The Shanghai Wife

by Emma Harcourt

  Annie closes her eyes and opens them again, as though the action will change what she is hearing. Molly is no longer crying. She has a whimsical smile on her face.

  ‘I’m confused. A moment ago you were screaming the house down about this man. Now you are smiling coyly. What has changed?’

  ‘I suppose saying it out loud sort of got rid of the anger and you telling me to leave Herbie only makes me realise I can’t do that. I love him. I’m all right now, Annie, really I am. His deception is what hurt the most and I’m not denying that will take time to right itself but at least he’s told the truth. I’m sorry for worrying you with my hysterics, but it’s all out now.’

  ‘I admire your courage, Molly. I don’t agree with your decision but I won’t say another word against it.’

  ‘Thank you, Annie. It’s simple really. I need Herbie as much as he needs me. Now I’d better get home. Herbie will be worrying.’ But she hesitates, and reaches her arm into her oversized bag. ‘I almost forgot these.’

  Annie accepts the handful of small, waxy mandarins. ‘The first of the season, thank you.’

  ‘Now, I really must be going. It’s not visiting day here either; I’ll get in trouble. Thank you for helping me make sense of this.’

  Annie has no idea what help she has been. She waves her friend goodbye in bemused confusion and holds one of the soft mandarins up to her nose; the citrus smells fresh and sweet.

  ‘When the mandarins are ripe, the tailor are on the bite.’ Her father’s prophecy slips from her lips, making her smile. He was not a religious man and she remembers how he would hold forth on a Sunday morning while they waited patiently for a fish to take the bait, standing still and quiet in the low-tide sandbank. He could send that fishing line halfway across the river, to the deep, dark centre where the bream swam. Or if he was after flathead, he could make the line sing silently through the water, coming to rest on the sandy bottom for a moment, luring that flathead towards the bait, before skipping the line off again, until the fish’s open mouth would catch the hook and he’d snagged the sweetest fish in the river for tea. Those were good Sundays.

  She must look to her future now, to each new day. Could she ask for her father’s forgiveness, could he be a part of that future?

  The afternoons are long at Karoola, where night waits for the final rustling in the trees to end before drowning the land in a dark flood. Annie’s bed is thin and high, plain white-painted metal rods form a cross in the headboard. Her fingers trace the smooth lines rhythmically and she repeats the exercise more slowly, concentrating on her control. There’s only the bare hint of a tremor now as her fingers slide around the bed frame. She sighs deeply and lets her arm drop. Stars appear in the square of night beyond her window. It’s the same sky her father sees from the farm, not so far away. Further still, the sky looks down on Shanghai—a world away.

  There’s a small table beside her bed, where the strong scent of jasmine hangs in the flowers that fill the jam jar. She closes her eyes and breathes in the sweetness, but sleep doesn’t come. Jasmine grew on the walls of her garden in Shanghai, and the smell reminds her of that other life. The bedsprings wheeze through her shifting weight. The quiet rushes about in her head like a moth caught in a net. She just needs a few hours of peace, of not thinking through the next months of her life. So she gets up, rubbing the Buddha’s tummy before she wraps a shawl around herself and pads quietly out into the corridor.

  Beyond the doors, the cool, fresh air smells of tomorrow’s rain and crushed leaves. Annie stands barefoot in the garden, looking up to the stars, and the vast blackness that swells about them, wondering if this will be her patch of sky for the future: if she will live so near to her childhood home, looking into this same night. To be so close to home, the enormity of her secret escape flares again like a freshly stoked hearth.

  There’s still an unexpected churn of nerves in Annie’s stomach at the memory of the night she stole her father’s motorbike and left. She knew the key hung by the back door and reminded herself to go carefully as the door whined so awfully. She sat a while in her sister’s room that afternoon and felt some comfort in stroking the bedcover that lay untouched. She talked to Judy too, explaining her decision to leave in a hushed voice despite the fact there was no one to hear her. It didn’t matter to Annie. At least she told the one person who would have missed her.

