It feels good to eat. I like the way the food makes me full and satisfied and content. I like the way it stops me thinking about my mother and father getting a divorce or about where I am going to live.
One day I come home to find Eddie restocking the fridge. I am in real trouble now, but he does not say a thing. I wait for my father to tell me off but when he doesn’t. I take more, I hide the wrappers and empty cans in the cupboard at the top of the wardrobe.
My belly gets rounder. My father buys me a new purple dress but my stomach still sticks out all the way.
“No more pudding for you,” he says.
Then one day my father is called to the front desk and given a bill. He says there must be some mistake, but when they said there isn’t he grabs my wrist and takes me upstairs and makes me show him my secret cupboard. When he sees it packed with empty coke cans, chocolate wrappers and honey roasted peanut bags, he cries out.
“Jesus!”
He tosses down handfuls of rubbish until it fills the entire bed.
I do not get pocket money for a whole six weeks. Eddie comes to my room and empties the fridge and turns it off for good.
Not long after, my father tells me and my little brother that we are going live to New Zealand with my mother and sisters.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I have to stay here to work.”
“When will we be coming back to Hong Kong?”
“I’m not sure.”
He takes a photo of us in the hotel room before we leave, me with my knotted, uncombed hair, my brother with his jam-jar spectacles and one-armed teddy bear.
*
In New Zealand, my mother does not have much money and we must live in a tiny two bedroom rental. My brother sleeps with my mother in her bed, and I sleep in the other room with my two sisters. My mother has to go out to work. She does hairdressing again and does not like it very much. She says that when she got married she thought my father would look after her for life. One night she tells us we are having sweetbreads for tea. I think of the delicious golden buns in the Chinese bakeries, then find out they are not buns at all but the organs of sheep and cows. We sometimes have brains too. My mother soaks the ugly puke-coloured thing in a bowl of salted water before making it into patties.
My father tries very hard to win my mother back. He telephones her every night and plays Neil Diamond ballads down the phone line. Soon the toll bill becomes very large and the phone gets cut off so we have to use the booth across the road.
I go to a new school, but don’t get too used to it because I know it won’t be long before my parents get back together and we return to our old life in Hong Kong. I am happy when my father comes to visit and I hear him tell my mother that he will stop playing around. He takes her out for a candlelit dinner and stays the night. But then she finds a photo of a Chinese woman in his wallet and throws him out. Later when he’s gone, she says she hates Chinese women because they always act so kittenish.
I take money meant for school books and sneak to the dairy and buy a bag of liquorice allsorts and a block of Caramello chocolate and eat them standing up outside the shop.
*
My mother meets another man and we move into a house in Sommerfield and I change to my sixth school. The man works in a rubber factory in Woolston and is divorced with three grown children. When my mother and the man decide to marry, I ask them if I will have to change my name.
I miss my father very much. We don’t hear from him for a long time. Then we get postcards from places like London and Switzerland and Copenhagen. I save them all up in an old photo album and look at them on rainy days. I imagine the fine hotels and different foods and excitement of seeing a place for the first time.
I study his spidery handwriting, with its fancy loops and slant to the left and the way he doesn’t dot the i.
Nine
MY LITTLE BROTHER and I begin to visit my father once a year. I babysit in Christchurch to earn spending money for the trips. My father writes me a letter saying he will match me dollar for dollar. He also says he’ll give my little brother one dollar for every goal he gets at soccer, but my brother is not very good and does not earn a lot of money that way.
I babysit an intellectually disabled girl in Roseberry Street even though she is sixteen and I am only twelve. She likes me to read her Paddington Bear before bed. Sometimes she drools on the book. One time after she is asleep, I take a look around the house and find some hot pink nail polish on her mother’s dresser. When the lady comes home, she points to my nails.
“What a great colour!” she says.
It’s just me and my little brother who visit my father because his work will not pay for my sisters, who are over eighteen. One time my brother and I fly Qantas. The catering staff are on strike so we get a $50 voucher to spend on food while we’re in transit in Sydney airport. We buy three king size blocks of peppermint chocolate and four large bags of Maltesers.
Another time we fly Air New Guinea. The planes are very old and the air hostess has a giant afro. We stop off in Papa New Guinea so the plane can refuel. The airport is like a milking shed in a field. My brother and I get out to look for something to buy. But there is just one shop and it only sells month-old woman weekly’s and grape Hubba Bubba. The shopkeeper is very dark-skinned and has an animal tooth tied to some string around his neck.
On our visits to Hong Kong, my brother and I have a Filipino Amah to look after us while my father is at work. There is a different one every time. They do not cook, but will do light cleaning. Many Filipino women work as Amahs in Hong Kong so they can send money back home to their families. They are very kind and give up their seat for me on the bus. On Sundays great crowds of them sit in the parks and play cards and chat and share food and paint each other’s toe nails. Sunday is their only day off.
One time we have an Amah called Malea Cordova who has a stalker boyfriend. He makes prank calls. He tells us he will fuck my mother and slit out throats. Malea is frightened so my father goes to the police station and the man is sent to jail. In Hong Kong, the police uniforms are green not blue.
