Crimson China (16 page)

Three weeks after they meet up, Wen receives an email from Jin. Through contacts in Chinatown she has found someone who will sell her a black market passport, but he will need to send her a photo of himself.
Make sure it’s a proper one
, she writes.
Not some
snapshot from your friend’s camera
. Wen reads the bitterness in this last line. He did not confess to sleeping with Angie, but somehow Jin had known.

He has seen an ad for passport photos in the window of a chemist on the high street in Morecambe, so the following afternoon he walks into town. It is early April and the weather has just begun to turn. The ocean breeze is brisk and clean; the sharpness of the sea air no longer suffocates him. As he walks along Marine Drive, it dawns on him that the unease he experienced on his previous visits to Morecambe has lifted. The shops have begun to look familiar, and for the first time he does not feel as if he is trespassing.

In spite of this, when he reaches the chemist, he is relieved to find it empty. He has rehearsed the words in his head several times, and now he utters them cautiously to one of the two middle-aged women behind the counter. Miraculously she understands him. She indicates that he should follow her to the back of the shop, where a tall stool sits in front of a charcoal backcloth. He sits on
the stool and she positions him, lifting his chin slightly with her thumb, her hazel eyes looking straight into his own.

“You’ll have to take that off,” she says with a nod, turning away.

Wen suddenly remembers the woolly hat. It has become such a part of him whenever he goes out that he’d forgotten he was wearing it. He pulls it off with an embarrassed flush and she takes a few steps back from him, holding up the camera.

“Don’t smile,” she says. But before he can unravel her words, the flash goes. After a moment, she hands him the digital image for his approval. Wen stares down at the picture on the tiny screen. It is not the one he has kept in his head all these months. He tries to work out why, and eventually it strikes him that he has lost the haunted look he once had. The chemist clears her throat.

“All right then?” she says expectantly.

“Okay,” he nods.

“It’s four copies for six pounds,” she explains, crossing over to the counter.

Wen needs only two copies but decides not to make a fuss. He takes out a twenty-pound note from his pocket. Apart from the lunch he bought Jin, it is the first money he has spent since the accident. Now, as he hands the woman the note, he feels a kind of sinking dismay, as if he is re-entering a world that he was relieved to leave behind. Living without the burden of money has liberated him these past few months, has somehow made him more human. Though he would not have described his comrades who died that night in the water as motivated by greed, the need to earn money had obliterated everything else in their lives. It was money that had lured them across the ocean, tore them from the arms of their loved ones, forced them into subhuman living conditions, and set them against one another. Money corroded them somehow – and ultimately stole their lives.

Every illegal Chinese he’d ever met had a story to tell about
being swindled out of cash by unscrupulous bosses, gangmasters and middlemen. Lin had found his first job in the UK through an agency in Chinatown. He’d been sent to a farm in the north-east where for eleven-hour shifts he worked harvesting leeks. The job was back-breaking, but Lin consoled himself that he would at least be earning good money. At the end of his first week, he was shocked to see that his pay packet contained only eighty seven pounds. When he confronted the overseer, he was told that deductions for national insurance, rent and agency fees meant that this was all he was entitled to. He had not earned even two pounds an hour! On such paltry wages, it would take him more than seven years to clear his debt to the snakeheads. In his darkest moments, he later told Wen, he had never imagined that England would prove such a harsh and indifferent land.

The cashier turns back to Wen, handing him the change. “It’ll be just a few minutes,” she says, indicating the photographic printing machine at the back of the shop. Wen nods and retreats slightly to one side so she can serve another customer who has just entered. At that moment, a battered white van draws up outside and lurches to a halt. The rear door slides open and Wen catches a glimpse of Chinese faces inside: tired men and women hunched too closely on the seats, wearing a range of dark-coloured anoraks. Cocklepickers, he thinks. He freezes, and feels his heart begin to race inside his chest. A young man jumps out of the van from the back seat, one hand clutching the other with a bloody rag. His thick black hair is pushed over to one side and there is a smudge of dried grey mud on one cheek. Holding the injured hand out in front of him, he pushes open the door of the chemist with his shoulder and steps inside. Wen immediately shifts round to face the shelf in front of him, pretending to study the row of shampoo bottles and deodorants, though he continues to watch the Chinese man out of the corner of his eye. Once inside, the man hesitates, and for a moment looks as if he might change his mind. Wen has
never seen the man before, and yet there is something about him that is utterly familiar: the hair, the clothes, the furtive glances over the shoulder, the fear and desperation in his eyes. Everything about this man he recognises.
This man could be my brother,
he thinks.
We are twins in all but name
.

Just then the chemist comes out from the back of the shop carrying his photos. She hands him a neatly folded piece of card containing them. Her colleague finishes serving the customer and glances over to the Chinese man, who steps towards the counter and holds up his hand. The woman frowns at the bloodied rag.

“You’ve done a job there,” she remarks. “Let’s have a look.”

The Chinese man approaches the counter and peels back the rag gingerly. Wen sees an angry red gash down the side of his hand, long and deep, the blood now mostly congealed. The chemist shakes her head.

“You were lucky. No veins or arteries there. Only flesh. Still, it’s a nasty one.”

The Chinese man looks at her, his brow furrowed. Wen sees that he does not understand a word, though the chemist appears unaware. She turns back to the shelves behind her and hunts around for a few moments, before placing a box of dressings and a small bottle of blue liquid in front of him.

“You’ll be wanting these,” she says.

The Chinese man stares down at the items.

“How much?” he asks.

The chemist points to each of the items in turn.

“Two pounds nineteen for the bandage and three twenty-nine for the disinfectant.”

