Wednesday 30 November 2016

Sleepless in Shanghai

It was the kind of hotel where the rooms are charged by the hour and the sheets are changed by the week, if you're lucky. I don't normally share rooms on business trips, but my company had thoughtfully provided me with a roommate in the form of the biggest badass cockroach you ever did see. The cockroach was cocksure. He no doubt pimped his female cockroaches out to out of town bugs, like the machos in reception did with their girls. I watched my roomie strut across the bed while I took refuge in the armchair that had more stains on it than the Turin shroud. I was sleepless in Shanghai. Outside the temperature nudged a steamy autumn twenty-six degrees, inside the air-con coughed and choked and spluttered. it was going to be a long night. 
If New York is the city then never sleeps, Shanghai is the city that never comes down from a coke high. It hustles and bustles, sirens wailing, horns blaring, people shouting and reversing vehicles gabbling a sing-song warning. It is a fantastic hubbub of aural sensations. But tonight it was even louder, the sirens were piercing, the shouts coming from inside my own head, the screams a little too close for comfort. 
It was obvious that something was afoot, doors banged, men shouted, women screamed, but I wasn’t about to open my hotel door to find out what it was. I’d just sit and watch the cockroach strut and try to ignore the kerfuffle in the corridor. But then it was my door being knocked, being kicked, being destroyed. The uniformed men came in like bullets from a gun. Grabbing me in a firm hold before I’d had the chance to move. 
“It's him you want, not me,” I said, trying to use my eyes to point them in the direction of the cockroach pimp on my bed. But it was me they had come for, I was under arrest, for what? Well, I wasn't quite sure. 

I sat opposite the man in the dark blue uniform wondering what the hell he was saying. He spoke quickly and angrily, never once looking at me. The interpreter was some kind of joke. I would have then better off with the cockroach interpreting for me, at least he had attitude. This guy had the personality of a three-year-old and the English skills of a baboon. He laughed nervously each time the police officer stopped speaking and spoke back to him without ever once trying to tell me what was going on. 
I'd already been held for three hours in a cell which can only be described as grim, but then again was slightly better than the hotel room that I'd been dragged from. At least the air conditioning worked and my cellmate was not as threatening. Now I was in an interrogation room that had smears of blood on the walls and a smell of death. 
The policeman babbled again, the interpreter giggled, I was none the wiser. 
It wasn't just me losing patience with the kid. I could tell the policeman was not exactly enamoured by him and was getting grouchier and grouchier which could only spell bad news for me. 
Finally, a knock on the door and in walked the man from the embassy. He didn't have to introduce himself. He walked and talked and looked like the very embodiment of the British government. 
He gabbled something in Chinese and then listened to the policeman. Finally, he turned to me. 
“He thinks you're a male prostitute,” he said, with a look of contempt that suggested he believed the Chinese policeman. “And that means you've broken the terms of your Visa. You'll be deported tomorrow.”
It all made sense. 

“You going to need to prove you not in order to stay.” he said.
 How the hell do you prove you are not a prostitute? Then I saw a chance, a chance to escape that hell hole of a hotel, a chance to get home to my wife and kids, a chance to leave the business deals undealt,  a chance to eat some cheese. 
“He's got me banged to rights,” I said. “I'd better start packing.” 

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