  The sound of buzzing was close in her ears. Mosquitoes bit her cheeks and neck. She walked his bike further than was necessary, too nervous to start the engine. The mud pressed into the tyres like the dough she’d left to rise for the morning’s bread. Her eyes winced each time the bike hit her shins. In the dark she couldn’t see the potholes. She wanted to turn the key, let the engine roar and speed her away, but she feared it would let out her secret and scream here she is, your thieving daughter, here is your blood betrayal.

  Only when her hands were sore to touch, when her shins were bloody, only when she’d pushed her father’s bike as far as she was physically able did she let herself breathe.

  ‘Bloody road, bloody mud, damn it Dad,’ she muttered to herself bitterly.

  She felt the sweat merging with her tears and her curses. The bike waited ’til she was ready, then she got on. It warmed up under her acceleration, heavy and wobbly. She held her legs tight against the twin tanks. The air was cold and the wind hit her face constantly. She dug her chin into the scarf wrapped around her neck, and was grateful for the gloves that were resting on the bike’s seat. She wore a felt cap, tipped forward, and kept her father’s riding goggles deep in her coat pocket, but soon enough decided to put them on. The fast-moving air cut into her eyes and dried them out.

  Her fingers were numb under the gloves, hooked like bird’s feet around the handlebars. Her back hunched into an arc over the body of the bike, her neck stretched forward.

  ‘Goodbye Annabelle Samuels.’

  The words whipped from her mouth and disappeared in an instant. The road wound through thick trees and bush and out again into cleared farmland. She thought she heard egrets rise from a swamp in one mass. But all around was still. The noise of the bike filled her ears and her head and was deep in her belly, throbbing constantly, grating into her pores, like the waves of metallic fumes in her nose.

  After days of riding, she reached the wharf, and stood beside a giant of a boat, hair tangled, legs shaking, alone and lost and ready to find herself on board and sail away from home, from her father, from her life, from herself.

  Something moves again amongst the bushes, turning the garden around Annie into a whispering, living thing. Like the nocturnal animals she can’t see, she doesn’t know who she is at that moment. No longer the girl raised in the farmhouse of her memories, married and widowed far from home and still a stranger to herself.

  The night sky hangs blankly above as Annie lowers herself to sit leaning against the wooden fence. She remembers sitting with Chow on the grassy slope of hillside by the Yangtze River. Chow leaned over and crooked an elbow beside her, his hand stroked her face. She can feel the softness now, and so real is the sensation, Annie leans in to the empty night garden, towards the memory of Chow.

  There’s so much portent in the stars she shuts them out and as her mind relaxes, the idea of visiting her father hovers nervously. Would he agree to meet her, could he forgive her twice? In the garden around her the animal noises stay close.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  March 1926

  When did it all start to go wrong? Was her fate sealed by that first kiss with Chow? Annie had never been in control of all the pieces or had all the information. Only now can she see this, here at Karoola, where time and distance seem to be turning her years in Shanghai into someone else’s story. Here she can judge her old life and all her hopeless inadequacies. Now she can see how little she knew Chow, how much she assumed.

  Lately this hospital feels less like a temporary rest and more like a permanent destination. The problem, she realises ruefully, is that she’s spent
too much time here already. Annie looks out of the bus window that’s taking them to the picnic spot beside the Macleay. There are ten other patients seated in rows around her. No one is talking. This is the hospital’s first picnic since Annie arrived at Karoola, the first chance of a social gathering for all of them; perhaps everyone is feeling introspective like her, as they travel slowly through the landscape.

  It was never her intention to come home like this. But her life ran hideously out of control in Shanghai after she returned from the Yangtze; a river that covered so many miles of countryside it felt like she’d slipped into another China as they sailed. But she couldn’t escape events in Shanghai. That river journey took her away from the city, but it didn’t protect her.

