Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘How do you think peasants really live? They live in pigshit, sleeping in blankets made of coal, coughing up black phlegm and blood.’ He lowered his voice until it was little more that a whisper. ‘I mean, that’s the way things have always been. Why do we suddenly want to be like them now?’

  Manxin opened her mouth to argue, but before she could Jinyi reached out and put a hand on his son’s shoulder, risking the pain that the movement sent lumbering through his ribs. ‘Best to keep ideas like this to yourself.’

  ‘I know Pa, but –’

  ‘Your mother would say the same.’ In the last few months Jinyi had learnt that this was an effective way of shutting down any argument. It seemed that Yuying was like a ghostlike presence hanging over every word, somehow more fully with them now than she had been before her denouncement and exile. That they were unsure of where she was only served to reinforce the idea that she was somehow keeping them all bound together.

  ‘But I mean, well, don’t you ever wonder what it’s like in other countries?’ Dali continued. ‘Imagine: your hair might be gold instead of black, your eyes might be emerald instead of black, you might –’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Jinyi rasped, and his son’s eyes darted up to meet his. ‘This is crazy talk. I don’t know what you’ve been doing today, and I don’t want to know, but this has to stop, or else you’ll end up in serious trouble. Go wash yourself – you’re filthy. And wash those ideas out of your head while you’re at it. If I ever hear you talking like that, you’ll get a worse beating than you can imagine.’ Jinyi was aware how hollow his threats sounded, coming in between coughs and wheezes. He clutched his chest and looked at his daughters. ‘The same goes for all of you.’

  As Dali rose from the kang, clutching the empty metal bowls which his sister had borrowed that afternoon from the only neighbours that still acknowledged them, he muttered a slight apology.

  ‘Just try and be like everyone else, OK?’ Jinyi sighed. ‘Now get out of here, you lot, I need to get some rest.’

  ‘You can’t Pa. Not tonight. There’s that performance in the food hall. We’re all going to go,’ Manxin said.

  Jinyi made to lie down, but the girls would not leave. He gestured to the bruises spilt across his face. ‘It wouldn’t be right for people to see me like this.’

  ‘But if you don’t go, everyone will think you prefer the decadent old operas and don’t enjoy the new revolutionary plays,’ Manxin said. ‘Or they might think that you have something to be ashamed of, something to hide.’

  ‘Do we have something to hide?’ Xiaojing asked, curiosity bubbling up in her eyes.

  ‘No!’ All three of them said as one, the force of their answer shaking the wooden bed beside them.

  ‘Pa,’ Xiaojing sidled up to him, ‘when is Mummy coming home?’

  ‘Soon,’ he replied.

  ‘Promise?’

  The whole family stopped to see how their father would answer. Jinyi clutched his ribs and moved toward the bedroom to get ready for their outing.

  ‘I promise.’ Jinyi’s lie hurt as much as his broken ribs.

  As his father disappeared into the bedroom to get ready, Dali pulled up slopping handfuls of water from the bucket in the kitchen, slapping it onto his grubby face and cursing to himself. He hated his days with the petty boys of his Red Guard faction, with the orders and the taunts and the humiliations.

  ‘Aren’t you proud of this country, the work we’re doing?’ Manxin asked as he washed.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Dali snapped. ‘It’s just there’s still so much wrong, I wonder how anything is ever going to change.’

  ‘Things are changing. Things get better every day, and we have Chairman Mao to guide us.’ She touched her brother’s shoulder. ‘If you believe in it, it will happen.’

  Jinyi did not sleep that night. Each breath he drew stung him. Each thought of his wife burned him. He could not stop wondering where she was, wondering if she knew that he was thinking of her, wondering if she too was holding tight to their promise.

  What distances can love travel? Let me tell you. Take Yue, for example, a large mackerel who lived back before people started bothering too much about dates. She was born in a bean-shaped bay on the east coast, flanked by overgrown hills and by a slanted pagoda and fishing village. Both her mother and father were also fish. She lived a contented life – as contented as a fish can be, I would imagine – arching like a bronze dart through the ashy waters, nibbling on smaller fish and insects and watching the strange world that sloshed giddily along on the other side of the surface.

  She had learnt to avoid the spindly nets and bow shadows of fishing boats pushed out from the shore, but grew more adventurous in swimming closer, watching the wavy shapes of families seeing off husbands and sons with gifts of rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and fluttering prayers. It was on one of these occasions that she first caught site of Shen, staying behind on the bank while his father drifted toward the distant stretches of the sea. Tatty book in hand, he was short and dark-skinned, with a pointed chin and pointed eyes and a melon slice for a mouth. She found him fascinating. Every day he would sit at the pagoda, his skinny legs dangling over the edge and his grubby toes occasionally stirring the surface of the water while he read from his book. As Yue grew bolder and swam closer, she was able to hear him reciting the old poems to himself, closing his eyes and fumbling over the verses he was trying to memorise. She heard him swear and then mutter, ‘Only a month until the imperial examinations! Why am I kidding myself? I’ll never make it as a mandarin; I’m just a bumpkin doomed to be stuck trawling for fish for the rest of my life.’

