At the end of a long, straight road, a grass-covered barrier stretched as far as the eye could see. Below it stood a granite block, engraved with a message, the characters picked out in gold. They got out of the car and stretched their legs with relief.
‘What does it say?’
‘Banqiao Reservoir Dam. Reconstruction Memorial.’
Beside the memorial stood a taller structure, blocks of pale limestone, one straight edge, the other curved into a wave.
Jaq walked round to the other side. ‘Come here, there’s more.’
Speedy translated.
‘The Banqiao Reservoir Dam, originally built in 1952, was one of the earliest large-scale reservoirs built after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. It was extended, constructed and consolidated in 1956 and was destroyed by a disastrous flood on August 8, 1975.’
Nineteen seventy-five. That was why she was here. Dan’s clue. But this was no natural disaster; it was a man-made tragedy. The iron dam. The worst confluence of Sino-Soviet engineering. Chinese tofu construction concealed by Russian concrete.
Too fast, too shoddy, a triumph of political optimism over the harsh reality of hydrogeology. The disaster was wholly predictable. The Chinese expert on the project, Chen Xing, mandated twelve sluice gates. He was sacked and only five were built. As the first cracks appeared, he was reinstated and repeated his warnings. Sacked again, and a primitive design was shored up with advanced Russian technology, concrete pumped in to strengthen a structure that was fundamentally inadequate.
Speedy continued. ‘August 8, 1975, during a period called “ten years of turmoil” when ineffective rescue was provided, so the lives and properties of tens of thousands of people were taken away . . .’
Tens of thousands? Or hundreds of thousands? Or closer to a million people? Do you only count those swept away as the Ru river burst its banks, or do you include those who drowned as sixty-two dams collapsed downriver? What of those who died of famine and disease in the days that followed? And the eleven million who lost their homes and livelihoods, scattering, never to return?
‘It was rebuilt in January 1987 . . .’
To a new design, with the correct number of sluice gates to release water before the pressure could build up to danger level.
‘The note is here to help us remember this lesson for life.’
Yes? So why place the note on the back of the monument? So the official cars driving up this elegant road to the offices of the water board could only see the celebration of construction? How many got out of their cars to read the lesson for life ?
Speedy shuffled his feet. ‘What are we looking for, exactly?’
Dan – what were you trying to tell me? Why did you bring me here? Where are you?
‘I don’t know.’
Speedy stretched. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s find somewhere to eat.’
The town of Banqiao was little more than a village. A strip of shops along a badly maintained road with some houses and blocks of flats clustered behind. Nothing but garages and electrical workshops, an oil press and a haberdashery. All closed, and not a soul in sight. Speedy parked in front of the only business with any sign of life. An Arabic quotation from the Qur’an announced it as a Muslim restaurant.
‘Is this OK?’ Speedy looked doubtful.
Jaq peered through a window blurred with steam. ‘I just want a bowl of soup.’ She pushed at the door. The clack of chopsticks stopped as everyone in the room looked up and stared, a hundred eyes fixed on the foreigner, fifty shades of brown plus a flash of green as an old woman turned away.
A rotund man with a bristly moustache came forward, shooing a white kitten away. After a rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat exchange with Speedy, he showed them to a table, whisking away a soiled paper tablecloth and replacing it with a clean one.
It might not be fine dining, but something smelt terribly good. The dishes arrived one by one. First a plate of spiced aubergines in a rich tomato sauce, followed by a carpaccio of beef on a green salad. And finally, the soup, a great cauldron of lamb broth with giant flat home-made noodles.
Speedy devoured everything with gusto. Jaq took her time, gazing around the room. Everyone had returned to their food, a hubbub of conversation, only the occasional glance to check on the peculiar visitor.
Nineteen seventy-five, less than forty years ago.
The waiter came to clear away her plate. He must be in his fifties or sixties. Perhaps he remembered the disaster. Jaq nudged Speedy. ‘Ask him if he remembers the 1975 flood.’
