‘Fog’s bad tonight,’ the driver says, not turning round. His Welsh sounds strange to Mari, contorted into short jabs of sentences that she finds difficult to follow. She has only ever heard two people speaking Welsh – Elsa and Tommy. He has a rolled-up cigarette in his mouth. She sits forward in her seat.
‘Where are we?’ she asks.
‘Banc Siôn Cwilt. Ever heard of it?’
She shakes her head, although when they were at Stanley her mother used to talk her through this journey at night, when she couldn’t sleep, when the rats outside the window and the rasp of cockroaches inside kept her awake. But in her mother’s version it was always midday, the sun high in the sky, with the thin line of sea in the distance reflecting white silver on the horizon. In her mother’s story, there were foxgloves growing in the hedges, or autumn leaves at Wstrws so vivid that even the air around them was the colour of oranges. Mari hadn’t known what an orange was, but it had sounded warm, and hopeful, the way Elsa said it. In the story her mother told, the sun was always out, and everything was light and shade, clearly definable.
‘Once we see the sea, you’ll know where you are,’ Elsa had said.
But it is dark, and theirs is the only car on the road, headlights hardly penetrating the mist. The driver drops his speed as they climb the hill, until they are going at a walking pace.
‘Where are we?’ Mari says again, more to herself than anyone else. It feels like the empty spaces of her nightmares, when she wakes up soaked in sweat, clutching at nothing until her mother comes and she holds on to her, breathing in Elsa’s sleepy smell, that warm, thick scent that gathers around her at night like a comfort blanket.
‘Smugglers used to hide out up here,’ says the driver. ‘The mist was good for some, once.’
Mari steals a look out of the window. Shapes lurch towards the car. They burst through the fog, turning out to be trees, stunted bits of hedge, broken gates, before stepping back into the shadows of her imagination. She keeps her eyes wide open for so long that when she finally blinks her eyelids are flecked with ghosts rearing out of the soil. One of them has a face like Tommy’s. Mari looks over at him, just to make sure he’s still there beside her. He has his eyes shut, his shoulder slumped against the car door. She turns to her mother. Elsa sits straight, looking ahead. She has taken her gloves off and holds them in her lap, stroking them from time to time. The silence banked up inside the car is as thick as the fog outside.
In her mother’s version of their homecoming there had been no Tommy.
The car bumps up and down without warning, then pitches back and fore before righting itself, throwing Mari against Tommy. He is wearing what he calls his good suit. The material is old and shiny, and it is too big for him. Elsa has folded the sleeves back on themselves, tucking the extra length inside.
‘I told you I needed to hang on to it,’ Tommy had said.
Elsa had smiled a smile that looked like the opposite of itself, it made her face seem so unhappy. Mari wondered why Elsa was so nice to him when he was so rude. If it had been Mari talking like that, Elsa would have told her to mind her manners.
‘Sorry, must’ve hit a badger,’ says the driver. Tommy wakes up.
‘Sit back,’ he says to Mari.
She pushes herself back in the seat, her knees forced flat and her shoes sticking out over the edge of the leather piping. It will leave red marks on the back of her legs, an indentation that will stay for days. When people ask her what kind of journey home they had, she will think of the red weals scored into her legs, and say nothing.
Her skirt is all rucked up, and she pulls it straight over her thighs. Her mother puts her hand on her leg and taps it gently, and Mari stops fidgeting. She puts her hands at her sides and looks straight ahead of her and counts in her head to a hundred in English, then cant in Welsh. When she is done she starts on Cantonese although she knows that she can only get to twenty, which is just as well, because by the time she reaches yih-sahp as Lin had taught her, she feels the road starting to fall away from them, under the car, so that for a moment she feels as if they really are flying, slowly coming down to earth. There are high hedges now on either side of them, but through their bare branches she catches sight of lights dotted here and there, until they get lower and lower and the lights get closer together. The car turns down a small lane, then takes a sharp left. There are houses on one side and nothing on the other. A low wall, the kind that her mother tells her to come away from otherwise she might fall, and then nothing beyond. The car stops at the first house. There is a nameplate by the door, picked out by the streetlight above. Gwelfor. She can’t see the sea, but she can hear it, an angry crashing somewhere down below the stone wall.
