by Paul Mason
“Alright.” His face was a scribble of agony. She let go.
“So you drinkin’ that or not? Don’t tell me you’re racist against the Japs as well?”
He tipped the whole cup of Yamazaki into his throat. She said:
“Here’s the deal: I fuck you. You don’t fuck me. I come first. You come before I come, no deal. I come before you come, you get your li’l USB stick returned and I tell Chi to let you go.”
“What about the rules. What if your mates find out?”
“Everything’s battened down. Nearly choked on sandstorm shit getting here. Nothing’s moving. Only the wind howling. Nobody vill hear you screeee-am. What’re you waiting for?”
She pulled her T-shirt over her head. He licked her breasts while she kicked her way out of her pants. He took a gulp of whisky out of the bottle. She killed the beam on the LED light and grabbed his balls. Fifty-nine seconds later she was sitting astride his chest punching him in the face: vindictive, out of control.
“I said you come after I come. What part of ‘I come first then you’ did you not understand? You’re a shit person, Brough. Useless.”
She looked for something to hit him with but could only find the Oreos, which she smashed and crumbled into his face and then collapsed, hiding her sobs behind her rigid, bony and-Brough suddenly thought-beautiful shoulders.
“I could...”
She hit him in the cheek with her elbow. Five minutes later she turned around and buried her nose into the crook of his neck, which he took as an unspoken apology.
“Let me,” he began.
“What?”
Five minutes later, after he had accidentally ejaculated in her mouth, she had him cowering in the end of the tent, kicking him with her heels, screaming muffled Chinese swear words at him.
“Will you please stop kicking me! It’s not fair!”
She stopped.
“Now listen, this is not going to work. Maybe we just don’t match each other. Sometimes, two people-they just don’t get on.”
“You want your USB stick?” She was peevish, snot-nosed, fragile. He nodded.
They tried it doggy style but while it worked for him it didn’t work for her. They tried it with Miss Lai crouching on top, dictating tempo, and Brough below-but by now fear of getting seriously harmed kept making his penis go limp.
Finally, his jaw electrified by another kung-fu jab, Brough sighed: “There is one more thing to try.”
She was breathing hard and blowing her fringe off her face and frowning:
“Be my guest.”
~ * ~
10
Mrs. Ma’s face blenched as she spotted Li Qi-han, marooned in a pool of light out in the alleyway. She shrieked, dropping Crystalmother’s baby onto the floor and totally losing her place in an online game of Match-It!
Li pushed through the door. He had looked better: one eye was bugged out, his lip was broken and liver-coloured; he had that “just-tortured” look you see a lot around police stations. It was common for detainees to hit the massage parlour on release - common even for them to come just for the human touch of the massage.
By the time Li managed to croak that he had been released without charge and present ten thousand yuan in new 100s as compensation, wedged between the third and fourth fingers of his lacerated left hand, the sound of boots thudding down a wooden staircase reminded Mrs. Ma she had pressed the panic button.
“It’s alright,” she trilled as two guards emerged from a hidden doorway, jackets hissing with static, and grabbed Li around the neck:
“He is nuts, but they’ve let him go.”
At this point Grandfather Li should have let out some disgusting wisecrack but-after Li Qi-han had been released and taken a shower, smoked a full packet of Yun-Yans, returned the Type 51 to its place on the mantelpiece shrine, drunk three warm cans of Snow and slept - Grandfather had disappeared.
On waking, a calm silence had broken out in Li’s mind. The pain in his joints felt sweet not sour; extreme fatigue made him serene. It was evening. The sun, which sets over the Helan Shan hours before it touches the horizon on the desert floor, was burning an orange hole through the dust. In the distance, a muezzin’s call was meandering upwards and upwards, close to the official limits of permitted ecstasy. He’d felt lonely without Grandfather Li. He’d decided to go and see Long Tall Daisy and sort things out at Mrs. Ma’s.
“Long Tall Daisy’s busy. In fact they’re all busy. Crystalmother is free in about five minutes,” Mrs. Ma snapped, one hand switching the computer screen to a grainy CCTV feed of the relevant cubicle, the other scooping up Crystalmother’s baby from the floor. “Daisy’s still got ten minutes left with another client and needs downtime afterwards but since it’s you-and you are too criminally insane to be around this place for long-I will hurry things up.”
Mrs. Ma’s false fingernails slid and cracked against her cellphone as she texted instructions to Daisy.
A few minutes later Daisy wandered sleepily into the reception, rubbing her hands on an alcohol wipe. Whenever Li had bothered to look at Daisy’s face before, the face had been unmemorable. It was her legs, long and perfect as a high-jumper’s, which mesmerised the clientele and allowed Mrs. Ma to bump Daisy’s price into the “three-and-three” bracket: three hundred yuan for tea, sympathy and masturbation; three hundred more for sex. The other girls called her “the long-three” after a domino with a three on both sides.
