Chinese Justice

by Peter Marriner

  The last rehearsal for her public trial took place once again in the school assembly hall where formerly Xeng had proudly introduced Nicola to his dutifully applauding charges. Now a row of those girls sat solemnly behind a long desk to represent her judges, while Milly Soong and several others rehearsed long speeches. Again Nicola stood before them, forcibly held in the uncomfortable bowing position. Her head was jerked up and down now and then to face the judges like a marionette, apparently so that the judges might examine her reaction to the totally incomprehensible accusations. Repeated practice, however, had made Nicola adept at recognising the sequence of sounds that heralded her turn to perform, and she was able to respond on cue, producing an expression of penitent shame at every correct juncture, even before she felt the warning tap of the cane from behind.

  She performed faultlessly in the rehearsal this time and was therefore returned unpunished to her prison across the schoolyard. She felt nothing but relief and that secret shame. She had escaped again. The killing of the scooter rider didn’t seem to have been one of the charges.

  Chapter Four

  When the time came for her real trial, Nicola hardly recognised it as such until it was almost over. Milly Soong and her sister revolutionaries paraded in front of the school with their prisoner in their midst. The girls were armed with a variety of home made weapons. Two older girls in front carried big red and black banners and some of the younger ones, bringing up the rear, were banging cymbals, drums and gongs.

  Nicola was more skimpily clad than ever. Under hard treatment the black dress had split open to the waist, exposing her breasts half-naked in torn black lace. The black shoulder straps had snapped and been re-knotted, hoisting the hem by an unfortunate inch or two. Round her neck, like a sandwich board, hung large placards painted in large black characters with what were presumably the details of her crimes. They at least provided her with some modesty before the large attendant crowd that competed in noise with the crashing instruments and shrilling voices of the schoolgirls.

  As they turned out of the school gates, two miserable male captives were marched past, also half-naked and placarded in the same way as Nicola. That was about as much as Nicola was allowed to see, for the two biggest girls who held her arms then forced her into motion following them in the usual ‘head down’ posture. She had a good view of her breasts almost wobbling out of their shallow confinement at every step and she could feel that her shortened dress hem was drawn so far up that the dangling placard bounced on half bared bottom cheeks. In these circumstances she felt her escort to be a protection, for though she could see very little of them, the swelling roar of the crowd sounded angry and dangerous, reminding her that this was more or less a witch hunt, with herself figuring as the witch.

  Their destination was the same school hall, which Nicola knew so well by now. This time the public had evidently been allowed to crowd within, filling the approaches. It made the march across the intervening space all the more terrifying and the escort of schoolgirls a thing to be grateful for. The press and delay about the entrance was equally intimidating, with the implication that Nicola was an insignificant mote in a gigantic upheaval. Slowly they shuffled up the steps and then within, where there seemed only to be standing room and she was packed so closely about by her young captors that she was unable to see anything but trouser legs and a dirty, boot-marked, wood block floor.

  There was an interminable wait while a long incomprehensible sing-song of voices went on ahead of them, punctuated by frenzied mass chanting of slogans during which Nicola’s escort slapped and pummelled her in their excitement. Twice the proceedings seemed to reach a crux. The crowd inside the hall fell more or less silent so that the people outside made themselves heard again. Bodies pushed and jostled in a wave of readjustment towards the door. Then there was a hush outside also, sufficient for the crack of a single pistol shot to be heard. A roar of approval and more slogan shouting outside and then back inside the hall it all began again.

  At the third resumption it seemed it was Nicola’s turn. She was thrust forward in front of the familiar long desk, just as she had been at the rehearsal. A row of feet beneath it was all she could see of her judges this time as well. In the unhappily familiar ritual the interchange of voices began; Milly Soong’s the most prominent, the tightly packed public ohhhing and ahhhing at intervals just as the audience of schoolgirls had done at the rehearsals, but with infinitely deeper menace. As usual, Nicola’s head was jerked up at intervals to identify exhibits; the silly photos of her naked in the hotel room with Xeng; the pair of black tights she had left behind at the flat; one of the biggest of the bronzes from the truck, an incense burner, massive, ancient and green patina-ed, its white excavation label still dangling from its neck. Automatically Nicola acknowledged each item presented to her, her dazed brain only capable of dwelling upon an agonised terror that a red scooter might be next.

