Chapter 25
THIS ROOM HAD ONCE BEEN a reception room for guests to the steelworks, and it came with its own restroom. Though it was neglected, someone still owned the property, so there was still running water—that was why Li Yan had snapped it up as quickly as he did.
The factory grounds looked quite desolate, but even aside from the liveliness around the factory buildings during warmer seasons, it wasn’t completely deserted here. Others also came around, looking for a place to hang out—they were just less religious about visiting.
Gu Fei didn’t come often, but he wanted to treat Jiang Cheng to a meal without being too far from home, and there weren’t any decent restaurants around here. When Jiang Cheng said he didn’t mind where they ate, he thought of this place.
“I guess there’s no heating here?” Jiang Cheng sat on the couch and stomped his feet.
“Light your own fire.” Gu Fei grabbed a lighter from the table and tossed it to him. “There’s charcoal in the bag next to the couch. You can find some rags and stuff outside… Do you know how to light a fire?”
“Yeah.” Jiang Cheng stood and went outside. A couple of seconds later, he returned with a violent bang of the door, a rag in his hand and a stiff look on his face.
Gu Fei was holding a pack of disposable plates, about to lay out the ingredients; the sound made him jump. “What’s wrong?”
“Fuck.” Jiang Cheng held out the rag between two fingernails. “I picked this thing up just now… and there was a dead rat under it! Scared the shit out of me!”
Gu Fei didn’t understand. “Why are you still holding it so bravely, then?”
“I thought it was probably useful, so I decided to be brave…” Jiang Cheng chucked the rag into the brick stove. “It should be enough for the fire.”
“You could have walked ten steps more and found something else to light the fire with. Something without a dead rat under it.” Gu Fei resumed sorting the ingredients onto their plates.
“It’s too damn cold, I didn’t want to move.” Jiang Cheng crouched in front of the stove. “I think I’m getting used to it now. At Li Baoguo’s place, there are even cockroaches in the pots.”
“He doesn’t normally cook. They provide meals at the mahjong place,” Gu Fei said.
“I can tell.” Jiang Cheng lit the rag. “If they had beds as well, he could probably sell the house.”
“He can’t.” Gu Fei brought the pot to the restroom and washed it under the faucet, then filled it with water before bringing it back out. “All the apartments belonged to the old steelworks. Most people here are so poor, the only things they own are the shirts on their backs.”
“…Oh.” Jiang Cheng put two pieces of charcoal in the fire and stared at them, as if lost in thought.
Once the charcoal caught fire, Gu Fei put the pot of water on top, then crushed two pieces of ginger and tossed them in. After that, he added a small sachet of pre-sorted goji berries and red dates.
“Making soup?” Jiang Cheng asked.
“Yeah.” Gu Fei held the lid of the pot. “Do you prefer the soup or the meat?”
“…What’s that supposed to mean?” Jiang Cheng looked at him, baffled.
“You’ll make a pot of chicken soup, and I have to choose between drinking the broth and eating the meat?”
Gu Fei sighed. “No. If I add the chicken when the water’s cold, the broth will be more flavorful. If I add it to boiling water, the chicken will taste better.”
“Oh,” Jiang Cheng said, surprised. “Why?”
Gu Fei thought that Jiang Cheng’s response perfectly encapsulated the mindset of an overachieving student: lacking in common sense, but full of curiosity. He didn’t want to explain, though, so he simply said, “Just tell me which you prefer.”
“Soup,” Jiang Cheng answered simply, then took out his phone.
“Okay.” Gu Fei put the chicken into the pot and covered it. “While the chicken is cooking, we can start grilling.”
“All right.” Jiang Cheng stood up, still looking at his phone. “What do you need me to do?”
“Eat,” Gu Fei replied.
Li Yan and company really liked to barbecue here, so they were well stocked. Gu Fei set up the grill rack, then transferred some charcoal from the stove. All the meat he’d bought was prepared and ready to use after a quick dab of seasoning—it was very simple.
“When you start the chicken in cold water, the flavor of the meat is gradually released as the temperature rises, resulting in a more flavorful broth,” Jiang Cheng read off his phone as he sat by the stove, basking in the heat of the fire. “When you put the chicken in boiling water, the outer layer cooks instantly, sealing the flavor inside. As a result, the chicken itself will taste better… Is that right?”
“…Yeah.” Gu Fei glanced at him. “Are you going to take notes, too?”
Jiang Cheng glanced right back. “These kinds of things don’t usually need to be memorized verbatim. A basic understanding of the meaning is enough.”
Gu Fei turned and began seasoning the meat. When Jiang Cheng spoke like that, he gave off strong overachiever energy, the kind you couldn’t really formulate a response to.
“You guys hang out here often? You’ve got a lot of supplies.” Jiang Cheng stood at the barbecue grill. “There’s even cumin?”
