Under Fishbone Clouds (37 page)

‘They’re good. The baby –’

‘We don’t have time for your bourgeois chats!’ A potbellied man with receding hair interrupted. It was Yangchen, the head of the commune now, the friendly manner that he had shown in the
restaurant
kitchen turned into a semi-permanent sneer. ‘I know you must be finding it difficult, Bian Yuying, following my orders when once your family treated me like a slave. But times have changed, and you will have to accept that. You know the rules. The
commune
is your family now, so don’t try and pretend you’re any better than the rest of us.’

Yuying blushed and bit her lip.

‘We’ll make the quota,’ Jinyi said. ‘So please forgive me, Comrade Yangchen. It was my fault, and I must have caught my wife off guard. She has had a busy day at the factory and –’

‘We’re all busy,’ Yangchen replied. ‘We all must work for the good of the commune, the good of the country, the good of the people. You two are no exception. You may think you are special, Hou Jinyi, but we all know what you really are. Have your little chat; do what you wish, but do not think it will not be noted.’

Yangchen rolled up his sleeves and huffed along with the furnace, and Jinyi and Yuying muttered to each other in lowered voices, drowned out by the busy movements of the small crowd around the insatiable brick beast.

‘They’re good. The baby is eating a lot, which is good.’

‘What about Dali? Has he been in a fight again?’ Jinyi asked.

‘No. He’s fine. They’re all fine,’ Yuying replied, impatient to be seen to be joining in with the work.

‘
OK, OK
. But how can I know? I’m never there. I’m always either here or at the factory. You know, this isn’t what I expected family life to be like.’

‘Don’t say that. You’ll only get us into more trouble. You know you have a family, and that every single one of them looks up to you. You know it all in your heart, even if not with your eyes. Now come on, we’ll talk later, I promise.’

Yuying strode away towards where the ladders and pipes crossed beside the roaring furnace, and Jinyi tried not to lose his temper. He had spent his youth longing to have a family of his own; now he had a wife and three children, only to be told by the state that the commune was to be his new family.

The quota would be made, but only if they were to do the same thing they did last month: lie. It’s no big deal – everyone does it, they all assured each other; we are bound to make up the
difference
next month, oh, without a doubt. What they did not know, though some were beginning to suspect, was that the lumpy pig iron they made was useless – the quality of their finished product was, predictably, poor. The Great Leap Forward, designed to enable China to overtake Britain in steel production within a decade, was in fact driving the country backwards into a squalor of waste and shortage. However, not everyone can share this god’s eye view, and the men and women panting through the long hours in that little compound were usually happy enough to confuse busyness and increased fervour with progress.

As midnight drew closer, Yuying sidled close to Jinyi, who was standing near where the extracted ooze was cooling. ‘You’re
thinking
about him again.’

He shrugged. ‘How do you know?’

‘I can usually guess what you’re thinking. Isn’t that what marriage means? You’re still worrying.’

‘No, of course not. I was the same at his age, fantasies and little bits of dream spilling out of my ears. It’s just boy stuff. I’m sure he can take care of himself.’

She knew he was lying, lying to give her hope, so she thought better of giving her doubts strength by voicing them. Instead she said, ‘So you don’t think he’s –’

‘No. Whatever you are going to say, no, I don’t. Worrying about things just makes them more likely, you should know that. Come
on, I’ve only got an hour left, and I’ll check on them all when I get back.’

‘What about Yangchen?’ she whispered.

‘I’ll find a way of calming him down. We used to be friends: it shouldn’t be too hard.’

The muddled group of workers all wore identical outfits, dark trousers and jackets in various stages of decay, though not all had the luxury of shoes. The exhausted faces looked crab-pink in the moonlight, and they scuttled around the furnace as if they were indeed crustaceans, worshipping what could have been a giant husk of shiny shipwreck washed to shore.

There was something about their son that both Jinyi and Yuying could not place. Perhaps it was the furrowed brow that was often the start of a tantrum, or the sentences he came out with that only made sense to them days after he had spoken. Perhaps it was the unhappiness he never owned up to.

Jinyi set down the last pile of the night’s freshly chopped logs, and wandered over to where Yangchen was standing watching the other men and women scrabble round the heat.

‘Cigarette?’ Jinyi offered his last scuffed half-stub to his old
colleague
.

Yangchen took it and lit up without replying.

‘Comrade, you remember that night during the civil war when the restaurant’s roof came crashing down, and we were all off work for weeks? Bian Shi kept paying us, and brought food to those of us with families, she –’

‘I know where you’re going, Jinyi. That’s your problem, clinging to the old ways. All of that is gone now, wiped clean. We’re
remaking
the world from a blank slate.’

‘I just wanted to apologise, Comrade. You can see we’ve been working hard here; there’s no one come near this furnace who would deny it. Neither my wife nor I will talk out of line again, I swear. Perhaps, if you could spare an hour or two of your time, you might honour us with your presence for dinner some time, and let us prove how devoted we are to the cause.’

