Bad Traffic (15 page)

It was chilly back in the van, but the chips warmed Ding Ming’s hands and stomach. The salt stung his wounded lip. Jian started the engine.

‘Can’t we wait?’

‘We’re going to that place. Navigate.’

The restaurant was marked with the characters for duck, the ‘petrol station’ with a star. Instructions in English accompanied the drawing.

‘Straight on, past two sets of lights. I wonder how much money they make in a day. Very simple business, but a strong one. It’s good to have hot food, a person can’t do
anything
on an empty stomach. These would be better with some spice on them.’

‘Shut up. Where now?’

‘I don’t think you should tell me to shut up when I’m
navigating
.’

‘Now where? Now where? Okay, talk all you like. Where are we going?’

‘Left.’

They headed out of town and onto an unlit road that curved around a lake. He pointed at a pool of light. ‘I think that’s it.’ Jian slowed. It was a garage with a four-pump forecourt and a shop at the back.

Why didn’t you stop?’

‘I don’t want them to see the van.’ The policeman parked in a lay-by a hundred metres or so further up the road.

They got out and started walking back. The lights of the town tinted the lower part of the sky orange, but all else was shaded blue by the moon. On the left ran a wall of uncut stones. It had been made without mortar and this pleased Ding Ming’s sense of aesthetics – it was clever, efficient and frugal. To the right lay the lake, its surface rippling in the breeze, and those dark humps beyond were hills.

Ding Ming had never seen stars in such abundance, more than you could possibly count. He craned his neck and his mouth hung open. He grew intrigued at the variation in
colours
and brightness of the twinkling heavenly objects, and wondered what that pale milky streak was.

‘That’s nothing,’ said Jian. ‘You want stars, you come up to the northeast.’

‘Are they the stars we see? Are they the same as the stars over China?’

‘Of course they are.’

The sight stirred the poet in Ding Ming. Here was
something
that all mankind shared, be they peasant, policeman or foreigner. Were they not each and every one an
inhabitant
of the same small globe spinning in space? Looked at in cosmic terms, his epic trip across the seas was nothing but a small step, and this alien and baffling country was after all not so far from home. And how petty were the affairs of humans, compared with the timeless magnificence of the cosmos. He wished his wife were here to share this.

An owl hooted and when it ceased Ding Ming wondered if he had ever experienced such a profound quiet before. Feeling enveloped by absence, he wanted to shout, just to add some humanity to the setting. He began to twist his feet when he planted them, and to scrunch his chip punnet, just to break the spell of silence.

The petrol station was closed and no one responded to Jian’s banging and shouting. Ding Ming peered between shutter slats. A dim light illuminated prodigious racks of confectionery and magazines. ‘Motoring World’ struck him as a very lyrical term. One big green book, he could swear, was called ‘Map of the Road’. He pointed it out.

‘We’ll have to break in,’ said Jian. ‘I could maybe smash this shutter with a rock.’

‘You’re a madman. As soon as you break that window, there’ll be a screeching noise, and a metal sheet will slam over the door.’

Ding Ming spotted a CCTV camera. He’d seen one before, in a bank in Fuzhou, but it was frightening to see one out here in the wilds. He turned his back on it, only to see more, trained on the forecourt. He put up his hood, and swivelled a raised arm, pointing them out.

He whispered, ‘They have pictures of us. They have
pictures
of the van, too. They’ll send cars to catch us.
Helicopters
will go across the sky pointing lights at the road. They’ll hunt us down like rabbits.’

‘Shut up about helicopters,’ snapped Jian, but he
obviously
didn’t like it, either. ‘I’m going to look on the roof. There might be a way in from above.’ He rolled a wheelie bin over and stood on it. The plastic lid bent under his weight.
Grunting
with the effort, he hauled himself up to the flat roof, the toes of his shoes scuffing brick. A crunching sound was him walking around up there.

Ding Ming stepped round the side of the building to get away from the implacable gaze of the cameras. A yellow phonebox was attached to the wall. It had a slot for coins. So… here was a phone, he had money, his captor had left him unsupervised. An unlikely opportunity had arisen. He picked up the receiver. It was surprisingly cold and heavy.
He was not a cunning person, deception did not come
naturally
, neither did nerve. But they had never really been required before. He heard banging and scraping. The
policeman
shouted down.

‘There’s a skylight, but there’s a metal grille over it. I’m going to see if I can get it off. Stay there.’

Ding Ming observed that his hands were shaking as he fed one of his precious gold coins into the slot.

