Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

Yuying searched for a similar clarity, a way of taming her strange surroundings by making them surrender to her scrutiny. As she worked, she guessed the names of the weeds and flowers, pulled up alike, for both were of little use if they could not be eaten. She felt the second baby kick in her stomach and fought off a smile, moving to the next row of the short field. Jinyi was searching for firewood, his aunt boiling up ancient stock in the kitchen, his uncle out of sight on the other side of the house.

  The walls were scuffed wooden slats over a pounded earth foundation. Across the windows were wind-thwacked sheets of paper. The first thing Yuying had looked for after they arrived was the tiny niche in the front wall, which held a small clay bowl. She was happy to have found it, but also surprised at herself. You were not so superstitious as a child, she told herself, though she was not sure whether that was true or not. A little rice wine – the kind with a warm, shivery bite – floated in the bowl, a thin layer of recent dust and ash settled on the top. It was an offering for the God of Heaven and Hell, for appeasement or atonement, a prayer for constancy in times of irreversible change. Even the garden birds stayed away from it, though this may have had more to do with the acidic punch of the liquor than their fear of a spiteful and unpredictable deity.

  The house was divided into three rooms, the smallest of which Yuying and Jinyi slept in, huddled together on stone slabs covered with mangy furs. It used to belong to Jinyi’s cousin, but they found it was best not to mention him to the elderly couple; he had been conscripted by the Communists during the war against the Japanese, and had not been heard from since. The room was sticky and prickly in the summer and draughty and damp the rest of the year. Despite the fact that the floors were swept at least five times a day, they were always dusty from the thick desert winds that swept in from the west. The winds also carried curses, but everyone was so busy preparing for the approaching birth that they did not pay them much attention.

  The nearest house took almost half an hour to walk to. The midwife, whose visits were getting ever more frequent, travelled almost twice that to reach them. She was hare-lipped and stocky, her head broad and doughy, and the pushy manner in which she took to her vocation suggested that she had entered it only in penance for the accident of her own birth. She poked and prodded Yuying with her wrinkled fingers, clucked and tutted as if she had never seen a poorer excuse for a would-be mother. Her advice rang in Yuying’s ears, and as she worked she heard her hectoring tone again and again:

  ‘You stay this thin and the child will be a scrawny little wretch. Remember what I said? More carrots and tofu if you want a boy, which I’m sure you do, because only a fool would pray for a girl. For heaven’s sake, don’t rub your belly like that, or you’ll end up with a spoilt little brat! Don’t they teach you anything in the city?’

  Yuying ran a hand over the stretched flesh of her blossoming stomach, then set back to work.

  The days began to merge into one for Yuying as summer approached; yet they also managed to be both monotonous and to introduce new petty humiliations.

  ‘You’ve got bags under your eyes, both of you,’ Auntie Hou would say, without a trace of emotion in her voice.

  ‘The sun’s coming up early now, so you’d better be ready in the morning. Can’t be frittering away your time, or all our work will go to waste,’ Old Hou would add. This was the usual extent of the conversation at dinner, a few undercooked vegetables and pancakes made from sweet-potato flour.

  As she watched Yuying grind the flour with the dirty and misshapen millstone, Auntie Hou moaned, shaking her head, ‘Been here more than a year, and don’t know what you’re doing! I’ll only show you this one last time, all right? Better be careful with that baby in you too, or the hungry ghosts will get you both,’

  ‘Yes, I’ll just –’

  ‘You’re sagging round the sides, girl. What are you, eighteen or eight, eh? Push into it, there you go, and turn. My gods!’

  This is how we measure ourselves, Yuying thought, her haunches tense and pressed against the wind – by finding out what we cannot do, by finding out who we are not. She looked at Auntie Hou, still shaking her head as she walked back towards the kitchen, and studied the bruises on the old woman’s face and neck. Some nights she and Jinyi would lie silent on their stone bed while Old Hou shouted in the next room, his voice loud and raw, making no effort to hide his half-cut rage. Then would come the sound of his fist or belt meeting her flesh, though they never once heard her cry out. This is the difference between here and home, Yuying thought. Bruises here were worn like birthmarks, the simplest bare facts of flesh. People were proud of their calluses and blisters, and took their beatings as if they had earnt them. Yuying stopped turning the wheel for the briefest of moments, to send her prayers on the frayed winds that the war would soon finish and they could both go home.

