Peter May - The Runner

Li looked out in astonishment at the dozens of skiers gliding down the shallow slope, then queuing to be dragged back up again on a continuous pulley. At the far side, screaming children sitting in huge inflated tyres flew down a separate run, while a motorised skidoo plied a non-stop trade for goggle-eyed thrill seekers up and down a deserted slope off to the right. He watched as a novice, a young girl togged up in the most expensive of designer ski wear, tried to propel herself along the flat with her ski sticks. She looked clumsy in the great plastic boots that were clipped into her skis, and she ended up sitting down with a thump, severely denting her dignity. There was nothing very sophisticated about any of it, but it was a brand new China experience for Li. ‘Do these people actually have their own skis?’ he asked Sun.

Sun laughed. ‘No, most of them hire everything here.’

‘How much does it cost?’

‘About three hundred and sixty kwai for a day’s skiing.’ Half a month’s income for the average Chinese.

Li looked at Sun in astonishment. ‘Three hundred and sixty…?’ He shook his head. ‘What an incredible waste of money.’ He had only been in America for little over a year, but somehow China had changed hugely in that time, and he felt as if he had been left behind, in breathless pursuit now of changes he could never catch. He glanced at Sun and saw the envy in the young man’s face as he looked out at these privileged kids indulging in pursuits that would always be beyond his pocket. There were only ten years between them, but the gap was almost generational. While Li saw Beijing Snow World as something invasive and alien to his country’s culture, it was something that Sun clearly aspired to. On the other side of the glass, a young woman walked past with two tiny white pet dogs frolicking at her heels. One of them wore a pink waistcoat.

Sun laughed. ‘That’ll be to keep it warm. She must be going to eat the other one first.’

The setting sun had become a huge red globe and was starting to dip below the line of the hills. Li drained his tea and stood up. ‘Better go,’ he said.

It was twilight as they drove into Dalingjiang. The village square was a dusty, open piece of broken ground where the men of the village sat on well-worn logs lined up against the wall of the now crumbling production team headquarters of the old commune. Several village elders were gathered in the dying light, smoking pipes and indulging in desultory conversation. A rusty old notice board raised on two poles had nothing to announce. Nothing much happened any more in Dalingjiang. They watched in curious silence as the Jeep rumbled past. Along another side of the square, were the logs laid out for the women. But they were empty.

Sun pulled up at the village shop, a single-storey brick building with a dilapidated roof and ill-fitting windows. Corncobs were spread out to dry over the concrete stoop. The door jarred and rattled and complained as Li pushed it open. A middle-aged woman behind two glass counters smiled at him. He flicked his eyes over the half-empty shelves behind her. Jars of preserves, Chinese spices, soy sauce, cigarettes, chewing gum. Under the glass were packets of dried beans, cooking utensils, coloured crayons. Crates of beer were stacked under the window.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.

‘I’m looking for the home of Lao Da,’ he said. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘But you won’t be able to drive there. You’ll have to park at the end of the road and walk.’

She gave him instructions and they parked the Jeep further up the dirt road and turned off through a maze of frozen rutted tracks that led them between the high brick walls of the villagers’ courtyard homes. There were piles of refuse gathered at the side of the larger alleys, stacks of red bricks, sheaves of corn stalks for feeding the donkeys. Dogs barked and bayed in the growing darkness, a scrawny mongrel beneath a piece of corrugated iron growling and whining at them as they passed. A donkey looked up with interest from its evening meal, and a cackle of hens ran off screaming from behind their chicken wire. The air was filled with the sweet scent of wood smoke, and they saw smoke drifting gently from tubes extending horizontally from holes in the side walls of houses. There were no chimneys on the roofs.

They found Xing Da’s parents’ house next to a derelict cottage, long abandoned and left to rot. The children of the village no longer stayed to work the land as their ancestors had done for centuries before them. They left for the city at the first available opportunity, and when their parents died, their houses were allowed to fall down — or else be purchased by entrepreneurs and developed as country cottage retreats for the wealthy.

Li pushed open a rusted green gate and Sun followed him into the courtyard of Lao Da’s cottage. In the light from the windows they could see firewood and coal stacked along the wall. Frozen persimmons were laid out along the window ledges. Li knocked on the door, and a wizened old man opened it, too old to be Xing Da’s father. Li told him who he was and who he was looking for, and the old man beckoned them in. He was Xing’s grandfather, it turned out. His wife, who looked even older, sat on a large bed pushed up below the window by the door to the kitchen. She glanced at the strangers without showing the slightest interest. Her eyes were vacant. In the light, Li saw that the old man’s face was like parchment, dried and creased. His hands, the colour of ash, were like claws. But his eyes were lively enough, dark and darting. He called through to the bedroom, and Lao Da emerged, peering at Li and Sun with suspicious eyes. Although lao meant old , Lao Da was only in his forties, half the age of his old father. He glanced beyond the policemen to the kitchen doorway where his wife had appeared, holding aside the ragged curtain that hung from it.

‘It’s the police,’ he said to her. And then to Li, ‘What do you want?’

‘It’s about your son,’ Li said.

‘He’s dead,’ his father said, his voice laden with everything that meant to him.

‘I know,’ Li said. ‘We have reason to believe that the crash he was involved in might not have been an accident.’ He saw the frown of confusion spreading over Lao Da’s face, like blood soaking into a carpet. ‘We’d like to perform an autopsy.’

‘But we buried him,’ his mother said from the doorway, in a small voice that betrayed her fear of what was coming next. ‘Out there, in the orchard.’

‘If you’d agree to it,’ Li said, ‘I’d like to have him exhumed.’

‘You mean you want to dig him up?’ his father said. Li nodded, and Lao Da glanced towards his wife. Then he looked again at Li. ‘You’ll have a job,’ he said. ‘The ground out there’s frozen harder than concrete.’

They drove west along Xizhimenwai Dajie past the towering floodlit neo-classical buildings that housed the Mint and the China Grain Reserves Corporation, the Paleozoological Museum guarded by a velociraptor, the French supermarket and department store, Carrefour, the latest in Beijing chic. Li was lost in silent thoughts Margaret did not want to interrupt. Burned still on his retinas was the image of the grave in the shadow of the mountains. Lao Da had led them by torchlight through a moongate from the courtyard into a small adjoining orchard. Trees that in summer would be laden with fruit and leaves, were winter stark, silent mourners for a young man who had played in this place as a child, guardians of a grave marked by a crude stone slab. A large pink wreath leaned still against the wall. Frozen fruit and vegetables, a bowl of rice, were laid by the stone. The charred remains of paper money, burned by poor people to provide their wealthy son with the means to survive in the afterworld, had been scattered by the breeze and were stuck now by frost to the ground all around. He had heard the mother sobbing, and seen her shadow moving in the courtyard. She had not wanted her son disturbed. But his father had said if there was the slightest doubt about how he had died, then they should know the truth. For they could not lay him properly to rest until they did.