The Gone-Away World (9 page)

Elisabeth and Master Wu and I are loafing. We have eaten a muddled sort of meal, cake and cheese and fruit, and slices of salami, and Elisabeth and Master Wu are discussing the matter of China's space programme. The discussion is quite animated. They have co-opted the butter dish (the Moon), the cake plate (the Earth) and a mango (the Sun, acknowledged to be much further away and not to scale, but equally a necessary component in their orrery), and currently Master Wu is waving a spoon, which symbolises the Apollo rockets. The gist of his argument is that the Moon is
up
in the sky, and America (as evidenced by European and American maps) is
on the top half
of the world. The journey from the United States to the Moon is therefore
considerably shorter
than the journey from China, which is (as evidenced by European and American maps)
on the bottom half
of the world. It is therefore
absolutely consonant
with his contention that China, despite her flaws, is the most advanced nation on Earth, that the Americans should reach the Moon before the Chinese. They simply did not have to work as hard.

Elisabeth is stumped by this contention on two fronts. In the first place, it is balderdash, of a sort which is so fundamentally wrong-headed as to be hard to argue. In the second, she cannot shake the nagging suspicion that her revered teacher knows full well the measure of this wrong-headedness, and is gently stringing her along to stretch her cultural preconceptions, is in fact
taking the piss.
She sputters for a moment.

Initially, this whole thing was grand sport. I tuned back in for a while and even suggested that the American rocketeers were at a disadvantage because the Earth was spinning, and they had to build a ship which could go really quickly so as to reach the Moon before it passed by overhead, whereas the Chinese had longer to make course corrections, owing to the greater distance. Master Wu brushed this aside as a minor consideration and Elisabeth seemed to regard it as treachery, and back and forth they went, Master Wu twinkling and vexatious, and Elisabeth in one of her moments of doubt. These are fun to watch, because they are extremely rare. Elisabeth's fundamental attribute is certainty. However, after the debate over the positioning of the mango and whether it should affect the arrangement of the cake plate and whether in fact the mango should be replaced with an object several miles away and about the size of a house, I sort of drifted off again and I am now viewing the room with new eyes, or at least, with eyes which are paying attention to the detail.

Everything is familiar, of course. I have sat here countless times since I first saw the overstuffed furniture and the weapons on the walls, and fell in love with the gramophone. At this moment, I am looking at the window frames. I have not, until now, spent a lot of time doing this, but a long day and a lot of
gong fu
followed by cake (planet Earth) and tea (either a non-relevant experimental error or a terrifying cosmological event even now threatening to upset the gravitational balance of the solar system) have produced in me a state of contemplative calm and watchfulness. I have studied Master Wu's mouth, and concluded that the occasional twitch of his upper lip is in fact a
quirk,
and evidence in favour of the supposition that he is winding us up. I have studied Elisabeth's upper lip and concluded that it is a fine specimen of the kind, slender and pale pink and slightly masked by a wisp of icing sugar. And so now I have turned my attention upward and outward.

The window frames are made of a darkened wood, which has a fine sheen of varnish over it, and the edges are crusty with yellow, resiny stuff. This is probably where the treated wood has sweated over the years. If I were to touch it, it would feel smooth and shiny and slightly flexible, and then it would snap like crystal sugar. The glass is old and ever so slightly distorted. Glass is mysterious. I once heard Mr. Carmigan, the chemistry teacher, discussing it with Ms. Folderoi, the art mistress. Mr. Carmigan asserted that glass is still technically a liquid, slowly but inevitably obeying gravity as the years pass, while Ms. Folderoi said it isn't and it doesn't. Mr. Carmigan replied that neither of them would live long enough to make a personal empirical observation. Ms. Folderoi hit him with an oil sponge. The debate—like the one unfolding in front of me now—was irascible but good-natured. Also like the one in front of me now, it was one in which I took scant interest. I ponder the window again.

Master Wu has eclectic taste in curtains. The window immediately beyond Elisabeth's blonde head has drapes of white cotton with cherries on them. They are not lined, so the Moon (the actual one, not the butter dish) is visible in the sky beyond. The window behind Master Wu possesses thick, green velour things, winterish and warm, with a pattern of gold coins woven in. I turn my head. The window over by the desk has brown curtains. They are made of rough silk, and probably were at one time quite expensive, although they are strikingly dull.

