Chapter 24

Gi Changning's finger was on the sensor. Hearing the lock go, she slapped her own ear in disbelief and wanted an answer at once. "Did it open? Did the door open?"

Meng Lai nodded. "It opened. Are we going in?"

Going in?

Gi Changning jumped, shot out a hand faster than thought, caught the handle and slammed the door shut again.

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

She leaned back out of range. "Are you doing the thing where a man walks past his own front door and won't go in?"

"There's no past about it. Once at most." Gi Changning got out her phone, unlocked it and opened her messages to Ji Ran. "Anyway it isn't my house. If I let myself in that's breaking and entering, isn't it?"

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

One of them hadn't deleted the other from the system, and the other unlocked the door and wouldn't go through it. She did not entirely understand the relationship between these two.

---

Inside, Ji Ran was ready to greet Gi Changning, and watched the door close again in front of her.

She had no idea what was going on. Three question marks rose slowly over her head.

What was that?

She went over, suspicious, and opened the door.

Outside stood Gi Changning with her phone in both hands, Ji Ran's message window on the screen, typing. At the sound of the door her hand jerked and she hit send.

The phone in Ji Ran's trouser pocket buzzed.

She took it out and read "I'm at the door", and looked at Gi Changning, and Gi Changning looked back.

Silence. Silence was Jinhua Gardens today.

Ji Ran did not follow. She spoke first. "Gi Changning. You opened the door. Why didn't you come in?"

Gi Changning put her screen out and looked left and right and anywhere except at Ji Ran, with none of the confidence she had had with Meng Lai, and her voice got quieter as it went. "Well, I can't just break in, can I?"

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She did not know whether to laugh. "How is coming home breaking in?"

With that she found slippers for them and hurried the pair of them inside before they froze.

At coming home, said with no hesitation anywhere in it, Gi Changning looked round at her. There was nothing troubled in her face. There was a soft amusement in it. Gi Changning looked once and turned straight away again, rubbed the reddening tips of her own ears and muttered something only she could hear.

Ji Ran did not catch it. "Sorry?"

"Nothing." Gi Changning changed into the slippers, and as she lifted her head she stopped where she stood.

Was this the Ji house?

The first month was not over and the year still felt new. There was a great Chinese knot hanging in the living room and pretty paper cuts on the windows, one of them already curling at a corner with nobody bothering to fix it. And somehow it was exactly that which made you feel the curl was how it ought to be, and better still if a little dust settled on it, so that when it fell on its own somebody could sweep it into the bin. Better than staying new forever with nothing human about it.

The floor that used to shine like a mirror had changed completely at some point, and now carried rugs in a lot of colours, the patterns simple and rough and old, the sort that make you want to sit straight down on the ground and talk loudly and eat and sing and dance.

The living room that used to be so empty looked smaller. A heavy massage chair stood in it, taking up space with great authority and not matching the rest of the room at all. There was a towel slung over the back of it, which told you it was much loved.

Further in, the sofa had a soft throw over it with gold tassels swinging off the edge, and square cushions scattered about, fat and round, some of them stacked up with a plump, daft-looking chinchilla sitting on top.

The coffee table, which was always clean and bare, had two little pots of succulents in the middle, small clumps huddled together. Beside them was not a fine porcelain cup but a book. Its owner had got halfway and gone off and not put it back in the study, just laid it face down on the table, as if he had only stepped out and would be back shortly and there was nothing to tidy.

Which was in fact the case. Her brother had been reading it that morning. Wang Zengqi's Grass and Trees of This World.

Even the reading had the smell of cooking about it.

Was this the Ji house?

She thought about it. It was the Ji house, except that New Year here used to be a formality. You put the couplets up and ate the family dinner. Once her brother started working she got three red envelopes, one from her aunt Liang Cheng and two from the Ji men, and the men's were stuffed fat, and she used the money to go about with friends over the holiday. The Ji house, quieter still, laid out melon seeds and nuts in neat rows, and the family who came to pay New Year calls had plenty of such things at home and did not touch them, and in the end Gi Changning ate the lot herself.

There was always a low pressure in that house that came from nowhere you could point at. Gi Changning did not care what her father thought. She would rather fill her own room with eye-watering colours and shut herself in it alone than spend one ounce of thought on improving a house that looked like a show flat.

