Princess Yifan, Page 2

  And eventually there was a lull in the conversation.

  “Lao-Ye, what’s in the attic?” enquired Yifan of her grandfather.

  “Eh? Attic?” He looked a bit confused by her question. Obviously it wasn’t something he had expected to be asked.

  “Yes, the attic. What’s up there?”

  “Well – er, just some things. Things we have but don’t need right now, or don’t have room for.”

  “Junk,” added grandmother, with a little smile.

  “Maybe some junk,” he conceded.

  “Can I go and look?”

  Simple questions, Yifan found, can often cause long and unnecessary conversation to break out. It happened in this case, and so the short version, after Yifan had played everyone off against everyone else, was that tomorrow morning, under supervision, Yifan could go into the attic dressed in old clothes and could look around. There were lots of rules and warnings attached to this permission but Yifan ignored those, since everyone would have forgotten them by tomorrow and would have to construct a new set, by which time it may well be too late to stop her.

  “Now, bed,” said Ji Ye, firmly.

  And, an hour or two later, Yifan was tucked up in bed, dreaming about the treasures above her head.

  *

  Ji Ye and Yifan crouched beneath the sloping roof of the house. The attic was not very well lit, a single naked bulb on a frayed wire being the only illumination. Both carried torches. Both were scared.

  “Listen!”

  “It’s a rat!”

  Some mildly incoherent shrieking followed. This is impossible to write down, so it will just have to be imagined. Eventually curiosity overcame fear, and the pair moved away from the open hatch and deeper into the attic.

  There were boxes everywhere. And there were sturdy plastic bags containing books, clothing and the sort of things Yifan’s grandmother called ‘junk’.

  Ji Ye started looking into the boxes and bags, picking out one or two things that she recognised as belonging to her.

  “Look! I wondered where that had got to! Oh, I bet it doesn’t fit me now.” She held up a sparkly top that Yifan quietly decided was going to end up in her own wardrobe, as soon as they got back home.

  Yifan would have liked to root through the bags too, but she had a purpose to being in the attic. In fact, if she had not been so single-minded, she wouldn’t want to be up here in the dark, with spider webs and possibly rats, and – oh, don’t think about those things! Yifan took some deep breaths and calmed herself down. She suspected that what she wanted would be further back in the darker depths of the loft, and steeled her nerve against the terrors in the shadows as she moved forward, sliding bags back towards her mother.

  And there, against the wall that separated this attic from the attic next door, there was an old red metal trunk.

  In the light of the torch it looked as if it had been painted with blood. But that was just its colour. On its side was stencilled a name in Chinese, and some numbers. It was a bit rusty along the edges, but not so bad – the loft was dry, and the water tank was at the other end. It was in the middle of the wall, where there was room to stand up, and there was a dusty bag containing blankets on top of it. On one side there was a pair of old dining chairs with broken seats. On the other side was a wooden tea chest covered in a dirty, heavy yellow cloth.

  Yifan cleared a space in front of the red trunk, and heaved the blankets off it onto the broken chair seats. She was aware that there might very well be spiders, but in her present state of excitement she felt more than a match for them.

  Ji Ye came up behind her, her arms full of items of clothing and with a pair of high-heeled shoes dangling from her fingers.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Lao-Ye’s trunk.”

  “That’s not dad’s name. I think it must be my mother’s father, or even her grandfather.”

  Yifan had to agree; the name was not her grandfather’s. But by now, the trunk must of course belong to him. Yifan reached out her hand to the metal hasp and….

  An unearthly scream rang all around them! Yifan and Ji Ye screamed too, and jumped back, upsetting piles of bags and boxes. Ji Ye banged her head on a beam and dropped her burden of clothes and shoes, clutching her noggin and going “Ow! Ow! Ow!”. Then she went over to the hatch and, kneeling, shouted down.

  “Why so much noise, Ma?”

  Her mother shouted back up, angrily, “Too much dust! You look down here – look at this carpet! The landing’s all covered in it. And when are you going to be finished, and move this ladder?”

  So that was the source of the scream. Yifan made sure her mother was alright after the bang on the head – she was fine, it had not been a hard blow – and helped her to get down the ladder, and passed down some of the salvaged clothes and shoes, all the time assuring grandma that of course they would clean up just as soon as they had finished up here.

  A few minutes later, with just the low sounds of grumbling from below, Yifan knelt alone in front of the red trunk. It had a hasp and staple fastening, which helpfully was not padlocked. But raising the hasp was difficult because it was rusted. It took all her strength to lift it over the staple, and then her hands were red with rust and flaked paint.

  The lid, however much she pulled on the hasp, seemed to be welded to the body of the trunk. That’s the problem with metal, Yifan thought. If it had been wood, it should have been much easier to open. After wrestling for some time, she had to give up.

  She sat in front of the trunk, wondering what she could do. John would probably have said something nonsensical, like, “Just give the lid a tap all around with something, to loosen all the rust that’s sticking it to the body.” As if something like that could possibly work.

