by Paul Mason
“The Red Guards blew it to smithereens in ‘69,” Big Wu sighed. “If you go along another twenty metres it picks up, though it’s very scarred at that end.”
Brough, his mind stilled by awe and silence, said nothing for several minutes but tried to process the information. He shot a series of grainy stills on the DV camera, its firmware struggling to boost the ISO value against the gloom.
“Where’s the furnace?” His voice was trembling in the damp.
Big Wu led him upwards to where the ravine branched off into half-caves and gullies. There were the remains of a stone hearth and, picked out by a fickle lamp, flecks of spelt and sheen amid the ashes.
“If it’s metal it can’t be Stone Age?”
“Much later. Different culture. We think this was the Scythians. They’d have smelted bronze in there. Look...”
Big Wu played his torch against a painted wooden sign. Large parts of it had been obscured with red daubs. He translated:
“‘This cave is thought to contain a Bronze Age hearth. Artifacts of possibly Scythian design discovered and can be viewed in the Beijing History Museum. The Ordos Culture - blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.’ Somebody in 1969 did not like the Ordos Culture,” Big Wu snorted and shook his head.
Something at the back of Brough’s consciousness was clawing to get out; a story about pollution, missing colleagues, the black hair of a Chinese woman strewn over his face in the sticky dark of a tent, his career - but it all seemed irrelevant.
Big Wu pulled him by the elbow into an alcove where, mounted under glass and lit by a 40-watt bulb, a single fragment of metal brooch was displayed, two inches across. It was dull, greenish bronze; a man’s figure framed in a partially-missing oval. The man was wearing bell-bottom pants with triangular turn-ups; a belt was visible and he was standing, arms akimbo, clutching the handle of a sword. His chest swelled towards a protective collar: a tiny warrior, maybe in leather armour or chainmail. Above that his face, framed by flowing hair, with round eyes, a bulbous nose and a moustache that made Brough think of Mehmet, the owner of a kebab shop in Shoreditch.
“He’s Turkish!”
“Could be Turkish, could be Asterix the Gaul,” Big Wu chortled. “Anyway the Red Guards didn’t like him. They concreted him three feet down with a load of other things: belt buckles straight out of Lord of the Rings; swords shaped like tigers; horses everywhere, prancing, getting eaten by leopards; beautiful filigree things the like of which,” Big Wu’s mind was straying towards exalted wonder in the cave, “the like of which even we, now, with three thousands years of metallurgy between us and them would struggle to achieve.”
The two men looked away from each other.
“When did you find it?”
“We knew the fuckers were hiding something and when we had the first factory occupation - in ‘94 - we had a good root around down here. There’s other parts we can’t even get to.”
“So they made it into a museum in the forties and then obliterated it in the sixties? Because these Scythians might have been European, not Chinese?”
Big Wu nodded.
“But why did they blow the wall carvings apart? There’s no faces. Can’t even see if they have Chinese eyes! These people are hunter-gatherers aren’t they? What did it matter to the Red Guards?”
Big Wu sighed white breath into the cold air.
“Take a look at them, Mister Brough. Tell me what they are doing.”
Brough gazed upwards.
“Living life.”
“And tell me what the artist - or the artists - were doing when they made it.”
The figures were so clear and black, the spirals so snaky and voluptuous, the animals so frizzed with energy and menace that even without rationalising it Brough could, in the magic dark, understand.
“Telling the story of the tribe, from one generation to the next?”
“Yes,” Big Wu looked bored now. “That’s the thing, isn’t it. That’s the thing you are not allowed to do. What else?”
Brough peered at him.
“What else can you see?”
Brough caught the rhythm of their dancing arms and legs, the leant-over stance they’d called “trucking” in the 1960s, the subtle connection between the stick figures, the angle of their gaze.
“They’re happy, for one thing.”
“What else?”
“Free.”
~ * ~
9
The armed police battalion arrived just as the sun was beginning to slant, turning the smokestacks peach and crimson. They formed a line across the desert like a medieval army: snatch squads interspersed with armoured cars and water-cannon trucks, rubber bullet platoons, small mortars to fire CS gas and an SUV with a sonic laser on the roof.
Brough saw it all through the flip-screen of the DV camera, its “battery-low” icon forcing him to shoot sparingly now. He was squatting atop a rubble barricade about fifty yards inside the main gate, which the strikers had welded shut.
The youths of Cancer Village swarmed around him with their scaffolding poles, but Brough could feel the fight draining out of them as the police commander ranted through a speaker system. A helicopter began playing a powerful light onto Big and Frank Wu, standing shoulder to shoulder and surrounded by their own security team.
Middle Wu shouted a rough translation into Brough’s ear as the police commander began megaphone negotiations. The cops pointed out the hopelessness of their situation and urged them to see sense, maintain social order and promote scientific development. Big Wu shouted back, outlining conditions for their surrender. Then Frank Wu launched into a long speech delivered in jerky Chinese phrases that Brough soon realised, through Middle Wu’s faltering English, was something more than just a list of demands:
“If I a dead leaf. If I blowing cloud. If I wave in sea. I strong as you. Out of control. When I little boy I fly faster than wind. Wind lift up wave and cloud and sea. I fall into thorn-bush. I bleed.”