  There was a long period then when all went quiet except for occasional massed gasps or waves of nervous giggles all around Nicola. Head down, she could feel the heightening of the hostile atmosphere without knowing what caused it. She had seen Milly Soong open the smart brief case which Nicola had given Xeng in London as a parting gift and pass forward what looked like a video-cassette. Over her bent head the judges and the audience were now watching a grainy record shot by a hidden surveillance camera, of what had passed between Nicola and the two schoolgirls in the shower. Nicola was identifiable on her knees between the two Chinese girls, the one whose thighs her face was buried in looking upwards with an expression between astonishment and ecstasy, clinging to Nicola’s hair with both hands. In growing panic, Nicola twisted her head just in time to see the last of it for herself. Increasingly steam-fogged and water spattered, the screen showed her own face, this time turned upwards towards the camera her expression distorted and mouth gaping open, her hands clutching to her the black haired heads of the two diminutive girls whose faces were out of sight and pressed to the front of her thighs.

  “Have you anything further to confess about these crimes?” Milly Soong repeated the key words a second time. Confusion suffused Nicola’s mind fixed upon her secret guilt. The girlish fingers in her hair jerked her head round, away from the now blank screen. A row of round enigmatic faces gazed at her. The one whose harsh words Milly Soong had translated was a middle-aged woman, her voice carrying mature severity.

  Nicola opened her mouth to make the correct response, but only a squeak emerged. Suddenly it dawned upon her dazed brain that she had left it too late.

  She was about to be sentenced by these awful, ignorant people, and she had never been able to explain herself. In confusion she veered wildly away from what she had been taught.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she protested, half expecting the cane to descend. “It wasn’t like that!” As her head was thrust down again, she heard Milly Soong coolly translating, or perhaps inventing. Suddenly realising the futility of her protests she tried to shriek as far as that was possible with her head held down level with her

  knees. “You beasts! This isn’t a proper court! I want to appeal to a proper court!” What Milly Soong’s translation made of it she had no means of knowing, but even if it had been accurate it would have been unfortunate. There was uproar all about her, angry shouting from the bench, and corresponding indignation from the crowd. The voice of the woman judge prevailed, an angry seesawing denunciation, which produced a buzz of excitement from her hearers.

  Nicola suddenly found herself at the centre of a cleared space. Two grinning men hurried forward with a short wooden bench, which they planted before her. The two girls who were holding Nicola thrust her to her knees and so belly-down onto the bench. It was short and her head projected beyond its end. She was completely terrified. What had she been convicted of? She had a sudden vision of an executioner’s sweeping sword coming down to slice through her out-thrust neck.

  The placard wa
s torn from her back; a swarm of girls were parting her thighs and fastening her to the bench at the knees with their red scarves; her hair was drawn back and her handcuffed wrists forward until they could be fastened one to the other with a further scarf, pulling her neck back and her head up to face the judges. In the position they fastened her with her rump projected, tautly curved over the end of the bench, it dawned upon her what was to happen. The sight of a man in a khaki uniform rolling up his sleeve to bare a brawny forearm with a long rattan cane in his fist as he measured her with his eyes confirmed the truth. Shame and terror vied for place in Nicola’s mind. She had insulted the court and now she had an inkling of what the penalty was to be! She was to be publicly caned!

  She twisted her head this way and that, seeing people crowding round without any order or organisation, gaping and excited, treating it as a spectacle. Some of them were school pupils in uniform, but there were people of all ages, some of them men and many of the women accompanied by young children.

