Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘Yes.’

  Bian Shi nodded, something inside her bristling. Everything repeating itself, she thought; isn’t that what always happens if you wait long enough? She had already decided that déjà vu was the gods’ way of telling her something. (I can neither confirm nor deny the truthfulness of this, I am afraid, for even gods have gagging orders.) She did not consider that thefts kept happening because there were a thousand hungry mouths in the city and only a dozen households and restaurants with enough food.

  ‘What did you take?’

  Jinyi gulped.

  ‘Mantou.’ A small steamed bun. Flour and water. He had pinched a single bun from a plate returned at the end of a meal, piled by the kitchen’s back entrance, waiting to be washed up. Though it was hard and stale, it was the best thing he had tasted in weeks. ‘I thought it was just part of the leftovers.’

  Jinyi had been standing on the street, his hand creeping in through the door, his fingers crawling like spiders over the concertina of stacked plates, feeling for the discarded dough. Yet just as he had reached for another bun, a fist had clamped round his forearm and yanked him in. The kitchen was fast becoming a footnote in the history of theft, Bian Shi could not help thinking; a catalogue of hopeless journeys that somehow led to her. Yet she was incapable of ever turning anyone away.

  ‘Could have been going for anything. There are expensive knives lying around,’ the head chef said, standing with his heavy hands on Jinyi’s shoulders. Behind the three of them the kitchen staff bustled about their tasks.

  ‘We ought to call in the boss, give him a real beating. Or send him to the troops. They’re always looking for workers. Get you sent to one of those Jap mines – how’d you like that?’ the head chef leered. ‘That would teach them all a lesson, that they can’t mess with us.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just a hungry kid. And it looks like you’ve already started dealing out punishments,’ Bian Shi said as she eyed the cut at the side of the boy’s mouth, his left eye blinking up the beginnings of a bruise. ‘Give him the stale mantou.’

  The chef began to stutter, then folded his arms and walked back to his chopping board in the depth of the kitchen. ‘Sure, why don’t we take pity on all the petty criminals and undesirables in the city?’ he muttered, frustrated, as usual, by Bian Shi’s strange show of compassion.

  The angry thwack of his cleaver on the wood rose above the noise of scuffling feet and relayed orders. You do not usually find a head chef lopping through the thin cuts of pork, but the restaurant was the emptiest it had been in years. This was thanks to the occupation: the only people who could now afford to eat there were the Japanese who were either stationed in the city or had recently followed the aeroplane trails to the new state of Manchuria. Among them there were many who chose not to pay, who put everything on a tab. And what, they seemed to ask, was the restaurant going to do about it?

  ‘So. What’s your name?’

  ‘Hou Jinyi.’

  ‘Not from here.’ This was not a question. She looked him up and down.

  ‘Not from anywhere. That’s no excuse, I know. I’m sorry, but who was going to eat that? The chickens pecking through those baskets would have got to it a few seconds later if I hadn’t.’

  ‘So this is what you do,’ she was still smiling, but the tone had changed, had sunk a little deeper.

  ‘No!’ He quickly looked round, happy to notice that the other staff were at least pretending to ignore the small scene. ‘I’m not like that. Look at me,’ he urged. ‘I’ve either been working or trying to work every day of my life. And I can tell you which one is worse. I’d rather be sore with hernias and limps than edgy, always looking about for things to magically materialise.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Anything people want. Anything. I’ve worked fields twenty hours a raining day, tilled, ploughed, cooked, cleaned houses, looked after spoilt children, made candy, swept streets, counted coal shipments, cut hair, worked as a standby burial man, stitched up old shoes that have fallen apart and been fixed a hundred times before and are still being worn against their will, and,’ he paused for breath and let his lips curl up toward his hedgerow eyebrows, ‘more odd jobs than I can remember.’

  Bian Shi leaned against the door. Lucky she had got there before her husband, she thought. She always did the accounts herself, despite not being able to read or write, totalling the figures in her head and dotting the boxes in the kitchens with numbers and doodles of birds, moons, dragons and lions, symbols that only she understood. When her children were not at school they were with Peipei the nursemaid, while her husband spent his days in the parts of the city the settled troops did not bother to rake through.

