by Nick Macfie
“Or a tosspot.”
“I see. Have you seen him? Recently.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him…”
“You wouldn’t put it past him?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him to…”
“You wouldn’t put it past him to do what, Bob?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him to get his nipples pierced.”
“I see.”
“He has that sort of karma.”
“Karma. Okay. Thanks, Bob. Just one more question.”
“If I can help.”
“Have you seen him today? Or did you see him yesterday?”
“No.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
I went back to the Honest Bar in Kam Tin where Terry had appeared as Santa Claus. No one had seen him there either.
“He was our Christmas present and Christmas past,” Laurie the barmaid said.
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Who wants to know, sir?”
I looked Laurie in the eye. I could have answered her and said that I, the person who asked the question, wanted to know. But there was no need, surely. Or did she think I was a policeman? Maybe the devil with a pitchfork? I stared at her pretty face. She did that thing with her lips.
“Sorry, Laurie. Do you remember me? I was in here a week or so ago and I sat with your Santa Claus. You said he had the festive spirit. Do you remember that?”
“Oh, Mr. Hadley, sir. I remember. You look younger than you do on TV.”
“No, no, no. I think you are confused. I am not on TV.”
“It could be the light, sir.”
“Okay. But do you know where Terry is?”
“I expect, sir, if you come back next Christmas, Santa will make his customary visit.”
I WENT TO THE INN of the Sixth Happiness on the top of Taai Mo Saan where Terry had shown us his plans for a downhill runway. What an extraordinarily stupid idea for such a smart person. I kicked the plants that shrank away on touch as I climbed the path from the road. The wind picked up as I made my way across the gardens with the red lanterns strung from willows. I knocked at the ancient red door.
No one answered. I pushed the door open and walked in through the house, the ticking coming loudly from what I now saw was a grandfather clock on a small landing half way up the stairs. I went through to the room with the rosewood tables and chairs.
Terry was sitting alone with his back to me, staring at a picture on the wall. I sat down at the table and followed his line of vision. He was looking at his runway design, now pinned to the wall, his head at an angle.
“It’s the funniest of things,” he said, without taking his eye of the drawing. “But I’ve run this idea by a couple of mates, a couple of people in the trade, a couple of people in the construction industry. Professional types, you know what I mean?”
He turned to look at me. He had a large scotch in his hand.
“Professional types in your line of business? I’m not sure I do.”
“And everyone of them - like parrots they was - everyone of them said: Terry, your downhill runway is total crap. A complete non-starter. Your idea of the curve was a mug’s game, and this is pure shit.”
“It’s certainly unusual.”
“Yes, Hadley old son. Unusual. That’s its main selling point, I say. It’s unusual and original. Totally non-derivative, if you get my drift. Not totally non-derivative. I got the idea from that fucking ugly Hong Kong Cultural Centre without windows and the ski slope roof. And what do they do? They just snigger. Snigger in an old man’s face. One of them almost threw up he was laughing so much.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Terry’s face was flushed with booze and his eyes matched his nose.
“But never mind that, now. What you come here for?”
“I just thought…”
“You’re a smug bastard, aren’t you, Hadley, you and your dead-pan delivery? ‘It’s certainly unusual.’ I can’t work out if you love yourself or hate yourself. Bit of a puzzle.”
“And you are full of magic, Terry.”
“Magic is as magic does, so the old saying goes. And you helped me a lot with that bit of magic on the good ship ‘Xanadu’. I won’t forget that.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Dunno, mate. Tidy up a few loose ends. Probably get pissed tonight. Go and have some fun with the lovely hot bird who was with me at the table. The one you kept on staring at, you dirty old sod.”
“Terry, I have to ask you. What happened to Zeb?”
“The dork who was menacing my daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Give a man enough rope. The scumbag who owed the casino tens of thousands? Who cried like a baby?”
“I never saw him cry.”
“You want everything in black and white, don’t you? Everything solved and wrapped up in Christmas paper and everyone happy as Larry. It wasn’t because he fucked my girl.”
“What wasn’t?” I asked.
“It was because it was aggravated. He was a menace.”
“I just want to know what happened.”
“I just want to know what happened. I don’t think so. I would leave it well alone, my old China. That is what I’ll say to you.”
“To warn me? Why wrap him up in gaffer tape? Why red?”
Terry took a swig of scotch, clapped his hands and shouted loudly for drinks which appeared immediately. It was the same bent old woman with her tray and two tumblers of scotch.
“Here you go. Ganbei.”
“Ganbei.” I took a large hit. It was neat, ice-cold and completely irresistible. Old Airds Thistle as it had to be served. It was a life-affirming drink which, in the few seconds it took to pass under where my tonsils used to be, absolved Terry Tinsel of everything.
“Not to warn you,” Terry said. “To tell you to fuck off. I have many tricks, I do.”
“Criminal tricks, perchance?” Old Airds Thistle did it every time. And very quickly in this case.
“Them as well. Which, as you have seen, make the world go round nice and easy.” Terry rose from his chair. “It’s always been the way.”
“Can I see your daughter again?” I had no idea why I asked that. Who was this man to make decisions about a girl he had abandoned?
Terry staggered slightly and downed his drink in one. He walked to the wall, unpinned his drawing, screwed it into a ball and placed it on the table.
“You don’t want to see my daughter again,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“She ain’t your type.”
“Bollocks. Why are you so angry? Was it you who pulled me out of the Margaret Thatcher room? Who drugged me?”
Terry stuck out his hand and I stood up and, after a pause, shook it.
