Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘This is how everyone sleeps in the commune. There are eight of us in here – all women, of course, though we’re all treated exactly the same, men and women,’ her mother replied, and they sank down, sitting cross-legged in the corner where Yuying slept. She reached up and brushed away a looping spider’s web before wiping her fingers on her dark trousers.

  ‘How was your journey?’

  Liqui shrugged, wringing her cap in her hands. ‘Fine. When I heard that some barefoot doctors from home had been posted to Hubei too, I knew that I had to come. Manxin’s too busy doing your work at the factory, and Xiaojing’s too young to travel on her own, so it had to be me. Luckily, a couple of the barefoot doctors refused the offer of a lift – they said they were going to walk across four provinces as proof of their conviction. So there was a bit of extra space. I had to walk for a few days to reach Xiantao after they dropped me off, but that supplies van picked me up just as I was leaving there, so I was pretty lucky.’

  ‘Xiantao? Where is that?’

  ‘It’s the closest city to here, Ma. Only forty li away. Don’t you know it?’

  ‘Oh, I see. The locals just refer to it as “The City”. I’ve never heard its name before. And nothing bad happened to you on your journey?’

  She bridled at this, and wrinkled her nose. ‘Of course not. They used to be Red Guards. We’re all comrades, after all. Anyway, bad things don’t happen to people who don’t deserve them.’

  Her mother nodded, then sighed. ‘How is … everyone?’

  Liqui wrapped her arms around her knees and began to rock herself forward. ‘Fine.’

  She did not say that she had not seen her father for a year, since he was last allowed home for the Spring Festival, when he had looked tired and gaunt and spent most of the three-day visit asleep. Neither did she mention Dali’s recent stuttering and panic attacks, his tearful refusals to leave the house if there was anyone at all on the street or his reversion to bed-wetting, which terrified his younger siblings.

  ‘Actually, Ma, there’s something I have to tell you. Granny Dumpling has died. We thought you should know.’

  Yuying tilted her head and opened her mouth, as if puzzling an equation that did not quite balance out. ‘How? When?’

  ‘She’s been ill for years, Ma. She hadn’t got out of bed since the sixties. We didn’t tell you before, because, well, what would have been the use? She was old and ill, and there just wasn’t any way of getting medicine. It happened while she was asleep, just like that. Yaba had been sitting with her; Manxin found him snoring in a bedside chair when she cycled round to take them both some breakfast one morning.’

  ‘I see.’

  Liqui waited for her mother to say more, but instead Yuying simply stared up at the last frail threads of sticky spider’s web that her fingers had missed.

  ‘We wanted to reach you for the funeral, but it all happened so quickly that we didn’t know what to do. We sent some messages, but no one was sure if they would get to you. We couldn’t wait, Ma. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. You did what was best.’

  ‘We were thinking about taking her ashes up to where Grandpa is buried, but Yaba didn’t want us to. We were wondering what you thought.’

  ‘Yaba probably knew your grandmother better than anyone, you know. Even me. She trusted him, so you should too,’ Yuying said.

  ‘You’ll be happy to know that the Party verdict at her funeral was much less severe than anyone expected. They briefly mentioned her bourgeois beginnings, of course, but said that she had served the new order well, and was a good model of the way people can reform. Isn’t that great?’ Liqui said.

  Yuying smiled. What the Party meant was that she gave up a highly profitable restaurant empire without any fuss. ‘That’s wonderful. I’m not sure she would have recognised herself in that summary though – she went along with many things, but that didn’t mean she fully understood them.’

  ‘She could always tell if you were lying though.’

  ‘Oh no, she only said that to make sure you would be good. She had a little story for everything, but none of them were true. I think that it helped her, somehow, find a place in the world. I wish she could have lived to see the results of this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to see a new start, a perfect world. She was born at the wrong time. Just think, after us, no one will ever have to see a world where things are topsy-turvy, where some people have everything and others have nothing, a world of greed and poverty.’ Yuying clasped her daughter’s hands. ‘We’re changing that, now, aren’t we? Your children, my grandchildren, they won’t need to be re-educated, because there will be no old ways to get lost in. Everything is going to be so much better. And your grandmother would have been happy knowing that. She always wanted to help people – especially the poor or the lost, like Yaba or your father.’

