The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (25 page)
As Joyce lumbered away, he begrudgingly admitted to himself that the killing of innocent passers-by might actually be a factor to be considered in an indirect way, too—it would be messy and make the situation horribly complicated. The authorities would have to be involved. And in China, as he had learned to his cost many times, one did not want the powers involved in any way if it could be at all avoided. Somehow, Joyce was right: they had to solve the problem, not run away from it. The bomb had to be moved away from the city centre. It had to be placed somewhere where it could go off and do no harm.
The elephant was moving slowly and Wong caught up with Joyce in a few strides. ‘We must move the elephant somewhere with no people before it booms. Where shall we put it?’
‘Somewhere deserted. Let’s get onto the main road and see what we can see.’
They turned out of the western approach to the theatre, looked out at Huangpi Bei Lu and stared. There were tens of thousands of people filling the road—the anti-American demonstration had reached as near as it would be allowed to get to the Shanghai Government Building, which was adjacent to the east side of the Grand Theatre. Bodies and banners filled the street for as far as they could see. Although the police had attempted to limit the demonstrators to Huangpi Bei Lu, many had spilled onto Nanjing Xi Lu, getting in the way of the cars, which stood nose to tail in a jam. It looked as if the entire pedestrian and vehicular population of the world had decided to descend upon the gates of the Shanghai Grand Theatre at this precise moment.
Both of them had the same thought at the same time.
‘What time is it?’ the feng shui master asked.
Joyce looked down at her watch: five twenty. ‘Gridlock time,’ she said.
Right on cue, half a dozen trapped cars started honking.
Panic creeps. As the mental precursor of frenzied action, panic should hit like a thunderbolt. It is usually connected to danger, and should therefore engender a rapid reaction. But more often than not, it meets an almost impenetrable wall, which is the human dislike of losing control. So instead, panic creeps silently around our synapses, head down, tiptoeing along. But as it goes, it grows, and we need to change our metaphor. It becomes a huge, expanding amoeba with many pseudopodia, and then grows into a full-scale stream of the stuff. It floods into an increasing number of sections of our subconscious, like an underground river breaking into new chambers. There are no visible ripples on the ground above, but nevertheless the firmament has become dangerously unstable.
This refusal to countenance panic is important, for panic may sweep through our cranial passages as liquid, but it is not water. It is a type of plasma which works like liquid nitrogen on the brain: it freezes the system, turns it cold and hard and unmoving: messages can no longer travel from synapse to synapse. The thought processes which should organise our escape stop working. So perhaps the correct thing to do in the face of extreme danger turns out to be to ignore it, and focus solely on solving the problem. Joyce, who tended to freeze when scared, was halfway there.
Wong sat down, his body facing away from the elephant, and started to think about what to do. This was a job for the intellect. Hard, cold logic, the computation of many facts at high speed, was what was needed. Some things one could do by instinct, but moving loaded elephants out of crowded city centres was not among them. This needed every one of the 800 000 million brain cells in his cranial cavity working independently and in correct sequence.
Space. Peace. Absence of people. That’s what was needed. If he could not save the elephant, it would at least have to die in a peaceful situation, willingly sacrificing itself so that others might live. He imagined the elephant exploding in a quiet, deserted field, with himself and other onlookers watching through binoculars from a safe distance—and preferably with a local mystic such as Shang Dan doing something to mitigate the negative forces unleashed by the beast’s demise. This is what must happen. He must enable this to happen. Find an open green area. He looked at his watch. ‘The bomb will boom in forty-seven minutes. We need to find a quiet place quickly. Park, something like that.’
By this time people from the demonstration had spotted them and many had surged onto the pavement to have a close look at the beast—elephants were not a common sight on the streets of Shanghai. The first to reach it were children, and their families soon caught up with them. At the start, there were a dozen people, then fifty, then a hundred, and then they were surrounded by a sea of bodies growing larger and denser by the second.
‘Sorry,’ shouted Joyce. ‘We need to move this beast. Excuse us. Can you keep away, please?’
No one paid any attention. From her vantage point on top of the grey mountain she shouted: ‘Please keep away! This elephant is explosive!’ Still no response. She realised she needed to switch to Mandarin, but this was not a subject covered anywhere in the first eight chapters of
Conversational Mandarin Book One
. ‘Bomb. Bomb inside elephant. Big bomb,’ she shrieked.
Several people looked up, baffled, at the young woman on top of the elephant. ‘Big bomb,’ she told them.
‘Bum?’ a young man stroking the elephant asked. He pointed to his bottom. ‘Big bum?’
‘No,
bomb
. Big bomb.’
She leaned over to Wong. ‘How do you say bomb in Mandarin?’
‘
Baang.
’ ‘What? Bomb in Chinese is
bang
?’
‘Not
bang
.
Baang
. High falling tone.’
‘Weird. How do I say “This elephant may explode”?’
‘
Zhe tou da xiang hui bao zha
.’
‘Thanks.’ Joyce shouted from the top of her voice: ‘
Zhe tou
da xiang hui bao zha.’
The crowd laughed. Several people applauded, apparently thinking that she was making some sort of witticism. The young man stuck out his bottom again and made a farting noise with his pursed lips. This elephant’s rump might explode with gas, is that what she meant?
