Kiss Me, Hadley: A Novel

by Nick Macfie

  “It’s all harmless stuff,” Jeffers said. He was full of worldly wisdom this night. “We’re all human,” he added. Another gem! “The trick is not to believe we’re making a difference.” And another, even though I had heard it before. “Once you start believing that, you’re fucked.”

  Jeffers put the cigarette in his mouth and pulled out his wallet, squinting through the smoke.

  “You’re going already?” I asked.

  “You want to see something that made me look ridiculous?”

  “Something else, Jeffers?”

  “Fuck off. Take a look at this.”

  He pulled out a yellowing, tightly folded newspaper cutting which he carefully unfolded on the bar.

  “It’s not a blueprint of the curved runway, is it?”

  He flattened the paper with the palms of his hand and pushed it across.

  “Feast your eyes on that, blue.”

  It was the first paragraph of a record review dated March 1981, under the headline “Ultravox’s Space Oddity”.

  “Forget the headline. Read the fucking text.”

  “Ultravox have entered dark new territory with their new album, ‘Vienna’, abandoning melody and rhythm for a series of deep, slow, muffled, space-like explosions of noise…”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Bit before your time, I guess. I wrote that for a Melbourne rag that no longer exists. I’ve kept it ever since.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I fucked up. It was a twelve-inch single. You remember vinyl? You remember ‘Oh fucking Vienna’, the single?”

  “Of course.”

  “Seven-inch singles were played at forty-five RPM, twelve-inch albums were played at thirty-three and a third.”

  “And?”

  “I thought this was an album. But it wasn’t an album, it was a fucking twelve-inch single. I played a musical mammoth single hit at thirty-three and a third RPM. It went on for twenty minutes and sounded like an elephant farting into a fucking icebox at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “So why do you keep the cutting?”

  Jeffers took it back, refolded it and placed in back in his wallet. “Because I fucked up. And no one ever noticed. No one ever said a dicky-bird. I got away with it. There’s a lesson to be learnt. A couple more drinks and let’s go and learn some lessons elsewhere.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good time to contribute to the welfare funds of some dodgy mama-sans.”

  The rain started falling as we drove down the hill into Central and towards Wanchai, the overhead neon of the bars beckoning through the smeared windscreen. The taxi pulled up outside the Pub Pipe, where Zeb had been beaten up and dumped in a back alley. Old women rose from tiny plastic stools.

  “Jeffers, Jeffers, long time. Hadley, Hadley, come in. Jeffers, Jeffers, come in.”

  Jeffers lit a cigarette and leaned his head back. “What do you say, you bastard? Help these good people put their children through private school?”

  “As good as place to start as any.”

  There were two other customers inside, both old, white and male. One was a dour Scottish detective who spent most nights on the strip and was happy to sit alone at the bar and stare into space. The other was surrounded by four girls and looked far too happy and interested to be anything other than a first-time tourist. He was having a ball. He would continue to have a ball, touching up all that young flesh with everyone laughing at everything he had to say, until he got the bill. The girls would scarper, clearing away the ashtray and empty glasses with suddenly bored faces, as he studied the bottom line for the fifth time and wondered how he would pay. Credit card, of course. Then he would wonder how to make sure he got to the monthly Amex bill plopping through the front-door letterbox ahead of his wife.

  There were three dancers on the floor, with another three sitting at the bar. I didn’t know any of them. The bar was dark and glum, as was the face of the Triad messenger boy behind the bar off to the left, whose glasses shone brightly in the light of a computer screen. He was always there, night after night, his glasses catching the electronic green glint and his face expressionless behind.

  “Jeffers, you buy girl drink?” This was the mama-san. “Hadley, you buy girl drink?”

  “Of course. Later.”

  We ordered beers and sat undisturbed at the bar while the girls chatted among themselves. I told Jeffers about Zeb. “You’ve got to nail the bastard,” Jeffers said.

  “Of course, but how?”

  “Does he have kids?”

