Chapter 12

Ji Ran had wanted to know about Gi Changning's past for some time. She could not ask Gi Changning, and her father and her brother both seemed to steer round it whether or not they meant to, so the only person left was her aunt.

Liang Cheng had no intention of hiding any of it. She sighed, and her voice dropped and filled with something close to helplessness. "The year my sister died, Ningning wasn't two yet and Changfeng was boarding at middle school. Your father went completely to pieces. He wouldn't look at the company or the children. Ningning was too small to be left, so they hired a nanny, and one day the nanny went home early without telling anyone. Ningning crawled about hungry. It was a Friday, thank God, and Changfeng came home from school and found his sister crying so hard she had hiccups, and made up a bottle of formula somehow."

That day Ji Changfeng had a terrible row with his father. Mr Ji was eaten up with guilt, and with Liang Zhi no longer there to smooth anything over he dug in on his authority as a father and would not admit he had been wrong to a child. The next day he fetched the children's grandmother up from the country to look after them.

Something went tight in Ji Ran's chest. She could see it. One small thing going differently, a fall, a socket, and there would have been no undoing it. Ji Ran had not grown up with money, but her parents' love came with nothing held back, and the safety of it was what kept pushing her forward.

"It was his fault," Ji Ran said firmly. "He had no right to put his feelings onto Ningning."

Liang Cheng understood that perfectly well. "It was his fault. Your grandmother gave him an enormous telling-off about it afterwards, and all that did was drive him from one extreme to the other. With her there doing everything for the children, he put every scrap of himself into the company and didn't come home for ten days, a fortnight at a time. When he finally did, Ningning didn't know who he was."

After that it only got worse. Mr Ji was frightened of the way his daughter looked at him. Being looked at like a stranger made him less able to answer it, and by the time he realised this could not go on and that he would have to build something with her, it was too late.

Ji Ran, standing outside it, could work out most of her father's mind from those few sentences. Under the blow of losing his wife he had wanted nothing but to wrap himself up, hear nothing and see nothing, and he had run from everything connected to her, which included the children.

Life is not the line about running away being shameful but useful. What is between a parent and a child is not only blood. It is kept alive by talking to each other.

Liang Cheng went on. "Because your mother was a dancer, your grandmother put Ningning into ballet at three. The old lady knew nothing about dance. She did it because ballet classes are full of little girls, and she wanted to find the child some company her own age."

Sometimes what children say without thinking does the most damage.

The other children at ballet were dropped off and collected by their parents. Gi Changning had only her grandmother. One of the busybodies asked whether she had a mother and father at all. At first Gi Changning cried. In time she got used to life without a mother and father, and anyone who raised it got hit. If she could not win, she waited, and when Ji Changfeng came home for the holidays she got her brother to settle it for her.

"She must have been five or six, I can't remember exactly. Your grandmother complained to me about it." Liang Cheng said, "Your father came home and found Ningning dancing in her ballet costume, and went up like a rocket. He forbade her to go on with it, and nothing your grandmother said made any difference. Ningning's character was already showing by then."

She would push back, Ji Ran thought.

She had. "Ningning couldn't pull her hand out of his," Liang Cheng said, "and she shouted at him, who are you, what gives you the right."

Gi Changning was a child, and what she liked and did not like was written on her. A man who had never been in your life and had never done anything a father does, and whose first sentence to you is that you have to give up the thing you love. Who would stand for it?

Gi Changning was never going to stand for it.

A child's voice has a particular sharpness, and it went into Mr Ji like a blade and turned.

Liang Cheng got out her phone and brought up a photograph from her cloud. A kindly old woman, broad and comfortable, grey-haired, in a floral blouse and black trousers, sitting on a stone bench in a garden and smiling into the camera. "That's your grandmother. She had an easy way about her and a smile for everyone. Ningning was raised by her and loved her very much. She died of an illness when Ningning was eleven, and your father didn't get there in time to see her."

The break between Gi Changning and her father turned on that death.

The old woman went into hospital, and by the end she was wasted to nothing. She grew confused and stopped recognising people, and still hid a sweet in a scrap of printed cloth to keep for Gi Changning. In her last hours she murmured her only son's childhood name, over and over, and never got what she asked for.

She died with tears on her face.

It cut Gi Changning to pieces. She hated him to the limit of hating, and never gave that man another decent look. In the house it was a cold war, and over dance it was open warfare, and the Ji home was a small battlefield with no peace in it except when Ji Changfeng was there.

Then Liang Cheng said something almost nobody knew. "Your father didn't stay away. He couldn't get there."

Ji Ran looked at her.

Liang Cheng met her eyes. "Acute appendicitis. When your grandmother died he was on an operating table."

---

The end of November brought hard winds. The city village had no heating pipes, and the Gis' one small air conditioner was in the second bedroom, so the main bedroom got by on an electric heater.

Gi Changning warmed her hands at it and went through Jinghong's requirements for the costume with her mother. "That's all of it, I think. She says if it turns out well she'll add to the balance."

Her mother wrote the requirements and the measurements down. "There's enough money. She doesn't need to pay a balance."

Then she smiled. "Nobody has ever paid me that much to make something."

She had made clothes before. In the days before people bought things online, you got a length of cloth and had a tailor make it up. It did not need much design, only to wear well, and it was a good deal cheaper than buying ready-made. Most of what came her way was a pair of trousers or a shirt, and more often a button sewn back on or a hem taken up, for a couple of yuan for her trouble.

Gi Changning pulled her mother over to the heater to warm up with her, and something turned over in her. She asked carefully, "Mum. A friend of mine wants to buy a hoodie like the one you made me. What do you think it's worth?"