  It was only when he left the village, driven to the capital by an ox trader to take the imperial examinations, that Yue realised she was in love. Perhaps, she thought, I could use part of my magic to help him achieve his ambitions. For, you see, all animals are closer to gods than humans, who every day drive themselves further from the divine, and all have a little magic – fish in the flick of their tails, deer in the nod and twitch of antlers, birds in the tips of their outstretched wings. However, before Yue could make up her mind, Shen had returned to the village.

  For the next month he was sulky and preoccupied, skimming stones across the bay while awaiting the exam results. One night, after getting drunk on the rice wine that his father brewed in the backroom, Shen wandered tearfully to the pagoda and was suddenly startled by sounds behind him: a series of sloshy splashes, the crunch of wet leaves, rustling bracken. He spun round, his eyes darting, making himself dizzy, only to dismiss the sounds as the usual noises of the wild. He was used to these: the calls of egrets and herons, the roar of wolves and chatter of monkeys high up the rocky hills. Then he heard something closer: footsteps padding toward him. He spun again and rubbed his eyes: how much had he drunk? In front of him was a girl so beautiful he firmly believed that it was his imagination that had conjured her up, for how could something so exquisite possibly be real? But she was real, and her round face broke into a big-dimpled smile. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead she leaned forward, letting her lips gently graze his, and he lost his hands in the cascade of her waist-length ebony hair.

  ‘My life is full of secrets. If you promise not to ask me yet, I promise I will tell you in the future,’ she told him later, after weeks of meeting every evening after his chores.

  ‘I promise. If I pass the exams we’ll go and live in the city and be married, and our pasts won’t matter at all because we will have each other,’ Shen replied.

  When he left her just before dawn each day, Yue slipped back into the water and into her original form. It was not long before a messenger rode out to the village, to deliver a banner to Shen’s house. He had passed the exams. His father tied the banner across their door, and fried a giant pike with garlic and ginger, to be washed down with the last reserves of the home-brewed liquor. The old man also renamed his house and added a stone step over the courtyard threshold to signify the family’s new status. Aunts and co
usins and second cousins and half-heard-of great-uncles arrived for the celebratory dinner, at which, while mouths were still crammed full of flaky white fish, Shen announced that they had another thing to celebrate, for he would soon be married.

  His short speech was met with stony silence. His father turned red, his guests embarrassed for him.

  ‘What about the matchmaker, the role of the parents, the bargaining, the dowry, the arrangements, the traditions?’ his father stuttered, aware that he was losing face in front of almost everyone he knew.

  ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ Shen replied.

  ‘What about her family? Tell me, she is from a good family at least?’

  ‘I have no idea. There’s no need for all that. We’ve fallen in love,’ Shen said.

  ‘Love? Love! I’ve never heard anything like this in my life. That rotten poetry has gone to your head! Love! You have brought shame on your family. Forget this wedding at once. If anyone finds you a suitable bride, it will be me!’

  Shen stormed from the house, and, finding Yue waiting at the pagoda, began the journey to the capital, whilst his father tore down the celebratory banner and changed the name of the house from ‘Scholar’s Residence’ back to ‘Ten Generations of Fishermen’. Yue and Shen were married the day before his new post in the outer palace began, and they honeymooned in the room they had started renting in an old woman’s rundown house.

  It was here, however, that the Jade Emperor became interested. For it was one thing assuming human form and having some fun – everyone has urges, after all – but it was altogether another getting married to a human when you were still, beneath the suit of pink skin, a fish. Everything has its place, and this, the Jade Emperor announced to the guards in his celestial palace among the clouds, was too much.

  The next morning, after her new husband had left for work, Yue was washing clothes in the river that bisected the capital when she felt the light wind begin to tremble and hiss like a candle being blown out. Before she had time to turn around, a swarm of blackbirds had swooshed down and grabbed hold of every small square of her clothes with their arched beaks. She tried to tug herself free, manically flailing her limbs against their tight grip, but her hair and clothes tangled in their grasp. Suddenly they began to beat their wings, dark feathers flapping as they uprooted her, and she screamed as they tugged her higher above the dark red rooftops.

  Shen returned home to find that not only had his clothes not been washed and laid out, but also his dinner had not been cooked. For a second, he let doubts about her love for him enter his mind. Had his father been right – is this what happens when you marry someone whose family you do not know? While he cursed himself and wondered whether anyone at work would notice if he wore the same clothes two days straight, Yue was sitting on a cloud, surrounded by the posse of blackbirds who flapped and bustled and squawked whenever she tried to move. After only an hour, she began to cry, her tears startling and scaring her rowdy guards. Before long, a shrill call was heard, which the birds took as the cue to change formation, and they danced nimbly behind her, nudging her firmly in the direction from which the call came. She had no choice but to begin walking.

  Yue was led to the palace of the Jade Emperor, who was sitting, as usual, on the back of his mighty yellow dragon, twirling his fingers in its wispy moustache.

