His bride had already tried to escape the zij. Who was to say she would not reject him when she found out that he was completely without family? Just as Ka Yang had rejected Suav. She was asleep for now, but what would happen when she found out that he had nobody to negotiate for him? Nobody to prepare the feast? Nobody to perform the ceremony of welcome in her new home?
In desperation, Ang had tried to explain zij to James and Mikey, who were the closest thing he had to a family now, but his English was so bad that even he got confused and all they did was laugh and say that his girlfriend’s family didn’t want him in their home. Ang started to think English people were too stupid to understand zij. He wondered for the first time whether Edie understood, even though she had accepted the bell – and even though she’d thanked him for it. But Ang Nu had not survived a thirteen-month journey through Dab Teb without a backbone.
He would just have to make another plan.
He would have to be father, brother, uncle and – when the wedding came – mother to himself. Maybe Edie wouldn’t guess until after they were married that he was all alone in the world, and after they were married, she would see that he was a hard worker and a good husband and by then it wouldn’t matter.
So Ang had donned the spirit mask to perform the welcoming ceremony – fixing it atop his head and covering his face with a long black cloth, in the way of the shamen. Then he had taken the bride price to Edie’s home himself. He had put all the money he had saved – one hundred pounds – in an envelope he’d found in Brian’s desk. He’d posted it through the door before dawn and run away before anyone could see his shame – that he did not have a family to negotiate for him. On the envelope, he’d let Edie’s family know where she was, as was required. He wrote the details of where they could find her in his most careful Hmong script, so they could see he had been to school and was worthy of their daughter.
Now it was their turn to act.
Edie’s father must come and get his daughter within three days.
If he did not, Edie was his.
This was Hmong.
While they’d waited nervously, Ang had treated Edie with great respect. He had brought her food every day, and water in a heavy glass jug. Even crayons from the bottom of the skip behind the nursery school, with which she had started to decorate their home. That made him happy. She was not Hmong and yet she was making something like her own story cloth already! He had chosen well. His mother and father might never see her, but he hoped the ancestors would be proud.
Edie’s father never came for her.
So Ang made a marriage hat.
He used mechanic’s wire from the stockroom and copper wire from old flexes on toasters and microwaves he found in skips. Wire was very Hmong, and Ang and his brothers had always made their own toys. Now he put every bit of skill he had learned into the marriage hat.
The frame was made of dozens of straight wires, twisted together at a central point and fanning out evenly like bicycle spokes in a spectacular symmetrical round. Each wire turned down sharply at the end to make a stiff metal fringe. Once he was sure that the frame was firm, he started to decorate it with the copper wire. He remembered the toys of his childhood and recreated them in miniature from the fine, beautiful red wire. Each twist, each turn, was lovingly wrought, each loop of copper was a conduit for an array of meaningful symbols and intricate charms. Some were copied from the story cloth, some remembered from his mother’s own marriage hat, which had had pride of place on the only shelf in the hut they called a house. Other charms told his own story – his and Suav’s – since leaving home. Little copper flying fishes; the bowl he had bought in the market – before they’d learned that a bowl just delayed food on its way to your mouth; the key to the garage, which gave Ang the freedom to come and go as he pleased, with nobody knowing or caring what he did as long as he kept the place spotlessly clean.
When Ang had finished the hat, he wished his father could see it. He wished his mother could. He was not a boastful boy, but the hat was the most beautiful thing he had ever held in his own two hands. Not every part of the zij and wedding had been or could be so Hmong, but the hat made up for all of it.
Three weeks after Edie stopped belonging to her father and became his property, Ang washed his clothes and his hair and went to the shop and bought brand-new cakes. They were the first food he’d paid for since coming to England, and each had white icing on top and a lucky red button in the middle.
He rolled up the story cloth and tucked it into his waistband; it would become Edie’s after today.
As would he.
Ang Nu said a prayer to the ancestors, and went to claim his bride.
Edie was confused by the lampshade. The light in the room wasn’t the kind that needed a shade. It was a long strip of light right up high on the ceiling, so it couldn’t have been a lampshade. The contraption was like a wok, with dozens of spokes fanning out from the middle and bent down sharply at the ends. There were electrical wires running from them, with multiple little knots and lumps in a complex and dangerous-looking web. ‘What’s that?’ she said warily, but he didn’t answer her.
Instead he tried to put it on her head.
Edie pushed it aside and scrambled off the bed.
Her mind raced and her heart beat so fast she could feel it against her T-shirt. She knew that aliens did experiments on humans when they took them off in spaceships. They drilled into their teeth and took away their babies, and read their minds.
They read their minds.
Even as Edie had the thought, he came at her again, still making a high-pitched, wavering sound, and raising the wire helmet over her head.
‘No!’
This time she knocked it out of his hands and it fell to the floor with a clatter.