Under Fishbone Clouds (13 page)

‘Now we just wait?’ he asked.

She nodded and then sat down on a flour-specked stool. ‘We’re Chinese, aren’t we? That’s what we do.’

‘That’s what we do,’ the head chef echoed, as if it was a motto or mantra.

‘How many have we had today?’

‘Loads. But paying? Eight maybe. But it’s still early.’

They talked of the minutiae of dishes, stocks, orders, staff and
profits
, about which the chef tried to prise concrete information from Bian Shi’s vague answers. They were occasionally interrupted by calls from the pair of waiters who wandered in and out, perpetually red-faced and sweating from darting between the different floors.
Yaba, tall and thin now, with badly cropped hair, was hunched earnestly over the sink. Bian Shi began to scratch the surface next to her with chalk.

Have you ever dreamed of being invisible? It is easy, Jinyi thought. Turn your eyes to the ground while others are speaking. Be thin in a land of skeletons; be hungry around a man and his meal. Be hunched among the straight backs of men with medals and insignia; be dry among the drunk. Be a country boy in the crowded streets of the city. This is how servants and waiters do their work – it is the unseen masses who knot the country together, the busy atoms rushing unseen between slow bodies. Jinyi knew too how to be seen: have a coin in your pocket amongst the starving; speak out amongst the lip-stitched and silent; celebrate amongst the almost dead.

Who are you? People didn’t even bother to ask Jinyi this anymore. Who, he wondered, were these sour-faced people who surrounded him each day? They were faces, graves, bricks, empty pagodas abandoned by malnourished priests. Jinyi had passed handfuls of these crumbling sites of rushed prayer on his journeys. One day they would be torn down, and smog-thick tower blocks driven in where they once stood.

The
wotou
were done, springy and glistening with condensation. Jinyi arranged them on a plate and handed them to Bian Shi. She took a bite and nodded, neither smiling nor scowling. The head chef was more picky, prodding the dough and watching it slowly billow back into shape before sniffing at it, doglike and unimpressed, and passing it to the nearest kitchen hand. Jinyi waited, holding the plate and feeling foolish. He flinched every time footsteps passed the door.

‘You can start work tomorrow,’ she said, breaking the silence. ‘Get yourself cleaned up before then. And if you even think about stealing anything again you’ll have more than the chef to worry about.’

Bian Shi had a thing for strays. Perhaps it was because she had been abandoned in a strange home with a strange new owner. Perhaps it was because she had never been able to summon up the guts to run away herself. Or perhaps it was simply because she needed a hobby.

Hou Jinyi was not the only young thief she had taken under her
wing. In fact, her first trip to the restaurant had gone much the same way.

Buddhists see repetition as something to overcome, but also something to learn from. People are born and born again, and each life offers the chance to see differently, to attain Buddhahood and escape the cycle. The same events may repeat themselves a
thousand
times, with only the slightest of differences. This is what history means. This is why Bian Shi could not turn away a single hungry mouth.

It had happened when she was still a young bride in awe of the size of her new home. In her first year in Fushun, she had only left the big house twice. She was unsure of how to speak to the
servants
, and suspected that their smiles hid designs against her – the first night her husband had left her she had lain awake listening to them laughing about the rustic country clothes she had packed beneath the wedding bounty.

All that fateful day, fourteen years before she met Hou Jinyi, the baby had gurgled and danced in her belly. It hung like a barrage
balloon
above her slim hips; she had already decided that it would be a boy. (This was what would please her husband, so that was what must be.) Despite the effort of the walk ahead, the sweat collecting on the dark hairs that laddered her belly, and her tight, childlike shoes, she had decided to venture out into the town.

‘Go to the market, we need fresh fish for the dinner. You, yes you, go and find out who the best midwife is in this city. The rest of you: the master expects the room in the eastern corner to be fully furnished for the new child by the end of the week.’

This was the first time she had addressed the servants directly instead of sneaking past them. She sent off these sudden orders standing awkwardly in the doorway, and slowly began to relish the theatrical authority, even though the tone she modelled on her own ancient and regal aunts seemed strange escaping her lips. She was a teahouse opera caricature, and she was enjoying herself for the first time in months. As more lies came to her she raised her canary-like voice and set the house ticking. Afterwards she grinned to herself, her palms damp and the muscles at the back of her thighs trembling like piano strings.

As soon as the servants were distractedly busy, she slunk from the house, holding the only souvenir from her first home that she
had not allowed herself to be parted from: a dark red hand-woven bag. She moved like a wooden toy, rocking herself purposefully forwards, out towards one of the dumpling restaurants where her husband might be. The Bian family owned three restaurants in the city, many-levelled wooden eateries in which the rich dipped the hand-crafted pastries and dumplings into shallow china dishes of soy, vinegar and oil swimming with lipstick-red chillis. He might not be at any of them, she thought. After all, it had taken her only two weeks of tearful evenings to see that he was not the kind of man she had been told she would marry.

She moved between unhurried horses leading men back from the market, past the squat traders, their sunburnt and scraggy skin dark beneath the slanting shadows of their straw hats. The slate roof sloped out above the restaurant ahead of her, the two dog-faced stone lions grinning or growling (she could not tell which) either side of the flight of steps leading to the door. A waiter loomed between the Fu Lions at the entrance; his scrawny limbs and stubborn movements reminded her of the well-fed mosquitoes that twitched sluggishly in her room. She turned down a side street, looking for the kitchen
entrance
. In the alley two naked toddlers were chasing each other, and a dog barked at the baskets of chickens whose necks had not yet been wrung. They squawked jittery hymns in time with the
chopping-board
rhythms spilling from the open windows.

