Mason - Rare Earth

RARE EARTH

RARE EARTH

Paul Mason

OR BOOKS

New York London

2011 Paul Mason.

Published by OR Books, New York and London.

Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

First printing 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-935928-24-9 paperback

ISBN 978-1-935928-67-6 e-book

Typeset by Wordstop Technologies, Chennai, India

Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom

All that, the Spring bore towards me,

And the flower I plucked,

Fathers spirit I thought it was,

Dancing and moaning .

Spring, Aasmund Olavsson Vinje

PART ONE

Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.

You spoil it with too much poking.

Lao Tzu

It was morning but his body was telling him midnight. Thats why he was trying to siphon the Jack Daniels into the can of Coke. It was only the rattle of the van making his fingers shake. The task complete, Brough held the can up into the flickering sunlight to toast the dawn.

Flashing by to the west were the mountains, same as yesterday: a vertical rock face without snow or vegetation, emitting silence into the landscape. The low sun was making bits of rubble cast long points of shadow across the earth, which was the color of cigarette ash.

Helan Shan mountain range famous for excellent feng-shui!

Chun-lis voice startled him. Shed been asleep the moment before, like everybody else except the driver. Brough squinted at her through the makeup mirror: sharp fringe, long hair, face hidden behind a pair of plastic sunglasses.

Feng-shui dictates ideal position for burial is with back to mountains, feet to river, she chirped.

Theyd crossed the Yellow River an hour ago: a bleak stretch of churning water. Now they were heading north along a pristine but deserted road, with fields on one side and this rock-strewn desolation on the other.

Notice small cairns?

Hed spotted them: little gray piles of rock dotted across the plain.

Many important Chinese businessmen buried here.

What, Brough snorted; they just come here, pick a spot, get buried and pile the stones on top?

Her voice, trickling like a brook, was starting to charm him, making him think of her, for a nanosecond, without clothes.

Choose spot, pay bribe to local official, build pile of stones. Otherwise, have to use commercial cemetery. This poster, she pointed to a billboard at the roadside, advertising commercial cemetery.

The plain was throwing off a white haze that was too dense to be morning mistthis was the dust rising as the sun began to scorch the soil. The leaves of the saplings, regimented along the roadside to infinity, were curled and brittle.

Other side of mountain range is Gobi Desert, she said, reading his thoughts, constantly threatening encroachment through passes of Helan Shan.

How long before encroachment?

He took a sip of the Coke and waited. There was always that moment of anxiety when you hide alcohol in a fizzy drink: will the Coke just taste like Coke? Will the little kick not happen? But after a second or two he felt that pleasant clunk in his cortex.

Probably in our lifetime, she replied.

Hed spent eight hours in a plane, three hours at Beijing airport, two more flying to Yinchuan, then six hours in a hotel room with no minibar. In that time he had retained just one colloquial Chinese phrase: the words for fuck me, fuck me hooted mechanically by prostitutes in the adjoining room as they entertained a group of officials. And now it was Friday.

Chun-li had drifted back to sleep; Carstairs was snoring next to her, head back, one hairy fist instinctively wrapped around his camera strap. Georgina, their producer, was draped across the whole back row of seats behind them: hair scraped behind a pair of Donna Karan sunglasses, a mans white shirt, cambric skirt billowing to her ankles, Birkenstocks dangling from her sleeping toes.

Now, through the sun-slant, Brough spotted a flash of color in the fields: little dots of pink and the silhouettes of human beings moving between the furrows. A few minutes later he spotted some more.

Whats this? He gestured to the driver, whod been on autopilot behind a pair of gold-frame aviators.

The driver laughed the kind of laugh you laugh when somebody you dont like has been hit by a truck:

Da-gong; he chuckled: Har, har! Da-gong.

Chun-li Brough whispered.

It was going to be tricky, this. He poked her knee with a biro. She snapped awake.

Can you tell the driver to stop so we can film da-gong?

Da-gong mean migrant worker, she whispered back, craning her neck to see what he had spotted: Ah! Da-gong also mean day-laborer.

Whats going on? said Georgina, awake the moment the engine note changed.

Just pulling over for a quick leg-stretch, Brough said.

What have we stopped for, David? she jerked herself upright.

But he had leapt out of the van and was striding into the field, Chun-li tagging behind him, the tail of his linen jacket flapping in the breeze.

There were about twenty of them in the work-gang, stretched in a line; he could see now that most of them were women, bending and swaying, their backs parallel to the earth. They were wearing headscarves the colour of cherry soupthe Hui minor-itys version of the hijaband swaddled despite the heat in cardigans, chintzy aprons and marigold gloves. A few blokes up front were scraping at the soil with homemade hoes. On a levee stood two men, Han Chinese, identically clad: white shirts, pressed black trousers, comb-over hairstylestheir faces composed as if for a funeral. Chun-li hurried over and began rabbiting at them in Mandarin.

David, I mean, weve got stuff like this already, said Geor-gina, stumbling up behind him. The air was thick with the smell of baking earth and melting tarmac.

You see, said Brough, ignoring her, I knew thered be fucking poverty if we just looked for it. Lying bastards

We dont know theyre poor, do we? And Im just not seeing the environmental issue here, she beganbut he said, with studied cruelty:

You ever worked in a fucking field?

And then: Hey Jimmy!

Carstairs was swaying towards them under the weight of his tripod, camera and kit-bag.

Jimmy, look at this. This. Is a fuckin money shot, correct?

Brough made a finger-frame towards the mountains, which would form a tyre-black colorwash against the pink of the womens headscarves and the dead, white soil.

Its not the shots, David. said Georgina: Its...

Gimme the stick-mike, Jimmy, said Brough.

Carstairs handed him a microphone with a radio antenna dangling from one end and a mic-flag with the Channel Ninety-Nine logo at the other.

Hold on a minute, Im serious here, Georgina folded her arms, Its a massive drive to Shizuishan and weve already done the peasant thing!

Yeah, said Brough: I-not-poor. I-love-Communist Party. Weve done lots of that.

Theyd grabbed an hours worth of filming in the twilight, on arrival: sheep farmers living amid the ruins of the Great Wall. All of them prepared to saystraight to camerathat they preferred pharmaceutical sheep-feed to the traditional grazing methods; that they would have adopted the sheep-feed anyway, even if the grassland had not died, suddenly, beneath their feet.