Chapter 15

On Monday, once Gi Changning had gone to school and his wife to work, her father cleaned everywhere except Gi Changning's room until it shone, boiled a kettle, and got the washing out onto the balcony.

The washing machine had come with them from their old home, an old model that used far too much water, and being small it could only take light things. Padded coats and down jackets in winter were all done by hand.

With that out of the way he checked the time. Ten o'clock. He wiped his forehead and rang a number. "Brother? It's me. Don't you and my sister-in-law buy lunch, I'll make something and bring it over. It's no trouble. Right. I'll hang up."

He rested a few minutes, then went to the kitchen, put on his apron and took out a piece of pork belly with the layers clean through it, a handful of green beans and a few coils of noodles.

Food went quiet in his hands and was dealt with in no time. He heated the oil, put in spring onion and ginger, then the pork belly cut thin. The fat came slowly out of it and the slices turned brown and clear, and he was in no hurry at all, adding the vegetables and the seasonings in their order, then spreading the noodles evenly over the top and putting the lid on to steam.

While that was going he cut half a winter melon for soup, seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper, and at the last minute put in coriander, spring onion and sesame oil, and a soft fragrance came gently up. He poured himself a bowl and tipped the rest into a flask and sealed it.

By then the noodles were done. The moment the lid came off the smell went up like something detonating. He took a careful breath of it, was satisfied, filled two insulated bowls with most of it and stood them beside the soup flask. Then he ate his own at speed, washed up fast, picked up the flasks and set off with his brother's lunch.

The elder uncle had rented a stall for years in the biggest vegetable market in Pingchuan. He had plenty of regulars and did well enough. On a weekday the crowds are thinner, and he and his wife were sorting out the vegetables that were past their best to sell at half price, while he worked his way through a cucumber that had gone soft.

The stallholder beside him was eating steamed buns with raw garlic. Near midday with no customers, the small traders go out for something to eat. He looked at the half cucumber in the uncle's hand, put two buns in a plastic bag and held them out. "Gi Hongguang, you've not eaten, have you? Have a couple of buns."

The uncle waved him off. "You haven't got enough for yourself. My brother's bringing me lunch in a minute."

At the word lunch the chewing beside him slowed right down. The buns went quietly back, and his voice filled with envy. "Your brother's bringing you lunch again."

The Gi brother's cooking was not famous across the city, exactly, but it had a name in that market. What he made, well. The smell alone carried a few hundred metres, and sometimes it pulled customers in off the aisle. Privately there were any number of stallholders who drooled over it.

Just then he came up at a brisk walk with a flask in each hand, in an old padded coat, mask and hat on, and handed them over. "Brother. Sister-in-law."

She took them quickly. "Sit down a minute, you'll be tired. I've put some tomatoes aside, take a couple."

He did not stand on ceremony. He found the folding stool where he knew it would be and sat with his hands in his sleeves, his voice muffled by the mask. "Thank you, but I won't eat."

"If you won't eat them, take them home for Qing and Ningning." She had the tomatoes in a bag in no time, and a good deal of other veg besides. "They're here. Don't forget them when you go."

He smiled his slow smile. "I'll remember. Thank you."

The uncle had the little folding table out. Years of selling vegetables had taught them to keep cutlery on them, so there were bowls and chopsticks. He put the flasks on the table. "What is it today?"

"Nothing much." He pointed at each. "Winter melon soup. Braised noodles with green beans."

That pleased his brother. "Braised noodles. I'll go and peel some garlic, that's my favourite."

His wife sat down at the little table and opened the soup. Coriander and spring onion floated on the clear broth, cut fine, and the steam came up at exactly the right temperature to eat.

The soup smelled fresh rather than strong. The noodles were another matter. The second the lid came off, the savoury smell went off like a bomb and your mouth watered before you decided to. The pork belly was brown and translucent, the beans soft with some snap left, and every strand of noodle had taken up the sauce and gone a pale brown with it. The beans were clean-tasting, the noodles had bite, the pork was rich without being heavy, and one mouthful settled you from the inside out.

The man next door with the buns found his head drifting towards the smell. He bit glumly into his garlic and felt that even a pure pork bun had lost its appeal. "Why haven't I got a brother who can cook?"

The uncle lifted his bowl on purpose and swung it under his neighbour's nose. "Want some? You can't have any."

His wife picked up an outer cabbage leaf and threw it at her husband's leg. "Can't you eat without talking?"

Then she found a disposable box and a pair of disposable chopsticks and shared some of the noodles out. "Don't listen to him. There's plenty, we'll never finish it. Help us out?"

He was delighted, and grabbed two handfuls of pak choi off his own stall. "Thank you. I've nothing much here. Two bunches of pak choi for your brother."

She did not refuse, and tucked them into the bag to go home with him.

The neighbour put the noodles away in a few mouthfuls with his garlic, which left the big meat buns he had just bought tasting of nothing. He sighed. "With cooking like that, it's a crime you haven't got a shop."

Gi Hongcheng said something modest, and something turned over in him, as if a seed were about to come up through the soil.

When the meal was over he gathered up the flasks. The food and the soup were gone, with barely a scraping left in the bottom. He paused. What his daughter and his wife had said came up in him unbidden. He swallowed, and said suddenly, "Brother. Sister-in-law. Do you think I could make money out of this?"

