Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  When he had finally convinced himself that no one would notice, Jinyi began to wear his son’s old vest beneath his work shirt, savouring the slightly sour smell, the closeness. When he chattered and joked and hummed as if nothing was wrong, it was not because he was not angry and exhausted, but because he felt he had to provide a balance, a warm and noisy yin to counter the silence and stares of Yuying’s yang. If her silence was a protest, his good humour was an act. And, with all acts, if you keep it up long enough you begin to believe it yourself. Only when you slip into someone else’s mind, as I have, does it become clear that the best actors are the ones who fool themselves.

  In May, Liqui returned home early after work with a short man with tiny paper-cuts for eyes and tufts of grey hair. He was carrying a small wooden box. Her father was out with Manxin, chaperoning her for a meeting with the suitor from the engine workshop. Yuying was therefore sitting alone in the bedroom, arranging a handful of drooping daisies in a pen pot. Liqui led the short man in.

  ‘Mother, this is Doctor Ma – do you remember, Granny Dumpling used to speak about him? He’s come to help.’

  Doctor Ma bowed and turned to Liqui. ‘If we could spend a little time alone …’ he drawled, and Liqui obliged, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Now, the body has nine pressure points which reveal their pulses, just like our own sun, drawing nine planets into orbit. From their irregularities we may identify the source of any problem.’ He held her wrist tight, counting. ‘However, some problems may not be problems at all – the body is a master of tricks and disguises. I want you to concentrate on that stain on the wall for me. Can you do that?’

  He turned around and fiddled with the small wooden box. Then with a sudden shriek he spun around and threw the open box at Yuying. Out leapt a wrinkled toad, which landed on Yuying’s chest. Its spindly legs whirred at her stomach before it slipped down to her lap, emitting a burpy croak before throwing itself to the floor. Doctor Ma ran after it, and eventually succeeded in trapping it under the open box. He slid the lid underneath and scooped it up.

  ‘Ah, well, I see that my surprise didn’t quite work. Never mind.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Let’s stick with the toad though. Perhaps if I coaxed it, it might give you a voice of its own to speak with, though that may cost a little extra. No? All right, all right. I see. You could of course buy the toad off me, for a much reduced price, I might add, and I would be happy to give you a secret recipe for cooking it – that would be sure to revive your spirits. No? Really? Hmm, well …’

  The door opened and Liqui poked her head round, her plait swishing in with her.

  ‘Is everything all right, doctor? Only I heard a clatter and –’

  ‘Yes, yes, everything is fine. Just a little experiment. Ah, I see the sun has set. I must be going, I’m afraid – another appointment, you know how it is.’ The doctor lurched through the door, clutching the boxed toad tight against his chest.

  ‘Sorry, Ma. I was just trying to help,’ Liqui said. Her mother did not reply.

  Before long, the days had melted into the sticky mess of summer. As much as he loved his daughters, and as much as he wanted to talk to his wife and convince her that everything was going to get better, Jinyi voluntarily took on extra hours at the factory, sweating away his time knotting plastic casing around the warm loaves. The futon was pressed back into shape and their father gone by the time the girls rose for breakfast each morning, and, on the many nights he played cards with Yaba and an assortment of factory and restaurant men on cramped dumpling-shop tables, Jinyi did not return until they were all asleep.

  It wasn’t that Yuying didn’t try. Believe me, I was watching while everyone else was out; she would stand in front of the mirror and try and form her mouth into the correct shapes. It never looked right. So she closed her eyes and tried to force the words up from her throat. A hum, a gurgle, anything. But her tongue was barren, her mouth cracked earth.

  And it wasn’t that she didn’t love them. On the contrary, in fact. She loved them too much. She believed she had found the demon that had been following them all those years, the demon that stole their children and cut away at their happiness, the demon that had become an expert at biding its time and waiting till everything seemed perfect before tearing them apart once more. And because she loved each one of them so much, she could not bring herself to look any of them in the face and tell them what she had made herself believe – it was all her fault. She was the demon.

