by Paul Mason
The air felt suddenly thick, oppressive. The sight of cadavers had its usual effect: sickness and anxiety plus the quiet elation you feel at not being dead yourself.
Silence fell, disturbed only by the creaking of the crane’s rusty jib and the wind blowing sheets of paper across the concrete. The Snow Leopards broke up into small riot squads, Miss Chi barking out commands on the helmet comms to stop them venturing too far into what was now beginning to look like a trap.
A man’s voice began ranting, metallic, out of every speaker in the complex, first in Mandarin and then, without explanation, in English.
“Retreat immediately! Look what you have done! Those boys should be alive. Their lives have been lost senselessly. Retreat now beyond the perimeter fence and we will begin negotiations. Be warned, we are dead men on leave.”
Brough, crouching behind a coal bunker, watched the Leopards form up into a single defensive shield wall while Miss Chi, her own stereo system brought up now in a Chiang-Jiang sidecar, began to castigate the defenders with shrill Hayekian economics. He saw the Leopards fire gas canisters from handheld launchers, leaving an arc of what he hoped was only CS gas and not some DIY chemical weapon.
“Cease firing and we will negotiate,” the defenders’ speaker clanged. “There is no sense...”
But the earth began to judder, and the shark-nosed shovel of a Komatsu super-dozer reared up as it mounted the barricade, yellow and black, obscuring the sky. As its tracks reached the tipping point, it slid, sideways, splintering wood, crushing filing cabinets, dislodging skips, scattering rusty pellets of iron ore and flattening burned-out automobiles.
The wind swept a cloud of debris into the air and the heavy sky forced it back down into people’s eyes and lungs. There were about a dozen strikers clinging to the sides of the dozer, half of whom were thrown off by the impact as the front end landed. Brough’s stomach tightened as the dozer tracks crushed one striker and severed the arm of another, before busting spectacularly off their drive-wheels and stranding the steel monster there in the open.
Miss Chi, seizing the initiative, pulled a pistol from her jacket and opened fire at the cabin of the dozer, but it had been bulletproofed with inch-thick iron, like Ned Kelly’s helmet, and the rounds pinged off.
Suddenly the Leopards’ shield line broke and scattered, the women scurrying towards the breach in the fence they’d come through. Brough had seen this moment many times before - where the will of the attacker breaks - and he had to admire the Leopards for their collectedness in retreat. The strikers surged forward, but a small group went too far and the women cornered them, smashing their limbs with expert non-lethality using metal truncheons.
As he cowered in what had become no-man’s-land, Brough saw Miss Lai ‘crouched by the fence’ signalling for him to retreat. There were more workers swarming over the barricade now, catapulting the space with ball bearings and metal bolts, bashing the ground with scaffolding poles.
A group of women strikers in overalls hoisted a new banner into place. It was spattered with hastily painted Chinese symbols Brough could not understand, but carried one symbol that he could: the cloth was divided diagonally into a black triangle and a red one - colours you will never forget if you’ve had your microphone snatched and your shins kicked by masked demonstrators at a G8 summit. It occurred to Brough that not many Chinese gangsters would go out of their way to implicate themselves as anarcho-syndicalists.
“Come on!” Lai mouthed at him, taking her helmet off for clarity and pushing her shield forward to draw missiles.
A gas canister landed in front of him and his throat began to burn. There was about a cricket-pitch length of space to cross. He could have made it, but instead held his hands out in that gesture of futility habitual among football managers, which tightens everything between the lower lip and the collar-bone.
A stun grenade bounced into the yard and hammered everybody in the chest. Inside his head a ringing silence exploded. Through tear-smeared vision Brough saw Miss Lai coolly replace her helmet, pulling down the visor and pushing her hair behind it. She put a riot-gloved hand to her neck and yanked something from it, tossing it towards him.
Amid the flecks of shattered glass and concrete, discarded shoes, bits of paper, the smoke, the silence and through a burning film of his own snot, Brough saw the eyes of the young men on the barricade. Angry eyes, Lagos slum eyes, Aymara-separatist eyes, Westbank-settler eyes. And he saw his gold chain, missing a few links, spatter onto the ground in front of him. And a little plastic oval slug bearing the logo of the Conn-Selmer Corporation, Elkhart, Indiana.
~ * ~
7
“Now you know why the Communist Party is obsessed with social order,” quipped Big Wu. “When it breaks down it breaks down big-time. Chinese people have this rage inside them...”
He looked at Brough as if waiting for an explanation, but Brough was fiddling with the video camera they had lent him, light as a toy and shaped like a stubby plastic revolver. The picture in the LED was incredibly clear but the autofocus sticky.
“There’s an eight-gigabyte SD card in there, enough for a good four hours,” Frank Wu interjected.
“Yeah if the cops search you,” Big Wu laughed, “you have to take it out and put it...”
“I know,” Brough stopped him.
They were in the office of the smelting plant - a prefab hut welded high up next to the roof and reached by metal stairs without a safety rail. Big Wu was tall and beefy, his forehead permanently wrinkled; Frank “Lloyd” Wu smaller and wirier, a smirk playing around his eyes that Brough took to be the product of a lifetime of frustrating circumstances.
