Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (32 page)

John, however, chose to ignore their fears.

‘Right, let’s go,’ he said, climbing to his feet.

We continued along the passageways, stumbling after Sang Lau, whose power over us was absolute in this place, since without him we would certainly be lost. It was possible that a search party might find us, but then again, we could wander the interior of this vast wormery for weeks without finding or being found.

A subtle change seemed to come over the place. Its resistance seemed to have evaporated, and it was almost as if it were gently drawing us on. The tunnels were getting wider, more accessible, and there were fewer obstacles to negotiate. I have an active imagination, especially in places of darkness, notorious places that are steeped in recent histories of blood and founded on terror. Far from making me feel better, this alteration in the atmosphere made my stomach knot, but what could I say to John? I wanted to go back? I had no choice but to follow where his
guide led us, and hope
for an early opportunity to duck out if we saw daylight at any time.

Although I am sensitive to such places, I’m not usually a coward. Old churches and ancient houses bother me, but I normally shrug and put up with any feeling of spiritual discomfort. Here, however, the oppressive atmosphere was so threatening and the feeling of dread so strong, I wanted to run from the building and to hell with the article and the money I needed so much. The closer we got to the centre, the more acute became my emotional stress, until I wondered whether I was going to hyperventilate. Finally, I shouted, ‘John!’

He swung round with an irritated ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve—I’ve got to go back...’

One of the policemen grabbed my arm in the dark, and squeezed it. I believed it to be a sign of encouragement. He too wanted to turn round, but he was more terrified of his boss than of any ghost. From the strength of the grip I guessed the owner of the fingers was the Mongol.

‘Impossible,’ John snapped. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘A pain,’ I said. ‘I have a pain in my chest.’

He pushed past the other men and pulled me roughly to one side.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have brought you. I only did it for Sheena—she seemed to think there was still something left in you. Now pull yourself together. I know what’s the matter with
you,
you’re getting the jitters. It’s claustrophobia, nothing else. Fight it, man. You’re scaring my boys with your stupid funk.’

‘I have a pain,’ I repeated, but he wasn’t buying it. ‘Crap. Sheena would be disgusted with you. God knows what she ever saw in you in the first place.’

For a moment all fear was driven out of me by an intense fury that flooded my veins. How dare this thick-skinned, arrogant cop assume knowledge of my wife’s regard for me! It was true that her feelings were not now what they had been in the beginning, but she had once fully loved me, and only a rottenness bred by superficial life in the colony had eaten away that love. The mannequins, the people with plaster faces, had served to corrode us. Sheena had once been a happy woman, full of energy, enthusiasms,
colour
. Now she was pinched and bitter, as I was myself: made so by the shallow gweilos we consorted with and had become ourselves. Money, affairs and bugger-thyneighbour were the priorities in life.

‘You leave Sheena’s name out of this,’ I said, my voice catching with the anger that stuck in my throat. ‘What the hell do you know about our beginnings?’

Speakman merely gave me a look of contempt and took up his position in the front once more, with the hunchbacked Lau indicating which way we should go when we came to one of the many junctions and crossroads. Occasionally, the thin one, who now had the megaphone, would call out in Cantonese, the sound quickly swallowed by the denseness of the structure around us. Added to my anxiety problem was now a feeling of misery. I had shown my inner nature to a man who was increasingly becoming detestable to me. Something was nagging at the edge of my brain too, which gradually ate its way inward, toward an area of comprehension.

God knows what she ever saw in you in the first place. When it came, the full implication of these words stunned me. At first I was too taken aback to do anything more than keep turning the idea over in my mind, in an obsessive way, until it drove out any other thought. I kept going over his words, trying to find another way of interpreting them, but came up with the same answer every time.

Finally, I could keep quiet no longer. I had to get it out. It was beginning to fester. I stopped in my tracks, and despite the presence of the other men, shouted, ‘
You
bastard, Speakman, you’re having an affair with her, aren’t you?’

He turned and regarded me, silently.

‘You bastard,’ I said again.
I could hardly get it out
,
it was choking me
. ‘You’re supposed to be a friend.’

There was utter contempt in his voice.

‘I was never your friend.’

‘You wanted me to know, didn’t you? You wanted to tell me in here.’

He knew that in this place I would be less than confident of myself. The advantages were all with him. I was out of my environment and less able to handle things than he was. In the past few months he had been in here several times, was more familiar with the darkness and the tight, airless zones of the Walled City’s interior. We were in an underworld that terrified me and left him unperturbed.

‘You men go on,’ he ordered the others, not taking his eyes off me. ‘We’ll follow in a moment.’

They did as they were told. John Speakman was not a man to be defied by his Asiatic subordinates. When they were out of earshot, he said, ‘Yes, Sheena and I had some time together.’

In the light of my helmet lamp I saw his lips twitch, and I wanted to smash him in the mouth.

‘Had? You mean it’s over?’

‘Not completely.
But there’s still you. You’re in the way. Sheena, being the woman she is, still retains some sort of loyalty toward you. Can’t see it myself, but there it is.’

‘We’ll sort this out later,’ I said, ‘between the three of us.’

I made a move to get past him, but he blocked the way. Then a second, more shocking realisation hit me, and again I was not ready for it. He must have seen it in my face, because his lips tightened this time.

