Chapter 33

Jinhua Gardens.

The afternoon sun was gentle. The two Ji men were resting in their rooms, and Ji Ran was minding a child.

Liang Cheng had taken half a day off that morning to sweep the graves and lay a bunch of red roses for her sister. She was working in the afternoon, and her husband Gou Jiawen was run off his feet at the institute, the end of some project, and they had not even given him Tomb Sweeping off.

And since young Liang Shuo had energy with nowhere to put it and kept on at his mother about going to see his sister, she had no choice. She asked Ji Ran over the messaging app and then sent him round. His holiday homework came with him.

A primary school child's homework looks small and very easy to a grown-up, and does not look that way to the child. Liang Shuo cannot sit still, and ten minutes of homework needs twenty minutes of building bricks.

Ji Ran thought fondly of the days when she tutored him, when at least the boy respected her and asked his questions properly and was as good as gold. Now he knew her too well to think of her as a teacher who looked like his mother, and had moved to the view that a sister is a sister. He is frightened of his teacher and frightened of his mother, and not frightened of his sister at all.

His sister is the best.

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

His sister was tired.

Liang Shuo is at the age for mischief, and given the chance he would get on the roof and pull the tiles off. A small space is no good to him. Only the living room could just about hold him.

It is as well the living room is carpeted and the Jis change into slippers at the door, or he would have needed a change of clothes twice a day over the holiday. As it was, once a day did it.

He finished copying out a classical poem from his textbook and looked at her with great hope, and put a great many bends in his voice. "Sister."

Ji Ran's heart is iron. She tapped the exercise book. "No. I know your teacher wants that poem five times and learned by heart. You've done it once, and you haven't recited it to me."

"I'll definitely learn it." He is a nice-looking boy, still young and unformed, with big eyes and puppy fat. His grandparents like buying him preppy English-schoolboy clothes, which makes him look even more harmless than he is. He shook her arm and wheedled. "Sister, ten minutes. Ten minutes and I'll come straight back and do my homework and learn the poem."

"No."

"Sister."

"You may not."

"Sister's the best."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She is very good at handling a badly behaved student and entirely helpless against one who wheedles. They stared at each other and she was the one who gave ground. "Here's what we'll do. Copy it five times and I won't ask you to recite it yet, and you can have ten minutes. All right?"

"Yes."

He is genuinely naughty and genuinely good when he is being good. Having got that out of her, he stopped at once instead of pushing further, put his head down and copied quietly.

Five times done, he threw the pen down and was about to cheer, and turned and met Ji Ran's steady eyes, and shrank back into the chair bit by bit, knees together, hands on his knees, small chin tucked in. "Sister. I've finished. Can I go down and play for ten minutes?"

She took the book. The first and second copies were tidy enough. From the third the writing began to drift, and by the fifth the characters were short of arms and legs, like houses built on the cheap and ready to fall over.

He saw her face and put out a hand, and before she could speak he had the book off her, turned a page and picked up the pen as if to copy it again. "I know. I'll do another one."

And he did, carefully, and gave it to her to check. "Sister, I'm so tired. Can my break be fifteen minutes?"

The new copy was plainly written in good faith, every stroke where it should be and not a piece missing. Ji Ran raised her eyes. He shot upright, chin a little down, eyes turned hard upwards, mouth pressed and curving.

Liang Shuo has his father's mouth and two small dimples when he smiles, and every time he does something wrong or annoys his grandparents, that one expression hits them like a dart and they pick him straight up and call him their good boy, and the temper is gone.

It works every single time.

Unfortunately his sister Ji Ran does not buy it.

She put the book back on the table. "Shuo. If you finish your homework early you'll have a lot of time to play, and you won't have to bargain with me at all."

"But my friend says what you've fought for tastes best, and if nobody fights him for a thing, he doesn't want it." He was perfectly serious, building his case on what he had just heard. "So time you've fought your homework for is the best time to play with. If you only play and don't do homework, there's no fun in the playing."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She did not altogether follow the way a primary school child's mind works these days.

A promise is a promise, though, so she nodded. "Fifteen minutes. I'll time it. After fifteen minutes you come back and do your maths."

"Right." He jumped off the chair, dug about in his trouser pockets and brought out two milk toffees and put them in front of her. "Have a sweet, sister."

"I won't." She looked at the pain on his face and pushed them back, not knowing whether to laugh. "Mind your teeth."

"I only have one a day." He put them back in his pocket and patted it, then took a spinning top out of his school bag. "Look. It's a light-up one. It flashes when it spins. I asked Grandad for ages."

Ji Ran was puzzled. "How did you get that into your bag under your mother's nose?"

