Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  These thoughts crossed my mind as Wong appeared in the doorway, looking at his watch. We were down to the last five minutes, but I think we’d all had enough. Since parting is the worst bit, it makes sense to make it as brief as possible. There was little to be gained from a tearful farewell, and I was quietly confident – or, rather, suffering under the delusion – that I’d be deported when I got to court. We hugged again, and I was surprised how much my sense of smell had improved since I’d been off the cigarettes. I could smell every scent on Rosie’s skin, from the familiar specialist soap she used for a skin ailment to Tiger Balm. My dad hugged me too, rather closer than before, as if the meeting had thawed him out a little.

  Wong led them to the consul car as two guards escorted me back into the cell block, and I turned one more time to see them wave. A bird flew past – a Chinese blackbird, perhaps – the first I’d seen in months, and it settled on the wall that led to the outside world. I climbed the now familiar stairs with a box of books and letters in my arms, and the captain was standing at the top. He sent the guards away and walked me down the corridor to the cell at the end where Liu and Yen were standing to attention. Yen took the box from me and put it on my bed, and when the captain had locked up and left, I climbed up to the slit in the window in the hope of seeing the bird again, but it was long gone.

  Memories of the visit soon faded as I got to read the new books. First up was Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which I loved. Its magical, spiritual view of life and its astonishingly surreal imagery made it the perfect prison read, lighting up my inner world and making the ‘real’ world more bearable. It was the first – and last – book to make me cry. Another favourite was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which appealed to the boozer in me, with its vivid portrayal of alcoholism. The book charts the tragic decline of the British consul in Mexico, who drinks himself to death on the Mexican Day of the Dead. Lowry creates a delirious, hallucinatory world that is as much about the protagonist’s mescal-fuelled fantasies as it is about the ‘real’ world. I was struck by the character’s insistence on destroying his life at all costs as he stumbles drunk around the small Mexican town with a ‘hideous pariah dog’ on his tail. The book is not easy to read, but it is a sprawling masterpiece that reminded me of my own downward spiral.

  The week following the visit from Rosie and my dad, I was called downstairs to what I assumed was another police visit only to be met by a different official, who introduced himself as Mr Song. My first thought was that he looked like Stan Laurel from Laurel and Hardy. He even scratched the top of his head with a vacant look on his face, like the film legend’s classic pose. He had a translator with him and a pretty assistant, and they told me they were from the prosecutor’s office. I’d expected a prosecutor to be intimidating, but he was a surprisingly amiable, laid-back character. He handed me a packet of Marlboros, which, oblivious to the prison regulations, he told me to keep. His assistants were friendly and a pleasant change of company after the dozens of hours I’d spent with the police. We went through my case and he sounded sympathetic to the idea that I was a foolish tourist rather than a criminal. The girl smiled a lot and made me horny. She wore a blue uniform with shiny buttons and a red and gold Communist Party lapel brooch. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Before leaving, they asked if I’d like them to get me anything. I asked for a carton of Marlboros and told them they could take the cash out of the money of mine the captain had. They walked me back to the bottom of the cell-block stairs and the girl waved and said goodbye with a smile. It made my day.

  The cigarettes went down well with Yen and Liu, who started jumping for joy and patting me on the back. The only problem was we didn’t have any matches. Liu came up with an idea to rub a soap brick with a bit of fabric, a method he’d seen former cellmates using. We were given a block of gritty soap that looked like a horse lick. I couldn’t see how on earth we’d generate enough friction to warm this thing up, let alone set it alight. Apart from anything else, the soap was damp. Liu must have spent two or three hours rubbing this thing, trying to work out how his former cellmates had ever got it to work. Yen and I were doubtful it would ever catch fire and started to think of different ideas. Yen came up with one that involved using the electricity from the light fitting on the ceiling. If Liu could hoist him up onto his shoulders, he might be able to do something. Liu, who liked to think of himself as vastly more intelligent and sophisticated than the country peasant, wanted to soldier on with the silly soap-brick idea, but Yen found a tiny piece of tinfoil that he rolled into a wire and proposed to use as an element. Suddenly the idea sounded possible, and after a quick listen at the door to check no guards were coming, Yen jumped up onto Liu’s shoulders and got to work. Within minutes, we’d lit a cigarette and everyone was ecstatic. Even Liu admitted Yen’s idea was smart, and we still had 16 cigarettes left in my packet. When we got to the end of the butt we lit another one off it and so shared two cigarettes and kept the rest for tomorrow. Thanks to Mr Song’s generosity and Yen’s resourcefulness, everyone had a smile on their face in the cell that night, and for the time being, at least, I was popular.

