Under the Hawthorn Tree by Ai Mi, Anna Holmwood Page B

that walk over the mountain and noticed how worn out her jumper was; otherwise why would he buy her wool? Her jumper was tight and short, and clung to her body. Her breasts were a bit big, and although she used a vest-like bra to rein them in they still protruded from under her jumper. Neither did her jumper cover her bottom. She had a bump at the front and a bump at the back, and knew herself to be a repulsive shape. Girls at school had a test for determining whether a girl had a good figure. If, while standing up against a wall, she could press her body flat against it, then she had a straight, and so attractive, body shape. Jingqiu had never passed this test. At the front her breasts stuck out too much, and with her back against the wall there were also gaps. Her friends laughed at her, calling her ‘three mile bend’.
    Her mother had bought the wool for this jumper when Jingqiu was three or four years old. She didn’t know how to knit, so had paid someone else to do it for her, but despite the large quantities of yarn – and due to this person knowingly wasting wool – she had got only two jumpers out of it, one for Jingqiu and one for Jingqiu’s brother.
    Subsequently, Jingqiu had learned to knit, and unravelled the two jumpers to knit the wool into one. After a few years she unravelled it again, added some cotton and knitted it into another jumper. Another two years passed and it was time to unravel the jumper again and add more wool. It had evolved into an explosion of colours, but as she was such a skilled knitter people thought the patchwork was of her design. However, it was an old jumper, and the wool had already become brittle, snapping easily into lengths. At first she tried twisting the ends together so you couldn’t see the breaks, but there were too many to fix – each one was met by another – so she had to knot them together and forget about it. So, from the outside, her jumper was a seamless hotchpotch of abstract colours, the joins unfathomable. The reverse side, however, held a secret; it was covered in blisters and pimples, just like the sheepskin jacket Chairman Mao wore on Jinggang Mountain, its strands of wool curled back to their natural state.
    Old Third must have seen these blemishes at some point and pitied me. He wants me to knit myself a new jumper. She was furious. ‘What’s wrong with you? What business did you have . . . looking inside my jumper?’
    â€˜The inside of your jumper? What’s wrong with the inside of your jumper?’
    He looked so innocent that she thought she had mistreated him. Maybe he hadn’t seen it after all. They had walked together the whole way and he hadn’t had any opportunity to look at the inside of her jumper. Maybe he thought the wool was a nice colour, reminding him of the flowers of the hawthorn tree, and simply bought it for her.
    â€˜Nothing, I was joking.’
    He looked relieved. ‘Oh, you’re joking. I thought you were angry with me.’
    Is he scared of me being angry? This thought puffed her up. I have the power to affect his emotions. He is the son of a cadre, is clever and capable, and looks like a capitalist, but in front of me he is earnest, as fearful as a mouse, and scared of making me angry. She felt like she was floating. She was playing with him, she was both conscious and unconscious of that; his alarm was confirmation of her influence over him. She knew she was being vain, and she did try not to be lured into this bad behaviour.
    She wrapped up the wool and gave it back to him. ‘I can’t take your wool, how would I explain it to my mother? She’d say I’d stolen it.’
    He took it and replied quietly, ‘I hadn’t thought about that. Can’t you say you bought it yourself?’
    â€˜I don’t have one penny to my name, how could I afford that much wool?’ She was squaring up to him now, using her economic situation as a weapon, as