The Jis are permanently awkward. They are too shy to say love out loud and hope that somebody will read the true thing buried under all that coolness. The two Ji men were like that, and so was Gi Changning.

And now there had come among them a Ji Ran who had been raised inside love, and directly and quietly, the way water soaks in, she had broken open that invisible shell and let the soft thing underneath show.

Gi Changning could use the eye and the contacts she had built up to find her parents a living. She would never have taken it on herself to change the Jis. That was something only Ji Ran could do.

---

It was not Meng Lai's first visit. In the years before they rented the studio Gi Changning often had her over, because the house was big enough and the two Ji men were out working, so the two of them could do whatever they liked. A good many of their routines were first worked out in that villa.

Empty, quiet and large. That was Meng Lai's main impression of the Ji house.

Half a year, and all of it had changed.

She stole a look at Gi Changning. They had been dance partners for years and she could tell from one look what was going on in that girl's head. Meng Lai shrugged and decided to leave her to it, and turned instead and held out, with no shyness at all, the cakes she had carried the whole way. "Hello, Ranran. I'm Meng Lai. Thank you for coaching me."

They were wrapped the old way, a square of brown waxed paper round them, the shop's name printed on a square of bright red, and the string tied in a bow you could hook a finger through. Pushed at you like that, you could smell the sweetness coming off them.

Ji Ran used to tutor primary school children, and some parents would cut up fruit for her to share with the child. Nobody had ever given her cakes with that much ceremony. Her face stalled visibly. She blinked, at a loss, and pushed them back. "There's no need for this, surely."

"There is, there is. In the old days you took your teacher a proper gift. Cakes is already embarrassing." Meng Lai pushed them back again, since there is no sense in carrying a present home, and talked on and on in the manner she had learned from her mother. "This is the layer cake the place by us is known for. Thirty years in business. I've eaten them since I was little. They're incredible. I queued for ages."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She had never met a sales pitch of this kind and could not find a gap to get a word into, so she held the cakes helplessly and asked, "Ningning says you need a hundred in maths in the test after the holiday?"

"That's right. Out of a hundred and fifty." Meng Lai relaxed properly once Ji Ran took the cakes. She had felt it was wrong to arrive empty-handed and had not been able to think what to bring, and then saw the rest of the layer cake on the table at home and thought food was always safe, and went down to queue. She had asked for the old-fashioned wrapping on purpose. Much more formal.

"A test after the holiday is generally not hard," Ji Ran said, holding the cakes. "Why don't you do a paper in a bit, and I'll see where you're weak, and we'll go at that. How's that?"

Meng Lai drew in a breath. It was not the paper that worried her, it was the words not hard. She waved a hand about and asked carefully, "Ranran. Is your not hard and my not hard the same not hard?"

Gi Changning had come back to herself at some point, with her face smoothed out as if she had put down a prejudice she had carried for years. She wandered over, lifted a shoulder and knocked it gently against Meng Lai's. "You've been told to do a paper. Why all the talk?"

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

She was only trying to assess the gap between herself and a genius.

Ji Ran watched the pair of them and pressed her lips together on a smile. "Come on. Upstairs to the study. It's all basic questions."

The study on the first floor is reached past the bedrooms. Going by one of the doors Gi Changning's step visibly checked, and then she carried on as if nothing had happened.

Ji Ran had printed the paper out in advance, and gave it to Meng Lai with some blank A4 for working. "Start now. When you've finished I'll look at it. There are pens here if you haven't got one."

"I've got one." Meng Lai took a pen out of her bag, and seeing only one paper, and none for Gi Changning, asked, "Isn't Gi Changning doing it?"

Ji Ran shook her head. "She's done it once."

Before the end-of-term exams she had set Gi Changning a paper to test whether the coaching was working, and the result was unexpectedly good. According to Gi Changning, one of the fill-in-the-blanks had even come up in the real thing.

The sight of the paper made Gi Changning slap her own forehead. She took a notebook out of her bag and handed it over. "I did the last paper again. Have another look for me, Ranran."

Ji Ran took it. She was used to marking and explaining at the same time, but Meng Lai was doing a paper in the study and talking would disturb her. She thought about it and said, "I'll take Gi Changning away and go through this with her. Will you be all right doing the paper on your own?"

Meng Lai was treating the paper as an exam, and in an exam hall with one candidate, where the invigilator offers to leave and stop staring at you, there is not much to decide. She gave a delighted thumbs up. "No problem at all. I absolutely will not cheat."

