Chapter 28

Next morning Gi Changning ate early and jogged over to Jinhua Gardens. She has danced for years and trains properly, and two kilometres costs her nothing. She arrived with only a light sweat on her, less tired than one danced-through routine with the technique right and the feeling in it.

The two Ji men had at least had a proper night's sleep, and the tiredness of the day before was gone when they got up. Ji Ran, reassured, picked up her bag to leave, and opened the door straight into Gi Changning.

"Ningning?"

"Surprised? Shocked?"

Hearing her, her brother put down the book he was reading. Their father was in the massage chair and tried to get up at once, and could not, because the thing had his calves. He shouted instead. "Ji Changfeng. Get Ningning in here to sit down."

"No need, Ranran and I have school." Gi Changning said hello to her brother and put her head round the door to wave at a father who could not get out of the chair. Then she stood in the doorway, pushed the damp hair back off her forehead with one hand and waved a sketchbook with the other. "I've brought the drawings."

The plan had been to give them to Ji Ran at school, and for Ji Ran to take them home after, but that was a whole day gone, and in an emergency a wasted day is a wasted life. Gi Changning thought about it. Jinhua Gardens is not far, a couple of kilometres at a run, which saves time and effort and counts as training, and she could walk in to school with Ji Ran.

Her brother checked the time and did not press her to stay. He took the book. "Why don't I drive you both? It's only a minute or two."

He looked at the two girls' faces, and added, slowly, "In all this time I've never once taken Ranran to school."

He had taken Gi Changning, years ago, and once work got busy and he could not make it the driver went instead. After her sixteenth birthday Gi Changning got very keen on the idea that she was an adult now and would rather pay for a taxi than be driven about.

As everybody knows, Gi Changning responds to kindness and never to force.

Ji Ran looks soft and in fact responds to neither, and did not mind how she got to school. She glanced at Gi Changning and saw no objection in her, then looked up at her brother and found a face full of hope and eagerness. "All right. Thank you, Changfeng."

He smiled, went back into the living room to put the sketchbook on the coffee table, and told his father, "The drawings are here. Look at them when you've finished. Ring me if you're going into the office first. If you're not, wait until I'm back."

Their father had set the chair for fifteen minutes and was barely halfway through, and could not get up, and could not properly curse his unnatural son in front of his daughters either. All he could do was watch Ji Changfeng win the chance to take both girls to school with a line that was not even particularly charming.

The front door closed. Son and daughters said goodbye, and the old father left holding the fort slapped his own thigh and assigned blame without hesitation. "This is Ji Changfeng's fault for fighting me for it. If he hadn't wanted the chair I'd never have set it for fifteen minutes."

He can drive too. He would like to take his daughters to school as well.

In short, Ji Changfeng's fault.

---

Ji Changfeng felt a tickle, reached up and rubbed his nose, and thought his father was probably saying something about him behind his back.

The two girls settled in the back. Gi Changning looked at the tassel hanging off the rear-view mirror, which looked very familiar, and poked Ji Ran. "Did you make that?"

Ji Ran nodded. "A New Year present for Changfeng. Dad's got one too. You know I can only embroider little goldfish."

It was a round embroidered thread ball, gold and red overall, with one goldfish and its long fins spread out like water and like silk. Being wrapped round a ball gave the fish some depth, which made it livelier still.

Sitting beside her in the back, Gi Changning could not reach it, and for some reason sounded sour. "Oh. A New Year present."

Then she counted on her fingers. "Xiao Xiao's got a goldfish purse. Changfeng and Dad have got goldfish balls. There's a goldfish hanging in the attic. And somehow I've got nothing at all."

Ji Ran would not be caught. "You've got exam papers."

Set by hand. Dozens of them. A privilege nobody else gets.

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

"Fine. I'm not pretending any more. I want a goldfish."

Ji Ran appeared to give it serious thought, caught the longing in the corner of her eye, and smiled. "Then I'll give you a goldfish for your birthday."

They have the same birthday, which was several months off. Ning worked out the dates and decided she could wait, and nodded, satisfied. "We'll have it together, then. What do you want?"

There was nothing much Ji Ran wanted, and saying so would take the wind out of her. She thought about it. "A dance, maybe. One I can watch close up."

Not in the noise of a welcome evening, and not a street battle in the square where anything can happen. She wanted to see Gi Changning perform one whole piece.

Ning tossed her hair. "The routine Meng Lai and I are making is nearly finished. When it's done the two of us will dance it for you first. How's that?"

"Good."

Their brother barely said a word the whole way, and listened to the two of them chattering in the back, from birthday presents to subjects to the new cook at the school canteen and whether he was any good, which he certainly would not be, not compared to Dad.

He pictured, without meaning to, his own father's hands, which cannot fold a dumpling, and then realised that the dad in question was the Gi girls' father.

