by Peter May
‘It’s where they can get a picture on a television screen of your baby in the womb. They do it with sound, somehow … high frequency sound waves. I’ve been reading up about it.’
‘What is the point of that?’
She hesitated. ‘Sometimes they can tell the sex of the baby.’ And he knew immediately what was in her head, and he felt sick to his stomach. ‘And if they can’t,’ she said, ‘then they can take fluid from the womb and know for sure.’
He stood, motionless, looking at her for a long time. He felt a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘And if it’s another girl?’ He waited for her reply, but she said nothing, and steadfastly refused to meet his eye. So he said it for her. ‘You’re going to have her aborted, aren’t you?’ Somehow it seemed even worse when the ‘it’ had become ‘her’.
Xiao Ling seemed to be examining her fingernails with great interest. ‘If they have to do the fluid test it’ll take about four weeks for the results. I would still only be twenty weeks gone.’
He took a long draught from his bottle and controlled the urge to shout at her. In any case, what gave him the right to judge her? He wondered what Yifu would have said or done, then realised he had no idea. And it came home to him just how different he was in so many ways from the uncle whose standards he had been trying to live up to all these years. Perhaps they were always going to be too high for him. Always just out of reach.
‘This clinic,’ he said at length. ‘It is private?’ She nodded. ‘Expensive?’ She nodded again. ‘How can you afford it?’
‘Xiao Xu has been doing well these last few years. I have saved some money.’
‘And Xiao Xu approves of this?’
There was a long silence before finally she said, ‘Xiao Xu doesn’t know. He thinks only that we have come to visit you.’
Li was shocked. ‘But it’s his child, too. Doesn’t he have a right to a say in what happens to it?’
Xiao Ling met his eyes for the first time and he saw, to his dismay, something like hate in hers. ‘He wants me to get rid of it whether it’s a girl or a boy.’ There was venom in her voice. ‘They got to him. I don’t know what they said, I don’t know what they threatened to do, but suddenly he didn’t want it any more. It was my fault, my problem, and as far as he was concerned it was up to me to get rid of it.’
Suddenly he understood the crushing loneliness she must feel. The whole world against her. Urging a single course of action. And she, driven by some instinct, or by the dreadful weight of five thousand years of tradition, just wanted a baby boy. A desire that, had she lived in almost any other place on earth, would have been the simplest desire in the world to fulfil.
‘If this … scan … tells you the sex of your baby …’ His mouth was dry, and the question would barely form in it. ‘What will you do if it is a boy?’
This time she returned his gaze, steady and sure. ‘If it’s a boy I will have it, and give Xinxin up for adoption.’
CHAPTER FOUR
I
A large kitchen knife came down twice in quick succession, and the heads of the fowl dropped from the rung of the ladder and into the ditch. For a few manic moments, the two headless chickens ran blindly around, blood spurting from their necks. The peasant who had delivered the fatal strokes stood watching breathlessly as the life ebbed from the creatures and they toppled over and lay still in the bloodied earth. A hand clamped itself on his shoulder and spun him round. He found himself staring into the perplexed face of Hu Bo.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Wang Qifa?’ Hu demanded.
Wang Qifa held himself erect and said, boldly, ‘Mr Hu, you were the one who warned us about the dangers of the hidden weapons. The old men in the village told me that chicken blood would protect me from harm. “As long as two chickens are killed, all hidden weapons are powerless,” they said.’
‘OK, cut and check.’ The man beside Margaret spoke into a walkie-talkie, and Margaret saw the image on the screen spool rapidly back to the moment before the knife fell. The exchange between Hu Bo and the peasant had already been shot three times – a master shot and two close-ups. The chickens had only been added when they were happy with everything else. They would only have one shot at them. The sight of their headless frenzy was sickening in itself, but there was additional resonance in it for Margaret.
‘Won’t the animal rights people be after your blood for this?’ she asked.
The man beside her grinned. ‘The chickens belong to a couple in the village. They were always destined for the dinner table. All we did was pay them a lot of money to let us kill them on camera. Now they’ll be guests of honour at a banquet tonight, the main item on the menu.’ He turned to watch the playback.
