The Rice Paper Diaries (5 page)

‘Is there somewhere we can have lunch?’

Elsa didn’t want to go back to the apartment just yet. She’d rather wait until Tommy was due home from work.

Lam slowed down.

‘This way,’ she said.

The restaurant was on the corner of a block, spread over three floors, with too much warm air circulating between the crowded tables. People were sitting in big family groups, and some of the men were reading newspapers.

Elsa was glad of the cool breeze by the window. She took her hat off and looked out at the craned boats and
sampans
jostling against each other for space on the quay
.
There must have been twenty people on the table next to them, dressed smartly. Children were playing hide
-
and
-
seek on all fours, in and out of the drapes of the tablecloth. From time to time one of them came out and said something to their parents and went back again, and as the tablecloth was lifted Elsa saw that they were playing with spinning tops, staring at the blur the colourful tops made as they whirled around.

A waitress brought a tray filled with covered bamboo pans and set them out on the table. Lam took off the lids and pointed to the contents of each in turn with her chopsticks.

‘Bean curd, fried noodles, steamed fish with mushroom, vegetable dumplings.’

Elsa helped herself to a little from each pan. She saw the children from the table next to them watching her as the dumplings fell off her chopsticks and she had to try again and again. She laughed.

‘How on earth do you do it?’

Lam smiled and shook her head.

‘Here, let me help you.’

They looked out over the harbour as they ate. A spinning top jumped out from under the table next to them. One of the boys crept over, head down, put an arm out to retrieve it, and scuttled away. His mother was eating dragon fruit with chopsticks. Bottles of
brandy were being brought to the table. Men raised their glasses and shouted ‘
Yam sing
!’ before draining them and topping them up again and again.

‘It’s a wedding party,’ Lam said.

The bride and groom looked as if their cheeks must hurt from all the smiling. Elsa tried to catch Lam’s eye, to share the joke, but she had seemed to have shifted into one of her closed
-
up moods, a distant look on her face. She was staring at a man and woman seated to the other side of them. The woman was giggling, leaning into the man. He had a broad smile that was wide enough for everyone. American, at a guess, thought Elsa, listening to his accent. The skin hung slackly off his jaw, perhaps because he was a little overweight, although he was young, not much older than Elsa. The Chinese girl sitting next to him had a strange smile pasted to her face, bright and plastic like one of the illuminated shop signs on Des Voeux Road. The man took his chopsticks and passed them to her; she broke them open for him and handed them back. Lam eyed the Chinese girl coldly, as if she were a goose strung up for sale in the butcher’s on the street outside. The man noticed nothing. He shuttled his beer across the tablecloth, passing the bottle from one hand to the other. Each time he moved, Elsa caught sight of a line of scarlet flesh above the collar of his shirt where he’d caught the sun.

Elsa wanted to ask Lam what she did on her day off, if she came to places like this with men like that, but she knew that Lam would be embarrassed, and would say nothing, covering her mouth with her hand.

‘Do you get homesick sometimes?’ she said instead.

All around them, the dribs and drabs of conversation on other tables were starting to slow down. At the wedding party table a small child sat curled up on a woman’s shoes, one thumb in his mouth and the side of his cheek pressed against her leg.

‘Homesick? What’s that?’

Lam tidied the bamboo pans, putting their lids back on and setting them at the edge of the table ready for the waitress.

‘I mean, do you miss your home? Where is your home?’

Elsa put a ten
-
dollar note next to the dirty dishes.

‘Keep the change,’ she said to the waitress.

The waitress bowed her head and slipped the note into her apron.

‘Canton? I haven’t been there for three years.’

Lam’s answer was just what Elsa had come to expect: neither a yes nor a no, and yet there was something complete and self
-
contained about it, like Lam herself.

It was cooler on the street, but the pavements were still crowded. Elsa followed Lam as she stepped round men pulling trolleys and rickshaws, and wide, shallow dishes of chickpeas drying in the sun. She tried to move as lightly as Lam did, balancing her weight in order to skip round all these hurdles in one graceful movement. They were about to cross the road to a tram stop when a car pulled up.

‘What on earth are you doing here on your own?’ Lizzie called over. Ronnie sat next to her in the driver’s seat, wearing sunglasses and looking straight ahead.

‘I’m not on my own,’ Elsa said.

‘Hadn’t you better hop in? We’ll run you home.’

Elsa turned back to Lam.

‘Don’t rush back. I won’t need you until six.’

Lam looked pleased, then, for the first time that day. Elsa got into the car and they pulled away down Des Voeux Road, overtaking the trams. Lam was still standing on the pavement, a blank look on her face again. Everything around her was moving and gathering pace backwards as the car sped off: the triangles of the bamboo hats in the shop behind her, the yellow mangoes on the fruit stall on the other side, the long dark alleyway to her left that ran the length of the block. For a moment they came together like a symphony, a final chord, and then Lam turned to go and they fell away from her again.

‘You look tired,’ Liz said.

‘I’ve had a busy day, that’s all.’

‘You don’t have to come to this do if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘I’ll be better by the end of the week. I wouldn’t miss your birthday for anything, Ronnie.’

‘Thank you, honey,’ he said, blowing his cigarette smoke out of the window. ‘It’s going to be a good one.’

Liz laughed, looking sideways at herself in the wing mirror. ‘There’ll be plenty of people and plenty of fizz; I’ve made sure of that.’

The car stopped for a moment at a junction. Alongside them a man stooped over a grave in the steep
-
sided Chinese cemetery. He had a small brush in one hand and a pan in the other. Then Ronnie put his foot down again, turning up onto the road for the Peak, and everything around them disappeared into a blur of trees and sky.

