Heavy, p.32
Heavy, page 32
“When you’ve known Ridell for as long as I have, Maureen, you’ll know he’s not in what you might call an intimate relationship with the truth,” said Foley, giving Pig a hard stare which just about penetrated the fading fog of pain. “Did he tell you how he got those scars you’re so interested in protecting?”
Pig missed her answer.
“Or how he met Ernest and I when we were boys?” Foley added, mercilessly.
“Of course not,” Maureen said, stoutly.
“Ask him sometime,” said Foley, “if you’re so keen to give away your scarf to someone who doesn’t need it.”
* * *
Worse than the freezing hell landscape, worse than the renewing aches and pains in his body, worse even than the sudden blackout that descended upon him as the saboteuchine cradle closed around him, Ernie thought, dangling from the rear of the stinking, monstrous mechanical hulk, was memory.
You could drag yourself to the ends of the earth on what looked like a suicide mission. You could try to balance yourself between one woman’s unshakeable jolly hockeysticks bloody hunger for adventure and one woman’s impending catatonic breakdown like you were walking a tightwire. You could hang off the back of a fucking marvel of engineering throwing snow in handfuls onto overheating parts and watch massive metal lobster claws rip up wrought-iron rails like blades of grass.
And you’d still find yourself, each night, bent between boxes of supplies and breathing bodies and the rancid smell of human sweat caked onto all of them, wondering: Do they know? Have they guessed?
Of all the futile, stupid things to worry about.
It was only that Jack Ridell lay back-to-back with him in the place where Simon had lain on Surt. Only that he remembered what he’d thought then, about lying back-to-back with Jack Ridell. None of them had been so ugly, then.
None of them had been so tall.
The second time he’d tried to climb into the cradle of the saboteuchine ended not only with a slice of time ripped from his memory, but with Jack Ridell’s hand over his mouth, a hissed shh, shh in his ear. The man dripping blood from his nose.
“You don’t remember?” Maureen asked him, when he tried to allude to it casually over the absolute filth they’d brought to feed themselves with. No sign of wildlife. No chance of shooting anything.
We’ve found a pig.
He didn’t remember anything useful, Ernie acknowledged, wryly. He remembered twenty years ago, no matter how hard he tried to forget. He remembered the last time he’d seen Xiao Huli, etched into his mind like scars. He remembered tiny, shame-filled glances and strange garbled messages and fragments of dreams that were either his or ones Simon had told him about, and he remembered all the words to a sixteen-verse song about pigeons fucking, and he remembered eight or nine different chapters he’d skimmed in a bad translation of Kahn’s Codebreakers, and most of the Mandarin he’d learnt.
He couldn’t extract a second of his time in the cradle from his memory: as far as he knew, he’d put his foot on the plate and then found himself clasped by Jack, blood dripping into his hair.
“Not a sausage,” Ernie said, trying to look apologetic.
Across the fire, Irene hugged her knees and ignored them all.
Maureen frowned. The mousy roots of her hair were hidden under her beret – God knew how she’d kept it – and she’d stretched out her ration of cigarettes. For a moment she looked almost normal, sitting there in the dancing light of the fire with snow melting on her coat sleeves.
“You fetched Mr. Ridell a tidy thump in the nose,” she said, “for one thing. It must have hurt like billy-oh, too, it’s all scars and whatnot up there. I’m not jolly well surprised it turned into a gusher, though, he’s always having nosebleeds. Something about the healing on the inside, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“What about before that? Why was he holding my mouth?”
Jack’s hand had tasted of mechanical oil and mechanical lubricant and no amount of scrubbing his lips with snow had removed the residue. He could still taste it now. It was a marked improvement on Compact Rations.
“You were screaming,” said Maureen, and there was a flicker on her face, just in passing, swept away by the firelight. It had unsettled her, Ernie thought, as she nodded across the fire at Irene’s near-comatose form. “She looks down in the mouth. I don’t think the work suits her.”