Cheese
. What to do? Joyce closed her eyes in despair. Darkness often helped. Visualisation—that was the answer. She remembered the advice she had received from one of her favourite teachers at school: when you are in a bad situation, calm yourself, visualise the situation you would rather be in, and then try to conjure up the routes that would lead you from your present position to the one you want to be in. She took a deep breath. Where was she now? Trapped. Surrounded. Hemmed in. Where did she want to be? Alone with the elephant, far away from the city, preferably near a veterinary surgeon’s clinic. What must she do to get from here to there? Move. Run. Gallop. Find a quiet spot. Escape.
She opened her eyes and jerked her hips forward. ‘Okay, we have to get going now. Out of the way, please. Out of the way.’ She gently spurred the beast on with her legs, the way she had watched Jungle Boy do on television, and it jerked forward, swinging its trunk to get people out of the way. ‘Which way?’ she called out to Wong.
‘Over there. I think is a park there. Not so crowded. We let it explode there.’
It took several minutes to travel a few dozen metres through the crowd towards the park gate, which Wong said was just past the two buildings on their immediate right—the Grand Theatre Gallery and the Shanghai Art Museum.
It was tough going. We talk of a sea of faces but actually human mobs are nothing like oceans—they have more of the quality of hot mozzarella. They stretch and become long strings. They pull against each other and they coagulate back into globules. They sometimes harden into tough little pools which won’t break up, and at other times they turn into groups of threads, sort of together and sort of separate. Chinese crowds have particular qualities of solidness, nay, of impassable stolidity. In every mob there are always individuals or lumps of people that are totally immoveable—even in the face of large objects (trains, trucks, cars, elephants and, on one memorable occasion in Tiananmen Square in 1989, a tank). As a result, movement was painfully slow.
The elephant actually trod on one man’s foot, causing Joyce to squeal in alarm. ‘Ooh,
sorrysorrysorrysorry
—CF, the elephant stood on that guy. I think he hurt him. We better do something. He’s probably got broken bones. Can you see if he’s hurt?’ But Wong took a resolutely Asian view of injuries to passers-by: if someone got hurt on the way, that was too bad. Since it was acceptable for cars to bash passers-by out of the way, why should an elephant not have the same right? The good of the masses was the important thing, and people in positions of importance (such as in an official limousine or on top of an elephant) could not be expected to pay attention to particular individuals in crowds they might encounter. It was the individual’s duty to look after himself.
Wong, McQuinnie and the elephant moved gradually through the thick mob—Joyce continuously looking back in horror at the people they injured—until finally they succeeded in making significant progress along the road. Towering above them on the other side of the road was the JW Marriott Tomorrow Square, a huge shiny skyscraper the top half of which appeared thicker than the bottom—like a huge steel knife stuck into the ground. It made Wong shiver. Police, evidently assuming this was some sort of sideshow scheduled to perform at the park, held up the demonstration to let them through. And so they lumbered at crawling pace to Entrance Gate Number Seven of the People’s Park, better known as Renmin Park. Joyce’s heart was in her mouth. ‘Dear God, I hope there are no people in the park today.’
It didn’t look very likely, considering the crowd at the gates—there was a stream of people coming in and out, some holding balloons, children with candyfloss, mothers with strollers.
Entering through the iron gates, they walked a few steps through a narrow passage and past a signboard on the left in Chinese and English: ‘Ethic or moral codes should be duly honoured, visitors are expected not to urinate or shit.’
In front of them the path diverged into three lanes: the middle one led to a lake, the ones on either side forming part of a ring road circling the park. All three were heaving. There were fence-to-fence people everywhere they looked.
The park, Wong noticed, had been beautifully designed— he couldn’t have done it better himself. The path in front of them gently meandered, gracefully revealing a perfect scene: a pond-side viewing area, shaded by a large tree and focused around a body of water surrounding a wooden house on stilts. There were water-lilies standing tall out of the pond on one side of the bridge leading to the structure, and dragonflies standing on nothing over the surface of the water on the other: a perfect blend of the natural and the urban.
This was something that the Chinese and Japanese did so well, and no one else seemed to understand. Other peoples seemed to assume that environments had to be either human (flat and urbanised, with featureless green lawns and football pitches), or natural (protected wilderness areas where matted vegetation grew into impenetrable forests). But in ancient oriental garden design there was an attempt to do something really, really important: to find and recreate the perfect human–natural environment, the paradisical spot that is imprinted in every human being’s race memory. This was why feng shui (and
vaastu
) were so vital.
‘Oh no.’ Joyce scanned as much of the park as she could see from her high seat: there were people in every corner. Indeed, in many places the crowds were so thick that it was difficult to see any grass. She looked down at Wong and noted the look of despair on his face.
The feng shui master was deeply torn about what to do. Try to save the elephant? Try to save the community? Try to save themselves? Only the first and third options made sense to him, but he had no idea how to effect them. Perhaps someone else could solve it. ‘I think we go back to the hotel. Tell people. Leave the elephant and get out of here peedy-queue. Go back to hotel and phone. Is not our problem. Is problem for the authorities. They can fix it, maybe.’
‘No way,’ said Joyce. ‘The authorities will shoot the elephant first. They like killing things. Then they’ll run away and let it blow up. There’s no time left to dig the bomb out of the elephant and switch it off. How long do we have left?’
Wong looked at his watch. ‘Forty-three minutes. Bringing elephant to park wasted a few minutes, did no good.’
‘Well, it was your bloody idea.’
The feng shui master felt as if he could hear the tick-tick-tick of the bomb inside the elephant. It appeared to be getting louder and stronger and faster as the countdown headed to zero.
But then he realised that what he could hear was the thud of his own panicking heart.
