Rare Earth Page 2

  Li Qi-han straightened himself and tried not to think about Sally Feng doing it with the Chief.

  “What’s to report?” Zheng gestured into the air with his cigarette.

  Li stood to attention, feeling the hair on his shins crackle with static from the Chief’s carpet - a brand-new red-and-gold creation interweaving the stars of the national flag with images of railways and construction cranes.

  He clutched the intelligence file tight under his arm, fighting back nausea and dread.

  “Nothing today, Chief.”

  Zheng, his feet crossed on the desk and head wreathed in smoke, wore his usual outfit: striped polo shirt, fawn slacks, tweed jacket and Playboy-logo belt, black-weave loafers and hair dyed the same colour as President Hu Jin-tao’s: latex black.

  Li himself was wearing a Nile green tennis shirt and caramel-coloured chinos: he despised designer belt-buckles but in preparation for his exam he had taken to wearing a cheap, milled-steel number with a rip-off of the Versace “V”.

  “You look a bit peaky today, Deputy Li,” Zheng teased him.

  “Peaky? Not me!” said Li. “Ready for action, Chief!”

  Li’s grandfather, a coalminer from Wuhan, had used to insist: a miner never misses work from being slaughtered with drink, as a point of honour. Li had arrived for work that morning slaughtered with drink but was not about to betray the family tradition.

  “Nothing at all in the intelligence?” Zheng insisted.

  “Squat.” Li bullshitted; “We’ve got to organise a morality lecture at the High School because of what those kids keep doing on the Internet. After that, nothing until the,” he angled his head and paused in the obligatory way, “twentieth anniversary...”

  “Okay, get lost then.” Zheng wafted a lazy circle of smoke in the direction of the door.

  Li quit the room agitated. He’d spent most of last night at the Tang Lu branch of KTV, moving deftly through his Frank Sinatra repertoire into a medley of Chinese love duets with Sally Feng. Around 4am he had been kicked out of a taxi, alone, on the wrong side of the river in the brick-kiln suburb towards Wuhai, stumbling around in the shit-filled alleyways and being sick. He had stared tearfully at the Yellow River wondering whether its spirits were trying to communicate something. Now, six hours later, the throb of white alcohol behind his eyes was communicating the need to lie down.

  He marched into the general office and slammed the day’s orders onto the desk in front of his subordinate, Belinda Deng. She was related to some disgraced Shanghai party boss: wide-faced, supercilious, constantly trading shares via text message. Much of Li’s workday was devoted to making Belinda Deng look down at her desk and not up, insolently, at himself.

  “Different shit, same day,” he said.

  Her face barely registered his presence.

  Li slouched over to the hot water machine, refreshing the leaves in yesterday’s tea flask. Everything in the office smelled plastic. The air-conditioner was making his neck hairs stand on end and his brain ache. His under-arms reeked of aerosol. Everything was, in this sense, normal.

  He studied Sally Feng’s broad hips as she twisted in her seat to keep her phone conversation private. He studied the wall map of Ningxia Province, with marker-pen lines indicating areas of support for crazy imams in the south, where water had run out and Islamic fundamentalism had run in. An orange paper dot marked the location of Tang Lu Industrial Suburb. He would soon be out of there for good.

  He felt shivery, bilious and weird. Usually when he got this paranoid after drinking it was because there was some kind of shit-storm on the political radar screen: an official visit, the upcoming trial of a mining boss. But the notes today said nothing. His computer screen said nothing, except for the usual “have-a-nice-day” from the Communist Party Discipline Section. There was nothing abnormal on the horizon at all.

  ~ * ~

  3

  “Oh my God, this is Mordor!”

  Georgina’s voice jerked him awake.

  Brough could tell from the slant of the light that it was late afternoon. He had dribbled Coke-coloured spit onto his shirt. He desperately needed the toilet. They were at some kind of motorway toll, wedged into the middle of a long queue of coal trucks.

  “D’you think they have a toilet here?” he muttered.

  “No look, it’s fucking Mordor! You ever seen anywhere like this?”

  Brough craned his neck to follow the direction of Georgina’s stare. It was the city he couldn’t pronounce: Shizuishan. He let his eyes drift across the skyline, swathed in brown haze, arrayed with smokestacks, cooling towers, petro-chem rigs and blast furnaces. Implausibly vast, as if every industrial city in Britain had been cut and pasted into one mega-city

  “Yeah,” said Brough, “Belgrade after the Septics bombed it. Listen, I’m desperate. Chun-li, d’you think I can just er, go to the toilet on the side of the road?”

  “For urinating or defecating?”

  “Urinating.”

  “Chinese men will do urinating under table at restaurant if nobody looking.”

  He lurched over the crash barrier and into the roadside scrub, stiff with jet-lag. The throb of diesel engines and the stench coming from the truck exhausts touched a childhood memory: his father had been a lorry driver. He unbuttoned his fly and relieved himself into the nettles.

  “Smell that?” Carstairs was beside Brough now, legs braced, unzipping his trousers.

  Brough let his nostrils flare against the smell of fresh coal.

