The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (55 page)

I made the mistake of asking Seligman what the river was called and he launched into a geography and history lesson, starting from its beginnings as a fishing village on the Huangpu River in 262
BC
and working up to its present fourteen million population. I lost interest when
BC
became
AD
. God, he could be a boring fart at times.

He was giving me a breakdown on the twelve urban districts when we stopped in front of a rundown garage with an old-fashioned petrol pump in front of it, like a sentry on guard duty. Our driver sounded his horn three or four times and a wooden door creaked open to reveal a worried-looking middle-aged Chinese, bare-chested and wearing the bottom half of a green track suit. The door he’d opened led to a workshop with a table full of car parts and tools.

Seligman paid off the taxi and began talking to the garage owner. Again there seemed to be a lot of head shaking and shrugging and I was expecting the worst until Seligman turned to me and said, ‘He said he’ll take us, it’s just a matter of how much we pay him.’

‘Whatever he wants,’ I said, impatiently.

‘That would take all the fun out of it, for both of us,’ he said, placing his rucksack on the ground. They argued fiercely for a few minutes and then the deal was obviously done because the American turned round and gave me the thumbs up.

‘Way to go,’ he said. ‘He says he’ll drive us, but he wants his brother to come as back up. The two of them will take it in turns.’

‘Can we leave now?’

‘Straight away. By the way, his name’s Wah-yim, his brother’s called Elvis.’

‘Elvis?’

Wah-yim shouted into the workshop and Seligman didn’t have to explain because the boy who came out carrying the top half of the track suit was obviously Elvis. His hair was lacquered into a backswept quiff that bobbed as he walked and he’d been trying to grow sideburns but without much success. His jeans were skin-tight and over a white T-shirt he wore a black leather jacket with the collar up, like something out of
Rebel Without A Cause.
As he threw the track suit top to his brother the sun glinted on the lines of chrome studs that spelt out ‘ELVIS’ on his back. The kid had style all right. He was chewing gum and trying to sneer at the same time as Wah-yim explained the deal to him.

They led us through the workshop and out into a courtyard beyond, where chickens pecked at the floor, a pig wallowed happily in a mud bath and an old dust-covered Mercedes Benz estate sat in the sun and brooded.

It looked like a clapped out pile of scrap in a breaker’s yard but the tyres had plenty of tread on them and the engine started first time when Wah-yim turned the key. The exhaust came out black for a few seconds and then the engine purred quietly while Elvis opened a pair of wooden gates that cut the yard off from the road.

The chickens scattered noisily as Wah-yim guided the car out. Seligman and I walked by the side and Elvis closed the gates behind us. Wah-yim set the wipers going and jetted water onto the windscreen until the dust became mud smears and then disappeared. Elvis took a couple of red metal petrol cans and a tin funnel out of the back of the car and took them to the pump, returning five minutes later smelling of petrol. The cans and funnel went back into the car, next to a crate of local beer and cartons of Marlboro cigarettes.

Elvis got into the front passenger seat and shoved a cassette into the player as Seligman and I slid into the back. The real Elvis began belting out of four speakers that
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.
Our Elvis began backcombing his quiff with a steel comb while Seligman lay back and closed his eyes as he tapped out the tune with his fingers against the door.
And you ain’t no friend of mine.

It took about ten minutes to drive out of the city and we were soon on a four-lane road that cut across the countryside through flat fields and sparse woods. Elvis turned round in his seat and pointed at the crate of beer in the back and I handed a couple of bottles to him. He smashed off the metal caps on the dashboard and handed one to Wah-yim before draining his in two swallows. He dropped the empty bottle on the floor and then settled back in his seat and was soon snoring loudly. I dozed in and out of sleep for two and a half hours until the car turned sharply to the left and the hypnotic vibration of the tarmac road was replaced with the rough rumble of a cobbled road that wound its way between two granite-topped hills. Seligman opened his eyes and rubbed the sleep out of them like a small boy. ‘Nearly there,’ he said. Elvis was still snoring, his knees wedged up against the dashboard. Wah-yim spoke to him a couple of times, but getting no reply he banged him on the top of his head with his fist.

