Under Fishbone Clouds (56 page)

‘Ah, well, I see that my surprise didn’t quite work. Never mind.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Let’s stick with the toad though. Perhaps if I coaxed it, it might give you a voice of its own to speak with, though that may cost a little extra. No? All right, all right. I see. You could of course buy the toad off me, for a much reduced price, I might add, and I would be happy to give you a secret recipe for cooking it – that would be sure to revive your spirits. No? Really? Hmm, well …’

The door opened and Liqui poked her head round, her plait
swishing
in with her.

‘Is everything all right, doctor? Only I heard a clatter and –’

‘Yes, yes, everything is fine. Just a little experiment. Ah, I see the sun has set. I must be going, I’m afraid – another appointment, you know how it is.’ The doctor lurched through the door, clutching the boxed toad tight against his chest.

‘Sorry, Ma. I was just trying to help,’ Liqui said. Her mother did not reply.

Before long, the days had melted into the sticky mess of summer. As much as he loved his daughters, and as much as he wanted to talk to his wife and convince her that everything was going to get better, Jinyi voluntarily took on extra hours at the factory,
sweating
away his time knotting plastic casing around the warm loaves. The futon was pressed back into shape and their father gone by the time the girls rose for breakfast each morning, and, on the many nights he played cards with Yaba and an assortment of factory and restaurant men on cramped dumpling-shop tables, Jinyi did not return until they were all asleep.

It wasn’t that Yuying didn’t try. Believe me, I was watching while everyone else was out; she would stand in front of the mirror and try and form her mouth into the correct shapes. It never looked right. So she closed her eyes and tried to force the words up from her throat. A hum, a gurgle, anything. But her tongue was barren, her mouth cracked earth.

And it wasn’t that she didn’t love them. On the contrary, in fact. She loved them too much. She believed she had found the demon that had been following them all those years, the demon that stole their children and cut away at their happiness, the demon that had become an expert at biding its time and waiting till everything seemed perfect before tearing them apart once more. And because she loved each one of them so much, she could not bring herself to look any of them in the face and tell them what she had made herself believe – it was all her fault. She was the demon.

‘Hou Jinyi?’ There was a fat man in a freshly pressed uniform
knocking
at the door, mopping his brow with a fancy handkerchief.

Manxin opened the front door and felt the stuffy evening air rush in past her. ‘He’s not back from work yet, I’m afraid. But his wife and daughters are here.’

‘Quite,’ the fat man said as he entered the main room, forcing Manxin to stand aside. ‘However, it seems that Bian Yuying will be little help if she insists on staying silent. You must be Hou Manxin.’

‘Yes, that’s me.’ Manxin followed as the man sat himself at the kitchen table and peered over the laid-out dinner dishes. Manxin signalled to her sisters, who got up from the futon and retreated to the bedroom. The fat man eventually pawed a chicken leg and began to tear off strips of the moist flesh with his teeth, gulping them down noisily, barely chewing.

‘My name is Ru Tai, assistant to the deputy magistrate of the South Fushun People’s Security Bureau. Perhaps you would care to enlighten me, young lady, as to what your mother is up to. I’m sure that both of us would be very unhappy if it turned out that any anti-revolutionary activity was being engaged in on the patch
that I am responsible for. Hopefully, we can sort this out ourselves. So, let me see.’

He pulled out a black leather notebook and thumbed through the pages with a greasy finger. ‘Your neighbours have reported that your mother has not spoken since she returned. What have you got to say about that?’

‘It’s not that simple, sir. She’s been unwell – a doctor from the factory where she works told us that she needs more rest.’

‘Yes, I have read his report. But you do not deny that she no longer speaks?’

‘No, that’s true, sir.’ Manxin hung her head.

‘I see,’ he said, helping himself to another chicken leg. ‘And why do you think that is? Remember, your answer will be kept between the two of us.’

‘I think she’s just sad, sir. Since my brother died she –’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, suddenly annoyed. ‘I can see that you
really
don’t have a clue. Well, I better talk to the woman herself. Go and fetch your mother.’

Manxin did as he ordered, and re-emerged from the bedroom with Yuying. She was wearing a long dressing gown, her bunned hair pierced through with a single chopstick. The two women stood in front of the seated official.

‘I shan’t patronise you by asking you to answer my questions
verbally
,’ he said, ‘but I would ask you to be cooperative. It would be a shame if I had to make a report about this household, what with your daughters’ precarious positions at their workplaces. So please oblige me by knocking once on the table for “yes”, and twice for “no”. Do you understand?’

Yuying rapped the table a single time.

‘I will keep this simple. Bian Yuying, is your silence some kind of protest?’

Two knocks.

‘Do you know of anyone else involved in the same activity?’

Two knocks.

‘Are you an enemy of the government, a member of an illegal organisation or a capitalist-sympathiser?’

Two knocks.

