The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  ‘Question,’ says Campbell. He seems to be in good spirits, almost playful. I could smash his face in.

  I grunt, keeping my eyes on the sand.

  ‘When’s a picnic not a picnic?’

  ‘When it’s practically a death march?’ I offer, gesturing towards the limping, hobbling picnickers traipsing past us.

  ‘He’s joking,’ Elsa says to Campbell. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘How would you know?’

  Liz Vernon comes over to us, her feet sinking into the soft sand.

  ‘Elsa dear, do you want me keep an eye on Mari so you can go for a dip?’

  Of all of us, Liz looks the hungriest. She’s lost so much weight that what’s left hangs forlornly around her wrists and ankles.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Elsa says, putting Mari in my lap. ‘Tommy will do it.’

  Elsa’s sun dress is worn through, almost transparent, like a layer of skin that has loosened and come away from her flesh, there’s so little of it left. Her knees and elbows look like rocks sticking out of the shallows. The curves of her bottom are just about still visible, though, and I keep an eye on them until she is under the water and has started swimming. Campbell is quiet on the blanket next to me.

  ‘Enjoying the view?’ I say to him, shifting Mari onto the blanket so she can crawl around.

  ‘Yes, not bad.’

  He’s so insipid. Makes you wonder what he’d say if he were lined up in front of a firing squad. Yes, thanks. Not bad. So-so. Some nights I wake up in a sweat and determine to go over there to Bungalow D with a knife from the kitchens and slit his bloody throat. Maybe I will, yet, once the garden’s summer crop is over and done with.

  ‘Ta-da, Ta-da!’ Mari has found a white pebble and is waving it at me with one hand. She loses her balance and falls over. She opens her mouth to cry.

  ‘Here you go, Mari,’ Oscar says. He picks up a twig and scrapes out a pattern in the sand. ‘Look, isn’t it pretty?’

  ‘Pitt-y,’ Mari says. She takes the twig and scrapes her own line in the sand. ‘Pitt-y.’

  Elsa is swimming now. I can see her arms lifting rhythmically in and out of the water. She is moving further and further away from the land. On the beach, one of the guards is nudging his colleague and pointing.

  ‘What’s Elsa up to?’ Oscar sits up and puts a hand over his eyes, scanning the horizon. ‘She’s too far out.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ I say, passing another twig to Mari, who sits up on her bottom and starts drumming the earth with both of them. ‘Ta-da, ta-da. Ta-da. Pitt-y.’

  I pick up a handful of sand and run it through my fingers to amuse her.

  ‘But she’s such a long way out,’ Campbell says again. He looks orange from top to bottom in this heat, with his hair and freckles and burned skin. Sweat is running off his forehead.

  ‘I told you,’ I say. ‘She always comes back.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He leans back on the sand, but he is still peering out over the water to where her head bobs up and down.

  Two of the guards are walking down the beach, kicking sand with their boots. Oscar is sitting up again.

  ‘Elsa,’ he says.

  His fear is infectious. Other people are starting to look in the same direction, murmuring to each other. Children run into the water, pulling each other’s arms and pointing. Mari starts to cry, not a baby’s cry for milk, but a loud toddler’s urgent yell, right in my face. I move away from her on the blanket, but she follows me around from corner to corner, yelling and screaming. ‘Ta-da. Ta-da!’ and waving a stick in my face, almost poking my eye out.

  ‘Mari!’ I say, and take the twig off her. She starts bawling then.

  One of the guards has walked into the shallows. The water is over his boots and halfway up to his knees, seeping through his trousers.

  ‘Ta-da!’ Mari yells.

  There is a lull in the tide, that moment where it rests on itself before turning back inland. Everything is still, apart from Elsa’s dark head on the surface of the water. She must be a mile out. Behind her lies the low reach of the land on the other side of the bay. It is scrubby and wooded, with few buildings.

  The guard standing in the water fires his gun straight up into the air. A few people jump and Mari stops crying.