  When neighbours passed to barter and discuss the crops, Yuying would slow her work, tilt her head and listen to the voices.

  ‘The hardest in years, I’d say …’

  ‘… devils in the fields, messing with the soil …’

  ‘… a dry one again … longest in memory …’

  ‘… one hundred days of mourning…’

  ‘… well, we got through the others, we’ll get through this one…’

  ‘… so what about your son, any grandchildren yet? And if not, why not, not that I mean to pry of course…’

  In all these voices she registered a throaty rattle like the crackling of logs on a fire, the dry throb of the oesophagus, and the way every sentence seemed to end with an assertion. They have learnt the land, she thought, so that they know it as well as they know the touch of their wives or the nails on their fingers. They will never know books or teahouses, mooncakes or servants. Where has he brought me?

  As the season stilled into warmth, a herd of oxen was driven past the bottom of their field, and Yuying could not believe that she was not dreaming them up from a distant art class, from a trail of black ink dipping through misty mountain passes. She wanted to run and point them out to her husband; she wanted to feel as she had felt as a child, awed by the smallest details that everyone else took for granted. She wanted to take Jinyi’s hand and watch them together, the slow and cumbersome sweaty creatures, swatting at fleas with their stubbed and effete tails, their heads swaying as they lolloped onward. She could imagine the feel of their breath, warm and musty and cloying, but did not dare move any closer, instead letting them haphazardly drift away, wet muzzles pressed against the furry side of the animal in front.

  Jinyi heard a soft, guttural low from the other side of the house, and turned for a second to watch them. They were probably work animals, he thought, prices dropped because of the war and half of them riddled with disease, being hurried to market; or else the crafty oxman was looking to let them nibble from someone else’s land. Jinyi shook his head, thinking about the things he could do with a couple of oxen and a bit of land. He heard his wife’s footsteps, and set back to work.

  ‘I can feel him turning, trying to get comfortable. He’s shifting his bulk, as if he’s not quite sure of his body,’ Yuying said to Jinyi that night.

  ‘What does that mean? If you have a body, you’re sure of it. If not, then you must be some kind of ghost. If you feel aches or pain, that just tells you you’re alive, and you should be thankful for that. It’s when you don’t feel anything that you ought to worry,’ Jinyi said, rolling over on the ancient animal skins that smelt of many generations of sweat.

  ‘You know that’s not what I meant. I’m just worried. After last time, I –’

  ‘I know, I know. I meant that these are signs that give us hope. Movement, that’s a good sign. A beating heart, a curious body. We should take comfort in these. He’ll be fine.’

  ‘Why are we both so sure it will be a boy?’ Yuying said, a smile forming in the dark.

  ‘Because it must be a boy.’

  ‘And when he is born? What will we do then?’ She was angling, hoping to hear Jinyi
tell her that they could go home.

  ‘Then we’ll look after him. We won’t start walking somewhere else again, I promise. We’ve got a warm bed here, a safe house, and enough food.’

  ‘As long as he likes sweet potatoes,’ she muttered.

  That was all they seemed to eat. The fields surrounding the house were planted and ploughed only for that tuberous root that could be pulled up snug in a single tug, the size of a clenched fist. They ate boiled sweet potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes mixed with salt, fried sweet potatoes with onion if any could be traded, and, for celebrations and festivals, caramelised sweet potatoes, the orange lumps glowing with strands of hot dark sugar. The flour they milled was also ground down from sweet potatoes, mixed with the off-white of wheat only on the rare occasions when trade went well. A few of those clay-red sacks of fleshy mulch were stacked beside the bed, the tubers shaved off as the vegetables were stored for winter. Just thinking of sweet potatoes made Yuying want to be sick.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with sweet potatoes. My family have been farming them for centuries. There was once a passing warlord who decided to stop fighting and settle here because he swore they were the best sweet potatoes he had tasted in all his expeditions. Well, that’s what Uncle Hou says anyway,’ Jinyi said.

