Bad Traffic (16 page)

Ding Ming and the policeman returned to the van. Ding Ming figured that when Mister Kevin and his lieutenants arrived, the important thing would be to get quickly out of the way. Perhaps, after it was over – the van returned, the policeman punished – Kevin in his gratitude would let him talk to his wife. He looked forward to returning to a world that might not be pleasant or comfortable but was at least safe and familiar.

He regretted his earlier hesitation at performing the action Kevin had asked of him. If he’d just done that then, perhaps this wouldn’t be happening now. His predicament could be seen as an instructive tale about the consequences of
disobedience
. Well, he’d learned his lesson. Those people owned him, he had to do what they wanted. His spirit was sick at the thought of that greasy cock in his mouth, but he imagined such troublesome selfishness would diminish over time.

He said, ‘Let’s go to sleep.’

‘My body is on Chinese time. It thinks it’s the morning. It’s telling me I should be getting up.’

‘If you get some sleep you’ll feel fresh tomorrow. I’m very sleepy. So tired. So sleepy.’ He conjured the term and,
imagining
his eyes a projector and the head of the policeman a screen, beamed the characters across:
shui jiao, shui jiao
. He heard tapping and rustling. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’m trying to build new ones by collecting tobacco from the butts in the ashtray.’

‘You could go to sleep and buy more cigarettes in the morning.’

‘Back home, the old guys smoke tobacco in rolled-up newspaper. When I was growing up, that was normal, we didn’t know any different. It’s harsh but you get used to it. I’ll smoke that page you were looking at… that picture of the lady with the huge tits. Might make for a smoother smoke, what do you think?’

He would return to Kevin, and he would be welcomed back, and after a rocky start that in years to come he would laugh about, his life here could begin. After some weeks he and his wife would be put on the same work detail and allowed to toil side by side. Their debt would steadily diminish and the money that they sent home would pay for all sorts of treats. ‘Good old Ding Ming,’ people would say. ‘A man at last, earning for his family.’ A burst of coughing and spluttering hacked the reverie apart.

‘
Wo cao
!’ said Jian. ‘This is rough.’ He coughed again. ‘Fuck me, this is rough.’ He looked gloomily at his cigarette, a tube of rolled newspaper, cocked upright to stop tobacco falling out of the end.

‘Stop smoking it, then.’

But the man persisted. It took him more than ten
minutes
to consume the thing, and when he finally stubbed it out and stopped coughing, the van was full of smoke and smelled of rank tobacco and burning paper.

‘My mouth is raw. I’m going out for a drink.’

Left alone, Ding Ming squatted on the seat with Kevin’s parka wrapped round him, and waited for Kevin and his lieutenants. He hoped there were many of them, that they would come suddenly, and that whatever was to happen, happen quickly.

Minutes passed, and he grew anxious at the policeman’s continued absence. What if he had taken it upon himself to go for a walk? The man was restless, it did not seem unlikely.
If he’d wandered away, then he’d see Mister Kevin and
company
arrive, and would hide from them, and Kevin would come up to this van and he would ask Ding Ming, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ and Ding Ming would have to say that he didn’t know, that the man had decided to wander off. ‘In the middle of the night?’ Kevin would say. And the suspicion would be there: ‘You warned him, didn’t you? You told him we were coming.’ And Kevin would be angry with him, and perhaps he would say, ‘I’m disappointed in you, William, so I won’t tell you where your wife is.’

He decided to look for the policeman and encourage him to return. His excuse for going out would be, he wanted a drink too. He took the empty cola bottle, he could fill it up. He was relieved to discover the man standing barely twenty paces away, throwing stones into the lake.

Ding Ming splashed a scoop of water into his face and rubbed it about with his hand. He could feel the pebbles beneath the thin canvas of his shoes. Bending to dip the
bottle
, his feet grew damp. He had holes in both soles.

‘Fill it right up,’ said Jian. ‘I don’t know if I can afford to buy anything for us to drink, I might have to spend all the money on petrol.’