‘Do you blame the Party for your own petty problems and
mistakes
?’

A pause. Then two knocks.

‘Do you intend to resume speaking in the future?’

Yuying did not answer. She and the official stared at each other, both trying to pin intentions on the other’s gaze. Finally she shrugged; how could she predict the future? The official pushed his wobbling body up from the table, wiping his fingers on his uniform.

‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think either you’re a mad old woman, or else you’re a seditious troublemaker. I’ll be checking up on you – if I hear of anything else happening on this street, the police will on their way, and let me assure you, they are much less easily convinced to be lenient than myself. Goodnight.’ He lumbered to the door before stopping and turning to them. ‘Some people might tell you that countries are built by wars, struggles, noble actions. Perhaps they may even be right. But states, Bian Yuying, great nations, they are built on words. Do not doubt though, that these words can be rewritten. I suggest you think about that.’

After the official had waddled into the clammy evening, the two youngest girls filed out of the bedroom and hugged their mother. For the first time in months, she hugged them back; and even her
eldest
daughter, who stood a couple of inches taller than her, nuzzled down into the warmth of the dressing gown. When Jinyi returned from an after-work mahjong sessions with a few new colleagues who knew nothing of his past, he found the four of them asleep on the futon, heads on shoulders on knees on backs, a mound of light snores. He relished the noise, resting his face on his elbows at the table; it reminded him of the night music from the early days of his marriage, when he would lie beside his young bride and listen to her murmur in her sleep, not knowing whether or not to risk placing his hand over hers.

Autumn cantered in, curling the frazzled leaves, and the
butterflies
slowly evaporated. One night autumn rain dressed the city in hazy mauve, and water dribbled through a bad join in the warped roof, sprinkling down onto Jinyi’s grey hair. He wrenched himself off the futon, only to find that the bedsheet around his ankles was also moist. He sighed and tiptoed into the bedroom. The girls were lined up one by one along the
kang
, so, not wanting to wake them, he slipped into the wooden bed alongside his sleeping wife. If she
noticed him, then she did not show it. He fell asleep awkwardly rigid, and woke with his arm around her.

In the weeks that followed, Jinyi pressed this imagined
advantage
, as if planning military manoeuvres to end a protracted siege. He began to come home earlier to talk calmly to Yuying – about his day, about the local gossip, about his meandering thoughts and theories and, when he felt particularly bold, about the past – while their daughters took turns cooking and washing.

He started to bring home new clothes for her to wear, to brush and weave her hair just as he had done for their daughters when they were young, and as he did all this he felt like he was somehow tying them back together, binding a net to keep them safe from all the things that had once kept them apart. However much he wanted to, though, Jinyi was careful to never ask her to speak – he did not want to upset the precarious balance they had established. Her silence was like a stray dog that had wandered into the house, one that they had slowly come to accept as part of the scenery.

Xiaojing soon turned fourteen and came home from school accompanied by a heavy-set man with a closely cut black beard.

‘This is Weiwei’s father. He insisted on walking me home,’ she sighed, and dropped her rucksack on the floor before skulking off outside.

‘My pleasure.’ He beamed at her, not picking up on the teenager’s irony. ‘My daughter, Weiwei, is your daughter’s classmate. She let it slip – you know how girls love to chatter – about your ailment, Comrade Bian. I must say, it intrigued me. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.’ Yuying stood up from the table and looked him over. ‘You see, I am a dream-reader. Not full-time, of course. I also work in the ticket office at the station, but the study of dreams is my true vocation. Furthermore, I can communicate with spirits. Therefore, I lay my services at your command – please, do not think of offering me money, for those of us with gifts must use them for the good of the people. Oh yes, just because we are aware of the spirit world around us, it does not mean that we are not patriotic citizens in the earthly world. In fact, you might be surprised at how closely entwined these two worlds are. Anyway, I digress – though I must insist that we keep this meeting between ourselves, I am afraid.’

Yuying looked at her daughters, and as she did so the bearded man slipped through the open door into the bedroom. The three women
quickly followed him and found him holding a photograph of the family taken during the May Holiday in 1970, his eyes scrunched closed.

‘Ahh! Your son. He is calling, calling out to you. Yes, yes, speak, speak to me. He is holding an old woman’s hand – his grandmother? – and she is leading him across a river of stars. Oh, it is so beautiful there, he says. He wants to tell you he is safe now, he – aaaahh!’

He screamed as Yuying tipped the bedroom chamber pot over his head. Lukewarm, bubbly urine sloshed through his hair and trickled down over his beard to darken his jacket. He spluttered and coughed, rubbed his eyes and pushed his soaked hair back from his brow, before shaking himself like a dog emerging from a river.

‘Plygh! Plygh!’ He spat. ‘You … you … demon! May a horde of ghosts swell up your throat until you can only croak the words of death!’ he shrieked as he stormed out of the house. Yuying closed the door behind him, and her daughters giggled.