Under Fishbone Clouds (53 page)

Jinyi pulled himself up from the table with a sigh.

‘You could come with me if you want,’ he said, anxious to reach out to her.

Xiaojing gestured to the pots beside the stove. ‘I should do some cleaning and make lunch.’

He nodded and stepped out of the door into the morning drizzle. The new factory boss told him that he could start back as soon as the national three-day holiday for the Spring Festival had finished. However, after appraising the haggard fifty-something man in front of him, the boss suggested a move from the ovens to the packaging production line. ‘Far less sweat for a man of your maturity,’ as he so delicately put it. Jinyi murmured his gratitude, though the job was little more than an anchor now, stopping him from floating into space.

A quick wander around his old work station and the canteen was enough to confirm that the handful of the workers who remained from ten years before were barely recognisable, and keen not to make eye contact. Not because they ratted him out – there was no shame in that, since everyone had had to shout loudly about others to drown out the chorus of charges against their own
families
– but because some things do not change. All of them there still knew even the smallest details about each other’s lives, from the number of teeth each man had left to the songs he hummed under his breath. I would rather have their contempt than their pity, he told himself as he trudged back home, taking the longest, most meandering path possible.

Yuying believed in atonement and rebirth, albeit framed in terms of class dialectics. Just as the winter wiped away the tallest and strongest of the previous year’s crops to make a clean slate for the spring, so she had been learning to forget who she used to be. Yet as she crossed county after county, and she measured out the seeds and nuts she had saved up for the journey, Yuying was not sure she had ever been anything except what other people had told her to be. She closed her eyes and let the juddering rhythm of the carriage tug loose the threads of her thoughts. From the frosted-up window spilt empty fields, half-built cities fanning out from spluttering cooling towers, unnamed stations where trains never stopped, dottings of slanted red brick and bonfires, hovels and boarded-up restaurants with crumbling stone lions, and huddled grubby workmen
preparing
for the night shift with a shared jar of rank tea.

She thought of her children. She thought of her husband. And as she did so, she felt some of the joy that had once kept her going bubble back to the surface.

The train was a zoo gone wrong. There were snarling lemurs of old women furiously elbowing their way to seats and hulking bears of men in need of a shave, lumbering through the carriages and dumping their huge tied-cloth bundles on sleeping feet or hands. There were buck-toothed and hare-lipped ticket-clickers hopping between the bodies hunched on the floor, dodging the restless legs that dangled from the luggage racks, while jabbering monkeys perched on tables or squatted between bags, gibbering and spitting and throwing playing cards, sunflower seeds and cigarette stubs at everyone around them. And at every station, just when it seemed that the train was filled to overflowing, a hundred more feral dogs with foaming mouths came barking and pushing and shoving their way onboard, sniffing out a spare inch of mucky, cluttered floor space.

The smell of cheap tobacco and black soap mingled with curdled sweat and the festering stink of the single hole-in-the-floor toilet. Yuying tried to move her feet, to wrestle them free from a tangle of travelling bags, decaying snacks and blood-crusty tissues. The
rocking
carriage was clamorous and shrill, the different dialects tumbling over each other and vying for loudness. Yuying slouched down in her seat, and snippets of conversations crept into her half-sleep.

‘They said they’d found a pig for New Year – well, the kids have never tasted pork, though of course most of it will be given to the Party to redistribute, but just a bit of dripping, a
jin
of lard, ooh, I can almost taste it –’

‘Mao Zedong may die, but Mao Zedong Thought will live
forever
–’

‘His wife wasn’t a bad woman, she just wanted to give them a good meal, and to be fair that cat had had a good life –’

‘A string of a thousand bobbing red lanterns strung between the village houses, blossoming into fire –’

‘We walked all the way from Hengshui, which took us nearly a week you know, and when we got there and raised our little red books and saw him waving in the distance, well, I’m not ashamed to say that tears streamed down my face and they didn’t stop for hours –’

Though the conversations meandered on towards morning, Yuying soon slipped into unconsciousness as province after
province rushed past the window. When she awoke, nothing would be the same.

Jinyi was contemplating the holes in his winter socks when his wife poked her head nervously round the door. Though he wanted to leap up and hug her, he was unable to move – the woman in front of him seemed to have shrunk, knotted into a tangle of crow’s feet and grey streaks. He put down the socks and asked their daughters if they would go to the market to pick up some onions. As they left, they each kissed their mother on the cheek, and already she knew that something terrible had happened. Her bag slumped in the doorway, where it would be left until her daughters unpacked and folded it away hours later when they returned.

Jinyi did not remember much of what he said. He stumbled through the phlegmy, coughed-up speech, rushing towards the end so that he could be free from the words stinging his throat.

‘… they didn’t tell me either, but they were just trying to look after us, to stop the world from crashing down around us.’

‘I knew,’ Yuying replied, her voice wavering like a taut
pipa
string being tuned up through the octaves. She had not moved from the doorway, as if to enter the house completely would mean
admitting
complicity with what had happened.