“Screaming?”
“Yes,” said Maureen. “Captain Foley didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence so Mr. Ridell put his hand over your mouth while we got you out. Are you sure you don’t remember?”
He remembered being in the saboteuchine, but the memory was attached to the presence of Graves, and that memory was laced with fragments of older ones: Don’t let them see you looking, Ernie.
“We’re going to run into someone sooner or later,” said Ernie, letting it drop.
“I bloody hope not,” said Maureen, and she gave the fire a kick.
Not so keen on track workers now, are you? Ernie thought, without malice. He could hardly hate her for it: once upon a time he’d thought: It will be like Coral Island, and been wronger than Maureen would hopefully ever be. There was the underlying thought that here, where they used the steaming, hissing, roaring saboteuchines and their stink because explosives were too loud, any unwitting intruder wouldn’t get the courtesy of a bullet in the back like poor old Haxonbury.
Guns were too loud. The sound carried in cold air.
At least Dick peacefully accepted that Ernie wasn’t going to be driving a damn sab any time soon, he thought.
That night, Ernie lay on his back with Jack Ridell’s sleeping body pressed against the side of his ribs, too many thoughts in his mind to separate into coherence from the ocean of radio static. Nanjing was receding from his mind, and he resented it; she deserved better than to be forgotten in favour of this. A decade of friendship shouldn’t vanish under Surt’s waves; and yet here he was, bunking up with someone who’d brought him the worst of all the horrors. Who was digging them back out of his mind, while it bucked and flinched away from London and London’s basement and London’s back-bending boxes and London’s pliers — and in spite of all this, he could only think:
Never let anyone see you looking, Ernie, I can’t stick with you if they know you’re like that.
Simon might be dead in Chengdu, Ernie sighed, trying not to move or breathe too hard, but even when he was alive there were moments when they might as well have been from different worlds.
He fell asleep with that particular cold splinter of pain wedged firmly in his heart.
* * *
The night they spent in the abandoned Church was the worst.
Irene had never known cold like this. She had never known sweat that froze solid in her hair and turned it into a mess matted with dirt and wool and machine oil that she was sure she would have to simply shave away, like a prisoner or a lunatic, because she would never be able to put a comb through it again.
Captain Foley was as kind to her as circumstances could allow, but circumstances were harsh.
The tracks ran on into the distance like the scars over Ridell’s face, and it seemed they would never end. The machines – the machines replaced the knowledge of Ridell’s Service Discharge and the absence of any way to contact Mother and Father as the most awful of things. They were louder than trains and stank. The straps cut her hands and cut her gloves; the footplates were hard to remain on and too far down for her to reach half the time; her arms ached.
And they pitched unexpectedly. The pistons sometimes fired so close to her that she thought she was about to lose an eye. The wires crackled where they ran from the turbine out into the shell. When she rode behind Maureen she was always terrified the woman would careen off in pursuit of something; when she rode behind Ridell he coughed so violently that she was sure he would expire in the cradle and she’d be unable to stop the machine.
She couldn’t reach the snow to throw it on the joints and the water in her canteen kept running out. The smell of metal heating up clung to her hair and followed her into her sleep. Her arms ached as if she had been hung from some unseen ceiling like a side of meat and that—
And that reminded her, of course.
Every time Ernie, Mr. Shoe, tried to get into the machine, he broke down. Twice he took a swing at Ridell. Once he struggled so violently she was afraid he would dislocate something. Each time he started screaming the photographs came back to her, like slaps to the face. With each shout she knew it was as if she had interrogated him herself.
He never mentioned it afterward. He had not said a word to her about why she had not left him in a hospital, why she had not taken him to a morgue. Why she had freed him then colluded in his imprisonment. Nothing.
But the night in the abandoned Church was the worst.
