Free Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings Page A

At least then there’ll be something to come back to.’
    ‘All right. Let’s stop talking about it and do it.’
    ‘All right. Sure. We’ll both leave this shitty little town.’ They raised their glasses and sank the scummy dregs of the bristly liquor.
    Neither dared ask exactly where the other planned to go. There were gaps and holes in everything Jinyi took for granted, and this, he felt, should be no different. When they left the shop a couple of hours later night had nuzzled up into the nooks and corners of the way home. The restless calls of the cats crept over the eaves above them. The two boys eluded the pair of soldiers on night duty by skirting through deserted courtyards, steadying each other so they didn’t trip over broken stools and empty chicken coops. When the time came to part, they were awkward, the alcohol wearing off into tiredness and despondence. Finally they bowed to each other. Both suddenly embarrassed by this, they turned and walked until they could no longer hear the lazy beat of the other’s feet against the soggy stones.

    Before the year was out Dongming and Jinyi’s former boss would jump from the highest stone bridge into the river, having never learnt how to swim. The same day his brightly feathered birds escaped from their cages and lived in the town’s trees until winter,when they suddenly departed. No one was able to explain how they continually managed to evade the Japanese’s persistent attempts to catch them, or why the birds, which had spent all their lives caged in a stuffy room, should survive so well in the wild. Both would eventually be attributed to the fact that, unlike every other bird known to the city’s inhabitants, they never emitted even the smallest sound, neither morning song nor warning squawk.
    It was the men in Dongming’s family who would die first, starved and exhausted, working for scraps on the building sites the soldiers had taken over. The asthmatic grandmother and the unmarried aunts survived in their papery skin a little longer. No one was left to witness them mixing sawdust into their stingy bowls of millet after the little sitting-room Buddha was requisitioned by troops as they took it to the town centre to be pawned.
    Dongming would head south, hiking through villages the Japanese had not bothered with, and circling down toward Chongqing, the Nationalists’ capital since they fled Nanjing in the wake of the invasion. Chongqing was then a city divided in half by the fast-flowing Yangtze river, the longest in China, and buffeted between the mountainous plateaus of Tibet to the west and south and the Japanese-controlled areas to the east. Even seventy years later the stretches of grassland amid the hills would remain cordoned off because of the amount of mines laid by the retreating army to protect their last base.
    Perhaps Dongming died crossing the expansive minefield, something even the Japanese did not dare to attempt. Perhaps he joined the ranks of the Nationalists and, when both the world war and the civil war were finished, fled with the rest of the higher-ranking officials to Taiwan. Perhaps he worked in one of the prison camps that sat at the top of some of Chongqing’s mountains, collecting mist and guarding the Communist prisoners until their executions. Perhaps he was imprisoned by the Communists when the People’s Republic was created, and was re-educated, sent to the fields or shot. In all likelihood, he never made it as far as Chongqing. But because Jinyi did not hear from him again, he must remain as a ghost to us, on the other side of knowledge. There are some things that even I am not allowed to tell.

    Jinyi followed the thin river which skittered beneath the mountain ranges. On the high ridges, stretches of the Great Wall had already crumbled into a few decayed teeth stubbing out of rocky gums. He had decided to head north because south would be back towards his uncle, his aunt, the dregs of his family. North was the edge, the