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These Days of Ours

Page 24

by Juliet Ashton


  I’ve cleaned your house from top to bottom. I know you didn’t mean it when you turned down my offer. I must say I found a lot of grime in your nooks and crannies but it looks like a new pin now. I hate to interfere but you’re going to love how I rearranged your furniture.

  So, love, we’ll see you in two days! Mary’s making one of her special cakes for the party and we’ll bring round the rest of the wedding photos.

  Lots of love,

  your Ma x

  P.S. Daddy would be proud of you. I imagine him up there in heaven, looking down and protecting you as you help out with all his Chinese children.

  P.P.S. I also believe he’s forgiven me for being a secret lesbian all these years.

  P.P.P.S. That was the first time I’ve ever typed lesbian. Ooh! That was the second!

  Kate stood on tiptoe to see her face in the small framed mirror that hung on an awkwardly positioned nail. Her hair, uncut since her arrival, was scooped into a ponytail that tickled her back.

  A pile of underwear awaited its turn to go into the open suitcase, along with some paperbacks, a wash bag and the photograph of Dad she loved so much, the one of him with a young Kate on his lap and a Chinese teapot in the background. It had sat on her chest of drawers in a smart leather travelling frame for the duration of Kate’s stay at Yulan House.

  Whipping a clean tee shirt out of the case, she pulled it over her head and that was her party prep accomplished. Fashion had fallen away, like other irrelevances. The kids found her foreignness interesting enough without any embellishment. Kate pulled out her make-up bag and peered at its tubs and brushes as if they were relics of a bygone civilisation whose peculiar ways were nothing like her own.

  Ping! An email arrived. I bet that’s him.

  It was.

  From: kingangus@astorhouse.com

  To: kateminelliparties@gmail.co.uk

  Subject: You’n’me

  5 Nov 2014 8.34

  Greetings my little China girl

  Here are today’s stats for your delectation:

  Weight lost: 3st 3lbs

  Days sober: 62

  Hours spent pining for you: Countless

  I’ve made myself a name badge so you’ll recognise me at Heathrow. Who you will ask is that handsome blond devil? He looks like a younger slimmer sober version of my darling Angus! PLUS I smell divine now i.e. not like the floor of a pub. PLUS I’ll carry your cases without wheezing. PLUS I’ll be driving myself there because I finally opened my ears and listened to a certain lady who kept telling me I had to stop hiding in Astor House. Oh, hang on! There’s another important stat!

  Days without ciggies 1

  I finally kicked the habit. For my health. And for you. I only want to live longer if I can spend the extra years with Catherine Rose Minelli. A rose by any other name would smell only half as sweet.

  Ax

  As Kate lifted her hand to type a response, another email arrived.

  From: bonkersbeccaoopboopadoop@leonlens.com

  To: kateminelliparties@gmail.co.uk

  Subject: YIPPEE!

  5 Nov 2014 8.50

  So much to tell you. SO MUCH. Can’t wait to hear what you think of my new teeth. Cost 8k!! Leon hit the roof. One roast dinner and a good seeing to and he was fine.

  I nipped over this morning and changed your furniture back the way you had it. Your mum made your house look like an old folks’ home. I threw out the pot pourri she put on every surface and I opened the windows to get rid of that sickly air freshener she sprays everywhere. Tomorrow I’ll pop over and put some essentials in your fridge. Milk. Tea. Sliced loaf. Tell me if there’s anything specific you want. I suppose you eat your Shredded Wheat with chopsticks now . . .

  There’s a big parcel waiting in the hall for you. Can’t make out what it is. The label’s torn. Do you want me to open it and check it’s OK? I don’t mind. It’s no bother.

  Feeling a bit cry-y today. Had to take Flo out to buy her first bra. She’s only 11! Still my little baby! It’s not really a bra just a cropped thing with straps but she does need it. She went red as a berry every time I said ‘bra’. I started saying it on purpose and she called me ‘Mother’ like she does when she’s annoyed with me (99% of the time). She’s grown up so much since you went away. God knows how but she’s just like Charlie!!

