TABOO TALES(erotica)

Excerpt from the private diary of Nguye’t Morrison

Wed, 27th April, 2011

I haven’t had a chance to update this since Saturday, things have been a little… hectic, shall we say. After Jamie gave me such a stunning Graduation present, he surprised me with a trip to Paris, and put a ring on my finger. I must show it to Julie and Shelagh, do a little gloating, well, a lot of gloating, the rock is enormous, or, as dad put it, bigger than a pimple on a pig’s arse; he’s such an old-fashioned romantic, how did mum resist him for as long as she did…

Jamie brought back something from his sojourn in Vietnam that made my weekend, in a ‘this is terrible but it’s also fantastic’ sort of way; details of the sordid dealings of that animal who stole my sister when she was 3-weeks old. It made terrible, horrifying reading, and it made me feel deeply unclean, but it gave us a definite lead on where to begin looking for Hu’e, and it finally let me know the true extent of the pain and loss that man has caused. I’m not sorry to say that I feel a great deal of schadenfreude, ‘Shameful Joy’, to know that he’s probably being tortured or raped in a hell-hole prison right now; sometimes natural justice does get a chance to work, and he’s probably lucky at that; if it were up to me, I’d tie the rope and kick away the chair…

I gave Polar Bear the low-down on how to bend the law sufficiently to allow us to get married, he wants to know why I’m not running for Parliament, and dad’s worried I’ll take up bank fraud as a hobby, but I just wanted my Polar Bear to be aware that the clock’s ticking; mum gave him the speech, the verbal equivalent of choosing to cut the red wire or the blue wire, and it finally percolated through; he may be a whiz at determining deep well yields and thingies, but when it comes to the realities of human marital customs, and the intricacies involved in planning weddings and suchlike, like all men, he’s a complete arse-head; he couldn’t seem to see that putting a ring on a girl’s finger and thinking it ends there is not a good or healthy thing to do, especially if said girl wears stiletto heels and is willing, purely in a spirit of scientific enquiry, to discover if it’s possible to push one though a man’s instep and nail his foot to the floor.

Sometimes poor Jamie is all too living proof that the average man’s head is a large echoing space, with only three active neurons; one each for football, beer, and scratching, all enclosed by a thick bony case that’s a good place to hang his ears, that sometimes looks like George Clooney, but more often like Mickey Rooney.

Anyway, we ‘re waiting with bated breath for a package from one more of his mysterious, nefarious, nay, downright shady contacts in one of the world’s lesser-known waste spaces, he refused to discuss it with Jamie via email, so it’s obviously relevant and important enough to send by bonded courier. Apparently the man is some sort of Frontier Sheriff-type, hand never too far from his gun, 1, 000 yard stare, all that stuff, and I keep asking myself; how does an oil prospector from South London ever meet shady characters like that, is there some sort of secret society they belong to, The Ancient and Elucidated Order of The Wandering Idiots, or is there a real Star Wars-type cantina out there somewhere, where some murky Han Solo-ish character waits for people like Jamie to show up? Enquiring minds want to know…

You’re waffling, girl, stop it.

The Polar Bear is trying to look all nonchalant, but I’ve been able to see through him since I was 3 years old, and he’s definitely keyed-up and excited; I know he’s trying to keep me from getting my hopes up, but he really should give me more credit than that; I know that whatever happens, we couldn’t be any worse off than we are now; we’re currently in a state of advanced ignorance about where Hu’e went after she was taken, and if this package has no new information, we’re still ignorant of her whereabouts — it’s not additive, we won’t suddenly become more ignorant, no matter what, it just means we start looking again, and find someone else to help us, and fretting about it and clicking and drumming fingers on tables and pacing and flicking TV channels aimlessly does no good to anyone, and really, really gets on my nerves. I just wish he’d go to the pub, find an old school friend and get smashed, blow-off some of that excess nervous energy, because he’s driving me up the bloody wall!

++++

This week has been the slowest week on record, every day since we got back from Paris has been one of those days where suddenly! nothing happened, and it’s been fantastic. This is my first real break from work/study in 6 years, and Nia’s not due to start her new job until May 16th, so two whole weeks of Nia and lounging around. What shall we do, what shall we do?

