Under Fishbone Clouds (16 page)

They were careful to walk slowly, casually, past Old Bian’s second restaurant and over the horseshoe bridge.

‘Is it true, that you live in their house? The Bians’, I mean?’

Yaba nodded, neither turning towards Jinyi nor deviating from their measured pace.

‘Isn’t it a bit strange?’

Yaba shrugged, and Jinyi thought he understood. Of course it is strange, the mute seemed to say with his shrug, but then so is everything else. How should life be? Jinyi thought of his uncle’s house, of Dongming’s family, of the elderly barber, and of the damp stone den he shared with starving families that spent their time looking for scraps of work, rifling through bins in the dark or just trying to keep out of sight of the occupying forces. How easy it is, he thought as they crossed the bridge over the slow river, to let the smallest changes turn you into someone else. And at this Jinyi found himself itching his scalp, wondering whether the part of the city this side of the river was a reflection of the other, whether his right hand would become his left, whether his crooked side parting would creep across his head.

They stopped outside a boarded-up restaurant and knocked three times, paused, then knocked twice again on the loosely nailed slats of wood. An old man appeared, peering out from between the boards, then vanished. A few seconds later he was at their side, leading them around the building to a cellar door. As they descended, they met none of the waves of arctic weather they had come to expect from such stone caverns, and it was soon obvious why. Once the thick door was pressed closed and bolted behind them, they ducked under a stained blanket hung from the ceiling and were confronted by a low rumble of muted cheers and curses. The cellar was filled with men, each one squatting or doubled over like graceless swans beneath the arched ceiling.

Unlike the modest cellar beneath their own workplace, there
were no cabbages stored for winter or bottles of liquor kept chilled for the type of men they dreamed of spitting on. Every few steps they passed different games. Spotting the others on the far side of the sweaty stretch, they began to work their way past the small crowds to the back of the cellar.

They stalked past lotteries played out with thin strips of white paper of varying lengths, past dominoes thrown down as if they were offerings to some angry deity. They stepped around
collections
of small trinkets piled under a teacup, the participants betting on what remainder would be left when the pile was divided four ways, and moved between furious games of hands where sticks beat tigers which ate chickens which ate worms which gnawed through sticks, and numerous games played with splintering wood-cut dice. Gambling was not yet completely illegal (as it would become when the Communist Party took over, leaving casinos only on the Portuguese-leased island of Macau), but it was increasingly frowned upon during the fledgling republic. No one was sure how the Japanese would react to these nocturnal gatherings, though they agreed that they were unlikely to be supportive without their pockets being significantly weighed down.

Yangchen and the head chef were squatting around a highly
animated
circle. Jinyi had to push past to be able to see inside the tiny ring, where two dark crickets were dancing towards each other, being encouraged to fight. A set of gourds and clay pots, two with their lids discarded, lined the outer borders of the circle.

‘I guess this isn’t a singing competition.’

Yangchen looked round and grinned.

‘There you are. You know, they’re vicious little things when they want to be. I’m betting on the lighter one, see: he’s scuttling around his enemy – yes, that’s it, my boy – waiting to attack.’

Cricket-fighting had been a popular pastime since the early Ming dynasty and the reign of the Xuande Emperor, also known as the Cricket Emperor, who favoured the sport so much that every year thousands of crickets would be given as tribute to the imperial family, and state decisions were often based upon the ferocity of buzzing forearms. Singing crickets, with their hoarse and jittery hymns, had been kept as pets in the Middle Kingdom for thousands of years, in bamboo cages beside beds, or weaving their way through scores of autumnal poems, their wings ablaze.

‘There used to be cocks here too, of course. But they all got eaten long before the invasion. Who’s got poultry to spare now?’

‘Then it was snakes. But they got eaten too,’ the head chef added to the conversation, and got a laugh from some of the group, though Jinyi doubted that this was a joke. As the crickets moved in, the small audience grew quiet, expectant.

Throughout the cellar men were swigging from outsized jam-jars half full of wilting tea leaves swaying like murky swamp fronds in the candle light. It was then that Jinyi noticed what was being played for. There was not a single coin to be seen, though this was of little surprise. Instead, Jinyi counted a catalogue of lost objects: apples, knives, painted chopsticks, slippers with badly patched heels, a stained set of wooden teeth, buttons and other things he could not quite define, thrown down with each bet. He felt around in his trouser pockets. He had a length of string and a comb with half of its teeth broken. Where to begin?

Shouts spilled from the circle and were quickly hushed. Yangchen’s cricket had won – the other was sprawled on its back, buzzing like a malevolent lightbulb. Yaba had moved to a mat where coins and chips were being divided into four piles, predicting numbers with awkward contortions of his fingers. Jinyi started moving to join him, but the head chef placed a large hand on his back.

‘Better not. It’s bad manners to sit beside a man when he’s
playing
. If he loses, he’ll think that you brought him bad luck, and if he wins he’ll think you’re angling for a share of his winnings.’

‘What’s more, who knows what he’ll tell them back in the big house,’ Yangchen added.

Jinyi shook his head. ‘He won’t tell them anything, Yangchen, he can’t speak.’

‘Ha ha. You know what I mean. It’s got to be different, sleeping up there and even eating with them sometimes, then spending the day with us. It’s not right. Gives me the creeps.’

‘That’s not what you were saying last month, Yangchen.’ A short man looked up from where the wicker pots were being prepared and the wagers measured out for the next fight. ‘I remember you saying you’d give your right hand to be sleeping up in the big house.’

