by Paul Mason
At 20:58 he glanced at his Blackberry to find a warning from Chun-li, followed by messages from both Twyla and Georgina and a note of commiseration from Allegro Harp.
Georgina’s read: “You are officially sacked. Dickhead.”
Twyla’s said: “Pis read ur email. V disappointed in U.”
Allegro’s said: “Sorry they made me do it, love ya!”
Chun-li, in a comprehensive email, explained the situation:
“David, Urgent problems here. Twyla insisted that report goes into programme so Georgina forcing Allegro to find individual words from outtakes of your tracking lines to make new script. Sounds like a robot speaking but is Allegro, expert at sound editing and has forced Georgina to grant him a major cash bonus to make track sound natural. Script now very cowardly. Piece to camera in Tang Lu removed. Also Mr. Wu no longer featured. Take care. Chun-li.”
The champagne was making Brough’s eyes swim already so when he burst out laughing he was not surprised also to feel tears run down his cheeks.
“What?” said Miss Lai.
“I’ve been sacked by text message.”
There was immediate consternation among Kids One-Through-Four and an instant six-way Mandarin shouting competition.
“OK Mister Brough you are so not helping us here,” Miss Chi pinned him with a haughty stare. “Are you, like, saying here that the Rare Earth report will not go out? They nixed the report?”
Brough shook his head.
“They’ve doctored the report but it will go out. They’ve sacked me for refusing to play a part in my own self-censorship. Why do you care?”
There was another cacophony with the rich kids, at the end of which everyone fell silent and stared at Brough, as if expecting him to pronounce on something massive.
“What?”
Lai grabbed his arm. Chi, beneath the table, laid a languid hand on his crotch and let her curls drape onto his shoulder.
“Ha,” giggled Miss Chi, “the boys here just got a little jumpy on account of the high stakes involved, but you can assure them, right, that the profile of the Rare Earth issue will rise dramatically in the West once your report goes out?”
“Oh yes,” Brough gasped as Chi jabbed a finger into his testicles; “dramatically”.
~ * ~
10
Once, in a futile attempt to teach him transcendental meditation, a girlfriend had introduced Brough to the concept of “awake without thinking”. Later, on a balcony ledge in Kirkuk, pissed out of his brain in the moonlight and trying to teach the Elephant & Castle Style of tai-chi to a video-journalist called Narciso Pirandello, they had together reinvented the concept as “drunk without slurring”.
The idea was to be so drunk, preferably on a single type of alcohol, that your senses became wide open, alert to the world-including its manifold subtexts, secret pheromonal messages, fleeting refusals of eye contact and the trajectory of incoming artillery shells.
It was in this state that Brough excused himself and staggered to the bathroom, not without a smile in honour of Narciso, shot in the head in Baghdad a few weeks later. In his drunk-without-slurring mode Brough had managed to figure out that Chi and Lai were working some kind of scam - on, or with, Kids-One -Through-Four-and that it involved his report. The sound-system in the club was playing that kind of pointlessly hip, French Cocktail Disco that made him long to sit down with a pint of bitter and a Pogues CD.
The bathroom was heavily populated with Chinese sex-workers, male and female, being simultaneously both a toilet and the male changing room for the Turkish bath. Brough placed an obstinate palm in the way of advancing male helpers, shrugged his shoulders to dislodge the hands of a woman who was trying to give him a muscle rub, and lurched towards a urinal.
Seconds later, Terence Stansgate arrived at the adjoining stall.
“We can’t go on meeting like this, matey,” Stansgate began.
“Got any jobs going at your place?” Brough snorted.
“Ah. Has there been unpleasantness at Channel Ninety-Nine?”
“You could say that. They’ve fucked me over with my story.”
“Your big mistake,” Stansgate sighed, they were both staring straight ahead into the wall; “was trying to do an actual story. Everybody tries. I did, once.”
He paused.
“What you’ve got to understand is that there is only one story in China and that’s the China story. It’s like a Mandelbrot thingy: deeper you go, crank up the microscope, you just get the same pattern, over and over again. And the terrifying thing is: to really understand it you have to think like them. Aid once you do that it suddenly dawns on you…”
“What dawns on you,” Brough zipped his fly and struggled to clear his brain.
“That they are right. That human rights should come second to economic development. That our democracy is just as corrupt as theirs only they, naive little souls, don’t bother disguising it - No thank you!” he snapped at an attendant sidling toward them with an eau-de-cologne spray as they began to leave.
Brough looked despondent. Stansgate placed a hearty heterosexual arm across his shoulders and shook him.
“Theory is, though, you’ll be minted after tonight. Minted, isn’t that the word?”
“What do you mean?”
Brough’s drunk-without-slurring powers were allowing him to pick up all kinds of innuendoes in Stansgate’s voice, which made what he said next only half surprising:
“Large trading volumes today on certain small-cap markets. Interesting patterns. Every Rare Earth mining company outside China’s seen significant trading: the duff one in Australia that can’t produce because of radioactive waste, the one in California that can’t get finance because it’s in a National Park, the Canadian one blockaded by Inuit protesters. You name it. I might put a few bob on myself, tomorrow.”
