Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  ~ * ~

  8

  “Okay, in a minute, we’re coming up to the best place to shoot panoramic shots,” Chun-li announced. She had been sleeping a second ago and it was a mystery to everybody how she knew.

  Brough was already seething. Even though the route to the Beautiful Genghis Khan Theme Park was apparently straight, and Mr. Bo’s only mission was to get them there, he had managed to get them lost. Then he had insisted on a mid-morning tea-break at a camel farm belonging to a coalminer who had become a millionaire thanks to judicious stock market investments, and then there’d been a further delay while Rupert and Hyacinth got out of the van to film a colossal concrete statue of Genghis Khan. When Carstairs, out of boredom, had got his camera out to shoot the statue, Rupert Wong had switched to filming Carstairs filming the statue.

  “Is it always like this, or are they just doing it for us?” Brough had whispered to Chun-li.

  She answered without looking at him, her face mesmerised by her text-message list: “Chinese propaganda departments have whole playbook for wasting time of Western journalists. This just Chapter One.”

  Now, as they piled out of the van again to take some landscape shots, Brough was on the point of rebellion. He could see the impossibility of standing everything up into an investigative blockbuster, given the time available; but since the Channel had already started the ball rolling over the Tang Lu pollution incident he would cling to that.

  He would script everything around Tang Lu: they arrive at Tang Lu, it looks like shit; they interview the people in the chlorine cloud; piece to camera - backplot. Could they get a Chinese academic to talk about the general problems of pollution? Could they, even better, get some Western tree-hugger based in Beijing maybe to slip in the point that much of the pollution is down to illegal activities? In the edit that would be the moment at which the rushes shot in Cancer Village come into play, if Allegro could sort the pictures out. Brough had it all worked out. No big deal about the Rare Earth story, just the human story of a community struggling with diseased land, air and water. Big Wu onscreen in English, bemoaning the state of the facilities and delivering that one coached and perfect line about the illegal operations and the multiple causes of cancer. Finish the piece with the standoff with the riot cops. Need some kind of piece on camera to draw the links together.

  Brough was aware, guiltily, that-amid swigs of breakfast milk and warm Coke and snide text messages to Allegro and even to Carstairs sitting right next to him-he was altering the story to fit what Channel Ninety-Nine would broadcast. He was selecting facts not just to suit Georgina’s scowling imperatives but also the needs of storytelling.

  Television can only tell one story at a time and the Rare Earth story, which was still pre-occupying him, was messy; it lacked proof and pictures. Outside Gorazde with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1995 he’d had both; in New Orleans there had been clear villains and victims. China? Shit, he’d not been here a week and the complications were overwhelming the story. Even in Northern Ireland it had been easier to rationalise...

  But now, the stunning white light of the Kubuqi Desert, shimmering over the brow of the hill, paralysed his train of thought. This was a real desert, not the metallic dust and scrub he had stumbled through before. Hourglass sand, pristine, scooped into waves one hundred metres high from peak to trough. The light wind was pushing veils of sand into the air off the lip of each dune; it seemed to twist like translucent fingers towards the sky, which was deep, cloudless.

  “It’s a rubbish shot, of course,” Carstairs chipped in, as they all stood there awestruck.

  “Yes the light is flat,” said Georgina. “Can we wait for the sunset?”

  “Baotou airport requiring early check-in due to heavy discount negotiated on tickets,” said Chun-li.

  “Just a couple of hours so I can get some shadow on that sand,” Carstairs pleaded.

  Mr. Bo sidled up to Chun-li and said something in Chinese. Chun-li had a rapid-fire interchange with him and reported back.

  “Mr. Bo suggests that as sky not suitable for landscape shots maybe we save for later and progress to next location...”

  “Which is, let me guess?” Georgina was striding around with her hands on her hips, excited by the vast, stupendous ripples of desert.

  “Lunch,” said Chun-li.

  ~ * ~

  7

  The walls of the fortress were white. On the battlements were banners of pale pink and yellow. The silhouettes of two men in medieval armour seemed to be dodging around playfully between the turrets-but as he got closer Brough realised these were just crude dummies and their movements must have been a trick of the desert light. It was a substantial battlement: thick clay walls twelve metres high, angled backwards and pitted like a sponge with swallows’ nesting holes.

  “This fortress is classic Qing Dynasty design,” said Mr. Bo. Chun-li translated.

  “What year was it built?” Brough was making small talk to kill the pain of having to speak to Mr. Bo at all.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven,” said Chun-li.

  “You mean seventeen eighty-nine?”

  “No, 1987. This whole complex was rebuilt from scratch on the foundations of a Qing Dynasty fort in 1987.”

  She added, under her voice: “Mister Bo doesn’t want to mention it but the real fort was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.”

  Brough nodded. They were in the inner courtyard now. There was a pre-fab hut, a gift shop selling plastic swords and helmets, an artex replica of the Great Wall for having your photograph taken against. A few Chinese tourists pottered among stalls that sold barbecued corn, mobile phone fascias, fake designer sunglasses. There were two or three lone, middle-aged men loitering in their nondescript windbreakers and comb-over hair, arms folded, always looking into the mid-distance to pass the time. Brough clocked them for plainclothes cops and so did Chun-li.