Ding Ming could not believe what he was doing – it was as if it were happening to someone else, and he was watching. He dialled the country code for China, and the township number, then the number of his own mobile. He held his breath as the phone rang loud and clear.

Twisting the receiver’s metal cable with his free hand, he imagined his request shooting into the night sky and being picked up by a satellite and hurled back down and
hitting
the bottom-of-the-range silver flip-top mobile with the scuffed case.

His call was answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Mother? It’s me,’ he whispered.

‘Ding Ming? Is that you?’ There was a slight delay but the voice was as clear as if she stood beside him. He cupped his hand over the receiver and hissed, ‘Mother, has Little Ye made a call home? I need to know where she is.’

‘My son? Where are you? You have to go back. Please.’

‘What?’

Another voice came over the line, gruff, male, speaking Fujian dialect. ‘Is that the foreign guest worker Ding Ming?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Never mind who I am. What do you think you’re playing at? Listen to me. We’ve been here for hours and we’re bored and angry. Your mother’s not having any fun, either. We’ve got her tied to a chair.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to strap this phone to her head, and then I’m going to pull out the teeth she’s got left and you can listen to her screaming. And then we’re going to find the rest of your family and do something worse.’

Ding Ming reeled as if he’d been hit. His hand squeezed the cable. His throat seemed lined with thorns.

‘Stop,’ he croaked.

‘This is what happens to runaways. We fuck their whole family. You owe us a lot of money and we’re not going to let you run away from your debt. We own you, do you
understand
? Is that clear?’

Something scraped above and the policeman shouted. ‘Hey. You.’

Ding Ming supposed he had been discovered. He dropped the receiver and it clattered against the wall, and the way the cord lashed as the receiver swung reminded him of an angry snake. It even glittered like snakeskin.

‘Ding Ming,’ shouted the policeman. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yes.’

He backed into the forecourt until that thing was out of sight. He was unsteady on his feet and could feel blood draining from his face. He couldn’t think, his head was full of static. He looked dumbly up. The policeman was
frowning
at him. He supposed the man would punish him but he didn’t care about that now. He only cared about what was happening to his mother.

‘I need something to lever it. Go back to the van and fetch that spade.’

Ding Ming continued to stare. The man was a black
silhouette
against star-sprinkled blueness.

‘What’s up with you?’

‘I… I saw a snake.’

‘Get the spade. Hurry.’

Ding Ming turned and ran. He could see the scene: toughs arriving on a motorbike, his mother wringing her hands, and then the cord, the feeble struggle. He even knew the chair she was tied to, the cracked grey plastic one with the metal legs – it was the only one with a back. With every
pounding
step his mind added a detail, and each was a twist to his guts. Minute after minute, she had sat terrified, and the toughs had lounged around, bored, cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth and spitting the husks on the floor. They’d told her he had run from his boss, from his debt, and what a bad son he was.

When he reached the van, he fought back the desire just to keep hurtling on down the road and into blackness. He tugged the spade out of the back. The blade was grimy with earth and touching the handle brought an image of the
lolling
tongue of the dead man he had buried. What viciousness the world contained – he was surrounded by it. The sound as he slammed the door seemed doleful.

But he was not a bad son, and not a runaway. The
policeman
had stolen him away, so it was all that man’s fault. Anger brought some mental clarity and he resolved to sort this nonsense out. His two remaining coins chinked in his pocket. He would call those men again.

The forecourt cameras made him self-conscious, and he pulled the hood tighter over his head, which narrowed his vision still further, to a tunnel. To look round he had to move his whole head. The policeman stood on the roof, smoking. As Ding Ming climbed onto the bin, a crack in the lid widened and he smelled a fetid odour. Hands snatched the spade away.

‘If I can just get this grille off, I’m in. An alarm will
probably
ring, ignore it. You stand outside peeking through the shutters, and point out the map book. When you see I’ve got it – and only then – run to the van. Alright?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say it.’

Fearing that his turbulent emotions were written all over his face, he looked aside at the wall as he mumbled, ‘I point out the book and wait till you’ve grabbed it.’

He jumped down and hurried round the corner and saw the phone receiver hanging. Right, more cunning was required. He noted with consternation that his hands were shaking even more this time. Softly he slid his second heavy, shining coin into the slot and winced as it clinked through the innards of the machine. He dreaded hearing the crunch crunch of footsteps on the roof – that man only had to take three or four steps and look down and the subterfuge would be discovered. But all he heard above was clanging and grunting.

