Under Fishbone Clouds (43 page)

As they marched through the residential areas, the families doing their washing in metal tubs on the pavement and the old men discussing imaginary pasts slipped into their houses. Doors were pulled to as subtly as possible, and crumpled wet sheets were left clumped in cooling water. Even half a year ago the
procession
would have expected to be confronted by an irate citizen, a local cadre worried about things getting out of hand or a begging apologist for the person being humiliated. However, having learnt
that this only made them next on the list of capitalists, traitors and rightists to be denounced, people had begun accepting these marches as everyday occurrences.

Most people had few friends now anyway; with petty rivalries quickly spilling into official criticisms, it was difficult to find anyone to trust. Even the toothless shopkeeper’s family had stayed away, shunning her and the dishonour that contact with her might have brought. The world was finally beginning to see sense, the Red Guards told each other with slaps on backs.

Jinyi woke with aches knotting his body. He forced himself up, to find that his daughters had prepared shivering piles of tofu for him. It tasted of the first times they had called him Pa. He
remembered
when they were just gurgling and giggling and he had first announced his new name – ‘Pa’s home’ or ‘It’s all right, Pa’s here’ – savouring the short plump syllable, the glow of his new role at the centre of a little universe. He tried his best to nurture the memory, to make it last, before the present forced its way in.

He thought of the promise he and Yuying had made, that they would never be apart again. Jinyi had been counting the days since her disappearance. He would keep counting. He flinched as the door swung open.

‘I heard a great speech today, Pa,’ Liqui said to break the silence as the four of them sat around the clay
kang
, which now doubled as their dining table. ‘It won’t be long till everything is turned over, and everything will be fair. Isn’t that great? By the time Ma comes home everything will be better.’

Jinyi nodded pensively. ‘She’ll be happy to see our dreams come to life.’

‘Not just dreams, Pa,’ Manxin said. ‘Liqui is right. We’ve got a real chance now, with all the local leaders getting active, and no
imperialists
like Liu Shaoqi left in the government to stop us. The whole world is going to be looking at us, and following our example.’

‘I know. I only meant that it is important to be patient,’ he
mumbled
.

‘The time has run out for patience. Your generation sat around waiting for the world to be changed for them, and people Granny
Dumpling’s age still remember being waited on hand and foot and deferring to corrupt emperors and relatives. It’s up to us now.’

Manxin was addressing her sisters, who followed her words
carefully
, while their father picked awkwardly at the dish. Her short pigtails swung out around her cheeks as she spoke, her cap set down in front of her. ‘Look at our dinner for a start. Only five years ago we would have had nothing but broth and stale husks, if we were lucky, and would have felt too guilty to eat them with all the news about hard-working peasants starving only a few communes away. But now we’ve got enough – now everyone is beginning to get their fair share.’

Jinyi nodded. His left ear was ringing, a dialtone buzz. It is strange how children remember things, he thought. They didn’t feel guilty back then: oh no, they ate till there was nothing left and then whinged and moaned and cried and sulked and stamped their feet. But then, he surmised, the past is even easier to change than the present. He thought of all the little treats: the sugar-coated crab apples and trips to the People’s Zoo, the homemade kite and the handcrafted holiday dumplings, the help with homework and comfort through countless nightmares, and the only thing they seem to remember from those early years was the time he had got angry and cuffed them round the head with the back of his hand. Jinyi shook his head. He could not even remember why he had got so upset.

‘What about you, Xiaojing?’ he said, trying to change the subject. ‘What did you learn today?’

Xiaojing waited a second before she spoke, and puffed out her chest, her short hair rowdy and electrified. She had taken to telling everyone she met that she was five, as if she had already raced through the next four months in her head and arrived there early. ‘Me and Weiwei and Shuxi learnt about the hardships of peasant life from some sheep people.’

Jinyi smiled. She had obviously spent a long time carefully memorising that phrase. ‘I see. Sheep people, yes, let me
remember
, they’re the ones with human heads and furry bodies and little hooves, right?’

Xiaojing was not impressed. ‘No, Pa. They’re dirty men with sheep. They smell funny.’

Jinyi and Liqui laughed, but Manxin scowled. ‘They’re called shepherds. And they are not dirty, they just don’t have the
opportunities for hygiene that you are so lucky to have. They are noble, honest, warm-spirited people, just like all peasants.’

‘So what did you learn about their hardships?’ Jinyi asked his youngest daughter.

Xiaojing ruffled her nose. ‘Sheep are dirty!’

Before Manxin could step in again to correct her sister, the main door creaked open, and they all turned to see Dali slinking in. His eyes were trained on the ground in front of him, and his short, scrawny body was caked in mud – it had dried in streaks across his dark jacket, clumps of dusty earth dropping from his cap as he squeezed it in his hands. Though at first he simply picked his way between the debris and mess that had been carefully brushed into neat piles by his sisters, he soon stopped and looked around at the main room, noticing the absence of the table and chairs as well as the shelves and everything on them, the scrolls and all the usual knick-knacks, and he tilted his head as a dog might when confronted with a punishment it cannot comprehend.

Jinyi did everything he could to resist the urge to ask his son where he had been for the last twenty-four hours. Finally he said what he thought his wife, had she been there, might have said. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have something to eat, Dali? You must be hungry.’

Dali shrugged, but crossed into the bedroom and sat down beside them on the wooden bed anyway. For ten minutes they ate in silence, mouths slurping and chopsticks snipping at the dwindling dish, padded out with small clumps of overcooked rice.

‘You look like a shepherd!’ Xiaojing said, keen to try out the new word.

