Bad Traffic

by Simon Lewis

  ‘Why do you want to see Black Fort?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  Ding Ming wondered what was going on back at the mud flats. Everyone would be talking about it. The migrants would be nervous – would their pay be docked? Would the wrath of Kevin fall upon them? Mister Kevin and his lieutenants would be gathered round a table, swearing bloody oaths of vengeance.

  The sky was darkening. They were driving east, away from the setting sun. Big birds circled and Ding Ming wondered if they were vultures.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘I’m scanning for helicopters.’

  Perhaps they were being tracked right now by radar, satellite or unmanned surveillance drones. Perhaps, in a control room somewhere, a man in a black uniform was following a red dot on a screen.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Police helicopters. Looking for a stolen van.’

  ‘They won’t send helicopters.’

  Surely it was only a matter of time before they were stopped, arrested and delivered into the butcher’s hands of the immigration authorities. And say they weren’t caught, he didn’t trust this madman to make good on his promise. And say it all went well, and after some obscure and no doubt dangerous quest had been completed, the madman did make good, and delivered him back to the mud – well, what then? He’d have to tell a clever story about how he had jumped out of the van and wandered for hours and hid in a public toilet, then found his way back all by himself – what if Kevin didn’t believe him? And what if Kevin – who did not, after all, seem a particularly rational person – believed him, but blamed him for the loss of his van? Perhaps Jian would bring down some calamity on Black Fort, and Kevin would blame him for that?

  And what about his wife? Would they tell her that he had been kidnapped, and condemn her to endless worry? Would she be punished for his perceived transgressions? It was too awful, all of it. He worded a silent appeal to higher forces – let what was to happen, happen, but let his wife be spared, just let her be fine.

  Simply to hear something other than the incessant fretting inside his head, he said, ‘I don’t think you should drive so fast. I think those signs are a speed limit.’

  He knew that if you broke the arcane rules of the road, a cop car would flash his lights and chase you. And some cops travelled in cars that were exactly the same as normal cars, and you only knew they were cops when they put a hand out of the window and attached a light to their roof and made their sirens whoop.

  ‘I can walk faster than thirty kilometres an hour.’

  ‘You don’t know where we’re going. We’re going nowhere. What does it matter if you go there at thirty or three hundred?’

  They were passing through smallholdings and villages of stone houses and good land left for nothing but cows and trees. The road widened as the van approached a roundabout. It was the first time they had encountered other traffic. Jian leaned forward and shifted on the seat. He barely slowed for the turn. Horns blared.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way! Go round the other way!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ muttered Jian, and the van shuddered to a halt. Ding Ming was thrown forward, and if he had not braced himself quickly on the dashboard would have bumped his head on the window. Now Jian was reversing the van rapidly straight back into the road he had come from. A din of clashing metal and Ding Ming was thrown against the passenger door. The window of the driver’s door shattered and glass tinkled.

  The van juddered to a halt. A lorry had swiped them. Ding Ming watched it pull up in a lay-by up ahead. He felt very still. The crash, which had taken barely a heartbeat, seemed now to be reverberating into the present. His ears were ringing.

  This was it, then, the beginning of the inevitable – capture was surely imminent. The driver of the lorry got down into the road and circled his shoulders. Jian accelerated hard, turned the right way into the roundabout, and took the first exit off it.

  ‘We’re going to get caught,’ moaned Ding Ming.

  ‘No, we’re not. He didn’t get our number, we’re fine.’ He swept broken glass off his lap.

  ‘Where did you learn to drive?’ asked Ding Ming.

  ‘I used to rocket round in a squad Toyota. You put the lights on and everything gets the hell out of the way. It’s a lot easier than this.’

  ‘You were a policeman?’

  ‘I am a policeman.’

  Ding Ming fell silent. It made sense. The man had the temperament: he was fierce and short-tempered. And he drove like an official – arrogantly, hogging the middle of the road. The knowledge made him even more uneasy, he had never had anything to do with officials. They were no use to a peasant, they only took your money as taxes and in a dispute would never side with the poorer man.