Something else, however, has now attracted my attention. On each window, there is a run of bells. They are small, but not so small as to produce a little tinkling noise. These bells would make a shrill, sharp clanging. Each bell hangs suspended on a separate length of thread, and each thread is fastened at the top to a thicker line, which in turn falls from a slender shelf tacked to the frame. Knocking one bell would cause it to ring, but might not disturb the others. Removing one bell, conversely, would almost certainly set off the whole lot. Opening the window even a little bit would sound like the percussion section's after-show party. I turn round and look at the door. The bells there are set up slightly differently. There is also a cat's cradle arrangement on the fire guard. In fact, when Master Wu goes to bed, putting the guard in front of the coals, he will be surrounded by a low-tech burglar alarm. I realise that I have looked at the bells and the windows any number of times without actually seeing them. How odd.

Master Wu and Elisabeth are still discussing the planetary question, but Master Wu, at least, has lost interest—or rather, he has found something more interesting. My discovery has woken me up. I was sort of cow-like, placid and digesting (or, in fact, ruminating). At some point during my examination of the bells, as I became more intent and focused, the impact of my presence in the room changed. Master Wu clocked this immediately, and is now watching me while he explains that
even if the Moon were low in the sky, the Chinese would still have to go up to it, while the Americans could simply drop on it,
and Elisabeth has noticed her teacher's divided attention and followed it back to me, and so they both put cosmology on the back burner on hold, and Master Wu asks me what is wrong.

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing's wrong. I just noticed the bells. On the windows.”

“Oh, yes!” Master Wu nods. “Very important. I am the Master of the Voiceless Dragon, you see. Many enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“Oh, yes.” He smiles genially. “Of course.”

“What kind?”

“Oh,” says Master Wu, matter-of-factly, “you know. Ninjas.”

And he shrugs. He takes a bite of his cake, and waits for one of us to say “But.” He knows that sooner or later, one of us has to. Elisabeth and I know it, too. Just hearing Master Wu say “ninja” is like hearing a concert cellist play “Mama Mia” on the ukulele. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of
gong fu
and karate. They can jump higher than a house, and burrow through the ground. They know how to turn invisible. They have mastered those elusive Secret Teachings (like the one we now know and no one else does) and can do things which are like magic. And that, surely, is Master Wu's point. He is making with the funny.

Before I can feel the wash of embarrassment which is rising up my spine, Elisabeth says “But.” I love her for ever.

“But . . .”

“Ninjas are silly?” asks Master Wu.

We nod.

“Yes,” he says. “Very silly. Black pyjamas and dodging bullets. I know. But the word is not the thing. And the word is wrong, anyway.” He stops and leans back. His voice deepens, losing the cheery crackle and the old man's roughness, and he looks bleaker and much older.

“The night I was born, my mother hid in a well, under the stone cap. I was born in lamplight. The first thing I smelled was mud and soot and blood. My father and a cattle man attended my birth, because we had no doctor. My uncles beat a pig to death in the square of the village we were resting in. They made it scream for seven hours, until the morning came, so that no one would know a woman was giving birth, so that my mother did not have to stifle her cries. For four days, my uncles carried her on a stretcher, and told everyone their friend Feihong was sick. They'd been pretending she was a man, a fat man, for three months. She carried a sack of stones on her belly, and as I grew, she threw them away, one by one, so that people who looked at her would just see Fat Feihong, with his funny arms and bandy legs, and his small feet. My mother had unfashionable feet. Too large for a woman. Still tiny for a man. But after four days, they couldn't carry her any more, or people would notice, would ask whether maybe Feihong had something serious, whether maybe they should leave him behind. Then she got out of the stretcher and she walked, and she carried me in her sling, the way she'd carried the rocks. I learned to be a quiet baby. I hardly ever cried. When I did, she sang, very loud, very squeaky, like a man trying to sing like a lady, and they called her Squeaky Feihong, and my uncles and my father sang along with her. Catscream Wu and Monkey Wu and Goatbleat Wu, you could hear them coming for miles, and the farmers claimed we turned milk. We were hiding, always. Last of the Voiceless Dragon, running and hiding, by being as loud as possible.