There was a blackened mark on the wall where the crucifix, six feet tall, must have hung. The outside was whole: wooden and rotting. Like no church she’d ever seen in England. Not large, but large enough that they could heave the sled inside, though the wretched machines remained outside in the snow, like unholy guardians. It looked like a fairy-tale palace.
It was the worst night so far because, out of the howl of the wind, she heard Maureen ask, “What’s wrong with her?” and knew she was Letting Captain Foley Down.
And it was the worst because she stood inside a church, God’s house, and saw it was defiled, and felt the same way herself.
It was worse than that, because while she gazed up at the black mark, the shadow of a cross, Ridell stood behind her, and said, “I used to sing in this spot. Two left and one back from the cross.”
Worse because for a moment she forgot that he was a murderer, that he was dangerous and unrepentant and had parts of his record excised. She forgot that Captain Foley had warned her to be very careful about him, and she forgot even the look of concern and horror on Ernie’s—Mr. Shoe’s face when he found himself clutched by Ridell after he broke down.
She only heard in his voice the note of sadness, the sound of someone who had lost something profound and beautiful, and she wanted to say: God is still with you.
* * *
The day after that they met a track work gang, and that, after all, was worse.
“He’s had practice,” said Ernie, with sourness, as Ridell lugged their bodies away from rails, and pushed snow over them. Four men: two old, one the same age as the Captain, roughly, and the fourth clearly his son, just coming into himself. All cold and under the snow.
* * *
Xinjiang was nothing like Sichaun which was nothing like Nanjing, where the sea swept up creatures best undescribed from the seas to the east.
Unnameable cold came with winds that had solid presences and should have had names, like gun batteries on the shore. Lian Lin stood in the lee of her new home and felt herself no one’s comrade, no one’s friend.
Most of all she felt herself no one’s betrothed, which Weng Ho had yet to perceive.
Lian Lin felt herself so much apart that she ceased to think in Mandarin; she thought in English, the language of pasts and presents. Most of all, of pasts.
Much of Karamay was new, but it was not new in the coveted way that new buildings in Chengdu had been coveted; it was new, and it existed to suck oil from the ground like a flea sucking blood from the vast body of a sleeping beast. Karamay itself, they were at pains to tell her, was not new. Only half of the populace were Han. There had been mosques here, once. One of them had become the headquarters of the Agricultural Policy Workers, and Weng Ho disappeared into it every day, bundled in coats stiff with sweat from riding his new bicycle, his glasses kept on his face more by devotion than physics.
Lian Lin went to the Headquarters of the Unified Communications Workers in Northern Karamay District on foot every day. It took an hour and a half. The wind blew her into a puddle on her first day; she could not care enough to miss her bicycle, for she would have been blown with it from a bridge had she tried to ride it.
She hoped Comrade Wu had kept the bicycle for himself, and not sold it.
On her arrival in her apartments – here she had apartments, rooms in the plural, and neighbours who did not speak to her because her accent was funny – someone had left her a box of food. There was a bag of rice, one bowl, milk sweets, and walnut biscuits which had a post-mark from Beijing on the box. The note attached welcomed her to Karamay.
In Chengdu she had been welcomed by her neighbours in person. They had eaten together in the canteen and pressed gifts on her; she in turn had pressed gifts on new arrivals to welcome them.
A cooking pot had been provided with the apartments. No one had the foresight, of course, to provide her with the radio codes which would have secured her extraction.
Lian Lin tried to remember how her mother had cooked: illicit, private, selfish meals, shared often as not with the Foreigner, and his lover. All she could remember was the time the Foreigner tried to make something from his own home and ruined good pork with it.
The Unified Communications Workers’ Headquarters had once been a church administration building, perhaps. It sat opposite old Mission Buildings. The broadcast tower rose up like a stiff steel finger to the sky. True beauty is steel, she thought. She wondered if they had their own here or if they simply shipped it in from Chengdu, and kept sucking oil from the ground.
