by Paul Mason
“Hiya guys! Hear you got some great material for me there!”
“Hi-ii,” Georgina sang, letting her eyes go bright. She had, on arrival in Beijing, procured the power-wardrobe of a female exec: black, flared pinstripe trousers, pointy shoes, boxy jacket. Twyla’s voice announced:
“Now we’re gonna be joined on conference call in a moment by Jacob Zacarelli of our legal advisory firm, Klein, Burgerlich & Kunz LLP. Jake is in New York. Hi Jake!”
“Hey you guys, it’s a lovely spring evening here and the Mets just lost three-one to the Pirates!”
This jovial exchanged confirmed that Jake Zacarelli’s purpose was to destroy Brough’s report.
“Whaddya have for us, David?” Brough could feel Twyla manipulating the situation even over speakerphone.
“Just wait one minute and I’ll play it to ya,” Allegro yelled. “There’ll be no track of course, only an Allegro Harp director’s commentary.”
Allegro’s method, legendary in the business, was to lay his own commentary, suggesting scriptlines for the reporter over the pictures he had chosen.
“I think it best if I just make notes at this point rather than stopping the tape or raising problems as we go.” Zaccarelli’s voice was laden with helpfulness.
“Jake’s a wizard at Chinese media law,” Twyla’s tinny voice enthused. “There’s apparently a defamation law we’ve gotta be aware of? Local officials have been known to sue people who file complaints against them?”
“Chinese media just ignore this law,” said Chun-li into her notebook.
“Ready to go,” Allegro sang, pulled the phone speaker over to his Mac and hit the spacebar. On a two-inch window, a miniature version of the rough-cut began to roll.
It opened with shots of smokestacks belching steam and pollution above the skyline of Shizuishan.
“We’re seeing a rustbelt skyline,” Georgina shouted.
From the Mac’s speaker came Allegro’s voice:
“So here’s where you put your doom-laden track about the pollution threat in China.”
Everyone except Chun-li jiggled with mirth.
The scene switched to tracking shots they’d taken as they’d crossed the Yellow River.
“And here’s where you explain the Yellow River is fuckin’ doomed!”
Shots of Old Mister Jin poking at the soil with his hoe:
“So save the planet or this peasant gets it!”
Now a Chinese bureaucrat with hair the consistency of a slug’s flesh was speaking. They’d filmed him on the first day.
“Ay-and,” Allegro pointed a finger at Chun-li: “Cue translation!” And he hit pause.
Flustered, she flipped through her notebook:
“Chinese official, Yinchuan farm bureau: We are doing everything we can to conserve water, and develop the economy scientifically in harmony with nature.”
With the timeline paused Georgina leant toward the phone:
“Anything so far?”
“Have to see the actual smokestacks at the start of the piece,” Jake replied. “Make sure we’re not suggesting those particular factories might be emitting pollution.”
“Carry on,” said Twyla.
The dusk-lit shots of Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride’s chimneys came into view.
“Now meet the victims,” Allegro’s commentary resumed. The editing style became urgent: it was the scene in Tang Lu East Village: the woman in a silk coat complaining, the old man gagging for breath, Busybody Guo turning up with her hatchet face. Then Brough’s piece to camera with the cloud of white gas rolling in behind him.
Brough looked at the man speaking from the screen. He seemed to understand so much less then than he did now.
“That’s the bit I told you about,” Georgina bawled at the speakerphone.
“Okay we need to go in detail through the translation and...”
“Ay-and here’s the bit where you put all your pathetic little corporate, ass-kissing caveats so’s the sequence is fair and balanced,” crooned Allegro’s voiceover, against the wide shots of Tang Lu. They heard both Twyla and Jake make an effort to produce laughter.
“Now this stuff here,” it was a sequence Carstairs had snatched in the theme park, with quad bike action on a long lens against the rippling desert, “I think is freakin’ awesome. Basically you could write all kinds of stuff here about China: you got these rich mo-fos,” Allegro was speaking live now, not from the machine, “and this gorgeous landscape. This weird, dead, merry-go-round. I mean wow. Poetic. I’ve left it loose for now -there’s shitloads...”
They watched as the quad bikes zipped, camels chewed, and the wind whipped the synthetic manes of carousel horses.
“We’re looking at really nice pictures here,” Georgina told the speakerphone. “Great landscapes of desert, sky, lots to write about desertification. I think it allows us to put the other stuff into context and present.. .hold on a minute, what’s this?”
Brough had put his hands together, as if praying, right in front of his mouth, which had dropped open.
“Oh my god,” said Chun-li.
Flickering, grainy, and with timecode burned into the bottom right-hand corner, there was Big Wu pointing out of a soot-blackened window.
“Man points at factory he does not like,” Allegro’s commentary continued. A shaky setup shot of Brough and Big Wu peering at a poster of the Periodic Table.