‘Thanks. This is how we’re all supposed to look now, isn’t it?’ Dali replied, brushing dirt from his shoulder onto the sheets.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll confuse her,’ Manxin said.

‘No, I’m serious.’ He set down his chopsticks and looked at the rest of them. He was still shy and awkward, but with a gangly kind of grace that both surprised and unnerved his family. His lack of height was intensified by the way he hugged his shoulders into his chest, while even his prickly eyebrows skulked so close together that the gravity of his face seemed to shift downwards.

‘How do you think peasants really live? They live in pigshit, sleeping in blankets made of coal, coughing up black phlegm and
blood.’ He lowered his voice until it was little more that a whisper. ‘I mean, that’s the way things have always been. Why do we
suddenly
want to be like them now?’

Manxin opened her mouth to argue, but before she could Jinyi reached out and put a hand on his son’s shoulder, risking the pain that the movement sent lumbering through his ribs. ‘Best to keep ideas like this to yourself.’

‘I know Pa, but –’

‘Your mother would say the same.’ In the last few months Jinyi had learnt that this was an effective way of shutting down any
argument
. It seemed that Yuying was like a ghostlike presence
hanging
over every word, somehow more fully with them now than she had been before her denouncement and exile. That they were unsure of where she was only served to reinforce the idea that she was somehow keeping them all bound together.

‘But I mean, well, don’t you ever wonder what it’s like in other countries?’ Dali continued. ‘Imagine: your hair might be gold instead of black, your eyes might be emerald instead of black, you might –’

‘That’s enough!’ Jinyi rasped, and his son’s eyes darted up to meet his. ‘This is crazy talk. I don’t know what you’ve been doing today, and I don’t want to know, but this has to stop, or else you’ll end up in serious trouble. Go wash yourself – you’re filthy. And wash those ideas out of your head while you’re at it. If I ever hear you talking like that, you’ll get a worse beating than you can imagine.’ Jinyi was aware how hollow his threats sounded, coming in between coughs and wheezes. He clutched his chest and looked at his daughters. ‘The same goes for all of you.’

As Dali rose from the
kang
, clutching the empty metal bowls which his sister had borrowed that afternoon from the only
neighbours
that still acknowledged them, he muttered a slight apology.

‘Just try and be like everyone else, OK?’ Jinyi sighed. ‘Now get out of here, you lot, I need to get some rest.’

‘You can’t Pa. Not tonight. There’s that performance in the food hall. We’re all going to go,’ Manxin said.

Jinyi made to lie down, but the girls would not leave. He
gestured
to the bruises spilt across his face. ‘It wouldn’t be right for people to see me like this.’

‘But if you don’t go, everyone will think you prefer the decadent old operas and don’t enjoy the new revolutionary plays,’ Manxin
said. ‘Or they might think that you have something to be ashamed of, something to hide.’

‘Do we have something to hide?’ Xiaojing asked, curiosity bubbling up in her eyes.

‘No!’ All three of them said as one, the force of their answer shaking the wooden bed beside them.

‘Pa,’ Xiaojing sidled up to him, ‘when is Mummy coming home?’

‘Soon,’ he replied.

‘Promise?’

The whole family stopped to see how their father would answer. Jinyi clutched his ribs and moved toward the bedroom to get ready for their outing.

‘I promise.’ Jinyi’s lie hurt as much as his broken ribs.

As his father disappeared into the bedroom to get ready, Dali pulled up slopping handfuls of water from the bucket in the kitchen, slapping it onto his grubby face and cursing to himself. He hated his days with the petty boys of his Red Guard faction, with the orders and the taunts and the humiliations.

‘Aren’t you proud of this country, the work we’re doing?’ Manxin asked as he washed.

‘Of course I am,’ Dali snapped. ‘It’s just there’s still so much wrong, I wonder how anything is ever going to change.’

‘Things are changing. Things get better every day, and we have Chairman Mao to guide us.’ She touched her brother’s shoulder. ‘If you believe in it, it will happen.’

Jinyi did not sleep that night. Each breath he drew stung him. Each thought of his wife burned him. He could not stop wondering where she was, wondering if she knew that he was thinking of her, wondering if she too was holding tight to their promise.

What distances can love travel? Let me tell you. Take Yue, for example, a large mackerel who lived back before people started bothering too much about dates. She was born in a bean-shaped bay on the east coast, flanked by overgrown hills and by a slanted pagoda and fishing village. Both her mother and father were also fish. She lived a contented life – as contented as a fish can be, I would imagine – arching like a bronze dart through the ashy waters,
nibbling on smaller fish and insects and watching the strange world that sloshed giddily along on the other side of the surface.

She had learnt to avoid the spindly nets and bow shadows of
fishing
boats pushed out from the shore, but grew more adventurous in swimming closer, watching the wavy shapes of families seeing off husbands and sons with gifts of rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and fluttering prayers. It was on one of these occasions that she first caught site of Shen, staying behind on the bank while his father drifted toward the distant stretches of the sea. Tatty book in hand, he was short and dark-skinned, with a pointed chin and pointed eyes and a melon slice for a mouth. She found him fascinating. Every day he would sit at the pagoda, his skinny legs dangling over the edge and his grubby toes occasionally stirring the surface of the water while he read from his book. As Yue grew bolder and swam closer, she was able to hear him reciting the old poems to himself, closing his eyes and fumbling over the verses he was
trying
to memorise. She heard him swear and then mutter, ‘Only a month until the imperial examinations! Why am I kidding myself? I’ll never make it as a mandarin; I’m just a bumpkin doomed to be stuck trawling for fish for the rest of my life.’