by Nick Macfie
It was Zeb, of course. But the fucker didn’t say where he was. That would be too straightforward. A minute later came a second beep with the address. I rubbed my hands together slowly - Zeb was in hospital, just around the corner from his super-expensive Mid-Levels home, a short taxi ride from the FCC. But why should I go and see him? My phone rang. It was Baxter.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he said.
“I know. It’s Zeb.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Hadley, but where are you? Can you go and see him? One of us should and I’m on a junk somewhere off Lamma. A party full of bankers. Can you go see if he’s all right? No need to stay. I’d be ever so grateful.”
My phone beeped. A message from the depths of Exmoor.
“Hi Hadley. How about we run a spoon-carving workshop in your wood for a stag party with nine blokes as part of pre-nuptial celebrations? It will give us a chance to let our hair down!”
Okay, Sparky, enough. I sent a message back. I wanted to express my reluctance to carve spoons with anyone, let alone nine men, and the fact that these text messages were getting tiresome.
“Fuck off,” I wrote.
Zeb’s private room looked over the harbour and his bed had been pushed to the window so he could enjoy the view. I walked in to see the bastard in much the same position I usually found Baxter in his office, turned to face the harbour. He had a drip feeding into the top of his right hand.
“Zeb?”
He was wearing striped pyjamas buttoned at the neck and his eyes were closed. The foamy, cream, turtle-neck sweater with the “Poppycock” label was folded carefully on his chair. I stood watching him for over a minute, not for the first time wondering how people can look so kind and innocent when they are asleep and be so manipulative when they are awake. The hundred-and-eighty-degree transformation happens in the opening of an eye. Zeb opened his.
“Hadley. You’ve come to see me. I love you, man.”
I walked slowly to the other side of the bed, behind his head, and stared at him some more. From my vantage point, looking down from about a yard above, he could only act defensively. I think there were even tears in his eyes.
“Never mind that,” I said. “Baxter ordered me to come. Tell me what happened.”
“That’s what best friends are for.”
This is when I should have showed him what I had brought him. But I hadn’t brought him anything.
“I am not your friend. What happened?”
“Hadley, you have to know, pal. You of all people.” I looked out the window and saw a kite (or was it a fiscal hawk?) with a wingspan of at least five feet circle slowly above the lush greenery that tumbled down to Central. It looked like it was about to pounce on some exotic prey. Something evil and consigned to crawl about on its belly all its life. Should I open the window?
“Know what, Zeb?”
“Some bastards did me over big time. It was like a big… whoosh. But I don’t remember much about it.”
I put my left hand on the bedpost and leant closer. “Speak to me succinctly, Zeb, or I am leaving. What is a big whoosh? Who did you over?”
“I don’t know, man. So unmellow. Some Chinese hoods, I reckon, but I don’t really remember. They must have drugged me. Spiked my drink. One minute I was fine, and the next I woke up in an alley behind the Pub Pipe with a pain in my balls.” The Pub Pipe was a bar in the Wanchai strip. “You have no idea how helpless I feel.”
That was a start. “Why did they do this?”
“Beats me. They didn’t rob me. They didn’t… I can’t quite choose my words properly. Or remember what I’ve just said. It must be the dress.”
“The dress?”
Zeb turned his face away, squinted his eyes and turned back.
“I mean, it must be the drugs. They’re giving me all sorts of drugs. More drugs. The beer. It tastes like madness.”
“The beer? You’re not making any sense.”
“Why do we hurt the one we love, Hadley?”
“The one you love? You only love yourself. And you got hurt. You also hurt Scout.”
“Darling Scout. She has it coming.”
I moved behind Zeb’s bedpost, next to the white pole holding the drip’s drip. There was a nob which I happily turned one hundred and eighty degrees to the right. I hadn’t a clue what was in the drip and I didn’t care.
“She doesn’t have it coming,” I said. “Scout is kind and good. You have it coming.”
“Oh, Hadley, no. I don’t think so. They fall in love with me. Why would they fall in love with me if they hate me?”
“They fall for something else.”
“Exactly.”
“They fall for something they hope you are. What they don’t know is that you are a million miles away. You are needy and self-indulgent. You are a total fucking loser.”
“Yeah, right. Let’s swap score cards. Let’s see who the fucking loser is.”
“Score cards. Wow. I’ve only just got it. You disappoint every woman you meet. It’s not until too late that they realise you are an empty and angry paper bag. That’s why you’re so bitter. It’s not because you’ve been disowned by your family. It’s not because you are useless at anything you put your hand to in the way of work. It’s because everyone goes away disappointed. It’s suddenly all apparent.”
“Fuck off, you pompous Brit.”
“And this time, you disappointed someone so much, they beat the living shit out of you and kicked you in the balls. Not that it will make any difference. You’re set in your ways, you are. It’s all so clear in my head that I want to sing.”
“Leave me alone. Just because…”
And that was all I heard, because I blocked my ears and started singing. Loudly. “These Are a Few of My Favourite Things” to be precise, watching Zeb’s mouth move to words I couldn’t make out. But I could see tiny speckles of spit coming from the black hole of his mouth. I got louder and louder and pressed my ears shut more tightly.