Margaret had liked him immediately. In spite of the enormous pressure he was under to meet schedules and deadlines, he seemed relaxed and easy-going, even when everyone else on set appeared tense. Michael had introduced them when the production car he had sent for her arrived at Ding Ling.
‘Charles has directed all my series to date,’ Michael had said.
Charles had shaken her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Margaret. But call me Chuck. Mike’s the only person I know who calls me Charles.’
‘Maybe,’ Michael had said, grinning wickedly, ‘that’s because you’re the only person I know who calls me Mike.’
Chuck had shrugged hopelessly at Margaret. ‘What can you do? The man’s impossible to work with.’
The shot had finished replaying on the monitor and a voice on one of the walkie-talkies said, ‘Clear.’
‘OK,’ Chuck said. ‘Set up the next shot, Dave. Quickly please. These people are waiting for their chickens.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘Anyway, I’m shooting the blood and guts in such a way we can cut around it if the network thinks it’ll put an early evening audience off its pizza and French fries. But, you know, this is how it happened. We’re just trying to show it like it was.’
They were in a truck that had been kitted out as a video control centre and lowered by helicopter on to a wall thirty feet above the set. Cables spewed out a rear hatch like the entrails of a dead animal, and hung down into the long stone corridor that led to the entrance of the underground palace of the tomb of Emperor Wanli.
‘I still can’t believe they let you shoot this in the actual tomb,’ Margaret said.
‘Hey,’ said Chuck. ‘It took Mike six months to talk them into it. That and a very large cheque. The Chinese are big capitalists at heart. They’ll have worked out exactly how much additional tourist revenue this series is gonna generate. And they must have figured it’s worth it, ’cos they’re having to close it to the public for six weeks – so we can set it up, shoot it, then clean it up. And from our point of view, this is the centrepiece of the series, so if we’re gonna spend the money somewhere, this is where it’s gonna go.’
On the monitor, Margaret saw that the camera had been moved into a low position with the dead chickens in centre frame. She watched as twice, the shot panned up, and then the camera rose more than ten feet as it moved back, so that the whole of the paved passageway leading back between high walls towards the steps of the stele pavilion came into shot. It was one smooth, flowing movement.
‘That looks good, Jackie,’ Chuck said into his walkie-talkie. ‘Dave, is Mike ready yet? Does he want to do a walk-through?’
Dave’s soft Irish voice crackled back across the airwaves. ‘Michael’s ready, Chuck. He says he’s happy to rehearse on tape. It’s a long speech.’
Chuck grinned. ‘OK, if everyone else is ready, let’s try one.’ He said to Margaret, ‘We’ll probably only use Mike in vision at the beginning of this, and at the end. In between we’ll lay over various pictures we haven’t shot yet. We’ll probably re-record the whole speech back in sound dubbing, but it’s nice to get location sound. It’s more authentic.’ And into the walkie-talkie, ‘Jackie, remember once you’ve got Mike waist-high and centre frame, keep him there as the dolly moves back, and only when you bring the c
amera back down again do I want to see him walk into close-up. When you’re ready, Dave …’
Margaret heard the first assistant director’s voice over the foldback warning everyone to be quiet. Then, ‘Roll VT,’ a pause and, ‘Action!’
The camera was close on the dead chickens. Then it started to drift back and lift. Chuck whispered into his walkie, ‘Cue Mike.’
Then she heard Michael’s voice. ‘Whatever superstitions there may have been about the kinds of defences the Emperor had built into his tomb, the fears of the archaeologists and their peasant labourers were based on historical record and the fatal experiences of grave robbers through the centuries. The Indiana Jones world of concealed traps and hidden weapons was not so fantastical.’
As he walked into shot he waved his arm upwards towards a high brick wall sealing the entrance to the tomb. Clearly visible was an inverted ‘V’ shape in the brick.
