The Buddha of Brewer Street (11 page)

So, many years ago, Kunga had written to the Dalai Lama for his advice. To stay and sign? To lie and deceive? To fight? Or to fly? The monk’s dilemma. The Lama’s response had been characteristically blunt.

‘To Rapang!’ his reply had instructed, naming a monastery in the remotest part of north-western Tibet. ‘Where there is no electricity. No vegetables. There you will find safety. For where there is no electricity and no vegetables, there you will find no Chinese!’

As Kunga had read the advice he could almost hear the Lama laughing. And how right he had been. The Chinese had no liking for the rigours of Tibetan life and everywhere tried to recreate a miniature version of the Han homeland. Han food. Han fashions. Han laws, of course. Even the language – only Chinese was permitted to be used in the schools. The Han claimed they were a civilizing influence in this feudal land. But they also opened bars and brothels. And gaols. And lost interest in their civilizing role with each mile that led them away from the nearest power station.

Rapang was a very long way from any power station, or serviceable road, or supply of beer. And it was here that Kunga had come several years before to be the chant master and to give himself time for meditation. If that in Chinese eyes made him a parasite, it was a remarkably ill-chosen spot. Not a place to grow fat. But a place of peace, a place where, in normal circumstances, he was able to sleep. Although tonight was different. Kunga lay restless in his cell, unable to push away his thoughts, listening to the complaints of the mountain wind through the shutters and distracted by the scampering of mice as they sought out the offering of rice he had placed before his small shrine.

There was no light. What moon there was lay obscured behind the shutters, closed against the howling wind. The darkness embraced him and once more he tried to open his mind to his dreams, to practise the dream yoga that enabled him to search into the corners of his consciousness. Perhaps that would help him understand why he was so unsettled tonight, why indeed he had been growing increasingly restless for several days. Dreams might help, but only if he could sleep.

He tried to relax his limbs, to drag himself through to sleep, but to no avail. It was as though spirits from another world were prodding his mind with a stick. And gradually that world became clearer. It was a world much like his own. Of mountains and bottomless lakes and air filled with the tang of wood fires and dew on meadows. Of colours as clear as if they had been freshly painted in enamel. And the sun beating down, warming his bones. Suddenly across the fields he could see a man approaching, carrying a small bundle. A man without a face. And as he approached, Kunga could see that the bundle the man was holding was the size and shape of a small child, wrapped in swaddling clothes. But as they drew nearer Kunga could see he had made a mistake. They were not swaddling clothes. They were funeral robes. A voice whispered in his ear that the child had been brought home; one last look, before they buried him. And with a sense of overwhelming terror that all but choked him, Kunga realized that this child, this bundle of rags, was the incarnation. The Lama. Dead. His world destroyed. And the bundle was being brought closer to him, mocking, accusing him, for Kunga had failed. Closer and closer they came until Kunga couldn’t breathe and knew that he, too, was going to die. And a shadow fell across the scene that turned the sweat on his body to ice. Now the man was upon him, reaching out to show Kunga the child, announcing the end of all hope. And the man looked up. Kunga at last could see his face. It was smiling. Taunting. It was Chinese.

Kunga uttered a cry and with both hands pushed the vision away from him. He sat on the edge of his bed, gasping for breath, feeling the sweat trickle down his face like tears.

He knew what it meant. The Lama had arrived, had been reborn but already was in mortal danger. As Kunga himself was in danger. A feeling of compelling dread gripped him. The time had come and already he might be too late.

An hour after dawn, and only five after Kunga had fled, a Chinese officer arrived at the monastery in his jeep. He was followed by three truckloads of troops. But to no avail. It would make no difference how many troops he brought with him. For already Kunga had gone, fled, leaving his life behind him.

Reg Limping was the topic of the day. And probably would be next Monday too, since the Sunday tabloid had promised to publish ‘more exotic antics and stunning images of the Honourable and Upright Member for Coalbridge’. Bloody photographs! They’d been taken just for fun. A bit of a turn-on. Nothing more than a few Polaroids to perk him up. And on his mother’s grave he’d have sworn that only a mental patient would allow them to be published. He had reckoned without the publicity-seeking out-of-work actress who also featured in them. Limping braced his shoulders and continued his uneasy progress around the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, lips set in what he hoped was defiant form as his eyes searched for colleagues who might engage him in conversation for longer than ten seconds. Hell, he was sure they would understand. Why, could’ve happened to anyone.

