The Rice Paper Diaries (16 page)

Kob’s voice comes at me over the juddering engine.

‘Home,’ he shouts. ‘Japan!’ He laughs, then taps the rear bumper twice. The vehicle pulls away.

I smell warm air, the beach, something frying in the camp canteens at the top of the hill. The green pine trees that grow between the rocks on Roosevelt Avenue.

I hear the engine gathering pace, a change in gear as we approach the long hill that leads to Aberdeen, back to Hong Kong.

In a few moments the little that I had left of Stanley is gone. The blindfold is hot around my ears. Everything is black, inside and out. I see shapes moving across my eyelids. Elsa and Mari. Then they are blotted out.

… a’r nerth, a’r gogoniant

yn oes oesoedd

Amen

IV

M
ari:

New
Q
uay, Wales,
1
947

1

Mary is her English name. In Welsh, she’s Mari. She doesn’t have a Chinese name, she says to anyone who asks, because she is going home, and there will be no call for it. That’s what her mother told her.

She is sitting up straight in the back of the car between Elsa and Tommy. The leather that presses against the skin on the back of her legs, in the gap between her pleated skirt and her woollen socks, is ice cold. She stares at her knees. They are covered in little mounds of skin that Elsa calls goosebumps.

‘You’ll warm up in a minute,’ Elsa says, putting her hand on Mari’s thighs. The soft new suede of her gloves still smells of the shop where they bought them on Savile Row before catching a train out of Paddington. Elsa had taken a long time to choose them, too long, Tommy had said. She’d set them side by side on the countertop, in different poses, first so that the right hand lay on top of the left, then side by side on the glass. They’d looked as if they were about to start playing the piano. Then she’d taken one of the two pairs, the dark red ones –
mulberry
she’d called them – and held them close to her face, the rows of covered buttons on the outside edges touching her cheek.

‘I’ll take these,’ she’d said.

Mari had stood behind her, looking at her mother in the mirrors, reflecting on this new version of her. She was still the same as before, but paler, older, more beautiful, but a little frightening. She didn’t roll up her sleeves and she didn’t smile. Men looked at her as she strode down Savile Row. Even Tommy had to lengthen his stride to keep up with her, and Mari had had to run, holding both hands out in front of her, hoping that one of them would remember she was there and scoop her up and lift her along the pavement with them. But they hadn’t; they’d kept on striding, talking in sharp bursts of words that sounded like marbles crashing against each other before rolling away into angry silences. She’d been glad when they’d got on the train and sat in the restaurant car, and she’d been given a glass of lemonade. She’d made herself wait two whole minutes before drinking it, her eyes on the clock above the bar, her nose over the edge of the glass, letting the tart bubbles burst against her nostrils.

She blinks away the tears. It’s been a long time since they got off the train at Llandysul. She is hungry and her back hurts.

‘Are we nearly there?’

‘No,’ says Tommy.

He has a voice that rumbles through everything around him, making it shake. Mari feels her goosebumps trembling. She turns away from him, and looks across her mother out of the window.
This is like nothing she has ever known. Her mother told her it would be like flying, driving along the road between Llandysul and New Quay at night. They don’t stop, for one thing. There are no buildings, no intersections, no men in
uniform. There is no noise, apart from the engine of the car. The spirals of condensation on the window aren’t condensation at all, but swirls of mist outside, coiled close to
the ground on the ridges at each side of the narrow road. There is no moon. Above them there is nothing, and below them there is nothing, apart from the barely visible road ahead. The mist rolls towards them and away again. The car’s gears screech as it struggles up Wstrws Hill, under huge bare trees whose branches reach out from either side of the road, as if they might grasp the car as it passes and fling it away, down into a ditch.

‘Fog’s bad tonight,’ the driver says, not turning round. His Welsh sounds strange to Mari, contorted into short jabs of sentences that she finds difficult to follow. She has only ever heard two people speaking Welsh – Elsa and Tommy. He has a rolled
-
up cigarette in his mouth. She sits forward in her seat.

‘Where are we?’ she asks.

‘Banc Siôn Cwilt. Ever heard of it?’

She shakes her head, although when they were at Stanley her mother used to talk her through this journey at night, when she couldn’t sleep, when the rats outside the window and the rasp of cockroaches inside kept her awake. But in her mother’s version it was always midday, the sun high in the sky, with the thin line of sea in the distance reflecting white silver on the horizon. In her mother’s story, there were foxgloves growing in the hedges, or autumn leaves at Wstrws so vivid that even the air around them was the colour of oranges. Mari hadn’t known what an orange was, but it had sounded warm, and hopeful, the way Elsa said it. In the story her mother told, the sun was always out, and everything was light and shade, clearly definable.

‘Once we see the sea, you’ll know where you are,’ Elsa had said.

But it is dark, and theirs is the only car on the road, headlights hardly penetrating the mist. The driver drops his speed as they climb the hill, until they are going at a walking pace.

‘Where are we?’ Mari says again, more to herself than anyone else. It feels like the empty spaces of her nightmares, when she wakes up soaked in sweat, clutching at nothing until her mother comes and she holds on to her, breathing in Elsa’s sleepy smell, that warm, thick scent that gathers around her at night like a comfort blanket.

‘Smugglers used to hide out up here,’ says the driver. ‘The mist was good for some, once.’

Mari steals a look out of the window. Shapes lurch towards the car. They burst through the fog, turning out to be trees, stunted bits of hedge, broken gates, before stepping back into the shadows of her imagination. She keeps her eyes wide open for so long that when she finally blinks her eyelids are flecked with ghosts rearing out of the soil. One of them has a face like Tommy’s. Mari looks over at him, just to make sure he’s still there beside her. He has his eyes shut, his shoulder slumped against the car door. She turns to her mother. Elsa sits straight, looking ahead. She has taken her gloves off and holds them in her lap, stroking them from time to time.
The silence banked up inside the car is as thick as the fog outside.

