The Rice Paper Diaries (22 page)

Although the sky on the other side of the sash window is a sharp blue, pretty to look at, she closes her eyes, and does what she always does when she’s trying not to cry. She makes a picture in her head of Hong Kong, as if she is drawing it in pencil, and tries to colour it in mentally, from edge to edge, until she’s happy with every detail. It’s getting more difficult each time, though. There is so much she can’t remember now, about Stanley, and Hong Kong afterwards. It is only her mother’s repeated telling of certain stories when she asks for them that confirms them in her memory. Even then she’s not sure she’s connecting the stories in the right way, putting them in the correct order, manipulating them like sand patties into the necessary ending, adding water, moulding them between her fingers until the loose yellow grains of sand turn dark and cling to each other, making the right shapes. The End. For that’s what everyone in New Quay has been saying to her and Elsa and Tommy: that their story has such a happy ending. Who would have thought it, people say to them? That after everything you would find each other and come home, after Elsa waited for you in Hong Kong all that time, never giving up (looking at Tommy), refusing to believe you were dead. How wonderful. ‘Yes, better than the movies,’
Tommy says.

The problem is that if Mari wants to remember the last day she saw Oscar, she has to call to mind the day she first met Tommy, for they were one and the same, beginning and end.

They’d been sitting around in what was left of the American Club. No one was out on the terrace, because of the monsoons. Rain and wind battered against the French doors, and the room filled up with people who’d come in to shelter from the weather, and found themselves sitting down, having a drink, and making an afternoon of it. All around them the moisture on people’s clothes was drying off, and the air felt steamy and thick. Elsa was sitting on one side of Mari, and Lin on the other.

‘Are you bored, Mari?’ Oscar bent over to her from time to time.

‘No,’ she said. And it was true. Although she was having to sit still in the middle of a room of grown
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ups, there was so much to look at that she hadn’t seen before, and so much to think about – the looks on people’s faces, their animated voices. Besides, they had eaten a large lunch, and she’d even been given a hot chocolate afterwards when she’d asked for one, and she was leaning in against her mother, feeling milky and sleepy. And there was a lull in the conversation, and Mari closed her eyes. She was looking forward to going back to the apartment with Elsa and Oscar, to rolling herself up in a ball between them in bed, and waking in the morning with their hands and arms all tangled around each other, like the frocks and shirts and blouses that lay around the room, breathing out the smell of her mother’s perfume. Elsa’s dressing table stood up against the wall behind, its pots of cold cream and jars of lavender water with their lids on crooked and their tops not quite screwed on. The base of the blind knocked gently against the window frame behind them. Oscar’s back was up against Mari’s face. She could see his freckles through his vest if she put her fingers out and stretched the cotton to make it transparent. He stirred, and she turned over, back towards her mother. Elsa opened her arms in her sleep and pulled Mari into her chest. One breast had slipped out of her negligee. Mari put her thumb in her mouth and the nail of her forefinger on the soft hairs around the large pink nipple. She stroked her finger backwards and forwards, as if Elsa’s breast was a toy rabbit, or a teddy.

But when Mari opened her eyes again, she wasn’t at home in bed with Elsa and Oscar. She was still in her chair at the American Club, with its covering ripped, and some of its foam gouged out, by the Japanese, Lin said, who were gone now, and there was Tommy staring into her face, his big, thick fingers holding her hair.

At first he’d smiled, as if he knew her.

‘She’s got my curls,’ he said, but then he’d turned away, rubbing the back of his hand against his eyes. Elsa and Oscar had stood up. Lin came over to Mari, took her hand and said, ‘Come with me, little one,’ and took her off to the bar next door, and sat her down on an old settee and played with her while she peeped through the cracks in the partition into the lounge, spying on the fragments she could see of Elsa, Oscar and Tommy, and listening out for the broken bits of words that were being thrown around between them.
What the hell – how were we to – my wife – my – expect – here I am
. Elsa’s grey eyes full of tears. Lin saying, ‘Look, look!’ dropping folded paper flowers into a cup of water and holding Mari’s hand as they opened out into perfect crimson circles dotted with yellow stamens and green paper leaves. This was what happened, every time, Lin said. They never refused to open. The water made it happen.