The driver stands with the car door open, the engine still running, while Tommy counts out the notes. Most of the houses behind him are in darkness.
‘Where is everyone?’ Elsa says.
‘Up at the hall, I expect.’ The driver looks at his watch. ‘Ten to midnight. Happy New Year to you!’
‘Happy New Year,’ Elsa and Tommy say together, as if they’ve been rehearsing it.
‘Well,’ Elsa says, as the car backs down the terrace again. ‘Here we are. Home.’
And even the word itself makes Mari afraid, more afraid than she had been of the smuggler ghosts or of Tommy’s black mood in the car, or of Stanley, or of Hong Kong afterwards, where even her mother said she felt a stranger after the war. She is afraid of the black hill behind the houses and the boom of the sea below. She is afraid of this place, where there are no people, no voices, no pavements.
She doesn’t ask for Oscar, because she knows she’s not supposed to, so she whispers his name to herself, inside her head, where no one can hear it. Oscar, Os-car, OS-CAR. But he doesn’t come.
2
Elsa and Tommy start walking back down the road, the way they’d come in the car.
‘Where are we going?’
Mari’s shoes feel cold and hard against her feet, bumping her up and down as she tries to keep up.
‘The hall,’ her mother says, and then, when Mari pulls at her hand again, ‘We’re going to a party.’
‘What, now?’
Perhaps it’s always dark here. Perhaps for the people who live here, this is day.
She holds onto Elsa’s hand and peers out from side to side. They turn up a steep lane with houses along one side and bushes on the other, with thorns as long as her fingers. Elsa doesn’t have to tell her to keep up. The hill is so steep that Mari has to bend her legs sharply to get up it as quickly as she can, pulling Elsa with her. More houses, a crossroads, another lane, and a pool of black on the other side.
‘What’s that?’
‘Stop asking questions, for God’s sake,’ Tommy spits out.
‘It’s all new to her, Tom, remember,’ says Elsa, and then, bending over Mari, standing between her and Tommy, ‘That’s the playing field, where the boys play football and rugby.’
‘Why is it black?’
‘It’s not – it’s green. It just looks like that at night.’
‘How do you know it’s grass? How do you know it isn’t sea?’
‘Because I know where everything is here,’ Elsa says. Her voice has an ironed-out sound to it when she is tired. ‘The sea’s on the other side of those houses, see, over there?’ pointing towards the roofs behind them. ‘Can’t you hear it?’
Mari stands still for a moment. Tommy keeps on walking, but Elsa stands with her. It doesn’t sound like the sea in Stanley Bay, the whisper and sigh as each long wave turned over itself and stretched out before coming to rest on the beach. It sounds like a high wind blowing, stormy, the kind of night that fills Mari’s dreams with witches and parrots. Elsa starts walking again.
‘There’s the hall,’ she says, pointing to a shape emerging from the black night up ahead. It looks like a ship from this distance. The doors are pulled tight shut, and there is no noise.
‘Where’s the party?’ says Mari. When they�
��d got back to Hong Kong from Stanley there had been parties all the time, all day every day. No one had cared what she did; she was allowed to play under the table in the Gloucester, or behind the bar, or talk with the waitresses who liked her and smiled, and fold paper napkins into pretty shapes with them, and wait for Elsa and Oscar to come and find her when they were ready. She was never frightened they might forget, and they never had.
‘I don’t know.’ Her mother hesitates, looks over at Tommy. ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
Tommy is walking towards the door with his big flat hand out, looking as if he will force it if need be, when it opens from the inside.
