The Firemaker

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.

Li saw that light in her eyes. He had asked for hope without hope of it, and witnessed now the unexpected effect it had had on her. ‘What is it?’

She sat upright. ‘Why did they kill him?’

‘Who?’

‘McCord. He was on their side. One of them.’ She turned bright eyes on him, the light of revelation now illuminating them. ‘He was panicking. That’s why. He was a loose cannon. He couldn’t see what they saw — a point in covering it up. I even asked him why they were bothering. He said they were stupid. But they’re not stupid people. They wouldn’t be trying so hard to cover up if they thought there was no point. And if they believe there’s hope, then there must be.’

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

Her mind raced back over McCord’s revelations in the shadow of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests The research team lived on the stuff for a year before we ever went public with it, he had said. And no one died of cholera toxin or mosaic virus. ‘They’d all been eating the rice,’ she said. ‘Five years ago. And yet only Chao was dying, that we know of.’ In all her excitement she was briefly struck by the thought that there was no greater folly than self-delusion. But this was no false hope, she was sure of it. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘not everyone who eats the rice gets the virus. Maybe not everyone who gets the virus dies of it. Maybe, with the huge resources Grogan Industries have at their disposal, they genuinely believe that a cure is possible. Why else would they be playing for time?’ She felt like the prisoner in the condemned cell who has just had word of a last-minute reprieve. Death had been postponed, maybe temporarily, maybe till it would have come anyway. But the sentence was no longer inevitable.

‘You mean you think we won’t die?’

‘Of course we will die! We all die! But maybe, just maybe, we won’t die of RXV.’ And with hope came the return of anger. ‘That’s why the world has got to know about it. We can’t just leave it in the hands of Grogan Industries.’ She threw her head back and gasped in exasperation. ‘And do you know what the real irony is? The profit motive that drove the development of the super-rice in the first place is the same motive that will drive the development of a cure. There is no money to be made from healing obscure or unfashionable illnesses. But imagine what rewards there would be in wiping out a virus that threatens to kill half the world’s population!’

She searched his eyes for some sign that he shared her excitement, her hope. But he seemed a long way away. Finally, he returned from that distant place and met her eye. ‘They must not be allowed to get away with it,’ he said. ‘Grogan and Pang and the rest.’ He saw his uncle impaled on his own sword.

‘No, they mustn’t,’ Margaret said.

Li gazed up at her for a minute or more. Then he said, ‘I love you, American lady.’

Her heart seemed to be in her throat. Her voice came as little more than a whisper. ‘I love you, too, Chinese man.’

And they held each other on the fold-down bed in the compartment of a condemned sleeper car in this industrial city in the north of China for a very long time, embracing for the first time the hope of a future together.

II

Yongli returned in the late afternoon. Li and Margaret had eaten some of the fruit that Lotus had packed in the holdall, and they had talked, endlessly. She told him about her childhood in upstate Illinois, summers in New England, the day her grandfather had a stroke and her brother drowned in the lake. He talked of his boyhood in Sichuan, the horrors of growing up in the Cultural Revolution, the loss of his mother. There was so much they had to tell each other, and neither had any idea of how long they might have to do it.

They saw Yongli hurry across the rusted tracks, glancing cautiously around him, his lengthening shadow following in his wake. They heard him climb aboard and his steps heavy in the corridor. He was breathing hard and perspiring when he reached their compartment. ‘That was a lot harder than I thought,’ he said. ‘But I got us some wheels.’ He pulled some packs of cigarettes from his pocket and chucked them on one of the beds. Margaret handed him some bottled water and he drank gratefully. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and slumped on to the bed. ‘Cost me an arm and a leg. It’s no great shakes, but it should do the mileage there and back okay. I’ve to pick it up just after ten tonight.’

Ten o’clock seemed an eternity away. The afternoon dragged by into evening, and still ten o’clock seemed a distant prospect. Yongli’s return had put an end to Li and Margaret’s conversation. She glanced at him frequently as he sat in the corner smoking. He must have been aware, surely, that his presence had had an inhibiting effect on them? He was surly and withdrawn, so different from the sparkling young man she had met that night in the Xanadu, when he had indulged in a verbal fencing match with her, a battle of wits. But then Li, too, in spite of their revelations of hope, seemed to have descended into the same trough. Perhaps it was infectious. The gloom that settled over Datong as the sun slid down in the west seemed to reflect their collective mood. Two hours earlier they had seen the work gang they had followed that morning, returning from some detail to the north, heading home for a hot meal, a glass of beer, a night relaxing in front of the television. Now darkness fell and they could see only by the dim glow of reflected light from distant streetlamps.

Eventually, shortly after nine thirty, Yongli got to his feet. ‘I’ll go and get our wheels,’ he said. ‘Meet me outside the gate in half an hour.’ And he was gone without another word, vanishing quickly into the darkness.

