Pandora's Box

I first met Seamus Kelly in the Student Union bar at Oxford University in England.  He was Australian, from somewhere I’d never heard of called Paramatta, and was doing a post-graduate course in Elizabethan Drama.  The name is Irish betraying his distant ancestry and pronounced Shamus, but you needn’t remember that as we instantly christened him Ned.  He was a tall, tanned and flamboyant character whereas I was only middle height, thin, pale and wiry, but our preoccupations with girls and booze were very much in accord.  My Traffic Engineering Masters was for the same two-year period and we ended up sharing an attic flat for our final year.

We kept in touch for a couple of years after qualifying.  Ned had managed a good theatre critic job with a Sydney newspaper whereas I was still very much a junior in the Highways Agency when late one evening I got a call from him.

‘Christ, Ned, its one o’clock in the morning!  What’s the panic?’

‘Sorry mate.  Just after breakfast here.  Listen, I’ve had a great idea.  There’s loads of highways jobs advertised in the papers, why don’t you chuck the bloody Agency and your terrible weather and join me down here in the sun and surf?'

The wind was lashing rain against my window panes and, frankly, tales of Bondi Beach, hot sun and topless girls seemed pretty attractive.  Six weeks later he met me at Sydney airport.

Paramatta turned out to be quite a big place, determined not to be thought of as a mere suburb of Sydney although a large chunk of the population commuted the ten miles or so downriver every day.  Ned had a neat little two-storey house quite near where the ferries leave for Sydney, so that was our favoured transport system.  The ferry took you right into Circular Quay, with just a short walk to our respective glass-block offices.  We’d meet after work, have a few drinks, pick up the latest play for Ned to review and then back to the pubs and clubs catching the last boat home.  We spent all we earned and had the time of our lives.  I even got used to Ned’s anti-Brit jokes (‘He’s in Transportation, the Poms were always good at that’).

Sex was a major preoccupation.  Ned and I had competitions as to who could pull the prettiest girl, or the ugliest, or the fattest, or how many we could lay in a 24-hour period.   We challenged each other to come simultaneously while fucking both ends of the same sheila.  We joined the gay Mardi Gras parade wearing only leather jockstraps, to wind up the boys.  One night with two equally drunk girls we all stripped off on the ferry and nearly got thrown overboard.

Word got around, and Ned’s disreputable journalist mates would come up with tips and ideas they had picked up on the grapevine.  That was how we first heard about the Shibuya girl-in-a-box service.

Shibuya was evidently a Chinese outfit that would discretely deliver a totally naked call-girl direct to your home in a large cardboard box, to be collected again the same way after you had enjoyed her company.  The girls were guaranteed clean and compliant, were fully trained in the Chinese man-pleasing arts and experienced in all normal and most abnormal practices.  The price, however, was steep.  We were given a mobile contact number.

Neither of us had ever screwed a Chinese girl before and the whole setup had a terrible fascination.  After rejecting the idea we found ourselves discussing it more and more frequently.  Our fantasies about what we might have done with that unfortunate girl got wilder and more bizarre until one day Ned said, ‘Hell, we could afford it if we cut down on expenses for a while.  Let’s just bloody do it, no worries.’

So we rang the number and booked Koo-ti for a whole weekend.

The days before the delivery seemed to be coloured pink.  We were in a beautiful haze of erotic imagination, tempered with occasional anxieties in case the whole thing was a hoax.  We planned several bondage events and bought ropes and handcuffs and straps.  We converted our sofa for bent-over fucking.  We fixed pulleys to the ceiling joists so we could make her give us head while hanging by her feet.  We screwed eye-bolts to all sorts of likely places and we found a couple of bamboo canes to satisfy Ned’s occasional masochistic fantasies.

On the Friday that the package was to arrive we had this great idea that we should spend the whole weekend as naked as Koo-ti, so we dug out Ned’s big termite-proof steel box that fastened with a padlock and posted ourselves the keys.  Then we cheerfully stripped off and put in every garment we possessed.  Just in time I remembered that one of us had to be decent enough to open the door so we tossed for it.  I lost, and pulled on a pair of stubby shorts.  Then we locked the box.

Promptly at eight that evening a white van pulled up outside the house and a Chinese rang the doorbell.

‘Koo-ti pack here OK’, he said.  ‘You got money?’

I paid him the roll of dollars and he counted it slowly.  Then he opened the rear doors of the van and two other men climbed out.  All three were identically dressed in blue overalls and caps, and all three pulled on heavy gloves and started easing out a large cardboard box.  I led them into our main living area where they set the box down and, with much smiling and bowing, departed.

