by Cath Ferla
It’s possible the ashes are your own. You forgot to clean them up.
A ruffled bedspread. An open window. A photo frame with an unfamiliar tilt. Ash. Were these really things to suggest something sinister? Might Jin Tao have sat on her bed to tie a shoe after sneaking into her room to borrow a book? Might she herself have moved the frame inadvertently? She’d had to leave earlier this morning because of the walk and she’d indeed been rushed. She could easily have left the window open, swiped the shrine with her bag, forgotten to clean up the ash, jerked the cover from the bed. Sophie leaned back against the wall, relieved.
She inhaled, caught the scent of crisping rice. In a minute she’d lose both her dinner and a saucepan. She jumped up from the bed and hurtled down the stairs.
In the kitchen, Jin Tao dished rice into a bowl.
‘If I had a dollar for every time I saved you from pot scrubbing, I could open ten restaurants,’ he said.
Sophie took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water. ‘Where’ve you been?’
Jin Tao turned, a wooden spatula in his hand, a happy grin on his face. A deep scratch ran the length of his left cheek. Sophie stared at it, shocked. He looked as if he’d been in a street fight and come off second best. She fought a sudden desire to touch the welt, place her skin against his to take away the pain.
‘You and Stuart had a fight.’
Jin Tao turned back to dishing up Sophie’s dinner. ‘How about I buy you a rice cooker for your next birthday?’
‘Only people who can’t cook use a rice cooker to cook rice. Am I right about the fight? What happened to your face?’
Jin Tao scraped the brown crust from the bottom of the pot. ‘Does that mean only people who can’t cook toast use a toaster to make it?’
Sophie took the bowl of rice from Jin Tao and began heaping it with beef and soup. ‘Toast isn’t cooking. Why are you ignoring my question?’
‘I’m not ignoring you,’ he said. ‘I’m just busy imagining you building a camp fire next time you feel like a bit of burnt toast with your tea.’
Sophie pulled herself up to sit on the bench, her legs kicking back against the cupboards. She spooned the food into her mouth. The bulgogi had gone cold but the kimchi soup carried enough chilli heat to make her whole mouth feel alight. Jin Tao pulled himself up to sit beside her. He pinched a bit of beef out of her bowl with finger and thumb.
‘Had a problem with one of my apprentices,’ he said, kicking his feet in rhythm with hers. ‘Bounced the guy yesterday for losing a bandaid in a diner’s cabbage salad.’
‘Gross.’
‘Tell me about it. Lucky Stuart spotted the thing before it went out,’ he said. ‘I bounced the kid pretty hard anyway and the little shit walked out.’
‘So today?’
‘So today we’re short a bunch of guys and the apprentice doesn’t show up. We need all the help we can get, bad attitude or not. I go round to his house and he’s smashed and he comes at me with both fists flying and I don’t want to get into a scrap with the little guy so I back off but I’m still looking back over my shoulder at him and I don’t notice this big dirty hook hanging out of the wall at the side of the house, you know, like to hang a flowerpot on, and it catches me and it hurt like fuck.’
‘Was it rusty?’
‘Might’ve been a bit.’ Jin Tao nodded. ‘But don’t worry, Mum, I’ve had my tetanus shots.’
He gave Sophie a gentle nudge and she felt a smile creeping to the edge of her lips.
She took a mouthful of her meal, took time to chew. ‘So what happened then?’ she asked.
Jin Tao held up a finger. He jumped off the bench and swung open the fridge. He grabbed a beer, uncapped it, took a long swig. Half a beer and he’d be giggling like a teenager, his face and torso flushed deep scarlet as though he’d contracted a disease. He only drank when he needed courage, he said.
‘So I go back to the restaurant expecting chaos, but Stuart’s got it all under control and service is happening and people are eating and the agency guys he’s got in seem to know what they’re doing.’ Jin Tao flailed his arms in the air. Beer spurted out of the neck of the bottle to settle in foamy patches on the floor. ‘The place is running smoother than it does on my watch and I’m thinking I’d better watch out here or Stuart will be asking for a partnership.’
