Heavy, p.38
Heavy, page 38
Foley, with one hand on the window frame to hold himself into his seat, said, “I’d rather not waste resources. Revealing yourself means we potentially lose the outpost. I’ll vouch for you to Braithwaite if anything comes of it, he knows he can believe me. While I’ve got someone who can speak it, you’re off the hook.”
“Can you trust him?”
Foley shrugged. “For as long as I need to.”
* * *
The irony of loading them onto a train was not lost on Pig.
He squatted in the cargo car among boxes with a mixture of Russian letters and Chinese ones stamped on them, and hauled Maureen in beside him. They reached down for Miss Gaitskill, and for Ernie, who struggled. Foley heaved himself up, and closed the door with a brisk salute to Zen.
“When we get off this train,” said Foley, “no one is to speak to anyone. Ernie here will do all the talking.”
“Will I,” said Ernie, looking at the ceiling of the train car.
“Try to look confused and awed. It should come naturally,” said Foley, dryly. “Zen has been in communication with Witham and our course is set. As long as you do exactly as you’re told we should be in and out of here without much trouble.”
* * *
When they got off the train they stepped into another world.
At first it was no different: a railway terminus was a railway terminus. Pig had seen a few.
Every other person in the terminus was Chinese and every other person in the terminus was staring at him. Almost no one even approached his height. Their voices raised in what he assumed must be mockery: Pig struggled to follow Foley through the initial crowd, and then the station was a wide open space, spilling out into a howling wind.
He had thought Kabul strange, when they arrived, shepherded through the city and straight to the base. He had no point of reference for it after that: they had been confined to base, and then to the mountains, and then he’d spent his time in the hospital, blinded, in agony.
The city was a fractional memory, and it was nothing like this, as alien from this place as London was from Kabul.
Here was a vista. New buildings came up in clumps, some of them still being built. Buildings he supposed must be old looked alien and rounded. People in the street stopped to stare at him, and moved on.
* * *
Perhaps a mile from the station, consulting every few corners with Ernie, Foley brought them to a halt, and stepped into an empty building.
“This will do,” he said, looking up at a ceiling arched and covered in blue and white and gold tiles of such beauty that Pig could feel his eyes begin to water.
“What is this?” Maureen asked, apparently quite overcome.
Foley didn’t answer, and only set about establishing a perimeter. Pig was puzzled: no one had followed them, and no one had stopped them. They were not exactly inconspicuous.
“Used to be a mosque,” said Ernie, somewhere behind him. Pig didn’t recall seeing any which looked like this in Kabul, and the ones in the mountains had been barely distinguishable from Presbyterian chapels: plain, white, and functional. Often on fire. Often just loose bricks and broken walls, covered in thick mortar dust and old blood.
“What is it now, though?”
“Scheduled for demolition,” said Ernie, in the hoarse whisper people often spoke in when they walked into cathedrals. “Or so the signs said. By the end of this week this place is going to be rubble.”
“Seems rather a waste,” Maureen remarked. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Religion is the opiate of the masses,” Ernie said, very dryly, as Pig stared up at the tiles above – they depicted constellations, dropping down into mountains as the arches touched the tops of walls. “A mosque isn’t in keeping with the Great Leader’s ideals.”
“Is this where you were before you were extracted?” Maureen asked, rather excited-sounding. Pig traced the line of the wall until he found the dent, the one which Rankin had pointed out to him in the remains of a torched one in the mountains. That’s the way they face to pray. That’s where God lives.
Poor Rankin.
“This dump?” Ernie snorted. “I told you, I was on the coast. Nanjing. The stepping-stone to the corpse of Nippon, where mutated fish wash up on the shore. City of a thousand ghosts, home of what I guess you’d call ‘martyrs’. When the Japs landed they turned the river red with blood.”
Pig let his gaze drop down the wall. The tiles in the dent – he couldn’t remember what Rankin had called it and Rankin hadn’t been sure he was right – were all smashed. They reflected the light in different directions, painting dwindling sunlight onto his face, shining it into his eyes.
