The Rice Paper Diaries (21 page)

Nannon comes up behind her, her shadow throwing Mari’s view of the boy into a crescent of darkness.

She raps on the window.

‘What are you doing down there?’ she says. ‘Go away.
You’re making my shopfront look untidy.’

The boy stands up. He has a scarf wrapped round his neck, even though it’s too warm for a coat. Nannon keeps her eye on him.

‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ she says.

‘Sore throat,’ the boy says through the glass. He does a mime for her and Mari, cupping his hands around his neck as if he is about to strangle himself, then pointing at his Adam’s apple, muffled in the layers of his scarf.

‘Go on, then,’ Nannon says. ‘Off you go.’

The boy picks up his marbles and moves down the road, towards the butcher’s. The bell above Henry’s door rings again, loudly, and Mari sees Frank coming out. He gets into the van, taking his time while Glyn starts the engine.

They move slowly along the top of Hill Street, towards Mari’s window. The boy is standing between her and the van. Next to Glyn, Frank looks even more animated than usual, as if he is talking to himself, continuing some conversation that he’d started with Henry. His lips move and his eyes roll around; he looks as if he’s weighing up some news Henry had put out on the chopping board for him to sample, chewing things over. Then he catches sight of the boy, standing almost in the path of the van, and his expression changes. He reaches out for the driving wheel, putting his arms across Glyn’s, steering it away from the boy, just as the boy throws his marbles at him, each one ricocheting off the van’s rusty bonnet with a crack before rolling back into the gutter under Mari’s window.

‘Bloody Jerry!’ the boy shouts, as the van swerves past him, picking up speed. He stretches his arm out above his head and holds his fist in a ball above his head.

Nannon knocks on the window furiously.

‘Get inside, right now! Or I’ll be having words with Eluned.’

The boy goose
-
steps through the door of the porch next to Bristol House, his right fist still raised.

By the end of the afternoon, rain is beating against the shop window.
When Mari is tidying up her things, she sees the boy again. He is bent down on his knees on the street outside, his hands out in front of him, his face turned away from the wind and rain coming off the sea, picking up his marbles one by one.

Mari taps on the window, quietly, so Nannon doesn’t hear. The boy comes right up to the glass, frowning.

‘They’s lambs’ balls, they are,’ she said.

‘Damn, bloody damn you, you bugger,’ the boy shouts, so that Nannon comes. When she sees the boy, she says, ‘Oh don’t you mind Richard. His mother didn’t want him back after the war, so poor Eluned is stuck with him, and she won’t put him in the home in Carmarthen.’

‘What home?’ Mari says. She’s hungry, but she doesn’t want to think about supper, in case it makes her think about lambs’ balls diced up with gravy on her plate, how they might stick in her throat.

‘The children’s home,’ says Nannon, banging drawers shut and putting her reels of coloured cotton thread away in their basket. ‘Come along now.’

Mari gets up off her chair and turns away from the window without looking up, because she can sense that the boy is still there on the other side of the glass, and she doesn’t want to see the look on his face.

8

The post office smells of beeswax and adhesive. There is wood everywhere, set in panels the length and breadth of the walls, and the counter is higher than Mari’s head. There is someone on the other side though, she knows that, because she can hear the muted banging sound of a rubber stamp.

Elsa pulls her forward. There are two people in front of them. A woman stands at the counter, whispering instructions about a delivery to Shrewsbury.
The man behind her is the man from the boat on the quay, with the trousers held up with twine. When he sees the woman at the head of the queue struggling to lift a parcel onto the counter, he reaches out and picks it up by its knotted string.

‘Here, let me help you.’

A woman in blue
-
and
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red uniform comes out from the other side, lifting a hinged stretch of the counter and doubling it back on itself. She takes the parcel back round to the other side and closes the counter again, disappearing from view.

‘Hot for the time of year, isn’t it?’ says the woman at the head of the queue. ‘At least it brings in the holidaymakers.’ She turns round, either to include Elsa and Mari, or to make sure they aren’t the people she’s talking about. ‘Mind you, you can’t move on the beach for their picnics and their blankets and their towels.’

Elsa bends down to Mari and says, ‘That’s where we’re going, afterwards.
You can have a swim and an ice cream if you like.’

Mari shakes her head. She doesn’t want to go to the beach.

‘That’s me all done, then, for today,’ says the woman with the parcel, gathering up her purse and bank book. ‘Many thanks, Sheila.’

She walks past Mari and Elsa towards the door. As it opens it lets in a sliver of midday sun, and voices from the shop next door. Mari is wearing a poplin blouse with short sleeves, and she can feel the skin on her forearms tingling in the heat.

It is almost their turn.

‘It’s money I’m wanting from you today, Sheila,’ the man in front says.

‘Well, I’ll give you what I’ve got, Alun, but I’m running a bit short.’

‘Can you give me ten, by any chance?’

Mari doesn’t hear her reply but it must be what the man wanted because he gives a satisfied grunt and leans on the counter, waiting. The room falls silent as the postmistress sets to counting her way through a bankroll, licking her thumb and forefinger, crisping up the new notes between them as she counts them out loud, too quickly for Mari to follow.

As he opens the door out onto the street a streak of blind heat hits the back of Mari’s neck, and she steps out of it, forward with her mother, right up to the counter, even though it means that her nose is almost pressed into the wood.

Elsa takes the letter out of her bag.

‘Pop it on the scales,’ the woman says.

Mari cranes her neck as Elsa puts the letter onto the scales above her. It is face down, with the address facing the wrong way round. She pulls on Elsa’s arm. Elsa ignores her.

‘Where’s it going to?’ the woman’s voice sounds distant, as if she’s moved away to get something.

‘Inland.’ Mari loves her mother’s voice. When Elsa speaks, people move in closer to her, put their heads on one side, and listen. Except this woman.

