The Lights of Signal Hill
Shortly before eight in the morning the roller door of the ground-floor assembly bay was only half up when Qian Tao stepped through it.
The shop smelled of resin curing, burnt and bitter, mixed with old machine oil. A tall young man covered in grey-white release wax was dragging an air line along, and Qian Tao took two quick steps and caught him up, raising his right hand from five or six metres away, his voice bouncing back off the high roof.
"What's up bro!"
Sipho turned, dropped the air line on the floor, split his face into a row of white teeth and came forward with both arms open. The two of them hit shoulders solidly, then turned their faces in and touched cheeks, slapped palms in the air with a sharp crack, and finally locked thumbs and shook twice, hard.
"Morning, Tommy! Looking sharp today!"
"Same to you, man! How's that fuel tank going?" Qian Tao, grinning, dug a box of mint sweets bought at a convenience store out of his work jacket and tipped two into the other man's calloused palm.
I stood behind watching. Qian Tao had needed until his third day in South Africa to learn that whole sequence. On the first day he had put his hand out properly to shake, and Sipho had slapped it away and laughed until he was crouched on the floor; that night, back at the flat, Qian Tao went through it from memory over and over until midnight, muttering to himself like a man reciting a process sheet.
Sipho laughed out loud, threw the sweet into his mouth, raised a hand to an opening in the aft starboard hull and let off a burst of Cape Town slang in a thick accent, both hands drawing the angles of the pipe runs. Qian Tao nodded as he listened, wrote two quick marks with a marker on the back of the drawing, and turned to wave us over.
Zhou and Chen Liansong, in white hard hats and heavy steel-toed work boots, had their heads down over a stack of blueprints.
Zhou was around thirty, hired into the joint venture later on. Besides the electrical side, every piece of machinery, hardware, keel reinforcement and piping in the hull he could read off the run at a glance and get eight or nine parts in ten right. Before we left, the plant had been clear about it: never mind what the foreigners talk up, watch how they put a boat together and get it fixed in your head.
Zhou did not have much English, but he never went into the shop empty-handed. He always carried a dark blue hardcover notebook with a ballpoint tucked into it, and a worn-shiny tape measure on his belt. Less than a fortnight into South Africa the notebook was a third used, every page dense with section drawings and dimensions, the writing tiny, not one line allowed to take up more room than it needed.
Under the starboard hull he pulled out a length of tape and locked it in his palm, bent, and climbed into the bilge access hatch. The hatch was half a metre square; I went after him with a torch, went down on one knee on the concrete, leaned half my body in, and threw the light past his shoulder.
Inside it was dark and close, with the dust of ground glass fibre in the air. Pieter, the old South African fitter who did the underwater assembly, was already sitting cross-legged inside with a ratchet in his hand and two heavy metal fittings at his feet.
Those were the most important things below the waterline of this thirty-eight-foot catamaran: the thru-hull fittings and seacocks.
On the English BOM sent from home they were nothing but a string of part codes with a bare Chinese description underneath: copper pipe fittings. Someone in the second-floor office had mentioned it once in a mail — a pipe fitting is a pipe fitting, the hardware market at home is full of them, why ship them all the way from Cape Town.
Zhou, in cotton gloves, crouched beside Pieter and did not blink.
Pieter looked up at him, saw the seriousness on this Chinese fitter's face, and slowed his movements. He lifted the metal fitting and turned it in the torchlight. The surface was a dull grey-gold, with a small ring of stamped letters on the edge: DZR.
He tapped it with the back of the ratchet and it gave a dead sound. This material, he said, stands up to seawater; ordinary brass does not. Two or three years in the water and the zinc goes, and it turns red and soft, like cheese left standing.
I put it quietly into Chinese for Zhou. Zhou said mm, took the fitting, rubbed his thumb over the stamp, handed it back, and did not say another word.
And then Pieter did not simply fill the threads with sealant and wrench it tight. He took from his tool bag a small locating plate he had ground himself out of an old piece of aluminium, set it between the fitting and the inner ring of the glass-fibre hull, pressed a ring of black Sikaflex polyurethane around the opening, ran the threads on by hand two turns and stopped. The surplus sealant squeezed out slowly on both sides of the plate; he pulled the plate out, smoothed the edge with a scraper, and left a black gasket exactly one and a half millimetres thick.
He pointed at that even black line and made a gesture at Zhou: feel it.
Zhou took one glove off and pressed his cracked fingers into the springy sealant. He pressed for a long time, let go, and pressed again.
"No gap." Pieter put his two palms together, squeezed hard, and slowly let go. "Squeeze the sealant all out and the metal sits straight on the glass fibre. The boat goes in the water, a wave twists it, and the water comes in. You wait twenty-four hours, half dry, then the torque wrench."