Brough realised that Frank was reciting Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in Chinese. The air seemed electrified as Frank finished speaking, and Middle Wu had to whisper the last line, the Cancer Village Commune’s founding slogan:
“After cold winter, spring certainly comes.”
The pickets fell silent, some shedding tears.
The police commander ordered them to put down their weapons. Big Wu, his shoulders hunched, gave the order to comply.
They threw away their poles and catapults and swarmed toward the main gate, where the front rank linked arms. Soon the spark and screech of an acetylene torch ripped into the metal and it swung open to reveal a couple of hundred riot cops formed into a flying wedge.
Big and Frank walked forward, Frank acknowledging a desultory cheer from the pickets with a grin, and an upward toss of the eyes. He turned to his smelting buddies, pointing at his watch and miming a fishing reel: don’t be late for fishing next weekend. Big Wu gave the crowd a last, sorrowful, angry look.
“Is that it?” Brough’s voice was rigid with anger.
“It’s a negotiated settlement,” Big Wu said gently.
“Us two will be charged with desert calligraphy. The workforce will get re-educated for a few weeks. The spot price will come down. The managers will get sent on a course about the Important Theory of Three Represents. It’s a typical Chinese strike. It’s chemotherapy day tomorrow, in any case, and they were threatening to withhold the drugs.”
“Why bother to fight in the first place, if that’s all?”
Brough had, in these past few minutes, noticed something about the crowd of workers pressing together to block the gate: they were the first large group of people he’d seen in China where everybody looked different.
In the Muslim village on day one all the blokes wore wispy beards, robes, white hats and puzzled smiles. The Snow Leopards were all girls of a similar age and hairstyle. The officials he’d had to meet had all beamed with the same slickness from beneath the same hairstyle.
&nb
sp; But every face in this mournful crowd was different: the middle aged woman, belligerently fat with tousled hair; the grey-haired, cherubic man with liver spots across his face; the gangly boy, the spotty girl; the mean girl and pallid boy - each with the other’s spindly elbow wrapped around the next. There was a gawky kid with a mullet hairstyle and a Metallica T-shirt. Next to him a heroin addict with sunken cheeks. An old man weeping sentimentally and hiding it with his cap. The three egg-brown, face-scarred girls still whispering to each other about dynamite.
Everyone’s face wore the same look of bitterness and defiance; the slapped look of those who’ve suffered not just defeat but begun to comprehend that everything they want is pointless to be asking for.
“What will happen to you?”
Big Wu’s shoulders shook with forced laughter.
“Either they’ll put us on trial or they’ll beat us to pulp in the cells or they’ll put us to breaking rocks or steal our kidneys. And then, later, they’ll give us money and tell us to fuck off somewhere else. But we won’t. We’ll come back here. We always do and they always let us. I think it was the Paris Commune reference that got them wound up this time.”
“What’s happened to the biker gang?”
“Cops got them corralled in a ravine. It’s the nature of Bonapartism: it has to create chaos and then crack down on chaos. Who cares?”
Brough watched the crowd part silently. Big Wu’s wife ran out to scold him for allowing the surrender but, after pummelling him with her fists, she collapsed onto her knees in the dirt, wailing. Big Wu stroked her greying head unsentimentally and turned away. They both seemed to have gone through this before.
There was silence apart from the thwok and throb of the helicopter blades. The police shields shimmered and glinted. In the sky the deep-grey thunderheads, lit by the setting sun, turned the colour of molten lead.
The crowd was gripped with a kind of guilt; an urgent impulse to look away from Big and Frank; to avoid eye contact; to avoid having to watch as they offered their upturned wrists to the handcuffs. Then they were seized with the urge to throw things away: not just incriminating things like weapons and printouts of illegal websites but trivial things - small coins, cigarette stubs, paper towels saved from lunchtime, sachets of plum sauce, wax picked out of their ears.
They would all be processed soon. Lined up, shouted at, interrogated, shoved. Ideological work would be done. Leon Wu, his face grey like the ash they were standing on, squinted at his mobile phone.
“I’m getting bars. Bastards have switched the signal on again.”
Music began, tinny and monaural, from the police command vehicle’s speakers. A sickly, exhilarating melody designed to invoke calm. Smoke billowed and black-edged scraps of paper blew across the yard as the helicopter made a low turn around the chimney stacks.
Brough slipped the flash memory card out if its socket and handed the dead camera to Leon Wu. He stuffed the card into his pocket, where the USB stick lay too. Then he froze as the helicopter search-beam bathed his shoulders and eyelashes in a blinding silver light.
~ * ~
PART FIVE
“Practice the action of non-action,
and everything will fall into place.”
