Heavy, p.41
Heavy, page 41
Mr. Ridell didn’t so much as look up at her hand. Maureen was rather disappointed; he was in the position to intercept the message and learn something useful himself, although whether he acted on it at all was something she couldn’t have taken a bet on. He seemed wedded to following Captain Foley come rain or shine, and nothing of what she’d learned from Mr. Shoe cleared up why.
Mr. Shoe read the message, and shook his head. He balled up the scrap of paper, swallowed it, and passed the pencil to Mr. Ridell, who ignored it. “Won’t do any good,” he said, “you look too foreign. You could pass yourself off as Russian but this close to those territories, you’d just run into people who can speak it as well.”
“Bother,” said Maureen, cheerfully.
“Just don’t get caught,” Mr. Shoe suggested, sarcastically. He prodded Mr. Ridell with the tip of the pencil, in the forearm, and added with no small bitterness, “It’s not a very pleasant experience, being caught.”
Heavy: Twenty-One
With more security in their position, Foley began coming and going from the mosque more often. Sometimes he took Miss Gaitskill: sometimes he did not. Ernie, and therefore Pig, was under something resembling lockdown.
“Where does he go?” Pig asked the ceiling, as Ernie went through Foley’s remaining things, and he made no move to stop him. “We stand out like a handful of sore thumbs.”
“Nothing useful,” Ernie muttered, in disgust. “Should have known it.”
“He can’t speak the language either,” Pig added, listening to Ernie waste precious energy on kicking a bag in frustration. The kicks were slow. The day was less windy than some of the preceding ones; snow mounted up around the mosque. He thought it might insulate the place.
“Everything’s either with Maureen or in his bloody coat,” Ernie grumbled, directing a brief, savage look at Pig. “You could just let me go. You could go yourself. You’re not tied down.”
“Go where?” Pig asked, turning back to the ceiling. “I don’t speak the language either. I don’t want to go to Chinese prison for being a tall foreigner.”
Ernie ignored him, and began scratching at a scrap of paper with one of Foley’s pencils.
“I thought this place was supposed to be demolished now?” Pig added. He was hazy on the passage of days, but he was sure it had been a week by now.
Ernie shrugged. “How long does it take for the Municipal Construction Workers at home to get around to tackling bomb damage from Forty-One?”
“They’re not called that any more—”
“Remember when St Paul’s got nicked by a stray one in Forty-Eight and they still hadn’t fixed that wing in Fifty-Two?” Ernie persisted, still ponderously scribbling.
“I was in Lesser Tenderbury.”
“You must have heard it on the news. Read the papers.”
“I had other things on my mind,” said Pig, trying not to remember what they were.
“I’m going to take a shit,” said Ernie. “If you’re desperate to watch I suppose you can follow me.”
Pig sighed, and braced himself to rise.
Foley came back into the mosque, foodless, caked in snow, trailing Miss Gaitskill behind him like a tow-boat. He glanced around him, shook off the snow. “Any sign of Miss Phelps?”
Maureen’s absences had been more protracted than his. She could usually be relied to return with something to eat, however: she had a knack for it. The previous day she’d returned with something Ernie said was a lucky coin; it had a hole in the middle. Maureen had given it to Irene; Irene had said rather coldly that she didn’t hold with pagan symbols, and the coin had fallen to Pig, who didn’t hold with them either but didn’t not hold with them.
Both men shook their heads.
“Bugger,” said Foley, cheerfully, shaking snow off his hat. “Sorry, Irene. Language. I was going to tell her not to bother with east of the refinery streets, I’m confident there’s nothing there in terms of potential drop sites – the works aren’t finished and Jake’s not down here much…”
Foley fished about in his pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He passed it to Ernie. “A little translation work for you.”
Ernie accepted the paper without looking at it, or at Foley. “What makes you think I’m doing anything for you, Dick?”
