Under Fishbone Clouds (62 page)

‘I would be delighted,’ she said, pulling on her robe.

The little walk became a romantic meal beside a small bonfire, which turned into a kiss and a night lying side by side beneath the fluttering stars, which led to marriage and the birth, a couple of years later, of a boy and a girl. Niu Lang became a woodsman and built a house for them in the forest; Zhi Nu spent the days looking after their babies and the nights pressed against her husband, while the heavenly cow spent its days as before, eating grass.

Zhi Nu liked her new life down on earth; there was no pressure, no expectations, just the simple pleasure of spending time with someone who cared – no matter that he may have been a little uncouth compared to her previous suitors (who had included an eight-headed god of hell, a half-man-half-dragon and several cloud princes). At any rate, it certainly beat her old life: as one of the daughters of the Jade Emperor, she had previously spent each day and every night spinning long, silky clouds to fill the sky. Love was so much simpler.

You may have heard that time is relative. This is certainly true for gods – since we have few uses for time, it often sneaks past us. When the Jade Emperor’s wife finally realised what had happened she was furious, not least because she had grown fond of those spindly wisps of cloud her daughter weaved, which smelt of
jasmine
and cedarwood. She shouted at her husband to do something, and he soon agreed.

The following morning, Niu Lang woke up to find the other side of the bed empty. After calling out for his wife, he decided to
venture
outside to see what she was up to. He did not find her. Instead, he found the cow lying broken and bloody in the garden.

‘Where is Zhi Nu?’ Niu Lang asked, suddenly panicking.

The cow thumped its tail, its sad eyes staring past Niu Lang. ‘Closer,’ it rasped.

Niu Lang sank to the ground and put his ear to the cow’s dry mouth.

‘There isn’t much time left. They took her.’

‘Who? Who took her?’ Niu Lang shouted.

The cow motioned to the sky with one of its hooves. ‘There isn’t
much time. Take my skin, please, take it, and … and … go to her.’ The cow lowed its deep, rumbling low, before closing its eyes.

Niu Lang ran his hands over its cooling flank, searching for a pulse. He knew what he had to do. After retrieving a knife from the kitchen, he began to cut into the wattle of the beast’s blubbery neck. He carved a jagged, bloody line down under its belly, down to its dead stump of tail, then pushed the knife in underneath the open flaps, severing the links to the gristle and cartilage beneath. Half an hour later he had ripped the fur from his friend’s body,
leaving
it a criss-cross of knotted ruby muscle.

With the two children sitting in wicker baskets suspended from a strip of wood hung over his shoulders, Niu Lang threw the skin over his head. Nothing happened. He wiped the sweat from his brow and took a deep breath. Then he started to run, breaking into an awkward canter as he tried to balance the babies and the bloody skin flailing in the morning breeze. The children began to shout and laugh, and Niu Lang suddenly noticed that his feet were no longer touching the ground. They soared above the mountains, past the clouds, and into the dark light of the cosmos.

Niu Lang landed in the heavenly kingdom, and threw the animal’s damp hide to the ground. The children had spotted their mother, weaving on a giant wheel ahead of them. Zhi Nu leapt up and opened her arms, awaiting an embrace. It never came. The Jade Emperor’s wife emerged from behind her and, taking a hairpin from her black mane, ripped a hole in space between them. Niu Lang fell to the floor, clutching his children, as the small hole widened into a ravine. He pulled them back from the edge as the ravine continued to push apart, driving them further away from Zhi Nu. Her
hysterical
shouts were soon drowned out when, with an ear-splitting roar, a river of stars flooded into the deepening valley. When he finally uncovered his eyes, Niu Lang saw that he and the children were separated from Zhi Nu by the Milky Way.

Nothing could be done, for the Jade Emperor’s wife was highly stubborn. Niu Lang broke down and began to sob as his children stared in surprise. Zhi Nu also wept continuously, her tears falling into her giant spinning wheel and creating monstrous grey rain clouds which delivered mournful storms to the world below. No matter what remedy they tried, neither could stop themselves from crying.

The Jade Emperor could not bear to see his daughter like that. Yet he could hardly risk upsetting his wife by undoing her magic. Finally, he came upon a compromise. He called a flock of magpies to him and ordered that for a single day each year they should leave the earth to make a bridge across the Milky Way, on which the two lovers would be allowed to meet. And so it is that every year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies disappear and cover the Milky Way with their dark feathers. If you listen closely on that night, you may even hear husband and wife whispering to each other on that long stretch of rustling wings.

