Under Fishbone Clouds (39 page)

‘At least we haven’t got it as bad as in the south,’ a colleague whispered to Teacher Lu. ‘My uncle lives a few provinces down, and last time I saw him he looked like a dog’s bark could bowl him over. Thin as a willow. He told me about a woman in his village with three children, how the eldest had died and they hid the body, so as to keep getting the dead boy’s rice allowance, and by the time the authorities checked on them they found the corpse missing an arm, both legs and parts of the chest. Now
that’s
hunger. We should be glad.’

‘Silly rumours. The papers say it is not that bad. With everyone working so hard now, how can it be?’ Teacher Lu replied, failing even to convince himself. He did not approve of this loose talk:
that is what does for us all, he thought, but he did not have the energy to properly castigate his colleague.

When the last bell rang at the end of the school day, Manxin found her older brother dabbing at a freshly black eye behind the giant oak the children called Old Bearded Master, and led him home.

‘Who hit you this time?’ Manxin asked.

‘Nobody.’

‘You look like a panda,’ she giggled.

‘No such thing,’ he replied grumpily, still rubbing the bruised flesh around his eye.

‘What? Of course there are, everyone says so. They eat bamboo.’

‘Have you ever seen one?’ he said.

‘I’ve seen pictures.’

‘Ha. There you go then.’

‘Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not real. Like the wind.’

She had trumped him, so he sneered and laughed to hide the
failure
of his teasing. They passed tiny worn houses that backed onto fields of swirling dust. Even closer to home the deserted streets were blessed with flakes of ash and soot.

It is a common misconception that hard times make brothers of us all. This was not the case. Ration tickets dropped on the street were always gone by the time the owner bent down to retrieve them. Families clung jealously onto the little they had, and
suspicions
grew in the dark of every hungry stomach. A few gaunt men were salivating at a poster that showed a bumper yield of crops, the bright colours smudged by the strange artistry of the dust clouds.

‘It’s just boy stuff, nothing to worry about. A few scraps and scrapes will make him stronger,’ Jinyi whispered to his wife when they returned from the furnace that evening. ‘Don’t make a fuss about it, all right?’

‘It’s not the first time, though,’ she said.

‘Best to keep your eyes open.’ Granny Dumpling said, inviting herself into their private conversation. ‘When I was his age, kids in our village were being kidnapped and sold as slaves to the local warlords. Well, I know there aren’t warlords anymore, but people don’t change that quickly. Old ways, new ways, bad ways, better ways, old problems, new problems.’

‘So what do we do?’ Yuying asked Jinyi, ignoring her mother.

‘There’s nothing for us to do. They’re just kids, they’ll grow out of picking on him. It’s part of growing up – trust me, it will make a man of him.’

Did it make a man of you? Yuying wanted to ask, but knew better than to be disrespectful, at least when others could hear.

‘Well, we’ll wait for now, but if it happens again …’ Yuying said, her resolve weakened by her inability to think of something she could do to change the situation.

While the rest of the family slept into the one weekend day off the next morning, Granny Dumpling was already doddering along the streets. Wobbling determinedly on her small feet, which, despite the changes in the law, she had not dared to unbind for fear of the embarrassing sight and smell, it took her almost an hour to reach the other side of the river. She noticed that the snaking alleys behind the riverside restaurants, usually filled with strays
scavenging
and fighting over scraps, were conspicuously quiet. Where the town used to come alive at night to the noise of howled love songs, revving snarls and cracking teeth, there was now only the rhythmic slop of the restaurants tossing out their dirty water. As she walked, Bian Shi recalled a recipe for dog-leg stew, brimming and bubbling with cabbage and chillies and tofu, the chewy russet meat bobbing to the surface.

The old street was a curved arc, an unusual antidote to the right angles and measured parallels of the more recent additions to the city, and she had to duck to avoid the fluttering washing hung out on wooden poles at varying heights. In between two cobblers’ front-room workshops, she spotted a tiny wooden shack with the single window boarded over, the marker she had been told to look for, and she checked the faces about her before sidling in through the small wooden door.

‘Doctor Ma?’ She sent her query into the gloom of clay pots and glass jars fighting for space on slanted shelves and stacked on the floor amid parchments and string-bound scrolls.