Dick dropped into a squat beside him, ignoring Pig as if Pig were so much unnecessary furniture. “Cooperation is the only key to survival, Ernie. If we help each other, we get to go home. If we don’t, then all of us end up here, in a shallow grave. Which, I might add, doesn’t appeal to me very much. I do have a family, and so does Irene.”
Pig thought about the house in Primrose Hill, the casually doped children, the inebriated wife. He thought, But Ernie doesn’t; he thought: I might as well not, with a temporary stab of guilt over Mabel and Mabel’s expectant waiting on some indication that he was Getting On at Golding Holdings.
Miss Gaitskill looked abruptly downcast in the background. Pig wondered if she expected to see her family – what she thought they’d be told if she didn’t come home. Did they know where she worked? What she was involved in? Did Mrs. Foley know?
“Cooperation is the only key to survival,” Ernie echoed, holding the paper scrunched in his hand. “Progress Moves Us Forward. Great Leader Observes Prosperity From Steel. The State Is Father, The Land Is Mother. You’d fit in here. Did you ever think of defecting?”
“No,” said Foley, pleasantly, balancing on his toes with his arse resting on his heels. “No one trusts defectors. Read the thing.”
“You know you’ve probably bought me a poster about water shut-offs,” Ernie said, ignoring it.
“Quite likely,” said Foley. “Except I know the character for ‘water’ and that’s not it.”
“Read it yourself,” said Ernie, pushing it back at Foley with a malicious smile. “I’m not doing your dirty work for you any more, Dick. You just reward me with suffering. This isn’t a fair exchange.”
“Spite me if you like,” said Dick, with an answering smile that was patient, friendly, and terrifying, “but remember you are also endangering the girls if you withhold information.”
Pig looked up at Miss Gaitskill. She had her hands clenched by her sides and her hair still wrapped in a scarf. She looked both terribly young and terribly old, all at once, her face frozen in immediate worry.
“You’re a piece of work,” Ernie muttered. “You both are. Nothing would s—” he turned his attention to the paper, still muttering, his hands shaking; whether from the all-pervading cold or nerve damage or something else it was impossible for Pig to guess.
“Water shut-offs?” Foley asked, pleasantly.
“Official Notice,” said Ernie, who was already some way ahead of the opening line.
“I recognised those characters,” said Foley with a light smile. “Better safe than sorry, I thought. What else?”
“Anyone with information relating to the foreign girl found – found in possession of prohibited materials in Urho District is to report to Captain Sheng of the Urho District Police,” said Ernie, folding up the paper and passing it back to Foley with an expression that Pig would have liked to be able to unsee. “Well done, Dick. We’re fucked.”
“Any description of the girl?” Dick asked, getting to his feet, already on the alert.
“Yes,” said Ernie, eyeballing him angrily. “She has red hair.”
“Irene, stuff the remainder back into sacks, will you?” said Foley, brisk but without any outward sign of panic. “I’m afraid we’re moving out of here as soon as possible. How’re your legs, Ernie?”
“Good enough for running away on,” Ernie rasped. “You brought this on yourself.”
“It doesn’t do any good to stay in one place too long,” Foley said, with a fixed smile.
“Rubbish,” Ernie said, with a kind of satisfaction – Pig was sure he seemed almost pleased. “We’re compromised and it’s your fault. You put her up to this.”
Foley said, “I did nothing of the sort. She wasn’t prevented from leaving, that was all.”
He tipped his head back over his shoulder as he stuffed writing materials into his satchel, and gave Pig a bland, unassuming smirk.
You didn’t tell me I had to watch her too, Pig thought, as cold water cascaded into his stomach and the snow mounted up outside. The blister inside his nostril had subsided; he wondered if it would be allowed to heal.
* * *
Ernie was woken from a fitful sleep by the sound of a bell. Both the fitfulness and the sleep seemed to be coming more often now, breaking the days up into long strings of uncomfortable wakings where the only alteration was the angle of the light and the volume of Jack’s ugly, gurgling breaths.
He was sure it must have been the last remnants of a dream, but when it sounded again he heard an accompanying shout of get out of the way in Mandarin. The snow had muffled much of the city noise, and the bell sounded as if it were ringing from underneath a pile of laundry.