He held it up, all innocence. "I didn't. It was already in the bag."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

"That's clever."

"Not really." He was modest about it. "I've got a friend who talked his dad into a tablet for schoolwork and only plays games on it."

She was alert at once. "That friend isn't you, is it?"

"It is not." He would have sworn on the spinning top. "I don't like online games. You can't see them or touch them and they're no fun at all. And my friend got sworn at by people in the game, and then he swore and his mum smacked him, and the next day he couldn't sit on his chair properly."

Ji Ran nodded. Whatever else, not being hooked on games was good news.

He went to the stairs and hung onto the door frame. "You can only start timing when I'm downstairs. No cheating."

She got up to go with him, not easy about leaving him alone down there. "All right. No cheating."

He went down happily and started on his light-up top.

The sun was good and the house gets plenty of light, so you could hardly see the colours when it spun. That did not bother him. The carpet was more of a problem, because the top would go a few turns and slow to a stop. He was not getting enough out of it, and said to Ji Ran, who had just come down, "Sister, I'm going outside with it."

With which he saw to himself. He picked it up, opened the door and was out in one movement, and outside, the moment he spun it, it wobbled twice, settled and went round beautifully fast.

From where Ji Ran was she could see him give two happy jumps on the spot.

Possibly the afternoon sun was too comfortable. She was getting drowsy.

In the open doorway he squatted down to watch the top, shuffling after it wherever it went, with no thought at all for his clothes or his shoes.

He must have got tired of squatting, because he stood up and stretched his legs and took something out of his pocket, and stood still a few seconds, and the top slowed in her line of sight and stopped. He bent to pick it up, and as he straightened he went rigid, and the top dropped hard onto the ground.

The next moment both hands went to his throat, and he went straight down.

From where she was, Ji Ran could see him. She came awake and ran out of the door, and his pale face was slowly going red and his legs were kicking without his meaning them to. She took two solid kicks, and on the ground beside him she saw a familiar toffee wrapper.

Her face set. From somewhere she found the strength to haul him up, got both arms round his middle, braced him with her legs so he would stay where she put him, kept his upper body tipped slightly forward, made one hand into a fist against the top of his stomach, closed the other hand over it and pressed hard inwards and upwards, again and again.

He was clearly in a bad way and she could not afford to care. Her arms went numb and she kept the same speed and the same movement going, until his mouth opened and a round sweet fell out onto the ground.

She stalled for a second, and could not hold either of them up any longer, and went down with him still in her arms.

A child that size is not light, and it knocked the wind out of her.

Liang Shuo is small, and after all that he burst into loud tears.

Ji Ran came back to herself, forgot that anything hurt, got off the ground and stumbled over and hammered on her brother's door, her voice shaking and close to crying. "Changfeng. Changfeng, get up. Hospital. We have to go to hospital."

---

Jinsha town.

Gi Changning's parents left her quite happily with Fang Xiaomu and went to find her uncle and get something to eat.

Having said second one, Fang Xiaomu wanted to sew her own mouth shut, and once she knew about the swap and that Ji Ran had not come, she volunteered to take Gi Changning somewhere good to eat by way of apology.

They bought bubble tea. Traffic enforcement in Jinsha is clearly relaxed, and Fang Xiaomu carried Gi Changning on her bicycle to a rice noodle place. It was past the lunch hour and the place was nearly empty. Fang Xiaomu was emphatic. "Their beef in golden soup is the best thing going. Trust me."

Gi Changning is not fussy about food, so she had the same. While they waited she asked, "You were at middle school with Ranran?"

"I was. We were close." Neither of them is remotely shy, and two people who talk to strangers easily will get a conversation going, if not a roaring one. "I met her in my second year. My village is right next to Dayan, very near. I used to come to yours for meals sometimes."

Fang Xiaomu was raised by her grandparents while her parents worked away, so she was more or less a left-behind child. Her grandmother had dementia and her grandfather looked after her, and when it got too much he would forget there was a granddaughter at home waiting to be fed.

"Grandad gave me money, though." She was not a well-behaved child at middle school, and given money she would buy spicy snack strips and sweets rather than bread. She was growing fast at the time and shooting up, and with nothing much going in she was thin as a stick. She is evenly built now and trains, and you can see the muscle in her arms and her legs, nothing like she was, which is why Gi Changning's parents had not known her. "The school canteen food was horrible, and when I ate a lot of it the others laughed at me. Ranran was the only one who shared hers."

There is no need to say anything about Gi Changning's father's cooking. It is more than enough to win over one small girl. In their second year, two thirds of the fried dough twists and egg pancakes and candied radish Ji Ran brought in went into Fang Xiaomu.