I said calmly now, ‘
You
’re going to lose me in here, aren’t you? Sheena said she wouldn’t leave me, and you’re going to make sure I stay behind.’

‘Your imagination is running away with you again,’ he snapped back. ‘Try to be a little more level-headed, old chap,’

‘I am being level-headed.’

His hands were on his hips now, in the ‘gweilo’ stance I knew so well.
Once of them rested on the butt of his revolver.
Being a policeman, he of course carried a gun, which I did not. There was little point in my trying force anyway. He was a good four inches taller than I and weighed two stone more, most of it muscle. We stood there, confronting one another, until we heard the scream that turned my guts to milk.

The ear-piercing cry was followed by a scrabbling sound, and eventually one of the two policemen appeared in the light of our lamps.

‘Sir, come quick,’ he gasped. ‘The guide.’

Our quarrel put aside for the moment, we hurried along the tunnel to where the other policeman stood. In front of him, perhaps five yards away, was the guide. His helmet light was out, and he seemed to be standing on tiptoe for some reason, arms hanging loosely by his sides. John stepped forward, and I found myself going with him. He might have wanted me out of the way, but I was going to stick closely to him.

What I saw in the light of our lamps made me retch and step backward quickly.

It would seem that a beam had swung down from the ceiling, as the guide had passed beneath it. This had smashed his helmet lamp. Had that been all, the guide might have got away with a broken nose, or black eye, but it was not. In the end of the beam, now holding him on his
feet,
was a curved nail-spike. It had gone through his right eye, and was no doubt deeply imbedded in the poor man’s brain. He dangled from this support loosely, blood running down the side of his nose and dripping onto his white tennis shoes.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I said at last. It wasn’t a profanity, a blasphemy. It was a prayer. I called for us, who were now lost in a dark, hostile world, and I called for Sang Lau. Poor little Sang Lau. Just when he had begun to make it in life, the bricks and mortar and timber had reached out petulantly for their former child and brained him. Sang Lau had been one of the quiet millions who struggle out of the mire, who evolve from terrible beginnings to a place in the world of light.
All in vain, apparently.

John Speakman lifted the man away from the instrument that had impaled him, and laid the body on the floor. He went through the formality of feeling for a pulse, and then shook his head. To give him his due, his voice remained remarkably firm, as if he were still in control of things.

‘We’ll have to carry him out,’ he said to his two men. ‘Take one end each.’

There was a reluctant shuffling of feet, as the men moved forward to do as they were told. The smaller of the two was trembling so badly he dropped the legs straight away, and had to retrieve them quickly under Speakman’s glare.

I said, ‘And I suppose you know which way to go?’

‘We’re near the heart of the place, old chap. It doesn’t really matter in which direction we go, as long as we keep going straight.’

That, I knew, was easier said than done. When passageways curve and turn, run into each other, go up and down, meet new forks and crossroads and junctions with choices, how the hell do you keep in a straight line? I said nothing for once. I didn’t want the two policemen to panic. If we were to get out, we had to stay calm. And those on the outside wouldn’t leave us here. They would send in a search party, once nightfall came.

Nightfall. I suppressed a chill as we moved into the heart of the beast.

Seven months ago Britain agreed with China that Hong Kong would return to its landlord country in 1997. It was then at last decided to clean up and clean out the Walled City, to pull it down and re-house the inhabitants. There were plans to build a park on the ground then covered by this ancient city within a city, for the use of the occupants of the surrounding tenement buildings.

It stood in the middle of Kowloon on the mainland. Once upon a time there was a wall around it, when it was the home of the Manchus, but Japanese invaders robbed it of its ancient stones to build elsewhere. The area on which it stood was still known as the Walled City. When the Manchus were there, they used it as a fort against the British. Then the British were leased the peninsula, and it became an enclave for China’s officials, whose duty it was to report on gweilo activities in the area to Peking. Finally, it became an architectural nightmare, a giant slum. An area not recognised by the British, who refused to police it, and abandoned by Peking, it was a lawless labyrinth, sometimes called the Forbidden Place. It was here that unlicensed doctors and dentists practised, and every kind of vice flourished. It was ruled by gangs of youths, the Triads, who covered its inner walls with blood. It is a place of death, the home of ten thousand ghosts.

For the next two hours we struggled through the rank smelling tunnels, crawling over filth and across piles of trash, until we were all exhausted. I had cuts on my knees, and my hair felt teeming with insects. I knew there were spiders, possibly even snakes, in these passageways. There were certainly lice, horseflies, mosquitoes and a dozen other nasty biters. Not only that, but there seemed to be projections everywhere: sharp bits of metal, cables hanging like vines from the ceiling, and rusty nails. The little Cantonese policeman had trodden on a nail, which had completely pierced his foot. He was now limping and whining in a small voice. He knew that if he did not get treatment soon, blood poisoning would be the least of his troubles. I felt sorry for the young man, who in the normal run of things probably dealt with the tide of human affairs very competently within his range of duties. He was an official of the law in the most densely populated area of the world, and I had seen his type deal cleanly and (more often than not) peacefully with potentially ugly situations daily. In here, however, he was over his head. The situation could not be handled by efficient traffic signals or negotiation, or even prudent use of a weapon. There was something about this man that was familiar. There were scars on his face: shiny patches that might have been the result of plastic surgery. I tried to recall where I had seen the Cantonese policeman before, but my mind was soggy with recent events.