Drink with a Stranger

By Mark Furness

Take a trip with young journalist Ned Day into the strangest place on earth he's ever seen...He's jet-lagged, alone, and lost in Delhi, India, searching for his missing, mentally ill brother. A mesmerizing stranger steps from the night and offers him a helping hand. Why not take it?

The streets blur into a bizarre Bollywood cityscape for N

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liquorice Light Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648529958

Book preview

DATELINE: 2025. DELHI, INDIA.

THAT MONKEY, NED SHOUTED to the driver of the motor-rickshaw as they zipped along a road that fringed a bushland park. It’s playing with a hand!

Ned pointed at a troop of the animals lounging in dry grass, aiming at the primate using the clawed fingers of the grey limb to scratch a companion’s back.

Ah, those monkeys, yelled the driver, keeping his eyes on the road, spearing his open-sided three-wheeler between a bus and truck in the jumble of traffic. Descended from the Hindu gods, they are.

Ned clutched a grab rail and hauled himself closer to the driver’s ear. "It looked like a human hand. Cut off at the wrist."

Oh, yes, sir. There is a Bollywood film studio behind the park. I am sure it is only a most special effect you are seeing.

Ned used his fingertips to wipe sweat and the grit of vehicle exhaust from around his eyes. His head wobbled from the hangover of sleeping pills he’d swilled with red wine on the flight from London. Pete, he said to himself, stay focussed on Pete.

The driver buzzed off the highway onto a potholed side road that branched into a dusty street, its edges littered with make-do shops and bustling people. At an intersection, trucks, cars, motor scooters, bicycles, ox-drawn carts and walkers swirled around the rickshaw, beeping horns, tinkling bells, shouting. A spittle-mouthed cow defecated and mooed at Ned. He unzipped the travel bag on the seat beside him and checked that Pete’s box of medication had survived the customs officers’ rough handling. Ned looked up and blinked, doubting his eyes for a moment: from out of the exhaust fumes and dust, a legless child on a roughly-made skateboard was paddling towards him.

The rickshaw lurched away, triggering a feeling like seasickness in Ned’s stomach. The word Bollywood rattled inside his skull, reminding him of an old film he’d watched in-flight. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard took a boat upriver during a war, a foreigner journeying into a nightmarish jungle to find and kill, or be killed, by a madman. Ned clung to the rickshaw’s grab rail and recalled one of Willard’s lines: ‘Never get out of the boat ... unless you were goin’ all the way.’

The rickshaw stopped in soupy air outside a four-storey building on a battered backstreet near the New Delhi Railway Station. The Balaji Deluxe Hotel was located beside a strip of low-rise shopfronts where skinny, bare-chested men wearing short pants squatted and chiselled and sandpapered stone statues that blended the shapes of people and animals. The carvers had created a fog of white dust which covered their skin from head to toe.

Ned gave the rickshaw driver a British twenty pound note which was worth vastly more than the rupee count on the rickshaw’s meter, but he had nothing smaller and no local currency. Keep the change.

The driver fingered the generous tip, then volunteered, There is a truth I must tell you, sir. Or my conscience must burn.

What?

That monkey, sir. There is a hospital behind the park. Sometimes those beings are getting in the bins.

What sort of hospital?

One of privacy for sick people of riches, wanting long lifes.

Ned carried his bags up cream marble steps through glass doors into a cool, sparsely furnished lobby with high ceilings. Two men behind the reception desk wore Western business suits and neckties. The Balaji was the last place Pete had stayed in Delhi, at least according to Ned’s research. He scanned the lobby: Pete, who was a miser, had clearly moved upmarket from his usual backpackers’ digs. Ned opened the electronic booking slip on his phone and pushed the handset across the desk.

Ah, Mr Edmund Day, said the shortest, roundest man. I am Mr Gavaskar. We spoke on the phone.

Ned observed Mr Gavaskar’s moustache; it seemed to be moving, like a caterpillar. Ned put it down to the cool air blasting from a ceiling vent. I appreciate your help.

As you requested, Mr Day, we have you staying in the same room as your brother.

The girl, said Ned. The one who stayed with him. Has she been back?

Miss Goldilocks? No. I’m afraid not.

Oh ... so you have her name now?

"I’m sorry, Mr Day. My too clever playing with words. You have seen Game of Thrones on television, surely? Make yourself a picture of the dragon queen."

Ned pictured the queen. Pete might have Borderline Personality Disorder, which came with bouts of ranting hypomania, but he was good at pulling girls. Keeping them was his problem.

In his room, Ned sat on the bed and connected his phone to Wi-Fi to make a video call. It was breakfast time in London when his mother answered. She looked at him through the camera of her smartphone as she sat at the kitchen table. He was surprised she could work it: there was a wine cask and a fingerprint-ridden, half glass of red on the table beside her.

She mumbled around a fuming cigarette which was clamped between her lips, ’ave you vound ‘im?

Mum, please. I’ve just arrived. I said I’d call when I got here.

She pulled the cigarette out. I’m so worried, Neddy. It’s been three weeks.

She quaffed red, then sucked hungrily on her cigarette before disappearing behind a cloud, If only your father was still alive. He’d know what to do.

Give me a break, Mum.

I’m sorry, Neddy. You’ll find your baby brother, I know. Major Callahan says ... She wheezed. God protects the faithful. So you make sure you keep the faith, Neddy.

Ned wanted to say, Fuck Major Callahan. He beat the urge. The Salvation Army chaplain had started sleazing around his mother as soon as his father became sick. He and Pete had dubbed him The Harem Builder; a harem populated by lonely women with a bit of money in the bank that he could milk.

If Pete has done it, it will be Callahan’s fault, said Ned, thinking of some reckless travel advice the chaplain had given his brother.

Oh, love. Really. He was joking.

I’ll call you tomorrow.

"Now don’t