Heavy, p.42
Heavy, page 42
Those winds dragged the stink from the refinery into the snow, and turned it grey.
At home, the coal from the power stations made the snow grey, and sometimes black, but coal dust and coal smoke had a good, wholesome, homely smell. It might get in the lungs rather, but that, Irene thought, only weeded out the weaklings. Even Mother and Father said so, usually most tender towards the destitute and helpless. One could always move to The Countryside, they said, and become a farmer.
Captain Foley, hands in pockets, walked slowly about the streets, noting the layout of the city. “Keep an eye on faces,” he said, “someone may prove useful later.”
No one stood out to Irene. Everyone looked the same. She could not be sure if it was merely the uniform grey flannels – in the time of Two Leaders, she knew from her work, this had been limited to Party Members. Now, with fear that the West might any day launch one of her own nuclear warheads upon them, now, with borders closing like a clenched fist, an ‘iron hand around the throat,’ the radio had called it, now everyone must keep to the same clothing in a show of unity.
On the radio it had been called a clear demonstration of how Communism stifles free expression. In the propaganda materials they had intercepted it was called free clothing for all Workers while The West lets her children go Naked and Hungry.
Perhaps it was their faces, after all.
A young man wheeled a bicycle, its rack laden with a bundle of books, his glasses slightly askew and his expression distant, and stepped out of the way to avoid running into her. He said something that sounded like an apology, and ducked his head.
She trotted to keep up with Captain Foley.
“Orderly,” he said, looking about the street. “Not much like our own beautiful chaos, is it, Irene?”
“No, Sir.”
“Ernie informs me that further south they have cages of ducks for sale on the street. A sort of Billingsgate for wildfowl. Monkeys and bats and the whole menagerie in Guangzhou, if I recall.”
“As pets, sir?”
“No, they eat them.”
In Forty-Nine, just after the warning, when half the population were on boats or planes and another quarter were doing the unthinkable, the farms had stopped and the meat had spoiled in the larders and the electricity board and the gas board hadn’t been running so there was nothing for modern households to cook with, Mother and Father had said.
A year before that she’d been left outside The Church, they said. We had you, and we had a duty to those who remained. There was nothing to eat but rats until the boats came back and the farms who’d kept going started to send things into the city.
In the Siege of Paris, before she was born, they’d eaten zoo animals. It was in the history books. Before Paris became a radioactive wasteland. When they had a zoo to eat animals from.
“They must be starving, sir,” Irene said, shocked.
“Communism and agricultural policy have never been healthy bedfellows,” said Captain Foley, with a grim look. “Remember how badly Stalin bungled that.”
“Yes, sir.”
The bread here was softer, whiter, and sweeter than any she’d eaten in her life at home. It could be squeezed and released to bounce back into shape. Irene was quite sure she could have eaten herself sick of what Maureen called the Round Sandwiches and Ernie called Bow-dzuh.
“Hullo,” Captain Foley said, pulling her sideways with a hand on the collar of her coat. “Look sharp, Irene, there’s trouble brewing.”
She stumbled, staggered, nearly lost her footing: she fell into a narrow walkway between two low concrete buildings, where the wind nearly knocked her down again. The Captain lifted her up by the elbow and gave her a rueful smile.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “But look.”
They turned to the main street. There were two cars now, of a style and manufacture that seemed common here but which Irene found impossibly alien. They had stopped in the road. One had three men in it, and the other two; the car containing three men also had a stooped figure in the back seat, covered in cloth. Perhaps a dog – it was about the height of a standing dog, but Irene was sure a dog covered in cloth would lie down.
Two of the men got out of their respective cars and talked to each other. There was something different about their bearing, their expressions. One gave the strange, threatening salute of the Communists – lazily, as if he wasn’t interested – and the other only shrugged.
The saluting one got into his car and turned it ponderously. He drove away.
The other man sat in his car for a moment, writing something. He gave it to the man beside him, and began writing again on a fresh piece of paper. He repeated the gesture a few more times: the wind tugged at Irene’s scarf.
Captain Foley murmured in her ear. “We may be faced with something of an obstacle.”
Irene held her breath. The car pulled away, the man in the passenger seat still writing, trying to hold his paper still.
“Sir?” she whispered, when it became clear he wasn’t going to elaborate.
“Blackbagging isn’t good news,” said the Captain, straightening up and giving her a little push towards the entrance of the alley, “When you’re the undercover operatives.”
Irene paused to look at him. He gave her another gentle shove, with an expectant look.
“Come along, Irene,” he said, not unkindly. “Pinch one of those fliers, we have to get back to the mosque.”
Irene trotted across the road, and plucked one of the flapping, fluttering sheets of paper from its moorings about the lamp post. The foreign shapes of the writing looked hurried, unprofessional. Her agency would never have allowed official messages to go out in this state; even the civilian police made an effort to get things printed properly. They must be terribly deprived here.
Captain Foley strode along the road with his hands in his pockets, and didn’t wait for her.