‘He didn’t seem happy that you left.’
‘He cheered up when I said he could come over later and take that ridiculously expensive bottle of shiraz that I’m never going to drink. And apparently you were a great help.’
Sophie slipped off the bench and carried her bowl to the sink. ‘Yeah,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘me and the potato peeler, we go way back.’
In two strides Jin Tao was beside her, taking the bowl from her hands. ‘Then let me,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘Cleaning up your mess is the least I can do after you cleaned up mine.’
He took the bowl from her grasp and his fingers brushed hers, lingered. For a moment they stood there, the bowl between them, fingertips connected. Jin Tao lifted his eyes to take a shy look into Sophie’s. She allowed herself to stare back, saw kindness and sensuality in his gaze. Her stomach flipped, breath short and fast. Jin Tao brought his right hand to Sophie’s side. His fingers traced a slow dance on her hips. Sophie’s whole body fell slack.
Don’t do it.
She needed to focus on something else. The dirty bowl. The foaming beer. Anything but the sensation in her stomach, the pulsing of her blood, the wetness between her legs. Anything but Jin Tao’s beautiful, damaged face.
‘I’ve got a first-aid kit in the bathroom,’ she said, twisting away. ‘Want me to take a look at that cut?’
Jin Tao dropped his hands and stepped back with a shrug. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.
Sophie knew she’d done it again – destroyed a moment before it had even happened. She straightened a tea towel on the handle of the oven door. Now was probably not the time to ask him if he’d been secretly visiting her room.
He ran water into the sink and began to scrub at the bowl with a brush. ‘You left your incense burning this morning,’ he said, his voice low. ‘It stank the whole top floor out so I opened your window to let in some air.’
A logical explanation. Not sinister at all.
‘Really?’ Sophie tried to make her voice sound light. ‘I thought it was a bit breezy up there.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, sharp. ‘Must be cold as ice.’ He placed the dish in the drying rack, wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘I’ve had a rough day, so I’m going to hit the sack.’
‘Sure.’
‘Okay.’
They stared at each other.
‘And this came for you.’ He pulled an envelope out from the inside pocket of his jacket.
Sophie adjusted the tea towel. ‘Do you always keep my mail next to your heart?’ She tried to make the question light, a joke. The words fell flat.
‘I brought the whole lot in together,’ Jin Tao said. He threw the envelope on the bench and fished out two more from the same pocket. He waved them in front of her. She could see that they were clearly addressed to him.
He indicated the tea towel. ‘You can probably leave that now. I don’t think you’ll get it to hang any straighter.’
Sophie still held the two ends of the tea towel between her fingers. He had her all figured out. He knew her nervous tics as well as he knew her penchant for burning rice. He knew her better than just about anyone. She looked back, conscious of the sheepish smile on her face. But he had gone.
The envelope waited on the bench. Gone were the days when mail meant letters from overseas friends. These days it meant bills or eviction notices or letters from the missing persons unit to say that, sorry, her mother still had not been found.
Sophie picked up the envelope and noted its weight. She held it to the light. It contained a small object, about three centimetres in length and a centimetre wide. She tilted the envelope to the left and the object slid t
o the bottom corner. Curious. She turned the envelope over and looked at the address on the front. Her name was spelled out clearly in black ink. The street and house number were correct. Strange, though, that the envelope was missing a stamp. Sophie took out a butter knife and made a neat slit at the top of the envelope. She opened her right palm and shook the contents into her hand.
Her breath caught in her throat as she stared down at a sleek, silver bullet.
女孩
Sophie shut the door behind her with a very quiet click.
There are some things I need to do alone.
