Chapter 32

Pingchuan.

The Tomb Sweeping holiday, with Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun at a resting point, finally shook the two Ji men loose from work, and they took Ji Ran to see the flat they used to live in.

While Granny Ji was alive, Jinhua Gardens had not been finished, and the family lived on an estate that was considered good at the time. A fine position, easy to get about from, near the centre of the city, getting on for two hundred square metres. Prices have climbed and climbed since, and now you could not buy one with money in your hand.

Ji Ran followed her father and her brother into the lift, up to the eighteenth floor.

People in business are always a little superstitious, and when he bought it he chose the eighteenth floor on an impulse, because the number sounds like going to prosper.

The last time Ji Ran had been there was to collect photographs of Gi Changning.

The flyposted adverts by the door had been cleared before New Year, and a few months on the wall and the door were covered again, with a fine layer of dust over them. Her father is used to it. He got out his key and opened the door with no concern for what the dust on it did to his clothes, and as it swung open several business cards fluttered down onto the floor. Picked up, they were all from property agents.

Which is to say, estate agents.

Nobody has lived in flat 01 on the eighteenth floor for years and nobody can get hold of the owner, and an empty flat is a waste. The ones with contacts know whose name it is in and know perfectly well he does not want to sell, and will not bother him. But there is always somebody with a thick skin, or too new to the game to know better, who cannot bear to miss a deal, and posts a card through the gap.

Her father picked up the broom by the door and swept them together. "The door's getting old and the gap's gone loose. I'll have it seen to, or put a new one on, and then these things can't get in."

Nothing inside has been touched since Granny Ji died. The rosewood furniture is under dust sheets, so that everything is blurred, like looking at flowers through fog. There is a piano in the living room, sealed up in dust. There are a cloth doll and a toy car forgotten on the sofa, and a plum-blossom cushion under an old television with a huge back on it. On the fridge there are stickers of cartoon characters, one of them stuck on the very edge on purpose so that from the front the fridge looks to have cut its ear off.

Looking at all of it, abandoned there by the years, Ji Ran felt she was seeing the childhood Gi Changning mentioned now and then.

Naughty, free, unruly, alive.

Like a run of stills from a game, each one with its own story.

The main bedroom was her father and Liang Zhi's. The wardrobe still holds clothes Liang Zhi wore and medals and trophies she won. There is a photograph of her in there under cellophane, not a cold black and white head and shoulders but Liang Zhi as a young woman in a red dress, laughing brilliantly.

Ji Ran looked up at the big wedding photograph over the bed, a white dress and a black suit, the two of them not looking at the camera but at each other, stopped there. She had seen it once or twice in her father's wallet, with the edges yellowed, and only the way those two people were looking at each other had not aged at all.

Her father turned quietly into another room and waved Ji Changfeng away, meaning he was not to follow.

Ji Changfeng had not meant to. He pulled the dust cloth off the piano and the dust went up in a cloud, pulled the bench out, wiped it with a clean towel and sat down.

He lifted the lid with both hands and tried two notes.

He had not played in a long time and his hands had gone stiff. He thought the piano was out of tune, and tuning is a complicated business he knows nothing about, and in any case he did not greatly care. Key by key he began to play Farewell.

In the small room, their father sat on a cushion in front of photographs of his mother and his wife. Fresh incense sent up thin threads of smoke that wound round them both.

For a moment it was like having them alive.

He wanted to say something. He opened his mouth several times and no sound came out.

Farewell, played badly, came through a wooden door that keeps out very little, and it was a bleak sound.

"There you are, Zhi. You took your son to piano lessons every day of the week and that is what came of it." He was unhurried about it, the way you talk about the ordinary business of a household. "Mum, you always said Changfeng would be a pianist. Looking at it now, there's no hoping for a pianist. Ningning may yet be a dancer. And our Ranran can be whatever she likes. Whatever she wants to study, I'll back her."

"I don't like coming here, you know." The way he smiles in private is more and more like his mother, who was always smiling. "Incense burns the same anywhere, and at Jinhua Gardens I could at least cut you some flowers. Here I daren't even bring an apple, in case it brings insects in to chew the photographs. If you want something, I'm going to the cemetery later. Zhi always liked cherries. Mum, your teeth aren't good, so I'll bring you strawberries. Sweet ones, with no sourness in them."

