Dusk in Cape Town
The electric doors at Cape Town airport slid open and the late-summer dry wind off the Atlantic hit me in the face.
The wind carried a dry, cold salt, nothing like the bone-soaking damp of February on the Fuyang riverbank. Twenty-odd hours curled up in economy had left knees and ankles swollen and numb, the laces biting into puffy feet.
Qian Tao, in that green jacket washed pale in the Fuyang workshop, was first out of the arrivals channel, both hands clamped on the handle of a luggage trolley. Chen Liansong and Zhou from the assembly shop came behind; neither said anything, both quietly kneading the hard muscle of their calves along the seam of their trousers. Of the four of us sent out from China, I was the only one who smoked. The other three did not touch tobacco. They had not even brought a lighter.
The pickup, a light Toyota bus, stood at the kerb under a faint film of grey dust. The driver was a broad-shouldered local who did not speak, threw our four cases into the back, and pulled the door shut with a bang.
The road turned onto the highway for Paarden Island. Outside, the sky was blue to the point of whiteness, and the sun cut across at an angle and stung dry against the eyelids.
Qian Tao rolled the window down to a gap two fingers wide. The wind roared in and flattened the stray hair on his forehead. He leaned on the glass and pointed at a mountain standing far off along the skyline, and turned to ask me. "Dongsheng, how come that mountain hasn't got a peak?"
I looked where he was pointing.
It had none of the rolling ridges of a Jiangnan hill. A grey-brown wall of rock came up off the horizon and ran sideways for several kilometres in one flat, clean line, like a wall poured in concrete and driven up to cut the sky in two.
That was Table Mountain.
I looked down and patted the black backpack on my lap. Inside it was the ThinkPad, and in the side pocket a China Telecom 3G card in a white plastic case, half the size of a palm, shaped like a fat little USB stick. For this crossing the boss, Xiong Zhangyou, had had the planning department get this particular card so that once I was back at the seaside flat I could plug it into the notebook and send and receive mail — especially for writing the weekly report at the weekend, when everything depended on the wireless signal in that plastic card carrying me back to the Fuchun River, thousands of kilometres away.
Out at the shop and on site, we had no interpreter with us.
Xiong Zhangyou counted money down to the bone. Four international return tickets plus allowances was a glaring number in the finance ledger. To save one interpreter's place, on-site English went entirely onto Qian Tao's shoulders.
"Qian Tao knows a couple of sentences, that'll do." Before we left, Xiong Zhangyou waved us off from the third-floor corridor. "When you get to South Africa, the electrical side and the assembly side — let him run between the two, and get the foreigners' skills out of them."
Qian Tao stood there at the time, his green jacket zipped to the chin, his Adam's apple moving twice, and did not dare answer back.
The car went fast. Within forty minutes the houses outside turned into a low, unbroken band of warehousing. The smell of diesel in the sea wind thickened, rusty rails crossed the grey-white road one after another, and we were at Paarden Island.
The car stopped directly under the brick-and-stone colonnade at the gate of the Robertson & Caine works.
Corrugated iron sheds stood in a long row, the outer walls painted white, the base stained brown by the Atlantic wind. The wind struck the corrugation and made a hollow, continuous hum.
A few days before we left, in the corridor on the second floor of the Fuyang main building, William had taken me aside to the window. William was still in Fuyang watching the tooling and the schedule and had not come with us, and even so he was uneasy about it. "Larry, when you get to South Africa, dealing with the local workers, especially the coloured people and the black people, tell everyone to be careful. You Chinese like to say 那个, 那个 as a filler. In their ears it sounds far too close to nigger. It causes trouble easily."
The four of us had been knocking about the Fuyang shop long enough that a verbal habit could hardly be banned outright, and it never became an absolute rule — but I had warned Qian Tao and Zhou about it in advance.
Stepping down from the Toyota, Zhou looked at the big, dead, iron sheds in front of him, and his lips moved; he had just, out of habit, started to say 那个 — and I was quick. The toe of my shoe shot forward and I trod on the toe of his thick canvas work boot.
Zhou drew in a sharp breath and swallowed the words back down, and the four of us understood each other without a word.
On the steps, Flip, the foreign logistics manager sent to receive us, was already coming down smiling.