Not quite anyone, Goodfellowe thought. To have conducted an affair with a snap-happy actress born three years after your own wedding was careless. To have put the young woman on public display at one of the Prime Minister’s receptions at Chequers was crass. Getting caught by a police patrol car consummating the affair in his Range Rover in a Buckinghamshire lay-by on the way home was little short of cretinous. And attempting to drive away from the scene so hurriedly that his trousers flew out of the window ensured that, whatever else happened in Limping’s undistinguished career, he would never be forgotten. He had not only ensured an eventual obituary in
The Times
, but had already tied up its content.
‘An unremarkable career made notable, indeed notorious, by an incident in a lay-by when …’

Yet, in his guts, Goodfellowe was eaten with envy. His own social life was little more than a shroud, his sex life the dust within its folds. On days like this he’d have given his left nut to have been in – or out – of Limping’s trousers. It was one of those days when he had visited Elinor.

His wife’s condition had grown steadily worse. The processes of the mind and the spirit subjected to unimaginable pain are still broadly a mystery to the medical profession, which, in many instances, can offer little more than condolence and bromides. Within Elinor something had snapped, that internal pathway which connects hope with resistance, and not all their efforts had been able to sew the connection back together again. So she had been sectioned, locked away as a danger to herself, where she spent her time slipping deeper and deeper inside herself. That morning Goodfellowe had visited and she hadn’t stirred. She had responded neither to his presence nor to his voice; not to the massage of her arms that he had given nor even, in a final act of tearful desperation, to the violent shaking of her shoulders. He thought that she was going to break in two. She had shrunk, grown so frail, her skin like parchment gathered from the floor of an Egyptian sarcophagus. But it was her eyes that affected him most. They were opened wide, but led nowhere. There was nothing within. Nothing stirred.

Yet he needed her more than ever. He had sat at the end of her bed and talked about Sam and pregnancy and his own inadequacies in dealing with the situation, begging Elinor for help. She had not stirred. Hadn’t been there, wouldn’t be there, for him or for Sam.

He blamed Elinor. He blamed Sam. He even – God forgive him – at times even blamed little Stevie for getting drowned and destroying all their lives. Hell, he could throw blame around like children throw fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night. Above all, he blamed himself. It was going to be another of those days when he would end up at home, drunk, on his own, bathing in self-pity and listening to the slavering of the Black Dog.

Yet as he watched Limping’s pathetic journey around his colleagues, something changed inside Goodfellowe. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before he was making the same journey, for he knew that after a single glass he would give anything to be in a lay-by getting worked over by some young nymphet, and after three he wouldn’t be giving a damn if the entire population of Buckinghamshire was at the window looking on. And, night after night in recent weeks, there had been many more than three glasses. Yes, Limping’s trousers would undoubtedly fit him rather well.

So what? Elinor wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t even know. And he didn’t give much of a damn about anyone else’s opinion. Except for Sam. Ah, but there it was. Whoever else he owed, he owed Sam more, and considerably more than he was able to give on his own, particularly with this nightmare of her pregnancy. Which meant he needed someone else. A woman, of course.
Woman!
Which meant a really good shagger … No, no, forget the shagging, don’t get distracted! He needed a friend, a source of feminine advice, that’s how he’d meant to explain it. Someone who could help him with Sam. Maybe using Sam as an excuse was pathetic but, as he watched colleagues turning their backs on Limping after offering nothing but mouthfuls of banalities and disingenuous smirks, he knew what he wanted. A woman who could not only shag his brains out so that he wouldn’t remember his guilt but who could also be his guide with Sam, and bury some of that guilt too.