Mari tries to connect the fragments, to tell herself the story that will make a paper flower of a happy ending, but she can’t. Her head feels cold and wet against the stiff pillow case. She remembers listening to the voices behind the partition getting louder, while the rain ran in trails down the windowpane, until Oscar got up and came over to her, and told her that he wouldn’t be seeing her for a little while. And she had pushed him away because she was tired and had been upset by the man who’d tugged her hair and she wanted her mother, and then Oscar was gone.

At least, that’s the way she remembers it today, as she watches the seagulls diving into their nests on the chimney tops of the houses beneath, their cries ripping through the sky. They fly off again, down towards the sea, but still she can hear a baby gull that hasn’t learned to fly, walking up and down Lewis Terrace, its constant screaming tearing through the day, until Mari thinks that there is nothing else, only this chafing ache inside her head that will never go away, scratching her eyes from the inside, pushing the tears out.

She cries at last, loudly, until she hears a knife clanging against the quarry tiles in the kitchen, and footsteps chasing each other up the stairs, and they come into the room, Nannon first and then Elsa.

‘What’s the matter?’ Nannon sounds cross, angry that something has happened and she didn’t see it coming, Mari can tell. She’s wondering how Mari got into her bed and stayed there so long, her wet hair soaking the clean clothes, without Nannon knowing anything about it.

Elsa puts a hand out to stroke her head.

‘Are you ill? Did they send you home?’

Mari shakes her head, still bawling, trying to drown out the baby gull outside.

Nannon puts a hand to her hair too.

‘What in God’s name?’ she says. She brings her face close to Mari’s and sniffs.

‘Is that what I think it is?’

She looks at Elsa.

‘What happened?’ Nannon says.

Elsa puts a hand on Nannon’s arm and Mari sees that Elsa knows already what happened: she’s guessed that the smell from Mari’s head is the stench of the water in the toilet at the school, that is in a black
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bricked building on the other side of the yard, with ‘Girls’ painted on one side and ‘Boys’ on the other. Even though she had gone into the girls’ side, Richard had followed her in with Iris and they had ducked her head in the fetid water with brown bits floating around in it and held her under until she’d had to open her mouth and let it in and swallow a mouthful of it. Only then had they lifted her head up and laughed as she had run off, out of the school gate and all the way up to Lewis Terrace, thinking to herself,
This is how it ends
.

‘I’m not going back to school,’ she says.

‘Well you’ve got to go somewhere,’ Nannon flashes back. ‘Come on, out of that filthy bed with you, and let’s get your hair washed and the sheets changed.’

‘Where?’ Mari says, as Nannon and Elsa pull at the sheets, as if they are pulling against each other.

‘Somewhere, I said,’ says Nannon.

‘Nannon,’ Elsa’s voice cuts in. ‘Not yet.’

Nannon clears her throat. ‘Well now, that’s enough nonsense for one day.’

Elsa says she has a headache and goes to lie down. Nannon takes Mari to the bathroom to wash her hair, using her own special mixture of egg yolk and vinegar to condition it. Afterwards she lets Mari eat her sandwiches in the rocking chair in the kitchen with the cat, until her hair’s dry and she can go and put her shoes on and walk down to the end of the pier and back before tea.

10

Elsa and Nannon have let her close all the doors and have the hallway to herself. In Gwelfor and Bristol House there is a long thin passage running the length of the houses from front to back. Even though the houses themselves are different shapes, the hallways are the same, with smooth black
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and
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white tiles, and mottled glass in the porch doors.

