Chapter 49

Once the winter holiday began, Ning Shu booked the teacher almost every day for aikido. She worked at it hard enough that he said outright: what she learned in a month, anyone else would take a year over.

Lu Zheng had nothing like her lunatic stamina. That night she practised alone in the training hall until late, and when she came out he was asleep on the sofa.

She had no wish to wake him and was tiptoeing to the door when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a small red dress.

Yuanzi, holding her skirt up, came up on tiptoe to the sofa without a sound and leaned over Lu Zheng's face.

"Daddy." Chin on her hands, she gazed at him in adoration.

Ning Shu felt something close to horror.

She had never meant the children to meet Lu Zheng. And now the little thing had found him herself.

"Daddy's so handsome."

He lay on his side with one hand behind his head, deep asleep.

Yuanzi clambered clumsily onto the sofa and settled her plump little body against him, meaning to sleep too.

Ning Shu signed at her frantically to keep away from him.

Yuanzi's power had grown a great deal in these years, and the ghost-air on her was thick. An ordinary person could not take it.

She would drain him.

Yuanzi pouted and would not leave. She burrowed her head into his chest, then took his hand and hugged it to herself.

"Daddy."

There was nothing for it. Ning Shu came over and whispered, "Be good, Yuanzi. You can't do that. Daddy will get ill."

Yuanzi was very sad, and sat up as if it hurt to.

Then she put both arms round Lu Zheng's head and kissed him, a loud smack. "Daddy, I'll be good."

He woke on the instant.

Yuanzi was already gone.

The first thing he saw was Ning Shu half-crouched beside the sofa, blinking at him with a blank face.

He was still half out of it. He touched his cheek. It took him a good while. "You..."

Then something dawned on him, and he looked down and smiled, pleased as anything.

She saw that smile and knew exactly what he thought.

"Hey! It wasn't me!"

He sat up, the corners of his eyes creased with it.

"Don't go getting ideas!"

"What I think is my business."

"It really wasn't me. I didn't kiss you!"

"Did I say you did?"

"..."

New Year was close, and the family went back to the village for it.

Her uncle and aunt had found work in the city. He was fit and strong and had got on as a security guard at a big shopping centre; she cleaned at a hotel.

Ning Shu thought work like that too hard on them, but her aunt would not hear otherwise. Ning Shu might be earning now, but they could not lean on her for everything. They had to feed themselves.

They were plain people, the two of them, with the diligence and the decency of Chinese farmers at the bottom of the heap, and as long as the children got on in life, no amount of hard work mattered.

Loaded with bags, the family made the long trip home, and the grandmother and grandfather were waiting at the village gate.

The grandmother looked remarkably well. As she said herself, with no children chattering in her ears she had less to fret over and the days went easy, so of course she was well.

They went up through the village in a cheerful crowd, and the neighbours they met said enviously, "Auntie Hu, the children are back!"

"They're back!"

"Doing well, all of them!"

"Doing well, doing well!"

"You're a lucky woman!"

"I am."

By the time they reached the house the grandmother's eyes had creased right up with smiling, and watching her so happy, Ning Shu began to understand the choice she had made all those years ago.

She had walked away from a life where a crook of her finger brought money in by the bucket, and chosen the most ordinary one there was: a village far from anything, children with the man she loved, watching them grow, grandchildren round her knees and laughter in the house.

The children had grown and gone, and her husband was still beside her.

To hold his hand and grow old with him.

Her happiness was all there in her smiling eyes.

It was good.

That evening the grandmother and the aunt cooked a tableful, and the family ate round it in high spirits.

The grandmother sighed. "When what the heart wants gets too strong, the demon in it finds the gap and gets in. If you want the truth of it, evil things all grow out of people's fixations and their wanting."

Ning Shu did not follow. "Grandmother, you mean ghosts and monsters come out of people's hearts?"

"They can see the weak place in a person. They see the greed and the anger and the foolishness, and they feed on it. The more a person wants, the heavier the demon in the heart. The old woman let an evil thing wear her and use her, and that is what cost her her life."

"Grandmother, isn't it normal for people to want things?"

"Which is why I keep telling you: it's not only the body you train, it's the heart. A person can want. But nothing is ever to be forced. Force it and it turns into a fixation, and a fixation breeds the demon."

Ning Shu nodded, half understanding, and later told her about the night she was followed. The grandmother was badly worried. "Now the heavenly eye is open, you learn and take things in five or six times as fast as an ordinary person, and more. Besides your schoolwork you should be learning some skill that keeps you safe."

"I have. I've found a teacher. Aikido."

"Ai-what?"

Gouwa chipped in. "It's a fierce kind of Japanese fighting! Sis has been teaching me."

"What do you want with Japanese fighting? China has tai chi, Wing Chun, the Diamond Fist and the Demon-Subduing Palm... not enough for you?"

Ning Shu laughed. "The old traditional styles need years of grinding at the basics. Aikido comes quickly, it's easy to pick up, and it works."

The grandmother went into the house and came back with two notebooks. "Fists and feet will guard your body. These are two books of charms from the school. At the right moment they can save your life."

