The Firemaker (51 page)
‘We’ll never get past them,’ Yongli whispered as they approached the back of the queue. ‘If they check our papers …’
But Lotus had more fortitude. ‘You said it yourself, Ma Yongli. They are looking for Li Yan and a
yangguizi
. Not two Chinese couples.’ She glanced at Margaret. She had a waterproof scarf tied down over her wig. Her make-up was crude, but in the bad light of the station entrance, she would pass for Chinese at a glance. Li Yan’s whiskers were convincing. Lotus only hoped that the brim of his hat and his umbrella would shield them from the rain. She had little confidence that the gum would hold in the wet.
More travellers joined the queue behind them as they shuffled forward, making slow progress to the baggage checkpoint. The rain still battered down on them, dampening conversation in the queue. But it was also making the officers checking the queue, after long hours of toing and froing in the wet, less conscientious than they might otherwise have been. They made a cursory check of the documents of a young couple in front of them, and then waved Li and the others through without a second glance. Yongli checked through their holdall and they were into the station. He was pale and trembling, and enormously relieved. They didn’t stop to look back, but hurried forward to the gate that opened on to their platform. The train stood huffing and chuffing impatiently, great clouds of steam rising into the night. The platform was heaving with passengers searching for compartments, friends and relatives hugging and kissing them farewell, children waving to aunts and uncles or parents embarking on long journeys, all under the watchful eye of a stern-faced female attendant at the ticket barrier. Li knew her type at a glance. Officious, bureaucratic, unbending. She would slam the gates closed at three minutes past midnight exactly, shutting out all latecomers, even if the train itself were late in departing. She examined their tickets and waved them through brusquely.
On the platform Lotus gave Yongli a long hug and then kissed him and held his face and told him to be careful and come back to her safely. He was choked, almost tearful. ‘I’d do anything for you, Lotus,’ he whispered. ‘Anything. I love you.’
She gave Li a kiss on the cheek and told him to look after her man. Then she embraced Margaret in a long, desperate hug. When they broke apart she said simply, ‘Good luck.’ She bit her lip as she watched them climb aboard. Yongli leaned down and kissed her again. A whistle sounded, and reluctantly she turned and hurried away into the station before the gate clanged shut. Yongli watched her go with moist eyes. He turned at last, and the three of them made their way into the crowded Hard Class compartment to find their seats among the damp travellers who squeezed into every corner, opening baskets of food and flasks of tea, making themselves comfortable and preparing for the long journey ahead. Margaret heard someone noisily dragging phlegm up from their throat and gobbing it on to the floor. She shivered with disgust, but didn’t dare look, keeping her head down, face shielded by the black hair of her wig. She prayed no one would speak to her and was startled when Li whispered, ‘If you can sleep, lean against my shoulder.’ She nodded and he put an arm around her. He touched his whiskers self-consciously to make certain they were still there, and glanced at Yongli. But Yongli was lost in a world of his own, pressed up against the window, wiping a hole in the condensation to try to see out. There was little to be seen, though, in the dim lights of the empty platform.
Another whistle sounded, somewhere up ahead a light flashed, and the train jerked and then moaned, and started pulling painfully out of the station, creaking and groaning as it gathered speed. As they emerged from the station, trundling and rattling across a great conjunction of lines, Margaret inclined her head a little to see out of the clear patch Yongli had rubbed in the window. Raindrops spattered hard against the glass, running city lights down the pane in wavering, jagged streaks. A flash of lightning threw the skyline into sharp relief for a brief moment. Less than a week ago she had driven into Beijing in the heat of a Monday afternoon, with the hope of an escape for six weeks from a life that had barely seemed worth living. Now, just five days later, she was leaving in the dark and the rain, a fugitive, guarding a life that seemed all the more valuable for the sentence of death that had been placed upon it. She clung tightly to Li. She wasn’t even going to try to analyse her feelings for him. All that mattered was that she wanted to be with him. For all that she might have lost, still she had found something precious. Something worth living for – even if that life had only a short time left to run.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
Saturday
A pall of yellow smog hung over a skyline of factory chimneys and tall buildings belching smoke out into the dawn, an early morning mist rising to join with the coal smoke and dust blown in off the desert to make a sulphurous cocktail in the sky.
