by Adam Brookes
The wind had picked up and, in the silence, Mangan watched cloud shadow stipple the mountains.
“You can go,” said Grey Suit.
They caught an afternoon flight from Nanchang. Approaching Beijing, Mangan was tight and silent. Harvey drank Five Star beer. Beneath them the north China plain darkened from gray to purple. Beijing glistened in the early night as the aircraft banked and the engines hissed.
They were at Mangan’s flat by ten to look at the pictures. They crashed through the front door, scattering equipment bags, to find Ting, wide-eyed and phone in hand, scolding. Mangan was brought round, her concern breaking his mood and calming him.
“I’ve been on the phone all evening,” she said. “Where have you been?”
Mangan gestured to himself, as if he were making an entrance in fine attire.
“Here we are,” he said.
“She missed us,” said Harvey.
“She did,” said Mangan.
Ting waved her willowy, bare arms.
“I almost called London.”
She was done up for Beijing society: a slender dress in charcoal-gray silk, very short; Tibetan jewelry in exquisite dull silver. Her skin was Manchurian pale, the color of ivory. She sat down hard, gave an exaggerated sigh and ran her hands through short spiky hair.
“Why didn’t you call? I missed a gallery opening.”
“State Security ate my mobile,” said Harvey.
She put a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, no.”
Mangan smiled.
“We’re okay. Really. It was okay.”
“And… we got the pictures,” said Harvey.
Mangan dropped his trousers and began picking away at the gaffer on his thigh, wincing theatrically, and they all laughed.
Mangan poured glasses of vodka, and Ting turned off the lights and the three of them sat on the shabby sofa and watched it all played back on Mangan’s flatscreen television. The pictures were strong. They had the old woman in the purple rain jacket, with her quavering voice and weird stare. They had the chilling wujing images taken from the street, before they made their way to the roof. Harvey had silhouetted the wujing against the lights of the trucks, so they became anonymous, threatening shadows. And the arrests were very clear—the old woman dragged down the street, her feet juddering across the wet black asphalt. Mangan could feel the structure of the piece forming. It would tell well in straight chronology. This, then this.
But they had nothing from the roof. The worst of the violence—the ponytailed boy bleeding into the gutter—was all on the card confiscated by Grey Suit. The intensity, Mangan realized, built and came to not much. It would be a story without an end, he knew, a compromise.
He was bleeding. From where, though?
Peanut kneeled on the clinker, swaying. It was evening, he thought.
He wiped a hand across his mouth and the back of it came away smeared with blood. Was he bleeding from the nose? It seemed so. He was, he supposed, close to unconsciousness. A train passed a few feet from him, but the roar of the diesel, the clack of the wheels, seemed far away.
He began to crawl.
Far to his left, he could make out engine yards and beyond them the station. The darkening sky had to it the pale orange wash, not of sunset, but of a city’s lights.
He had damaged himself when he jumped from the freight car, but he couldn’t understand how. He crawled further away from the tracks, towards a low brick building with broken windows, weeds growing at the base of its walls. He was very cold and his tongue was thick in his mouth. For twenty-four hours, clinging to the coupling, he had eaten and drunk nothing. The wind chill had left him stunned.
He reached the brick building and slumped against the wall, from which, he now saw, a faucet protruded. He hauled himself to it and turned the tap. The faucet hissed and shook, and belched an intermittent spray of cold water. Peanut cupped his hands and drank, retched, drank more, and sluiced his face clean of blood.
His head began to clear. He flexed his limbs, rubbed his hands. Then, tentatively, he stood. He looked to the skyline, saw illuminated towers rising in the dark, flickering and silver. He’d never seen the like.
Xining. The city.
He looked up the tracks towards the station and saw flashlights, their beams dancing on the steel rails. He turned, felt in his pocket for the plastic bag cinched at the top with an elastic band, and found it between his fingers. Then he ran.