  Her voice began to crack when she mentioned him. She wanted to ask her daughter to tell her where Jinyi was, to describe exactly how he looked now, to repeat every word he had said when she had last seen him. But she could not. She could not burden her daughter with her longing. She could not risk looking like she had not reformed. Imagine what they might say – a woman who cares more for her husband than the revolution. Is there anything worse?

  So instead Yuying and Liqui drifted into an intimate silence, a family silence, a hand-me-down silence that people grow into, until Liqui reached for her dusty rucksack. She felt around the canvas cloth for a few moments before she closed her grip on something bulging at the bottom.

  ‘Ma, I brought something for you. Mrs Xi, from your factory, gave them to us. I saved one for you.’

  Her fist emerged, wrapped around the squidgy globe of a bruised tomato. It was overgrown, a deformed apple, bulging and leering near the sunken dimple tip. It was the colour of faded lipstick, with bits of hair and crumbs and fluff stuck to it from the journey. Liqui wiped it on her sleeve, careful not to add any more soft bruises to its already considerable collection, then thrust it into her mother’s hands.

  ‘Thank you, but –’

  ‘Go on, Ma.’ Liqui pushed her mother’s hands towards her mouth.

  Yuying tentatively sank her teeth into the squelchy red flesh, a dribbly frogspawn of ruby seeds and juice spilling over her fingers as she did so. It tasted sour, almost fermented, but beyond that she was surprised at how juicy it was, quenching a thirst Yuying had not registered was there. She handed it back.

  ‘Please. We’ll share it,’ she said, but waved it away when it was next proffered and ended up watching her famished daughter eat the whole thing, both of them with identical smiles beginning to form on their lips.

  Mother and daughter sat like that as the last dregs of the day gurgled away. When the other women came slowly trailing in, Yuying introduced her daughter as tactfully as she could, knowing that some of her roommates still felt the heart-stopping pull of homesickness and longing.

  Liqui’s eyes were weighed down with tiredness after her journey – she had spent both nights trying not to nod off in case her head should lull down onto one of the boys’ shoulders, or, even more mortifyingly, she should snore. She did not pick up many of the names or stories trotted out; instead, what stayed with her was the way that the women there wore their scars as others might armbands or nametags. Rather than attempt to hide or draw attention away from them, the women identified themselves, and one another, by their markings, studying them for meaning and solace as if they were stigmata. The woman with blotchy pink scald burns stained across her face and neck; the woman with five hammer-broken fingers which now arched out, swollen, lumpy and hooked; and the woman with the sunken eye, glazed and unseeing and bordered by stitched-up flesh. The marks left on the others were not quite so easy to see.

  Liqui slumped further down the wall, ready to huddle up with her mother and retreat into her snug warmth, when one of the women turned to them.

  ‘Where’s Mingmei?’ the woman with the claw-like hand asked. A quick headcount sh
owed that there were only seven women, plus Liqui. Yuying shrugged.

  ‘She hasn’t been in here with you? We thought she was feeling sick again, like last week, and had come back for a lie down. No? Really?’ she added as she scratched her cheek with her good hand, the other limp at her side.

  ‘Should we go and look for her?’ one of the seemingly unscarred women asked.

  ‘No, she’ll come back when she’s ready,’ the woman with the sunken eye joined in. ‘You know what Mingmei’s like. She’s always fluttery, strange. She clings to her thoughts, and keeps them in, letting them twist her. We told her that with Mao Zedong Thought, anything is possible. She pretends to agree, but it’s clear that she hasn’t given up her bourgeois past.’ She seemed to be saying all of this for Liqui’s benefit, pointedly listing the criticisms with an upturned nose, as if she could smell each word escaping her mouth.