Ji Ran laughed. "Good. I believe you."

Before she went she said again, "Call me if you need anything, or message Ningning."

Meng Lai drew it out. "Don't worry, Teacher Ji."

Outside the study Ji Ran saw Gi Changning's eyes resting on one of the doors, with something in them that was part memory and part regret. Ji Ran smiled, and with the notebook in her hand asked, "Want to go in and look?"

Gi Changning nodded before she could stop herself, and then shook her head. "No need."

Before she had finished, Ji Ran had the door open. "I ought to apologise, actually. I went into your room without asking."

There was a breath of air like a small wind, lifting strands of both girls' hair.

Gi Changning's breath caught. She stared at a room that seemed unchanged and seemed utterly turned over, and found her feet carrying her through the door.

The mess she had left behind had been put in order. The loud out-of-date posters had been stuck up again, their yellowing edges reinforced with a layer of glue that held them tight to the wall in a slightly buckled way, with a ripple in them here and there.

The carpet under her feet was still sky blue. The pale gold curtains were drawn right back and the sun came through the glass without asking, and the warm light fell on the fluorescent pink bedding and the lemon yellow quilt folded in a neat block, so that the brightness seemed turned down a few notches and the eye-watering effect dropped several grades. If it were not for the clear dust sheet over the bed, she would have thought she had only gone out and could come back whenever she liked.

The magazines that used to lie about the shelves were in order by issue number, with a cloth cactus beside them for decoration. One shelf held the single-volume comics that are now a mark of their era, some with the colour gone from the covers, some with pages shed from being passed round, and they had come through all that time and stood there like old friends.

Gi Changning found herself drawn to the shelves. At the level of her eyes stood a row of photographs in frames of different sizes.

The one in the middle was an old woman with a kind face, sitting on a stone bench in a garden. Plump, in a sprigged shirt of an unmistakable period, her short grey hair lifting a little behind her in the wind. She must have smiled constantly, because the corners of her mouth turned up on their own and there were deep laughter lines at her eyes. Her clouded eyes looked straight into the camera, as curious as a child's.

Gi Changning rubbed her palm hard on her clothes twice, made sure there was not a trace of damp on it, and picked the frame up carefully by the edge. She traced the old woman's outline with a finger, and then pulled the photograph in against her chest, trying to put some warmth into a cold fixed image, and at last let out a long breath.

Out from the middle, the photographs varied. Liang Zhi as a young woman dancing Zhu Yingtai on stage. A newborn Gi Changning putting out a hand and closing it round her mother's finger. A small Ji Changfeng hanging over the side of a cot watching Gi Changning blow bubbles in her sleep. Her father in his prime with his left hand on his wife's shoulder and his elder son on his right arm, a tiny Gi Changning sucking her thumb in her mother's lap, and her grandmother, still well, shaking a rattle at the baby. And the photograph of her first time on stage, dancing Swan Lake.

Her eyes stopped on the one at the far end. The angle was odd, shot from below looking up, as if whoever took it was not tall. In it her father carried a daft-looking little person on his broad shoulders. The little person had hold of his short hair and was grinning triumphantly at whoever was behind the camera, showing a mouthful of baby teeth that had not all come in.

Ji Ran said quietly, "My brother says Mum was still alive and the family had just got a digital camera, and he insisted on taking your picture. You wouldn't have it and kept crying, and you only laughed when Dad lifted you up high."

Gi Changning looked at the small child grinning foolishly and could not help grinning back. It was a past she had no memory of at all. The family in a flat that was not very big, her father's hair still black and thick, nothing in his face to worry about.

How is a frozen moment supposed to know what is coming?

"You can't fit many photographs on a shelf." Ji Ran stood by the desk and pulled out a drawer, showing a thick album inside. "Luckily they were on film in those days, and the memory card from the camera they bought later hadn't gone bad either. They printed up clear."

She paused, then said, with a small laugh, as though she had just thought of it, "You were rather sweet, when you were little."

Gi Changning put the frame, warm now from her chest, back in the middle, and wiped the misting off the glass with her sleeve. She asked quietly, "Why?"

Why keep the room. Why do any of these things, which from outside look like no use to anybody.

