Sawdust and Kraft Paper
1
First thing in the morning I took the kraft-paper list out of the inside pocket of my shirt and held it in my hand.
The folds had gone white along the creases, and a patch of hardened black grease still clung to the bottom left corner.
The corridor on the second floor was laid with a thick dark-grey carpet. Soles made no sound on it; the foot sank in like a dry sponge, weightless, with nothing to push against.
I pushed the door open, and the cold air from the air conditioning hit my face first.
Bridget Arrow's desk was on the east side, second row, by the floor-to-ceiling window.
As the central figure in Robertson & Caine's purchasing and order scheduling, Bridget had a name for getting things done. She was in her thirties, tidy, with a briskness in the brow.
There was not a thing out of place on her desk. Besides a single monitor, there was one row of grey document boxes to her right, each spine carrying a printed white barcode label.
"Morning, Larry."
Bridget looked up. She held a thin ballpoint and tapped the tip once on the dense purchase schedule in front of her.
I spread the yellowed kraft-paper list on the corner of her desk, avoiding the snow-white leather desk pad.
"Bridget, these items on the list, the fittings for the 37-foot and 38-foot catamarans. The system shows them all closed out, but the warehouse says they don't match."
Bridget turned her head. Her eyes rested half a second on the crooked ballpoint scrawl. She did not reach for the greasy paper. She turned back, her fingers ran two commands out on the keyboard, and the purchasing module of SYSPRO came up.
A long column of purchase order numbers rolled down the screen, every line carrying a bright green confirmation mark.
"Larry, look." She pointed a long forefinger at the delivery column on the right. "The purchase orders for both the 37 and the 38 are all closed. The suppliers delivered two weeks ago."
"Julius says the actual packing in the Cape Crating warehouse doesn't match this," I said, pointing at the two shop abbreviations circled in ballpoint. "Some of the small parts were written in by hand. The system has no detail for them at all."
Bridget put down the ballpoint and took a sip of black coffee from the white porcelain cup.
"Larry, logistics is Flip's business." Her voice was flat and even, without a flicker. "I am responsible for Purchase Orders and delivery dates. If the suppliers drop the cargo at Cape Crating, my job is done."
"As for how Flip packs it, which crate it goes into, what handwritten sheet Julius keeps down there, that is logistics. I don't check wooden boxes."
She set the cup back on the saucer. The porcelain base knocked against the wooden coaster, one tick.
"If you want packing detail, go to Flip."
Alet Du Plessis from the next carrel happened to walk past with an armful of files. Seeing me standing at the desk, she stopped and nodded.
"Morning, Larry."
She glanced at the two columns of green order lines on Bridget's screen, then at the yellow paper in my hand.
"Larry, the purchasing schedule and the shipping list are two different sets of books." Alet spoke quickly. "You need to go to Flip."
She laid the shipyard guarantee approval form lightly on Bridget's desk, exchanged two figures with her in a low voice, and her eyes never once fell on the grease-stained kraft paper.
I folded the list in four and pushed it back into my trouser pocket.
At the far end of the corridor came the muffled tread of leather soles on carpet. Flip Engelbrecht, the logistics manager, came along with a coffee cup in his hand. Seeing me, he raised a hand from several paces away.
"Larry. Settling in?"
I stepped up and held the list out.
Flip took it without breaking stride, did not so much as blink, and tucked it under his arm into a black leather folder.
"Don't worry, friend. I'll handle it. We have a meeting with the freight forwarders this afternoon. Take it easy."
His feet did not stop at all. He brushed past me with the coffee cup, trailing a faint smell of mouthwash, and went straight down the corridor to the tearoom.
Every line of orders in the system was closed. Every purchase number was wrapped up on schedule. And of the tens of tons of parts, which crate they were stuffed into, whether they had made it onto the ship, not one person on the whole second floor could produce a physical account.
2
I did not press the point upstairs. I turned and went back down the iron stairs.
The heavy steel sliding door in the back wall stood ajar. It closed behind me, and the smell of sawdust, anti-rust paint and glue came up at once.
Julius was crouched by a heavy crate in the corner, a pry bar wedged into the seam of the lid, bearing down little by little, the boards giving out a long scraping groan.
Abdullah came over, wiped his forehead with the back of a hand black with grime, and held out a bottle of mineral water, already opened.
"Larry, don't look at those green screens upstairs." He pointed at the yellowed kraft-paper book pinned under Julius's toolbox. "What your Chinese yard wants is down here. Those people upstairs have never seen what a wooden box looks like."
I walked over and crouched down. The cover of the book was worn to fuzz. Every page carried, in the crooked pencil of a short stub, a job number, a part number, a quantity, and the carton and the crate it went into. One crate to a page.
"Look here." Julius put one rough finger on a line, lifted his lined old face, and spoke in a hoarse voice. "Custom stainless boarding ladders for the 38, and the navigation cable. They are not on the export sheet from upstairs. They came the day of packing. I wrote them down on this paper. Flip will never work out which of them went into crate 3 and which into crate 5."
