Heavy, p.43
Heavy, page 43
A rendezvous can be arranged.
The word was unfamiliar. The context of the remainder of the message, a team is in your province, suggested that it meant a kind of contact, perhaps an escort. The wind tugged at the newspaper and she let it take the thing, sweeping the paper away from her like a bird taking flight.
She consumed the message as the wings of the People’s Daily danced away over the buildings, moving at a furious pace: more a vengeful spirit than a bird, its business conducted, its seeds sown, whisked away into the coming night, reporting to its masters.
Lian Lin watched the dancing, hurrying sheets of paper as they leapt and fell and tumbled on through the air, meeting their deaths against the sides of buildings and the rooftops of others, spreading words unseen and unwanted onto homes, Workers’ Offices, the snow-sodden streets. Their escapes ended in sacrifice; words leaking onto walls, propaganda carefully-composed now carelessly-spent. Lian Lin put her head down and trudged back into the buildings.
Another tea awaited her in the records cupboard. This one smelled of urine.
* * *
It became quickly Lian Lin’s habit to check each day for new notes. They came without hesitation or delay: someone in the city was checking as quickly as she was replying. The thought filled her with sudden fear; that she was already under surveillance, that she was already suspect seemed clear from her exile, even if it had placed her in such a convenient spot. Perhaps, she believed, as she dumped box after box of documents into new cells, it was because the place was so convenient for her.
Had she not been requested to find radio codes? Was she not perfectly-placed to do so? Were the authorities not, then, merely waiting for her to incriminate herself? Were they not, in fact, leaving these coded messages in their bad handwriting to draw her out?
Lian Lin stopped in her puzzling as the Uighar woman came to the records door and said, without any kind of correct, polite, or cautious circumvention, no attempt to save her face:
“Do you not speak Rìyǔ?”
“No,” said Lian Lin, dropping another box heavily onto a metal shelf. “No one speaks that language. It is dead.”
It was possible, she thought, that the remaining peasants still stumbling about in the mountains of those dead islands in the Pacific spoke it, but they did not do so in front of their betters, their occupiers, if they knew what was good for them. It was the language of murderers. Once the Avenging Wind campaign had followed the falling A-bombs, the remainder of the dead empire learned to ask for mercy in Mandarin.
“But your father was a Rìběn soldier,” said the Uighar woman, leaning on the doorframe. “Everybody says so.”
“I was born in forty-six,” said Lian Lin, picking up another box. “Rìběn was already dead. How would an Imperial soldier be my father? You should not trust gossip, Comrade, it will ignore facts and speak to you in falsehoods and that way opens the path to treacherous talk. Do not listen to gossip.”
The Uighar woman ignored this. “He could have been hiding,” she said.
“Oh, now you think the People’s Army would allow a Rìběn man to hide here? You doubt their diligence? Should I report you, Comrade?”
She only laughed, briefly, at Lian Lin. “You have no father on your records, Comrade Lin, I think it is because he was a Rìběn man.” Her manner was light, as if she were mocking Lin for having outdated shoes, or an ugly haircut. “Perhaps he was an American, though. Maybe that is why you look so funny.”
“I’m Han,” said Lian Lin shortly, taking the woman’s rudeness in stride. Had she not heard worse all her life? Had her—had the old woman not said, People will strike what they do not understand, like monkeys beating a book? “I look funny to you.”
But the woman shook her head and said, “Comrade Sheng is Han, you don’t look like him.”
“Comrade Sheng is a man,” Lian Lin pointed out, as if she were talking to a child. “You should not listen to gossip, Comrade.”
The Uighar woman folded her arms and said with a little smile, “Gossip says you came here because you wanted to marry your sweetheart, but you haven’t married him yet. Gossip says you come from Nanjing where the Rìběn Imperial soldiers were run back into the sea. Gossip says you have no friends here and yet you do not try to make any. It is not gossip that says the next quota for Beijing will have your name in it, Comrade Lin.” She reached up to close the records cupboard door. “It pays to listen to gossip, Comrade Lin, if you don’t want to meet with the police.”