“Cumin, pepper, chili powder, we have it all. I just don’t know whether anything’s expired—who knows when they bought them.”
“…Shit.” Jiang Cheng picked up a bottle. “Let me see… Shelf life, thirty-six months. Should be fine. I doubt it’s been thirty-something months since you bought this.”
“How long is thirty-six months?” Gu Fei grabbed the bottle without even looking up and scattered it over the meat.
“Three years,” Jiang Cheng said.
“The last time was a few weeks ago, at most. You sure are particular. I usually just check for weird smells.”
“Is it because you can’t figure out how long the shelf life is?” said Jiang Cheng.
“Yeah.” Gu Fei swept his eyes over Jiang Cheng. “I can’t compare with the refined life of an overachiever.”
It wasn’t long before the skewers on the barbecue began to drip grease. The smoke permeating the room started to smell of fragrant meat. Barbecuing wasn’t a difficult task, skill-wise, and Gu Fei seemed quite practiced at it, so Jiang Cheng didn’t offer his help. He sat by the chicken soup, warming himself at the fire.
It was quiet outside. The sky had gone completely dark, and the open window looked like a sheet of black cloth. It made Jiang Cheng feel cold. But in front of him, the stove and grill rack reflected the bright flames, tethering him to the ground and giving him a sense of security. Altogether it was a funny feeling, just like the other day in the ridiculously tiny car: Outside was the cold street and the bitter wind, but inside it was warm and calm.
Now, outside the window was dark uncertainty and unease, but in front of his eyes was light and warmth.
Jiang Cheng really liked this feeling.
After all this time—since he came here with his melancholy and bitterness, his confusion and helplessness, and all the other things he wasn’t used to—he finally felt his feet land on solid ground. The feeling might be temporary, or just a trick of the senses, but right now, he couldn’t help but quietly savor it.
“Can you handle spice?” Gu Fei asked.
“A little, not too much,” Jiang Cheng said.
Gu Fei sprinkled some chili powder over the meat, then put a few skewers on a plate and handed it to Jiang Cheng. “Try it. I prefer them a little charred.
These are the less burnt ones.”
“I like it a little charred, too.” Jiang Cheng took a bite. “Tastes pretty good.”
“I thought you overachieving students didn’t eat burnt food. You even check for shelf life. Aren’t you scared the char will give you cancer?” Gu Fei went back to grilling the meat skewers.
“Are you done?” Jiang Cheng retorted as he ate. “What do you have against overachievers? You won’t shut up about them.”
“It’s my first time seeing a real live one in all the seventeen years I’ve lived—my heart’s pounding from excitement, obviously.” Gu Fei put the rest of the skewers onto the plate in one tall heap, then set the plate on an upside-down wooden crate by the stove that functioned as a table. “An overachiever with a mouth on him, too.”
Gathering around a fire and eating skewers when it was cold outside was a blissful indulgence; Jiang Cheng didn’t feel like bickering with Gu Fei for the time being. He continued eating without saying a word.
“Want a drink?” Gu Fei rifled through a nearby cardboard box. “There’s still some alcohol here from before, I think.”
“Baijiu?” Jiang Cheng asked.
“What else? Do you drink beer when it’s this cold out?” Gu Fei grabbed a bottle of baijiu and placed it on the wooden box. “Times like these call for an erguotou to warm the soul.”
Jiang Cheng paused for a moment, staring at the bottle, before nodding.
“Fine, let’s have a little.”
The way Gu Fei filled the paper cups to the brim gave Jiang Cheng a bit of a shock; he’d never had baijiu that way before. But since he and Gu Fei seemed to be able to argue about anything any time they spoke, he stayed quiet as he watched Gu Fei place the liquor before him.
“You may think I don’t have to formally thank you,” Gu Fei said, raising his cup, “but I’m still going to say thank you.”
Jiang Cheng raised his cup as well. “You may think I don’t have to say ‘no worries’… But I’m going to say it anyway.”
Gu Fei laughed. He bumped his cup against Jiang Cheng’s, then took a swig.
Jiang Cheng looked into Gu Fei’s cup. The bastard chugged baijiu like he was drinking beer. Jiang Cheng had no choice but to match him and take a similarly-sized gulp. The liquor blazed a path from the top of his throat all the way to his stomach, then sent a fire burning upward, setting his neck and ears alight.
Gu Fei glanced over at him. “You don’t normally drink much, do you?”
“I don’t drink hard liquor the way I drink beer,” said Jiang Cheng. He lowered his head and took a bite of the meat. It was deeply satisfying to chug a drink by the fire in such cold weather.
“A sip or two should be enough for you,” Gu Fei said, “with that wound of yours.”
“It doesn’t hurt much today.” Jiang Cheng pressed against the wound. He really didn’t feel anything now. He hesitated, then asked, “How are things…with Gu Miao?”