  ‘I know. That’s the only story he ever tells.’

  ‘Come on, it’s not that bad. This is where my ancestors live. They’re still out there; we just can’t see them. When you hear the wind chimes, or calls from birds you don’t quite recognise, or distant drums, that’s them. That’s what I used to think about my parents, to stop myself from going crazy here when I was young.’ Yuying imagined their children growing up there, and felt suffocated. Their days would be filled the same way as hers, with mud and ache and hunger. The house sat on the side of a valley, linked up with a few others higher up to form a spindly, set-apart village. There was a market day at the closest small town once a month, and a small abandoned schoolhouse on the other side of the hill. Each of the families on the hillside lived like spiders in the centre of a tatty web of prayers, curses, hopes and the ever-present dead ancestors who watched over their shoulders, their faint breath almost noticeable on the downy hairs of their necks.

  Yuying noticed that Jinyi’s leg was twitching. He was half asleep, yet she did not want to give up yet.

  ‘I heard some of the traders talking the other day. They said that the civil war is nearly over.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘It could be finished by next year.’

  ‘That’s good news. Who’s winning?’ Jinyi mumbled.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m just joking. Let’s get some sleep.’ Jinyi yanked the hairy blanket tighter about his ears; moonlight peeked in through the tears in the paper across the square window.

  ‘It’ll be good news for my family. The city will be safe again.’ As soon as she said this she was unsure of what she meant. As safe as when the Japanese were there, guarding anything that fell within the sphere of their interests and herding everything else into shadow? Or as safe as before the invasion, a time known to her only through the foggy nostalgia of her mother’s occasional reminiscences?

  ‘That’s good,’ Jinyi said.

  ‘Though they might need help rebuilding the house and getting all the restaurants running again.’

  ‘It won’t be easy, but they’ll manage.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ she asked, turning and pressing her head up onto his turned shoulder.

  ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

  She let him sleep, and surrendered herself to the small aches and jabs of the baby pushing against her sides, tiny hiccups juddering across her abdomen.

  What is it that drives people so far from themselves? Is it to see how much they can give up while remaining the same? Or to witness what is left when everything is stripped away? And why do they do this? For love? A few years ago, Yuying would not have hesitated to say, ‘Yes, for love’, but now she was not so sure. This thought made her blush with guilt as she lay beside her snoring husband. She wondered whether her mother too had had to make and unmake herself. And this was simply another version of the question she asked herself every day: What will happen to me if I never return?

  Yuying lay awake, rubbing her fingers into her bulge, trying to stir the baby into kicking, into sharing her sleeplessness. What will happen to me if I never return? Jinyi snuffled and snored beside her. Might it be that we find ourselves only in how we are perceived, she wondered, and if this changes, then do we change too? She did not like this thought, so she turned instead to imagining her husband suddenly having a change of heart, and she smiled to herself as she thought of Jinyi taking her hands and announcing that they must return home.

  Pain suddenly arched through her, as though she was a spark plug or an old tractor engine being started, and she roared loud enough to wake not just her husband but the whole house. It gripped and squeezed her, pulsing and tensing and piercing her muscles. Her husband sat straight up, roughly rubbing his eyes while his knees pushed off the blanket, and she bucked into the spasms of pain, and in that second she knew.

  And again it came, the pain starting at the base of her spine and suddenly filling her; a clenching, tongue-biting lurch of pain mangling her inside out.

  ‘Get help,’ she whimpered at Jinyi, who was already up and pulling on his trousers.