Near Wenyuan the traffic thickened and he slowed to a crawl behind the car in front.

"Will you be on time for work?" Ji Ran offered, "We can get out and walk."

"It's fine." He is very hard to hurry. "There's nowhere to turn round here. I'll drop you and carry straight on."

At the school gates the two girls got out and the three of them said goodbye, and Ji Ran told him particularly not to worry about them with so much on at the company, and not to come and fetch them either.

He agreed.

They walked in shoulder to shoulder, and their backs disappeared into the crowd of students going in and out, and he let out a breath and felt oddly at a loss. On that stretch of road from Jinhua Gardens to Wenyuan he had been more relaxed than he could remember. No work to discuss with his father, nothing to worry at. Only two girls talking, and it was like the sun coming up and the whole sky going light.

Driving back, he quietly decided that once this was over he would take his sisters to school every day.

As for the old father keeping watch at home?

Let him try and take it.

---

Jinhua Gardens.

When Ji Changfeng came in, the living room was empty and the sketchbook was gone from the coffee table. He turned and went to the study.

Inside, his father had his glasses on and was going through it carefully. At the knock he said, "Come in. You're back at a good time, Changfeng. Come and look at this."

He sat down opposite and picked the book up and turned a few pages. "Was this drawn in one night?"

His father took his glasses off and worked his shoulders. He had come straight here after the massage and stayed, and his neck and his back were tired. He leaned into the chair. "I didn't believe it either to begin with. Looking at it now, I'd been shutting myself in."

Because Gi Changning's mother had not sent one design. She had sent a whole set. A T-shirt, trousers, a jacket, a dress, a hat, and even a pair of wristbands.

His eyes went to the dress on the open page. A round neck, elbow-length sleeves, the hem below the knee. The white of it was spotless except for the skirt, which carried great drifts of gold ginkgo leaves falling from the waist, the depth and the colour relations worked with coloured pencil at different pressures. The leaves lay at different angles, as if a breath of wind had turned them to show the particular glow that belongs to sunlight.

The sleeves had ties on them to balance the top half, and the waist was gathered on a loop fastening, with a pearl-shaped waist pin drawn out on its own, fine and pretty.

It was a dress that made you think of sunlight the moment you saw it. It sat very well with Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun.

A page on was a T-shirt, plain black, with nothing but a simple square key pattern in the middle in white pencil, highlighted in grey to say the pattern was silver.

He turned back to the key pattern T-shirt and went between the two pages several times. "Is this a set?"

Nothing on the drawings said so. He simply felt it was, and he could already see a model wearing it.

His father knew exactly which set he meant. "It should be. What do you think, Changfeng?"

"Honestly," he said, low, "apart from the first dress, the rest doesn't really fit the summer theme. But."

His father knew what he had not said. "But it fits Anzhi's new trend idea beautifully."

What is a trend, anyway? Hardly anybody can tell you. A wind blows from somewhere, and a colour is in, or a cut, or some innovation, and a handful of people make the trend and a great many more follow it.

On the runway a luxury house puts a shoe on a model's head and calls it a hat and that is a trend. Diamonds are sewn on and one falls off and has to be paid for and that is fashion. The internet asks loudly who on earth would wear that, and when the event comes round, borrowing the clothes is a mark of standing.

The alternative crowd used to wear skulls and call it cool. Now you wear skulls and your mother hits you. Sprigged dresses used to look provincial. Now a sprigged dress is pretty and suits you.

There is no arguing with any of it.

The maverick who leaked the drawings had been caught in a loop of the same kind. A trend has to be exaggerated, has to be singular, has to have metal in it. If he had not done what he did, the new trend line would have been his.

And now they had another option.

The Jis move fast. The same evening they agreed on it they got Gi Changning's mother's number from Ji Ran, talked for a solid hour and a half in the study, and arranged to meet her at the company on her day off to go through it properly.

So on Sunday morning Ji Changfeng's car pulled up below the Gis' block.

Gi Changning's mother came down in a coffee-coloured trench coat with her hair up, carrying a bag she had made herself.

He opened the car door for her. "Good morning, Ms Shan."

She stalled for a second or two. Nobody had called her that in a long time. Colleagues she is not close to use her full name, and the people who know her call her Qing. She hooked a strand of hair back behind her ear and smiled. "Good morning, Mr Ji. Is that what I should call you?"

"Changfeng is fine, if you like." He shut the door. "I only wanted to make it clear that Anzhi is inviting you because of your ability, and nothing else comes into it."

"I see." She nodded. She was still nervous, and after that her back loosened a little. She looked at the embroidered ball swinging from the mirror, and recognised Ji Ran's needlework.

Anzhi is a very well known label. She knew the chance had come through Ranran and Ningning, and after half a year of making costumes for dance students she was not going to run herself down either.

The corners of her mouth went up. "Thank you. I like being called that."