Under Fishbone Clouds (65 page)

‘No, that’s not what I meant, I –’

‘I know you didn’t. Forgive me, I’m tired. But I can’t leave, not now. I may not be able to lift him well, or clean him, or hold him down while we feed him, but he still needs me. If he wakes up and I’m not here, who knows what he’ll do? Some days I’m the only one he recognises.’

‘I know. Even when he’s quiet, I can see that look in his eyes – as if he’s trying to work out who I am and how I got here and whether I intend to hurt him or not. It scares me.’

‘Your old father is still in there somewhere, deep down, don’t you ever think that he’s not. This illness it’s … it just confuses the way he sees everything, that’s all. It’s not his fault.

‘It’s just hard to see that sometimes, Ma. Well, stay if you want,
but there is a warm bed waiting for you back at Liqui’s, and I can deal with him if he wakes before Jingchen gets here.’

‘Go. If I want to rest I’ll settle on that bed there – the old man who shared the room died a few days ago, so we’ve got it all to ourselves now.’

Xiaojing looked at the metal cot and wrinkled her nose. ‘Is it clean, though?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be? The dead take their diseases with them.’

‘It’ll bring you bad luck though, Ma, sleeping where a dead man slept.’

‘Ha! I’ve had enough bad luck; a bit more can’t hurt. And besides, we’re in a hospital, dear. If you think there is a bed in here that someone hasn’t died on, then you’ve got your head on backwards.’

Xiaojing sighed and shrugged, picking up one of the crumpled magazines that each of them had read and reread a hundred times. There were still a few hours until dawn. Each of the daughters and their husbands took different shifts depending on their work and the needs of their grandchildren, bringing in home-cooked food – the hospitals no longer provided meals – and pyjamas scrubbed clean from the daily ‘accidents’. This was the pattern of their lives, a part of them praying for it to end, a part of them praying that he would hold on forever. Yuying tried to sift through those last years, to pinpoint the exact date when the nervous, screaming, flailing, child-like man in front of her came and stole her husband away, but she could not do it. She had given up counting the slips, the falls, the tantrums, the fits and shouts; they were simply part of her routine now. A good day was one in which he smiled, stayed calm and quiet; the bad days passed in a rush of activity. Only last week, a few days before he had tried to suffocate his wife, he had woken in the night and started shouting. To placate him, Liqui, taking her shift watching him while Yuying slept, had offered him food and he had mumbled something about noodles. Since there were no noodles in the house, Liqui had hurried out to find some after waking her husband and asking him to man the bedside in case Jinyi started hitting his head against the wall again. Jinyi had cried until no more tears would come, until his eyes were messy red blotches in a mask of scrunched paper. Liqui had searched the city for a twenty-four-hour shop, then bought noodles, returned home, boiled the water and finally brought the steaming bowl to
the bedside. I will not eat, he had shouted, you cannot poison me! And I hate noodles!

When dawn shuffled in and the nearby workyard roared into life, an elderly nurse came in to change the drip.

‘He’s a tough one, isn’t he?’ she said, grinning at the two tired women seated beside the bed.

‘How do you think he is doing?’ Xiaojing asked.

‘Oh, I’ll bet he’s survived far worse than being cooped up in here. My old husband was the same, a mere wisp of a man too, but with the strength of an ox. I wonder where it all comes from.’

‘He’s certainly strong when he gets angry,’ Xiaojing muttered.

‘Ha, yes, that’s right. He’s quite a fighter, this one. If you ask me, the more of life they lose, the more they cling onto what remains. I’ll be down the hall when this bag runs out – just holler for me, won’t you,’ the nurse said, sweeping from the room.

Everyone has advice, Yuying thought, brief words of wisdom that soon crumble to dust. Everything looks so simple, so clear-cut to them when they do not have to live it every minute of every day. Everyone is an expert on other peoples’ lives. She remembered one of the earlier doctors who had tried to reason with her that Jinyi was lucky, since everyone else in the country was going out of their way to actively forget the past, while he was granted a reprieve from those terrible years. She snorted, and her daughter turned to look at her before she slumped back into her restive state.

Jinyi snuffled, coughed; his unbruised eye squeezed itself open. He looked about the room, his hands twitching at the sheet.

‘Good morning, Jinyi, how are you feeling?’ Yuying asked, her voice calm and clear.

He stopped twitching and stared at her quizzically.

Yuying scraped her chair closer to the bed as she answered his unasked question. ‘Don’t worry, we’re in hospital. There is nothing to worry about. I’m here. I’m your wife, Bian Yuying. And here’s your youngest daughter, Hou Xiaojing. Would you like something to eat?’

‘Nnh,’ he rasped, and recoiled, shocked by the sound of his own voice.

‘A drink?’

‘Nnh.’

‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

‘Nnh.’

‘Would you like me to read to you from the newspaper then?’

‘Nnh,’ he grunted, and began to groan as he tried to move his aching right arm.

‘Jinyi, no! Don’t do that, you’ll end up on your back again, or else you’ll fall onto your chest and we’ll have to get the nurse to help prop you up. Would you like another pillow?’

He did not reply, his eye closing to a dim slice. His mouth stayed pursed open, the dank, heavy air hissing in and out. His mind was a jigsaw into which the wrong pieces had been forced, his thoughts unaccountable relics of shipwrecks and ruins. Light flickered in from the window as the circular saws burred through scrap. Time was a series of indivisible, unlinked moments – he could no longer connect this strange series of events, order them and call them his life.

