HUGGED-UP STUDDED BLOOD-PUPPET
He pinches his lip. Sloppy on his fifth can of Galahad. Sitting on a deckchair in front of the laptop in a mobile home with a neon blue glow spelling out his face in the dark. The haze of the wet can affronts the forward of his mind. The dribble off his chin stains his corduroys and vest. A lurcher mix is barking with a hoarse yelp outside.
He imagines cycling down by the pike canal, mouldy drunk, in search of 48 hours’ worth of fags. The bike going sideways and him falling inside the hard shoulder of the motorway. The puddles on the road marauding his chest with cold and cheating his breath, shocking the body enough to immobilise him. A red bread van speeding frontways and rolling over his leg. His calf muscle exploding and spitting out brittle shin fragments. Glass bits of his own bone shards getting flung deep into his eyeballs and asking to be plucked out individually. Isolated on the road like a dead cat, hum of wet arse off the canal full of shopping trolleys and needles and razor cowries that washed in from the river.
Lad tugs his lip more, so that it was pursed between his fingers and looked like the orange beak of a mallard. Smoking Marlboro Gold. Starts rubbing his knees and face, which are clam and sweat, and his forehead feeling like it’s tingling. He’s after smoking too many Chinese weed. He’s studying the front of the cardboard fag packet with the crinkly shiny mylar, the fags illuminated by the warm orange of a hot halogen lightbulb over by the kitchenette. The packet has government warnings on its facade: ‘SMOKING CAUSES CANCER AND EARLY DEATH’, says the fag box. A photograph of a concerned woman with pain in her gaze, draping her face on the chest of a pale man who has tubes hanging out of his nose like scaffolding, and a forlorn child banging her head on the shoulder of the woman.
Our lad feels his heart tremor all hot in his earlobes, he peruses the photo and knows it isn’t real. They are cancer actors. Gowls who pretend to have cancer and agony as a pastiche, to get paid cash for appearing on the front of fag boxes. How the fuck can fags give you cancer if the pricks on the box are actors, our lad thinks. Why can’t they use real cancer boys? If there’s a load of real fag cancer boys, then surely they’d be first up to volunteer themselves for the front of the box as a warning?
‘FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT, YOU GOWL-LIPPED SPASTIC?’ says the fag box.
He leaps back from the chair and wonders if the fag box had really spoken to him, or if he’d imagined it. That’s the way your head whinnies like bothered horses after a few lungs of bad boldy.
He spit-licks a Marlboro and spills out the baccy like the guts of a defeated foe onto a Rizla. Then backs it up with a fat bastard pinch of Chinese weed. That’s what was causing the panic, and the mad notions of getting his shin burst open by a bread van on the canal. Irrational thoughts, fluttering like kites with slippy strings in a gale, uncontrollable and dragging him with them to the edge of heaven’s bend. It’s giving him a whitener, but he can’t stop rolling it up into a joint. That Ennis weed, grown above the Golden Lotus takeaway. A grand takeaway, savage for a four-in-one or a chow mein, but everyone knew what was going on upstairs. On a warm day with wind, you’d smell it walking along a gust like nice silage. They’re growing boldy upstairs, that sweet pineapple spicy bang that you can’t ignore. Floating in the heat, warm hay, pine cones, black pudding, lime, the first sniff of an open beer bottle, that’s that skunk stench of strong grass grown under hot mercury vapour lights, wafted through a cooker hood and pumped up with mad man’s fertiliser. The takeaway tries to hide it with the odour of sesame oil and five-spice out the vents, but everyone knows the craic. They’re growing weed upstairs, and the chips and curry are only a front for the weed-growing.
The triad gangs make them do it. The people watering the plants above the Chinese are illegals, the triads bring them to Ireland in those big innocent-looking containers that are piled on top of each other at the train yard. Tell them they’ll get them enrolled in a business college, they’ll learn English and economic commerce. But the triads lie. They rob their passports in Shanghai, shove them all in a tin for three weeks at sea. Herd them into blacked-out vans in Limerick docks and force the poor people to grow weed upstairs in Chinese takeaways up and down rural Ireland. They are slaves, hash-growing slaves with no identities, lost people. They have to pay off their debt for being smuggled into Ireland. Living like rats in rooms as bright as the sun and as hot as Corfu, never leaving the grow-house, food delivered through hatches.
