Under Fishbone Clouds (60 page)

It was June, and the fields were on fire. The yellow husks
shuddered
and brayed in the dancing flames. Soon the borders of the city would be marked with charred black ash, and the smell of the sweet, crisp smoke would drift over the houses, mingling with the cooling tower haze that had reduced the sky to a cataract.

Yuying was combing her hair, amazed at the number of
gravel-coloured
strands that caught in the comb’s teeth. She had done up her dark Mao jacket and fixed a butterfly clip on her head, her one rebellious nod to modernity. She thought of Manxin’s wedding, of Liqui’s, and thanked her luck that this time the groom’s family had agreed to host the wedding banquet.

‘I was shaking with fear before we got married, and I tried to hide it by acting more arrogant and noble. I’m not sure it worked, though,’ she said as Jinyi entered the bedroom and picked up a shirt to put over his long-sleeved vest.

‘You fooled me. I thought you were a regal dragon. At least you didn’t have to drink your father’s hundred-year-old white liquor. I couldn’t speak for twenty minutes after that; I had to just nod and smile. I bet all those rich merchants and officials thought I was a real simple-minded bumpkin.’

‘A dragon? Hmm, aren’t you going to comb your hair? Come on, make a little effort, won’t you?’

‘All I’ll be doing is toasting the guests. By the end my hair will be as frazzled as my brain anyway. I only remember half of Liqui’s wedding with all the drinking her husband initiated.’

‘That is not going to happen this time. Xiaojing’s husband seems even shyer than her. Besides, most of his mother’s side of the family disappeared for criticising the famine after the Great Leap Forward. At least, that’s what people say. Please, don’t mention that today though, alright?’

They reached the groom’s grandparents’ house, where the
celebratory
dinner would be held, via a long narrow alley running close to the river. Yuying soon felt the familiar sense of shame
welling
up inside her: despite the ever-increasing sums they borrowed
from old friends, they could not afford lavish meals and dowries for three girls on their meagre savings. Yuying pulled up her trouser legs to avoid the tawny puddles of fetid water and foamy dregs from emptied washing-up bowls.

The two of them had just reached the doorway as a spittle-thick rain began to stumble down the alley in a million tiny refractions of sharp light, the first rungs of a rainbow.

‘Last one, isn’t it?’

‘Last what? Wedding?’

‘Yes. Last of the big ones, anyway,’ Jinyi said, as they settled at one of the many fold-out tables in the front rom of the old house.

‘Oh, I don’t know. What about Lian, and all her cousins?’ Yuying smiled at him.

‘Of course. I just meant that everything has gone full circle now. We’ve done our bit, and the girls are part of other families now. They’re not ours anymore.’

‘I see. So what should we do now then?’ she said, teasing him.

‘Oh, we’re too old to do anything new. We’re like birds now: our cage has been left open but we cannot quite remember how to fly.’

‘So we just stay here and keep the cage clean?’ Yuying laughed. The simile was ridiculous, but still she encouraged his little
eccentricities
; especially since these days his imaginative ramblings were often buffeted by long silences or incoherent mumbles. When he was
trying
out an idea on her, something he would never say to anyone else, she felt she could recognise the nervous boy coming to the big house, the young husband not knowing what to say or what to do, still not sure who he was or could be. Had that much really changed?

‘No. We just do what we’ve always done.’

She took his hand, and they sat together listening to the sound of the groom’s father stacking crates of beer in the corner.

Soon the guests arrived, lightly sprinkled from the stop-start summer showers, each with different amounts of cash stuffed in cigarette packets that would be covertly handed to the groom when each family offered him a celebratory cigarette. By the end of the afternoon, the room would be an ocean of stale smoke, letting the inebriated guests slip away under a hazy cloak.

The twelve round tables in the front room seemed to stake out different eras: the middle-aged women just beginning to mix dark jackets and trousers with colourful shoes or lipstick; the groom’s
lecherous great-uncles and distant cousins wearing the washed-out blues and peaked caps of the strict 1960s; a table of toddlers in red jumpers along with their fussing parents; students yawning despite the disapproving glances of elderly relatives; factory
workers
in stained Mao suits; new wives keeping tabs on how much their husbands drank and flirted; and a whole table of the dribbling half-dead in various degrees of decrepitude and decay. Jinyi picked up a plate and headed towards the long buffet table that had been set beside the door. In a corner, the emcee fiddled with his glasses as he rehearsed his patter.

The borrowed PA spluttered and howled into life and the emcee coughed into the microphone before he began to shout at an
ear-piercing
pitch. Jinyi and Yuying sat near the main door with their eldest daughters – Manxin heavy-set and relaxed with Lian on her lap, and Liqui twiddling strands of her hair beside her bored husband. Opposite them Xiaojing sat with her new family, her gangly body pressed into the dark work suit. Her short crop of hair only served to highlight her long, equine features. She was nervously fingering the tablecloth. As the emcee rattled through the obligatory
greetings
and adages, Yuying overheard a gaggle of young wives
whispering
through food-full mouths.

‘I heard her dowry was pretty pathetic. As if her parents just rooted through their cupboards for cast-offs. I would have died of shame.’

