Under Fishbone Clouds (55 page)

The table wobbled each time a new dish was piled on; the soggy dumplings, orange lotus, marinated chicken feet, steaming tofu and shredded twists of pork in a neon sauce surrounded the freshwater fish, one eye staring up at the poised chopsticks as its splintered flesh sank in a brown sizzle. Jinyi was determined to enjoy this reunion dinner, though he found his appetite ebbing away with the sheer exertion of pretending to be happy. He was about to exhort Yaba to begin when he remembered something and stumbled up to throw open the window, before searching for something to prop the front door open with. How else would they let the New Year’s good luck in? Heaven knows we need it, he thought. He settled on the unscrubbed wok as a doorstop. If it were possible to sweep the last years out along with the dead skin and shoe grime and matted cobwebs, he wondered, how far back would I go?

Manxin emerged with Yuying, who slowly lowered herself into a chair. Her eyes were dream-battered moths, fighting to stay in flight. To everyone except Yaba, who still saw her as if she was a podgy little girl skipping in his footsteps, she looked unusually pale, her whiny breathing unnaturally loud, as if making up for her lack of words. Jinyi poured thimbles of liquor for himself and Yaba and they sank the first toast.

‘Everything that happens today will happen for the rest of the year, that’s what our ancestors believed,’ Jinyi said, the sharp aftertaste scalding his tongue as he topped up the thimbles. ‘To be close to my family – that is all I want for the rest of the year. Please, eat.’

‘Thanks Pa, it’s wonderful food. Much better than Manxin’s!’ Liqui said, and her elder sister playfully thumped her shoulder.

Jinyi raised his thimble, but everyone had suddenly stopped
eating
. They lowered their chopsticks and turned to seek the source of the metronomic pinging. It did not take long: Yuying was tapping a long fingernail against her teacup. She looked up at her husband, a sad but assertive gaze, her pupils adrift in a nexus of bloodshot circuitry.

‘Er, well, of course, yes, I’m sorry.’

He leaned over and trickled a measure of rice wine into his wife’s cup.

‘Ma, perhaps you –’ Manxin began, but as she spoke her mother picked up the teacup and knocked back the contents. Yuying rattled it back on the table, her eyes watering.

‘People might
talk
,’ Liqui whispered across to her mother,
picking
up where her sister left off. The only women seen in public smoking or drinking were usually either prostitutes or those
disgraced
beyond hope of rehabilitation.

‘Let your mother be,’ Jinyi said. ‘Men and women are supposed to be equal now, aren’t they? If she wants a sip, she can have one.’

‘But if she drinks today, she might be hungover for the rest of the year,’ Xiaojing said.

‘Girls, when I was young there were old men on every corner quoting Confucian epigrams at you. Now Confucius has been banned as a corrupting influence, quite rightly of course, but that does not mean you should not still respect your elders. Your Ma can make her own choices, and you can make your own.’

‘Yes, Pa,’ they muttered.

Yaba clapped his hands and then raised his fingers to click his
chopsticks
together, and the rest of them followed his directive to stuff themselves full of food. Yet it was not long before the pinging started again. Jinyi shrugged and pushed the bottle across, allowing his wife to glug out a few fingers of liquor, which she promptly downed.

The conversation soon turned to the new tower blocks being built beside the station, how far five yuan might now stretch, the
wastelands of untended weeds and bracken being bought up by newly registered companies on the outskirts of town, who had
married
whom and how many children they now had and, at the girls’ insistence, the long dresses suddenly appearing in the windows of some of the small stores near the river. The two youngest girls teased Manxin about the man from the engine workshops that she had recently been introduced to, asking her questions about when she would next meet him and what he looked like. She soon turned bright red and Jinyi had to tell them to stop. They chattered until the dishes had dwindled to scraps and bones, and midnight arrived with a crackling burst of fireworks spitting light into the icy sky.

Hours later, squirming on the futon through the haze of tipsy sleep, Jinyi was awoken by the sound of a cawing bird. No, he thought, that cannot be right. He turned over and closed his eyes before hearing it again. A stray cat howling for a mate outside the front door? No. His ears tuned in – a noisy retching and the splatter of vomit. He heard heavy breathing, then another croaky rasp and the hissing sound of someone trying to spit out all the tastes in their mouth.

He opened the door carefully, in case it was a trick. Instead he found his wife, hunched forward on the step and vomiting into the street. He asked nothing, but reached out and gently took hold of her long hair, holding it back for her as she leaned forward once again over the step.

In February, after three weeks of Yuying’s silence, Jinyi and his daughters had reached breaking point. Jinyi shouted until he felt as though he had swallowed a desert, while the girls pleaded tearfully; but none of them could make Yuying speak. Furthermore, she
often
refused to leave the house. As the month ground to a close, one of the new bosses from the bread factory accompanied Jinyi home. The boss, who urged people to call him Mr Peng, was so tall that he had to stoop to fit through their door, and gave the impression of having been zipped into a badly fitting body. Mr Peng stood next to the kitchen table where Yuying was sitting, and pushed his new glasses up his long nose.

