England, Delhi and Amsterdam
Chapter 9
England was grey and predictable. The April morning wind cut along the train platform and slid down my neck. Gone was the noise and colour of India, now all was bleak and dreary, the only sounds a train shunting along somewhere and two holiday makers chatting about their holiday in Greece. The food had been weird, the sun was too hot and the villa hadn’t been as big as it had looked in the catalogue.
Listening to them brought back to mind a story a friend of mine, Laura, had told me. She had found herself on such a train platform when she returned to England after 4 years of vagabonding around the world. She’d just come back with the trans-Siberian express and was waiting for her train home when an 18 year-old lad came to talk to her. He had just got back from Ibiza.
“It was magic!” He enthused. “I went to all the clubs and all the beaches. I drove a moped and got a good tan too! I got off with loads of drunk English girls and we danced all night. It was terrific!” He looked at Laura and her motley collection of bags and realised that she didn’t have a tan. “So where have you just come back from then?”
“Erm, Moscow?” She answered meekly. He looked at her as if she were insane.
“Cold there was it?” He said as he began to back away down the platform. Too weird.
I laughed as I replayed this story in my head and the English holiays makers slid their bags closer to them defensively.
I crashed at my long-suffering friend’s apartment and didn’t exactly fill the place with enthusiasm. Clive called me up there and we didn’t ask how each other was. I told him the story with the lawyer and hung up.
He flew into London a few days later and I went to meet him to debrief and hand over all of Natasha’s papers. He ‘d occupied the flat of a friend who lived near Victoria and when he opened the door he was all smiles. I could see in his eyes that he was embarrassed about what he had written. He also looked about 5 years older than when I’d last seen him and I remembered what a nightmare he was going through. Fuck it, he was still a friend. We embraced and then went upstairs to drink tea in the living room.
Clive had just got another passport under yet another name and was therefore free to start running around with suitcases again. The procedure was this: he sought out people who had no intentions of travel (there were plenty of apathetic souls back in Manchester to choose from) and then he applied for a passport in their name – but with his photo. There’s still no database of photos to connect to names in the UK.
Clive was a little more nervous than usual about business as three of his associates had been arrested and he put it down to careless emails. In the smuggling business it’s hard to trust anyone however. Facing a possible 25 years in jail there are few people who hold out on naming their accomplices. Would you?
Now free of the whole fucking mess I took off to visit friends in Europe while my publisher planned the launch of my book for June. I hitched to Antwerp in Belgium and there met friends who were driving to Budapest. There I stayed with an old friend I’d met travelling in Morocco, Ivan. I passed a couple of weeks drinking beer, writing and playing backgammon with Ivan. His luck was so bad with the doubling dice that he ended up buying all the groceries in addition to giving me a roof. Perhaps not the best way to endear yourself to your host.
I met up again with the manageress of the local cinema with whom I’d had a ten day affair en route to India three years before. When she learnt that I’d written about her in my book she demanded a copy. What I wrote hadn’t been all that flattering though and so I claimed I had no copies left. Ivan got his own back on me by lending her his copy after I left.
“Ah, she gave me so much free coffee and tickets to movies that I couldn’t say no.” He confessed. The cheap bastard.
I drifted up to Berlin to stay with Mariana, a girl who’s appeared by magic on various occasions around the world like a fairy god-sister to help me out. She had helped me out on my way hitchhiking to India and then bumped into me on the beach in Goa 6 months later.
“You made it!” She cried and before she left she gave me enough money to live on for a few weeks.
I arrived on her doorstep completely broke and we hugged like two and a half years hadn’t passed. She had been born in a humble background in Bulgaria and had escaped by being so beautiful and charming that rich men kept falling in love with her. She was so doted upon that she felt completely comfortable about passing a few handouts along to me every now and then.
She looked after me for a week and then bought me a ticket to Amsterdam where I’d arranged to meet Clive. He was so overwhelmed with his smuggling operation that he needed my help in negotiations with Sethi. I wouldn’t mind making just a few phone calls would I?
I left grim, urban East Berlin behind and arrived in the waterways of Amsterdam half a day later. Hedonistic and commercial as the centre can appear in tourist season, it’s actually a city of great charm and character. The streets and canals form something like a gian horse shoe, forever curving so that you can set off either way down a street ot reach your destination. A fact that doesn’t greatly help the orientation of the tourists stumbling out of the coffee shops after a joint of skunk too many.
I stayed with friends and met up with Clive in one of the main plazas. He appeared under a thundercloud and we’d barely shaken hand before he was off on a bitter monologue.
“I’ve got fucking tooth ache and no time to go the dentist. I’m in fucking agony. And Natasha doesn’t seem to give a shit. I sent her mother there to do the visiting. There’s nothing left between us any more but she’s coming out and that’s a fact. On top of everything I’ve picked up a smack habit too.” Regardless of the weather, Clive was all shadows.
He bought all the beers and the meals as we brainstormed possibilities and the next day we called up Sethi in Delhi. Sethi asked me to phone him at home later that day which seemed a little ominous. The hours ticked by slowly and we watched blonde Dutch girls ride around town on their bicycles. Finally the afternoon arrived and I made the call.
Sethi was as falt and mercenary as ever but he had an offer for us. The deal was that the mean female judge as on her summer break and a special holiday judge was holding session. If we sent $15000 in advance, Sethi was confident of being able to bribe the judge to sign the medical bail release forms.
I told Sethi we’d think about it and we went to sit by the canal and gaze into the depths. The house boats rocked on their moorings and the narrow brick houses cast their reflection into the water.
“Do you think he’s trying to fuck us?” Clive asked me.