On her first day, Lian Lin had thought herself an exile. Surely this was Comrade Yi’s compromise; to show mercy, he had not sent her to prison. He had not given her to the police. He had sent her into exile in Xinjiang, where she could do no further damage.
She had walked into the offices of the Headquarters of the Unified Communications Workers in Northern Karamay District and introduced herself. She had been shown an Urigyhar woman whose name she immediately forgot, and a Han man who was Comrade Sheng, and told she would follow their instructions.
They asked her how much she understood about broadcast. Comrade Sheng told her their altitude gave them great status; Lian Lin did not inform him that no one in Chengdu could locate Karamay on a map and that no one in Nanjing had even known Xinjiang still had people in it.
“File these,” she had heard the woman say, pointing her to a selection of cardboard boxes. “In there,” pointing to the door to a room full of different, slightly more solid boxes.
The woman and Comrade Sheng walked away, and she distinctly heard the word ‘promotion’, and laughter.
Lian Lin squatted on the floor beside a box whose sides had begun to bulge. At least there was no mould, she thought, at least there were no cockroaches, here. It was dry, and cold, and if life had flourished within the walls of these boxes it was as desiccated as the landscape.
She opened the box.
The top sheet of paper was dated for the previous month. It had been stamped with the official chop of Beijing. It had been rescinded with the stamp for obsoletion. The procedure for such documents in Chengdu, followed rigorously by Comrade Lin, had been to destroy them as soon as the stamp was confirmed.
Lian Lin read the paper. There were columns, and there was a short heading concerning the correct use of the column content, and a short footer concerning the correct disposal of the document, which had not been obeyed, along with the time period in which the document was to be valid. That period had elapsed.
She reread, just to be sure.
The wind howled past the windows of the Unified Communications Workers’ Headquarters building.
Lian Lin put her face into her hands, and rocked on her heels, and she laughed, and she laughed, and she laughed.
The next sheet down was the same.
And the next.
Years.
Lian Lin laughed all afternoon. She giggled to herself as she walked an hour and a half home, blown this way and that with the snow, her hands red-raw and her face stinging. When she went with Weng Ho to the Revolutionary Picture Theatre and found they were showing this month only Heroic Lee Kwan, which they had seen in Chengdu nearly six months ago, she shrugged and said oh let us see it again, to his look of sorrow.
When she stepped into her new home, hungry and unable to make much beyond plain rice, she laughed again, and hugged herself.
Boxes and boxes of year on year of radio codes, and no way to send them.
* * *
The following day Lian Lin walked an hour and a half to the Headquarters Building, and was told in curt terms that she was not to use the offices to have her personal mail delivered to her, especially when it amounted to an out-of-date copy of the People’s Daily.
She apologised, and returned to the boxes.
The People’s Daily from last month had red dots under some of the words, so small they were barely visible. One word, an English word in English letters, had one tiny dot beside it which looked like a radio mast.
Lian Lin squatted beside a box of obsolete radio codes worth their weight in gold and committed the code to memory. She tore the paper to shreds; she introduced the shreds to the filing room waste, and acquired a copy of the most recent People’s Radio Report while Comrade Sheng drank illegal coffee and bragged about something she couldn’t work out because of his obnoxious, insufferable, Northern accent.
The coded missive before had told her many things: news of the effects of Great Leader’s policies. What life was like in the West. Some she believed; some she did not. Today it told her: we have a drop site in your vicinity, but we believe it is being watched.
Cruel ironies grow where no other life can take root.
Lian Lin scanned the next page.
We are coming for you.
Heavy: Seventeen
At home they would be celebrating Diane’s birthday, Maureen realised, the day she woke in a singed Orthodox church to the uncomfortably familiar sound of Mr. Ridell shouting himself awake, and whomever was closest putting something over his mouth to shut him up. It would be deep into the winter, and Diane would be, gosh, twenty-four.
