Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, a couple of billion years, give or take,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you get bored with the same thing happening every night?’

  He looked at me and laughed again. ‘But he always eats a different bit. There’s always a bit of unexpected variation in everything; that’s what keeps all of us going.’

  He whistled, rattling the long lead in his fat hands, and I left him, feeling a little more confident about my task.

  10

  1977 THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE

  There are spirit voices, writes Marco Polo, that call travellers from their paths and lure them to disaster. When crossing the shifting deserts of the Silk Road by night, he tells us, men separated from their party often stray from the track to follow the low chatter of disembodied voices. They may hear the voices of their companions or loved ones, or else the distant chatter of drums, the frantic shouts and screams of far-off battle; anything that might drive them deeper into the unknown depths of the dunes. The men who follow these calls are never seen again. For this reason, Polo advises, stay close to those you travel with, and do not be tempted to strike away on your own, however much your senses urge. The traveller that Polo posits is someone who seeks his own reflection: he does not so much fear being lost as he fears losing himself. Take a man away from his home, from his language and from his fellow men, and how much of the man remains?

  Marco Polo recorded with awe the Chinese use of paper money as a substitution for gold and jewels; the Mongols’ many wives and fiery alcohol brewed from mare’s milk; the great Khan’s ten thousand white horses; snapping fire crackers and sparking rockets in the new capital, Beijing; the magic black stone that sustained fire; and the strange and detailed calendar used by the court. And yet the magpie eye of the traveller who never settles in one place often sees only novelty and wonder, and not the hunger and sores and scabs and turds lurking behind the carefully constructed sets. It is both the privilege and the punishment of us gods that we see everything.

  What, you may ask, has this long-dead Italian got to do with Jinyi and Yuying? All three were called by spirit voices. All came close to losing themselves in the places they encountered. None returned the same as when they left.

  Jinyi started wondering, as he made the long journey home, whether everything had been real or just part of his fevered imaginings. All he knew was that the only reason he had kept going when others around him had fallen in the fields was longing.

  Scholars debate whether Polo ever really made it to China or not; what they forget is that, more often than not, histories are written in the heart.

  The Jinyi who journeyed back to Fushun looked like a ragged, withered uncle of the one who had left. His receding black mane was sparked with white, the fringe dusted with tobacco yellow. His eyebrows now threatened to meet in the middle of his face, which managed both to pull tight around his eyes and sag limply around his cut-glass cheeks. Save for a single week each year (if he was lucky), he had not been home since the heyday of the Red Guards. His hands, wrinkled like prunes, fumbled with the stiff door handle; he was old.

  Of the nine years he had been in the fields what more can be said? Imagine lying so still that grass grows up through your pores. This is how the time had passed. Now Mao had died and been gutted and pumped with preserving fluids and stuffed and boxed and shoved into a mausoleum in the centre of Tiananmen Square, where his faithful vigilantes had a decade ago gathered for a glimpse of his smile and wave; the old Chairman’s wife had been blamed for the mayhem and was being prepped for the show trial of the century; and those left of the lost generation were slowly being allowed to trickle home.

  Jinyi joined a ragtaggle band of emaciated workers begging for lifts from every truck, van, army car, motorbike or rusty bicycle that passed them. The huge migration mirrored the birds that had just fled the winter, seeking out some familiar warmth. Is it that I have successfully reformed, Jinyi asked himself, or have they given up on reforming people? He hitched rides through small towns decked with patchy lanterns and strings of withered red chillies, over rickety river bridges, beside dipping paddies, fields and plains, around half-logged forests, past wide-eyed villages and smoke-stack cities, and into the coal skies of the familiar north. He concluded that he did not care.

