The awning goes up on the eighteenth of August, after lunch, in the courtyard of Wei Fugui's house, at Xinbao, in the township of Dongdi.

The sheet is blue, the kind they use on building sites, eight metres by six. It is borrowed. There are four poles, bamboo, and they have been leaning against the wall since the wedding in March.

There are nine tables. On each table: the teapot, the dish of peanuts, the small glasses, the open packet of cigarettes.

The party is for his brother's son. The boy has got into university. The letter came on the twelfth.

The cousin who writes down the names asks where to put the old people's table.

“In the shade,” the mother says.

The old people's table goes under the sheet, on the henhouse side, which is the side where the sheet hangs a hand's breadth lower because the pole on that side warped at the wedding in March and nobody has changed it.

At a quarter to two the sheet is spread and the guy ropes are missing.

It is hot and the sky is white. There is no wind.

The boy is called Xiaobo. He is nineteen. He is the first in the house to go to university.

The card with the score is pegged to the washing line, between the team shirt and a dishcloth. His mother wrote it with a red marker.

At two the relatives from Dongdi arrive. At half past two the ones coming from outside the county. They bring the red envelopes and put them on the table by the door, where a cousin writes the names down in an exercise book.

“How many are we,” the mother asks.

“Nine tables,” Fugui says.

Fugui has been putting up awnings for twenty years. He has put them up for two weddings, for a funeral, for the opening of the shop and for the new street's festival. He knows where the poles go. He knows that the sheet takes the wind like a sail and that the wind, here, in August, does not come.

Nobody thinks about the water, and in any case the sheet slopes west.

That day, in the province, the rain falls in a way the bulletins record point by point: at Shulin, in the district of Dongpo, a hundred and eighteen millimetres fall in twenty-four hours, which is the highest in the province. In the county of Wenchuan the G350 highway stays closed by two landslides. In the county of Pengshan the Min river swells. In sixty-four counties twenty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four people are moved out of the areas at risk before anything happens, and nothing happens to any of them.

At Xinbao there is no area at risk. Xinbao is a village on a plateau, with two-storey houses and walled courtyards, and the houses were built by the families who live in them, and the parapets on the roofs are there to stop the maize cobs falling off while they dry.

The parapet of Fugui's house is from two thousand and twelve. Not that it is old. It is hollow brick and mortar, with no iron inside, and it was never meant to pull against anything.

At twenty to four the fourth guy rope is missing.

The first three are tied to the electricity pole, to the hook on the henhouse and to the rail of the outside stairs. The fourth corner, the one to the south, has nothing to tie to. There is the mulberry, but the mulberry is beyond the low wall, in Chen's courtyard.

Chen is at the low wall. He is roping a plastic sheet over the bed of his three-wheeler. He has a yellow rope.

Fugui looks at him. Chen looks at him.

Last year the guy rope stripped the bark off the mulberry for a hand and a half. Chen said so twice, then, and once in January.

“It will rain for sure,” Chen says.

“They say at six,” Fugui says.

Then Fugui turns towards the house. He goes up the four outside steps. On the roof of the first floor there is the parapet: brick and mortar, as high as a chair, a brick and a half wide. The parapet is his own.

He passes the rope around the corner pillar. He makes the knot he always makes, two turns and a half hitch. The nylon rasps on the brick.

Then he pulls. He pulls down with his palm, twice, the way you test it.

The sheet lifts and goes flat.

At twenty past five the water on the sheet makes a belly over table three.

At half past five the corner pillar comes out of the parapet. It comes out all at once, with four bricks attached. The sheet drops on the south side and brings down the rest with it.

Underneath are the people of tables three and four.

Three do not get up. Two more die in hospital, one in the evening and one in the night. The injured who go to hospital are seventeen. One boy's foot cannot be saved.

Fugui is outside the sheet, on the henhouse side. He goes back in. He takes the pig knife off the hook in the kitchen. He cuts the first guy rope at the base, then the second, then the third. The sheet sags where he cuts and lifts where someone pushes from underneath.

At the fourth he stops. The fourth is not taut. The fourth is already on the ground, with the bricks still knotted inside it.

The rain stops at ten past six.

On table three, under the sheet, the glasses are upright and full. The table fan in the middle of the courtyard goes on turning, and is still turning when the first ambulance arrives from Changning. The card with the exam score is pegged to the washing line and is dry. From the bed of Chen's three-wheeler the radio gives the seven o'clock bulletin, which says light rain, easing.