Some hours later, the distant sound of firecrackers woke me. It was past midnight and I was hungry, so I wandered into town to find something to eat. All the restaurants in the area had closed, but there were a few mobile street stalls serving noodles and rice with pork and vegetables. I sat and chatted to the vendor in my rather silly combination of pidgin English and sign language that seems to go quite a long way anywhere in the world, and drank a can of Chinese cola. By the time I’d eaten, I’d managed to establish some kind of vague directions to get to the nearest point of the Yangtze River and wandered off into the night to see the Far East’s greatest waterway.
Three years earlier, I’d made a similar pilgrimage to the spiritual lifeblood of India, the Ganges. It had been one of the greatest days of my life, a day that had come to represent all that was wonderful about the rambling existence I’d chosen. Walking with my girlfriend, Rosie, by the ghats in Varanasi, I knew that this was as good as it gets; not only was I in one of the most beautiful and fascinating places in the world, but I was in love, too. Sitar and tablas emanated from every doorway, while Hindu pilgrims – intoxicated by the sheer pulsating energy of the place – moved around us in a daze. I’d read about the river’s legendary powers and marvelled at the thought of the astonishing faith that billions of people had invested in it for thousands of years. Even the British had bought into the river’s magic. There were tales of how the ships of the East India Company had taken the river’s sacred drinking water from Calcutta to London without the customary stopover in the Cape since the Ganges’ water stayed fresh for the entire voyage.
Once I drank it at a party in Goa – a thimbleful infused with California Sunshine, a particularly potent type of LSD. Within minutes I could see the bones in my hands as the translucent skin fell away. For some time after, every person I saw was a skeleton. It was extraordinary. Everyone at the party was naked. I walked around feeling embarrassed, as if I werefully dressed on a nudist beach. No experience with any drug has ever repeated this unique state of mind, but I’d read of such experiences being attained naturally by Indian yogis after many years of deep meditation, and the Ganges lay at the very centre of these miracles. Now the great river was in front of me, crystal clear and still, as the rains had long since dried up for that year. When I eventually rinsed my hands in the river, I felt a rush of energy through my arms, while my fingers and palms experienced an extraordinary pins-and-needles-type sensation. It reminded me of the electric baths used by elderly arthritic Japanese in their public washhouses, as the currents rippled through my arms and around my torso.
The intervening years had been good to me, the happiest of my life. Now I stood once again in front of a great Eastern river, only this time I was alone. There was very little light as I made my way down a gangway to the water’s edge, and it was impossible to see for more than a few metres due to a heavy mist. I thought of Charles Dickens’s Pip on the marshlands of Great Expectations. Squatting on the riverbank, I sank my hands into the water and felt a shiver down my spine. Unlike the Ganges, the Yangtze had a static, lifeless quality. I quickly withdrew my hands and noticed a pungent, rancid smell. The water was putrid and my hands felt tainted by the texture of the black liquid. Far from feeling energised, I immediately sought out fresh water to wash the slimy sensation off my hands, but had to make do with a piece of grubby old newspaper lying close by. I wandered back to my hotel looking forward to having a shower. My first touch of one of the greatest rivers in the world had been gloomily ominous.
The night train from Beijing stopped in Nanjing at 3 a.m., and I was hoping I’d be able to get a ticket at the station. The Shanghai Express was due to arrive at around six, so I’d have to find somewhere to get breakfast before the hotels opened. My financial problems were compounded by not being able to get any money out on my credit card. My original plan to hang out in Shanghai for a few days began to look unrealistic, and I had no idea how I was going to pay for the ferry to Japan. I took a cab to the station with a sense of foreboding. Three weeks had passed since I’d bought the hash from the Afghan in Peshawar, and I was days away from seeing my friends in Kyoto, but the toughest challenges lay ahead.
As I walked towards Nanjing station with the usual retinue of hustlers and would-be baggage carriers in tow, I noticed a police checkpoint at the entrance to the station. Around a dozen officers were standing around a conveyor belt, loading the luggage into what appeared to be an X-ray machine. I began to feel intensely paranoidand considered making a swift about-turn and returning to the hotel when one of the officers, seeing I was a foreign tourist, signalled tome to walk around the checkpoint. It turned out that there had beena series of explosions on trains in the district caused by passenger scarrying fireworks in their luggage. Thankfully, foreign tourists were not deemed a threat and were exempt from these checks. It was unlikely that the contents of my rucksack would be detected by the X-ray, but I became acutely aware of the random nature of the hazards that could appear at any time now that the hash was no longer built into my guitar bag.