  On that subject your nagging/sound advice got through to me. I apologised. Not only about the way I misled him about Flo but also the way I let it slip out in public. There were many harsh words but I deserved them so I just listened. That was hard! You’re good at listening but I would get an F in a listening exam. Finally he said he forgave me and it felt as if I’d lost a stone. Off my brain, if that makes sense. We’re civil now. No, we’re more than that. Charlie and me are cool.

  Do you think I’m allowed to be proud of him and his book? Well, I don’t care, I am. Apparently pictures of his gob are going to be on the sides of buses! Flo is BURSTING with pride about her famous dad. Well, not yet famous but he will be and then I’ll be the ex-wife of Charles Garland who wrote BLOKE. I’ll be very positive about him in interviews, I promise.

  Right. I should bugger off and do something useful. Leon’ll be home in a bit. I’m soooooo glad you’ve achieved your dream (and your dad’s dream). But I’m gladder that you’re coming home because you’re family, Kate, and I need you close.

  See you at the party!!!

  Oodles of love

  B xoxoxoxo

  P.S. Don’t forget to pick me up a massive bottle of Coco Mademoiselle in duty free or I’ll wallop you.

  Kylie Minogue is a blameless individual but Kate had had her fill of Spinning Around. The smaller children had learned the song phonetically; with no idea what they were saying they belted out the lyrics as they gyrated in the canteen.

  ‘Xiao yi xiao!’ Chow, the caretaker, aimed a camera at Kate and the various small individuals piled on her.

  Kate’s minimal Mandarin vocabulary recognised this as ‘smile’. The kids shouted, ‘Cheese!’ just as she’d trained them.

  They took countless photographs at Yulan House, but there was a poignant edge to these ‘last opportunity’ snaps. Little Fan wouldn’t let go of Kate’s leg, clinging on and having to be prised away by her friends.

  There were fifty orphans or abandoned children in Jia Tang’s care. A nice round number, it would grow or reduce as youngsters arrived or left, but right now each of them wanted to dance. Jerky, ecstatic, they seethed with uninhibited joy. Gao pumped the air with her tiny fists as her friends whirled her in her wheelchair. Even Song, recovering from an operation to fix her cleft palate, was present in the arms of a trusted older child, Sammi.

  On the edge of the action, Sammi seemed immune to the lure of the music. He was quiet, as he generally was. Before Yulan House took over his care (Jia Tang had refused to take no for an answer when dealing with his parents) Sammi saw things he was just beginning to talk about. He put his face close to Song’s and pulled the blanket over the baby’s sleeping face.

  Laughing as Rocky, the most flamboyant of Yulan House’s office staff, spun her round – for a seventy year old he had moves – Kate fixed the scene in her mind. The low ceilinged canteen in the building’s signature cream was the heart of the orphanage. Food happened here, and lessons and impromptu theatricals. Kate had already decided to apply the Yulan palette to her own home. Cream. Moss green. A dull, knocked back red. Accustomed now to fewer things around her, she would de-clutter; when Kate saw Charlie’s home on Skype the fussy backgrounds sparked a fuzz of static in her head.

  A scuffle broke out. High pitched screams in the corner. Egg tart on the floor. Kate dashed over to adjudicate. She made peace in pidgin Mandarin, exploiting her special status with the children. She was the foreigner, the strange one. And they loved her for it. Her funny-coloured skin. Her peculiar hair that kinked and waved. Her sky-coloured eyes. None of them stayed belligerent for long when she talked their language: natural gigglers, they fell about at her attem
pts to wrap her lips around their words. It was all in the intonation; each time she took off Kate wondered where she would land. She knew the word for friends, however. ‘Pengyou?’ she asked, squatting down to their level.

  ‘Pengyou!’ the abbreviated pugilists agreed.

  With little experience around kids, apart from her time spent lolling with Flo, Kate had been stiff at first, unsure how to relate to the little characters pulling at her, chattering to her, ignoring her. Jia Tang had given her some advice which unlocked the door to each of their hearts. Treat them like individuals.

  In the centre of the room, barely taller than her older charges and radiating warmth like a mobile sun, Jia Tang clapped and wriggled arthritically. Ageless – Kate never dared ask – she had the same combustible energy as the small fry. Jia Tang had confided that the children were the secret to her endlessly recycled zeal.

