Chapter 5

This had to be a joke.

This had to be the joke of the century.

She and Lu Zheng had a child. They had been careful every single time. Wait. Wait, there had been that once in the bathroom when they had not. But only the once, so how could…

"Little one, don't frighten me. I will actually die of fright."

Ning Shu's voice was shaking. In this life she wanted to be well clear of Lu Zheng and never go anywhere near him. But now there was a small piece of baggage turning up at her door.

The girl in red sat down on the floor and drew circles with her finger, and said in a very small, wronged voice, "Doesn't Mummy like me?"

Her eyes were filling.

"Oh, don't cry." Ning Shu went soft. She could not stand to see a child cry. Except that this was not a child, it was a ghost, and the sound of it snivelling in the middle of the night made her skin crawl.

"Good girl. Don't cry." Ning Shu made herself go over, crouched down and put out a shaky hand to pat her on the back.

She was solid to the touch.

Her body was cold. It was a cold that went straight through to the bone.

"Don't cry now, don't cry." Ning Shu soothed her. "Mummy likes you. Is that better?"

The girl looked up, still wounded. "Really? You like me?"

"Mm."

What was this, Ning Shu thought. She might be twelve in body and twenty-six in her head, but she was nowhere near ready to have children, and here was one arriving fully grown and hanging off her and calling her mother, and the worst of it was that the little wretch had come up out of the toilet.

What kind of rebirth was this?

"What's your name?" Ning Shu asked.

The girl went on drawing circles. "Mummy died before she gave us names, so the underworld officers won't take me and my brother."

"There's a brother as well? Mine too?"

"Mm. We were together."

Wonderful. Two at once. A boy and a girl.

Lu Zheng. You really are something.

"I'm going to take it that your brother was right…"

The girl looked on the edge of tears again, so Ning Shu changed course fast. "No, I mean, I'm very glad you came to find me."

"Mm."

This small ghost had a thin skin on her.

"So what do we do now? Shall I have Grandma do the rites for you and send you on to be born again? You'd get a decent family next time instead of being stuck with a mother as hopeless as me."

"We can't go on. I want to stay with you. And I want to see Daddy."

"No! Don't go and see Daddy. Your father is a very frightening sort of man." Ning Shu was entirely serious about it. "Very, very frightening. He'd string you up by the heels."

"Mm." The girl did seem genuinely alarmed, and shuffled backwards.

Oh dear.

Ning Shu softened her voice. "If you can't be born again, what good does following me do you?"

She could not see her own future clearly. If she ended up in the same state as last time, dragging two small ghosts along, she would be finished sooner or later.

"Mummy's going to open the heavenly eye soon. You'll be a great master."

Ning Shu did not follow. "Open the heavenly eye? Now?"

The girl nodded. "Because Mummy can see me. And that dung beetle today. He said Mummy felt how much it hurt, and that's why she saved him. He said thank you, and he'll pay you back."

Ning Shu thought of it. Gouwazi had been playing with the beetle and she had stopped him and let it go, and at the time she really had felt something. Everything that lives has a spirit in it, and she had put herself in its place, and she had not been able to stand watching the small thing tormented.

So that was what her grandmother meant about the heavenly eye letting you feel yin and yang and the five phases and every element in the world.

Not that Ning Shu was counting on being paid back by a dung beetle.

"The signs are there already, and before long you'll open the heavenly eye and be a very great yin-yang master, and then Mummy will be able to find a way to keep me and my brother with her." The girl was getting excited. "Then we can be with Mummy forever, and Mummy can take us to find Daddy."

No. No no no. Keeping you is fine, but we are not going to find Daddy. Not going. Absolutely not going.

"My brother and I still don't have names. Mummy, give us names." The girl took Ning Shu's little finger and shook it.

Her hand was freezing. The cold went right through.

Ning Shu looked at the child. There was a good deal of Lu Zheng in her face, and most of all in those long, hooked eyes.

Names. Certainly not Lu. Ning Shu wanted nothing whatsoever tying her to Lu Zheng, so they could take hers.

Ning Shu thought about it. "In that case, you and your brother can be Tuantuan and Yuanyuan."

The girl put her head down and thought, and then said resentfully, "You didn't put any work into that at all."

What did she mean, no work? They were cheerful, lucky names. Whole and together. Even the giant pandas were called that.

The girl went back to drawing circles on the floor. "Still, since Mummy wants so badly to be all together with Daddy, I suppose I can put up with it."

No. No she did not. Mummy wanted Daddy at the far end of the earth and a wall between them forever.

"We'll change it. That name's unlucky. Pick another."

Ning Shu was hopeless at naming things, and she stayed in that toilet with the small creature until it got light without coming up with anything better. In the end they settled it. The brother would be Ning Tuanzi and the sister Ning Yuanzi.

The first cock crowed somewhere in the village. It was morning.

Ning Yuanzi said, "Mummy, I'm going now, or Great-grandmother will see me and there'll be trouble."

