Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (7 page)

I waited at the bottom of the ramp in the airport concourse, for my brother and his girlfriend to appear. The airport was, as usual, monstrously crowded with thousands of Chinese milling around waiting for relatives and friends, amazingly managing to avoid touching each other—a personal contact they dislike intensely—though I would have had difficulty in sliding a piece of paper down the spaces between them. My heart was beating against my ribs, and for the first time in many years I was smoking again. I glanced at the labels on the suitcases, as passengers came down the ramp, for Philippine Airlines’ labels, and soon they began filtering past me.

Then suddenly, there they were, amongst the sea of black heads, at the top of the ramp. The relief flooded through me, and I kicked myself for being so paranoid. What an idiot. To think that a sweet girl like Marcia was capable of killing someone! Now that they were home, safe and sound, the idea seemed ludicrous, even heinous. I vowed never to tell them of my fears.

I signalled, made myself visible to Steve,
then
went to take a place in the queue for taxis.

Steve reached me, just as I was coming to the head of the queue. Marcia was nowhere to be seen. I had assumed, because she was so small, she had been down below the crowd

We shook hands and I said, ‘Didn’t I see Marcia?’

Steve shrugged and smiled.

‘She wanted to stay on for a few days, to see some relatives.’

That sounded reasonable. Her family were out on one of the many smaller islands, while she and Steve had been staying on the main island.

On the taxi drive to Steve’s club, where he intended to leave his suitcase and have a meal, I studied my older brother. He seemed calm and relaxed, and in quite a good frame of mind considering he had been through the stress of travel.

Still, so long as there was no harm done, what did it matter now?

He seemed distracted, however, so I did not press him with questions, until we were actually sitting down to a meal in the club
dining-room
.

‘How was the trip?’ I asked.

‘Oh, fine.’

He played with his table napkin as I spoke, rearranging it carefully on his lap, although
this had been done once by the waiter
.

‘No problems, business-wise?’

‘No, everything went according to plan.’

‘And Marcia?
She enjoyed the break?’

He nodded.

‘She seemed to.’

The soup arrived at this point, and I ceased probing. He certainly looked well enough, but there was something about his
manner which
worried me. He was too distant, even for someone who was a little jet-lagged, and I wondered if his business had really gone well. Then a thought struck me. What if Marcia
had
attacked him, and he, being a strong male, had prevented her from injuring him? Perhaps my concern for his safety was justified after all, but he had successfully protected himself from the kind of deadly attack I had witnessed from my black drongo, Yat Ho.

I was about to say something, when three people walked through the door. One was a small olive-skinned man with a blunt chin and determined look.
He was flanked by two uniformed Hong Kong policemen
: an inspector and a sergeant. They spoke to a waiter, who pointed towards our table. The trio then made their way through the diners, to stand behind my brother.

The man in civilian clothes spoke, and I knew then that he was a Filipino.

‘Mr Steven Bordas?’

Steve turned his head, wiping his chin with his napkin at the same time.

‘Yes.’

‘I am Sergeant Callita. You are under arrest...’

I must have heard any words that followed, but their memory is lost in the buzzing of shock that overcame me. Steve looked at me and gave me a tight smile, which said,
we both knew that one day I would do something like
this
.

I grabbed the Filipino policeman’s sleeve.

‘It’s not his fault, it’s mine.’

It was so clear to me now, now it was too late. Yat Ho had not killed because of the change in the other two drongos, but because of the unnatural suppression of her own aggression. I had overlaid her real personality with a placid one, effectively sealing it off. The drongo persona had bubbled underneath, unable to find a safety valve to relieve the pressure, and finally she had exploded. I should have been comparing Yat Ho with Steve, not with Marcia, having done the same thing to my brother’s natural aggression.

He had murdered Marcia
!

Steve was taken away and I called to him that I would get his lawyer on the phone. He waved his hand over his shoulder, as if he did not really care what I did.

I sat in the restaurant, stunned by what had happened. Poor Marcia, I thought.
Poor sweet innocent Marcia.
I had been instrumental in her death, as they say, by experimenting on my own brother. It was a terrible thing to do. I was determined that it should all come out at the trial. I would defend my brother with the truth. Poor Steve.

While these thoughts were running through my head, Marcia walked into the room, saw me and waved. She crossed the floor and took a chair opposite me.

‘Something terrible’s happened,’ she said, as I sat there open-mouthed, staring at her. ‘Steve told me to stay in Manila, but I caught the next flight out, after his. There are policemen after him...’

‘I know,’ I said in a shaky voice, ‘they’ve arrested him. But what’s he done?’

She told me then and though Steve was still in a lot of trouble, I heaved a sigh of relief. It was bad, but not as bad as I had first envisaged, thank God.