  Despite having no money, trading on the kindness of strangers for a shared bowl of noodles in village rest-stops or a bite of someone’s apple or mantou in the back of a cramped pick-up, Jinyi spent the journey home thinking about the feast that he would prepare for the Spring Festival the following month, the treats and dishes he would craft for his newly reunited family. He would cook his wife’s favourite dumplings. He conjured up the smile he would see on her face, and the thought warmed him more than a hot meal might have. At crowded country canteen tables and in grubby seatless bus stations he attracted stares from the hundreds of other returning undesirables as his hands unconsciously rehearsed the action of kneading the dumpling dough, scooping in the filling and pinching tight the shell-like skin. Must have rats nibbling between his ears, onlookers muttered loud enough for him to hear. Again, did not care.

  Jinyi finally managed to open the stiff door and collapsed inside, his bones chilled by the January frost, only to find that the house was empty.

  ‘Dali? Manxin? Liqui? Xiaojing? Is anyone here?’ he tried to shout, but finding his voice frozen tight in his larynx, he settled instead for a hoarse whisper. There was no reply.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Jinyi registered a lopsided wooden table, evidently second-hand and poorly restored, surrounded by four mismatched chairs, each a different size and design. He sank into one, and wondered whether it was the chair or his back that creaked. A rusty kettle was slumped on the stove, talking to a wok upturned on the floor beside it. A drooping picture hung on the main wall, capturing Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai approaching the microphone in Tiananmen in 1949, whole lifetimes ago. Great men, Jinyi thought, set to live out their next incarnations in textbooks, posters, movies, poems and watch-faces.

  Suddenly he was grinning, remembering how as a child he had believed that the spirits trapped in pictures would creep out at night to do as they pleased. He had even blamed them when confronted by his enraged uncle over the bite marks in the corn bread. It must have been those tiny monks and their fat cows from that picture, he had wailed as the fist bore down. After all, his aunt had warned that boys who were naughty would get trapped in the mirror for sixty-four years, so why couldn’t it work both ways? Remembering this, Jinyi almost laughed, but stopped himself. Then he reconsidered, looking around to check that there was no one near who might hear or report that Hou Jinyi was laughing. So he guffawed and giggled and hee-hawed, ten years of laughter spurting out like shaken-up cola, until he was exhausted.

  The shelves had even been refitted, and both a wooden cabinet and a fuzzy brown fold-out futon had appeared. The bread factory had continued to pay his and Yuying’s wages to the children each month, and Dali, Manxin and Liqui had since been allocated their own factories, making army coats, tinned foods and notebooks respectively. The factories had faces and hands and big plans; they could replace families before you could even salute.

  Jinyi wandered through to the bedroom and slipped onto the still warm kang, content that this corner at least was the same as when he had left, a small slice of his old self hung up like a forgotten coat that twitches restlessly on the hanger, begging to be worn again. Jinyi wrapped himself in one of the girls’ sheets, giving in to the deepest of sleeps from which he would later re-emerge as a father, a husband, an ordinary bread-oven man and the inconspicuous tenant of 42 Zhongshan Lu.

  ‘Pa.’ He was woken by a hand on his shoulder, shaking the dust from the long sleeves of his dreams. ‘How are you feeling?’ It was Manxin, her eyes peering out anxiously from under a pushed-back bob. Jinyi rubbed his eyes – at twenty-four, his eldest daughter looked startlingly like a stockier version of her mother.


  ‘Pa, say something.’ Liqui had appeared at Manxin’s side, her mouth knotted into a ball of nerves as she worried her plait.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t fuss,’ Jinyi said.

  He raised himself up as his youngest, Xiaojing, her hair cropped above her equine face, entered with a bowl of rice broth which she pushed into his hands. His three daughters were lined up in front of him like soldiers awaiting inspection.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Jinyi asked the gangly girl at the end of the line.

  ‘At the middle school. Manxin took me to queue up to register. It’s going to open again after the holidays and I can go! I am thirteen now, after all,’ Xiaojing answered.

  Thirteen. Jinyi nodded; he had missed more than half her life. What had this lanky teenager done with the lisping little girl who used to trail a battered doll around and teach it how to make tea? Did she even recognise him?