Speedy barked at him, aggressive, staccato.
The waiter shook his head and pointed to someone else, an old woman hunched over a mound of noodles.
Speedy translated. ‘This guy moved here from the mountains, in the eighties when they were rebuilding the dam. But he says that the lady over there’ – a pair of narrow green eyes flashed up at them – ‘Madam Ru, she witnessed everything.’
Suiping, Henan Province, China, 8 August 1975, 2 a.m.
The growl of the river dragon woke the green-eyed girl. She sat up straight and listened.
The pigs were awake, splashing through puddles in the byre below, snuffling and grunting. Thunder rumbled in the distance, on and on. Or was it thunder?
In her dream, the dragon had landed on the opposite bank, where the river used to flow. She had hurried towards him, a fellow monster, fascinated by the flaming pearl under his chin. Strong legs propelled her across the dry riverbed, her feet suddenly sure and nimble on the uneven stones. But as she got close enough to make out the emerald scales on his sinuous body, he arched his back and unfurled his wings. He flapped them once and the sky collapsed, smothering her. He flapped his wings again and the earth cracked open under her feet and she was falling, falling.
Wide awake now, breathing hard and slick with sweat, she pulled the hay from her hair and rolled over, opening a shutter to escape the smell. After days of torrential rain, a few stars had braved the night sky, winking at the receding storm clouds. A light breeze brought warm, moist air that caressed her skin. She stretched her bare arms through the open window and slipped out onto the roof.
The villagers mocked her strong arms. Gorilla Girl, they called her, but her legs didn’t work properly so other limbs had to compensate. She pulled herself upwards, scraping the bare skin of a polio-withered leg against the crude thatch of the barn. She stopped on the ridge to catch her breath, inhaling the warm scent of an osmanthus tree that trailed yellow flowers smelling of apricots and honey.
Not thunder. The growl had grown to a roar, and now the earth was vibrating, too. The stones were singing, singing for her. It was a long time since anyone had sung to her. Alone in the darkness, she peered into the night, down towards the village, up towards the mountains – and that’s when she saw it.
When the water came, she was ready. She threw up her arms, welcoming the spray that cooled her burning skin. The great wave crested, the water lifted her up and carried her away.
She didn’t have to walk any more; she was flying.
‘Chu Jiaozi!’ The river dragon has come!
Suiping, Henan Province, China
A tall bird lurked in the shallows, perfectly still, waiting for the silver ripple of a fish. As the thrum of an outboard motor intensified, the bird turned its head this way and that, forming a question mark with its long neck. The approaching boat ploughed a deep furrow through the water, cascading waves spreading out behind. A dog barked. The bird raised a razor-sharp beak in protest, bending its long legs and springing into the sky, huge wings unfurling – cream feathers fringed with charcoal – trailing its long legs like streamers over the vast reservoir, flapping south towards the forested slopes to find a fishing spot in quiet streams that tumbled from cone-shaped hills.
Madam Ru had not been disposed to talk to them. She berated the waiter, a torrent of abuse streaming forth, before she threw some coins onto the table. As she stood up, her chair clattered to the floor and she banged the door
as she stormed out.
The waiter had apologised to his guests. A young man picked up the fallen chair and spoke softly to Speedy.
‘I guess it is still too painful for some. But this guy,’ he nodded at the beaming man, ‘he’s offered to take us out in his fishing boat. To look at the dam from the reservoir side. What do you think?’
They’d come all this way, and Jaq had no idea why. She wasn’t leaving yet.
Sitting in the front of the fishing boat, a fibreglass dinghy with an outboard motor, Jaq shaded her eyes against the sun and followed the heron’s flight, marvelling at the power that had allowed it to rise from the water. Power. A curious concept: rate of work, energy divided by time, joules per second. She turned back to the dam. It stretched east and west, a vast concrete wall that held back 178 billion gallons of water. Water that appeared so benign, the smooth glittering surface broken only by the ripples from the boat.
