A few years ago, I wrote the first page of what was intended to be a lucrative blockbuster thriller and never got any further. I've decided to share it here for no particular reason.
I’m aware that this first page is not evidence of a remarkable lost literary talent - quite the reverse. It's probably representative of the thousands of attempts to write a thriller that are scuppered by the lack of a plot. When I wrote the piece (in 1996) I had a great idea for a scene and an opening but no idea how to turn them into a novel. I thought the process of writing the first page would help – it didn’t. Enjoy:
On
19th March 1996 a man calling himself Nigel Lawrence asked for a room in the
Green Guest House, Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong.
After a brief series of questions and answers, the bored owner, Rajind
Shah took a weeks money in advance and gestured towards a room at the end of
the corridor. To Mr Shah, Nigel
Lawrence appeared little different to the stream of travellers that constantly
entered and left his small set of rooms.
A week’s money in advance was perhaps unusual but even this caused no
more than a few seconds of flickering interest.
Rajind Shah did not see himself as an observer of people and had no
interest in any of his guests. But then,
the Green Guest House bore little resemblance to the grander international
crossroads clustered on Kowloon and across the water on Hong Kong Island. It was situated in Chunking Mansions, a
hellish warren of small guesthouses hostels on the upper floors and restaurants
and electronic shops on the lower. The
Green Guest House consisted of one corridor with five window-less boxes on
either side. Each contained a bed, chair
and had a tiny shower room attached.
Decked almost entirely in white tiles, the rooms were clean but lit with
a harsh fluorescent strip that made them feel like interrogation cells.
This
mattered little to the steady stream of western travellers like Nigel
Lawrence. In fact even having a room to
oneself would be seen as a luxury by many backpackers and the steamy maze of
Chunking Mansions offered a certain flavour of romance, intrigue and excitement
to some. But there was no romance in the
place for Rajind Shah who wondered whether the steady living he made for him
and his family justified a life without sun or space. And there was no romance for Nigel Lawrence
who was certainly not short of intrigue or excitement.
There
comes a point when an actor lives a part so comprehensively that he almost ceases
to be acting and on that day in March Nigel had long ago reached that
point. He had spent two months in
Thailand before he flew to Hong Kong that day.
He had done the usual traveller things in the usual traveller
places. He had trekked in Chaing Mai and
Mae Sot, smoked acres on grass in Ko Tau and Krabi and met other
twenty-somethings, students and assorted drop outs from all over the
world. On reaching the Green Guest House
he was part of the subculture with a thousand checkable stories and sightings
to prove it. Yet that day in Chunking
Mansions was also the day the acting stopped and the game begun.
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