  The road is bumpy and Annie holds the seat firmly to stop her body jiggling with the movement. They are so close to the river; she can see a ripple run across the water’s surface as a school of small fish swim by out of sight. The patients’ picnic is a welcome distraction from the boredom at Karoola, but none of the nurses know the significance of the river for Annie.

  They were canoeing, taking the shortcut home. Annie and her sister had taken off their shoes and hitched their dresses up to their thighs as they struck out through the familiar water. But somewhere in the middle between the blue-black deep and sandy shallows, the canoe tipped sideways and as they struggled in the water, Judy flung out a hand that Annie didn’t catch. The current caught them unawares, moving so swift and strong in the dead centre of the river. Annie remembers the small boat approaching and her glorious relief. But it passed the girls as Annie waved and called frantically. She kept her eyes on the boat, on their chance of safety, and watched as it turned and drifted back towards them in the current’s passage. She turned to Judy, grinning and whooping with glee, but she was gone. A hand reached down and grabbed Annie by her dress, dragging her out of the water. She pushed it away, trying to get back to the water and her sister, but they held her tight. A man dived in to look for Judy and she heard the fathomless echo of his splashes and hopeless gasps through the hollow tin floor of the boat where she lay exhausted and empty.

  She sighs deeply as the bus pulls up beside a patch of grass that runs down to the riverbank. In front of her the Macleay stretches across a vast reach of muddy water. This is the first time she has looked at it for years. Even before she left the valley, Annie stopped going near the river. It overflowed with the horror of death and loss and it was impossible to look at it and not feel her chest fill with suffocating guilt. She stares out into the fast-moving current, breathing deeply. A fishing boat sails smoothly past with a pelican trailing in its wake. She remembers watching the birds that circled above Alec’s ship as they sailed along the Yangtze. There’s the same sense of lazy journeying in this river’s view, but Annie knows the moving waters are not as placid as they seem. Would the years make Chow’s absence more bearable too? Rivers, for Annie, will always be about loss.

  Someone calls to her to join them before the ham sandwiches are all eaten. She turns away from the river and sits down with the group. The smell of dried oyster shells carries on the breeze off the water and makes her think of days spent exploring the uneven rocky banks while her father fished. It feels right to be back; despite her circumstances, this is home.

  ‘Why the sad face, Annie?’ a woman asks her pleasantly.

  ‘I’m not sad, just thoughtful. This place does that to me.’

  ‘You’ve heard the story, then, of the young girl who drowned near here, a few years ago now? Such a tragedy; they say her sister up and ran away afterwards and died too.’

  The woman relays the story with the easy impunity of someone disconnected from the tragedy. There is no reason for her to be otherwise, except were she to notice the stunned look on her fellow picnicker’s face. But Annie doesn’t socialise with the other patients, and her discomfort goes unnoticed today just as her presence has been ignored in the preceding months.

  ‘How did the sister die?’ Annie hears her own question like an echo from within the cavernous well into which she’s fallen at the mention of her past. She knows every intimate detail of this story but its unexpected retelling, here, as she looks over the very river of her sister’s demise, unnerves her utterly.

  ‘Threw herself off a ship in the middle of the ocean, so her father said.’

  Unaware of the impact of her words, the woman picks at bits of food stuck in her teeth, sucking and smacking her lips with enthusiasm.

  ‘Do you know her father?’ Annie tries to steady her voice as she asks.

  ‘No, never met the man. I heard it from my sister who had a friend who knew the family.’

  Annie leaves the ham sandwich untouched in its paper wrapping. She wanders back down to the riverbank and stumbles in the mangrove roots where the grass turns to dirty sand. Behind her, the woman calls out again—her sandwich will be eaten if she leaves it too long. Annie ignores their laughter.

  Now she knows how much leaving home hurt her father. It was her only chance of a future, that’s what she told herself. How easily she managed to crush any thought of her father’s desperation at finding his only remaining child gone that morning as her silhouette dissolved into the quiet of the pre-dawn paddocks.

