The Rice Paper Diaries (2 page)

Ever since she’d arrived in Hong Kong they’d kept up a stream of advice, these over
-
friendly women –
and of course, you can get an amah as well as a cook; remember to turn the blinds down at midday, it’s not too bad now but it’s going to get unbearable before long; the other thing you’ll need is really good, strong mosquito nets
– but none of them had told her she would be standing on the steps of the Queen Mary feeling alone and afraid, wanting her mother.

Four, five, six.

The pain came again. She let out a sharp breath, trying to control it, but it pushed its way up inside and overwhelmed her, so that she reached out for the rail again and cried out.

‘Who has left her here like this?’

She heard a man’s voice at the edges of her consciousness. Although it sounded angry, she was thankful for it. She tried to lift her head, but she stumbled forward. All she could see was the corner of a white coat and sensible shoes, good English brogues, and she felt reassured.

‘How long has she been like this?’ he said.

‘Not long.’ It was the nurse’s voice, defensive. ‘Baby’s not moving. We had to keep her on her feet.’

Elsa felt herself being lifted onto a stretcher and the corridors of the hospital sliding past. She put her arms out to hold onto something, to keep everything still, but someone put them back in at her sides again. The gold hands on the nurse’s watch close to her face moved inevitably forward, ticking silently, blocking everything else from view. Her apron smelled of carbolic soap.

‘How old is she?’ It was the man’s voice again.

‘It’s none of your business how old I am.’

The man’s face came closer to hers. He had red hair and freckles that had almost disappeared into his tanned face. His eyes were set so deep in their sockets it was difficult to see what colour they were.

‘It’s very much my business, Mrs…’

‘Jones,’ the nurse said. ‘Twenty. First baby.’

The way she said it made Elsa think of another baby, and then another. She couldn’t imagine herself walking around the Peak with a perambulator, with a newborn in the pram and a couple of toddlers in tow.

Don’t worry, darling
, the women had said in the Peninsula, crossing and uncrossing their legs and lighting cigarettes.
You can get someone to do that for you
.

Seven, eight, nine.

She wanted the stretcher to change direction, to take her back to the front door of the hospital and leave her there. She wanted this angry doctor’s voice to go away and stop shouting orders. But the nurses wheeled her into the middle of a bright, bare room that hurt her eyes. They lifted her onto a bed and switched on a light above her head. She looked up and saw her face reflected in its metal frame, her features young and formless.

‘I’m Dr Campbell, the man said. ‘We’re just giving you something for the pain.’ One of his fingers caught her hair as he turned towards the table behind him.

The nurse squeezed Elsa’s arm tight and put a needle in.

The doctor came back to the bed and bent over her.

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘At the customs building,’ she said.

‘Connaught Road?’

His face seemed very close to hers again.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I need to send someone down right away to get his signature on these forms.’

‘What forms?’

‘There’s a new operation they’ve started doing, in America.’

She struggled to sit up, but he put a hand on her shoulder until she lay back down.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘I’m doing my best to make it all right.’ His voice had lost its harsh edges, but the look on his face didn’t make her feel any better. He glanced away as he held the stethoscope to her chest and listened. She stared at the outer rim of his ear, at the perfect curve of skin and cartilage. When he looked straight at her again everything balanced out, the oversized ears, long nose and deep
-
cut cheekbones. She wondered if he could hear the baby’s heartbeat flickering under her skin, like a trapped moth beating its wings senselessly as it tried to get out.

A hot line burned its way across her chest. They told her not to look down so she looked up, and saw everything reflected in the metal edge of the light. She saw the doctor pick up a knife and a sliver of red racing across her stomach. She saw his gloved fingers pulling the flesh back. She watched as a head attached to four small frog legs was lifted out.

She waited, and wondered what she was waiting for.

‘You’ll need a trousseau,’ Nannon had said, when Elsa had told her she was getting married and going to Hong Kong. ‘And there’s the heat to consider. Let’s have a think.’

She leaned over the glass counter. She picked up a smooth piece of tailor’s chalk and set to writing notes to herself on the back of a satin offcut.

That was Nannon all over. Whatever the occasion – a wedding, baptism, or homecoming – she would look it up in one of her books, and write out a list. Once she’d finished she would leave them lying around, only to find them later, abandoned under the sewing machine, or next to the till. She’d read them through, perplexed, saying, ‘Whatever was that all about? What on earth would I have been making with tulle
and
bengaline?’ as if the mysteries of her past self were too fragmented for her even to begin to stitch them back together. Finally she lowered her eyebrows, the furrows on her forehead disappeared, and she immersed herself in the certainties of the present again.

‘How hot is it out there, anyway? In summer, I mean?’

‘Very?’ Elsa shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m not sure.’ She thought of all the things she didn’t know yet about Hong Kong.

Nannon pulled open the shallow drawers under the counter. She brought out copies of fashion magazines and a dog
-
eared manual on etiquette. Elsa used to flinch when Nannon looked things up in that book, licking her index finger and riffling through the pages until she landed on the one she wanted.
The next stage would be Elsa in her petticoat and Nannon with a mouthful of pins, until whatever it was – Elsa’s school uniform, or a dress for her first dinner dance – was sewn together and ironed out and hung up.

This time was no exception. No matter that Elsa was getting married before her, and going to the other side of the world. Growing up at last. Nannon was going to see Elsa right, she said. Do them both proud.

She started on one of her lists, and Elsa waited, knowing better than to interrupt. The shop smelled of Nannon, the way she smelled first thing in the morning when she’d splashed her face with lavender water and combed her hair out and put it up in a bun on the top of her head. She smelled of camphor and roses and freshly baked biscuits.

