Chapter 42

When Ji Changfeng's call came, Ji Changning was backstage having her make-up done.

She did not know whether the backstage of every dance company is that loud, or whether foreigners simply have bigger voices, but when she heard what came down the line she put a finger in her other ear without meaning to and said, "Sorry?"

His voice has always been level and steady. Across a full twelve hours of time difference it came through sounding tired. "Ningning. Dad isn't good. Can you come back and see him one last time?"

"One last time?" She seemed not to follow it. She looked at herself in the mirror with her face already done, and raised an eyebrow. "Don't be funny with me. He's perfectly well, isn't he? Last time he rang he could still shout at you and laugh. Has he got you acting for him again? I've told you, I'm on tour, I genuinely can't get away. The moment it's finished I'll come and see him."

He said nothing. He stood with his back against a cold hospital corridor, with the light outside the operating theatre too bright to look into, and listened to his sister's voice going quieter and quieter. Then he said, "Ningning. You know I'm never funny about anything."

She went silent.

It is true. Ji Changfeng is the eldest son of the Ji family and a perfectly good heir, always gracious, always composed, the glue between a rebellious sister and a stubborn father. He is never funny about anything.

And what a ridiculous thing for a man who is never funny to say, she thought.

Chairman Ji is like the head of a household out of the old order, as if everything must be held in his hand, his children included. He would not let Ji Changfeng dance. He would not let Ji Changning perform. He would not let her join a foreign company. And he spent money donating a building to send her abroad to study, and took no notice whatever of the account of hers with ten million followers, and after she joined the company he told her, "If any foreigner gives you trouble, you tell me, and I'll have your brother go and hit them back."

She used to grumble about him to the photographs of her mother and her grandmother. She could never work out how either of them had put up with Chairman Ji.

And this man was going too?

How could he possibly go?

She felt somebody pulling at her hand. She tried to shake it off and could not. The shrieking at her ear would not come together into whole words. As she was about to go out through the door, somebody stopped her.

It was a woman well on in years, with every hair of her bun in place, who looked at her quietly and said, in English, "Joy. You're on."

Joy is Ji Changning's English name.

Only then did she notice that she had been about to walk out of the wings. Her colleagues had hold of her hand and one girl had an arm round her waist. She was gripping the phone, and the call had already cut off, and facing a woman who looked rather serious, she came back to herself.

Of course. She was on tour. The woman in front of her had once argued everybody else down to get her into the company, and that is how Ji Changning came to be the first Chinese principal at a ballet company known all over the world. She had just been made up as the black swan. She was on next.

"I'm sorry, Ms Mitchell." She stopped at last and looked at the doors, close enough to touch, and let the make-up artist straighten her hair and her costume. The corridor beyond the doors felt like a hole that could swallow all five senses, and her heart went cold by degrees. She pulled the corners of her mouth up mechanically, trying to find her way back to the state a performer worth the name ought to be in. "I'll have myself in order in a moment."

That stage was not hers alone. It is the whole company's work, and she was not going to be the one who broke it.

For a second she seemed to go back fifteen years, except that the person in the bed was not her grandmother but Chairman Ji, and the one desperate to get there was not the father but the daughter.

And so the audience in that theatre saw a black swan who was not only sly and proud, but mad with something that had pain in it.

---

Late at night the capital is all lights and colour. Any number of people long to be here. Any number are buried here.

Gi Ran blinked. Hours at a screen had left her eyes stinging. She stood up, and perhaps she stood too fast, because her heart began to pound and the dark came across her vision in waves, and in the moment of standing she went over, chair and all.

Her colleagues heard it, dropped what they were doing and got hold of her. "Gi Ran. What's wrong?"

"Low blood sugar, probably." She rubbed her temples, and after a few seconds her sight came right, though her heartbeat was slower to settle. She thanked them. "I'll go to the washroom. We're at the end of the project. Nobody needs to stay late with me. Go home and rest."

"It's no trouble, we're finishing anyway. The sooner it's done the sooner we're free." One of them took a sweet out of a desk drawer and put it in her palm. "You've been up every night for this project. When it's over, take some leave and sleep properly. Look at you. You're nothing but bones."

She took the sweet and said nothing either way about the leave, and made her way to the washroom and washed her face in cold water.

The Gi Ran in the mirror was white in the face and thin. It was early autumn and still warm, and she had put a jumper on weeks ago.

There would be a bonus at the end of the project. Last year she bought a flat back home in Pingchuan, and on her present salary the mortgage is not hard. What she wanted next was to buy the shop unit her father currently rents. Once the bonus came in, with her savings and the family's on top, barring surprises it should be enough.

She let out a breath and took a tissue from the counter and dried her face.