His brother stopped, worked out what he meant, and thumped him hard on the back with a grin he could not hide. "Of course you could. Ask this greedy article next door. If you sold food he'd be first in the queue."

The greedy article, finishing his last bun with no joy in it and washing it down with water, thought back to those noodles and said with real feeling, "If you're serious, forget queueing. I'll bring a crowd of lads to fill the place."

"Actually." His wife thought of something. "Old Yang and his wife, outside the market, the ones who fry the dough sticks. Their son's had a baby and they're going to the capital before New Year, and the word is that once it's settled they won't come back to Pingchuan. The shop may go up for transfer. Hongcheng, if you're minded, I'll ask what the rent is."

There were two Gi brothers. The elder was Gi Hongguang, the younger Gi Hongcheng.

He thought for a few seconds and made up his mind. "All right. If you would."

---

The end of December. After Christmas comes New Year's Day. Nobody had got round to taking the bright Christmas trees down and the shopping centres were already up in red lanterns for the next one.

Ji Ran got home from school to the dark sitting room she expected.

With the year ending the company was busy. The two of them were home in the middle of the night and gone very early, and all Ji Ran saw when she got up was breakfast in a flask and no sign of either of them. For several days running they simply slept at the office. The late supper she made went untouched, and the same hotel delivered breakfast without fail.

In all that house there was only Ji Ran, and it was enormously empty.

She put her bag down. Tomorrow was Saturday and the homework was not urgent. She looked out of the window, where the ash trees stood bare in the distance and the street lights turned them into monsters with their claws up.

A loneliness with no edge to it settled over her.

Ji Ran took her phone, put her coat on and went out.

The box hedge and the pines carried a thin layer of frost that broke the light into pieces. She walked slowly out of Jinhua Gardens, through the ash trees, into the city village, and stopped below the Gis' block.

She looked up. The little attic had its lights on, the warm white of a bare bulb coming through the curtains, and the kitchen window was open, and she could hear talking and the smell of cooking she knew.

She breathed it in. Cold air and the complicated smell of a wok together. She stood on the dark side of the street light looking up, greedy for it, her breath opening white in front of her so she could not see clearly.

Gi Changning was sitting quietly in her room. On the desk beside her was a sheet of paper, badly crumpled, the ink on it illegible, thrown away a good while ago by the look of it. She smoothed it out. From the size and the ruled lines she guessed it was half a sheet of notepaper, with a lot of numbers on it, and she held a pen and worked at copying the writing out.

The Gis went in for a big clean. With New Year's Day coming, Gi Changning had finally, with her mother's help, got her room turned out, under the bed, the corners, the ceiling, every blind spot included. She had found the paper under the desk, dropped in an awkward place, in exactly the corner the eye skips. She had assumed it was her own rough paper until she opened it.

It was far too old for that, and thick with dust. It had been lying in that corner at least six months.

Not hers. So Ji Ran's?

The thought went round once, and curiosity won. She wiped the dust off with a tissue and set about deciphering it.

The handwriting was not neat, a flowing joined-up hand, and Gi Changning wrote joined-up herself, so copying the strokes was not hard.

At the end she looked at what she had reconstructed, and the gel pen bled a dark spot into the paper. She understood, and something seemed to hit her out of nowhere, hard enough that every part of her began to ache.

She dropped the pen and went to the window, and it took several goes to get the iced frame open. The cold came in all at once across her face.

She breathed in and out a few times, braced her hands on the sill, and her hair, which had got longer, hung down on either side and hid whatever was in her face.

A figure came into her view.

The street light pulled the shadow long. It was far enough off that she could not judge height or tell man from woman, and still Gi Changning seemed to know. She grabbed her down jacket off the wall and went out of the door like a lunatic, leaving her parents calling after her, down the stairs and running hard, and caught up with that shape she knew. Dragging in air, she shouted, "Ji Ran!"

Ji Ran turned.

With the sprint over, Gi Changning's calf had cramped. She walked the rest and the two of them looked at each other without speaking. Then, getting her breath back, she asked, "Those two aren't home again, are they?"

Ji Ran nodded. "No. It's very quiet."

"Those two and their money, which never runs out." Gi Changning's face was flat and her voice was colder than the air. "You can give them everything you've got and there will never be a day when they give it back."

Ji Ran said evenly, "They have given it back."

"You can't lie to me." Gi Changning cut across her and pointed back at the attic. "If those two gave you enough, you would not be standing out here in this cold."

The answer stuck in Ji Ran's throat.

"That house. That little attic." Gi Changning's voice climbed. "It's poor, it's cramped, it isn't as rich as the Jis and it's nothing beside that great villa in Jinhua, and you still can't let it go. Look at me, Ji Ran. What is it you're missing out here? Something those two can't give you."

Love.

Ji Ran had grown up soaked in it.

So she gave it willingly. But however much love there is, there comes a point when it tires and runs out.

Love goes both ways. The Gis could give it back at any hour of any day. From the Ji men there was not enough coming back, and Ji Ran's sense of safety was sliding, and she was lonely and unsure, and missed her old home all the more for it.

"Ranran, we weren't born to live for other people." Gi Changning closed her eyes. "Can we talk?"