‘Where to?’ the woman’s voice sounds impatient now.

‘London,’ Elsa says.

‘Pass it over.’

Elsa takes it off the scales and holds it between her fingers, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It is still upside
-
down, and Mari can make out the address for herself.

‘R
-
A
-
C
-
S
-
O,’ she says out loud, spelling out the letters.

‘Quiet, please, Mari,’ Elsa says, the smooth depths of her voice lifting sharply, making her sound like Nannon. Mari runs her fingers over the wood panelling in front of her, examining the grain of it, the contours of lakes and countries and oceans and bottomless pools all petrified into its surface. But when she puts out her fingers to touch the wood it is impossible to get a grip on it. It feels flat and smooth, and her fingers slip off it.

‘You must be feeling quite settled now,’ the woman says. ‘Back to normal.’

‘Yes, thank you, Sheila.’

‘Is it a nice area of London?’

‘What?’

‘Clap
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ham,’ The woman’s voice sounds as if she’s reading it off a piece of paper.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ says Elsa. ‘I haven’t been there.’ And then quickly, as if she’s just remembered, she opens her bag. ‘I’ve got another one, for Hong Kong. How much will that be, airmail?’ she says, reaching out Mari’s letter to Lin, written on paper that was see
-
through and rustled like tissue paper, and was hard to write on.

‘Don’t worry,’ Elsa had said, when Mari’s pencil had made a hole in it. ‘Lin will understand.’

Mari had been sitting on Elsa’s knee drawing a picture for Lin, while Elsa wrote her own letter, dipping her fountain pen into a pot of ink, then writing without hesitating, in one drawn
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out rush. When she’d finished the letter and held it down against the blotter, she sat still for a moment, hugging Mari. Mari carried on drawing her picture for Lin, a pretend photograph of her, Elsa and Oscar sitting on the beach at Stanley, her playing with a twig making shapes on the surface of the sand, while Elsa sat up on her knees, and Oscar stretched back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the toes.

‘Can I have a pet bunny?’ Mari said, her eyes still on her picture.

‘Certainly not,’ said Elsa. ‘Frank would skin it, and Nannon would put it in a pot.’

Elsa’s breath felt warm against her ear. Mari watched as she took her letter off the blotter, folded it up carefully and sealed it in an envelope. Underneath, on the blotter, the words took a long time to dry off.
They looked odd, the wrong way round.

‘All my love,’ she says out loud, and then, when nobody says anything. ‘All my love.’

Sheila’s head pokes out from above the counter.

‘You’re a sweet little girl, aren’t you? Mind you, not so little any more, is she?’

Mari looks down at her shoes, tight on her feet.

‘No school for you yet, then?’ Sheila’s voice comes at Mari again.

‘She’s starting after Whitsun,’ Elsa says.

Sheila comes out from behind the counter to lock up after them. ‘Early closing today,’ she says to Mari. ‘I’m off down the beach like everyone else.’

By the time Elsa and Mari have been back to Gwelfor and collected their things and settled down on the rocks off the end of the pier, they see Sheila sitting alone in the middle of the beach, surrounded by clusters of women and children. A group of boys are making a racket, racing each other, wincing as the balls of their feet hit the burning sand,

‘Fancy a dip?’ Elsa says to Mari, in the water already. ‘I’ll hold you tight.’

But Mari shakes her head and stays put on the rocks while Elsa dives under and disappears for a long time before popping up, spraying out water like a dolphin. She dives under and swims away again for too long. Mari is afraid to count in case she reaches a hundred and Elsa isn’t there, at the surface of the water. Instead she keeps her eyes on the rocks, on the tightly bunched limpets that grip to their edges, like paper cocktail umbrellas bleached of their colour until all that is left are their paper
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brown spindles, clinging to the rock for dear life.

9

Mari can hear voices in the kitchen from the porch. She takes off her shoes and puts them into the top of Frank’s wellingtons, where no one will see them. She knows the door won’t make a noise, not if she’s careful, nor the hinges either, because Frank is good at keeping things in order. He spends his Sunday afternoons on odd jobs for Nannon, buffing up the door knocker, oiling hinges, fixing bits of fence at the top of the orchard. She stands on the striped red
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and
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white runner in the hall and holds her breath.

‘And I told him,’ she hears Nannon say from the other side of the kitchen door. ‘He’d better get his act together, or people will start to take notice. People will talk.’

‘Does it matter?’ Elsa’s voice sounds sharp. It’s not the voice she uses to talk to Mari.

‘Yes, of course it matters.’ Nannon sounds irritated too. ‘He should be looking for another posting. Thinking about what to do next. How to keep you, and Mari.’

Elsa doesn’t answer. One of them is slicing vegetables, wet metal tapping against the wooden chopping board over and over.

Mari walks up the stairs on the tips of her toes, avoiding the tread five steps up that she knows will creak if she puts her full weight on it, making sure that she doesn’t stub a toe against the stair rods. As she reaches the top she can feel water still dripping off the bottom of her hair at the back but she doesn’t look round to see if it’s left a damp patch on the carpet. She crosses the landing to her bedroom, and slips in as quietly as she can, closing the door behind her, turning the china knob with its painted yellow roses all the way round, until the catch is shut.
The bed looks perfect, as it always does. Nannon changes the sheets every week, and puts the fresh set on herself, pressing out the starched corners, smoothing them away to each side. ‘There, that’s better, isn’t it?’ she always says to Mari.

Mari pulls the covers back and climbs straight in. Her wet hair will soak through the clean pillow case, but she just wants to burrow down under the weight of the blankets, even though it’s the middle of the morning and she’s not supposed to be here. Elsa took her to school after breakfast and isn’t expecting her home until lunchtime.