It’s happening all over Ireland since the recession. The owners of the takeaways are victims too. They don’t want grow-houses above their businesses, hiking up the electricity bill, causing mould in the ceilings from leaky hydroponics. They just want to run a business. But if they refuse to allow the harvest, the triads will hurt their families back home in China. That’s how the triads operate. They’ve been around for hundreds of years, fucking over their own communities the world over, like any country with a large and poor diaspora. The Sun Yee On triad run the weed in Ennis now the Limerick gangs have all been jailed and killed. They spray it with all sorts of fibreglass crystals and push out the local dealers. There’s no Libyan hash around since the Ra decommissioned its bombs, only Chinese weed, sold by Polish lads and the odd Ennis head. The Irish are being pushed out of their own territory, silently and calmly. And the Chinese ganja, it drives you mad. They treat it with nonsense chemicals that jack up the THC to unreasonable levels. It makes you paranoid, and the hangover has other lads shouting inside your own head. Our lad had read about it in the Ennis Tribune: ‘Triad gangs now control cannabis trade’. And when the gardaí raid the grow-houses, it’s the poor slaves who get locked up, not the bowzies who pull the strings.
He crawls up from the deckchair and walks away from the laptop, with unreal munchie pangs and white fear. It’s 11.23 p.m. on the phone, so the Golden Lotus is still open. His red eyes ogle the mobile home for the wallet. Delicious flavour-memories perambulate around his tongue as if they are real. Creamy peanut satay, the burny crunch of a salt-and-pepper piece of battered chicken thigh with spicy bell pepper, the scorched black taste of chow mein up your nose as you swallow, the salty mystery and soft mouthfeel of a bite of prawn curry and fried rice, green peas and onion crunching in the mouth with velvet brown curry sauce, crispy quick-fry chips, oily spring rolls, black-bean sauce. Mouth watering so much he’s swallowing spit. He leaves the bike behind, lest he gets slaps off a bread van. Lad saunters on down yonder, out the shaky resin door, past the GAA pitch, through the main street, until he can smell the Golden Lotus takeaway. There’s a hot July rain, the kind you didn’t mind drenching you, hitting your skin at the same temperature as your body. It’s the only type of acceptable Irish precipitation.
12.15 a.m. The pink-and-blue neon koi carp flickers above the false pagoda door arch of the Golden Lotus takeaway. Warm puddles emanate a wispy steam that you can only see when they catch the lavender rays of light from the koi carp fish. The interior is cramped with tea-stain wooden panelling up the walls. Soft midi piano plays through a ceiling speaker, parish community flyers hang in front of the cash register, beside which is a stout golden automaton cat that has a battery-operated waving paw.
Lien is positioned behind the counter, her soft friendly smile and clip-on bowtie are ready to take his order. She’s seen our lad here before, several times a week for the past year. He orders the Singapore fried noodles, the sesame prawn toast and a tin of Club Orange, shyly avoiding Lien’s eyes, the way he does when he meets women, then exits to the car park to rest the brown paper bag on a wheelie bin. Opening the aluminium container he is peacefully assaulted by oily fragrant steam. Clambering the plastic fork in his fist, gorging a mouthful of greasy rice noodles into his welcoming maw. Eyes closed and salivating, head back, the brackish mass of noodles satiates his munchies. Endorphins explode like fireworks in the brain, he feels it as a warm tingle on his forehead.
The neon lights of the flickering koi illuminate his flapping jowls against the honest backdrop of the black night. His large body feels at peace with itself, as waves of electrical jolts filter through his skin with that one sparkly gulp of his Club Orange tin. His whitener has subsided and he’s back at a base level of stoned. He reaches for the half-burnt joint in his arse pocket and grooves on over to the alleyway behind the Golden Lotus to fire it up. He flicks the flint of a shitty pound-shop lighter and sparks the bifter. Leaning back agin the masonry wall, exhaling blue smoke up above his head and watching it puff up and dissipate like milk into a dirty lake. Thinking about herself, gone from him, above in Carlow with the mother in the wheelchair. Thinking about the night of the accident. If he’d have swerved the van, her mother would have been fine. It didn’t work out like that. Now herself had changed her Facebook photo from a photo of him and her to a photo of James Connolly.