  ‘Show me your hands.’

  Jinyi held his dirty hands away from his body, as if he was ashamed of them.

  ‘You work with your hands?’

  ‘Me and everyone else.’

  ‘Can you cook?’

  ‘Sure. Me and everyone else.’

  ‘But can you cook well?’

  Jinyi shrugged. ‘Good enough to eat.’ He let his hands fall to his sides, no longer knowing what to do with them; he reached for nonexistent pockets and, on not finding any, shoved his hands behind his back.

  ‘Why not show us, then?’ She nodded her head toward a workboard beside a battered pot of simmering water.

  Jinyi did not dare look at her to check whether this was a joke. He walked to the workboard as casually as he could manage. The bruises drummed through his head, and his tongue flicked at the cut on his lip, his tastebuds fizzing with the metallic rush.

  He studied the piles of ingredients, the pots, bowls, boards and knives.

  ‘Do you want me to make dumplings?’

  The head chef snorted behind him. ‘Yeah, just saunter in and make dumplings. Ha!’

  ‘Our dumplings are made from a secret recipe,’ Bian Shi said, ignoring the chef. Jinyi looked about him at the nearest bowl of minced pork. A secret? What? Spring onions? Garlic, certainly. Salt, pepper. Chillies? Doubtful. He caught sight of the dough, laid out in sheets and ready to be whipped into furrowed clouds around the marble-sized balls of mince. The secret must be the flour, he reasoned. A bowl of it sat next to him, heaped and ready for kneading.

  ‘Why not make something more simple for us? Wotou, perhaps?’

  Peasant food. For months Jinyi had eaten wotou for breakfast, lunch and, on the few days which stretched to three meals, dinner. These buns made of cornflour and water, perhaps some potato starch as a binder, are steamed for twenty minutes – or less, depending on the urgency of hunger. They are tasteless, but filling. I have seen whole lives lived on this bland snack.

  ‘OK.’ Jinyi reached for the bowl of cornflour and dipped his hand in, letting the grain slide out between his fingers. His eyes searched the worktop for things to add. What would impress them? He heard the chef’s heavy breath somewhere behind him, and knew that Bian Shi was watching his hands. As quickly as he could, and not daring to look up, he stole a handful from the russet-coloured bowl of dumpling flour and mixed it in with his own. He sank a cup into a nearby pan and pulled out enough tepid water to begin combining the mixture into a gummy yellow glue.

  With one hand he dribbled the liquid in, a bit at a time, while his other swirled the dough around the bowl, his thumb the pivot stopping it from sticking at the centre. This was the key: halting the flow of water before the dough was quite bound, still loose enough to break apart if stretched. The steam would do the rest, he hoped. Was this an audition, a test? Would school have been like this? Or was it simply a ruse to waste time until troops arrived to arrest him? He wondered whether he would be allowed to eat the food when he was done, and his stomach made a sound like the revving engine of a car that will not start. He suddenly felt guilty about the packed streets of people with whom he should be sharing these strange and wasted treasures. Unconsciously he shaped the dough into little yurt-like buns, pushing his thumb halfway up through the centre of
each flat underside. His hands worked without him, as though he was still stirring sugar or massaging scalps, as though he was drawing back time. He finished quicker than he could believe, and he placed the eight wotou on the middle rung of a circular wicker-floored turret, ready to be steamed.

  ‘Now we just wait?’ he asked.

  She nodded and then sat down on a flour-specked stool. ‘We’re Chinese, aren’t we? That’s what we do.’

  ‘That’s what we do,’ the head chef echoed, as if it was a motto or mantra.

  ‘How many have we had today?’

  ‘Loads. But paying? Eight maybe. But it’s still early.’