On the other side, there is nothing, at first. Only shadows. Then, as Elsa walks into the hall with Mari still holding her hand and Tommy gummed to her side, Mari blinks again and again until she starts to see shapes: the curve of a cloak, the bowed top of a trilby. There is a crowd of people facing away from her in the half-dark, looking towards a raised platform at the other end of the hall. From the stage comes a flare of light.
Mari can feel a rhythmical popping in her ears and the pulse of Elsa’s hand in hers.
A figure is running down the aisle between the coats and hats. She is wearing a white, gauzy dress with a skirt shaped like a tutu, and a tiara made of silver tinsel wrapped around a circle of wire to make a halo around her head. She turns this way and that, scattering sparks of light as she moves her head. Her feet must be skipping along towards Mari on the floor, but she looks as if she is floating. She has small bones and long limbs and wide eyes. She has a silver tinselled wand that she waves to her right and left as she makes her way down the aisle, and she laughs as she sprinkles her magic dust over the coats and hats as she goes, and they turn as she passes them.
Mari is getting used to the dim light. Over the stage behind the faces there is bunting, red dragons on one side and red, white and blue stripes on the other. On the platform are hordes of children lined up in a group, the tallest at the back, and the smallest, about the same age as Mari, at the front. They have their mouths open, as if they are about to sing, or recite. Their eyes are on the white angel.
Behind the angel, a voice says from the stage, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a big hand for our New Year Fairy 1947, Miss Iris Davies.’
And the room explodes with claps and shouts and whoops that burst open like firecrackers in the gaping rafters above Mari’s head, and everyone leaves their seats. The women are kissing each other and the men are shaking hands and they are all saying, ‘Happy New Year, Happy New Year!’ until someone catches sight of Mari and Elsa and Tommy standing there, and the noise fades away. Even the fairy angel stands as still as a frozen snowdrop, staring at Mari. And Mari doesn’t know who is more frightened, her or all these grown-ups, until the fairy stands over her imperiously and taps the top of her head with her wand.
‘And who are you?’ says the fairy.
‘Mari,’ she whispers.
‘Mari who?’
Mari looks up at her mother.
‘Jones.’ Tommy’s voice booms out behind her, out from the playing field, louder than everything, louder than the sea.
‘Well, Mari Jones,’ says the fairy. ‘Happy New Year to you.’
People are saying their names and milling around them, and throwing their arms around Elsa and Tommy, and asking questions. Some of the women are taking handkerchiefs out of their handbags and patting their eyes.
‘It’s too much,’ one of them says. ‘It’s just too much.’
‘I know,’ says Elsa. ‘I’m sorry.’
Mari wonders what it is Elsa has done, but before she can ask, the arms and elbows and pinching fingers pluck her away from her mother and carry her over to a trestle table. The lights are turned up and cloths lifted from the table and Mari sees that it is covered with dishes of food. There are corned-beef sandwiches, sausage rolls, scones, cakes, milk puddings and jellies. Hands are holding out plates to her and she is taking whatever they offer her and stuffing what she can into her pockets. Someone gives her a bar of chocolate; someone else says, ‘Here, have a tangerine,’ and presses a soft orange round of fruit with skin on it into the palm of her hand.
‘What’s that?’ she says, pointing to a dish that smells sweet and hot.
‘Tapioca,’ says the fairy angel, serving some into a bowl for her, and then, when she sees that Mari doesn’t understand. ‘That’s frog’s eyes to you, Curly.’
It looks like coconut milk with pearls floating in it. Mari puts a spoonful in her mouth, expecting the pearls to hurt her teeth but they dissolve, sticky and sweet on the roof of her mouth. The angel dollops a spoonful of jam into the middle of the bowl; the next mouthful explodes with a sharp tang of something, maybe strawberry, and a seedy grit that gathers at the back of her throat. As soon as her mouth is empty she fills it again. Her spoon feels like a shovel, and her arms get tired.
‘Slow down, dear,’ says a woman shaped like a rolled-up pancake with a squidgy middle.