  Elsa turns and starts swimming the other way, back towards the beach, her arms rising and falling strongly and evenly.

  ‘Thank God,’ Campbell says, resting back on his elbows again.

  ‘See?’ I raise my voice so he can hear me over the din that Mari’s making. ‘She always comes back.’

  30th August

  I wake early. I know straightaway something is wrong. Afterwards I will wonder what it was that signalled trouble. Whether there had been a humming in the air that was denser than usual, or the muted sound of stems and stalks splitting, falling over themselves like a breaking wave. I pull my trousers on and head over to the garden in my bare feet.

  As I come round the corner past the American quarters I see them. Greenfly. Blackfly. Pests of every description. The ripe, glowing skins of my fruit and vegetables are covered in them. I lift a cabbage leaf. The underside is spotted with eggs. I can hear them cracking open, I swear it, and the insects coming out, stretching their legs, taking a great gulp of air, and then starting to suck the sap out of every last leaf. There isn’t a single plant in the entire garden that isn’t withered and ruined. Bamboo poles that have fractured under the weight of falling beans poke out of the ground like chopsticks. Rows of corn that have come away from the vine are bent over. They look as if they are about to keel over completely, stalks spread out to either side of them like raised hands. Surrender. Underfoot, foliage that has acted as groundcover since the spring has either been eaten by the flies or died off in the space of a few hours.

  The queue that was gathering for morning congee outside the canteen has turned to watch. Kob and Fuji appear. Fuji is grinning. Perhaps it’s not the ending he expected but he evidently finds it pleasing all the same. This will make him look good back in Tokyo.

  Campbell comes over.

  ‘Bad luck, Tom,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not just the veg,’ I say to him. ‘There’s something else down there.’

  ‘What?’

  But Kob has already seen what’s there.

  ‘Hands above your head!’

  One of the guards raises his bayonet and trains it on me.

  Kob is staring at the soil between the rows of dimpled Chinese melons and dried-up pawpaws. The sun is up, blinking out a morse code on the wrought metal and wire that stick out of the ground like old bones. Kob pounces. He shouts out to the guards. They move quickly, making their way along the furrows that I first made with my clumsy bare hands. For a while all that can be heard is the scraping of shovels as they slice their way through them, turning up roots, bulbs and seeds as they go. Other guards follow them up and down, examining the earth, turning it over again in places with their fingers.

  Once the first plug is found the rest seem to rise to the surface of their own accord. Cables and wires are brought up and held out at arm’s length like a human sacrifice. The guards put them in the wooden crates at Kob’s feet, and go back to look for more.

  When they have finished, he calls me over. I start walking. Nothing else moves, apart from the sun. The prisoners, guards, Elsa, Mari, Campbell, even Mimi – their faces all have a rigid, surprised look, as if someone has brought a movie to an abrupt halt, and they are stuck in the freeze frame. I’m the only one who keeps on moving through real time. I stare at them as I pass. Mari’s tiny fingers reach out to me. Her fingernails need cutting. Elsa usually does it with her own teeth because there isn’t a pair of scissors small enough. Mimi’s hair is a mess. Someone must have got her out of bed in a hurry to come and see this. Oscar Campbell is the biggest surprise. He looks if he’s about to cry.

  I stand close to Kob. He is shorter than me, and I know he hates having to look up at me.

&nbs
p; ‘You were trusted,’ he says.

  My mouth is dry.

  They march me over to the Jap headquarters and leave me with armed guards in the room where we used to play bridge. There are empty glasses on the sideboard. Through the open window I can hear a child playing outside one of the bungalows, a rubber ball smacking against concrete over and over.

  By the time they come back I reckon they must be planning on taking me to Tytam Bay, where the tides are strong and southwesterly. I’ll bet they’re going to shoot me and leave my body to rot in the sun, then let the sea carry it away. It makes me think of the crosses we were given at Sunday school when I was a boy, made of dried-out palm leaves with points sharp as nails. We used to run down to the beach after chapel and stick them in the sand and wait for the incoming tide, thinking the water would turn them green again, but it didn’t. All we woke up to the next day was a soggy mess of crosses sticking out at awkward angles, and by the following day they had been washed out to sea.