In an alley off the freight yards he stood and watched from the shadows. A girl sat in a doorway beneath a green neon light. She wore tight pink jeans. A man stood over her, murmuring to her with an expectant look. Or a greedy look, Peanut thought, as if he were contemplating some rich food. The man carried beneath his arm a small black bag with a loop for the wrist. The bag suggested its owner to be a man of business, a man of accoutrements. Peanut had seen such bags carried by visiting officials in the prison and had fixed upon them as the likely location of valuable items.
The man looked extremely valuable. He wore a blue jacket of a soft, slithery material, a striped shirt and cream slacks, and shoes that to Peanut’s eye had the shine of polished wood. The man was balding and bulky and leaning over the girl, and she nodded and picked up a handbag that lay at her feet.
What did the valuable man think he was doing here at night in an alley off the freight yards, talking to girls in doorways?
Peanut stepped from the shadows and walked towards them. The man looked up and frowned. Seeing Peanut, in filthy green trousers, stained tracksuit top, he backed away a little. The girl sat very still and watched Peanut.
“What?” said the man.
Peanut held his hands open and moved closer to them.
“I just need a little help,” said Peanut.
“Piss off,” said the man. He sounded uncertain. Peanut made a regretful face. He stepped quickly to the man’s left side in a feint. The man lashed out ineffectually with both arms. Peanut stepped in close and gripped his jaw and rammed his head against the wall. The man emitted a squeal. Peanut hit him hard on the chin and his knees gave way and down he went. The girl sat staring fixedly ahead, her hands splayed against the wall, as if steadying herself. Peanut said nothing, just leaned down and placed two fingers in a pinch on her throat. Her skin was very soft. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows in a questioning expression. She gave a tight shake of her head. He let go his grip, bent to pick up the black bag and walked shakily down the alley.
Xining bus station at night had the air of a transit camp, Peanut thought. Muslim families, the women in lace headscarves, sat on the floor amid orange peel and peanut shells cradling rose-cheeked children. Their men clutched mobile phones. Soldiers lounged and smoked. The tannoy clattered around the walls as the buses disappeared into the taut, dry night.
The toilets reeked of chemical perfume and urine. The floor was slippery with spit. Peanut squatted in a toilet stall, shivering, massaging the knuckles of his right hand. He was savagely hungry. Before him, the man’s black bag.
Peanut unzipped the bag. He was dimly aware of the clatter of the paper towel dispenser, running water, a man hacking and spitting. He pulled the bag open carefully. As he did so, it emitted a sharp electronic whine. He flinched. The bag fell on to the slimy floor. The whine resolved into the marching favorite, “Dang Bing De Ren,” “Those Who Join The Army.” The valuable man’s mobile phone was ringing. Heart thumping, Peanut took it from the bag. The phone hummed and vibrated between his fingers and blinked blue. On a screen a single character flashed on and off. Jia. Home. Peanut stared at the device. He’d never held one before. So now we’ll turn it off. But how? Does one push a button? Baffled, he stood up and dropped the phone into the squat toilet’s dark aperture. The noise continued. Peanut flushed, and it stopped.
So, the contents of the bag. Cigarettes. A smart lighter. A diary—business meetings, something to do with property, phone numbers. And a black wallet. Within its folds five hundred and thirty-two yuan in a
variety of notes, and the shenfenzheng, the laminated identity card. Its photograph showed the man aged about ten years younger, with a face less lined and less ample than the one that had crumpled before Peanut’s fist. There was a likeness, perhaps, if you screwed up your eyes and hoped. Song Ping was the name, from Lanzhou.
So that’s who he’d be. For now.
Peanut stood, opened the stall door and walked to the sinks. He washed his hands with soap, scrubbing with his nails at the engine oil and blood. When he looked into the mirror, he wondered at what he saw. The skin was dark from the sun of the high desert, the hair short and bristled. In the eyes, something flickering between desperation and intention. He rolled his big shoulders, breathed.
The money and the identity card were in his pocket. He buried the clutch bag in a bin, walked out of the toilet, keeping to the wall, and pushed into the line for the long-distance ticket booth.