After a glance at Jack he heaved himself to his feet. Jack immediately looked up.
“I’m going to take a shit,” said Ernie. “If you’re desperate to watch I suppose you can follow me.”
Jack sighed.
Ernie massaged life back into his legs and hobbled to the side of the building that pointed in what he assumed was the right direction – east, the opposite side to the alcove Jack had spent so long staring at – and found a window. He heard Jack stirring somewhere behind him, trying to find some compromise between keeping him in sight and not having to watch someone squat to defecate.
Police, get out of the way.
What’s happening?
Someone has been caught with prohibited materials.
Ernie half-leaned out of the window and shivered. The conversation was in accents that bore little resemblance to those in Nanjing, but the words were almost identical. He couldn’t see the speakers – which meant they couldn’t see him – but they were not far away, out on the road.
“Are you shitting or not?”
“What’s it to you?” Ernie snapped.
“Get back from the fucking window.”
“My feet are inside, mind your own business.”
No further conversation came from outside. Ernie climbed down from the window, every joint stiff, and waddled back to the mosque’s main room. He couldn’t settle on the tiled floor: just kept walking, slowly, painfully, in circles around the spot where Jack sat.
“You’re making me dizzy,” Jack mumbled.
“Good,” said Ernie, and kept going. His legs hurt, but stopping wouldn’t help. He stuck his hand under his hat and scratched his scalp with the side of his hand – the wool was abrasive enough, and it didn’t hurt his fingers – and kept walking.
After maybe an hour, when he thought his hips were about to catch fire, and tiredness stole up on him again like an old friend, he heard them again. The sound of a loud engine, passing on the road: Ernie stumbled back to the window—
“Hey,” Jack called.
—and whispers, carried on the wind:
Put one here.
No one lives round here, it’s a waste.
Captain Sheng said one every block, don’t argue.
This isn’t a block, it’s a house graveyard.
Just stop bitching and put one up so we can go back to the station.
Ernie balanced on the broad, stone window ledge. It was cracked two-thirds of the way along. He shivered. The snow was deep, sloped up against the edge of the building.
He could just roll down off the ledge and—
“Don’t make me do it again,” Jack pleaded. He sounded sincere.
“I’m just going to—”
“Run off,” Jack finished.
“Someone’s put a poster on the street outside,” said Ernie, still hanging off the window sill, struggling to keep his balance. “I want to see what it says.”
“No,” said Jack.
“You can come with me,” Ernie sighed. Taking Jack with him was asking to be spotted, but the alternative was not allaying his fears at all, and instead sitting alone in the mosque listening to his own thoughts treacherously reminding him Xiao Huli was caught with prohibited materials every time he tried to sleep. There were ways, he acknowledged, to blot out the voice, but he didn’t much fancy trying that in front of Jack’s eternally watchful eye. Not any more.
Jack shrugged. “The door.”
He pulled Ernie back in through the window: Ernie didn’t resist. His muscles still burned in the memory of attempted resistance. Either Jack was stronger than a man living on a diet of squashed cardboard and occasional baozi had any business being, or he was too weak to put up any kind of a fight.
He acknowledged with sadness that the latter was more likely.
Jack followed him out into the snow. The cold was like a physical force; Ernie hadn’t appreciated until now just how much shelter the mosque provided, only preoccupied with how much the cold within ached and ate at him. No longer in a room pitifully heated by body heat and occasional illicit fires, each breath that came into his lungs felt as if it were burning him and drowning him at once.
“God almighty,” Ernie whispered, stumbling along the side of the fence.
“Is this it?”
“Keep your voice down,” Ernie said, taking the poster out of Jack’s hand. “Let’s get back inside.”
Back in the relative warmth of the mosque’s main room, burrowed under sacks and wrapped in the discarded sheet Jack had found in an upstairs room earlier that week, Ernie smoothed out the poster. It was hand-written, hasty – something someone had churned out on their way to the sites they were distributing them at, possibly in a car. Wobbly calligraphy, large characters. Ball point, not good ink.