The reservoir was not just storing water, it was storing energy. A giant battery composed of only the purest, cleanest material.
The pagoda-style roof of the power station came into view as the boat swept round the island. Under the wooden shingles and curling eaves, spinning turbines were converting the energy of flowing water into electricity. Hydroelectric power, cleanest of all forms of energy generation – no greenhouse gas emissions, no waste – and the most versatile: easy to vary the production rate to match the peaks and troughs of demand. Excess energy from other sources can be stored by pumping the water back up to the reservoir. The power output is entirely proportional to the flow of water through the turbines, giant spinning water wheels which turn magnets to produce an electrical current in stationary coils of wire. Power equals flowrate times height of fall times density of water times acceleration due to gravity. Everything is fixed except flowrate, which can be varied by opening and closing the water gates. In a perfect system, with no energy losses due to noise or heat from friction, one cubic metre per second of water with a density of one tonne per metre cubed falling ten metres from reservoir to riverbed gives 98 kW of power. Enough to run fifty electric fires, 500 fridges, 20,000 charging mobile phones. That’s 130 horsepower – the work rate of 130 farm horses – all that just from a one-metre cube of water, weighing a tonne, falling from a four-storey building every second. When you think about it like that, it is easy to see just how dangerous hydroelectric power is. In fact, more people have been killed, per kilowatt hour generated, as a direct result of failures of hydroelectric dams than by any other form of energy generation. Water is essential to life, and deadly to it. A few litres are enough to kill you. Every year 350,000 people die from drowning – that’s forty people per hour, many of them children.
The fisherman pointed at the power station and shouted, ‘Wŏ bùnéng zài kàojìnle.’
‘What is he saying?’
‘He can’t go any closer,’ Speedy said.
‘It’s OK,’ Jaq said. Under the deceptively still water, powerful currents were racing towards the turbines. Best to keep well clear.
‘Have you seen enough?’
A good question. Why was she even here? A hint, a hunch. She thought that Dan had directed her to this place, but why? There was nothing to see but water. Had she misunderstood his coded message? Read too much into it because of her fascination with man-made disasters? She gazed across the reservoir, up to the distant hills and then back to the impassive dam.
Something caught her eye. A flash of turquoise. Curiously familiar.
She pointed. ‘Can we go over there?’
The fishing boat wheeled round in the direction she indicated, a great arc of spray catching the sunlight. Through shimmering drops of gold, Jaq glimpsed another boat emerging from behind the island. A faster, sleeker craft, jet black and low in the water, silent and powerful, heading straight towards them.
And, standing at the prow, a man with a gun.
Suiping, Henan Province, China, 8 August 1975
The green-eyed girl rode the river dragon. Water everywhere, smashing and swirling, powerful currents sucking her under and spitting her out. Danger all around. A tree, torn up by its roots, snagged her trailing shirt in its branches, rolling her under. She tore herself free, her clothes ripped to shreds, and grabbed hold of a bamboo fence that slithered past. She could hear other people, sobbing and screaming, crying out to one another.
‘Oh, my baby! Help me find my poor baby!’ A wailing woman swept past clinging onto a wooden door, an ill-designed raft that flipped over as the water surged around some obstacle. When it bobbed back up the woman had gone. Reunited with her baby.
Something blunt and heavy crashed into Ru and the water closed around her. She lashed out, searching for a handhold. Which way was up? The top of her head bumped against a large, soft surface, her hands finding the hide of an animal, a cow or an ox. Everywhere she swam there were more of them, lifeless corpses, moving with the water, trapping her under.
Lungs bursting, aching for breath – she’d never been under the water this long – desperation gave her new strength. She kicked against the animal carcasses, but it was no use. She rolled with them, moving herself sideways until she found a gap.
She surfaced, gasping. The new moon was a sliver of light, but the stars were bright in a clear, mocking sky. I’ve sent you all my water; it’s your problem now.