  [4]

  The Company of Men

  After the prosecutor’s visit, I saw no more of the police. My case had been fully investigated and solved on the night of my arrest, and the subsequent investigation had been an absurd waste of police time and resources. Five weeks’ worth of three senior police officers’ time had been spent chatting about a half-kilo dope bust, but Alan’s English had improved steadily and I’d got to smoke cartons of free cigarettes. The door of the cell rarely opened now, and I went back to throwing my rolled-up socks at the wall until Liu got pissed off and told me to stop. The jail diet was terrible and I was beginning to regret telling the police I was vegetarian, which I wasn’t. I’d turned my nose up at a sliver of fatty pork belly in my first week, since I was not used to eating a lump of fat, but now I began to have second thoughts. In fact, it was the only tasty dish we got. Along with the rice, there was either cabbage, boiled cucumber, pork, hard-boiled egg, tofu or occasionally chicken. I was getting tofu, hard-boiled eggs or cabbage while my cellmates had more variety. I don’t much like hard-boiled eggs, and the cabbage was vile, but tofu can get pretty dull after a while, too. I got a meeting with the captain and told him I’d decided to take up a meat diet again, but I don’t think he passed on the message as they never gave me pork again. Funnily enough, pork belly has since become one of my favourite dishes, which I cook regularly.

  I started to cast my mind back to how it had all gone wrong, and how the trip designed to ‘get my head together’ had become such a disaster. It was in the mountains of Amdo Tibet that I’d first decided to make the Silk Road trip from Pakistan back into China. At that point I’d still not made a decision to buy hash once I was there, but I knew it would be cheaper and easier to fly to Pakistan and come back overland than make a return trip from China. Besides, I knew it would be a long and gruelling trip, and I didn’t want to do it twice along the same route. Pakistan had been high on my list of countries to visit for some years, and I’d hoped to be able to cross the border into Iran while I was there. At that point my health was still good, and while staying at a guesthouse in the mountains I’d written a folk song called ‘Peshawar’, based on a meeting I’d had a few weeks earlier with an Afghan refugee. Writing the song had filled my head with romantic notions of the famous border town, and I wondered how I might integrate a visit to the North-West Frontier into my Silk Road trip. I knew I could fly from Hong Kong to Karachi quite cheaply and then make my way overland through Pakistan, along the Indus Valley and over the Khunjerab Pass back into China.

  The next morning, I took a long walk into the hills above the town of Xiahe, a Tibetan hill station a day’s bus ride from Lanzhou in Gansu Province. The high pastures around the town had been populated by Tibetan yak herders for hundreds of years and had been generally left alone by the Han Chinese who tended to occupy the lowlands. The people spoke
a different dialect of Tibetan from those from the Autonomous Region, but pilgrims came from far and wide to the lamasery on their way to Lhasa. Some made the gruelling trip on their hands and knees, prostrating themselves as they went, which would take literally years to achieve. It was an absurd challenge from an agnostic Westerner’s point of view, but the elderly lady I saw embarking upon her ordeal was oblivious to the hardships of her chosen path, and I felt an awkward combination of awe, envy and pity that she could derive such peace and happiness from the bizarre undertaking.