  ‘Hou Jinyi?’ There was a fat man in a freshly pressed uniform knocking at the door, mopping his brow with a fancy handkerchief.

  Manxin opened the front door and felt the stuffy evening air rush in past her. ‘He’s not back from work yet, I’m afraid. But his wife and daughters are here.’

  ‘Quite,’ the fat man said as he entered the main room, forcing Manxin to stand aside. ‘However, it seems that Bian Yuying will be little help if she insists on staying silent. You must be Hou Manxin.’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Manxin followed as the man sat himself at the kitchen table and peered over the laid-out dinner dishes. Manxin signalled to her sisters, who got up from the futon and retreated to the bedroom. The fat man eventually pawed a chicken leg and began to tear off strips of the moist flesh with his teeth, gulping them down noisily, barely chewing.

  ‘My name is Ru Tai, assistant to the deputy magistrate of the South Fushun People’s Security Bureau. Perhaps you would care to enlighten me, young lady, as to what your mother is up to. I’m sure that both of us would be very unhappy if it turned out that any anti-revolutionary activity was being engaged in on the patch that I am responsible for. Hopefully, we can sort this out ourselves. So, let me see.’

  He pulled out a black leather notebook and thumbed through the pages with a greasy finger. ‘Your neighbours have reported that your mother has not spoken since she returned. What have you got to say about that?’

  ‘It’s not that simple, sir. She’s been unwell – a doctor from the factory where she works told us that she needs more rest.’

  ‘Yes, I have read his report. But you do not deny that she no longer speaks?’

  ‘No, that’s true, sir.’ Manxin hung her head.

  ‘I see,’ he said, helping himself to another chicken leg. ‘And why do you think that is? Remember, your answer will be kept between the two of us.’

  ‘I think she’s just sad, sir. Since my brother died she –’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, suddenly annoyed. ‘I can see that you really don’t have a clue. Well, I better talk to the woman herself. Go and fetch your mother.’

  Manxin did as he ordered, and re-emerged from the bedroom with Yuying. She was wearing a long dressing gown, her bunned hair pierced through with a single chopstick. The two women stood in front of the seated official.

  ‘I shan’t patronise you by asking you to answer my questions verbally,’ he said, ‘but I would ask you to be cooperative. It would be a shame if I had to make a report about this household, what with your daughters’ precarious positions at their workplaces. So please oblige me by knocking once on the table for “yes”, and twice for “no”. Do you understand?’

  Yuying rapped the table a single time.

  ‘I will keep this simple. Bian Yuying, is your silence some kind of protest?’

  Two knocks.

  ‘Do you know of anyone else involved in the same activity?’

  Two knocks.

  ‘Are you an enemy of the government, a member of an illegal organisation or a capitalist-sympathiser?’

  Two knocks.

  ‘Do you blame the Party for your own petty problems and mistakes?’

  A pause. Then two knocks.

  ‘Do you intend to resume speaking in the future?’

  Yuying did not answer. She and the official stared at each other, both trying to pin intentions on the other’s gaze. Finally she shrugged; how could she predict the future? The official pushed his wobbling body up from the table, wiping his fingers
on his uniform.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think either you’re a mad old woman, or else you’re a seditious troublemaker. I’ll be checking up on you – if I hear of anything else happening on this street, the police will on their way, and let me assure you, they are much less easily convinced to be lenient than myself. Goodnight.’ He lumbered to the door before stopping and turning to them. ‘Some people might tell you that countries are built by wars, struggles, noble actions. Perhaps they may even be right. But states, Bian Yuying, great nations, they are built on words. Do not doubt though, that these words can be rewritten. I suggest you think about that.’