Only why did her heart feel so wrong today? She pressed a hand to her chest. She had had palpitations before, from the late nights, and this was nothing like them. It was as if something that mattered enormously to her was going away, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Her own imagination gave her a fright. Perhaps late at night really does bring up the part of a person nobody else sees. Gi Ran, who has been praised by her managers and her colleagues since the day she joined for being unshaken by praise or blame, fumbled her phone out and rang her parents in Pingchuan.

It was very late. The call connected, and her mother's voice came through slightly thick, clearly just woken by it. "Ranran?"

"It's me." She did not notice the shake in her own voice. "Mum. How are you and Dad doing in Pingchuan?"

Her mother put the light on, pushed her father awake and switched to speaker. "Your dad and I are both fine and the business is doing well. We can make the payments on the flat, so don't you worry. And stop working all night. Your mum and dad can still earn."

Listening to her mother going on exactly as she always does, and her father agreeing blurrily with it, the bad thought in her thinned out and went. Of course. If anything had really happened at home, even if her parents said nothing, her uncle's family would quietly tell on them. Like the time just after her father opened the shop, when it did so well that out of envy somebody came and smashed the place up, and she knew nothing about it up in the capital until her aunt rang her, and she called the police and hired a lawyer and made enough of an example of them that the ones circling went off the idea.

And if something really had happened at home, neither of her parents would sound that steady.

She looked up at the bright strip light in the mirror, and her parents' chatter began to go away from her. She wanted to say she was all right, and she opened her mouth and nothing came out. The person in the mirror started splitting into several shadows. She shook her head, and felt her own awareness go out with the breath she had just let go, and then there was a bang, and the phone dropped away.

In the second the back of her head met the washroom carpet, Gi Ran thought that she was going to worry her parents again.

---

It was the following afternoon by the time Ji Changning's plane reached the capital, and the last message from Ji Changfeng on her phone said that they had got him stable for now and moved him to intensive care.

Meng Lai drove out to the airport. It was coming up to the end of the working day and the traffic was bad enough to fray anybody, and she held the wheel and stole looks at Ji Changning in the mirror.

The car was unusually quiet. Ji Changning's face was blank and her eyes were empty and fixed on nothing in particular.

Something sour and hard to name came up in Meng Lai. After the exams the two of them took completely different roads. Ji Changning went abroad to study. Meng Lai put dancing down in her third year and worked savagely at her books for a year, and the exams went well, and she had luck with her, and the reallocation got her into early years teaching at a first-tier university. She did not want to go back to Pingchuan after graduating, so she settled in the capital as a perfectly ordinary nursery teacher.

Sometimes Meng Lai envies Ji Changning very much.

Envies her for being able to go after dancing without looking back, for putting ballet down for years and then picking it up again on sheer inhuman stubbornness and becoming a principal. These days Meng Lai only dances with small children, and when she does she remembers partnering Ji Changning, and cannot stop herself wondering what would have happened if she had kept dancing back then, or taken the arts exams.

The traffic crawled. Meng Lai is not used to a silence like that, and spoke first. "Changning. Is your dad at Union?"

"Union, yes." Ji Changning kept glancing at her phone. She was afraid of the worst message arriving. "My aunt says they can't treat it in Pingchuan. He had to come to a big hospital."

Meng Lai had only got the message yesterday asking her to collect her from the airport. She had asked in passing what was wrong, and been told his father was at Union. Meng Lai has always known where the line is. She and Ji Changning had been in touch less and less since the exams, and much less since they started work, and she had stopped herself out of instinct and not pushed. So they can't treat it in Pingchuan surprised her. "How can it be this sudden?"

"It isn't sudden, really." Ji Changning gave a low laugh, and it was not clear who she was laughing at. "He has high blood pressure. When the Anzhi designs leaked he was angry enough to put himself in hospital, and I thought it was under control. But the pressure has already got at his heart and the blood supply to his brain."

"Meng Lai." She leaned back against the seat with no strength in her, as if everything in her had gone off somewhere else. "A week ago he rang me. He wanted me to come and see him. I was performing in Italy, and his voice was loud enough to carry through the whole backstage, and I fobbed him off the way I always do. I said I'd be back in the country soon and I'd come home and stay properly for a few days."

"Will I still have a home after this?"

That house in Pingchuan was full of cold and of people squaring up to each other, and she knew that however unsettled she was abroad, there was always somewhere she could go back to.

Ji Changning is twenty-six this year, not a rebellious girl of sixteen. She asked herself: wasn't the thing you hated your father for most that he never got to see your grandmother one last time? And if you don't see your father one last time, who are you going to hate for that?

