Authors: Andy Oakes
Searching for a hair. Long, wavy, blond. Just a hair. Tears falling onto her arms, her hands. Nose running. Breaths … laboured, tortured. Racked by frantic spasms of sobbing.
Bobby … he had such lovely hair. The first time that he got it cut I cried. Watching it as his shorn locks being swept off of that dime barber’s floor with that dirty broom.
“Jesus, Bobby. Jesus.”
*
It was only when she was in the soft lobby of sleep’s motel that she realised that the carpet that she had searched on her hands and knees, was new. Very new. Probably never been walked upon until she had entered room 201. Bobby’s room.
The bastards have thought of everything, Bobby. Everything.
She fell asleep. His letters, his cards … her mattress, her dreams. She fell asleep, aware of only four words constantly repeating themselves through the sparsely strung necklace of night hours. Repeating themselves …
Is this my fault …? Is this my fault …? Is this my fault …?
*
In the fifty thousand characters of the Chinese language there is no word for privacy. There is no need for such a word, the Chinese, quite simply, do not recognise privacy. Neither is there a word for intimacy in the language.
In the People’s Republic expect hotel staff to enter your room without knocking. In the People’s Republic expect a doctor to examine you and offer you his diagnosis in front of six other patients sitting in that same room. In the People’s Republic expect people to bump into you in the street and not offer an apology. In the People’s Republic expect to bump into others in the street and for them not to expect an apology. In the People’s Republic expect to see a three wheeled pedicab run over a young child and not stop.
Only
renao
is given credence and worth in China … a word, a value, that is the very flip-side of privacy, of intimacy. A word whose meaning cannot be found in the English language or in any other European language. Renao. ‘Hot and spicy’. The pleasure of living life amongst a large group of friends and relatives. Renao. Chopsticks clicking. Loud voices jarring against each other. Plates of food being thrown unceremoniously onto the table.
Mah-jongg
tiles snapping to attention with the sound of stern, unforgiving applause. Renao. A life spent hot and noisy in a clamorous China where privacy is impossible except by the hazard of chance … except when thrust unwillingly upon you.
*
At exactly 7.00 am Barbara Hayes was awakened by a room boy in a crisp white uniform placing a bright red thermos flask of hot tea onto her bedside table. Rubbing the vestiges of sour dreams from her eyes, her mouth tasting of broken sleep and long-haul aircraft food. Holding the sheet up to her chin. She said nothing; he said nothing. He left the room. Settling back into the pillows, hoping that sleep would reclaim her and her it … only to hear footsteps outside, the door opening once more. The room boy, this time carrying a thermos of cold water.
“You could at least knock. It’s 7.00am for Christ sake. Can you leave so that I can get some sleep?”
The room boy smiled, bemused.
“I come. I go. It is not important. You sleep. Sleep.”
He left the room. She closed her eyes. Five minutes later he returned, a change of fresh towels draped over his arm. Barbara pulled a sheet around herself and entered the bathroom shaking her head; avoiding the mirror but catching an unwelcome reflection of herself in the glass shower cubicle.
At the urgent rush of the shower cascading into life the room boy smiled once more. He knew that there was no hot water.
*
The young man, blond, long wavy hair. Eyes, sky-blue and intense beyond his years … stared out from the photograph. Barbara couldn’t recall when it had been taken. Who had taken it. What the smile hinted at. What the eyes spoke of. But she knew what they now said …
Find me, I am your child. Take me home.
Showing the photograph to the elderly Chinese in Fuxing Park. At first with confidence and hope. Expecting a nod of recognition followed by a few mangled words of English. How the Chinese love to speak English …
The American boy. Yes. Yes. He walk here many times. Very many times. He gone now. Gone to big hotel on other side of city. Other side. You find there. He there.
It would all be so simple. Easy answers. But as the eyebrows raised, the gazes turned away, the words failing to be born … showing Bobby’s picture became a slow torture of erosion. The washing away of her confidence by the drop-drop rains of silence. She left Fuxing, her steps becoming more and more hurried, until she was running from the grasp of the foliage, the prune faces, the rotten teeth in their mouths of ginger and garlic. Back toward the hotel. Room 201. His room. At the back of her eyes, tears intensely hot; not daring to give them up, not until they blistered her with their intensity. Wanting to feel that pain, begging to physically hurt.