Lao Tzu
~ * ~
1
“Tell me again,” Brough was fighting to speak through a mouthful of cocopops and chili-noodles, “how filming a theme park fits in with my story?”
Georgina flashed a pair of spite-chilled eyes at him across the table, cool as iced melon.
“Our story,” she said. “The one we came here to do. It fits with our story.”
Chun-li slurped her breakfast soup and texted, both actions being a great excuse to stay out of eye contact with the others. Carstairs did that cameraman thing of ignoring them, like a minicab driver ignores a drunken couple arguing in the back seat.
They were at breakfast in the restaurant of the Ordos Summer Palace Hotel, a revolving glass platform populated with waitresses in medieval silk, perfumed by fountains and cooled by nuclear-strength air-conditioning. Brough was fighting back one of those hangovers that feel more like an acid trip than alcohol poisoning because you are simultaneously a) still drunk, b) remorseful, c) possessed of spine-tingling clarity of thought.
“Georgina when you see these rushes...” he began.
“S’ gonna be hard, matey,” Carstairs chipped in, “that little flash drive you gave me doesn’t work with my laptop. Sure it was formatted right?”
“USB stick’s OK?”
Carstairs nodded:
“Fumigated it. Copied it. Fed it to London on broadband.”
Georgina gave one of her sighs. She was wearing her bruises and lacerations well: since coming round from sedation, she’d scraped her hair into a vertical ponytail and gone for a lip-gloss-only look. This was a clear signal that she was about to pull some kind of Nietzschean stunt to sabotage Brough’s story.
“So we’re sitting on a story about, what? Pollution? Or is it corruption? They try to kill us? They’ve got a whole underground production process for this Rare Earth stuff and I get, on tape, in English, a Tiananmen Square survivor telling me the whole thing? And we’re not interested?”
Georgina gave him that silent look of dismay the English upper-class reserves for total losers.
“Look David,” she was keeping it gentle given the unassailability of her position; “it’s Tuesday. The program goes out tomorrow. We have to fly tonight and the edit’s going to be a bastard. I’ve just spent twenty four hours,” she glanced bitterly at Chun-li, still texting, “unconscious; followed by a day on the phone to London, the British Embassy and the wai-ban trying to organise a search-and-rescue mission in the desert and then half the night getting it all called off, simultaneously with getting you out of jail, and my ear irradiated,” she held up her new, Chinese-issue cellphone, “all because of your,” she paused, “your little mishap.”
She let the silence ring with irony.
“I’ve had Twyla on the phone this morning threatening to cancel the VT and let Shireen do it as an extended voiceover; I’ve had the Embassy trying to send us somebody who sounds very much like a member of MI6-and we’ve only just persuaded the Kubuqi Desert wai-ban not to impose a minder.”
“Actually,” Chun-li’s voice was weak and exhausted, “wai-ban just text me. Insist on having minder for rest of trip. Say otherwise David’s visa be revoked.”
Brough, like all TV journalists, was adept at doing one thing while planning the next, so had been mentally preparing for a fight with Channel Ninety-Nine from the moment he’d worked it all out: that the battery plant, the illegal mining and the sintering plant in Cancer Village were all part of the same illicit operation.
But he had not expected to be having that fight with Georgina.
After arresting him, the riot cops had put him into an armoured car and driven him to a detention centre. They’d neither body-searched him nor heavied him. They’d left him in a cell with a lightbulb and a surveillance camera and he-still getting his brain ready for some kind of sadistic mind-fuck, which is usually what they’re planning if they don’t hit you - had lain on a bare plank for an hour in silence, staring at a point on the ceiling, reciting the only poems he knew by heart: the mist-filled doggerel of Matthew Arnold, full of dead leaves and corpse-cold chapels.
Mentally he’d prepared himself for everything except the arrival of Georgina, fuming, Jimmy Carstairs trailing behind her with a wry smile, and Chun-li in tears.
“I thought they’d killed you,” he’d blurted out, fighting back tears himself.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Georgina had hissed.
He had filled them in on the Cancer Village Commune and had been getting round to a heavily censored account of his journey with the Snow Leopards when the effects of beer, Mongolian barbecue and an adrenaline slump had kicked in.
He had put his arm around Carstairs, hugged Chun-li - who had been officially sacked for
four hours until the moment she’d located Brough at the riot-police barracks - and even touched Georgina affectionately on the arm with the back of his hand.
He had heard the story of their helicopter ride; of some weird kid trying to shoot them (how had he missed that detail?); of the clinical efficiency of Chinese medics. Chun-li had not bothered telling any of them about her encounter with Khünbish.
Brough had explained - he thought lucidly - the black economy in Rare Earth, drawn the relevant part of the Periodic Table on a napkin, and proposed they ring up Channel Ninety-Nine’s newsroom immediately to offer a ten-minute exclusive, with a quick, secret filming trip back to Cancer Village to complete the story. They would need to commission a pie chart to show how China was sitting on 90% of the world’s Rare Earth output and how it planned to tighten that grip using export quotas.