I was well aware of the dangers of being caught with hashish in Pakistan or Japan, but China had never seemed the kind of place where the police would want to get involved. I’d had a few brief encounters with the police on trains and once after a dispute over a bar bill in Beijing. A bar owner had tried to charge me ten times the normal price for a bottle of beer on the street, and a passer-by had intervened when it looked like I was about to get a hiding. Later I was embarrassed to discover I’d unwittingly bought an imported beer that was correctly priced. The officers who happened to be walking by at the time went to some lengths to ignore me, partly, no doubt, because they could not speak English, but also because foreigners seemed to be outside of the local laws and customs. Obviously this was an arrogant assumption to make; however, there were good reasons for it. Tourists had their own currency called ‘foreign exchange certificates’ and were forbidden to stay in the majority of the hotels where Chinese stayed. Since the government went to great lengths to separate foreigners from the general populace, it was more trouble than it was worth to get involved with them, and most Chinese were disinclined to have any contact with tourists. Also, tourists were affectionately called ‘guests’, and hassling them at checkpoints would be tantamount to inviting friends to dinner and frisking them on the door. Since tourists were considered wealthy it was presumed they would not commit crimes, and even if they did it would be awkward for the average Chinese policeman to intervene.
After the shock of meeting a police checkpoint outside the station, the six-hour train journey from Nanjing to Shanghai passed by uneventfully. The carriage was draughty but humid, and the nicotine-stained windows gave the platform lights an amber glow. An affluent-looking mother and son sat opposite me speaking Mandarin, and I took the opportunity to make small talk to pass the time. They spoke excellent English and came across as the kind of upper-class Chinese I’d had little experience of before. The boy was dressed like an English public schoolboy in a navy-blue blazer and tie, while his mother wore an expensive-looking fur coat. She reminded me of an opera star or the wife of a rich industrialist, while her son was a proper Lord Fauntleroy. They were visiting relatives in Shanghai and asked me what I liked about their country. It was a question I’d been asked many times before; I had a standard reply in which I praised the delicious food, dramatic scenery and friendly people. It involved a slight bending of the truth. The food was good, but much of the country was now hideously ugly and not always friendly. Communism had ripped the guts out of the place, with its vile architecture and divisive social policies, but I was aware my enthusiasm for the country had begun to wane after I had caught hepatitis A. The debilitating illness had made it difficult to enjoy the most basic pleasures of travelling. Simply leaving my hotel room had become exhausting, so there was no question of sightseeing. I’d had to give up the beer, too, which is one of the pleasures of Chinese travel. It was ridiculously cheap and, when ice-cold, perfectly pleasant. I�
��d spent many hours on trains enjoying it. Hawkers sold it on railway-station platforms, out of large Perspex iceboxes, and it was fun to share with train-compartment colleagues on long journeys. I’d taken an epic 54-hour train ride from Lanzhou to Guangzhou and had drunk several large bottles on the way. I nodded off and woke up dehydrated, so I headed off down the carriage looking for water. Chinese trains have large boiling-water tanks so everyone can get a free cup of green tea, and I found one soon enough. The tap had a red sign in Chinese hanging over it, but I helped myself anyway. The water was lukewarm, but my thirst couldn’t wait. A man saw me drinking it and wagged his finger while pointing at the sign. I carried on. That, I assume, was the night I got hepatitis. Sensible people write off their travels when struck down by such diseases, but I was determined to carry on, stumbling from one escapade to the next, with pallid skin and Lucozade piss, desperately trying to get back to Japan.
As the train neared Shanghai, I managed to cheer myself up at the thought of being back in Kyoto in just a few days. There would be friends to visit, and I’d be able to track down Rosie’s whereabouts. I planned a trip to the sentō, the hot baths that are found on the street corners of every Japanese residential district. Although I was travelling with a guitar, I missed my musician friends and was getting bored playing alone in hotel rooms. As Japan’s cultural centre, Kyoto had an eclectic mixture of different kinds of music, including jazz, blues, house and heavy rock. The Beatles still reigned as the kings of pop and could be heard on every jukebox in every bar across the country. Paul McCartney’s early ’80s dope bust had been a huge event in the Japanese media and had given even the most squeaky-clean member of the band the kind of outlaw folk-hero status usually reserved for the group’s bad boy, John Lennon. I was nervous about arriving in Japan with the hash, well aware of the kind of grilling I could expect if suspected, but I’d run out of money and didn’t want to hang out working in Japan any longer than necessary. I’d make some money and buy a plane ticket to wherever Rosie was. All I had to do was get on the boat and relax. There was nothing to it; everything would be fine.
A taxi driver nodded to me outside the station and I threw my guitar and rucksack onto the back seat and slid in next to them. It was my first visit to China’s most populated city and I was unsure how long it would take me to get a ticket for the boat to Japan. The journey to the hotel took me through the heart of what was once the centre of Britain’s attempt to penetrate the Middle Kingdom. The Bund had few of the charms of its former colonial glory, and the sedan chairs that had carried Europeans around the streets of the city had been replaced by plush taxis that carried the city’s well-heeled inhabitants from A to B. Where once an international police force ran a cordoned-off section of the city for the benefit of the expat community, the Chinese were now very much back in command. A Public Security van, siren blazing, belted past the cab as it turned into Nanjing Street, the centre of Shanghai’s nightlife. The last of the night’s revellers walked down the pavements beneath huge billboards advertising Japanese and American goods, while a tramp in a blue-denim Mao suit rummaged through a rubbish bin outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. It was the middle of the night, but the street was well lit with gaudy neon signs that splattered down the sides of shop facades, while Western music boomed out of doorways.
