by Sam Meekings
The walls of the restaurant seemed to be moving of their own volition, drifting off through space. The drink fizzed through to the tips of my fingers, my tongue, my spine, and I let it transform me into something fluid, slippery, set free from sense.
A couple of hours later – after I’d napped in the chair and woken suddenly to the manager switching on his crackly little TV – I swigged the dregs straight from the bottle and settled the bill. For a few seconds I thought I’d travelled back in time, because the television was still showing that boring bit of news about the new school opening up in the countryside. Some fat guy with buck teeth was being interviewed about the money he’d donated. I was sure I recognised him. I must have seen this bit before. Could the world really have been so boring that this was all the news stations had to report? Or had some suit at the top sent down an injunction ordering only good news? It wouldn’t have been the first time.
When I rose, the floor began to shift, not quite as solid as it had been before, and my legs had trouble holding me up. I leaned on the window and let it lead me round to the door.
I worked my way down the street in slow motion, wondering why the pavement wouldn’t stay straight. No point going into the office now. I looked at my watch, a gift from Li Yang. It was a big silver one with clockwork that you could hear buzz. From Europe. Sweden or Austria or something like that. Somewhere with a lot of snow. I’d had a hard job explaining it to my wife. I think I’d said it was a knock-off the police had confiscated and were selling on the sly. I think she even believed me that time.
Almost five. Time to take a trip to Chun Xiao. Offer up my useless condolences or tell her that I still had hope he was out there? Either way I’d be lucky not to get an earful.
The biting air was beginning to clear my head a little, so I decided to walk to Wei Shan’s. He didn’t live too far from the Golden Dragon. When we’d first started heading out for drinks after work I’d tried a few times to suggest we find a restaurant a bit closer to my end of town. But he wasn’t having any of it. What was the point, he said. Once you’ve found a place that does spicy chicken or steamed tofu just the way you like it, why risk going somewhere else? Besides, he’d added, the manager was an old friend and we sure as hell weren’t going to find somewhere cheaper. Well, I had to give him that. And anyway, he was stubborn as hell. Wei Shan liked change about as much as cows like abattoirs. So in the end I had to go along with him. And he was right, the spicy chicken was pretty good.
I turned the corner and nearly tumbled over some grotty old man and his poky dumpling stall. Whenever darkness starts to fall, the streets seem to fill up with idiots, as if their sole purpose in life is to make things difficult for the rest of us. I had to stop for a minute to look around. Though I’d known Wei Shan for decades, I’d only actually been to his home once or twice before. And certainly not in the last handful of years. Even the man himself stayed away from it as much as he could. I understood. Nagging wife. Contemptuous kid. Why walk directly into the line of fire when you could keep your head down in the trenches?
After taking a few wrong turns and doubling back on myself once or twice, I picked an alley that looked vaguely familiar and made my way down it till I spotted Wei Shan’s building up ahead. A shabby place, full of two-room apartments where damp peeled the cheap white paint from the walls. I remembered Wei Shan telling me that his son had the bedroom and that he and his wife pulled out the sofa every night to sleep in the living room. When was it that children became more important than their parents? I mean, that’s messed up. But still, I could see what they were doing. The kid probably thought he’d got it made in his own little den. Little did he realise that his parents were only looking after him so that he could get good marks in his exams, join the Party, get allocated a good job and then be in a good position to look after his poor old Ma and Pa when they reach old age. There’s always a hidden catch. Even with family. No, scratch that. Especially with family.
By now I could feel sticky patches of sweat spreading across my shirt, and it was a fair bet that my face was all red and blotchy. But so what? I wasn’t going to be there long anyway. Pop in, say how sorry I was. Drink a toast to him, maybe. Depending on what they had to offer. Then get out of there.
Once I reached the second floor, I took a minute to wipe my brow and try to contort my features into a suitably solemn expression. Then I banged on their door, hoping to heaven that I’d got the right flat.