At Union she opened the car door and went up, asking her way to the department Ji Changfeng had sent her. Meng Lai was about to leave when she found Ji Changning's bag still on the seat.

She found somewhere to park, picked the bag up, and had no idea which room his father was in, so all she could do was ask her way with what Ji Changning had given her.

She searched for nearly half an hour. Then she saw a principal dancer famous for her elegance holding on with both hands to a bed that already had a white sheet over it, and screaming until her voice tore.

"Dad."

---

Gi Ran was going through the results of her tests.

The doctor had plainly seen a great many young people who treat their bodies as nothing, and tried to reason with her. "How many of you has that company of yours sent in here? You earn the money and you spend it on medical bills. Do you think that's sensible?"

There is not much wrong with Gi Ran's heart. Her liver and her stomach are the worst of it. The malnutrition and the thyroid nodules are trivial additions. The loss of the curve in her neck is simply the standard complaint of her trade.

Seeing that none of it moved her much, the doctor knew he had been talking to the wall, and sighed. "There's an imported drug now. It isn't on the state insurance, so you would have to..."

"Thank you, doctor. I don't need it." She was half sitting up in bed, and the sheets and the hospital gown made her look paler still. She tipped her head back to look at him, and her voice was firm. "I'll take proper care of myself. There's no need for the imported one. My mum and dad will be here in a minute, and you don't need to tell them either. I'm an adult and I can decide for myself."

The doctor had nothing to say.

There was nothing he could do. The patient did not want it and he could not force it on her. "Call me any time if anything changes."

Gi Ran folded several pages of the results up and hid them under the bed, and nodded. "Thank you, doctor. Sorry to have troubled you."

He had barely gone when her father came in with a flask of water, and poured her a cup of it, and said heavily, "Have a drink first, Ranran. Your mum's gone for food. Don't worry about anything."

"What have I got to worry about?" She shook her head and comforted him. "There was never anything wrong with me. We're at the end of a project and I was busy and forgot to finish my dinner, and my blood sugar dropped. I'm sorry I frightened you."

He had his mask on. He turned away, and in the gap while he was setting the flask down he quietly wiped his eyes. He has always known his daughter is independent and has done well. She carried the whole household while she was still small. She had her high school fees waived and won a scholarship on top, and she was top of the province in the sciences, and the school gave her a prize, so the family did not even have to find her university fees. The one awkward part was that applying for the maintenance grant at university needed proof of means. Apart from that she had the university's scholarship and the national encouragement award, and she went in for every competition with prize money attached, and the honours from those competitions later made a handsome line on her CV and got her into a big tech company everybody has heard of.

The salary now is enough to make you whistle.

And all that money was bought with Gi Ran's health. She eats in the canteen and lives in the company dormitory and wants very little, and she is very good at her job, so her managers think well of her and her colleagues cluster round her, and she is always the one working hardest and the one promoted fastest.

In her first year of work she rented her parents a new flat.

In her second year she rented her father a shop unit for a restaurant.

In her third year she took on a mortgage and bought a flat in Pingchuan, and from then on they had a home in Pingchuan.

Her father has still not got over it. Heaven knows how frightened they were last night, hearing two bangs and then shouting and shouting and getting no answer from their daughter. The pair of them were awake in an instant and their hearts nearly stopped, and without thinking about anything they bought overnight train tickets and came to the capital, and it was a colleague of hers who eventually told them she was at Union.

It was not until they actually saw her asleep that half their fear went.

Watching his daughter sip at the hot water, he could not help it. "Ranran. Why don't we go back to Pingchuan?"

She stalled. "Back to Pingchuan?"

"Yes. The business is doing well. You don't have to work like this." He was not speaking standard Chinese but dialect, with a catch of the nose in it, and it sounded like going back to that village where so much is buried. "Look how thin you are. I'll feed you up properly when you're home. It's been so long since I cooked for you. Your mum and I can manage the mortgage. We'll be steady. We don't need to be rich."

Time has gone far too fast, he thought. Yesterday his Ranran was a little girl. Today she is a grown woman. And how did she become a grown woman? He dug at memories that would not come out whole, and his heart hurt past describing.

They owe Ranran far too much. Her shoulders are so thin. How did she hold a household up with them? Parents only ever want their girl back under the wing, living happily.

Gi Ran listened quietly. The water in the cup had gone tepid. Night had come down, and the corridor and the ward were full of all kinds of noises.

He stopped talking, and saw on his daughter's face the same mild amusement it always has.

Gi Ran has never been able to do anything with her family, least of all with her parents' concern coming at her in armfuls. She thought about it. "After the new year, then. I'll resign and come back to Pingchuan and see whether I can get through the civil service exams. And if I really can't, I can sit the postgraduate exams and go back to studying."