“I thought,” said Brough, “Rare Earth production outside China was insignificant.”
“Ha ha, very good. Poker face.” Stansgate tapped the side of his nose with a finger. “Insignificant until the West realises the Middle Kingdom’s got them by the short and curlies and then, well, just watch the Kaiser Bottom-Fish Index move!”
“What’s the Kaiser Bottom-Fish Index,” said Brough, staggering backwards from the urinal towards the door.
“Ha, ha,” Stansgate was swaying now as he struggled to button his fly: “Good man. Geneva Convention. I will give only name, rank and number.”
~ * ~
11
“You!”
It was Georgina striding up the staircase, her eye-anger all the more violent for being surrounded by a mask of purple flesh.
“You did this!” she thrust her face into Brough’s face, pointing at the bruises with a cracked fingernail: “I suppose those two girls got hold of your mobile phone by accident? And by the way don’t think I’ve come here to plead with you to retrack the piece. The programme’s in the can. It’s finished and so are you.”
Brough’s reaction to female verbal abuse was always to stare into a space exactly one metre behind the complainant’s eyes, and two inches above their head, and say nothing, which he did now.
“Shit, honey, what happen’d to her?” It was Miss Lai, a possessive hand gripping his arm.
“Who are you?” Georgina seethed.
“David’s a good friend o’ mine, this good of guy really kicks ass, journalistically speakin,’ dontya think?”
“Yes, well.” Georgina folded her arms, looked at her shoes, rocked on her heels, considering a response.
“You get my message?”
He nodded.
“Well here’s another one,” and Georgina hit Brough in the nose with the heel of her palm, knocking him backwards into the chest of Terence Stansgate.
“Hello Terence,” Georgina’s face assumed for one second a gymkhana smile and then melted back into a scowl, at Brough, who was wiping nose-blood onto his sleeve.
“What I’ve come for is Channel Ninety-Nine’s intellec
tual property.”
“Excuse me?” said Miss Lai, lifting her sunglasses onto her head to squint at Georgina.
“I’m sorry, this is a private matter between myself and my colleague!” and Georgina put out such strong negative vibes that it made Miss Lai, just for a second, take a step away.
“I hear you retracked my piece with bits of outtakes,” Brough summoned the energy to say, but she fixed him with an unsympathetic gaze.
“Your words are the intellectual property of the Channel, as is the footage you shot while on our payroll. Likewise all the other material Allegro tells me you have copied onto your USB stick. I would like it back, and you are obligated to destroy any copies. And please don’t tell me it is up your fat, melodramatic backside or I will have to ask this gentleman here to personally oversee its removal.”
Brough noticed for the first time that she had brought muscle with her: a skinny Chinese guy in a black Harrington jacket standing discreetly, hands crossed over his belt buckle, two steps down the stairway. Typical TV-company cheapskate muscle.
“Ah, Georgina, may I have a word?” said Terence Stansgate and moved to put a hand on her arm, which she brushed aside, screaming into his face: “Fuck off, Terry!”
The noise on the stairway dropped like someone had punched the middle out of a graphic equaliser; only the swish of expensive clothing and the deep bass of the Lindy Hop below bracketed the silence. An Austrian banker with a transgender Sichuan hooker, two male models just in from the launch party of a major label’s autumn collection, sundry waiters with trays of cocktails poised above their heads, plainclothes security men for various high-value individuals who’d been loitering invisibly, just like Georgina’s low-value guy: everyone froze and stared at her.
It was Miss Lai who unfroze first, stepping into Georgina’s space and gazing at her aggressively.
“Okay lemme get this clear, you claiming intellectual property rights over content originated by Mister Brough here? And would the jurisdiction for any such claim be the People’s Republic of China - or maybe the registered home territory of Channel Ninety-Nine Incorporated which is, oh yeah, lemme see if my memory serves me correct, the Bahamas?”
“It’s our property. Give it back.”
Georgina’s minder took this as a cue to step forward to just behind her, while Terry Stansgate took it as a cue to go back into the toilet and start texting his contact at the British Embassy.
Brough rummaged in his pocket for the USB stick and held it vertically between finger and thumb in the space between them.
Georgina’s thug made a grab for it, which Miss Lai deftly intercepted with a block, a hold and a shove which made him spiral around his own arm through space, with a splitting sound as his acromio-clavicular joint popped.
At this everybody else scurried off the staircase, in anticipation of the arrival of Nancy Kiang’s wing-chun guys.
“Hey honey don’t ruin my evening!” called the maitre de, shimmying down the stairs in a sideways dance step.
‘“s over anyways”, Miss Lai flipped her shades back down and blew her fringe off her face with an upward puff of breath. “Brough, you comin’ back to the party?”
