Running with the Barbarians (1991)

Inside the Kai Tak terminal we were given the news. Our connecting flight to London had left without us. We’d missed it by half-an-hour. We’d been “duffilled”. Which seemed kind of strange, almost sibylline, because on the flight from Melbourne, during one of my frequent walks around the aircraft, I’d noticed a girl engrossed by Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar. In that same book Duffill, who “was old and his clothes were far too big for him”, left the Orient Express at the Italian station of Domodossola to buy provisions. He wasn’t quick enough when the train started pulling out and he was left behind on the platform. Thereafter his name became a verb.

Our flight was late because somewhere between Melbourne and Manila, high above the Indonesian archipelago, a fuel line had ruptured, meaning no fuel could get to at least one of the engines. Though the aircraft theoretically had masses of fuel, certainly enough to get us to Hong Kong, it was stuck in the tanks inside the wings. Reaching Hong Kong without landing somewhere and fixing the problem was out of the question. Of course, at the time we knew none of this. The captain spoke reassuringly of an “unscheduled landing”, he referred to a “slight problem”, we had “nothing to worry about”. Certainly the antique Chinese couple sitting next to me thought so. It was, I thought, the way to go, nodding cheerily at anything which shows a tendency towards animation. But I didn’t want the last picture I saw of this world to be two leather-faced antiquarians I couldn’t even converse with without using a crude form of sign language, who inclined their heads deferentially each time I thanked them for letting me pass in order to go to the toilet, who bared their teeth like maniacs whenever I accidentally bumped the wife with my elbow while trying to make myself comfortable. What did they think when they heard the phrase “nothing to worry about”? Didn’t they even understand that small amount of English? I pictured the captain repeating the message in Mandarin and suddenly, when he got to the crucial part, the smiles freezing on the faces of my Chinese friends, their hands clawing at their seatbelts, the wife communicating to everyone in that universal language – the scream – while the husband runs up the aisle until he realizes he has absolutely no idea where he’s going and falls to his knees in mute uncomprehending resignation.

Nothing to worry about! I’d seen enough late-night television to understand it means exactly the opposite. The only reason you have nothing to worry about is because soon you’ll be dead. Perhaps the captain’s meaning was that soon we’d have no mortgage repayments, no child support payments, no electricity or gas bills to eat into our meager incomes. We have “nothing to worry about”. The captain might as well have said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my solemn duty to inform you that this aircraft is about to go into a nose dive and impact the ground at a speed approximating five hundred kilometers per hour. Please assume crash positions.” Am I exaggerating? As we touched down in Manila the entire runway, or so it seemed to me, was flanked with fire engines and ambulances, all facing in towards the plane. And as we passed they turned to follow us, their lights flashing all the way to the terminal. It reminded me of a scene out of Thunderbirds.

The Captain came on the intercom again. I’d been listening to a Bruch symphony when the speakers in my headphones clicked and his well-rehearsed supportive tones informed me that the fire engines were just a formality, a precaution, protocol, if you will. There’s really nothing to worry about. There he goes again, I thought. And this time I refused to believe him. The Captain, evidently, was a liar. You do the math. “Nothing to worry about” does not equal a shitload of fire engines and ambulances with lights flashing. If my Chinese companions had understood me I would have pointed out the window and said, ‘He expects us to believe him after that?’

We sat inside the terminal at Manila for close to three hours. I don’t think they had the air-conditioning on because the air was stifling. I watched a young Chinese woman with a very young daughter shake out a napkin and lay it on the floor in an almost perfect square. Her husband pulled various packages out of a back pack and arranged them on the napkin. When it was all done they sat down to eat. The husband offered me a cold spring roll but, having eaten not so long ago on the plane, I declined. It was a touching moment. This tiny family unit, complete and lacking for nothing, inviting a stranger into their midst. It made me think of my own wife and children, wonder what they were doing. I looked at my watch. The children would be in bed, my wife sitting up alone reading or watching television. Or perhaps she too would be asleep. Pretty soon I was nodding off over Conrad’s dense prose.

When we finally arrived in Hong Kong we discovered our connecting flight had gone without us.

So we were duffilled. I counted about fifty of us all up. Some of us were not happy. Particularly the group of ten-or-so from somewhere in the north of England. They wore jeans and soccer shirts, they paid good money to have someone shave their heads, and the women . . . Well. When they wanted their hair done they gave a nod towards H.G Wells and Dr Who and went back to 1973 when they used to run with tha gerls. Not one, men included, was much taller than five foot. They were sturdy, this lot. Squat and chunky. The men’s stunted legs, their intimidating shoulders, and the women’s grim jowly faces made them look like bulldogs. The women were fat, but the men were all muscle – I imagined if they were so inclined they could rip a person’s arm out of its socket without much trouble. It’s probably what they did back home of a Saturday night. A quick pint or several down the local, then off to some dark alley to severe someone’s arm from their body. I stood completely still, too afraid to move lest I unwittingly poke one of them in the eye with my elbow.

