Heavy, p.50
Heavy, page 50
Jack clenched and unclenched his hands, ignoring the blood on his face. Ernie thought of the conversation on Surt, Dick’s look of horror: I can’t keep it to myself any more. My conscience is much stronger than my fear of him, he’d said.
And later: I think he lied to me about Swineheart.
Staring up at Jack Ridell’s blood-streaked face as he finally wiped at the sluggish flow with the dreamlike motions of a man too drunk to feel pain, Ernie thought: Blind loyalty only ran in one direction. So Jack would hold up Dick’s mission until it broke him in half, but Dick – he was sure of this – would drop them in the shit the moment it suited him.
“You’re bleeding again,” he said.
Jack shrugged, staring at his own blood. “It happens.”
“Why?”
He’d meant: Why are you still listening to him, but Jack wasn’t going to answer that one in a hurry.
“Scars on the inside pull the membranes too tight. They break easily,” he said, instead, still staring at his own blood. There was something of the old Jack in the way he said it, something of Cleverest boy in my class, and One day I’ll go to the seminary, and I’m going to learn the whole dictionary. The way he’d been older than Ernie and Simon and seemed younger, his country bumpkin accent and his absolute confidence.
It was just the words, Ernie thought. Just that he had said something longer than no and fuck you.
Alright, Ernie thought. We’ll talk about this. We’ll talk until he leaves go and I can just… slip away. “How—?”
“They got infected,” said Jack. He rubbed at the blood on his hand with his other hand. It had soaked into the wool. “By the time I found someone.”
“All right,” said Ernie, patiently. “But what happened?”
Jack fixed him with a dead stare and said, “I panicked.”
Struggling for sense, Ernie nodded once or twice, and said, “You panicked and your face got infected.”
The next words were too loud, clumsy and childish. “Rankin trod on something. It clicked. I ran blind. The others didn’t.”
He didn’t bother to explain who Rankin was and Ernie didn’t ask. The story stank of military service.
“I dived for cover,” said Jack, now so quiet he was almost inaudible, “went face-first through a wire dump. Blast tore off half my uniform. Buried me. I could hear them burning. Thought I’d gone blind. Smelled them burning.”
He looked as if he were drawing out splinters from his flesh. His fingers twitched and curled. Ernie thought, We all wanted to live. Don’t you remember what they said in the Times? We were ‘a testament to the strong will and determination to live that made British Boys great.’ Survivors.
“Senegalese Seconds dug me out after three, four days,” Jack concluded, glancing at him with distant eyes, muddy blue. “I could feel the flies. Inside my face. The flies found me first.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose an eye,” Ernie murmured.
“That’s what they said,” said Jack, hollowly.
“Fear the horseman rides on chargers who may throw him off at any moment; it is habit that they do not,” Ernie quoted. “Xiao Huli wrote that. I think you—”
But Jack interrupted him, sullen in the grip of some all-consuming memory. “Maybe it’s her we’ve come for.”
He couldn’t have meant it as a barb, but it felt like one.
You could have got her out, Ernie’s conscience whispered. You could have gone for her. You ran away instead. You ran blind like Jack did.
“She’s dead, Jack,” he said, trying to shut out the doubt with the firmness of his voice.
An odd sort of desperation, ugly with something Ernie faltered to recognise as hope, wrung higher notes out of the thick and deep voice that rolled from Jack’s chest. He clutched with his hands, momentarily throttling the air. “Simon, then, you only have his word—”
The boil of guilt lanced, Ernie had no more power to prevent himself from a sudden shout than he had to unroot himself during Irene’s attack. He spat out, “Simon should be dead, he is bloody well dead!”
Should be, whispered his conscience. Should be.
He realised he should have said, so you don’t trust his word either; but by then it was too late.
* * *
In the end, she did not trouble herself with an excuse. There was no one between the records cupboard and the side door to ask where she was going. Comrade Sheng had taken it upon himself to share a story his cousin had told him about a foreigner – how absurd foreigners were, Comrade Sheng said, the things they believed – and everyone was listening to him.
