Chapter 20

Gi Changning's father saw the classmates off. He sent the uncle's wife home to sleep, since she had been up before dawn taking in stock and had worked half the day in the shop. Then he cleaned the place through and sterilised the bowls and chopsticks, and when all that was done he wiped the sweat off his forehead, shut the door, sat down behind the till and went carefully through the day's takings again.

Before long the calculator showed him a ridiculous number. Take away water and power, ingredients, wages, and it still made him suck in his breath.

He rubbed the display hard, as if he suspected he had hit a wrong key somewhere, and worked it out once more.

The number did not change.

He sat staring at it. He added the cash in the till to what had come in by QR code, and said nothing for a long time.

Out in the street people were calling their wares, car horns and motorbike engines crossing over each other. Inside the shop it was very quiet. To save power, the air conditioning had been switched off once everybody left.

Midday sun came in and spread over everything without asking. The specks of dust that hide in the dark were like his own muddled thoughts, with nowhere left to go in that light.

Even at rest his back stayed bent. He put his hands over his face like a man waking up, and a small choked sound came out of his throat.

Then he grabbed his phone, put his mask on, locked the door and pulled down the shutter. He walked fast to the bus, and got off in front of the biggest shopping centre in Pingchuan.

The ground floor was all clean glass and polished floor, the lights always on, soft music playing. It settled you without your noticing.

He went straight to a gold and silver counter. The brand was well known, one you saw on television adverts, and it had a good spot on the ground floor. The Chinese logo was grand, the gold pieces were beautiful, and the prices were for looking at from a distance. He passed one gold case after another without slowing, like a man who had done it before, and stopped at the silver case, which held very few pieces. He looked along it for a few seconds, then pointed a rough finger. "Hello. I want this one."

The sales assistant took a moment to catch up with him. "Sorry. What did you say?"

He was not impatient about it. "This one. Could you take it out and let me see it?"

She unlocked the case and lifted out a solid silver bangle. It was fairly wide, matt rather than shiny, cut all over with a pretty pattern of flowers in full bloom. The style was old-fashioned, and it had a good weight in the hand. Young people now want plain things and do not like so much pattern, so this one had sat in the case a long time. The assistant told him he had a good eye and praised the bangle, and then could not help asking, "Won't you look at anything else? We have new styles in and they sell very well."

"No. I want this one." He touched the pattern carefully and shook his head. Then he saw that he had not changed his clothes, that he had come out still wearing his apron. No wonder the people in the street and the assistant had both looked like they wanted to say something. It did not trouble him at all. A man who had kept his head down his whole life straightened his back, took the apron off slowly and laid it over his arm. "Sorry about that. I was in a hurry and forgot to change. You must think me a sight."

She smiled and said she understood. "Not at all. We have an offer on, so let me put the discount through and write it up. One moment. If you don't mind, you can join our members' scheme for nothing. There are two points events a year and you can exchange them for gifts. How will you be paying?"

"Scan." He had his phone out already and showed her the code. "Give it a polish for me, and put it in a good box. It's for my wife."

---

In the evening Gi Changning's mother came home from work and found a small box in the bedroom that had no business being there.

It was not big. The wrapping was fine, and on the lid was the logo of a jeweller nobody in that house would set foot in. She did not stop to change. She carried the box through to the kitchen. "Old Gi. Old Gi. Who bought this?"

He was pickling beans. He had put up several jars between the twelfth month and the first, and one day's trade had nearly emptied the one they kept in the shop. He thought they would run short, so he was doing a few more to have in reserve.

Gi Changning was on the sofa watching television, and answered for him, drawing it right out. "Dad bought it, obviously."

She had two silver pendants in her hand. One of them was going to Ji Ran tomorrow.

Exactly the same, the pair of them. Nobody could say he had favoured one girl over the other.

That upset her mother. She had not even opened the box. Jewellery is the last thing anybody needs, and that shop was known for good work and high prices. To open the restaurant they had already dipped into the money saved for Gi Changning's university. The shop had not paid itself back yet. How could he start spending like this?