A lanky teenager opened it. His black hair flopping down in a greasy fringe, his tiny eyes pressed into a glare. How old was he? Thirteen? Fourteen? Fifteen? A sudden image flashed through my mind, and all I could see in front of me was the body of the spotty kid I’d uncovered in the hospital basement. I felt giddy, nauseous, and I had to reach out for the doorframe for support.
The teenager raised an eyebrow. I wracked my brain.
‘Cheung?’
‘Yeah. You’re the guy from dad’s office, right?’
‘That’s me. Is your mother about?’
‘Dunno.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘You’re seriously telling me don’t know whether your own mother is in the flat?’
‘I’m not her keeper. I don’t keep a record of when she leaves and when she gets home from work.’
‘All right, all right. Can you have a look for me?’
‘Hmm. You’d better come in.’
He moved aside and I made my way inside. I felt like I should say something, but I wasn’t sure what. Sorry about your dad? How you holding up? Is there anything I could do? I tried to form my mouth into any of those stock phrases, but I couldn’t manage it. All of them sounded stupid. And besides, what the hell was he supposed to say to any of them? Maybe I should share some of my theories. Or would that only make things worse? By the time I’d thought of something appropriate to say, however, I turned around to find he’d already slunk away, leaving me standing alone in the empty hallway.
I took a look around. Not much had changed since the last time I had been here, four or five years back. The same gaudy statues on the hall table. The same little ceramic pot where they kept the car-keys. The same fading photos, progressing through the years as you looked from left to right, starting with the old black and white family shots – Wei Shan with his parents, Wei Shan as a Red Guard just before he got sent up in Mizhi County during the Cultural Revolution, Chun Xiao and her old man, Wei Shan and Chun Xiao’s wedding, the proud parents with a little red-faced baby, Cheung starting school and the three of them with the new car. Their whole lives summed up in seven little photos. What else is there?
The long mirror opposite the front door had been covered with a dark cloth. It seemed Chun Xiao believed in the old wives’ tale that if you see the reflection of a dead body in a mirror then death will visit you soon. But there was no body. That was the whole problem. My mother used to say you had to cover all the mirrors so the spirit of a dead relative didn’t catch sight of its own reflection as it started its journey into the next world. I guess the assumption was that if it glimpsed itself and recalled who it once was, it would never want to leave, and you’ll be stuck with a ghost hanging round your home forever.
Silly superstitions, the lot of them. And wherever Wei Shan’s spirit was, it sure as hell wasn’t here. Even if he was dead, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to hang round this shitty corner of Lanzhou watching his family mope. I mean, I sure as hell hope that the dead have better things to do than wander round all the boring old places they visited when they were alive.
I thought about my father’s funeral. First thing my mother did was burn all his clothes. Except his best peasant suit, of course. He wore that in the coffin. Looked awful – he’d shrunk so thin in the weeks before his death that it billowed around him like a loose robe. But she burned all the others. Wailed for hours while she fed his old trousers and vests to the flames. She burned wads of fake banknotes too, out at the c
rossroads in the middle of the night, even though you weren’t supposed to back then. Don’t ask me why people think that you can send stuff on to ghosts in the spirit world by burning it. Load of crap, but of course you can’t say that to mourners. So you have to hold your tongue.
I had a horrible thought. What if Chun Xiao had decided to burn all Wei Shan’s clothes to send to him in the next life, only for him to turn up again, alive and well but maybe a little concussed? He’d be pretty pissed off. Though in all fairness most of his clothes were so crappy they deserved to be incinerated. Still, the concussion idea wasn’t a bad one – perhaps he’d banged his head and lost his memory. He could be wandering about the countryside right now, trying to remember who he was and what he was doing there. At least then there was still hope. And right now anything had to be better than being stuck in this halfway state, torn between grief and uncertainty, unsure what to believe and continually clutching at the most frail and absurd possibilities.
I flicked through the post on the hall table. Bills, mostly. A few cards. And a red envelope with no writing on it. No. Tell me I was hallucinating. This wasn’t good. I peeked inside. Just out of curiosity. And I was right. Stuffed full of banknotes. A dense wad of them, crisp and shiny and all but screaming out to be fondled between greasy fingers. Shit. This definitely wasn’t good.
