Night Heron by Adam Brookes Read Free Book Online

vinegar!—at a truck stop under a canvastarpaulin in the rain. He took another bus, and then another, heading east. He spent a night in a scabrous hostel, one storey of crumbling concrete so filthy that, for an instant, he longed for the cleanliness of the prison. He spoke to no one, and moved, slowly, in the direction of Beijing.

3
    Beijing
    Harvey and Mangan cut the story the next morning. Beijing was gray with cold autumn rain. Harvey sat at the laptop, stringing together sequences. Ting, in a pink waterproof, brought coffee. She peered at the screen, at the
wujing
leaping from trucks.
    “Bastards,” she said.
    Harvey looked up.
    “Temper,” he said.
    She waved a hand. “Really. They’re thugs. We don’t deserve them.”
    Mangan, still in pajamas, fought bravely with the script. London wanted the piece in at under three minutes, today. The state news agency, Xinhua, had run a terse five-line account of the mass arrests at Jinyi and the international wires were sniffing at it, so Mangan had to move fast. Harvey logged the pictures and built more sequences. Ting worked through the interviews, looking for the right grab, giving them options. But how to convey a sense of who the Followers
were
? A cult? A religion? Or vulnerable people so disoriented by life in modern Chinathat a levitating folk healer in Arizona looked like a hopeful prospect?
    By mid-morning he was still struggling.
    “They claim to be the denizens of a new order,” he told the microphone. “An order based on ancient Chinese myth, remade in a bid to change China.” This over a mysterious, beautiful shot of the Followers’ hands weaving in the air. A pause.
    “But the Communist Party sees only the threat of rebellion.”
    Harvey said, “What is a denizen, for Pete’s sake?”
    “Look it up,” said Mangan.
    “Shall we tell the viewers to do the same? And you said
in a bid.
”
    Ting had the bureau dictionary. “A denizen is an… inhabitant,” she said brightly.
    Harvey folded his arms, downing tools. “It’s crap, Philip. It’s clinical and full of cliché.” He swept his arm towards the screen. “Just look at the pictures. Tell the story.”
    Mangan sighed and deleted. Harvey was a ruthless picture editor—a side of him that Mangan at once valued and loathed.
    Ting stood behind Mangan and gave his wide bony shoulders a mock massage.
    “Come on, Philip.
Jia you
. Did you know the Master believes homosexuals are made of antimatter? Really, it’s on his website.”
    The streets from Liuliqiao long-distance bus station lead east towards the sacred center of Beijing. On these streets it is common to see migrants from north-west China who have just alighted from their buses—here a Muslim man in a white skullcap and a stringy beard, there a young woman in a headscarf from the tiny villages of yellow dust on the Loess Plateau. They stand in the middle of the pavement, looking up at the silvered skyscrapers for the first time. They often look ill at ease, theirpoorly fitting clothes in brown and blue, their calloused hands, their dark skin. The pale
Beijing ren
sweep by the migrants on the street.
    On this particular autumn morning, just after dawn, the casual observer might have noticed just such a migrant, a large man, with an ample midriff, make his way at moderate pace away from the bus station. He wore a blue tracksuit top and stained green trousers and a pair of newly purchased running shoes. A plastic carrier bag dangled at his side. He, too, seemed surprised by the power and scale of Beijing’s new prosperity. He stopped and leaned back, admiring the sunrise reflected in the shimmering frontage of a bank. He looked this way and that, turning to appreciate some new perspective, some striking confluence of light and architecture. Now and again he stopped, turned about, sat for a moment.
    Once, a security guard in a white belt strode out from behind hissing smoked glass doors and ordered him away. The rotund man bent at the waist,