I thought of my first night in jail, after 13 hours of police and customs interrogations, pacing the wooden floors of the detention-centre cell beneath the glare of strip lights. I’d lain on my bed with mosquitoes circling like famished vultures and cried myself to sleep. I thought back to the kindness of Yen and Liu in those early days and the captain who’d assured me I’d get ‘short time’. And he’d been right – even though he’d known nothing and was simply trying to cheer me up – the time had gone quickly in retrospect, though it didn’t always seem like it while it was happening. I’d got lucky in the end and my sentence had been ‘a holiday’, as my Chinese friends liked to point out. I’d passed through the dragon’s belly and out the other side.
Captain Mai turned up at around 8.30 and asked me to come to the office. I had to sign some papers, and he gave me a bag with the gold ring my mother had given me on my seventeenth birthday. On our travels, Rosie and I had bought a cabochon of lapis lazuli, which we had laid into the ring by a jeweller friend. Now it sat on my finger after two and a half years in a dusty envelope, with its azure blaze set off by the sunlight streaming through the bars. I wanted to keep my Ti Lan Qiao ‘necklace’ as a souvenir and had hidden the plastic card with my photo and prison number in the lining of my jacket. The photo had been taken on my first day in the jail, with me wearing a red, green and gold spliff-smoking Rasta T-shirt. Along with my number was a stamp of the red star of the Chinese Communist Party and the words ‘drug peddler’. While patting me down, Mai found the jail ID and confiscated it, which was a shame. Surely I’d earned this one token of my time served?
The Chinese were all at work next door and we’d already said our goodbyes, but Chen Yong Ho had come to see me off and we shook hands. His day would come, but not for many years. I felt bad for him, but he was happy for me: a true test of friendship. The foreigners were happy for me, too, I think, or at least they were happy to be reminded that sooner or later they, too, would be leaving the clutches of the Chinese penal system. And then I was gone. Mai marched me down the stairs, and I glanced along the death-row landing. These prisoners would soon be leaving, too, and their families would never see them again, unless their last drive was captured on state TV. All the cells were locked, with a few trustees milling about and guards sipping green tea. Lawyers would be arriving shortly with unsuccessful appeal papers and wills to sign. I thought of the old man I’d met in the cells beneath the courthouse, how I’d given him a tissue to wipe the snot and tears from his face as he waited for death. He’d probably been too old to have been much value as an organ donor and died without benefit to the state: a small triumph, I suppose.
We were on the ground floor, where Mai stopped to fill in a short form to notify the brigade they were losing one of their members. A guard I recognised smiled kindly at me. He was bald, like me; my follicles had not taken well to imprisonment, even though I’d kept my hair shortly cropped anyway. We walked across the yard towards the main prison building, and once I got a few metres from 8th Brigade I turned to see my comrades vying for a view through the bars. I had my bags in my arms and my guitar over my shoulder and gave them a final salute, and they waved back as we turned round a corner for the last time.
A police minibus was waiting and Captain Mai handed me over. We shook hands and he looked quite overwhelmed with emotion, and for a moment I thought I could see a tear in his eye. It was moving for me, too: partly because it was a momentous occasion in my life, but also because I’d grown quite fond of Mai, who, along with the captain in the detention centre, had always shown kindness towards me. Both men had been considerate and had always been prepared to step outside the robotic limitations of their jobs to show a little humanity to those in their care. The Party they represented was cold and officious, but they embodied the warmth of many individuals within it, and I shall remain eternally grateful.
There were no handcuffs involved as the police van drove through the streets of Shanghai, but neither was I free. I asked a guard to stop and buy me some cigarettes with the cash I’d had on me at the time of my arrest, and he agreed, though I was to stay in the van. I opened a fresh pack of Marlboros and passed them to the officers, who accepted, and lit one up myself, flicking the ash onto the road through the barred window of the minibus. I thought back to my first drive across the city in a police car and how I’d desperately tried to convince myself it would all be OK, that they’d probably just deport me from the country. The spotty driver with his siren blazing and the English-speaking policewoman I’d tried to be nice to in the hope they’d let me go. They’d run every red light on the journey, barging their way through the traffic as if they’d caught an international terrorist. Now my driver was slumped in his seat, arm out of the window, eyeing the pretty girls on Nanjing Street and taking his time.