  There were grunts of agreement, though Liqui was not quite sure what they meant. The women’s resentment of their missing roommate was clear enough, however, and Liqui knew firsthand that what people liked to do more than anything was judge. Furthermore, immorality was like lice; sheer proximity was enough to run the risk of being infested.

  ‘She deserves those punishments. The cadre is only doing what’s best for her. She’ll see that someday, and stop moping about it all,’ the clawed woman said.

  ‘And she doesn’t do herself any favours: never joining in the evening songs, never sewing things, never speaking to the locals. And it works out badly for the rest of us, just because people think we’re all the same,’ another woman added.

  Liqui had expected sisterhood and shared sympathy between the women, yet this was something else; a brittle closeness founded on the common ground of their shared anger and hostility. They complained about Mingmei not because she was bringing their dorm into disrepute, but because they could not complain about anything else, least of all their current situation. They spoke about her because they had to speak about something to stop their mouths from opening into screams.

  They slept. The night was warm and luscious, melting around their bodies, the smell of musty sweat and old shoes rising from the walls, and though each of them could guess how it was going to turn out, they wished only for sleep to come prowling from across the fields. The bad news could wait till morning.

  At dawn the shouts came mixed in with the cock’s crows. From a distance, as they flocked with the crowd of villagers towards the calls from the sodden banks of the river, Mingmei looked as if she had sprouted scales, winking like chainmail in the shifting splints of morning light. The bottoms of her trousers and her bare feet were caked with wet mud, and Yuying could not help noticing that the young woman’s exposed toenails were cracked and dirty.

  The murky water pulsed on regardless, twisting and sprinting as if some unseen force in its roaring depths was driving it ever stronger towards the limits of the heart’s range, spray spitting at the slippery banks. Her shoes must have made it to another county by now, Yuying thought; it is the little things that outlive us. Wet twigs clung to the crooks in Mingmei’s clothing, a few tangled in her hair. Her puffy face made her look as though she had just been crying.

  ‘Her limbs had got caught up in that dam down there, a right mess if you ask me – I think I tore even more when I pulled her out. Scared all the geese and ducks and cranes away. Stones in her pocket too, though I wouldn’t have thought them necessary – people from cities can’t swim anyway, can they?’ a middle-aged man was saying to Comrade Lu, the bulkier of the two cadres.

  ‘Hmph,’ Comrade Lu huffed in response.

  ‘You’re lucky she got caught. Most bodies disappear. But the river gave her back. It must mean something,’ the middle-aged man continued.

  ‘I suppose she must have come across the east side of the fields and thrown herself in there, before being carried around,’ Comrade Hong said quietly.

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ Comrade Lu replied, before turning his attention to the gathered crowd, a mixture of villagers and foreigners, with Yuying at the back, clutching her daughter’s clammy hand tightly in her own. ‘I hope you all get a good look at this! You, you, you and you,’ he punctuated the words with short thrusts of his meaty fingers into the crowd, ‘take her body back up to the houses; we can’t leave it down here by the road. The rest of you, it’s time to get back to work.’

  With that he waved them away; a quick glimpse of death before breakfast might provide a morsel of gossip for a few days, he thought, perhaps even an instructive story to scare the kids with, until she is forgotten.

  ‘Liqui, I don’t want you to think –’ Yuying started as they clambered back towards the plots.

  ‘Ma. It’s all right. I’m fifteen – I know how things are. Our strength gets tested all the time. I’ve seen worse things than that. If it were easy, we wouldn’t need to do so much now,’ her daughter replied, letting go of Yuying’s hand. She was too old for it, and, she secretly told herself, she knew more of the world now than her mother did.