She understood Seamus’s words to her now. For years she’d felt resentful that her father had never truly let her into his personal space. The den, as they’d referred to it, had been Seamus’s world: a room lined with shelves rammed with books, papers and cassette tapes. Sophie spent time there on Seamus’s lap, learning stories of Irish family history and pride, inhaling the scent of tobacco and red wine mixed with sweeter notes of the oil he’d massaged into the leather bindings of his encyclopedias. In many ways it had been a comforting space, because it was the place of her father, the only room of the house that seemed to breathe him. And thrilling also, because in there she’d felt safe while at the same time feeling as though she were at a precipice – she’d always known there was more to her father than he let her see.
Sophie turned the nib on the lock to her door. If Jin Tao wanted access now she knew she would do the same as her father had done to her – shut him out. She needed privacy and silence. There were too many voices already, and they were just the voices in her head. She slipped her right hand into the back pocket of her jeans and fished out the silver bullet.
A thumb drive.
She’d realised what it was as soon as she’d noticed the divide that separated the cap from the body. With relief she’d snapped apart the two components. And then she’d jogged her way through the lounge room and up the stairs. She needed to see what message this bullet brought her. She had a feeling it wasn’t going to be something good.
Her MacBook took an age to boot. Sophie drummed her thumbs against the desk and cursed as the screen flashed green and then blue and then brought up the hard drive’s various programs one by one until finally coming to rest. It had taken a minute but it seemed like hours. She jammed the bullet into the USB port and waited for it to open.
The drive’s name: The Walls. She scanned her memory for links, clicking methodically through the memory tree of her life. She came up blank. She moved her cursor to the file icon. By clicking on the file she risked screwing her hard drive or opening her information up to a hacker. But if she ignored it, she’d never learn the message that this bullet contained.
I’ve got enough unanswered questions in my life.
Sophie opened the drive. It contained three folders: 一, 二, 三. She knew enough Chinese to understand the basic text: one, two, three. She opened the first folder and scanned the contents of the files. It contained PDF documents and jpeg images. Sophie pulled up an image and drew a sharp breath.
Staring back at her from the screen was her mother, Helen.
She hadn’t looked at it for over ten years but Sophie knew the photo intimately. It was the image she and Seamus had released to the press shortly after Helen’s disappearance. They’d chosen the photo because, although dated, it was the only one in the albums that showed a clear close-up of her face. Mothers, Sophie had discovered in the frantic hours and days after the disappearance, are rarely photographed alone. The Sandilands family photo albums overflowed with images of happy children and laughing groups of people. But Helen was largely absent. She’d either been behind the camera or had been made virtually invisible by way of her position in the middle of a throng, the sticky hands of a toddler obscuring her face.
Sophie stared. It had been so long since she’d seen her mother and here she was, in front of her, vivid and real. She loved this photo. It had been taken long before her mother disappeared, although her features had remained very much the same. The woman in the image seemed happy. She held her head aloft, as though halfway through a chuckle, her eyes danced and her face bloomed with good health. Her cropped black hair and straight fringe, combined with a rather wide seventies-style shirt collar, gave her a funky, straight-out-of-the-commune look. Behind her, out of focus, a Hong Kong street: a smear of grey, green and red.
Sophie returned to the folder and flicked through the other files. Each jpeg contained a newspaper image from the time of her mother’s disappearance. Snapshots from the press conference her father had given, an image of Sophie taken from the pages of a glossy women’s magazine, more pictures of Helen – as a young woman in a party frock, her hand clasped in Seamus’s; and another, as a young girl staring up through the lens of the camera, a shamble of exposed pipes and wires running the length of the wall at her back.
The Walls. The reference made sense now. Kowloon Walled City, her mother’s birthplace and the place she’d run from: an unregulated, ungoverned vertical shantytown in Hong Kong. Destroyed now, but once home to prostitution, drugs, money laundering and triads. Sophie’s mother had witnessed a murder and a mark had been placed on her back. Seamus had rescued her, married her, brought her to Australia and tried to keep her safe. Helen had turned her back on her past, learned a new language and taken a new name; adapted her cooking for the local palate. She’d tried to make herself invisible in her new country and culture. But it hadn’t worked. She’d still disappeared.