  ‘I know why I am here. I apologise, Your Grace, I know I shouldn’t have got married. But I beg you, do not imprison me simply because of my heart.’

  ‘We are all,’ the Jade Emperor replied, ‘prisoners of the forms we are given. And,’ he nodded indulgently, ‘we are each a prisoner of our longings. I do not intend to keep you here: your life is below, in the sea.’

  ‘But I cannot return there now! I cannot abandon my husband. We are in love.’

  He sighed. ‘There are rules, rules that even I cannot break. The universe depends on balance. You must know that to become human takes centuries. It has been done: with prayer, with meditation, with hope and with effort, you can use your magic to become human. Fully human, not just transforming your scales into skin every morning. But you must prove yourself. And that will take a thousand years. I wish you luck.’

  ‘But I do not have a thousand years! By the time I become human, my husband will be dead.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  The dragon yawned, puffy clouds of air spilling from its purple tongue, and the blackbirds were already bustling her towards the door when she spoke again.

  ‘There must be another way! Is there not anything I can do to be with him?’

  The Jade Emperor grinned. ‘Of course. There are always choices to be made, or else everything would be simple. When you return to the bay, you could shed your scales. It would be excruciatingly painful, but you would become human very quickly. However, if you lost your scales in this way, you would also lose your magic. No more powers and, more importantly, no more immortality. I think you will find that patience is much more attractive. It may even do you good. Farewell.’

  And with that Yue was falling through the sky, the birds nowhere to be seen, and her pristine white fingers were retreating to slippery fins. With a thunderous splash she was back, flapping her tail through those home waters, her gills pulsing as she slinked through the sunlit blue. And somewhere between the seaweed and the smaller schools of shrimp and the colder, darker deep, she thought of Shen, alone in the capital, and she realised that she could not wait, that she would trade magic for loss, for what good was eternal life if it was to be lived alone? With that, she began to shake the length of her body, squirming from pursed lips to thrashing tail.

  At first nothing happened. However, Yue did not stop, but threw herself harder into the movement, smaller fish and eels clearing away from where she was stirring up the waters. Then there was the sound of something ripping, the whistle of a seam splitting, and the first scale flicked from her body like a button bursting from a tight pair of trousers. She screamed in pain, but continued to contort herself, the scabby silver flecks peeling from her and the water turning grapefruit pink. As her body ripped and blistered, her shrieks pierced the surface of the water and sent the diving gulls fleeing in panic.

  Yue’s wails reached the sky, and the clouds shook as they shared her anguish. To this day, if you see fishbone clouds, the altocumulus sprawling loosely over a blue canvas in mimicry of a fish losing its scales, know that this is the sky’s way of showing its sympathy for the fact that, somewhere, someone is giving up something of themselves for love.

  Shen watched the mackerel sky from a slot-window in their new home, and felt his heart leap, twist. The next morning, an hour before dawn and the cherry specks of cloud still low across the horizon, Yue limped through the door, sweaty and panting and her whole trembling body painted with cuts and bruises. And that is how the story ends – both of them growing old in their little rented room, which grew to a house of their own with children messing around in the garden, which shrunk to twin graves, thin shallows of earth set side by side on a hill overlooking a bay.

  My point is this: love is a matter of wilful disbelief, of contortions and ultimatums. Love fights in us, and makes us fight. It is what drives us on. And yet there is something about this tale that bothers me. For it is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the real work of keeping love alive. That is why it bothers me;
and yet who can deny the fact that we are always in need of love stories?

  The performance at the food hall had been long and excruciating. The family had worked hard to keep smiles of enjoyment fixed upon their faces as the revolutionary opera about a young city boy who was taught the error of his ways by simple country farmers had dragged on and on. They had left the hall afterwards to the sound of former friends muttering behind their backs.

  Manxin woke the next morning before the market roosters began their hymnal. She gently untangled herself from her sisters, the mixture of their clammy sweat damp on her clothes. Even Dali was still asleep, knotted into a foetal ball on a stack of old newspapers and ragged clothes in the far corner. Only the wooden bed where their father had slept was empty.

  ‘What are you doing out here? You should be resting!’ she chided her father as she wandered into the kitchen.

  Jinyi had balanced the splintered tabletop on two piles of broken wood from the torn-down shelves, and was sitting on a wobbly stool that she had never seen before. In front of him was a wooden bowl filled with flour, another in which sat a slab of pork attracting a horde of giddy flies, and a couple of grizzled green onions, still dusted with mud. The kettle was chugging and hiccupping on the stove. Manxin could not help noticing that the blob of meat was almost the same colour as her father’s bruises.

  ‘Sit down. I have something I want to show you.’

  She approached sceptically. ‘How much did all of this cost?’

  He pretended not to have heard her. ‘Now I want you to watch carefully – I can only do this once. We’ll start with the filling: everything rests on that first bite, the hot meat warming your mouth, the soup dribbling out and tingling on your tongue, the smell –’

  ‘Pa,’ she interrupted, ‘why are you making dumplings? It’s not the Spring Festival for months. It’s no one’s birthday. Is Ma coming home today?’