Lian Lin took two sheaves of expired codes, one sheet of fresh ones, the manual on transistor radios, and, in a final act of defiance, a cup of tea.
She drank the tea as she walked around the building. A casual excursion from an office where, as far as she had seen, the Workers of the District did little in the way of Working. Perhaps they thought that no one would ever notice. Perhaps they felt secure. In another life, Lian Lin knew, she would be the one to file reports of their laziness, but now it suited her as Comrade Sheng’s arrogance suited her.
Lian Lin left the tea cup lying in the road and went across to the empty building opposite.
Outside the decaying Mission building she paused, pulling herself upright, thinking of steel in Chengdu and imagining steel in her bones. She would be brave; she would be the girl she had been when she broke into houses and set seditious texts to the flame; there was nothing to fear. Once she had moved like fire in the name of righteousness and now she would move like a river in the name of survival.
A flock of birds exploded from a hole in the roof and she almost swallowed her own tongue.
A good omen, she wondered, or a bad one?
The birds settled again, slowly, and Lian Lin unfroze her legs from the spot as her feet went numb. In time, she thought, when she had settled into the West; there would be a chance to resume… to resume… to re—they would watch her for that.
She opened the back door of the Mission just far enough to step inside.
Darkness enveloped her, and she felt her way along the wall, wishing for a weapon, wishing she had any idea how to use a weapon more efficient than the cudgels they’d used on the bourgeois book-owners, the antique-hoarders, the professors with their stockpiles of forbidden words.
A peasant’s weapon is a pure weapon; or they’d simply not the bullets to spare on Rightists at the time.
She heard English from ahead of her. Old memories stirred.
A voice raised until it was barely decipherable: angry, wounded, and shouting, “HE DIDN’T LIE ABOUT THAT. SIMON IS DEAD.”
She caught her breath, and felt for the gap in the wall ahead of her that would allow her entrance, unsure if she wanted it. There was still time – she could return to the station, alert the authorities – have Comrade Sheng call his cousin, if he could be made to believe her – she could save herself with the simple admission that she’d been duped – they would – they would not listen to Quota Lin…
She stepped out of the shadow, blinked in a room that smelt of birds and dirty people, and dust.
A foreign man and a dark woman half his height stood in the opposite doorway, him in front of her, her head down. Closer to herself was a tall foreign man with straw-coloured hair whose face had been horribly mutilated, with blood bright and red on his hands. Closer still stood a figure she recognised and whose presence turned her own blood to water in her veins.
It is a trap, she thought, her heart tugging her throat shut. The only weapon she had brought was a handful of paper. Even the teacup lay abandoned in the snow; the keys to the broadcast room might take an eye at close quarters but they all, surely, came with guns.
Her mother’s Western friend, Mr. Shu, turned on his heel and met her eye.
She saw his wide, round eyes grow wider in recognition.
Ernie stood rooted to the floor; no sooner had Dick returned with Irene cowed and silent behind him than a stranger had ploughed in through the back door of the Mission, making a mockery of any attempt to hide themselves or protect Dick’s precious bloody perimeter.
It took a moment for him to understand that this was much worse than he thought.
She had changed, of course. Ernie had barely thought of her since she began to spend more and more time away from Xiao Huli’s home, as she faded away from her ageing mother. Absurdly, it had seemed a relief – even as Xiao Huli spoke of it in puzzlement, in anger, in pain; She has joined the Red Guard.
He let his arms droop by his sides and thought, staring at her, Jack was right.
Lian Lin, Li Lin’s only child, standing in the bird shit several thousand miles from home, with her fists in her pockets and her face adult with years and with cares. It was as if a ghost had walked into the room and stood and stared through him.
Before he could find a single word to say, Dick had darted forward with his hand extended. He introduced himself, made some reference to communications, asked about some papers, swept her out of the room again in a whirlwind of conviviality with Irene at his heels – any thought that he didn’t know what he was preventing carefully undermined by his glance over his shoulder at Ernie.