“When the dog bites…”
I stopped. A frowning nurse had appeared in the doorway.
“What is going on here?” she asked.
“Bit of a sing-song, nurse.”
She marched up to Zeb’s bed and pulled it back to its normal position.
“What a disappointment you are,” she said to Zeb, ignoring me. “I’ve told you before. You are heavily sedated and must try to sleep.”
She turned the nob on the IV without any suggestion it had been tampered with. She was young and pretty and her stomach was completely flat as she reached up to the nob (above the fucking nob in the bed). She had a ball-point pen tucked into the top of her white uniform, a giant fob watch and a faint, herbal scent.
“Well, hi there,” Zeb said. “Please don’t be angry with me.”
He put on this little boy’s voice and made a pouting face which I found so loathsome and inappropriate that I wanted to retch. What a disappointment. The nurse ignored him.
“So, Nurse Lim (I read her name tag), do they give you time off for good behaviour?” Wait, what kind of a question was that? I was coming on to her? I was doing a Zeb?
“Sorry?” she said.
“What time must I leave?”
“Under normal circumstances, you could stay as long as you like. But Mr Shrubs must get some rest. He is under heavy sedation for the trauma.”
“The trauma?”
She led me away towards the door and lowered her voice. “I am afraid it has weakened his central vitality and may have a permanent detrimental association.”
Things were looking up. I hadn’t a clue what Nurse Lim was on about, but it sounded irresistibly serious.
“I understand, nurse. Could he…?”
“Could he what?”
“Well, I don’t want to put you on the spot. But is it possible he could die?”
“Die? Of course not. There was no physical trauma. Just the major humiliation and embarrassment.”
“I completely understand.”
/> “Maybe five minutes more, and then you must leave. Are you very close?”
“We work together.”
“All right, then. Five minutes.”
“Hadley,” Zeb called from the bed. His voice was suddenly a croak. What a fucking fake!
Nurse Lim and I turned to the patient. Her arm brushed mine. It had to be deliberate.
“What is it, Zeb?” I asked.
“The man in the club. The man with the snakes.”
“The man with the spiky hair?”
“He’s a…” Zeb closed his eyes.
Nurse Lim took his pulse.
“He’s a what, Zeb?” I asked.
Zeb shook his head. “He’s, like, in the zone. Like totally awesome.”
“Thanks for the information,” I said. “Like totally specific.”
“Sure.” Zeb closed his eyes and appeared to sleep.
“Is he going to be all right?” I asked Nurse Lim. “Do you have a phone number? In case his condition deteriorates?”
“It would be a doctor who called the next of kin if his condition deteriorates,” she said, tapping the IV where it went into the top of Zeb’s hand with the back of a slim, unpolished fingernail. “I am not a doctor. Are you American?”
“No. Of course not.”
“It’s a way you have about you. Not completely real. I’m sorry, but I have to do my rounds.”
Florence bloody Nightingale left the room. In a brief moment of petulance, I reached up and turned the nob on Zeb’s IV one hundred and eight degrees to the right again. That’ll show him. It might also kill him. I turned it back.
“Hadley.”
Oh, what now? “What is it, Zeb?”
“What are they doing to me?”
“What are who doing to you?”
“The medicos, man. Something is going on. I go to sleep, I wake up.”
“They are giving you lots of nice relaxing drugs. They’re trying to make you a nicer person. You may be in here for decades. Try to get some sleep.”
“Why did they draw a Christmas tree on my dick?”
I’ve been in many strange situations and been asked many strange questions in my life. “Are you American” was pretty strange. But this one took the biscuit.
“I beg your pardon, Zeb.”
“I feel a little tired and confused. Dazed like a big zonk, you know? Wondering why anyone would so such a thing.”
“Are you saying the doctors drew a Christmas tree on your penis?”
“Not the doctors. The Triad scumbags. With a magic marker.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“I’ve only just found out. But it kind of scares me. It’s like a big…”
“A big whoosh?”
“Yeah, exactly. Who would do such a thing?”
“You’ve only just found out?”
“Copy that, pal.”
“But this must have happened at the same time. At the same time as they… did you over?”
“Yes.”
“But that was days ago. You must have seen it before now?”
“Not entirely.”
“You take a leak and don’t see a bright green Christmas tree on your dick? I am afraid I am completely lost.”
“It’s not as simple as that. I am not completely in control of all my facilities. Faculties. The drugs are heavy.”
“The doctors and nurses… have they seen it?”
“I doubt it. It’s on the bottom.”
“They drew a Christmas tree on your bottom?”
“No. It’s on the bottom. On the bottom of …”
“Your willy.”
“Yes.”
“So it took a long time to find it?”
“I wouldn’t have found it all, except that… Hadley, please don’t make me go on. I am so drugged up, I could be making the whole thing up without knowing. Hold on, let me take a look. You’d better turn away.”
No shit.
“I am going to look underneath my pyjamas, pal.” I heard a rustle of material. “It’s a bit difficult to make out under here, but yes, there it is. You can turn back now. I tried to rub it out but it won’t go. I rubbed and I rubbed. Some fucker did this to me. That spiky man. He was singing Good King Wenceslas. I must try to get some sleep.”
