Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  It was June, and the fields were on fire. The yellow husks shuddered and brayed in the dancing flames. Soon the borders of the city would be marked with charred black ash, and the smell of the sweet, crisp smoke would drift over the houses, mingling with the cooling tower haze that had reduced the sky to a cataract.

  Yuying was combing her hair, amazed at the number of gravel-coloured strands that caught in the comb’s teeth. She had done up her dark Mao jacket and fixed a butterfly clip on her head, her one rebellious nod to modernity. She thought of Manxin’s wedding, of Liqui’s, and thanked her luck that this time the groom’s family had agreed to host the wedding banquet.

  ‘I was shaking with fear before we got married, and I tried to hide it by acting more arrogant and noble. I’m not sure it worked, though,’ she said as Jinyi entered the bedroom and picked up a shirt to put over his long-sleeved vest.

  ‘You fooled me. I thought you were a regal dragon. At least you didn’t have to drink your father’s hundred-year-old white liquor. I couldn’t speak for twenty minutes after that; I had to just nod and smile. I bet all those rich merchants and officials thought I was a real simple-minded bumpkin.’

  ‘A dragon? Hmm, aren’t you going to comb your hair? Come on, make a little effort, won’t you?’

  ‘All I’ll be doing is toasting the guests. By the end my hair will be as frazzled as my brain anyway. I only remember half of Liqui’s wedding with all the drinking her husband initiated.’

  ‘That is not going to happen this time. Xiaojing’s husband seems even shyer than her. Besides, most of his mother’s side of the family disappeared for criticising the famine after the Great Leap Forward. At least, that’s what people say. Please, don’t mention that today though, alright?’

  They reached the groom’s grandparents’ house, where the celebratory dinner would be held, via a long narrow alley running close to the river. Yuying soon felt the familiar sense of shame welling up inside her: despite the ever-increasing sums they borrowed from old friends, they could not afford lavish meals and dowries for three girls on their meagre savings. Yuying pulled up her trouser legs to avoid the tawny puddles of fetid water and foamy dregs from emptied washing-up bowls.

  The two of them had just reached the doorway as a spittle-thick rain began to stumble down the alley in a million tiny refractions of sharp light, the first rungs of a rainbow.

  ‘Last one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Last what? Wedding?’

  ‘Yes. Last of the big ones, anyway,’ Jinyi said, as they settled at one of the many fold-out tables in the front rom of the old house.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. What about Lian, and all her cousins?’ Yuying smiled at him.

  ‘Of course. I just meant that everything has gone full circle now. We’ve done our bit, and the girls are part of other families now. They’re not ours anymore.’

  ‘I see. So what should we do now then?’ she said, teasing him.

  ‘Oh, we’re too old to do anything new. We’re like birds now: our cage has been left open but we cannot quite remember how to fly.’

  ‘So we just stay here and keep the cage clean?’ Yuying laughed. The simile was ridiculous, but still she encouraged his little eccentricities; especially since these days his imaginative ramblings were often buffeted by long silences or incoherent mumbles. When he was trying out an idea on her, something he would never say to anyone else, she felt she could recognise the nervous boy coming to the big house, the young husband not knowing what to say or what to do, still not sure who he was or could be. Had that much really changed?

  ‘No. We just do what we’ve always done.’

  She took his hand, and they sat together listening to the sound of the groom’s father stacking crates of beer in the corner.

  Soon the guests arrived, lightly sprinkled from the stop-start summer showers, each with different amounts of cash stuffed in cigarette packets that would be covertly handed to the groom when each family offered him a celebratory cigarette. By the end of the afternoon, the room would be an ocean of stale smoke, letting the inebriated guests slip away under a hazy cloak.

