The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (32 page)

‘Try to get me in Economy and Robbie can get me an upgrade, but I’ll pay the full whack if I have to. If the first flight is full tell Robbie it’s urgent and get him to get me on the jump seat.’

‘Will do,’ she said, but I was already walking away from her. As I headed for the stairs Bill put his head out of his glass cage and shouted that the office car was waiting for me at the front door.

I was at Gatwick an hour later and I called Katy from a pay phone. She said she’d got me on the direct Cathay flight and that Robbie had fixed it so that I didn’t have to pay. I could tell from her voice that she knew about Sally, but like Bill she didn’t say anything. I wasn’t surprised she knew. A newspaper office is the last place you can expect to keep a secret. I got to the desk twenty minutes before take-off and the British Airways guy who did the button pressing gave me a strange look when I said I had no luggage, but Robbie had got me on First Class so he had to bare his teeth and ask me to go straight to immigration please and have a good flight. The Asian smile would have to wait until I got on the plane. I wasn’t thinking straight, I couldn’t concentrate, all my thoughts had been removed and individually packed in cotton wool and sealed in polythene bags. I didn’t want to think about Sally, not right now, so I left the bags alone, I couldn’t risk opening by mistake the one that had her name in it. But I’d forgotten something and I was just about to walk through immigration when I remembered what it was. I’d run out of coins for the phone. But the paper accepts all collect calls so I rang Katy and asked her who our stringer was in Hong Kong.

‘I’ll check with Foreign,’ she said and she went off to Nick Webber’s glass box. Fifteen minutes to go before take-off so there was no rush but I was still tapping the phone nervously against my ear by the time she came back on.

‘Howard,’ she said. ‘Howard Berenger.’

‘Staff or freelance?’ I asked, because stringers could be either.

‘Freelance,’ she said. ‘Do you want his number?’

‘No kid, it’s all right. Just call him and tell him to meet me at the airport. Tell him what I look like, OK?’

‘Sure,’ she said. She sounded like she was going to add ‘Good luck’ and I was relieved when she didn’t.

‘Hell, I nearly forgot. Ask Roger if he’ll finish my story. It’s slugged RAPE23 and it’s damn near finished so I want my name on it.’

‘Will do,’ she said.

I made the plane with five minutes to spare. I’ve flown on most of the airlines in the world at some time or another, and after a while they all seem the same. The service varies, so do the uniforms and the food, but a plane is a plane and time in them is wasted time. I took the freebie shaving kit so that I would look halfway decent when I landed in Hong Kong and I took the headphones and put them on right away because I didn’t want to make small talk with the tweed-jacketed bearded guy with bad teeth in the seat next to mine.

A Chinese girl with an American accent and too much eye make-up asked me if I wanted a drink. Do bears shit in the woods? Of course I wanted a drink, I’d wanted a drink every day of the three weeks I’d been on the wagon, and I wanted a drink now more than ever because I needed something to keep Sally in the bag and out of my head. I’d promised myself that I’d stay off the booze this time, come what may, but this was different. I needed a drink and if I didn’t have one I knew I’d go crazy, so I ordered a gin and tonic.

It came with a tinfoil packet of salted nuts which I treated with the contempt it deserved. I held the glass up to my eyes, watched the bubbles collect on the inside and smelt the lime that nestled among the ice cubes and then I sniffed it and felt the spray tingle against my nose and I could smell the gin and then I sipped it and let the coldness of it roll around my tongue and down my throat and then I drank it in three gulps and it was gone. Three weeks. Almost a record.

The stewardess took the empty glass and then we taxied to the runway. The engines went on and the seat kicked me in the back and we were up in the air with just sixteen hours, or however long it was, between me and Howard Berenger and Hong Kong.

I put the seat fully back and tuned the stereo into the jazz channel and while Grover Washington Jr did his stuff I slowly and carefully opened the plastic bag with Sally’s name on it.

Sally is twelve years younger than me and I’ll be thirty-eight next birthday so she had more of her own teeth and a lot less cynicism than I had.