5

‘What’s wrong?’ Tommy was looking in the mirror, adjusting his bow tie.

‘Nothing. I fell asleep after lunch and had a bad dream, that’s all.’

‘We’d better get going.’

Victoria Harbour was calm under a grey sky. No one would guess at the storm Elsa had dreamed of, the waves rising up out of the harbour and crashing over the hotels and shops and people all along the waterfront. She’d dreamed they were sitting in the Peninsula when the water rolled into the big windows, making them crack and splinter into jagged pieces that came rushing on a wave of water towards her, cutting her hands. She shouted and screamed and held her arms up, the blood running, but no one took any notice. They carried on just as before, as if this was only happening to her.
And then she woke up and realised that it was.

Elsa hesitated before stepping off the quay onto the boat. There was a moment when she felt everything moving beneath her, the gangplank under one foot and the quay under the other, but then Tommy took her hand and the feeling of panic was stilled.

As the
sampan
turned back on itself to face Kowloon the evening sun caught its pewter
-
coloured sails, opened out symmetrically like butterfly wings. Elsa was struck by how flat the land was on the waterfront. It wasn’t inconceivable that the Peninsula Hotel or any of the other smart places on the other side of the harbour should be flooded one day, but no one seemed concerned when the tides were high, as they were today, the sea almost running over onto the pavements on the quay. She mentioned it to Tommy as they made their way with Ronnie and Liz past the waxed bonnets of the cars parked up outside the Peninsula, but he just laughed and said she took her mother’s folk tales too seriously.

‘What tales are those?’ Ronnie asked, raising his eyebrows, ready to be entertained, watching as Tommy held out a chair for Elsa before taking a seat himself.

‘Gloomy Welsh myths, Ronnie boy,’ Tommy said, opening his eyes wide, and they both laughed, and Tommy slapped his big hands against his thighs. Elsa loved Tommy’s hands. She’d married him for them. A farmer’s hands like shovels, with blunt
-
edged fingers, they reminded her of where she came from and what her people did, either farming the land, or travelling the world as merchant seamen or a little of
both, as Tommy’s family had always done. When she turned his hands over, she could trace the lines in his palms, as if they made a map of New Quay that she carried with her everywhere. When she took him to bed, he spoke to her in Welsh and ran his farmer’s hands over her breasts. She remembered the day he asked her to marry him, the red round perfection of the sun on the water at Cwmtydu’s deserted cove, and the gritty feel of sand in her underwear afterwards, and being glad that she wouldn’t be considered a child any more, now that she had a fiancé.

Ronnie had drunk too much champagne already and was staring at her.

‘Fabulous dress, Elsa,’ he said.

Liz lit up a cigarette.

‘Thank you, Ronnie.’ Elsa bent over to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Happy Birthday.’

‘Thank you, honey.’ He held onto her hand for longer than he should.

‘Is your husband jolly already?’ said Tommy to Liz, trying to catch the waiter’s eye.

‘He’s been drinking all afternoon,’ she answered, not smiling back.

‘I see we have some catching up to do, Ronnie boy.’
Tommy held his arm up in the air, shaking his big fingers instead of clicking them, and a young Chinese boy in a white, double
-
buttoned jacket appeared at their table, holding an empty silver tray against his stomach.

‘A bottle of champagne,’
Tommy said. ‘No, make that two.’

The boy bowed. He turned the tray over and cleared the empty glasses from the table.

By the time they’d finished the second bottle of champagne, the marble floor had started to move around under Elsa’s feet and she’d got used to the noise of the wind shaking the windows that opened out onto the front of the hotel.

‘I need the ladies,’ she mouthed to Liz.

‘I’ll come with you.’ Liz reached for her bag.

In the restroom Elsa went straight into a cubicle to tidy up her dress. She heard the door outside open and close and Mimi Forsyth’s voice say, ‘You look nice, Liz.’

‘Starting to fill out now.’ Liz sounded happy again. ‘Lively in here tonight, isn’t it?’ The words were distorted, as if she was frowning at herself in the glass as she applied another layer of lipstick.

‘People are making the most of the good times, I suppose.’

The tiny stitches in Elsa’s dress were jumping around in front of her eyes, but when she looked closely, they were as perfect and close
-
set as they had been in the Wangs’ shop.

‘Where’s Elsa?’ Mimi said.

Liz made a non
-
committal noise. She must still be at the mirror, applying swirls of lipstick the colour of candy.

‘That dress,’ said Mimi. ‘Don’t you think it makes her look a little… well, you know… as if she’s…’

‘Gone native?’

‘You should talk to her.’

Liz’s reply was lost as the door screeched open and shut. When Elsa came out of the cubicle, they were both gone. Her hands trembled as she washed and dried them. The red walls were crowding in on her, and all she could see were the dulled edges of the mirror frame above the sink where the gold leaf had flaked off. But when she looked at her reflection, she could see that the roundness in her face that used to make her look as if she was always smiling, or about to, had become more angular, more knowing, and there was a soft knuckling of bone across her shoulders.

In the long, windowless corridor running from the restrooms back to the stairs down to the lobby, the people who were walking towards the bathrooms avoided the gaze of those who had just left them. Elsa kept her eyes down too. Her mouth was dry and she had a headache. She wondered how long it would be before Tommy would be ready to go home.

‘Mrs Jones?’

She looked up.

‘Yes?’

She recognised him straightaway.

‘It’s Oscar, Oscar Campbell,’ he said. He reached a hand out as if to shake hers but when she took it and leaned in to accept a kiss, he pulled back.

‘How are you?’

No one had asked her how she was, not since that day at the hospital. Sometimes she hated good manners.