Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

fury. He will destroy himself...’
    ‘You are a genius,’ she said.
    ‘I am... subtle.’
    They stood, watching the water sliding beneath the craft, as darkness fell. When it became cooler, once the sun had finally gone, she put her arm around him.
     
     

BLACK DRONGO
     
      Written during my years in Hong Kong, where I used to watch the black drongos fighting amongst themselves. Hong Kong was seething with ideas for short stories one just had to reach up and pluck them from the air.
     
     
    So what you want to do is take Marcia’s personality and put it in the body of a bird?’ said Steve. ‘What are you trying to create, some monster freak? Some creature that’ll think, like...like
    Marcia?’ We were at dinner, just the three of us, in a small restaurant off Mody Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. My brother Steve and his girlfriend Marcia were flying out of Hong Kong the next day. They were going on a business holiday, to some remote place in the Philippines, which was incidentally Marcia’s homeland.
    I explained patiently, ‘I’m not transferring her psyche, Steve, there are laws against that. All I want to do is copy Marcia’s persona, and superimpose it upon that of the drongo.’
    ‘Okay Einstein, what’s the difference?’ he said.
    ‘Her persona is simply her personality. A psyche is someone’s conscious and unconscious, someone’s mind or self, if you like. I’m not allowed to screw around with psyches, although it is possible to make a transfer under controlled conditions. Only the GRL, the Government Research Labs, are permitted to dabble in that. This won’t hurt her in the least, and she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she’s furthering my studies of behaviour patterns in wild birds.’
    ‘What if I don’t want you to mess around with my girl’s persona?’
    ‘Stevie...’ said Marcia, in that soft voice she has, but he cut her off, with, ‘No, wait, I want to hear what Einstein here has to say about it. You just keep quiet for a minute. No, I’m sorry Marcia, this is for me to decide whether it’s right for you to do this or not. You don’t understand these things like we do.’
    Steve can be a real pain in the ass, when he wants to be, which is most of the time, but he is my brother and I put up with him because I love him. He is unbelievably insecure, and this manifests itself in hostility and aggression. Tonight, he was being nice: any other time he would have blown his stack and started throwing things around the room. He always mellowed a little prior to travel, gradually becoming as pliant as he would ever be with Marcia, or any woman.
    Men could take him better than women: they recognised the apprehensive hunter-gatherer in him as something they had within themselves, though often not to the same extreme. Steve was one of those people who believed you had to prove yourself all the time, against the competition. If you didn’t, you would be taken advantage of, and eaten alive. They would fall on you like jackals while you were exposed to them. You had to keep your defences up, show them you were a man to be reckoned with, never let them see your vulnerability.
    He played squash as if to lose would mean the guillotine. He was merciless against business rivals. My older brother was still living in a world where you clubbed a man senseless and took his meat and his woman and made sure you felt damn good about it. Any weakness in you would be exploited, and you would become carrion for the vultures.
    I did not consider Steve a bad man, and most other men liked his company, many women too if they were the kind who preferred being told what to do, but there were others who considered him an aggressive thick-skinned bull.
    I hadn’t told Steve that the reason I wanted Marcia’s persona, as opposed to any other, was because of my observations of their relationship . Steve had always been a bully, and the person who took the brunt of his obnoxious behaviour, was Marcia. She, on the