Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (31 page)

Kala quivers and shimmers like a black poplar in the wind, his protruding eyes full of the terror of DEATH, the GREED in them shrinking rapidly as the light fades, and his armour rattles, shaking me from his breast. His pupils dwindle to the size of black gnats and his limbs wither. His teeth rot and crumble in his mouth. Down between the massive thighs, his once huge phallus shrivels until it resembles a tiny root. His scrotum bag deflates like a dead puffball and splits open: a dusty powder spills out and blows away on the warm night breezes, seeding the grasses with impotent evil.

Kala is dead.

‘Thank you, Nyoman,’ I say, ‘I owe you my whole existence.’

‘I am yours and you are mine,’ she says, then she walks away, over the lone and level plains.

I stare at the giant Kala and shudder. Even in death he is a terrible sight. Then the wonderful Kresna comes out of the east, his blue-black form shining with holy beauty. His tall, handsome figure comes to stand beside me and I feel the glow of his Goodness, and Righteous Wickedness, filling my heart. His hand is on my shoulder, as he tells me, ‘Someone has done my work for me...’

3.

I awoke from my dream in the safety of the darkness and found myself on the bed. I remembered someone shared the other half. ‘Nyoman?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied in her quiet voice. ‘Don’t worry, my darling.’ She folded her wraith-like form around me, holding me in the nothingness of her touch.

‘A terrible thing has happened,’ I cried, my voice seeming to fade a little. ‘A frightening thing.’

I clung to her in my distress, needing comfort, needing her sympathy and companionship.

‘I know,’ she said, running her light fingers through my hair.
‘Now we’re the same and we can be happy together.
You do feel happy, don’t you, darling? You do want to be with me?’

I knew I was safe now, even in the moonglow, safe from Kala, as Nyoman opened the shutters and we saw the tattered remains of my shadow next to the ragged shade she herself cast. I had not noticed until now, that her dark twin was such a shabby creature: a stray mongrel amongst shadows, thin and wasted: a shadow that had been ravaged, yet one that had, eventually, emerged victorious from the struggle of life over death.

It was true that though I myself had a certain substance, my form was a nebulous thing, undefined and indefinite. I was now that forgotten person in the crowd, unnoticed, to be disregarded by my fellow creatures. I was myself as evanescent as a shade, as elusive as Nyoman, and my reply choked in my throat as I tried to express my utter and eternal love for her.

Hong Kong again.
I was taken into Kowloon City (the Walled City of the Manchus) in 1991, shortly before it was razed. It was a unique
shanty town
of individual shacks built into a single unit: a higgledy-piggledy block of misfitting walls, floors and tunnels. Few gweilos have been inside. Few would want to go inside. The number of rats exceeded the number of illegal immigrants who spent their lives within its walls, protected by this quirk of politics, this square mile of Chinese territory within British Hong Kong
.

They had been loud-hailing the place for days, and it certainly looked empty, but John said you couldn’t knock down a building that size without being absolutely sure that some terrified Chinese child wasn’t trapped in one of the myriad of rooms, or that an abandoned old lady wasn’t caught in some blocked passageway, unable to find her way out. There had been elderly people who had set up home in the centre of this huge rotten cheese, and around whom the rest of the slum was raised over the years. Such people would have forgotten there was an outside world, let alone be able to find their way to it.

‘You ready?’ he asked me, and I nodded.

It was John Speakman’s job as a Hong Kong Police inspector, to go into the empty shell of the giant slum to make sure everyone was out, so that the demolition could begin. He had a guide of course, and an armed escort of two locally born policemen, and was accompanied by a newspaper reporter—me. I’m a freelance whose articles appear mainly in the
South China Morning Post.

You could say the Walled City was many dwellings, as many as seven thousand, but you would be equally right to call it a single structure. It consisted of one solid block of crudely built homes, all fused together. No thought or planning had gone into each tacked-on dwelling, beyond that of providing shelter for a family. The whole building covered the approximate area of a football stadium. There was no quadrangle at its centre,
nor
inner courtyard, no space within the ground it occupied. Every single piece of the ramshackle mass, apart from the occasional fetid airshaft, had been used to build, up to twelve stories high. Beneath the ground, and through every part of this monstrous shanty, ran a warren of tunnels and passageways. Above and within it, there were walkways, ladders, catwalks, streets and alleys, all welded together as if some junk artist like the man who built the Watts Towers had decided to try his hand at architecture.

Once you got more than ten feet inside, there was no natural light. Those within used to have to send messages to those on the edges to find out if it was day or night, fine or wet. The homemade brick and plaster was apt to rot and crumble in the airless confines and had to be constantly patched and shored up. In a land of high temperatures and humidity, fungus grew thick on the walls and in the cracks the rats and cockroaches built their own colonies. The stink was unbelievable. When it was occupied, more than fifty thousand people existed within its walls.

John called his two local cops to his side, and we all slipped into the dark slit in the side of the Walled City, Sang Lau the guide going first.
Two gweilos—whites—and three Chinese, entering the forbidden place, perhaps for the last time.
Even Sang Lau, who knew the building as well as any, seemed anxious to get the job over and done with. The son of an illegal immigrant, he had been raised in this block of hovels, in the muck and darkness of its intestines. His stunted little body was evidence of that fact, and he had only volunteered to show us the way in exchange for a right to Hong Kong citizenship for members of his family still without. He and his immediate family had taken advantage of the amnesty that had served to empty the city of its inhabitants. They had come out, some of them half-blind through lack of
light,
some of them sick and crippled from the disease and bad air, and now Sang Lau had been asked to return for one last time. I guessed how he would be feeling: slightly nostalgic (for it was his birthplace), yet wanting to get it over with, so that the many other unsavoury remembrances might be razed along with the structure.