  A sudden anticipatory hush from these onlookers was all the warning Nicola received. Straddling the bench with her thighs apart, her skirt had ridden up high and the descending rattan cracked like a whip across taut black silk only an inch or so above the stretched hemline. Nicola shrieked to the roof. She had just felt the difference between a man’s arm and a girl’s. A man’s arm was certainly more effective. The crowd hissed. The thin red wheal the cane had left appeared spanning bare plump flesh as Nicola’s frantic jerk combined with the impact of the cane to lift the edge of her skirt just that fraction higher, displaying the limitations of her knickers.

  Swishhh... Crackkk!!! Swishhh... Crackkk!!!

  The crowd gasped appreciatively at each stroke and Nicola made the bench creak with her reaction. Her cries were quite incomprehensible to the crowd, but replete with expression nevertheless. Her skirt had ridden right up to her waist with the third stroke and her half-transparent lace knickers had split under the repeated impact of the cane so that all three red stripes ran almost undisguised across naked flesh. She lost her head completely then, forgetting the intention to protest had earned her this punishment and under the stress of the cane repeating the lesson she had learnt to parrot in exactly this fashion.

  Intelligently, the policeman who wielded the cane, permitted Nicola just time and breath enough to deliver each sentence, merely using it to prompt and punctuate her hysterical recital, each stinging stroke being followed by her confessional phrase and accompanied by Milly Soong’s translation in a clear and penetrating voice for the benefit of judges and public.

  “My name is Nicola Horsham.” Crackkk!!!

  “I was sent here by the British government.” Crackkk!!! “I seduced the traitor Xeng.” Crackkk!!!

  “I bribed the traitor Xeng by allowing him to fuck me.” Crackkk!!!

  “I stole the antiquities, the property of the people.” Crackkk!!! “I destroyed public property.” Crackkk!!!

  “I tried to escape the just indignation of the people.” Crackkk!!! “But I was captured by the patriotic students!” Crackkk!!!

  Although she had repeated her confession the bamboo continued to fizz down, landing with repeated meaty cracks across flinching female flesh whilst Nicola howled in pain whatever came into her head, “I confess... I confess... I am guilty... imperialist arrogance... despising the people... deserving punishment... ” and overall the triumphant sound of Milly Soong’s translation.

  Chapter Five

  Twenty four hours later Nicola was aboard a train running slowly, with many halts and restarts, across a flat plain chequered with small fields in shades of brown yellow and green, intersected with the glinting lines of irrigation canals. She was one of a score or so of convicts occupying a boxcar attached to a freight train, men divided from women by a wooden barred partition. The men were chained one to another with heavy shackles upon their wrists and ankles. Like the other women, Nicola was only lightly handcuffed, but like them she wore chained around her neck a billet of wood like a large luggage label inscribed with black inked ideograms.

  One of the women with Nicola she recognised as the teacher with whom she had been imprisoned in Xanzou School. The woman was more communicative now, though evidently still fearful of being denounced by her fellow convicts who gave them scowling glances at the sound of a foreign language. She explained that a faction called the Cleaners had seized control of the administration in Xanzou, though she had no idea how far their connections extended. Nicola and the others had been sentenced in due form it seemed, and they were bound to a prison work camp somewhere in the far-western desert. The woman’s dread of this was obvious. Nicola had read of such places too, slave labour camps where political troublemakers were worked to death. Winter was coming on and the prospect was truly dreadful. She might be dead before anyone found out where she had disappeared to. The other woman drew for her on a scrap of paper, in spiky ideograms, an appeal for the delivery of an appeal for help to a British consulate, but how she was to persuade anyone to do it, she had no ideas other than to wait in hope.

  The train crawled slowly, most of the time at little more than walking speed, stopping and starting for no apparent reason. From the vantage point of the truck, Nicola looked out upon a landscape little changed for centuries. The land seemed to be full of figures, mostly in dark colours, working in the fields, trotting with loads along the earth dykes, or casting dip nets into the waterways. Had they not been labelled and handcuffed, her fellow convicts might have dropped from the train and disappeared among the fields. For Nicola, easily identifiable at a distance as a stranger, half-naked, with no food and no idea of where she was, that seemed not to be an option. She would stand out even among the millions as an obvious oddity.

