Night Heron by Adam Brookes Page A

families posed for snapshots with Chairman Mao’s portrait behind them. So. The Great Helmsman’s still here, he thought. A boy flew a kite. Peanut looked up, searching the sky for its flutter, but his gaze settled, in shock, on a lamppost, from which protruded a camera. No, multiple cameras. On every lamppost. Dear God. Dozens of them.
    He looked down, tried to keep his pace slow, his body relaxed. He headed for the opposite corner of the square, to where another underpass would take him back on to Chang’an Avenue. You stupid, bitching idiot, he thought.
    At the steps more polo shirts. But he was leaving the square now, and they paid him no attention. He clattered through the dark tunnel, back up on to the pavement, moved quickly away. Still, on each and every lamppost, cameras.
    He took the first street that ran north off Chang’an, moving into the crowd. He was, he saw now, horribly conspicuous. The people on the pavement wore suits, sunglasses, fashionable shoes. They wore black. They were slim and smart. Peanut, the hulking, sweating migrant, needed to be among other sweating migrants as quickly as possible. He was shaken, badly. Move.
    He turned east, and noticed, spray-painted on the wall of a shoe shop, a piece of graffiti, the stenciled face of a woman wearing a pair of absurd, protuberant goggles. Beneath her a single English word in capitals: THREATEN . The woman’s delicate features were disfigured by the goggles. Peanut frowned at the image and walked on.
    He was in back streets now, gray
hutongs
, which was comforting. The smell of coal smoke and frying allowed something of his past self to resurface. He stopped for a cigarette outside an old, familiar temple, Zhi Hua Si, the Temple of Wisdom Attained.
    A little further on, he found what he had been searching for: the tall, beige, apartment blocks of the Jianguomenwai Foreign Diplomatic Compound. Near the Friendship Store. Where the foreign news agencies are. Or were.
    He skirted the perimeter wall and noted the positions of the
wujing
guards on the gates. The blocks were, weirdly, just as he remembered. And they seemed still to house foreigners. He saw them coming and going as he wandered slowly past the north gate, a group of women in headscarves, a young man, a European perhaps, speaking into a mobile phone. He didn’t linger.
    Dusk fell as he walked along Guanghua Lu, past the foreign embassies. He slowed for a moment outside a mansion, from whose windows spilled golden light. A line of black limousines waited outside. He looked at the flag that hung limp in the autumn evening. Then he quickened his pace and was gone.
    As darkness came he moved ever further east. The great buildings with their glistening frontages fell slowly away and the surroundings became meaner. Thunderous convoys of trucks were heading into the city, migrant workers in the back of them, sat atop piping and sand and breeze block. The building sites would churn all night. He walked past bleak auto repair shops and restaurants serving noodles in chipped bowls and glasses of the clear, blazing sorghum spirit, its odor fishy and sour. At a stall lit by a single bulb he bought
baozi
wrapped in paper, the pork mince leaking through the bread.
    That first night he spent in a doorway, his hand on a piece ofmetal pipe he’d lifted from the side of the road. The cave, the desert shale and the freight car all seemed distant, half-imagined. He was, he realized, exhausted by feeling, by the working of memory.
    He woke at dawn and stood in the half-light, calculating. He cut south down a filthy alleyway, its walls spray-painted with dozens of mobile phone numbers and tattered advertisements for venereal disease clinics.
    The alley brought him out on to a narrow, shadowy thoroughfare, cluttered with shopfronts. A small state grain depot abutted a shoe repair shop, and a peeling café, the Elegant Blue Mountain Food Hall. Outside the Blue Mountain, the antithesis of elegance, was a chef in apron