Once they were in the cubicle, with the whale music playing, Li blurted out:
“What do you charge for anal sex?”
He was angry and wanted to do something cruel to Daisy, like in a porn movie. She answered:
“That request has never been made.”
Her voice was soft, flat, betraying her constant bewilderment at the fact she was not still on a farm in Zhejiang Province and about to be sold to a toothless halfwit for the bride price of a television.
She texted Mrs. Ma and, a few seconds later, held up her mobile phone mutely to Li’s gaze. Another three hundred plus tip.
“It’s OK, I have gone off the idea,” Li stripped his shirt off, sulking.
“You had a fight with a herd of sheep?”
His ribs were covered in tight, round bruises from the batons. He tried to laugh but it hurt.
“Wow, you struggled with a vampire?” Daisy peered at the holes, still raw and proud, where the taser barbs had been pulled out.
Her voice lilted and swished like that of a sleepy child saying goodnight. She stroked Li’s neck and went into the sign language she’d had to invent when she first came to Mrs. Ma’s, on account of her first language being Wu, not Mandarin, and not even official Wu but mountain Wu-unintelligible to anybody beyond the next valley.
She pointed to Li’s pants, which he removed. She pointed to the massage couch and Li lay back on it, letting out a separate moan and shudder for each vertebra as it touched the surface. She opened her tatty robe to reveal breasts the shape of steamed buns tweaked to a point. She had trimmed her pubic hair to a heart shape and was soon naked except for her light-blue cotton socks and a pair of white operating-theatre sandals she’d been given by a nurse after her miscarriage.
She kicked these off with what may have passed in the mountains of Zhejiang as seductiveness-and then, long and slow, began to massage Li Qi-han’s feet.
Li’s penis became electric hard. The rest of his body could barely summon muscle tone but his cock, tuned to the frequencies of life and freedom, throbbed like a magnet.
He saw a long, blue-socked foot arch like a swan’s neck above his face. The massage bed was narrow and wobbled as she knelt astride him. Balancing on her toes she lowered her vagina onto his face and he found his tongue licking her in a manner that his conscious mind, if it had not been consumed by happiness, would have found disgusting.
A few minutes later they were still wrapped in the sixty-nine position, which Li had never done before, but were now on a small sofa and in the dark. At some point
they had fallen off the table and bounced off the tiled floor but neither of them could remember it. The whale music had finished; only the hum of the CD player and the hiss of joss sticks remained.
Li drew a breath of her skin and hair. He threw his arms around her ass and clung to her, upside down, as if to a lifebuoy. When he looked up, the glow of her cellphone was lighting her face, like a Degas ballet dancer. He found himself smiling.
“Don’t worry vampire-boy: your time is up but I’m not throwing you out. Mrs. Ma is accepting your ten thousand as a credit line so you can keep going for exactly sixteen hours and forty minutes if you feel like it.”
“Where are you from?”
“I come from Zhejiang,” she went into a singsong formula; “My family are poor. I have never had a disease. My police file is spotless. Acupressure is an ancient Chinese art.” Then, switching to English:
“You want fuck me in hotel room? You like younger girl? I can find.”
“Hey you speak English!” Li laughed and it felt like a hydraulic drill inside his chest was doing the laughing.
Soon they were cuddling, nose to nose, each appearing to the other in that weird perspective lovers achieve that makes the other look like a giant ant. Long Tall Daisy cradled Li’s head in her fingers and breathed into his hair.
“Why did they kick your head in?”
“It was a mistake. Cops thought I was trying to kill some journalists when I was only trying to help the police do their job.”
“Yeah but you did try and kill them. It’s all over Tang Lu. Why did they let you go?”
Grandfather Li had disappeared without ever telling Li what was actually going on at Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride, intimating only that it was a city-wide conspiracy involving the usual cast of deputy this-and-that’s - and that Xiao was scared shitless. Li had meant to probe Grandfather for the full story - but in the back of his mind he knew probing Grandfather for information was ludicrously ambitious and had assumed he would be told in due course.
“It’s all to do with that factory, Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride.”
“Ah.” She was silent for a moment. Li slid four swollen knuckles between her legs and began to rub there. She giggled and squirmed out of the way.
“We get a lot of those Hydride workers in here. Their wages must be three times normal. All they want to do is drink and fuck,” she sniggered uncontrollably.
“They ever talk about what goes on in there?”
“All the time, vampire boy.”
A shiver drifted up Li’s spine.
“What do they say?”
“It’s hot in there. They wear spacesuits and big gloves. They make batteries.”
“Yes but what’s the secret? What do they really make?”
“It’s a big joke. They’re always telling it. They have to live in a dorm and get the irises of their eyes scanned coming in and out; get searched inside their anus, have a cellphone issued to them by the company, and their whole lives are recorded on closed-circuit TV. They come here on a bus and a whole security team looks after them, in and out.”
“What’s the joke?”
“The joke is, it’s just a battery plant. It’s not what they do that’s secret, it’s who they do it for.”