Margaret looked at Li with concern. ‘Is he all right?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ Usually you couldn’t shut Yongli up, or stop him making bad jokes. But there wasn’t much to talk about, and not much to laugh at. If they got caught, Yongli could face execution. There was a good chance they would be looking for him in Beijing. It was known the two of them were friends. Still, his friend’s mood was puzzling, uncharacteristic. Li looked at Margaret. ‘I hate this,’ he said. ‘I hate doing this to my friend. I hate running away.’

A little after ten they picked their way carefully across the tracks. They heard a train coming in the distance, clouds of steam and smoke rising up in its lights. Its whistle blew several times in the dark. Li took Margaret’s arm and led her to a dead area between junctions, and they crouched down to watch the train pass and head on into the station. As soon as it was gone, they sprinted across the remaining tracks and up an asphalt slope to the big iron gate through which they had come that morning. Li peered out into the street. It was quiet, the occasional lorry rumbling by. Haloes of mist were starting to form around the streetlights, and there was a slight chill in the damp air. ‘We’ll wait in the cover of the wall until he comes,’ Li said, and they stood hidden in its shadows with an oblique view through the half-open gate into the street beyond.

By ten thirty, there was still no sign of Yongli, and they were both starting to get nervous. ‘Suppose he’s been picked up,’ Margaret said. ‘We wouldn’t know. We could be waiting here for hours. And if he talks…’

‘He won’t talk,’ Li interrupted firmly, but she could see that he was worried, could hear the tension in his voice.

Another ten minutes went by, and then they saw the lights of a vehicle approaching slowly along the sidewalk. With the curve of the road, its headlights were pointed directly at them. They pressed themselves hard into the shadow of the wall, and as it drew closer and its lights swung away, Li leaned forward to take a look. He pulled back again immediately. ‘Police,’ he whispered.

The gentle purring of the engine in a low gear drifted slowly past and Li risked another look. It was a uniformed patrol vehicle, and it was heading on down the street.

‘Do you think they were looking for us?’ Margaret whispered.

He shook his head. ‘If they knew we were here to be looked for, they would know where to look.’

Another agonising ten minutes passed before an ancient pick-up truck clattered along the street towards them, pulling up in front of the gates with a squeal of brakes. Yongli leaned across from the driver’s side and signalled to them through the open passenger window. Li took Margaret’s hand, and they darted out across the sidewalk and up on to the bench seat of the pick-up. Li banged the door shut. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Yongli waved his arms in frustration. ‘We had no goddamn gasoline. The guy screwed me for a tankful, and we had a hell of a diversion to get it. I’ve got more cans in the back. He says if I get caught with his pick-up he’ll say it was stolen.’ He crunched into first gear and they lurched away from the sidewalk.

‘Is everything all right?’ Margaret asked anxiously.

Li nodded. ‘A fuel problem. But it’s okay.’

Yongli withdrew his map from inside his shirt and handed it across Margaret to Li. ‘You can navigate.’

Li flicked on the courtesy light and ran his eyes quickly over the large, pristine map of the Middle Kingdom. He snorted. ‘There’s only one road. To Erhlien.’

‘Then just make sure we stay on it.’ Yongli’s gloom had been replaced by agitation. He seemed excitable, almost hyper. He thrust a pack of cigarettes at Margaret. ‘Here, light one for me.’ She passed them to Li who lit two and passed one back to Yongli. He dropped the stick into fourth gear and they picked up speed, trundling north parallel with the railway line, heading for the wide open spaces of Inner Mongolia and the northern reaches of the Gobi Desert.

They left the lights of the city behind them with some relief. The road passed among hills that marked the farthest limit of Shanxi province, and through the remains of a huge broken-down wall that stretched to the east and west. ‘The Great Wall of China,’ Li said. But it wasn’t so great here, where it had been allowed to fall into disrepair and was little more than a heap of rubble and stones. For a while the road followed it, before swinging north again, leaving the hills behind, and entering the dark, vast emptiness beyond.

III

It was around three hundred miles to the international border with Mongolia, once known as Outer Mongolia because of its relationship to the Middle Kingdom. They planned to make the journey in a little over six hours, Yongli dropping them as close as possible to the border, allowing them to cross during the hours of darkness. But none of them had considered the possibility of a puncture three hours into their journey, or the fact that their pick-up would not be equipped with a jack.

Yongli kicked the tyre in frustration. He knew he should have checked there was a jack before they left. The brace would unscrew the wheelnuts, but they had nothing to lift the truck, allowing them to remove the wheel. Ironically, the spare was sound and well filled with air.