Flip was around forty, his fair hair combed without a strand out of place, his pale blue cotton shirt pressed with not one crease. Behind gold-rimmed glasses were a pair of mild, smiling blue eyes, and he carried an impeccable British-gentleman assurance.
"Welcome to Cape Town, my friends!" Flip strode up and shook hands with each of us in turn, his palm dry and soft.
He spoke lightly, turned and called over a shop foreman, and had Qian Tao, Zhou and Chen Liansong taken down to the electrical and assembly bays on the ground floor.
The four of us separated at the portico. Zhou and Chen Liansong followed Qian Tao into the depths of the shop, where the welding sparks were; the green jacket vanished quickly into the grey-black machine shadows. In this plant they would soak at the bottom level, learning mechanical assembly and electrical wiring, while I went up with Flip to the second floor to find the documents.
The ground-floor shop was an enormous noise.
Enormous glass-fibre catamaran hulls stood on steel trestles, and the shriek of air sanders, the hiss of welding guns and the grinding of crane cables on their drums all ran together. The air was thick with sharp polyester resin and stinging metal dust.
Workers in dust masks and trousers black with oil and glass-fibre dust climbed over and inside the hulls. All of them were people of colour — deep black-brown, lighter copper. Sweat ran down from their foreheads along the straps of the masks and cut white lines through the dust on their faces.
I followed Flip up the iron stairs and pushed open the heavy, double-glazed door.
The roar of the shop was cut off the moment the door closed, leaving a faint vacuum in the ears.
The second floor was laid with a short dark-grey carpet, and the air conditioning was generous, almost cold. There was not a trace of the resin stink in the air, which carried instead the faint sourness of freshly brewed coffee and, at intervals, the sharp sound of telephones and keyboards.
Partitions stood in neat rows. As far as the eye went, the people in swivel chairs answering phones, checking drawings and drinking hot coffee were all fair-haired or light brown-haired whites, shirt collars crisp, desks spotless.
Two floors, one iron staircase, and the whole industrial site was cut in two.
Flip led me to a row along the window.
There was no proper workstation there; hard against the aisle a narrow desk in pale wood had been put in. The top was clear except for a South African three-pin socket and a grey network cable.
Beside the small desk, separated by a waist-high screen, was a spacious executive desk. Behind it sat a fair-haired woman in a fine-striped collared shirt, a large LCD monitor in front of her and three neat stacks of dark blue ring binders at the corner of the desk.
"Alet." Flip tapped the screen. "This is Larry, from China."
Alet Du Plessis turned. She looked to be in her thirties, brisk, and her sharp eyes rested on my face for two seconds before she produced a very correct smile, stood up and held out her hand. "Hello Larry, welcome to Robertson & Caine."
Her grip was firm, her fingertips dry and warm.
"I'm Alet. I coordinate logistics and purchasing." Her English was fast, her articulation crisp, with a distinct South African white accent. "Your system access is open. Plug in the network cable and you can work. Documents and order tracking, come to me any time."
"Thank you, Alet." I pulled out the chair at the narrow desk and sat down.
I took the ThinkPad out of the backpack, raised the lid, dug out the adaptor and put it into the three-pin socket in the wall, and connected the power. Then I took the grey cable at the corner of the desk and pushed the plug into the port on the side of the notebook; the plastic clip made a light, clear click.
The network icon in the corner turned twice and lit green.
Mails began to pop up in Outlook one after another: Zhao Chenyang's invoice chasers, copied over from home, and Manager Ye's internal reports from the Fuyang floor about line stoppages from missing material.
I leaned back in the chair and let out a long breath. At that cramped little desk, the digital world at the other end of the network cable was the only connection I had to the chaotic factory thousands of kilometres away.
I did not sit at the small desk long.
Container No. 1 back home had been opened and turned out to be one enormous blind box; customs had us pinned on the tariff code and the item names, Old Chen's declaration was being rejected almost to pieces, and the losses from the idle line on the Fuchun River were climbing by the day. I had to establish on the spot in South Africa exactly what state Containers 2 and 3 were in.
I said a word to Alet, took my notebook downstairs, crossed the noisy assembly bay, and turned into Cape Crating at the back of the site.
