Under Fishbone Clouds Page 16

  ‘I know!’ was all Jinyi said. There were a few seconds before the inevitable.

  ‘What are we going to do now? What about the money?’

  In place of an answer Jinyi picked up the two bags and started along the track, resisting the urge to turn back and kick the abandoned sedan chair into the river. Yuying had no choice but to follow, her cheeks welling up red as their feet sloshed through the colourless patches of grass and over the stone. In the river behind them, limbs still flailed and splashed.

  They squelched away along the track, damp and angry. Wawa began to cry again. Yuying had to summon every last reserve of will power to prevent herself demanding to be taken back home, right now. The sun began to simmer down lower in the sky, and her temper bubbled and hissed like a pan of oil left unattended on a hot stove.

  ‘I can’t believe –’ she began.

  ‘Don’t, Yuying. Just don’t. All right?’

  ‘But how are we going to –’

  ‘Don’t do this, I’m begging you.’

  ‘I mean, what on earth –’

  ‘Stop!’ Jinyi dropped the soggy bags at his feet and spun around to face his wife. His face was red and blotchy, his clothes dripping. ‘What do you want me to do? Go back and wrestle every bloody note from their hands? I’m sorry. Is that what you want? Does that make it all better?’

  No, it did not. They both seethed in silence. She wanted to stamp her feet and summon a carriage to go back home. But there were no carriages. There weren’t even any donkeys. Just the dull grey track and her wet husband and her bawling baby.

  ‘Look, the money’s gone, so let’s try and leave it in the past. We’ll be at a village soon, I’m sure of it. Let’s just keep walking.’

  Yuying nodded, and her husband picked up the bags. She wanted to ask why it was she who had to leave her hopes behind while they went in search of the past. Yet, even though they had only been walking a few weeks, she was beginning to understand the pull that home has on the soul, and the infuriating way that the things you promised to escape from snag in your mind.

  They walked on without words, and eventually Wawa slipped into a grumbling half-sleep at his mother’s chest.

  Don’t you know I’m only doing this for you, Yuying wanted to say. Because I was told that love blossoms only in the fertile earth of sacrifice. Because I know you want to protect me. Because I want you to protect me. But she did not say it – instead she bit her lip until it bled.

  Jinyi listened to her shoes slopping against the stone and gravel, the bitter coda of their day. Don’t you know that I’m only doing this for you, he wanted to say, but did not.

  The money had been worth less and less anyway. In the weeks they had been travelling the value had halved, and then halved again, until they did not know whether anything could still be bought with a whole wad of grubby cash. With the inflation caused by the re-ignition of the civil war spilling through the cities, people had to fill baskets with crumpled notes for the simplest of shopping trips. Even in large cities, markets and reputable shops had backtracked to allow bartering – a couple of eggs for half a cup of cornflour – while cobblers exchanged their work for home-made envelopes pressed full of tea leaves or sunflower seeds. Throughout the country, everyone was saying the same thing: these notes are only good for one thing. And what that thing was, well, that is best left to your imagination.

  In the next few hours they saw two other families heading in different directions, each choosing the stony mule-track rather than the road a couple of li to the west. Their faces were masks of exile, their sagging clothes maps of the places they has passed through and the people they had left behind. There was no communication between the scattered travellers as they passed each other – each journey was made up of private regrets and hardships which could not be shared. The flow of people indicated one thing, however: that up ahead there must be a village large enough to be able to provide the straggle of broken stories with beds for the night.

  Jinyi and Yuying walked with their heads down, ignoring the hills dipping and reaching into fog beside them, the river rushing further behind. Instead they watched the track scuff and narrow under their feet. Was the landscape still beautiful? No, it had changed. Nothing is beautiful without being seen; which is to say that only by looking at something does it become real. The surroundings faded to the colour of rust, to ruined canvases forgotten in attics. Jinyi wondered again whether this was all a mistake, trying to prove who he was by dragging the three of them back into the heartland he had abandoned as a teenager. He pushed to the back of his mind his fear about what they would find of each other when their journey reached its close. Yuying kept her mouth shut, stroking Wawa’s hair and ignoring the sighs and rasping coughs of her husband.