Her mother said, as if it were obvious, "I'm not charging your friend. Give me her measurements and I'll make another one. It's no trouble."

"You can't do that. She can't have it for nothing." Gi Changning counted on her fingers. "Cloth, design, labour. It's all money, isn't it? She said two hundred wouldn't be unreasonable for mine."

"Two hundred?" Her mother was horrified. "Nothing like that. Fifty for the cloth is plenty."

And then, "That friend of yours online as well. It won't come to anything like five hundred. When I've finished I'll work out what it cost and you give her the rest back. I'm not having her out of pocket."

Gi Changning understood deeply that her own mother had no idea what she could do. "Mum. If somebody's willing to pay you, stop pushing it away. She is not going to be out of pocket."

"You can't talk like that. Nobody earns money easily."

"You don't earn it easily either." Gi Changning put both hands on her mother's shoulders. "Take the money and don't worry about it. If it comes out well I'll have her talk about you online, and then we do commissions, and the money comes rolling in. Better than leaving at dawn and getting back at night, isn't it?"

Her mother looked at how serious her daughter was and could only nod. Except that she did not go to work only for the wage. There was the insurance, and as long as the mill stood, the family had something fixed under it, which let her sleep.

Still, Ningning had given her another thought. If the orders really came, she could apply to go down to eight-hour shifts and sew at home in the evening, main job and side job together, and perhaps they could move somewhere with heating.

Winter was so cold. It was better to be warm.

---

It was nearly midnight. Liang Cheng let out a breath, and the thin cloud of it opened in front of her as though years of the past and the weight of it were going with it.

Outside the villa, Liang Shuo rubbed his eyes, curled uncomfortably against his father, smacked his lips and wiped a handful of dribble down his father's chest.

Liang Cheng took him and settled him on the back seat, and said to the Ji men and Ji Ran, "That's enough, go in. It's getting colder and I'm not having our Ranran freeze. When I've a free day, dinner is on me."

Ji Ran nodded obediently. "Yes."

The headlights came on with a thump and cut into the dark.

Liang Cheng wound the window down and looked back at the villa, and said suddenly, "Jiawen, stop the car."

He did not know what for, and stopped. Before he could ask, his wife had the door open and was running back to the villa door, calling to Mr Ji as he was about to go in. "Wait a moment."

Mr Ji stopped, waved Ji Changfeng and Ji Ran on, and walked back to her.

Liang Cheng was not tall, not beside her sister. She looked up at him. Fifteen years had turned a young man full of fire into someone a long way into middle age. She still remembered her brother-in-law proposing and promising her sister they would put her through school together. Liang Cheng had her own family now, introduced by a colleague and settled through matchmaking. There had been no great romance in it, only the slow steady warmth, and the small life the two of them had made was growing, and everything was going the right way.

Only her brother-in-law. His time was running on and his heart had stopped fifteen years ago. He would miss his wife for ever and love Liang Zhi for ever, who had given him more joy and more pain than he could count.

Liang Zhi could be sister, mother, wife, dancer, all of it. In Mr Ji's head she would always be Liang Zhi.

Only Liang Zhi.

Liang Cheng held the tears back. "There are things I couldn't say before. If I don't say them now, nobody will."

He seemed to feel what was coming. He pulled his mouth into something like a smile. "Go on."

"You can't spend your life waiting for other people to feel it with you and understand you." Her lips moved before the words came. "Not Changfeng, not Ningning, not Ranran. It's been all these years. None of us deserved to owe you."

Mr Ji said nothing for a long time, and then his shoulders dropped all at once and he put a hand over his face. "You're right. You're right."

It was obvious enough, and he had not seen through it until tonight.

Fifteen years, and the house had not been a home, and every bit of it started with his own stubbornness. If only. If only.

Time goes one way. Where is there an if only?

Liang Cheng had said the thing she had been holding, and she smiled. "I feel better for saying it. It isn't too late. I'm going."

The car pulled away.

In the driver's seat, Gou Jiawen was uncharacteristically nosy. "Cheng. What did you say to him?"

"Nothing much." She sat in the back stroking her son's soft hair, and looked up at the side of her husband's face. "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Ji Ran stood at the door watching her father's back, and somehow found a stoop in it. Liang Cheng had gone, and in all that bleakness he stood there on his own, and a line of verse came into Ji Ran's head.

A life between heaven and earth, gone as suddenly as a traveller far from home.

Something told her not to disturb him.

Ji Ran went up to her room, where the photograph album lay on the desk. Liang Cheng had left it for her on purpose.

Before she went, Liang Cheng had asked what Ji Ran wanted to read at university, and whether it was still medicine.

Ji Ran had not answered. She had thought about medicine and about computing, and since coming to the Jis her father had put out a feeler or two about business school and running the company one day.

When she had no choices, Ji Ran could go at one thing with her whole mind and never look sideways. With choices in front of her, she was dazzled by them and could not decide.

Liang Cheng had not wanted an answer on the spot. She pulled out a photograph, turned it over to a line written in biro, pointed at it and said, "Ranran. Medicine takes real conviction. I don't mean you have to do medicine. I mean that what you actually want matters more than anything else."

Ji Ran found the photograph. The woman in it had a high belly and a face gone round, her hair tied back, a small bunch of grapes in one hand and the other up in a peace sign. The light was good and the summer green behind her made the loveliest background, and her smile was brighter than the sun.

She turned it over.

The biro had faded a little, and the writing was still light and quick on its feet, the way she had seemed to everyone who knew her.

All our lives we are working to get free of other people's expectations and find who we really are.

For my baby, who hasn't got a name yet. Liang Zhi.