  Turns out it’s not the beach we’re headed for, though. When we come out of the house I’m prodded in the backside and told to keep moving. We proceed along the road we call Roosevelt Avenue past the Dutch block, the ration shed and the warders’ quarters, until we come to a barred gate that I’ve never been through before.

  It is opened from the other side, so we can walk straight through it, into the prison.

  September 1942

  Ein Tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd

  sancteiddier dy enw

  deled dy deyrnas

  gwneler dy ewyllys

  megis yn y nef

  felly ar y ddaear hefyd…

  I can do most things in English, except pray.

  I am in a dark room, alone. It is small. If I reach out my arms I can touch the walls on both sides. There are no windows. The door is locked. The air smells stale, as if it has only just been vacated by someone else. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark, but they don’t. I hear nothing. I see nothing.

  I guess that the blackness has a reason; to make me lose track of time. So I count, inside my head. I put a finger to my wrist and estimate the length of seconds, minutes, hours. I don’t let myself sleep.

  … dyro i ni heddiw

  ein bara beunyddiol

  a maddau i ni ein dyledion

  fel y maddeuwn ninnau i’n dyledwyr…

  On the second day there are noises outside my cell. People talking. Keys are jangled. I get to my feet, walk over to the door. I am swaying. I am thirsty. They shake the keys again, as if they are about to open the door. Then they walk away.

  I keep counting. I am so thirsty. I run my hands down the walls. They are damp, I lick my fingers. The dirty water makes me retch.

  When I am not counting, I am praying. When I’m not praying, I’m counting.

  … ac nac arwain ni i brofedigaeth

  eithr gwared ni rhag drwg

  canys eiddot ti yw’r deyrnas…

  On the third day they come to the door again. They do exactly the same as yesterday. Talk loudly and rattle a bunch of keys. I stay sitting on the floor, waiting for them to go away again. But this time they don’t. They open the door and order me out.

  I walk in front of them down a narrow corridor. It is all light. The door at the end is opened from the outside and then there is more light. It makes my eyes water. White concrete, white sky, white sun. The prison exercise yard. I am the only person in it, apart from the guards. They manoeuvre me out of the doorway with the butts of their guns, then retreat and close the door.

  I hear footsteps behind me, but they are oddly weightless, like a child’s pattering. Several of them. I turn round as they jump at me.

  Dogs. Two dogs. The pet wolfhounds. They feel as high as my chest, and they are leaping, snapping at my hands and legs. I put my hands out and stumble backwards. They rip and tear the bare skin on my ankles. Their teeth sink into the flesh.

  I look down and am surprised that it doesn’t hurt more. It should hurt.

  I hear laughing. The guards looking out of barred windows.

  The pain hits just as one of the hounds, black and white with a black patch around his eye, jumps straight at my throat. I put up a hand. His bite is large, taking in my whole palm. I feel blood running down my fingers. It is warm.

  They are growling, circling me, ready to charge again, when the door is opened and a voice shouts out and they run to it.

  A guard comes out and gestures to me to go back inside.

  I walk back along the corridor in front of him. I know which room they are taking me to because the door is wide open. I don’t want to go back into the darkness. I try to memorise the light as I walk through the doorway: its reflection on the white walls, the sound of it, the feel of the day on my skin. The blood from my savaged hand is running down my leg now, dripping onto the floor. They push me into the room, but they don’t shut the door. I go to the far end, turn round, and sit down against the wall. I look out of the doorway at the light. My breathing becomes slower.

  Just as my eyes are about to close, there is a clap. The door is slammed shut, from the inside. All is blackness again.

  I can’t see anything.

  A hand grabs my hair, puts a knife to my throat. I wait for the metal to cut me open. I think I want to be dead, to stop feeling my heart beating, frightened.

  Then I hear a voice.

  ‘Get up.’

  It is Kob. I struggle to my feet.