That was R&C's crate-packing warehouse.
It was inside an enclosed shed, the corrugated roof very high, a few rows of industrial lamps hung from the beams, and the Atlantic wind held outside by a heavy roller door.
The moment I stepped in, the air changed. Thick engine oil and rust preventive mixed with the sharp saw smell of fresh pine shavings, and pneumatic nail guns fired one after another, bang, bang, like small-calibre pistols going off beside your ear.
The floor was pitted, strewn with broken slats, bent nails, cut silver strapping and flattened bottle caps.
Several dozen enormous crates were stacked across the concrete like container blocks, built of rough white pine boards and stencilled on the outside in crude black paint: L38-01, L38-02, SHANGHAI.
No automated arms, no spotless conveyor. Everything in front of me was hand labour and sweat.
A young worker went past quickly with a two-metre shock-absorbing batten on his shoulder. His hair was a mass of black curls, sweat running down his dark face, soaking through the grey sleeveless vest.
Seeing me standing at the edge of the shavings in clean civilian clothes with a visitor's badge on my chest, he stopped, settled the heavy batten on his shoulder, showed two rows of dazzling white teeth and threw his chin up at me with a street-Cape-Town lilt.
"What's up, bro?"
The tone was cheerful, entirely without guard.
I smiled back and nodded. "Morning. I'm Larry, from China."
"Abdullah!" He tapped his chest with his thumb, grinning widely. "Looking for boxes?"
"Yes. The Shanghai boxes."
A few paces behind Abdullah, with his back to us, stood an older worker, slightly hunched.
He wore a faded grey cloth flat cap, and his gloves had been sewn from heavy canvas, the fingertips long since worn through, showing the coarse, black, cracked, oil-blackened knuckles. In his hands was a heavy pry bar more than a metre long, and he was putting his weight down on it, driving a lifted crate lid hard into its groove.
"Julius, slow down!" Abdullah called out to him.
The old worker called Julius did not turn. He dropped the pry bar, picked up the pneumatic nail gun at his waist with his left hand, and bang, bang, two half-inch nails bit hard into the pine and the shavings burst, some of the dust landing on my shoes.
Only then did Julius straighten up and turn his face slowly round.
His stubble had gone grey-white, his eye sockets were deep, and his dark brown face was cut with deep lines. He looked at Abdullah, all smiles, then moved his muddy but careful eyes to the badge on my chest.
He did not produce the professional smile of the white management upstairs. He only looked, silently, at my leather shoes standing in the shavings.
In South Africa, the whites upstairs almost never put their leather shoes into this heap of shavings.
I did not step back. I took one step forward, looked at the pry bar in his hand, and levelled my voice. "Hello Julius. Good hands."
Something faintly surprised moved in the old man's muddy eyes. He did not take off the gloves. He only pressed the brim of the flat cap lightly with his right hand, the one in the torn glove, nodded, and let a hoarse, low English sentence out of his thin lips. "Afternoon, sir."
The hard cold guard that stood between skin colour and foreign faces loosened, soundlessly, by one narrow gap, on that concrete floor scattered with shavings.
Coming back up from a circuit of the warehouse with a crate number copied down from the stack in my hand, I went straight to the innermost logistics office on the second floor.
In the best workstation, by the window, Flip — who had received us so warmly at the portico — was leaning back in a leather swivel chair, a bone-china coffee cup printed with a catamaran at his elbow.
I tapped the partition.
Flip turned. Behind the gold-rimmed glasses were still those mild, smiling blue eyes, and the whole man still carried that impeccable British-gentleman assurance.
"Larry! My friend!" He stood up warmly, came around the desk and took my hand in both of his, his palm dry and soft. "That's a long way to come. How are you finding Cape Town? Coffee? I have some very good Kenyan beans."
"Thank you, Flip, no coffee." I took a breath and held out my notebook to him. "We need to go through the packing lists for Containers 2 and 3. Container 1 was opened back home and seven critical items are missing. Customs has it locked and will not clear it. The whole plant is stopped for material. Mr. Zhao and the board are chasing it every day."
Not a trace of impatience crossed Flip's face. He listened carefully to the end, even nodded with sympathy, and patted my forearm twice, his tone as gentle as if soothing an anxious junior.