As he gapes up at that cool blue smoke, he spies the upper echelon of the talcy flumes getting disturbed to the left by the exhaling hot air of a grated vent. It’s the vent from the upstairs weed grow-house. Up high on the wall, burping out that sweet shitty pineapple bang of happy grass, off above into the hills of Clare. His mind fizzles adrenal with all sorts of possibilities. Him bare-chested and steaming, climbing up the vent and squeezing through ducts. Landing in the middle of the illegal hash den like Steven Seagal. A family of Chinese weed-slaves cowering in the corner, as he performs a roundhouse kick on the electrical ballast box from the grow-lights. Sparks flying high and bouncing off his veiny pumped arms. Kicking the door of the grow-house open and ushering the family to safety outside. Like a real white saviour. Police lights dancing outside, an applauding sergeant with a big smile awaits the hero. The attractive daughter of the Chinese slave family leaning in and shifting him on the mouth as the camera pans out and up, with the Golden Lotus in a blaze behind them. Fade to rolling credits, directed by John Woo with ‘Gimme Shelter’ by the Stones as the end track.
He’s seen all the fucking Hong Kong gangster films, Shinjuku Triad Society, Year of the Dragon, The Killer, Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled, watched them religiously. He knows how this would play out. He knows how the triads behave, there’d be ten of them upstairs in that grow-house, with meat cleavers and banana-clip black Uzis, with their tattoos and sweaty vests, but he doesn’t care. He’s had enough of them polluting Ennis with mad weed and turning innocents into slaves, and is ready to kick through the back door with fists presented, to protect the vulnerable inside and give them liberty. He will be their justice. If his end is to be at the hands of ten triad machetes hacking his neck, then he is ready to die.
His body rushes with the passion, and he fucks the bones of that joint onto the wet tarmac. Launches a shoulder at the side door of the Golden Lotus and dents it off its hinges. He kicks it and kicks it until he can’t feel his shoe. The door batters sideways from its top hinge. He grabs the available side of the metal panel and bends it towards him, screaming and spitting and roaring. With door half-open, he squeezes his way through, as rough shards of the broken metal score bloody hashtags all over his right arm and chest, like Bruce Lee in the mirror scene of Enter the Dragon. Sad Chinese fiddle music plays in his head as he moves in slow motion, stomping up the concrete stairs to the blinding white and the ever-growing stench of strong skunk weed. He arrives at the top of the stairs. Through the mercury vapour lighting, with mouth open and fists out, he leaps towards a hazy figure. His leg snares a cable from a grow-light, and his body descends to the floor, dragging two light fixtures and a few hash plants with him as his skull cracks on the harsh grey mortar.
When he wakes up, it’s black, real black. The ground underneath him heaves diagonally and he can’t get his feet up from under his shins. The weight of the room pulls him to the ground. There’s a large force at play. He crawls into a ball and is hurled towards a wall where he stays until the light returns. He can’t tell how long he’s been in the dark. Memories of shouts and screams, chains and whips, lights in the eyes and water down the mouth haunt his mind like the waking seconds of a hangover after a mad wedding. And the air smells salty, like the periwinkles they sell in Kilkee. He hears lads roaring Chinese or Cantonese, he can’t differ. Metal corrugate slides with a harsh hiss and new light blinds him.
A hand grabs the scruff of his neck, while another set of hands wrap cable ties around his wrists. The light is giving him a fierce headache, the air is hot and damp, much hotter than Ennis outside the Golden Lotus. Waves crash around his ears, new accents chatter, distant traffic hums and honks, seagulls squawk and flap. He feels the imposing presence of gigantic towers leering down on him. Our lad soon realises he must be somewhere in China, kidnapped from Ennis. He’s done two weeks drugged up on sleepers in a shipping container. When he knocked himself out in the grow-house, the triads must have used the slave Quaaludes to put him in a deep sleep. He landed into their hands, into the spider’s nest. He feels a right fool. No doubt his wallet and any form of identity proof are gone too.