It was the first time she’d thought much of home, the gruelling and pointlessly destructive work taking up most of her waking hours. If this was how the Manual Labouring Classes had to pass their days it was no bloody wonder they didn’t Rise Up, they must be bloody well knackered.
Pig missed her answer.
“Or how he met Ernest and I when we were boys?” Foley added, mercilessly.
“Of course not,” Maureen said, stoutly.
“Ask him sometime,” said Foley, “if you’re so keen to give away your scarf to someone who doesn’t need it.”
* * *
Worse than the freezing hell landscape, worse than the renewing aches and pains in his body, worse even than the sudden blackout that descended upon him as the saboteuchine cradle closed around him, Ernie thought, dangling from the rear of the stinking, monstrous mechanical hulk, was memory.
You could drag yourself to the ends of the earth on what looked like a suicide mission. You could try to balance yourself between one woman’s unshakeable jolly hockeysticks bloody hunger for adventure and one woman’s impending catatonic breakdown like you were walking a tightwire. You could hang off the back of a fucking marvel of engineering throwing snow in handfuls onto overheating parts and watch massive metal lobster claws rip up wrought-iron rails like blades of grass.
And you’d still find yourself, each night, bent between boxes of supplies and breathing bodies and the rancid smell of human sweat caked onto all of them, wondering: Do they know? Have they guessed?
Of all the futile, stupid things to worry about.
It was only that Jack Ridell lay back-to-back with him in the place where Simon had lain on Surt. Only that he remembered what he’d thought then, about lying back-to-back with Jack Ridell. None of them had been so ugly, then.
None of them had been so tall.
The second time he’d tried to climb into the cradle of the saboteuchine ended not only with a slice of time ripped from his memory, but with Jack Ridell’s hand over his mouth, a hissed shh, shh in his ear. The man dripping blood from his nose.
“You don’t remember?” Maureen asked him, when he tried to allude to it casually over the absolute filth they’d brought to feed themselves with. No sign of wildlife. No chance of shooting anything.
We’ve found a pig.
He didn’t remember anything useful, Ernie acknowledged, wryly. He remembered twenty years ago, no matter how hard he tried to forget. He remembered the last time he’d seen Xiao Huli, etched into his mind like scars. He remembered tiny, shame-filled glances and strange garbled messages and fragments of dreams that were either his or ones Simon had told him about, and he remembered all the words to a sixteen-verse song about pigeons fucking, and he remembered eight or nine different chapters he’d skimmed in a bad translation of Kahn’s Codebreakers, and most of the Mandarin he’d learnt.
He couldn’t extract a second of his time in the cradle from his memory: as far as he knew, he’d put his foot on the plate and then found himself clasped by Jack, blood dripping into his hair.
“Not a sausage,” Ernie said, trying to look apologetic.
Across the fire, Irene hugged her knees and ignored them all.
Maureen frowned. The mousy roots of her hair were hidden under her beret – God knew how she’d kept it – and she’d stretched out her ration of cigarettes. For a moment she looked almost normal, sitting there in the dancing light of the fire with snow melting on her coat sleeves.
“You fetched Mr. Ridell a tidy thump in the nose,” she said, “for one thing. It must have hurt like billy-oh, too, it’s all scars and whatnot up there. I’m not jolly well surprised it turned into a gusher, though, he’s always having nosebleeds. Something about the healing on the inside, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“What about before that? Why was he holding my mouth?”
Jack’s hand had tasted of mechanical oil and mechanical lubricant and no amount of scrubbing his lips with snow had removed the residue. He could still taste it now. It was a marked improvement on Compact Rations.
“You were screaming,” said Maureen, and there was a flicker on her face, just in passing, swept away by the firelight. It had unsettled her, Ernie thought, as she nodded across the fire at Irene’s near-comatose form. “She looks down in the mouth. I don’t think the work suits her.”
“Screaming?”
“Yes,” said Maureen. “Captain Foley didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence so Mr. Ridell put his hand over your mouth while we got you out. Are you sure you don’t remember?”