  After the official had waddled into the clammy evening, the two youngest girls filed out of the bedroom and hugged their mother. For the first time in months, she hugged them back; and even her eldest daughter, who stood a couple of inches taller than her, nuzzled down into the warmth of the dressing gown. When Jinyi returned from an after-work mahjong sessions with a few new colleagues who knew nothing of his past, he found the four of them asleep on the futon, heads on shoulders on knees on backs, a mound of light snores. He relished the noise, resting his face on his elbows at the table; it reminded him of the night music from the early days of his marriage, when he would lie beside his young bride and listen to her murmur in her sleep, not knowing whether or not to risk placing his hand over hers.

  Autumn cantered in, curling the frazzled leaves, and the butterflies slowly evaporated. One night autumn rain dressed the city in hazy mauve, and water dribbled through a bad join in the warped roof, sprinkling down onto Jinyi’s grey hair. He wrenched himself off the futon, only to find that the bedsheet around his ankles was also moist. He sighed and tiptoed into the bedroom. The girls were lined up one by one along the kang, so, not wanting to wake them, he slipped into the wooden bed alongside his sleeping wife. If she noticed him, then she did not show it. He fell asleep awkwardly rigid, and woke with his arm around her.

  In the weeks that followed, Jinyi pressed this imagined advantage, as if planning military manoeuvres to end a protracted siege. He began to come home earlier to talk calmly to Yuying – about his day, about the local gossip, about his meandering thoughts and theories and, when he felt particularly bold, about the past – while their daughters took turns cooking and washing.

  He started to bring home new clothes for her to wear, to brush and weave her hair just as he had done for their daughters when they were young, and as he did all this he felt like he was somehow tying them back together, binding a net to keep them safe from all the things that had once kept them apart. However much he wanted to, though, Jinyi was careful to never ask her to speak – he did not want to upset the precarious balance they had established. Her silence was like a stray dog that had wandered into the house, one that they had slowly come to accept as part of the scenery.

  Xiaojing soon turned fourteen and came home from school accompanied by a heavy-set man with a closely cut black beard.

  ‘This is Weiwei’s father. He insisted on walking me home,’ she sighed, and dropped her rucksack on the floor before skulking off outside.

  ‘My pleasure.’ He beamed at her, not picking up on the teenager’s irony. ‘My daughter, Weiwei, is your daughter’s classmate. She let it slip – you know how girls love to chatter – about your ailment, Comrade Bian. I must say, it intrigued me. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.’ Yuying stood up from the table and looked him over. ‘You see, I am a dream-reader. Not full-time, of course. I also work in the ticket office at the station, but the study of dreams is my true vocation. Furthermore, I can communicate with spirits. Therefore, I lay my services at your command – please, do not think of offering me money, for those of us with gifts must use them for the good of the people. Oh yes, just because we are aware of the spirit world around us, it does not mean that we are not patriotic citizens in the earthly world. In fact, you might be surprised at how closely entwined these two worlds are. Anyway, I digress – though I must insist that we keep this meeting between ourselves, I am afraid.’

  Yuying looked at her daughters, and as she did so the bearded man slipped through the open door into the bedroom. The three women quickly followed him and found him holding a photograph of the family taken during the May Holiday in 1970, his eyes scrunched closed.

  ‘Ahh! Your son. He is calling, calling out to you. Yes, yes, speak, speak to me. He is holding an old woman’s hand – his grandmother? – and she is leading him across a river of stars. Oh, it is so beautiful there, he says. He wants to tell you he is safe now, he – aaaahh!’

  He screamed as Yuying tipped the bedroom chamber pot over his head. Lukewarm, bubbly urine sloshed through his hair and trickled down over his beard to darken his jacket. He spluttered and coughed, rubbed his eyes and pushed his soaked hair back from his brow, before shaking himself like a dog emerging from a river.

  ‘Plygh! Plygh!’ He spat. ‘You … you … demon! May a horde of ghosts swell up your throat until you can only croak the words of death!’ he shrieked as he stormed out of the house. Yuying closed the door behind him, and her daughters giggled.