Where, to his horror, a policeman was checking documents. And another was standing back, just watching. Peanut looked down, patted his pockets, as if he had forgotten something, then stepped out of the line and walked quickly towards a fruit stall. He purchased a bag of oranges and without looking back walked out of the terminal to a stand of local buses. He chose one at random, boarded and paid full fare. He took a seat and looked back at the terminal. Four, no, five police cars had drawn up, and officers were moving through the long-distance terminal, trawling the crowd. For him? He sank low in the seat. The bus, half-empty, pulled out.
The bus was slow and anonymous. It took him south-east from Xining, meandering through grimy, dead towns.
Stillness is the enemy.
He savored a dawn meal—dumplings of pork gristle and coriander, sluiced in black vinegar!—at a truck stop under a canvas tarpaulin in the rain. He took another bus, and then another, heading east. He spent a night in a scabrous hostel, one storey of crumbling concrete so filthy that, for an instant, he longed for the cleanliness of the prison. He spoke to no one, and moved, slowly, in the direction of Beijing.
3
Beijing
Harvey and Mangan cut the story the next morning. Beijing was gray with cold autumn rain. Harvey sat at the laptop, stringing together sequences. Ting, in a pink waterproof, brought coffee. She peered at the screen, at the wujing leaping from trucks.
“Bastards,” she said.
Harvey looked up.
“Temper,” he said.
She waved a hand. “Really. They’re thugs. We don’t deserve them.”
Mangan, still in pajamas, fought bravely with the script. London wanted the piece in at under three minutes, today. The state news agency, Xinhua, had run a terse five-line account of the mass arrests at Jinyi and the international wires were sniffing at it, so Mangan had to move fast. Harvey logged the pictures and built more sequences. Ting worked through the interviews, looking for the right grab, giving them options. But how to convey a sense of who the Followers were? A cult? A religion? Or vulnerable people so disoriented by life in modern China that a levitating folk healer in Arizona looked like a hopeful prospect?
By mid-morning he was still struggling.
“They claim to be the denizens of a new order,” he told the microphone. “An order based on ancient Chinese myth, remade in a bid to change China.” This over a mysterious, beautiful shot of the Followers’ hands weaving in the air. A pause.
“But the Communist Party sees only the threat of rebellion.”
Harvey said, “What is a denizen, for Pete’s sake?”
“Look it up,” said Mangan.
“Shall we tell the viewers to do the same? And you said in a bid.”
Ting had the bureau dictionary. “A denizen is an… inhabitant,” she said brightly.
Harvey folded his arms, downing tools. “It’s crap, Philip. It’s clinical and full of cliché.” He swept his arm towards the screen. “Just look at the pictures. Tell the story.”
Mangan sighed and deleted. Harvey was a ruthless picture editor—a side of him that Mangan at once valued and loathed.
Ting stood behind Mangan and gave his wide bony shoulders a mock massage.
“Come on, Philip. Jia you. Did you know the Master believes homosexuals are made of antimatter? Really, it’s on his website.”
The streets from Liuliqiao long-distance bus station lead east towards the sacred center of Beijing. On these streets it is common to see migrants from north-west China who have just alighted from their buses—here a Muslim man in a white skullcap and a stringy beard, there a young woman in a headscarf from the tiny villages of yellow dust on the Loess Plateau. They stand in the middle of the pavement, looking up at the silvered skyscrapers for the first time. They often look ill at ease, their poorly fitting clothes in brown and blue, their calloused hands, their dark skin. The pale Beijing ren sweep by the migrants on the street.
On this particular autumn morning, just after dawn, the casual observer might have noticed just such a migrant, a large man, with an ample midriff, make his way at moderate pace away from the bus station. He wore a blue tracksuit top and stained green trousers and a pair of newly purchased running shoes. A plastic carrier bag dangled at his side. He, too, seemed surprised by the power and scale of Beijing’s new prosperity. He stopped and leaned back, admiring the sunrise reflected in the shimmering frontage of a bank. He looked this way and that, turning to appreciate some new perspective, some striking confluence of light and architecture. Now and again he stopped, turned about, sat for a moment.
Once, a security guard in a white belt strode out from behind hissing smoked glass doors and ordered him away. The rotund man bent at the waist, looked submissive, raised a hand.