‘You did?’ Jinyi rose hesitantly. He was unsure whether to approach her – unsure whether she would still, after all these years, want him to – and unsure of what to do with his lumbering hands.

‘I knew it from the day he was born, just like with Wawa. Both of them were such perfect babies, so fragile that I thought they might shatter if someone even let a fingertip graze them. Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put
making
steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt it in the pit of my stomach all this time; I just never knew what it was until now.’

Jinyi watched as his wife’s head slumped down, her hair
hanging
loose around her neck, and she walked unsteadily towards the
bedroom, waving away his arm, outstretched to steady her. Those were the last words she would speak for a year.

The winter wind pawed at the windows and sharpened its claws on the rickety door. Jinyi had expected tears, shouts, sobs, howls, things being thrown and broken. Accusations and pointed fingers would be better than this, he thought. The sudden silence had flooded the small room and was squeezing out the air. He did not dare try the handle on the bedroom door for fear that it would be bolted. Three days left to the Spring Festival, he muttered to himself; I’d better start preparing things. And so their first hour alone together in ten long years, their first real conversation in a decade, ended with Yuying perched on the wide
kang
, her round eyes staring at a ribbon of blood left from a swatted mosquito while her tired, wiry husband
pummelled
his calloused fists into a clump of dough.

Yuying sat as still as she could, wondering whether her body could hold everything inside it without bursting. After an hour, perhaps longer, she heard her husband singing to himself as he cooked. It was an old song, older than the both of them put together. For a moment she was tempted to give in to it, to put aside the receding hair lines, the sagging arms and bellies and breasts, the ear-hairs and pinched faces and wheat-husk teeth that showed how far they had hardened and faltered apart from each other, open the door and hold him to her. Yet still she did not move; life, she told herself, was not like that anymore. She still loved him. More than anything. But there was something in her that felt she was being punished for daring to love; something that told her that every time the two of them drew close, history or fate or whatever you want to call it conspired to pull them apart. The maps that once lined her heart had been redrawn, written over and scribbled on so many times that the original pathways had become illegible.

‘Pa, how is she?’ Manxin asked later, once the turquoise evening had settled on the streets and the girls thought it safe to return.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ Jinyi replied, not looking up from the kitchen corner where he had walled himself in, surrounded by a fat heft of dough left to rise slowly in the wintery sun, pots of chilli oil he had spent the afternoon simmering down until it tasted of flames and the bowlful of thick dark sauce in which he planned to float a blubbery cut of tofu.

‘But she’s your wife,’ Liqui ventured.

‘I know,’ Jinyi sighed. ‘But it’s been ten years. I don’t know what else to say. Let’s just give her some time to get used to the news, some time to accept it. If I know your mother, she’ll come out soon and be ordering everybody around in no time.’ He tried to smile, but it shrivelled on his face.

‘Well, I’m not going to be the first to go in,’ Xiaojing said
defiantly
, and her sisters looked at each other.

‘We’ll wait, like Pa said, and give her some time,’ Manxin
suggested
, and they slumped on the futon.

The long wooden clock hanging on the wall belted out the hours with a shrill chime, the lazy pendulum juddering through the quiet. Rescued from Granny Dumpling’s place, the creaking mechanism was older than its former owner and just as stubborn. Xiaojing took the key and wound it, the teeth gnashing and squawking in the slot, as if this might hurry time along. The girls had left their books, needlework and pens and paper in the bedroom, and none of them had the courage to go in and retrieve them. Instead they slouched and stared at the scroll of a pair of cranes, a gift from Yaba to replace the one the Red Guards had torn up. The two proud birds retained something of their slender grace, their curved beaks poised to dart down to the slight ripples spilling out around their sharp-line legs. The girls had found out long before, however, that no matter how long they stared or how much they wished, the cranes would not dance for them.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Liqui said as soon as the clock struck ten, her words dovetailing into a yawn. ‘We’ve got a Party inspection at the factory at six tomorrow morning, so I can’t be late.’

‘Take this through to your Ma, then,’ Jinyi said, still sitting in the kitchen, pointing to a bowl of gloopy stewed aubergine.

It was then they realised that, despite their father having spent the whole day laboriously preparing sauces and marinades, none of them had sat down to dinner. The girls exchanged glances, and decided not to point this out – anyway, it was not the first time they had gone to bed hungry.

‘Aren’t you coming to bed, Pa?’

‘No, no, I’ve got a little more to do in here. If I get most of it done now, we can spend the whole Spring Festival as a family. I’ll be a little while, so I think I’ll just sleep in here tonight – I don’t want to barge in and wake you all up later.’

And so he kept chopping, folding and marinating until tiredness subsumed his worry, his grief and his anger, and he covered the
half-finished
dishes with damp cloths and piled them on the windowsill. When the girls awoke the following day, the futon would already be folded up once more and their father gone to the market.