Night Heron (6 page)

Beijing

Peanut walked. He tried to stay with a crowd. He found the noise extraordinary. No shop was without an electronic wailing and tinkling, or the beat of music so loud he felt it in his stomach. The traffic roared, and every other pedestrian squealed into a mobile phone.

Twenty years of silence, of wind on the desert, now this.

He tried to watch his back, weaving an irregular course, retracing his steps.

He walked east, past the shining department stores whose messages and purposes, expressed in screeching primary colors, on flickering screens, he could not fathom. On one street, a parade of girls, dozens of them, thin as saplings in identical tight scarlet dresses, handed out leaflets. He reached for one, just to touch the glossy paper, but the girl ignored him so thoroughly it was as if she didn’t even see him. Peanut found this both salutary and reassuring. Peanut did not wish to be seen.

Mid-morning found him on a detour. He crossed up into Beihai Park and walked by the lake. A weak autumn sun had broken through. On the lake, a lone pedal boat paddled by a
woman in yellow and a child. He stopped, examined the contents of his carrier bag. Valuable man’s funds were dwindling, only one hundred and fifteen yuan left. He extracted a crumpled note and purchased an ice cream and sat on a stone bench, before suddenly rising and moving off quickly as if the staying still had become too much to bear.

He sensed Tiananmen Square before he saw it. The noise diminished. The architecture reverted to state brutalism, looming over the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City. He took an underpass amid schoolchildren who chattered like starlings in a hissy southern dialect, and climbed the steps that would bring him out on the square.

As he emerged into the sunlight two men in polo shirts, static, attentive, looked straight at him. His stomach lurched. The children streamed past. Turn around? One of the two saw him hesitate, and gestured idly, a flip of the hand. Here, now.

Reflexively, Peanut turned to his cringe. The slight stoop, the falling shoulders, the bowed head, hands crossed in front of the body.

One of the two looked him up and down.

“
Lai zher ganma?
” What are you doing here?

“Just walking, Officer, some exercise.”

“What’s in the bag?”

Peanut said nothing and opened the carrier bag. An apple, some underpants, some money. A newspaper clipping, wrapped in plastic. Polo Shirt peered in.

“No posters, no banners?”

Peanut affected shock. No, Officer. Absolutely not.

Polo Shirt heard the Beijing accent, but saw the hard hands, the banknotes. Something not right. Valuable man’s identity card would not last a second here. Break his train of thought, now.

“And, Officer, if I may ask, what time would the flag-raising be tomorrow?”

Polo Shirt said nothing, just gave him a hard look.

“Only I have to bring my grandson, who’s in from Harbin. And I’m not sure what time we should get here. For the flag-raising. Can you help me?”

Polo Shirt jerked his head towards the square.
Zou.
Go.

Peanut hurried away, his mouth dry, lost himself in the crowd.

On the square, families posed for snapshots with Chairman Mao’s portrait behind them. So. The Great Helmsman’s still here, he thought. A boy flew a kite. Peanut looked up, searching the sky for its flutter, but his gaze settled, in shock, on a lamppost, from which protruded a camera. No, multiple cameras. On every lamppost. Dear God. Dozens of them.

He looked down, tried to keep his pace slow, his body relaxed. He headed for the opposite corner of the square, to where another underpass would take him back on to Chang’an Avenue. You stupid, bitching idiot, he thought.

At the steps more polo shirts. But he was leaving the square now, and they paid him no attention. He clattered through the dark tunnel, back up on to the pavement, moved quickly away. Still, on each and every lamppost, cameras.

He took the first street that ran north off Chang’an, moving into the crowd. He was, he saw now, horribly conspicuous. The people on the pavement wore suits, sunglasses, fashionable shoes. They wore black. They were slim and smart. Peanut, the hulking, sweating migrant, needed to be among other sweating migrants as quickly as possible. He was shaken, badly. Move.

He turned east, and noticed, spray-painted on the wall of a shoe shop, a piece of graffiti, the stenciled face of a woman wearing a pair of absurd, protuberant goggles. Beneath her a single English word in capitals:
THREATEN
. The woman’s delicate features were disfigured by the goggles. Peanut frowned at the image and walked on.

