I Cried at the Chairman's Funeral for Money novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Lamp Lane

Gu Hanzhou had run a hundred emergencies from behind a desk, and he had never once walked a stranger's hospital corridor in a hurry.

He did it now, with Shen Ke half a step ahead of him, pale and silent.

The old man lay on a trolley with a mask on his face, thin and grey.

An orderly was already wheeling him through double doors.

"Family only," said the nurse at the desk.

"I'm his," said Shen Ke, and stopped, because he had no word for what he was.

"He is a pupil of the patient," said Hanzhou. "I am Gu Hanzhou of Gu Silk. This hospital's new wing carries my father's name. I would like the nephrologist on duty."

He heard how it sounded, and for once he did not mind.

The nephrologist came in four minutes.

It was a fluid overload, she said, and a dangerous level of potassium.

They had caught it, and he would stay in for two days, and he would sleep through the night.

Hanzhou paid the admission with a card, and called his grandmother from the stairwell.

"The penance can wait until tomorrow," said the Old Madam, before he had finished. "A sick old man outranks a kneeling grandson. Stay with the boy."

"Yes, Nainai."

"Hanzhou."

"Nainai?" he said.

"He is a good one," said the Old Madam, and hung up.

When he came back to the corridor, Shen Ke was sitting on a plastic bench with his elbows on his knees.

He was crying.

It was nothing like the lament in the hall.

There was no tune and no verse and no one to hear.

The sound he made was small and ugly and wrenched out of him.

His shoulders shook, and he pressed the heel of one hand against his mouth to stop it.

Hanzhou stood in front of him, with no idea what to do.

He had watched a thousand people cry in meetings, and had waited for each of them to finish.

He took off his coat and put it over Shen Ke's shoulders.

Then he sat down beside him on the bench, and took the free hand off his knee, and held it.

"I'm sorry," said Shen Ke thickly. "I'm sorry. I do this for money, and I can't stop when it's mine."

"Don't stop."

"He's all I have. He found me at fourteen in the doorway of a funeral parlor, singing to a dead man for the free noodles."

"Then he is a very good man," said Hanzhou.

It was the most useful thing he could think of, and he saw that it helped.

When the visiting hour ended the nurse sent them away.

They stood in the cold car park, under the sodium lamps, with the coat still around Shen Ke's shoulders.

"I should go back to the courtyard and fetch his things," said Shen Ke. "His tablets, and his cushion."

"I'll drive you."

"You don't have to."

"I know what I have to do, Shen Ke," said Hanzhou. "It is the first time in my life I'd like to do something else."

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