A Million People, Hadley

by Nick Macfie

  “She gave you a wee embrace on the stage.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “Has she made you an offer you can’t refuse?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” A kiss she had said. Hot Chocolate said it started with a kiss.

  “Hadley. Open your eyes. Look at her track record. She is a mawkish, self-indulgent, arrogant and hugely rich young beauty, who has screwed everyone from Henry Kissinger to Mian Langhari.”

  “Henry Kissinger?” It started with a Kissinger.

  “She is also about to start campaigning, as you would have us believe, as a born-again Muslim, giving up sex and drugs and rock and roll. Seriously?”

  Baxter swung round from his view out over the harbour.

  “Hadley, I’m taking you off the story.”

  “What?”

  “My mind’s made up. You are far too close to it all. You have been through too much and become emotionally involved. Fagin’s right. She is a piece of fluff, though of course there is a story in her even suggesting she wants to convert to Islam.”

  “I agree. I can write that. I just don’t think we should trash her.”

  Fagin shrugged his shoulders. Of course they were right, the bastards. What was I playing at? It was her pants, that was all. Her pants had turned my head.

  “You are correct of course,” I said. “Let me try to talk to her again.”

  “No need for that. Hand over all your notes to Fagin.”

  “I haven’t got any notes.”

  “You didn’t take notes?”

  “No. I wasn’t thinking. But I can see her again. Any time.”

  “Any place,” Fagin said.

  “You don’t think there’s a story there at all, do you?” I said to Fagin.

  “Nothing that you should get involved with, no.”

  I MET FAGIN in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, after fighting my way from Central MTR station through the yellow-clad student protesters and up Wyndham Street and the fifty-four steps of the Ice House stairway to the club entrance. I arrived panting and leant on the wall for a few seconds to allow the blotches on my face to die down. The FCC, a brown and white colonial-era building which used to be an ice house, is my favourite place to drink, if the time is right and it is empty. Early evenings from Monday to Thursday are fine. The place has to be avoided on Friday nights, New Year’s Eve, or any obscure British festivals when lawyers and bankers wear silly clothes, accompany silly people, and generally piss off the one or two members who are actually correspondents.

  It was five-thirty on a Tuesday evening and the main bar was deserted. Perfect. I ordered a large gin and tonic, sat at my favourite end and read the South China Morning Post as I waited for Fagin who turned up twenty minutes later wearing a kilt.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s Burns Night, you prick.”

  “Burns Night? That’s in January.”

  “Aye, but the place was closed for renovation, if you remember. And the events calendar was full up. So they chose tonight.”

  “But that means all these people will come in wearing kilts and playing bagpipes.”

  “Piping the haggis, aye. It’s great.”

  “Well how much time do we have?”

  “How much time?”

  “Before people start behaving like children and looking up each other’s kilts and shitting in ashtrays.”

  “The main programme shouldn’t get going until about eight.”

  “All right. What are you having to drink?”

  “A large Black Label, thanks. And talking about behaving like children.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well what was that show you were putting on for Baxter? Are you in love, laddie?”

  “I admitted he was right, didn’t I?”

  “Aye, but it was obviously a half-hearted change of heart.”

  “It just seems to me that we are all too willing to bury her. What was that story you wrote about her being picked up by a drunken sailor?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, who was your source? You used that line I told you about. ‘Any marina in a storm’. Except I told you ‘any port in a storm’, if I remember correctly. Who was your source? Who said ‘marina’ and not ‘port’.”

  “Hadley, calm down.”

  “Tell me who your source was. No one knew about that line. Only Marina. She would never have used it.”

  “Are you shagging her?”

  “Fuck off, Fagin. Whoever your source was played you for a fool. She never said that.”

  “The manager saw her leave with the sailor.”

  “And he heard her say that line?”

  “No, that was someone else.”

  “Who? I can tell you who. Someone out to hurt her.”

  “If you must know, it was a senior aide to her husband.”

  “With sparkly ear rings and a daft Yorkshire accent.”

  “Aye, that’s him.”

  “For fuck’s sake. He is the man who wants me to be his servant.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yorkshire Todd. He had me using a vacuum cleaner and cleaning dishes and dusting fucking Venetian blinds. He’s fucking mad. He’s played you something rotten.”

  “He’s played me, Hadley?”

  “I am afraid so.”

  “Have you shagged her?”

  Here was the thing, and it’s shameful. I didn’t want to have to say I hadn’t shagged her. How pathetic is that?

  “Here’s the thing,” I said.

  “What thing? Either you’ve shagged her or not. Has she said she will shag you if you write that puff piece about her? That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Fagin.”

  “For fuck’s sake, what? Of course, she wouldn’t be that crude, would she? Did she say she would let you hold her hand, or kiss her on the cheek?”

  Oh boy. “Remember when she went missing and the consulate put out a story she was seeing a sick relative or something in Hong Kong?”

  “I do.”

  “Remember I had seen her the night before? On the beach? Some prick had knocked her down at Rick’s and I picked her up and we went down to Shek O.”

  “You shagged her on the beach?”