In her mother’s version of their homecoming there had been no Tommy.

The car bumps up and down without warning, then pitches back and fore before righting itself, throwing Mari against Tommy. He is wearing what he calls his good suit.
The material is old and shiny, and it is too big for him. Elsa has folded the sleeves back on themselves, tucking the extra length inside.

‘I told you I needed to hang on to it,’
Tommy had said.

Elsa had smiled a smile that looked like the opposite of itself, it made her face seem so unhappy. Mari wondered why Elsa was so nice to him when he was so rude. If it had been Mari talking like that, Elsa would have told her to mind her manners.

‘Sorry, must’ve hit a badger,’ says the driver.
Tommy wakes up.

‘Sit back,’ he says to Mari.

She pushes herself back in the seat, her knees forced flat and her shoes sticking out over the edge of the leather piping. It will leave red marks on the back of her legs, an indentation that will stay for days. When people ask her what kind of journey home they had, she will think of the red weals scored into her legs, and say nothing.

Her skirt is all rucked up, and she pulls it straight over her thighs. Her mother puts her hand on her leg and taps it gently, and Mari stops fidgeting. She puts her hands at her sides and looks straight ahead of her and counts in her head to a hundred in English, then
cant
in Welsh. When she is done she starts on Cantonese although she knows that she can only get to twenty, which is just as well, because by the time she reaches
yih-sahp
as Lin had taught her, she feels the road starting to fall away from them, under the car, so that for a moment she feels as if they really are flying, slowly coming down to earth. There are high hedges now on either side of them, but through their bare branches she catches sight of lights dotted here and there, until they get lower and lower and the lights get closer together.
The car turns down a small lane, then takes a sharp left. There are houses on one side and nothing on the other. A low wall, the kind that her mother tells her to come away from otherwise she might fall, and then nothing beyond. The car stops at the first house. There is a nameplate by the door, picked out by the streetlight above. Gwelfor
.
She can’t see the sea, but she can hear it, an angry crashing somewhere down below the stone wall.

The driver stands with the car door open, the engine still running, while Tommy counts out the notes. Most of the houses behind him are in darkness.

‘Where is everyone?’ Elsa says.

‘Up at the hall, I expect.’
The driver looks at his watch. ‘Ten to midnight. Happy New Year to you!’

‘Happy New Year,’ Elsa and Tommy say together, as if they’ve been rehearsing it.

‘Well,’ Elsa says, as the car backs down the terrace again. ‘Here we are. Home.’

And even the word itself makes Mari afraid, more afraid than she had been of the smuggler ghosts or of
Tommy’s black mood in the car, or of Stanley, or of Hong Kong afterwards, where even her mother said she felt a stranger after the war. She is afraid of the black hill behind the houses and the boom of the sea below. She is afraid of this place, where there are no people, no voices, no pavements.

She doesn’t ask for Oscar, because she knows she’s not supposed to, so she whispers his name to herself, inside her head, where no one can hear it. Oscar, Os
-
car, OS
-
CAR. But he doesn’t come.

2

Elsa and Tommy start walking back down the road, the way they’d come in the car.

‘Where are we going?’

Mari’s shoes feel cold and hard against her feet, bumping her up and down as she tries to keep up.

‘The hall,’ her mother says, and then, when Mari pulls at her hand again, ‘We’re going to a party.’

‘What, now?’

Perhaps it’s always dark here. Perhaps for the people who live here, this is day.

She holds onto Elsa’s hand and peers out from side to side. They turn up a steep lane with houses along one side and bushes on the other, with thorns as long as her fingers. Elsa doesn’t have to tell her to keep up. The hill is so steep that Mari has to bend her legs sharply to get up it as quickly as she can, pulling Elsa with her. More houses, a crossroads, another lane, and a pool of black on the other side.

‘What’s that?’

‘Stop asking questions, for God’s sake,’
Tommy spits out.

‘It’s all new to her,
Tom, remember,’
says Elsa, and then, bending over Mari, standing between her and Tommy, ‘That’s the playing field, where the boys play football and rugby.’

‘Why is it black?’

‘It’s not – it’s green. It just looks like that at night.’

‘How do you know it’s grass? How do you know it isn’t sea?’

‘Because I know where everything is here,’ Elsa says. Her voice has an ironed
-
out sound to it when she is tired. ‘The sea’s on the other side of those houses, see, over there?’ pointing towards the roofs behind them. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

Mari stands still for a moment. Tommy keeps on walking, but Elsa stands with her. It doesn’t sound like the sea in Stanley Bay, the whisper and sigh as each long wave turned over itself and stretched out before coming to rest on the beach. It sounds like a high wind blowing, stormy, the kind of night that fills Mari’s dreams with witches and parrots. Elsa starts walking again.

‘There’s the hall,’ she says, pointing to a shape emerging from the black night up ahead. It looks like a ship from this distance. The doors are pulled tight shut, and there is no noise.

‘Where’s the party?’ says Mari. When they’d got back to Hong Kong from Stanley there had been parties all the time, all day every day. No one had cared what she did; she was allowed to play under the table in the Gloucester, or behind the bar, or talk with the waitresses who liked her and smiled, and fold paper napkins into pretty shapes with them, and wait for Elsa and Oscar to come and find her when they were ready. She was never frightened they might forget, and they never had.

‘I don’t know.’ Her mother hesitates, looks over at Tommy. ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

Tommy is walking towards the door with his big flat hand out, looking as if
he will force it if need be, when it opens from the inside.