“Right.”
“Why did that pretty nurse call you a smarmy prick?”
“She didn’t.”
“Could have sworn. Hadley?”
“Yes Zeb.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For changing your headline.”
“You changed my headline, Zeb?” Why would he do that? I was very sensitive to criticism about my headlines. They rarely needed changing. “Which one?”
Zeb was smiling now. “Noose work if you can get it.”
The story was about Sri Lanka putting out a wanted ad for a hangman who wouldn’t have anything to do because nobody had been hanged in a long time. “Noose work if you can get it” was perfect.
“What did you change it to?”
“I have to confess I found it a little obscure. I couldn’t see why you were saying ‘noose’ work instead of ‘nice’ work. So I played it straight.”
“What are you talking about? You are not in a position to change my headlines. It’s a play on words. It’s ironic. Noose, as in hangman’s noose. Noose work if you can get it.”
“Didn’t think it really worked.”
“It wasn’t your call to make. What did you change it to?”
“As I say, I played it straight.”
“What was it?”
“‘Sri Lanka is advertising for a hangman, which is nice’.”
Bowie singing “Oh no, not again” in “Ashes to Ashes” sprang to mind. My heart was pumping wildly. I wanted to smother this man with his pillow. I wanted to string him up on his fucking IV.
“You have to be kidding,” I said. “My headline was perfect. Yours makes no fucking sense.”
“Let me be the judge of that, Hadley.”
“You had no right. You are a complete berk. Fuck you.”
“Whatever, man.”
Zeb closed his eyes and turned over in his bed. The story was already three days old, but I called up the desk and got them to change the headline back and re-file the story.
CHAPTER TEN
A WEEK LATER, after a few days off from the casino and the wire, I was back at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, having a few early evening eye-openers and a whinge about the day with a former Shrubs journalist, a chain-smoking Australian called Jeffers. He was in his mid-fifties, had worked in Asia for two decades longer than me, knew Wanchai in all its incarnations (including a bar called the Carnation) and spoke in a growl. He had short, curly gray hair and was deaf in one ear thanks to pistol shot close to his head in Kabul. He would leave Hong Kong for a year or two and come back and still the crotchety Wanchai mama-sans, lighting incense to appease ghosts of bar-fines at pavement altars, would call his name as he passed as if he had never been away. “Come in, Jeffers, buy girl a drink, Jeffers.” It was spooky stuff. Cigarette in hand, he would oblige more often than not and be disarmingly polite, attentive and hugely generous.
“Jeffers.”
“G’day, mate.” The ‘mate’ came out as ‘miiiight’.
“Early finish?”
“Fucking pom.”
So Jeffers was a few drinks ahead of me, but this was his way of saying hello. I was still seething about Zeb changing my headline.
“The new fucking Japanese finance minister,” he said. “He’s still trying to make news. Too rich for my blood. I gave it to someone who could stand the pace.”
“We called him a fiscal hawk.”
“So fucking what?”
“Are you telling me you know what that means?”
“Haven’t a clue, blue. Cigarette?”
I should say here that Jeffers spoke the Australian Brits thought all Australians spoke. He called people b
lue, cobber, mate. All of that stuff. They were words people understood, unlike “fiscal hawk”.
“You say things like the Chinese president is burnishing his credentials,” I said into my third whisky. “Or the Japanese finmin is a fiscal hawk. You talk about Indonesia being an investors’ darling. It is not a real language.”
“I said the finmin was burnishing his fiscal hawks,” Jeffers said. “We have pictures of him doing it, the bastard.”
Jeffers made a half smoker’s cough, half grumble, resting his chin on his chest and tapping the bar with his cigarette hand. He was swaying slightly, forwards and backwards. We could have been on the “Xanadu” in a medium swell.
“Got an email today from a dodgy Chinese construction company,” he said. “It’s threatening to build a fucking airport with a curved runway.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was the happiest moment of my fucking day.”
“Did you do a story?”
“Of course. Wrote itself. Checked out the company existed and then had some fun with it. Used to be a plane would circle before landing. Now it can circle before takeoff. That was my intro.”
“That doesn’t make sense either.”
“Fuck off.”
“A man told me about this plan the other day. Then he said he had given up on it. The future was in downhill runways, he said.”
“I never saw your story.”
“I never wrote it.” Why hadn’t I considered doing a story? It was wonderful. Maybe I was losing my touch. Or maybe I realised that the informant, a Triad gang member with wall-to-wall tattoos, might not pass as a reliable source. Also, he never actually said the future was in downhill runways. That was an unconscious leap from the truth which would never had happened if I were writing the story for real. I hoped that was the case, anyway. And what would make the mad fucker consider a curved runway in the first place? I could see the pilot landing, his hand hard down on the wheel, the screech and smoke of rubber on concrete, the grimace on the chief purser’s face. Totally barmy idea.
“Don’t look so worried,” Jeffers said.
“But at least it should have occurred to me.”
“It’s all harmless bollocks.”
“It’s certainly all bollocks.”
Getting pissed in the FCC and talking nonsense. Was there a happier, less productive way to pass the time?