  ‘When I tire,’ Jia Tang said, ‘I kneel down with the little ones, hold their hands, sing their songs with them, or just listen. And I am renewed.’

  Massive, far too sweet, a celebration cake stood proud on a stand, obliterated with icing and held in the peripheral vision of every juvenile in the room. Kate could sense their anticipation. After months as an ayi – Yulan’s term for a volunteer prepared to do anything and everything that was asked of them – Kate knew their quirks. She’d doled out dinner, shampooed their blue-black hair, tucked them up and shushed them in their long dormitories, woken them up, read to them, listened to them read to her. Mother, sister, friend, not only to the delightful dots like Dishi, who was sunny and sweet and as fat as a doughnut, but Li who stabbed her companions with a fork if their hands came too near her supper tray.

  Each of them deserved love just for being, not for being good or kind or pretty; the ethos of Yulan House correlated with Kate’s own. Each of them was a disparate thread Jia Tang had gathered up and knitted into one unusual but warm garment.

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ said the young teacher who’d travelled one and a half thousand miles from Guangzhou to offer her services for nothing. The cook, a paradoxically thin woman, said, with the help of the teacher to translate, ‘Think of my Smacked Cucumber when you’re eating horrible Yorkshire pudding and chips!’

  Accepting so much carefully expressed goodwill was exhausting for a composite of Irish repression and English restraint like Kate. She felt herself fill up with complex emotion, feelings she’d been fending off. It was becoming real: tomorrow she would leave this place.

  The magnolia tree in the courtyard offered consolation and peace, as it so often had. She settled into a spot at its base that knew her bottom so well they might have been made for each other. Kate had woken up to this tree every morning – shockingly early: Yulan House kept monastery hours – and fallen asleep in its shadow every night. It had taken her breath away when she’d first seen it, for real, after all the photographs.

  The tree was where naughty children were sent to ponder their sins. Troubled children cried against the trunk. Happy ones ran round and round it. Kate had spent hours with the tree, sometimes with a baby on her knees, often alone, as she endeavoured to borrow some of the magnolia’s patience.

  Kate had been slow to admit what was happening. She’d fought it. The Kate who’d arrived at Yulan House had lost her belief in transformative love, love that made better people of those it touched. Watching the tree’s abundant waxy blossoms bloom into cups, drop, get swept away, she felt her faith return.

  ‘This tree is a good friend to us.’ Jia Tang was at her side, dressed in her best, a neat navy uniform-style garment that Becca wouldn’t wear to do housework. Her breath was scented with the chrysanthemum tea she favoured. ‘As you know, we named our whole community after the Yulan, what you would call a magnolia. He always listens. Never interrupts.’

  ‘Are you poetic because English is your second language?’ Kate regarded the much smaller woman. ‘Or are you poetic in Mandarin, too?’

  ‘Actually, English is my fourth language.’ Black teardrop eyes beneath smooth lids met Kate’s slyly.

  The formality of the English spoken by those of the staff who were multilingual had alienated Kate. She’d longed for slang, lazy pronunciation and less-than-respectful greetings. In time the decorous expressions felt soothing, just like the orphanage routines. Jia Tang insisted on structure, in order to reassure the children that, whatever their lives may have been like before, they could expect consistency from Yulan House.

  During their late chats in Jia Tang’s sparse office, Kate had asked how she dared to make the promise implicit in Yulan House’s welcome. ‘The children believe you’ll look after them as long as they need you to. But this place is in continual need of money and resources. I see you holding your breath when you do the books.’

  ‘Yes, we live hand to mouth,’ admitted Jia Tang. Despite the solidity of the compound, the loud clang of the iron gates and the comforting smell of mu shu pork curling through the corridors, Yulan House got by on a wing and a prayer. ‘We’ve kept going for thirty-six years. The orphanage works because it has to.’

  Poetry again. Kate knew better. She’d witnessed the small hard-headed woman haggle with tradesmen until they were almost paying her to take their goods. She’d seen Jia Tang stare down shifty officials who stood between her and a little soul in need of her help.