  She still hoped that some higher authority would discover and sort out her terrifying plight. Yet signs of growing disruption and disorder were not wanting. The stations they passed through were crowded with people and baggage with all the marks of refugees. When the train passed through industrial regions, factories seemed to be deserted and chimneys innocent of smoke. Military convoys of tanks and guns were evident upon the roads and soldiers with flags in various versions of the basic red appeared upon station platforms. Once the train crawled slowly across an interminably long bridge over a wide brown river, the ends of the bridge guarded by mobile rocket batteries, pointing skyward at indeterminate enemies.

  At night the land lay almost in darkness. In the countryside only the headlights of slow moving vehicles and a few dim flickering lights were visible. Once in the distance Nicola saw a whole town on fire, lurid red flames lighting dark building and gaping windows under a pall of smoke.

  Food was scanty, a sack of raw vegetables at one stop, a tin bowl of rice, weak and watery, at the next. The straw strewn floor was all there was to sleep upon.

  Nicola had to face the knowledge that she was being conveyed deeper and deeper into the interior, already beyond easy trace perhaps, her only identification the label about her neck. The woman teacher came from Shanghai and bewailed her exile with every mile. The constant reiteration took root in Nicola’s mind and Shanghai came to seem a haven of sanity and safety from which the rails were taking her inexorably away.

  Days later, about dawn, the train crawled into yet another urban freight yard. The convicts were taken off here. Fastened by the wrist to a long chain, they shuffled across a wilderness of rusty rails and apparently immobilised trains to some sort of railway police office amid the tracks. After a lot of noisy argument and expostulation, with uniformed men stamping in and out, they were locked up in a row of open fronted cells already half-full.

  Without badges of rank it was impossible to judge where authority lay. The Xanzou teacher whispered that this was the last stop before the camp. The engine of their train had been requisitioned and that they must wait for another to be available in company with these common criminals.

 
That was the last information she was to be able to obtain. While they were trying to settle themselves, men kept coming in to gape through the bars at the wicked foreign she-devil. Nicola was skimpily clad. Her thin dress had long since broken its flimsy shoulder straps and she wore it with the remains knotted around her waist. The black lace bra was a skimpy housing for her breasts so much larger than most Chinese women could boast of.

  The other women convicts seemed fearful of the association with her, slapping and kicking her vindictively. The only food they were given brought things to a head since it was merely a communal bowl of lukewarm rice. They fought over it hysterically, Nicola fighting back with success, being bigger and stronger. Between them they made so much of a row that she was forcibly separated from the rest by baton wielding policemen. The man who brought the food was summoned and, producing a key, unlocked Nicola’s wrist from the communal chain. She was fettered hand and foot instead, apparently to punish her for brawling and then an argument ensued among the policemen at a loss what further to do with her. At last the guard from the train was directed to take her elsewhere.

  Nicola followed her conductor across the darkening marshalling yard, stumbling over several sets of rails to an isolated concrete building, her fetters jangling noisily on the metal. They crossed a large ground floor room with a dirty tiled floor and a row of tall windows looking out onto the yard. There were maps lining the walls, several empty desks, monitors with grey blank screens and numerous battered green filing cabinets. It was lit by neon tubes in the ceiling, several of them dead and not replaced.

  Men in olive uniforms gaped or sniggered at her. A man wearing a peaked cap shouted down her conductor, angrily waving him onward. Next door was a two storey warehouse with a heavy door standing open and an elderly man in blue cotton trousers and white vest unloading cardboard cartons from a handcart. Mounting the outside stair, clumsily in Nicola’s case with her fetters jangling and thumping on the wooden steps while the guard yanked her impatiently by the arm, they paused on the landing for the man to knock deferentially on the door.