The Rice Paper Diaries (23 page)

The door from the parlour opens behind her.

‘Coming to watch us chop wood?’ Frank says.

She follows him and Tommy out into the yard. It is tiny, with a brick wall behind. The boy next door is sitting high in an apple tree. He stares down at them.

Frank takes the loose branches he’s brought down from Pwllbach. He sets them on a large thick ring of tree trunk, and starts splicing them one by one with hard, swift blows. He grunts as they fall open. Tommy leans back against the gate and blows smoke out through his nose, tapping the ash off the tip of his cigarette over and over. The boy, Richard, is throwing fistfuls of grit at Frank, but Frank swats them away. They leave red marks on the back of his neck. Tommy rubs his cigarette out under his shoe, and starts to load the chopped logs into the shed to dry. Their insides smell sweet and juicy, like grass.

Mari looks up at Richard. He puts his tongue out at her and throws another handful of grit at the back of Frank’s head.

She turns on her heel and goes indoors, into the kitchen. The kitchen still smells of the pork loin that they had for lunch, although Elsa and Nannon have been busy washing and wiping everything down. Elsa opens the window, the top half down in the sash, to let some air in.

‘There, that’s better,’ she says.

‘Shall we get started, then?’ says Nannon.

‘Oh, I don’t know if I can be bothered. I can manage with what I’ve got.

‘No you can’t, and you’ve got a stack of coupons going to waste. Come on, let me measure you up. Come into the shop.’

So the three of them troop into the shop and no one says to Mari that she’s not supposed to be there. It is shady and cool because the blinds are drawn. She feels like her mother’s shadow and she likes it. Elsa stands in front of the mirror.

‘No need to be shy with me,’ Nannon says. And Elsa starts to take her clothes off, slowly, until she is standing there in her underwear. She stares at herself, as if she is looking at someone else. Nannon turns to her basket to get her tape measure and Mari sees the tremor in her hands. Nannon puts the tape measure against Elsa’s shoulders, and she says brightly, ‘How about a nice long skirt dress with a big belt, straight across the shoulder. Full in the skirt, you know? They’re all wearing it.’ She points in the direction of the illustrated magazines spread open on the counter.

Elsa says nothing, still looking at herself in the long mirror. A dull thudding noise comes from the garden outside, like someone banging on a locked door in a fury.

‘It’s only the kids next door playing with old tennis balls, take no notice,’ Nannon says. ‘That lad is a nuisance. The sooner he gets taken away, the better.’

‘Is she going to go through with it?’ Elsa asks.

‘Poor Eluned. She’s got a kind heart, but she’s had enough.’

Nannon measures Elsa’s chest, her fingers knocking against her hollow ribcage. She holds the tape loosely so it won’t press into Elsa’s skin, as if she’s afraid it will leave a mark. She tots up the inches from the nape of Elsa’s neck to just under her knee, while Mari counts the bones that stick out all over, like the stringers of a half
-
built hull.

Nannon, for once, doesn’t fill the silence with words. Mari closes her eyes and breathes in the smell of Nannon’s love that clings all about her: the scent of dried egg and braised liver on her apron, lavender water around her cleavage, the soft mass of her overheated flesh under her plain cotton dress, the care in her fingertips on Elsa’s skin.

Then there is a scream from outside and the sound of tennis balls falling to the floor, and a girl crying. Mari opens her eyes. She runs to the back porch. The jamb of the door is swollen and cracked, and she has to pull the handle hard to open it.

Tommy is standing with the axe raised, blood dripping off it, pieces of sawn wood on the ground all around him. On the trunk they’ve been using to split the logs is a rat, its head separated from its body.

Mari hears Elsa and Nannon coming up behind her, but she can’t turn round. She can’t stop looking at the rat’s red eyes, its headless torso still twitching, its worm
-
pink tail. Tommy and Frank are staring at it too. Frank has one hand at his neck over the little red marks, as if they’ve started itching. The yard next door is empty.