  What was it Peipei used to say? That the perfect wife had no tongue, but six hands. A pair to cook and clean, a pair to nurse and raise, and a pair to hold and caress. The image of the Guanyin, a bodhisattva in the Chinese Buddhist pantheon, with eyes burning through each of her hundred outstretched palms, passed briefly through Yuying’s mind. And perhaps it should not surprise us that this goddess of mercy was first depicted as male, before going through a sex change around a thousand years ago. Compassionate, many-armed, merciful, and with the strength of men, Guanyin gave up the blissful nothingness of nirvana in order to help others, to guide people through the dizzy cycle of reincarnations. Her name means paying attention to sounds, hearing prayers. She listens, but does not speak. A lovely lady, take it from me.

  The inhabitants of Putuoshan, an island off the east coast, have their own story about the origins of this Bodhisattva, who they say was incarnated in China around two and a half thousand years ago. Where the rustling baritones of the wheat-thick plains in the cool northeast met the shrill whispers of paddy fields in the humid south, there lived an old king. Of his three daughters, only the youngest was still unwed, and so the king was busy examining the extravagant gifts and proposals received from the various princes of neighbouring states, having forgotten which of these he was presently at war with. Yet when his daughter, Guanyin, announced that she intended to become an initiate in a distant temple, he said nothing. For days he paced the endless corridors of his home, clenching and unclenching his fists, grinding his teeth until his servants had nightmares of chain gangs grinding rocks.

  In the end he relented. Go to the temple, he told her, but you must work there cleaning the latrines everyday. She went. Weeks later, when she had not appeared back in front of him with her resolve broken, his calculated smile began to slip into a scowl. This had not happened before. As always seems to happen, the king was faced with two choices: let her remain in the temple and lose face with the warring kingdoms bordering his own, or have her executed for disobeying him?

  Late that night, two soldiers were sent to the temple, disguised as pilgrims, with swords hidden under their saffron robes. After a show of exaggerated prostration and prayer, they crept between the buildings until they found the dormitory floor on which the princess slept, and, luckily for them, found her curled closest to the corridor, the more ample floorspace taken up by an array of snoring nuns. Yet when the first soldier swung the sword down to the girl’s neck, it shattered into a thousand pieces. They looked down to see the shards of metal fallen from the sword were nothing more than drops of water reflecting the pink-tinged moonlight around her head. With this they flew from the temple and returned blabbering and incoherent to the king, only to find out the hard way that the second soldier’s sword did, indeed, cut through flesh.

  The following night the king sent a general to the temple, with no pretence of disguise. He tiptoed barefoot across the sooty roof slates trailing towards the back courtyard, then hung by his fingernails from the jutting eaves, before letting himself drop, feline and four-legged, at the entrance to the dormitory. He gripped Guanyin’s neck and did not let go until a full twenty minutes after her last rasping burst of breath had stuttered to a stop. He then returned to the king t
o collect his pay and titles.

  Guanyin awoke in hell, her throat dry and throbbing. She looked about her as the writhing blackness slowly found form. Her larynx bulged, stretched. Something flittered behind her, then at her side. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of sound there emerged a rabble of white butterflies, sparking colour into the caverns. She stepped forward and, in the light thrown out from the beating wings, saw flowers stretching up from the reddened clay wherever her feet fell. (For, when your line of vision reaches only as far as the border of your own field, what else can mercy mean but a forgiving soil?) It did not lake long for the king of hell, restless and hungover, to notice that something was wrong. The blossoming of bright flowers through the cracks in the earthen walls bothered his conjunctivitis, and he rubbed his eyes and shouted, bringing forth a colossal wail from the pit of his churning stomach. With that, the walls closed in on Guanyin. The whole earth knotted itself together around her body and slowly pushed her upwards, squeezing her through the strata until, with a gurgling belch, she ripped through the earth’s surface and found herself, breathless and exhausted, freed from the country of the dead.