The pick-up sat at an angle on the camber of the road, tilting down towards the nearside rear wheel. Moonlight shimmered off into the distance among the endless swaying acres of grassland. The only sound was of the wind whistling through the grass. It was a wind soft on the skin and filled with the sweet scent of wild flowers. A vast black sky bejewelled with stars spread above them like a dome, the moon a brilliant silver orb passing through its firmament. The road vanished to distant points behind and ahead of them. They were stranded and exposed, with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.

Yongli was almost beside himself with anger and self-recrimination. ‘It’s hopeless, it’s completely hopeless,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all my fault.’ Margaret was beginning to tire of him.

Li had instituted an exhaustive search of the vehicle — beneath the seats, under the bonnet in case the jack was strapped to the inside of the engine compartment, beneath the tailgate in case there was some hidden storage area. But they found nothing. And the back of the vehicle was empty. Nothing that might be of any use in improvising a jack. Li sat pensive and smoking at the roadside now, staring off into the distance. He had said almost nothing since the puncture.

Margaret had an idea. ‘Where’s the railway line?’ she asked suddenly. ‘We’ve been following it most of the way.’

‘Over there.’ Li pointed off to their right, but she couldn’t see it.

‘There might be old sleepers — you know, railroad ties — or bits of track lying around that we could use to lever up the truck.’

Li was on his feet in an instant. ‘You’re right,’ he said. And he turned to Yongli. ‘You head south, I’ll go north. If you don’t find anything within an hour, come back.’ Yongli nodded and set off immediately at a jog for the railway line. Li said to Margaret, ‘Will you be all right here on your own?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I’m coming with you.’

At first they jogged up the line, but their pace very quickly reduced to a fast walk, Margaret struggling to keep up with Li over the uneven ground. They did not talk much, conserving their breath. Li reckoned they covered maybe seven miles in the hour, and they found nothing. The futility of that wasted time, and the further hour they would waste going back, was demoralising. It remained unspoken, but they both knew that if the truck was still there by morning, they were bound to be seen and reported. And it would only be a matter of time before they were picked up by the police.

Li turned, disheartened, in the direction they had come. Margaret caught his arm. He stopped, and for a moment they stood looking into each other’s eyes, sharing their despair. Then he drew her to him and held her, feeling the contours of her body moulded into his. And they kissed. A long, hungry kiss filled with both passion and pain that left each of them aching with a desire they knew they could not fulfil. Not here. Not now.

By the time they got back to the pick-up, Yongli was there in a state of anger and frustration. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he shouted at Li. ‘I found a whole fucking pile of railroad ties about a mile down the track. I came running back screaming my lungs out trying to stop you.’

Li shook his head. ‘We didn’t hear you.’

‘That’s nearly two fucking hours we’ve wasted!’

‘Well, let’s not waste any more,’ Li said, annoyed. It was bad luck, but it was no one’s fault, and he resented Yongli’s attitude.

This time they ran all the way down the line to where the railroad ties were stacked, Li explaining to Margaret in between gasps for air what had happened. When they got there, Li surveyed the pile. ‘We need two,’ he said. ‘One to run lengthwise between the wheels to provide a lever point for the other.’

Yongli said, ‘They’re too heavy for one person. I’ve already tried. We’ll have to make two trips.’

It took another thirty minutes to get both railroad ties back to the pick-up. Margaret felt hopelessly redundant, a passenger, unable to do anything to help. She stayed behind to loosen the wheel nuts when Li and Yongli went for the second tie. It proved a lot harder than she had imagined. They had been over-tightened either by brute strength or by machine. She only began to make progress when she locked the brace on to the nut at a forty-five-degree angle and stood on the end of it, flexing her knees to bring repeated pressure to bear. The first grinding creak and half-turn felt like a major achievement. By the time the two men returned with the other tie, she had loosened all the nuts, taken all the skin off one of her shins, and was soaked in a fine film of sweat. But she wasn’t about to complain. She saw the strain on their faces, and the rivulets of sweat that ran into their eyes and dripped from their chins.

Performing the remainder of the task turned out to be remarkably simple. The second tie was manoeuvred into position at right angles to the first, with the near end immediately below the vehicle’s jacking point. Li and Margaret brought their combined weight down on the other end and lifted the rear of the pick-up by several inches while Yongli slipped the punctured wheel off and replaced it with the spare. When the nuts were in place, they lowered it again, and Yongli finished tightening them.

They had lost more than three hours, and the first light of dawn had appeared in the sky to the east. Yongli seemed close to panic. ‘Come on,’ he shouted, and he leapt up into the cab to start the engine. But Li stood where he was, panting, his face blackened and sweat-stained. ‘It’ll be broad daylight by the time we get to the border now,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to find somewhere to lie low until tonight.’

‘Shit!’ Yongli thumped the wheel in frustration.