The cab pulled up outside the Pujing Hotel, and I passed a 20-yuan note to the driver and waited for the change. A scraggy white cat squealed as the doorman leered at it with a broom from the hotel entrance, and I walked into the huge foyer, where an elderly clerk peered over his glasses.
‘No room tonight,’ the man said tartly before I had a chance to ask.
‘Are there any other hotels in the area? I’m taking a ferry to Japan in the morning and need a place to rest for a few hours.’
‘No room.’
He cast his eyes across the room to a large sofa in the corner. I’d been planning to use the room to transfer my newly wrapped dope into the mini-Mars Bar wrappers I intended to buy later in the morning. My scam depended on being able to have my own space for at least an hour or so, but I was too tired to go looking for another hotel so I took a towel out of my bag and lay down. It seemed like I’d barely fallen asleep when an acrid, sulphurous smell wafted up into my nostrils. A janitor was pushing a mop around my makeshift bed, slopping ammonia across the cold stone floor. Glancing up at the clock above the reception desk, I saw it was 6.30, and the clerk I’d met earlier had been replaced by another man, who resembled a Chinese Charles Hawtrey, the actor from the old Carry On films. Unsurprisingly there was still no room, so I asked if I could make use of the shower in the meantime. The receptionist slapped his hand down on the bell on his desk and a small, elderly but sprightly bellhop appeared in a traditional Chinese tunic with a friendly smile.
‘How can I be of assistance to you, sir?’
‘I’d like a shower and a place to keep my luggage until I can book a room, please.’
‘Certainly. I have already taken it upon myself to put your musical instrument into the storage room, thus preventing the possibility of its theft. There is, alas, an escalating incidence of larceny across China’s eastern-seaboard towns, sir.’
I was astonished at the bellhop’s long-winded use of the English language and was reminded of the occasions on which I’d met educated people on the Indian subcontinent who still spoke in a kind of Raj-era dialect rarely heard in post-’50s Britain. I wanted to stop and have a chat with him, imagining he’d have interesting tales to tell about Shanghai in the colonial period, but the receptionist rudely interrupted us and sent him on his way. I felt sorry for him; he was clearly an educated man forced to accept a menial job, being ordered around by intellectual inferiors who treated him like a worthless flunky. I imagined he’d had a grim time of it during the brain-dead years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the educated were endlessly hounded and philistinism was brutally enforced as a state religion. I decided that I’d make an effort to have a chat with him after I’d bought my ticket, and wandered off into the city for breakfast.
In the light of day, the city had lost much of the sparkle of the night before. Without the neon signs the buildings were bland and indifferent, while the crowds had grown into oppressive hordes. There seemed little point in taking a taxi because the traffic did not appear to be moving significantly faster than walking pace, and if the receptionist’s directions were accurate I didn’t have far to go. Eventually I found a large building that supposedly had a travel agent on the sixth floor, and after a few enquiries I discovered the agency on the eighth. It was good news. A boat was leaving the docks at midday for Kobe, and crucially, I could pay using my credit card, which was not giving me any cash. Since I was down to my last few dollars I had little choice but to buy the ticket, but time was running out and I’d yet to buy the mini Mars Bars that were the key to my safe passage out of China. I headed straight to the nearest Friendship Store on Nanjing Street, a vast emporium of international goods stacked high with everything from Indian spices to Johnnie Walker whisky.
With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see where we make our mistakes, but I’ve never managed to work out how I spent a good 45 minutes in the department store and left without what I’d gone in there to buy. I remember the exquisite jade carvings, the high-quality Korean leather jackets, the ginseng elixirs and Dragon Well green teas, but I can’t recall even seeing the foreign-food section. I’m sure it was there, and doubtless they had something at least similar to what I was looking for, but I left with nothing.
As well as failing to repack my dope, I didn’t have enough money to book a hotel room to make the swap anyway. Had I stopped to think for five minutes, it would have been obvious that my mission was falling apart. The most important part of the Chinese leg of the mission had collapsed, but I was past the point of no return: nothing could stop me now.
It was gone ten when I got back to the hotel and I was frantic to leave. Although the boat left at twelve, passengers
were required to board at eleven, and I had no idea how long the journey to the port would take, or if I had enough money for the taxi. My rucksack and guitar were in the hotel’s storage room, and I was unable to find anyone to unlock the door for me. The Charles Hawtrey lookalike ignored me, and the bellhop had disappeared. I paced the floor for ten minutes, chain-smoking cheap Chinese cigarettes, when a man appeared who could apparently help me.
‘The bellhop is taking his morning break and will be back shortly. He is the only person who has a key to the storage room.’
‘But I have a ship to Japan that boards in 45 minutes and I have to get a taxi to the port.’
‘I do not have a key; you’ll have to wait till the bellhop comes back.’
I smoked another cigarette. Then another. I was pacing the floor in a sweat now, and the spindly clerk was peering over his glasses looking at me contemptuously. Finally I’d had enough.
Monkey House Blues Page 2