"The rugs downstairs were my brother. The cushions and the succulents Dad brought home. I won the chinchilla in a prize draw at the shopping centre before New Year." Ji Ran did not answer it head on. She came and stood beside her. "Dad picked the photographs for the shelf and my brother stuck the posters back up. But I did the room."

"Because I was thinking that if you came home one day and saw it like this, it might make you a bit happy."

Gi Changning turned round sharply and hugged her tight without a word, and asked, not for the first time, "Ranran. Where do you get it from, being a saint?"

Never complaining, always moving forward.

Gi Changning could not work out what had been in Ji Ran's head at the time. These were the things Gi Changning herself had not wanted, and Ji Ran had put them back one at a time, like a pair of hands that are soft and boneless and also hard as iron, piecing the broken old days of the Ji family back together bit by bit, and giving Gi Changning her own past to hold and finishing what had been left unfinished.

It turned out the Jis were not incapable of changing. They had only missed a very great deal, and now at last there was a chance to get it back piece by piece.

How does the world come to have somebody like Ji Ran in it, Gi Changning thought.

She had been looked down on and treated unfairly and bullied at school, and her whole family had been turned upside down, and she still had it in her to reach out and pull somebody else up.

Ji Ran was knocked back two steps. There was a familiar soap smell about the girl, the washing liquid Gi Changning's mother always used. Ji Ran's eyes softened and she teased her. "Perhaps Ning did a lot of good deeds in a past life."

They were born the same year, the same month and the same day, and by the true times of birth Gi Changning really is a few hours older.

"Hmph." Gi Changning was not satisfied with that answer and did not let go either, and grumbled into Ji Ran's ear, "You weren't sweet at all when you were little."

Before her father's accident the Gis had done well enough, and there were a great many photographs, which they brought with them to Pingchuan and kept at the bottom of a cupboard. Gi Changning had seen Ji Ran as a child, studio portraits and snapshots both.

Ji Ran's eyes widened slightly.

Gi Changning felt her stiffen, and her own eyes curved, and she held the drawn-out pause a moment longer before going on. "But you were very pretty."

"And you get prettier."

Possibly because she had eaten well over the holiday, Ji Ran had put on a little and was not as thin as she had been. Her colour was good and her eyes were bright and black, and the distance she used to carry had gone, and to Gi Changning she shone more all the time.

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

"Thank you for the compliment." She took it gracefully, and patted Gi Changning on the back with the notebook. "Though no amount of flattery will make me go easy on your paper."

Gi Changning let go at once and jumped sideways. "Ranran. You've turned bad."

Ji Ran spread her hands and sighed for effect. "You pick things up from the company you keep."

"You definitely have turned bad. Who's the company?"

Ning hunted for the guilty party for some time without success, let her eyes drift towards the study, and declared, "It'll be Meng Lai who taught her that. It certainly isn't me."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

Be braver. It is absolutely you.

---

Meng Lai sneezed.

She rubbed her nose and thought she had dressed warmly enough and was in no danger of a cold.

Ji Ran had just finished marking, and could more or less see from the mistakes where Meng Lai was weak. She looked at the pair of them sitting in a row and observed, "You two fit together nicely. One of you can't do geometry and the other can't do functions."

Gi Changning muttered, "I hate moving point P."

Meng Lai agreed with feeling. "I hate proofs."

The two of them hit it off instantly and slapped palms.

Ji Ran coughed.

Meng Lai and Gi Changning sat up smartly, as if nothing had happened.

Ji Ran handed the paper back to Meng Lai and dragged a whiteboard out from the wall. She had taught Gi Changning this same set once and knew her way round it. "Whether you can do them or not, I'll start at question one and we'll firm it all up."

Ji Ran had tutored primary and middle school children. She cuts a question down to its bones and goes back to where it comes from, and formulas and definitions come to her hand without her looking for them. In her hands every type of question is a soft lump of dough, to be rolled round or pressed flat, so that the question goes back to its plain self and then opens out into several ways of solving it and several ways of being asked. Now and then she uses a simple example to make something stick, and she can set a question on the spot and mark it on the spot.

With only two students in the study there is no putting your head down to avoid being asked, so you have to give it everything, which is exciting in its way.

At last they came to the big geometry question Meng Lai had made such a mess of.

Ji Ran wiped the board. She has a steady hand and draws straight lines level and square without a ruler, and a figure appeared on the board. "Before we look at part one, I want to tell Meng Lai something."

Meng Lai sat up straight. "What?"

