The Rice Paper Diaries (13 page)

The whisky hits the back of my tongue like a fireball.

I clear my throat.

‘I was wondering what you plan to do with the old tennis courts,’ I ask.

Fuji and Kob look at each other. Fuji has drunk his whisky too quickly and has reverted to the same position he’s been sitting in most of the night, his cards in one hand and the other folded into his arm. He looks like an old woman knitting.

‘Nothing,’ Kob says, his eyes thinner than his lips. Seems he remembers his English when he really needs to.

‘I was wondering if we could turn it into a garden. Grow vegetables and the like.’

Campbell is looking at me. I can tell how nervous he is, that he regrets not having the guts to come out with this himself.

No one says anything. The room seems too bright: the electric lights, the new wireless on the sideboard.

Finally Fuji says, ‘Yes. Do what you can with it.’

They offer us another whisky and we all accept. Even Campbell is more animated than I’ve ever seen him as we walk back to our quarters.

‘Well done, my man,’ he keeps saying. ‘Great stuff.’

Elsa laughs intermittently, the way she used to at parties. As I walk ahead of her and Campbell I feel like the tallest person in the camp and I start to sing ‘Bread of Heaven’. Elsa groans and apologises to Campbell, her voice affectionate – ‘He likes a song when he’s drunk.’ One of the guards lets a shot out of a gun across the fence that they are watching night and day to stop Chinese black marketeers selling us fags and sugar. I stop singing.

28
th
June

I turn to at six most mornings. The sun rises furiously in the sky, grabbing the day by its throat. The camp is silent as I walk through the quarters over to the tennis courts. I work without thinking, turning clods of earth with a two
-
pronged fork which has to do the job for now, and by the time the whistle is blown for congee I realise that two hours have passed.

Campbell says I’m to have top
-
up rations, as will anyone else who commits to working at least five hours a day with me. The promise of extra food is enough. Soon there’s a group of men with me in the mornings, walking over the rise from the Indian quarters.

We plant anything we can get our hands on. If our rations include fresh tomatoes, or melons – which are a rarity – the flesh is often puckered and spoiled, bleeding juice, but the women who work in the kitchens cut out the seeds and pass them on to us. People with friends in Hong Kong get them to send bulbs in their relief parcels. Although they are confiscated on arrival more often than not, the occasional packet gets through.

Before long there are rows of green seedlings emerging out of the earth, and runner beans climbing up bamboo poles. Once I’ve made a start, there’s no stopping me. We have a go at corn, eggplant and beet spinach. The tomatoes are doing well. My rooftop plants have started to take, and I transfer them to the larger plot. It’s too early to put root vegetables in, but I’ll put carrot tops straight into the earth when the time comes, and I may even give
paak tsoi
and peanuts a try.

‘We could end up being completely self
-
sufficient at this rate. No more kowtowing to the Japs,’ I say to Elsa.

She’s sitting next to me above the Indian warders’ quarters, cutting down a pair of my trousers to make them into shorts. Three sewing machines survived the fighting, and the women pass them round the camp as and when they need them. Needle and thread are coming through from the Red Cross, although not as much as they would like. The kids are constantly growing out of their clothes, despite the poor rations, and anyway a lot of the mothers seem to enjoy sewing for the sake of it, just to pass the time. They’d make clothes out of anything. A young woman walked past me yesterday wearing a sun top put together from flour sacks, embroidered with pink flowers around the edges where the sacking met the pale white mound of her breasts. She was carrying a bag of rice from the ration distribution garage over to the kitchens, leaning forward to take the weight of it on her back. One of the corners of the bag had split and the rice poured out like water from a leaking tap. A group of children ran after her and fell upon it avidly, stuffing it into their mouths, and pushing each other away.
They swallowed it so fast it made some of them choke, so that in the end they had to use their fists to tap each other on the back, and watch half
-
chewed, off
-
white kernels spray their way through the air and land in the dirt at their feet. The girl carried on walking, taking no notice, her firm buttocks sticking out of her tight shorts like ripe greengages.

