Under Fishbone Clouds (58 page)

‘By day, a tree in our path might be a mild annoyance,
something
we have to walk around to reach our destination. By night, its sharp silhouette and hunched shadow make it look like a ghost hungry for flesh. Things look different in the day. Go back, think about our grandchild.’

She had looked down at the marrow curve of her belly swelling beneath her faded jacket. ‘I can’t live like this.’

‘You have a choice. Change everything by running away, or change everything by staying,’ Yuying had said.

‘Listen,’ Jinyi had added. ‘Go back for just one more night, that’s all I’m asking. Everything will be different tomorrow, I promise. Take my word for it. Go on, for your father.’

Slowly she had nodded, and, after finishing the refried leftovers and two bowls of lightly burnt rice, she had let them take her back to her room. Yuying had lifted her daughter’s spirits by recounting the events of the first few months of her own marriage,
transforming
the nervous bickering and disappointments into well-meaning farce, complete with the resolution of a happy ending. Marriage is a type of theatre, she had whispered; for everything to work, a lot of strings need to be pulled behind the stage.

Jinyi had left his wife with their daughter at her room, where Yuying had helped her prepare the breakfast porridge for when her husband came grumbling back home. She had regaled her daughter with altered tales of her own childhood, of the fierce patriarch and the empire of restaurants, of the occupation and the civil war, but mostly of the days of arranged marriages when prepubescent girls were mutilated, disowned or sold, all to save face. Jinyi had slipped back into the warm night and, instead of going straight home, he had taken a side road, past the glass windows of late-night massage parlours filling the evening with pink fluorescent light, and crossed the river on the crumbling stone bridge. As he had scrambled down the other side, his aching limbs and panting chest reminding him of his age, he could already see the tip of the slim pagoda, dressed in the green nets and wooden poles of shoddy scaffolding. It rose above the long line of new office blocks, staring out from a sea of foreign logos.

He could hear the foreman’s angry shouts from two blocks away. Nightlights were hanging from the paint-stripped temple gate, and as Jinyi had approached he caught sight of a short man slipping on the half-tiled roof, then steadying himself and carrying on. The workers had turned to look at him as he had entered, their dark eyes shifting under masks of dust, patches of clean skin visible only where dribbles of sweat had washed away the weeks of dirt. They had stared, but said nothing. After he had ducked into the temple, orders were barked and the drilling had started back up, mimicking the sound of some angry god issuing proclamations.

‘Please let me apologise for the workmen – they seem to be here twenty-four hours a day. Terribly noisy, but the sooner they finish the repairs the better.’ A thin middle-aged man with a shaved head had looked up from where he was crouched over a tattered book. An open umbrella was suspended over his head, catching the dust raining down from the ceiling, protecting the long folds of his saffron robe.

‘It’s no problem,’ Jinyi had said, his voice echoing in the empty hall.

‘It’s nearly done. Amazing, isn’t it? When you think of the damage done back in the … erm … what do we call it now?’

Jinyi had shrugged. ‘The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? A mistake, I suppose.’

The monk had nodded. ‘The insides here were gutted, axes were taken to the walls, and then a fire was started. Luckily, we had the foresight to bury most of the books before the crowds arrived. I did not expect it to be so long before I dug them up though!’ He gestured to the ragged book in front of him. ‘But a few of them survived. The earth moves in cosmic cycles; nothing is ever a surprise. The cranes may leave but they always return eventually. Whatever changes, something always remains. Whatever remains, something always changes.’

‘I see,’ Jinyi had said. ‘I was worried you would be closed by this time.’

‘The soul is always open. May I ask if you are looking for
something
in particular? Only, I have a good memory for faces, illusory and deceptive though they may be, and I can’t recall having seen you here before, friend. You have faced hard times and yet more are to come – do not worry, this is no magic, just what I can see in your face. You are worried. You come here for solace, am I right?’

‘Not this time. I’m … fine. But I need a fortune. Not for myself, for my grandchild.’

‘I see. We can also calculate the most beneficent name,
depending
on the child’s horoscope. Just tell me the sex of the child and the exact hour and date of birth and I will begin the consultation.’

Jinyi had shifted awkwardly. ‘Well, the thing is, the child hasn’t been born yet. I think it’s due at the beginning of February. And, er, they won’t tell us the sex before birth; the doctor said it’s against the law. If I had to guess, though, I think it’ll probably be a boy. My wife doesn’t agree. But anyway, none of that is important – I just want to take a good fortune to my daughter, to reassure her that everything will be all right.’

‘I understand your concern, but I can be of no assistance, except to tell you that everything will indeed be all right – the universe has a way of tying up loose ends. It’s called karma. Perhaps you should talk to my brother.’ The monk had stood up and reached for a small bell, which he then rang. The sound of shuffled footsteps could be heard in a nearby room. ‘His view of the world is quite different from mine. As, indeed, it should be. We can only live in the universe we believe in. Goodnight.’

As he had walked away, a bigger, bulkier man had appeared through a side door. He had approached to Jinyi slowly, his bulbous
bald skull glowing in the lamplight; his saffron robes faded to
sackcloth
brown.

‘Yes?’

‘I’d like a fortune, for my grandchild. I know this might –’

‘Fine.’ The second monk had rooted around beside a pile of books, and dug out a pot filled with thin lengths of bamboo. ‘Now, here’s how it usually works. You donate some money to the upkeep of the temple, and then pick a piece of bamboo. We then pull out the scroll from inside and that’s your fortune. Everything is down to the
vicissitudes
of fate. However, as you can see, the temple needs quite a lot more work done. So, if your conscience should dictate that you must make a large donation to aid your poor brothers in their prayers, I think we could come to some kind of arrangement.’