  ‘Of course. You all look so strong, so healthy. Daughters of steel and iron, isn’t that what they say? You make me feel old.’ He tried to smile.

  ‘You’re not old yet, Pa,’ Manxin chided.

  ‘So where is my son? His life is busier than even mine was at that age. Last time I came back for a visit he was working night shifts so I never saw him, and the time before he was away with a volunteer group in the countryside. I can’t even remember the time before that. He can’t still be at work at this hour, can he?’

  The girls shuffled nervously, a row of bit lips and fidgety hands.

  ‘Listen, Pa. We didn’t tell you any of this before, because we didn’t want you to worry when you were so far away, but Dali never worked nights, he never visited the countryside.’

  ‘Then where was he? Come on,’ he said, his voice rising uncontrollably. ‘Where is he, dammit? A secret is like a demon trapped in a wine bottle – the longer you keep him in there, the more havoc he’ll cause when he escapes.’

  Yet he did not need to be told. He remembered the last few times he had seen Dali, how his slow grunts and hunched-up shoulders had deflected any questions, how the corners of his dark eyes had danced with fire. Jinyi had, however, slept too deeply during those brief visits to hear his eldest son pacing at night, tugging greasy clumps of hair from his scalp as he frantically listed and re-listed his troubles under his breath.

  ‘He’s dead. Pa, I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you.’

  Jinyi managed a nod, but his head had been sent spinning from him, an unhinged comet crashing through his senses. He felt it in his stomach, in his chest. He felt it in his shaking fingers.

  ‘How?’ He stuttered at last, his hands creeping up over his chest, hugging himself tight against the shock. And Manxin tried to tell him, the words slipping and spilling out in a tearful rush, with interruptions and sniffles from her sisters, until the four of them ended up flopped on the warm kang in a brittle hug of shared quiet, knowing each other’s stinging pain.

  Under a washed-out midnight sky, Hou Dali had tiptoed from the house. It was 4 September 1974, the last sweat of the drawn-out summer still hugging his clothes. He had been waiting all day for his sisters to fall asleep. It was by then months since he had last bothered to turn up at his factory job, checking the lining and then sewing buttons onto winter army coats, his quick, slapdash stitching barely concealing his contempt for the fat-bellied officers who would tug and gripe at his handiwork. Instead he had been kept at home by his sister, forced to drink bowl after bowl of stinking herbal medicines, brewed from roots and herbs by Manxin in the same pot they used to cook rice. It was better than venturing out alone and risking more of the same: being thrown into the local toilets, dragged up flights of stairs just to be pushed down them, stripped and tripped into the shallows of the river or forced to drink the piss of former Red Guards.

  Every several paces down the deserted street he had stopped and looked about him, thinking he was being followed. The banners and torn posters left on some of the walls made his lips curl, while the hundred washing lines displaying identical blue jackets, a fluttering army of bodiless fanatics, left him dizzy, disorientated. His right leg moved faster than his left, the nerves and tendons frazzled by a hot iron from the factory. He had ducked into an alley between house rows when he spotted the night soil collectors making their rounds. A slice of clear sky loomed between the brick walls as he waited, panting, a spray of stars fizzling like the flick of a dragon’s scaly tail.

  How, he had wondered for the hundredth time, could his sisters bear it? Perhaps Hei, the leader of one of the gangs that had been tormenting him for the last eight years, had been right when he said that Manxin was more of a man than Dali was, and that they must have got mixed up at birth. ‘That is what comes of being traitors, born to imperialist scum!’ Hei had sneered. Even at school he had been picked on because he preferred sitting alone with his pictures of aeroplanes to lobbing a makeshift ball against a wall or scrabbling in the mucky field in a game of tag. No, he had corrected himself as he snuck down the alley, that was wrong – he hadn’t thought himself above them; he would have given anything to play with them, but he was just too scared that the wrong words would come stuttering out of his mouth.