By his God damned bloody smile.
Ernie twisted around and raised his hands to Jack. “You were right. Help me.”
“What?”
“Help me.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jack, which Ernie thought bitterly was the most honest thing he could have said. He could feel muscles shaking, his teeth beginning to grind against each other; somewhere in the back of his mind the endless minutes in the London basement seeped into the carefully unimagined hours before an old friend fell into the mass pit. A hot, bloody surge welled up inside Ernie’s chest.
“She killed Xiao Huli.”
The doubt in Jack’s face was a physical blow, but Ernie had been expecting it. Lian looked like a damn prim little bitch. She’d grown into that face, perhaps, and maybe she’d convinced herself as well as anyone looking at her that she was a clipped-winged bird with only office supplies on her mind, but he knew. He’d seen what the Red Guard left behind. Xiao Huli had poured out word upon word upon word of horror, as Mong Lee Chang had lain fractured from a beating. As the bruises and broken bones swept through the country. Her pain, her sorrow; her only child a willing partner in this brutality after all that she’d taught her.
“Please, Jack—”
The words died in his mouth. Dick came sauntering – sauntering – back into the room, two women at his heels; one a Church mixer and the other a Revolutionary one. Lian – no right to her mother’s name, none at all – relieved, her hands in her pockets, her tired eyes cautiously lighting on him.
Ernie felt his knife, folded in his pocket.
He unfolded it.
“You signed a warrant for her death,” he said.
Dick moved into the middle of the room, looking for some object or other. Dick’s head popped up, but he no more understood Mandarin now than he had before; perhaps it was just the tone that worried him. Perhaps it was his inability to understand.
“I have joined your side,” she replied, dark circles under her eyes. Her voice was strained. “Be happy. This is what you wanted for all of us.”
Ernie closed his fingers around the handle of the knife.
“You stabbed your own mother in the back,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, to keep Dick from guessing what he meant to do. “You turned her in for a good report, you little bitch.”
She said softly, “I would do it again a thousand times. You have no business to speak of it. She was not your mother.”
Ernie had meant to keep a conversation going, to walk up to her as if he was greeting a friend, and stick the knife between her ribs; Simon had told him he’d seen it done in a back alley by Victoria Park, once. He’d come shaken from an assignation with a girl and demanded that they find a pub. Spent more money than he should have, buying drinks they were still too young to be drinking. Backed into a corner and muttered around a cigarette: I just saw a man die.
He’d meant to do all this, but her soft voice, her quiet firmness – I would do it again a thousand times – rushed up to the back of his throat like bile and dragged him forward with his knife out, raised like a cartoon murderer.
* * *
Ernie’s shout echoed in the rafters and the remaining birds hopped and squirmed. Pig scrubbed at the underside of his nose, where Foley had blistered him, and tried to find a word like sorry that meant My brothers died too, and which would be a comfort and a gag. He couldn’t think of anything. He could only think, I never thought one of you would live when the other one was dead.
At the back of the hall something stirred, and Pig’s heart jumped. Behind him he heard Foley say something to Irene, and his stomach gave an unpleasant twist to partner it. There would be more blisters in his future if they were invaded.
He hoped against sad hope that the movement was another bird, but God, absent for all these years, showed no sign of relenting on his account.
A girl, younger than Irene, younger perhaps than Maureen, came out of the shadow of the doorway. She was Chinese, but she didn’t look like the locals Pig had glimpsed. She had a nose that dipped in further, was broader at the end. Had eyes that were rounder. Looked taller, to his eyes. Her hair was cut short, like the photographs of revolutionary soldiers, cut to her chin. She looked tired.
Ernie saw him staring, turned around.
From recognition to movement he flowed like water from a tap: there was less time to move than he had been granted even with Miss Gaitskill. One moment Ernie was still as something carved on the spot and the next he had a bayonet blade in his hand and an ugly expression as he lunged, lunged like the painted figures of Caesar’s murderers, lunged the way Pig had been trained over and over never to do—
He threw himself at Ernie’s legs, overshot his mark. Half-fed and quarter-healed, Ernie was not the lightning-fast wrathful angel he must have wished.