  ‘So you’re here to arrest Black Fort.’

  ‘I’ve said too much already.’

  ‘Show me the address again.’

  Jian took out the black book and opened it to the right page.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘I hold it, you look at it.’

  Ding Ming examined the instructions and looked words up in his little red dictionary. He discovered that a mile was a unit of distance and that there was no such thing as a ‘memoreal’, it was probably a misspelling of ‘memorial’.

  They were heading into a small town, where traffic was heavier. Ding Ming flinched every time a car passed and turned his face from every pedestrian. The only shop he saw was a florist’s.

  He said irritably, ‘It’s getting dark. You think we can find a map? Where’s a bookshop? Lao tian a.’

  He wanted to cry from sheer annoyance. They wouldn’t find this farm in a few hours. They wouldn’t find it in a week. He should never have returned to the van, he should have wandered the nothingness, living on squirrels and rabbits, washing in public toilets, until one day he saw the sea.

  They’d be there and back in no time, the policeman had said. He was quick to make promises, like Kevin, and would take them as lightly as that pervert did. Mister Kevin Pervert. Mister fat lazy pervert Kevin. Ding Ming was shocked at his own vehemence. The anger he had been so careful to repress had broken through. This was all Kevin’s fault, the fat lazy pervert pervert. He wanted to shout at the man.

  He discovered that in his anger he had torn the tissue-thin pages of the dictionary. He smoothed them down and put the book away in his pocket, chastened. Kevin was his only hope, Kevin was his future, Kevin would tell him where his wife was. He rebuilt his mental dam and stored his feelings behind it and insisted to himself that the man was not so bad.

  ‘There,’ said Jian. He pointed at two neon Chinese characters, ‘Happy Duck’, which seemed to jump out at them. Just the sight of a Chinese character was enough to raise the spirits after all this foreignness. And a duck was a good omen. It was, of all things, a Chinese restaurant. ‘Let’s ask them.’

  (42

  Kevin’s bulky green parka was draped over the back of the seat. Ding Ming did not like wearing a wet shirt poisoned with blood, and certainly didn’t want to be seen in it, so he took it off and put the parka on. It came down below his knees and his hands were swallowed in its sleeves. Its fur-lined collar was soft against his neck. He put the hood up and it swallowed his head completely, it was like his own personal cave. He supposed he might have some difficulty moving in the thing, but it was very snug.

  Emptying packaging out of its pockets he found a quarter full cola bottle. Jian hadn’t seen him – he could drink it and the man wouldn’t know. But he decided it was more to his advantage to be seen to be trustworthy, so he shared it.

  ‘You look like a giant baby in that.’ The policeman bumped the van over the kerb, stopped it, and they got out. The street was eerily quiet, with none of the life Ding Ming was used to: no hubbub of conversation or hum of machinery, no gangs of old women playing mah jong or youths playing pool, no theatre, no colour. There were people around – their televisions glowed behind drawn curtains – they just weren’t very s
ocial.

  The only figure in the whole scene was a woman pushing a pram towards him. He stepped off the pavement to let her pass. As with all white people, he could not tell her age, she could be anything from fifteen to thirty-five. She was a vision of class and beauty. Her lovely red hair – red hair! – was scraped back from her head and tied up with a pretty band. Gold teeth gleamed when she puffed upon her cigarette, and silver hoops hung prettily from her ears. She swept regally past. Jian grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back onto the pavement.

  ‘Stop running away from them.’

  ‘They hate us.’

  ‘They don’t hate you. They don’t even notice you.’

  A fantastic car was parked up ahead. It looked like it had been poured rather than moulded. No rivet or flaw disturbed the flow of its curved surfaces, as lovely as a woman’s. It sparkled with reflected light. To Ding Ming it hardly seemed possible that he and it occupied the same world. An ache grew in his breast, the pain of aesthetic rapture. A daring notion occurred to him – what if he were to touch it? He dismissed the idea as the sort of thing that would get him into trouble, but there was no harm in taking another step and craning forward. He moved a little to the side so that he did not see in that lovely surface the mundane interruption that was his own reflection.