"Larry, listen to me. Don't worry about China."
He pulled out a chair for me and sat down, his voice certain and sincere. "I understand the difficulties on site completely. This is absolutely not your responsibility. Shipping from this side moves quickly, and now and then the data gets out of step. Please don't worry, I will handle this. I will look into the system and sort out the packing lists for you today."
It was said decently, warmly, and without a single gap.
But at the same moment he finished the sentence, his right hand quite naturally pushed the sheet of notes I had handed him to one side, and slid it under the leather mouse pad.
On his screen there was no ERP system open and no Outlook. In the middle of it was a colour webpage about a yacht regatta in Cape Town that weekend.
He smiled, picked up the coffee and took a sip, and let the conversation slide quite naturally onto the wind off Table Mountain.
I looked at the white mother-of-pearl button done up so correctly at his collar, and there was something like a ball of cotton in my throat.
In five years at the Japanese company I had met harsh men, men who slammed the table, men who picked everything to pieces. I had never met this. He smiled at you always, agreed with you always, said I will handle it always, and would not send one mail on your behalf.
At half past five in the evening the people on the second floor picked up their briefcases and left, one after another.
The central air conditioning stopped on time, the cold air dispersed, and the smell of coffee in the air turned stale and faintly sour. Alet squared her binders before she left and looked back at me. "Larry, you should go back to the apartment. It gets windy outside."
"All right, I'm going now. Thank you, Alet."
I looked at the empty second floor, stood up, and went down to Cape Crating again.
The workers in the packing shed had long gone. A few dim explosion-proof tubes hung under the eaves, swaying slightly in the wind. The nail-gun air lines were coiled against the wall, and shavings all over the floor rolled in circles along the concrete in the draught.
I turned on the light from my phone screen and walked over to the batch of heavy crates with the JOB-03 / SHANGHAI tag.
On the side of one of the flat two-metre crates a clear plastic pouch had been stapled on. The surface of the pouch was covered in black oil fingerprints pressed there by rough hands.
I pulled the flap open and took out a yellow kraft-paper document folded in four.
It had not come out of a computer.
It was handwritten in blue ballpoint and copied through with carbon paper, the writing crooked, rough and hasty, all of it abbreviations made out of local shop slang:
*L38-elec box × 1*
*misc bolts & nuts (heavy)*
*pump brkt set*
Beside every abbreviation was a heavy, slanted tick in ballpoint, the ink blurred by sweat and oil into smudged haloes.
I took out of my pocket the standard R&C SYSPRO packing list I had printed upstairs that day.
Black on white, a neat column of nine-digit standard part numbers beginning LA-SRC-, clearly setting out the hardware hinges, the stainless brackets and the imported high-pressure oil pump, with specifications, weights and customs tariff codes all complete.
I held the two documents together under the beam of the torch.
Not one word matched.
The twelve key outfit assemblies listed clearly on the system sheet appeared nowhere on the oily handwritten sheet; and the box of "misc bolts" scrawled on the handwritten sheet had not even a code in the system.
This was not data out of step.
The fine, regular system sheet in the computer upstairs, fit for customs declaration, was a numbers game played for Finance and for the declarant. What had actually been nailed up inside that crate of thick pine, only Julius and Abdullah, standing in the shavings, knew.
A violent gust of Atlantic evening wind slammed into the iron shed and the whole structure gave a heavy, hollow thud.
I stood in the half-dark in front of the stack, folded the handwritten sheet back the way it had been, and instead of putting it into the plastic pouch, pushed it into the deepest inside pocket of my shirt.
I walked back up to the second floor.
The office was in darkness. Only my added little desk had a slab of pale light on it from the ThinkPad screen. The grey cable in the network port hung quietly at the corner of the desk, and in the bottom right of the screen Zhao Chenyang's mail was still blinking.
I pulled the chair out and sat down, and switched my phone off.
Outside, the vast mass of Table Mountain, cut flat by a giant's axe, had sunk completely in the ink-blue dusk into one enormous black silhouette, like an iron coffin laid across the Atlantic wind, with the lid clamped hard shut.
I reached up and touched the stiff, oily handwritten sheet against my chest, and put my hand back on the keyboard.