The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (18 page)

Angelita, trying to be helpful, fell heavily onto the woman with whom her employer was struggling, landing on her stomach and causing her to groan. While the two women grappled with the kidnapper—who appeared to be alone in the flat—Sinha scanned the apartment for a windowless room. He knew that a room with no window would almost definitely be a maid’s room, and would likely be reached through the kitchen. So he raced past a two-ring cooker and entered a utility area containing a washing machine and an ironing board.

Beyond that, he saw the door of a maid’s bedroom, bolted from the outside. He slipped the catch and slowly swung it open. Inside, a small girl was watching television. She looked up at him briefly, registered no interest, and turned straight back to the screen.

‘Come, Jia Lin. I’m a friend of your mother’s. We’ve come to take you home.’

‘After this,’ she said.

‘I’m sure your mother will buy you a DVD of this movie for your very own.’

Seconds later, Linyao and Angelita both appeared behind Sinha. ‘Jia Lin,’ they shouted, simultaneously.

‘Hi,’ the little girl said, her face lighting up with happiness. Jia Lin jumped off the bed, and ran past Sinha and her mother, burying her face in the domestic helper’s legs.

7

The atmosphere in the underground theatre was tense and feverish. Silence, broken only by the sound of people weeping or trying to comfort each other, had followed Vega’s exit. Murmuring noises then broke out as the religious among them started beseeching various deities to effect their release from this nightmare. Even to the only nominally religious, these seemed to be a good idea, and a steady drone of mumbled prayers to the Almighty or mantras to the collective will started to hum through the echoing chamber.

A few people wept openly, and one man curled himself into a foetal position and started calling for his mother, which, if the truth be told, made most of the others feel like doing the same. God or mum? Now there’s a choice. The Catholic route of combining the two with a Holy Mother seemed to make excellent sense to several people for the first time. For the entirely non-religious, a great truism became clear to them: if religion is a delusion, it is a useful, even necessary one, and people too intelligent or self-possessed to delude themselves are greatly to be pitied.

As time passed, the misery level fell. The very texture of the air in a room containing people condemned to death is somehow changed: it is filled with life and light as the inhabitants start to feel grateful for the most mundane realities. Thank you for dirty floors. Thank you for stale air. Thank you for this minute of breath and thank you in anticipation of the next. The notion that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone is wrong. People who have been given a glimpse of the end of the road don’t have the luxury of waiting until life has gone to miss it. To lose the confidence that the sun will rise on another day is a type of death in itself.

This mental barrier of despair was broken through in silence, without pain or panic. The room felt like the cabin of an aircraft falling slowly out of the sky. People sat quietly and thought about their families, their parents, their children. If the purpose of the Children of Vega had been to make animal-abusing diners feel guilty for their crimes against four- or eight-legged friends, the exercise was proving a dismal failure. Not a soul was feeling remorseful about having eaten large numbers of innocent, fun-loving lobsters. The few who were not praying but having coherent thoughts about the situation were thinking only about how they had fallen into the hands of madmen, and whether there was the slightest chance of fighting or arguing their way out.

‘We nominated curling oysters for the meal,’ businessman Chen Shaiming suddenly said. ‘There’s nothing cruel about eating oysters. We shouldn’t be here. They should let us go.’ He raised his voice, in the hope that someone outside would hear him. ‘Are you listening? You should let us go.’

His corpulent wife Fangyin chimed in, a whiny nasal echo of her husband: ‘Yes, everyone eats oysters. Can you tell them, please?’ She turned to look at Joyce, who was assumed to be the in-house expert on the ways of killer vegans.

Joyce pursed her lips. Traumatised by what she had seen, she was curled up motionless at the back of the cage. It seemed so unfair, especially since she had last year become a vegetarian herself. She decided that she might as well talk—it would take her mind off the horror that kept replaying itself on the screen in her mind. ‘Well, maybe a vegan might think that eating oysters
is
cruel. I mean, you eat them alive, right?’

‘Yes, but not in a
cruel
way,’ Fangyin objected, feigning surprise at any such implication. ‘I think they rather like it.

Much better than just rotting there on the ocean floor for years and years. Dying of old age is a slow, nasty death.’