Lian Lin watched the door close. It was a warning, she realised; not friendly, perhaps, but a warning. Whenever the next search for Rightists came – and she knew now, they would keep coming, there would never be a final purge, they would come and they would come – her name would be offered. There was no one to protect her.
And so Weng Ho would not receive his consolation life with his consolation wife here in the horrid north with its greenhouses; he would be implicated.
She began to shake. The box in her hands rustled.
Go to ground, Little Fox, she had said. But we will dig you out.
* * *
“Under cover of night,” Foley said, as they filled up the last sack, and Miss Gaitskill’s panting breaths returned from the upstairs room with news that no one was visible near the mosque. “Fortunately for us, night will be along before you can say knife at this time of year.”
“If she hasn’t given away our position already,” said Ernie. He was on his feet. He looked as if his skull was speaking to the world through the flesh mask of his face, but he was on his feet.
Ernie seemed well enough to walk; the snow was still falling, and would cover their tracks.
He put his hand into his pocket and felt the so-called lucky penny, the coin with the hole in it, that Maureen had tried to give Miss Gaitskill and which now resided with him. Perhaps she should have kept it.
“Have a little more faith in Maureen’s fortitude,” said Foley, tartly. “If they hit her hard enough in the head she won’t remember where we are anyway.”
Pig caught Miss Gaitskill’s eye. The look on her face spoke perfectly to the feeling in his chest; he instead shouldered his bag and stood ready, waiting.
Ernie said, “She’ll tell them whatever they want to hear, Dick, that’s what torture makes you do.”
“Didn’t work on you,” said Foley, with a short, sharp laugh.
“I didn’t have anything to say that your people wanted to hear,” said Ernie, and there was a softness in his breath that was like poison in Pig’s ears. He wanted to slap his hands over them, but he knew what he’d hear if he did: the sound of his own blood flowing, like the sound of the sea crashing on Surt’s cliffs. “Nothing I said was going to change what they did.”
“Let’s hope she comes to the same conclusion,” said Foley, swinging his own bag onto his back.
* * *
They began walking as soon as the sun went down. Cars on the roads passed with their headlamps on, but in this part of the city it seemed they were few, their unfamiliar engine sounds purring along the increasing snow only rarely. Foley led them away from the extravagance of street lamps – light in the darkness, where no one had to fear reconnaissance flights, where no one marked the passage of bombers – and between buildings standing dark and empty.
They moved away from the direction they’d come from the railway station. Pig was lost in seconds; the sun gone, any idea of north, south, east or west became purely academic.
The snow fell like feathers, the air stinging his face. Clouds above obliterated stars, most of the moon. Cold air sank into his lungs.
Ahead, Foley whispered encouragement to Miss Gaitskill. There was fondness there, Pig thought. There must be. He talked to her, sometimes, like a man talking to someone else’s dog: the same jollying inflection, the same clear assumption that she didn’t really understand what was being said to her. So he must like her.
People liked dogs, didn’t they?
Pig thought of his father’s dog, long-dead. A black lab bitch, Sheba, who’d sat by him at Michael’s empty memorial; sat by his bed in fifty-three as the wet sickness in his lungs dragged him under, her muzzle on the blankets, her tail thumping on the floor whenever he reached up to touch her. Grey about the chops (just like me, he’d joked, when they put him into bed); she’d cried when they took her to Harris, in the town, to be given the injection. Probably knew it was coming.
He tightened his grip on Ernie’s upper arm, tugged him over a snow drift.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Ernie muttered, hitting Pig in the side with his free arm, reaching across his body. The blow was not hard – even accounting for the man’s diminishing strength, it was not intended to hurt him – and Pig barely stirred from the recollection of Sheba’s black tail flopping thump, thump on the floorboards. He’d wanted to pat her, some kind of comfort, as his father lay there struggling, struggling through each breath, drowning on dry land, but fear of what he was capable of stayed his hand then. Who knew what kind of mercy would come out of him?
“There’s no need to hit me,” he mumbled.
