Chapter 32

By the time Ning Shu got up to the roof, the boys had already pulled Lin Qiaoqiao back from the edge. She was in a bad state, sobbing with her hand over her mouth.

Ning Shu ran and put her arms round her and said quietly, "It's all right now."

Ning Shu knew what it was. Lin Qiaoqiao could not stand any more of the whispering behind her back and the looks that came at her all day with meaning in them.

She had wanted to clear her name with her own death.

Lin Qiaoqiao pointed at Xu Qingying. "You framed me. Even dead I won't let you alone."

And a little way off Xu Qingying raised her eyebrows at her and pulled a face, as though she were the one who had been wronged past bearing. "The guilty one shouts first."

Ning Shu put her mouth to Lin Qiaoqiao's ear and said it low, one word at a time. "I'll get you your name back. Trust me."

That evening after school, Ning Shu watched Xu Qingying walk out of the gates laughing with her friends, and dropped the recorder into a bin.

If the open road was shut, she would settle it her own way.

There was no moon that night and not a star to be seen. The black cloud went from one side of the sky to the other, and it looked like rain. Xu Qingying said goodbye to her friends and turned alone into a dark, deep little lane.

There was nobody in the lane and not even a street light. A cold draught came along it, and Xu Qingying felt it on her back and picked up her pace without meaning to. And then white paper began to come down out of the air, and for a moment she thought it was starting to rain.

But when she put her hand to the piece on her shoulder she saw it was cut in the shape of a person, and there was a name written on it.

Xu Qingying.

And on that paper figure, red crosses had been drawn on the head, on the shoulder and on the knee.

Xu Qingying went backwards, badly frightened, and still made herself shout. "Who is that? Who's doing this? Is it Lin Qiaoqiao? Is it you?"

And then she saw, at the far end of the street, a little girl in red giggling at her. The girl had her hair in two neat little plaits, and she came towards her at a light, quick step.

The road was black. Xu Qingying got her phone out of her bag with a shaking hand and turned the torch on and shone it at the child.

And the child had a head and no face.

Where the eyes and the nose and the mouth should have been there was nothing at all.

Only a flat white surface.

Xu Qingying screamed, and the scream went up and out over everything.

"A ghost! There's a ghost!"

Ning Yuanzi said what Ning Shu had taught her to say. "I know what you did."

Xu Qingying had said it herself. Only a ghost could know what had happened.

"I know what you did."

She said it to her over and over. After that night in the lane, wherever Xu Qingying went she saw the faceless little girl in red. She saw her getting up in the night. She saw her on the way home from school. Even in bed, a hand would come out from underneath and pull at her leg.

"I know what you did."

"I know what you did."

Xu Qingying was driven right out of her mind, and at last, at the flag-raising on Monday morning, she went up in front of the whole school with her face grey from want of sleep and told them what had happened.

"We cut those paper figures, me and Tang Jia and the others. We waited until there was nobody in the classroom and we put them in Lin Qiaoqiao's bag to get her into trouble. And I never lost a watch. That was only an excuse to get everyone to search Lin Qiaoqiao's bag. I don't like Lin Qiaoqiao. I don't like her and I'm jealous of her. All of it was me."

Xu Qingying wept the whole way through it and apologised to Lin Qiaoqiao. Not out of any real regret or shame, of course. She had been frightened into it.

After that nobody wanted much to do with Xu Qingying, her closest friends least of all. None of them would speak to her.

The class kept out of her way wherever they could. Everything that had been done to Lin Qiaoqiao came back round onto her, which was fair enough.

The form teacher was dismissed by the school over it. The one who came in his place was a university graduate who had come out to teach in the country on purpose, and he was good to the pupils.

And after all of it, Lin Qiaoqiao worked harder than ever, and Ning Shu helped her wherever she could.

---

Time runs like water, and three years went by in a blink. Ning Shu did very well in her entrance exams and got straight into the best high school in Jiangcheng, Jiangcheng Number One.

And just as the whole family were happily getting ready to send Ning Shu off to the city for it, the village had a visitor nobody had asked for.

Ning Shu's mother, Ye Furong, pulled up at the gate of the yard in a large Mercedes.

Since the business with the ghost baby, her grandmother had not once got in touch with Ye Furong. She behaved as though she had never had that daughter.

Ye Furong had lost the ability to have children after it, and in her husband's house she got nothing but sour looks. The one thing holding her up was that she had a son.

This time Ye Furong did not come back finding fault with everything the way she used to. She helped her sister-in-law in the kitchen with the fire and the cooking. The change was so complete that her brother and his wife did not know what to do with it.