On my father’s day off, if the weather is fine, we go walking around The Peak. If it is raining, we just stay home. Sometimes my father and little brother spend the entire day playing shooting games, firing at each other with BB guns across the tops of flipped-over couches. Once my father accidently shoots my brother in the eye with a tiny orange pellet and makes him cry.
Sometimes my father does not come home from work so my little brother and I ring around the bars.
“I’ll be home soon,” he says.
We wait for hours.
Other times he does not come to the phone and I hear him say to the barman –
“Tell them I’ve already left.”
*
The next time me and my little brother go to Hong Kong, there is a new girlfriend, Judith, a Chinese Police Officer with poor English skills. She has presents for us: a racing car set for my brother, a rosewood jewellery box inlaid with Cloisonné flowers for me. But the following visit, she is gone.
There are other girlfriends too. They like to buy me things and tell me how pretty I am. I do not remember their names. None of them are ever live-ins so it’s just me and my father at night. I get to stay up very late and sit on the couch while he talks and sips his drink.
“More ice!” he calls when his glass is empty.
I run to the freezer, drop in two ice cubes and take the glass back.
He talks about many things. His work and who he investigates. How there are corrupt men who end up at the bottom of swimming pools or pushed off buildings. He tells me about Hong Kong crimes like the Chinese taxi driver who murdered his female customers, cut off their nipples and kept them in jars.
Ten
BECAUSE THE LITTLE blue pill does not work too well anymore, I am very restless at night. After everyone is asleep, I sneak into the lounge for cigarettes. I am careful to take only two or three, some fro
m my father, others from Celia. One time I go behind the bar for a lug of martini mix and spot a little knife, a switch blade that my father must have bought as a joke, to go with the cigarette lighter than looks like a gun.
I lie on my bed and press the button and the blade pops out. I do it over and over. As I run the steel over the tip of my finger, I see it is not very sharp and will need to be ground against stone to be any use.
I hide it, along with the stolen cigarettes, under my pillow. Then one night when I feel under the pillow, there’s nothing. My collection’s gone, including the knife. Celia has been here. I am angry. She should not touch my things. It is none of her business, even if some of the smokes are hers.
I go into the wardrobe and take out her wedding chegonsam and use my teeth to make a little tear in the pink silk, just beneath the left sleeve. If she ever wears the thing again, everyone will see her pit hairs.
*
Late at night I dial Trent’s number.
“It’s Rachel.”
“Piss off,” he says.
“What’s wrong?”
“I nearly got done for cardinal knowledge.”
“What’s that?”
“Stupid bitch.”
A flat line in my ear.
I do not move for days. My mind is spaghetti.
On the third night after, I hear the phone ring sometime near 1am. My father is at a bar in Kowloon. He’s so drunk he’s afraid the taxi driver will rob him so Celia must catch a taxi all the way over there to pick him up.
“I will be a couple of hours,” she says through my door. “Look after Chung Si.”
After she is gone I rise from my bed and head for my father’s bathroom. In the medicine cabinet there is Panadol, cough syrup, flu tablets, vitamins and capsules of Chinese medicine. I take a can of coke from the fridge in the kitchen, a coffee cup from the cupboard and return to my room. The coke spits as I drop each pill in. I whisk with my finger. Not all of it dissolves, but I knock it back anyway, then lie down and pull the sheet over my body and hope for the best.
I wake in darkness and vomit on myself.
The next time I stir, I see that I am throwing up over the side of my bed. I blink heavily in the half-light. There are patches of orange vomit on the carpet, over my bedcovers, on me.
My mouth is foul and gummy and sore. I heave until daylight breaks over the rooftops. In the kitchen someone is making breakfast.
When Celia leaves to drop Chung Si off at school, I unfold my rubber limbs and get out of bed to look in the mirror. There is vomit in my hair. A blood vessel has burst in the white of my eye.
I clean myself up and scrub the carpet, but little bleached patches remain. I toss the bedcovers in the washing machine then Celia comes home before I have a chance to get back to my room.
“I bought you these,” she says.
She hands me a small plastic bag. Inside there is a skewer of fish balls in a thick curry sauce. They are my favourite.
That night my father knocks on the door and I hold out my hand.
“None left,” he says. “Besides, it’s not healthy to sleep all day.”
“I’m not hurting anyone.”
“It’s been five weeks. You should be up and about.”
Then he says, as if merely an afterthought –
“Anyway, it’s time you went to school.”
Eleven
I CALL my mother.
“I want to come home.”
“Not yet.”
“He’s making me go to school.”
“You’ve only got yourself to blame.”
She and my father are on the same page.
In the taxi, I sit next to my father and stare out the window. We are in the middle of nowhere. There are rolling hills and not much else. The South Island School is a long way from the city in a place called Deepwater Bay, Aberdeen.
When I was seven, I went to Kennedy Primary School in Kowloon. I had to wear a starched shirt and a tie and was expected to know my times-tables by heart. I hope that high school is not as bad.