The vice consul, Jackie Barlow, was waiting outside the airport in a chauffeur-driven consular car, and the officer passed over my two boxes of books, cassettes and various other bits and bobs I’d acquired. They were to be handed over to the embassy and shipped back to England at a later date. The airport looked more Japanese than the kind of building I’d come to associate with China. Everything was new, and the bulk of the passengers were men in Western suits. There were no ramshackle shanty towns of hungry-looking peasants like I’d seen all over the country at train stations; this was the new China, a country ready for the twenty-first century.
I was lighting up a cigarette when one of my guards stopped me; I was not yet free and I was already breaking the law. Just two and a half years earlier, it would have been strange to see people not smoking; now they were trying to turn Shanghai into Singapore. A smiling girl from China Airlines came over with my ticket, which she handed to Jackie Barlow.
‘This is as far as I go,’ Jackie said. ‘These men are going to see you to the plane.’
I thanked her for her help over the last couple of years, and for bringing cigarettes along to our prison visits, which she wasn’t obliged to do. We’d got a few old newspapers from the embassy, too, and it was always good to get a copy of the Sunday Times once every three months. She’d been a valuable link for my family and had kept them up to date on any legal developments in the early days, when nobody knew what the hell was going on. The Shanghai consulate was at the forefront of trade between Britain and China, so a couple of jailbirds must have been pretty low on their to-do list.
She walked off towards the car park. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and we made our way to the departure area. There was no hanging about in airport lounges: the plane was waiting for me.
‘Good afternoon, sir, welcome to China Airways. I hope you enjoy your flight.’
The air hostess didn’t seem to have noticed that I was accompanied by two police officers, but when I turned they’d already gone. I got a window seat at the back of the plane and sat watching the pretty hostesses go about their work.
‘Did you enjoy your visit to China?’ asked a businessman, looking up from his stocks-and-shares newspaper.
‘Oh, yes. It’s a very interesting and beautiful country.’
‘How long was your visit?’
‘Not very long; I was just here on holiday.’
‘Very good.’ He smiled.
He put his head back into his newspaper, and I gazed out of the window as the plane gained momentum before slipping into the crystal-blue sky.
Epilogue: The Road to Madrid
The Triumph spluttered and snorted along the motorway, carburettors gargling under the weight of its steel frame, my life bungeed to the back rack in a tower of fabrics and CDs. A pair of panniers drooped over the seat like basset-hound ears, flapping noisily against the scorching exhausts in time to the engine’s mechanical rhythms. Birds of prey hovered over the highway as orange trees blurred into formless tunnels of amber-green over the sticky asphalt. The road was empty, as if it had been laid out before me and would disappear behind me, while my two wheels screamed along its temporary surface, oblivious to the world that
lay beyond it. As if from nowhere, a Mercedes-Benz slid past as I maintained my ninety-miles-an-hour cruising speed, and I looked up to see two small kids pointing and laughing out of the back window as the silver bullet shrank into the distance, and then I was alone again.
The silhouette of a bull grew from a black speck on the horizon into a giant tarmacadam beast scuffing its hooves at the foot of a mountain, wedged between a bank of olive trees clinging precariously to the rocky hillside and a dried-up ravine that snaked down the granite facade into the valley below. I glanced back to check on my load, as had been my habit for the last few hours, but something was missing. My right hand, numb with the vibrations of four hours in the saddle, unclenched the throttle as the engine chugged down the gears to a stop on the side of the road. Again I looked round in amazement at the luggage on the back of my bike, its zip bursting with the few items of clothing it seemed worth taking back to England. Everything was where I’d tied it before leaving Andalusia the night before, except the spare crash helmet that had sat on the top of my bag, fastened down by a spider-web bungee strap. I leaned over the saddle of the bike to see if the helmet had slid down the side and was somehow lodged between the mudguard and the pillion handrail, but there was nothing. I took off my own crash helmet, stepped back from the kerb and then walked along the road. I slid down to my knees in a squat among the roadside scrub.