‘I’m sorry, this all belongs to my uncle. I’m just visiting him.’ A short man with tiny paper-cuts for eyes and tufts of grey hair said, waving his hands apologetically as he emerged from the backroom.

‘I was sent here by a woman at the hospital – Comrade Lin – who
told me that Doctor Ma could be of some help for my grandson’s … erm … ailments.’

‘Ah, I see. I am Dr Ma. You’ll have to forgive me for that little fib just now, but you can never be too careful. Though you may find it hard to believe, there are some who would like me to stop offering help to the sick and the needy. The revolution is truly wonderful, do not get me wrong, but I remain a little sceptical about the use of so much Western medicine in the hospitals. After all, my family has been healing people for over a thousand years. Please sit down, and tell me more about your grandson.’

He cleared some papers from a stool and, as she spoke, began to unfold a large chart, punctuating her sentences with exaggerated murmurs of interest.

‘He does not seem to be doing very well at school – trouble with other boys, I think. He says that because his stomach is always rumbling he cannot concentrate.’

Dr Ma cleared his throat and posited a theory – an imbalance in the stomach.

‘The stomach, what we doctors call the sea of water and cereal, is a
fu
organ, and is bound with the
zang
organ of the spleen. They are both elementally tied to the earth. However, it seems that the balance has been upset. Not doing well at school, now that is because the spleen dominates the intellect. Cold palms? Lack of concentration? Yes? I see, well there we have it.’

‘You don’t think he’s just hungry then?’

‘Oh my, no, no, no. Our body and mind are bound together, and if one is upset then the other will suffer. Luckily, there is a remedy. Of course, these are unusual times, and we are all doing all we can to help the country, so …’ Dr Ma mumbled, waiting for her to interrupt.

‘Ah, yes, you are very kind to help us in this way. Please accept this in return.’

She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a red jewel. Dr Ma examined it uncertainly, trying to decide whether jewellery,
whatever
its worth, might be of any use when the only trade those days was carried out with ration books or secret handshakes.

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly …’ he said, almost hoping she would replace it with a
jin
of rice or flour, something his senses could more easily measure.

‘Please, I would not want to take something from you without giving something in return.’

And so the bargaining, disguised as courtesy, reached it climax; he thrust the jewel into his pocket, and she left cradling a small clay pot, stuffed with rank-smelling dark grasses and what looked like jellied fungus.

If everything is intertwined and the world is fluid, in flux between motion and invisibility, as the doctor asserted, then the blur between the heat of the community furnaces and the burning certainty of belief, the balance between expectation and reality, had become tangled, inseparable. Granny Dumpling wondered whether a cure for this fervour that seemed to have overtaken the city might also be found in a mixture of herbs and prayers. Her stunted feet throbbed and she squatted down to rest on her heels as a donkey, its scabby fur stretched over vast ribs and spindly legs, whimpered at the jaundiced man beating it down the street. The body, she had learnt from experience, is a trap.

She entered her daughter’s small house to find Jinyi raging about a tuft of hair that Dali had pulled from Manxin’s head. Yuying was trying to rock the baby to sleep. They never knew what to do with the few scraps of time they found alone with their family.

The fumes from the medicine frothing the pot Granny Dumpling set on the under-used stove quickly filled both the rooms.

‘Oh, Granny Dumpling, go and cook that stuff in the public toilets and scare away the other bad smells.’ Manxin pleaded, pinching her nostrils.

‘What kind of evil things live in that pot?’ Dali asked nervously.

‘Never you mind what’s in it; it is the effect that counts. Just one sip will give you special powers, magical powers. What, you didn’t think magic potions would taste like honey, did you? Nothing good ever happens without some kind of sacrifice.’

Granny Dumpling then proceeded to force the thick liquid down Dali’s throat, cupful by acrid cupful, unheedful of his gags and splutters and gurgles while Manxin stared, unsure whether to laugh or applaud. A small trickle of the brown syrupy goo dribbled from the corner of his mouth. The last cup contained only the soggy dregs of floating leaf mulch and lumpy twig bits, but she shrugged and told him to hold his nose while he swallowed. He coughed and choked.

‘Come on, I’ll take you two to the dining hall and get that taste from your mouth. It’s almost time,’ Jinyi said quickly, before Dali had time to start crying.

