We were at the local park. My grandmother and I, and my baby brother. Of course, he was no longer a baby. The park was a large one. You entered it by joining an old stone path that ran parallel to a long waterway. Alongside the path was a strip of grass and a series of willow trees, their squat dusky trunks overwhelmed by a sprouting fountain of green plumes that reached out, overhanging the water. It was early spring, but there was still a winter tang in the air, and my grandmother’s cheeks were rosy. She pulled her coat in as she walked forward, her stolid dwarf’s march – rhythmic and unrelenting – defiant in all seasons. Up ahead my little brother skipped, jumped and bolted forward, his movements more erratic. As he ran he gibbered and communed with imaginary friends and make-believe foes, engrossed in a world of his own making. At one point I heard him cry out:
What time is it?
Just struck nine.
Is the cat at home?
He’s about to dine.
The words floated into my consciousness in a gentle echo, my brother’s sing-song voice soft and faraway, and I remembered this was a song I’d once known, a game I had once played, although the details of it were soft and distant. I looked across the water of the river. It shone a thick deep green, except where the light hit it in the middle in a splash of shimmering white. We came to an old bridge across the water, with traditional bamboo arches. My brother scampered across the bridge to the other side, where the green strip widened into a grassy knoll. On the far side was a playground with swings and slides and everything else that tickles a kid’s fancy.
My grandmother stopped suddenly.
‘Hold on,’ she said, waving one arm. Her breathing was ragged.
‘Are you okay, Po Po?’
She waved her arm again, dismissing the question.
‘Of course I am okay. It’s just that the air is cold and damp. It doesn’t always sit well on my lungs.’
I looked at her. I was a nervous teenager at the best of times, and the thought of my grandmother being frail or fallible sent anxiety straight through the core of me.
She caught the expression on my face. Her eyes narrowed in that wicked, shrewd way I was so familiar with, her lips curling in the ghost of a smile.
‘Don’t be writing me off yet, Little One. I may have got a little puffy. But don’t forget, the biggest, most powerful factory produces a lot of smoke.’
She breathed out, her breath forming a plume of steam in the cold.
‘Whereas in the smallest, littlest workshop, no true power is given off. So there is little smoke. And such a workshop can collapse given the slightest earthquake.’
She looked at me.
‘What I am trying to say, Little One, is that I am like the really powerful factory and you and your dozy brother over there are like the small, weak workshops …’
‘Yes, I understood that, Po Po. I got the gist of your comparison,’ I said haughtily.
My grandmother smiled all the more wickedly.
‘You got the “gist” of my comparison, did you? How fancy your language is! Is it as fancy as this boy you went to meet?’
I felt myself flush red. But my grandmother didn’t press my embarrassment. Instead she took pity on me.
‘You are a sensible girl. And as long as you are sensible, you don’t need to be ashamed. I think you should enjoy life. Somewhere along the line, your silly parents forgot how to do that. And life … It flashes by faster than one of Emperor Huizong’s best fireworks. It really does. And you realise that when you are coming to the end of it.’
I looked at her. Her face was ruddy in the cold, her eyes set straight ahead. I wanted to say something. I knew she had shared a confidence with me, I knew this moment meant something. If I had been a little older, perhaps I would have been quick-witted enough, skilful enough, to laugh gently and tell her that she was the one who would outlive us all. My mother had said something similar on occasion. But I doubt my grandmother would have bought it.
In the event, the moment was interrupted. My little brother came barrelling in, his head lowered in a bullish run, charging at my grandmother’s waist and laughing like a fool.
My grandmother gasped at the impact and looked down at my brother’s upturned face, flushed and happy, desperate for attention.
‘And what are you about, you naughty little bastard!’ she said, ruffling his hair with genuine affection.
‘Po Po,’ I said, scandalised. ‘You can’t speak to him like that! You can’t use that word in front of him!’
‘No, no, of course,’ my grandmother said with severity, miming zipping her lips shut.
My brother was giggling uproariously, in that shocked way children do when they identify an adult who has broken the rules they themselves have set.
‘You said “bastard”, you said “bastard”!’ he squealed delightedly.
My grandmother tickled him underneath the cheek.
‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But you can never tell. Now go play.’
She slapped him hard on his backside, and he giggled all the more before running off towards the swings and the slide.
She watched him go. There was such love, such affection in her eyes.
We followed him to the playground. There were other children there. As gregarious as my brother was with us, a shyness had recently crept into his behaviour when he mixed with children his own age. I felt shy so much of the time and I hoped he wasn’t becoming like me.
I left them there, my grandmother standing as solid as a rock on the perimeter of the playground, watching my brother with wry amusement. When I returned from the park toilets, the sun had slipped behind a cloud. I walked over to my grandmother, who was now sitting on a bench, gazing at the grass. I scanned the playground for my brother.
But he wasn’t there.
At first the scene didn’t make sense. I was sure I hadn’t grasped the whole picture. That I’d missed him on first glance. And yet those instinctive pinpricks of dread had already touched me.
I looked again, trying to quell the building fear.
He wasn’t there.
My grandmother was staring at her feet. Her eyes were glazed and there was a half-smile on her face, one corner of her mouth curved downwards; her whole expression was lopsided, vacant somehow. I ran to her.
‘Po Po!’
She didn’t seem to hear me.
I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
She blinked and looked up at me.
‘Where is he?’ I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.
She blinked again.
‘Qiao, my little brother. Where is he!’
‘I … I …’
For a moment she seemed frail, an old woman lost in memory, trying to find her way back to the present. Then her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, her awareness returned and her voice sharpened.
‘Don’t be stupid. I am sure your brother is fine. Maybe it’s time you stopped being such a frightened little girl!’
I stepped back as though I had been slapped. My grandmother could be acerbic, and I had been on the wrong end of some of her more cutting retorts, but now she was trembling with an anger that shocked me. I looked at her in disbelief, winded by what she had said, but there was no time to process her words – my brother had vanished. Blinking in terror, I scanned the field again, and then, in desperation, I ran back towards the river, retracing our steps.
I was panting, the cold air sharpening lungs which were ill suited to bursts of motion, as I’d always been terrible at sport and rarely exercised. And yet I drove myself forward, moving as fast as I was able. I caught the outline of the river – the opaque green of the water’s surface, still and pristine – but then I saw my brother’s face underneath, his eyes open and lifeless, gazing out from that emerald stillness.
I blinked the vision away and told myself not to panic, but my heart thudded violently. And then I heard his voice, heard him singing softly under his breath.
What time is it?
Just struck nine.
Is the cat at home?
He’s about to dine.
He was crouched under a willow tree, totally engrossed in his play. The tears were hot on my cheeks as I pulled him to me and pressed my mouth into his neck, and he kicked and protested and went, ‘Eww!’ in the way younger boys do.
Strange, I guess. My brother was capable of doing some truly disgusting stuff. He was fascinated by all manner of grotesque creatures: the dung beetles which waddled across the soil in the parks, the segmented worms he would turn up and poke in the grounds outside our building, the hornets which stuck themselves to our windows with a bleary, drunken buzz at the height of the summer’s heat. Many of these creatures he would endeavour to capture and preserve; he was fascinated by the way they flapped, jerked and oozed, and he would unleash their cadavers upon us at the most inappropriate of times. And yet it was a sudden display of affection from his older sister that truly grossed him out.
I didn’t mind, however. I nuzzled his neck all the more, and laughed. I was so happy he was okay.
We made our way back to the playground and our grandmother.
She patted his head and grinned.
‘You little bastard,’ she said.
He laughed out loud.
She grinned and took his hand. But she didn’t look at me.
We began to make our way back.