"The parts are all in the BOM," Julius said, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. "The BOM is upstairs. Flip's list comes out of a computer. Ours goes with the crate."
He pushed the list back in front of me.
"The two don't match."
I took the list and pointed at the English abbreviations.
"Julius. When this cargo reaches Fuyang, every piece has to go past Chinese customs. Job number, tariff code, description. One piece short, the whole container stops."
Julius nodded, then shook his head, pushed the list back in front of me, and drew a heavy circle with the short pencil.
Julius tucked the pencil behind his ear, picked up the pry bar, and walked to the next crate.
3
At noon the open yard was soft underfoot, the Cape sun baking the asphalt.
With my handwritten notes in my pocket I cut across the open storage yard, meaning to look for Qian Tao over in the electrical bay. I ran straight into two familiar figures.
Naaim and Andre.
They had been the assembly and tooling backbone of the South African plant, posted to the Fuyang yard in China only last month to support the trial build. The plan had been for them to stay until the fitting-out and the electrics on the 37 and the 38 were fully settled.
And here they were, one battered canvas bag each, grey with travel, standing at the plant gate.
Naaim saw me and stopped dead.
"Larry!"
"How come you're back early?" I went up to them. "Isn't the fitting-out in Fuyang still going?"
Naaim set the heavy canvas bag down on the ground, leaned back against the rusted railing, and spread both hands.
"No parts, no work." He wiped the sweat off his bald head. "What is in the containers and what is on the list do not match at all. Mating bolts, special pipe fittings, more than half missing. The cable runs a few metres and there is no connector left. The Chinese workers stand in an empty hull with spanners in their hands."
Andre, standing to one side, took out a lighter and lit a cigarette, head down, toeing a small stone on the ground.
"The apartment in Fuyang was fine," he said, letting out smoke. "But no material, no work. Can't follow Chinese television. Can't talk to anyone in the street. The two of us in that flat, one pack of cards, day after day."
"The boss did the cost of the travel," Naaim said, shaking his head with a wry smile. "Two men drawing overseas allowance for nothing, and the line still can't be assembled. So one air ticket and they sent us back."
I offered Naaim a cigarette and lit it for him.
The flame jumped once in the dry wind. Three men crouched by the scrap crates outside the warehouse. Nobody said anything more.
"When the jet lag wears off in a day or two," Naaim said, dusting off his trousers and giving me a wink, "one evening, Andre and I will take you Chinese brothers out in the pickup. Up the flank of Lion's Head, over to Signal Hill. Night view, a proper meal. That is the real Cape Town, not this mess in the plant."
"Done," I said, and smiled.
Far off, Table Mountain stood like a grey-white wall in the clear sky, holding the wind off the bay.
4
At one in the afternoon I stopped knocking on the glass door upstairs.
This batch was Container 3. One 20-foot container, broken down into seven wooden crates, carrying material for the two boats A4001CH and A3002CH, job numbers SJ292 and SJ293. The seven crates were already nailed shut. The container shipped on Saturday. Those green characters on the second floor were the two job numbers, and nothing more.
I borrowed a pair of heavy canvas work gloves from the shop, and from Julius a metre-long heavy steel pry bar. I took off my jacket, changed into a hard-wearing shirt, and went back down into the crates.
Julius looked up at me. He said nothing, moved half a step aside, and gave me the first crate, the one stencilled in black.
Abdullah put a foot on the edge of the boards and cocked an eyebrow. "Careful, Chinese friend. Watch the splinters."
I crouched, wedged the flat tip of the bar into the seam between the pine board and the angle iron, put my shoulder to it, and sat down into the weight.
A crack, and then a bang.
Two thick nails, rusted to a dark brown, came out of the grain. Sawdust hit me in the face. A choking cloud of pine dust went up.
Half the lid came up.
We peeled back layer after layer of yellowed corrugated padding and oiled anti-rust cloth. What was inside had nothing to do with the categories on the screen upstairs: odd-shaped stainless marine hinges, bundles of high-pressure oil line, marine control cable in rubber sleeves, and a whole crate of unopened imported pump fittings, all shoved sideways into one compartment.
"Call them out." Abdullah bent over and handed the pieces out one at a time.
"Bilge pump connector, twelve."
I crouched on the ground with a ballpoint and a notebook. The old man called one, I ticked one, then turned back to Julius's list and matched a line. A match got a tick. A short count got a figure. A wrong model got circled in red. Some pieces carried no label at all; I pulled the digital camera off my neck, snapped the bore and the profile, and wrote the photo number in the margin.
By the time the first crate was done, the sun had moved.
The second crate was nailed harder. I changed the angle of the bar, and on the third nail it snapped. Half the tip came up, past my sleeve, and stuck in the sawdust. Julius gave me a sideways look, picked the broken nail out of the sawdust, weighed it in his hand, and dropped it in the toolbox.
Abdullah handed me a bottle of water. I opened it and drank, and the water ran off my chin onto my collar.
"Larry," he said, crouching down, pointing a toothpick at my notebook, "this. Useful?"
"Useful," I said. "In China, customs will go through every single line."