His head is pounding and his mouth is dry. Before his eyes accustom to the white of the gigantic megalopolis at the docks, he’s fucked into the back of a Toyota Transit. Pitch dark again, battering around against aluminium panels, chickens clucking outside, roasting his bones inside, smell of foreign diesel up his nose from the loud engine. He can’t think straight at all, two weeks of sleeping tablets and being fed vitamin-liquid through a water pistol will do that to you. But sure there’s no one back in Ennis to notice he’s gone anyway. Just the cats waiting outside the mobile home for a tin of mackerel. Herself with the crippled mother won’t enquire.
The van stops, and it’s clear that he’s far from the tall buildings and the docks. It’s evening now, and it’s warehouses for miles, with dogs howling a few streets over. The distant city rumbles and hums the way Ennis doesn’t. Strong-armed lads in Gola trackies and Adidas pants, big fuckers, take him from the van and into a warehouse where he’s stripped down, untied and pointed towards an area that was once clearly a little warehouse side office with a shower and a jax. There’s an open safe and a yellow calendar with photos of Kylie Minogue when she had curly hair. Whatever this warehouse once was, it hasn’t been run as a business for donkey’s years.
One of the big fuckers with the Adidas trackies lobs a bar of soap at him and roars a few bits of Chinese into his direction. Our lad showers. He’s fucking stinking, the shower makes him feel like Christ climbing out of the tomb on Easter Sunday. Gorgeous warm water and lavender soap, washing off the journey, giving him back a bit of life, clearing up his head. He dries off with a towel and finds there’s a nice soft dressing gown laid out for him. Lad sits down in an old armchair and a feed of noodles and dim sum is lobbed in front of him by one of the big fuckers. The shock and trauma was such that he hadn’t even realised the hunger on him as he leaps into a soft pork dumpling. The big fuckers take out a pack of fags and offer one to himself. He relishes the drag. Things are chilling out a bit, he thinks. The two boys don’t seem too bad, all things considered. He imagines that if they were back in Ennis, they’d nearly get a game of five-a-side going after a few jars in Halpin’s Lounge. He can’t understand a word they’re saying, but they’re grand ould lads, probably United fans, he’d say. He has a squint around the warehouse. Normally he’d be thinking of an escape, throwing a few flying kicks, rappelling through a window like Steven Seagal, but no, he was grand. Fuck it, he’d been kidnapped and taken to China, but sure there’s bollock all back in Ennis. Free holiday, he says.
The two big fuckers get a bit jumpy after one of them points at the time on his phone. They take a military posture and start putting out the fags on the concrete. An orange light is flashing in the corner as the large roller-door of the warehouse opens up, pure like in the cinema. Blue steam from outside crawls in the door, lit up by headlights, followed by a black BMW 8 Series, a white Mercedes AMG R50, and another black 8 Series behind it. That’s nearly a million quids’ worth of cars, he can’t fathom it. Judging by the servile posture on the two hard fuckers, our lad reckons their bosses are sauntering in. About eight lads in suits get out of the Beamers first, then a fucking suave-looking cunt jumps out of the Merc, flashy pants, silk shirt, aviator shades on his head, cool-looking prick. Lad knows from the John Woo films that these boys are a snakehead: the head cell of a triad gang, specialising in people-smuggling. These must be the cunts calling the shots over the grow-houses in Ennis above the Golden Lotus takeaway.