‘When, on May 19th, 1957, after a year of digging, the archaeologists discovered the “diamond wall” that sealed the gate to the tomb, the rumours that grew about what might lie behind it fed very real fears. Science and superstition, culture and ignorance coexisted in the minds of the team members as well as the peasant diggers. People spoke of crossbows operated by a hidden mechanism that would send poison arrows to pierce the flesh of anyone who tried to open the gate. They indulged in talk of toxic gases that would be released to strike down the tomb’s invaders, sabres that would fall from the vaulted ceiling of the interior. No one could survive.
‘Then, ten days after the discovery of the “diamond wall”, their fears were further fed by the sudden appearance of a mysterious old man …’
Chuck said to Margaret, ‘We’ll see the old guy at this point, talking to the peasants.’
‘He was dressed in ragged clothes and a straw hat, and had a long white, wispy beard. He told the peasant diggers that he possessed an ancient genealogy passed on to him by his ancestors. This document, he said, told of a stream running through the underground palace of the tomb. To reach the coffin they would have to cross the stream, at the other side of which they would find a chasm one hundred thousand feet deep. At the bottom of the chasm were barbed wires bridged by a stepping board. Only those born on a certain auspicious day could cross it. All others would lose their lives.
‘Such was the effect of his story, that the old man made a tidy sum from the peasants who were falling over themselves to have him tell their fortune. But the next day, when the archaeologists heard of it and went in search of this person who was spreading panic among their workers, the “immortal” was nowhere to be found.’
Michael smiled at the camera, reflecting his audience’s scepticism about the old man. ‘Ridiculous? You and I might think so. But Hu Bo and the other archaeologists on the team, educated men all, were not prepared to dismiss anything. For they were studying an ancient account of the construction of the tomb of the first emperor of China, Emperor Qin Shihaung, more than two thousand years ago. Qin not only unified China and built the Great Wall, he constructed a vast army of life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard his mausoleum.’
‘Shots of the Terracotta Warriors here,’ Chuck said. ‘We’ve got loads of stock.’
‘The account of the construction of his tomb told of pearls, jade and all kinds of treasures. Candles made of dugong grease were lit and kept burning. Hidden crossbows and arrows were installed inside with an automatic propulsion system to prevent robbery. The coffin was surrounded by a river of mercury, kept flowing mechanically. Above was a celestial body with the sun, the moon and the stars, and below was a landscape with rivers and mountains …’
Michael walked into close-up and looked very earnestly at the camera. He was incredibly photogenic, Margaret thought. He looked good in the flesh, but the camera made him beautiful. The camera loved him. A tiny, involuntary, frisson made her shiver.
He said, ‘Rivers of mercury? If they existed, they would certainly be rivers of death for anyone trying to enter Qin’s tomb. So has anyone tried? Well, actually, no. They have dug up the Terracotta Army, ranged in battalions around the tomb. But to this day, no one has had the courage to attempt to enter the tomb itself. Why? Because soil tests show a dangerously high level of mercury. So was it any wonder that Hu Bo and the others, under the direction of the venerated Xia Nai, approached the opening of the Emperor Wanli’s mausoleum with fear in their hearts?’
He turned away from the camera. ‘Shit! I missed out the bit about the stones painted with cinnabar.’
Chuck leaned forward. ‘That’s OK, Mike, we’re off you at that point. We can pick it up in dubbing. But, really, I don’t think we miss it.’
Michael turned back to camera. ‘We miss it,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to do it again.’
‘Goddamn perfectionist,’ Chuck muttered. Then, ‘OK, cut it and set it up from the top.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘What did you think?’
‘Sounded good to me.’
‘Me, too.’ He sighed. ‘We could be some time at this.’
She stood up. ‘I think I’ll take a wander. Catch up with you later, if that’s OK?’
‘Sure,’ Chuck said. ‘Mind if I join you?’ He grinned. ‘If only.’