It was only in the middle of the night, woken by her urgently throbbing bladder, that Yuying worked out that this was the story Jinyi had been referring to. It was an unusual story, as it ended not in death or tragedy, but in finding comfort in the smallest things, finding hope in the narrowest of possibilities. It was a story of quiet faith and of patience. Perhaps this was his way of saying I love you, she thought, squatting over the chamberpot. She shrugged: it hardly mattered what he had meant – it was how she chose to understand it that counted.

It was not long before the Jade Emperor visited me once again, to check on my progress. I was in a deserted kitchen – he never seemed to appear when others were around. His robes were foam and flame, his eyes seeing everything without bothering to look round.

‘How many earth years has it been now?’ he asked.

‘Too many to count,’ I replied. ‘But surely if I don’t see the whole lifetime of the heart then my picture will be incomplete. You don’t agree?’

‘A day, a lifetime. Is there a difference? The heart beats
thousands
of times a day, flits forward and back through a thousand feelings in a matter of hours. To catalogue every small twinge and turn of the heart in one single day might take you centuries.’

He was teasing me. I tried not to rise to it. ‘If I remember correctly, it was you who ordered time to be divided into years so that man could understand it.’

The Jade Emperor grinned. ‘Yes, you’ve got me there. I asked the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig and cat to race each other to determine the order of years. You know, the rat tricked the cat and told her the wrong time for the race, so I ended up with twelve animals and not thirteen, and the poor old cat has been getting her own back on rats and mice ever since! That rat is a wily old devil, I’ll give him that – he also rode for most of the race on the ox’s head, only jumping off right at the end to claim first place. You should have seen the looks on the other animals’ faces! They were flabbergasted.

‘But that makes no difference,’ he continued. ‘Why not give up now and stop wasting these glorious years on this futile
undertaking
? Come, join me for a banquet, and I will promote you to Lord of the Rain Dragons. What do you say?’

It was my turn to smile. ‘My mother used to tell me a story when I was a boy. It was about a fool who lived at the bottom of a huge mountain. Every month he took his radishes to the market and went to collect water from the river, both on the other side of
the mountain. The trip – winding up along the rocky passes and through the frosty gales before making his way carefully down the other side of the peak – took many days. Finally, the fool had an idea. He would dig a tunnel straight through the mountain, and then he would never need to make the long, tortuous journey over it ever again. For years he dug; his hands withered, his back grew bent, his eyes finally became accustomed to the darkness as he swung his pick against the rock.

‘His neighbour, a renowned wise man, came to visit him one day. “What on earth are you doing?” the wise man asked. “You have been digging for close to twenty years, and you have cleared a path of barely a quarter of a li. Your idea is ridiculous. It would take hundreds of years for one man to make a path through this mountain. Why not go back to growing radishes and be content with your lot?”

‘But the fool was not impressed with this reasoning. “Call
yourself
a wise man? Soon I will die, but my son will carry on this work, and his son after him. One day, my great-great-grandchildren will be able to travel straight through to the river and the market.” The wise man saw that the fool was right, and left him to his work.’

By the time I had finished this story, the Jade Emperor’s whiskers were twitching angrily and his eyes were the same colour as the world a few moments before an eclipse. In a second, he was gone.

12

2000 THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

A boy was spitting. His pinched-dough nostrils flared up, his shoulders rose as his nose rumbled and he hawked up another round of ammunition. He drew in his carp lips and tilted his head up toward the naked bulb. Then he puckered and fired – a volley of lumpy-custard phlegm was sent across the room, slipping onto the white panel floor. His grandmother was snoring beside him, her head slouching towards her gargantuan chest. The boy’s legs dangled restlessly from the plastic chair that had been nailed to the floor. Then the cycle began again, as he attempted to repeat the perfect dull-edged arc of soaring spit. Jinyi stared across the waiting room at the boy, his lips moving as if in search of the word that might describe this endlessly repeated action. Yuying tutted and turned back to her book.

How long had Jinyi been watching, involuntarily moving his mouth as the boy hawked and spat? He was not sure. All that mattered to him now was describing that action. What was this small human’s face-hole doing? Come on, he thought; it’s on the tip of my tongue!

A number pinged up on the
LED
display and the boy stopped to examine his crumpled print-out. They had won. He shook his grandmother, who blinked and wiped the dribble from her chin.

‘Come on then,’ the fat old woman said as she wobbled to her feet. ‘You be good for the doctor and I’ll buy you one of those
caramel-strand
animals from the park, all right?’