Flashy Boy walks over, not a word of English, but a gorgeous smile on him. He shakes our lad’s hand in a most cordial fashion. One of the feens in the suits comes over with a very pricey-looking bottle of brandy, and glasses are presented. The brandy was unreal, like hot plums, he’d never tasted the likes of it. Flashy Boy is alright, he even takes out his phone and starts showing our lad photos of himself at home with his wife and two childer, cooking a barbecue, swimming, a family man. Not a hint of English though, but whatever he’s saying sounds pure friendly. Our boy is starting to feel very comfortable. He knows he’s been kidnapped, but all of these fellas are more or less treating him like a celebrity. He starts thinking that maybe they’ve heard about his action back in Ennis. Maybe they’ve found out about the hen party in the pool hall, where he took out Christy Bennis and Suntan Dundon with the Kerryman’s end of a bike lock. Or the night he shattered Reptile Canavan’s pelvis outside Supermac’s in Kilrush. What if news travelled through the Golden Lotus all the way to China that he was out to get them? And that maybe they’d be better off with him on their side, as an enforcer rather than one of their enemies? He doesn’t have all the facts at hand, but that’s the game he’s going to play along with. Because there’s no fucking way he’s siding with these evil pricks. They’d made a big mistake letting him into their lair.
The rest of that night is a blurred montage of fast cars, nightclubs, women and shots. Crowds parting when the gang walks into the parlour. Flashy Boy introduces himself as Shoushan and makes it very public by his proximity to him that our lad from Ennis is his new best friend. Shoushan Hueng is leader of the Sun Yee On triad snakehead, wanted the world over for people-smuggling, organ-smuggling, weapon-smuggling, the grow-houses back in Ennis, the lot. He’s far too high up to be prosecuted, he has dirt on every member of government in Beijing. His only danger is the rival 14K triad, but even they wouldn’t risk war by taking him out. He hasn’t touched anything directly contraband in years – his day-to-day work involves producing action films and blackmailing wealthy businessmen.
The night ends as the rubbish trucks and road-sweepers groom the city. Shoushan accompanies our lad to a tower on the docks and upstairs to a fuck-off apartment and leaves him the keys. Our lad can’t believe it: white marble floors, full kitchen, giant LCDs on the wall, a bathroom bigger than the mobile-home in Ennis and a fifteen-foot window overlooking the Hong Kong harbour below. He reaches into the pocket of the Estée Lauder suit they’d decked him up in and pulls out a crumpled packet of Chunghwa-brand fags. He examines the bright red box, no photographs of cancer actors pretending to die, just an inviting yellow building with a pagoda roof. He sparks up and cheers like a sliotar just crossed the bar at a final, jumping up and down on his voluminous magnolia leather couch, with the fag pursed between his lips, ashes flaking all over the gaff. With an introspective solemnity, he stares out over the Hong Kong skyline onto the docks. Millions of flickering lights rise up and poison the clouds with a pale green that you’d normally see on the torso of a sick toddler. Miles Davis-style jazz brass plays in his head as he scans the skyline. Innumerable lives beneath him, behind little windows, the quality of those lives rising with the size of the windows and how high up they are in the towers. And he’s at the top.
His gaze switches from the city to the reflection of his apartment’s interior on the window-pane. He sees a white envelope on the glass coffee table. He opens it, it’s written in English. The letterhead reads, ‘Hueng Films, Great Eagle Centre, Fleming Road, Hong Kong’.
He reads the note:
Dear Sir,
We were highly impressed with your attempts to infiltrate our operation in Ennis. I oversee a film production company. We specialise in action movies. We believe you have the potential to become a great leading hero in Hong Kong action movies.
Please enjoy your apartment. For your safety and convenience, we have placed personal security outside your door, who will also tend to your needs.
We will be in contact.
Yours sincerely,
Shoushan Hueng
Fuck me, he thinks. These lads have reckoned him to be a new Steven Seagal, he wasn’t expecting that. But he can definitely see their angle. On the walls hang posters in glass frames of Hong Kong films produced by Hueng’s company: Bullet Cops, Tradewind Dragon Boys, Hero Fight, Dog Eagles, Triad Banquet, Lucky Dagger, each looking more class than the next, with explosions and beures and guns and lads with machetes. These bowzies are the real deal. Our boy’s moral position begins to shift – ya, they’re the same lads who traffic those poor slaves to Ennis and force them to grow crazy weed. But this action film arm that they have going seems fairly harmless. Maybe they’d even do a film about him in Ennis rescuing the weed-slaves and it could raise awareness for the hundreds of innocent Chinese migrants who get jailed every year back in Ireland. Maybe herself and the mother in the wheelchair would see it. Fuck it, if that happened, he could still maintain a sound moral position, but also get to be a big massive movie hero too. Win–win. That night as he sleeps on his gigantic waterbed in silk sheets, he finally feels a sense of purpose and meaning that is alien to him, but comfortable.