I put it into Chinese sentence by sentence. Zhou listened, pulled his glove back on, and reached into his pocket for the ballpoint.
He crouched in that cramped corner, opened the dark blue notebook, and drew the section on a blank page, marking the thickness of the sealant layer and the cut angle of the plate, and beside it a line of small characters: twenty-four hours, then torque. The lines were as neat as a draughtsman's. When he had finished he turned the page round to show Pieter, who gave him a thumbs-up. "Good hand, mister Zhou! You got it!"
Zhou was a little bashful. He took two flattened Double Happiness cigarettes out of his pocket and held one out. Pieter took it and put it behind his ear. Two craftsmen with no shared language crouched there at the cool bottom of a hull and smiled at each other.
I switched the torch off, backed out of the hatch, and straightened up, a patch of grey-white dust on my knee.
Not far off, Chen Liansong was crouched in front of the reserved position for the main switchboard, multimeter probes and wire markers in his hand, checking wiring against the blueprint with Marlon, the engine-room electrical fitter. He was a steady sort; every jumper's gauge and every terminal type had to be checked three times against the drawing before he would put a tick in his own table.
"Marlon, this sixteen-square cable." Chen Liansong pointed the tip of his pen at the symbol on the drawing, and Qian Tao crouched between them to carry it over. "Goes directly to the inverter?"
Marlon leaned in and looked, and nodded. "Straight to the inverter. No joints in between. Marine rule."
Chen Liansong took out his vernier callipers and measured the bore of the rubber liner on the cable gland, writing each measured outer diameter into the table. Beside them he added a few lines in Chinese: talcum powder inside the sleeve before pulling, chamfer rounded off, otherwise our people at home will tear the protective sheath on the first pull. He wrote those characters more carefully than the ones on the drawing.
Qian Tao, meanwhile, was jogging between the bow and the material store, marker behind his ear, his "What's up bro" ringing out at every workstation. Whichever group could not draw its special stainless screws, whichever bay could not find a batch number on a seal, all it took was for him to come up, pat a shoulder and hand over two mint sweets, and the "Not my job" that came out of a South African worker's mouth became, a little later, "Okay Tommy, let me check the shelf for you".
The morning went by in the hammering of impact wrenches and the screaming of grinders.
At lunch the four of us sat on the concrete steps behind the shop door. The packed lunch was cold bread with stewed beans. Qian Tao ate fastest, folded the carton into a small square and put it in his pocket.
Zhou spread the notebook on his knees and Chen Liansong leaned in. Neither spoke; they turned the pages one by one, and when they came to the section drawing of the thru-hull, Chen Liansong put his forefinger under the figure "one and a half millimetres", tapped it, and looked up at Zhou.
"We do it like this when we get back," Zhou said.
"Mm." Chen Liansong answered, and pointed at the talcum powder line in his own notebook. Zhou looked at it for a long time and nodded.
The sun lay on the concrete at the back door and threw the light back. Somewhere off, a forklift beeped in reverse. I chewed the dry bread and it suddenly seemed to me that noon was very quiet.
After lunch I went up the iron stairs to the second floor alone.
At the end of the corridor the door of Flip's office, the logistics manager, stood half open. He had his back to the door on the telephone, his voice very low, so low I could not make out the words; I only saw him reach up and tug at his collar. Steam rose from the coffee machine behind the blinds, and jazz came and went on a radio. In the corner of his desk sat a cardboard box, half unpacked, with a few yacht annuals in it.
I did not stop. I went back to my temporary desk and opened Outlook.
Two unread mails from home were sitting in the inbox.
The first was from Old Chen, the customs declarant, and the tone was anxious. Attached was a long customs pre-entry list marked all over in red and green with the queries from the customs document review centre. The containers still at sea had not even arrived, and the English item names were being pulled out one by one and questioned: what exactly is this, what material, which tariff code. The L37 and L38 valves and fittings were in there too; the four characters "copper pipe fittings" had been returned outright, and customs wanted the specific material and tariff code, failing which it would be treated as ordinary hardware and held for sampling. At the end of the mail he had put three exclamation marks.
The second was from Zhao Chenyang. The body was short, in red bold type as always, annotated against my report sent in at the weekend, under the paragraph about on-site learning and sorting out the BOM:
"What the South African side has verbally agreed on sorting the BOM cannot be fully trusted. Your first task is to press for shipment; do not put the cart before the horse. The daily travel allowance and overseas living costs for four people in Cape Town are on the high side, and domestic budget control is tight. Please assess compressing the return date according to progress and settle the date of return as soon as possible."
I looked at the red characters on the screen for a while, and minimised the window.
What was wrong was not the South African list. The string of codes on the list was right. What was wrong was the line of Chinese we ourselves had hung underneath them.
I opened Old Chen's mail first and started the reply.