‘Now, Bian Yuying. My predecessor …’ he shuffled the papers on his clipboard and fiddled with his glasses again, ‘… Mr Wang, mentioned you in a couple of his reports. Let me see. Ah, yes: “An
exemplary worker, showing patriotic spirit and socialist zeal.” Quite a glowing recommendation, don’t you think?’

Yuying looked down at her feet.

‘Don’t worry,’ he blustered on, ‘I haven’t come here to embarrass you. But we could certainly use your experience back at the factory. What do you say?’

Yuying continued to look at her feet.

‘Well, I won’t pressure you. Have a think about it, and when you feel better, you know where to find me.’ He turned abruptly. ‘Hou Jinyi, I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you for your time, sir,’ Jinyi said as Mr Peng strode away as fast as his long legs would carry him.

Jinyi made his way to the stove, slipping into a familiar routine of cooking and then cleaning. He did not mind the extra work – it gave him less time to dwell on the past or to worry about his wife. He tried to guess what she might want, what she might say if she were to choose to speak again. In this way, he created
imaginary
conversations, which blurred and became entwined with his daughters’ voices. He pushed the gnawing sting of grief down into the deep pit of his stomach, where it knotted his intestines and needled his sides.

In April a doctor was sent by the factory to check whether Yuying was simply trying to avoid returning to work –‘which would, I’m afraid, need to be reported to the authorities,’ the young doctor took Jinyi aside to say. ‘Imagine what would happen if everyone decided just to stop talking, to stop working. The whole country would be in chaos. No, it wouldn’t do, I’m afraid, uncle.’

The doctor’s hand-me-down white coat trailed close to his feet, and its sleeves hung loosely from his shoulders. He checked Yuying’s tongue and tonsils, then shone a light into her ears. He spent a long time looking suspiciously into her eyes and talking to her as though she was a badly behaved child, despite the fact that she must have been around twenty years his senior. Finally he recorded her heartbeat, temperature and blood pressure.

‘Now, Mrs Bian, have you been having any, er, well, have you been feeling hot at all lately? Not, not the weather, I mean, erm …’ The doctor lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘…
hot flushes
?’

Yuying stared him down, raising her eyebrows to show the
contempt
in which she held him, and then shook her head.

‘No, ah, well, fine … fine.’ He flustered with his briefcase and beckoned to Jinyi to meet him outside.

‘Women’s things,’ the doctor said, and tapped his nose
conspiratorially
. ‘Though she may simply be faking it.’

Jinyi cleared his throat and glanced down at the basket of fruit on the doorstep, inside which was clearly nestled a large bottle of rice wine. He pushed the box towards the young doctor with his foot, and cleared his throat again. ‘Just a little gift to thank you for your help. So, umm, what are you going to write in your report?’

‘Oh, emotional breakdown brought on by family tragedy,
menopausal
depression and so on. The factory won’t be expecting her back any time soon.’ The doctor picked up the fruit basket. ‘Make sure she gets lots of rest and drinks plenty of water.’

When he had finally convinced himself that no one would notice, Jinyi began to wear his son’s old vest beneath his work shirt,
savouring
the slightly sour smell, the closeness. When he chattered and joked and hummed as if nothing was wrong, it was not because he was not angry and exhausted, but because he felt he had to provide a balance, a warm and noisy yin to counter the silence and stares of Yuying’s yang. If her silence was a protest, his good humour was an act. And, with all acts, if you keep it up long enough you begin to believe it yourself. Only when you slip into someone else’s mind, as I have, does it become clear that the best actors are the ones who fool themselves.

In May, Liqui returned home early after work with a short man with tiny paper-cuts for eyes and tufts of grey hair. He was carrying a small wooden box. Her father was out with Manxin, chaperoning her for a meeting with the suitor from the engine workshop. Yuying was therefore sitting alone in the bedroom, arranging a handful of drooping daisies in a pen pot. Liqui led the short man in.

‘Mother, this is Doctor Ma – do you remember, Granny Dumpling used to speak about him? He’s come to help.’

Doctor Ma bowed and turned to Liqui. ‘If we could spend a little time alone …’ he drawled, and Liqui obliged, closing the door behind her.

‘Now, the body has nine pressure points which reveal their pulses, just like our own sun, drawing nine planets into orbit. From their irregularities we may identify the source of any problem.’ He held her wrist tight, counting. ‘However, some problems may not be problems at all – the body is a master of tricks and disguises. I want you to concentrate on that stain on the wall for me. Can you do that?’

He turned around and fiddled with the small wooden box. Then with a sudden shriek he spun around and threw the open box at Yuying. Out leapt a wrinkled toad, which landed on Yuying’s chest. Its spindly legs whirred at her stomach before it slipped down to her lap, emitting a burpy croak before throwing itself to the floor. Doctor Ma ran after it, and eventually succeeded in trapping it under the open box. He slid the lid underneath and scooped it up.