  The door is opened again. Two guards come in. One of them puts a blindfold over my eyes. They kick my bitten shins as we walk down the corridor.

  Outside there’s an engine running.

  ‘Where am I going?’ The voice feels like mine, but it doesn’t sound like it.

  I am dragged up onto the back of a vehicle. I am pushed into a sitting position on a hard seat.

  Kob’s voice comes at me over the juddering engine.

  ‘Home,’ he shouts. ‘Japan!’ He laughs, then taps the rear bumper twice. The vehicle pulls away.

  I smell warm air, the beach, something frying in the camp canteens at the top of the hill. The green pine trees that grow between the rocks on Roosevelt Avenue.

  I hear the engine gathering pace, a change in gear as we approach the long hill that leads to Aberdeen, back to Hong Kong.

  In a few moments the little that I had left of Stanley is gone. The blindfold is hot around my ears. Everything is black, inside and out. I see shapes moving across my eyelids. Elsa and Mari. Then they are blotted out.

  … a’r nerth, a’r gogoniant

  yn oes oesoedd

  Amen

  IV

  Mari:

  New Quay, Wales, 1947

  1

  Mary is her English name. In Welsh, she’s Mari. She doesn’t have a Chinese name, she says to anyone who asks, because she is going home, and there will be no call for it. That’s what her mother told her.

  She is sitting up straight in the back of the car between Elsa and Tommy. The leather that presses against the skin on the back of her legs, in the gap between her pleated skirt and her woollen socks, is ice cold. She stares at her knees. They are covered in little mounds of skin that Elsa calls goosebumps.

  ‘You’ll warm up in a minute,’ Elsa says, putting her hand on Mari’s thighs. The soft new suede of her gloves still smells of the shop where they bought them on Savile Row before catching a train out of Paddington. Elsa had taken a long time to choose them, too long, Tommy had said. She’d set them side by side on the countertop, in different poses, first so that the right hand lay on top of the left, then side by side on the glass. They’d looked as if they were about to start playing the piano. Then she’d taken one of the two pairs, the dark red ones – mulberry she’d called them – and held them close to her face, the rows of covered buttons on the outside edges touching her cheek.

  ‘I’ll take these,’ she’d said.

  Mari had stood behind her, looking at her mother in the mirrors, reflecting on this new version of her. She w
as still the same as before, but paler, older, more beautiful, but a little frightening. She didn’t roll up her sleeves and she didn’t smile. Men looked at her as she strode down Savile Row. Even Tommy had to lengthen his stride to keep up with her, and Mari had had to run, holding both hands out in front of her, hoping that one of them would remember she was there and scoop her up and lift her along the pavement with them. But they hadn’t; they’d kept on striding, talking in sharp bursts of words that sounded like marbles crashing against each other before rolling away into angry silences. She’d been glad when they’d got on the train and sat in the restaurant car, and she’d been given a glass of lemonade. She’d made herself wait two whole minutes before drinking it, her eyes on the clock above the bar, her nose over the edge of the glass, letting the tart bubbles burst against her nostrils.

  She blinks away the tears. It’s been a long time since they got off the train at Llandysul. She is hungry and her back hurts.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘No,’ says Tommy.

  He has a voice that rumbles through everything around him, making it shake. Mari feels her goosebumps trembling. She turns away from him, and looks across her mother out of the window. This is like nothing she has ever known. Her mother told her it would be like flying, driving along the road between Llandysul and New Quay at night. They don’t stop, for one thing. There are no buildings, no intersections, no men in uniform. There is no noise, apart from the engine of the car. The spirals of condensation on the window aren’t condensation at all, but swirls of mist outside, coiled close to the ground on the ridges at each side of the narrow road. There is no moon. Above them there is nothing, and below them there is nothing, apart from the barely visible road ahead. The mist rolls towards them and away again. The car’s gears screech as it struggles up Wstrws Hill, under huge bare trees whose branches reach out from either side of the road, as if they might grasp the car as it passes and fling it away, down into a ditch.