OFFICIAL POLICE NOTICE
Ernie looked up at Jack, who was watching him with his scars pulled together. “Police,” he said.
Individuals who have encountered a foreign woman with red hair—
“Shit,” said Ernie, aloud.
“They’ve found us?” Jack asked, alarmed.
“They’ve found Maureen,” said Ernie, sweeping through the rest of the poster as fast as he could.
—Report to Captain Sheng of Urho District Police with evidence.
“That means they’ll find us soon,” Jack concluded. Ernie squinted at him. He’d been smart, once. The boy Jack Ridell, sharp as a knife. The man Jack Ridell, a scarred ruin. But still not stupid.
“As soon as they have a translator and someone to ask questions the right way,” Ernie said, staring at the poster.
“You mean torture.”
“I mean they might not have to,” said Ernie, avoiding any comment on the unfortunate tendency of Maureen Phelps to talk. The prohibited materials they’d mentioned earlier: Dick’s completely superfluous messages. He’d been unable to read them – Dick kept the one-time pads close to his side and without the newspaper key it was hopeless anyway – but there was no rationale for leaving so many so often. She was a decoy.
Ernie pulled his hand over his face.
She was carrying prohibited materials. Poetry.
A report has been made concerning seditious activity.
Xiao Huli’s arrest hadn’t been an accident; there had been enough rumours to get to the truth. Handed in to make way for someone whose ambitions would not allow the old woman to remain a nuisance, to remain at large, scribbling her poetry. Someone whose connection to her was intimate.
Jack was on his feet, picking up their supplies, ramming them into a sack. “What do we tell Foley and Gaitskill?”
I suspect, thought Ernie, pulling the sheet off himself, Dick already knows.
* * *
A couple of times, Captain Foley took Irene with him for reconnaissance. He insisted on it: “With your hair hidden and not too close attention, you look more like a native than I do. If you’re with me, I don’t stand out – and you’re observant, between the two of us we can get to grips with this city.”
He never alluded to why they might need to. He didn’t mention what their purpose was in this strange, cold, open, windy plateau at all, and nothing presented itself. Irene reasoned that if she didn’t know, she would be unable to tell anyone if she were captured, if she were—
Her thoughts at this had strayed onto Ernie’s injuries. Mr. Shoe’s injuries. Ernie’s. It had taken her a few moments to recall that of course, necessary suspicions held by the organisation for which she still worked were not the same thing as the brutal paranoia of the SinoSoviet States.
The streets were never crowded. There simply were not enough people. Even in London, where her Mother and Father had so often told her there had once been hundreds more, bustling and packing the streets with markets, even London after curfew, had never been like this. And people stared, of course, but that at least had not changed.
They walked different quarters of the spread-out city. A lot of building works were taking place; Captain Foley made notes of their location. There were notices; Captain Foley copied down one or two. He did not appear concerned or in a hurry, which Irene supposed must be Good Cover; they purchased food with money Captain Foley said Jake Zen had given him. At one place where this happened, the food seller – a woman Irene’s height with sore, blistered hands and a distant smile – had pointed first to a painted hammer and sickle on one side of her small shop’s open hatchway, then to a star painted on the other, her eyebrows raised in question. Do you speak?
Captain Foley had shaken his head both times. The woman had made a surprised expression but sold them the food – more soft bread – all the same. Captain Foley had said cha to the woman, who understood that well enough. The tea they drank was watery and bitter and had no milk.
“It’s the same in most languages,” said Captain Foley, as they moved on. “Tea, The, or cha, chai. All from the same word, I hear.”
Surprised, Irene said, “That is useful.”
“An Englishman should always know how to obtain tea,” Captain Foley said, with a mischievous smile.
* * *
They went making observations to the east of the oil refinery, where the wind was worse, and the air was colder, and there were westerlies from what Captain Foley said weren’t the Himalayas: “We’re too far north.”
