Crimson China

by Betsy Tobin

  “Here,” he says to one of the others as he gets into the car. “It’s all they had.”

  Wen hears them passing round drinks and food. He hears the man next to him take a sip of something, then swear.

  “Tastes like piss!”

  “Give it to him if you don’t want it,” says the other.

  Little Dog snorts. “Haven’t you heard?” he says. “Dead men don’t drink.”

  Now Wen is wide awake, Little Dog’s words echoing in his brain. They carry on driving, and after another hour the traffic slows again. Little Dog swears several times. At length the car comes to a halt and Little Dog shuts off the engine. The man next to him orders Wen to sit up. He can tell that it is already dark outside, perhaps early evening. They take him from the car and propel him forward into a building, pushing him up a set of stairs and into a room where they shove him into a wooden chair. Wen feels them binding him to the chair with rope, his hands still tied in front of him.

  “Shut the blinds,” says Little Dog.

  Someone turns on a light, he hears the scrape of a chair, and in the next instant, one of them has pulled off the pillowcase. Wen blinks in the glare of the light. Little Dog sits in front of him in a straight-backed chair, beside a small round wooden table. The other two men hover nearby: the one he recognises from before, the smaller of the two, leans back against the edge of the table, his arms folded over his chest. The other man is clearly the muscle: though not tall, he is heavy set, with thick arms and meaty hands. He stands beside Little Dog, his body twitching slightly. Wen glances quickly around the room. The door to the stairs is now shut. The walls are covered with a dingy pale green paint, and a single bare bulb hangs from a cracked ceiling rose. Against the rear wall is a battered sofa. In front of it is an old television set on an overturned wooden crate. There is only one window, now covered by a set of broken venetian blinds, their slats slightly askew.

  “So,” says Little Dog, eyeing him up and down. “You must be a good swimmer.”

  “I was lucky,” replies Wen cautiously.

  “Not any more,” says Little Dog. He nods to the heavy-set man, and the latter steps forward, raising one arm. Wen is slow to realise what is happening: he shuts his eyes at the last instant, feels the force of the blow against his right cheek and chin. The man’s fist is like a mallet. He feels the skin split slightly; the pain is like a sharp pulse. He opens his eyes and Little Dog cocks his head to one side.

  “We want our money,” says Little Dog.

  The man hits Wen again, this time from the other side. This punch is harder and it snaps his head backwards. He takes a deep breath, just as he tastes blood inside is mouth.

  “I can get your money,” he gasps.

  “Really?” says Little Dog, leaning forward. “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “A few days,” says Wen. His head is a halo of pain. He squints through the haze at Little Dog and sees him shake his head slowly from side to side.

  “Not good enough,” he says, nodding to the other man.

  Wen closes his eyes again: this time the punch is to his gut, and he feels a small amount of vomit rise up in his throat. He leans forward, gasping, nearly choking. Black spots dance in front of his eyes.

  “Get his phone,” he hears Little Dog say curtly.

  The other man leaps up and he feels hands searching his pockets. They remove his wallet and phone and his passport and ticket. The man hands the ticket to Little Dog, who looks at it and raises an eyebrow.

  “Going on holiday?” he says to Wen. He leans forward, newly angry. “You little shit! You think you can hide from us?”

  “No,” murmurs Wen.

  He watches as Little Dog tears the ticket in half, then halves it again, and then once more. He throws the scraps into the air and Wen watches them drift to the floor. Little Dog nods to the big man again, who steps forward and hits him again in the gut. This time the vomit comes more easily, all over his knees, his feet and the floor.

  “Shit,” says Little Dog, now irritated. “Go get some towels.”

  Later, Little Dog stands at the window, peering through the broken blinds. He holds Wen’s phone, scrolling through the contact list. After a moment, he dials one and speaks tersely into the phone.

  “Wei? Who is this?”

  Little Dog listens for a moment. “There’s someone here who wishes to speak to you,” he says into the phone.

  He turns and holds the phone out towards Wen, nodding at the thick-set man. For a moment, Wen thinks that they will put the phone up to his ear, but then he sees the lighter in the burly man’s hand. It is small and sleek and made of stainless steel. The man steps closer and holds the lighter up towards his face. Wen pulls backwards with alarm, his guts starting to churn. He watches him flick the lighter with his thumb and the flame flares. The man flicks it once again and brings the flame closer to his face. Wen cranes his neck back as far as he can, his eyes glued to the flame. The burly man smiles and brings the flame right beneath his chin. It takes an instant for the pain to reach him; he smells his own flesh searing even before he feels it, but when he does he screams in agony. The burly man snaps the lighter shut and nods to Little Dog, who turns away, finishing the call.

  Afterwards, they untie him from the chair and handcuff his wrist to the base of a radiator by the window. Wen lies with his face against the floorboard, one eye sealed shut from the force of their blows, the taste of blood in his mouth. The burnt skin on his neck still feels as if it is on fire. At some point he has wet himself; he is not sure when, but he is relieved there is no longer pressure on his bladder. The men leave him lying in the darkness and go out. He hears them start the engine and pull away. Once they are gone, the pain seems to worsen. He could not move even if he wanted to: does not have the will nor the energy to escape.