Ernie stared at him in the darkness. “I didn’t,” he said, and it seemed like he meant it.
He let go of Ernie’s arm, and looked about. Foley had vanished. Ahead there was a building with no lights, its windows like the black eyes of insects staring down at him, a blot on the white surface of the snow. A blot among the reflected lamp light.
Movement from within. Pig froze, foolishly, a hare in a snowfield. He squinted at the shadows, moving through shadows. One tall, one short figure. A moment later, Foley’s voice, just audible, from the cracked-open door. “Get on.”
Pig turned to relay this message to Ernie: there were only footprints in the snow.
“Fuck,” Pig muttered, and snow whipped up under his feet as he whirled around, his boots churning up slush that immediately re-froze. The footprints, filling up with falling flakes, still showed a dark line through the empty buildings, perpendicular to their route, neither the way they’d come nor the way they were going. “Fuck, fuck.”
He scrambled over snow whose solid core spoke of building materials under the drift. Twice he stubbed his toe; once he almost turned his ankle. He found Ernie soon enough, making good time in the narrow space between half-finished walls topped with snow, keeping to the shadows.
Ernie put on a burst of speed.
His frailty belied some deeper determination: he drove himself on through the snow like a wounded animal, his strange, twisted-legged gait, his floundering footsteps. Everything reminiscent of the Boxing Day Hunt, when the dogs drove their red-coated quarry through her last, painful steps.
Pig dove at him as he tried to dodge around the corner, hampered by the drifts, hampered by his own weakness.
He caught Ernie by the heel, brought him flat, tugged at his ankle.
Ernie kicked at his face, reached for the top of the nearest wall, four feet up and too far away. His nail-less hands in their woollen sheaths slapped helplessly at the snow. There was no shouting this time: only the far-off whisper of cars, the wild thudding of his own heart with no recriminations, no accusations spat. Only the pant of breath muffled by falling snow.
Ernie’s foot caught him in the face. In the wintry silence Pig heard loose cartilage in the remains of his nose crunch into the wounded skull behind it. Flashes of red, blackened by the low light, splashed onto the snow, stained it as if the earth itself were wounded.
He dragged Ernie toward him, kicking, struggling, even biting: feral, furious, silent, hopeless.
Pig twisted Ernie’s arms around his own chest, tugged the man’s fingers – soft-ended, weak – into his own armpits, until he fully embraced himself. They’d done the same to him in the ward in Kabul when he’d tried, feverish, to claw through a wall, shrieking about mines. He was sure the orderlies at Michael’s hospital must have done the same.
Ernie wheezed and spat.
Pig tried to pull them both to their feet but only succeeded in slamming Ernie into the ground from three or four feet up, hoping to a God who never listened and wasn’t there that he had enough snow below him to cushion the blow.
Ernie wriggled feebly, hissed, choked.
Another car passed. Snow fell into Pig’s ear.
“Stop doing this,” Pig said. He rolled Ernie over: the intensity of hatred in his stare could have melted snow.
He felt fragile when Pig lifted him up, his arms still pulled across his body. Something broken or disjointed. He was still heavy, and he wouldn’t raise his feet to walk, forcing Pig to drag him along, stumbling with his feet either side of Ernie’s limp, obstinate boots.
Blood froze and refroze on Pig’s lips: warmed by his breath, frozen by the air. Ernie’s breaths were uneven, choking, ugly as his own. He turned his back on the direction of their progress, and pulled Ernie backward.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Ernie whispered, savagely.
“You don’t know what he’ll do if I let you go,” Pig said, glancing over his own shoulder for obstacles. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
“You don’t make any sense,” Ernie said, in hopeless anger. “God, Maureen was right about you.”
Pig didn’t answer him. The building Foley had disappeared into was not far away; within easy sight.
“I think you fractured something,” Ernie added, in a very quiet voice.
Pig closed his eyes and walked backward over the snow, fresh flakes falling into his eyelashes, cold air burning in his lungs. That’s what happens to everything I touch, Pig thought, feeling his way through the bumps and mounds of re-frozen snow. That’s just what I am.