  She had been pushed up to the island of Putoushan, a short stretch of sea away from her father’s kingdom. And it was here that Guanyin decided to stay, having found that in the course of her strange journey she had acquired the power to heal the sick with the lightest touch of her fingertips, and call lost fishermen away from shipwrecks with the simplest of melodies carried on the island breeze. For nine years she worked to cure the crippled, the tired, the diseased, the broken and the exhausted brought before her, sleeping only the few minutes between patients and tides. Though she did her best to ignore the chatter of the crowds that passed through her room as they bickered over battles, princes and taxes, after nearly a decade away from her first home she found it harder and harder to block out the increasingly frequent conversations she overheard about the king’s ailing health. He was dying, his bones slowly rotting from the inside out.

  Having searched through the mysterious texts she found she could decipher in the cliff-faces and falling leaves on the island’s central mountain, Guanyin discovered a recipe for an elixir that would cure her father. However, the recipe relied on the inclusion of human flesh. Giving in to her boundless compassion, she ordered a monk to pluck out her eyes and slice off her arms to complete the potion and then sent it to her father. In the crystalline light of her blindness, she wandered into the forests at the top of the mountain, and disappeared. Across the sea her father recovered and, overcome with gratitude and regret, summoned the greatest sculptor in the kingdom. Make me a statue of her, the king ordered, with arms and eyes so impressive that everyone will marvel at the extent of her sacrifice. The result of the sculptor’s work, a thousand-armed goddess with eyes staring out from each of her open palms, outlived even the second youth of the rejuvenated king. But then, our actions always outlive us.

  By the time they got to the village, Yuying had forgotten the goddess. She struggled along, clasping the tearful, snotty baby to her chest while holding a hand to her own mouth as she sneezed and coughed, her feet still sloshing as they walked. Her husband made no such pretences; he simply turned his head to one side, pressed a finger tight against a single nostril, and showered the ground with stringy puddles of gelatinous green.

  Stalls selling a few shrivelled white cabbages lined the streets between the squat houses of packed earth and warped timber. This was the type of village, Jinyi thought, that a single stray match could level in one evening. They passed a shared well where two streets met, with scrawny old men queuing up to draw water, muttering to each other about the daughters they had lost to places they could no longer pinpoint on a map.

  Two wooden tables were set outside an open-fronted kitchen, their rickety legs shaking whenever people sat, stood, or reached for the small clay pots of vinegar or chilli oil. Jinyi and Yuying joined the slightly less crowded table and sat Wawa in the damp crib atop the soft bundle of bags. They ordered bowls of noodle soup, the only thing for sale, and, like all the locals jammed in around them, hunched themselves protectively over the broth, scared of letting even the thinnest wisp of warm, thick steam escape them. Wawa stared wide-eyed at the world wandering by, his sooty eyebrows darting up and down as he noisily slurped the warm noodles his father fed him.

  ‘Excuse me, aunties,’ Jinyi said to a pair of old women sitting nearby who were eyeing Wawa. ‘Is there somewhere round here a family could stay for the night?’

  ‘There are many places,’ the first, balding old woman replied. ‘Most friendly village in the county, this.’

  ‘She’s right,’ the second, lightly moustached old woman said. ‘I’ve never left, but my sister here, she’s been all over the country. She’s been to three, maybe four different villages. It’s true. None as nice as here. People passing through have been known to say so too.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Jinyi said. ‘So where would you recommend?’

  ‘Recommend? Well, I don’t know about that. Nice young couple like yourselves, well, you could easily get cheated.’

  ‘She’s right, there are people would do that without blinking an eye,’ the second old woman added.

  ‘Don’t want to be taken for a fool, do you? I’ve seen it happen to these city types what come through here.’

  Jinyi picked up his bowl and drained the last of the oily broth along with the few short noodle stubs that had sunk to the bottom. He was getting tired, and, as his wife’s head began to bob with the onset of sleep, Wawa started to whine for attention.

  ‘We’re not city types. We’ll be fine. Thank you for your help.’ He began to get up.