“Do you have the Internet here?”
“Up till this morning, but they’ve cut it off. They’ve cut the GPRS signal too - but why do we need it when we can get all our information from Chinese state television?” Frank joked.
“Have you ever lived in London?”
Brough was picking up all kinds of Essex tonal flecks in their English, reminding him of dockers he had known at Tilbury. They had that same look, too; gentle, slow, the outrage shining from their eyes, constantly clouded with puzzlement at the fact that nobody else is outraged.
“We’re big East Enders fans,” Frank grinned. “Box set. DVD.”
If he ever got these rushes into an edit suite, Brough knew, a professional VT editor was going to have a good laugh at all the thumbs, peering faces, crap sound and shaky vision.
The camera recorded straight to memory, and chunked the action into separate files every time a button was pressed. So they would see three seconds of fingers and fumbling. That whole 2’36” clip where Brough had put the camera down on the floor next to his leg. The bit where the women’s commission voted against letting him film and all you could see on the rushes was Brough’s joggly, upside-down retreat, to their raucous laughter.
There were his panoramic views of the sintering plant, each shot held just long enough to cause a VT editor to throw a computer keyboard at the wall and shout: “Why don’t you hold your fuckin’ shots!” There was a pan, way too fast to be useable, up a house-high heap of iron pellets. There was a poignant shot of debris strewn on the baseball court.
Then the bodies: three strikers and the two Hell’s Angels, lined up toe-to-toe in the factory yard and covered with a tarpaulin. He had remembered not to dwell on details and took only one good tight shot of a crushed biker-boot, going wide and wider still to avoid gruesome, unusable images.
Then there were the pieces-to-camera:
“Channel Ninety-Nine has gained exclusive access to a Rare Earth processing plant being run autonomously by a group of striking workers...”
Brough’s face froze for a moment and he stopped speaking. Ludicrous lines. So he tried it again, camera propped on a wall, with the exterior of the plant as backdrop:
“I’ve gained exclusive access to a place the authorities didn’t want me to see. Cancer Village is home to an illegal processing plant for a su
bstance called Rare Earth. The population here believe it’s killing them. And they’ve had enough.”
He followed Frank Wu to a committee meeting, pulled a few “psychological tight” shots on people’s faces: Frank, eyes screwed to convey a mixture of ruthlessness and amusement; Leon Wu next to him, bored, distracted by the love-juice smell he can’t get off his middle finger; an ancient, chemo-ravaged former Red Guard speaking only in lists; three young production-line women, egg-brown faces scarred by skin disease, urging the immediate planting of dynamite under the main pelletising drum.
Then there was the interview with Big Wu. Frank, though declining to take part, listened in, off camera, by agreement. There was a split developing already between a Jacobin wing around Frank, which wanted to blow the plant sky-high, and the workerists, led by Big, who wanted to negotiate. Every few minutes Big’s gaze would be drawn into the camera lens and you could hear Brough remind him “look at me, not the camera”:
“We came to Cancer Village when the plant opened, just after eighty-nine. They were closing the factories in Beijing and we’re sintering experts, the Wu family. Deng Xiao-ping said then, you remember, ‘Saudi has oil, China has Rare Earth’ - but who cared about Rare Earth at that time? We worked the iron. Iron is our life. That’s what our dad used to say.”
“Where did the cancer come from?”
“That’s the problem. Multiple causes. There’s all kinds of shit in the river. Plus the whole living compound is riddled with asbestos. By the time they installed the acid line for the REO...”
“Rio?”
“Rare Earth Oxide - by the time they’d installed that, there were already a few kids being born with defects. I think the acid line probably accounts for no more than 25% of all carcinomas. In the cave-”
“Cave?”
“The cave underneath the grinding shed, we think they found traces of metallurgy dating back to the Song Dynasty.”
“Who did?”
“The archaeologists, in the 1940s.”
“Has anybody done tests? Have you sampled the air and water for cancer-causing agents?”
“We were getting there about five years ago. An investigative journalist came down. But then the government cracked down on the polluting plants and we had to close.”
“Close?”
Brough cocked an ear to the racket beyond the door. The pelletising unit was cranking and grinding, spitting out inch-round balls of green iron into a dusty hopper.
“When I say ‘close’ of course,” Big Wu caught his meaning, “I mean ‘close’ as far as Beijing is concerned. By then the REO had become the main business and the iron just a sideline, so closing down was not an option. Look...”
Big Wu hauled himself up, ignoring the camera, which Brough grabbed shakily, attempting a follow-shot into the light streaming through a dirt-streaked window. Big Wu’s fingers, clasping a cigarette, began pointing:
“That building there was the dormitory, when we first came here. That one there, that shit-pile, was the cultural centre. The school roof has fallen in. The houses are built of cinders - I think a little kid could nut those breeze blocks in half after a week’s kung-fu training, eh, Frank.”
“They’re like rice cake,” said Frank, off camera.