"That Ji Ran." Fang Xiaomu clicked her tongue. "Being picked on herself, and still finding the attention to look after somebody else."

Somebody else being Fang Xiaomu.

Gi Changning agreed entirely. "Which is why she'd make a very good doctor."

The noodles came and Fang Xiaomu took a deep breath of them. "Then Ranran found out I could ride a bike and asked me to yours for dinner, and Uncle Gi and Auntie Shan knew my parents were away and felt sorry for me and said to come at weekends too. They wouldn't take money for it. Uncle Gi is a lovely man. He'd set some aside before we ate so I could take it home for my grandparents."

Her grandfather paid it back in kind, and never bought Fang Xiaomu anything without buying one for Ji Ran too, to thank the Gis for looking after her.

Those lunches at the Gis' were, frankly, the brightest thing in Fang Xiaomu's whole middle school career.

Gi Changning did not follow one part. "So why did Xue Miaomiao shut Ranran in the sports store?"

"Don't talk to me about Xue Miaomiao." Fang Xiaomu ground her teeth. "My grandmother died about then and I took a few days off, that was all, and I came back to find Xue Miaomiao had shut her in the store room, and the school not only didn't do anything to her, they sat on it. I wasn't having it, so I went and had it out with that bastard of a headmaster, and he called my parents in."

Put down by her parents, Fang Xiaomu went to see Ji Ran, and found a girl on a hospital bed with a drip in her left arm and her notes in her right hand, revising, who saw Fang Xiaomu crying and comforted her.

Which made Fang Xiaomu cry harder.

After middle school her parents looked at her grandfather on his own and decided to bring the money home and start some small business locally and give him a decent old age, and the whole family moved to Jinsha. She knew Ji Ran was going to Pingchuan, and she only wished her well.

"I'm at the county's number one school, a day and a half off every two weeks, and we can't go out, so nothing from outside gets in. I only heard about the Xues much later." She pulled in a mouthful of noodles and swallowed, and her eyebrows alone looked delighted. "Since the Xues went under I come and look whenever I've got time, and the more I look the better I feel. There's a thing you bring on yourself."

Gi Changning chewed, and thought it had been on the heat a touch too long and was not as good as her father's. She looked at Fang Xiaomu, lit up with it, and felt the same. "I'll be honest. I'm very happy too."

Delighted, in fact. And she was going to pay attention, because when she got back to Pingchuan she would tell Ji Ran all of it, and not one detail was getting left out.

"And there's better news." Fang Xiaomu was glowing. "That bastard of a headmaster has gone. I only wish I had Ranran's number, because I'd love to cheer her up with it."

Gi Changning was interested. "Tell me more."

Fang Xiaomu was modest about her achievements. "Nothing much. I found out at high school that you can report things to the education bureau, so I reported him once a month for a year and a half. I don't know which letter did it, but off he went."

Gi Changning could only put her thumb up. "Nicely done."

Fang Xiaomu saluted. "You're too kind."

Afterwards neither of them was in a hurry. Gi Changning had had no call, and Fang Xiaomu did not want to miss one word about Ji Ran, so they sat on in the noodle shop with a bubble tea each and talked and talked.

Fang Xiaomu sighed. "It's good. Nobody's going to pick on Ji Ran now."

Gi Changning stopped, and then laughed. "Now I believe you really were close."

"Actually." Fang Xiaomu pressed a dent into her cup, and said slowly, "Actually most of the others didn't mean any harm at the time. It was Xue Miaomiao who was vile. She'd trip up anybody who got close to Ji Ran. She was horrible."

Gi Changning shrugged. "And the only one who stayed stuck to Ranran was you. Fang Xiaomu, I think you'd suit something fairly pure and academic."

Ning's eye for people was trained in the world the Jis move in, and in less than an hour she had read the honesty and the heat in Fang Xiaomu, and the fact that she has not one crooked string in her. What she was gently saying is that Fang Xiaomu is good-hearted and should not take everybody for a saint with no interests of their own.

Because sometimes saying nothing is its own kind of violence.

Whether Fang Xiaomu heard what was underneath it or not, she nodded with great sincerity. "I'd like to do aeronautics, or see whether I can get into a military academy."

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

Those two, of all things.

"Can I ask what your marks are like?"

Fang Xiaomu chewed her straw. "Top five in the year, steadily. Top three now and then. I wouldn't dream of first."

"At a key school?"

"That's right. There's only one key school in the county."

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

She decided to change the subject. "Let's video call Ranran."

As an arts candidate, she would be staying in the stalls.