Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  “Did you know that?” he’d queried Chun-li mistily as they’d bundled him into the van.

  “Everybody knows Rare Earth a Chinese monopoly,” she’d butted in. “Also everybody knows about illegal mining. Illegal mining has been covered in Ordos local paper, also China Daily, also long documentary on Radio Free Asia quoting many anonymous Chinese sources but never visiting illegal mine.”

  Brough had stared at her as if in love.

  “However if David has found illegal production system, that means involvement by local officials. Hence very sensitive.”

  “Yeah, very sensitive,” Brough remembered saying, but not much else, because after that he’d gone to sleep on Chun-li’s shoulder.

  Waking up, finding a pile of smart-casual clothing purchased by Chun-li, plus a brand new Chinese mobile, he’d cursed the fact that his Blackberry was gone. To tell the story of his passage through the desert they would have to go back and shoot some landscapes. Maybe, he daydreamed, they would do a few “think to camera” shots of the kind they reserve for the silverback males of TV reporting when the words they want to say are too pretentious to be seen actually coming out of a human mouth.

  Then his Lichfield Guardian training had kicked in: they would need to fact-check. Put the allegations to the management at Cancer Village and Tang Lu. Locate Big and Frank Wu in the criminal justice system. Get the Chinese ministry of-who-gives-a-fuck?-but anyway somebody Chinese and official, to respond on camera.

  Okay, forget the car crash, the gunshots at the crash scene, the kid they’d tasered. It puts the reporter too far into the centre of the story and it’s incidental to the narrative. Big-up getting pulled in by the cops in Tang Lu; tell the full story of the fighting at Cancer Village - the brutality of the strikers; the bodies of the biker-boys. The relative restraint of the riot cops. Spectacular pictures. Impartial storytelling.

  By the time he’d come out of the shower - he’d let the hot jets play on his bruises until his skin zinged - Brough had already won a Rory Peck Award, a Royal Television Society trophy and been shortlisted for both a Pulitzer and an Emmy. The jeans Chun-li had selected for him were too long and the checked cowboy shirt a little bit too close to the Village People look, but he’d felt refreshed, vigorous, pleased with himself and ready for an argument.

  But now, at breakfast, he was already losing it.

  “Wai-ban chief at reception imminently,” Chun-li announced, scurrying off towards the elevators.

  “There is no way we are going off chasing this Commune story,” said Georgina.

  “No need to chase. Just fact-check and get some shots, love,” Brough protested.

  It was the word “love” that seemed to make Georgina snap. She stood up, hair flying in the air-conditioned breeze. And the sight of her mouth-contorted into the spite-fuelled deadly weapon with which she had fought her way up through the indy production sector - made Carstairs cower.

  “Get this fuckin’ Walt out of my sight!” she shouted at Carstairs: her voice was laden with menace.

  Brough went into the innocent act, shrugging his shoulders: what’s the fuss? She screamed at Carstairs:

  “He’s a fuckin’ Walt, you know that? That’s what they call them, don’t they? Walter, fucking, Mitty. My brother’s in the Army. They call them ‘Walts’. Wannabes. Menopausal, wannabe, fat middle-aged fucking fantasists.”

  Brough tried to deflect her anger by going into a Travis Bickle “you talkin’ to me, cos I ain’t talkin’ to you” impression, with a chopstick, but it fell flat.

  “He panics. He legs it into the desert. He miraculously acquires a DV camera and shoots ama-a-a-zing stuff,” she laid the sarcasm on, full-English. “He comes back with a story. An uncheckable story with no pictures, no corroboration. Meanwhile the Tiananmen Anniversary Special has a teeny-weeny gap in the timeline - minute fifteen to minute twenty two. No VT about pollution. And you know what it’s all about, Jimmy?”

  Carstairs’ gaze seemed captivated by the remains of a bowl of cornflakes. Brough had given up trying to do anything other than stare into space.

  “The tiny, frustrated penis of the foreign correspondent.”

  “Let’s cool it,” Brough said, gesturing to the stunned and static audience of waitresses behind her.

  “No, fuck it, you have to hear the truth,” Georgina had braced herself by folding her arms tight across her chest.

  “Here’s the truth,” said Brough; “I’m in the news business; you’re in the entertainment business.”

  “You are a cunt. A morally inadequate sexist cunt,” she yelled.

  “In fact you are in the propaganda business,” Brough yelled back. “Just like him.”

  Georgina’s gaze followed the direction of Brough’s chopstick, which pointed to a small Chinese man in a tweed jacket who’d been edging towards Georgina’s elbow for the last minute.

  “This is Mister Bo,” said Chun-li, beside him.

  Mr Bo blinked and nodded helpfully.

  “Mister Bo is Deputy Chief of Kubuqi Desert wai-ban. Mister Bo has personally cancelled several important engagements to ensure our shooting day becomes a success.”

  ~ * ~

  2

  Superintendent Xiao was already sick of Ordos. Last night he’d checked into a crummy hotel, phoned his wife, resisted numerous calls to the bedside phone from ding-dong girls, filled the room with smoke, finished off every bottle of peach yogurt in the mini-bar, wandered the streets and bought Zhongnahais from a local store, together with a pot noodle.

