Chapter 27

"Gi Hongcheng. You touch my dress stand and see what happens."

Ji Ran's head came round, past Gi Changning's shoulder, towards the bedroom. In her memory her parents might not be a perfectly matched pair, but they had got each other through the hard years, and after the accident her mother had carried the household on her own shoulders and never complained about any of it. The two of them did not row. They barely even bickered.

When her mother used his full name it was usually to tease him, or to pretend to be cross so he would come and make a fuss of her. A tone as sharp as that meant she was angry. Very angry.

Gi Changning had just time to let Ji Ran in before she shot into the bedroom, and Ji Ran shut the door and came after her. Inside, her mother had both arms locked round a dress stand. Several of the coloured pins holding the fabric had come out onto the floor, and with nothing to hold it a piece of irregularly cut cloth hung off the stand, about to meet the ground.

Her father stood opposite his wife with both hands up to show he had no intention of taking the stand off her. He backed away two steps, and his face was bitter. "Qing, it really was only a suggestion. I..."

He licked his cracked lips and did not know how to explain it. "I only wanted things to be a bit better for us."

Gi Changning and Ji Ran looked at each other, and somehow each read what was in the other's face. The two girls split at speed, one to put her arms round the mother and one to steady the father.

Gi Changning got an arm round her mother's shoulders, gently lifted the stand out of her hold and set it upright to one side, and picked the pins up off the floor. She knows nothing about clothing design, so all she could do was smooth the fabric out and push the pins back anywhere. Then she rubbed her mother's back slowly and let her lean her weight against her, and said quietly into her ear, "Mum. Don't be angry. It's bad for you."

Ji Ran looked round the room and saw a flask on the bedside table. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand and felt water in it, and carried it over to Gi Changning's father, unscrewed the lid and held it out. "Dad. Will you tell me what's happened?"

He took it without a word and drank, and for some reason sounded tired. "You and Ningning go out first. I need to talk to your mother properly."

"I'm not going out." Gi Changning got in first. "Does this look like talking properly? Ranran and I are hearing this."

Ji Ran showed no sign of moving either, and nodded. "Rowing doesn't solve anything. We're a family. Can't we be open with each other?"

She paused, as if something had struck her, put the flask lid down and gave a small bitter laugh. "I see."

Gi Changning's eyebrow twitched and she looked at her sideways.

Ji Ran's shoulders dropped visibly into a curve and her head went down, and the pale back of her neck looked as though it could not take any weight at all. She looked a second away from crying. "I'm not really one of this family. Dad's right to be careful. I'll go."

Gi Changning's eyes went wide. She looked as though she had met Ji Ran for the first time that day.

Ji Ran turned to go the moment the words were out, and before she had taken half a step her father caught her arm. "Now then, child."

"You child." Her mother shut the bedroom door behind her and crossed to Ji Ran in a few strides, faster than Gi Changning could follow. "You child. What sort of talk is that? Are you trying to break your parents' hearts?"

Ji Ran flicked a glance at Gi Changning, and looked her mother in the eye. "I'm not. But Dad, Mum, when you row and won't tell us why, isn't that breaking mine and Ningning's?"

"How is that the same thing?" Her father is no good with words and nearly got led into the ditch.

Gi Changning saw her moment and cut in, squeezing over beside Ji Ran so that the two girls stood shoulder to shoulder with their parents on either side, and somehow all four of them ended up sitting in a row along the edge of the bed. Gi Changning gave Ji Ran a discreet thumbs up. "She's right. We're not little. If we don't settle this in one go it'll hang there in all of us like a splinter, going in every now and then."

"Mum. Doesn't it hurt when a needle gets you while you're sewing?"

"Dad. Doesn't it hurt when the hot oil spits at you?"

Ji Ran took it up. "Ningning's right. Once or twice doesn't hurt. What about three times, four times? Enough of them and it turns into a callus and your hand stops feeling it, and then you look down and see it, and doesn't that catch at you?"

Gi Changning put it plainly. "We've all got mouths."

Which carried no weight at all coming from her, but Ning is thick-skinned about these things. What is past is past, and she has a mouth now, so that will do.

With the two girls going back and forth at them, and the odd piece of advice that did not follow on from anything, their parents visibly came down off it.

Her mother looked away. "Ask your father. He started it."