“Man spills da beanz on ba-ad factory.”
Big Wu’s pixellated face began to speak:
“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.”
“Stop!” Georgina shouted.
“Er, what is the name of that, er, interviewee?” Jake queried.
“You know what, man, your camera technique sucks,” Allegro told Brough, hitting the pause.
“We’ll call you back,” said Georgina.
After a glare from Georgina, which Brough met with a series of shrugs, Allegro explained:
“It just came back. I did what you tol’ me. I stuck the flash card into the reader. Zilch. I ran my diagnostics on it. Zilch. I leave it there with this de-scrambling programme running in background and about an hour into the edit, it comes back to life. Bing! A whole bunch o’ files. Take a look!”
He hit the enter button and Brough saw the Cancer Village footage tile, sequence by sequence, across the computer screen.
“Something else very strange also happened,” said Chun-li. “Last night I deleted 108 text messages from my cellphone emanating from that deceased crazy person. Now every one’s been restored.”
“And now you mention it,” Allegro grinned, “all the porn I deleted before I brought the Mac through customs has reappeared as well!”
~ * ~
4
“Okay you’ve seen that footage: is it a story or is it not?”
Brough and Georgina were striding side by side along a hotel corridor too long to see the end of, orange microfibres flying off the carpet and sticking to their legs.
“Yes,” said Georgina finally.
“So I’m pleading with you: help me get it on screen.”
She stopped and stared at her trousers.
“What the fuck is it with this carpet!” She started brushing the static-charged fibres with her hands, staggering backwards against the wall for balance. The fresh paint on the dado rail left a vermilion stripe across her jacket.
“What’s wrong with this place?”
“You’ve got to stand up to them. Those pictures-you ever seen anything like that come out of China?”
“It’s not me,” she replied, through her teeth, jabbing at the paint stain with a rolled-up Kleenex. He went on:
“All they want is a manufactured, fake, secondary, useless, pre-scripted, tiny ...thing! ... to confront the Chinese government with. That’s right isn’t it?”
“But this Rare Eart
h cartel story? Shit like that doesn’t work in VT. You old newspaper guys never get it: television tells one story at a time.”
He fantasised about strangling her. Then he said:
“I think those two guys are dead, you know: the ones that get led away by the riot cops at the end.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Alright, let’s track them down. Let’s get Chun-li on the case...”
“Did he sign an affidavit?”
Brough stopped walking and stared at her blankly.
“Did this Big Wu guy, the interviewee, did he sign anything? And is there any documentary evidence that what he says is true? We’re not talking about the News of the World here, we’re not allowed to just make stuff up: we’ve got a public duty...”
“This could be really good. You could be the news queen of lower fucking Manhattan in no time with this on your CV.”
“Listen, David, don’t worry about my career...” she let the thought trail off into the hostile silence.
It lasted a long time. Eventually Brough realised something:
“What? They’re going to sack me? Fuckin-A, that’s what I say to that. This is this, Stanley,” and he used the USB stick to do an impression of Robert De Niro holding up a bullet in The Deer Hunter. “This ain’t something else, this is this.”
“I hope you’ve never said anything detrimental about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” she was shouting now, arms folded tight around her chest. “Because if Channel Ninety-Nine lets you go, the only network that’s going to touch you with a bargepole is Iranian state TV.”
He stuck his hands into his pockets and began striding along the corridor, she half a step behind him.
“What if...” he began. But his mind had already begun computing the consequences of being sacked. He’d bought his apartment at the peak of the property bubble and was already in negative equity. Before that he’d lost tens of thousands in the dotcom crash, and his retirement income was dependent on four or five scraps of private pension plan, each with its own minor, value-destroying defect. Only his deftness at expenses scams left him in the black at the end of each month, and he lived in dread of the January tax deadline.
On top of that, there was the issue of television. The Channel’s global audience was close to half a million at 9pm; they’d grown it from nothing in a straight fight with AJ and CNN. Shireen may have been discovered on a talent show, and need all foreign names spelled out phonetically on the autocue, but she was a natural. Twyla, serially sacked by every American network, had a world-class talent for manipulating stories and people.
Brough’s elbows had rubbed all too often, at the bar of the Basra Lounge, with those of print journalists whose column inches had been shrunk to the point where the story was impossible to tell; or documentary filmmakers whose masterpieces would only be viewed at an anarchist cinema on Tyneside. Television, to Brough, was a drug and - as with all addicts - not being on it sounded a lot worse than being on it just a little bit.
“What if,” he began again, “we just show the Cancer Village factory, play the clip from Big Wu, put a massive balancing statement over a Leni Riefenstahl-job depicting clean, unpolluted Beijing. Jimmy could nip out now and shoot it. Qualify the whole thing by saying nothing is corroborated but it leaves the government with questions to answer. Pre-warn the bastards by playing them the clip...”