"Master Chen: the item name cannot go in as 'copper pipe fittings' again. The actual goods are marine thru-hull fittings and seacocks, in dezincification-resistant brass (DZR), for below the waterline, connecting through the hull. Photographs of the material stamp, the actual specifications and the assembly diagram are attached. Please reclassify the tariff code according to material and use, and I will go by your judgement. This batch must ship as the original parts; ordinary hardware from home cannot be substituted."
I attached the close-up of the stamp photographed on site and the scan of Zhou's section drawing, and pressed send. The mail went into Sent, and the thing that had been packed in my chest all morning loosened a little.
I got up to fetch a list from the printer at the end of the corridor and ran into Flip coming out of his office, the call finished. He still had the pale blue shirt on, sleeves rolled to the forearm, an empty coffee cup in his hand.
"Larry." He stopped. "The L38 container. Has the item name cleared customs?"
"It's in hand. It went in wrongly on the Chinese side; the correction has just gone out."
"Good." Flip nodded, his eyes resting on the printed sheet in my hand and moving away again quickly. "When it's fixed, send me a copy of the list. I need it before Friday." He paused, as if afraid I had not understood, and said the last few words slowly again. "Before Friday, please."
"Right."
He said no more, and went off toward the pantry with the empty cup. I watched him go. He walked more slowly than usual, and somehow also faster.
Then I went back to Zhao Chenyang's mail.
I put the cursor in the reply box and wrote nothing. After a long time I saved it to drafts.
Before we left for South Africa, in the meeting room of the old workshop building by the Fuchun River, Xiong Zhangyou had put his tea cup down hard on the table and shouted at Zhou, Chen Liansong and Qian Tao, pointing at their noses:
"You three, when you get to Cape Town, don't go around with your eyes on your foreheads. Bend your backs! Watch how their hands move on the wrench, watch how they lay the sealant under the base plate! Drawings are dead. Skill is alive. If you can't get a proper feel for what's in the belly of those tens of tonnes of hull, don't come back and ask me for a plane ticket!"
At the other end of the long table Zhao Chenyang had his head down, taking his time over notes in a leather notebook, the corner of his mouth still.
I closed the notebook computer.
At one in the afternoon I went back to the shop. Pieter dragged a scrapped glass-fibre test panel out of the corner, drilled a hole in it, put another set of thru-hull fittings beside Zhou's hand, said nothing, and handed him the sealant gun.
Zhou stood in front of that panel with the gun in his hand for a long time. The first ring of sealant went down uneven, thick and thin; Pieter reached in with the scraper, wiped it off, pointed at the nozzle and indicated he should start again. The second ring was a little better. On the third, Zhou's hand steadied, and the ring of black sealant closed on itself with no break in it. Pieter took out a thin feeler gauge, slid it into the joint, measured, and nodded, and gave no assessment either way.
Zhou took the locating plate in his hand and turned it over and over, measured the edge and the chamfer with the tape at his waist, and then crouched down and went over the layer of sealant on the cut face of the test panel.
The sun moved further west. Before the end-of-shift whistle, Pieter came over and pushed that polished aluminium plate straight into Zhou's hand and waved a hand: take it.
Zhou blinked, looked down at the plate, looked up at Pieter, and his lips moved; in the end all that came out was a stiff "Thank you".
Pieter laughed, took the Double Happiness from behind his ear, smelled it under his nose, and put it back.
At five in the evening the Cape Town wind began to get up.
Outside the gate came a burst of ugly horn. A Toyota pickup with patchy paint and two old tyres in the bed pulled up at the kerb, its exhaust puffing white.
Naaim was in an old T-shirt with one hand on the wheel, and Andre leaned out from the passenger seat, waving frantically at the four of us coming out of the gate.
"Hey Larry! Tommy! Get in!" Naaim slapped the door and shouted. "You're over the jet lag. Tonight we go up the mountain!"
Qian Tao cheered, put a hand on the side of the bed and rolled in. Zhou, Chen Liansong and I climbed in after him.
The pickup went south along the coastal road. The Atlantic wind came at us head-on with salt in it and pressed our work clothes, still carrying oil and resin, flat against our backs. Zhou held the rail of the bed with one hand and kept the other pressed over the inside pocket of his jacket the whole way, as if afraid the wind would take the notebook.
The road wound up through the pass between Lion's Head and Signal Hill. The damp broadleaf scrub of Jiangnan does not grow here. Along the roadside stood stone pines like umbrellas, canopies spread wide, trunks forced over to one side by the constant ocean wind. Silver trees and low conifers grew on the gravel slopes, and clumps of protea stood in the rock crevices, thick dark green leaves spread flat on the ground.
Off to the left Lion's Head rose sheer, cold grey sandstone like a great lion lying down. The sun was sinking toward the horizon and orange-gold light lay along the knife-cut cliff.
The pickup braked at a platform on the cliff.