  His thoughts drift to Angie. What happened when she woke to find him gone? Did she understand at once the depth of his deceit? Some part of him crumples then; anguish seeps through him like a stain, more painful than the blows he has endured. Perhaps, he thinks ruefully, his fate has always been to betray.

  At length he dozes off, waking only when they return some hours later. The stocky one opens the door, glances in to make certain he hasn’t moved and closes it again. He hears them moving about for the next hour or so, then the small house falls quiet. He sleeps again, and dreams that he is walking on the beach with Angie by his side. He looks out across the water and sees Lili wading towards him, her face stricken. He steps towards her but his feet sink into the sand beneath him, and when he looks up she is gone. He continues sinking until the sand is up to his chest. Angie has carried on walking and does not see, and though he tries to shout, no words come. The dream ends abruptly, just as he is sucked beneath the surface.

  In the morning when he wakes, the pain in his head has turned to a dull ache. His cheek and ribs hurt, and one arm is sore, but apart from that he is okay. He sits up slowly and leans back against the radiator. The house is silent; he has no idea whether Little Dog and his men are asleep or out. He is thirsty and his stomach growls noisily. There is something almost reassuring about the body’s need for food during times of adversity, he decides. When he made the journey overland from China, he lived on nothing but pot noodles for months on end, often raw. At the time he grew to hate them, but each day his hunger outweighed his aversion, and at mealtimes he ate his portion as enthusiastically as the rest.

  He has not thought of them in many months, not since before the accident. They had been nine in all: seven men and two women. The oldest was forty-seven, the youngest was just nineteen, and for four months they were his constant companions. Together with a minder, they were given false passports and flown from Beijing to Bulgaria. None of them had ever boarded a plane before, much less been abroad. Some had never even been to Beijing. Once in Bulgaria, they were taken in a van to a safe house in the countryside, where they were forced to remain in a large attic room for nea
rly three weeks. At first there was an air of camaraderie and joviality among them; but after several days this changed to boredom, restlessness and irritability.

  Over the course of those three weeks, he came to know each of them: their likes and dislikes, weaknesses and strengths, what marked them out as individuals. Old Wang was the eldest and assumed a sort of paternal role among them, bargaining with their minders for better food or more blankets when the weather outside turned cold. He told Wen that two years before he had been laid off his factory job in Shanxi Province, after nearly twenty years’ service. Since then he had been unable to find steady work, drifting from one casual job to the next, trying his hand at any number of unsuccessful ventures. His first wife had died many years before; he had one son, now grown, who had recently married and was keen to start a family of his own. Five years earlier, Old Wang had remarried. his new wife was much younger than himself. and was blind, he told Wen, which explained why she had agreed to the marriage. At the time he had felt very fortunate to find a second wife in a country where young men outnumbered women by far.

  But what he had not been prepared for was her shrewish manner. Blind or not, the woman was impossible to satisfy. One year after they were married, she gave birth to a daughter, much to Old Wang’s delight. But his wife had set her heart on a son, and so had badgered him at length for a second child, though having one would incur severe financial penalties that he could ill afford. A year later, a second daughter was born, for which his young wife berated him ceaselessly, having heard an item on the radio about male chromosomes determining gender. Because of her blindness, she was unable to work, having turned up her nose at an opportunity to train as a masseuse, one of the only forms of employment open to blind people. Neither could she care properly for their two children, so he was forced to hire an aiyi, a witless girl from the countryside to help out. It was the combination of all these things – the loss of his job, a disabled wife, the need for hired help, and the prospect of educating two young children – that had driven him to go abroad. He missed his two young daughters terribly, but had been happy enough to leave the shrill demands of their mother behind. One day, he intended to build a house big enough for him and his wife to live at opposite ends, he told Wen with a grin. Maybe I will take a mistress, he added with a chuckle. If the house is big enough, my wife need never know.

  The youngest member of the group was called Wang, though the others quickly dubbed him Little Professor. He was nineteen, soft-spoken, wore wire-rimmed spectacles and had brought with him a thick, well-thumbed volume of ancient poetry, which he read constantly. Wen remembers the silence that enveloped the room the day Wang first told them he had dropped out of university to go abroad: to forfeit a place at university was almost unthinkable. Wang explained in his quiet way that his father was very ill and required constant care, thus making it impossible for his mother to work. His treatment and medicine were very expensive, so Wang had little choice but to go abroad. Perhaps one day I will resume my studies in England, he ventured. Maybe I will even go to Niuqiao, he added with a grin, the phrase used by mainland Chinese to refer to Oxbridge. The others laughed, but at the time they had also thought why not? This young man was surely clever enough for any university.

  The two women, though uneducated, both seemed fiercely capable – as if the fact of their sex made them all the more determined to succeed. Both were single parents who had left a child behind with relatives; one was divorced, the other widowed. Little Red explained that her husband had died in an industrial accident three years before when a large crane had malfunctioned. The circumstances had all pointed towards negligence on the part of the company, but in spite of her repeated complaints, no compensation had been offered. Instead, she had received a small wreath of chrysanthemums, together with a note saying that her husband’s outstanding debts in the staff canteen would be cancelled under the circumstances. Since then she had struggled to make ends meet, but was determined that her only son would not suffer as a consequence of his father’s death. He would go to the best schools, she told them, her voice trembling with emotion, and lack for nothing. The boy was brave, Little Red added proudly, and would weather the separation. One day, no doubt, he would thank her.