‘Come for a walk with me,
cariad
,’ I say to Elsa, putting a hand over hers, feeling the needle catch against my skin.

‘I can’t,’ she says.

‘Why not?’

‘What about Mari? I can’t just leave her.’

‘She’s fast asleep, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, I know, but she’s got this cough.’

‘What cough?’ I sit up.

‘It’s all right,’ Elsa says. ‘The duty doctor said it was a slight chest infection, and Oscar Campbell’s signed a chitty for her to be given a multivitamin tablet every day. But she gets this tickle in her throat, and she’s been waking up at night, needing water.’

The sun is setting over Tweed Bay, and the heat is starting to drain out of the day
.
In the distance two figures wearing pointed hats are carrying nets slung over their shoulders towards one of the boats in the shallows. They bend over as they work. The nets look like sails folded up on themselves. One of the men has his trousers rolled up.
The other one is wearing wellingtons
.
The one in wellingtons starts to disentangle a bundle of rope in the boat.
They both get in, gingerly, as if they are getting on a bit, although it is hard to see from here with the sun behind them. One of them sits in the stern of the boat, still unsnarling the rope that runs from one hand to the other in knots, while the other one stands up and starts to push the boat out to deeper water with an oar.

‘You should have told me,’ I say. ‘Straightaway, so I could have done something.’

‘You’re always so busy with that garden,’ says Elsa.

‘What do you mean,
that
garden, as if it’s got nothing to do with you?’

She glances at me, then back at her needlework. The stitches she makes are small and even. She always holds the material close to her eyes to push the needle through it. In Hong Kong I kept telling her she should get around to wearing glasses, but she never did anything about it. She said she quite liked seeing life that way, blurred at the edges. It’s true there were certain things she seemed never to want to examine too closely, even her own image in the mirror, so it couldn’t have been pure vanity, or laziness.

‘It’s a hell of a risk, that’s all,’ she says. Her intonation is so similar to Campbell’s when she says it that I know exactly which horse’s mouth to blame. That is so like him, with his pursed
-
lipped,
slowly slowly
response to everything.

Fair enough, then. I won’t tell her what else is hidden in the garden. I was going to confide in her and no one else, but the haughty shadows the twilight draws across her face make me feel as if I’m looking at her from a distance, under a spotlight, observing everything about her I don’t like: her near
-
sighted desire just to see what she wants to see, her naïve, blind trust in the people who run the show, like Campbell, and her newfound enthusiasm for playing at Florence Nightingale on her day shifts at the sanatorium.

So I keep it to myself, my secret. Those seeds in the garden have to bear fruit, not just to stop us all from starving, but because I’ve got another plan on the go, one that I haven’t shared with Campbell and his pals.

I’ve been sending messages out of camp, glued into the insides of the van driver’s cigarette packets. Packages come back in on the ration trucks, in clean bed sheets wrapped up tight to conceal the leads and plugs inside. I take them and hide them in the garden, deep in the earth under my tidy rows of onions and dwarf beans. I’m the only one who knows where all the components are buried. I crouch down on the damp earth. While Campbell and Elsa and all the rest of them are feasting on pea soup, I’ll be building my own wireless, finding the right frequency to get us out of here.

But I have to wait, that’s the problem. Work and wait. And no one else seems to have the patience to wait with me, apart from Mimi. I know I can trust her, at least. They all think we’ll be out in a few weeks. And then, as one month gives way to the next, and we acquire layers of sunburn that makes us look older and tougher, they start saying that it’ll be the end of the year.

‘We’ll be out by Christmas,’ I hear people saying to Campbell in the queue for food at the canteen. ‘You’ll make sure of that, won’t you, Sir?’