Running … not one Chinese seeming to stare at her.
Of the thirty-six ways of handling a situation … running away is best,
goes the adage.
Making it to the room door. Slamming it shut. Fumbling with the heavy brass lock. Slipping it and muttering to every room boy in China …
“Try and get through that you bastards!”
The mahogany of the door cold against her back, unyielding as she slipped down it. Tears, in torrents, untethered. Down her cheeks. Her chin. As warm as babies’ fingers.
It was some time before she could move, stand, walk. Rehearsing in detail every action before it was made. She opened the attaché case, hand still wet. Moving to the thin black diary. Page upon page of names and numbers. With each one, a story. With each one … a debt – a deal – or a favour. Remembering, at all times, the cardinal rule of amassing and retaining power, as her index finger travelled the black lines of digits. Never ask for a favour … only grant them or take them.
Slowly she dialled the number.
*
Debts – deals – favours … in that order. That is the oil of politics and diplomacy. The lubricant that ensures that its engine runs free and easy with no risks of seizing up.
Debts – deals – favours.
In the People’s Republic, this lubricant it is known as
‘guan-xi’
. The invisible but powerful threads that bind people. Moves situations along. That opens up back doors. It works well in China; it has to. It constantly oils a system that coheres a nation of one billion people. From the top to the bottom, it works. It can conjure up a dish of Sichuan fried chilli bean curd when every other restaurant diner has been assured that they had sold out of it. It can cut out waiting through three torturous hospital queues to see a frantic doctor …
zhouhou-men
, ‘taking the back door’ to his home, after hours, to where the best and more leisurely medical care is given. It will give you access to the ‘Friendship Store’ … the department and grocery store reserved for foreigners and top graded cadre only, where goods not available to the ordinary Chinese abound.
Guan-xi
. It has no rank. It does not know its place. It is there in the peasantry. It is there in the Politburo. It seeps, unimpeded, through the labyrinthine system of grades and ranks … the Chinese puzzle of twenty-four steps of government. The flex of its fingers takes all within its span. There is a joke in China that doctors, drivers and shop clerks are the ‘Fat Jobs’ … the professions that can make the most of guan-xi because of the access that they have to services or commodities that can be traded through the back door. They call these fat jobs the ‘Three Treasures’.
Washington D.C. also has its three treasures … debts – deals – favours … in that order.
*
It was a private number that she dialled. A number that by-passed the bureaucratic regiments of the embassy … the hurdles that were set in place to upend or discourage all but the most persistent; or those with the necessary contacts. It was a private number that was relayed through its own telephone exchange and switching station. It was not foolproof, they were, after all, in China. But it was the best that they could do.
The name at the end of the line would volunteer his help to her because they were old friends. She had known him from a time when life was a lot less complicated … or so it seemed. A time coloured only by Leonard Cohen and Moroccan Gold. He would also help her because she had great legs.
With every digit dialled, a memory. Every memory tethered to his room at Harvard. Both students. Both learner lovers for two hours, never to repeat the clumsy episode over the next twenty-years as their lives frequently overlapped. If she closed her eyes tight, very tight ‘like raisins’, as Bobby had described them as a child. … she could still taste the cheap red wine. She could even feel his large hands upon her. The wrestling match with her bra. Her pantyhose. Her knickers. Pulling her reluctant fingers down towards his urgent, impatient crotch.
The telephone was answered. A measured and sort of sit on the sofa kind of a voice that you would imagine coming from the kind of man who only ever rose at the ‘crack of lunch’. An American voice. Barbara could almost smell the blueberry pie. Could almost hear Cagney singing a chorus of … ‘I’m a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy.’ There was a pause before she spoke. That instant before a leap into space is made, is risked.
“Hi Edward, it’s Barbara. How are you, Mr Ambassador?”