Her grandmother watched all of it and said coldly, "A daughter married out really is water poured on the ground. All these years and she couldn't come back to look at her own daughter, and now here she is in a hurry. Well, I'll take it that her conscience has woken up. For now."

Ye Furong had in fact brought Ning Shu a great deal. New clothes, new shoes, and a pile of snacks for Gouwa.

Ning Shu glanced at the bag. "Mum, I can't wear any of this."

Ye Furong said, "Why not? Don't you like it? Never mind, we'll buy more once we're in the city."

Ning Shu said, "It isn't that I don't like it. I stopped wearing children's clothes a long time ago."

Ye Furong's face changed a little at that, and she looked at the boxes, and sure enough everything she had bought Ning Shu was children's.

"Oh dear, look at me. I've got myself muddled. Ningning's grown up and she can't wear these."

Ning Shu was fifteen this year. She had come up a good deal and was heading for one metre seventy. In the last life she had gone from bottom-rung walk-on parts to magazine covers, and that had been down to her height and her looks, and over these years what she carried had settled and gone clear as well.

"Where's Yingjun? I brought him snacks." Ye Furong dug out the other bag quickly, stuffed full of them.

Gouwa was about to thank his aunt when Ning Shu looked at him and said coldly, "Gouwa's grown up too. He stopped eating snacks years ago."

Ye Furong's face finally changed properly. She said, "You're set on crossing me, aren't you?"

And then her grandmother came out and said, "One foot through the door and you're quarrelling. I think you may as well not come back at all."

Ye Furong took a long breath, got hold of herself, and put the smile back on. "Mum, how could I not come back? This is my home."

"Have you ever treated Pingshui Village as your home?" Her grandmother leaned on her stick and sat down at the table. "From the day you married into that Ning family, didn't you cut yourself off from the village that bore you and raised you, and from this useless old woman?"

"Mum, if you'd listened to me back then and gone to the city and made something of yourself, would I have had to marry a useless man like Ning Hengtao? If I could have leaned on my mother, would I have leaned on a husband?" Ye Furong had got to feeling hard done by. "I wanted to get out of a village where the birds won't even lay. I wanted a better life. Is that wrong?"

Her grandmother struck the stick hard against the floor. "Your daughter is fifteen and she already knows to learn a trade and work at her books and stand on herself. You aren't a tenth of your own daughter. Yes, I was a useless mother. So what have you come back for? You may as well not own me at all. Go and lean on your husband."

In the end it was her uncle who smoothed it over. "It isn't often my sister comes back. Let's leave all the unhappy things. Come on, come and eat."

Her grandmother stopped speaking to her after that, and all through the meal she kept putting food in Ning Shu's bowl, and the family were easy and warm together, and Ye Furong was the one who looked like an outsider.

Her aunt said, "Ningning's got into a good high school in the provincial city. Gouwa didn't get in, though, so he'll do his high school in the town."

Ye Furong said quickly, "The town school gets hardly anyone through. Even a second-tier university is a struggle out of there. It's nothing like a school in the city."

Her aunt sighed. "That's Gouwa's own fault. His marks are poor."

Ye Furong said, "Never mind, I've arranged it. Ningning's got into Jiangcheng Number One, and if we pay the higher fee Gouwa can go as well. Jiangcheng Number One is the best school in the city. Ninety per cent of them go on."

"And you'd be as kind as that?" Her grandmother made a cold sound.

Ye Furong said, "Gouwa is my own nephew. As his aunt, of course I look after him."

Ning Shu looked at her and guessed that the old woman had most likely sent her again, and that it was probably still about having her tongue pulled out in the underworld.

So she said, "We can afford the higher fee at Jiangcheng Number One ourselves. There's no need for you to put it on here. And as for my grandmother, you needn't waste your breath. I won't be helping her."

Ye Furong said, "Your grandmother has come round about all that over the years. She's stopped worrying while she's alive about what happens after she's dead."

"Then what have you come back for?"

Since it had got that far, Ye Furong stopped pressing a warm face to a cold backside and said it straight out. "I've come back to ask Ningning to do me a favour."

Her grandmother put her chopsticks down. Her face went colder, and for a few seconds nothing in the room moved.

It was her uncle who asked, "What is it you want Ningning to do?"

"It's like this. Hengtao has a big client in the business, and the man's son has been unwell lately. He's ill all the time. They've had a master in to look at him, and he says the boy has to take the blood of a qilin and the tears of a phoenix together before he'll get better. They've found the qilin's blood. It's the phoenix's tears that."

Her grandmother's face changed at the words. She stood up and pointed at Ye Furong and shouted, "Get out of my house."