He was delighted first and worried second. "Aren't the civil service exams supposed to be very hard? Studying is good, though. You study and don't worry. Your mum and dad can keep you."

"It's all right. I'm very good at exams." She smiled. "If I set out to do something, I generally do it."

He did not know what to do with himself for happiness. He checked the time. "Why isn't your mum back? She'll have got lost. I'll go down and find her."

She nodded. "It's very late. Be careful, Dad."

"I will."

---

Her mother was carrying a vacuum flask and a bag of steamed buns.

The flask had black chicken soup in it, bought specially for her daughter.

The capital is well provided for and walking at night is easy enough, but the queue was long and it took her a good while to get it.

She was hurrying towards the hospital when she saw somebody on the steps.

Whoever it was had their head buried in the space between their knees and their body, quite alone, not making a sound.

It is a common enough sight at a hospital. But something pricked at her heart, and she found herself going over without deciding to, and crouching down, and saying gently, "It gets cold at night, love. Don't catch something. Think how worried your family will be."

Ji Changning lifted her head blearily and saw a woman who was a complete stranger, and somehow felt nothing against her, and pulled at the corner of her mouth. "My family. He went today."

What went means, said in a hospital, does not have to be explained.

A grief came over her from somewhere she could not name, and her eyes went wet with it at once. "If you don't mind it, will you come and stay with me tonight?"

Ji Changning had no idea where that kindness had come from. What if the woman meant her harm? Was that not asking the wolf in? She had had no wish to talk to anybody. Then she tipped her head and looked at the wet, gentle eyes, and something in her went soft. "My brother's taken my cousin back to school. He'll be here in a bit. We're going home together tomorrow."

"That's all right, then." Her mother brought out a bun, still warm. "You've not had dinner, have you? I've only just bought them. Carrot and vermicelli and egg. Something to fill you up."

"Thank you." Ji Changning took it in both hands. The steam came up past her eyes. She did not eat it. She stared at the steam instead. "Can I ask you something? When somebody looks at you at the very end. What do you think they want to say?"

Fifteen years ago her grandmother lay in a hospital bed saying her father's name. She seemed to know the end was on her, and she put out a shaking hand towards Ji Changning. The old woman's skin was rough as old bark and her clouded eyes could no longer make anything out, and they found the shape of the granddaughter she loved most anyway, and she opened her mouth, and in the end nothing came.

Fifteen years later her father lay with tubes in every part of him. He held on to the last, held on until his daughter came and stood in front of him, and his scattering mind was pulled back together by something nobody could see. In the moment she arrived he produced a smile with nothing kindly in it, and for a second Ji Changning might have been looking at her grandmother. He put out his hand and touched his daughter's hair one last time, and when he had, he lifted a finger and told her to go.

His daughter had already watched somebody she loved die once. How could he bear to make her go through it again?

But people are selfish. He wanted to see his daughter one last time and he did not want her hurt, and he thought that if being hated would keep Ningning from grieving, then let her hate him.

And so he closed his eyes peacefully.

"I expect," her mother's voice said, in the early autumn evening wind, going into Ji Changning's ear, "he was sorry he wouldn't get to see you again."

Ji Changning bit into the bun, and the tears came straight down. "Was he?"

Her mother was about to say something more when a voice behind her said, "Qing."

Her husband had found her.

She said goodbye. "I'm off. Mind how you go."

Ji Changning said she would, and heard the conversation behind her.

"Ranran says she's coming back to Pingchuan next year."

"Really? That's wonderful."

Pingchuan.

Ji Changfeng's car drew up and he came over with a cup of pumpkin porridge. "I've taken Shuo back to school. I know you don't eat in the evenings, but you can't have eaten properly on the plane either. Have some porridge to line your stomach, and eat later when there's something in it, or your stomach will hurt."

"You sound exactly like Dad, going on and on." She took it. The temperature was right. She drank some through the straw, because the carrot bun she had just eaten had gone down awkwardly. "Changfeng. What would you say to me coming back to Pingchuan?"

"What about your company?"

"I can move."

He laughed. "Then come back. If no company will have you, I'll put up the money and build you one."

"You and Dad really are father and son. Could you think a bit better of me?"

---

Upstairs, the doctor was doing his round, and Gi Ran looked at the young man taking careful notes behind him. "Is he a trainee?"

"He is. Just started. I'm showing him how it all works."

She watched the trainee's white coat disappear past the door, and put away what had come up in her eyes.

Her parents, just back in the ward, followed where their daughter was looking. "What are you looking at, Ranran?"

"Nothing." Gi Ran held the chicken soup in both hands. "I just rather want to be out of here."

Only a little.