The men griped out loud, only pausing for their women to tell them what to say next.

‘Ask them wha that fook they think they mean it’s gone.’

‘Wha tha fook do ye mean it’s gone?’

‘Ask them where the bloody ‘ell it’s gone to.’

‘Where the bloody ‘ell ‘as it gone to then?’

‘Ask them why did they no stop it from leavin’.’

‘Why did ye no stop it from leavin’?’

‘They’re nothin but a bunch of fookin’ slopes.’

‘Fookin’ slopes.’

All this directed towards the hapless female Cathay Pacific personnel girl. Who, I judged by looking at her, was on her first night on the job. Any moment now she would burst into tears.

I was disgusted. And embarrassed. They were the worst England has to offer. The most horrible On the Buses caricatures. Noisy, belligerent, confrontational. I got the impression they were spoiling for a fight. One pug-nosed woman, noteworthy for her inflexibility, believed the entire world should know by what degree she’d been wronged.

‘People will ‘ear about this!’ she threatened, pointing and wheezing with the indignity of it all. ‘I know people. My son works for the newspaper back ‘ome. ‘E’ll write stories.’

These people always seem to know someone. Their relatives always seem to work in professions where they can inflict the most damage – either to the mind, the body or the wallet – on someone. They always seemed ready to spring into action at the first familial clarion call. Her son probably did work for the newspaper – parochial to the last, as though there really were only one paper, or at least only one that mattered – but most likely he was a tea boy, starting his career at the bottom like the rest of us. Because another thing these types of people are forever doing – they’re always big-noting themselves.

The woman let rip with her self-righteous prattling. And the mood was infectious. Soon the entire contingent had something they wanted to prove. They had been cheated and lied to. This simple indisputable “fact” brought them together and created a clubby atmosphere, only of the most egregious kind. An element of racism crept in and soon they were strutting about like lords, adopting superior postures for the benefit of their Asian “inferiors”. They snatched hotel vouchers from the personnel girl, who flinched and took a step back, and held the rectangular pieces of card gingerly between thumb and forefinger as though they were tainted in some way. Ashamed, I wanted to tell the girl, I’m not with these people. When my turn came for a voucher I thanked her profusely and, thinking of my aircraft companions, smiled a lot.

A group of Chinese porters, grinning to the last, loaded our bags onto a trolley and led us to a waiting coach. They grinned despite the constant hail of abuse.

‘Watch tha’ fookin’ bag, ye daft twit. Cost me a packet that did.’

Next it was the bus driver’s turn to face the volley. He stood grinning and motioning us up the stairs while several of the lads, egged on by their wives, told him exactly what they thought of his bus. Colourful, filthy expletives rolled off their tongues, but to my astonishment the bus driver kept smiling and grinning. Maybe he, like everyone else who had tried to help us tonight, had experienced worse. At least with my group no-one had thrown a punch.

We were driven directly to the hotel. The city, bathed in orange light, was filthy. On many buildings the paint had either peeled or fallen away leaving large irregular segments of bare cement. The constant dampness had long ago robbed signs of their meaning. Red and green Chinese letters were only half visible. It was as though someone had come along and tore strips off the walls.

We turned a corner into a dimly lit road and passed the entrance to a night club. On the pavement two men were beating up a third, one man wedging the hapless victim between his arms while the other lunged at his stomach with his fists.

‘Savages,’ a woman in the seat in front of me said, and for the first time I was inclined to agree with her.

Though it didn’t prevent me from wanting to say, At least they dress well. Because yes, both attackers were fashionably dressed in black slacks, polished shoes, and gold button down shirts, as was the victim. It appeared to be some kind of uniform. Perhaps the altercation was the result of a work dispute.

Unbelievably, the woman’s friend said, ‘I ‘ope they fookin kill ‘im.’

Which made me think those thugs weren’t too different from the bus crowd. Every city has its dark alleys.

Within a few minutes we were deposited out front of the Metropole Hotel on Nathan Road. I made sure I was at the front of the line when the rooms were allocated. I didn’t want to have to spend a minute longer with my traveling companions. As we’d pulled up in front of the hotel they’d let fly with a fresh tirade of abuse. The hotel wasn’t good enough. It was in a seedy part of town. They should be compensated for any inconvenience. Why didn’t someone shout at them, You are being compensated, you wankers! Why didn’t I shout it? I knew exactly why. For the same reason you don’t poke a bulldog in the eye. Besides, I valued my arms. It occurred to me maybe the bus driver and now the hotel porters could take a swift walk round the block, shell out a few hundred Hong Kong dollars, and hire the services of the two brutes we’d seen only a few minutes earlier. They seemed to know what they were doing.

My room wasn’t much different to other hotel rooms I’d occupied in other parts of the world. I took a bath, closed the curtains to block out the carroty light, and crawled into bed. It was almost 3am. I opened Conrad’s Victory, but within minutes I was asleep.