He remembered being in the saboteuchine, but the memory was attached to the presence of Graves, and that memory was laced with fragments of older ones: Don’t let them see you looking, Ernie.
“We’re going to run into someone sooner or later,” said Ernie, letting it drop.
“I bloody hope not,” said Maureen, and she gave the fire a kick.
Not so keen on track workers now, are you? Ernie thought, without malice. He could hardly hate her for it: once upon a time he’d thought: It will be like Coral Island, and been wronger than Maureen would hopefully ever be. There was the underlying thought that here, where they used the steaming, hissing, roaring saboteuchines and their stink because explosives were too loud, any unwitting intruder wouldn’t get the courtesy of a bullet in the back like poor old Haxonbury.
Guns were too loud. The sound carried in cold air.
At least Dick peacefully accepted that Ernie wasn’t going to be driving a damn sab any time soon, he thought.
That night, Ernie lay on his back with Jack Ridell’s sleeping body pressed against the side of his ribs, too many thoughts in his mind to separate into coherence from the ocean of radio static. Nanjing was receding from his mind, and he resented it; she deserved better than to be forgotten in favour of this. A decade of friendship shouldn’t vanish under Surt’s waves; and yet here he was, bunking up with someone who’d brought him the worst of all the horrors. Who was digging them back out of his mind, while it bucked and flinched away from London and London’s basement and London’s back-bending boxes and London’s pliers — and in spite of all this, he could only think:
Never let anyone see you looking, Ernie, I can’t stick with you if they know you’re like that.
Simon might be dead in Chengdu, Ernie sighed, trying not to move or breathe too hard, but even when he was alive there were moments when they might as well have been from different worlds.
He fell asleep with that particular cold splinter of pain wedged firmly in his heart.
* * *
The night they spent in the abandoned Church was the worst.
Irene had never known cold like this. She had never known sweat that froze solid in her hair and turned it into a mess matted with dirt and wool and machine oil that she was sure she would have to simply shave away, like a prisoner or a lunatic, because she would never be able to put a comb through it again.
Captain Foley was as kind to her as circumstances could allow, but circumstances were harsh.
The tracks ran on into the distance like the scars over Ridell’s face, and it seemed they would never end. The machines – the machines replaced the knowledge of Ridell’s Service Discharge and the absence of any way to contact Mother and Father as the most awful of things. They were louder than trains and stank. The straps cut her hands and cut her gloves; the footplates were hard to remain on and too far down for her to reach half the time; her arms ached.
And they pitched unexpectedly. The pistons sometimes fired so close to her that she thought she was about to lose an eye. The wires crackled where they ran from the turbine out into the shell. When she rode behind Maureen she was always terrified the woman would careen off in pursuit of something; when she rode behind Ridell he coughed so violently that she was sure he would expire in the cradle and she’d be unable to stop the machine.
She couldn’t reach the snow to throw it on the joints and the water in her canteen kept running out. The smell of metal heating up clung to her hair and followed her into her sleep. Her arms ached as if she had been hung from some unseen ceiling like a side of meat and that—
And that reminded her, of course.
Every time Ernie, Mr. Shoe, tried to get into the machine, he broke down. Twice he took a swing at Ridell. Once he struggled so violently she was afraid he would dislocate something. Each time he started screaming the photographs came back to her, like slaps to the face. With each shout she knew it was as if she had interrogated him herself.
He never mentioned it afterward. He had not said a word to her about why she had not left him in a hospital, why she had not taken him to a morgue. Why she had freed him then colluded in his imprisonment. Nothing.
But the night in the abandoned Church was the worst.
There was a blackened mark on the wall where the crucifix, six feet tall, must have hung. The outside was whole: wooden and rotting. Like no church she’d ever seen in England. Not large, but large enough that they could heave the sled inside, though the wretched machines remained outside in the snow, like unholy guardians. It looked like a fairy-tale palace.