"The pair of you get on so well. Thick as anything. I'm jealous." And his eyes had in fact gone red. "I don't like coming. When I come, I can't stop thinking it's late and the two of you still aren't home."

Outside, half of Farewell stopped. Ji Changfeng seemed to have got some feeling back into his hands, and the notes had stopped coming out one at a time.

His father smiled bitterly. "I'm old."

Through the years without Liang Zhi, through the days after losing his mother, he had finally learned to come to terms with his luck and with himself.

---

Ji Ran came out of the main bedroom and stood beside her brother.

He pressed the black and white keys with the serious face of a man conducting research, and his hands did not stop. "I didn't want to learn the piano when I was small."

She could not see his face. She could hear him. "But Mum said a boy with no skills will never win a girl. So I asked her what skills Dad had."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

As a small child?

"She didn't answer. The next day she sent me to piano lessons." It was getting smoother. He has long pale fingers with a little callus on the index and the thumb, from writing. Looking only at the hands, anybody would say they were made for a piano, though the owner of them does not think so. "I wasn't having it, so I went and asked Dad what skill he had that won Mum. He said he had exactly one, which was a thick skin."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

His voice stayed level. "So I learned his skill and went and nagged Mum to let me off the piano. She was softening, and I can't keep my mouth shut, and I told her Dad's skill really did work. So that evening Dad and I were both hit, and I went to piano lessons."

Ji Ran could not help laughing.

He turned and saw it. "That's a good smile. Don't take after our father. He comes here every time with a long face and talks and talks, and he knows perfectly well Mum and Granny never liked listening to it."

"Not everybody has to force themselves to be sad. What you've lived is worth just as much." He began teaching her the keys. "Be yourself, Ranran."

When they left, their father's eyes were a little red and Ji Ran's fingers smelled of incense, and Ji Changfeng closed the piano lid with great care.

The first piece Ji Changfeng learned as a child was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The first he ever played for his family was Farewell.

Not everybody has to force themselves to be sad.

Because they have their own ways of remembering.

---

Jinsha town.

Gi Changning stared at the two blood-red characters of the name on the placard and frowned, dragging hard through her memory. Something came. "Mum. Is the owner of Limin called Xue Yi?"

Before her mother could answer, the woman who had stopped said, "That's right. Xue Yi."

She heard Gi Changning speaking standard Chinese and answered in standard Chinese with dialect through it. Her grandmother used to speak a plastic sort of standard Chinese too, so Gi Changning could follow it.

"Has he got a daughter called Xue Miaomiao?"

The woman made a noise of assent, clearly well informed about the families in that town. "That's right, there's a Miaomiao. The two of them spoiled her rotten. The child was a law unto herself."

So it was Xue Miaomiao's father.

Gi Changning still remembered Xue Miaomiao at Xiao Xiao's birthday party, ordering Ji Ran about, and she remembered her walking out of Linjiangxian with the wind gone out of her.

She remembered best of all what Ji Ran had said about her. There was no after that.

Cold cruelty at school and worse than cold cruelty, the whole of middle school, compressed into there was no after that and finished.

The damage was done. Does saying it is in the past really put it in the past?

It did not for Gi Changning.

She opened the car door. "Mum, you go on to the supermarket. There's something I want to do. Just don't forget to come back for me when you've got the shopping."

"Certainly not." Her mother objected first, and got out after her, frowning. "I'm not having you on your own. Whatever you're doing, I'm coming."

Gi Changning scratched her head. "It's nothing. I only want to ask about Limin."

Her father got out as well. He remembered a chain supermarket not far from Limin, and gave his brother the directions, and said their household would have a wander round here.

Her uncle said to phone him, asked nothing at all, and drove off.

The woman was in no hurry, and once she knew Gi Changning was interested in Limin her appetite for gossip caught fire. "Oh, the Xues were grand once. A big Mercedes each, the two of them, and Jinsha wasn't good enough for them. They went to buy land in the county town and build a shopping centre. The foundations weren't long down when the tax office turned up. Somebody had reported them by name, and when it was all looked into, there it was. Tax dodging. Millions, I heard."