  The twelve round tables in the front room seemed to stake out different eras: the middle-aged women just beginning to mix dark jackets and trousers with colourful shoes or lipstick; the groom’s lecherous great-uncles and distant cousins wearing the washed-out blues and peaked caps of the strict 1960s; a table of toddlers in red jumpers along with their fussing parents; students yawning despite the disapproving glances of elderly relatives; factory workers in stained Mao suits; new wives keeping tabs on how much their husbands drank and flirted; and a whole table of the dribbling half-dead in various degrees of decrepitude and decay. Jinyi picked up a plate and headed towards the long buffet table that had been set beside the door. In a corner, the emcee fiddled with his glasses as he rehearsed his patter.

  The borrowed PA spluttered and howled into life and the emcee coughed into the microphone before he began to shout at an ear-piercing pitch. Jinyi and Yuying sat near the main door with their eldest daughters – Manxin heavy-set and relaxed with Lian on her lap, and Liqui twiddling strands of her hair beside her bored husband. Opposite them Xiaojing sat with her new family, her gangly body pressed into the dark work suit. Her short crop of hair only served to highlight her long, equine features. She was nervously fingering the tablecloth. As the emcee rattled through the obligatory greetings and adages, Yuying overheard a gaggle of young wives whispering through food-full mouths.

  ‘I heard her dowry was pretty pathetic. As if her parents just rooted through their cupboards for cast-offs. I would have died of shame.’

  ‘Mmm hmm, that’s right, I heard it too. Just a single second-hand sewing machine. They haven’t even bothered to give them a radio. She’s going to get pretty bored just playing with clothes all day!’

  ‘Well, her husband’ll have to buy one himself now, or else he’ll lose face just like his in-laws. My husband has already said he’s going to get us a television next year.’

  ‘No! You lucky thing! Uh, have you tasted these chicken legs? Too much garlic. Of course, we had only the neck at our wedding …’

  They nattered on, and Yuying sighed to herself, knowing that everyone else was also assessing the dinner, the clothes and the liquor, and tolling up the expenses; she had done the same herself at similar events. After all, how do you know who you are if you don’t know everything about the people around you? How else would you know your place, where you fit in, how to address others? When her sisters had got married, it was ‘three wheels’ that brides wanted: a sewing machine, a watch and a bicycle. By the time little Lian would get married, Yuying suspected that young brides would be demanding houses and cars.

  The emcee called the new couple to the front of the room, urging them to sing a song for their guests. They nervously obliged, stumbling hesitantly through two verses of the latest ballad from Beijing as the guests clapped along, whistling and shouting encouragement and the occasional heckle. Yuying looked across at her husband, his lips moving as he stared at his fingers, silently rehearsing his speech. His face showed that same stoic calm that he had displayed when they buried the first child, buried the second, when she had left him or when he had returned, and on that day the truck had come to take her to the fields. It had taken a few years before Yuying had learnt that it was an act, a way of measuring out his confusion. She recognised the little tics – the twitch of his left eyebrow, the picking of fingernails, the flared nostrils – that announced his uncertainty, his struggle to appear calm and collected when the world around slipped beyond his comprehension. She smiled; love is the cumulative effect of such useless knowledge.

  ‘You will be fine. Just think of how much you will miss her,’ Yuying whispered.

  Jinyi nodded uncertainly as the emcee beckoned him to the front. His mouth was sticky, hot, and he ran his tongue repeatedly over his gums. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he began, and looked around the room. People were picking at the dishes, b
ottle tops were being popped off beer bottles and a child had just started crying. What is it that I want to say? Jinyi suddenly asked himself, and panicked. Some old proverb about love and longevity, something about security and double happiness? Why was it that things resisted being put into words, he wondered, that truths suddenly seem slippery and doubtful when spoken aloud? He was sweating.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he said again. He scratched his head, then, his eyes flitting across the tables, latched onto an idea. ‘Thank you all for coming.’

  The guests were looking nervous now, exchanging glances. Jinyi looked around for his wife, but could not quite make her out in the sea of anxious faces.

  ‘The day of your wedding should be the happiest day of your life. I feel happy. I have a loving wife and dutiful children …’

  His eyes searched about until he spotted Yuying smiling at him, and only then could he draw the strength to push on.