Liqui arrived with food and clean clothes, and the women greeted each other with yawns. They spotted a dark stain spreading across the front of Jinyi’s pyjamas and tried to unknot the buttons without disturbing him. They slid them down and off his feet, revealing his pale, spindly legs, the sparse tufts of grey pubic hair, the coiled snail of his shrivelled penis. Yuying dug out a baby wipe and cleaned the sticky mess, carefully anointing his vein-mapped flesh. His daughters threaded his feet through a clean pair of pyjama bottoms, which they dragged up to cover him. Jinyi rasped and moaned, his eyes pressed closed, immune now to embarrassment.

‘Now go, please, Ma. You need the rest. Go on, the house is empty now; you can get a good bit of sleep and come back soon,’ Xiaojing said.

‘No. I’m not leaving him. Not again.’

‘
OK
. At least go and get yourself something to eat from the
canteen
,’ Xiaojing said.

Yuying sighed and got to her feet. ‘I suppose I don’t have a choice if I don’t want you to keep on at me. I’ll be back in a minute.’

She bent close to the bed, supporting her weak frame against the metal headboard, and whispered to her husband. He did not respond. She pulled on her heavy coat, replaced her slippers with her flat black shoes, and arranged her bag on her shoulder, delaying
leaving as long as possible, hoping for a sign that he had heard her before she went.

‘Don’t forget this,’ Liqui said, thrusting a mobile phone into her mother’s hands. ‘Just in case.’

Yuying nodded and wandered from the room, clutching the
fold-up
silver phone in her palm. Her own company frightened her – if she was not helping others, seeing herself through their eyes, then she was not sure who she was. The mobile beeped, and she fumbled with it, prising it open to see that it was low on battery and needed to be charged. She should have known that, she reminded herself. The messages she received on the phone were troubling; she could read them all right, but she was not sure how to reply, how to order the brush strokes on the numerals into a coherent sentence, and so the communication could only go one way. In fact, she considered, the whole damn beeping thing bothered her. Phones in houses were fine, the idea of buidings linked by wires tripping through the sky seemed clear to her: making a call was like completing an electrical circuit. But these disembodied gadgets seemed somehow ghostly – like storing a thousand captive voices in your pocket.

She lined up in the canteen in silence. When she remembered how she had once thought – how everyone had once thought – that by changing the way she acted she could help change the world, her lips strayed into a wry smile. Now every little thing she did, from cooking to whispering to washing to holding hands to arguing with doctors, she did to try to keep the world from changing. It was an impossible task, she thought, but that is what we Chinese are good at.

In one corner of the canteen was an old, battered television,
playing
out a traditional love story in the form of a soap opera. Tinny strings raced to a crescendo as the doe-eyed actors stared at each other. It was a story I’d heard a hundred times before – but then again, those are the best kind. Shall I tell it to you? After all, we can’t stay moping around at Jinyi’s bedside all day now, can we?

Zhu Yingtai’s family were as rich as they were conservative and traditional. Thus when, at the age of twelve, Zhu Yingtai asked her father if she could go to school, the old man did not know whether to burst out laughing or to retrieve his old walking cane to beat such foolish ideas out of his daughter once and for all. After a moment’s
deliberation, he chose the latter. However, the bruises across the back of her legs did not deter Zhu Yingtai. Ever since she had taught herself to read, she had spent her days looking through her father’s collection of classical tomes; while her sisters picked at their
needlework
, learnt how to prepare tea for visiting guests and attended to the silkworms, Zhu Yingtai was carefully turning crisp, inky pages, lost in the intricate brush-strokes. As was later to become tragically clear, she was not the type of person to give up her hopes without a fight.

She took a length of silk cloth and spun it tightly round her chest; she bit her nails down to the quick; she wriggled into a pair of straight trousers and pulled on a baggy jacket; she practised
sneering
and walking with her feet facing out and her hands swinging ape-like at her side; and she learnt how to hawk and spit. Finally, Zhu Yingtai took a deep breath and a pair of scissors and hacked off her long plait, until her hair was cropped close to her head. Then she climbed out of her bedroom window.

Yet instead of running away, she simply walked round to the front of the house and began to bang as loudly as she could at the gate. A flustered servant hauled the great wooden door open and peeked out.

‘I am an acquaintance of Old Zhu. Please direct me to his
chambers
,’ Zhu Yingtai said, as sonorously as she could.

The servant scuttled away and, on returning, beckoned her into the entrance chamber. She made an effort to sit with her legs splayed casually in front of her, and began to crack her knuckles as her father swept into the room. He stared down contemptuously at the odd-looking visitor before him.

‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Old Zhu asked. ‘Answer me, boy! What business do you have claiming to be an acquaintance of mine? Do you have a message for me, or are you a beggar here to waste both of our time?’

‘Do you not know me, then?’ she asked, pitching her voice as deep as possible.

‘Enough of this foolishness!’ he shouted. ‘I have never met you before in my life. Now get out of here before I set the guards on you!’

Zhu Yingtai began to approach Old Zhu. She cleared her throat, and spoke in her natural voice. ‘Father, look more closely. It is me, Yingtai.’

The old man peered into her eyes, and was suddenly rendered speechless.

‘Since I have fooled even you with my disguise, surely those who have never met me will also believe I am a boy. Therefore if you let me attend school dressed like this, there will be no risk of me bringing dishonour on the family. No one will recognise me for who I really am, and you can tell the neighbours that I am off
visiting
relatives in another province. What do you say, father? Please let me go to school.’