‘Well, sure. But that was before my brother told me about the Communists. Anyway, I don’t give a shit about the money – though it might be nice to be able to have something more than stale
bread to bring back to my folks. No, I was talking about the three daughters. Back me up here, Qingsheng! I know you saw them too, when they came with the boss for that banquet last year, when we cordoned off the whole second floor, remember? You know exactly what I’m talking about.’

The middle-aged kitchen porter shook his head. ‘One wife is more than enough for me. You’re better off just dreaming about them, trust me.’

‘That’s all he does. Watch them and dream. I’ve seen his eyes glaze over,’ grinned the head chef. ‘Dirty bastard.’

‘Yeah, pick on me, just because I’m on a winning streak. But you’ve seen those breathtaking girls, you know what I’m talking about. They look like they’re made of porcelain. The eldest one especially, with that round face and huge eyes. Li, you said they were the most beautiful in the city, didn’t you?’

Li shrugged, but Jinyi was already intrigued. Not by the tone of the talk, veering between the playful, the smutty and the subtly spiteful, but by mention of the girls. Since he started working in Fushun, the only women he had seen apart from Bian Shi were the backs of heads leaving the restaurant, bedraggled prostitutes in the aubergine glow of badly lit side-streets, and the tight-faced mothers straining to feed their screaming infants in the room where he slept.

‘Now, I only saw their feet at the beginning of the banquet, because I had to keep the fire stoked as it was snowing and all. But I remember them clearly. Golden slippers. I swear it, they were wearing golden slippers!’ Yangchen was talking conspiratorially, whispering to his colleagues while the other men fiddled with their pockets as the next round of bets were placed.

‘That much is true. I haven’t seen such well-dressed Han in years. They were wearing silks too, and their hair was slinking down in shiny plaits. Graceful, they were – not like the type of women we usually get in there, hanging off the arms of soldiers or bankers,’ Qingsheng conceded.

‘It felt like hours, waiting for their meal to end so I could see the rest of their bodies, especially with all you lot going on about how they looked and what you’d heard. And just from seeing the
movements
of those gold scales shimmering across the floorboards, I knew all the rumours were going to be true! Oh man, they were –’

Yangchen stuttered to a stop as he saw Yaba approaching. The kitchen workers turned and sank down to watch the next match, the insects let loose from the gourds and driving at each other with a brittle whirring noise, like the sound of lone bombers
approaching
across an empty sky. Soon the restless flitting of the crickets seemed to infect the gamblers, and they became irritable and
argumentative
; Jinyi slipped from the cellar with a few others early on, careful to close the heavy door on the sounds of the raised voices. Most of the men would spill straight from the cellar toward the dawn shift, not bothering to stop for sleep.

The summer breeze hit Jinyi’s face as he drifted towards the stone room to sleep on his thoughts, moving instinctively and leisurely, as if lifted on the soles of golden slippers.

Lord George Macartney sailed back from China disappointed. Trade was still not forthcoming – British merchants in China were forbidden to speak to the locals and were even barred from learning the language. Within twenty years of Macartney’s failed mission, the British, with their growing taste for warm drinks, were
carrying
millions of pounds of tea back from the Guangzhou port each year. Yet they had nothing to counterbalance this one-way trade, except their prized silver bullion. This was obviously unacceptable to a nation of shipbuilders and mid-morning tea-breakers.

In stretches of sun-lashed fields in rural India, the English East India Company hit upon a solution to reset the scales: poppies. From the unripened plants the resin was extracted and dried, and the chestnut-coloured mass tied into British trading bags. By the 1830s, despite the Chinese ban on importing or cultivating opium, British merchants had reversed the flow of trade. British silver, as well as silver from the quickly depleting Chinese stocks, began to trickle back across the ocean. To halt the illegal trade that was crippling the Chinese economy, in 1838 government
representatives
stopped ships and ordered the handover of opium. They then dumped nine million Mexican silver dollars’ worth of it into the sea. For days the waves lapping at the harbour bubbled and foamed and frothed. The British viewed this as an act of war.

The Opium Wars succeeded in showing the military supremacy of the foreign forces. During the Second Opium War, British forces 
burnt down the summer palace in Beijing and forced humiliating treaties, including the perpetual lease of Hong Kong and an area around the Kowloon peninsula, on the defeated Chinese. Perhaps more importantly, the trade in opium was legalised.

This was one of the many reasons why Old Bian was reclining upon a cushioned opium bed, privately witnessing the swaying silk curtains melt into rain-like threads of light. Years drifted by for him like this, in the pull of gentle tides. His fingers clutched at the air, and he was handed the long bamboo pipe by a lithe waiter hovering nearby. He had come from a drawn-out lunch with one of his mistresses, and, eyeing up the skinny young waiter, wondered if he had enough energy to manage it again.

His mistress’s room had been a mess, but she had at least
prepared
a few dishes for them to eat, though he left these untouched. The place needed a decent clean. Didn’t he pay for the room, and its upkeep? Was she worth it –forced to listen to her whine about her brat for a couple of hours just for a maudlin, tearful fuck? He decided not. There were plenty of others he could rely on. Anyway, the outer contours of her face were beginning to pinch into crow’s feet, and he couldn’t abide that.

Before Bian got the hit, pain slipping away and bliss prickling up behind his eyelids, he was restless. Sleeplessness, itchy skin,
constipation
. He took another drag. His worries dissipated. Someone was talking. He raised his eyes, and felt his body floating, glowing; he could feel it tingling in his pores.

The establishment in which he was lying was built around a long, snaking corridor; the doors to each of the spacious rooms remained closed while there were people walking between them, so that for all one knew, one’s son or neighbour could be in an adjoining room. Furthermore, no one ever seemed to leave by the same door that they entered, though Bian was not sure whether this was for the same reason or not.