Chapter 7

Faced with one simple line from a daughter and a sister, both Ji men frowned as though an army had arrived at the gate.

Mr Ji stared at the screen with a finger on the row of dots, reading it the way you read a comprehension paper. "Does this mean something, these dots?"

For once, Ji Changfeng followed his father's thinking exactly. "Yes. Ranran has been wronged."

Mr Ji's eyes filled, and the tragedy went on playing in his head.

Sweet obedient little Ranran, curled up in a ball and crying quietly, tears the size of beans landing one by one on the floor, nobody at home to sit with her, asking her big brother through her tears when they might be coming back.

The poor child.

Mr Ji was moved to the edge of weeping by his own production. "Ranran swallows the hurt so we won't worry. How can a child be that good?"

Ji Changfeng said what he could. "She's only just arrived. It's reasonable that she doesn't trust us yet."

His father sounded more wretched still. "No. We have to stand over Ranran. If we let this go, people will think the Jis have nobody to answer for them."

Ji Changfeng nodded hard.

Both of them had heard about Ji Ran and the girl from her middle school as soon as Xiao Xiao's party broke up. When they learned the Xue family had a connection to one of the Ji group's smaller labels, the man in charge of that label was told to cancel a branch plan that had never even reached the stage of a contract.

It was too late in the evening to dig far into the old business. They would have to wait for office hours to find out what had actually happened to Ji Ran in middle school.

And if Ji Ran had really been harmed.

The two of them exchanged a look with murder in it.

Ji Changfeng woke his phone again. "So what time are we going home?"

Mr Ji had nothing to say.

Then, "What work? Pack up. We're going now."

---

At Jinhua Gardens, Ji Ran, who knew nothing whatever about her father and her brother, would never in her life have guessed that a row of dots could carry a mind that far. She waited quietly for twenty minutes and no reply came.

He must be busy even at the weekend.

Ji Ran hauled herself off the sofa, with a new appreciation of Gi Changning's line about the two of them being workaholics. She rolled her shoulders and started for the stairs, and before she reached the first step her phone buzzed.

It was Ji Changfeng.

Big Brother: Home around midnight.

A moment later, another one.

Big Brother: Sorry.

Ji Ran had no idea what the sorry was for. She thought about it for a while and then found herself smiling, as though through two perfectly ordinary words on a screen she had touched what he meant. Sorry for working instead of being here with her?

Now that she knew the time, Ji Ran put the phone down, took off her coat and went to the kitchen. There was not much in the fridge, mostly frozen food and instant noodles, and two jars of Lao Gan Ma, one of them well down. Everything had a long date on it. Hardly any green vegetables. Two potatoes, three carrots, a handful of green beans and a piece of pork belly frozen solid.

Nothing sharp late at night. It is bad for the stomach.

So she took a small bag of millet out of the freezer, meaning to make a millet porridge that would sit kindly, and brought two potatoes and a carrot with her for a cold dish.

She moved the pork belly down to the fridge to thaw, hoping to have time tomorrow for braised noodles with green beans.

She loved her father's braised noodles. Straight out of the pan, you could smell them three streets off.

The Ji kitchen was not much used, and yet it had every tool and every seasoning. There was an induction hob beside the cooker, and all of it was spotless.

She scrubbed the rice cooker bowl first, rinsed the millet, put in the right amount of water and pressed the button.

While that cooked she could not find a peeler, so she took the skin off the potatoes and the carrot carefully with a kitchen knife. A grater was easy enough to find. She shredded them and put a pan of water on the hob at the same time.

Her father had taught her to cook. They had finished with the hospitals by then and gone back home. Her mother had to work, and her father was in bed with so much of his back burned that he dared not sit up. Ji Ran was starving and frightened of the gas, so he talked her through it and she cooked on the induction hob.

Once he could get up again, the kitchen stopped belonging to the other two women in the house.

She rinsed the starch off the potato until the water ran clear, blanched it with the carrot just long enough in the boiling water, and lifted it straight into cold water, which is the only way to get a cold dish that stays crisp.

She found a bowl, added the seasonings, remembered the half jar of Lao Gan Ma in the fridge and guessed that her father and brother could take heat, so she put in a spoonful for it. Then she took a china plate off the rack and piled the potato into a small peaked hill.

She washed up, cleared the rubbish, put the seasonings back where they came from, stretched, and covered the plate with a mesh dome.

The millet was beginning to smell. When the timer reached zero it would turn itself to keeping warm.

With all that done Ji Ran was sleepy. She checked carefully that she had missed nothing and went up.

She put the heating on and left the sitting-room light burning.

---

At five past midnight the Jis got to Jinhua Gardens exactly on time.

Under a black sky the sitting room was as bright as day, as though it were waiting for someone late back from a journey.

Mr Ji, who had been in such a hurry, slowed down. His heart went over.

It had been a long time. So long since a light had waited for him that standing at his own door he wondered whether he had come to the wrong house.

Then he frowned, worked out at once who had left it on, and said unhappily, "This late and Ranran isn't in bed? A child that age shouldn't be up."