  A hairy head leaped, and jaws gaped and wet teeth glistened, and a terrible howl of threat began, and hanks of hair shook as the demon mouth opened and closed. Ding Ming jumped back with shock and, even after he had realised that it was just a dog – and a small yappy one at that, disturbed in its slumber on the passenger seat – he was still shaky with alarm. Worried his trespass would set in train further unpleasantness, he hurried after the policeman.

  Ding Ming suspected that any restaurant proprietor who saw him looking like this would assume he was begging and chase him out. Still, he wanted to bathe in the reassurance of the familiar, so, sticking to the shadows, he slunk to the restaurant and peered in. It was a small, bright space with a counter that stretched the length of the shop. There were no chairs or tables, but there was a flashing entertainment machine, which seemed an odd touch. A middle-aged Chinese man stood behind the counter in a white smock. Ding Ming pressed his face against the window and yearned to be that man. To have created a decent clean restaurant – that was an achievement he could understand.

  Jian tugged him in and said, speaking Mandarin, ‘Ni hao, bang ge mang xing ma?… Hello. Can you help us, please?’

  The man was frying potato slithers in a vat of oil. He replied in Cantonese. Ding Ming knew only a few phrases in that dialect, picked up from pop songs and films, such as ‘I like your hair’, ‘you are my precious one,’ and ‘die, bitch.’

  ‘Ni hui shuo putonghua ma?… Do you speak any Mandarin?’ Jian asked.

  Obviously he didn’t, because he said, ‘You want chips?’ His English was easy to understand, though Ding Ming didn’t know what chips were.

  ‘We want help.’

  ‘I can’t hear you under there.’

  When Ding Ming took the hood down it made him self-conscious of his battered face. He said to Jian, ‘Gei ta kan dizhi… Show him the address.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He can tell us where it is.’

  ‘Just ask where we can get a map.’

  Ding Ming frowned as he shaped the lumpy sounds. ‘Where we can buy map. Country map. Map for England.’

  A Chinese girl, pleasantly plump and round-faced, had come in from the back and was watching them, wiping her hands on her smock. She said, ‘You’ll have to go to the petrol station.’ Her English was rapid and fluent, harder to understand than the man’s. ‘Are you in a car?’

  Embarrassed at his abject appearance, he shrunk from her gaze. He wished the lights were not so bright.

  ‘Yes.’

  The man put a sheet of paper on the counter, licked the end of a biro, and began to sketch a diagram of how to get to this ‘petrol station’, whatever that was.

  Ding Ming’s attention was drawn to the food on display. What magnificent sausages, the biggest he had ever seen. And those fried in batter looked even more delicious. He realised he was very hungry.

  ‘Do you want some chips, duck?’ She winked. ‘On the house. Free.’ She began ladling fried potatoes onto a paper sheet. He felt overwhelmed by her kindness and wanted to linger in the warm shop. He saw something heroic in this man and his daughter. They were pioneers who had gone boldly into the territory of the barbarian and carved out a life for themselves. It was inspiring. He was moved to say, ‘This a good place.’

  But Jian said, ‘Let’s go,’ his manner curt and distracted. Obviously he saw these people only as potential witnesses, an added danger.

  The girl gave them each a punnet. ‘Good luck on your trip, ducks. Goodbye.’

  Ding Ming said, in Cantonese, ‘I like your hair.’

  (43

  It was chilly back in the van, but the chips warmed Ding Ming’s hands and stomach. The salt stung his wounded lip. Jian started the engine.

  ‘Can’t we wait?’

  ‘We’re going to that place. Navigate.’

  The restaurant was marked with the characters for duck, the ‘petrol station’ with a star. Instructions in English accompanied the drawing.

  ‘Straight on, past two sets of lights. I wonder how much money they make in a day. Very simple business, but a strong one. It’s good to have hot food, a person can’t do anything on an empty stomach. These would be better with some spice on them.’

  ‘Shut up. Where now?’

  ‘I don’t think you should tell me to shut up when I’m navigating.’