“Probably. There’ s no way we can know. But then, shit, we don’t have many other bright options to choose from. Have you got the money?”
“I can get it. It’s owed to me here and there. But it’s fucking crazy to send the money up front to a leech like this.” We sat in silence for a while and then Clive shrugged. “Fuck it. We don’t have much choice. We’ll do like he says but he’s fucking dead if he’s screwing us –make sure he knows that.”
We walked back in the hotel and I called up Sethi again. I explained that the money would have to come in instalments and he promised that as long as all the money was received beforehand, Natasha could walk free on the 24th of June.
“But Mis-ter Set-hi,” I pronounced in as deadpan a voice as I could muster, “I want it to be perfectly clear that my client holds you personally responsible for the money.”
“That is perfectly fine, Mr Tom.”
“And I would like you to know, Mr Sethi, that you will be personally responsible for the money.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Personally responsible.” I didn’t have any illusions. I knew that I couldn’t scare anyone but perhaps I could make Sethi nervous about the repercussions of robbing my ‘client’.
I returned to London to give a couple of interviews for my book and give a speech at the launch. In my spare time I collected large sums of money from various drug dealers. Clive was in the Gulf states and I had to pick up some of his debts to send to Delhi.
It was altogether surreal. I’d phone up someone called ‘Jimmy’ or ‘Budgie’ and arrange to meet them at a tube station. I’d hang around on the platform until I saw someone else who clearly wasn’t waiting for a train. We’d approach each other nervously.
“Tom?”
“Yeah, Budgie?” Then we’d take a walk down the platform and before we turned around an envelope containing tow or three thousand pounds would be slipped into my pocket.
I wasn’t smuggling or dealing or even taking any drugs yet my involvement at this stage was getting closer to the edge all the time. I told myself it was all cool because I was doing it for altruistic reasons; to get Natasha free. Yet when I took Clive and Natasha’s false passports down to the Indian embassy to get the visa stamps put in, I’m not sure how I would have explained my innocence in front of a judge had I been apprehended.
The plan was that Clive would fly from the Gulf to Holland to complete a last piece of business. Then he’d come to London, collect the passports and then fly out to Delhi. I’d booked him a flight that would land at Bombay and then take a domestic connection to Delhi so that he wouldn’t bump into the same customs guys. From there Clive would pick up Natasha and they’d leave through Nepal, probably bribing the guy on the frontier to ignore the absence of an entry stamp in Natasha’s false passport.
I was staying in the apartment in Victoria when Clive arrived. He shook my hand , threw his bags in the corner and sat down at the computer to check his email.
“Get the kettle on, Tom. You got the tickets and the passports? Fuck, my tooth hurts. Is that my phone? What does that wanker want from me?” While he answered his mobile he withdrew a packet of powdered heroin and snorted a line up his left nostril. Drugs have nothing to do with elegance, after all. I put the kettle on and left the apartment before I broke something.
This wasn’t the friend I knew. This was a creation of heroin and cocaine and tooth ache and stress and bitterness and bad deals and no trust in a life long gone off the rails. Clive didn’t crack up under pressure, he just hardened beneath it, becoming cool, cynical and efficient.
He was set on getting Natasha free and then he might just roll over and die. He was a man of his word who was never going to let her down but in the process he had become a machine. He became oblivious to other people and their lives. His drama was so intense that we were all in the shadow of it and fuck us if we didn’t put him first. He burnt bridges wherever he went and left a trail of trashed apartments and hurt feelings behind him. He spoke to friends who helped him in a way that most wouldn’t dare to speak to their worst enemies. Maybe he had to, maybe this was the only way he managed to keep on going when most others would have cracked up long ago. Either way, as I watched him frenetically type his emails that morning, I thought to myself – this guy is going to end up dead or in jail within a year. Sadly, I was right, too.
Clive flew out the next morning, leaving behind a burnt lampshade, stains of molten heroin on the coffee table and pills lying all over the carpet. The usual debris. His host’s girlfriend returned home and burst into tears.
It was now all out of my hands. Clive had met two Indians in the Gulf with mafia connections and they accompanied him to Delhi. They arrived on June the 23rd, a day before Natasha was due to be released. One sleepless night later they phoned up Sethi to find out what time they could meet Natasha at the jail.
“there has been a complication…” Sethi sighed. Complications in India mean more money but the lawyer had no idea what was coming next. Clive’s mafia friends just smiled and said ‘leave it to us’. They drove to Sethi’s office and suggested that if he ever wanted to see his family again then he’d better keep up his end of the deal.
Natasha was free one hour later.
They drove to Nepal, the mafia took care of the entry points and a week later they flew back to Holland.
And suddenly that was it. After ten months in jail Natasha was now free and getting stoned in Amsterdam. I flew out to see her and we didn’t quite know what to say to each other. We finally managed a nervous hug and when I asked her how she felt about it all she answered:
“It’s like it never happened.”
Of course the heroin helped that but both she and Clive looked years younger and they had the playful air of sweethearts. That weekend we had fun drinking and going to the cinema, cracking up when Natasha got hopelessly lost. Three hours later we found her by a canal, looking like a five year-old who had lost her parents.
“We’ll make you a sign that you can wear around your neck,” I suggested, “it can say ‘my name is Natasha and I live in the Rembrandt Hotel. Please help me.’”
And there we were. As fast as it began it had all ended and I decided to use the British Airways money to fly to Israel. I never asked Clive for any money for all I had done for him but I was sure he wouldn’t forget me if I was ever in need.
It was only later that I realised that some stories don’t end up happily ever after.