And then I laughed. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t help myself; it was too absurd to take seriously. I knew in that instant that my life had changed – that there was no going back, that I’d have to get a job, that I’d never play cat and mouse with customs officials again. It was the end of an adventure that had lasted the best part of a decade, turning my life into a lottery whose successes only underlined their futility.
The helmet had weighed little more than a kilo, and 800 grams of that was dope: the result of a laborious hollowing-out-and-packing job taught to me by a friend in the mountains near Granada. Now I stood on the side of the motorway, gazing back up the road behind me, as the slipstream of a passing truck blew dust in my eyes. A pair of Hoopoe birds flashed by in a chequered orange flutter and rested on the base of an olive tree. They were spying on me, chuckling to each other as if they were in on the joke that had brought about my abrupt change of lifestyle. In the middle of the road an ochre-coloured lizard crouched on the relative safety of a white line, looking left, then right, before scuttling across to the island between the two roads. I knew which way I was going now.
I briefly toyed with the idea of retracing my journey to look for the £4,000 Riff mountain crash helmet that was presumably lying beside or in the road somewhere between here and Almería. But to have done so would have been to admit failure in understanding the strangeness of fate and the unconscious dreams and desires that make us do such idiotic things.
In spite of this philosophical interlude, my stubbornness was unable to let go of the thought of my livelihood lying further back down the road. What if it had only just fallen off and was only a couple of hundred yards behind me? Four grand’s worth of Sticky Moroccan waiting to be picked up by a stranger who’d probably never know why the crash helmet was so unusually heavy and unbalanced. Or picked up by highway police and thrown in a ditch to keep it away from the traffic, where flies would drone and buzz curiously around it as the vegetable matter inside began to rot. Then I thought of the prospect of turning up at Plymouth from the Santander ferry with fifty quid in my pocket and no job, my plans to move down to Brighton with the proceeds of the scam blown out of the water. I’d have to sign on the dole and do some menial job that paid peanuts. There’d be no more whimsical flights to Goa or drop-of-the-hat jaunts to Pakistan or Thailand. I’d be stranded in the place of my birth with no quick and easy exit strategy. My wings would be clipped and I’d be forced to endure an avalanche of ‘I told you so’s’ from jealous acquaintances who’d never know the life I knew. And it was a good life: it was the last great folk adventure, pitting your wits against the banal, sticking two fingers up at the cardboard cut-out facades of convention, the dreary rat race in which there were no free lunches but everyone was conditioned to believe they had a vested interest in making someone else rich.
And to give up now would be a betrayal of beliefs I’d begun to hold dear. I would be vindicating the authorities: all the customs men from Heathrow to Osaka who’d stuck their fingers up my arse, the police officers who’d stripped me naked and subjected me to endless hours of interrogations, the judge who’d sent me down, the screws who’d refused me my mail when it was 18 inches from their noses.
But this rage against power and authority had its flip side, too. There were the customs men who were only doing their jobs, the judge who’d come down to my holding cell at the courthouse in Shanghai with a handful of cigarettes and the first decent meal I’d seen for six months. The captain of the detention centre who’d shown me genuine kindness and reassurance when I had no idea whether I was going to get 15 years or a slap on the wrist. The prosecutor who looked like Stan Laurel, who gave me a carton of Marlboros to smuggle back to my cell. The prison guards who’d always had a sympathetic smile.