‘But how do you actually do it?’

‘You pick up the oyster in the shell,’ her husband explained. ‘Then you squeeze lemon onto it. If it sort of squeezes itself up, that means it’s fresh. That’s why we call them curling oysters. Then you add a bit of chilli sauce—that usually makes it curl again—and then you pop it in your mouth. You chew it quickly and then you swallow it. That’s all there is to it. No cruelty at all. A quick, painless death.’

Joyce spoke carefully, thinking about each word: ‘But, if you—if the thing winces when you put lemon on it, maybe the lemon, like,
hurts
it?’

‘But you have to put lemon on it,’ Fangyin said. ‘And you have to see it wince. Otherwise it is not fresh, and you can’t eat it. If you eat an oyster that doesn’t curl, you can suffer a fate worse than death—you can have an upset stomach.’

‘That’s not a fate worse than death.’

‘It is to me.’

If anyone was upset by Fangyin’s crassness in the face of the killing they had just seen, they didn’t say anything. But several closed their eyes when she used the word
death
.

There was a noisy interruption from the cage next to the one Wong and McQuinnie shared. ‘That’s the same with me. I nominated Korean spiced baby octopus for my dish,’ said Park Hae-jin. ‘You put chilli and garlic sauce on it, and then you eat it. It’s not cruel to animals or anything. They
like
the chilli sauce. They do a little dance.’

Joyce’s brow furrowed. ‘But if you put lemon or chilli on a creature and it writhes about, it probably means that it doesn’t like it. It probably hurts.’

There was a loud snort from another cage. ‘Of course it hurts,’ said Tun. ‘Haven’t you ever accidentally wiped your eye or something when you’ve touched a chilli? It hurts like crazy. Lemon, too. Ever squirted a bit of lemon into your eye by mistake? You’re idiots, pretending that it doesn’t hurt.’

Joyce nodded, her face suddenly very disapproving. ‘Yeah, he’s right, I’m sure. When you stick stuff on those creatures, you’re really hurting them. It’s ever so cruel. That’s why you’re here.’

There was silence as the Chens took in this unwanted information.

‘But what will our punishment be?’ Fangyin asked. ‘Will they sprinkle a little lemon into our hair? I think that would be a fair punishment. I don’t mind even if they squeeze a whole lemon into my hair. It would spoil my hairdo but I am prepared to accept that as a punishment, if I have to accept something as a punishment. Can you tell the man?’

Joyce was exasperated. ‘He can’t hear me or any of us, so no one can tell him anything, okay?’

Park, the octopus eater, looked depressed. ‘But I’m sure it’s a happy dance. I know the difference between a happy dance and an unhappy dance. They
like
the chilli sauce.’

‘Shut up, you idiot.’ This comment came from Tun, who clearly had a volcanic temper. ‘Chilli sauce contains capsaicin, an extremely harmful and painful chemical compound. Those baby octopuses are writhing in their death agonies, not dancing. And besides, you crunch them up in your mouth while they are still alive. Are you going to tell us that they enjoy that as well? Would you enjoy that—being doused with burning chemicals and then being eaten alive?’

Joyce said nothing, but a vile thought ran through her head:
Perhaps he will find out.
She blocked the thought immediately and stared around to distract herself.

Park opened his mouth to defend himself, but shut it again without saying anything. He took his jacket off and shaped it into a pillow before lying down on it. ‘My head still aches,’ he said.

A rather handsome if chubby youngish man sat in the back corner of the room, in a cage with a short dark-skinned woman dressed in bright colours. ‘The thing we nominated was not cruel, I’m sure of that.’ His accent, similar to but not exactly like that of a Hispanic American, gave him away as Filipino.

‘What was it?’ Joyce asked.

‘
Balut
,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Eggs. Just eggs, that’s all. Even vegetarians eat eggs, don’t they?’

‘Well, some do. Vegans don’t.’

‘There’s no cruelty in eating eggs.’

His wife nodded furiously. ‘We only nominated eggs, which even vegetarians eat,’ she repeated, to make sure everyone had got the point.