Elvis shot upright in his seat, his hands reaching for his head, and he yelled at the driver. I couldn’t understand the words but I got the drift – ‘Lay off the hair, sonny, or you’ll be eating hospital food for a month.’ He began pampering his quiff as if he was preparing a Yorkshire terrier for its first show.

When he was satisfied he gestured for another two bottles of beer. He smashed them open but this time made to keep them both until Wah-yim grabbed him by the ear and pulled hard. Elvis thrust one of the bottles at him and grinned.

The air was thick with the smell of beer and sweat and fumes from the petrol-filled cans behind us so I wound down the window and sucked in some warm air from outside, though as we were driving past a sprawling pig farm at the time it wasn’t much of an improvement.

The road we were on linked a series of small villages like pearls on a chain, and as we drove through children and dogs would watch us go past. One small boy scraped a stick alongside the Merc as Wah-yim slowed to let a sunbathing dog haul itself to its feet and amble off. Wah-yim yelled at the boy and the boy screamed back and the dog barked. It reminded me of the Gorbals.

Seligman was fully awake now and looking intently through the side window. ‘There’s a turn off somewhere near here,’ he explained. ‘It’s very easy to miss.’ We were rattling through rice fields now, women in circular straw hats standing knee deep in brackish water were doing something with wooden hoes but they were too far away for me to see what. Seligman pointed and spoke to the driver in Chinese and we turned off the cobbled road onto a raised mud track that cut between two massive fields. Looking sideways gave the illusion of the car driving across the surface of the water as it lurched from pothole to pothole. Wah-yim slowed right down but even so the rear wheels kept sliding as they lost traction on the slippery surface. Elvis wound down his window and threw his empty bottles out one by one, doing his best to hit the farmers but all he managed to do was splash a young girl with pigtails that reached to her waist. She stood glaring at the car, her hands defiantly on her hips, and it was obvious even at a distance that she was cursing us loudly. Elvis threw his head back and laughed, and then waggled his leg out of the window.

After half a mile or so we slid down off the track and back onto another cobbled road, this time a single track that twisted and turned through hills dotted with spindly ill-nourished trees.

Seligman leant across and tapped the driver on the shoulder and we slowed to a halt.

‘Why here?’ I asked.

‘The site is about a mile further along this track, but we can get a better view from the top of this hill.’

We left Elvis and Wah-yim opening another couple of bottles and lighting cigarettes, oblivious to the smell of petrol.

The hill wasn’t too steep, but even so I had to reach forward with my hands in a few places to steady myself. Sir Edmund Hillary I’m not, and I gave up any exercise that involves wearing shorts when I was eighteen so I took it slowly, while Seligman scampered up to the top. He looked the sort who’d do five hundred push-ups every morning before taking an icy shower. I could have kept up with him if I wasn’t still feeling the effects of the kick in the stomach. That’s what I told myself anyway.

Seligman got to the top of the hill some thirty seconds or so before me and he waited next to a large bush with thick, oval-shaped leaves. The air was cooler there, and as I joined him I could see why. About a quarter of a mile away flowed a wide, murky river and the wind was obviously blowing across it and up the hillside. The bank on the far side was just a greenish smudge with grey mist-shrouded mountains behind. The river could have been half a mile wide, or a mile, or more, there was no way of telling. There were two modern boats close to the shore on our side, white hulls with bright orange superstructures. One was heading towards us, one away. The incoming boat turned to sail alongside a wooden pier that jutted into the water, showing that most of the deck space at the rear was filled with mud. At the back was a crane-like object with a ribbed metal scoop at the end like the jaws of bulldozer.