Around her, others tried and failed to stay afloat. She kept her distance. There was no love lost between Ru and the villagers, but she had to look away, avert her eyes from faces that she knew: the boy who threw stones at her and called her a freak, the girl who brought the swill she was meant to share with the pigs. The lucky ones must have been asleep when the tidal wave hit them; they would never wake up. The less fortunate struggled on through the nightmare, but all were doomed.
Ru had one advantage. She’d learned to swim long ago, when she lived with her grandfather beside the reservoir, in the same water that was now tearing up roads and carrying away whole villages and their farms. Perhaps the water remembered her because, bit by bit, it allowed her to move to the fringes, away from the arrowhead with its waterborne shrapnel and missiles.
But she was tiring. Each time something crashed into her, it took her a little longer to recover, increasingly difficult to time her breathing to miss the standing waves, going under more often, taking longer to surface. Coughing out water only to take it into her lungs again. Her arms ached, their movements weakening.
When she smashed into a tree, her instinct was to push herself away. But she no longer had the strength, so she wrapped her arms around the trunk instead. The water pummelled her, pressing her chest against the smooth bark, while debris slammed into her back, knocking the breath out of her.
The world began to spin. Was this any worse than drowning, finding refuge above water and yet being unable to breathe? If she let the water take her, the end would be quick. She slackened her hold and the current spun her round the trunk. The pressure eased on her chest and she was able to take in great sobbing lungfuls of air. She hung onto the trunk, not giving up, not ready to stop fighting yet. Her arms ached; the effort of pulling against the current was too much. Only two ways out. Down or up. A low branch touched her face and she reached up to grab it, praying it would hold as she heaved herself upwards.
‘Go away.’
A moon face appeared in the darkness. A boy, younger than her, kicked at her with a dangling leg.
‘This is my tree,’ he said. ‘I was here first. It’s not strong enough for two.’
He was probably right; the slender trunk was bending in the current now that her full weight was suspended from it. But what choice did she have? There were no other trees near, and she didn’t have the strength to continue.
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Just let me rest a while.’
‘Get lost.’
As kicks and blows rained down on her, she grabbed a thin ankle to make it stop. He screamed as he lost his balance and fell into the torrent.
It
took forever to haul herself up to the spot he had occupied, a saddle between higher branches. Using her arms to swing a leg either side for balance, she jammed her back against the larger branch while holding onto a smaller one. It was a young tree, the type that shoots up tall before filling out. Other structures had attempted to resist the onslaught and snapped, but this tree had bent under the initial wave – she could see debris among the topmost leaves – and sprung back as the torrent abated. Slender and flexible, rather than thick and sturdy, it might survive. As might she. For the first time that night, she began to believe it. Her breathing slowed. She closed her eyes.
When she woke, she saw that a pale band of light had appeared at the eastern horizon. She looked back towards the mountains. The river dragon was sleeping. The water that should have been confined in a reservoir now lay spread across the fields. There was little sign of the towns and villages that had once dotted this land, no landmarks to tell her how far she’d travelled. The first wave had torn into the sleeping settlements with brutal force. Anything anchored to the ground was flattened; everything else was swept away.
As the sun rose, she took stock. Her village was gone. She wouldn’t miss most of the people, but she was sad for the animals. The pigs had been her friends, especially the new litter of piglets. Since her grandfather had died, the pig barn was the only home she knew.
Ru stayed in the tree all day and a second night. It rained a little and she opened her mouth to catch the water, then licked it from the leaves, but she was still so terribly thirsty. She knew better than to drink the flood water. The swollen things bobbing around below her were beginning to smell and she tried not to look too closely at their faces. Insects crawled in her hair and buzzed around her eyes and nose. She tried to eat them, but her mouth was too dry to swallow the disgusting dry morsels.
By the third night she knew she would have to move in the morning. The waters must be receding; perhaps she could swim to safety.
The Chemical Reaction Page 29