  And of course, it possibly could. Yifan found a table-tennis bat in a nearby box of dusty paraphernalia and started tapping all around the edge of the lid with the end of the handle. Some rust and dust fell from the join onto the floor of the loft, but it took three or four circuits before the lid showed signs of being able to be moved.

  By jamming the bat into the gap she made at one end, she could then concentrate on the other end, and after long minutes of hard work the lid of the trunk was free, and Yifan lifted it. Its hinges creaked. There was a thick metal wire inside the lid which she used to keep it propped open, like a car bonnet. And now, with the torch in her hand, she could examine the treasure she had uncovered.

  There were papers, all in Chinese, many of them official with Government stamps on them. Some were about University, some were household documents. There were packets of black and white photographs of people she did not recognise. Yifan took these out to take down to her grandparents. Then there were some small boxes with jewellery in them, which she also put aside. An old University uniform was wrapped in paper at the bottom of the trunk, and then, finally, tucked up in a corner at the back, she found what she was looking for.

  Wrapped in age-yellowed tissue paper there was a blue and white vase. It had a bulb-shaped base and a slim tapering neck. The top was stopped with what looked like blood, but which (Yifan sensibly decided) must in fact have been wax. Altogether, it was just less than five inches tall. The decoration was much the same as the other blue and white stuff she’d seen before – leaves and birds. The bottom was white, with a vague impressed mark in it which may have been a Chinese character.

  As she held it in her hands Yifan’s breath stopped. Even her heart seemed to stop. This was the proof that she had met her older self. It was proof of something special in her life. She still had only a vague idea of what arky-ology was, but in that moment she vowed it would be her life’s work.

  Ji Ye had come part-way up the ladder and was waiting for Yifan so that she could pass down the remainder of her haul of clothes and shoes. Together they shifted that pile down from the loft, and then Yifan passed her mother the photographs and jewellery from the trunk.

  “I’m coming down now, mama,” she announced, and Ji
Ye went behind the ladder to steady it.

  Yifan turned around and, grasping the top of the ladder, put out her foot to find a rung. Then her other foot. And now to pick up the precious vase, which was – well, almost out of reach. But not quite… she could stretch a bit…

  Her fingers brushed the bulbous base of the little object. It teetered, and she made a lunge for it, terrified… and touched it again, and now it fell over on the dusty floor of the attic, and began to roll, and Yifan, overbalanced, flailed to keep herself from falling off the ladder; and the vase passed her as she watched helpless to stop it, and fell through the hatch.

  She had stuck out a leg to keep her balance, and the small pot struck her knee when it fell. And in that striking, it was deflected; and its new path was a long, shallow arc heading towards the banister rail at the top of the stairs. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, and Yifan had no option but to look on, no ability to reach out in time, no way of calling for any help before the small blue and white vase struck the hard wooden rail and smashed into pieces.

  *

  “She’s very upset,” repeated Ji Ye, on the phone to John. “She hasn’t talked for hours.”

  John sighed. He had no suggestions or ideas about how to revive Yifan’s spirits. Yifan was, by Ji Ye’s account, sitting on her bed in Cardiff, staring at nothing, and refusing food. She had been there since she’d got down from the attic, after the small vase had smashed, and nothing anyone could do could lift her mood.

  “What was so important about that vase?” he asked, trying to appear intelligent.

  “I don’t know. But it’s really upset her that it’s broken. Mama says it’s a cheap thing, maybe seventy years old. It was sealed with wax, but there was nothing inside it.”

  “Maybe there’s something about it in one of the documents in the trunk,” John ventured. Now Ji Ye sighed.

  “Most of them are from my grandfather’s University days. There are a few personal letters, and quite a few old photographs, considering what was happening in China at that time.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Well, North-East China was under Japanese rule before China became Communist in 1947. My grandfather – my mother’s father - was one of very few Chinese to be able to study in University then. Then when the Communists beat the Kuomintang there was a lot of confusion. And after that there was the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao’s attempt to make China into an industrial nation. That was in 1958. It was chaos. There was famine and political upheaval, and tremendous distrust. Photographs would have been a bit of a luxury during all that time.”

  “Perhaps the vase contained tears, or breath,” John suggested. “It was popular in Roman times to collect your tears in a small bottle, if you’d been through an emotional event. Or else it could have been his last breath, or his private thoughts whispered into a secret place.”

  Ji Ye considered this, but said that it was not something that was done in China. “We will never know,” she said. “We’ll be back home in two days, anyway, and I hope that Yifan recovers herself before then.”

  Yifan at that moment was listening to Lao-Ye, her grandfather, who was perched on the end of her bed. He was telling her stories about her great-grandfather, who had suffered under the Japanese rule in North-East China, and who then started a family in the even more difficult times that had followed.

  “He’s grandma’s father, though,” said Yifan. “What about your father?”

  Mister Ji was a bit nonplussed. He never really talked about his own side of the family. After a bit of thought, he started speaking again.

  “I wouldn’t talk so much about my family,” he began. “But what there is you can find beside the iron box in the attic. There is not so much.”

  And he kissed Yifan on her forehead and left her to sleep.

  It took a little while, but she finally worked it out in her head in the darkness – there was another box in the attic. The tea chest! But now, how could she sleep?