It was the worst night so far because, out of the howl of the wind, she heard Maureen ask, “What’s wrong with her?” and knew she was Letting Captain Foley Down.
And it was the worst because she stood inside a church, God’s house, and saw it was defiled, and felt the same way herself.
It was worse than that, because while she gazed up at the black mark, the shadow of a cross, Ridell stood behind her, and said, “I used to sing in this spot. Two left and one back from the cross.”
Worse because for a moment she forgot that he was a murderer, that he was dangerous and unrepentant and had parts of his record excised. She forgot that Captain Foley had warned her to be very careful about him, and she forgot even the look of concern and horror on Ernie’s—Mr. Shoe’s face when he found himself clutched by Ridell after he broke down.
She only heard in his voice the note of sadness, the sound of someone who had lost something profound and beautiful, and she wanted to say: God is still with you.
* * *
The day after that they met a track work gang, and that, after all, was worse.
“He’s had practice,” said Ernie, with sourness, as Ridell lugged their bodies away from rails, and pushed snow over them. Four men: two old, one the same age as the Captain, roughly, and the fourth clearly his son, just coming into himself. All cold and under the snow.
* * *
Xinjiang was nothing like Sichaun which was nothing like Nanjing, where the sea swept up creatures best undescribed from the seas to the east.
Unnameable cold came with winds that had solid presences and should have had names, like gun batteries on the shore. Lian Lin stood in the lee of her new home and felt herself no one’s comrade, no one’s friend.
Most of all she felt herself no one’s betrothed, which Weng Ho had yet to perceive.
Lian Lin felt herself so much apart that she ceased to think in Mandarin; she thought in English, the language of pasts and presents. Most of all, of pasts.
Much of Karamay was new, but it was not new in the coveted way that new buildings in Chengdu had been coveted; it was new, and it existed to suck oil from the ground like a flea sucking blood from the vast body of a sleeping beast. Karamay itself, they were at pains to tell her, was not new. Only half of the populace were Han. There had been mosques here, once. One of them had become the headquarters of the Agricultural Policy Workers, and Weng Ho disappeared into it every day, bundled in coats stiff with sweat from riding his new bicycle, his glasses kept on his face more by devotion than physics.
Lian Lin went to the Headquarters of the Unified Communications Workers in Northern Karamay District on foot every day. It took an hour and a half. The wind blew her into a puddle on her first day; she could not care enough to miss her bicycle, for she would have been blown with it from a bridge had she tried to ride it.
She hoped Comrade Wu had kept the bicycle for himself, and not sold it.
On her arrival in her apartments – here she had apartments, rooms in the plural, and neighbours who did not speak to her because her accent was funny – someone had left her a box of food. There was a bag of rice, one bowl, milk sweets, and walnut biscuits which had a post-mark from Beijing on the box. The note attached welcomed her to Karamay.
In Chengdu she had been welcomed by her neighbours in person. They had eaten together in the canteen and pressed gifts on her; she in turn had pressed gifts on new arrivals to welcome them.
A cooking pot had been provided with the apartments. No one had the foresight, of course, to provide her with the radio codes which would have secured her extraction.
Lian Lin tried to remember how her mother had cooked: illicit, private, selfish meals, shared often as not with the Foreigner, and his lover. All she could remember was the time the Foreigner tried to make something from his own home and ruined good pork with it.
The Unified Communications Workers’ Headquarters had once been a church administration building, perhaps. It sat opposite old Mission Buildings. The broadcast tower rose up like a stiff steel finger to the sky. True beauty is steel, she thought. She wondered if they had their own here or if they simply shipped it in from Chengdu, and kept sucking oil from the ground.
On her first day, Lian Lin had thought herself an exile. Surely this was Comrade Yi’s compromise; to show mercy, he had not sent her to prison. He had not given her to the police. He had sent her into exile in Xinjiang, where she could do no further damage.