‘I will most certainly do my best,’ he says in that slick way he has of saying something that is clearly not the truth but sounds closer to it than anyone else will ever get. That’s why people trust him, let him lead.

‘You do have faith in me, don’t you?’ I say to Elsa, tightening my grip on her hand, the needle digging deeper into my skin.

‘Of course.’ She pulls away to gather up her sewing things and gets to her feet. ‘I’m just going to look in on Mari.’

There’s a drop of blood on the palm of my hand where the needle pricked it, but it wipes away easily enough. I meant to sit and wait for her to come back, but I’m tired and aching all over. I get to my feet too, make my way to the quarters and fall onto my blanket without even splashing my face. It’s a toss
-
up between hunger and fatigue most nights. If I stay up too long after we’ve had our evening meal I can’t sleep. I end up chewing the bloody blankets to fill my mouth with saliva, in the hope it will make me feel something in my stomach. But if I go to bed straight after supper, there’s no time to see or talk to anyone, even Elsa, especially Elsa, no human interaction to distinguish one day’s hard labour from the next. Mari is sprouting before my eyes like a potato plant, and yet I’m so tired I hardly get to take any notice.

15
th
August

Now we are all waiting.

I sit under the shelter of the pine trees in the cemetery with Mimi, her hand resting on my knee. It’s quiet up here, with nobody much around. I get my list out and take another look at it. I consult it so frequently that it feels odd if it isn’t there, folded up in my right
-
hand trouser pocket, the corners starting to rub and wear away. Soon enough I’ll have to copy it out again. But I even enjoy that – borrowing pen and paper from Campbell and sitting down to go through my graph one more time, using a light
-
coloured pencil to indicate sowing times and a dark
-
coloured pen to show when the crops should be ready.

It’s almost time. Parsnips as misshapen as withered old men on park benches show me the firmest, whitest flesh when I break them open with my knife. Lemons like waxed suns start falling from the trees of their own accord, and I have to tick them off my list sooner than expected and go round camp begging for a basket to gather them in. The cucumbers are longer and thinner than they should be, with lumpy skins, but each slice streams with fresh juice.

Next to floppy ears of Ceylon spinach on the vine are rows of brassica and chard. I can already taste the tough green stems. I rub celery leaves together between my fingers and hold them to my nose. Gooseberries have sprung up with the help of makeshift canes; a few loose clusters have started falling to the ground with a soft thwock, splitting open to reveal their translucent husks. The golden skins of onions the size of my fist are on the verge of breaking and peeling away from the layers inside.

It is Sunday night and I walk around the garden, checking on my produce. Soon it will be brought into the kitchens to be chopped, pickled, preserved, bottled, jellied, or just eaten. I kneel down and breathe in the smell of roots growing and holding onto the soil, not letting go until their work is done. I feel around among the tubers with my fingers, discreetly, so no one will notice. It’s still there, my underground network of electrical components. One or two may have been spoiled in the sudden rainstorm that blew southwards over the peninsula last week, but I’m happy to bet it’s mostly good to be harvested along with the rest. This is the perfect time: Kob and Fuji have become fattened and lazy. They even pant as they try to keep up with their pet dogs.

I see Elsa’s tall shadow coming towards me. I straighten up before she notices the knobbled earth underneath our feet where, under the criss
-
cross of cabbage stalks, metal rods protrude here and there like the ribs of an underfed child.

She offers me a cigarette.

‘Where d’you get them?’ I say, as we saunter up to the top of the cemetery.

‘One of the doctors gave me a couple of packs.’

There’s been a dysentery outbreak in the main school building. Lizzie Vernon offered to sit with Mari so Elsa could work round the clock at the sanatorium, sitting by people’s beds, mopping their hands and faces at regular intervals, fetching Campbell if they seemed to be getting worse. During the day the women who work in the laundry room have been flat out washing sheets and hanging them across the yards to dry, kids skipping in and out of them, making ghost noises and jumping out at each other from behind the damp linen.