  “No.”

  “So kill him.”

  “Jeffers, be serious. He only got out of hospital yesterday after some dick had drawn a picture of a Christmas tree…”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying it very well. Someone drugged the fucker, probably in this bar, and left him out back. Right here. Whoever it was drew a picture of a Christmas tree on his dick.”

  “I see.” The news didn’t have the impact I’d expected. “If not kill him, at least you can have him seriously hurt again. That would shut him up. You could call him bed-ridden Zeb in your story. It has a nice ring to it.”

  “I’m wondering if I should call the police.”

  “Fuck the police. Anyone of these mama-sans, and you know them as well as anyone, would know someone who knows someone. It wouldn’t cost a lot.”

  “Are you being serious?”

  “Dead right, cobber. Writing a story’s not going to help. There’s nothing you can write anyway. But some 14K Triad gang member can rearrange his kneecaps so he won’t walk again.”

  “But would it make a difference?”

  “Journalists don’t make a difference.” Yet again. Jeffers was scrolling down his phone, squinting through the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth. “Triad gangs with big sticks make a difference. Hold on, let me read the news. Civil war in Yemen, earthquake in Iran, Spain bankrupt and Japan’s new finance minister doesn’t get a mention. The best our Hong Kong bureau can come up with is a man falling from a balcony wrapped in gaffer tape.” Jeffers kept scrolling down the text. “This isn’t a bad story. Some expat in Hong Kong locked himself out of his forty-fifth-floor penthouse. Tried to break in through the window and fell. Except that he was wrapped in red duct tape.”

  “You see, that’s a story. I would read that from beginning to end. How did he climb up?”

  “He didn’t. He climbed down. From the roof. This is a great story,” Jeffers said. “Why doesn’t Shrubs do stories like this anymore? He lived in the penthouse of a building which was being repainted and there just happened to be a gondola outside his balcony?”

  “With a couple of gondoliers singing Puccini arias at the girls down below?”

  “Maaate, don’t be a prick. They were painting the building. The bloke tries to climb down from the roof into the gondola and….”

  “Did the gondola fall, or shake?”

  “Story doesn’t say.”

  “Was it breezy?”

  “Breezy? Jeez, blue, how do I fucking know?”

  “Well you should find out. ‘Gondola with the wind’.”

  “That’s not nice if someone’s dead.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Mid-Levels. Conduit Road.”

  “Conduit Road? That’s where Zeb lives. He lives in a penthouse.”

  “Oh boy. Give him a call.”

  I had no more information than that, but I was immediately convinced Zeb had been killed. My fickle brain then took a sideways turn and remembered a line out of Henry IV Part II from my schooldays. And is old Double dead? And is old Zeb dead?

  I walked out to the street and dialled his cell phone, a number I had only that morning added to my contacts list from his futile messages about being zonked. I had a second’s relief when someone answered. But whoever it was that answered didn’t say anything.

  “Hello, Zeb?”

  I thought I could hear breathing, but it was difficult to tell agai
nst the street noise.

  “Zeb, are you there?” And is old Zeb dead?

  I heard a siren, but again I couldn’t tell if it was on the other end of the phone or somewhere in Wanchai. Whoever answered hung up. I went back to the bar where Jeffers was listening attentively to a Filipina who was pouring out her troubles, a girlie drink on the bar in front of her. He was sitting with his good ear towards her breasts, which were barely visible through the cigarette smoke.

  “G’day cobber, this is Edith. Edith, this is a poor shit-broke Pom I know called Hadley. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Hadley and I know each other from years back,” she said.

  Oh wow. I recognised the dimples in the cheeks. I remembered a discreet tattoo of a rose (not a penis or a bauhinia!) and an expensive perfume.

  “You’ve come back,” I said.

  “Edith is saving up to study Greek mythology.”

  “I don’t know why you would want to tease,” she said. “I said cosmetology. I know nothing of Greek mythology.”

  “I wasn’t trying to tease,” Jeffers said. “You were speaking into my deaf ear.”