‘So what will we do for food?’

‘Maybe we’ll see an orchard.’

‘Or get invited to a feast.’

‘I could do with a steamed bun.’

‘Beef noodles.’

‘Hotpot.’

‘Fish soup.’

‘Just a proper cup of tea,’ Jian said.

Ding Ming realised this was a good place to be when Kevin and his men came, he’d be able to run away. He’d head left, along the pebble beach, then turn onto the road and run
uphill where it curled around the lake and up a ridge. If he got on that road he could outrun anyone, and from that ridge he’d be able to see everything that transpired.

He looked at the policeman’s big hands and remembered how they had struck him and probed his split lip, still sore, with his tongue. Yes, much better to be out here than
confined
with him in the van. All he had to do, then, was keep the man talking.

He brought up a topic that was much on his mind. ‘Have you ever…’ It was difficult to give it voice, but he forced himself on. ‘Have you ever had a woman suck on your… little brother?’

‘What a question.’

‘What was it like?’

‘There is no greater joy.’

‘Was it your wife?’

‘You won’t get a wife to do that. You have to pay a whore.’

‘Do foreign men do it? Is it something that they do to each other? I mean, is it normal?’

‘Who can say what the habits of these people are? Why are you asking?’

‘I saw it in a film.’

‘No, you didn’t. Your boss asked you, didn’t he?’

Ding Ming lowered his gaze. The policeman was astute. What else had he noticed? ‘Yes.’

‘And that’s why you were running away.’

‘Yes.’

‘I suggest you bite it off. He won’t ask again.’

‘Thank you for that advice.’

‘I’d get another job if I were you.’

But Ding Ming, writhing with embarrassment, was
desperate
to change the subject. ‘What’s being a policeman like?’

‘It’s a job. At least I don’t have to suck cocks. Well, not literally.’

‘Lots of banquets?’

‘Invitations most nights.’

Ding Ming knew the kind of banquets policemen held – dozens of courses, as much booze as you could drink, and all on state funds.

‘But… Sometimes you have to let the villains go, just because someone with clout told you. These days it’s all the wrong way round. I see scum driving big cars and being the big boss when they should be in jail.’

He threw a stone. Ding Ming threw one after it and was disappointed to see that his went barely half as far.

‘Sometimes we get told when to hold executions by the
hospital
. They’ve some guy in, he’ll pay a lot for new corneas, can we shoot one of our rapists? You start to lose… you get lost… everyone’s making money, you want to be in on it. Everyone else has an Audi, you want one too. I found out about this
colleague
of mine, guy under me… he took a bribe off a murderer to get the charge dropped. The victim’s family bribed him even more to reopen the case. He went back to the murderer, got even more money. You know what I did when found out?’

‘What did you do?’

‘I took a cut.’

Ding Ming threw another stone, a little further this time.

‘How glorious to be an official.’

‘When I was young I wanted to make a difference. I was stupid and wrong, but I cared. I wanted to build socialism – we all did. Then you find out it’s just another racket, and you’re a foot soldier for the biggest tong of all.’

To Ding Ming this was hardly news. Any peasant could tell you: the government were a bunch of gangsters. The emperor might be benign but his officials were venal and that’s how it had been for five thousand years. You didn’t expect to hear it, though, from the mouths of policemen.

He said, ‘I wanted to learn English. I got up every
morning
and studied under the bedclothes and at night I studied under streetlamps. I won a prefecture scholarship to teacher training college and I was very happy. I had top marks in all my classes and my English level was better than my
teachers
. But the township said the college has informed us that you are not suitable, and they took my scholarship away. They gave it to the cousin of an official in the public
security
bureau. I met that man, the cousin. He could not speak one word of English. Not one word.’

Ding Ming threw a stone, and this one went twice as far as the last.

‘That’s a pity,’ said the policeman quietly.