Ji Changfeng opened the door and walked into warm air. The bright sitting room was empty of people. Only a khaki coat lay on the sofa where nobody had got round to moving it, saying without a word what had changed in this cold house.

Then both of them caught a smell that did not belong here.

Porridge.

Mr Ji went to the kitchen in his outdoor shoes. He saw the rice cooker with its keep-warm light on, and his hand began to shake without his permission. He pulled the plug, lifted the lid, and the particular soft sweetness of millet came slowly up and filled the whole of the ground floor.

Ji Changfeng stopped where he was. Millet porridge is gentle, soft, not a smell that pushes at you. He had eaten in more fine restaurants than he could count, and he stood in front of a bowl of ordinary porridge and breathed it in.

The way he had as a small boy, following a thread of cooking on short legs at mealtimes, arms out, falling into the arms of the person called mother.

No chef on earth can produce that taste.

They were used to working. They were used to coming back to a dark house. What they had forgotten was that for sixteen years, whenever Ji Ran came home, there had always been a light waiting for her.

It filled them both with blame for themselves.

Mr Ji took out two bowls without saying anything, filled them the way any father in a happy household does, and put two pairs of chopsticks on the table.

November nights are cold. The white steam off those bowls carried more heat than any summer.

Ji Changfeng went upstairs and looked at Ji Ran's door, confirmed by the dark line under it that she was asleep, and came quietly down. "She's asleep."

In the middle of the table he lifted the mesh dome and found the shredded potato.

The peak had sagged a little with time, and the orange of the carrot ran through the white. No dish in the world looked better than that one.

Mr Ji swallowed a mouthful of porridge and found that a stomach which had already had dinner was suddenly starving. He lifted a mouthful of the potato. Crisp, nicely judged for salt, and the Lao Gan Ma heat he liked.

He remembered that when his wife was alive, what comforted a tired man was one hot meal.

Outside the window the stars were out.

Winter was nearly here. How was it prettier than spring?

---

On the Monday both families took the day off, went in with every document they owned and moved the registrations. After the paperwork there was nothing left to do but wait.

Tuesday was a normal school day.

Ji Ran turned down her father's and her brother's offers of a lift and arranged to take the bus with Gi Changning.

A day was more than enough for the Ji family's real-and-fake-daughter business to go round Wenyuan several times. All the way in, anyone who knew either of them could not stop their eyes sliding over, itching for the details and held back by the fact that nobody knew them well enough to ask. So they watched from a distance.

Gi Changning alone would have been fine. She was well liked, she ran the dance club, she knew people in all three years, and her legend had reached the middle school next door. Unfortunately she had Ji Ran beside her, who had held first place since the day she arrived, was adored by the teachers and the head, had always kept to herself, and carried a metre of cold air around her that ordinary mortals did not walk into.

Gi Changning had put on the proper Wenyuan skirt. She did not wear her backpack so much as carry it, since there was almost nothing in it, not even homework. The two of them walked into the teaching block together and split up.

Last week's midterm papers had been marked over the weekend, and the results had gone up yesterday on the wall of each classroom.

Gi Changning studied her own position with a straight face.

Her total began with a three. Bottom of the year, two marks below the boy from the sports stream.

He was standing next to her, and said with relief, "Ning, thank God for you."

"Get lost."

"Right you are."

The papers had all come back yesterday. Chinese and history were passable. Maths and geography were close to blank. The worst were the English and politics on the last day, which she had sat just after overhearing that she was not a Ji, and she had been barely conscious in the hall. In politics she had guessed a few multiple choice right, and in English, which was her best subject, she had not broken a hundred.

If she were still a Ji, nothing she scored would matter. At the Gis' it was different. She had not been there long, and she knew without being told that this was a family trying to change its luck through the university exams.

Because Ji Ran had been working at it the whole time.

Gi Changning got back to her desk, shoved her bag into the shelf under it and started to put a foot up on the desk out of habit. Halfway up she remembered the skirt, turned it into crossed legs instead, and began clearing the surface.

The first two lessons were spent going through the papers. Gi Changning marked the key points properly, wrote down the working and the reasoning and tried to keep up with the teacher. There was room for improvement in most subjects. Only maths sent her to sleep. She strained her ears for ages and came away knowing the answer without knowing why it was the answer, which meant that the same question in different words would floor her at once.

Even so, the maths teacher was close to tears over it.

The bell for the long break went and Gi Changning shut her book and lay flat across the desk as though the last of her strength had gone.

Wenyuan did not do exercises in the long break. It was free time, and class six went for the door like crabs out of a pen.

The sports boy came over and knocked on her desk. "Ning."

This time she came out of her daze instantly. "What now?"

He jerked his chin at the door. "Someone wants you. Says they're from your dance club."

She turned. Two boys in dance club hoodies stood in the doorway, and when they caught her eye they threw a few extremely pointed hand signs.

Gi Changning clicked her tongue. She had not been down to the club much since the second year started, but she knew those two. First years, both street dancers, and there was no chance they were here for anything good. She stood up, put her hands in her pockets out of habit, remembered the skirt had no pockets, flexed her wrists instead, walked to the door and leaned loosely against the wall. "Something I can do?"