“She’ll stay home for now.” Gu Fei took another sip. “Those parents yesterday got the other two boys to bring their families to school to pitch a fit together.”
“The fuck?!” Jiang Cheng scowled. “I bet they did something to make Gu Miao react like that. She hardly even looks at people most of the time.”
“They scribbled in her book.” Gu Fei lifted the lid of the pot. The soup inside was boiling now; he tasted it, then added some salt and seasoning. “Er-Miao wanted to handle it herself, so I didn’t go to the school about it. I didn’t think she was going to handle it like that.”
Jiang Cheng could guess what the scribbles on her book looked like. That age—the age where adults would excuse them with “they’re only a child”—was when children were cruelest. He thought of his own elementary school days, when a slightly slower kid in his class was shunned and bullied by everyone else. Even Jiang Cheng had taken part, afraid that standing out from the crowd would earn him the same treatment.
“So they’re making Gu Miao stay home?” Jiang Cheng said. “They don’t care who started it? Even if she was wrong for hitting him, surely she doesn’t deserve to be suspended!”
“The school didn’t want to take her in the first place. I begged the principal for ages.” Gu Fei paused, falling silent for a while before glancing at him. “Er-Miao was supposed to go to a special school.”
“…I see.” Jiang Cheng had already guessed that Gu Miao had some sort of problem, but when he heard Gu Fei say special school, he was still uncertain how to reply.
“She was born a little…different.” Gu Fei sprinkled cumin on a skewer of meat. “She had speech issues. She only started speaking at two or three, and even then, she’d only use a couple of sounds and she could barely get her tongue around them. She has trouble learning new things, and probably with expressing herself, too. She just screams whenever she’s hungry or thirsty or in pain.”
“So she…” Jiang Cheng trailed off. Gu Fei stared at the food in his hand as he spoke, looking utterly indifferent, but Jiang Cheng could sense his misery.
Jiang Cheng didn’t probe, and Gu Fei ended it there. They didn’t talk about what exactly was wrong with Gu Miao, or where that scar on the back of her head was from—whether it really was from Gu Fei’s dad, like Li Baoguo said. They didn’t discuss whether the rumors about Gu Fei were true. Jiang Cheng was curious about all of it, but he decided not to ask.
The chicken soup was delicious. Maybe it was the unique allure of hot soup in cold weather, but a single mouthful was enough to send him to heaven with its warmth.
“This chicken soup is going to my head,” Jiang Cheng marveled.
“Did you buy your top student credentials?” Gu Fei took a sip of his drink before holding the cup in front of Jiang Cheng’s eyes, giving it a swirl. “This is what’s going to your head.”
“…Oh.” Jiang Cheng paused, then picked up his own cup and took a sip too, nodding. “You’re right.”
The alcohol content might have been high, and Jiang Cheng might not have been a regular baijiu drinker; nonetheless, eating and drinking like this soon reduced the paper cup’s contents to nearly nothing.
Maybe that was why he suddenly felt like laughing. It was the same urge as the one that struck him in Gu Fei’s shop, when they were talking about their fight—he was seized by the same desire to burst into brainless hysterics.
He turned to look at Gu Fei. “I…” Gu Fei had just taken a mouthful of soup; meeting Jiang Cheng’s eyes, he turned away and sprayed it all out.
It was enough to send them both into fits of hysterical laughter.
Jiang Cheng laughed so hard he couldn’t hold his chopsticks—they clattered to the table. He tried to set them down properly, but they soon rolled onto the floor. Still giggling, he bent down to retrieve them, but instead came back up with a small wooden dowel he picked up off the ground, which he put next to his bowl.
At the sight of the dowel, Gu Fei laughed so hard that half of his soup sloshed out of the bowl he was holding.
“I can’t,” Jiang Cheng laughed, pressing one hand to the wound on his ribs. “I’m injured, I can’t laugh like this…” Gu Fei couldn’t speak. He leaned back against the wall and continued to chortle for a while before ending it with a big sigh. “I could barely breathe…” When they’d finished laughing, Jiang Cheng’s back, chilled in the wind from the open window, was now covered in sweat.
“Ahh.” Jiang Cheng searched through his pockets for tissues to wipe his mouth with, but came up empty. “I’m exhausted.”
“Looking for tissues?” Gu Fei pointed at the table behind him. “There.”
Jiang Cheng turned around. There were several rolls on the rickety old table behind him. He reached for one, and as he took it, a sheet of paper fell from the table to his feet. When he picked it up and was about to put it back, he paused, staring at the paper in surprise.
It was a piece of kraft paper with a five-line staff printed on it, torn from a music manuscript book. It was the kind of paper he was intimately familiar with:
His favorite manuscript books were made of kraft paper like this.
A sheet of music manuscript paper wasn’t a strange sight in and of itself.