Irene, standing beside him, said, “Do you think God is still here?”
He wasn’t sure if she meant him to hear her. He scratched under the flannel shirt of his new uniform, and said, “I wouldn’t know, would I?”
* * *
The northern cities, in Ernie’s mental map of the Chinese states of the SinoSoviet Alliance, were a wasteland where people languished when they didn’t have the connections to move south. In Manchuria, Xiao Huli had told him, on the basis of a long-ago residency there which had: given [her] the conceptions of my poetry, the food was bland and the wind blew dust from the steppes into everything and the men were, she said, laughing, so ugly you would rather make love to the wind itself.
The station they arrived in did little to give the lie to this. Manchuria might lie thousands of miles to the east, but the wind was filled with knives, here on this high-up land, and the higher land surrounding did nothing to abate the cold. Though the men were mostly Han, there were enough faces of Mongols, of Uighars – even some he guessed who must be Kazakhs – that Xiao Huli’s jibe rang true, to his tastes at least.
They all spoke Mandarin, though.
When he’d first come to China he’d been perplexed. In London you could walk through Yiddish into Francophone refugees through to a hundred Overseasman dialects from Burma to Boers, and Farsi was everywhere once you got to the diplomatic districts. In Nanjing Mandarin came out of every mouth without exception. Hui spoke it. Uighars spoke it. Everyone spoke it. No exceptions, except when it was Russian.
Ernie listened to the accent of the city. It sounded nothing like Nanjing, but the words themselves closed over his head like waters over the head of a drowning man. Most of the words in the vicinity were: look at that foreigner, he is so tall, what happened to his face, what is he doing here?
“We need a secure base,” said Dick, in his ear.
A few thousand miles south they would be speaking Mandarin in Chengdu, where somewhere, somewhere unmourned, probably in a pit, probably alongside strangers, Simon still lay.
“Don’t you have one?” Ernie muttered.
A few thousand miles south and east they would be speaking Mandarin in Nanjing, where Xiao Huli lay, somewhere unmourned, probably in a pit, probably alongside those who had sought out her words, her wisdom, her guidance, her fury and kindness… old woman Li still lay.
“Plans have rather been forced to change,” said Dick. “I had one. It’s not in this city.”
The Little Fox of Nanjing had laid down her pen.
In the same city as the Little Fox, Xiao Huli, lay unmourned by most, they spoke Mandarin in memory of a boy Ernie had nick-named One Golden Lily. But at least they’d spoken in his memory at all.
“Just walk,” Ernie suggested, a little spitefully. “See if your luck holds.”
* * *
Words and notices poured out information. Demolition, building. Canal maintenance. Days when the water supply would be suspended. Edicts from Beijing. Unsafe bridge. Do not enter. Due to be demolished at the end of the month.
Ernie put his hands behind his back and felt the familiar itch of grey flannels against his skin.
They stopped in what was shortly to be re-created as a Centre For Scientific Arts, a nebulous phrase which, in Ernie’s experience, meant that no one was sure what they were doing with it besides tearing it down to rebuild something newer. Dick prowled about looking for civilians to plug; Jack and Irene disintegrated into sight-seers, the bumpkin and the suburbanite peering up at the tiles as if they expected to be handed a guide book.
Maureen followed him.
“I could help,” she said, under her breath.
“You’d help by letting me get on with it,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t want a distraction?”
“They’re already distracted.”
Maureen rambled loudly, aimlessly about History; about Communism about her personal theory that the mechanism of the Allied states referred to as Democratic Freedom was operating as a sop-throwing device to keep its petrified citizenry from cottoning on to their existence as an oppressed mass.
Dick appeared from a side room to tell her to shut up or at least betray her country a little more quietly.
Marking his position, Ernie faded back, out of the side door.
He crept over the barriers, between the wooden fence slats, between the distinct units of metal fencing held down with concrete blocks. This city was cannibalising its past faster than the cities of the south, he thought. He wondered how anyone could stand up on such constantly-shifting ground. That was probably the idea—
Ernie felt a twinge of pain in his thigh, down his leg. He missed his footing. Shifting ground, or just careless feet.