Naaim switched off, turned round, tapped the dashboard and indicated to Qian Tao to open the glovebox. Qian Tao pulled it open: a revolver lay inside, black.
The few of us froze for a moment. Qian Tao lifted it out first, turned it over for a while, then handed it to Zhou. Zhou took it, weighed it in his hand, said nothing, and passed it to Chen Liansong.
After a moment someone asked. "There aren't any bullets in it, are there?"
Naaim watched us from the driver's seat, gave a small chuckle, waved a hand at us to be careful, and had it put back.
His smile went. He said that around here people with guns still kept one rule: if somebody climbs into your yard, the first shot is not to be at the man, it goes into the ground as a warning; and if he does not back off, then the second shot can be at him. He said it was to leave a man who came over the wall one chance.
He put the gun back, closed the box, and looked round at us. He said that in South Africa, after eight at night, a woman will not walk in the street alone; and that while he was in Fuyang, at midnight, he had seen a woman walking along the road by herself, walking as if it were daytime.
He laughed at that himself and did not go on.
The wind on the top was much colder than below. Naaim dug a hoodie out from behind the seat and pulled it on, and Andre dragged two pale yellow paper bags out from under the rear seat. The moment the tops were torn open a hot, heavy smell of spiced oil burst into the cold air.
"Hungry birds, come on!"
Inside was freshly fried local chicken, whole legs and breasts, golden and crisp in a coarse spiced crust, still spitting oil. Andre found a few bottles of chilled ginger beer and lager under the seat, bit the caps off with his teeth, and put one into each hand.
Qian Tao grabbed a piece and took a huge bite, the crust crackling, juice running down the corner of his mouth. "That's good! That's got some punch!"
Six of us stood round the bonnet, eating hard in the fading light. Naaim and Andre talked about growing up in a Cape Town fishing village, about going out to sea with their fathers as boys, about waves that came up higher than a house, and teased Qian Tao about the "What's up bro" he had been saying all day in a Chinese accent. The two South Africans laughed out loud, without a trace of calculation, and the wind carried the sound a long way.
Andre said the worst thing in these waters was the great white. Last month, he said, he had heard of a fisherman who put his arm over the side of the boat; the great white took it for the seals it usually eats, came up out of the water, and closed its jaws on the arm and took it off.
The few of us listened, stunned. Qian Tao had a chicken leg halfway to his mouth and forgot to put it in.
"Why 'bro', Tommy?" Naaim asked, wiping the corner of his eye. "You say it to everybody. Even the man at the gate."
Qian Tao chewed and thought about it, holding a chicken bone the way you hold chopsticks, then turned and told Naaim in English.
"In China we say xiongdi. Brother. You say brother to a man, and he finds it a bit harder to pick a quarrel with you."
Naaim was quiet for two seconds. Then he raised the bottle in his hand toward Qian Tao. "Then you're my brother. Cheers."
The two glass bottles knocked together in the cold wind with a clear ring. Chen Liansong leaned on the rail of the bed, not joining in, only watching and smiling, the little notebook full of numbers still in his hand; probably he meant to use the last of the daylight to check the day's figures over once more.
When the laughing eased, Andre, chewing on a bone, turned to me. "Larry, how much longer are you four staying?"
"Not settled yet," I said. "The boss wants us back early."
"Mm." Andre tossed the bone into the bag and wiped his hands. "Pieter said he wants to take Zhou to watch us set the keel next week. He says Zhou doesn't speak a word of English, but when you carry the questions over, everything he asks is on the point."
I put that into Chinese for Zhou. Zhou did not answer. He only looked down and rubbed the place over his inside pocket with his thumb.
The wind grew stronger, and the air went cold to the bone.
Far off, over the city, the dark came in off the Atlantic edge like ink poured out. First the V&A Waterfront lit one solitary lamp, then the Cape Quarter, then the main roads, then the residential districts spread in layers along the foot of Table Mountain. Thousands upon thousands of gold, cream and pale blue lights ran together. The sound of the sea came up faintly from the cliff below.
Zhou wiped the chicken grease off his hands on his work trousers, took the dark blue notebook out of his inside pocket, and turned to the sketch of the thru-hull he had drawn that day. The little light coming up from the city below fell on the page, and he read the line he had added once more: scrape first, then the plate, then squeeze, then stop for a day.
Qian Tao threw the bones left in his hand into the paper bag and stretched against the first stars coming up.
"This place. It's really bright."
Zhou did not look up. He carefully pressed that thin aluminium plate into the spine of the notebook, closed the hard cover, put it back into the inside pocket against his chest, and patted the pocket twice.
The long wind off the Atlantic crossed the ridge of Signal Hill, and the stone pines all over the slope gave out a deep, rising sound like surf in the dark.
Below, the lights of the city ran away without end, all the way to the edge of the sea.