  They talked of the minutiae of dishes, stocks, orders, staff and profits, about which the chef tried to prise concrete information from Bian Shi’s vague answers. They were occasionally interrupted by calls from the pair of waiters who wandered in and out, perpetually red-faced and sweating from darting between the different floors. Yaba, tall and thin now, with badly cropped hair, was hunched earnestly over the sink. Bian Shi began to scratch the surface next to her with chalk.

  Have you ever dreamed of being invisible? It is easy, Jinyi thought. Turn your eyes to the ground while others are speaking. Be thin in a land of skeletons; be hungry around a man and his meal. Be hunched among the straight backs of men with medals and insignia; be dry among the drunk. Be a country boy in the crowded streets of the city. This is how servants and waiters do their work – it is the unseen masses who knot the country together, the busy atoms rushing unseen between slow bodies. Jinyi knew too how to be seen: have a coin in your pocket amongst the starving; speak out amongst the lip-stitched and silent; celebrate amongst the almost dead.

  Who are you? People didn’t even bother to ask Jinyi this anymore. Who, he wondered, were these sour-faced people who surrounded him each day? They were faces, graves, bricks, empty pagodas abandoned by malnourished priests. Jinyi had passed handfuls of these crumbling sites of rushed prayer on his journeys. One day they would be torn down, and smog-thick tower blocks driven in where they once stood.

  The wotou were done, springy and glistening with condensation. Jinyi arranged them on a plate and handed them to Bian Shi. She took a bite and nodded, neither smiling nor scowling. The head chef was more picky, prodding the dough and watching it slowly billow back into shape before sniffing at it, doglike and unimpressed, and passing it to the nearest kitchen hand. Jinyi waited, holding the plate and feeling foolish. He flinched every time footsteps passed the door.

  ‘You can start work tomorrow,’ she said, breaking the silence. ‘Get yourself cleaned up before then. And if you even think about stealing anything again you’ll have more than the chef to worry about.’

  Bian Shi had a thing for strays. Perhaps it was because she had been abandoned in a strange home with a strange new owner. Perhaps it was because she had never been able to summon up the guts to run away herself. Or perhaps it was simply because she needed a hobby.

  Hou Jinyi was not the only young thief she had taken under her wing. In fact, her first trip to the restaurant had gone much the same way.

  Buddhists see repetition as something to overcome, but also something to learn from. People are born and born again, and each life offers the chance to see differently, to attain Buddhahood and escape the cycle. The same events may repeat themselves a thousand times, with only the slightest of differences. This is what history means. This is why Bian Shi could not turn away a single hungry mouth.

  It had happened when she was still a young bride in awe of the size of her new home. In her first year in Fushun, she had only left the big house twice. She was unsure of how to speak to the servants, and suspected that their smiles hid designs against her – the first night her husband had left her she had lain awake listening to them laughing about the rustic country clothes she had packed beneath the wedding bounty.

  All that fateful day, fourteen years before she met Hou Jinyi, the baby had gurgled and danced in her belly. It hung like a barrage balloon above her slim hips; she had already decided that it would be a boy. (This was what would please her husband, so that was what must be.) Despite the effort of the walk ahead, the sweat collecting on the dark hairs that laddered her belly, and her tight, childlike shoes, she had decided to venture out into the town.

  ‘Go to the market, we need fresh fish for the dinner. You, yes you, go and find out who the best midwife is in this city. The rest of you: the master expects the room in the eastern corner to be fully furnished for the new child by the end of the week.’

  This was the first time she had addressed the servants directly instead of sneaking past them. She sent off these sudden orders standing awkwardly in the doorway, and slowly began to relish the theatrical authority, even though the tone she modelled on her own ancient and regal aunts seemed strange escaping her lips. She was a teahouse opera caricature, and she was enjoying herself for the first time in months. As more lies came to her she raised her canary-like voice and set the house ticking. Afterwards she grinned to herself, her palms damp and the muscles at the back of her thighs trembling like piano strings.