  Edith turned away.

  “Look, didn’t mean to poach, matey,” Jeffers said. “That was a pretty telling mistake.”

  “You’re deaf. Not your fault.”

  “As if studying Greek mythology was an option for anyone from the Philippines. Of course it isn’t. They are doomed before they even decide to work in shitholes like this. The country wrings its people dry.”

  “Which is why we let the girls wring us dry. I just rang Zeb.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Someone answered and hung up.”

  “Do you think he’s dead? You don’t know.” Jeffers was looking at his phone. “Hold on, we have a picture.”

  They say death, especially in war zones, reminds us of our mortality and acts as a powerful aphrodisiac and it was true that Edith’s bottom, from where I was standing right then, was irresistible. Peace and life are boring and war and death are complete turn-ons. Reporters, TV producers and cameramen put up at the same hotel at any trouble spot around the world are at it like rabbits. Marriage vows count for nothing. It’s living for the edgy moment and throwing heart and soul and body into it.

  Jeffers handed over his phone. It was difficult to make out what had happened or describe the composition from a picture one inch square.

  There was crumpled metal, there were orange ropes, there was something red which could have been blood. It was difficult to define the body position, but so much for no bloodshed. What was clear was that the body was wrapped in red, with a cream turtle-necked jumper visible on top.

  What confirmed it for me, that this was Zeb, was the large, glinting hearing aid in his left ear. What kind of a prick wears a telephone in his ear when he’s breaking into his own penthouse hanging from a rope? I went outside and called the office. Fagin told me the opposition were running a story about Zeb being pushed from his flat tied up in pick gaffer tape. So there had been a murder. No one wraps themselves up in red gaffer tape and then jumps.

  And why red gaffer tape? Something hard hit my arm. I turned to see a young Chinese man with thin hair and a menacing face. He had elbowed me, but I didn’t know if it was deliberate or not. His hands were blue with tattoos. He smiled back at me as he walked away, turning his head to look back two or three times. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t dare challenge him. I watched a former South China Morning Post hack, an old Wanchai hand, emerge from red velvet curtains of the Ocean Bar across the road to be assailed by old crones from the bars either side. He broke clear, staggered away, stopped, lit a cigarette, the reflection of which I could see in the oily rain on the pedestrian crossing, and went back in the way he’d just come. Love is a many splendoured thing.

  Jeffers was deep in conversation with the mama-san. I sat watching Edith’s bottom. I felt nothing for Zeb. My mind was elsewhere. What did Scout mean when she said she only liked sleeping with complete shits? It was obvious what she meant, but was it true? Why were women attracted to gangsters? What was that all about? Why should the fact that someone robs banks or kills people for a living make the women want to drop their knickers and go “ooh”? It wasn’t a primeval attraction to a hunter and a provider, it was the hots for someone cruel. This was the case in absolutely all fiction - look at Thomas Hardy and the Bronte sisters. Look at Richard the bloody Third. What was going on with that wooing scene with Anne, whose husband he had just killed? He was getting it on at the funeral, literally over the dead body! Scout’s dad is a killer. Scout’s mum sees a tattoo of a dragon rampant as he pulls out some poor bar owner’s fingernails and she’s head over heels in love. As opposed to head over heels over the balcony.

  Edith came back to the bar, lit a cigarette and blew smoke gently in my face.

  “You buy me a drink?”

  “Of course. It’s lovely to see you.”

  “You still live in the middle of nowhere miles and miles away? With the croaking frogs in the field?”

  “I live on one of the islands now,” I said. I didn’t remember any dying French villagers.

  “You take me home tonight?”

  “I’d like to do that.”

  “This time you don’t stand naked on the balcony and sing ‘Can You Hear the Drums, Fernando’.”

  “Ah, you remember.”

  “I remember the neighbour shouting ‘fuck off wanker’.”

  “I am flattered.”