“Why? Because of ninjas. Not ninjas like in Hong Kong movies. Couldn't fly. Dodge bullets hardly at all. But . . . strike from the shadows? Kill in the darkness. These things they did
very well indeed.
And sometime, long time ago, someone paid them or ordered them to kill everyone in my family, and make my father's father's father's
gong fu
disappear. They never quit. They just keep trying. It's what they are. War—for ever. My father's oldest brother. His children. Their mother. All gone before I was born.”

Master Wu sighs.

“Lots of people were at war in China then. Chiang Kai-shek was chasing Mao all over the country. We hid with Mao's people on the Long March. Thousands of miles, mountains and lakes. Our war just disappeared into theirs. And when they died—when maybe ninjas killed them instead of us—that just disappeared too. Everybody was dying then.” He shrugs at the wall, the weapons in their racks. I had assumed he was proud of them. Now I think maybe they are there to remind him. I think he is prouder of the extremely ugly ducks.

“Their war,” Master Wu goes on, “was about who was in control. Ours was about staying alive, of course, but it was also about
choice.
Very much the same thing. We teach
gong fu
so that you have a choice. Otherwise . . . the man in charge has all the power. Yes? And . . . what if he is not a man? A hundred people all bowing down to a child who does anything he pleases. No responsibility. Just power. No wisdom. Just actions. As if the throne were empty. China had too many child-emperors already.

“Whoever paid the ninjas believed we are wrong. Power belongs in one place. Nothing should disturb the way things work. No alternatives. Or maybe it was just them: the Clockwork Hand Society, ninjas, call them what you like. And us: Voiceless Dragon. Them and Us. For ever. So my mother carried me to Yenan on a bed of rocks. My father taught me my
gong fu
when I was three. I learned in Yenan, which is a hard place. But I learned about silence before then. My first teachers were ninjas.”

If Master Wu were a grizzled, elderly trucker, or a veteran of more familiar wars, he would light up a cigarette or grab our hands and tell us we were lucky kids. He does not. He just sighs again, and somehow when he does this, the regret which ripples out from him is a physical thing. I have heard of people who fought with their anger, who made rage into a physical force. I have never heard of anyone doing it with sorrow.

I look around. The night has drawn in while he was talking. The window onto the veranda is open, and I am listening for stealthy feet on the boards outside. In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu's garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateurish.

I try to relax my shoulders so as not to be caught tense by the attack which might be coming. This is extremely difficult in a big soft chair, and I feel like an idiot for choosing the lounger. Elisabeth is sitting on a more upright thing with hard cushions, and consequently need only roll forward or leap up to be ready for anything. Master Wu's chair is a rocker, although he has stopped the motion with his cane. The opportunities for fast deployment from a rocking chair are many. Only I will be caught double-weighted (stolidly caught between one foot and another, and therefore immobile), or worse, on my fat arse. I have not been mindful. On the other hand, if I am honest, the two better fighters in the room are well-placed by virtue of my choice. Perhaps I am subconsciously a master tactician.

“When I was five,” Master Wu goes on, “I built a ninja trap.” The sorrow recedes and something warm fills him: a weathered pride held close across the years.

“I had been out in the forest collecting game from snares. Rabbits. In the mud, there were footprints. The ninjas came out of the forest and watched us in the night. They liked us to know they were watching, all the time, so that anything you did after dark, you were afraid. It was daytime now. And I thought if I made a big snare, a strong one, and laid it on the path, I might catch a ninja, and make my mother less afraid. I might see approval in my father's face, like when I worked well in his tannery, or when I practised my forms one more time after he had told me I could stop. He might grunt. My father laughed when he thought something was funny, and he smiled when he was happy, but he only grunted when he was impressed. I made him grunt very seldom. So I borrowed some tools, and I made a big, wide snare out of wet leather, and covered it in mud leaves and attached it to a big old log so that when the snare was touched the log would haul the ninja up in the air, and left it there.”