Even so, I wasn’t ready to give up yet, so I climbed onto the Triumph and burned along the motorway to the nearest slip road in order to backtrack on myself in search of the crash helmet that contained my livelihood. It was a long shot, but fuck it: I’d do my best to keep the adventure going.
The first road off the motorway snaked around the hillside and over a fly over to a small roundabout with an offshoot back onto the Andalusia route south. I hunched the machine over onto its side to manoeuvre around the 240-degree bend and opened her up as the back wheel slipped from under me and sent the bike sliding down the gritty roadside to a stop beneath a buzzing pylon. A passing Spanish man pulled over to the kerb and asked me if I needed any help, but I wasn’t hurt and the bike seemed OK in spite of losing an indicator. Above, a huge signpost split into two soared up like my own twin towers, pointing south to Andalusia and north to Madrid. I was momentarily dazzled by the choice of the two destinations, knowing full well what each signified for my future. My life has been peppered with such choices, and I have to say I’ve frequently made the wrong ones, ignoring my intuition and following my ego, throwing caution to the wind and doing foolish things to test my luck or simply to make my life more interesting.
I’d grown tired of running away, and there was nowhere else Ireally wanted to go. The travel bug that had driven me since my teens had lost its allure. I’d got busted in China because I no longer cared what happened to me; in fact, subconsciously I wanted to get caught, I wanted out. I knew as I looked up at that sign and the fork in the road in front of me that I had a choice, and that in our often murky lives options rarely appear with such clarity but instead are shrouded incontradictions and mixed feelings. And in that simple sign, a multitude of other signs burst into my consciousness, as if I were two different people vying for control over my destiny. I questioned whether my life had been a fraud, whether my picaresque lifestyle belied a deep selfishness in which I was the only person that mattered. I thought of my mother flying across the world to see me in court, standing in her red dress, so beautiful and dignified, and what it would do to her to hear of me stuck in some dungeon for years. Again. I began to question whether I really wanted to spend the rest of my life hanging out with people whose lives were one long holiday, itinerant expats who’d fly into an airport with a couple of suitcases once a year and then take another year off to ‘recover’.
In truth it was a boring life, and the consequences of failure were catastrophic. But worst of all, I wasn’t very good at it. Sure, I’d made some money along the way and spent many long months living off the proceeds in various exotic locations, but my modus operandi was haphazard and my days of freedom were numbered. It was only a matter of time before I’d hear the monotonous clang of cell doors, see the 24–7 strip lighting and smell the rancid stench of slop buckets. I’d grown accustomed to the
reassuring prompts of bells ringing: the wake-up bell, the breakfast bell, the work bell, the break bell, the lunch bell, the shower bell, the dinner bell, the meeting bell, the bedtime bell, and on and on . . . Nobody told me what to do any more; therefore, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t so much a rudderless ship as a pinball careering around from one thing to the next in the knowledge that sooner or later I’d slip between the paddles and be sucked back into the machine, only to be churned out at some later date and have to start all over again. It was a cruelly dispiriting game that I was destined to lose time and again.
I sat on the bike, pondering these thoughts as the sun hid behind the road signs in front of me. A light wind blew between the canyons, leaving a chill in the air, while a fine layer of pink dust from the Sahara lodged itself between the scratches on my petrol tank. I lit a cigarette, which I smoked clumsily through leather motorcycle gloves as a pair of Guardia Civil police officers pulled up beside me in a jeep. They asked me if I was OK, and I said I was fine as I turned over the engine to leave, but the carburettors were flooded from the bike lying on its side and the machine wheezed and coughed wearily. The cops pulled over to the side of the road and came to take a closer look as the starter motor went flat again. Then one of them walked round to the back of the bike and motioned the other to help, and the two men pushed me along the road in neutral before I slipped into second gear and opened up the throttle, which spat out the excess petrol and roared triumphantly. I waved to my helpers, who stood by their car looking pleased with themselves, and for a split second considered asking them if they’d found any crash helmets on the roadside today.
Monkey House Blues Page 27