Cheung appeared back in the hall and I straightened up and smiled.
‘She’s not here.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. Do you want to check to see she’s not hiding under the bed?’
‘Very funny. You even checked the bathroom?’
‘I’ve checked. She’s not here.’
‘Great. That’s just great.’
‘She might be back soon. Might not. You can wait if you want.’
‘Huh. Well … I probably ought to get going. Lots to do.’
I knew I ought to say something else, but I wasn’t sure what. Should I offer my condolences, let him know I’m here if he needs to talk to someone? Or should I tell him not to give up hope, that I had a feeling his father might still turn up? I couldn’t decide.
‘So … how’s the erhu going?’
‘It’s the pipa. I play the pipa.’
‘Of course, of course. How was the big recital?’
He shrugged. ‘So so.’
‘Well, I hear you’re pretty good.’
‘Whatever.’
‘You keep practising, I’m sure you’ll make everyone proud.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I probably ought to get going.’
‘You said that already.’
‘I know, I know. Tell your mum I stopped by, okay?’
‘Sure.’
He closed the front door behind me and I reached for my pack of Double Happiness. Stupid kid. Teenagers all seem to share this uncanny knack for making you feel dumb. I took a drag. I had to cut him some slack. But now I was confused. Did I need to come back, to make a proper condolence call? Or would that do? I’d showed my concern, hadn’t I? And anyway, I couldn’t sit round there waiting for Chun Xiao to come home from work all evening. I’d suffocate.
Well, that was a waste of time. I was reminded of something Wei Shan himself used to say. Life never moves in a straight line. He said it every time he’d had a few too many, which was probably most days. You think you’re always moving forward, but that’s a joke. He used to say that life was more like the drive from hell. You keep making wrong turnings and finding yourself in dead ends, and once you get going its almost impossible to turn around or reverse out without hitting something. You get stuck on roundabouts and ring-roads that lead you round in endless circles. And then there are the other drivers. Once you got him started, Wei Shan could rant away for hours. But I knew what he meant. My life was filled with wasted journeys. Today more than ever.
I made my way back outside and threw my stub to the curb. Maybe I should have said something a bit more optimistic to Cheung. Told him I’d do whatever it takes, that I wouldn’t rest until I’d hunted down the bastards responsible for the landslide and made them pay. That wasn’t the kind of thing I could say without getting laughed at. But what the hell. I would find out what happened there that night. I owed Wei Shan and his family that much. And besides, I’d come this far. I’d found bodies, a mine, and I had Hong Youchen’s name. And now I’d seen the anonymous envelope full of cash in Wei Shan’s home. I was close. I had to be.
So there was only one thing for it. I had to get to the bottom of this whole mess once and for all. I had to take a look for myself.
Forty-five minutes later I’d left the highway behind and was back on the dirt road leading to the top of the track, though this time there were no police cars in sight. Even the little makeshift car park marked out on the drenched grass was deserted. I parked and stepped out. The whole hill was ominously silent now the diggers and tractors and army trucks had gone, and it also seemed horribly still, as if it were waiting stoically for the next calamity. It reminded me of some wretched creature that had endured its skin being flayed from its back, knowing all the while that worse was yet to come.
I’d brought a decent torch and tied plastic bags around my shoes to protect them. I made my way over to the edge and crouched at the top for a while, listening for voices, footsteps, anything. Nothing but my breath, ripped and ragged in the cool night air.
Despite the dark, I could just about make out a track leading along the ridge where countless shoes had scuffed the grass and mud. I followed it across the peak until it veered suddenly over the edge and into nothingness. I got down on my hands and knees and peered over. I could see crags of rock and what looked like rivers of mud trickling slowly down into the black. How far to the bottom? It was impossible to tell, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to find out. Here and there amid the streaks of crumbling earth rubble had accumulated against bumps and ledges. But at least there appeared to be a few solid footholds – lodged rocks, clumps of roots, even a few surviving tree-stumps. Far below I thought I could see the glint of something metallic, a tin roof from a peasant’s shack, perhaps, that had been dragged down with the rest of the hillside. Sharp knuckles of stone, clumps of gravel, and … there! Two splintered juts of timber rising up in parallel from the slope. A doorway? Had to be worth a look.