She had walked into the offices of the Headquarters of the Unified Communications Workers in Northern Karamay District and introduced herself. She had been shown an Urigyhar woman whose name she immediately forgot, and a Han man who was Comrade Sheng, and told she would follow their instructions.
They asked her how much she understood about broadcast. Comrade Sheng told her their altitude gave them great status; Lian Lin did not inform him that no one in Chengdu could locate Karamay on a map and that no one in Nanjing had even known Xinjiang still had people in it.
“File these,” she had heard the woman say, pointing her to a selection of cardboard boxes. “In there,” pointing to the door to a room full of different, slightly more solid boxes.
The woman and Comrade Sheng walked away, and she distinctly heard the word ‘promotion’, and laughter.
Lian Lin squatted on the floor beside a box whose sides had begun to bulge. At least there was no mould, she thought, at least there were no cockroaches, here. It was dry, and cold, and if life had flourished within the walls of these boxes it was as desiccated as the landscape.
She opened the box.
The top sheet of paper was dated for the previous month. It had been stamped with the official chop of Beijing. It had been rescinded with the stamp for obsoletion. The procedure for such documents in Chengdu, followed rigorously by Comrade Lin, had been to destroy them as soon as the stamp was confirmed.
Lian Lin read the paper. There were columns, and there was a short heading concerning the correct use of the column content, and a short footer concerning the correct disposal of the document, which had not been obeyed, along with the time period in which the document was to be valid. That period had elapsed.
She reread, just to be sure.
The wind howled past the windows of the Unified Communications Workers’ Headquarters building.
Lian Lin put her face into her hands, and rocked on her heels, and she laughed, and she laughed, and she laughed.
The next sheet down was the same.
And the next.
Years.
Lian Lin laughed all afternoon. She giggled to herself as she walked an hour and a half home, blown this way and that with the snow, her hands red-raw and her face stinging. When she went with Weng Ho to the Revolutionary Picture Theatre and found they were showing this month only Heroic Lee Kwan, which they had seen in Chengdu nearly six months ago, she shrugged and said oh let us see it again, to his look of sorrow.
When she stepped into her new home, hungry and unable to make much beyond plain rice, she laughed again, and hugged herself.
Boxes and boxes of year on year of radio codes, and no way to send them.
* * *
The following day Lian Lin walked an hour and a half to the Headquarters Building, and was told in curt terms that she was not to use the offices to have her personal mail delivered to her, especially when it amounted to an out-of-date copy of the People’s Daily.
She apologised, and returned to the boxes.
The People’s Daily from last month had red dots under some of the words, so small they were barely visible. One word, an English word in English letters, had one tiny dot beside it which looked like a radio mast.
Lian Lin squatted beside a box of obsolete radio codes worth their weight in gold and committed the code to memory. She tore the paper to shreds; she introduced the shreds to the filing room waste, and acquired a copy of the most recent People’s Radio Report while Comrade Sheng drank illegal coffee and bragged about something she couldn’t work out because of his obnoxious, insufferable, Northern accent.
The coded missive before had told her many things: news of the effects of Great Leader’s policies. What life was like in the West. Some she believed; some she did not. Today it told her: we have a drop site in your vicinity, but we believe it is being watched.
Cruel ironies grow where no other life can take root.
Lian Lin scanned the next page.
We are coming for you.
Heavy: Seventeen
At home they would be celebrating Diane’s birthday, Maureen realised, the day she woke in a singed Orthodox church to the uncomfortably familiar sound of Mr. Ridell shouting himself awake, and whomever was closest putting something over his mouth to shut him up. It would be deep into the winter, and Diane would be, gosh, twenty-four.
It was the first time she’d thought much of home, the gruelling and pointlessly destructive work taking up most of her waking hours. If this was how the Manual Labouring Classes had to pass their days it was no bloody wonder they didn’t Rise Up, they must be bloody well knackered.