He was in back streets now, gray
hutongs
, which was comforting. The smell of coal smoke and frying allowed something of his past self to resurface. He stopped for a cigarette outside an old, familiar temple, Zhi Hua Si, the Temple of Wisdom Attained.

A little further on, he found what he had been searching for: the tall, beige, apartment blocks of the Jianguomenwai Foreign Diplomatic Compound. Near the Friendship Store. Where the foreign news agencies are. Or were.

He skirted the perimeter wall and noted the positions of the
wujing
guards on the gates. The blocks were, weirdly, just as he remembered. And they seemed still to house foreigners. He saw them coming and going as he wandered slowly past the north gate, a group of women in headscarves, a young man, a European perhaps, speaking into a mobile phone. He didn’t linger.

Dusk fell as he walked along Guanghua Lu, past the foreign embassies. He slowed for a moment outside a mansion, from whose windows spilled golden light. A line of black limousines waited outside. He looked at the flag that hung limp in the autumn evening. Then he quickened his pace and was gone.

As darkness came he moved ever further east. The great buildings with their glistening frontages fell slowly away and the surroundings became meaner. Thunderous convoys of trucks were heading into the city, migrant workers in the back of them, sat atop piping and sand and breeze block. The building sites would churn all night. He walked past bleak auto repair shops and restaurants serving noodles in chipped bowls and glasses of the clear, blazing sorghum spirit, its odor fishy and sour. At a stall lit by a single bulb he bought
baozi
wrapped in paper, the pork mince leaking through the bread.

That first night he spent in a doorway, his hand on a piece of
metal pipe he’d lifted from the side of the road. The cave, the desert shale and the freight car all seemed distant, half-imagined. He was, he realized, exhausted by feeling, by the working of memory.

He woke at dawn and stood in the half-light, calculating. He cut south down a filthy alleyway, its walls spray-painted with dozens of mobile phone numbers and tattered advertisements for venereal disease clinics.

The alley brought him out on to a narrow, shadowy thoroughfare, cluttered with shopfronts. A small state grain depot abutted a shoe repair shop, and a peeling café, the Elegant Blue Mountain Food Hall. Outside the Blue Mountain, the antithesis of elegance, was a chef in apron and white cap pulled low over the brow. The man’s face was a cascade of loose flesh, lit by blue flame from a roaring gas stove before him. The chef gingerly dropped dough sticks into crackling oil, his jowls wobbling with concentration. After a moment he’d fish them out and add them to a glistening pile. A kettle steamed. Peanut walked over.

“I’ll take three dough sticks. And some tea.”

The chef turned a pair of moist eyes on him.

“Good morning to you, too.”

Peanut stared at him. “Sorry. Good morning. Now three of your dough sticks and some tea.” He reached into the carrier bag.

But the chef was looking straight at him. “On the way to work, are we?”

“What’s it to you?” said Peanut.

A sigh. “Whatever happened to manners?” said the chef.

“They don’t have those where I’m from,” said Peanut.

“Oh, yes? Where are you from, then?”

“Not your business.”

“You sound like you’re from right here, in Beijing.”

Peanut looked at him again.

“Want
sugar?” said the chef, unperturbed.

Peanut nodded. The chef dusted the dough sticks with powdered sugar, and then looked Peanut up and down.

“You can sit on the steps if you like.”

Peanut took the dough sticks and a scalding glass of tea and sat on the tiled steps in front of the Blue Mountain, and ate, the grease running down his chin. Then a slow, luscious cigarette, as the light came and the street began to stir. Chef was doing brisk business now, passing out the little bags of dough sticks, cups of
doujiang
, the sweet soy milk, and tea. A little boy handed over a few tiny coins for half a cup of
doujiang
. There was banter with a vigorous, permed matron. Peanut watched the chef. There was a living there, a life, on a little street somewhere.

But not yet.

“Ask you something,” said Peanut.

“Ask away,” said the chef.

“The migrants, where do they all live?”

The chef turned from the stove, eyebrows raised.

“Big hostels, fifteen to a room, if they can afford it. Others have built shanties further out to the east. But those places are rough, I warn you. Wretched people.”

He spat, and then grinned.

“But good for business,” he said.

Peanut probed.

“This your business, is it?”

“This place.” He gestured with his chin towards the Blue Mountain. “And that one.”