The next morning, the Hong Kong sun creeps through the room, its warmth across his chest wakes him up. He reaches out with both arms, as if to hug the rays of light on the sheet like they’re God’s flashlight finally finding him in the abyss and picking him out for salvation. The door of the apartment is opened by security and a team of caterers rush in with a selection of pastries, followed by some very trendy-looking lads with spiky hair-dos. They sit him down, start cutting his hair, measuring up his body for some tailored suits, washing his teeth, taking his photograph from every angle and shaving his face. He could get used to this.
They leave another note:
Dear Sir,
I hope you enjoyed the services provided by Hueng Film’s team of personal stylists.
Before we find you a leading role and begin filming, it is important that you look appropriate for the big screen. We advise some work to be done on your teeth, and some minor alterations made to your physique.
This has all been taken care of and we will be in contact with details soon.
Yours sincerely,
Shoushan Hueng
He isn’t insulted by the note. Sure, he was 38 in October and action movies are a young man’s game. An ould tummy tuck would be no harm, and in fairness his teeth look like they’d been shot into his mouth with a musket from forty yards.
Across the harbour in Fa Yuen, near the Mong Kok markets where you buy the fake handbags and electric-eel wallets that fuck up your credit cards, Shoushan Hueng is screaming and roaring in a back office. He’s owed several million in bitcoin from a director of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, Japanese lad by the name of Masatoshi Busujima. Mr Busujima has been ignoring demands for the money for yonks. Filthy dirty lad, into all sorts of sordid depravity, he has everything and anything trafficked into Japan for his increasingly bizarre sexual urges. One of these creeps who’s so rich that every conventional desire a person could have is at his fingertips, so he must continually test his own boundaries to get the horn and feel alive. Hueng is his procurer: whatever Busujima wants, Hueng sources. It started off with Estonian amputees; moved on to famine victims with inflated stomachs from South Sudan; by last March it was disabled children who had wealthy western parents. Hueng wouldn’t ask questions, he’d sort it out, for the right price. But Mr Busujima is rich and powerful enough to tell the Sun Yee On triad to get fucked and not pay his bills. He’s too high-profile to be threatened by any sort of violence. But what Mr Busujima is unaware of is that the triad has purposefully purchased enough shares in Sumitomo Mitsui Bank that they are entitled to attend Friday’s annual general meeting, which is to be a very big international affair. The triads have a taste for revenge, and Mr Busujima has just sent detailed photoshops and instructions to Hueng of his next sexual request. It’s to be delivered via a deep-web livestream tomorrow night.
Back in the massive apartment, our lad from Ennis is drinking a Heineken on the couch in his Estée Lauder suit. He’s flicking through two potential scripts for upcoming films that he could be the lead in. One is about a jazz trombone-playing New York cop, dispatched to Singapore to take out the 14K triad heroin ring, who ends up addicted to heroin himself. Another is about a simple Irishman called Blobby Sands, who sets up a potato shop in Shanghai and finds himself fighting the local 14K triad as they try to extort his spud shop. The hero character’s specialities are making car bombs, being drunk, singing songs about Englishmen and fighting with a shillelagh. The character wears a potato sack and a famine-type hat from the 1840s, but also has platform shoes and flares from the 1970s, topped off with an Aran jumper. He wasn’t too keen on that script. He felt the Asian writer, though well-intentioned, had a very limited knowledge of Irish culture and had penned a story that relied upon tired, stereotyped tropes that represent only the negative aspects of Irishness as portrayed through the colonial lens of media and film. Swirling the final sups of Heineken around the bottom of the emerald bottle, he’s troubled over which role would be the best to start his career. He has a very strong preference for Singapore Junkie Cop rather than Black ’47 Triad Paddy. They’re both something he’d stream online if he came across them, subtitles or no subtitles.