  I signalled for another drink. “Fagin, I know so much about her. I know what she gets up to.”

  “Did you give her one?”

  “Her husband tortured me. He’s threatened me and her.” I felt my eyes well up. “I haven’t shagged her. But he thinks I have.”

  “Okay, steady.”

  Fagin put his hand on my shoulder and I recoiled. I wasn’t used to such affection, especially from a Scottish git.

  “She saved my life, Fagin.”

  “What?”

  “When the truck came and killed the man. She said that was her people.”

  “Oh lord.”

  “Indeed. She told me not to tell anyone.”

  “Aye, no need to worry.”

  “The thing is, Baxter’s right. I do have such great stories to tell. Makhdoom’s top aide is barking mad. He wants me to be his servant, to clean up after him. The colonel’s a dentist and uses a mallet. The future of Pakistan, of nuclear-armed Pakistan, is not in safe hands.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been taken off the story, right? I don’t suppose I will ever see her again.”

  THREE NIGHTS LATER, I was back at Rick’s Cafe. I installed myself in my usual seat in the corner, away from the dance floor. It was the grown-up’s equivalent of the kitchen at student parties.

  “Long time, Hadley,” the Glaswegian manager said, putting a large gin and tonic in front of me. “The last time I saw you, you were escorting some Pakistani beauty up the stairs.”

  “The secret’s out of the bag, then?”

  “Aye. And more. We all heard about the bomb blast. We all put two and two together.”

  “No, you shoul
dn’t.”

  “I won’t then. But you’re okay?”

  I was getting misty-eyed, for fuck’s sake. “Yes, thanks,” I said.

  And that was that. Scottish integrity. John Knox had it in spades. Mary Queen of Scots said as much.

  Some straggling protesters, mostly gweilo and carrying yellow umbrellas, came in looking worse for wear. As did I when I looked solemnly at myself in the mirror between two bottles of Gordon’s gin. I looked to the left. Oh lord. A lawyer was smirking at me. What was it this time? He headed in my direction with the smile fast turning to a “why you bastard” kind of look. I knew for sure this one was a lawyer because I had seen him pissing in a flower bed at the end of the road about a year ago.

  “Are you the journalist?” he asked. “Our man in Hong Kong, that sort of thing? Is that you?”

  “I am a copy editor,” I said politely. “How can I help?”

  “Help,” he said. “That’s a laugh. The reason I came over here is to find out why you people always write in sound bites?”

  “I…”

  “Why do you have to wait until the tenth or twentieth anniversary before you quote people saying what a sin it was to invade Iraq?” He leant towards me. “You spend a couple of weeks in a war zone and wear it on your sleeve for the rest of your lives. It’s pathetic. You make me sick.”

  I was happy to have someone to talk to. “Tell me,” I said, “don’t you think lawyers should be able to charge for offering their opinions in their free time?”

  Rumpole swayed gently on his heels and looked at the ceiling. He had a very red face.

  “Yes,” he said. “That will be five hundred dollars.”

  “That’s very good.” Wait a minute. I had a flashback to that night. The lawyers with the moustaches like greased string. Except this one… This one had shaved. “Aren’t you the prick…”

  Someone came up behind me to finish the question.

  “…who ran straight into me and knocked me on to the floor right on this very spot and then ran away like a felon? A blaggard?”

  And before the dickhead could get his louche mouth around the word “blaggard”, Marina did something that made a scraping noise like metal on bone and made me wince. She stamped down on the front of the prick’s shin, using the outside rim of a highly specialised shoe. It was a less subtle version of Rosa Klebb’s poison-laced dagger in “From Russia With Love”. It tore a six-inch hole in expensive worsted cotton, drew lashings of blood and reduced the lawyer to a heap.

  “Come on, Hadley,” she said, leaving a thousand dollar note on the bar and pulling me towards the stairs. “Let’s hit the boulevard.”

  I signalled to the Glaswegian manager with a couple of glances between him and the money that there was probably some change due the next time I saw him and followed Marina out the building. It was only at the top of the stairs I realised she was wearing dark glasses, just like the first time we had met. She stood staring at me, and me at her. She took off the glasses to reveal the wet eyes, glistening under the blue, green and orange neon of a circular sign saying “Welcome to Rick’s”. She leant forward and kissed my lips softly, and for a good three seconds. She stepped back, ever so slightly panting.

  “Probably best you don’t tell anyone about this,” she said.

  “Tell anyone about what?”

  “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  I recognised the line straight away. It was Julia Roberts talking to Hugh Grant after she kissed him for the first time in “Notting Hill”. What a fucking phony! We turned right into the white noise and lights of Carnarvon Road’s camera shops, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Korean restaurants, money changers, massage parlours on high floors, shops selling Chinese leather pilots’ briefcases, people standing in doorways offering anything and everything in hushed voices. Someone offered Marina a fake Rolex and escaped the shoe thing.

  There, parked on a double yellow line and guarded by a man in uniform, was a white, open-top BMW, about the same vintage as my Mercedes but in tip-top condition. Tip-top was the kind of expression Marina would use.