  ‘I am proud to be the father of three daughters. Every room they enter they fill with light, with love. I wish them each several lifetimes of happiness. All my blessings, to Hou Xiaojing and … and …’

  Jinyi was struggling through a fog of names. Which one was it? Dongming, Zu Fu, Qingsheng, Yangchen, Turkey, Bo? No, none of those seemed quite right. His eyes swept the room until they finally focused on the expectant face of the groom. He was mouthing something, and Jinyi took a deep, raspy breath, trying to read his lips. ‘Yes, of course, to Hou Xiaojing and Fei Shuyou.’

  Jinyi wiped his brow with his sleeve as he slunk back to his table, aware of the confused glances and indignant whispers filling the room.

  Yuying took his hand and sat him down beside her. He could not keep still, staring around him, picking out the members of his family.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Yuying whispered as the emcee picked up the microphone and began introducing the groom’s father.

  ‘Where is he?’ Jinyi asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where is he?’ his voice quivered.

  Yuying’s reply was drowned out by applause and feedback from the speakers as the father of the groom leaned too close to the microphone. Jinyi took a large slug of the rice wine set in front of him. He could not wait for the rounds of toasts.

  His speech was quickly forgotten; the newlyweds returned to the front of the room to attempt to take bites from opposite sides of an apple dangled tauntingly on a string between them, and everyone cheered along. Before the cigarettes were offered, the groom was given a large bottle of beer with a chopstick inside which he had to retrieve with his mouth, leading him to gag and splutter as he downed the frothy, lukewarm brew.

  When we have run out of lives, when we have lived every possible scenario, every possible pleasure and conceivable tragedy, every kind of love and every kind of death, what then? Jinyi suddenly felt as if he had run out of things that could happen to him, as though he was full. His head ached, and yet he still had to go around the tables, toasting the guests and smiling away their sceptical stares as they remembered the strangeness of his speech. He tried not to blush.

  Jinyi took Yuying’s hand and they rose to their feet, ready to make the rounds, to make the same toast to each of the tables, to suffer the same jokes, the same challenges to down his glass. When we have exhausted every possible moment, time starts again, and we replay each moment in a different order, with the slightest of variations serving only to underscore the similarities. By the end of the afternoon, Jinyi was no longer sure how many lives he had lived, nor which ones were really his and which only dreams.

  ‘I hope she will be happy,’ Jinyi muttered.

  He and Yuying were among the last people left. Most of the guests had seen off the newlyweds in a borrowed auto-rickshaw that took a lap around the city before dropping them at the groom’s parents’ flat, where the marriage would be consummated on a shoddy camp-bed set up in the kitchen. Jinyi and Yuying were both tipsy, slow, not quite ready to return to an empty house.

  ‘She will be. There is nothing more exciting than escaping all the things you thought you would never get away from, like your family,’ Yuying joked.

  ‘I’m sorry. About the speech, I mean,’ her husband whispered.

  ‘Forget it, Jinyi,’ she said. ‘You love her, that’s all that mattered. Anyway, people will have been far more shocked at me daring to toast with you. Not very ladylike, though I’m not sure there is such a thing any more.’

  ‘You were more like a lady than anyone else here tonight.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, at least we gave people something to talk about, so they won’t all focus on how little we spent on the wedding.’

  ‘Yes, at least they’ll have a lot to gossip over.’ He laughed.

  ‘I almost felt we should have had an extra table, for all the people who weren’t here,’ Yuying said, placing a hand delicately on Jinyi’s knee. ‘My parents, and yours, Dali, Yaba, the Lis, all those people from the factory who never came back, your mahjong friends … shouldn’t the dead be able to celebrate?’

  Jinyi thought it over. Yaba had died only eight days before Lian was born, and in the last hours before his heart splitter-splattered out into gasps, as Manxin had sat and rested her ballooning belly beside his bed in the ward, it seemed as if he mistook her for her grandmother, the pregnant woman who had changed his life some fifty years earlier.