  “Fuck, that takes you back!”

  Carstairs was pushing sixty: he’d been a long-lens snapper in Fleet Street, a cameraman in various wars and now made his money out of corporate videos plus - as he had put it to Brough on arrival - ”shit like this”.

  “That’s where all our bleedin’ jobs went, innit?” he gestured with his chin to the skyline.

  Brough nodded.

  “What’s up with that bird?” Carstairs ventured.

  Georgina had once been breezily at home in the foreign correspondents’ world of drink, late night bitterness and casual sex. But she’d quit, gone into the indy sector, made some money and now had a boyfriend in New York: hedge fund guy with a saltbox in Connecticut and a reconstructed septum.

  “She’s made a documentary about the Yangtse Dolphin,” said Brough; “She knows all there is to know about China.”

  In the van, Chun-li was having a high-speed Mandarin conversation with her cellphone, which Georgina had learned to read as a sign of trouble.

  “Slight problem with Shizuishan wai-ban,” she announced.

  “What?” Georgina began tugging at her handbag to fish out the schedule. The city’s foreign affairs department, known as the wai-ban, were supposed to escort them to a three-star hotel, a banquet and the inevitable smoke-hazed drinking session to scope out tomorrow’s interview with a senior party guy.

  “Senior Party Guy will not receive interview.”

  “Why not?”

  “Urgent business trip to Beijing.”

  “What do the wai-ban advise?”

  “Move to next city.”

  Chun-li’s voice betrayed that she knew how ridiculous it sounded. But that was what they’d said.

  “So hold on a minute,” Georgina’s voice began to quaver slightly, “who’s going to give us the interview about environmental policy?”

  “Difficult to say,” said Chun-li, as Brough and Carstairs swung themselves into the van. Georgina made her eyes bore through Chun-Li’s tinted shades, searching for some kind of logical outcome.

  “Are you telling me these guys can just cancel an interview we’ve taken six months to set up at half a day’s notice?”

  “Extremely possible,” said Chun-li.

  “For a major TV program specifically sponsored by the Chinese government?”

  “Quite usual.”

  Channel Ninety-Nine had scheduled a special edition of its flagship talk show, Live at Nine with Shireen Berkowitz, to be filmed “as-live”
from the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai. The aim was to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or “Events” as they’d agreed to call them. “Let’s do the issues that matter today - not twenny years ago,” their boss, Twyla had told them. That meant everything except torture, democracy and human rights.

  Brough’s job was to front a seven-minute report about the Party’s fight against environmental depredation in western China. They had to be in Beijing by Wednesday to edit and feed it to Shanghai. Brough’s presence was not required in Shanghai; in fact his presence anywhere near a live broadcasting position had been actively discouraged.

  Georgina flicked through her Lonely Planet:

  “Let’s get to the hotel, have a beer and work on it.”

  “Also another slight problem,” it was Chun-li’s voice quavering now. Brough, Carstairs and Georgina caught the quaver and began to stare at her intently:

  “Three-star hotel in Shizuishan cancelled our reservation on advice of wai-ban chief.”

  “Well fuck the wai-ban chief let’s rebook it ourselves,” said Georgina.

  “I already try that, they say: No Vacancies.”

  “Well book another one!” Georgina exploded.

  “Already tried that also.”

  There was silence.

  “No western-standard hotels apart from already-un-booked Three Star Beautiful Pagoda, No Vacancies. No other hotels at all listed.”

  “Where do the foreign businessmen stay?” said Brough.

  “Not very often in Shizuishan.”

  Georgina screwed her eyebrows into a single eyebrow and studied her guidebook.

  “See this? Where’s this town here?” she tapped the page with her finger and thrust the book under Chun-li’s nose; “It says there’s a decent hotel in this place. But I can’t find it on the map.”

  Chun-li produced a Chinese atlas and flicked through the pages, settling finally on one that showed only a blank expanse of desert and a precise, square grid of conurbation in the middle of it, with only one road in and out. It was a place she’d never heard of, about an hour’s drive north.

  ~ * ~

  4

  A joke among steelworkers in Shizuishan runs: first prize in the trade union lottery is a week’s holiday in Tang Lu, second prize two weeks. But that does not bother Tang Lu residents. They laugh at it out of a kind of pride.

  Li Qi-han, who had clocked off and was headed for the massage parlour, hated Tang Lu. Despite his mining ancestry he was a Beijing boy to his core and the locals knew it: from the absence of that happy cynicism that Tang Lu folk carry around on their faces; from his lack of resignation.

  Li’s face was, in fact, permanently annoyed. Annoyed at Sally Feng, annoyed at the Chief, annoyed-above all and perpetually-at his dad.

  Fair enough; in 2006 things had looked promising: there’d been talk in the Party newspapers about compensation for former “rightists”. Grandfather Li had been a notorious rightist: jailed in 1956 for writing a wall poster against the Soviet invasion of Hungary-and never seen again. Li’s dad had signed a petition requesting lump-sum compensation for the surviving relatives of persecuted rightists. But a year later, after working its way around the desks of various cadres, the whole rightist rehabilitation campaign had been deemed, itself, “rightist”.