The passage inside was narrow, constantly twisting, turning, dipping, and climbing, apparently at random. Its walls ran with slick water and it smelled musty, with pockets of stale food stink, and worse. Then there were writhing coils of hose and cable that tangled our feet if we were not careful: plastic water pipes ran alongside wires that had once carried stolen electricity. When the rotten cables were live and water ran through the leaking hoses, these passages must have been death traps. Now and again the beam from the lamp in my helmet transfixed a pointed face, with whiskers and small eyes, then it would scuttle away, into the maze of tunnels.

Every so often, we paused at one of the many junctions or shafts, and one of the Chinese policemen, the stocky, square-faced one, would yell through a megaphone. The sound smacked dully into the walls, or echoed along corridors of plasterboard. The atmosphere was leaden, though strangely aware. This massive structure with all its holes, its pits and shafts, was like a beast at the end of its life, waiting for the final breath. It was a shell, but one that had been soaked in the feverish activity of fifty thousand souls. It was once a holy city, but it had been bled, sweated, urinated, and spat on not only by the poor and the destitute, but also by mobsters, hoodlums, renegades, felons, runaways, refugees, and fugitives, until no part of it remained consecrated. It pressed in on us on all sides, as if it wanted to crush us, but lacked the final strength needed to collapse itself. It was a brooding, moody place and terribly alien to a gweilo like myself. I could sense spirits clustering in the corners: spirits from a culture that no Westerner has ever fully understood. More than once, as I stumbled along behind the others, I said to myself,
What
am I doing here? This is no place for me, in this hole.

The stocky policeman seemed startled by his own voice, blaring from the megaphone: he visibly twitched every time he had to make his announcement. From his build I guessed his family originally came from the north, from somewhere around the Great Wall. His features and heavy torso were Mongol rather than Cantonese, the southerners having a tendency toward small, delicate statures and moon-shaped faces. He probably made a tough policeman out on the streets, where his build would be of use in knocking heads together, but in here his northern superstitions and obsessive fear of spirits made him a liability. Not for the first time I wondered at John Speakman’s judgement in assessing human character.

After about an hour of walking, and sometimes crawling, along tunnels the size of a sewer pipe, John suggested we rest for a while.

I said, ‘You’re not going to eat sandwiches in here, are you?’

It was supposed to be a joke, but I was so tense, it came out quite flat, and John growled, ‘No, of course not.’

We sat crossed-legged in a circle, in what used to be an apartment. It was a hardboard box about ten-by-ten feet.

‘Where are we?’ I asked the torch-lit faces. ‘I mean in relation to the outside.’ The reply could have been ‘the bowels of the earth’ and I would have believed it. It was gloomy, damp, foetid, and reeked of prawn paste, which has an odour reminiscent of dredged sludge.

Sang Lau replied, ‘
Somewhere
near east corner. We move soon, into middle.’

His reply made me uneasy.

‘Somewhere near? Don’t you know exactly?’

John snapped, ‘
Don’t
be silly, Peter. How can he know exactly? The important thing is he knows the way out. This isn’t an exercise in specific location.’

‘Right,’ I said, giving him a mock salute, and he tipped his peaked cap back on his head, a sure sign he was annoyed. If he’d been standing, I don’t doubt his hands would have been on his hips in the classic ‘gweilo giving orders’ stance.

John hadn’t been altogether happy about taking a ‘civilian’ along, despite the fact that I was a close friend. He had a very poor opinion of those who did not wear a uniform of some kind. According to his philosophy, the human race was split into two: There were the protectors (police, army, medical profession, firemen, et al.) and those who needed protection (the rest of the population). Since I apparently came under the second category, I needed looking after. John was one of those crusty bachelors you find in the last outposts of faded empires: a living reminder of the beginning of the century. Sheena, my wife, called him ‘the fossil,’ even to his face. I think they both regarded it as a term of endearment.

However, he said he wanted to do me a favour, since he knew that my job was getting tough. Things were getting tight in the freelance business, especially since Australia had just woken up to the fact that Hong Kong, a thriving place of business where money was to be made hand over fist, was right on its doorstep. The British and American expatriates equalled each other for the top slot, numerically speaking, but Aussie professionals were beginning to enter—if not in droves, in small herds. With them they brought their own parasites, the freelancers, and for the first time I had a lot of competition. It meant I had to consolidate friendships and use contacts that had previously been mostly social. Sheena and I were going through a bit of a rough time too, and one thing she would not put up with was a tame writer who earned less than a poorly paid local clerk. I could sense the words ‘proper job’ hanging in the air, waiting to condense.

Even the darkness in there seemed to have substance. I could see the other young policeman, the thin, sharp Cantonese youth, was uncomfortable too. He kept looking up, into the blackness, smiling nervously. He and his companion cop whispered to each other, and I heard ‘Bruce Lee’ mentioned just before they fell into silence again, their grins fixed. Perhaps they were trying to use the memory of the fabled martial-arts actor to bolster their courage? Possibly the only one of us who was completely oblivious, or perhaps indifferent, to the spiritual ambience of the place was John himself. He was too thick-skinned, too much the old warrior expat, to be affected by spooky atmospheres. I thought he might reassure his men though, since we both knew that when Chinese smiled under circumstances such as these, it meant they were hiding either acute embarrassment or abject terror. They had nothing to be embarrassed about, so I was left with only one assumption.