  Now she is back, and standing beside the river, with home so close, she understands in that moment how deeply she betrayed him. She pictures her father angry and ashamed, pretending his daughter is dead to anyone who asks. It makes her heart contract with sadness and her eyes sting with the emotion of holding back tears. There is no chance of explaining why she left now, or apologising for stealing his motorbike. Her father’s already decided her fate; Annabelle Samuels drowned two years ago. She can never be that girl again.

  The flies are beginning to annoy Annie. She brushes them off her face. There is no point staring at the river any longer. There will be no reconciliation with her father. There is no one now who cares about her fate. She will waste no more time on notions of hope which are as flighty as one aimless cloud. She must make a new start. It’s a necessary decision. Her job is to simply keep going, no faith required.

  Annie fingers her gold wedding band. The ring rolls silently through the grass as she throws it: a glinting circle of security for someone else. If she is to focus ahead, she must do so with honesty, and hope that others accept her because of it; there will be no more deception, just as there is no more running.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  April 1926

  Annie pushes herself up to sit so that Molly can massage her swollen ankles. She slept poorly the previous night; a dream of Chow with her on the boat trip up the Yangtze woke her and now she can’t get rid of the image of him drowning; sucking air frantically as his arms splash each time his head rises above the water.

  ‘You’re a good friend,’ Annie sighs, leaning back as she tries to shift the baby’s weight off her bladder.

  Molly smiles through her industrious kneading. The pressure sends pleasant waves of warmth through Annie’s calves.

  ‘I’m lucky you found me again, Mrs Molly Lowe.’

  ‘I’ve not done badly out of the friendship either, Mrs Brand.’

  ‘Remember how surprised I was to see you? We must look an odd couple—the unhappily pregnant vixen with kindly Mrs Lowe who longs for the child she cannot bear. Sorry, Molly, sounds so harsh.’

  ‘It’s the truth Annie; I’ve come to terms with it so it doesn’t hurt anymore, and as you say best to be straight. Mr Lowe and I do just fine.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t coincidence, Molly. Maybe our reunion was meant to be.’

  ‘Always see the positive—remember?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I remember your husband’s catchphrase, how could I forget it when you say the words almost every time we meet!’

  ‘Some days I need to remind myself.’

  Annie reaches for the Buddha statue on the table beside her bed and rubs its stomach tenderly with her thumb a moment before handing it to Molly.

  ‘I w
ant you to have him, as a thank you for putting up with me.’

  ‘Annie, I can’t take this; I know how precious it is to you.’

  ‘I insist. After all these months you deserve it. I was hopeless with Christmas gifts anyway. Please Molly, you can’t say no.’

  ‘What on earth will I do with a Buddha statue?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find a home for him.’

  Molly reaches over and hugs Annie. She smells of flour and salt, of pre-dawn kneading in a hot, sticky kitchen. Her thick arms hold Annie only a moment.

  The tightening around Annie’s groin intensifies, hard and sharp. The baby shifts inside and it feels like a huge glug of water trying to find space in an already full bottle. Deep, flushing breaths push her through the pain. Molly runs for a nurse.

  ‘I’ll be back when you’re done.’ Molly strokes Annie’s brow before she is ushered out. ‘I’ll bring some things for the arrival and we’ll celebrate. Don’t be afraid, it will all be over soon and you’ll have a beautiful new bub to show for it.’ Her words fade away as Annie is taken to the surgery.

  She grips the metal bed frame and groans. It’s like a horse kicking her on the inside. Each wave of pain sinks so deeply in her bones that it feels like her tongue will rip from her mouth. The sound is guttural; Annie grunts and pushes. Her legs are locked into stirrups, so she can’t move. Something cool and wet on her forehead gives momentary relief. Then she’s in the pit of her body, the dark, suffocating hole where the pain smothers her mind. She pushes at the stirrups, screaming. Hands hold her, soothing hands that don’t help. Panic rises out of her, like a terrifying monster. She rides on it, holding to the pain and the terror of this thing that keeps pushing at her to escape.