Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  “Also the open road. The motorcycle is a symbol of freedom,” announced a third, the one with cool sunglasses and the pink-stencilled swastika: “Freedom and democracy.”

  “I thought you were opposed to democracy,” said Brough.

  They giggled in near unison.

  “No, Mister Brough.” said the Statement Girl. “The Communist Party supports democracy, only we need an extended transition and not necessarily towards the Western style of democracy.”

  They all had perfect, colloquial English learned in some other part of the world.

  “This guy tryin’ to indoctrinate you against Communism ladies?” It was Miss Lai, holding a frankfurter and a jar of Cheez Whiz.

  They giggled again.

  “Want some Cheez Whiz?”

  Brough shook his head. His neck was beginning to ache from looking up at them:

  “So how did it develop, this subculture?”

  “Started when we were in high school I guess,” said the Statement Girl.

  “You all went to school together?”

  “Ha! This guy never stops!” said Miss Lai, at his elbow. A flicker of concern crossed their perfectly plucked eyebrows. Lai guffawed:

  “No, really, go ahead, tell the guy. Get some practice!”

  The whites of their eyes glistened as they waited for Brough’s next question.

  “Are you,” he took a swig of beer, “all from the same place?”

  “Xuanpu District, Beijing,” said Statement Girl.

  “We’re still off the record by the way.” Miss Lai chipped in: “Chatham House rules.”

  “Your English is very good-have you studied abroad?” said Brough.

  “Paris,” said Swastika Girl, “but then I moved back to Beijing to continue my studies.”

  “MBA?” said Brough.

  “Actually fashion,” she blushed.

  “And yourself?” Brough angled his head to the Statement Girl in an excessively kindly way,

  “Dance!” she laughed, “at the Northwest Indiana Conservatory. Now I’m doing an MPhil at Beijing Women’s Fashion University.”

  “So what brought you back here?”

  A wave of silence and consternation seemed to pass across their faces again and they looked intently at Miss Lai.

  “Okay Mister Brough,” said Miss Lai. “you know what is the big anniversary this year? And no, not your shitty little Western-inspired coup twenty years ago! Zero-nine is the sixtieth anniversary of...” she spiralled a finger near his head.

  He wracked his brain. There was a fact there at the edge of it he could not reach.

  “Ding! Time’s up. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China!”

  “Shit, I did know that.”

  “See,” Lai lectured the others: “They come to our country aided by unreliable elements and kick the shit out of our reputation; fuck our little village girls in their hotel rooms and go away knowing nothing of our history. Or of their own role in our exploitation.”

  The women surrounding him suddenly looked very displeased; indeed struggling with their displeasure to appear polite. Miss Lai continued:

  “Okay so in the big parade, October time, the district of Xuanpu is getting a major honour.” She cocked an eyebrow at the Swastika Girl, who began speaking into the space above Brough’s head, in a voice similar to that you hear in a recorded elevator announcement:

  “In November 2008 the higher authorities urged the Xuanpu District to set up a female militia group.”

  “Responding to this great honour,” Statement Girl picked up, “selection was quickly conducted among business, civil service bodies and higher education establishments in order to create the Militia Square Array.”

  “However,” Flying Jacket Girl joined in, breathless with excitement, “it quickly became clear that the Square Array of the Xuanpu District could not be assembled without calling on forces from beyond the initial pool of volunteers...”

  “Therefore,” Swastika Girl continued, “many highly educated female entrepreneurs who had temporarily moved abroad to study, realising that they met the physical requirements, immediately volunteered.”

  “Ah, I get it, you’re all above a certain height. I was wondering about that...”

  “Not above, Mister Brough,” said Miss Lai, “to get into the Steel Fuchsia Number One Female Militia Square Array you have to be exactly one metre seventy-eight, which with the army boots brings you to one metre eighty-three, which is six feet.”

  “That’s some kind of army boots,” said Brough.

  “White leather - Prada’s makin’ em on special commission,” said Miss Lai.

  “And the rest of the uniform? Let me guess...”

  “It’s a kinda skirt they had, popular back in the sixties – maybe there was a fabric shortage? A historic reference I guess,” said Miss Lai, feigning bashfulness.

  “What colour?”

  “Fuckin’ fuchsia, of course.”

  Brough snorted beer down his nose and laughed until his eyes watered.

  “Sorry, you had me there for a while. Very funny.”

  “I’m not joking!” said Miss Lai.

  “To wear the uniform of the Steel Fuchsias is a proud opportunity for the patriotic women volunteers of Xuanpu District,” said Statement Girl, throwing her shoulders back.

  Brough drained the dregs of his beer. As the sun dipped low the desert breeze had begun to whip into their faces.

  “And what did you make of Western democracy while you were out there preparing for this unique honour?”

  “I found it kinda degenerate,” said the Statement Girl, after a few seconds’ thought.

  “Lack of social harmony is a major problem,” said Swastika Girl, adopting that dull, modulated tone Chinese newscasters use: “but also political fragmentation. America has strong political factions based on strongly competing ideologies of liberalism and neo-conservatism. Communist Party’s senior theorists believe this leads to renewed civil warfare within twenty-five years.”

  “But without democracy...” his thoughts trailed off.

  He’d stood on the campus at Trent Poly arguing with Trotskyist newspaper-sellers just after the miners’ strike, their largactil gaze unflinching in the face of logic. But at least it had been an argument: this was much weirder.

  “China’s commitment to democracy is unparalleled,” said the Swastika Girl, breaking into his reverie.

  Brough had talked philosophy with psychopathic Bosnian Serbs, discussed Islam with pro-Taliban clerics, and the finer points of Aymara separatism in the backstreets of El Alto, in each case at gunpoint. In Brough’s experience you could reason even with indoctrinated nut-jobs. Even with Islamists you have some kind of shared logic system to start with - not just about good and evil but about development and contradiction. But he sensed, behind these pretty eyes, blinking pleasantly at him now, a totally different philosophy.

  For a few seconds the long doom of Western civilisation played out in a rapid-fire montage inside his brain. There was a cloud of red sand whipping off the horizon.

  “Lemme show you your bivouac, Mister Brough,” Miss Lai grabbed him by the arm and led him away from the smiling group, who flipped their mobile phones open and began chatting in giddy Mandarin about their investment portfolios.

  She steered him to a pup tent at the edge of the encampment.

  “Can you get me to Ordos by tomorrow?”

  “We gotta deliver you personally. There’s a lot of radio traffic following your, er, incident and a lot of jumpiness. Get you there tomorrow night.”

  “What happens if I just get up and leave?”

  “We shoot you, maybe not with a dart either. Anyway, tonight’s a lockdown: storm’s about an hour away. Prolly have to dig ourselves out in the morning.”

  Brough unzipped the tent.

  “Is everybody here a member of this Steel Fuchsia thing?”

  “Heck no, just those guys! We’re lookin after them - getting them into shape. W
e got all kindsa people in the Snow Leopards; dotcom kids who flipped their companies, nuclear science geeks on R&R from Bushehr: day traders sitting out the stock market slump. Just gotta show some commitment to free enterprise! And motorcycles!”

  “And they’re really going to march in pink mini-skirts on your National Day parade?” said Brough.

  “Well, not exactly marching - it’s a kind of special marching style, kind of a retro thing again, where you keep your leg straight and make a lotta noise with your heel as it hits the tarmac? I think you guys in Europe invented it, way back when...”

  She threw her insouciance into his face. Brough had run out of things to say.

  “What happened to feminism?”

  “Raising women out of the status of domestic sex slavery is a key objective of Chinese Communism,” Miss Lai’s voice flipped into an irony-laden monotone: “And is 98.7% complete.”

  ~ * ~

  7

  Chun-li’s achievement had been to get the doctors to sedate Georgina for twenty-four hours. Carstairs, once his shoulder had been jerked back into place and papers shown to him certifying the injury had been sustained in a Channel Ninety-Nine vehicle, was happy to lie back and ogle the bottoms of the nurses, high on acupuncture and intravenous painkillers.

  He had not made any phone calls. Technically it was Georgina’s shout whether and when to let the Channel know their driver had been killed, cameraman injured and that they had a reporter missing in the desert. But she was asleep and beeping in the next bed.

  Chun-li, meanwhile, had been busy. She had caused a minor spike in the spot price of digibeta tape in Western China by buying up as much as three separate audio-visual stores in Ordos could supply, together with the heaviest tripod she could find, and a set of lights procured from an amateur photography club.

  While interfacing with this world of high-spec Western electrical goods sold from darkened retail spaces she was inevitably offered, and given the circumstances had accepted, the chance to purchase other forms of Western hardware, opting in the end for a compact Beretta 8000 pistol with two clips of 9mm negative energy to go with it.

  Then she meditated. She stood in her hotel room in her pants and bra, emptied her brain of worries and made her mind the mirror of heaven and the glass of all things. She made slow, circular defensive blocks against an imaginary foe; stretched her feet into the long stances of Wu-style tai-chi, which her mother had practiced, surreptitiously, in defiance of the compulsory simplified Yang style, in a labour camp during the 1960s.

  Next, she contemplated the primacy of the objective circumstances over subjective will in Marxist theory. She let herself say, out loud, all kinds of crazy shit until, as the Tao suggests, her mind no longer dwelt on right and wrong.

  It all came down, in the end, to the same principle: wu-wei, the action of non-action, performed with the profound conviction that no harm could ever come to her since she really did not exist.

  Then, on the dot of 11pm, having secured a new driver and an identical Ruifeng van, she arrived at the smoke-glass doorway of the Club Prix de l’Arc just in time for Happy Hour. She had put on a halter-neck top that, while not completely shapeless, would give off clear floral signals that she was not - well, at least not in the same way as every other woman in the black-lit interior of the club - for sale.