  He hated eating alone; he found it offensive. Xiao loved comradeship and banter. In this town there were too many prostitutes prowling the corridors, too many doormen on the take; too few finished buildings. Too few actual citizens.

  And too much tension. That nameless tension of the kind that grips a town if, maybe in the next town, there is some inexplicable breakdown of social order; or somebody has been raped by members of an unpopular ethnic minority but no-one is allowed to report it.

  He’d spotted numerous teams of district management goons in uniforms he’d never seen before, stationed in golf-buggies or on motor-scooters at strategic points. Xiao knew what they were there to do: intimidate small knots of workless migrants off the streets, prevent something that was happening somewhere else from happening here.

  He’d phoned Hard Man Han, phoned a couple of minor officials in Ordos, worked the networks of face and favour. His guanxi was surprisingly good in Ordos, once he was on the phone and being Superintendent Xiao again and not a bum.

  He’d tracked the news crew down to the Summer Palace; located a man of Brough’s description in the riot police HQ; got Han to send Chun-li an anonymous text to tip her off about Brough’s whereabouts; gleaned as much as he needed to know about the conflict at Cancer Village.

  The dusk had been blue, nuclear, riven by the lightning from the desert. There’d been helicopter rotors in the distance. He’d drifted off to sleep with the lights and his shoes still on...

  Now it was morning. He had done 20 press-ups, changed his dirty underpants for clean ones as the text message from his wife instructed, checked out of his hotel almost without shouting at anybody on the reception desk.

  Most important, he had received two more texts from his Ordos contacts: one informing him of Brough’s release, another outlining the filming schedule of the news crew and the time of their flight out of Baotou, which was midnight. He had less than 18 hours to put his plan into operation.

  The harsh light of the morning sun found Xiao stumbling along the unpaved edge of a road to the howl of traffic and the creak of locked tower cranes. He would hail a taxi, head for the Ordos Desert Beautiful Genghis Khan Theme Park and complete his mission there.

  He was mentally rehearsing the action-on-contact he would take when he heard a terrifying noise: thud-splat! Thud like when you punch somebody in a stomach full of beer; splat like when you snap the claw off a roasted chicken.

  Xiao had seen a parachute jump
go wrong during his time in the PLA and had a subconscious memory of what that thud-splat sound might mean. He looked up.

  In the top corner of his vision, where you don’t expect to see a falling object, he saw a falling object. It was a man. Why had the thud-splat sound already happened if the man was still falling? Well now he spotted another man’s body on the pavement in front of him, freshly shattered and already leaking brain fluid onto the neat concrete paving slabs.

  Thud-splat, again. Now there were two bodies, right on the pavement, and somebody’s guts had spilled out.

  Xiao’s response to stress was to think in words and phrases, not concepts. To say sentences to himself, often hackneyed and cliche, like:

  “Oh-ho, what’s this then?”

  That’s what he said to himself now as he saw the two bodies lying on the concrete:

  “Oh-ho. Something fishy going on here!”

  He went into cop mode, listening and looking. What he heard was the moan of air-conditioning vents in the wall beside him. And heavenly chatter: as if a football team was having an argument about who should take a penalty, eight floors above his head. He looked up: little faces were peering over the lip of a roof.

  “Oh-ho! Maybe this is some kind of mass suicide attempt!” he heard himself think.

  That triggered a survival reflex: with shoulders hunched like a cartoon villain, he tiptoed away from the base of the building and into the middle of the road to avoid being killed by another falling body. The faces on the roof had vanished.

  Xiao was sweating: getting old - fool!-sweating in the presence of death. He lit a Zhongnanhai and stared at the bodies. Two middle-aged men. Han ethnicity. Certainly not rich. One, a big guy, was lying on his front as if dead for centuries; what was left of his face wore an expression of resigned disgust. The smaller guy, the one Xiao had seen falling, was lying face up, his leg bent comically behind his back. This one wore a frozen look of irony. Actually, now he noticed it, the stuff that looked like guts splattered on the pavement was actually the contents of a colostomy bag.

  The fire escape of the building slammed open and a group of men spilled out. They looked excited, dejected and guilty-as if they’d just been in a combat zone and now they had to go back to everyday life, drink tea, admire their parents’ calligraphy. They were all dressed in casual clothing: jeans, T-shirts, no-name training shoes. They looked fit and alive: the opposite of mopes.

  “Ah-ha!” Xiao thought. “So maybe it’s not suicide. Maybe these guys are up to no good.”

  And he shouted.

  “Hey you! You there! Leaving the building. Can’t you see there’s been an accident? You might be witnesses! Wait there until the police arrive!”

  Xiao is big, has a mug on him that would stop a T-72. His presence commands respect. So naturally the men did stop, did look him in the eye, did gaze at the dead bodies silently for a moment. And one of them, wearing a grey hoodie, maybe the leader, did peel off and saunter across the road, pulling a cigarette from inside his sleeve and lighting it.

  “Who are you?” the man mumbled, blowing smoke over his fists.