As their train rumbled and clattered its way into the industrial city of Datong, Margaret awoke from a restless slumber to find herself still nestled into Li’s shoulder, his arm holding her safe and secure. Their carriage was a fog of cigarette smoke, people coughing and snorting as they gathered their belongings together. The floor was littered with orange peel and old food wrappings, and was sticky with spit. Yongli still leaned against the window, gazing through the streaked glass, like a blind man, into space. Margaret reached out and touched his arm. He turned and she smiled, and he made a poor attempt at a smile in return. Li got to his feet as the train shuddered to a halt on the platform and flicked his head towards the door. Margaret and Yongli followed him into the corridor and out and down on to the platform where the flow of travellers swept them through the ticket barrier and on to the crowded concourse. Heads down, they hurried past two patrolling police officers and out into the street.
The city was already gearing itself up for the day. The streets were filled with people working in the haze by the roadside, stall-owners sorting vegetables or arranging clothes, tinsmiths wielding hammers, bicycle repairers respoking wheels. Vehicles with their sidelights still on emerged from the mist for a few moments, and then passed into it again. Buildings seemed insubstantial and ghostly, people wandering the sidewalks like spectres. It was cooler than it had been in Beijing, and dry. It also seemed like another country, almost another century. It was how, Margaret imagined, a Chicago of the 1930s might have looked. Even the Chinese-built cars seemed old-fashioned, of another era. Men in dark coats with broad-brimmed hats and carrying tommy-guns would not have seemed out of place.
A work gang in railway colours trotted past. Li tapped Yongli on the shoulder to rouse him from some distant reverie. ‘Come on.’ He spoke with the authority of a man who had some idea of what he was about.
‘Where are we going?’ Margaret asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Somewhere out of public view.’ And they followed the work gang at a discreet distance, through tall iron gates in a high wall, and out across a great confluence of lines, red and green lights winking in the mist, the occasional grind of metal on metal as rails slid between rails to make connections between lines. They lost sight of the workers and kept on across the lines, towards the dark shadow of a bank of derelict sheds. The rails here were rusted, grass and weeds growing tall between the sleepers. Lines of old carriages lay rotting in front of the sheds.
Li pulled himself up on one and kicked the door open. The inside smelt musty and damp. With Yongli’s help, Margaret hauled herself up and followed him down the corridor. It was an old sleeping car, compartments with fold-down beds on two levels, stripped bare and divested of any comfort they might once have had. But the carriage was clean enough, and though it smelled damp, seemed secure against the elements, and dry. Li slid open a door to one of the compartments and looked in. ‘This’ll do,’ he said. With the sheds on one side, and a view out across the junction towards the city on the other, they would be able to see anyone approaching. He threw their holdall on to one of the beds and sat down to light a cigarette and slowly peel off his whiskers. Margaret wandered to the window and looked out through the dusty glass at the sun pushing up above the skyline, dispelling the early morning accumulation of mist and smoke. She pulled off her wig and with relief released her hair to tumble across her shoulders. Yongli remained in the doorway.
‘I’ll go and try to get us transport,’ he said to Li. ‘I might be some time.’
Li nodded and chucked him a bundle of notes held with an elastic band. ‘See if you can get some cigarettes,’ he said. Yongli turned to go. Li called after him and he turned back. ‘I appreciate this, Ma Yongli.’ He hesitated. ‘And I’m sorry. I was wrong about Lotus.’
There was a pained look in Yongli’s eyes, and he looked away, unable to speak for a moment. ‘You were,’ was all that he said in the end, and he turned away again. They heard his footsteps retreating down the corridor, and then watched his tall, round figure dwindle across the tracks, disappearing finally into the mist without looking back.
‘He seems very low,’ Margaret said eventually.
Li drew deeply on his cigarette, the tobacco crackling as it burned. ‘Ma Yongli is an extrovert. He can be … manic, sometimes. He has incredible highs. He also has terrible lows. He’ll come out of it.’ He stood on his cigarette. ‘I must try to sleep. I got none during the night.’ He looked at her. ‘Will you be okay?’