  At the centre of the fort was an octagonal tower, twice the height of the outer walls and built of charcoal brick, with lacquered red woodwork at the eaves. It reminded Brough of the Golden Gate at Kiev: that, too, had been fucked up in the 1980s by communist archaeologists. Mister Bo beckoned them all inside; Rupert Wong took shots as they trooped in. Georgina and Hyacinth filled the cavernous stairway with oohs and ahhs.

  They came out onto a balcony: below the fort, the ground fell away to an escarpment. The valley below marked the point where the vast, rippling seascape of the Kubuqi Desert came to an abrupt stop and the normal, scrub-strewn grit of the Ordos Desert resumed There were a few camels jogging along the floor of the valley with Chinese tourists wobbling along on top; a decrepit fun-fair, a go-kart track, a supermarket-sized trinket shop and beyond that a ski-lift. A few tiny figures were sliding down the near-vertical slope of a massive sand dune on toboggans. In the far distance, some Communist officials on an away-day were chasing each other across the dunes on quad bikes.

  “What’s that?” Brough pointed to another fort about a kilometre away along the cliff top.

  “Ming Dynasty fortress, rebuilt 1994”, Mr Bo announced. “Now a conference centre and living museum of Mongolian culture. Re-enactments daily.”

  “Let me guess what our next filming location is going to be,” Brough muttered as they entered the restaurant.

  “Actually,” Chun-li grabbed his arm and put her face close to his, “Ming Dynasty complex is off limits today because a quite sensitive event is taking place.”

  They parted so Brough could join in the wowing and neck-craning. The interior of the tower was an exercise in geometry and quiet power: four tiers of mahogany balustrades and pillars ranged around a hexagonal atrium, cream-plastered walls, light from the midday sun glinting off the buttery bronze of an ancient bell suspended from the roof-beams. A staircase connected each balcony with the next, and around the balconies were private dining rooms, quiet for now, attended by chalk-white waitresses who looked like they had been recently worked on by a makeup artist.

  Fresh orchids in the
wall sconces, antique scrolls hanging from the pillars: to Brough, seeing Chinese opulence for the first time, it solved part of the mystery; it explained the viscerality of the violence, the randomness of the cruelty. You would do a lot of things to defend a lifestyle like this.

  They filed into a dining room with a circular glass table at the centre, resting on a large stone sculpture of a leaping fish; the scroll-armed chairs were rosewood. Carstairs, who’s been running a dodgy antique dealership on eBay as a sideline, queried the authenticity of the furniture. Mr. Bo laughed and attempted English:

  “In China, all antiques doubtful. However, this restaurant formerly museum owned by state, so probably real, or if fakes, quite old!”

  Rupert and Hyacinth pealed with laughter and applauded politely. Hot towels came in, followed by cooled waitresses, frozen glasses and lukewarm beer; then julienned eel, smoked bacon and seared green beans; a medley of chicken beaks and claws; pork sliced so thinly that it melted on their chopsticks like cheese. Finally a two-foot long steamed carp, arranged on the plate with its head and tail in the attitude of leaping out of a bed of golden lily flowers.

  By now Brough, in a series of sub-tabular text exchanges with Chun-li, had established that the nearby Ming Dynasty fortress was to be the venue for an emergency meeting of the Rare Earth cartel and that, if her intelligence was right, key members of it would come to the Qing Dynasty restaurant for lunch to commemorate a landmark day in the history of Rare Earth metallurgy.

  “Why landmark?” Brough had texted.

  “GM finished.” Chun-li had replied.

  “Crops?”

  “Cars. Gone bust. Obama make speech.”

  “Apparently General Motors has gone bust,” Brough chipped in to the conversation.

  “Inevitable matey, wasn’t it?” Carstairs wiping his mouth on a linen cloth.

  “Bit of a surprise to me - not many Bloomberg terminals out in the desert.”

  “Been on the wires since Friday.”

  “Maybe China’s sovereign wealth fund will chip in to buy it,” Georgina joked.

  Everybody laughed nervously.

  For Georgina, each minute that passed without Brough doing something unpredictable or exploding into a childish rage was a bonus.

  “Will it have much impact here, d’you think, Chun-li?” said Brough, insouciant.

  She stared at him blankly across the table and replied:

  “Maybe the light is good enough now to move to shooting?”

  “What was that bronze bell for, at the top?” said Brough.

  “Telling the time,” said Chun-li.

  Mr. Bo launched into a long-winded explanation, complete with demonstrative hand movements, miming a waterfall, bronze casting, peasants digging in the fields.

  “Short version is,” said Chun-li, “in Qing dynasty landowners used water vessels, filled from a tank in the roof to measure the hours and then a mechanism made a hammer strike the bell.”

  “Can we film it? Can we film the bronze bell?”