She clicked her tongue over it. "You owe the state tax, you pay it back. Except Xue Yi had just borrowed tens of millions to build the centre, so where was the money? Nothing to pay the state, and all that owed to the bank, and what was left over for suppliers and the store cards was neither here nor there."

"Then everybody who'd bought a store card came to get their money back, and Limin wouldn't give it, so they carried everything out of the shop. They didn't leave so much as a plastic flower."

She pointed at the placards. "That lot are small-time hooligans the suppliers paid a bit to sit there. If any of the Xues dares show a face, they'll have him."

She got into her stride and dropped into dialect here and there, and Gi Changning could only just follow, and put the Xues' collapse together out of the parts she caught. There was certainly some exaggeration in it and some invention, and the shape of it was probably right.

Only the dates. Gi Changning rubbed her thumb and finger together. "You said before New Year. Do you mean before the first of the first month, or before the first of January?"

"Spring Festival." The woman said it as the obvious thing. "Though they live in the county town, so I didn't hear until after the holiday. It was definitely the twelfth month when the tax people came to the door."

Gi Changning began to see it. Ji Ran is easy to push around. The Jis are not. She had what she wanted, and put on her sweetest face. "Thank you. Let me buy you lunch."

The woman is very fond of pretty, well-mannered girls, and had just scratched an itch, and was in an excellent mood. "I've enjoyed talking to a bonny little lass like you. Nobody usually listens to me. Next time. Next time I'll cook you a fish."

When she had gone, Gi Changning asked, baffled, "Mum, what does that mean? And why fish?"

Her grandmother used to have a pet name for her, something close to that word in sound, so perhaps it was close in meaning as well.

"She's saying you're a pretty girl." Her mother smoothed her hair. "And fish is a Jinsha custom. You cook a fish when an honoured guest comes. Our Ningning is very likeable."

Ning puffed straight up. "Obviously."

Her father sighed beside them. Through glass splashed with red paint he could see the emptiness inside, the rows of counters fallen and collapsed, like the Limin sign itself, which will never be put back together.

It had not been many years.

Not many years since Ji Ran went to the Xue girl's birthday party.

He had taken that phone call and rushed to the local bus and into the county town in a shirt that was neither new nor old, with the back of it soaked through with sweat and his mask sticking damply to his nose and mouth. He had apologised carefully, and worked, and paid for one small dress.

Afterwards Ranran told him it was not she who pushed Xue Miaomiao.

Of course he believed her. How could he not believe Ranran. It was that he was one man with nothing behind him, and he could not get her any justice.

You watch a man raise his tower and you watch it come down.

He did not look at the ruin of Limin again. What he thought was that a man should be straight, and in business most of all you keep your feet on the ground, and there are no short cuts anywhere. Then he walked on, and a girl on a bicycle went past at speed with a rush of air, and he pushed his wife and daughter in towards the middle of the pavement so nothing coming would catch them. "Come on. Let's find out where Hongguang is and walk over."

The bicycle that had just gone by braked hard, and the girl put both feet down and walked it backwards until she was a few steps from them, and her eyes got wider and wider. "Uncle Gi? Auntie Shan?"

Hearing themselves called that stopped both of them, and they turned to look.

The girl on the bicycle was sure now, and dropped the bicycle and pointed at herself, delighted. "It's me. Xiaomu. Fang Xiaomu. I was always round for meals. Don't you remember me?"

Her mother's face opened. She looked up at a girl who was now a head taller than she was and nothing like the stick of a child she remembered, and said with real pleasure, "It's Xiaomu. A few years, and look at you, a grown girl."

"It's me, it's me. What brings you back? Where's Ji Ran? Hasn't she come?" Fang Xiaomu is tall, a good one metre seventy-five. She looked round and could not find Ji Ran, and found instead a girl she did not know. She cooled off a little, looking at a face very like her auntie's, and said doubtfully, "Uncle Gi, Auntie Shan. You..."

Her mother was about to introduce Gi Changning when Fang Xiaomu got there first.

"Your second one. She's this big already?"