“Sir,” Irene panted, when she’d finally run fast enough to catch up. “Sir, what’s—”
“What’s wrong?” Captain Foley finished, without vehemence. He kept up the pace that had her scurrying, feeling like a mouse beneath the Underground trains. “That remains to be seen. We shall need this translated.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Captain lowered his face into the collar of his coat and the bindings of his scarf and added in a tone she couldn’t altogether understand, “But if I don’t miss my mark, that was Maureen in the back of that car.”
It must be the wind, Irene thought, trying to length her stride to keep up. The wind, and the muffling effects of his scarf. For a moment he’d sounded almost triumphant.
* * *
East of the refinery – the one landmark that truly stood out in the city, although Maureen supposed that was different when one grew up in the place – after some hours of searching, she found the Party building in question. It was dilapidated, and surrounded by less unloved structures, and even had it not been crowned with a mast, there was a helpful picture of one included on the sign outside.
The sign was in both Russian and Chinese.
She wandered around the outside of the building, looking for the appropriate spot, the correct marker. There was a loose brick in the older structure, at foot level, shielded from the infernal snow by the overhang of the room.
Maureen reached into her pocket and went through the messages.
One, for canalside drop.
Two, removed from Star Kitchen drop, for returning to Captain Foley – once she’d let Mr. Shoe have a crack at it, of course – the slip of paper she’d taken to carrying around with her after Mr. Shoe’s warning, which simply read, “I have been taken, get help” – a sort of insurance policy – and, buried under everything else including her cigarettes, Three.
Maureen rolled the thing up into the shape and approximate size of a cigarette, and wedged it between the brick and the top of the brick’s resting place.
Not much chance of being observed in this wretched awful weather, she thought, hands still clumsy and almost numb. She straightened up and heard, over the groan of the wind, two people talking by the window above her head. It was a damn pity she couldn’t understand a word they were saying, although judging by how much spiteful laughter punctuated their words, it was probably not a conversation worth overhearing.
She backed away quietly over the snow.
The truth was that even with all the subterfuge and the covert message drops and the daring-do involved in sneaking food to her party every day – it would have been far easier had Captain Foley secured them any money, but it appeared their presence in this city was something of a change of plan – she was getting a trifle bored.
All the zipping about with the sabs had been exhausting and smelly but at least they’d been going somewhere and doing something.
Maureen ached to be off. The city didn’t have much more to offer and it was jolly hard to snoop properly if one didn’t learn the language. After the first day with the cigarettes she’d seen nothing else that looked like it might pass for Underground Activity, and she would of course need Pass Codes and Countersigns and so on if she were to infiltrate and attempt to Become Part of It.
The best she could do was to depart from the Party building with its mast and go and make another attempt to stumble upon more nefarious activity. There was sure to be something going on, and if there was one thing she was coming to understand, it was that no one jolly well expected her. If they didn’t expect her, they weren’t prepared against her, and the Element of Surprise should carry her through to the point where she could begin to Organise A Resistance.
Occupied with this thought, Maureen continued on down the road.
Some footsteps caught up with her from behind.
Maureen whirled around, wondering who the damn hell could possibly be keeping pace with her and what on earth for. A nasty thought flashed across her mind concerning the sort of stories she’d heard about Oriental Men and Lone Women, but she dismissed it.
It was hardly the weather for that kind of behaviour.
“Miss,” said a heavily-accented voice in English. “Miss.”
Its owner was just a little taller than her, and most of that seemed to be his hat. It was the military sort favoured by the policemen she’d seen here. He had a longer coat than they did, and she could see a fur collar on it. Quite decadent, she thought, sniffily. Rather corrupt. Hardly in keeping with the ideals of Communism, was it?
“Yes?” Maureen said, putting a cigarette in her mouth.
“Ah, you are English,” he said.
“I speak English,” said Maureen, whose understanding was that her family had in fact been in the country since roughly the time of Alfred the Great.
The man in the ostentatious coat with the peaked cap did not register this. He only said, “What are you leaving under bricks, Miss?”
“Nothing,” said Maureen. “I just wanted to know why they were loose.” She took out her matches and cupped the end of the cigarette. Lighting in this kind of wind was an exercise in considerable patience.
“Repair work takes time,” said the man with his stupid coat and his aggressively clean-shaven face and his grim little smile. “You are not visiting our city at its best.”
“I’ve seen worse,” said Maureen, who, even in the face of interrogation felt she could hardly bring herself to utter the perfectly British lie that it was a Lovely Place.
“Empty your pockets,” said the policeman, without any further conversation.
“That’s littering,” Maureen said severely, pulling hard to keep her cigarette lit. “My mother taught me not to do that.”
“Empty your pockets,” the policeman repeated. He did not appear to be bothered by the cold. Maureen wished she could say the same thing herself, but her feet had gone unfortunately numb.
Maureen tossed some cigarettes into the snow.
“Inside-out,” said the policeman, struggling with the phrasing. He made an illustrative gesture which could also, Maureen thought, be taken for something quite obscene.
She turned her pockets inside out, and palmed the emergency message as she did so.