“The clinic’s a disgrace. The roads are dirt. The iron rice bowl - you know that term Mister Brough?”
Big Wu stared at Brough and mimicked his head-shaking gesture, wondering at his ignorance.
“The iron rice bowl was Mao’s promise to the workers. You will never starve. The factory will look after you from literally,” his eyes went limpid with anger, “literally! The cradle to the grave.”
Big Wu paused a moment to re-light his cigarette and took a draw.
“Its all gone now. What’s the point of mourning? You have to live with the world as it is. The Chinese working class, now, is just a bunch of peasants making toys in Guangdong. It will take them twenty years to organise. In the meantime we work with metal; it’s our life.”
“What’s the deal with the Rare Earth?”
Brough’s key skill was drawing people away from their obsessions and to the point in hand.
“Like I said, who knew back in the nineties what Rare Earth could do? Did you know the Neo magnet was only invented in eighty-two?”
“Really?” Brough’s voice would betray, to any seasoned video editor, the fact that he did not know what a Neo magnet is.
“D’you know how a Neo magnet is produced, Mister Brough?”
The interview stopped while Big and Frank enthused about the production process, dragged him over to a diagram he didn’t understand, poked their iron-calloused fingers at a grimy Periodic Table on the wall. By the end of it, Brough knew that most permanent magnets in the world are made from a mixture of Neodymium, Iron and Boron, and that these magnets - how had he lived forty-four years without knowing this? - actually provide the power in things like hard disc drives and wind turbines and MRI scanners. That the battery in every Toyota Prius needs 15 kilograms of Lanthanum to make it. That the average wind-turbine contains two metric tons of Neodymium. That the whole future of green technology was dependent on Rare Earth.
The next mpeg file showed Big Wu seated, nodding at Brough, who had been coaching him to deliver a comprehensible summary:
“At this plant we turn Rare Earth into a powdered alloy to make magnets. We’ve been operating illegally since 2005 with the full knowledge of the Inner Mongolian authorities. We’re pretty sure most of the blood cancers are linked to the use of acids in the production process.”
“And you’ve taken over the plant to demand better healthcare?”
“Better healthcare,” said Frank Lloyd Wu, off camera, “and justice for the victims of Tiananmen Square.”
“We’ve also hiked the spot price for the alloy as a kind of instant tax. This place needs rebuilding if they want social harmony restored,” Big Wu continued, struggling to stop his eyes addressing the camera instead of Brough.
After he’d shot some cutaways and got Frank to hold the camera for a setup shot of the two of them looking at the Periodic Table, Brough accepted a cigarette. Something in the atmosphere - maybe the sweet smell of fresh carbon, or the cigarettes, or the diesel fumes from the generator, or the overalls black with iron filings - it was some deep memory anyway, just like Proust with his cup cake - some deep memory made him think of the seventies.
“My dad worked in the steel industry; as a driver, though, not in the mill.”
“You are from Sheffield?”
Brough nodded.
“They got smashed as well, I recollect,” Big Wu pondered. “The Full Monty is a big favourite in our video club. And Brassed Off.”
“We’ve been smashed all along the line,” Frank piped up; “Huanuni, Bolivia; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Sheffield, England. What is it the world hates about the man who puts his hands to metal, Mister Brough?”
~ * ~
8
Big Wu slid open a steel door, ushered Brough through it and slid it shut, hitting a Bakelite switch to make a few weak buds of light bloom along the stairway, leading down. The clank of the factory was soon dulled and the smell of damp sulphur pricked and probed inside Brough’s nostrils.
They were quickly deep and through an airlock, submarine-style, with a wheel to close it behind them. The cave was long and narrow, levelled off at the bottom with concrete and at the top, high above, sealed by the steel beams that formed the factory’s foundations.
“It’s not really a cave,” Big Wu shrugged; “It’s a ravine. They built the plant to seal it shut. It would have been open-air when they did this...”
Brough’s gaze followed the arc of Big Wu’s hand, upwards, to where the sky might have been during the Late Stone Age. The side of the cave was of smooth, cream stone-pitted and streaked with metallic red. About twenty thousand years ago somebody had decided to scrawl the whole of human life across it.
The sun was a dot with two concentric circ
les, wild lines of energy spreading out from its circumference. The stars were drawn as children draw them. The tribe that had lived here were cavorting in the same shapes as ecstasy-fuelled ravers make when the laser-light freezes them for a nanosecond on a dancefloor. The subtle strokes of stone on stone had created sluts, ice-queens, drunken teenagers, cool dudes, Dad-dancers, crying toddlers, wallflowers, puking boys - each forever captured in the act of making shapes to the music of stone and wood and antlers. Around them tigers prowled, snow leopards slunk, pinto horses galloped. A river curled like a snake through their vertical world.
At the edges things became more conceptual. War masks, spirals, snakes, cunts. Fantasy women with giant hips and breasts. Pictograms depicting only magic, energy and mystery. The scene came to an end, in mid-thought, where the rockface had been sheared off, catching a stick-woman trying to attract the attention of a stick-man, whose reaction we will never know.