Both girls' heads whipped round and fixed on him.

He had nothing to say.

He took a nervous swallow of water and got it down, and said flatly, "Well. The shop's doing well, as you both know, and now I've started doing lunches I'm on until the afternoon. It doesn't feel right having your aunt as my only help. She won't take money for it, and she's got the vegetable stall to mind as well. It's too much for her."

He stole a look at his wife, who still had not turned round, licked his lips again and came to the thing that had set it off. "So I was thinking. Could your mother leave her job and give me a hand? We'd run the restaurant, and next year we'd take the place next door as well, and it can only get better. Earning for yourself has to beat working for somebody else."

As he went on, the faces of both girls got harder to describe, and before either could say anything their mother snorted. "I'll leave the job. I'll run a restaurant with you. The mill won't miss one of me. But Gi Hongcheng, when I asked you what happens to the dressmaking once we're busy, what did you answer? Say it in front of the children, all of it."

He put his head down and scratched at the side of the flask with his short nails. He was quiet for a while, and then mumbled, "I said. I said once we're earning, who cares about the dressmaking."

Well.

Gi Changning and Ji Ran looked at each other and drew breath together.

That was dancing right on her mother's sore spot. No wonder she was angry.

Her mother clicked her tongue. "There you are. Is that a human being talking?"

She did not take dressmaking orders only for the money. She loves the work. She loves cutting different fabrics and shapes and putting them together into something new. She loves it when two colours hit each other hard. She loves wanting to know something when a problem comes up. She loves that strange feeling she cannot name when she talks to the students at the dance academy. She loves the happy noise they make when they get the costume. All of it together makes her feel she is not only making a garment, she is finishing off somebody's dream.

And the man telling her to drop it was the one who shared her bed and claimed to know her.

She did not understand how Gi Hongcheng could brush it aside like that. Nor did she understand, since it was all for money, for the household, for a better life later, why there should rise up in her the furious question of whether her work counted as work.

So when he reached out to touch the dress stand she locked both arms round it without thinking. On that one stand were pieces of cloth assembled into a dream, and the coloured pins were the stars set in it.

Her own work was in it, and a future she could get her hands on.

"Dad, you were wrong." It was Ji Ran, unexpectedly, who spoke first. She sat beside him, and her voice was flat and certain and it carried. "You and Mum are married, so you're one thing. You and Mum are two people, so you're two separate people."

She looked straight at him. "You've no standing and no right to ask Mum to give up designing. Besides which..."

Gi Changning took her mother's hand and finished it. "Besides which, Mum loves designing."

"Mum loves designing."

Four words, and they worked like a pair of invisible hands pushing the cloud off the sun.

Her mother's eyes went to the dress stand without her meaning them to. She had been clutching it a moment ago and the fabric was creased now, and the coloured pins she had dropped and picked up were stuck back in anyhow, ugly, with no beauty in it at all.

But in her drawings that garment had been through more than ten revisions, from the colour to the cut, from the embroidery to the smallest detail, and in her head it was already finished, and it was beautiful.

Why the fury? Because designing is not only work. It is something she loves.

He let his head drop and pulled at the corner of his mouth. Did he really not understand? He knew how happy his wife was when a garment was finished, how she would lie there before sleep repeating the nice things people had said. Since the accident he had never seen her laugh like that about anything else. What he remembered was everything she gave the household, and over the years he had begun standing on the high ground of the household and asking her to give things up.

A little money and it has gone to your head. Who do you think you are, he asked himself.

Gi Hongcheng, you really are a swine.

He put the flask on the bedside table and got slowly to his feet. There were only two girls and a few steps between him and his wife, and he crossed them as if he were crossing mountains and rivers, and the ten years of his ruined face, and everything that had been good and bad in all of it.

He stopped in front of her.

Then he went down, one leg bent under him, on one knee in front of his wife, the way he had the first time, and took the left hand of a girl called Shan Qing, carefully, watching her face the whole time, and when he found no distaste in it his heart stopped jumping and sat back where it belonged.

His back straightened. He felt in his trouser pocket and brought out a small box.

She seemed to work out what it was, and put her right hand over her mouth.

Gi Changning and Ji Ran had already got themselves over to the window and half behind the curtain, hiding like two people who think that shutting their own eyes makes them invisible, with only their heads out to watch.