  It was only a few days later that Manxin arrived home from the factory, shook the rustle of crunched-up leaves from her coat and asked the whole family to sit at the table. Her moon-shaped face was lit with the wisps of a smile which she was trying to force down into a more refined expression. They all knew what she would say before she even opened her mouth – she had been meeting with the young man from the engine workshop once a month since spring, and Jinyi had even had dinner with his parents.

  ‘Xue Jingtien and I are getting married!’ she announced.

  In the noisy gabble of overlapping squawks and squeals that followed – as Jinyi tried to start a passionate speech about how proud he was, as Xiaojing and Liqui shouted and laughed and teased, and Manxin gushed at the possible plans – no one heard Yuying hoarsely whispering, ‘Congratulations.’

  There are a number of different theories about how the world began. Some say that it came from Pan Gu, a man who emerged from the primeval chaos. Back when there was only nothingness surrounded by more nothingness, an egg formed, and in it grew Pan Gu. After thousands of years, he burst forth from the shell, and with him emerged the sky and the earth, the heavy matter sinking to his feet and the light matter rising up around his head. Some thousands of years later, he died. His eyes became the sun and the moon, his hair split and sparked up stars; his blood became rivers, his skin fields; his last words became the clouds, borne along by the winds of his last breath. From the fleas that had fed on his giant body, humans slowly evolved.

  Some insist that the goddess Nuwa patted a handful of dark matter into a ball and called it earth; from the wet clay that bubbled up there she moulded men and women to populate her creation. I have also heard talk of a large explosion, which may have some measure of truth, since the gods have always enjoyed fireworks displays – the louder and more dangerous the better. Other people even talk of the world being put together in a single week, as if by builders on a tight deadline. Who said that those foreign barbarians have no sense of humour?

  But it seems to me that the oldest stories are closest when they assert that there can have been no beginning, just as there will be no end. Everything is perception, even time: yesterday is only a story, a memory; the future is as yet only a collection of hopes or fears. Neither is real. Only the present moment exists. We must remember to be more careful with it.

  11

  1981 THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER

  ‘Between here and there we must travel back a hundred years. See that old woman in the park, walking backwards? Some people think they can do it that way. They don’t know the secret path we know though, do they Lian?’ Jinyi said and winked.

  The little girl nibbled on the deep-fried dough stick left over from breakfast and nodded. Jinyi grinned at his granddaughter, eager to display a confidence he did not feel. It was only two weeks earlier that he had found himself meandering about the par
k, suddenly unsure of why he was there. He had been forced to ask a stranger to help him get home, and the loss of face still upset him. But what was worse was the niggling suspicion that fate was once again snapping at his heels. He was together with his wife again and, now that they had been asked to take early retirement to make way for younger workers at the factory, now that their children had left home and their troubles slipped further into the past, they had discovered each other anew. Yet something told him that life wouldn’t let him get away with happiness for long.

  ‘Can we go back for lunch?’ Lian’s head was a scrag of black hair, her face as round and dimpled as a mooncake.

  ‘Of course. Keep hold of my hand now, come on – you can’t travel back in time on your own. And don’t forget your grandma,’ Jinyi replied, looking up at Yuying, who was a few steps behind, holding an umbrella up over their heads to stave off the late spring sun.

  ‘What kind of nonsense is your grandpa filling your head with now, hmm?’ Yuying said as she caught up. ‘Yesterday he was telling you about a dog in space. What was it today? She’s only three, Hou Jinyi.’

  ‘I’m three and a half!’ the little girl huffed.

  ‘Quite right,’ Jinyi chuckled. ‘And there was something else, wasn’t there?’

  ‘An ape?’ his wife said. She was growing used to Jinyi’s words slipping into thin air. They got misplaced, along with his keys, his glasses, his chopsticks and his thoughts. Yuying had to continually poke and prod him to keep him from floating away from the present.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s it. There was an ape in space, walking on the moon. I heard about it on the radio. They do crazy things in some of those foreign countries, let me tell you. Anyway, I only told her we were travelling back in time, and that’s the truth – just look around you.’