  Li’s dad, a leftist in the sixties but now running a self-help book imprint, had suddenly been hit with a massive tax demand, Li himself- who’d had no idea what his dad was up to - got called into the discipline section at the Beijing Olympics Propaganda Bureau and told to pack his bags for Ningxia Province.

  So now, two years on, he wandered through the backstreets of Tang Lu, headed for the massage parlour: pissed off with the Chief, Sally Feng, his dad, life itself-and still suffering from this strange, unsettling apprehension.

  Soon he would sit an exam in The Important Theory of Three Represents: “Just demonstrate some basic knowledge of Jiang Zemin’s contribution to Marxism and you can fuck off back to Beijing,” Zheng had told him. But studying the Three Represents had made Li become irritable, agitated: so agitated that, for weeks now, he’d needed to drink white alcohol to get to sleep.

  On top of that he had, for some reason he did not care to rationalise, erected a shrine to Grandfather Li on the mantelpiece in his apartment, consisting of Grandfather’s last known photograph, in PLA uniform, and his Type 51 pistol from the Korean War, a family heirloom. Li had been burning large handfuls of “spirit money” on this shrine most nights.

  The backstreets of Tang Lu were teeming with that life you barely see in Beijing anymore. A woman lifted her toddler to pee into the gutter. The tea-seller smiled, beckoning Li to her table of gleaming steel pots: this one to calm his inner fire, this one to stoke it up. In the hairdresser’s, one prostitute was combing the hair of another. Each had a Motorola flip-phone wedged between chin and shoulder: the one gossiping with her sister in Shenzhen, the other placing a bet on tonight’s basketball game with an illegal bookmaker.

  Kids wrestled in the street dirt; miners’ wives engaged in hard-faced, emotionless gossip. In an alley behind the hairdressers’ stood the neon-lit frontage of the Happy Girl Massage Parlour. Li slipped silently through the door, barely nodding to its proprietor, Mrs. Ma.

  He liked to keep his massage activities discreet and preferred the Happy Girl precisely because it was the kind of place party officials and local government stooges would avoid. Here it was mainly freelance mining engineers, Mongolian drug dealers with buzz-cut hair and other nouveau riche scum.

  He killed his cellphone as the serving girl steered him into the booth. He had his shirt off, neatly folded on the chair, by the time she’d brought him a bottle of Snow beer and laid it respectfully on the side-table next to a basket of condoms and a basket of salted peanuts.

  There was a mirror: he was in good shape for 27, if a little scrawny. His pudding-bowl haircut marked him out as a dutiful Communist. He waited for the girl to leave before getting his pants off and laying face down on the massage table. Who would Mrs. Ma send in? There was always the frisson of waiting to find out.

  The door handle clicked. He could tell from the swish of her tunic, the clunk of her sandals that it was Long Tall Daisy; her breath, as always, a little bit rancid with catarrh but her fingers already trailing gently up his leg in compensation for that.

  He would come back to Mrs. Ma’s place for a full night with Long Tall Daisy before he left Tang Lu. He made a mental note of that as she started the CD - eerie, orchestral waves montaged with underwater whale noises - and lit an incense stick. Though his hangover had gone he still felt, for some reason, jumpy.

  ~ * ~

  5

  This is what they see on the tape when they finally get to view it:

  Vertical spectrum-bars with a high-pitched whine, the word CARSTAIRS in a digital font, and timecode in the corner of the screen beginning 03.00.00. That means the start of tape three.

  The opening shot shows the inside door of a Ruifeng van. The cameraman has hit the record button to run the camera up to speed as he mikes-up the reporter. Now the sound channels kick into life, jolting the graphic equaliser.

  “Hold on David, I’m not really sure we have time for this.” It is Georgina’s voice, querulous but resigned.

  “Maybe I get out first,” Chun-li suggests, off camera. “Pollution very sensitive issue in towns like this.”

  “I’m not surprised!” It is Carstairs, his voice betraying that alert distraction that takes hold of cameramen as they begin checking their levels, their battery power, stashing extras of everything into the pockets of their trousers.

  “I think I’d better stay with the van,” Georgina suggests.

  “Yeah, no worries. Just me and Chun-li.” It is Brough’s voice, calm and languid like it was when US Marines pointed a .50 cal machine gun at him from a Blackhawk, deep to his groin in water, one humid afternoon in New Orleans.

  The camera swings up as they bail out of
the vehicle. Brough smoothing his sandy hair, his jacket crumpled; Chun-li wobbling around in the dirt on her unsuitable heels.

  It’s the very last light of the day: the colours are the warm rust of a traditional Chinese hutong. Low brick shacks topped with curved, medieval roof-tiles; an unpaved road where shaven-headed kids play stone-throwing games in bright yellow cardigans and acid blue T-shirts.

  Chun-li leaves the frame and heads up the street but the camera stays on Brough, who keeps squinting at something in the distance, nervously, and whispering to himself: “Shit!”