Ding Ming did not want to dwell upon past injustices, to do so, he knew well, was to paralyse himself with
pointless
emotion. He turned away from the lake, as it seemed the sight of all that dark water was encouraging this morbid bout of reminiscence.

‘Because I didn’t graduate, I can’t be a teacher. I should never have tried to get an education. It was a waste of time and money when I should have been working.’

‘How did you get over here?’

‘Snakeheads smuggled me.’

Ding Ming shivered as he remembered. The journey had taken three and a half months. In between trips by truck, cart and boat, he and Little Ye had been hidden in safe
houses
and forbidden to leave. Subsisting on rice and bread, sometimes they’d gone weeks without seeing sunlight. The people who dealt with them obviously did not see them as anything but a troublesome cargo that required a certain minimum quantity of air and food.

He had fallen out of the habit of asking what city or
country
he was in. His only concern, day after day, had been
when would they be moved again? On a map, he would be able to trace very little of their route.

‘And how much did you pay for this?’

‘Twenty thousand dollars.’

‘US dollars?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you get that kind of money?’

‘I didn’t. That is how much I owe to the snakeheads. I pay it off while I am working here.’

‘How long do you think that will take?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘How much are you earning, with that man?’

‘A dollar an hour, maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘Do the snakeheads charge interest on the loan to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think it’ll take ten years. Twenty.’

‘At least it is a chance.’

‘You couldn’t get a job at home?’

‘Easily. For fifty yuan a month. No chance to save. There are no good jobs for a peasant in China. Not without
connections
or qualifications.’

‘What about your girl? You going to let her sit at home and play mah jong for ten years? Eyeing up the lads who stayed?’

‘She’s in this country, but another place.’

‘She came too? She also owes twenty thousand dollars?’

‘Yes.’

‘You shouldn’t have brought her. It’s no life for a woman.’

‘She insisted.’

In fact it was Little Ye, Ding Ming’s sweetheart since the age of fourteen, who had convinced him to go. The couple had married a few days before the trip. They’d had a small do in a restaurant and there had not even been time to get the
disposable camera’s pictures developed before they were packed into the pitch-dark hold of a Taiwanese fishing vessel.

Ding Ming added, with some pride, ‘She is a modern woman.’

‘She is, is she? Maybe she will suck you off, then.’

Offended, Ding Ming turned away. Underneath this man’s hard shell was only sourness. He saw a car approaching. Here they were, then. Finally it was going to happen.

The engine of the car grew louder, the headlights brighter. Ding Ming sidestepped along the beach. Why was it so slow? He wanted it all to be over with quickly, but the thing was taking an age just to arrive. He began to jog, and pebbles crunched.

Jian called, ‘Where are you going?’

Ding Ming looked over his shoulder. It was a small car, shaped like a beetle with a chugging engine, and driven by an old woman. A second stared with a pale pinched face out of the passenger window. It seemed to Ding Ming that her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, and for a moment he saw what she saw – two Chinese men with wild hair and dirty faces, one holding a stone. The car sped up and in a few moments it had chuntered past.

There was a bench here, and, oddly, a litter bin. He
gestured
towards them and started talking, just to prevent
having
to make up an excuse for his odd behaviour.

‘This must be a beauty spot. Perhaps poets come here to write about the moon reflected in the water and the hills like…’ a pause stretched as he tried to think of a clever metaphor… ‘fish heads in soup.’

‘Where I come from, it looks like this. I could almost believe I was home.’

‘I’ve heard the northeast is beautiful.’

‘Some places. We have landscapes that can make your heart sing.’

Jian tried to skim a stone, but it dropped in without
bouncing
. ‘My daughter had an idea to open a travel company
That was going to be its name. Singing Heart Travels. History tours, photography tours, wildlife tours…’

‘Wildlife – to eat it?’

‘To look at it.’

Jian tried skimming and again had no success. Ding Ming skimmed a stone and it bounced twice.

‘You have to pick flatter stones. And it’s a flick of the wrist, it’s not about power. So you have a daughter.’