"I'm sorry, Qing." He has one good quality. When he says he was wrong he means it, with nothing held back, and having said it he does not do it again. "I'm a swine."

She nodded wildly. "Yes. You are a swine."

"I was going to save this for our anniversary."

He opened the box. Inside was a plain gold band, thin and matt. When they married he had been keeping up with the fashion and bought a platinum ring set with small diamonds that caught the light. She had sold it to pay for his treatment, and he had always meant to replace it, and now that he was older he thought gold was best after all.

The Gi Hongcheng of his young days had been full of life, nothing like the dead weight he became afterwards. He had had his spirit and his big plans and his own brand of shamelessness in front of the girl he loved. "There's nothing this swine can do about it now, Qing. What are we going to do?"

"My God," Gi Changning breathed into Ji Ran's ear. "Have you ever seen Dad do that?"

Ji Ran shook her head, lost in admiration. "Never."

Her mother's ears had gone red. She knows Gi Hongcheng. In the middle of that row, however angry she got, he kept his hands up, which is a posture of complete surrender. It means that in front of Shan Qing he gives in every time and will never raise a hand and will never argue back.

It was only that the years had been so long that he had come to take what Shan Qing gave as his due. He was too close to see it, and one nudge from somebody outside it was enough.

Though, speaking of outsiders.

She glanced at the two daughters watching from behind the curtain. "That's enough. The two people who don't belong in this room can get out. Are your parents monkeys?"

"No, no."

Gi Changning badly wanted to see the rest and shuffled her feet. Ji Ran could not stand it, took her hand and walked her straight out, and closed the bedroom door behind them at her leisure.

The last thing the girls saw was their mother putting out her left hand, and their father, still on one knee, carefully putting the gold band on her ring finger.

The door shut.

Gi Changning let out a breath and finally got round to it. "Ranran, what are you doing here this late?"

It was as well that Ji Ran had been there, because she was honestly not sure she could have handled that one alone.

It made her say it again. "That retreat-to-advance trick of yours was perfect."

"It was all right. I only came to ask Mum a favour." Outside the window the light had gone and the sun was down. Ji Ran touched her own stomach. "And to get a free meal."

"I haven't eaten either."

Two empty girls sighed at the same time.

At that moment their mother came out. "What are children sighing about? Old Gi, go and get the dinner on. Ranran, eat before you go."

Nobody in that house keeps quiet at the table, so Ji Ran raised the design over dinner. She did not mention the leak, only the theme. "It's a good chance, and if it goes through, Changfeng will invite Mum to work on it in Anzhi's name."

She changed Dad to Changfeng at the last moment. With Gi Changning's father sitting there it seemed the wrong word.

Gi Changning frowned at Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun. She knew it was the summer theme, and in a second she had worked out that something must have gone wrong at the company.

Anzhi is a well known label that has sponsored national team athletes, and it is not short of designers. Her mother knew how rare a chance like this was. She thought for two seconds and asked, "Ranran. Tell me honestly. Will it make trouble for you?"

"It won't." Ji Ran smiled obediently. "Mum might be doing them a very large favour."

Knowing it would not hurt her daughter, she agreed at once. "Right. I'll draw it up tonight and Ningning can bring it to you at school tomorrow."

Settled.

After dinner Gi Changning walked Ji Ran down and as usual took her as far as the entrance to the city village. The street lights towards Jinhua Gardens are bright and Ji Ran had walked it many times.

Ji Ran saw her puzzled look and told her about the leaked drawings. "Changfeng says it may be trending in a couple of days. We'll keep the lid on as long as we can."

"Understood." Gi Changning made an OK sign. "Don't worry, I know the rules. It won't go anywhere."

Ji Ran had a plastic bag in her hand with a box of savoury pancakes in it, the steam fogging the box, packed up for the two men at home.

Before they parted she remembered something. "Dad and Changfeng don't seem to be able to see your feed."

If they could, her mother's designs would not have surprised them so much.

Gi Changning stopped, and smacked her own forehead. "Force of habit. I blocked them. I'd forgotten."

That night Gi Changning's mother looked at the new band on her finger and drew.

That night Ji Ran's father and brother ate savoury pancakes, and at last there was a post from Gi Changning on their feeds.

Everyone, in the end, got something out of it.