Mari stands in between them – Frank, Nannon, Elsa and Tommy – feeling the end of the afternoon closing in all around them like the hot bricks of the garden wall.

11

Mari knows the names of all the months now, in Welsh as well as English. Sometimes she gets them mixed up, although she can’t see how that can be her fault, for there seems to be nothing about ‘July’ that might make it the same as
‘Gorffennaf’. ‘Gorffennaf’
– the end of the summer – seems the wrong word to Mari, anyway, for when July arrives it isn’t the end of the summer at all, far from it. Come August, there are still holidaymakers everywhere, promenading up and down the pier in black jackets. They strip down to their bathing suits and lay out bath towels and blankets on the hard, baked sand of the beach below. Heat blisters out of their uncovered skin, and in the evenings the scent of calamine lotion attracts the midges.

And in August there is the regatta – bunting and fancy sundresses on show, and a warm breeze smelling of tar and candyfloss blowing through the crowds. Mari sits on her knees near the lifeboat shed eating wilting cucumber sandwiches from a wicker hamper and watching the races. Boats run stern to stern and people’s cries carry on the wind as the damp sand under Mari’s feet dries into crinkles that burn the skin between her toes. Elsa and Nannon drink tots of a brown sugary liquid out of egg cups, until they laugh at the way the bay winds out around them, and sit back against the warm smooth cliff
-
face jutting out from the sand, and fall asleep with their hats over their faces and their skirts hitched up. Mari sits up straight as a mast on the blanket, waving the wasps away from the abandoned egg cups, making sure that she doesn’t fall asleep too before the tide comes in.

She doesn’t want August to end, because August keeps her close to Elsa and Nannon, and August keeps Tommy at a distance, busy with Frank up at Pwllbach rolling up hay into bales, or lending a hand on other farms in return for help with their own. She doesn’t want August to be over just yet, because when it is there will only be four weeks left before she is sent away to school in Cardiff.

Nannon takes her into the shop on a Sunday afternoon, and makes her up a new night gown with her initals stitched into it: MJ – she doesn’t want it getting mixed up with the other girls’ clothes in the laundry, Nannon says. She tells Mari about the department stores in Cardiff, says that she and Elsa will take the train and visit Mari and go shopping. Often. And Mari will spend the holidays at home.

When Nannon says the word ‘home’ Mari finds herself trying hard to catch her breath, like the day when Tommy had smacked her, but she doesn’t ask any more questions. She has been afraid to, ever since she heard Tommy and Frank and Elsa and Nannon talking about Kenya behind the kitchen door. She’d opened the door and gone in and they’d fallen silent. She hadn’t known what
Kenya
was, if it was English or Welsh, like July or
Gorffennaf
, so she’d looked it up in one of the encyclopaedias in the parlour. She’d put her fingers to the photographs of savannas covered in acacia trees with fluffy, feathered tops that looked like an old woman’s hair, and then she’d closed the book, and shut her eyes, and tried to conjure up what she could of Stanley, an afternoon spent with Elsa and Oscar sitting on the hill above the cemetery, playing noughts and crosses in the earth. But although Oscar was still there in her mind’s eye, marking out an X in the sand with a stick, he was as indeterminately monochrome as the zebras and leopards in the reference book, his eyes a washed
-
out tint that looked like no colour at all.

Perhaps as she gets bigger, she thinks, as July turns into August and then September, life will become greyer and less distinct, until she won’t remember the smudged
-
out features of Oscar’s face at all.

But when August does come to an end Mari finds it isn’t that simple: after a light covering of frost like finely bobinned crochet across the terraced lawns, the days heat up rapidly, and the blues and greens of the bay below become brutally sharp. Nannon calls it
haf bach Mihangel
. An Indian summer. More words that sound nothing like themselves. All Mari knows is that it isn’t time to leave yet.