The policeman crouched, and picked up the two remaining messages. He put them in his pocket. “That will be all.”
“Thanks awfully,” Maureen said, smoke whipping into her eyes as her cigarette abruptly went out. “I could just have put them in a bin, if you had any.”
“Or under a brick,” said the policeman, with a sharp, sour little smile. He appeared to be thinking about something, and while Maureen was waiting for him to spit it out, he lunged forward, and shoved a black cloth bag over her head.
“Hoi,” Maureen growled, and tried to kick him. She twisted to one side, and then to another, keeping her arms as far apart as she could. She had heard one of the chaps at the Docks during the strike say that keeping your wrists separate meant they couldn’t handcuff you, if they didn’t use the old, chain-link cuffs.
The policeman punched her in the side of the head so hard that she fell down.
Maureen tried to aim a kick at where she supposed his feet might be, her head ringing, but connected only with air.
* * *
A car engine sounded, growing closer.
The policeman kicked her in the stomach so hard that she spat bile into the inside of the bag, and curled up. Maureen wrinkled her nose at the smell. She tried to keep her ears open, but the rumble of an idling engine and some brisk Chinese were all she heard, and her head rang and throbbed, and her stomach ached abominably.
Hands picked her up and threw her like a suitcase into the back of a car.
A door slammed shut.
“Give me the message,” said the policeman, from beside her.
“What message?”
“The message you have in your hand,” said the policeman. He took it from between her fingers.
“I don’t suppose,” Maureen said, trying to angle her face away from the wet patch inside the bag as the car pulled away, “You’re going to be so good as to tell me who the hell you are?”
“I am Captain Sheng,” said the policeman, as the car changed direction. “And I have been expecting you, Miss Maureen Phelps.”
Well, Maureen thought, as he hit her in the side of the head with something heavier than his fist, that made a change.
Heavy: Twenty-Two
In the almost unused workers’ canteen Lian Lin sat across the table from Weng Ho, looking down at the bowl of rice she had brought from her rooms, which was now cold and unappetising. There was nothing in the workers’ kitchen because everyone either brought their own food or purchased it from vendors in the city. Lian Lin had never been in the habit of doing this, and so far, the habit had not formed. The winter of ’69 was not a time for forming new habits.
Weng Ho was talking. Lian Lin acknowledged him without listening. The workers’ canteen was in the old part of the building, because no one used it, and it was therefore not worth recreating in the newer wings. He had come to visit her from the Agricultural Policy buildings, which lay on the far side of the Northern end of their district.
“…helped me off the road,” he finished, and put more of his own meal into his mouth.
He had said a neighbour cooked it for him. Lian Lin hoped, in a distant sort of way, that the neighbour was a pretty girl. Perhaps he would fall in love with her instead. He could enjoy his exile in Karamay with a pretty girl who cooked him bland Northern food because he would never realise it was an exile inflicted on him for his association with her.
Lian Lin nodded.
“I tried to ask her what she was doing here,” Weng Ho said, with his mouth full, “but I don’t think she understood.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Lian Lin. She poked her rice for a while, until Weng Ho took pity on her and dropped some of his own lunch into her bowl. She did not thank him: his neighbour might have mastered the art of cooking rice so that it did not ruin the pan or cause a cloud of smoke, but her Northern food was still bland and boring and pathetic and tasteless. It contained no fish, no fruit, no chillies, nothing but stringy sheep meat and sheep butter, and oil which had travelled, and pickled vegetables which had travelled. It was a sad, sickly invalid of a dish.
She picked at it. Even the starving Westerners no doubt ate better than this.
Weng Ho stood with some talk of the picture house on his lips, some promise to show her greenhouses lingering. His wonders lingered in the air like the smell of crude oil, waiting for an answer she didn’t feel any need to give.
When he finally left, Lian Lin went out into the ugly weather to Ensure The Fitness of Body and Mind In Service of Great Leader by walking around the buildings.
The wind dragged her this way and that. No other living figure was in sight.
She dropped to halt her shoes from a merciless slide off her feet: loose stones numbered so many in the older part of the building that it would be a labour equal to rock-breaking in prison to examine each one for signs of being a drop point. Her shoes required several re-fittings to remain upon her heels instead of lazily reneging on the promise of covering her frozen toes.
Lian Lin returned to the cupboard in which she was slowly filing away past correspondences. Comrade Sheng and his Uighar friend with her Uighar name had left her tea; it was cold, and Lian Lin suspected it had been cold when they left it for her.
She drank it anyway.
As the light began to fade she received the day’s People’s Daily. She went back outside with it, into the gloom and the falling snow. No further codes embedded in the print; now it was only the key. The editor gone, his replacement more loyal.
Lian Lin made a more thorough check, and at last came upon what she sought: a note, in new hand-writing, its character laborious and poorly-formed, heavy strokes where they should be thin, as if copied by someone who did not know their calligraphy and only knew the final shape. A child’s note.
She stood in the lee of the old mission building with the People’s Daily in front of her face and her heart in her mouth, scolding herself for her carelessness, her indifference:
