Chapter 31

Tomb Sweeping brought Gi Changning's mother her first free days in months. She talked it over with her husband and they decided to go back to the old village to sweep the graves, and have a look at the state of the house while they were there.

When the uncle heard, he sat up half the night working it out with his wife and decided to shut the stall for a day and go with them.

The Gis come from Dayan village, in Jinsha town, a long way from Pingchuan with no fast train. You take a long-distance coach from Pingchuan to the county town, then a local bus from the county town towards Jinsha, get off when it passes the village, and walk the rest.

Eight hours all told.

None of which is necessary now, because the uncle has a car.

The two households left at seven in the morning and reached the village about one in the afternoon, a great deal faster than the coach.

Gi Changning was woken by her mother's voice. She opened her eyes blearily. "Are we there?"

"We're here." Her mother put a coat round her shoulders. "You've only just woken up. Don't get cold."

She got the coat on anyhow. She had never sat in a car that long. The back seats do not adjust and her back ached, and when she got out she felt light and as though her feet were not reaching the ground. She had slept at a bad angle too, and her neck was stiff, and when she rolled it the bones ground against each other.

The uncle drove lorries for years and is safety-minded and steady, and after hours at the wheel he was still bright. He got out and said to his wife, "It's changed. I hardly know the road."

The village is full of old people, and with the weather warming up the ones with nothing to do were sitting about on corners and on the newly built square, talking and getting the sun on them. Being the holiday, a lot of children were out shrieking and chasing, and the older students did not dare play basketball properly in case they hurt one, so they were doing tricks with the ball instead.

An unfamiliar car went past the square and turned into a lane, and every eye on the square followed it.

"Who's that?"

"No idea." One old man shouted at his grandchild to stop rolling on the ground, and guessed, "Somebody's relatives?"

"As if I don't know who's got relatives down that lane." The first old man was extremely curious. It is a small village, and when anything stirs in one house the whole place knows, and anybody who makes it their business can recite three generations of a family, let alone the visiting relatives. He stood up and put his hands behind his back. "I'll go and see whose they are. And when I'm back you can give me your granddaughter's birth chart and I'll read it for you."

"Clear off, you old thing. Nothing to do all day but poke into what doesn't concern you." The one minding the children could not be bothered with him, and went on muttering once he was out of earshot. "Couldn't read his own son into prison, and he'll read somebody else's chart. Like father like son. Neither of them any good."

The old man was a scrawny thing with a bent back and he did not move slowly, and he was at the mouth of the lane in no time. He did not go in. He stood at the end of it and watched five people get out of the car, one of them a young girl. His eyes are still fair, and he looked at where the car had stopped and said to himself, "That's the Gi house. Is that Gi Hongguang back? Oh yes, Gi Hongcheng's lot did have a girl."

Dayan is not as poor as Gi Changning had imagined. The village has concrete roads, and the single-storey houses stand in neat rows with white walls and red tiles. The houses along the main street carry stirring slogans painted on them, and at the far north and south ends there are trees in front of the doors, thick-trunked and straight up into the sky, old and never cut back, left to grow as they liked, and wild with it.

The Gi house is not old, only worn. The paint on the walls has yellowed, and a hand laid on it comes away thick with dust. With nobody living there, spiders large and small have made the front door their hunting ground and run about it as they please. In the yard somebody planted a bottle gourd, which has climbed the wall and up onto the roof and thrown a few green vines out over the top. By June or July it would flower.

The house was built when Gi Changning's parents married, and later, when her grandmother could no longer get about, the old woman was brought there to be looked after. The uncle's house is further west, in a lonelier spot, where the weeds are probably half a metre high.

Gi Changning looked at all of it carefully. All she had of Ji Ran's childhood was a few passing remarks, and out of those fragments she had built some idea of the village and the people in it, and even standing in it, standing at the door of the house, she could not make it solid.

Her parents and her uncle and aunt talked about how to clean the house and when to go to the graves. Her father wanted to borrow the car and drive to another village to sweep his wife's parents' graves as well.

Gi Changning felt somebody's eyes on the back of her head, very distinctly, and whipped round. "Who's there?"

The Gis stopped talking and all turned to look.

The old man at the lane end had been caught outright, and showed not the slightest embarrassment about it. He came a few steps forward and slapped his thigh like a man greeting old friends he had not seen in years. "Well now. Hongguang and Hongcheng. It's been a while."

He spoke dialect, and with several teeth missing he swallowed half of it, and Gi Changning did not understand a word. He then took hold of both brothers' hands with great familiarity and shook them up and down. "I saw you from a way off and didn't dare believe it."

The uncle had not dealt with the village for years. After their mother died he settled in Pingchuan and only came back now and then at New Year and the mid-autumn to see his brother's family and bring presents. He put on a trading smile, racked his memory, and finally produced a name, in a dialect that had drifted a little. "You'll be Uncle Yan from the east end. Keeping well?"

Gi Changning's father did not even manage a smile.

Every village has its legend and none of them hold up. Dayan's is that in the Song dynasty a general laid an ambush on the hill by the next village, and when the fighting came a great rock rolled down from the hill and stopped here, and later people built a settlement and called it Dayan, Big Rock, and took the surname Yan from the sound of it.

Yan is a big name in Dayan, and anybody called Yan is related to any other, however distantly. The Gis are an incomer name.

"Keeping well, keeping very well." Old Yan's eyes went to the two wives, and he said it with a sort of sigh. "And this will be Hongguang's wife and Hongcheng's. I've not seen much of Hongguang's. Hongcheng's I'd never have known."

Dayan dialect is fast and if you drift for a second you lose it. The uncle's wife is not from there and looked as blank as Gi Changning. Gi Changning's mother made a small sound nobody quite caught, and smiled sweetly. "Why wouldn't you know me? Looking as hale as that, I'd never have known you."

Gi Changning could not follow it and could hear how are you not dead yet underneath it perfectly well.

Old Yan had fallen out with the Gis years back, and in a village you see each other whether you like it or not, and however bad the blood you exchange a few words. He looked at Gi Changning, a tall girl who carried herself in a way you never see in a village, with the air of somebody raised in comfort.

A hothouse flower, not a weed.

Something went through her mother's mind. She pulled Gi Changning in against her and said, carelessly, in dialect, "I hear your boy's got himself into trouble and put himself in prison. How many years was it? Oh dear. And you not getting any younger. What a shame."

Old Yan's hearing is good. The corners of that creased old mouth dropped.

"I'll say this, Uncle Yan." Her mother was all kindness. "You want to be building up some credit for that boy of yours, instead of reading charts for this one and that one all day long. You're healthy and you eat well, and you might ask yourself who's paying for it."

She was in a white trench coat with silver work at the cuffs and collar that you could barely see, and in the sun the light moved through it. Her long hair hung loose and soft, black and bright as silk. She stood perfectly still with her eyes gone dark, and under them Old Yan could not get his breath.

After the Gis came down in the world, the Shan Qing who had looked better in a plain white shirt than any other girl in that village became entirely and only Hongcheng's wife, working herself to the bone with a few clothes to a season, and what she got from the village for it was what a shame.

Old Yan went back to the square with the wind out of him.

The one minding the children was beating the dust off his granddaughter's clothes, and asked as he came up, "Well? Whose were they?"

Old Yan said nothing.

He had not expected an answer. He finished with the dust, let the child go off and play, and said, "And you can stop asking people for their birth charts. You can't read your own and you're reading other people's. Take my advice. Mind that mouth of yours. That'd be doing your son some good."

Old Yan got up unsteadily and went home without a word. His house is an old one, and everything in it worth money has been sold. Last year his son was arrested for a theft of a very large sum, and he put in every bit of savings he had and sold everything he owned to pay it back, and what is left is bare old plaster. Through the winter just gone he would not burn a lump of coal, and he nearly did not get through it.

And look at the Gis. A few years, and a car, and clothes with names on them. What had he done to deserve a son who ends up in prison?