There’s a sharp rap on the door, and he’s ushered down to a car that is taking him for his cosmetic surgery in a private hospital. The journey is pleasant, and the limousine has sparkling water and Pringles. No queues or nothing at the hospital, he doesn’t even have to sign in at reception, he’s brought directly to the operating theatre like Mariah Carey off for a tit job. Gowned out and ready to go under anaesthetic, he lies on the table with lights above him and the smell of antiseptic up his nostrils, thinking about the hunk he’d meet at the other side of the surgery. The doctors are incredibly friendly and he’s receiving high-quality medical attention. Our lad is scared of needles so they give him the gas, and as he goes under, the room wobbles and ripples like he’s peacefully descending beneath the surface of a swimming pool and looking up at the ceiling.
He comes around from the anaesthetic in agonising pain, the darkened room is surrounded by computer monitors. The surgery feels extensive around his frame. His mouth moves like it’s full of cotton and nettles, and when he asks for water, his own voice sounds unfamiliar and high-pitched, which very much frightens him. He senses confusion, like when he first woke up in the shipping container. As he looks down at his body, he notices that his shins have been entirely removed and his feet are now attached to his thighs. Same with his arms: his hands are now where his elbows were. He tries to shout out, to tell someone that a mistake has been made. Again, no words come from his throat, only high-pitched warbles like those of a child. On his chest are several moving tentacles that have been fused with his skin. An injured heart kicks shock to his head, which becomes light. He moves an eye left and is confronted with his full reflection in the screen of a darkened computer monitor. The entire back rib-cage has been removed and is hooked up to a large mechanical apparatus that pumps his blood from wrist valves into large canisters, which is fed back into his limbs with tubes.
To his right, he peruses some badly photoshopped blueprints on the wall. Sketches with Japanese, Chinese and English lettering depicting the rough predictions of what he now appears to be. One drawing he can read, as it’s labelled ‘Western Octopus Sex Child Man’. Standing beside the sketches is Shoushan Hueng, whose usually cordial disposition is now a nonchalant blank stare smoking a fag. Our lad is livid with betrayal, anger and disappointment. If he could speak or move his body, he’d lob a headbutt straight at Hueng’s nose. He realises that the triads have double-crossed him, in the name of some sick prank. The promise of a career in action movies was a ruse to get him to agree to surgery and be transformed into a Western Octopus Sex Child Man. Hueng ignores the emotions in our lad’s eyes and gives a thumbs-up to his cronies in the background by quipping something in Cantonese. The computer monitors are turned on, in the centre is a webcam that has a red LED, which switches to green.
On the central monitor, Mr Busujima sits naked. Our lad stares at the nude middle-aged Japanese man on the screen in bemused terror. He watches his washed-out stomach, flashing blue and shadowed by pasty bitch tits, his receding hair and shiny scalp, his savage jowls. Busujima’s voice distorts over the tiny speaker as he howls repeatedly, ‘Watashi wa sekushī ni kanjiru. Anata wa sekushī ni mieru.’ The triads in the room all laugh when they hear this. Lad’s stomach rumbles with nerves when the loud machinery revs up, and blood is pumped as his skin flushes from pink to pale with every circulatory transfusion from his body to the machine. Hueng orchestrates a control panel on an iPad. The tubes and wires in the back of our lad from Ennis tense up, which is excruciatingly painful to the fresh stitches all over his skin. His body begins to jerk autonomously. He has no command over his limbs. Hueng controls him via the hydraulic blood-pumps bluetoothed to the iPad. Our lad, now four foot tall and howling high-pitched like a boy, performs involuntary sexual manoeuvres on his body using his octopus tentacles. Mr Busujima screams, ‘Sekushī, sekushī, sekushī’, and masturbates on the other connection of the livestream.
What Mr Busujima doesn’t know is that Hueng is video-recording the whole session. Tomorrow night at the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank AGM in Tokyo, Hueng will broadcast the video of Mr Busujima masturbating to the four-foot remote-controlled octopus child man to all the other shareholders. By that evening it will be international news. Our lad from Ennis will be a world-famous Hong Kong film star alright, just not the type that he had imagined.