  My own mission was less noble. I didn’t really believe in anything, nor was I searching for any kind of union with God or a higher state of consciousness. I liked to think I was a vaguely spiritual person – cherry-picking my way through various belief systems as long as it didn’t require undue sacrifice – but I’d never taken the plunge into religiousness. At boarding school we’d been forced to attend both morning and evening prayers, but I’d sat upright in my pew as the rest of the school bowed their heads. Now, 15 years later, my religion was a swashbuckling mix of adventure and daring that put me in the same frame as the fugitive heroes of my favourite folk songs and movies. I identified with the loveable rogues and lucky losers, the riverboat gamblers, the chancers, the hustlers. I wanted to be out on the high seas flying the Jolly Roger, rustling cattle across the Mexican border. What I lacked in religion, I more than made up for in personal mythology. My guides were the renegade prophets of popular culture, from Joe Strummer to Johnny Cash, though I was yet to realise the significance of the latter’s prison songs to my own journey. And the promise of this idyll drew me towards the mountains of the Afghan–Pakistan border, the nearest I was likely to get to the Wild West of my beloved cowboy songs and films. The modern world had lost its magic. You could tell as soon as you walked out of an airport, where every street was lit like a garage forecourt and no one spoke to strangers. And so I made a plan, sitting in my room at the guesthouse, guitar in hand, to seek out the best dope in the world, from the oldest growing region, and take it by hand all the way to the centre of the modern world. There would be money to be made – a few grand, I guessed – but it wasn’t just about the money; I could just as easily get the Afghans to pack it into a parcel and post it. No, it was vindication for a way of life, testimony to my quixotic verve; it would be the apogee of the picaresque existence I’d chosen. It was dangerous, even foolish, but the myriad dangers would magnify the excitement. It would be the mother of all scams, and in just a few weeks I’d be sitting on tatami mats in Kyoto drinking cold beer as my friends got to smoke the best dope in the world.

  The next morning, I took the bus back down to the sweaty lowlands of the Yellow River basin. Halfway down the mountain Tibetan culture gave way to a mild strain of Islam, where men and women mingled in the streets. I found a friendly restaurant with tasty stew and naan bread. After lunch, the bus meandered down through the valleys into Han country, with its ugly concrete blocks and police sirens. The Yellow River was soupy brown with silt, but Lanzhou was not a bad place to hang out. I got a dorm bed in a large government-owned hotel that accepted foreigners. A young Chinese girl came into the hotel. She was a student and spoke poor English, but was eager to learn more. Her name was Xiao-Lian (lotus cloud), and she was skinny with long hair and big eyes. I liked her and she asked me if I’d like to walk into town together. Weate delicious garlic-and-peanut noodles at a stall by the river, and she talked of how she’d love to go to the West. I got the impression she wanted to do more than just visit. She was a sensitive, delicate girl and looked out of place in her often crudely harsh surroundings. China is a tough country for such dainty souls. She was different, and people who stand out in the crowd need to be tough, as Chinese society demands uniformity and standardisation before happiness. I was surprised when she asked if I’d like to go to her room and was concerned about whether there would be any bad repercussions for her. I had never been invited into a Chinese home before, let alone a single woman’s, and felt nervous for both of us.

  I said yes.

  She lived on the sixth floor of a nasty grey tenement block. The room was small, drab and cramped, but she’d made the best of it. There were rolled-up piles of futon bedding on the floor, and I learned she shared the room with two other students. Through a barred window I saw another horrible concrete block opposite. Washing hung from its balconies in a patchwork of colours that took the worst out of its dreary facade. She stood close behind me, and I could feel her body heat as I spied a bunch of jasmine dangling from the window frame. I turned as she took a shy step backwards. She was attractive rather than pretty, with a downtrodden but resilient demeanour. An awkward silence hung in the air, and it was almost a relief to hear a key turn in the lock of the room’s door. One of her flatmates, a dumpy girl in a polo-neck jumper, walked in and seemed oddly uninterested in what must have been an uncommon sight. I said ni hao and she nodded back before collecting a satchel and leaving. We were alone again. I looked across at Xiao-Lian; her eyes were sad but hopeful, as perhaps were mine. Then the door creaked open and we both turned towards it and left. At the bottom of the lift she gave me a book of Chinese poems with English translations, and I took a rickshaw back to my hotel. I never saw her again, but rewrote the events of our meeting in my head, lying between the sheets in my prison cell, for many pleasant nights after.