“Sorry, Officer, at once, Officer,” he said, and continued on his way. At one point he ducked into a coffee shop only to emerge immediately. The casual observer might have seen a confused middle-aged migrant, his passage ponderous, a naif come to the brave new capital of China.
But a trained observer might have seen something different, a measure of watchfulness and purpose beneath the ponderousness. The trained observer might conclude that this bristle-haired fleshy character, in his stopping and starting and turning about and his smiling, quick-eyed appreciation of his new surroundings, was, in fact, conducting counter-surveillance. Rudimentary and unpracticed, for sure, but counter-surveillance nonetheless. The tradecraft of those who live parallel, hidden lives. And such an observer might further conclude that this man was living such a life. Or perhaps practicing to do so, or reminding himself how.
By early afternoon Mangan had coaxed a script into being, Harvey had laid the closing pictures, and they’d sent it. It was strong, but Mangan was not satisfied, picking over it in his mind. The duty editor in London had sent back a Thanks. Good work. Which meant nothing.
The piece would run in an hour or two, perhaps even attract some attention. The agency supplied networks in odd places—South Africa, Lithuania. Often, carefully constructed stories were never heard of again. This time, though, the pictures were exclusive. Reuters had a story on the wire. Baton-wielding paramilitary police detained hundreds of protesters in south China Wednesday, as a nationwide crackdown on religious sects continued. The European and American networks would want to pick up the story. They’d pay the agency for Harvey’s pictures, fillet them and revoice them using their own correspondent, who had neither been there to witness the brutality, nor spent the night in a State Security lockup, Mangan reflected. He sat at his desk, tried to turn his mind to a piece for the paper.
Ting was in the kitchen, spooning rice soup into a bowl, sprinkling it with spring onions. Mangan could see her silhouette against the window, watched her. She turned, holding the bowl gingerly, then caught his eye and gave him a questioning look.
“Anything I can do?”
“Write two thousand words for me,” he said.
“Zuo meng, ni.” You’re dreaming.
“Where’s Harv?”
“He said his work here was done and he was taki
ng a long lunch.”
“I think I might join him.”
She placed the spoon carefully in the bowl and pointed sternly at his laptop.
“Write! Soon you won’t be able to afford me.”
“Oh, no. What will you do?”
“Find a richer, less feckless western journalist and entrap him in marriage. Maybe a diplomat.”
He smiled. Ting’s allegiances, he knew, were complex, stretched between her wealthy, storied Party family, numerous suitors, and this dingy excuse for a bureau, with its pathetic salary and Mangan’s quixotic journalism. Why did she stay? She looked at him.
“Tell me if you need anything. More quotes, anything,” she said.
“Oh, I will.”
He dropped his eyes to the blinking cursor. Exclusive from our China Correspondent. Should he write up his own arrest? The paper loved all that. A tense night in the cells! Deep in the belly of China’s security state! Well, no. It would just bring more grief from the authorities. He rested his elbows on the desk. It was Ting’s turn to watch him now, as she sat on the sofa, cross-legged, lithe, managing to eat hungrily but delicately at the same time. It was quiet but for the chink of spoon against bowl.
Mangan wrote, and by early evening the thing was done. A workable piece and not much more, but done. Ting was in the bathroom with unguents and lipstick. Harvey had reappeared in a rather sharp black suit, with a bottle of wine. Mangan wore a jacket in green tweed once raucous, now faded. He stood, rumpled, holding out a glass in a spidery hand. Harvey regarded him with mock distaste, and poured. They eyed each other and drank fast. Harvey walked over and tapped on the bathroom door.
“Come on, empress. It’s the embassy. Mustn’t be late.”
The door opened and she did a fake sashay out. Crimson silk tonight. Very short, again. Harvey handed her a glass and they all drank. Mangan pointed to the door. Forward! And, tipsy, they ran across the clattering landing to the lift.
It was the ambassador’s residence, a mansion on Guanghua Lu reeking of austere colonial purpose. From the windows, pools of golden light spilled into the smoky autumn evening.