Chapter 26

It was the first time Ji Ran had seen her brother angry, and he was nothing like himself. From the side, the broken veins in his eyes and the shadows under them from a night without sleep made him look grim, and with no expression on his face, his eyes cold and the corner of his mouth turned up in something that was not quite a smile, his body looked entirely relaxed and the pressure came off him all the same.

The door of their father's bedroom on the ground floor opened and he came out slowly, rubbing his temple. He is near retirement, he had been up all night and had closed his eyes for a few minutes, and his body could not take it. Even the short sleep at home had not been good sleep. The vein in his forehead was jumping and his head was banging. His voice had no strength in it and the sharpness came through anyway. "Ji Changfeng. Put that face away. This isn't the company, it's your house, and Ranran is sitting next to you. Who are you being frightening at?"

Hearing his father snap at him, he realised his feelings had got out. He took a deep breath, raked at his hair in annoyance, pulled the cushion out from behind him, pushed himself along to the other sofa and said, apologetic, "Sorry, Ranran. I didn't keep a hold of myself."

Honestly, Ji Ran had not been frightened. What she mostly thought was that he had not slept and his temper was normally uneven for it. And somewhere underneath she could tell that he had not gone up to bed because he was waiting for her to come home from school, so that he could say sorry for worrying her as soon as she walked in. So she said honestly, "It doesn't matter. You don't have to sit that far away."

"It's my fault. I shouldn't bring work feelings home." He was perfectly straightforward about it. He had been up the whole night, nearly thirty-six hours without closing his eyes apart from that short stretch on the sofa. He picked up the jug on the table and poured water for his father and his sister. "Does Ranran still want to hear about the company?"

Their father came over and sighed heavily. "It may be that this was coming to us. There's no use being angry, Changfeng."

"Be reasonable, Dad." Watching his father turn philosophical, he put a hand to his head. "You're the one who's angriest. I was afraid you'd give yourself high blood pressure."

You have not seen a board meeting where Chairman Ji taps the table lightly and every person in the room goes quiet and dares not breathe, and afterwards they all walk the long way round his office, and anybody reporting on their work and able to do it in three sentences does not add a word.

Ji Ran went round behind her father and pressed the points on his head gently with her fingers. "Will it cost a lot?"

"A lot. The summer range may not get out ahead of the market now, and the new trend line is more or less down the drain." The pressure on his head was steady and unhurried and very comfortable, and even the pain eased a little. His forehead smoothed. "We'll go after whoever is responsible and sue whoever needs suing. But there's no measuring what the counterfeits will cost us or what comes after."

To lay the ground for the new line the Jis had brought in a maverick of the clothing design world, very good at exaggerated lines and bold work and clever use of geometry, the sort that catches the eye the first second. He had won a design prize abroad that is obscure and carries real weight, and he suited the direction the Jis wanted for new trends.

"The trouble came out of the theme," her brother said, taking it up. "The summer theme is Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun. His own leaning is more towards the ash after the flame has burned out, the shadow under the blazing sun. So it took us a long time to get our two sides lined up. The drawings went back and forth a great many times and at one stage we wondered about changing designer, and just at that point he produced a version we were very happy with. Which is also the lead design for the whole range."

A maverick has his own way of finding ideas. This one likes a drink, cannot hold one, and is not pleasant in his cups. Over the New Year he was out with friends, and once the drink had got to him he complained loudly about how difficult the Jis were, and then, with a confidentiality agreement signed, sat down in front of his friends and cheerfully drew the design out.

The luck was that he had taken a private room. The bad luck was that one of those friends owns a clothing factory that makes white-label goods for an online marketplace, sells mainly online and is trying to move into original work. This friend photographed the drawing, quietly made a run of them and put them on the market, and turned the summer piece into a spring one. Anzhi's live monitoring exists to catch trends and market movements accurately, and the thing looked novel the moment it appeared, so it went up the chain. That is how it was found.

Once it was out, the designer argued that he had rung his friend when he sobered up and told him to keep it quiet, so the counterfeits were not his responsibility. If the leak of the drawings got any bigger he faced legal liability, and at the very least he would go onto the trade's blacklist in this country, which is a shared list that means nobody in the business will take him on. And since Anzhi has partners and channels abroad as well, whether anybody overseas would risk him was also an open question.

In short, the man's name was finished. The legal department would pursue both him and the counterfeiters, and there was still no measuring what the company had lost.

What had got out was the single most important design in the Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun range. The reserve designs do not stand comparison with it. You could call them ordinary. You could not call them striking.

"The summer range has to be on sale around the middle of April," her brother explained. "Before April we have to finish the publicity and get stock into the shops and the rest of it. The designers the company trains aren't strong in this style. So either we find somebody who can take it on and whose style fits, or we give up and go with the reserve designs."

But designers are not easy to find. The ones with a name are either working under another label or running their own, and Anzhi cannot invite them in and risk another leak. And then there is discussing the new design, the contract, round after round of changes to details, all of which takes a long time, and by the time it has been ground out the best window for going on sale is long past. Better to go straight to the fallback.

There was one more problem. The concept film for Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun was already out and a good many people were looking forward to it. Anzhi is not some small unknown label, and if it let people down its name would suffer.

Their father patted his daughter's hand to say she could stop, and told her to sit down and rest. The short sleep had made him a good deal calmer about it. "At this point it's ride the donkey while you look for a horse and keep hold of both. As the saying goes, good luck leans on bad and bad luck hides inside good."