  ‘Now where? Now where? Okay, talk all you like. Where are we going?’

  ‘Left.’

  They headed out of town and onto an unlit road that curved around a lake. He pointed at a pool of light. ‘I think that’s it.’ Jian slowed. It was a garage with a four-pump forecourt and a shop at the back.

  Why didn’t you stop?’

  ‘I don’t want them to see the van.’ The policeman parked in a lay-by a hundred metres or so further up the road.

  They got out and started walking back. The lights of the town tinted the lower part of the sky orange, but all else was shaded blue by the moon. On the left ran a wall of uncut stones. It had been made without mortar and this pleased Ding Ming’s sense of aesthetics – it was clever, efficient and frugal. To the right lay the lake, its surface rippling in the breeze, and those dark humps beyond were hills.

  Ding Ming had never seen stars in such abundance, more than you could possibly count. He craned his neck and his mouth hung open. He grew intrigued at the variation in colours and brightness of the twinkling heavenly objects, and wondered what that pale milky streak was.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Jian. ‘You want stars, you come up to the northeast.’

  ‘Are they the stars we see? Are they the same as the stars over China?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  The sight stirred the poet in Ding Ming. Here was something that all mankind shared, be they peasant, policeman or foreigner. Were they not each and every one an inhabitant of the same small globe spinning in space? Looked at in cosmic terms, his epic trip across the seas was nothing but a small step, and this alien and baffling country was after all not so far from home. And how petty were the affairs of humans, compared with the timeless magnificence of the cosmos. He wished his wife were here to share this.

  An owl hooted and when it ceased Ding Ming wondered if he had ever experienced such a profound quiet before. Feeling enveloped by absence, he wanted to shout, just to add some humanity to the setting. He began to twist his feet when he planted them, and to scrunch his chip punnet, just to break the spell of silence.

  The petrol station was closed and no one responded to Jian’s banging and shouting. Ding Ming peered between shutter slats. A dim light illuminated prodigious racks of confectionery and magazines. ‘Motoring World’ struck him as a very lyrical term. One b
ig green book, he could swear, was called ‘Map of the Road’. He pointed it out.

  ‘We’ll have to break in,’ said Jian. ‘I could maybe smash this shutter with a rock.’

  ‘You’re a madman. As soon as you break that window, there’ll be a screeching noise, and a metal sheet will slam over the door.’

  Ding Ming spotted a CCTV camera. He’d seen one before, in a bank in Fuzhou, but it was frightening to see one out here in the wilds. He turned his back on it, only to see more, trained on the forecourt. He put up his hood, and swivelled a raised arm, pointing them out.

  He whispered, ‘They have pictures of us. They have pictures of the van, too. They’ll send cars to catch us. Helicopters will go across the sky pointing lights at the road. They’ll hunt us down like rabbits.’

  ‘Shut up about helicopters,’ snapped Jian, but he obviously didn’t like it, either. ‘I’m going to look on the roof. There might be a way in from above.’ He rolled a wheelie bin over and stood on it. The plastic lid bent under his weight. Grunting with the effort, he hauled himself up to the flat roof, the toes of his shoes scuffing brick. A crunching sound was him walking around up there.

  Ding Ming stepped round the side of the building to get away from the implacable gaze of the cameras. A yellow phonebox was attached to the wall. It had a slot for coins. So… here was a phone, he had money, his captor had left him unsupervised. An unlikely opportunity had arisen. He picked up the receiver. It was surprisingly cold and heavy. He was not a cunning person, deception did not come naturally, neither did nerve. But they had never really been required before. He heard banging and scraping. The policeman shouted down.

  ‘There’s a skylight, but there’s a metal grille over it. I’m going to see if I can get it off. Stay there.’

  Ding Ming observed that his hands were shaking as he fed one of his precious gold coins into the slot.

  (44

  Ding Ming could not believe what he was doing – it was as if it were happening to someone else, and he was watching. He dialled the country code for China, and the township number, then the number of his own mobile. He held his breath as the phone rang loud and clear.