As they waddled off down the long corridor, Jinyi turned his attention to the globs of runny-egg mucus left on the floor. Yes, I know what this is, he told himself. Something from the
head-periscope
, the thing from the thing. He scratched the flaky bald patch at the back of his head. Yuying noticed and closed her book,
placing it back in her carrier bag with the skin-coloured lipstick, the folded wedge of cheap toilet roll, the red-bean-flavoured sweets, the half-eaten corncob and the two pairs of disposable chopsticks.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll see the doctor soon, and he’ll sort everything out.’ Yuying said, placing her hand over her husband’s. Both were crumpled and speckled with lines and liver spots.

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He was impatient, pulling his hand from under hers. Why is it, he thought, that once you get close to seventy people start treating you as if you are seven again? Can people not count that high? I’m just a little forgetful, that’s hardly the end of the … whatsit? … the thing.

Yuying smiled and looked up at the clock. She did not want to risk enraging or upsetting him. Only last week she had come back from shopping to find him shouting at the TV, shaking with rage at the unstoppable torrent of voices and pictures. He had only calmed down when she had found the remote control – inexplicably placed in the chopstick and cutlery drawer – and switched it off. That was the day before his last fall.

From the black dots on the wall display colour began to prickle up, the first light out of primordial chaos. Yuying consulted their ticket: 247, now also flashing in siren red above them. She nudged her husband, who shifted his weight forward and pushed himself up uncertainly, still too proud to reach out for support.

‘Just be honest,’ Yuying whispered, though Jinyi simply readjusted his stiff grey cotton suit and pretended he had not heard her.

The doctor was sitting at a white wooden table in a small room with white walls. The white sheets on the single bed were dotted with maroon patches, and the white curtain to be pulled round it was decidedly crusty. This was, however, the fifth best hospital in the city, or so the sign outside proudly claimed. It was also the second cheapest; though in theory the government should have paid back eighty per cent of any costs, since both of them were retirees of state jobs.

‘Well hello,’ the doctor said – a little too loudly, Jinyi thought, as though he suspected the couple was deaf. The doctor was in his early thirties, his face shining with the joys he expected to fall effortlessly into his lap, his fingers ever busy, alternating between the four red pens in his shirt pocket and his floppy fringe.

‘Hou Jinyi, I would like to ask you a few questions. Is that all
right?’ The doctor said, after Yuying had bent close and whispered to him for a few seconds.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s great. Now, I hear that you had a little fall last week. Is that right?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose. Someone must have left … something on the floor, and I can’t have been looking where I was going.’

‘Ah ha, of course, of course.’ The doctor nodded earnestly. ‘So can you tell me when you were born?’

‘Well, I …’ Jinyi’s words trailed off into silence.

‘It’s hard to say, doctor.’ Yuying said, coming to his rescue. ‘My husband grew up in the countryside, you see, and never saw a real calendar until he came to the city. But we celebrate his birthday in April, and we think he must be around seventy-five or
seventy-six
.’

‘I see. Mid to late seventies, that makes sense. So, can you tell me what year it is now?’

‘Yes. It’s, erm, 19 … well, it’s 1976.’ Jinyi knew this was the wrong answer, but he figured it must be close enough.

‘Hmm, all right, now can you tell me who the current president is?’

‘It’s that … man … that man with the big eye-things. You know who I mean.’ Jinyi’s voice was rising, unable to hide his irritation.

‘Big eye-things? Ah, yes, Jiang Zemin’s black spectacles are a
little
on the large side. Ha. Very good. I think I can see what is
happening
here. We will need to do a few more tests, if that is all right with you.’

‘Will they be expensive?’ Jinyi asked, and his wife looked at him sharply.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. They should help us to understand the extent of your problem.’

‘What is the problem, doctor?’ Yuying asked hesitantly.

He took a deep breath. ‘Well, the lack of spatial awareness,
dizziness
, memory problems, confused vocabulary and language issues – these are all signs of dementia. It’s just what happens when the brain gets old, I’m afraid, once it has too much to hold. But we’ll know more after the tests.’

‘Where are my words?’ Jinyi mumbled.

‘You’re just having a few problems finding them, that’s all. And
besides, “Nothing that can be expressed in words is worth saying.”’ The doctor smiled, pleased with himself.

‘Lao Tzu,’ Yuying said and the doctor nodded.

‘We’ll know more after the tests.’

He scribbled a few indecipherable notes on a square sheet of paper, which he handed to Yuying before ushering them out of the room. They stood for a minute outside the office, buffered between people hurriedly moving through the corridors. Everything goes so fast these days, Jinyi thought. There is no time for anything.