Jinyi had pulled out his wallet and shuffled through the notes, each with the dimpled face of Mao Zedong grinning up at him. He had squinted at them for a few seconds, trying to recall each one’s worth – currency values were constantly changing. In the end, he had pressed a whole week’s wages into the large monk’s hand.

‘Make it good,’ Jinyi had said. The monk had nodded.

As the monk’s oversized brush had scratched against the cheap paper, dashing out long-winded epithets, Jinyi had studied a reproduction tanka hung up on the only wall without cracks, holes, mould or smoke stains. At its centre was a Buddha floating serenely on a cloud; above and around him were various
bodhisattvas
in a range of acrobatic contortions, the many-handed
many-eyed
dancing across bright waves of sky. Beneath him were the slobbering faces of demons juggling flames, their bodies hunched and withered, yet their expressions more vivid and energetic than the drowsy enlightened above them. This is a riddle, isn’t it, Jinyi had said to himself; we are not reborn in other lifetimes, but a thousand times in our own. We are not reborn in different bodies or in different places, but in different feelings. It is these we must escape if we are not to be ensnared by a single one.

‘Is this one of the realms of heaven or a complete universe?’ he had asked.

The monk had shrugged without looking up from his writing. ‘Search me. There are whole universes living in your socks, in the winding tunnels of your ears. Now then, I’m almost finished, so if you wouldn’t mind keeping it down for a few minutes …’

Jinyi had left the temple quarter of an hour later with one of the most impressive and bombastic fortunes ever created. This child is truly blessed, he had imagined telling his daughter, and had pictured her half-tilted smile, her dreams kindled. And, he had thought to himself, when people believe in a prophecy, they work all the more to make it come true. If he had learnt anything from his time in exile, it was that the truth was malleable, slippery.

It was not till early afternoon the next day, pacing back as fast as they could from their shifts on the farm, that Jinyi and Yuying had returned to their eldest daughter’s room. Manxin had ushered them straight back out again so that they would not disturb her husband’s hard-earned sleep, and the three of them had huddled on a
rain-warped
wooden bench outside, watching a herd of grunting
bulldozers
destroy a street of courtyard houses to make way for a hotel.

‘I know how you must have been feeling last night,’ Jinyi had begun. ‘And that it must have been hard going back. It’s always easier running away than sticking things out, but nothing ever gets solved like that. You did the right thing. Anyway, I’ve got something for you that might help make you see things differently.’ He reached into his bag for the scroll. ‘Now, do you remember I promised that everything would be different today?’

‘I remember, and, Pa, you were so right!’ Manxin had replied. ‘But how could you have known? It’s amazing.’

Jinyi had been confused. He had not given her the gift yet. ‘What’s amazing?’

‘Well, this morning Jingtien came back from work and brought his parents round for breakfast. Now usually this would have made me want to cry and scream, but he was being really sweet. They had even brought the food with them so I wouldn’t have to cook. Jingtien said he had been talking to his parents about everything, and that his dad could help us. Well, his dad said that it wasn’t right that I kept working in a dirty, smoky, smelly factory when I had their grandchild inside me, so he offered to get me a job at the high school where he’s the headteacher. Can you believe it?’

Yuying had smiled and clasped her daughter’s hands. Jinyi had let go of the scroll and retied the bag. Perhaps he would save it for later. ‘So what will you be doing there?’ he had asked. ‘Will you be a janitor, or a dinner lady?’

‘No! I’m going to be a teacher.’

Her parents had opened their mouths, but had not been able to think of anything to say. Jinyi had scratched his head, while Yuying had fiddled with the chopstick in her hair. She had finally settled on tact. ‘He doesn’t mind that you never finished high school
yourself
, that you never went to college?’

‘No. Why would he? No one my age has been to college – but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid. We just happened to fall into a hole in history. This is my way out.’

‘What will you teach?’ Jinyi had collected himself to ask.

‘Well, he said it was up to me, but they had a shortage of science teachers. So I picked biology. I’m not sure why, but I spent ten years looking after my sisters, so I think I’ve got a good idea about how things work.’

‘I think there might be a little more to it than that,’ Yuying had murmured.

‘Oh don’t worry, he gave me a big textbook. Just cover one
chapter
a week, and you’ll be fine, he told me. We’re not allowed to mention anything outside the textbook anyway – in fact, the list of things not to talk about is longer than the list of things we can talk about. If something is not in this book, then it is not on the curriculum, which means that students shouldn’t be discussing it. So all I’ll have to do is read the chapter a few days before I have to teach it, and then explain it to the students. Simple really. Plus, I’ll get two months off when I have the baby.’

‘Congratulations. You’re lucky. I thought about being a teacher once, you know, back before the revolution,’ Yuying had said as she clasped her daughter’s hands.

‘Yes, congratulations,’ Jinyi had added.

And with that Manxin had gone back to her life, managing now, with this small change, to blot out the pieces of snide advice from her mother-in-law and her husband’s exaggerated demands. Jinyi had not given her the fake horoscope that day, nor the day after.

Back in the canteen kitchen he finished chopping up the meat and peered out of the window to see his granddaughter sprawled out on her back beside the stream. Whistles of steam rose from the three rice-cookers, their lids rattling, and Jinyi checked his trouser pocket – it was still there, the secret fortune, a scrunched-up scrag
of mock-scroll that he no longer dared unfold. He could almost convince himself that because the real future was unknown and the phoney prediction remained unread, they shared a
correspondence
, that their truths were inseparable and indistinguishable. If even an interfering neighbour’s few sly words about a family could divert a destiny so utterly, he thought, then why not suppose that a few written words might be able to do the same? His belief rested on the condition of the fortune never being given, and this enabled him to think of himself as its protector and, by extension, his granddaughter’s most important guardian.