She’s a full head shorter than I am which makes her about five feet two and me the older brother she always has to look up to. Her eyes are blue and bright and her nose turns up just enough to be pretty without being cute and she has a habit of licking her upper lip with her catlike tongue when she’s worried. Describing a sister’s figure is tough because you’re talking about a body that I’d grown up with and seen change over almost three decades, but she was slightly plump and I guess if I was eyeing her up in a pub I’d have said that her breasts were just a shade too full and her legs a bit too short, but there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been glad that she was my sister. She’s smart, very smart, smarter than I am, she can out-think most people she meets and five minutes into a conversation she’s finishing their sentences for them. She’ll grow out of it I guess, except that she wasn’t going to because she’s dead and I must get out of the habit of thinking of her in the present tense because now she’s part of my past.

I last saw her about a year and a half ago, in London. Sally had a grasshopper mind, chopping and changing and job-hopping whenever she got bored. Her CV was a nightmare. She’d dropped out of teacher training college and went off to sell skiing equipment in some posh resort in the Alps. She did well but soon got bored and came back to England with a couple of thousand pounds in the bank and a suntan and got a job as a computer operator with one of the big City stockbroking firms. Three months later she switched over to programming and made section head before chucking it in and crewing a yacht being delivered to some property tycoon in Australia. She spent a couple of months in Oz selling advertising space on a daily and decided she’d like to be a journalist, wangled a courier flight back to England and hit Fleet Street, except that the Street hit back. No experience and no union card meant that she had as much chance of getting a job on the nationals as she had of winning the Grand National without a horse. She managed to get a few shifts on one of the Sunday tabloids but then the chapel found out she wasn’t in the union and showed her the door. She got a few articles published in women’s magazines, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Sally had set her heart on seeing her name in lights, and what she wanted she usually managed to get.

How, she’d asked me, sitting cross-legged on the leather sofa in my flat, how could she break into the closed shop that journalism had become? Find a free sheet that’ll take you on, or a trade magazine. Learn the business from the bottom, shorthand, typing, pick up the basic skills and the union card, then switch to a local weekly paper, covering the courts and the district council meetings, think of it as an apprenticeship, then move up to one of the regional evenings or dailys. Keep pushing stuff out to the nationals, spend your holidays haunting the pubs and bars where their reporters drink, keep pestering the news editors until they give you a few shifts just to shut you up and then prove how good you are. If you’re good you’ll get in. If you’re not, you won’t. That’s how I did it and it took me five years. That’s what I told her, big brother offering younger sister the benefit of his advice. It felt good.

‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ she said, and flicked her hair sideways in annoyance. So much for brotherly advice.

‘There’s got to be a quicker way,’ she said, and true to form she found it. In Hong Kong. The journalists there are a transient bunch at the best of times so it was fairly easy for anyone who can string a couple of words together to get a job on one of the papers. That guaranteed membership of the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association which in turn entitled her to a union card back in London. Smart girl. She’d arrived in Hong Kong eighteen months ago and I’d spoken to her half a dozen times on the phone. She was enjoying herself so much she’d decided to stay. Hong Kong was magic, do you miss me? How’s London? How’s the comic? Must go, bye. Crazy. I’d barely thought of her during the time she was in Hong Kong, I guess because I knew she’d always be there at the end of a phone if I needed her, but now she was dead and the feeling of loss was a dull ache that just wouldn’t go away. I missed her, I wanted to talk to her, with her. Shit, she was my sister and I should have been there.

I realized with a jolt that I’d said the last bit out loud and I opened my eyes to the tune of Sadao Watanabe’s ‘Birds of Passage’ to see a stewardess bending over me with a worried frown spoiling her little girl looks. She asked me if I was all right and I said sure, just a bad dream, and would she please get me another gin and tonic and make it a double. This time I didn’t savour it, I drank it quickly, but it didn’t do anything to make the ache go away. I hadn’t expected it to, it would take more than a couple of gins. At the very minimum it would need answers to the five questions Bill Hardwicke hadn’t asked. I was going to Hong Kong to get the five answers and then I’d take it from there. Sally wasn’t a jumper, she was too full of life to have ended it by throwing herself through a window God knows how many storeys up. She was full of fun and pulled me out of black depressions more often than I cared to remember.