He called home again, and settled the receiver deep into the fur-lined hood to muffle it. The plastic grew warm with his panting breath. The call was answered, but all he heard were vague shuffling sounds.

‘Hello? Hello? Mother? Is that you Mother?’

Abruptly she was screaming at him. ‘Oh, my son, my son. I can’t feel my arms any more, they tied the rope so tight.’

His stomach lurched. He scrunched up his face. He guessed a hand was holding the phone up to her mouth. ‘They say they’re going to pull my teeth out and other things. He wants to talk to you. You have to do what he says.’

‘Guest worker?’ a male voice drawled.

‘I didn’t run away. I was kidnapped…’

‘Shut up. Ring this number.’ He began to dictate. Ding Ming put his finger into his mouth and wrote the digits in spit on the wall. He pictured a substantial figure, red-faced with booze, speaking without hardly moving his lips. ‘One five three nine…’ Such a casual tone – it was the voice of a man dealing with a minor nuisance at work.

His mouth was parched, he could work no more spit into it. ‘No, wait – the last four again.’

The phone cut off and buzzed tetchily in his ear. He found and pressed a ‘next call’ button. He could only see his
spit-drawn
digits by laying his cheek against the wall and
looking
at them obliquely so that the liquid caught the light. With shaking fingers he dialled the new number. It was difficult to see the keypad through his tears and he fumbled the second 6, hitting 5 by mistake. He depressed the receiver’s cradle so that he could start again, and the machine hiccuped and the display flipped down to zero. He put his last coin in.

Was it 2265 or 2256? His numbers were already fading. A phone began to ring. It rang a long time and Ding Ming looked at the lake. The water was black and still. Even to drown himself would not help, money would still be owed. Up above, the policeman cursed, and metal rasped.

‘Hello?’ A sleepy voice, speaking English. Ding Ming whispered, ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Who is this?’ He knew that tone, and the lazy way those syllables ran together to make ‘hoossiz’ – Mister Kevin.

‘My name William.’

‘Who?’

‘I work in mud. Touch your… little brother with my hand. Got take away.’

‘Oh, yeah, the little Chinky takeaway. I’ve got some nasty bruises off your friend. You’d better get back right away.’

‘He no my friend. He take me. I no… I no can choose. I want go back. Please, understand. I no want my mother be hurt.’

‘Are you still with that guy?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the van?’

‘Excuse me please?’

‘The car, he took my car, where’s my car?’

‘Car is here.’

‘Tell me where you are, we’ll come and get you. I’ll make sure everything is smoothed over back in Chinkyville and we can pretend none of this happened. Okay?’

He felt a surge of gratitude. Mister Kevin was harsh but fair, a lonely figure in need of love, a reasonable man of his word, soon to inform him where his wife was.

Something clanged into the forecourt and Ding Ming caught his breath. He turned his head and saw the spade skitter across concrete and come to rest against a petrol pump. The policeman yelled, ‘Fuck. I can’t get in. We’ll stay the night and come back in the morning and buy the fucking thing.’

Now his feet could be heard scrambling for a footing on the lid of the bin. He was climbing down. Ding Ming
realised
he was too late, the man would be round the corner in a few seconds. He winced at a sharp crack. The policeman swore again. He was very close, but there were no footsteps. Ding Ming put the receiver on top of the phone and scurried to peek around the wall. One of the policeman’s legs had plunged through the broken lid, and with much grumbling and swearing the man was clumsily extricating himself. He ran back to the phone.

‘At petrol station,’ he blurted.

‘I need more than that.’

Where were they? He had no idea. He rummaged his head furiously for the right English words, hopping from one leg to another in his haste.

‘Got lake, close by town. Town got Chinese restaurant name Happy Duck.’

‘Happy Duck? That’ll be in the phone book. Alright… me and the lads will be down soon as. Sit tight. Stay out of the way when it kicks off.’

He heard a thud. The policeman had jumped down from the bin. Footsteps – now his tormentor was walking in the forecourt. They came unhurriedly closer. A few more steps and his captor would see him.

‘No hurt my mother. Tell me where my wife is.’

‘Huh?’

Ding Ming put the receiver back and hurried round the corner and walked right into the policeman. Feeling that just to catch the man’s eye would be to give himself away, he lowered his head, and saw that one of the fancy leather shoes was filthy with crud. It had packaging stuck to it and what looked like smears of banana.

‘What’s up with you? Seen more snakes?’

‘They’re everywhere.’