A building appears in the distance, set high in the jungle like a maximum security prison. Three concrete blocks, maybe fifteen storeys high. No football fields or bike sheds. No quaint woodwork room or tuck shop selling half Boston buns, and mince and cheese pies.
It is lunchtime when we arrive and students eat from trays in a large cafeteria. They are all nationalities – Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, British, American, Australian and Greek. Some of the boys wear turbans. Some girls have dots on their foreheads and gold rings in their noses.
We meet the headmaster, Mr Smith, in his office. My father sits stiffly beside me. I can tell he’s afraid, not of the headmaster, but of me, and what I might do. Mr Smith turns to me.
“You’ve had problems at your other school in New Zealand?”
When I don’t answer, Mr Smith looks at my father.
“But she’s coming right,” says my father.
Mr Smith nods.
“Fair enough.”
Then he slides the invoice across the desk and my father slips it into his pocket.
*
I need a new school uniform and today Celia is taking me to a Chinese tailor in Kowloon. She needs cash so we catch a cab to Central and meet my father at his office on the twentieth floor of Exchange Square.
My father has a nice view of the harbour. On his desk is a paperweight I made for him when I was ten – a large grey river stone with seashells glued on top. He has certainly done very well for himself with his big office and important work. On Fridays he goes for lunch with his colleagues. Quite often they do not return to the office for the rest of the day. Sometimes he does not come home until Saturday.
When we arrive, he tries to be jolly in front of his workmates. They smile and tell me hello. My father throws Chung Si up in the air and fills a little paper cone from the water cooler for her.
“Good to see you up and about,” he says to me.
He gives me fifty dollars and tells me to have a nice time.
At the Star Ferry Celia, Chung Si and I make our way down the shifting plank and take a seat. A few rows over a man is lying down with a newspaper on his face. Our seats are near the windows, there is no glass, just a tarpaulin rolled up to the top. I watch a man in a blue sailor suit untie the thick rope and hoist up the plank and the ferry pulls away and heads for Kowloon.
Up front, tourists talk loudly and snap cameras. Occasionally, they look at us. Their eyes move from me to my Chinese mother and Chinese sister and back again. Some of the locals stare too. Celia raises her chin and looks at the harbour.
Chung Si is singing to herself and swinging her feet back and forth. Her English name is Stephanie, although my father is the only one to call her that. The name comes from the TV programme Hart-to-Hart, and the red-head private investigator, Stephanie Powers. Chung Si’s favourite English word is underpants. She laughs very hard whenever anyone says it.
Chung Si must go to school even though she is only four. Her uniform is a starched white pinafore, shiny black patent leather shoes and frilly ankle socks. Celia yells at Chung Si when she is doing her homework because she does not do it right. She must try harder. But one day I look at her workbook and see that her handwriting is neat and in English and far better than mine.
When Celia puts Chung Si to bed at night, I sometimes hear them whispering to each other in Chinese.
“Mēyéh, Mummy?” Why is that or what’s that for?
And Celia will stroke Chung Si’s sleek hair and patiently explain the answer to whatever she asked.
Chung Si has her own tape deck and listens to English stories before she goes to sleep. Her favourite is “You’re the Greatest, Charlie Brown.” There is a bad tempered girl called Lucy and a dumb kid called Linus. The girl is rude and angry and unreasonable and I hope that Chung Si doesn’t think that all western girls are the same.
In Kowloon, we stop at a food stall and eat dumplings and beef noodles and
Chinese tea. Then on our way to the tailor at Chungking mansions, we see an elderly beggar on the footpath. In front of him, there’s Chinese writing in white chalk.
“What does it say?” I ask Celia.
She stops to read.
“He lost his job because he is too old. He is nearly blind and has no family to look after him. He asks for our pity.”
I look at the old man and he is nodding and smiling even though he can’t understand us. Celia reaches into her purse and puts a ten dollar note near his bare feet.
“Dòjeh,” he says with a voice like gravel.
“There are no beggars in New Zealand,” I say as we move on. “They just go on the dole.”
The tailor does not speak much English, so Celia answers when he asks me a question. He digs around out back and returns with a bolt of cloth of green and white gingham very like the inside of a picnic basket. He drapes it over my shoulder and circles me, pinning here and there, snipping and slicing with big black scissors.
Chung Si watches from a stool.
“You are going to a big girl’s school,” she says.
The tailor’s head snaps up and he laughs at Chung Si.
“Ha!” he says. “Very good English.”
When he finishes measuring and pinning and cutting, he folds up the fabric and says something to Celia.
“Your uniform will be ready next week,” she tells me.
Then I will have to go to school.
*
I lie awake in the darkness and imagine my old room. I am pulling on my jacket, unlocking the windows, running off to St Peter’s Church. Fleur is already there and we walk up Colombo Street, past KFC, down Wilsons Road, along the river, back to the church. She shows me the new black tights she got in a Farmers’ sale.
My father breaks the spell with a coughing fit in the lounge next door. I think of him sitting there all by himself, drink in hand, on the couch with the big scorch mark from when he fell asleep smoking. He will be staring at the television even though it’s not on.
A Trick of Light Page 4