eye. Like a heavyweight boxer in a title fight who goes on punching beyond the bell, I just did not hear the high-pitched wailing of the police siren. As the character slumped unconscious to the ground and I began to think I might have overdone it, I suddenly felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.
'Police! You're under arrest.'
There is something strange and frightening when in the course of a single moment you realize that your life has irrevocably altered. It is the moment when a young wife, joyfully looking forward to her husband's return so she can reveal the news of her first pregnancy, is told by the grave-faced policeman at the door that she is now a widow; when the champion jockey, who only a moment ago was soaring high over the jumps, wakes up in hospital to be told that his vertebrae are so badly smashed that he will never ride again. The moment is strange because it is so sudden and disorientating, and it is frightening because you are cast headlong into a situation where a completely new order reigns and a new set of rules prevails. Your unsuspecting emotions are cruelly whiplashed into a vicious reversal of direction. No matter how loud you scream inside, 'This can't be happening, this can't be true,' no one will ever hear you. Events are propelled forward with an absolute and remorseless energy.
Under arrest! I used to have a recurring nightmare about being at the wheel of a car careering out of control downhill with its accelerator jammed full on. No matter how hard I struggled to disengage the clutch with one foot and ram the brake down hard with the other, I could do nothing to stop the vehicle. It wasn't the fear of crashing that made me wake up in a sweat, it was the terrifying powerlessness to stop the forward motion, the deeply unnerving experience of sheer relentlessness.
The nightmare had now come true. I looked up and saw the khaki drill, the dark leather of the Sam Browne cross belt, the black shiny peaked cap and the drawn pistol. Just behind, the flashing light on top of the Land Rover seemed to gyrate crazily like an out-of-control lighthouse beacon. I was about to start the B-movie dialogue of, for want of something more original, 'You've got the wrong man,' when Clint beat me to it. Waving his police warrant card to try to emphasize his authority, he shouted urgently, 'There's people in the bar who should be held for questioning.'
Even as he spoke, Peres and the bottle boys, the real culprits, were slinking out of the bar. As soon as they were at a safe distance they broke into a run down the street and away into the night. The hyped-up inspector, who by this time, having confiscated the knuckleduster, was cautioning me and hustling me into the rear of the Land Rover, completely ignored Clint's warnings. He was young, inexperienced and totally out of his depth.
The next thing I knew I was being driven to Tsim-Sha-Tsui police station, with Clint and Buffalo in hot pursuit in their own car. At the station I was processed through the system, searched, cautioned and interviewed and my statement taken down by a clumsy typist. It was written in uncultured English, heavy with police terminology, which tends to reduce an infinite variety of real-lif
e happenings to a limited series of categorized events. After reading the statement I was told to initial in the margin the errors and crossings out and to sign and date it at the bottom.
Since the knuckleduster was classified as an illegal weapon and the possession of the weapon constituted an offence contrary to the Public Order Act, my case was transferred to the CID. I could not escape the charge of possession of an offensive weapon – POOW as it was referred to – since I'd admitted in my statement to having it in the first place. I'd had no choice, I had been caught with it literally red-handed. To my dismay, I learned that self-defence was no defence. As for the fight, I felt that the charge would be the relatively minor offence of causing an affray. No such luck. I was to be prosecuted under the Public Order Act for the much more serious offence of assault occasioning actual bodily harm – AOABH for short. Around 4.30am, with my spirits ebbing away, it was decided that I should be taken into mess arrest. I was driven in a police Land Rover to Gunclub Barracks – the resident Hong Kong battalion headquarters – where I was to remain for the next two weeks until the case came up in court.
Soldier I Page 18