‘The average bride will also need three to four house dresses,’ – Nannon’s forehead wrinkled up again as she read aloud from the book – ‘two or three tea aprons, and one large apron for kitchen work. The bride who expects to entertain women friends extensively and who moves in an extravagant set should also have a tea gown or lounging pajamas.’

‘Lounging pajamas it is, then,’ she said, setting her chalk down on the counter decisively. ‘Whatever they might be.’ She sniffed, reaching for her tape measure.

Elsa didn’t wear the pajamas, or the aprons. In Hong Kong everyone had a cook for lunch and went out for dinner. The aprons hung on the back of the kitchen door. Nannon had made them out of one of their mother’s old dresses, one of Elsa’s favourites, a pale blue gingham, serviceable and summery, intended Elsa knew to remind her of their mother without recalling the dark, frozen memory of losing her.

When Elsa, trying to distract herself, told her Hong Kong friends that at home men dressed up for New Year in sheets and ribbons and carried a horse’s skull from house to house, as a kind of prank played on neighbours to add to the evening’s entertainment, they forgot their manners and let out huge belly laughs. ‘Yes, they call it the Mari Lwyd, the horse,’ Elsa said, getting quite carried away, enjoying her audience, and they tittered again, and she realised they weren’t laughing with her, and she stopped talking.

And she remembered that when her mother was ill no one had told her what was happening, at first. She sat in the kitchen excited because it was New Year’s Eve, listening to Megan, the girl who came in to help with the washing and scrubbing, talking about the Mari Lwyd.

‘Is it a real horse?’ Elsa asked. ‘Or a ghost?’

Megan laughed, stirring a pot on the range.

‘Neither. It’s men dressed up, it is. They put a big white sheet over their heads and one of them carries a horse’s skull hung with ribbons all colours, and when you open the door they want to give you a fright. Just for fun.’

Megan had been too cheerful, far more cheerful than usual. Usually she had a face like a mangle, their father said, but on that day she’d been making an effort to appear lively, perhaps under orders. Everything in the kitchen was too cosy and warm. In Elsa’s memory every surface shines: the table, the row of pans hanging over the range, the little coffee pot from Mexico that Elsa loves so much. And their mother, lying back in bed upstairs, her cheeks flushed and her hair out around her on the pillow, making her look young, not like someone about to die.

But still Elsa had no idea. Her father had been home for longer than usual, it was true, so she’d had time to get used to him again, to the English words that he scattered like seeds through the tilled rows of his Welsh, and to wonder what it meant, some of it, that was too quick for her. All she knew was that their mother was out of sorts, and that she was in bed.

And then, in her memory of it at least, Megan is gone, and her father is gone and she is sitting alone in the kitchen, listening to the
cawl
bubble in its pot. There is a knock at the back door and she rushes to open it, looking forward to the fun and the surprise and the pretty ribbons, and calling
Mammy, Mammy, everyone,
come and see, what fun
, and then the door is open and the dressed
-
up horse looks like a real dead horse, his teeth gnashing in his skull and she is terrified and screams and screams and her father is crying out harshly upstairs in a voice she has never heard before, and Nannon, too tall and thin, comes downstairs and puts her finger to her lips and takes Elsa to see their mother lying still with her eyes open and the windows shut and their father with his back turned away from them. Her mother’s face was flat on the pillow, and her lips had ridden up a little back off her teeth, showing a perfect row of white pearls with serrated edges.

That was the last time anyone called at Gwelfor on New Year’s Eve. Nannon made up their black dresses from one of her fashion magazines with Elsa at her side, passing her the pins and thread, neither of them saying a word. Although Elsa was only nine, she understood well enough. How could Nannon even begin to prick the surface of their loss? There was no manual for that.

Elsa listened to the rhythmic turn of the fan above the light. She looked at the top of the doctor’s head, as he moved over to a small side table with a glaring spotlight above it. She turned to see what was going on, but the nurses told her not to.

In the room next door a baby yowled. Cars passed occasionally on the road below that led to Repulse Bay. Footsteps hurried along corridors with polished linoleum floors.

The fan hanging from the ceiling cut through the air a few more times, and then stopped. Someone had switched it off. The doctor and two nurses were standing over at the small table, looking into a towel spread out under the light, like a half
-
opened package. No one was saying anything.

She counted without breathing. She hadn’t expected this.

Seven, eight,
nine.

Silence.

2

When her mother had died, Elsa had spent days sitting at the kitchen table. She’d read books, practised her looped handwriting and looked at the food that Nannon made. Sometimes she fell asleep there, elbows pushed out and her head resting on her forearms, so that her face felt creased and uncomfortable when she woke up. Nannon understood, and said nothing. She took the food away and left Elsa to sit at the table. Their mother had called herself a proper New Quay woman (although she had always smiled when she said ‘proper’:
Let the men travel to Peru, or round Cape Horn, or to Australia and back
, she said); her four
-
cornered world was this Pembroke table, with a drawer in its side for cutlery, and flaps that could be folded away. It wasn’t a kitchen table, not really, it was too delicate and portable for that, but their mother had made it hers. She kept the flaps propped open and used it to pluck chickens, roll out pastry, make apple jelly, and to do the accounts. When they needed to eat she took a fresh tablecloth out and unfolded it and flicked it open so that its corners flew up into the air before landing on the table, and Elsa used to set out the cutlery, big pieces of silver with heavy handles. If there was ironing to be done, her mother put an old blanket over it while the iron heated up on the range behind her. When their father came home (once, maybe twice a year, like other ‘proper’ New Quay men, except that sometimes the proper New Quay men didn’t come back at all, not if they contracted yellow fever in Mauritius or malaria in Africa), it was on this table that his presents were tumbled out for them to pore over: wooden elephants from Kenya the size of Elsa’s dolls, with tusks made of real bone, Japanese tea sets, music boxes with lacquered tops.