  The guard handed Marina the key and she told me to hop in. She gunned the engine, lifted her sunglasses on to her hair, bit her bottom lip and did not as much as given a token glance in the rear-view mirror as the car took off.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  I was seriously concerned. The woman was troubled, to say the least. She had been drinking and she was behind the wheel. I did up my seatbelt and gripped the door with my left hand and the bottom of my seat with my right.

  “Relax, Hadley.”

  I can’t stand people telling me to relax. It all began with that line: “Probably best you don’t tell anyone about this.” She was a complete fake.

  We passed a building where I had pissed in the lobby years before, thinking it was condemned. The building looked derelict, then and now, its paintwork pitted with mould. It was in fact prime property and, new to Hong Kong and drunk, I had jumped to the first of many wrong conclusions. Now it was being torn down. A huge, red cloth sign said yet another shopping centre was to take its place. It didn’t say “yet another”. Those are my words.

  “I hate the mall,” Marina said, ramming the gear lever into second.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, but my voice was drowned out by the noise of the traffic. The conversation was over.

  She took the harbour tunnel back to Hong Kong island and was following the same route to Shek O we had taken the first night. The air cooled as we climbed the hill, the smell of the moist vegetation taking me back to childhood holidays in Essex, and still she wouldn’t speak. She took the bends too fast as we headed down into the village, leaning into corners instead of changing gear. Before the right turn through the golf course towards the Thai restaurant and the sea, she slowed and turned left into the drive of one of the huge houses looking down on the village. The name of the house, caught in the headlights on a brass plaque, was “Margalla Hills”.

  The gates opened automatically. Marina drove up a hill, rhododendron bushes on each side, the lights showing a large, three-storey white house with eaves and blue window frames. There was a lawn to the left and a turreted courtyard and garage to the right into which she drove, pulling up inches before a workbench a foot deep in spanners, hammers, hoses, saws, half a lawnmower, two vices and paraffin cans. Wooden planes hung from the walls.

  “Here we are,” she said, patting my knee. “I’ve given the staff the night off. It’s just you and me.”

  We walked across the lawn and I thought I could hear the sea crashing against rocks. The door was unlocked. I followed her into a damp-smelling corridor. She turned on the lights and led me into a sitting room full of rosewood furniture and two white, rattan sofas. A bit like my own, actually.

  “Sit,” she said. “I shall make you a gin and tonic as I know you like it.”

  I sat on the sofa facing the window. She came back with the drinks and sat next to me. She was brim-full of energy. It struck me that she might be bi-polar. She was manic and earnest. Like a CNN reporter.

  “You may wonder what you are doing here,” she said.

  “Well…”

  “The truth of the matter is that you make me feel comfortable, Hadley.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes. It’s first class. Whenever I am in public and am thinking of you, I shall do this.” She put her drink on the table, sat back, raised her arms and rested her long, downward-pointing finger tips on the top of her head. “I am making a heart with my arms and hands. Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You told us this in Lahore.” Completely barmy.

  “But I am not talking to a group of journalists now. I am talking to you. It is a gesture of the affection I have for you. A first-class gesture.” She reached for her bag and brought out a spliff.

  “Oh, it’s another huge one.”

  “So many men want sex and no affection. So it is w
ith me. I am like those men. And when I find a man for whom I have affection…” She looked at me through fucking tears. “I am hoping for encouraging news about the little story you are writing about me.” She put her hand on my knee. “How it is going to put my political career on the correct rails.” She was marking a track with her fingers on my knee.

  “Well it’s funny you should mention that,” I said. “I had a word with my colleagues and they think it’s a great story.”

  “First class.”

  “But we would have to have balancing comment.”

  “Balancing comment?”

  “Well, yes. A comment from someone, a political opponent, saying what he thinks about your plan. Whether it would work. Whether or not it’s too late to turn your career around.”

  “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  Her hand had stopped.

  “This is how it works, Marina. You know that.”

  “I had hoped you might be showing more gratitude.”

  “I am grateful, Marina. But there is nothing I can do. I have been taken off the story, anyway. They say I am too close.”

  “Too close?”

  “So much has happened to me. I think they are thinking in terms of post traumatic stress syndrome.”

  “Post dramatic…? What is that please?”

  The manic earnestness had been replaced by cutesy pouting. I reached inside my jacket pocket and pulled out the crumpled cutting of Fagin’s “Pakistani poster child politician” article. Humans are the only primates that can derive pleasure from hurting one of their kind.

  “I read this on the plane,” I said, holding it limply before her. “Did you see it?”

  She took it from my hands. She stared at it, her lips apart.

  “You said ‘any marina in a storm’ to a Norwegian sailor,” I said. “That was my line to you.”

  She put the cutting on the table. “You don’t understand how these things work,” she said.

  “I think I do, Marina.”

  “No. You see, someone told a lie to the reporter. It is not very unusual in my country. Someone pays someone to pay someone to introduce a story. Everyone is conspiring to bring down everyone, one way or the other, if they’re not having them softly killed. And someone has told a lie about me and you believe it.”

  “Was he Norwegian?”