Under Fishbone Clouds (52 page)

‘He’s dead. Pa, I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you.’

Jinyi managed a nod, but his head had been sent spinning from him, an unhinged comet crashing through his senses. He felt it in his stomach, in his chest. He felt it in his shaking fingers.

‘How?’ He stuttered at last, his hands creeping up over his chest, hugging himself tight against the shock. And Manxin tried to tell him, the words slipping and spilling out in a tearful rush, with interruptions and sniffles from her sisters, until the four of them
ended up flopped on the warm
kang
in a brittle hug of shared quiet, knowing each other’s stinging pain.

Under a washed-out midnight sky, Hou Dali had tiptoed from the house. It was 4 September 1974, the last sweat of the drawn-out summer still hugging his clothes. He had been waiting all day for his sisters to fall asleep. It was by then months since he had last bothered to turn up at his factory job, checking the lining and then sewing buttons onto winter army coats, his quick, slapdash
stitching
barely concealing his contempt for the fat-bellied officers who would tug and gripe at his handiwork. Instead he had been kept at home by his sister, forced to drink bowl after bowl of stinking herbal medicines, brewed from roots and herbs by Manxin in the same pot they used to cook rice. It was better than venturing out alone and risking more of the same: being thrown into the local toilets, dragged up flights of stairs just to be pushed down them, stripped and tripped into the shallows of the river or forced to drink the piss of former Red Guards.

Every several paces down the deserted street he had stopped and looked about him, thinking he was being followed. The banners and torn posters left on some of the walls made his lips curl, while the hundred washing lines displaying identical blue jackets, a fluttering army of bodiless fanatics, left him dizzy, disorientated. His right leg moved faster than his left, the nerves and tendons frazzled by a hot iron from the factory. He had ducked into an alley between house rows when he spotted the night soil collectors making their rounds. A slice of clear sky loomed between the brick walls as he waited, panting, a spray of stars fizzling like the flick of a dragon’s scaly tail.

How, he had wondered for the hundredth time, could his sisters bear it? Perhaps Hei, the leader of one of the gangs that had been tormenting him for the last eight years, had been right when he said that Manxin was more of a man than Dali was, and that they must have got mixed up at birth. ‘That is what comes of being traitors, born to imperialist scum!’ Hei had sneered. Even at school he had been picked on because he preferred sitting alone with his pictures of aeroplanes to lobbing a makeshift ball against a wall or scrabbling in the mucky field in a game of tag. No, he had
corrected
himself as he snuck down the alley, that was wrong – he
hadn’t thought himself above them; he would have given anything to play with them, but he was just too scared that the wrong words would come stuttering out of his mouth.

Worse than the torments though, were the times when they did nothing. The times he would walk down the winding streets to the factory and everyone would ignore him or turn the other way. Or the way his few friends disappeared in a shroud of silence, just as his parents had. Or the vague threats he would sit up for nights on end worrying about, which never materialised. Or even his sisters who, though well-meaning, nonetheless believed in the Party and the Red Guards as much as they did in their brother’s ‘madness’.

He crossed the road where he had last seen his closest friend, before he was kicked and stomped into a mass of bloody coiled springs and broken filament because of the classical poems in his journal and the spectacles beneath his oily fringe. Better to always keep your mouth shut, Dali had told himself.

Across to the food hall where his mother and a thousand others had been denounced, attacked, branded or publicly executed, and down past the high school with its shards of toothy glass in broken windows and the distorted light of small fires keeping those inside warm. He had lumbered over a fence where the plots and
communes
on the outskirts began, confident that any local guard dogs would have been stolen and stewed years ago.

If I can’t get them back directly, then this is the next best thing, he had thought. He slid down a short bank and his bare feet
scuffled
onto gravel, his mind too much of a blur to really register the scrapes and stubs on his soles.

Dali had stopped suddenly, feeling the flat wooden tracks under his feet. He gripped one hand in the other to stop it from shaking. When the power of the state extended even to the schoolyard
bullies
and the woman next door watching you doing your washing, where could you turn? I should have seen it coming, he had told himself; we Chinese invented the kowtow, for heaven’s sake: the most humiliating form of bow imaginable, sticking your nose in the dirt and your arse in the air to show how inferior you are. Some things never change. They can do anything they want to me, but at least I can still control this.

If they had only listened to him, Dali had found himself
thinking
once again, they might have been the best Red Guards in the
country, they might have truly transformed China into a socialist paradise instead of this hole of liars and thugs. He felt sweat
bristling
on his chest, welling between his buttocks. To steel himself he thought of the bruises, the cuts, the blows, the kicks, the slaps, the burns, the pinches, the clouts, the thumps, the thwacks, the shoves, the throttles, the scars, the black eyes, the breaks, the
fractures
, the torn ligaments, the sears, the jabs, the scrapes and, most of all, of the words and sentences and slogans and names. This then was the law of cause and effect – this was the only action he still had control over.