Park was not standing for this. ‘Tonyboy, don’t you pretend your dish is cruelty-free while the rest of us are guilty.’

‘What? Eggs are eggs.’

‘Not if they are
balut
.’ Park turned to direct his comments at Joyce. ‘May I introduce Tonyboy Villanueva and his wife Girlie. What they have neglected to tell you is that
balut
refers to fertilised duck eggs.’

‘Oh,’ said Joyce, as if she knew what he was getting at.

‘They are fertilised,’ Park repeated. ‘Think about it. They have little bird foetuses growing inside. The creatures are alive. They have tiny wings and tiny bones and tiny feathers.’

Tonyboy shot back: ‘But it’s not cruel. We cook them, sometimes.’

‘And sometimes you eat them raw,’ Park said. ‘Even if you cook them, what are you doing? You are throwing some poor live baby bird into a pot of boiling water. I suppose you are going to tell us that they like it—that it’s like going to a swimming pool for them?’

‘Shut up, Park,’ Tonyboy said, defeated. ‘You made your point. But I still think—’ ‘I thought you said we nominated chicken?’ interrupted Girlie Villanueva.

Her husband lapsed into guilty silence.

‘Tonyboy, did you nominate—?’

‘Yes, but I think better we keep quiet about it. Eating eggs will probably seem less upsetting to these people than, than— the other thing.’

‘What was the other thing?’

There was a long silence during which Tonyboy looked the other way. ‘I nominated
balut
with
pinikpikan
,’ he said quietly.

‘Mother of God, bless us.’ Girlie covered her head with a pashmina scarf.

‘What is
pinikpikan
?’ Park asked.

‘It’s a Filipino chicken thing, what we call an Igorot dish.’

‘And?’

‘It’s roast chicken.’

Park refused to let him get away with this. ‘Come on. This is a live food restaurant. Roast chicken is not just roast chicken. Talk, Tonyboy, talk.’

The Filipino businessman sighed. ‘Okay. You might as well know. With
pinikpikan
, you hold the chicken down by its head and then you beat it all over. When its whole body is bruised, it starts to swell up—the blood creates haematomas under the skin. Then you pluck it and roast it. It gets big like a melon, swollen because of the beating. The meat is more juicy and tender that way.’

‘That’s bad news for you guys,’ Park said.

‘What about us?’ said a new voice. In a cage at the back was an Indian couple in their fifties. ‘We nominated the Shanghai hairy crabs. If they are going to steam us to death, then I cannot think of a more painful way to go,’ said Vishwa Mathew Roy. His wife burst into tears.

Park let out a long slow breath. ‘Death by steaming.

That’s—’ He was interrupted by the click of the door at the back of the stage opening.

Vega re-entered the room and walked over to the judge’s bench. ‘’aving a nice little conference, are we, chums? Well, sorry to interrupt the sweet little nuffins you animal-murderers are swapping, but it’s time for the next ’earing, okay, folks?’

Everyone tensed.

The double doors on the other side of the stage opened and six masked men entered, several of them carrying guns. Three walked to the cage containing the Chens, while others went to the cage Park occupied with his dazed, silent wife Yon.

‘It’s all a mistake,’ Fangyin pleaded. ‘I don’t even like oysters. I just pretend to eat them. Really I don’t eat anything at all. I’m a Venusian, just like you people. I’m always on a diet. Ask my husband. I don’t eat
anything.

’ Ignoring her pleas, the guards lifted the two cages onto a wheeled pallet and trundled them to the area to the left of Vega’s court. All four of them were talking at once.

‘Please, this is all a mistake—’

‘Mr Vega, if you would just let me—’

‘I could make you rich. Just say—’

‘Please don’t—’

Vega held up his hand. ‘SILENCE,’ he yelled. ‘What a bloody awfoo racket.’ He took a pair of airline-style earplugs out of his pocket and twiddled them into his ears. ‘Much better.’ He looked at the papers in front of him. ‘You four ’ave been accused of—blah, blah, blah, blah. I really can’t be bovvered with all this stuff.’ He tossed the papers aside and looked over at his victims, terrified in their cages. ‘Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? You guys have been found GUILTY of being extremely unpleasant little shits, why not leave it at that?’