  “I don’t remember much else.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I think that’s why you move to the island. I think you a little bit anti-social. A little bit alcoholic.”

  “What do you think of me doing this, bar-fining you?” I asked her in the taxi to the ferry pier. “You think it’s wrong?”

  “I think that, despite the thick, ugly glasses, you are handsome, Hadley.”

  “Thank you, but that is not what I mean. What do you think of me paying for you to sleep with me?”

  “I think you a very lucky man.”

  Centuries of domination by Spanish, American, Japanese, English and Filipino men are hard to shake off, especially when the women don’t think it’s in their interest to shake them off.

  “You think you are being bad,” she said. “But I like you because you are nice to me. You never hurt me. You take me home in the taxi and sing songs. Girls like men who are nice.”

  “I see,” I said.

  But I was lying. I didn’t see anything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE NEXT NIGHT I went to see the patch of the rural New Territories where I used to live with another glorious Filipina until she took off with an airline pilot (from a completely straight runway). I hit my former local, surrounded by duck farms and orchards where they grow the little golden orange “kumquat” trees for the Lunar New Year. The girl, Maria, had worked at the bar and had been its only attraction. For me, anyway.

  In between new, blue-roofed “Spanish style” apartment blocks three storeys high with covered flat roofs, was the Honest Bar. It had a smiley Santa Claus face on the front door with “Merry Christmas” written in aerosol stick-on snow. This wasn’t this year’s decoration. It had been there as long as I had been a customer.

  But inside was different. It was less scruffy. None of the customers was familiar. Another Santa Claus, a human one, with little to do sat on the stage, his back ramrod straight and a sack of presents at his side.

  I sat at the bar and ordered a double Black Label.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the waitress.

  “Laurie, sir.”

  “Do you know Maria who used to work here? With the legs?”

  “Of course, sir. Everyone knows Maria. She is our harbinger.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She is our harbinger, sir. Our mentor. For us Filipinas in the Hong Kong church, sir, she is a patron lady.” One superstition perched precariously on yet another.

 
“How long have you worked here, Laurie?”

  “Just two months, sir. Do you know Maria?”

  I adjusted my bottom on the rough rattan stool to prepare myself, and Laurie, for an extraordinary piece of news.

  “I am Hadley,” I said.

  Laurie looked at her watch and did this pretty thing with her lips which only Filipinas can do - make them pout and curve at a right-angle to themselves. It is a sign of confusion.

  “Good evening, Hadley, sir. I am wondering if you know Maria.”

  Of course, there was no reason Laurie should know me. But that didn’t stop me. “No, you don’t understand. I am Hadley. Maria and I, we were like that. Is ah-Fei still around? He was the boss when I used to come here.”

  “I do not know. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. There’s no reason you should know.” I looked around the bar. “Do you know where Maria is now?”

  “Maria is happily married, sir. She visits rarely.”

  “With a nice pilot, right?”

  “The pilot is finished, sir. With a rural bandit. A young and active perpetrator in the province of Batangas, sir.”

  Time to change the subject. “Your Father Christmas doesn’t have much to do, I see.”

  “Ah, the Santa Claus. He gives out gifts to the needy, sir. He has the true Yule-tide Christian spirit.”

  “That’s good. Nice and seasonal. Bring me flesh and bring me wine. Can I take another of these Christmas spirits?”

  I pushed forward my glass. Our Lady of the Patron Saint Maria would have sorted this little ingénue out in no time. Rural bandit, my arse. I thought of Maria and quickly thought of Scout and realised I hadn’t told her about Zeb. I walked outside and dialled her number, not knowing if she was working or not. She answered with an abrupt “yes?”

  “Hey Scout, it’s me.”

  “I’m late for work, Perse. Can it wait?”

  “Just a quick one. There’s something I should have told you earlier. About Spike. Zeb.”

  “What is it? He’s been arrested?”

  “Worse than that. Scout, Zeb is dead. It happened last night.”

  There was silence. Then: “You’re telling me Zeb is dead?”