"Nothing much." The two of them looked at each other and grinned. The taller one said, "We heard the Jis threw you out, Ning. We came to offer our sympathies."

Gi Changning folded her arms. "If you've got something to say, say it."

The shorter one was the easier to provoke. He had an empty glass fizzy drink bottle in his hand, and the mockery in his eyes was not hidden at all. "Nothing else. A dance battle. Up for it?"

A dance battle?

Gi Changning nearly laughed out loud. She caught the bottle he lobbed at her, perfectly loose in the body, and the corner of her mouth went up with something wicked in it. "I'm afraid you two won't dare."

---

The bell went and Ji Ran put her papers and her mistakes book away. The two lessons had been no different from any other, except that a few more classmates came to her with questions and a good deal of that assessing look had quietly gone out of the air, none of which made much difference to her either way. She shook her head and called, "Xiao Xiao, can I borrow yesterday's notes?"

Few Wenyuan pupils took the ordinary arts and science route, so everyone had a desk to themselves. Xiao Xiao sat diagonally ahead on Ji Ran's left. She found the page, folded it over and handed the book back. "Here."

Ji Ran stretched to take it. "Thank you."

"Don't be silly, we don't thank each other. Oh, actually." Xiao Xiao dug out a paper, saw that the desk in front of Ji Ran was empty, took it over and sat down. "I didn't follow the last part of the last physics question. Could you talk me through it?"

"Of course." Ji Ran drew the force diagrams on rough paper and worked the whole question through from the start. Halfway through, Zheng Yao, who had stood up for her at the party, came bursting in at the door. "Ji Ran. Old Sha wants you."

Ji Ran wrote out the formulas quickly. "Then you just substitute at the end. I'm going to the office."

Xiao Xiao had the look of someone who has just seen it. She checked against the answer and clapped. "I've got it. Go on, go. Don't keep Old Sha waiting, you know what she's like."

Old Sha's office was on the same floor, not far from class one. Ji Ran knocked, and a woman's voice said, "Come."

She opened the door. A woman of mixed parentage, a full one metre eighty with a head of bright gold hair, had just poured herself a cup of water. She blew on the jasmine flowers floating on the top and waved Ji Ran in, asking in English as she did it, "What do you make of your midterm results?"

Ji Ran answered in English without thinking about it.

Most Wenyuan pupils came up from the attached middle school and had been taught in two languages since they were small. When Ji Ran arrived she could not follow the English teaching at all. Old Sha had been her form teacher since the first year, and had taken to talking to her in English, correcting her grammar and pushing her vocabulary out, while Ji Ran filled the rest in by brute memory and just about kept up.

So the habit of question and answer in English had carried on ever since.

Ji Ran was grateful for it.

"Good." Old Sha heard the fluent answer out, blew at her jasmine with satisfaction, and switched to a thoroughly north-eastern Mandarin. "Your scholarship has been approved. Come and sign. It should be in your account in about fifteen working days."

Old Sha was the form teacher of class one. Her full name was Sha Kesheng, from the phrase about beating the enemy and winning, born in Paris, raised in the north-east, a maths graduate with three languages and a quarter Russian blood, who had set her heart on becoming a glorious teacher of the people.

And then failed the state teaching exam.

Ji Ran had put her scholarship application in at the start of the second year. Wenyuan's rules were strict, since it had to be judged on the first exam after the arts and science split, and in practice she was the only pupil in the whole of the second year who applied. With first place in the midterms as well, Old Sha had chased the school until they pushed it through, and had called Ji Ran in before the paper was cool.

She put the glass down to let it cool on its own, pulled a carrier bag out from under another desk and, once Ji Ran had signed and confirmed, pressed it on her. "This year's autumn and winter uniform. Your brother ordered it. You may as well take it."

The autumn and winter uniform had been handed out in October. Ji Ran had been fighting for the scholarship then, and was hardly going to spend money on a uniform she would wear for one season.

Old Sha was brisk. Having confirmed that everything she meant to say was said, she waved without a shred of sentiment. "Right. That's all."

Ji Ran knew this teacher well. She turned the handles of the bag over, rather taken with it, not having expected the silent Ji Changfeng to notice a small thing like a uniform. She nodded. "Thank you."

"Nonsense, it's my job." The great teacher of the people, Comrade Sha Kesheng, drank her jasmine tea and winked at Ji Ran with a face designed for impact. "If the money doesn't turn up, tell me. I'll go and see the head."

Ji Ran remembered Old Sha in the first year carrying a rebellious little brute in each hand without effort, and answered after a pause. "Yes. I'll remember."

The second the office door closed, Comrade Sha Kesheng settled down happily to admire a results sheet that had left the rest of the field standing. "Look at that. That's my pupil."

The long break was thirty minutes of free time, and Ji Ran meant to go back to class. The corridor was full of people in a hurry, and she was not paying attention when she walked straight into somebody.

"Sorry, sorry. Oh, Ji Ran?" Zheng Yao apologised fast, then stopped, worked out who it was and grabbed her by the wrist without asking. "Come on, come on. Gi Changning's having a dance battle with someone in the small square. Do you want to watch?"

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

Then, "I do."