  “Just a citizen trying to be vigilant,” Xiao’s eyes probed the other man’s. He flicked his gaze across the group of men beyond. They were not sweating in the presence of death. They look elated.

  “Well citizen, best be on your way,” the man in the hoodie drawled. “These suicides are a nuisance; the cops will be round in no time taking statements, and they might class this as some kind of threat to public order. Double suicide? Could be seen as some kind of political statement, given the time of year. I’d be moving along...”

  Xiao now admitted to himself that these were plainclothes police. That plodding delivery and querulous, penetrating way of stating every word as if it’s a proffered bargain, the subtext being: do this and we’ll leave you alone. It had to be the “opposition”.

  “You guys are State Security, am I right?” Xiao gave the man in the hoodie an avuncular, scolding frown.

  The man in the hoodie cracked a weak smile, dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his training shoe. Then, from out of the hoodie, he calmly pulled a taser and fired it straight at Xiao’s chest.

  Xiao screamed and dropped, twitching, to the floor.

  The man in the hoodie squeezed the trigger of the taser again, pumping 50,000 volts into Xiao as he lay there shouting words that should have come out “Stop! I am police too!” but came out as muffled yodelling instead.

  The man in the hoodie turned to his friends, who stood there a mixture of amused and exhilarated in their smart-casual gear. And he enunciated clearly, as if reading from a manual:

  “Armed police. Taser, taser, taser.”

  And with each word “taser”, he pumped more juice into Xiao, whose urine was pissing vertically out through the cloth of his trousers with each surge of electricity.

  Bystanders scurried away, bowing their heads. Wizened bird-sellers; foot-bound women who’d lost their parents in Shanghai when the Japanese came; chartered surveyors cycling to work; all-night video game addicts wandering home penniless; shopgirls stumbling through the curtain of life that begins at their eyelashes; migrant builders on a smoking break. They all managed to ignore Xiao’s twitching limbs and to find routes away from the scene quicker than drops of mercury on sand. So too did the plainclothes cops.

  Now came the sound of an ambulance siren; the LED-lights of motorcycle outriders turned the daylight silver and a police speaker began announcing calmly, “Disperse, disperse!”

  The sun was glinting off thousands of mirror-glass windows in Ordos. The sky was cornflower blue with a twist of desert sand turning it pink in zonal bands. Xiao, horizontal, could see all this through the fish-eye vantage point of his half-paralysed eyes, so at least he knew he was still alive.

  ~ * ~

  3

  “Hel-lo Twyla!” Georgina let her eyes smile persuasively, “How was your flight? Wow! From business to first? No way! What do you think of Shanghai? No-ooo! What time did you get in? Hey, great. Had your first taste of Chinese breakfast yet? Wow! Phillipe Starck? Yeah, they’ve got those robes in the Beverly Hills one too!”

  They were all wedged into the van: Mr. Bo up front instructing the driver; next Georgina, trilling into her mobile phone; Chun-li sitting as far away as possible on the same bench, trying to upgrade their airline tickets and at the same time get a discount by switching between calls to two different travel agents; behind Chun-li, Carstairs-his stitched and iodined knuckles clenched around his camera, silently computing overtime payments. Next to Carstairs, Brough, scribbling script-lines onto sheets of hotel notepaper and crumpling them onto the floor in violent bursts of frustration.

  Taking up the back row were Rupert Wong, a cameraman, and Hyacinth Deng, a reporter, both from Kubuqi Desert TV. Hyacinth had a face made-up in the bright colours and shapes of a manga character and was already competing with Georgina and the CD player for the van’s soundscape by having her own trilled phone conversation with her own boss. Mr. Bo had - as Chun-li explained - “kindly invited local TV crew to film our filming for news feature on foreign media interest in rapidly-booming GDP of Kubuqi Desert”.

  Brough had made a profane remark about this arrangement.

  “Better not make too many comments about Mister Bo,” Chun-li had whispered. “He pretends not to speak English but actually has degree in media studies from University of Bedfordshire.”

  “Yes he’s here,” Georgina sang, pulling a face of hate at Brough, “he’s fine. Just let his ... imagination get the better of him I think - d’you want to speak to David?”

  Brough made a masturbating sign with right hand and stared out of the window, mouthing the words “fuck you”.

  “Well anyway he’s fine now and the rushes from the polluted factory are all fine too - yes, allegedly polluted factory-and all we need to do now is - yes, Twyla, he does know - all we need to do is make sure we get the balancing interview...”

 
Brough checked his mobile. It was brand new and had no stored numbers, but there was a text there from Allegro Harp, his regular video editor, sent from a Chinese mobile number: “Beijing. God. Nightmare. Call me. Allegro.”

  Allegro Harp is black, gay and lives in New York’s East Village, where the all-night noodle scene and the proximity of rent boys from the housing projects in nearby Loisaida suit his lifestyle. An industry legend, Allegro can edit anything into a masterpiece using only an Apple Mac, a hard drive and his fingertips, provided he is supplied with cocaine at the start of the process and bareback Latino sex at the end. Chun-li had been asked to put both these things on her to-do list for Beijing but was not hopeful.