  A year before, two young men had appeared at Yaba’s house one afternoon, claiming that they were the grandchildren of his father’s missing brother. Yaba was amazed, and soon started to note their physical resemblances to his dead father, their shared mannerisms and accent. It might just be your mind playing tricks with you because you want to believe, Yuying had warned him; can you really remember much about a man who died more than half a century ago? Yaba had been offended. The two young men had stayed on at his house and ate the food he cooked, and, with Manxin’s reluctant help, even learnt to understand much of Yaba’s own invented language of gestures. However, they politely refused his offers to help them find work in Fushun. They stayed for ten months, planning a business venture which, due to its competitive nature, they could not talk about, except to ask for loans, which Yaba happily gave them. When they had finally disappeared they had left Yaba’s bank account empty, his flat cleared of furniture and possessions, and his heart shot through with holes where hope had been.

  Jinyi finally spoke. ‘There are enough ghosts in this country. If we let them all in, we’d be swamped. And besides, there isn’t enough liquor for all the ghosts we know.’

  Yuying did not move. ‘Sometimes I feel like the air is thick with them, like they’re crowding around, determined to push us out. I used to worry about the neighbours watching us, or our colleagues noting every little thing we said, but now I wonder if it isn’t something else that keeps us in check.’

  ‘You’re just used to looking over your shoulder, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, look at me getting all soppy. Come on, let’s go,’ Yuying said, and reached for her husband’s hand to help her up, though these days she was increasingly unsure of who was helping whom.

  As they made their way carefully down the steps they clung to each other for support. The puddles in the alley had almost dried, and this time Yuying unconsciously let the bottom of her trousers scrape through the dirt. The light rain had given way to the anxious songs of cicadas, to the mellow haze of late afternoon.

  The streetlamps purred. ‘We’ve missed the rainbow,’ Yuying sighed.

  ‘There will be another,’ Jinyi assured her.

  Some people say that each rainbow is unique and irrefutable; this is true if we accept, as countless magicians have learnt, that each trick relies on the eyes making a fool of the brain. Some assert that our understanding of how moisture creates this spectrum of light proves that science has freed us from any need for gods with which to make sense of the world, others that the sheer beauty of the prismatic arch proves the existence of an unfathomable creator. Some maintain that the rainbow affirms the
equality of all people since, everyone, regardless of their country, position or wealth, sees a rainbow at some point in their lives; others argue that, since the location of the observer in relation to the sun determines the supposed position of the jet of colours, no two people see the same rainbow.

  ‘A rainbow is a bridge,’ Yuying said as they approached their own street.

  ‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ Jinyi sighed.

  ‘No. Listen, a rainbow is a bridge that connects our hearts and our hopes. Where the rainbow ends is where our dream-selves wait, right? Well, I was thinking, it also teaches us something about ourselves, since it takes the burning sun and the soaking rain to create such a strange and unexpected child.’

  ‘Yin and yang,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Or like me and you.’

  Jinyi coughed into his cupped palm. ‘Does that make me a rain cloud?’

  They laughed and slipped back to silence. But something in her could not stop. She thought of the bombs that had once rattled the street, she thought of burying the baby and of the stillbirth, of Jinyi abandoning her, of their arguments and fights, of her stoppered anger that had long since evaporated into acceptance, of her dead sons and dead mother, of the last ties she had with who she used to be. The rainbow was a series of incomprehensible links, a chain of colours that only made sense from a distance. Perhaps, she thought, our attempts to make sense of our lives, to tie the events together into something more than a ragbag of memories, are just as much a trick of the brain as a rainbow is a trick of the light. Her train of thought was broken as her husband stumbled and she moved to steady him.

  ‘Anything can be a bridge,’ Jinyi muttered as they reached their home. ‘We just don’t always see it that way. Do you remember that story about the bridge of stars?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, never mind. It’s too late for all that now, anyway. Come on.’

  He held out his hand. She grasped it tight, and they crossed the threshold together, making their way lazily towards bed.