  Georgina looked at him, confused. Brough was legendary for refusing to “waste tape” on the landscapes, details and covering shots producers need in order to make a TV package complete. A bar-stool legend tells of Brough refusing to stop and film graves outside Monrovia back in 1999, confident that they would find fresh bodies further up the road, then refusing to stop and film the bodies because his instinct told him there would be “something better” a mile further on. That footage, of Brough crouching in a ditch, whispering a piece to camera and then pausing as the microphone records the sound of a firing squad, is still shown on the hostile environment course run by Armageddon Solutions in the session entitled “Some Risks Are Unacceptable”.

  “Why do you want to film an antique bell?” Georgina’s tone was that of a mother with a disappointing child.

  “Because,” Brough improvised, mixing insolence and whimsy, “I might be able to write to it. I might,” he waved his hands in slow circles, “make the scene symbolise order amid chaos; tradition amid modernity. Fabulous wealth...”

  Carstairs threw his napkin to the table and reached for his camera:

  “Maybe Rupert would like to come and film us filming a bell.”

  Rupert beamed and grabbed his camera. Hyacinth, sensing the tension of the day draining off, to be replaced by fun and charm, moved places to engage Georgina in a pidgin-English discussion centring on the topic of Yves Saint Laurent. Mr. Bo lit a cigarette. The driver, who had smoked throughout the meal, scraped his plate for leftovers and belched.

  “In the cool, palatial ruins of this nineteen-eighties era, Disneyland repro of a Qing Dynasty bell tower,” Brough began under his breath, imitating the television-delivery style of 1970s legend Alan Whicker, “the power-brokers of Inner Mongolia gather to fix the price of what few yet realise is to become the world’s most precious,” pause for breath, “metal.”

  He slipped through the door, followed by Carstairs and Rupert Wong, Chun-li clutching her arms around her chest to stem a rising panic. They climbed a flight of wooden stairs and then another. A waitress asked if they needed help. Chun-li said no, but the waitress insisted on making a slow hand-gesture and a beatific bow as they struggled up to the platform next to the bell.

  By now there was clattering, slurping and male hubbub coming from behind the doors of other private rooms, all closed. At the foot of the tower Brough spotted a flurry of coat-taking and bowing by the waitresses, who had lined up like modern slaves and begun chanting a melodious greeting to their guests.

  “Just get me faces,” Brough snapped at Carstairs. “Don’t care how, just faces.”

  Carstairs scrambled to a position above the bell, plausible enough to be filming it if he’d had a wide-angle lens on, which he did not, and ideal for the telephoto lens to pick up detail as the men came up the stairs. From the sound of them, there were maybe four or five: the rustle of linen suits and the creak of nicotine-ravaged lungs echoed into the atrium.

  “Can’t see faces,” Carstairs whispered. There were only hands visible, sliding and gripping the banister; “Wrong angle.”

  An old wooden mallet from the Qing Dynasty was fixed to the wall with brass hooks. Brough wrenched it, pulling the hooks out of the plaster, and hammered it into the side of the bell.

  A shimmering deafness overtook them. Chun-li wailed and covered her ears. Rupert Wong lost his footing and tumbled backwards. Brough was already stumbling down the stairs, wearing a fake smile to intercept the restaurant manager, who was running up towards them with a deranged face. Meanwhile Carstairs was pulling tight, methodical, four-second shots on the peering faces of the businessmen whose heads had moved, like curious turtles, out into the stairwell at the moment the bell clanged.

  They were well-kept faces. A jowly, earnest guy like a Chinese Vito Corleone pulled a grimace and was gone. A fat slob in the middle of a conversation on his Bluetooth earpiece peered upwards under a wrinkled brow. Two Jiang Zemin look-alikes scowled in unison. A venerable oldster and his foxy secretary glanced up together, the camera pulling a two-shot that if it had been a still photo would have scooped first prize in any competition on the theme of “innocence and corruption”.

  Now a bald security guard, his face flattened by the telephoto zoom, began barking at the camera. His leather-clad finger pointed at Carstairs and the camera magnified the fingertip to the same size as his angry face.

  “Oh my god!” Chun-li had been saying this under her breath, over and over, but now as the sound of the bell subsided she tugged Carstairs’ arm and pointed, and jumped up and down as if she’d spotted a shark,

  “There, there!”

  Peering from directly below them, so that their faces were upside down in the viewfinder, were the flat-top hair, roof-tile eyebrows and charming smile of Oktyabr Khünbish. And a gum chewing kid wearing Oakleys.

  ~ * ~

  8

  “What’s going on?” Georgina walked straight into the shoving match that had begun at the
top of the stairs, with a spoonful of grapefruit segments poised elegantly between bowl and mouth. Brough, Carstairs and Chun-li had formed a tight human ball around the camera while the manager, the cartel bodyguard and Oktyabr Khünbish were trying to prise the camera away-in Khünbish’s case from a position on the outside of the balustrade which he had leapt to in order to grab Chun-li’s hair.

  “You whore!” Khünbish yelled. “Why do you refuse to answer my text messages?”

  “Tell these foreign assholes that if they don’t hand over the tape in ten seconds they are dead,” the cartel bodyguard jabbed Chun-li in the chest.

  Georgina shouted:

  “Hey leave her alone!”