A Hong-Qi, a Red Flag, is a car … but not just a ‘car’, you can’t describe a dream of stretched black and chrome as just a car. In a country where the purchase of a bicycle can eat up two and a half years of savings and the flash of the silver from its forks or shopping basket exude status, germinate envy; the Red Flag is a hand-tooled wonder. A jewel in the crown of the elite; a social marker. A marker to be pointed at, one of the few that says. …
Yes, we have abolished class in China – but not rank, never rank.
The Red Flag is the transport of those drenched in rank. The high cadre … Generals, members of the Communist Party Central Committee, Bureau Chiefs, Governors of the Provinces, Cabinet Ministers, their wives and inner circle of hangers-on. Remember the proverb, old and Chinese, the ownership of a Red Flag breathing life into. …
If a man becomes an official, even his chickens and dogs will ascend to heaven.
*
Piao had never ridden in a Red Flag before. He was not a high ranking cadre or an official. Neither was he chicken or dog material. He could not have clucked or barked for some official even if his life had depended upon it.
Polished rosewood, heavily stitched creaking antique leather, contoured jump-seats, a fine lace antimacassar draped over the back of the rear seat, heavy brown curtains drawn across the rear windows. As a child, as every child, he had dreamt of being cocooned inside the moody, expansive coffin interior of a Red Flag. Less enthralled with the idea as he got older, seeing the blunt nosed missile of the Mercedes – Cadillac mix blood for what it truly was; a mongrel that could call its own tune, carving its unique path through the city. Cars, bicycles, blocking its path, being shunted aside, out of its way. Red lights ignored, flaunted. The Red Flag excluded by special right, from the need to have to brake suddenly … in case the high ranking cadre in the back seat should be jolted or injured; even at the cost of maiming or possibly killing a pedestrian.
As an adult, Piao’s tempestuous love affair with the Red Flag was over. Now, without even needing to concentrate, he could still see the star white face of his wife, the rear curtain slowly falling across it as the Red Flag pulled her further and further away. The traffic melting, dividing to let it speed ahead … robbing him of her. Her final glance back as an arm encircled her shoulder. A heavily gold-ringed hand bloomed with lines, teasing her face away from his gaze. … eyes looking forward now, towards Beijing and the cold bed of an old man. Without even needing to concentrate, Piao could still feel the rain licking at his face; could still taste the tears, salty and tainted by diesel exhaust.
The Senior Investigator drew back the curtains as they slid onto Huaihai Lu, brushing aside a red light and waved on by a policeman. The sun falling through the glass in a slow motion arc of amber, catching him full on the side of his face, its breath as warm as a satisfied lover. The ride was perfect. Silent, smooth … perfect. Perhaps he could learn to cluck or bark, he thought, teasing himself. Absentmindedly his hand ran over the leather of the seat … its softness, its smoothness. He remembered her thighs; the milk valley of the inside of her legs.
“It’s your first time in a Red Flag, isn’t it, Senior Investigator?”
Piao needed a chirpy, talkative driver, as much as he needed a toothache.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Ah well, there you have it … you see I am a sort of Senior Investigator in my own right. Don’t let this stupid chauffeur’s uniform fool you. It’s the person inside, I always say. The person inside. See, the first thing that anyone ever riding in a Red Flag does, is to draw back the curtains … so that they can be seen I expect. What’s the point in riding in a Red Flag if nobody can see that it is you who is riding in it. Follow my logic?”
Like one of those toy dogs that you place on the rear shelf of your car, Piao felt himself nodding stupidly.
“But the real give-away is the leather. First time riders, they always stroke the leather of the seat. You’d think that it was a plump girl’s thigh the way that they stroke it. As I said, a real give-away, if ever there was one …”
Piao slowly removed his hand from the leather of the seat.
“… now this is what you call a car, it leaves the Zil streets behind. The Russians are fair enough engineers, but a car is more than that, isn’t it? It’s about style, lines, use of materials. Have you run your fingers over the wood yet? First timers always do that as well. As soft as your wife’s cheek. Another give-away. Go on try it. The best available timber in China.”
Piao felt obliged, he ran his fingers over the heavily varnished gold grain. It was as smooth as plastic. The driver beamed.