  Worse than the torments though, were the times when they did nothing. The times he would walk down the winding streets to the factory and everyone would ignore him or turn the other way. Or the way his few friends disappeared in a shroud of silence, just as his parents had. Or the vague threats he would sit up for nights on end worrying about, which never materialised. Or even his sisters who, though well-meaning, nonetheless believed in the Party and the Red Guards as much as they did in their brother’s ‘madness’.

  He crossed the road where he had last seen his closest friend, before he was kicked and stomped into a mass of bloody coiled springs and broken filament because of the classical poems in his journal and the spectacles beneath his oily fringe. Better to always keep your mouth shut, Dali had told himself.

  Across to the food hall where his mother and a thousand others had been denounced, attacked, branded or publicly executed, and down past the high school with its shards of toothy glass in broken windows and the distorted light of small fires keeping those inside warm. He had lumbered over a fence where the plots and communes on the outskirts began, confident that any local guard dogs would have been stolen and stewed years ago.

  If I can’t get them back directly, then this is the next best thing, he had thought. He slid down a short bank and his bare feet scuffled onto gravel, his mind too much of a blur to really register the scrapes and stubs on his soles.

  Dali had stopped suddenly, feeling the flat wooden tracks under his feet. He gripped one hand in the other to stop it from shaking. When the power of the state extended even to the schoolyard bullies and the woman next door watching you doing your washing, where could you turn? I should have seen it coming, he had told himself; we Chinese invented the kowtow, for heaven’s sake: the most humiliating form of bow imaginable, sticking your nose in the dirt and your arse in the air to show how inferior you are. Some things never change. They can do anything they want to me, but at least I can still control this.

  If they had only listened to him, Dali had found himself thinking once again, they might have been the best Red Guards in the country, they might have truly transformed China into a socialist paradise instead of this hole of liars and thugs. He felt sweat bristling on his chest, welling between his buttocks. To steel himself he thought of the bruises, the cuts, the blows, the kicks, the slaps, the burns, the pinches, the clouts, the thumps, the thwacks, the shoves, the throttles, the scars, the black eyes, the breaks, the fractures, the torn ligaments, the sears, the jabs, the scrapes and, most of all, of the words and sentences and slogans and names. This then was the law of cause and effect – this was the only action he still had control over.

  Fuck all of them. He had held out his arms and rushed forward, whirring and giddy, imagining he was a child again, imagining he was an aeroplane. Hou Dali did not see his life f
lashing back before him – he had simply run forwards, his arms stretched out and his eyes closed, straight into the unstoppable rush of the coming train, the sudden thud and crush of the collision scattering the last of his thoughts across the gravelly tracks.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Jinyi asked.

  ‘How could we?’ Manxin sniffed back a sob. ‘You already had so much to worry about. Why wash your wounds with poison? We thought if we told you, you might never come home again. There are only so many things a man can hear.’

  Jinyi nodded. All this time he had been thinking it was harder to be taken away than to be left behind. All this time the whole country had been fooling itself into believing in the impossible, and so had he.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered.

  He looked at the three pairs of leaky almond eyes, the prickles of red tendril creeping into the corner of each one as they looked to him for comfort, for reassurance, for something, for anything. Jinyi was filled with the same urge he had felt some twenty-five years before for the two lost boys – hold them close, never let them out of his sight again.

  Yet this was not the lapping river of grief he had felt before, when the babies were taken. This was harder, more forceful: a dart of ice freezing his tongue, scalding the tips of his fingers like a thousand nettle stings, so that he wanted to tear his burning skin from his suddenly useless body.

  ‘Girls,’ he fought through the moans welling up in his throat, ‘we are in the middle of a huge storm of fog and rain. It is still almost impossible to tell right from wrong, to tell love from hate. But at least we are together now – that is all that matters.’