I lowered myself down, feet first, my toes straining to find one of the first footholds I’d spotted below. But before I knew it my feet had slipped on the wet earth and I soon found myself slipping and skidding through the mud and gravel, gaining speed so quickly that I had to throw myself forward into the dirt to stop from tripping down into the abyss below. I reached out and grabbed hold of a clump of roots and weeds embedded in the earth, holding on as tight as I could while half the hillside seemed to tumble down past me in a mad and ceaseless rush. I was choking on dust and grime, my eyes stinging. I’m not sure how long I lay like that, waiting for the slope to settle and my heart to stop hammering like an alarm clock in my gut. When I pulled myself to my knees, my eyes were stinging, and the taste of blood and ash was deep in the pit of my throat. And I’d only managed to get down two or three metres. Shit.
I crawled over on my hands and knees, getting scratched and muddy as I made painfully slow movements towards the juts of timber rising up a little to my left. It felt like hours by the time I made it to what must have once been the entrance to the mine. A great pile of dirt and stone had gathered between the exposed wooden beams that had marked the doorway, and I had to dig for a few minutes to clear enough space to push myself through.
I was going back into a mine, after countless people had died inside because of a landslide. I stopped to wonder if this was the stupidest thing I’d ever thought of doing. Well, it was definitely up there on the list. But it wasn’t as if I had anything better to do, and I’d only beat myself up about it later if I turned back now. So I dug my torch out of my pocket, flicked it on and ventured in.
Inside it was darker than a crow’s
eye. I half slipped on the squelch beneath my feet. Streams pulsed through the dirt and rock; I reached my free hand out to steady myself on the low ceiling. The wet walls crumbled wherever I gripped. It was like walking blind into the gut of some strange creature. I knew from looking over enough official regulations that all miners were supposed to wear hard-hats with fitted lights, but chances were that unless they had some important visitor to impress, the workers here had probably only had a cigarette lighter between them. If that.
The light from the torch trailed off into the darkness. So far the roof seemed surprisingly sturdy. I guess much of the landslide had just poured straight over the top. I was guessing it wasn’t going to be the same story further down. I mean, all those miners must have come in along this path on Monday. But none of them made it back up. I tried to work out what the odds were of the whole thing collapsing on me. Did the recent landslide mean it was more or less likely? I wasn’t sure.
The passage swung to the left and my torch picked out the start of a handrail set into the stone. I took hold as I turned, rust rubbing against my skin. I took a few more steps before my feet tripped against a pile of mud and rubble. With each step it seemed as though I was sinking further into a muddy sludge that had filled the passageway. How far down did this thing go? I ran the light up into the distance, letting it linger on the larger rocks and the giant broken splinters hanging almost horizontal where the wooden supports had given way. I leant one hand against the crumbly wall to steady myself, every stumble and curse echoing into the darkness ahead, far beyond the reach of the straining torch.
The tunnel turned again, and I grasped for the handrail. The ground was higher now, lumpier, and fallen rock and earth littered the path. I passed under the remains of a broken archway. Huge hulks of splintered wood had been pressed hurriedly back against the walls. So I wasn’t the only one who had been down here since the accident. Is this what all the police and soldiers had been doing – propping up supports and digging the fallen rocks and earth out of this tunnel in order to pull out the bodies trapped deeper inside? A few sharp rungs of moonlight pushed through from holes somewhere above. A shiver ran its way down the knots of my back, as cold as icy water. What was to stop this part of the tunnel from crashing down again? What was to stop me getting trapped without any other way out, just like those other poor buggers, with bones broken by the rocks raining down and left to fight and thrash and struggle and scream against the avalanche until the air ran out?