"No, Old Gi. Have you got the receipt? Take it back tomorrow, first thing. What do I want with a thing like that? It's money thrown away."

He sealed the jar with water round the rim to keep the air out, washed his hands and dried them, put an arm round her shoulders and walked her into the bedroom. "Don't be cross yet, Qing. Look at it first and see if you like it. If you don't, I'll take it straight back."

She was about to lose her temper. He closed his hands round hers and opened the box with them, and there lay the silver bangle. He said it slowly. "Your mother gave you a bangle like this once. You sold it to pay for my treatment, and a gold chain and a gold bangle with it. I'm going to buy them back for you. One at a time."

He had been round a great many jewellers. Bangles that bold are out of fashion now, and the shop in the centre was the only one with anything near that pattern of flowers in full bloom. He had been afraid he would not find one at all.

As it turned out, he was not too late.

Her fingers were shaking.

Ten years lay between her and the last time she had seen that bangle. Her mother was dying, and had taken it off her own wrist, tarnished black, and put it on her daughter's. She wanted her girl's life to be like the pattern on it, flowers in full bloom. Life does not take orders. One by one she sold the pieces her mother had left her, all that love and all those good wishes, to buy her family a future she could see.

Could a future be bought? She was young then, and she did not know.

She only knew that she loved them. So she worked herself into the ground, and her thin shoulders turned overnight into the pillar holding up a house that was ready to fall.

She held it up for ten years.

Ten years is long enough to get used to a bare wrist with nothing on it to turn with your fingers. Long enough to be too busy to remember what her mother had told her. But in dreams at midnight she saw herself young, with a silver bangle on her wrist catching the light, so bright it hurt.

It had never once occurred to her that something she had forgotten completely was still being carried by somebody else.

What is gone cannot be mended. What is still coming can be.

Ten years of worry and confusion came out of her mouth as one short sentence. "Put it on me."

"Right." He slid the bangle onto her wrist, and smiled. "It looks lovely."

He thought of himself as a man who had carried nothing. He had failed his wife, failed his child, failed the household, and had got by in a low mood from one day to the next. What he could do was cook for them, since his hands were still worth something, and watching his family eat and be satisfied was the happiest he ever got.

People want to be needed.

He wanted it very badly.

After the burns one blow followed another, and he grew more and more aware of how people looked at him. His family was the only thing holding him in place. But his wife's patience, and a child who had grown up too fast, left him feeling he had failed at something he could not name.

Was he only holding them back?

Would they do better without him?

So when Gi Changning said they should open a shop of their own, half of him caught fire and the other half was cold water under ice. Money was tight already. What if the business was bad and they simply lost it? Ningning was in her second year. The university exams were a year off. What if there was no money to send her?

Was he going to go and ask the man who had raised his daughter? Ask the girl they had raised themselves? Ask the Ji family?

The Jis were good people and Ranran was a good girl. But he was not going to turn his own uselessness into somebody else's burden.

He was still arguing it out with himself when his wife put the bank card down in front of him, and that was that.

He went at it like a man who had burned his boats, carrying a mountain on his back. And it had turned out well.

Sitting there with the day's figures done, he thought he would take his time and get back what had been lost, one piece at a time.

There was plenty of time.

---

Upstairs on the second floor, the uncle's family.

The air conditioning hummed in the main bedroom. The uncle's wife had slept a lot during the day and was not tired yet. She sat cross-legged on the bed and told her husband how the day had gone at Four Seasons.

"Hongguang, you should have seen it. Ningning and Ranran's classmates worked like anything, and they're good-looking and well mannered with it." She clicked her tongue. "Girls are so thoughtful. Why didn't we get that bit of luck?"

Her husband laughed at her. "Don't say that in front of your son. He'll be jealous again."