An hour later Jinyi ushered his two children – their disappointed stomachs still pleading for more than just the measly portion of stewed turnips they had been allocated – back to the house, where Yuying was waiting with the baby. He then jogged to the furnace, where he stood with Yaba and a few others in front of the cage of spluttering flames, debating by how much they should report that they had exceeded the monthly quota. When he returned again, plucking children from beside his wife and slipping into the warm space himself, he was at least halfway content. He suddenly thought of his dead aunt, but quickly pushed her from his mind. There is still time left for love, he thought to himself, for the
rekindled
hope – learnt and unlearnt and learnt again – of knowing someone else’s life besides your own. His hands strayed across his wife’s arms.

She smelt the smoky, sour smell of his greasy hair with her eyes closed. ‘Is this what they mean?’

‘What?’

‘The proverbs, the stories? Is this what they are talking about?’

Silence. The moonlight shuffled, the shadows cleared their throats.

‘I think it is.’ He smiled into the dark.

Outside the window, in the western expanse of the sky, in the provinces of the White Tiger, near Turtle Beak and across from the Hairy Head, was the constellation of the Stomach Mansion, known to some as Aries, the three brightest stars shedding their light from lifetimes of the distant past.

And next to the well-used crib, on the warm
kang
, top-to-tail with his sister, Dali tossed and turned in the starlight, his stomach rumbling. He was quietly dreading another day at school, another round of teasing and nicknames and taunting, another chance for humiliation. All in all, he had decided, it was not easy being eight. He could not wait to be nine.

We sifted through the sky as though we were autumn leaves slipping downstream, leisurely surfing on the sway. I gripped the huffing beast behind its pricked ears, holding on until its hooves brushed against the cobbled stone. We had touched down in the courtyard of a temple – the only place qilins are allowed to appear. Yet the whole place seemed to be in ruins, and the parts of the old walls that were not crumbling were covered in creepers and vines. Weeds poked up among the cracks. Scratches in the stone showed where the iron incense trough had been upturned and dragged away to be melted for scrap.

‘Where will you go now?’ I asked as I clambered from the animal’s bristly back.

‘There is a hairline crack between thoughts and dreams. I will go there, and wait for it to open.’ the qilin snorted, before reeling up and cantering away.

Its reply seemed plausible enough to me – I have spent enough time skimming through human thoughts to know that many strange and inexplicable things happen there. I decided to take a look around. The courtyard led on to a small rectangular building. Fire had devastated the inside, and the roof tiles had all been stolen. Once my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I saw that birds had nested beside the charred remains of an idol of Lao Tzu, and a snake was leisurely making its way towards the antechamber at the back where the young novices would once have slept. I rubbed a layer of dust and ash from the centre of the main wall to reveal the huge round
taijitu.

‘I hear you have been getting some help.’ the Jade Emperor said, and I spun around to see him standing casually behind me.

‘That’s not against the rules. You never said I couldn’t,’ I
stammered
in surprise.

‘You may get as much help as you wish,’ he replied. ‘But you might wish to remember that all hearts work a little differently – the hearts of Li Bai and Du Fu might not teach you anything about the hearts of Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi.’

‘Oh, I’m not sure I can agree with you, sir. To know a heart you must learn at least a little about everything it is connected to.’

A smile darted across his thin lips. ‘Then you are doing better that I had expected. Tell me, what were you looking at?’

I pointed at the grubby
taijitu.
‘You mean this?’ I asked. How could he possibly not know what it was?

As if reading my thoughts, he let out a little laugh. ‘Humour me. Explain to me what it is, if you would.’

‘All right. It’s a circle in which are represented the yin and the yang.’

‘Tell me, do the yin and yang exist?’

‘Of course. Everything is made up of them: day and night, man and woman, light and darkness.’

‘So, do circles exist?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘Have you ever seen a circle in the natural world?’

‘Well, I’ve seen things that are a circular shape. But never a perfect circle, no. I mean, there are only three-dimensional shapes in the natural world, like spheres and oblongs. Nothing exists without depth. But I have seen people move in circles.’

‘Ah, there we have it. Not only the light and dark of the yin and yang in this picture, but also the circle that encloses them, are symbols. Yin and yang are the very fabric of the universe; time is the endless unbroken circle that encloses them.’

‘Yes, I see. But what has this got to do with the heart?’ I asked, and once again the Jade Emperor’s unnerving grin spread across his face.