"Yes, yes. She absolutely must not see you."

There would be no explaining that.

Ning Yuanzi stood and went to climb back down into the latrine, and Ning Shu stopped her. "Why would you go out that way?"

Ning Yuanzi said, "Great-grandmother has set an array outside the house. The only way I can get in to see Mummy is through the latrine, where the yin and the damp gather."

So that was it. She had to crawl through there, which must be dreadful. Ning Shu felt sorry for the child, who was her own flesh and blood after all. She had no time for their father, but the children had done nothing.

"Yuanzi, bring your brother next time so Mummy can see him too."

"Mm, all right." Ning Yuanzi climbed down into the latrine, and remembered to look back. "Mummy, before you open the heavenly eye, if you get into any trouble, just say Yuanzi's name three times inside your head. Then Yuanzi will know, and she'll come and help you!"

"Oh. Thank you." Ning Shu was touched.

Once Ning Yuanzi had gone out through the drain, Ning Shu went back to her own room to catch up on her sleep. A whole night talking to a small ghost had worn her out.

The next day Ning Shu slept straight through to midday, and when she got up she was foggy and her head would not clear. At lunch her grandmother looked her over several times.

"Ah-Ning, didn't you sleep?" Her aunt brought a great basin of red-braised trotters to the table and untied her apron, and asked kindly, "Look at the rings under your eyes. Were you up all night chasing something?"

Ning Shu was afraid her grandmother would read something in her face, so she said quickly, "I just couldn't get to sleep. It's nothing."

"Was it that little ghost coming back for you last night?" her grandmother asked, straight out. "Look at the state of you. Black air over your head and no spirit in you. You've picked something unclean up, plain as anything."

Ning Shu's heart jumped. Her grandmother was not to be underestimated. One look and she had it.

"Er, I don't know. I thought I heard something." Ning Shu knew she could not get it past her, so that was the most she could say. She could hardly tell her grandmother that she had seen the little ghost and sat up all night talking to it, and that the little ghost was the child she had had with a certain tycoon before she was reborn.

Her grandmother went on eating and grumbling. "It doesn't fear death, that thing. I set an array and it still dares come. Next time I'll take it, and it can jump about then."

Ning Shu said quickly, "Grandma, I don't think the little ghost means any harm. It didn't do anything to me. It's probably just being naughty. Leave it alone."

"That won't do. If it keeps coming to you, it eats into your fortune." Her grandmother was serious. "The living and the dead keep to their own roads. You go your broad road and I'll cross my single plank, and we have nothing to do with each other. If a person is around ghosts too much, the yang in them wears down. Never mind the low spirits and the bad luck. In time they fall ill."

"But aren't you dealing with these things all the time, Grandma?"

Seventy, and still sound as anything, and no sign of her spirits being low.

"I'm different. I'm a master. This is my living, so naturally they don't frighten me."

Ning Shu thought, once I am a great master too, I can keep Tuanzi and Yuanzi with me.

Last night she had perhaps been too stunned to take it in. Two children at once was enough to leave anyone staring. Only now was she coming round to it. When she died there really had been a child of Lu Zheng's inside her.

Two poor things, barely begun, and then their mother died and there was no way on for them, and they had drifted on the roads between yin and yang for who knows how long, and had somehow come back more than a decade with her.

It was a strange story, but Ning Shu did not doubt a word of it, because the small creature looked far too much like Lu Zheng. She was his, down to the bone. They say a daughter who takes after her father comes out beautiful, and the way little Yuanzi looked now, she was pretty enough to ache over.

Whatever happened, she was going to keep the two of them with her. She was not having them go on wandering those roads and being pushed about by other ghosts.

It was feeling, and it was also what was owed. They could not go on to their next lives because of her.

She had only just reached the village entrance when she saw the Zhu family's woman, Zhou Honghua, come out of the house with two snotty children by the hand and settle at the top of the street to sit in the sun.

Zhou Honghua was the one who had been meeting Li Mazi, and Ning Shu had walked in on them, and because she was afraid Ning Shu would talk, she and her lover had put their heads together and pushed her down the slope.

The slope ran at about forty-five degrees. Ning Shu had gone down it head over heels and very nearly lost her life, and what saved her was a tree trunk across the way that caught her clothes.

Enemies meet on a narrow road.

The moment Zhou Honghua saw Ning Shu her face changed.

Ning Shu pretended not to see her, chewed her gum and walked straight past.

Zhou Honghua's eyes slid about. She hesitated several times, and then called out after her, viciously. "You're not to tell anyone! Or I'll make you sorry!"

Threatening her?

Threats were the last thing on earth Ning Shu was afraid of.

She turned to give it back to her, and saw a thick knot of black mist rising above Zhou Honghua's head, gathering there and growing.

At first Ning Shu thought her eyes were going. Then she rubbed them and looked again.

Oh my god.

There was a dead child riding on the woman's shoulders, its face white as paper.

It sat astride her neck, and black mist was coming off every part of it.