"A great lad past twenty, jealous of a crowd of children. Gi Zhao may not be ashamed but I am." She was never gentle about her own son. Then she changed tack and sighed, and there was relief in it and something more complicated. "The way I see it, this shop of Hongcheng's is going to do. You're the elder brother. It's time you stopped worrying."

He had nothing to say to that.

The Gi brothers' father died young. Their mother held the house together, worked the fields alone, and raised the two of them.

An elder brother stands in for a father. He left school before finishing middle school and went home to farm. Farming depends on the weather, and a bad harvest makes a hard year, so he took work in the town and farmed alongside it.

When his younger brother grew up he got his licence and went into long-distance haulage with a friend, driving the big lorries. He was away for years at a stretch and hardly ever home. His brother was there to look after their mother, and he was young and strong, and he would earn well and move the whole family into the county town in style.

He did settle, as it happened. He married, he had a son, and he spent everything the driving had earned on a small block in Pingchuan. The demolition they were promised still has not come, but it is a building and it is a home.

He leaned back against the headboard with his wife against his shoulder. He did not smoke and he did not drink, but there was a faint smell of cigarettes on him now. A plain, honest man all his life, he sounded embarrassed. "I let Hongcheng down. And you've had to put up with it along with me."

All the years he was away it was his brother who looked after their mother, and his brother who nursed her through her illness without taking his clothes off at night. He was the eldest son and he kept missing his chances to be with her, because there was always time. Then there was not. He was ashamed of himself as the eldest, and when he heard his brother was moving to Pingchuan he paid that whole debt of guilt out to his brother's family.

"What nonsense." The uncle's wife was not from Pingchuan. She had met him through somebody while he was still on the long runs, married him, registered it, and settled in a city she did not know, and fitting in had not been all that hard. She did not care for soft talk, and she dug her elbow into his stomach. "Gi Hongguang, have some shame. Do you think I did it for you? I did it because I feel for Qing and Ran. Ningning."

Besides, all they had ever given was a roof out of the wind and rain, and nothing else. The younger brother was forever sending food up, and Qing made her two sets of clothes a year. You find out what people are like by living near them. Nobody is blind to who means it and who does not.

The swapped daughters still felt like yesterday's news. She had gone from not believing it to accepting it, and when she got worked up she still called the girls by the wrong names. She slapped her own mouth, and thought back to that afternoon, to Ji Ran calling her brother-in-law Dad.

Ji Ran was the same as ever. Quiet, with eyes you could see straight to the bottom of. No different at all.

And Gi Changning was the same as ever too, loud and careless and good at wheedling, as if Ji Ran saying Dad was the most ordinary thing in the world.

One girl all movement and one all stillness, and the pair of them fond of each other. As near sisters as makes no difference.

The uncle's wife burrowed down under the quilt and said, out of nowhere, "That's good."

Life is supposed to get better.

---

The shop settled into its routine. The cooking was good and new dishes kept appearing, and word of it spread through the streets around. The pickled beans especially could hardly be made fast enough. Some customers came in and ate often enough to be recognised purely so they could cheerfully ask for a bit of pickle to take home for their porridge.

The regulars had advice for him. Rent next door, knock through, make it one place. Then you would have the room.

All he could do was smile and say nothing.

Gi Changning helped out for a few days. Once she was satisfied the shop really was doing well, she spent the last days of the winter holiday meeting Meng Lai at the usual place.

She pushed open the door of the studio and found Meng Lai not stretching and not warming up, but spread flat on a yoga mat like a dried fish with no dreams left.

Gi Changning poked the fish in the cheek. "Wow. Have you run out of battery?"

What had taken all the air out of her?

Meng Lai did not move a muscle of her face. "Take a good look at me, Ning. There'll be fewer and fewer chances."

"What? Are you about to go and meet your maker?"

"Worse than that." She still did not move, and she sounded wronged and furious. "The Empress Dowager at my house has been listening to every aunt on both sides plus a crowd of gossiping old men, and she has taken away my right to dance."

Is there any difference between no dancing and meeting your maker?

There is not.