The Chinese man reaches in his pocket with his good hand and pulls out a small roll of ten-pound notes, perhaps seventy or eighty pounds in all. The week’s wages, thinks Wen. The man holds out one note, then points to the box of bandages.

“This,” he says.

“You’ll be needing the disinfectant,” she admonishes. “Otherwise the wound could get infected.”

The Chinese man shakes his head. “No,” he says, tapping the box. “This.” The chemist shrugs and rings up the item, handing him the change.

“You should see a doctor for that. It may well need stitches,” she says, now a little peeved. The Chinese man stares at her blankly. Wen resists the urge to explain to him what she is saying. “The hospital,” she repeats a little too loudly. “Do you know where the hospital is?”

“No,” says the Chinese man. He grabs the box and turns, leaving the shop quickly.

The chemist sighs and shakes her head at her colleague, who raises an eyebrow. Then both women shoot a glance at Wen. He colours, feeling as if he ought to explain the man’s actions. It is obvious that his presence prevents them from censuring the wounded man openly, as they might have done. He moves to the front of the shop and watches through the window as the man jumps into the van and the other cocklers slide the door shut. The engine sputters a few times and the van pulls out into the traffic, disappearing eventually round a corner.

A part of him feels bereft, though he is not sure why. He does not know these people, and he certainly does not envy their circumstances, so why should he regret their leaving? He walks out onto the street, the image of the injured man burned into his mind. An illegal Chinese would have to be on the verge of death before he would dare to seek medical treatment in this country. Doctors and hospitals were a link in the chain of authority that led to police, government officials, immigration and deportation. They could lead to a fate that, for some, was worse than death.

Last summer, a friend of Wen’s from the restaurant in London had the misfortune to be hit by a car while waiting for a bus. He was knocked unconscious and when he came to, he was in a
hospital bed. When he failed to answer the social worker’s questions, a supervisor was called. She in turn called the police, who then notified immigration. Before his injuries had even healed, he was back on a plane to China. Once home, he faced a stiff fine from the Chinese authorities and he was still seven thousand pounds in debt to the snakeheads. Now he must pay off his debts on a fifteenth of the salary he was making in England, a task that would take him a lifetime, with nothing to show for it. One night in January while Wen was on the drive back to Liverpool, he had received a despairing phone call from his friend: drunk and weeping, he lamented that he lacked the courage to take his own life. Such tales were legion in the Chinese community. Newcomers quickly learned the twin tenets of life here: caution and forbearance. If one suffered, one did so in silence. Never ask for help, treatment or protection of any kind. Because there were no entitlements.

Wen pulls the hat down low and heads in the opposite direction, away from the bay. He walks to a post office where he buys an envelope and stamp and posts the photos to Jin, together with a hastily scrawled note.
I am sorry to trouble you
, he writes.
I hope
this will be the last time.

When he returns home, he is full of restless energy. He washes up the dishes from breakfast and mops the kitchen floor, but even then does not feel anything like the bone-numbing tiredness he used to experience after a day of digging cockles on the beach. Seeing the van-load of his compatriots reminds him that he has not truly laboured since the accident. For the past several weeks he has done nothing but study English, cook and do housework. He is not built for such inactivity; he realises this now. Perhaps it is perverse, but suddenly he aches to feel that sort of tiredness again. He looks around at Angie’s already tidy kitchen and his eyes alight on the back door to the garden. He tries the door and finds it locked; he has never seen Angie use the garden. He rummages
through the kitchen drawers until he finds a clear plastic bag full of keys, which he tries one by one. After a few minutes, he succeeds in opening the door, and for the first time he steps out into the garden.

It is long and narrow and densely overgrown, so dense, in fact that he cannot see the end. At one point there must have been lawn down the middle, but now it is knee-high weed, overlaid with shrubs from the borders that have flung themselves wildly across the centre. The garden has several trees, some of which he recognises: on the left is a mature elder that has spread unchecked in every direction, opposite what appears to be a very old and gnarled fruit tree that lists heavily to one side, perhaps an apple or plum. Further back, a pair of oddly shaped conifers sits on the right, and an enormous oak towers over the end of the garden, shrouding everything in gloomy darkness. Beneath the long weedy grass at his feet, he sees a winding path of mossy stone set into the earth. He steps from one to the next, trying to make sense of the layout.

The garden is thickly planted along the edges mostly with shrubs that are now so overgrown that they are unrecognisable. Winter is only just ending, yet many have already sprouted new leaves. Wen knows little about plants and flowers, though his stepmother kept a kitchen garden while he was growing up, and he often helped her with the heavier tasks, such as turning the soil and spreading the manure they exchanged for produce with a local farmer. His stepmother grew all kinds of vegetables: long beans, garlic, spring onions, radish and winter melon. Every inch of earth was cultivated, as the family depended on the proceeds.

Wen looks around at the profusion of unchecked growth around him: a plot of land of this size would be a great luxury in today’s China, especially one that was not used to grow food. He pushes his way to the back of the garden until he comes up against a crumbling brick wall several feet higher than his head. On the
right is an old wooden shed, its door hanging lop-sided on rusty metal hinges. He pulls open the door and finds an array of rusty tools covered in cobwebs: two long rakes, a large, slightly bent pitchfork, a pile of shovels and small-handled spades and a pair of shears. To one side sits a towering stack of empty plastic pots and several pairs of old canvas gloves, now cracked and mouldy with damp. He picks up a glove: too small for a man, he decides. It must have belonged to a woman, together with the tools. Someone planted and nurtured this garden, a long time ago. He wonders who? For it was certainly not Angie.