Ji Ran sat back down on the sofa and drank some water, which was at exactly the right temperature. She had been listening while her father and her brother set out the shape of it. The deeper details they touched on in a line or two, so that even with no experience of the company she could follow most of it. And while she listened, an idea came to her from somewhere.

Her brother saw her thinking and poured her more water. His voice was gentle. "What's on your mind, Ranran? Will you tell us?"

"Nothing." She shook her head first, then nodded, as if she were arranging the words. She turned it over for a moment and decided she could not let the chance go. "Mum. I mean Ningning's mum. She makes costumes to order for dance students now and people think very highly of them. Could you let her try?"

The two men looked at each other and found the same question in each other's eyes. They had never heard that Mrs Gi was any good at clothing design. They knew she could knit. Asked out of nowhere, neither of them knew what to say.

Their father did not answer at once. He thought about it, and said carefully, "I'd need to see her work."

Ji Ran got out her phone. Every time a piece was finished, if the customer had not asked for it to be kept quiet, Gi Changning posted a photograph on her feed. Ji Ran found Gi Changning's feed, scrolled down to the clothes, and held it out to them. "These are all Mum's. She draws them herself, buys the fabric herself and makes them herself. She's very good at embroidery too."

To see better the two men put their heads almost together. They looked through designs in wildly different styles, and their faces grew steadily more serious. Now and then they said a quiet word to each other. They were clearly giving it their full attention.

Performance costume has to be bold with colour, because it has to read from a distance, and at the same time it must not get in the way of what the dancer has to do. Dance students come from every discipline, and Gi Changning's mother had already made costumes for classical, modern, jazz, cha-cha, Latin and plenty more. She listens carefully to what the customer wants and finds the balance in it, and her natural eye for colour does the rest.

Gi Changning had told her that a figure skater once found her mother through a dance academy and asked for a skating costume, and she had never done one and had to turn it down.

When they had been through the feed, her brother picked his words. "Ranran, you have to understand that performance costume and everyday clothes are two different things. Being good at one doesn't mean being good at the other."

Ji Ran said it as if it were obvious. "But the trench coat and the jumpers and the trousers I brought with me are all Mum's. And that red and blue sweatshirt Ningning wore once. You remember it?"

Both men's eyes came up.

Of course they remembered.

They had seen the clothes Ji Ran brought from the Gis'. They suited her very well, leaning towards the classic, with the odd bright touch. On the whole, safe.

But the colour on Gi Changning's sweatshirt was something new. As a rule, when clothes use colours that saturated, the mild case is that the colour takes over and the bad case is a car crash. That red against that blue had the force of the contrast taken out of it by how much area each colour was given, and it suited Gi Changning down to the ground. It was beautiful.

And thinking about it now, it was very much the new trend style.

"Right." Their father handed the phone back, thought for half a minute and decided. "Ranran, you go and ask your mother for one design, on the Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun theme. One is enough. If we use it I'll invite her to work on the range as the brand, and I give you my word I will not take her work from her. Will that do?"

Ji Ran looked out at the sky. The street lights were on and the sun was not fully down, and it would be setting later and later as the weeks went on. She stood up. "They're close by. I'll go over to Ningning's now."

She put her coat on. "Don't wait dinner. I'll eat with Ningning."

Their father had nothing to say.

Her brother had nothing to say.

Watching the back of a daughter and a sister going out of the door, the two of them felt oddly bleak.

"Come to think of it," he said slowly, "why can't we see Ningning's feed?"

Their father had nothing to say.

That went in deep, son.

---

Gi Changning covered her nose and mouth and sneezed. The door of the main bedroom stood wide open and she was standing between her parents. "Dad, Mum. Whatever it is we can talk about it properly. Please don't row."

Her mother had her arms folded and laughed coldly. "I have been talking about it properly. It's your father who can't understand plain speech."

"I've been asking your opinion the whole time." He seemed genuinely not to know why she was angry. "You picked a fight out of nowhere. I don't understand."

"Oh, you don't understand?" That made her angrier, and if Gi Changning had not been in the way she would probably have punched him in the chest to wake him up. "Gi Hongcheng. Your work is work and mine doesn't matter, is that it? You weren't asking my opinion. You were telling me."

He held both hands up and pressed them down, trying to cool it. "Qing, if I've done something wrong I'm sorry. Can we not do this in front of our daughter?"

Gi Changning's ears were ringing. In the old days at the Jis she would have waded straight in, but these were parents who were always easy with each other, and she did not want to damage anything. She made a time-out sign. "Stop a minute. The question is why you're rowing. Don't talk round me. I want to know."

She had come home from school as usual, and before she had eaten a mouthful she heard something wrong in the bedroom. She knocked and nobody answered, so in the end she opened the door and went in, and found one parent sitting and one standing, her mother shaking with fury and her father blank-faced and outwardly calm, and an atmosphere ready to draw swords with something awkward underneath it. She was afraid they would come to blows, and ran to get between them and be a bridge.

Heaven help her, it was the first time she had seen her parents row since she came home.

Her father was about to say something when there was a knock at the front door.

Gi Changning looked from one to the other, and neither of them showed any sign of moving. She said quietly, "I'll see who it is. Keep calm, both of you. No rowing. All right?"

She went and opened it, and her eyes widened. "Ranran?"

It was.

Before she could so much as ask why she had come, her mother's voice came out of the bedroom, almost a shriek. "Gi Hongcheng. You touch my dress stand and see what happens."