Sophie moved on to the PDF files, although she could already guess what they contained. Sure enough, each contained a scanned copy of a newspaper article from the time of her mother’s disappearance. PI’s wife in disappearing act. Private Investigator’s case turns personal. Triad involvement in missing mum? Hong Kong mafia links to missing woman.
Sophie sat back in her chair, her mind buzzing. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to collate this data. The State Library would contain the newspaper clippings from the time of her mother’s disappearance and it wouldn’t be difficult to find the articles and scan them. But why go to the effort? Did the collator of the information hope to spook her in some way, to threaten her with a triad link? Sophie’s past was something she kept to herself in Sydney. She’d gone to great lengths to create a new life here and she’d told only a couple of trusted friends about her troubled history.
One of those friends was Jin Tao, in the next room.
Sophie rocked in her chair. Even though she didn’t publicise it, Helen’s disappearance was hardly private information. The story had been splashed around the media for years until even the newspaper editors realised it had run cold. If the sender meant to threaten to dig up Sophie’s past he or she didn’t have much to work with. There was nothing in the files that wasn’t already on the public record.
She reached across the desk for her mouse and clicked the file closed. Beneath it sat the folder labelled 二. Sophie guessed what it might contain. In the corner of the room, the shrine to David sat now in darkness. She moved to it, dusted off the ash and lit a new candle. The walls immediately took on an apricot bloom. Gentle shadows played across the photo in the silver frame. Sophie picked up the photo and stared into it. The little boy watched her.
鬼
A park in Beijing in autumn. Sophie and David slouching, gloved hand in gloved hand, through browned and blushing leaves, the air cold and apple-crisp. David, interested in the world below him, bent low to examine the ground. On his head a winter beanie, green as the bush and round like a gumnut. Sophie turned her head to the clouds and the trees. Kites: she counted six of them flying high and bright above, their tails snaking sharply through the grey as their frames dipped and waved.
‘Da Wei!’ She gave his young shoulder a prod and pointed a gloved finger at the sky. ‘Look down at your feet and you’ll miss all this,’ she said, her simple Mandarin earning her stares and nods from passers-by.
But David wasn’t interested. He squatted at her feet. ‘Boring,�
� he complained. ‘Just for kids.’
She looked at her young charge, only a child himself, his gloves removed, fingers clawing at the rocky earth. ‘And what’s so interesting down there?’ she asked, bending down to his level.
‘The ground, Ayi. The earth. It’s ancient.’
Sophie stared at David’s pale face. So young and already so bright. Li Hua’s son was destined for great things, but right now he needed to learn how to be a child.
‘You need a little exercise,’ she whispered with a wink. ‘Come on, let’s run together to the playground.’
David pulled his hands from the dirt, picked up his gloves and shoved them in the pocket of his jacket. Then, on Sophie’s word, he broke into a gentle trot. She ran with him, purposefully falling back and surging forwards in an effort to inject some energy into his pace. The boy ran in spurts, pumping his arms, heaving out breath with the effort. He didn’t look back or to the side to check on his competitor, but kept his head straight and his eyes focused on the crooked shapes of the equipment as the playground came into view around the bend. She had given him a task and he would accomplish it with minimal fuss and minimal pleasure. He would not try to race her, to interact with her or to have fun. He would simply do as he was told, run towards the play equipment, and there he would stop. Not for the first time, Sophie wondered how Li Hua, who was so open and so interested in people and community and friends, had managed to produce such an introverted child. She would’ve liked to have known his father. Perhaps that would have shed some light.
As he barrelled down the straight and the playground emerged from the shadow of the trees, David came to a sudden and brutal stop. Children swung and leapt about the pieces of peeling equipment, their laughter mixing with the melodic whine of an erhu, played by an elderly man who sat beneath a tree. David stood on short, tracksuited legs, catching his breath.
Sophie jogged up beside him and gave him a gentle push. ‘What are you waiting for?’