  That night, beneath the tree, Kate asked, with a note of anxiety in her voice she wouldn’t allow anybody else to hear, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’

  Inside, Kylie had given way to Rihanna. Dishi gyrated on a trolley.

  ‘You’ll find the answer inside yourself.’ Jai Tang rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to turn off the oriental whimsy.’ She produced a small wrapped package from the folds of her outfit, like a conjuror. ‘Open this,’ she said, ‘and think of me when you’re back in rainy London.’

  Reluctant to leave the tree, Kate went back to the party. Normally so rational, Kate had found herself entertaining notions that she’d offended some goddess of love. What other explanation could there be for a lifetime of near misses? The minxy goddess whisked Charlie away each time the music changed.

  Now that Kate had duped the goddess and found a love without any divine help, perhaps she could accept Charlie’s friendship as the prize it was, without wishing it was something other, something more. He, after all, had managed to convert his fervour for her into platonic love.

  ‘Yam sing!’ A fellow volunteer, Xu, touched her on the shoulder.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Kate touched her hair, wishing it was in better nick; Xu was dashing, with ripe lips and a slender, androgynous body.

  ‘It means cheers,’ said Jia Tang.

  ‘But,’ said Xu, in his dancing accent, ‘it can also mean have a safe journey home.’

  ‘Home,’ said Kate, liking the shape of the soft word on her lips.

  ‘Yam sing,’ said Jia Tang. ‘To you both.’

  Kate could imagine the disgruntled mutters, the tutting that she shouldn’t be alone. She had no intention of being alone; if they knew the identity of her only guest it would cause a stampede. There would be disapproval and gratuitous advice, all of which could wait until Sunday, over a leg of lamb.

  The house smelled all wrong. It felt neglected. Slowly, Kate reclaimed her home, lighting candles, roasting a chicken. The perfectly ordinary decor seemed opulent, the ensemble of texture and tone overwhelming her. As her first full day back in London went by, she became acclimatised and could see the beauty of it again. After all, she’d chosen every element herself. The house was hers, her footprint on the Earth. Yulan House had proved to Kate the value of home.

  Jet lag made a mockery of routine. Energy peaks had to be utilised because dips followed close behind. Any minute now and Kate would be sleepy as a kitten, so she opened her laptop to bash out the email she’d been composing.

  From: kateminelliparties@gmail.co.uk

  To: kingangus@astorhouse.com

  Subject: In Which I Explain Myself<
br />
  7 Nov 2014 6.20

  Angus,

  You’re right. I am an ungrateful and horrid harpy. Even though you were teasing when you said that, I know that most women would leap at the chance of a handsome chap collecting her from the airport. But I have my reasons.

  (a) I wanted to do this whole trip under my own steam. So no limo. No chilled champers. No blond non-smoker carrying my bags.

  (b) We needn’t go into (b). You know why we can’t pretend the last few months of our relationship didn’t happen. I love you to bits, Angus, but I’m not able to come back to you. Dinner, yes. I’ve missed you. But on my terms, not yours. OK?

  Much love,

  Kx

  P.S. I brought you back a panda in my suitcase.

  Kate didn’t quite trust Angus’s rehabilitation. He flaunted his sobriety the way he used to flaunt his boozing. The recovery felt brittle.

  She empathised with Angus’s sense of being left behind by the tide, of knowing that what he most wanted was not going to happen, so she was gentle with him.

  And firm. Life with an alcoholic had been grim. There had been laughs and luxury and real love, but mainly it had been a slog, a coal mining of the heart. Kate didn’t regret her decision to scram.

  Sometimes Kate asked herself If Charlie and I were together, would I leave him if he was an alcoholic? It was a rhetorical question: Kate would be at his shoulder throughout. She was full of such pointless self-knowledge.

  A dense, damp November night had already closed in by seven o’clock. If Becca had had her way, the sitting room would be fizzing with music now. Flo would be refusing to dance; Becca would be refusing to stop.

  Savouring the calm, Kate picked at something on a tray and eyed the undemanding pap on the television. After seven months with no blaring box she wanted to shout Look at all the colours!

 

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