“Scout, thank the lord, has escaped all that precious, English middle-class, let’s-buy-a-nice-car-and-turn-on-the-telly shit. She’s like me. She’s a free spirit. Even freer now that hubby of hers fell out of a moving bus.”
“He fell out of a moving bus?”
Terry was swaying ever so gently. “Justice is blind,” he said. “So was that geezer about a day before the accident. Ouch.”
“Ouch? Why do you say ouch?”
“Happy Christmas,” he said. “Fuck runways and airports. I’m going.”
He walked off unsteadily towards the courtyard and turned. “One more thing, Hadley, don’t even think about writing any of this in your bloody journalism bollocks job. Keep in mind the man with the platinum hair and the orders he gives to people. He’s the boss. I may be a free spirit, but you most definitely are not.”
I followed Terry for a few paces, watching his back. He turned swiftly and I stopped. He stood at attention and I thought he was going to do that thing with his eyes, but he didn’t. He slowly raised his right hand over his left shoulder and pulled an imaginary arrow out of an imaginary quiver on his back. He lined it up on an imaginary bow and pulled the imaginary string ba
ck, closing his left eye and taking aim with the right. He was aiming at my head. Then he dropped his arms and tapped his nose with his finger.
“She still knows nothing about me,” he said. “Mum’s the word. And the gaffer tape is a kind of a trademark. A signature. Red’s a nice colour, especially at Christmas.”
With that, he was gone through the dark red, circular gateway, stepping cautiously over a wooden step.
A breeze blew the lanterns strung between the willows, making them chafe against the leafless branches and twigs with a kind of see-saw sound. My phone beeped.
“I’m not sure what I have done to offend you on such a calamitous scale, but if you are not enamoured by the ‘wooden spoons’ project, why don’t you come over to my wood and we can fashion some old English weaponry? We could make bows and arrows out of some recently coppiced hazel? (Watch out, they’ll be bendy!) Or we could make a battering ram out of an old oak (once I’ve managed to untie all the non-aligned yellow ribbons lol). I promise I will ensure all safety measures are adhered to. You can be Robin Hood and I will be your Marian. Just do it! Yours, Sparky.”
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding Through the Glen. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, With His Band of Men… I still didn’t know if Sparky was a man or a woman and I didn’t fucking care. Piss off, you daft mug.
I felt awful. Everything had gone wrong. I had no story, I had no girl and I realised I wasn’t going to see the girl’s dad again either. No picnics under the trees on Lamma, then, six feet above a croupier’s corpse. Was that why I was so upset? The old geezer who had manipulated me and those around me had suddenly left us to get on with life by ourselves once again. For a split second, I imagined it was Terry who was on the phone to Harriet Stone in her office all those months ago in London when she was waiting for her man. Of course it wasn’t. But it could have been. He would have fitted the bill.
I pulled out my cigarettes and headed back inside for another drink to find Scout sitting in her father’s rosewood seat. She had appeared out of nowhere.
“Hello, Perse,” she said.
Exquisite pain. Complete joy. A stirring of recently coppiced and bendy heart strings. Love unfulfilled, you can’t beat it. Maudlin fucking bullshit. Everything about her, poised on the seat, spoke volumes to me. Along the lines of: I’m out of here after this token fucking farewell in search of a life of love and danger.
“Scout. How did you get here?”
“I wanted to say goodbye.”
“More bloody magic.” More bloody heartache. Bring it on.
“I suppose so.”
“So you know all about… everything?”
“I know what happened. You were very clever to keep it all so quiet.”
“What will you do now?”
“Go back to England. Get my daughter. Take it from there.” It was no longer sublimely biblical “Eve” between us, but “my daughter”. So sad.
“I see,” I said. “What about Terry?”
“What about him?”
“Well, he’s done all this stuff for you. I suppose you will see him again. He seems so angry, I don’t know why, but…”
“I wanted to tell you something before I left.”
“What’s that?” She was cueing me up for more pain, words that I would repeat to myself again and again for however long it took to stop being in love with her.
“Hadley, you’ve got something hanging out of your nose.”
Aha. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Sorry.”
“I reckon Terry thinks you are all right, beneath it all,” she said.
“Beneath it all? Good. I see.”
“He chose you specifically.”
“That’s nice. That he chose me to pull strokes with. To cheat, in fact.”
“Yes, I thought it was.”
Scout got up to go. My stomach was full of collywobbles.
“Thanks for all you’ve done,” she said. “And happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas.”
She kissed my cheek chastely and stared at me with those big elliptical eyes for a couple of seconds. Her breath was like a light jasmine tea. Mine, I imagined, was like a loud, steam-powered air-conditioner in a distillery cellar with something green and gross hanging from the expulsion vent, twirling in the wind.
“Why do you think he went to so much trouble?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. Why couldn’t he have told her the truth?
“Because he’s trying to make a difference,” she said. “He told us. He’s trying to make amends.”
I could feel the cold where the breeze hit my cheek, wet from her lips. Scout took her father’s route out of the tea house and didn’t turn to wave.
I couldn’t help it, but an old Yuletide favourite came to mind. Not the classic “She’s a dirty, dirty dancer, dirty, dirty dancer, never ever lonely”. Something even more traditional.
In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted.
Heat was in the very sod…
As good a place to stop as any. I clapped my hands for another drink. You’ll soon forget her, Hadley, as lovely as she is. Think about her dad, the lead character in your little adventure. The murderous and spiky-haired Terry had gone.
The poor man had come in sight, gathered his winter fuel, and…
The old man had pissed off.