During which they were so happy with each other it was as if they had just fallen in love, while sitting at the playground, among used heroin needles and some rusty swings, they swore a blood oath. “Any of you have AIDS?” asked Karen, who disinfected her hand after any contact with objects or people. As she considered what infections could be carried by another person’s blood, Hannah had already made a cut on her hand. Hannah wasn’t scared anymore. She had lost everything that a child could lose, and once in a while she cut her arms with razor blades just to feel something. Then she looked at the wounds and felt ridiculous for engaging in this stereotypically female form of autoaggression. Peter held out his hand silently and let Hannah cut him even though he didn’t understand what the oath was supposed to be good for. Still, he was happy in the group. Like all of them. The children who now placed their hands one on top of the next seemed to light up on the little playground. They were no longer the weirdos. They were a unit.

Then it started to rain again, as it always did in Rochdale during the longest days of the year.

It was summer

Which, in the world of

MA WEI

Meant the air quality would deteriorate a little. Otherwise everything was the same as always. Conspiracy theory number 569, to explain the fast-paced change in the world, was as follows:

China—and when we talk of China, we’re talking about within the so-called Party—had adopted a forty-year plan thirty years ago. The plan contained the steps necessary to scale to the heights of world power.

First, become the cheapest global producer of everything. Which helped the Chinese population attain modest wealth. And also served to gain access to the technical know-how behind all the products developed abroad, which were produced and copied and finally perfected in China.