“I’m not liking the flippant reference to Leni Riefenstahl but go on,” Georgina struggled to suppress the triumph in her voice.
They rounded the angle of the corridor. Their path was blocked by a team of carpet layers and painters, one lot painting the walls as the others unrolled fresh carpet. Beyond them, electricians were powerdriving cables into bare concrete as the shell of a new hotel wing took shape.
“Okay,” Brough took a long breath. “No riot cops, no arrests. No piece to camera on a barricade. Just a factory and an allegation, the clear Beijing sky, peach blossoms. ‘Can China’s government manage the vast challenge of cleaning up its industry in the midst of economic downturn?’,” he imitated himself: “Only time will tell.”
~ * ~
5
By late afternoon they had whittled it down to the essentials. The Tang Lu pollution episode would stay in, but all reference to, and identifiable shots of, the Nickel Metal Hydride plant would be removed. The complainants never named it, Zaccarelli argued; that’s to our advantage. There would be a long sequence on desertification, using a montage of the Kubuqi sand dunes and some library footage of the Gobi desert, which would be dropped in at the Shanghai end.
Finally a generic reference to the many villages suffering pollution problems, plus a setup of Big Wu and his 20-second clip. Then, over freshly shot footage of Brough and Chun-li in the hotel room trying to call the Cancer Village management office, and the clear sound of the answering machine, the words: “Channel Ninety-Nine attempted to put these allegations to the management at the factory, but they did not return our calls.”
Finally shots of Beijing in springtime, the soft blue of the sky, student lovers riding their bikes side by side, holding hands. Peach blossom. Only time will tell.
“Okay, now everybody gettoutahere and let me work my magic,” Allegro ordered.
“I feel like I need to take a shower,” said Brough.
~ * ~
6
He headed for the hotel bar, a subterranean cave with indigo lights whose predominant textures were black Artex and fur. The fur was white and bristled against his ears as two tall Chinese waitresses dressed in rabbit-skin bikinis steered him, coercively, towards a bar-stool.
“What I can’t work out,” said Carstairs, who was already sitting there fingering the rim of a $50 gin and tonic, “is how The Carpenters became such a global phenomenon.”
On a cramped stage, a bikini-clad chanteuse, backed by a tawdry duo on Roland FP-7 and electric bass, was chugging through I Won’t Last A Day Without You. Brough ordered a $25 beer and spotted Chun-li threading her way, eyes to the floor, between tables of shaven-headed British engineers, fat Americans in shorts and some sleazeballs resembling John Cazale. He ordered her a glass of date juice and an ice cube.
Chun-li, who had changed into a don’t-mess-with-me outfit of white blouse/tan skirt, drew stares of derision from the barmaid, which turned into outright hostility when she ordered the television to be switched from basketball to news and haggled the price of the juice down to a few Chinese yuan.
“Well here’s to you, Chun-li.”
Brough felt raw. Once a report was in the can the adrenaline always drained away, leaving only the emotions he’d gone through to produce it.
“Hey and here’s to you mate!” Carstairs grinned at him. “Nearly died laughing when I realised you’d legged it into the desert. And you, young Beretta lady, we should probably get you an honorary membership at the Basra Lounge!”
“And here is to great journalistic team of Brough and Carstairs,” she mocked her own accent; “greatly sabotaged by Georgina, aided by mysterious forces, completing mission to expose corruption in Western China! Oh no...”
Something on the TV screen had made her face go sickly. The newscaster was speaking: behind her the back-projection pictured a familiar industrial skyline. Next, the bulletin switched to a live outside broadcast: aerial shots of a large industrial complex and a female reporter trilling like a songbird.
“That’s whatshername!” said Carstairs.
Hyacinth Deng, dressed in a smart red chemise with matching lipstick, now leant into a brisk walking shot: she was making her way into a dusty hutong, camera following her on the shoulder. The place looked familiar.
“What’s she saying?” Brough whispered. Chun-li gabbled a translation:
“Here in Tang Lu East Village pollution been a problem many years. Now residents win campaign for less pollution and movement of entire community to new homes.”
In the street there was a crowd, fronted by Busybody Guo, who began lecturing Hyacinth. C
hun-li translated:
“For years, says boss-lady Guo, we had to live next to this pollution coming from factory but thanks to tireless efforts by editor of Tang Lu Daily (founded 1958), local government have finally agreed to move residents.”
Now it panned to a two-shot of Editor Sheng flanked by Commerce Secretary Zhou, both smiling expansively. Sheng made a bland statement, acknowledging the factory’s world-class safety record but pointing to the poor standard of the housing and explaining how concerned the residents have become.