She nodded, and he curled up on the bed in a foetal position, and within minutes was deeply asleep. She looked at his face in repose, all the tension relaxed out of the muscles. He appeared so innocent, almost childlike, she wanted to hold him and comfort him and mother him. She looked away quickly, tears blurring her vision. She mustn’t think about it, she told herself. There was no future in regretting things that had not even happened yet. They were all going to die some time. Dying was not what mattered. Living, and what you did with your life, were the important things. She must try to hold on to that.
She sat down opposite him, and for a long time watched him sleep, drinking him in, taking simple pleasure in just being with him, at peace and without fear. It seemed to her that she no longer feared death. She was more afraid of losing what life she had left, of wasting even one precious second of it. The worst thing was knowing that in all probability she had longer than Li. She kicked off her sandals and slipped on to the bed beside him, folding herself into his curves, putting her arms around him, holding him tight and feeling his body suffuse hers with its warmth. Ironically, she felt truly happy for the first time in years, almost euphoric. She allowed herself to slip away into a dream-world where anything and everything was possible, where even in the blackest of human moments there would still be light. And she knew she loved him.
*
He rose slowly, like a diver emerging from the deep, to break the surface of consciousness, soft bubbles foaming around him, the heat and light of the sun strong and bright after the strange underwater gloom of a deep and untroubled sleep. He became slowly aware of her softness enfolding him, and he turned carefully so as not to disturb her, and found his face next to hers. The slow gentle rhythm of her breathing continued, unbroken. She was almost painfully lovely. The fine line of her nose, the arch of her brows, her delicate chin, her full and well-defined lips, the freckles sprinkled randomly across her nose. He brushed a lock of hair gently back from her forehead. Her breath was hot on his skin. He leaned forward to kiss her and saw her eyelids flicker. He closed his eyes as she opened hers.
She saw him lying sleeping, his face only inches from hers, his head tilted slightly as if he were about to kiss her. She felt a strange ache inside as she remembered her final thought before succumbing to sleep. She tipped her head forward to kiss him and saw his eyelids flicker, and closed hers as he opened his.
He smiled when he saw that her eyes were shut. Then, after a moment, they opened again, and she returned his smile. He kissed her softly, feeling the gentle give of her lips against his. She responded, and opened her mouth in a desire to draw him in. They were moved now by something beyond passion or lust. Beyond time. For there seemed no need to rush, and every reason to savour. The sun beat in through the grimy window of the abandoned carriage, bathing their bodies in heat and light as they moved together, joined by love and sadness, affinity and death. Her breasts filled his hands and his mouth, her skin sweet on his tongue. She felt all the fine muscles of his back, firm buttocks that she grasped and pulled towards her, drawing him inside. He was so beautiful she never wanted to let him go. He filled her with himself, moving slowly to the rhythm of their hearts. She gasped, almost sobbing. It was a pleasure close to pain, on the edge of endurance. Her fingers dug into his back, trying to hold him there, to draw him deeper, to finally consume him, until he exploded inside her and she lost all control, wave after wave of ecstasy washing over senses numbed by years of indifference. A convolution of muscles and nerves that robbed the brain of independent thought and immersed them both in unashamed abandon. Nothing mattered now, nor ever would again.
They lay naked, breathless and damp in one another’s arms, the sun burning their skin hot through the window. For ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, neither of them spoke. Neither wanted to break the spell, to end the moment, to bring them back from some distant euphoria to their present peril. Eventually Li reached for a cigarette and blew smoke at a ceiling stained brown by nicotine. He said, ‘Is there any hope for us?’
She inclined her head to look at him. She could say that maybe a cure would be found in time, that RXV would prove much easier to defeat than AIDS, but it seemed unlikely, and what merit was there in false hope? But then she stopped herself, her heart pounding suddenly. Look for hope, she thought, and you will find it. For there is never any place in the world without light. She had accepted McCord’s hopelessness, his dark despair, without thought. But now she replayed the scene they had acted out on moonlit marble and saw light for the first time.