His thoughts turned to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth de Vries. Late thirties. Divorced. Marmalade eyes and lips which, when they smiled, seemed to put an earthquake through his sorrows. Not that they had smiled much in his presence recently. They had been about to become lovers the previous year until circumstance had intervened in the form of a press insinuation that he was having an affair with an eighteen-year-old Chinese girl. A misunderstanding, of course. Practically bloody libellous. But the damage had been done. Their silences were no longer filled with unspoken understanding but simply voids where their minds refused to meet and meld. So he had stopped visiting The Kremlin, the fine Russian restaurant she owned, and had begun drinking at home. Alone.

But he needed her. Sam needed her, too, or someone like her.

As Goodfellowe watched, an agent of parliamentary retribution, a Whip, had come up to Limping’s elbow. Brief words were exchanged. A restraining hand placed on Limping’s arm. As though he were under arrest. They left together in the direction of the Chief Whip’s office. Limping’s smile even less convincing.

No, that wasn’t the way, not for Goodfellowe. There was still a faint smear of pride upon his soul. And so it was resolved. He needed help. He needed the help of a woman. He would give Elizabeth a call.

Kunga had only a few hours’ start and was on foot, but that was enough. He knew the tracks and rock-strewn trails in this area, while the Chinese would be confined to the one, useless road that had brought them bouncing and bruised to the monastery.

The Chinese would be consumed with anger when they discovered he was gone. The monastery would suffer. The abbot had known that. Which is why he had asked Kunga to take Dawa with him. Dawa was a fourteen-year-old
tulku
, or incarnation of a great teacher, one of the monastery’s most precious assets; he must be kept from the Han. And in addition they took Tenzin, a strong young man and one of Kunga’s favourite pupil monks, for they would need much help and strength to get them through the mountains. There had been no time for preparations, no special clothing, not even boots, only a little money and the food that could be wrapped hurriedly in a blanket. And sunglasses. The abbot found them each a pair of sunglasses. Cheap, and Chinese. But, when the snowfields were stirred by the sun to the intensity of a laser, their eyes and their lives might depend upon them.

They followed the river for many kilometres as it tumbled and frothed downstream in the direction of the distant highway, their calf muscles aching with strain, then hitched rides and took buses in the direction of the southern border town of Dram. Dawa slept most of the way. Kunga couldn’t resist many fleeting moments of envy. Axles on Tibetan roads spend a life in constant torment, and they put Kunga in touch with every part of his body in a manner he rapidly came to regret. But apart from the discomfort, for two days they encountered few problems. Tibetans are naturally nomadic and help is freely given to travellers. At a small monastery they exchanged their monks’ robes for sheepskin
chubas
and in the local marketplace bought some
tsampa
barley and honey to augment their meagre supplies. They had no travel permits, of course, but that was not unusual. At every checkpoint they ‘broke a few ribs’ – paid bribes to the People’s Armed Police, which was also not unusual. On the third day, however, the atmosphere changed. At the checkpoint fifty kilometres north of Dram, at the entrance to the border zone, the procedures grew slower, distinctly more methodical. The police were looking for something. Or someone. But not a family group, they gambled. So an obliging young Tibetan woman pretended to be Tenzin’s wife while Kunga put on the appearance of a demented patriarch possessed by demons. The superstitious Chinese recoiled from this by-now filthy and overripe old man with hideous waving hands and let them through. But they knew they might not be as lucky next time. When at last they entered Dram they shied away from the main thoroughfares, losing themselves in the dusty alleyways and crowded markets of the back streets. It was on one of these back streets, in a grimy mud-walled tea shop, that they made contact with their guide. He had only one eye and the fingers of his left hand were stunted with frostbite. And he appeared reluctant. If they wanted over the mountain, he would lead them, but only for twice the normal price. The border patrols had doubled, he said, and so had the risks. The guide studied them closely – one strong, one young, one old, all appallingly equipped – and shook his head. They wouldn’t all survive.

They set out the following night, doubling back a little to escape the more obvious patrols. As dawn broke they stepped off the mountain road at a point below a ruined monastery, its empty windows and gateway standing like a bleached skull against the dark mountainside. Kunga noticed a solitary white vulture wheeling in the skies above the ruin. An omen.