Ji Ran sighed gently. "Construction lines are not magic. You can draw them, but don't draw them everywhere."

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

Guilty.

The question was not hard. It was not a fifth as hard as the real exam, and it could be done without a single construction line, and Meng Lai had drawn six, turning a simple question into a complicated one until she could not follow her own working.

Gi Changning, by contrast, had done it rather well. Her foundations are so poor that complicated proof methods do not occur to her, and if she gets nervous she forgets construction lines exist.

The two of them are extremes in their own way. Well matched, as partners.

Ji Ran tapped the board and changed to a red pen. "So. Part one."

---

The light was going. With the spring festival past, the days were slowly getting longer. When Ji Ran stopped talking, Meng Lai was surprised to find she had not had enough.

Like Gi Changning, Meng Lai has a small private pride of her own. She does not want to ask the teacher questions in class and set the room whispering that you cannot follow something that simple, so she asks the clever ones afterwards. But break is only ten minutes and the clever ones have their own work to do, and she was too shy to take up much of it. So a very small question would be put off and put off until it had grown into a large one.

It is like building a house. If the ground under it is not solid, what goes up is a castle in the air, and a knock will set it swaying, or bring it down altogether.

In that study, which was as private as anything, with no strangers in it and the girl beside her worse at the subject than she was, she could ask whatever she liked without worrying about the time or about looking foolish. With the arts exams sitting in her mind as the thing she was aiming at she dared not be careless either, and Ji Ran taught so well that the thinking came apart easily and the fog in front of her thinned out into clear roads going off in all directions. It was wonderfully satisfying, and Meng Lai filled several careful pages of notes.

Thinking it over, a pound of layer cake was not enough for fees. She would buy two more pounds tomorrow.

She shut her notebook, meaning to go over it again at home, and took the chance while Ji Ran was drinking to ask, "Ranran, do you want to be a teacher one day?"

Gi Changning's ear twitched. Her head came up and she tapped Meng Lai with her pen. "What are you asking that for?"

"I only asked." Meng Lai blinked innocently. Gi Changning had not hit her hard and it did not hurt. She did not know what Ji Ran had agonised over, and in any case a second year thinking about what to read at university is perfectly normal. But a reaction like that from Gi Changning suggested there was a story behind it, and Meng Lai caught up and changed course at once. "I only meant, you teach so well, Ranran. I'm mourning on behalf of all the students who won't get you."

Gi Changning was amazed on principle. "When did you learn to lay it on like that?"

Meng Lai raised an eyebrow, pleased with herself. "There's a great deal you haven't noticed."

Ji Ran's throat was sore after a whole afternoon of talking. She had two dried seeds steeping in her water for it, which made it faintly sweet, and she drank and watched the two of them squabble like infants.

The truth is that since the long talk with Gi Changning out in the snow before New Year, Ji Ran had rarely thought about what to read at university.

Once she had wanted medicine, because of the burns. Later she thought of switching to computing for money reasons. After she came back to the Jis her father had asked, carefully, whether she might go into business. Now the two men talked about the company in front of her without hiding anything, and if she was there they asked what she thought, as a family talking among themselves.

And she had been busy right through the new year, so there had been no time to think about it at all.

Asked now, her first reaction was, oh. There is teacher training as well.

When there is only one road you simply walk it and do not waver. When there are several in front of you, you cannot help stopping and turning things over.

Luckily the exams are a long way off. Ji Ran sighed inwardly, screwed the cap back on her flask and asked the two infants, who had called a truce, "Do you want anything to eat? I'll cut some fruit."

Meng Lai, embarrassed all over again, checked the time on her phone and refused several times over. "No, it's getting late. If I go now I'll be back as my mum finishes work, and if I eat something I won't want my dinner and she'll say I don't eat properly."

She packed her notebook and papers and pens into her bag and said goodbye. "Thank you, Ranran. I'll go over all of it tonight."

Meng Lai's estate is a fair way from Jinhua Gardens, and by bus it would be nearly dark by the time she got in, so Ji Ran did not press her to stay. She fetched out the arts exam material she had gathered the day before and gave one copy to Meng Lai and kept one for Gi Changning. "Have a look at this at home. There may be gaps in it."

Meng Lai thought it was revision material, turned two pages and nearly went down on her knees. It was clipped together with a bulldog clip and ran to over twenty pages, covering every arts coaching school in Pingchuan with the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then the exam rules from previous years, dance candidates especially. Meng Lai would swear that even her beloved mother could not have produced anything as thorough.