It was then that she felt a hand at the string of her bag, loosing the lasso from her shoulders then suddenly tugging. Instinctively her fingers snapped out tight and pulled it back. The shocked boy, already poised to dart backwards with his prize, let go and
stumbled
into a crate of recently delivered vegetables.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted at him, grabbing his offending arm.

The would-be thief was prepubescent, his skin pulled tight over his turned-up shoulders and narrow, bird-like face. Bian Shi guessed that he was about eleven or twelve. His dark eyes were oil sloshing on water, and he blinked furiously at every small movement.

‘Well?’ she shouted again, the bag swinging from her hands. Then, remembering that she no longer had to play that role, she bent closer to where he was standing. Something about the pull of the baby, like the rudder of a lost ship turning instinctively to land, made her bring her face close to his. He squinted, scrunched up his
nose. They were inches apart. He continued to blink rapidly, as if his eyelids were the shutter of an unstoppable panoramic camera.

‘Open your mouth,’ she whispered. He obliged.

She had seen those kinds of children before. The hollow floor of the mouth scabby and almost black; the thin stump where the tongue had been severed was the colour of an over-ripe
pomegranate
, the stub of a plucked flower set above the throat’s turning. She tried not to retch, and, seeing this, the little boy closed his mouth. By the time his eyes next met hers, she had made her decision.

Xiao Yaba, she would call him, ‘little mute’; and this name would catch on, for he had no way to tell anyone another name. There were many more like him – silent Chinese Oliver Twists, orphans taken and raised by networks of petty thieves, their tongues cut out at an early age by their captors so that they would not report them to the authorities or warlords, and, of course, so that they would be bound to the thieves. Having no other recourse, they would follow orders and enter a world of unlocked doors and tiptoes, of snatched bags and bruises. His flitting eyes attested to the tiny backrooms in every city, to the fact that everything has its reverse.

He did his best to meet her stare. ‘So. What do you want to do now?’ she asked forcefully, his wrist held tightly in her fist. She loosened the grip, but he did not move. Instead he tilted his head and his lips curled into what might once have been mistaken for a smile. It was instantly obvious to her that he had not practised this expression in years. A sudden thought came to her and she looked around. Apart from the toddlers and the poultry, the alley was deserted. This is how lives intersect, where instinct subsumes sense.

‘Do you want to come with me?’ she asked, still not letting go of his wrist.

He said nothing. She took this as a yes. She smiled and, although her motives were not entirely selfless, felt a rush, not to her head but to her rounded stomach.

Yaba noticed the dampness of her small hands prickling up against his own skin. And in that drawn-out moment he compared them to the grip of his street ‘uncles’, the tightness that had pressed down his struggling arms and bucking head, the fat fingers that stank of raw garlic and stale piss that had pinched his nostrils together, the rough hands that had yanked open his jaw as he had gulped and
gulped – his mouth filled first with a rush of air and then with the copper-coin tang of his own blood.

‘You can stay with me now. We can help each other. Do you understand?’ He nodded quickly, and she was reminded of ducks bobbing for food.

‘My name is Bian Shi.’ The wife of Bian – her maiden names were left under a floorboard in her father’s house. ‘I live over there.’ She pointed down the alley, toward the wider streets he had never ventured near. He looked about him for his ‘uncles’, not believing what was happening. Was this a trick?

‘First things first. What can we do?’ She looked about her, and for a moment Yaba thought her tone might shift again, and that she might haul him to a judge. He flinched, an involuntary habit. ‘Now listen, I can’t take you home with no job, no purpose. He’ll only get mad – at the both of us. No name, no family, that’s bad enough,’ she said, as if to herself, moving her hand to the small of his back and pushing him forward through the alley towards the side-door of the restaurant. She looked at him and winked, although her heart was beating faster than ever.

Together they strode purposefully between the clutter of boxes and deliveries into the kitchen. The floor was littered with the debris of offcuts, cigarette ends, potato eyes, spilt slops, the bad ends of discoloured vegetables and the overlapping footprints of the barefooted chefs, assistants and young boys rushing about in the cramped and sticky heat. Dumplings floated to the top of vast pans of steaming water, woks fizzled and meat dripped from hooks on the wall. The man who might be assumed to be the head chef, stocky and unshaved, was cursing and shouting at the cowering staff, though his hands never strayed from the delicate curls of pastry he was wrapping around small nubs of mince. When he saw a well-dressed pregnant woman and a grubby street kid standing in the corner he stopped shouting. The deafening thread of noise quickly trickled to an awkward silence. Then he spoke.

‘I think you’re in the wrong place.’ His words were calm and measured, but had a sharp, urgent edge to them.

‘No, I’ve come to talk to you. Are you the head chef?’ There were a few titters of laughter. The thump of her heart filled her stomach. The chef went back to folding the pastry, his thickly accented words swilling from his wet lips.

‘This is a restaurant. I’ve a job to do, so you’d better send your complaints somewhere else.’

The jostle of the kitchen began again, with more plates clattering in the overcrowded sink. The diversion was evidently over. But she did not move.

‘Listen,’ her voice quivered up to the next octave. ‘I’ve come to ask you to give this boy a job. Something simple is fine, washing dishes or chopping vegetables. He’ll give you no trouble, I can assure you of that. Just keep an eye on him, teach him what to do and he’ll pick up the rest.’

The chef wiped his hands on his dirt-streaked shirt. His face was blotchy and red. ‘There are no jobs. Where do you think you are? Now, I’ll ask you again –
please
,’ he exaggerated this word,
mimicking
a simpering civil servant, ‘get out of my kitchen.’

‘Just a simple job. I’m sure there’s something that needs to be done in here. It’s a mess, and you all look busy.’ She tried to laugh lightly at the end of her speech, but instantly regretted it.