I was going to miss her sense of humour. She caught me with a belter one afternoon, chewing gum at the counter of an all night chemist in Hampstead where we’d gone to buy Alka Seltzer and anything else that might help relieve what I thought was an upset stomach but which turned out to be the first sign of an ulcer that’s been playing me up for the best part of four years now.

‘What’s the date?’ she’d asked.

‘Fifteenth, I think. Why?’

‘We’ll be needing these then,’ she replied, and picked up a handful of contraceptives from a display box. ‘Pay the lady, then,’ she said, opening her eyes in mock horror. I was stunned and it was a toss up who was the more embarrassed, me or the grandmother behind the counter. Sally just stood there looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, revelling in my discomfort. Bitch. Then there was the time she sent a dozen red roses to the office with a card that said, ‘To the man I love most in all the world’ and signed it ‘Reggie.’ She’d been pulling strokes like that on me ever since she was 13 years old and I could never get angry at her because she was the one bright shining star in a life that I found grey and bleak. If you think I’m cynical now, you can’t begin to imagine what I’d be like if Sally wasn’t part of my life.

‘I’m going to miss you, Sally,’ I whispered, and this time didn’t care that the words came out.

The stewardesses served dinner and then the lights were dimmed and a film flickered on. I finished another gin and tonic (fourth or fifth? Maybe the sixth. Who’s counting anyway?), and reclined the seat and slept.

The ever efficient stewardesses woke us up two hours before landing and gave us breakfast and then I used the freebie washing kit, dumping it in the bin in the toilet cubicle. I wanted to arrive in Hong Kong with nothing, and I planned to leave the same way, the only thing I’d bring back would be the knowledge of what happened to Sally. Anything I needed while I was there I’d buy and leave behind. Don’t ask me to explain why, it just felt cleaner that way. I didn’t want to arrive with a suitcase like a tourist, or with a briefcase like a businessman. I simply wanted to find out what had happened and then get back to London.

I read the Cathay inflight magazine from cover to cover and tried to absorb as many facts and figures about Hong Kong as I could. Population six million or thereabouts, ninety-eight per cent of them Chinese, Chinese and English the official languages, shops open seven days a week, principal exports clothing, toys and watches, a Crown colony due to be handed back to China in 1997. That sort of stuff. Then my ears popped and the seatbelt light was on and we were flying between, not above, the tower blocks and then the 747 banked sharply to the right and we were dropping down to the finger of reclaimed land sticking out into the harbour.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in one of the immigration queues, waiting impatiently midway down a line of a dozen people. The speed the lines moved varied with the efficiency of the immigration officer who was stamping the passports and our line was being dealt with by a young Chinese girl who gave all the indications of having terminal sleeping sickness. Eventually I got to the head of the queue and she took my passport without looking at me, then scrutinized every page, every visa. My passport is nine years old and I’d spent most of them flying around the world for various newspapers so I had almost as many stamps as Stanley Gibbons. She checked every one, then she squinted up at me through a pair of lenses that looked like the bottoms of milk bottles. The girls in Hong Kong are the prettiest in the world the man in the seat in front of me had said as we’d taxied down the runway to the terminal building. He should have seen this one, with her badly-permed hair and a dimple in her chin big enough to grow potatoes in. This girl was ugly; her eyes were too far apart, her ears stuck out like mug handles and her skin was marked with old acne scars. She probably had a great personality, was an absolute dream with children and small animals and would make someone a wonderful wife and mother, but I doubted it. I think her plainness was more than skin deep.

‘How long will you stay in Hong Kong?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. As long as it takes.’

‘Business or holiday?’

‘Holiday, I suppose.’ I reached for the passport but she moved it away.

‘You have been to Hong Kong before?’

‘Only in transit.’