  The crowd dispersed through the fields to the menial tasks with which they tied themselves to the day. The women there had made themselves immune to death. They did not speak of it, except perhaps to mutter that Mingmei had brought it on herself. In later years the women in her dorm would revisit these times with different eyes, remembering the way each of them ignored Mingmei’s tears and the couple of evenings she returned later than usual, bruised, with matted hair and dirt-stained clothes. They would think of how they told her to shut up and let them sleep, or how they had stared dismissively at the growing curve of her belly and told her that she only had herself to blame. Like the blinding fire of dying stars or burning suns, some things can only be looked at safely from a distance. To open themselves to it then was impossible, because it would have meant storming the locked attics of the mind and letting out the things that had, over a number of years, been painstakingly bundled, bound, gagged, taped, beaten, chained and locked inside.

  ‘She’s better off this way,’ they heard the woman with the claw telling the others as they stooped to the picking; no one argued with her.

  The ‘Long River’, the Yangtze, dissects the country in a horizontal squiggle, its slow dive from the Sichuan mountains to the Shanghai coast resembling the whirling nosedives and leaps of a kite the wind has tugged from a child’s hands. It has more than seven hundred tributaries which irrigate a million plots, and even now trickle through ten million dreams. It is dragon, god, king – bestowing grace or punishment on the little lives it holds tight, according to some unknown plan. Yangtze River dolphin, Yangtze porpoise, alligator, sturgeon, carp, mullet, swordfish, Chinese paddlefish and a million others.

  Like those branded undesirable and exiled to the countryside, be they loose-tongued urban workers or wily Party men like Deng Xiaoping sent to be reformed through labour, Qu Yuan, wandering along the banks of another river over two thousand years earlier, would not have dared imagine the dramatic rehabilitation he would later receive. He was watching the egrets swooping over the trawl, singing some of his freshly composed verses to himself when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Hey! I know you, don’t I?’ The speaker was an elderly fisherman; his skin wrinkled and patchily sunburnt, his frail body a marked contrast to his rippling, bulky arms. The ambling poet and scholar was, by contrast, pale and nervy, his long knotted beard speckled with premature grey.

  ‘No, I am afraid that you must be mistaking me for someone else. I am sorry. Am I in your way?’

  ‘Nah. Not at all.’ The old fisherman grinned, showing his toothless gums, as he began to stride down the bank to where his thin boat was moored, hidden behind a strut of tall reeds. Then suddenly he turned back. ‘Wait. I do know you. You’re that official, aren’t you? Yes, yes, I’ve heard all about you. You’re Qu Yuan. Why, my son can even recite some of your poems, though they’re a little beyond an old man like myself.’

  Qu Yuan coloured a little as the old man retraced his s
teps to face him.

  ‘But here’s the thing, my friend. This whole county is mostly fishermen or tea-pickers or, if you’re lucky, sow-breeders. Now, tell me, what’s a renowned man like you doing round here, eh?’

  Qu Yuan ran a hand through his beard as he considered his reply. He had until recently been a chief minister in the government of the state of Chu, and what was more had been one of the king’s most trusted advisers. Yet the king had gone against his advice and attended a meeting in another state. There, a trap had been sprung and the king captured, only to die in the foreign jail before the demanded ransom could be paid. Qu Yuan had urged the king’s son, who became the next monarch, to build up the army to avenge this humiliation. However, the new king had put his trust in more sycophantic ministers, who advised caution and, jealous of Qu Yuan’s past favour, argued for the minister’s exile. The new king had agreed; after all, he did not wish to risk humiliation himself.

  When Qu Yuan spoke, his voice was hoarse and throaty, despite his careful enunciation and obvious gravitas. ‘Where everyone is dirty, I alone stay clean; where everyone is drunk, I alone remain sober. That is the reason I have been banished here.’

  The old man laughed. ‘Don’t be so stuck up! Surely a wise man like you knows that you have to move with the times. If everyone around you is getting tipsy, why not at least have a little tipple yourself? No one’s perfect, you know. If you ask me, sir, you only have yourself to blame.’

  ‘If a man had just washed his hair, you would not expect him to then put on a filthy hat; if he had just bathed, you would not expect him to then dress in dirty clothes. I would rather throw myself into the river than sully myself by rolling in the dirt with those hypocrites in the government,’ Qu Yuan replied.