Outside, the hot September sun beat down, throwing the mountains that rose out of the north-west into sharp relief. The sweet smell of pine rose from the spruce trees all around. Margaret walked away from the activity surrounding the technical wagons, through the shade of the trees, to the outer crenellated wall that encircled the tomb. A bleak and barren landscape, bleached white by the sun, surrounded this walled oasis. The foothills of the mountains were dotted with the tombs of Wanli’s ancestors, symbolising the desperate attempts of history’s rich and powerful men to maintain their status over the rest of us, even in death. Futile attempts at immortality. And now, centuries later, they served only to provide entertainment for the MTV generation. If only those rich and powerful men had known.
Margaret pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her trousers and scuffed her way idly along the paved top of the outer wall, pushing a pine cone in front of her as she went. It was all interesting enough, and Michael was charming and attractive, but she was still emotionally raw. She would almost certainly recoil from the merest hint of romantic interest. She still ached when she thought of Li.
As she approached the stele pavilion, the third assistant director, a young Chinese girl, put a hand up to stop her, and placed a finger to her lips warning her to be silent. To her right, in the deep slash that cut through the hill to the stone façade of the tomb’s entrance, she saw Michael in the glare of lights mounted all around him doing his piece to camera again. The camera dolly tracked back from him as he approached the design team’s re-creation of the diamond wall. She could hear his voice echoing back from the walls that leaned over him. ‘If they existed, they would certainly be rivers of death for anyone trying to enter Qin’s tomb …’
Ahead, up a flight of broad steps, the stele pavilion towered over everything, one roof atop another, curling eaves supported on ancient wooden beams. The stele itself, a standing stone tablet inscribed with ancient script, stood more than twenty feet high, framed by open arches in each of the four sides of the red-painted pavilion.
Thirty feet below it, in a tree-shaded square, extras in period costume sat round stone tables on seats carved in the shape of elephants. A long paved walkway led off, across three marble terraces, to the distant gates, and the parking lot beyond where production vehicles – make-up, wardrobe, a catering wagon, Michael’s Winnebago – clustered in the shade of the trees around its fringes.
She heard someone shout, ‘Cut!’, and then the third assistant listened intently to a garble of instructions coming over the walkie, before relaying them in Chinese to a cluster of production runners in the square below, who began rounding up the extras. She waved Margaret on, and Margaret walked up the steps to the stele pavilion. From here she could watch the activities in the square below as well as the crew r
esetting at the diamond wall. Months of preparation, she reflected, dozens of people, hours of filming, all to put a few minutes on screen. She was not sure she would have the patience to survive in a business like this.
When Margaret got back to the control truck Chuck was more animated than she had seen him all morning. A tall, lanky man, with a shock of prematurely grey hair, he seemed to have folded himself over the control console and was talking rapidly into his walkie-talkie. ‘We get one shot at the master, guys,’ he was saying. ‘We get it right, or we spend the rest of the day setting it up again.’ He had lit a cigarette, the first she had seen him smoking. He waved it at her apologetically when he saw her. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘I only smoke when extremely stressed. So if you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand you know I’m about to implode. Design have been setting this up for days. It’s cost an arm and a leg, and I don’t want to have to reshoot.’
‘What’s the scene?’ Margaret asked.
‘It’s the moment when they remove the first bricks from the diamond wall and open the tomb. Special effects are great.’ He paused. ‘I hope.’ Then he grinned and puffed some more at his cigarette. ‘I’ve got three cameras on it, so it had better be good.’
Margaret saw that two other monitors, which had previously been black, now showed the pictures being fed from the other two cameras. The master shot was set wide and showed the ladder leading up to the top of the inverted V. Dozens of extras dressed as peasants in blue cotton Mao suits were gathered around the foot of it. The actor playing Hu Bo stood at the top of it, a trowel-like implement in his hand, ready to start digging out the bricks.
Another camera had been set somewhere higher up the wall, giving a view from above Hu Bo, down to the upturned peasant faces. The third camera was set low, among the legs of the gathering at the foot of the ladder. In the background Margaret could see camera and crew. She said to Chuck, ‘Are we meant to see them?’
Chuck laughed. ‘They’re supposed to be the film crew that shot the real opening of the tomb. That’s how we know exactly what it was like. We’re going to intercut our stuff with some of the original footage.’