Detained

They compromised on the Palace Suite at the Peninsula.

Peter insisted a doctor examine her anyway, and she was too tired, too wrecked to resist. The doc gave her sedatives. She said the nightmares might be bad and the sedatives would help her sleep, but Darcy didn’t need to be asleep to be in the nightmare.

The sounds of men’s fists and boots, screaming, laughing. The smell of sulphur, cold sweat, and hot metal. Too many men: running, fighting, roaring. The big man with the scarred face trying to pull her away, shouting, “No look. Come.” The blood, so much red blood. Will’s blood—coating the floor. He slipped in it. He told her to go, but she would not leave him. So much blood, so much laughter, so much red.

Angry men pulled her away. She screamed till she had no voice. Till she couldn’t see him anymore. Till they killed him.

And then nothing.

Peter told her the man with the scarred face brought her to the prison gate and laid her on the roadway where the riot police could get to her and bring her out. They revived her in an ambulance on-site.

There was no word about Will. Even now, hours after the revolt had been quelled. She couldn’t believe he was dead, but she couldn’t understand how he could be alive either. So much red pain.

Peter said Will was alive. He knew how to take a beating, how to protect himself. But Peter didn’t hear the guns, or see the hate on the faces of the men who attacked Will. Men who should have protected him. Too many of them to count their fists and boots.

Peter stayed at Quingpu. Bo and Aileen stayed with her. No one wanted to be alone and they wouldn’t sleep tonight. The butler brought food they picked at, and copious amounts of coffee. Aileen made phone calls. Bo got drunk on Australian wine and stayed out on the balcony in the dark.

Darcy couldn’t settle. Couldn’t shut her eyes without seeing Will’s face, beaten and broken. She wrote the first draft of her story. She wrote about Feng Kee, the landlord and gangster who extorted, threatened and pulled a knife on Will Parker, nine years ago on a cold winter night.

She wrote about Will defending himself, leaving Feng on the street injured, but alive. She described how Feng went back to his village, picked up his life and died six weeks later in restaurant fire. She explained how the Feng family had seen the newspaper coverage of Will, remembered a debt they wanted him to pay, and orchestrated his kidnapping. She listed the family members implicated and the names of the kidnappers, all criminals for hire, now in jail.

She detailed how the police rescued Will only to jail him for murder.

She wrote about Bo, the

Shanghai taxi driver who taught Will the local language. How he was kidnapped and bashed alongside his employer, but became his saviour, affecting his initial rescue by going to the police, and his final exoneration by discovering Feng’s real cause of death.

She left Robert out of the story. She didn’t think he’d mind. She left herself out as well. It was easier to write if she thought about it as an experience someone else went through.

She didn’t write about fear, pain, guilt or blood. There was no emotion in the story, no ‘colour’ like feature story writers added, just the facts. As a news reporter that was her job, to tell what happened and why.

The background covered, she went on to write about how before he could be freed, Will Parker was caught up in a prisoner led revolt at Quingpu prison.

And then she couldn’t write any more. Her brain couldn’t form the sentences, her fingers couldn’t find the keys, couldn’t type the words. She sat at her laptop at the beautiful desk in the Palace Suite and her eyes couldn’t see.

She knew her lead paragraph was wrong. The story needed to open up with Will. Needed to describe his current state. It should say, ‘Will Parker was declared innocent of the murder of Feng Kee and freed from Quingpu prison today’. That’s what it should say.

The alternative—that Will Parker died in a prison riot defending the woman who defamed him and brought him to the attention of people who would hurt him—was beyond her ability to set down on the page.

She wasn’t aware she was sobbing until Aileen came for her. She didn’t want the woman’s comfort. She wanted to work.

Obituary writers did it all the time. They took someone’s death and turned it into simple words so other people could know about them. Gave the facts, date, age, cause, contribution, survived by, legacy. Some papers had the first drafts for well-known people already on file. Already set up for a plug and play of the ending when it happened. Later, if the person was famous enough, they wrote larger stories, adding in details, opinion, speculation and reflection.

She should be able to do this. Write that lead paragraph. No more than twenty-five to fifty words. But she didn’t think obit writers wrote about people they’d fallen in love with and watched die to save them from the same fate.

Aileen was talking to Peter. She relayed the news. The police taskforce had interviewed the man with the scars. He confirmed Will was trying to protect Darcy and was shot and beaten by the guards. Peter had seen what the security cameras that weren’t damaged recorded. He was no longer so certain Will was alive. He was staying at Quingpu until there was news.

“Peter would like to talk to you,” said Aileen, holding out her phone.

She took it. Peter’s voice was flat and hollow. “Darcy, are you all right?”

He sounded like a different person. Like his own grandfather might sound, a hundred years old and weary of life. It made Darcy’s eyes burn. “I’m writing the story. It’s what he wanted.”

“Of all the things for him to want. Everything he’d once run a mile from. Write it good, Darcy. His cellmates told me the guards beat him because he was brave and honourable. They’re the ones that helped get you out. I’m not sure I understand it, but Will organised for half the prison to see some old Kung Fu movie.”

“Bruce Lee. The guards were calling him Bruce Lee.”

“They were angry with him because the movie was supposed to be a foreigner’s privilege. Stupid bastard gave it away like steamed buns.”