Elsa and Nannon are making sloe gin. They stand in the kitchen pricking the sloes with silver needles. They’ve set everything out first so they can get them bottled up before lunch. On one side of the low sink is the pyramid of purple
-
blue fruit they carried home with Mari along the new road the day before. The bloom on their skins looks mildewed, but it’s better that way than to pick them too early, Nannon had said, her fingers pecking like beaks in and out of the bushes, slinging handfuls of sloes into her basket without stopping, until she said she needed a breather and reached for her thermos flask. Although the sloes will never be sweet, she told Mari, as they sat on the grass verge taking long gulps of tepid tea from the same cup, at least the first frost has bitten into the sour edge that lies just under their skins.

Mari pushes her head up from the table by her elbows. On the other side of the draining board, set out on an old tea cloth, are three empty bottles and a heap of sugar in a covered bowl. Nannon starts pushing the sloes into the empty bottles. Elsa has lit the range, and the room is filled with the scent of ginger tea and woodsmoke.

‘No dozing at this time of day,’ says Nannon, nudging Mari’s head gently out of her hands. She goes to fetch a basket from the scullery and comes back in and puts it on the table.

‘Damsons,’ she says. ‘Up in the orchard. I want you to strip the two big bushes of them before they get too ripe and start falling off.’

Mari hardly ever goes into the back garden that falls in dug
-
out terraces to the back door. Usually it is hidden from view by clothes drying in the wind. Frank has put in two washing lines running from the top to bottom of the garden, and the pegged
-
up sheets hang down at sharp angles. She knows where the orchard is, though, through the gate and behind the air
-
raid shelter.

‘What did you need a shelter for here?’ Tommy had asked when he’d seen it.

‘Swansea was bombed and half
-
burned out, wasn’t it?’ Nannon answered without hesitating. ‘They said all ports were vulnerable, even here.’ She’d turned to Elsa. ‘You could see the glow in the sky from Pwllbach.’

They don’t need the shelter now, Elsa tells Mari, but it is still there between her and the orchard, a bank of earth and corrugated iron with a gaping mouth that makes it look like Twm Siôn Cati’s cave. It scares her. This is the reason she doesn’t like going out into the garden. She doesn’t like having to go past that silent hump of dead soil, with the outlines of ghosts moving about in the sheets behind, half
-
formed shapes that stutter in the wind like a broken news reel.

She tries to pretend it isn’t there as she pushes the dripping sheets out of the way to get up to the orchard.

‘Hello.’
Tommy is sitting under an apple tree, his hair made wild by the breeze, his face fuller now that he’s been eating Nannon’s food, his eyes bulging.

She sets to picking damsons off the bush, some of which have started falling already, just as Nannon said. They have burst open on the grass underfoot and lie face
-
up, their yellow insides grimacing at Mari like Sara’s jaundiced smiles. Mari doesn’t want to go to Pwllbach again. And she doesn’t want to get another hiding from Tommy. She puts the basket down and carries on collecting the damsons. They are a deep purple, deeper than the sloes, almost black and they are big too, so that she can only pick them one by one.

Tommy gets up and helps her, his hands moving quickly, his blunt fingers holding the damsons as carefully as she does, making sure they reach the bottom of the basket without being spoiled.

When the basket is full he takes it off her and puts it down on the grass at the base of the apple tree before sitting down again.

‘Come and sit next to me,’ he says, patting the mossy patch next to him.

They look out over the roofs of
Lewis Terrace. Mari’s bottom is starting to feel damp through her skirt, and she tries to lever herself up onto one of the apple tree’s protruding roots.

‘You can see all the way up to Snowdon today,’
Tommy says. ‘It’s a shame I didn’t bring the binoculars out with me.’

Mari wonders if he means that she should run and get them. She makes as if to get up off the ground, but Tommy puts out one of his big hands and rests it on her arm until she sits back against the tree trunk again. She looks straight ahead, at the distant houses painted in strong reds and yellows on the promontory of Aberaeron, then to the north, at Llanon, a low topple of cottages and a church as small as the miniature heads of cow parsley that she cuts up to make bouquets for her dolls’ house. Last of all there is the long seafront at Aberystwyth, with the peaks of Snowdonia beyond.