It is Sunday afternoon, and they are all at Bristol House because Nannon wants to measure Elsa for a new summer dress once lunch is over and done with. Elsa and Nannon are washing up in the kitchen, the clink of china plates through the door softened by tea towels and cloths. In the parlour to the other side of the passage are Tommy and Frank, not talking, just sitting. Tommy will be smoking and reading the paper. He spends a lot of time reading the paper, although he must read very slowly because he never turns the pages, at least not when Mari has her eye to the keyhole.

Frank is always doing things. Once he’s had his one cigarette he will be up and out into the tiny back yard making a pot holder out of bits of wood, or glueing the lid of the sugar bowl back together so that you would hardly notice the cracks in its blue
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and
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white spotted surface. Nannon says that he can’t help himself. She smiles as she says it.

He is always finding things too. This morning, while they were in chapel, he went walking on the beach and came back with an empty tea chest, and a rubber ball. He put the chest out in the shed in the tiny yard at the back, and he gave the ball to Mari, telling her to keep it to herself.

Her fingers had wrapped themselves around the ball, although her hand was just too small for it. She rolls it up and down the hallway, listening to the smooth noise it makes as it rolls from one end to the other before bouncing softly against the two doors, first the front and then the back.

Someone turns the kitchen doorknob from the other side. Mari runs after the ball, catching it with one hand and holding it behind her back. Elsa comes out, carrying a tray with two teacups and a plain brown teapot and a small jug on it.

‘The children next door are playing in the yard, if you want to go outside,’ she says. The cups tremble in their saucers. Mari shakes her head. She runs to open the door for her mother. Elsa smiles at her and disappears into the sitting room, pushing the door shut with her foot behind her.

Mari wants to roll the ball again, but she waits for Elsa to come out, her face flushed and a smile still fixed on her face that disappears as she turns back to the kitchen. Mari can hear the children next door screaming at each other in the back garden. A swing made out of a plank and some rope hangs from the small apple tree and they are fighting over whose turn it is to have a go. The little girl squeals. Mari is glad that she doesn’t have a brother, or a sister, for that matter, or a boy staying in the house like Richard, whose mother didn’t want him back after the war because she is too poor and she’s got five other children. This is all hers: the neat tiles, the lines of the walls, the framed cross stitch on the wall. A small, high table stands on thin legs next to the back door. Mari can’t see into the pot painted with parrots and fronds of grass that stands on a doily on the top but she knows that this is where Frank puts his watch, to keep it safe, checking the clasp on its silver case to make sure it’s shut before putting it in gently, in case it might break the porcelain.

Mari tiptoes from one end of the hall to the other, counting the squares as she goes until she reaches the front door. The glass panels aren’t as pretty as the ones at Gwelfor, they are just a plain arrangement of two colours, but they are rich colours all the same, blue and mulberry. A dark shape moves across the leaded glass, throwing a shadow into the hall. She lifts the letterbox, although she knows already who it is. His long shadow looks too big for his body, like Rumpelstiltskin’s. He has a peaked cap, baggy trousers, a pouched bag hanging off a long strap, two nets, one large, one small, and a long
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handled hammer that he carries over one shoulder. And even though it is hot, he is wearing gloves, big, thick gloves.

It is the rat catcher. For no reason, it seems, there are rats everywhere. They play hide
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and
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seek behind the Memorial Hall; they race after the dustcart like children playing; they trickle along the streets in the dusty gap between the pavement and the road. They appear out of the drains that come out of the sea wall. Nannon says it is the heat.

It has got hotter and hotter and so has the rat catcher, running around, wiping away the sweat as he chases after them. He hits them over the head through his nets with the hammer, leaving muddied patches of blood that don’t wash away in the rain because there hasn’t been any. Children come across claws and bits of flesh and poke at them with dusty sticks, waiting for them to move, and screaming when they imagine that they do.

Mari lets the letterbox fall with a clatter, and the rat catcher’s mulberry shadow gradually disappears, like blood leaching away.