‘Mmm hmm, that’s right, I heard it too. Just a single second-hand sewing machine. They haven’t even bothered to give them a radio. She’s going to get pretty bored just playing with clothes all day!’

‘Well, her husband’ll have to buy one himself now, or else he’ll lose face just like his in-laws. My husband has already said he’s going to get us a television next year.’

‘No! You lucky thing! Uh, have you tasted these chicken legs? Too much garlic. Of course, we had only the neck at our wedding …’

They nattered on, and Yuying sighed to herself, knowing that everyone else was also assessing the dinner, the clothes and the liquor, and tolling up the expenses; she had done the same
herself
at similar events. After all, how do you know who you are if you don’t know everything about the people around you? How else would you know your place, where you fit in, how to address others? When her sisters had got married, it was ‘three wheels’ that brides wanted: a sewing machine, a watch and a bicycle. By the
time little Lian would get married, Yuying suspected that young brides would be demanding houses and cars.

The emcee called the new couple to the front of the room, urging them to sing a song for their guests. They nervously obliged,
stumbling
hesitantly through two verses of the latest ballad from Beijing as the guests clapped along, whistling and shouting encouragement and the occasional heckle. Yuying looked across at her husband, his lips moving as he stared at his fingers, silently rehearsing his speech. His face showed that same stoic calm that he had displayed when they buried the first child, buried the second, when she had left him or when he had returned, and on that day the truck had come to take her to the fields. It had taken a few years before Yuying had learnt that it was an act, a way of measuring out his confusion. She recognised the little tics – the twitch of his left eyebrow, the picking of fingernails, the flared nostrils – that announced his
uncertainty
, his struggle to appear calm and collected when the world around slipped beyond his comprehension. She smiled; love is the cumulative effect of such useless knowledge.

‘You will be fine. Just think of how much you will miss her,’ Yuying whispered.

Jinyi nodded uncertainly as the emcee beckoned him to the front. His mouth was sticky, hot, and he ran his tongue repeatedly over his gums. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he began, and looked around the room. People were picking at the dishes, bottle tops were being popped off beer bottles and a child had just started crying. What is it that I want to say? Jinyi suddenly asked himself, and panicked. Some old proverb about love and longevity, something about
security
and double happiness? Why was it that things resisted being put into words, he wondered, that truths suddenly seem slippery and doubtful when spoken aloud? He was sweating.

‘Thank you all for coming,’ he said again. He scratched his head, then, his eyes flitting across the tables, latched onto an idea. ‘Thank you all for coming.’

The guests were looking nervous now, exchanging glances. Jinyi looked around for his wife, but could not quite make her out in the sea of anxious faces.

‘The day of your wedding should be the happiest day of your life. I feel happy. I have a loving wife and dutiful children …’

His eyes searched about until he spotted Yuying smiling at him, and only then could he draw the strength to push on.

‘I am proud to be the father of three daughters. Every room they enter they fill with light, with love. I wish them each several
lifetimes
of happiness. All my blessings, to Hou Xiaojing and … and …’

Jinyi was struggling through a fog of names. Which one was it? Dongming, Zu Fu, Qingsheng, Yangchen, Turkey, Bo? No, none of those seemed quite right. His eyes swept the room until they finally focused on the expectant face of the groom. He was
mouthing
something, and Jinyi took a deep, raspy breath, trying to read his lips. ‘Yes, of course, to Hou Xiaojing and Fei Shuyou.’

Jinyi wiped his brow with his sleeve as he slunk back to his table, aware of the confused glances and indignant whispers filling the room.

Yuying took his hand and sat him down beside her. He could not keep still, staring around him, picking out the members of his family.

‘Are you all right?’ Yuying whispered as the emcee picked up the microphone and began introducing the groom’s father.

‘Where is he?’ Jinyi asked.

‘What?’

‘Where is he?’ his voice quivered.

Yuying’s reply was drowned out by applause and feedback from the speakers as the father of the groom leaned too close to the microphone. Jinyi took a large slug of the rice wine set in front of him. He could not wait for the rounds of toasts.

His speech was quickly forgotten; the newlyweds returned to the front of the room to attempt to take bites from opposite sides of an apple dangled tauntingly on a string between them, and
everyone
cheered along. Before the cigarettes were offered, the groom was given a large bottle of beer with a chopstick inside which he had to retrieve with his mouth, leading him to gag and splutter as he downed the frothy, lukewarm brew.

When we have run out of lives, when we have lived every
possible
scenario, every possible pleasure and conceivable tragedy, every kind of love and every kind of death, what then? Jinyi suddenly felt as if he had run out of things that could happen to him, as though he was full. His head ached, and yet he still had to go around the tables, toasting the guests and smiling away their sceptical stares
as they remembered the strangeness of his speech. He tried not to blush.

Jinyi took Yuying’s hand and they rose to their feet, ready to make the rounds, to make the same toast to each of the tables, to suffer the same jokes, the same challenges to down his glass. When we have exhausted every possible moment, time starts again, and we replay each moment in a different order, with the slightest of variations serving only to underscore the similarities. By the end of the afternoon, Jinyi was no longer sure how many lives he had lived, nor which ones were really his and which only dreams.

‘I hope she will be happy,’ Jinyi muttered.