The angel fairy is still over her shoulder, pressing a mince pie into her hand and watching her break the pastry open before it’s barely in her mouth. She can feel specks of raisins and orange peel sticking to her chin.
‘Eat up,’ says the fairy. She never takes her eyes off Mari. She stares at her without smiling, watching the way her hand wraps itself around each mince pie and then tries to cram it whole into her mouth. Each time Mari has finished the fairy gives her another one, until a voice over her shoulder shouts out, ‘Iris, come over here, please.’ The angel backs away, her blackcurrant eyes still fixed to Mari’s, watching her lick her lips and suck the sugar off her fingers.
Mari sits on one of the chairs and leans back against the wall. She tries to take her time but she can see food disappearing; all those children who had been on the stage are helping themselves to egg custard and sausage rolls. There is bread and dripping right next to her on the table and its suet smell fills her head. The heat circulating between the jackets and waistcoats and dresses around her gets thicker and hotter, and she looks up to ask for help, but the faces are blank again, the eyes and made-up lips all moving oddly, warped out of shape, and she can’t make out what they are saying, their voices too loud and then too quiet, until she feels it again, that popping in her ears, and she creeps to the door and looks out at the black playing field and throws up, a stream of green vomit that tastes of rice that has gone off. Her mother has told her she will never have to eat rice again. Her mother is right, she thinks as the vomit forces itself up into her throat and spatters out into another puddle on the lane outside the hall, lit up only by the backs of the houses behind. Her mother is always right. But under the tang of tapioca and corned beef, she can still taste it on the back of her tongue.
3
‘Frank, could you go and get some more wood from the outhouse, calon?’
In Gwelfor there are just the six of them, counting Nannon, Frank and the cat. Mari has made a den for herself under the table, behind the green chenille cloth that hangs over its edges. She is nursing the black-and-white cat in her arms like a baby and cuddling it. The cat holds its four paws up in the air without protest and closes its eyes.
Elsa lifts the cloth from time to time and bends down. She looks too tall, like a giant; or perhaps it’s the house that’s shrinking around her. Her head seems to touch the chiselled glass of the lightshade above, and everything else – the footstool in front of the fire, the gilt-edged mirror on the wall – seems reduced.
‘Are you all right?’
Mari’s eyelids are heavy. The air is dark and soft under the table; the sounds beyond her den are muffled by the fringed tablecloth and the red woollen rug. Her mother is holding back the tablecloth. On the other side there is a fire going under a mantelpiece with a china dog at each end. There are two easy chairs either side of the fire.
‘Why the hell did he leave it open like that?’
Tommy is standing by the door, his hand on the doorknob.
; ‘Tommy,’ Elsa says.
He leans around the door, peering into the shadows behind it, as if he expects to see someone there.
‘Tommy dear, sit yourself down,’ says Nannon. ‘Frank will stoke up the fire, make everything cosy for you.’
Mari tries not to stare at Nannon, but she looks so much like Elsa that it’s difficult not to. But while Elsa is long and thin, Nannon is plump all over, with arms and legs that poke out almost at right angles. She has lines across her forehead, maybe because she seems to keep her eyebrows raised all the time, as if someone has just told her something she never expected to hear. Her eyes are grey like Elsa’s but they are shot through with ruptured blood vessels that run in red lines across the whites of her eyeballs. She looks very tired, although she can’t be, because she doesn’t stop moving from one side of the room to the other, puffing up cushions to get Tommy comfortable in one of the easy chairs, then making her way straight back to the table to offer Elsa a sandwich, or a jam tart. She doesn’t stop talking either, except when Tommy cuts across her.
‘Shouldn’t that be Franz?’ he says.
Nannon puts a plate down hard on the table above Mari’s head.
‘No, it’s Frank these days. And I’m Mrs Meyer.’
Nannon sounds as if she is pursing her lips, like someone who is on the verge of beginning a story, someone who expects everyone to listen, so Mari does.
The Rice Paper Diaries Page 12