They had been in a waterfront bar and Steve had had too much to drink. Marcia went to phone a taxi, to take them back to the hotel. When she returned, all hell had been let loose. It appeared that Steve had suddenly exploded in a fit of violence and had proceeded to lay about him without warning. The clientele of that particular bar were no angels themselves and
dockers,
fishermen and wharf rats began to pile into the mad
gweilo
with boots, fists and one or two knives. Steve retaliated in kind, stepping up his attacks on the opposition, cracking heads and throwing the smaller Filipinos around like dolls.

Chairs were broken, jaws were broken,
mirrors
were broken. There were three unconscious bodies strewn about the floor and Steve was swinging a bottle at a fourth, just as Marcia entered. The barman had pulled out a revolver and was screaming to Marcia in Tagalog that she’d better get her boyfriend out of there, or he was going to blow the fucking madman’s head off. Marcia managed to bundle Steve through the door and into the taxi, whereupon he collapsed in moody silence in the corner of the cab. The next morning they heard that the police were after him, for drunkenness, assault, and various other criminal charges.

‘It’s my fault,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve got to help him.’

Steve stood trial in Hong Kong, there being a Far East Area Criminal Court in Kowloon. His lawyer picked off the various charges against him, but he still ended up with ‘Assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm’. He was sentenced to a year in the Far East Central Jail, of which he would serve about eight months the lawyer said.

So now I sit in my cell, with three other convicted felons for company. I couldn’t let Steve serve his sentence: I’m doing it in his place. While Steve was out on bail we extended our illegal activities to swapping psyches. I am now in Steve’s body and he in mine. It’s really only fair that I do his time for him, when the whole thing was my fault anyway. I’m tempted at this point to quote the words at the end of
A Tale of Two Cities
—‘It is a far better thing I do
now.
. . ’—
but
I can’t remember the whole bit.

I’ve taken a year’s sabbatical from the university and Steve has taken my body to Thailand with Marcia for a long holiday. She was a little confused at first but doesn’t seem to mind, so long as I don’t care and Steve is happy. We’ve explained to her what we’ve done and have assured her that everything is fine with both of us.

Jail is quite interesting really, if you haven’t got a lifetime to serve, but Far East prisons are tough places. You need to be a hard man to survive in here. Obviously Steve, the old Steve, would have been in his element, being an instinctive bully. His aggressive attitude and pugnacious personality would have ensured he was left well alone.

However, Steve isn’t in here—I am. I am fairly timid by nature and in these
circumstances
a natural victim. I doubt I could survive on my own. The oriental thugs in here would destroy a mild
gweilo
like me in very little time at all, these Chinese triads and Vietnamese gangsters. So I borrowed another personality before I came in: superimposed it upon my own. It seems to work. I can scrap with the best of them, steal their food before they rob me of mine, intimidate them, put them in their places,
establish
a pecking order with me at the top. They fear me for my inherently fierce nature, my vicious character, and either
stay
out of my way or suck up to me.

Why not? Someone’s got to be the king pin, so why not me? With the help of an overlaid persona, of course—that of the most belligerent black drongo I could find, Yat Ho.

Anyone who met Dylan Tom, my irascible house cat, will know what sparked this story. Dylan would let you stroke him once,
then
he would turn and sink his teeth into your hand. He was not a bad a cat. He just hated being fussed. Dylan
live
19 years, often sleeping in open drawer of my desk while I worked. Strangely, I miss him.

‘
B
reaking up is so hard to do
. My computer had come up with that when I had asked heaven that morning whether I would ever get over her.

It confessed it was a line from an old song, an
ancient
song, probably. Yet, like all simple, trite sayings, it was so true. Breaking up with Krystina was killing me. I was so depressed I wanted to murder her and the bloody new boyfriend. I hadn’t even met him. When I tried to imagine the two of them together, he was like some phantom twerp in the shadows behind her, tall and weedy, good at nothing, cynical.

Krystina and I met for the last time in our favourite rice-wine bar on Reynold’s Path, overlooking the river. I watched the water traffic skimming the wavelets on the other side of the smoked glass with moody eyes, hoping she was noticing how miserable she had made me.

She had noticed.

‘Stop being so full of self-pity,’ she said, coldly. ‘It’s history.’

‘History is further back than two weeks,’ I replied bitterly, though I added with some spirit, ‘It’s only history to you because I’m the one being dumped. When I suggested we split up last year you told me it made you feel sick to your stomach. You reminded me that we had both said it was Forever. Some short Forevers around here, that’s all I can say.’

Her eyes were like those balls of light-blue ice barmen eject into drinks. ‘Well, what did you ask me here for?’

I shrugged. ‘I thought—I just wanted to talk it over. We’re still friends, aren’t we?’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said, fiddling with her shoulder strap. ‘I think it’s best we should break clean and not see one another again.’

‘We always agreed that we’d stay friends,’ I gasped. ‘That we’d go on seeing each other, for lunch or whatever, even though we might have fallen out of love.’