He figured Gu Fei was the kind of useless student who would mistakenly buy this, thinking it was a workbook for English vocabulary… What surprised him was what was written on the manuscript paper: more than half a page of a score.
“Holy shit.” Jiang Cheng blinked and gripped the edge of the table, forcing his eyes to focus on the doubling image in front of him. He hummed two bars. “It sounds good. What song is this?”
Gu Fei was still leaning against the wall. He stared at Jiang Cheng for a while. “You can read music?”
“No shit.” Holding the sheet, Jiang Cheng leaned back so he was against the table leg, his head bowed as he pored over the page. “We top students know everything… Who wrote this?”
Gu Fei fell silent.
Jiang Cheng looked over it again, then lifted his gaze to peer at him. He pointed a finger at Gu Fei. “You?”
“Hm?” Gu Fei took another sip. “Why me? Do I look like someone who writes music?”
“No, but…” Jiang Cheng flicked the paper. “But this key signature, this sharp symbol, it’s the same as your handwriting. Longer at the bottom, like someone with one hand on his hip.”
“The hell?” Gu Fei snorted.
“You wrote this? Or did you copy it for someone?” Jiang Cheng waved the paper at him, then hummed two more bars. “It sounds really nice.”
“Top students sure are a different breed.” Gu Fei deflected his question. “You learned music notation in middle school, didn’t you? And you still remember it, even.”
“Shit, you underestimate us.” Jiang Cheng stood and slapped the paper against the table. He really was in high spirits now, happily sloshed as he spoke breezily, “I’m going to open your eyes.”
“Are you going to sing?” Gu Fei was also excited now; he stood up and applauded as he leaned against the wall.
“Wait.” Jiang Cheng got his bag from the couch. “I’m not sure if I brought it… I normally bring it with me everywhere… Ah, here it is.”
Gu Fei watched Jiang Cheng dig through the contents of his school bag and pick out a translucent and slender plastic case.
A flute?
Jiang Cheng’s ability to read music, especially his ability to hum a melody instantly upon reading it, was astonishing enough. Even though Lao-Xu called Jiang Cheng an overachieving top student, he didn’t look the type—nobody would believe it unless they saw his actual grades. His top achievements were tongue lashings and physical lashings. His prowess at basketball was much less of a surprise than his music skills.
Like Gu Fei himself, even if he’d signed his own name on the music he wrote, anyone who didn’t know him would assume he’d beaten up the real composer and robbed it from him.
Jiang Cheng was probably a little hyper from his drink. There’d been no less than four ounces of erguotou in his cup, which was now empty. When someone who rarely drank downed that much liquor in such a short stretch, this kind of behavior was to be expected.
“Is that a flute? It’s so thin.” Gu Fei looked at the slim metal tube in his hand. It was long and black.
“Kind of. It’s a tin whistle.” Jiang Cheng cleared his throat. “An Irish whistle. I really like it, but I don’t play it often. I didn’t play it often back at home either.”
“Why not?” Gu Fei asked.
“Because it doesn’t look as sophisticated as the piano.” Jiang Cheng snorted. “My mom… Well, she didn’t think much of it. She said it was noisy. She prefers the piano.”
“You play the piano, too?” Gu Fei studied Jiang Cheng’s hands. He hadn’t noticed before, but now, as Jiang Cheng’s fingers lined up along the length of the whistle, he could see they were long. The joints of his slender fingers were defined, but not bony.
“Yeah. You wanna bow down before me? There’s a cushion on the couch, why don’t you bring it over?” Jiang Cheng gestured at the floor in front of himself with the tin whistle. “You can kneel down right here.”
Gu Fei burst into laughter. He found himself a cigarette and lit it.
He didn’t think he’d heard a tin whistle before, but when Jiang Cheng played a bar, he suddenly remembered: There was a period of time when Ding Zhuxin had been into Celtic music and listened to it every day. It was filled with all kinds of wind instruments, from wooden flutes to bagpipes. It must have included the tin whistle.
He didn’t know what Jiang Cheng was playing, but it sounded very familiar.
Just as Gu Fei was awestruck that Jiang Cheng could play the tin whistle —and play it well, at that, the way his fingers danced nimbly across the holes… Jiang Cheng abruptly stopped and cleared his throat.
“Sorry. I’ll start again.”
So Gu Fei had to give him another round of applause.
Jiang Cheng eyed him, then put the whistle back to his lips. He lowered his eyes and his fingers danced, the notes beginning to glide out once more.
This was Gu Fei’s first time listening to someone play an instrument like this right in front of him. The feeling was indescribable. Jiang Cheng’s usual scowl of displeasure and annoyance vanished with the first note. His softly fluttering eyelashes looked steady and serene. In this moment, Gu Fei suddenly and sincerely made peace with the fact that Jiang Cheng was an overachieving top student after all.