Across the street stood the Blue Diamond Beauty Salon, its windows adorned with faded posters of lissom, pale girls. As if on cue, a steel shutter rattled and ran up, and out of the Blue Diamond stepped a girl teetering in red heels and tight black jeans. She held a mop and a bucket. Her hair was wet and hung
long down her back. She set the bucket down and with tiny mincing steps began to work the mop ineffectually across the salon’s tiled frontage.

Peanut stood up.

“I’ll do that, if you like.”

Chef turned.

“I’ll do your mopping if you let me use a bathroom for ten minutes,” said Peanut.

Chef considered. The girl looked at Peanut, expectantly, let the mop drop to her side. She was seventeen or so, toothy and wan. Even at this time of the morning she wore some sort of shimmering scarlet lipstick. Peanut attempted a jovial smile.

“Ten minutes, then, in the bathroom. And all the steps,” said Chef.

Peanut moved to walk across the street, but Chef placed a greasy hand on his arm. “And no touching. You touch, you pay.”

Peanut waited a beat.

“Couldn’t afford it,” he said.

So he mopped, reflecting that it was the first labor he had performed in two decades that would be rewarded in some way that he valued. A transaction. He worked for an hour. The steps gleamed. Peanut washed down the walls. He asked for some vinegar and newspaper, which Chef, bemused, gave him, and he began working the grime off the windows. From inside, the girls regarded him with puzzlement. The Blue Diamond, while not entirely losing its sordid air, regained the look, from the outside at least, of a hygienic establishment. Chef was amused.

“You may use the bathroom now,” he said.

The girl in the red heels took him inside. The trappings of a beauty salon were present: sinks, hairdryers, scissors. But the girl led him through a beaded curtain and down a dark corridor that smelled of disinfectant. On one side, doors with small glass
panels through which Peanut could see beds and embroidered sheets.

“What’s your name?”

She turned. “Beautiful Peony.”

“For heaven’s sake. What’s your real name?”

She blinked. “There’s the bathroom.” And tottered away, her tiny frame silhouetted in the gloom.

Peanut locked the door and stripped and eased his bulk into a pink shower stall. The shower gave little more than a cool trickle, but he was content standing there. The water, gray with the dust of Qinghai and the filth from the train, seeped down the drain. He scrubbed out his underpants and shirt in the sink. He pulled a plastic razor from the carrier bag and began to work the grainy tablet of soap into a lather on his chin, then stopped.

From the salon, raised voices.

He turned off the tap and listened.

A scream?

Peanut pulled on his damp underpants and his running shoes, retrieved an item from the carrier bag, and made his way back down the corridor, stopping just before the beaded curtain.

Chef appeared to be having his hair washed. He was seated in a reclining hairdresser’s chair, leaning back over a sink. But at his throat, well, that was a meat cleaver. Someone was screaming. The hand holding the meat cleaver belonged to a short, thickset kid. He wore a baseball cap with some sort of red design on it and a black leather jacket. He was looking towards another man, this one in a parka and sunglasses, a little older, wavy hair, tall, wiry. Peanut watched and listened.

“You’re overdue.” It was Sunglasses talking. “
Shoubuliao.
” We can’t have that.

Beautiful Peony was in a corner bent almost double with fright, clutching at another girl whose hair was dyed orange and who was crying. A woman, middle-aged, barrel-shaped—Chef’s
wife? The madam?—was trying to remonstrate with the two men. Let him go. We can pay.

The two men looked hard and quick, but young. Peanut hummed a little to himself. My good fortune today, he thought. He took a breath. And pushed through the beaded curtain.

After the reception at the residence they had gone out for a raucous dinner. Yunnanese food, complex mushroom dishes and a rice wine served in bamboo beakers that did early, serious damage. Harvey had found a lean Australian tennis coach from one of the big hotels and the two were drunk and bawdy. Milam from the
Los Angeles Times
was there, and the Reuters reporter, Mackenzie, the two of them rapturously attendant upon Ting, who sat sparkling-eyed between them. Mangan caught her eye, and she allowed her face to light up in a comical aren’t-I-lucky expression, just for him. A dreamy French intern from one of the agencies dragged up a chair next to Mangan and sought advice about her career, which he failed to give. When they all pushed on to some new bar, Mangan slipped away and walked home alone to Jianguomenwai.