  ‘Are you all right? What’s the ma–’

  ‘Get help,’ Yuying cried. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, the pain replaced with an ooziness, the sloppy flop of her stomach turning over. She pressed her fingers to the tops of her thighs and brought them up, sticky and smelling of rusted copper and the acrid tang of old soup stock. And though it would be hours before the room would have even a scrap of light, she knew that they were covered in blood.

  In the next few hours the local midwife arrived, her hare-lip visibly twitching and her short rings of hair stuck to her oversized brow, and Yuying began the bitter push of delivering the stillborn baby, tinged blue and bloody. There was no comfort in knowing that they had been right, that it was a boy. The little twisted mess of clammy skin and wrinkles was passed quickly from the room, hidden from Yuying’s sight as she lay back, stoic and sweaty and silent on her elbows, speaking to no one, and no one daring to speak to her. She stared steadily at a point on the ceiling while her lips knotted into a tiny oval, a half-formed expression that she could not bring herself to utter. If I speak it, she thought, it will become real. People moved in slow-motion around her, leaving her to the depths of blood and grief; the haggard midwife had other women to see, aunt and uncle were already out at the work that needed to be done no matter what. Eventually only her husband was left, nervously watching her chest slowly rise and fall.

  As the sun came up, she asked to see her son. Jinyi moved to the child tentatively, almost afraid to touch it. It was clammy and small and tied in a bed sheet on the kitchen table, waiting to be taken by the men to be buried at the end of the field. It was only to the child that she would speak, worn-out whispers given to his peeled red stub of an ear. She moved her mouth close to his wrinkled head and closed eyelids as though her warm breath might suddenly make him move, speaking to him so softly that her husband had to leave the room, unable to bear the muttered hum of her gentle words, her tone that was warmer and more delicate than anything he had heard from her before.

  Once outside Jinyi tried to catch his breath, stunned by the suddenness of this second ending; six and a half hours since he woke and he could only remember a few moments, ones he would try his best to put from his mind. He felt as though his heart had been crushed, mangled; and yet he suddenly wanted to relive it all, both of the babies’ brief half-lives, to see all the moments he had missed, to treasure every single second, even if that meant reliving all of this again. A scream curdled in his throat and tears scratched at the corners of his vision; he picked up the trowel and descended through the rows, bec
ause what else could he do?

  Somewhere along a mountain pass, or in some private forest, Jinyi and Yuying must have caught the attention of some hungry demon, whispered Auntie Hou to herself. Snake-headed, all black teeth and charred tongue, he must have crept behind them all the way to the Hou’s house. Already he had claimed two of their children. Had they been girls, it might have been all right, but these were males, the blood of a family, its strength and its name. With every rustle of wind-gathered leaves, or the creak of the warped timber in the walls, Auntie Hou grew more and more convinced that the demon that had taken both the children was still out there, waiting. When not working, she collected dried grass to burn in place of incense before the grubby altar that squatted behind the kitchen table. She tried to remember all her sins and urged the grieving husband and wife to do the same. You are cursed, she assured them.

  Jinyi was the first to begin believing Auntie’s words, and drew chalk lines over their door to stop the demon returning. The claw-filled nightmares that left him matted with sweat were at least preferable to torturing himself over whether it was somehow his fault. It was almost harvest, the sticky warmth slowly being blown south, and Jinyi spent all his spare time praying to the handful of deities whose names he could remember, asking that the next baby would be healthy and strong. Yuying spent the same weeks vowing to herself that she would never let her husband close to her body again.

  ‘There is a doctor – don’t worry, not one of those new-fangled ones fiddling about with Western medicine! Oh no, I mean a real doctor – who may be able to make sure the demon never finds you,’ Auntie Hou told Jinyi.

  She had heard of him from a neighbouring family whose sick child had been brought back to life by the doctor decades ago. Jinyi consented without asking Yuying, suspecting she might be uncooperative. She does not have to know, he thought. However, despite their best efforts, sending messages with everyone passing by and even sounding out the crowds at the market, the famous doctor could not be found. He had not been seen, apparently, since the civil war began.