The white-hot brand of guilt in his chest paid little attention to this; it glowed brightly, and it burned him.
* * *
They left the mosque as soon as they had stripped it of every useful item. Captain Foley moved with brisk efficiency, which Irene tried to imitate, collecting up everything of use. Without a pause for breath, he led them out into the city, towards one of the places they had scouted out before. Irene realised now that the Captain had been making contingency plans, finding safe houses which would serve them if they fell into situations like this one.
Ernie had said to her, one night, that Captain Foley – always calling him by the boyish nickname, Dick – had been eternally interested in making sure nothing could go wrong: belt-and-braces, he’d said. Even when they were taken by surprise, even when they were sunk, Ernie had said, “Dick would be almost obsessed with preparation.”
He’d said, too, all Dick cared about, on Surt, was making sure they all survived until the rescue planes came for them. If they were coming at all. Someone had to keep them all alive, Dick had said. See that they all made it.
“Did you?”
“No.”
The new safe house was only a mile and a half away, scarcely time enough to be discovered. The snow slowed them, and Ernie’s health slowed them, and, to her shame, her short legs slowed them. But they arrived inside the empty foyer of an unfinished tower block, of the Corbusier sort, before nightfall.
Captain Foley had Ridell light a fire. He busied himself immediately with drawing out a rudimentary map of the city, based on their explorations, leaving white patches where they hadn’t walked, where he wasn’t sure.
“Sir,” Irene asked, as the first flames of the fire began to flicker into life, licking at scraps on the concrete floor, “where will they have taken her?”
He didn’t hear her. She stepped closer, bag in hand, sweat frozen against her face beginning to thaw uncomfortably now that they were inside.
“For the rescue mission, Sir,” she began.
“A moment, I’m thinking,” said Captain Foley, frowning over the map.
“She has information she can give them if she’s talked into defecting,” Irene pointed out. She bit her tongue; Maureen would not be talked into defecting. No one trusts defectors; the watchword and motto of the organisation. They scooped them up, sweet-talked them, and locked them away safely. Gently cajoled them into writing back to friends at home: how marvellous it is in the Free West.
Irene spared a glance for Mr. Shoe, Ernie, hunched up by the nascent fire.
He had recovered some of his strength, perhaps, but his body was beyond repair. He would always be bent, broken, scarred and distorted. He would always be unsteady and mistrustful. He would never breathe easily – she remembered the photographs, again. The state of his hands as Ridell had carried him into the Morris two or three lifetimes ago. The blood.
And that was us, she thought, that was us, the kind and merciful Free West, the Allies. Who knows what the Communists will do to her?
Of course it would be worse. Of course it would be harsher. Of course Maureen would be crippled and bent and starved and drowned and finally flung in a pit when she had no further use. The reports had always been clear; it was why they went to such lengths to get back Our Men And Women, Captain Foley had told her, time and again. One couldn’t leave one’s own people in places like that, to suffer those things. No unnecessary deaths, Captain Foley said. Never. Colonel Braithwaite would not allow it.
“Party buildings here,” said Captain Foley, at last, tapping his own map.
“Is that where she will be?”
“Mm? Yes, I expect so.”
Irene nodded.
Ridell departed for a side-room, answering the call of nature.
She recalled the dismal records of Ernie – Mr. Shoe’s interrogation. The Water Cure, and under the heading: own urine, 1 pint. In her work she’d always known that the various Cures took place, but on paper, usually, they sounded bland and unremarkable. One filed them. That was all.
Ernie got to his feet, stiff as a marionette.
“Going for a piss,” he said, to no one in particular. “He’s set me off.”
Ernie – Mr. Shoe – didn’t head for the rear room Ridell had entered.
A mild frisson of discomfort twitched Irene’s skin and her memory: men always stood in rows and urinated together. It was impossible to avoid seeing in the places where the Church went seeking souls for salvation. Drunkards, but sober men too. They had no shame about it. They had nowhere else to go.