“And who do they do it for?”
She let out a surly “huh”, from the pit of her stomach, and blew her sweaty hair out of her eyes.
“You ask that question they start strangling you and dump your body in the desert.”
“They threaten you with death?”
“Those guys smell like death. Iron filings, magnets, bad breath, machine oil, clothes washed in a toilet, acid - all of that stuff; but most of all they smell like death. Some have to wear wigs made like out of wire wool or rat fur.”
“Tell me who they do it for?” He put his tongue inside her ear.
But she burst into tears and hid her face in her hands.
“When I think of what they do to the whales I can hardly bear to say it!”
~ * ~
PART FOUR
“Hand in hand, march forward!
Even if we do not see any light”
Migrant worker’s song
~ * ~
1
Superintendent Xiao scowled at himself in the mirror of the lavatory at Tang Lu Railway Station. The bags under his eyes looked darker than usual, the wrinkles in his face more persistent; the white chalk his wife had patted into his hair at the temples was going sticky in the heat, stretching his scalp taut.
She’d forced him to change out of his slacks and smoking jacket. He’d said:
“I’m on a plainclothes mission!”
She’d sneered:
“Ha! All you look like is a plainclothes cop!”
Xiao’s wife could conduct an entire drum orchestra of middle-aged ladies with a single eyebrow, and she’d used that eyebrow to denounce his Armani leather belt and force him to rehabilitate his old plastic one, from the 1990s, with a tin buckle. She had swapped his smoking jacket for an ancient windbreaker, confiscated his tasselled loafers and Longines watch and ordered him to wear a pair of old gym shoes, completing the look by making his hair look grey with chalk.
“There, now you’re just another loser from Ningxia Province,” she’d declared.
Studying the man peering out from the cracks and stains of the mirror amid the yellow smoke, the urine reek and the sound of guys retching up snot, Xiao was inclined to agree. He let his cigarette trail like an uneaten noodle from his bottom lip and made his face go blank, like the hero of a French gangster movie.
The bitch had even confiscated his Zhongnanhais and replaced them with smuggled 555s, which disintegrate between your teeth. He hoiked a half-ounce of snot and tobacco dust from the back of his throat, let fly onto the grubby marble floor and shuffled out onto the concourse.
When Tang Lu was founded, during the Great Leap Forward, it had a railway but no station. Coal would be loaded out of handcarts beside the gleaming tracks, by railway workers who slept in canvas-covered pits. There’d been a grey concrete lump of a terminus dumped there sometime during the early 1970s which had, during the market reforms, suddenly swarmed with people trying to migrate East.
Under Jiang Zemin, the concrete slab had been replaced by a steel and glass slab of equal dinginess, its interior lit by an expansive LED display showing the punctual arrival and departure of six trains a day to Shizuishan and one, the Helan Mountain Express, direct from Tang Lu to Baotou. Railway workers had renamed it the “Swiss Mountain Express” following the attempted flight of a local party boss in late 2001, anxious to exchange two suitcases full of used deutschemarks for the coveted new euro 500 notes.
Xiao stilled the impulse to barge to the front of the queue. It was years since he’d travelled anywhere by train. He would go sleeper class - no sense pretending to be a complete bum, since he’d probably have to mix with money people at the other end. He made a mental note of the faces of ticket touts lurking next to the snack bar; he shuffled, looked at his wrist where his watch should have been and tried to avoid the glances of other passengers, which - though it was surely paranoia - seemed all to be focused on him.
“Hi Chief, what’s happening - fishing season started?”
He gazed, startled, at the cashier.
“Where are you travelling to today? Do you want a police discount?”
“Keep quiet woman, I am in plain clothes,” he hissed. “Baotou, one way, Soft Sleeper.”
She cast her eyes down at the abacus and issued the ticket, fingers trembling slightly as she handled the banknotes.
Xiao barged his way through several queues, trying to remember his plainclothes training. Problem is, Chinese plainclothes cops operate so as to be noticed. The idea is not to blend but to intimidate. Only foreigners and Gansu peasants can’t spot a plainclothes cop, runs the police academy joke: foreigners because they have never seen China, Gansu peasants because they have never seen clothes.
“Hey Chie
f, the fish biting today?”
It was the newspaper seller. Everybody knew Superintendent Xiao wore this grubby, cream windbreaker only once a year: to judge the Tang Lu Workers’ Fishing Club championship (before it was discontinued during the mutant bream scandal of 2006). He put his head down and headed for the ticket barrier. Maybe he would buy a baseball cap in Baotou.
As he reached the platform he noticed a clutch of railway officials running towards him, buttoning tunics, hoisting up laddered tights, some attempting fake mobile phone conversations with fake superiors, all looking as if they’d been dragged out of an all-night-maybe all-decade-session of card games, blow jobs, snoozing and white liquor. The stationmaster halted in front of him and attempted a bleary-eyed salute.