Fuck all of them. He had held out his arms and rushed forward, whirring and giddy, imagining he was a child again, imagining he was an aeroplane. Hou Dali did not see his life flashing back before him – he had simply run forwards, his arms stretched out and his eyes closed, straight into the unstoppable rush of the coming train, the sudden thud and crush of the collision scattering the last of his thoughts across the gravelly tracks.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Jinyi asked.

‘How could we?’ Manxin sniffed back a sob. ‘You already had so much to worry about. Why wash your wounds with poison? We thought if we told you, you might never come home again. There are only so many things a man can hear.’

Jinyi nodded. All this time he had been thinking it was harder to be taken away than to be left behind. All this time the whole country had been fooling itself into believing in the impossible, and so had he.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered.

He looked at the three pairs of leaky almond eyes, the prickles of red tendril creeping into the corner of each one as they looked to him for comfort, for reassurance, for something, for anything. Jinyi was filled with the same urge he had felt some twenty-five years before for the two lost boys – hold them close, never let them out of his sight again.

Yet this was not the lapping river of grief he had felt before, when the babies were taken. This was harder, more forceful: a dart of ice freezing his tongue, scalding the tips of his fingers like a thousand
nettle stings, so that he wanted to tear his burning skin from his suddenly useless body.

‘Girls,’ he fought through the moans welling up in his throat, ‘we are in the middle of a huge storm of fog and rain. It is still almost impossible to tell right from wrong, to tell love from hate. But at least we are together now – that is all that matters.’

‘But it will get better, won’t it, Pa?’ Liqui asked. ‘The Gang of Four has been arrested, the schools are going to reopen, and you and Ma will soon be back together again.’

Jinyi stared up at them, suddenly lucid. ‘Look around you. Nobody knows what will happen next. Could anyone have predicted the last ten years, the last twenty? No. This could just be a respite, a brief lapse. Be careful – you watch what you say, who you speak to, who you trust. You work hard and do not criticise anything or anyone, not even the Gang of Four, until we see what happens. That is the only way to survive. Understand?’

The girls murmured their agreement, and Jinyi slipped back into the abstract depths of that numbing feeling. He waited for
something
to happen – for the door to suddenly swing open, for words to be spoken, for his heart to buckle under that unbearable weight – but nothing came. He heard only the girls’ unleashed sobs and, mingling into them, the voice of a man outside with a loudspeaker, hawking the evening newspaper. The past does not end, does not disappear, he thought; it always finds a way to creep back in under the door and turn the air sour. Jinyi clutched the girls closer, three heads sinking into the hollow of his chest.

By the time he pulled himself from the futon the following
morning
, his elder daughters had left for their factories and Xiaojing was quietly stirring a breakfast of millet porridge at the stove. He
battled
with the ordinary actions of washing, dressing, eating, as if they were absurd stage directions of a surreal play in which he had been cast. Yet if the last decade had taught him anything, it was the necessary primacy of performance over truth, of actions over feelings. Grief still filled him, but it was now subsumed by another worry: what he would say to Yuying.

‘Pa.’ His youngest daughter was speaking. ‘Perhaps we could go
to the hill today. We put a mound of stones there for Dali, as there were no ashes. We could go together.’

‘I’m afraid I’m too busy. I’m going to go down to the bread
factory
. They will want to know when I’m going to start work. I can’t keep them waiting, it wouldn’t be right.’ Though behind his flimsy excuse, what he meant was clear. I cannot, not yet, I will not let him go.

‘Of course. I only thought …’

He swallowed hard. ‘Life has to come first. Think what people would say if they heard I was sitting here moping. Anyway, what do you usually do with your time?’

‘I used to be in the Red Guard Youth Movement. These days I do some cooking and cleaning here, pick up your and mother’s
coupons
from the bread factory, and haggle in the market. Oh,
sometimes
I go to the tin factory with Manxin, to watch and learn, but I try not to get in the way.’

‘Do you often see your friends?’

‘Friends? Well … I guess the vegetable woman at the market is pretty friendly … and so is Mrs Tien next door – sometimes if I’m cooking by the window I can hear the old stories she tells to her grandson. And of course I’ve got my sisters.’

‘And now you’ve got me too,’ Jinyi said, and Xiaojing nodded politely, unsure of how to respond to the strange things her father was saying.

He was not the same man of her memories – he was shorter, smaller, weaker, slower; his words were a jumble of hesitant
syllables
, showing neither the wisdom nor the paternal authority she had imagined as her mind had reworked her earliest memories. Neither did he seem to be the same man her sisters had told stories about: the man who could conjure luxury dishes from only scraps of leftovers, who could haul two children onto his shoulders and race them around the park like a wild animal escaped from a zoo, who would sing slurred songs about demons and dragons after a cupful of rice wine. Instead he was a pale, more shrivelled version of the man in the black-and-white photo on the shelf, a man with a halfhearted smile who did not know what to do with his hands.