  ‘Steady on now – if you’re looking for a nice warm bed, nothing fancy, there’s an empty room in our brother’s house. His son’s gone to the forest, hunting. Won’t be back for a few days.’

  Jinyi sat back down. ‘That’s very generous of –’

  ‘Well, of course,’ interrupted the balding woman, ‘He’d have to clean the room out first, and get a fire going, and that would mean losing half a day of work. But I’m sure you wouldn’t be so rude as to not compensate him, just to make up what he’d lose, you see.’

  Jinyi nodded. He had been waiting for this part. ‘Certainly, we wouldn’t want to cause any trouble, gracious aunties.’ He looked to Yuying, shaken from her grogginess by the crabby baby beside her. He nudged her arm.

  ‘Yes. That will be fine,’ she said, not turning to face them as she dipped her little finger into the broth before presenting it to Wawa’s open lips.

  Jinyi noticed the faces peering at him, unashamedly waiting to see how he would deal with his wife. He blushed, bit his tongue, and shrugged.

  ‘Thank you for helping us, gracious aunties. It has been a long trip.’

  The two old women set off together, arm in arm and stooping in short steps across the road, to ready the vacant room for the travellers who, they would find the next morning to their disappointment, were not as rich as they appeared.

  ‘Wawa’s sick,’ Yuying said, not caring how many people were listening.

  ‘He’s just woken up. Bit of a cold, the same as us. Nothing some food and a warm bed won’t cure.’ Jinyi said.

  ‘No. He’s sick, look at him.’

  Jinyi looked at the baby. Wawa’s eyes were a little puffy, but this was surely just tiredness. Jinyi then looked at the dark spoonfuls of skin under his wife’s eyes, and rubbed his own.

  ‘We need warmer clothes. And more money. I’m not sleeping outdoors again, and neither is your son,’ she said.

  ‘Listen Yuying.’ Jinyi leaned closer to whisper, his breath full of steam and a hint of the garlicky broth. ‘I’m trying. Just trust me a little. I’m doing everything I can. We’ll be there soon, so relax. Don’t fret and please, don’t embarrass yourself here. Remember it’s not the city any more, all right?’

  ‘No,’ she said through bared teeth. ‘It’s not all right. Look after Wawa,
and don’t leave here!’

  Yuying set the baby on Jinyi’s lap, and, before he had time to stutter a surprised reply, she strode across the street and round the corner, one of the bags clutched in her hands. Jinyi pulled up his shoulders and tried to ignore the people staring at him as he rocked Wawa in his arms, weighing up his lumpy bulk. Wawa gurgled lazily, nuzzling into the crook of his father’s elbow. Jinyi’s cheeks burnt red; he had lost face. To distract them both he began humming, reedy and low enough that only Wawa could hear, the song he always sang to his chubby little son, a tune that came naturally from some out-of-reach corner of his memory.

  Once she turned the corner, Yuying leaned against a dirt wall to catch her breath. She did not want to cry. Her mother had told her that love had to be earned. She pushed herself forward and reached out for a middle-aged man lolloping down the street, gripping him by the shoulder.

  ‘The pawnshop?’ she whispered. Her eyes were frantic, like water suddenly stirred up by the wild movements of hidden fish. The middle-aged man sniffed, a loud juddering drawing in of oxygen and mucous, and looked her up and down.

  ‘The pawnshop?’ she spoke louder this time, clutching tighter at his dirty shirt.

  He raised his hand and pointed, then turned and started walking, shaking his head and muttering to himself about city types. Unlike her husband, Yuying no longer cared how people looked at her. She smoothed the folds of her mud-speckled red jacket and pulled her scarf tighter around her.

  The door opened only halfway, since it was blocked by piles of cluttered wooden boxes. Yuying squeezed her way in and saw a long-bearded man sitting on top of what appeared to be a circular dining table. The shopkeeper’s outfit was testament to his profession – a medley of mismatched colours, including a red skullcap, flowing blue pantaloons, and a Qing-style green jacket, a contrast to the waterlogged greys of the streets and people outside. He was building a house of cards.