  As soon as the servants were distractedly busy, she slunk from the house, holding the only souvenir from her first home that she had not allowed herself to be parted from: a dark red hand-woven bag. She moved like a wooden toy, rocking herself purposefully forwards, out towards one of the dumpling restaurants where her husband might be. The Bian family owned three restaurants in the city, many-levelled wooden eateries in which the rich dipped the hand-crafted pastries and dumplings into shallow china dishes of soy, vinegar and oil swimming with lipstick-red chillis. He might not be at any of them, she thought. After all, it had taken her only two weeks of tearful evenings to see that he was not the kind of man she had been told she would marry.

  She moved between unhurried horses leading men back from the market, past the squat traders, their sunburnt and scraggy skin dark beneath the slanting shadows of their straw hats. The slate roof sloped out above the restaurant ahead of her, the two dog-faced stone lions grinning or growling (she could not tell which) either side of the flight of steps leading to the door. A waiter loomed between the Fu Lions at the entrance; his scrawny limbs and stubborn movements reminded her of the well-fed mosquitoes that twitched sluggishly in her room. She turned down a side street, looking for the kitchen entrance. In the alley two naked toddlers were chasing each other, and a dog barked at the baskets of chickens whose necks had not yet been wrung. They squawked jittery hymns in time with the chopping-board rhythms spilling from the open windows.

  It was then that she felt a hand at the string of her bag, loosing the lasso from her shoulders then suddenly tugging. Instinctively her fingers snapped out tight and pulled it back. The shocked boy, already poised to dart backwards with his prize, let go and stumbled into a crate of recently delivered vegetables.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted at him, grabbing his offending arm.

  The would-be thief was prepubescent, his skin pulled tight over his turned-up shoulders and narrow, bird-like face. Bian Shi guessed that he was about eleven or twelve. His dark eyes were oil sloshing on water, and he blinked furiously at every small movement.

  ‘Well?’ she shouted again, the bag swinging from her hands. Then, remembering that she no longer had to play that role, she bent closer to where he was standing. Something about the pull of the baby, like the rudder of a lost ship turning instinctively to land, made her bring her face close to his. He squinted, scrunched up his nose. They were inches apart. He continued to blink rapidly, as if his eyelids were the shutter of an unstoppable panoramic camera.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ she whispered. He obliged.

  She had seen those kinds of children before. The hollow floor of the mouth scabby and almost black; the thin stump where the tongue had been severed was the colour of an over-ripe pomegranate, the stub of a plucked flower set above the throat’s turning. She tried not to retch, and, seeing this, the little boy closed his
mouth. By the time his eyes next met hers, she had made her decision.

  Xiao Yaba, she would call him, ‘little mute’; and this name would catch on, for he had no way to tell anyone another name. There were many more like him – silent Chinese Oliver Twists, orphans taken and raised by networks of petty thieves, their tongues cut out at an early age by their captors so that they would not report them to the authorities or warlords, and, of course, so that they would be bound to the thieves. Having no other recourse, they would follow orders and enter a world of unlocked doors and tiptoes, of snatched bags and bruises. His flitting eyes attested to the tiny backrooms in every city, to the fact that everything has its reverse.

  He did his best to meet her stare. ‘So. What do you want to do now?’ she asked forcefully, his wrist held tightly in her fist. She loosened the grip, but he did not move. Instead he tilted his head and his lips curled into what might once have been mistaken for a smile. It was instantly obvious to her that he had not practised this expression in years. A sudden thought came to her and she looked around. Apart from the toddlers and the poultry, the alley was deserted. This is how lives intersect, where instinct subsumes sense.

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’ she asked, still not letting go of his wrist.

  He said nothing. She took this as a yes. She smiled and, although her motives were not entirely selfless, felt a rush, not to her head but to her rounded stomach.

  Yaba noticed the dampness of her small hands prickling up against his own skin. And in that drawn-out moment he compared them to the grip of his street ‘uncles’, the tightness that had pressed down his struggling arms and bucking head, the fat fingers that stank of raw garlic and stale piss that had pinched his nostrils together, the rough hands that had yanked open his jaw as he had gulped and gulped – his mouth filled first with a rush of air and then with the copper-coin tang of his own blood.