  *

  In the morning Yifan was tugging at her mother’s duvet and clamouring for her to wake up. When Yifan clamoured everyone knew about it for a mile around, so Ji Ye was unable to resist; and in less than half an hour she was blinking sleep out of her eyes and standing in the hatch of the loft.

  “Why are we here?” she asked, yawning, as Yifan shuffled towards the old metal trunk.

  “Because Lao-Ye has some stuff here,” said Yifan over her shoulder. “And here it is.” She knelt in front of the red trunk, and beside it was the tea chest. Her hands trembled as she picked at the yellow cloth that covered it. It was stiff and dirty, and she was sure that there were spiders and all sorts of things in it, but her excitement was too great for her to worry about wildlife.

  The cloth came off the chest, and Yifan dropped it as far away as she could in the confines of the loft. Black things scuttled into the shadows, and for a few seconds her heart thumped, but she did not cry out or tremble.

  Because in the tea chest, right at the top, there was an old box made from thick cardboard, furry with age and dust. And discernible through the dust were Chinese characters, and the characters said, in Traditional script, “Princess Aster’s Vase”.

  III.

  Belinda Theobold is a sweet young woman, slightly chunky, a little bit breathless when she talks, which is quite a lot. But this evening she hadn’t talked much at all.

  “Really?” she managed, after Vicky had finished her piece and leaned back to take a sip of fruit tea.

  “Really!” said Vicky. And Belinda puffed out her cheeks and reached for her white wine.

  Vicky is Yifan Shen, but years ago changed her name from Yifan to Victoria. Not because Yifan was not a perfectly good name, but because it was a name that English people tended to mis-hear and mis-speak. She and Belinda were in a bar in Green Street, close to Sidney Sussex College where they were both undergraduates. The bar was warm, and on this weekday and at this time not particularly busy. Outside, snow fell in silent feathers from a sky that glowed soft amber from the reflections of streetlamps. Cambridge was ahush beneath its white, thickening blanket, and its people had caught its quiet mood.

  “The thing is,” continued Vicky, “I don’t remember ever having had that experience when I was a child. I mean, it’s something you would remember, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” said Belinda. “You would remember meeting yourself when you were older. And what if this younger self did find that pot? Would you have done this course if you hadn’t?”

  “Well, I DID find the pot. But not because I told myself about it. I found it when I was thirteen, and we were going through things because my grandparents were moving back to China. And yes, it did spark my interest in archaeology, and it did lead me to study here.”

  “So you think it was an hallucination.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Just that it was kind of spooky. She really did sound like me when I was eleven. I found myself trying to justify things to her, and honestly, trying to hide my boyfriend from her – I could feel her trying to probe me, like some little alien. But it was me. She was me.”

  It had taken quite a while before Vicky had decided to tell anyone about her experience back in the summer. Belinda was her best friend, but this sort of experience was not the sort of thing you just came right out with. She hadn’t told her mum, or John; and Bart was no longer around to confide in. She had thought that it would just go away, and she wouldn’t think about it after a few weeks, but it was still in her mind, niggling, and finally she had had enough and made a clean breast of the whole incident to Belinda.

  Belinda, who was quite an impressionable young woman, was fairly boggling. She nodded over Vicky’s head at a waitress, and waved her empty wine glass.

  “I think it’s fantastic,” she confessed. “Just the sort of thing I would have wanted to happen to me. Just think – meeting your future self! If that had happened to me I would have wanted to know so many things – like, are ther
e flying cars, and what’s the winning lottery ticket?”

  “I don’t think I – she – was interested in that sort of thing,” said Vicky. “She was as thrown by it as I was. It was strange for both of us…. Anyway, there aren’t any flying cars – it’s only been eight years!”

  Telling Belinda was probably a mistake. Belinda was enthusiastic about the experience, and what Vicky wanted was some reassurance that it hadn’t really happened, or that it had been something that happened to other people too, just like déjà vu or feeling a chill when you were alone in an old house.

  -- I found it, came an excited, familiar and internal voice.

  Belinda, in the act of raising her fresh glass to her lips, saw a change come over her friend. Vicky was white as a sheet, as if she’d seen a ghost. Her eyes were glazed; her body was still, but trembling ever so slightly.

  Belinda put her glass down and carefully took Vicky’s teacup from her hand and put that down too.

  “Are you OK?”

  There was no answer from Vicky.

  “Is it happening again?” squealed Belinda, delighted that the very thing she had just heard about might be playing out in front of her very slightly popping eyes.

  -- What are you doing here? said Vicky, more than a little bit cross.

  -- What’s the matter? Yifan sounded as if she was about to cry, which made Vicky feel bad.

  -- Oh, I’m sorry. Just that this is not a good time.

  -- I found the vase. I broke one, but then I found the real one. It’s Princess Aster’s vase. It doesn’t look like a vase, just looks like a pot with a lid. The lid doesn’t come off.

  -- It’s a lamp, really. An oil lamp. The lid will come off, but only with professional help. Don’t even think of trying to do it yourself. And DON’T let John try! You know what he’s like with things.