  With the exception of Wen, they had been drawn together by desperation and necessity. He was the only one among them who had no dependents, and the others seemed surprised when they learned of this. Old Wang had leaned forward, his eyebrows knit together.

  “So you do not need to be here?” he asked doubtfully.

  “No,” Wen had admitted. “I suppose not.”

  “You came because…?” Old Wang’s voice trailed off.

  The others listened with interest. Wen felt his mouth go dry. How could he explain? Despite coming from the largest country on earth, he felt crowded by his life and by his circumstances. Some mornings when he woke, he found he could not breathe, as if the life was being squeezed from him little by little each day. He had tried without success to explain this feeling to Lili. That day in the safe house, he had looked around at the bewildered faces of Old Wang and the others, and had decided to lie.

  “I gambled badly on a business investment,” he said finally. “And lost. So here I am.”

  Old Wang nodded several times, clearly relieved.

  “For every millionaire in New China,” he said, “there are a thousand paupers just behind.”

  After three weeks of pot noodles and no fresh air or exercise, Wen had begun to feel as dense and slack as a sack of grain. When they were finally told they would be moved, there was a brief bout of exhilaration, quickly followed by dismay. They were taken in the early dawn to three trucks transporting livestock and produce across the border. The trucks travelled in convoy and each day Wen and his compatriots were allocated to a lorry and instructed to hide in sealed compartments behind the driver, where they were forced to sit curled like foetuses in the dark for up to eight hours at a time, while a wooden lid was screwed shut over their heads. Wen thought the first day was bad, but on the second he was moved to a lorry carrying pigs, and the stench of faeces and urine was almost unbearable. At night they slept in barns, bedding down in hay lofts, relieved to stretch their cramped muscles.

  On the fourth day, he and Little Red were told to climb into a box together. As she squatted down next to him she grinned.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s like the pain of childbirth. The further we get from it, the smaller it will seem. And one day, when we are back with our families living in a fine house built from our earnings, this journey will be nothing more than a pinprick in our memory.”

  Now, lying with his swollen face against the floorboard, Wen wonders what became of Little Red. He knew she was destined for an electronics factory in the north where a distant cousin of hers was already working. He hopes that her experience has been less fraught with peril than his own. But then the door opens and Little Dog enters, banishing the past in an instant.

  “Time for a chat,” he says.

  November 2004

  Lili spends the next few days almost feverish with apprehension. On the third morning, she rushes into school early to find Jin, but before she even has a chance to ask, the latter shakes her head.

  “Nothing,” Jin says. “I’ve tried ringing several times but his phone is off.”

  “If they let him go, he would contact us,” mumbles Lili worriedly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wish we knew more about the woman,” says Lili. “The one he was living with in Morecambe Bay.”

  Jin frowns. “Actually,” she says, “I have an address.”

  The following morning Jin persuades Fay to let them have the day off. They take a train from King’s Cross, changing once in Birmingham. Lili has never travelled on a train in England before, though it is much like a soft seat at home, she remarks to Jin.

  “The toilets are cleaner here,” says Jin. “But the food is worse.”

  For much of the journey,
Lili gazes out the window at endless fields of winter stubble. The sky is overcast and the countryside looks bleak and inhospitable. At one point, she looks across at Jin.

  “Did you take the train before? When you went to see him?”

  Jin nods.

  “And when you got there?”

  “He met me at the station.”

  Lili turns back to the window, endeavouring to quash the small pang of jealousy she feels whenever Jin relates a detail of her life with Wen.

  It is lunchtime when they arrive at Morecambe. Two taxis wait outside the station. They climb in the first and Jin hands the driver a small scrap of paper with an address. The driver looks at it and nods, handing it back to Jin. They drive along the coast road briefly, and Lili scans the bay, wondering whether Wen will be waiting for them when they arrive. After a few minutes, the taxi leaves the coast and winds through a series of residential streets, eventually pulling up in front of a small detached house. The driver turns back to them.

  “This is it,” he says.

  Lili feels suddenly nervous and must force herself to climb out of the car. She watches as Jin pays the driver. When he has gone, Jin turns to her and takes a deep breath. Lili realises they are both apprehensive. But it is too late now, she thinks resolutely. So she turns and leads the way up to the door.

  She rings twice. They can hear a stirring from within, and at length a dishevelled woman opens the door wearing a blue dressing gown, hastily tied up. She appears to be in her mid-thirties, with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and eyes ringed with dark circles. To Lili, she looks pale and vulnerable.

  “Yes?”

  “Good afternoon,” says Lili nervously. “We are sorry to trouble you.”

  The woman frowns. Lili glances at Jin, her nerve faltering.

  “We’ve come about Wen,” says Jin quickly.

  The woman’s eyes widen. “Who are you?”