‘She spoke English like a native. Even better than you, I think.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I see. It’s a toss, not a throw. She’s dead.’

Jian’s stone again vanished with a plop. He watched the ripples spread out and diminish and rubbed a hand over his face and bent over with his hands on his knees.

Ding Ming said, ‘I’m sorry.’

After some time, Jian stood and said, ‘She’s dead and now I’m going to go and kill the men who killed her.’

Ding Ming would like to have asked more questions but delicacy held his tongue. To have a child die was a
terrible
thing. He stood with his hands clasped in an attitude of sympathetic mourning, as if the blackness before them were not a lake but a grave. He let his respectful silence stretch and grew aware of the midges buzzing round his head.

The policeman took his jacket off and said, ‘The arm needs to be more free. I’ll get it now – you watch.’

When he laid the jacket on the bench it made a clunk. Ding Ming was alarmed to see a gun butt poking out. The policeman would shoot Kevin and his lieutenants dead, then, cursing traitors, turn the weapon on the man who had betrayed him. Nauseous with worry, he tapped his damaged lip with nervous fingers. The policeman had
presented
his back to him as he sifted through pebbles. Ding
Ming contemplated the thick neck. He guessed that the man, in the grip of strong emotion, was composing his features.

‘This is a good one. Flat and round. Watch this.’

The man drew his hand right back. Ding Ming pulled out the gun, pincering the butt between thumb and first finger. It was so unexpectedly heavy he almost dropped it. He put it in the pocket of the parka.

The stone arced across the water, dipped, and bounced.

‘Got it,’ said Jian.

Ding Ming’s fretting did not abate, for now, at any moment, his theft might be discovered. But there was, too, a giddy sense of achievement. He could hardly believe what he had done, he had never been so reckless.

‘Do it again,’ he said, struggling to control a flutter in his voice. ‘That might have been a fluke.’

‘What’s your record?’

‘Five.’

‘I’ll get six – you watch.’

‘You’ll be here for years.’

Ding Ming stepped to the shore and the gun banged against his thigh. He put his hand in his pocket and held it still, fingers around the cold barrel. He watched the
policeman
skim stones and realised that he had to keep the man busy at his childish activity – as soon as he put his jacket back on, the theft would be discovered.

‘Two. You see that? I got two.’

‘Not bad.’

‘Not bad? Watch this.’

But his next stone did not skim.

‘It was the wrong shape. You do it again. I want to watch.’

There was something dark about the policeman’s
enthusiasm
, it had a touch of mania to it. Ding Ming groped among the cold pebbles with shaking hands. He shut his eyes hard
in the hope that when he opened them his captor would have vanished from his life. Why had this man, with his grief and rage, come into it? Were his own troubles not large enough? He opened them and saw a hand holding a stone.

‘Here.’

It was the ideal shape, smooth and flat. He arranged
trembling
fingers around it and tossed it. It turned in the air and splashed straight in, a couple of metres out.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I just didn’t do it right that time.’

‘You look terrified. What is it?’

‘I was wondering if there are fierce animals here. Bears or wolves.’

‘I think they are the least of our worries.’

Now, at the same level as the insect noise, a distant engine hummed. Ding Ming looked about. Yes, a vehicle was approaching, its headlights burned through the darkness.

Jian said, ‘I’ll take you back tomorrow morning.’

‘What?’

‘After we get the map book, mark upon it where I have to go. I’ll find it myself. It’s not fair to take you with me. I’ll take you back to that place tomorrow. You’ve only missed a day’s work. I don’t think they’ll be too angry with you.’

The noise of the vehicle grew louder, and Ding Ming could see it now, a boxy green truck. He recognised it, he was sure, yesterday it had been parked by the mud. He told himself that the policeman deserved whatever was about to happen.

He squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could, opened them and stepped away as he said, ‘Men are here. Run away now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I called my boss. That’s him – run away. Men have come for you. I’m sorry. Run.’