Yangchen weighed it up. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Tomorrow? Well, of course, we would be delighted, but –’

‘Then tomorrow it is. Don’t worry, I know where you live.’

Yangchen threw down the butt, then strode off to shout at a pair of
gloved women bickering over the fragile apparatus. Jinyi sighed and set off home, while the rest of the compound families drew closer to the furnace, as if to prove their hearts by enduring its heat.

It was only a few hours later, after two night feeds and one
nightmare
, that Jinyi and Yuying awoke entwined, a mess of limbs and tousled hair, with the baby crying and light beginning to haze shyly through the windows. As Jinyi kissed his wife, he whispered of his conversation with Yangchen.

‘Dinner? On the only night of the week we don’t have to be at the furnace? Without a wok, without any food? Do you want us to lose face?’

‘We’ll take a few bits back from the canteen and make a few cold dishes – cucumbers in chilli oil, a few tea eggs – and the rice wine will make it go down fine.’

Yuying considered mentioning the children and their endless appetites, the dwindling supply of liquor left from her father’s cellar, or the rumoured shortages sweeping from city to city, but decided against it. She didn’t want to risk the children overhearing and getting scared.

Jinyi looked at her and smiled, knowing how to change her mind. ‘I know you, Yu, even if we were starving you wouldn’t turn away a guest.’

Yuying raised her eyebrows. ‘We couldn’t starve, Jinyi. That’s a thing of the past. The Party will look after us now, as long as we work hard.’

Jinyi left the bedroom and the waking children to his wife and mother-in-law – this was their part of the day – and picked up the pail to refill it at the nearby tap. Yet as soon as he had pulled open the stiff, unlocked front door, he was confronted with the green shirt and cap of a grumpy postal worker, who shoved a dirty piece of paper into his hand. On one side were a few barely legible
characters
, and on the other was written ‘Bian Jinyi’.

‘Wait. Where’s the envelope?’ he asked the postal worker.

The grumpy man sighed. ‘Strange thing, actually. This bit of paper was found inside a package sent to the official at the market. It must have been shoved in secretly by someone who couldn’t
afford the postage. You’re lucky you only live round the corner, and that there aren’t too many Bians round here anymore.’

‘My name isn’t Bian,’ Jinyi said. ‘I mean, it used to be, for a while, but –’

‘I don’t really care,’ the grumpy man said. ‘I’ve done my bit.’

With that he strode down the street, leaving Jinyi holding the dirty sheath in his hands. He finally flipped it over and read through the short note:

Jinyi drew in breath, and put down the pail. A friend? He didn’t know that either he or his old family still had such things. Auntie Hou, gone at last. Old Hou in trouble. Good. He screwed up the dirty sheet of paper and threw it out into the alley.

For the next hour, he pushed through the morning rituals of
tantrums
and hair-pulling, of bicycle bells and dodging dark puddles, telling himself throughout that he should not care. Throw out the old ways, he told himself; that is what the great Chairman has told us. They are better off in the past, where they belong. Yet Yuying had forgiven him his mistakes, his faltering heart. His thoughts slipped down through his body; he spent the day beside the bread oven scalding his hands, until they were red and blotchy with the scars of his guilt.

‘Are you all right? You seemed a bit quiet this morning. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the kids, though,’ Yuying said, catching him in the queue in the factory canteen.

‘Oh. I’m fine. Just stuck in a dream. You know how it is,’ Jinyi replied.

‘Well, don’t dream too much. You know dreams only cause trouble.’

Sometimes we tell lies so that we ourselves will believe them. Even gods lie, you know, but only because some things are too
difficult
to be told, or so I have heard the others say. There were plenty
of men, some that Jinyi even ate and shared bad jokes with at work, who had knotted fake pasts from the loose coils and frayed strings of their wants and needs. There were whole scores of Nationalist soldiers who had deserted once the end had become inevitable,
hiding
out until the noise died down. They were everywhere, dressed in the ill-fitting disguises of commitment and modesty. Sometimes we wear our lies in our eyes, in our hands, and sometimes they wear us, weave us chrysalis-like with words, until we emerge, lithe and changed.

These are the things Jinyi had lied about:

Other things were glossed over in silence. These are the things that Yuying had lied about:

The latter had changed with the years, with the fast-forward of life, with the little acts of tenderness that replaced passion, with the gradual wobble of her body and the scars and stretch marks, the fierce pride of motherhood and the fear of losing everything in a second to something unexpected and unexplained. She risked attention and nuzzled closer to her husband in the queue, letting his quiet calm engulf her.

Lies are like demons padding at your heels – take this from me. They are always just a couple of steps behind you, slipping quickly out of sight whenever you turn. Their panting and salivating, their smacking of lips that dribble in perpetual anticipation, are mistaken
for a leak in the roof, for creaking doors or other miscellaneous city noises. They bide their time, waiting to catch up with you.