He worked his way into the back street, running parallel to the one they’d approached by.
At the end of the street he turned down into the larger one running perpendicular to it. At the end of this street he found a sign explaining that the sign he was looking for had been removed, and giving directions to the oil workers’ dormitories.
Why not, thought Ernie. They would need administrative peoples: the Alliance ran on administration, bureaucracy, and paperwork. He could if nothing else stamp papers and look stupid. He looked pitiable in his current state; pity was currency.
An arm snaked around his chest.
“Hey,” Ernie snapped, startled out of his own thoughts.
He tried to drive his elbow backward into his attacker, but his arms didn’t move the way they used to. The blow hurt him; his arm was twisted up, behind his back, and agony shot across his shoulders. A smell, something familiar, came to him.
He heard loud, uneven breaths that were not his own.
“—OFF ME,” he shouted, losing the first part of the sentence in his haste. He tried to twist out of the grip and only succeeded in feeling as if he was about to dislocate his own shoulder.
“Stop it,” said Jack, grabbing his other wrist and putting an effective end to his struggles. “Please.”
“You backstabbing piece of shit,” Ernie spat, as Jack pulled him off his feet, back onto his feet, and turned him around to face the way he’d come.
“I’m not the one running off,” Jack said, his voice thick and deep behind Ernie. “Walk.”
“You could just have let me go.”
Ernie stumbled and skidded like a drunkard in front of Jack Ridell’s relentless walk. The wind shot into his ears. The street was almost deserted, now: part of the day when the populace must either be working or waiting to work. A lone car sat on the far end of the street, but even from this distance it was plainly empty.
“We were friends once,” Ernie said, bitterly. “You’re hurting me.”
“Don’t run off.”
“I was hardly bloody running.”
“Don’t,” Jack repeated, shaking him. Ernie felt as if his bones were rattling. “He doesn’t want you disappearing.”
* * *
Inside the old mosque, Foley greeted them as if they’d been out for a walk. He left Ernie sitting with Miss Gaitskill, and said Maureen had gone out with the intention of “acquiring” some food for them, and that it would make a change from Compact Rations.
He smiled genially at Ernie and patted him on the shoulder: Pig saw the man wince in pain.
Dick fished out a cigarette, lit it, and patted Pig on the arm. “No harm done, eh?” he said, in a low voice, as they walked out of the main mosque room and into a side room with a lower ceiling. The tiles had been removed here: one or two remained stuck in the plaster, like spots on skin.
Pig tried to hold his breath as the smoke began to tickle his throat.
Sometimes, in the nights in the open, he’d felt as if he were drowning in gas again; some nightmare in which he’d been tied to a chair and was breathing in the smoke of burning soldiers, high up in the dry mountains, on damp clifftops, and at the bottom of the cliffs he’d find a pig. The pig would be Rankin when he arrived, or one of the other men: twisted and blackened, human cinders. The gas filled him and burned him from the inside.
“No harm done,” Pig repeated, dutifully.
Jake Zen had looked at them as if they were ghosts. Living alone in the middle of nowhere must do that to a man. Ernie had said something to him in a foreign language and Zen had looked surprised, said, Back-up? to Foley.
“I’m going to have to insist you keep a closer eye on him, old chap,” said Foley, patting him on the arm again. “I think the strain is getting to him. And of course, there’s always the worry with old operatives that they’ll go native.”
Pig nodded, far away in his own thoughts.
Zen had said something about “cut sleeve” to Ernie and Ernie had glared at him and said something that sounded angry in his foreign language. Zen had laughed. He’d found himself then wondering what Lieutenant Travers was doing, back in Finland. Was she making more saboteuchines? Was she winning bottle caps from Graves at cards?
“He’s not in his right mind,” said Foley, softly.
Pig jolted back to the moment, and veered further away into the unwanted past.
He must have been taking it very badly.