But Brough and Georgina were staring each other out, like two kids in a playground.
“What did you make me say?”
“Don’t worry,” she laughed, with a worried glance at her writhing sidekick, “nothing disgraceful. Just took stuff out. You still see the gas cloud and the complaints. And you know what? The Chinese spokesman in the studio just said: ‘we’ll look into it’. We understand the problem, our own people are onto it, the re-housing should have happened months ago. Do these things happen in the West, Miss Berkowitz? That was it.”
“What about Rare Earth?”
“She tried that line but nothing doing. We keep all strategic resource exports under constant review and are constantly cracking down on illegal mining as part of our Strike Hard campaign against corruption. To be honest the whole sequence was not scintillating but it ticked a box. You going to give me that thing or not?”
“You know what Georgina...” he held the USB stick just out of her reach.
“This is the truth. It’s not the whole truth but it’s a substantial evidential base. A cop arrests us, he tries to bribe us; a minor bureaucrat tries to kill us, we get him on tape - OK secretly but useful in any legal action - spilling the beans. It’s complex: one factory is supplying contraband Rare Earth to the Japanese, another makes magnets for an illegal cartel. Then there’s the nut-job in the Audi - smuggling the magnets into Russia, according to Chun-li. We’re dealing with two or three different mafia groups here, and a whole load of low-level fascist coercion. Poverty, pollution, injustice. People on camera one day and the next day involuntarily committing suicide...”
Miss Lai placed her hand, gently, on his elbow as he ranted:
“When this goes out, the whole world will get a case study of how China works. The Chinese won’t see it; they won’t give a shit if they do see it, probably. But the whole world will know what a bunch of inhuman fuckin’ thugs it is that we have to rely on to keep Walmart stacked with cheap toys and the wind-turbines turning.”
He closed his fist around the USB stick, wiped his nose, and took a few weary steps up the stairway. Miss Lai, on his arm, flashed Georgina an evil glance. There were too many heavies around now for anybody to try and settle things by force.
Then he stopped, his chest heaving with outrage and turned to Georgina.
“You say this is your intellectual property?” He held the USB stick up to the light as if to taunt Georgina.
“Well, it’s my story. So here...”
And he flipped it into the air, where it made a few turns through the disco-light and landed in her outstretched palms.
He would ask himself later why he’d done it, but at the time it just felt like a cool thing to do, and he let himself revel in it.
“What the fuck?” screamed Miss Lai. “You got copies, right?”
“David is trained journalist - can keep copy of information inside his head.” It was Chun-li, who had slipped into the scene un-noticed, from the ladies’.
“Give me that!” Miss Lai launched herself down the stairs towards Georgina who was still clutching the USB stick in her outstretched hands, trembling. But Chun-li stepped between them, emitting a tai-chi forcefield that made Miss Lai stagger backwards and eventually sit down, defeated, on the velvet stair-carpet.
In the silence Chun-li pulled her phone out and read:
“Kaiser Bottom-Fish Index up 50 per cent. The KBFI, a composite share price of Rare Earth mining companies closed tonight at 1,512, up fifty per cent on the day from the thousand mark where it has hovered since the financial crisis began. Analysts note this remains significantly short of the 6,000 peak registered during the commodity price spike of 2007. Source: Metal Index Outlook 1600 GMT.”
“Bingo!” said Brough to Miss Lai, thrusting his hands into his pockets and slouching down the stairs without a glance at anyone-and with only a shrug to acknowledge the presence of Chun-li beside him, her hand in the crook of his arm.
~ * ~
12
They took a taxi to Houhai. The moon shimmered across the lake, turning the posters on the flaking walls silver. The calligraphy, announcing the hutong’s imminent demolition, had long since faded. Chun-li led him down a white lane criss-crossed by the moonshadows of bicycle spokes, telegraph wires, half-dead osmanthus shrubs, washing lines, old birdcages. The air was heavy, silent except for the slap of water against a stone bridge.
They turned into an alley, clambering over a pile of Qing-era roof tiles, half a rusty pram, some bags of coal. Even the masonry became crumbly, merging with the dust and dirt. At the corner of a grime-caked courtyard, Chun-li paused and drummed her nails on a window whose glass had been made grey by a century of rain.
General Guo’s door creaked open. He was totally bald, a liver spot on his cheek, white stubble on his chi
n. He was dressed in the unofficial uniform of every old man in the world: nondescript brown trousers, checked shirt buttoned to the neck, filthy v-neck sweater and a pair of decaying slippers. He smiled with fossilised stumps of teeth and engaged Brough with an eye rich in irony.
“Do come in,” he said, in the English of fifty years ago. “I shall put the kettle on. I am Guo Jie. Guo as in the Chinese word for Kingdom, Jie as in ‘outstanding’. Guo Jie,” he made signs with his hands for the Chinese tones.
“General Guo now aged eighty-four. Swam with Chairman Mao in Yangtse River,” Chun-li’s voice had become awed and breathy.