I had a couple of suggestions for her, but she deep-sixed those, she said it was impractical, that walking bow-legged into her new job was bound to cause comment; she’s not closed and barred the bedroom door or anything; nor is she averse to more than a little wild whoo-hoo; she just believes I should give her a sporting chance to get away now and again… she did suggest I give my dirty mind a good wash, and get a proper shave while I’m at it, designer stubble works on Brad Pitt, on me it just looks… scraggy, like a badly-mowed lawn.

Nia killed some time by going to Lambeth Town Hall and filing a Deed Poll, a legal instrument to legally change her name, to Nguye’t Laura Vienh Lo, mum’s maiden name, this being Part One of her nefarious plan to outwit the Registrar when we registered our overseas wedding. With a few little tweaks and refinements, it was the plan she’d outlined in Paris, tested it out on dad, and gone ahead with putting it in motion. Hopefully we’d get the paperwork through in a couple of days, then we could book flights to Hong Kong for the purposes of getting married, so we’d just have a couple of days away; we’d pay with jet-lag, but it would be worth it.

I waited, impatiently, I’ll admit, for my package from Thawip in Thailand, he said it would be interesting, and he gave me the name of a bloke in the HKPF, the Hong Kong Police, which intrigued me; it’s a bit of a leap from Luang Prabang in Laos to Hong Kong, maybe if this bloke had something to tell me it would be worth going out to see him; I had an appointment with Aboitiz Geotech-Orient in Tagbilaran City, in the Philippine Visayas, in late May, looking at offshore gas extraction possibilities in the Camotes Sea, maybe I could reschedule and hop over to Hong Kong to kill two birds with one stone, it’s only a little over an hour from Manila to Hong Kong. I decided to see if this package merited meddling with my schedule.

I did know one thing though; if I went out to Hong Kong, no way Nia was coming with me; I didn’t like the idea of her getting it into her head to do a bit of sleuthing while she was out there, the authorities take a dim view of that sort of free-enterprise, that’s what the HKPF and the PAP (People’s Armed Police) are for, and they don’t appreciate amateur interference; they have an unfortunate habit of speaking English right up to the point where you need to explain yourself then they suddenly stop understanding English and start writing out your confession in fluent Mandarin…Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

Nia, of course, will definitely refuse to see it that way. Amongst her many adorable traits is a doggedness that sometimes flares up into outright rebellion, hopefully she’d stay quiet and do the think-work, let me do the leg-work, maybe we’d meet somewhere in the middle. I decided to pop into the office later, see if I could switch things around, once this package got here and Nia had a chance to digest what, if anything, it actually meant.

Saturday morning passed into Saturday afternoon, and just as I was thinking that it wouldn’t arrive until Monday, the doorbell chimed. When I opened the door, a man in a courier uniform stood there holding a bulky sealed package. I signed for it and tore the packet open. Inside was a thick wad of photocopied pages and photographs of various sinister-looking men, all holding number plaques, obviously mug-shots, maps, and copies of UN and American Drug Enforcement Agency reports and commentaries. All in all, there must have been 300-plus pages, more information than I had hoped for, now all we had to do was make sense of it all, and then maybe we’d get our next move.

Nia was delighted, she immediately latched onto the police reports, sorting them by date, oldest first, some of them dating back to 1980, and tying them up with the stack of mug-shots. After a while, one of the piles of reports began to refer increasingly to one man, a harmless-looking middle-aged man named Han Wu, sometimes labelled ‘Jimmy’, with an increasing number of references to something called 14K, and other references to something or someone called ‘Kuomintang’, which sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

This Jimmy character seemed to spend a lot of time being questioned in Chiang Mai, and had been granted numerous visa’s to Laos, flying to Vientiane almost every month. He also seemed to take an extraordinary amount of holidays to Canada, flying to Toronto three or four times a year on a multiple holiday visa, and there was a DEA report linking him to something called ‘The KMT’. He was linked with several of the others in the pile of mug-shots, with reports that tallied as to dates when they had all been in Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, Singapore and Hong Kong at the same time, and many of them seemed to enjoy travelling to Canada almost as much as ‘Jimmy’. These were just snippets Nia passed over to me as she read through and collated one report after another. I decided that the UN reports would make an interesting read. I was not wrong.