Ned joined me from the bedroom where he’d been hiding, his dick already hard forward in anticipation.

‘Get those stubbies off, mate, and lets have a good look at her.’

I rapidly shed my shorts, glad to release my own erection from temporary captivity.  We sliced through the wide bands of brown plastic tape holding the top of the box secure and opened the flaps.  Flesh tones showed here and there under a generous layer of polystyrene nodules.

‘OK, Koo-ti, out you come!’

Nothing happened.

Ned banged on the box.  ‘Wake up darlin’, time to earn your keep!’

Still nothing happened.

‘She must be drugged, or passed out in there,’ I said, beginning to pull out handfuls of packaging.  ‘Help me get her out.’

The first shock was that the naked Chinese in the box was a man.

The second was that he was very, very dead.

We watched, appalled, as blood dribbled from the knife marks in his chest.

I woke up first.

‘Stop the blood getting onto the carpet!  I’ll ring Shibuya.’  I grabbed the phone and dialled the number.  A recorded voice informed me that the number had been discontinued.

‘You know what, mate?’ said Ned, gloomily dabbing at the blood with kitchen tissues.  ‘We’ve been fucking shafted.  Let’s have a beer.’

‘No, we get this bastard back in the box before he goes stiff on us.  Then we have a beer.’

I’d begun to think, and the more I thought about our situation the worse it got.  Here we were with no clothes, no transport and a murdered Chinese.  The delivery van and its crew looked like thousands of others and the only fingerprints on the box would be ours.  We were in one hell of a fix.

With the corpse safely hidden away back in the box Ned seemed to have gone to pieces.  He was already on his third beer.

‘You got any tools in this house?’ I asked.

‘Hammer, maybe a screwdriver.  Why?’

‘Hacksaw?’

‘No way, mate.’  But he saw what I was getting at and went over for a close look at the padlocked box.  ‘I might be able to do something with a bit of wire.’

We gave up an hour later.  We’d tried every possible implement in the house.

‘Looks like we’re starkers till Monday, then.  No worries, have another beer.’

I woke up with a headache next morning which got suddenly worse when I remembered our predicament.

‘Ned, concentrate!  What the fuck are we going to do with Charlie?’ This over breakfast after Ned had staggered in to join me.

‘Tell the police?’

‘And what do we tell them, eh?  That we ordered a Chinese whore and got a murdered man?  What kind of a story is that?  You know as well as I do that they won’t believe a bloody word.  We’d be lucky to get ten years!’

It was another beautiful sunny day and just about OK to walk down to the shops wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of flip-flop sandals.  I bought a tough hacksaw and Ned and I took turns for the rest of the morning sawing at the padlock.  Finally, we had clothes.

I took the ferry into Sydney that afternoon and hired a van, drove to a northern suburb to buy a spade, then to another suburb for a packet of fire-lighters and some more brown plastic tape.  We secured the cardboard coffin just as it had come, and between us heaved it into the van.

It was evening before we reached the top of the escarpment beyond the coastal plain, and a while later still when we found a barely-visible track between the silver eucalypt trees.  Then I turned off even that track and bumped for half a mile or so over virgin ground.

It took us more than an hour to dig a hole in that hard soil, but we did it and thankfully said goodbye to Charlie.  We rammed the earth flat and as an afterthought dug up a few scrubby plants from nearby and replanted them over the grave.  Then we brushed out all our footprints and slowly made our way back to the road, with Ned following to smooth away the tyre tracks.

Early Sunday morning we drove to a plot of waste ground south of Sydney and set fire to the box.  The spade went into the harbour.

Then we went home and had a few more beers.

I returned the van on Monday morning, and for the next few days we watched every newscast and scrutinised the papers for any item about a missing Chinaman.  By Friday evening we had just about persuaded ourselves that the whole thing had been a bad dream when the doorbell rang.  I looked at Ned.  He looked at me.

‘You expecting anyone?’ 

I shook my head and lumbered to my feet.  ‘I’ll go.  I can always pretend innocence as a foreigner.  Be ready with a good alibi.’

A young Chinese girl was waiting on the doorstep, her fawn coat thrown over a tight-fitting red silk dress.  She gave me a bright smile.

‘I’m here for the weekend with the compliments of the Shibuya Management,’ she said.  ‘They are very grateful to you both.  My name is Koo-ti.’

01.03.04