‘Come on then, let’s see if we can’t find where they do the tests. Upstairs, I’ll bet. Perhaps they’ve got a lift we could use. That would be nice.’ Yuying talked because she could not think of anything else to do, because the meaningless chatter was more comforting than her own thoughts.

There was no lift, only a broken escalator and a slippery set of stairs, which they negotiated hand in hand. When they reached the next floor, the corridors curled off in every direction, giving the
impression
that the hospital was immense, that it was akin to an
endless
maze from which there was little hope of escape. They passed rooms filled with incubating babies; rooms that were silent but for the tick-tock trickle of intravenous drips hanging like empty speech bubbles above the patients’ heads; rooms of scattered
bedpans
attended by armies of insects; rooms where middle-aged men in dark suits drank liquor and smoked endless cigarettes over the beds of the comatose; rooms of rash-speckled children
playing
marbles; and rooms in which prosthetic limbs hung on hooks, almost beckoning. Whenever Yuying asked for help or directions, the dumpy nurses looked at them contemptuously.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jinyi whispered to Yuying.

‘Sorry? Whatever for?’ she said, shaking her head and smiling indulgently.

He did not reply. It had begun as a series of little secrets. The things that he felt confused about, the small slips and scrapes, the household projects he would start and later come across with
surprise
, wondering who had left the work unfinished – all the little things too trivial and embarrassing to be worth mentioning. After that it had graduated into a family joke: you haven’t lost the keys
again, have you Jinyi? Don’t worry about introducing yourself to Pa, he’ll only forget your name anyway! Should I phone twice or three times to remind you about dinner? Jinyi had laughed along with the jokes, as if to say, yes, I’m getting a bit old and forgetful, but that’s as bad as it gets. And as such, the slow progression meant that for the first few years it had been easy to ignore, while for the next couple of years if it was spoken of, it was only in pitying terms behind Jinyi’s back.

‘After all,’ his daughters had all agreed, ‘he has suffered enough humiliation and trouble for one lifetime. Just let him be.’

Jinyi clutched his wife’s arm to make sure she did not slip on the freshly mopped floor at the end of yet another corridor. He could at least pretend that he was in control, that everything was still fine. He could still recall with perfect clarity their wedding day, the
tiniest
details of their earliest arguments, every turn of the river and every leafy bristle of the forests they had pushed through on their way to his aunt and uncle’s house, yet he sometimes found he could not remember a single thing that had happened only the previous day. Whole days, weeks, seemed to have disappeared, been struck from the calendar. His dreams alone retained a strange clarity: the faces of his aunt, of Dongming, of his colleagues in the dumpling restaurant, of the baby boy they carried through the fields away from the fighting in the city, all returned to him at night, as if they had never left his sight. However, there were days when his new great-grandson came and climbed up onto his knee and he found himself struggling to work out who the little boy could possibly be. Again, his only recourse was to smile and avoid risking offending whoever’s child it was, smile and do his best to hide his panic.

‘This must be it,’ Yuying announced, and they settled onto another set of plastic chairs outside another small room. A little girl in front of them in the makeshift queue was about to have her blood taken, and, when she caught sight of some of the things going on through the half-open door, she began to scream at her mother in protest.

‘Oh, I must remember to buy a chicken and cook a big stew for when Xiaojing and her husband come to dinner. We’ll give them the leftovers too – they need everything they can get now, what with their factory being “temporarily closed”.’

‘Xiaojing. Yes, she’ll be home from school soon.’ Jinyi latched onto a thread of his wife’s daily monologue. Since they had been
forced to give up the mornings on the farm, Yuying had told him what had to be done each day before they did it. It was her way of filling the time, of ordering the chaos.

‘No, dear, she’s much too old for that. Your daughter sells
DVDS
now, remember?’ Yuying said, drumming her fingers on her bag.

Jinyi’s eyes were half closed. In the late Tang dynasty, the Confucian poet Han Yu wrote of the mythical unicorn that its sighting is a sign of good fortune, as is made clear in the works of the classical scholars. Even small children recognise the name and know that it is lucky. However, Han Yu noted, it is also a creature which resists definition – we can only say what it is not, never what it is. Therefore, he concluded, we might be staring right at a unicorn and not know what it is. This was how Jinyi felt almost every day; the familiar things in front of him – spoons, keys,
spitting
boys, doctors, grandchildren – were rendered unfamiliar by his inability to match them to their name, to provide them with their definition. His world was slowly becoming populated by unicorns; a multitude of unicorns of different colours, shapes and sizes, strange beasts whose presence seemed more terrible than
auspicious
.