How long had it taken to put together?

Gi Changning finally understood what Ji Ran had meant by all you have to do is talk Mum and Dad round, and I'll sort out the rest. With a document like that they could avoid a great many wrong turnings instead of feeling their way across in the dark.

Ji Ran did not think much of it. Her holiday homework had been done long ago and she generally read ahead at home, and in any case all she had done was put it in order. Having handed out both copies, she said, "If there's nothing else..."

Meng Lai took one stride forward and hugged her like a bear. "Thank you, Ranran."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

Do all of you who dance like hugging people?

Gi Changning put her copy into her bag with great care, pulled Meng Lai off without ceremony and said, "I'll read it properly."

After a bit more nonsense Meng Lai really could not put it off any longer, and Ji Ran saw her downstairs.

Since Meng Lai was going, Gi Changning shouldered her bag too. "I'll wait at the stop with her. It's time I was home."

Gi Changning, who used to be driven everywhere or take taxis, now looks up bus routes without blinking and has a travel card, so she does not have to hunt for change, and Ji Ran does not have to tap twice.

What she had not expected was the front door opening, and the two Ji men, who work late three hundred days out of three hundred and sixty-five, walking in in their suits.

Ji Ran turned up one corner of her mouth, quietly.

Meng Lai looked like a woman who had just understood something, and her exit was first class. "Hello, Uncle. Hello, big brother. It's late and I've got a bus to catch. See you tomorrow, Ranran. Gi Changning, I'm off, don't worry about me, I know the way out, don't get up, there's no need to see me off."

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

Thank you very much, Meng Lai.

Her brother's face, which had been set, loosened. He knew this classmate of hers. "Let the driver take you. It's dark, and a girl on her own at night isn't safe."

"No." Meng Lai refused flatly and loudly. "There's a metro near us and it's one stop on the bus. It's no trouble."

With that she got her bag on and left, and on her way out gave Ji Ran a discreet thumbs up.

Neither of them had to explain anything to the other.

Gi Changning watched the glances going between them and frowned.

Hold on. Had she missed something?

---

She stood where she was with her bag on both shoulders, in the posture of somebody leaving, and could not make her feet move.

She thought her father had got old.

The man who used to row with her and play the pity card and be so imposing with it was showing a tiredness she had never seen on him. The suit that was always pressed flat had creases in it. There were lines at the eyes that used to be so sharp. The last of the sun came in orange, and it gave the Chairman Ji whose word had once been final the same kind face as the grandmother who had died.

Gi Changning saw at last that her father and her grandmother did look very alike, and the tightness in her chest at the sight of him went slowly out with her breath.

Ji Ran had moved off at some point to cut fruit in the kitchen.

Honestly. Gi Changning is not stupid enough to miss that Ji Ran must have tipped them off, or the two of them would never have left work on time. She snorted to herself. Honestly. If she had just said so, it was not as if Gi Changning would have run.

All right. She might have run.

She put her bag down.

"Changfeng." Her eyes went to her father, and she used a tone she had never used before. "Dad."

---

Her father thought he had misheard, and only came to when Ji Changfeng answered beside him.

Since the parents' evening last year he had not seen Gi Changning for a long time.

Partly because it was not his place to, and partly because he did not dare.

Seeing her now, she was taller and thinner, and she looked very well on it. Far better than she had looked in his house.

And it was not until Ji Ran came back that he understood how far wrong he had been.

He looked at this new version of Gi Changning and opened his mouth, and the shape of it changed several times, and at last he got it out. "Right. Right. Sit down, sit down. Ranran tells me you're going in for the arts exams?"

"I am." Gi Changning reached over and took the plump, daft-looking chinchilla into her lap and began mauling it. "Ranran gave me the material just now. I'll go through it properly at home."

That afternoon she talked for a long time without noticing. About how the house had changed, about the photographs in the bedroom upstairs. Her brother and Ji Ran joined in later, and there was laughing and talking, and every one of them ended up half full of fruit.

In the Ji house of six months ago it would have been unimaginable. Not having the fruit plate thrown would have counted as peace.

Apart from the standard-issue New Year good wishes, Gi Changning had never once spoken to her father as evenly as this. And at the end of it she politely turned down both dinner and a bed for the night, and got ready to go back to a little attic two kilometres away.