He went to step up on a stool and get onto the brick bed for a sleep, with do your son some good going round and round in his ears, and somehow his ankle went loose and the stool tipped. He kicked out twice, failed to catch the edge of the bed, and came down flat on the concrete floor.

He rubbed his bruised tailbone, lost his temper, picked up the stool by his foot and threw it. There was a crash, and he forgot his tailbone and got over there in a few strides, and his hands shook, and he began to cry.

He had just smashed the only electric kettle in the house.

---

When he had gone, Gi Changning asked, "Mum, who was that?"

Apart from that one row, she had rarely seen her mother show so much. Though showing is not the word. She had rarely seen her mother hate anybody like that.

In fact she had never seen it at all.

Her uncle got the cleaning things out of the boot, and there was not enough, so they decided to drive into town for mops and cloths and have something to eat while they were there.

They had stopped once at a service area to rest. The food there is expensive and bad and they had had one burger between the lot of them, and by now everybody was hungry.

In the car, her mother put an arm round her shoulders and told her how it had been. "That old wretch learned a bit of fortune telling when he was young and has been shouting about it round the village ever since. Somebody's birth chart one day, somebody's house and where it should stand the next. He's senior by the generations, so people humour him, and they all have him in to say where to build."

"When your dad came out of hospital, and I was taking Ranran to school, an auntie in the village I got on with told me to divorce him and leave the child. That was how I found out what the old wretch had been telling people. That Ranran's chart was too heavy and had blighted your grandmother first, then your dad, and I was next. He told it with every detail in place. I was so angry I got on my bike and went round to have it out with him."

The Gis are an incomer name and Old Yan is senior by the generations, and after a loud row it came to nothing, and he hated them all the more. Every village around knew that what had happened to the Gis was Ji Ran's heavy chart.

People were less open-minded then than they are now, and most of them believed a bit of that sort of thing.

Grown-ups talk and children copy, and some of those children were Ji Ran's age, and you can work out the rest with your toes.

Ji Ran was very small at the time and did not hear what was underneath what the grown-ups said. She did once ask her mother about it, quite seriously, and her mother explained it calmly, and once Ji Ran was old enough to understand she never asked again.

Her mother hated Old Yan enough to want him dead on the spot.

"Last year the auntie rang me and told me the old wretch's only son had gone to prison." She wound the window down for some air, and laughed coldly. "Heaven keeps a clear account. When the boy comes out he may be seeing his father's ashes."

The uncle and his wife were hearing all this for the first time, and he swore, in the particular dialect of Dayan village. "I saw your faces and your Hongcheng's. I should have sent him off."

His wife was indignant. "What sort of creature is that?"

Gi Changning's fists were tight. "If I'd known I'd have hit him."

"We don't lay hands on rubbish." Her mother held her hand. "It's dirty."

A man like Old Yan, who looks down on everybody, with an only son in prison and the whole village passing it mouth to mouth and looking at him sideways, has enough to take into the grave and chew over.

---

Dayan is not far from the town, ten minutes by car. The biggest supermarket in the town is called Limin, on the busiest street, two storeys, and it had squeezed out every other small shop and was doing splendidly.

Being the holiday there were plenty of people about. The fruit stalls along the road ran in a line and the snack vans shouted their different offers through loudspeakers, in dialect.

The sign over the great Limin supermarket was hanging off the wall, with the words PAY UP sprayed on it in red paint, and the one nail left in it was ready to go at any moment. Nobody in the town thought anything of it. They glanced as they went past, and said that at least it gave the young hooligans something to do.

The uncle slowed, wound down his window and put his head half out and asked a passer-by, in dialect, "Excuse me. What's happened at Limin?"

"Ah." The woman's face said she understood. "Just back from away, are you?"

He nodded. "That's right. We wanted to buy a few things."

"Then you're out of luck." She clicked her tongue and pointed up at the sign. "Last year. Limin went under and they took the owner in. Tax, they said."

Through the window Gi Changning could see PAY UP sprayed over the walls and the glass, and a group of young men in the best years of their lives sitting on the steps with cigarettes in their mouths and placards in their hands. One of the placards read, in red paint, XUE YI PAY UP.

Hold on. Xue Yi?