  I booked a train south to Guangzhou. There was time to kill scouring the nearby streets for dried noodles to eat on the journey. I bought a large hot-water flask and a small bag of Dragon Well tea from a hunchback and his dwarfish wife who’d set up shop inside the station. They were happy for my custom, still beaming their waifish grins across the lobby as I queued for my ticket. I was fortunate to get a second-class sleeper, but the berth was cramped all the same. My co-travellers turned the occasion into a picnic and were more than happy to include me in the festivities. The men chain-smoked throughout the meal, gnawing on chicken drumsticks, with smoke puffing out of their nostrils. Large bottles of beer appeared out of a plastic cooler box, and I got my mini dictionary out and attempted to communicate with my hosts as the women filled my glass. I asked one of the men what he thought of the late Chairman Mao, and he waved a chicken foot dismissively while gobbing a lump of gristle out of the window. These were middle-class Chinese who were probably happy to see the back of Mao and his Iron Rice Bowl. The new China was giving them a life their parents and grandparents could only have dreamed of, and they had little nostalgia for the bad old days.

  The train journey became a nightmare. I had the most painful headache of my life, and for the 54-hour journey it got worse and worse. The other passengers in my carriage were very kind, giving me whatever medication they had to relieve the pain. There were red pills, blue pills, green-and-white capsules, sachets of white powder to slip into my green tea: I tried them all, and none of them worked. As night fell, I lay on the fold-out bed and balanced a piece of milky-green jade on my Third Eye, in the centre of my forehead, as recommended by the writers of Rosie’s New Age crystal books, to no avail. The Chinese found this hilarious and giggled amongst themselves as I writhed in agony. Eventually a girl from New Zealand got on the train and gave me a couple of ibuprofen, and the pain went away, at least for a while.

  The train pulled into Guangzhou late in the evening, but there were no spare beds at the foreigners’ hotel and the shops were shut. Some tourists gave me some more headache pills, and I found a pleasant park with a comfortable bench. I chained my guitar bag to the bench and used my rucksack as a pillow. Mosquitoes arrived in squadrons for a sustained attack, and there I lay with a coat over my head like a tramp. I woke to the sounds of birds singing and the sight of pensioners doing t’ai chi. They looked ghostly, gracefully pushing the air around themselves as they stared at me. I felt hopelessly clumsy just watching them, scratching incessantly, having been bitten all over by mosquitoes. As the sun came up, I found a guesthouse by the river and drank a cup of coffee. I got talking to some tourists who ov
erheard me coughing and recommended I see a doctor as soon as possible. Although it cost considerably more than the ferry, there was a hovercraft leaving the mainland for Hong Kong every hour, so I took a taxi to the port and was in Kowloon for lunch.

  At the hospital in Hong Kong, a doctor told me I had Chinese flu without bothering to examine me. He said I’d be fine in a couple of days, but I wasn’t so sure. I lazed about in Chungking Mansions smoking some weed I’d bought off an Iranian guy I’d met while having a cheap beer outside a 7-Eleven store. He was on his way to Japan, and I gave him some good advice on where to stay and go out at night. All the time I was coughing and spluttering; he felt sorry for me and encouraged me to fly back home, meaning the UK. I didn’t consider England home any more, and the Hindu Kush was as good a place as any to recuperate. I decided I’d rather find a tranquil mountain retreat and get my strength back, so I booked a flight to Karachi for the following day.

  The Philippine Airlines flight was packed, so the girl at the airport apologised and asked if I minded being upgraded to first class. I was not used to such luxury. We flew to Manila first, even though it was in the opposite direction, and I was pampered all the way by a bevy of beauties in batik gowns and silk slippers. It was one in the morning when we got to Karachi, and I bought a connecting flight to Peshawar for fifty quid that was due to depart at seven o’clock that morning. I got chatting to a taxi driver outside the airport, who gave me a small piece of hash that we smoked together as I fanned myself with my boarding pass.

  The flight to the north of the country took about an hour and a half. A young Pakistani guy in Western clothes sat next to me and tried to make conversation, but I had no energy. He was in the Pakistan Air Force and spoke excellent English, which he was eager to practise. I felt I was being rude, but I could barely keep my eyelids open while he talked about himself. The ‘Chinese flu’ had got worse, and I began to feel that whatever was wrong with me could not simply be a bout of flu. My muscles ached and I couldn’t stand up for more than a few seconds before I collapsed onto the nearest seat. I was angry, too. This was a trip I’d been looking forward to for a while, yet I couldn’t even muster the energy to look out of the window of the plane. At the airport my rucksack and guitar turned up on the carousel, but I could barely lift them onto the trolley.