Third crate, fourth. By the fifth, the web of my glove had worn through and the palm and the base of my fingers were ringing numb. One piece in that crate was written as two on the list, and there was only one. I took it out on its own, set it on the floor, stepped back and photographed it, then added a line in small writing at the edge of the notebook.
Sweat ran down my forehead and fell on the paper, spreading in grey-black rings. The back of my shirt was soaked through and stuck to my spine, cold.
By the time the seventh lid was nailed back down, every light in the warehouse roof was on. Seven crates stood in two rows on the concrete, new nail holes beside old.
5
By evening the sky had turned, and the sun laid a thick orange wash down the long Cape Town seafront road.
The four of us, Qian Tao, Chen Liangsong, Old Zhou and I, rode second-hand bicycles back along the coastal road to the apartment. The sea wind on my face finally carried off a whole day of heat from the shop.
The company had rented the apartment for us, round the headland outside the plant. It was a roomy three-bedroom flat with a sea view, an open balcony and an open kitchen. The whole place was tiled, and above the kitchen sink there was even a drinking-water tap: turn it, and you could drink straight from it.
On the way back we turned into a large chain supermarket on the corner.
Cold air came at us as we went in. The fresh section took up more than half a wall. Row after row of chillers held almost nothing but meat, cut and marinated: bone-in lamb chops, thick-cut steak, rows of skewers, each piece sitting in its own marinade, the labels printed with the local method. Converted into renminbi, far cheaper than at home. Qian Tao pushed the trolley and could not move away from the chiller, eyes shining. Then we came to the vegetables, and all four of us stared. The shelves held potatoes, onions, carrots, and nothing else. The few lettuces left were wrapped in three or four turns of thick clear film, standing upright in plastic trays, done up like flowers in a shop.
"Come on," Chen Liangsong said, patting the basket. "Back street. That little shop."
We turned down two back streets and went into a Chinese grocery behind a grey roller shutter.
It was cramped and narrow, and the air was Sichuan pepper and vinegar. The Fujianese behind the counter took one look at us, dusty and in work clothes, plainly just in from China, and greeted us warmly in Minnan-accented Mandarin.
"Just in from China? Come, come. A few boxes of home goods came off the shelf at the back."
On the dusty wooden shelves we dug like treasure hunters and came up with a few jars of bright oily Lao Gan Ma black bean chilli, two bundles of Xiamen dried noodles, Shanxi aged vinegar, and even two small jars of Wangzhihe fermented bean curd. These tastes of home, which could not be found in the big supermarket for love or money, were the most solid comfort on that stretch of Atlantic coast.
We carried the plastic bags back to the flat, and the ceiling light over the open kitchen laid down a soft white.
The kitchen was well fitted: a four-ring built-in induction hob, a full set of heavy stainless cutlery, and an oven and a dishwasher under the hob.
Chen Liangsong rolled up his sleeves and cut the meat on the wide wooden counter, the Western kitchen knife making a clean hiss through the lamb. I turned on the drinking-water tap, filled the pot, and set it on the big ring to boil. Qian Tao lined the Lao Gan Ma and the soy sauce up on the counter. Old Zhou sat on a low stool to one side, wiping the mud off his work shoes with an old cloth.
The big sliding door to the balcony was open a crack, and the Atlantic came in at once, thick with salt. The lamb turned over in the pot, and the chilli heat of the black bean sauce and the mellow smell of soy spread through the wide living room. The noodles went in and soaked up the hot broth.
The four of us sat round the table and ate, and none of us mentioned the plant or the wooden crates. The taste of home went down hot, and the empty, anxious feeling of a day adrift in a foreign country finally settled.
After dinner Qian Tao cleared the bowls into the dishwasher. I wiped my hands and went to my own room.
My room faced west, and the window was not large. I opened it, and outside was the black sea.
The sound of the reef and the breakwater below was deep and heavy. The ache from a day of prying at crates loosened, a little, in that sound.
6
It was late.
Qian Tao and Old Zhou's rooms had gone quiet long before.
I sat down at the desk and turned on the small lamp.
I opened the black ThinkPad. In the USB port on the side sat the 3G card. The little indicator inside the casing blinked on and off, a blue-green cold light.
I opened a blank Excel sheet.
The white grid glowed on the screen. I spread the notebook pages from the sawdust of the Cape Crating warehouse beside the keyboard, plugged the camera into the laptop, and brought up one photograph after another of the parts.
Crate one, crate two, all the way to seven. What was on the list and not in the system, what was in the system and not in the crates, I filled cell by cell, following the ticks and the circles I had made that day. When I reached the piece written as two and found as one, I enlarged the photograph: a shallow nick on the edge of the bore.
The seven crate numbers went in. The job numbers SJ292 and SJ293 from the handwritten list hung at the end of every row.
I typed the first line of the header.
[Container 3 - Physical Packing Account, Verified on Site]
I turned the lamp down to its lowest. I kept my fingers light.
The screen lit my face. Below the window the swell struck the breakwater, once, again, and slowly came into time with my typing.