It’s hard to see the edge.
He did seem sad.
I can’t leave him like this.
“We need to make sure nothing happens to him,” said Foley, in the same soft voice, smoke coiling up and obscuring the tile-blue depths of his eyes. “As old friends – as, well, I suppose as his NCO, while we’re here, aren’t you?”
Pig said, “I’m not in the army any more.”
“Then to ensure the survival of the mission of a whole,” said Foley, without changing his expression. “And not leave us deaf and dumb in a hostile land. Pig, I’m asking you to find a little compassion in you – what if something were to happen to him, while he’s like this?”
Pig looked at the blank wall behind Foley. There was a single blue tile stuck in it around head-height. His head height.
“I nearly broke his arm,” Pig muttered.
“It’ll be worse for him if he wanders off.”
Pig said nothing.
Foley jammed the lit end of the cigarette into Pig’s left nostril.
While he was still reeling from the suddenness of it, a blow hit him in the belly, doubling him over. The pain temporarily overrode the burning inside his face, and he gasped as the wind was forced from him.
Foley seized a handful of Pig’s hair and pulled his head back.
“Look at me,” said Foley, a little out of breath but otherwise peaceful.
Pig screwed up his face.
Foley sighed, and pulled out the extinguished cigarette. Pig opened one eye cautiously.
The Captain held Pig’s hair in one hand and the bloodied cigarette in the other. He flicked the latter away, stooped to where Pig remained doubled over and fighting for air. He said, in the same gentle, cajoling voice as before, “We don’t want anything to happen to Ernie. Can’t have him wandering off in a daze and getting hurt. You’ve seen what happens when the boys wander off by themselves.”
Pig tried to swallow. The angle of his neck wouldn’t allow him.
He tried to nod, and felt his hair pulling out of his scalp.
“Don’t let it happen again,” said Foley, releasing his hair. He wiped his hand on his trousers. “I will be disappointed.” He pointed to the door. “Don’t hang around in here and give him more opportunities to do something silly.”
* * *
The sun had set by the time Maureen reappeared, grinning like a dog that has chased a rabbit to ground and only waits on the instruction to dig it out.
She came bearing a paper bag the size of a knapsack and looked as if she had been dragged through a puddle backwards. Her face fell slightly on counting the contents of the room, but she only raised her eyebrows and shoved the bag at them as a group.
“You may now call me quartermistress,” she said, grandly. “I have pilfered and you are fed.”
“What are these?” Miss Gaitskill asked, taking out something white and round. “It feels spongy.”
“It’s bread,” Ernie said, taking one.
“It’s white,” said Miss Gaitskill, squeezing one. “And the middle’s hard.”
“Bow see,” said Ernie. Pig sat down beside him. “I thought they were a southern thing. I suppose the habit spread—piss off, Ridell.”
Pig glanced back at Foley, who was investigating one of the white orbs – maybe the size of a clenched fist – with interest. Foley shook his head, and Pig turned back to Ernie with his head lowered.
“Are you sure it’s bread?” Maureen asked, her mouthful. “There’s meat in here, it’s like a round sandwich. If bread was made out of, oh, cotton or something.”
“Where’s the grit?” Irene asked, swallowing some at last.
“Jack,” Ernie sighed. “You’re bleeding on my bun.”
Pig put his hand under his nose and mumbled an apology. The bun in his own hand was white, unblemished. He offered it to Ernie: Ernie shook his head, and took a bite from his own, its perfect pale curves profaned with two spreading spots of red.
“Why couldn’t you just let me go?” Ernie said fiercely, into the bun.
* * *
Maureen had thought, as she set out to stage what turned out to be a disappointingly uneventful raid on a bakery, that she would be sorry to see Mr. Shoe go. He had proven interesting – the stories he had! – and pleasant, and jolly good at keeping morale up when Irene was beginning to flag. He seemed to be growing disillusioned with the mission, and Maureen felt she understood why, but at the same time she knew it would be absolute foolishness to make a break for it herself.