They were thread-bound and very old; Ning Shu guessed they had been at the bottom of the grandmother's chest for years.

Inside were charms and how to use them: a charm for going unseen, a charm for passing through doors, even a charm for fire.

"Tricks of the eye, all of them. I didn't teach you before because I was afraid you'd get easy with these little dodges and let the real training slide."

Thinking back, the paper soldiers from before had been one of this kind, and it had been a very useful method indeed.

So she began on them. She drew a charm, cut her finger, and recited:

A drop of oil where the sun comes up, a steel blade in the hand to fell four oxen. Above, the Old Lord on High; below, the Founder of the Clear Stream. Nothing passes within, nothing runs without.

And the bleeding stopped. That was the charm for stopping blood, which only staunches it for a time and does not heal.

Then the charm for going unseen:

Spirit generals of heaven, essence of the eight trigrams, fathers of the five elements, the six jia and the six ding: hide!

And the person vanished. Though the longest Ning Shu could hold it was twenty seconds before she showed again.

The grandmother said how long a charm worked depended on your own cultivation. The higher it went, the longer the charm held. So the training was never, ever to be let slide.

Early one morning Gouwa wandered over with a toothbrush in his mouth to watch her at her aikido, and grinned. "Sis, how come you look like the old folks doing tai chi in the little park in town?"

"Come here."

He came over, still grinning, and she drew a circle with one fingertip on his hard chest.

He had helped his father in the fields since he was small, and there was a lot of muscle on him.

"Sis, that's like you're tickling me."

"Tickling, is it?" Her fingers hooked and her palm struck, and Gouwa went staggering back several steps clutching his chest, the corner of his mouth twitching with the pain. "Ah!"

"Still look like an old lady?"

"Sis, where did you learn that? That's amazing!" He looked at her in worship. "Sis, teach me!"

"First cock-crow every morning. Can you get up for it?"

"Wow. Up with the cock?" He marvelled. "Why do you work so hard?"

Why did she? Because the night she was followed, if Lu Zheng had not arrived when he did, she might have lost her life. What was the use of all the feng shui and the fortune-telling, what was the use of the money, if the life was gone? Gone, and everything with it.

So she had to learn to protect herself in the shortest time possible, so that when trouble came she would at least not be meat on a board.

Gouwa trained with her a few days, and she found that he actually had a very good head for it and no small talent. His trouble was that he never stuck at anything, a dab here and a dab there, so nothing ever took.

In the three years she had spent learning the trade from the grandmother, if he had sat at her elbow and listened properly, he might have made a practitioner one day too. No heavenly eye, but the skill would have been there.

Before New Year's Eve the grandmother took the family to the next village to visit relatives, aunts and great-aunts Ning Shu did not know and could not put names to. The grandmother told her who to greet, and she greeted them.

Round the stove the aunts took her hand and asked whether she had been promised to anyone yet.

Her aunt explained, smiling, that Ningning was at high school in the city, and going on to university. Doing well.

The village women's mouths turned down. "What's the use of a girl doing well? She'll only marry and have babies in the end."

Her aunt did not like that. She tossed the melon seeds in her hand back onto the plate. "What about marrying? Married women can't learn a trade?"

"A woman's greatest trade is a good husband."

"A man is what a woman leans on all her life."

...

"Too true," Ning Shu said, with a cold little laugh. "Marry a good man and you'll never want for food or clothes. Spend your whole life turning round him, sit in the doorway all day cracking seeds and talking an afternoon of nothing, and when he comes home at night you cook for him and heat his bath and wait on him. What a meaningful life. No need to run all over the world earning your own money to spend yourself. All that freedom, and the bags and the watches and the cars, the Chanel and the Coach and the Cadillacs, every one of them bought with your own hands. Far too much work."

"So you've got it right. Never go anywhere, stay in the village breathing the fresh country air, mind the babies, and let a whole life drift quietly by."

The women's faces turned ugly at that, and they went awkwardly quiet. The life Ning Shu had described was one they could not even picture, and yet none of them could keep the longing out of their eyes.

That was real freedom.

A freedom they would never reach.

Ning Shu thought of herself in the first life. Had she been any different? She had risen on Lu Zheng's arm, read his face from hour to hour, been the little songbird he kept, and however ill she felt, however foul her mood, she had still had to meet him smiling.

Not this time. She would not be a kept woman again. She would get the life she wanted by her own work, and win other people's respect.

With nothing in common to talk about, the village women gave up on her and went back to their own family gossip.

Rather than sit with them, Ning Shu thought she would be more comfortable with Gouwa.

He was on the threshold, his tall frame slouched against the door post, head down over his iPhone X and dead to the world.

"Come for a walk with your sister."

"No time." He did not look up.

"Getting cocky, boy."

He said it as if it were obvious: "I'm playing a game with my brother-in-law."

"What brother-in-law?" She took hold of his ear. "Hm?"

"Ow! Sis! Don't, I'm dying here! Let me finish this round, all right? I can't let the team down!"

Ning Shu was not unreasonable. She fetched a stool and sat beside him to wait.

He took off his headphones and gave her a crooked look.

"Brother-in-law was worried you'd get bored waiting. He went and killed himself off."