As he landed on top of Ernie he heard bones snapping and the sound went through to his stomach before the howl hit his ears.
“Please,” Pig begged, “stop making me hurt you.”
The shriek of pain held more than a little rage. Pig pried the bayonet from Ernie’s hand and threw it, indiscriminate, as far away as possible, and Ernie tried to bite him. Pig felt his bones move in unnatural ways, wished that Ernie would not compound his own sins.
“SHE KILLED XIAO HULI,” Ernie screamed, trying feebly to kick him. “SHE BETRAYED HER SHE HANDED HER IN SHE KILLED XIAO HULI SHE KILLED HER—”
Pig rolled off Ernie’s crumpled body and wheezed at the ceiling. There was murder in every direction, he thought. Everyone harboured this hideous shadow in their hearts. Rev. Prewitt had too much faith in the goodness of man; here all there was was death, fury and blood. He stooped over Ernie.
“I think your rib’s broken.”
“No thanks to you,” Ernie groaned, trying to curl up and twitching instead. “Where is she. Where is the little bitch. She killed Xiao Huli, do you hear me? She did it.”
“I hear you,” said Pig, giving Ernie his hand and, as an afterthought, his shoulder, to help him to his feet. He glanced up over Ernie at the girl: she stood frozen to the spot, shallow breaths, jaw tight. Hard to say if she was frightened or furious or both.
“Ridell,” said Foley, behind him. “A moment, thank you.”
Pig twisted about, trying to keep both the girl and the Captain in sight, Ernie hanging from his shoulder.
“Thank you,” said Foley, and shot Ernie in the stomach.
The shot roared through the mission building. Ernie looked numbly at his midriff as it darkened, blossoming outward in red. It looked blacked on his overalls.
“Put him down, Pig,” Foley said, in the same voice. “We’re going to be in rather a hurry.”
Ernie dug his nail-less fingers into Pig’s coat. “No, no, don’t let her – don’t—”
“He was of no further use,” Pig heard Foley explaining to the girl, “and he was becoming a liability. Irene, would you mind taking those bags? Thank you. I’m afraid we shall have to move quickly. Pig, I said put him down.”
“Nrk,” Ernie said, his fingers locked onto Pig’s sleeve. Pig tried to pry them off. “Don’t leave me.”
“Pig,” Foley sighed. “You’re endangering the entire mission. I can’t have him murdering the person I’ve come to save. Stop being so sentimental and get a move on.”
Pig folded Ernie’s fingers up and laid him on the floor.
“I don’t want to die,” Ernie protested thickly, through chattering teeth. “Jack please, don’t leave me here—”
* * *
It was not until the handsome foreign Captain – Fo Li – shot down Mr. Shu that Lian Lin took her next breath. He did not turn a hair; he did not break a sweat. He was as cool as the air outside; the dark little woman beside him just as composed, just as cold.
When Mr. Shu came for her she knew, in that instant, she would remember the moment in her dreams for the rest of her life. She knew his face would be etched upon her memories like a scar: a picture of simple naked hatred unlike any she had ever seen.
This man, this man had been a nothing, a faint presence in her house and sometimes gone; he had been another symbol of her mother’s unceasing, unforgivable decadence, her bourgeois preferences, her unthinking and her calculated disobedience to the ideals of Great Leader and the good practice of a neighbourhood.
Once she had even believed he might be her lover, until the old woman had laughed in her face and told her, as if it were only the love of a colour or a preference for more spice than was usual, that he harboured the passion of the Cut Sleeve, that her friend was no more than that. A friend.
This man, this face she knew of old – he had seemed old when she was younger, and fittingly seemed a ghost, the walking dead, when she was older. He had been torn apart and stitched back together. His hair was long and stood in curls. He had begun to grow a beard. He came pouring forth at her like a river of blood, like a wild dog, a sword in his hand.