"Next time. Next time I'll definitely stay." She raised an eyebrow at Ji Ran. "And Ranran has to stay with me."

Ji Ran made a small noise. "Somebody told me she's a terrible sleeper."

"Don't bring up my past. I'm an excellent sleeper now."

As she was going, her brother fetched a folder from the downstairs study and put it in her hands. "Look at it when you get home."

Ji Ran offered to walk her out.

The two girls went in front, with her father and her brother coming slowly behind, and under the bright street lights they drew four long shadows.

Gi Changning hooked her arm through Ji Ran's and said quietly, "Ranran. I was happy today."

She went on before Ji Ran could answer. "I want you to be happy too."

"I am happy," Ji Ran said, seriously. "Going forward is a happy thing in itself."

What has happened to you makes you what you are, and what you are now should not be tied down by it. To have the courage to go straight on is its own piece of luck.

To Ji Ran, Gi Changning was the brave one.

Gi Changning turned her head. Under the street lamp the line of Ji Ran's face stood out more clearly. She made herself look away as if nothing had happened, and faced front.

To have a heart wider than the sky. Isn't that rarer still?

How good, she thought, that somebody as rare as that is walking next to me.

---

At the entrance to the city village Gi Changning stopped. "Don't come any further. Go home, all of you."

Ji Ran nodded obediently. "All right. See you tomorrow."

Gi Changning said goodbye to the two men and went in alone. She could feel them watching her back, and she walked steadily, step after step, up the stairs and home.

Her mother opened the door. "I was just saying to your dad, when's she coming home. In you come, you're just in time to eat."

Gi Changning took a long sniff. "Is that pickled cabbage fish? I can smell the cabbage."

"It is." Her father poured hot oil over it with a hiss to bring the smell up, and carried the bowl to the table. "In a day or two I'm going to start doing lunches as well. Pickled cabbage fish noodles are new. Come and tell me what you think."

After dinner she went to her room and opened the folder her brother had given her.

It was a tenancy agreement. Five years, paid annually, paid by him.

"Honestly. Not a word out of him." Gi Changning sniffed. She had worried about the studio and thought they would renew it once the next advertising deal came in. Her brother had signed it without saying anything, and by the date on it, before the two families swapped.

The Jis really are the Jis.

Awkward, silent, tied in knots.

And in fact rather lovable.

---

On the way back to Jinhua Gardens all three Jis sneezed at once.

The two men were in suits and nothing else and running on their own heat, and they were in no hurry about a sneeze and strolled along the road. Their father put his hands behind his back. "Age catches up. Years ago I could swim outdoors in the middle of winter and be fine."

His son finished him off. "You could. And somebody saw you go in and thought you were throwing yourself into the sea, and you got hauled out by the arms."

Their father had nothing to say.

You do not go for a man's sore spots. Ji Changfeng, have you forgotten who your father is?

Ji Ran was hearing it for the first time. "How do you know that?"

"Mum told me." His voice went softer. "The story got round the company at Mum's dance theatre, and the director took her aside for a word and asked whether she'd been too hard on him and driven him to jump in the sea."

Their father nearly kicked this unnatural child. "You weren't even born. Don't talk rubbish. Ranran's standing right here."

His son did not answer, simply crossed to Ji Ran's other side and carried on turning out his father's history. "He had to put on a ballet costume and dance the cygnets before Mum would forgive him."

Ji Ran pictured this and could not hold the laugh in.

Seeing his daughter laugh, their father stopped shouting about unnatural children and muttered, "That is the proof of the love between your mother and me. Love. Do you understand love? Ji Changfeng, you clearly do not."

Ji Changfeng took no notice of the attack and kept up a steady output. "I suspect the reason he wouldn't let Ningning do ballet is that it reminded him of his own past."

Their father had nothing to say.

This son was beyond saving.

Ji Ran pushed her hair back, laughing. "When we've got time, let's go and see a ballet together. I've never seen one."

Their father dropped his past instantly. "Done. I'll take you, and Ji Changfeng can work late."

So long as it does not actually kill him, pile it on.

Ji Changfeng had nothing to say.

Another day on which a coup bore thinking about.

And looking up, the night had its stars on, the trees were putting out green, and his family were beside him, laughing and bickering.

The last warmth of the new year was nearly out. But spring had come.