  She spotted Oktyabr Khünbish immediately: he was posed beneath a silver gelatin print of a racehorse, taken at Longchamp sometime in the 1920s. He looked only slightly deranged from his concussion, and was able to flash a smile at her before slouching over to meet her at the bar:

  “What are you drinking, Miss Cai?”

  Chun-li ordered her usual - Blue Cat date juice with a single ice cube-and perched herself on a bar stool.

  “Oktyabr’s a cool name,” she ventured in teach-yourself Mongolian.

  “Actually,” he glanced at the floor, “these days it’s not really seen as politically correct to speak Mongolian to foreigners, so if you don’t mind...” He switched to Mandarin, “Yeah... Oktyabr. It’s somewhere out there in the family history. Ardent communists. But my clan name is Jalayir. Not acceptable on a Chinese passport so I went for Oktyabr. Just writing ‘X.X.X.’ looks so needlessly confrontational, hey?”

  “What was the horse called?”

  “Er, Jalayir,” he sighed. “My sub-clan runs the syndicate.”

  He was balancing a glass of Chardonnay by the base, between forefinger and thumb, and took a noisy slurp.

  “And, just so I am not making any more cultural fuck-ups, the name Khünbish means what I think it means?”

  “Too right!” he laughed. “Not A Human Being! They were torn between that and Wolfbite. My sister died of-well, you know, the usual stuff during the Cultural Revolution-at the age of three months, so my folks weren’t taking any chances.”

  Chun-li knew all about this Mongol ritual of giving babies taboo names to ward off premature death at the hands of evil spirits. She knew, too, all about this Communist elite ritual of engaging in total meaningless bullshit until you worked out which faction, corporation or niche interest within the Party might be playing them.

  “I am presuming, since you’re approved as a guide for the foreign media, that you are a loyal, decent and upstanding Chinese citizen?”

  She nodded.

  “Me too,” he grinned. “Lots of cultural nationalism out here in the Party - tolerated too, like horse-racing. There’s a hundred flowers blooming out here in the West, if you know where to look.”

  She made a goofy gesture at the club decor, as if to say “Clearly!”

  The walls of the club were of polished chestnut with mahogany used for the rails and details. Doric columns stretched to the tin-tiled ceiling, salvaged from a shirt-waist factory in Manhattan. Out of the Art Deco picture frames Clark Gable flashed his brilliantine smile at Myrna Loy, Cary Grant slouched against the rails of the ballroom on the SS Bremen, Harold Arlen tinkled the ivories alongside Frank Sinatra in the wee small hours of the morning.

  There were lush palms at every corner, a waiter poised within fifteen feet of any customer, and, apart from that, wall-to-wall Mongolian prostitutes and their clients, who, Chun-li noted, were mainly Han Chinese and, from their attire, superbly rich.

  “The aim is to become the de facto Jockey Club of the Chinese racing scene, once it’s fully legalised,” Khünbish explained.

  He was wearing a black shirt with collar open to reveal greying chest hair and a horse medallion; Armani trousers, a belt with the RL Polo symbol discreetly etched into the buckle and a pair of black cowboy boots with white tooling and Cuban heels. This made Chun-li think for a second about Brough and check her phone in case he’d replied to her text message. He had not.

  “How’s your concussion?” she ventured.

  “The better for this,” Khünbish held up the wine glass. “Been fielding calls about you guys all day so I could use some answers.”

  “Me too,” Chun-li was an expert wei-qi player and knew that one of them would soon have to go beyond the initial tactic of placing random stones on meaningless points across the board, and attempt to encircle the other, which involves going out on a limb and embracing risk.

  She explained about the pollution they’d accidentally discovered at Tang Lu, stressing the randomness of their arrival there and the low ambition of Brough’s team. Khünbish in response tended to probe in the direction of Brough: his background and intent. He went straight to the same issue that General Guo had gone to: why do the British send a war correspondent to China on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of those unfortunate events in Tiananmen? She returned to the same conclusion as originally formed: a pure accident. Brough’s mission was designed to do what English journalists call a “snow job” on the CCP over environmental issues. What she could not understand, she stressed, was the response of the local Propaganda Department, as endangering life seemed like an overreaction.

  Khünbish countered with a second line of inquiry, wonde
ring why a highly-educated and apparently well connected - he artlessly stressed those words - professional lady such as Chun-li would be wasting her time on media-fixing jobs if somebody somewhere did not have a higher agenda? He had also, she noticed, placed his hand in a friendly manner on her knee.

  “Why so much money in Ordos?” she gave him a stupid, gone-out stare from under her hair, and sucked the last of her date juice up with the straw, making it gurgle. He understood it as a time-out signal.

  “You got one million in the bank here and you’re classed as poor!” he laughed a cheesy laugh.