At the base of the hill was a cluster of wooden huts and between it and the river was a corrugated iron shed, three storeys high and covering an area equivalent to a first division football pitch with room for the police to surround it to keep the crowd back. Linking the shed to the pier was a conveyor belt, an endless rubber strip that moved on stainless steel rollers suspended ten feet above the ground by wooden poles set in threes like unfinished camp-fires. Just before it reached the shed it veered up and disappeared into a hole on the top floor. As we watched, the boat began to dump its load of mud onto the belt, scoop by scoop.

‘What happens inside the shed?’ I asked.

‘The mud gets washed through a series of metal screens to separate out all the stones and rocks and stuff. Then they use some sort of filtration system to separate out all the mud and smaller bits of crud.’

‘And that just leaves diamonds? Sounds simple.’

‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that, but basically it is simple. Sally said it was like panning for gold but on a bigger scale.’

‘How big are the diamonds?’

‘You can hardly call them diamonds, it’s more like diamond dust, very fine particles. They use them to coat drills, grinding machinery, that sort of thing. Every ton of mud produces a gram or two, but they sift through mountains of the stuff every day.’

The long, thin heap of mud had reached the hole in the shed and it poured through like a worm burrowing into the earth.

‘They ever find any big stones, diamonds I mean?’

‘Sally said no, she said they never found anything that could be worn in a ring, industrial quality only.’

The huts and the shed were contained in a triangular compound, bounded on each side by a ten-foot high wire fence topped with rotating metal spikes. The base of the triangle ran alongside the river bank and the apex touched the bottom of the hill on which we stood. There was only one way in, a gate that blocked the road and which was guarded by two men in dark blue uniforms holding what seemed to be rifles, or shotguns. By the side of the gate was a Portakabin with the windows blocked off with sheets of plywood.

A group of workers, their overalls covered in the red mud, walked out of the shed towards the Portakabin. One of the guards opened the door and they trooped in.

‘Was security as tight last time you were here?’

‘Yes, but they didn’t have guns then.’

‘What’s in the cabin?’

‘They check out the workers before they leave the camp, there’s an X-ray machine in there, or an ultra-sound, or something. They put them all through it before they let them out.’

‘They X-ray them every day? I thought X-rays were dangerous.’

‘Not every day,’ he said, pulling one of the leaves off the bush and rolling it between the palms of his hands. ‘They live in the huts down there most of the time.’

‘How close is the nearest town?’

‘There’s a village about a mile down the road, round the hill.’

‘But the workers live on the camp. Why would they do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘And why such tight security, if all they’re producing are industrial diamonds? Why go to all the trouble?’

I sat down next to the bush and watched the men come out of the cabin one by one and pass through the gate. Padlocked to the outside of the fence was a line of twenty or so bicycles and before long the group had ridden off down the road.

The dredger had finished unloading its cargo of mud and it sounded a piercing whistle before heading back to the middle of the river.

‘Who owns this place?’ I asked.

‘It’s a joint venture between a government geological institute and some British company, I’m not sure of the name. It shouldn’t be too hard to check.’

He sat down next to me in one smooth movement, one moment he was standing, the next he was sitting cross-legged on the grass. Graceful was the only word to describe it.

The two dredgers passed by each other. The crews didn’t wave or anything, it was obviously a journey they’d made many, many times, just part of the job. The last of the mud vanished into the shed and the belt was clear again.

‘What happened when you came here with Sally?’ I asked.

‘We just drove up to the front gate and asked if we could look round, it was as simple as that.’

‘They let you in?’

‘Sally showed them her press card and the guards fetched a manager, a Shanghainese who’d been to college in Vancouver. He wanted to practise his English so he took us into his office and gave us tea. He couldn’t stop talking. He’d studied geology and then returned to Hong Kong with a Canadian passport. Jumped at the chance of helping China exploit its natural resources, but after a straight three months in the camp he said he was starved of conversation.’

‘And he showed you around?’

‘Sort of. He showed us everything except what went on inside the shed. He said that was off-limits.’

‘But he let you look inside the Portakabin?’

‘No, we saw inside on the way out. We saw one of the workers being scanned and then they shut the door.’