The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  She runs to the back door and fiddles with the latch until it opens and she sloshes her way around the muddy buarth, first this way and that, not quite sure where to go, and then she runs away from the noise of pigs squealing into the barn, deep into the bales of straw, and hides behind one of them, under a row of curved sickles hanging on the far wall. A pair of heavy shoes is coming towards her, making a sucking, slurping noise as they are drawn in and out of the wet mud. They reach the slate floor of the barn, their heavy heels hardly muffled by the wisps of straw that lie everywhere.

  They come to a halt. Mari stays crouched down, waiting. Tommy lifts her up onto one of the bales and turns her over onto her front and smacks her backside.

  All the way home, Mari remembers not to complain, although her bottom is still sore. She walks behind the rest of them, the hedges getting taller and darker to either side of her. They reach the brow of the hill and the sea comes into view, unsteady on the horizon, with the houses swaying, reflected in the darkening water.

  There are no stars and no moon. The others walk ahead of her, shoulders bent, not looking back.

  7

  They don’t go to Pwllbach again after that, not all together. Tommy and Frank leave early in the morning to milk the cows before breakfast, and if Mari is up early she sits in the kitchen watching Frank binding his feet with strips of cotton before he puts his hard-toed boots on; ‘Fußlappen,’ he says to her, putting one hand on the top of her head, before going out the back way, letting the door bang shut behind him. But Elsa and Nannon stay in New Quay, and Mari stays with them. She gets used to having breakfast on the scarred kitchen table in Gwelfor, then lunch in the back kitchen at Bristol House, when Nannon has turned the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ saying, ‘You’ll get junket for pudding today if you eat your greens.’

  At first it is enough to follow Nannon around, picking up offcuts of material from the floor, using her magnet to collect pins that have spilled out over the counter, turning trims of lace back on their cardboard rolls. If Mari happens to look up out of the window and see children going by on their way to school, she hides behind the counter where Nannon keeps her paper patterns until their whistles and catcalls have moved on down the road.

  Nannon moves the mannequin to one side and puts a table in the big bay window. She brings out her sewing machine and her tailor’s belt and lays the belt to the right of the machine. That’s where it should always be, she tells Mari. She says that before she can even let Mari touch the machine she needs to learn about cutting. She gives Mari a piece of chalk and a pair of sharp scissors and tells her to draw shapes on old bits of material. Mari likes the feel of the scissor handles, the sound the material makes as it gives way under the sharpened blades. She cuts out starfish in plain calico, pigs made of sprigged cotton, mustard pods of herringbone gorse. As she gets better at it, Nannon lets her use the pinking shears. She chops out waves with jagged tops through reams of old linen.

  ‘Good,’ says Nannon, looking at her handiwork over her glasses. ‘We’ll be able to move on to stitching next.’ Mari wants to use the sewing machine, but Nannon says that must wait until she’s learned how to do things by hand, so Mari practises making patchwork pieces, hexagons tacked onto firm paper, then sewn to each other.

  When she has spent weeks being a good girl, and more weeks doing as she has been told, she is allowed to thread the machine and turn the wheel by its handle, listening to it clacking as it goes, ignoring the women’s voices as they pass the shop window on their way to the butcher’s. She only looks up once they have gone, her hand on the wheel. Bristol House is the highest house in the village, says Nannon, with the worst view. The bay is almost completely blocked out by the houses below, apart from a gap where the road turns down into Picton Terrace. There’s a block of dark-blue sea the size of Mari’s patchwork pieces, and the backs of houses, and the butcher’s more or less opposite. She can see straight into the back of the butcher’s, past the umbrella stand and ceramic tiles, through to the glass-fronted cabinet behind the counter.

  After lunch Mari watches from her sewing table as Henry the butcher stands at the window making sure that the blind is rolled all the way up, and the sign on the door turned from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. Women go past Bristol House holding empty baskets and string bags. Mari sees them crowding into the butcher’s, picking over the rabbits piled up on a tray, not skinned yet. One of the women puts a hand out and squeezes their kidneys, one after the other, until their eyes pop open. Mari can see the women’s mouths moving through the glass, and Henry taking their tickets and money and slamming the till shut. The tray holding the rabbits shakes, and they look as if they are dreaming violent dreams that almost wake them up, making them shudder before they settle back down again. Henry’s red fingers reach out for them one by one and he skins them on the chopping board on the counter. By the time the women pass under Mari’s window again all that will be left in Henry’s shop will be an untidy mound of grey fur.

  But today there is an interruption. Mari knows the sound of the van before she sees it, the racket it makes as it struggles up the hill, the choke pulling back before the driver puts his foot down one more time in an attempt to reach the top. It is full and heavy today, she knows that from listening to Nannon and Elsa chatting over breakfast. It’s on its way down from Pwllbach with slaughtered lambs in the back, their testicles cut off, according to Nannon – ‘to make them sweeter,’ she said to Elsa, pulling a face. People have been waiting weeks for this delivery, Nannon said. ‘There’s going to be a riot, I tell you.’ Not a rabbit riot, though, Mari thinks. She likes the sound of the words, rubbed up against each other like that.

  The exhaust backfires as Glyn parks outside Henry’s, obscuring the women and their rabbit riot. Frank is sitting next to him, the window wound down, his elbow resting on its frame. He sees her and Nannon look out at him and he gives them a little salute.

  ‘I don’t think I can bear to watch those women elbowing each other out of the way to get at my Frank,’ Nannon says. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’

  But Mari stays where she is, watching as Frank gets out and opens the back of the van. He carries the lambs’ carcasses wrapped in newspaper, oozing blood onto the pavement. Glyn is sitting completely still in the driver’s seat, his eyes straight ahead of him. When Nannon comes back, Mari asks her what he’s thinking about and she says straightaway, ‘Nothing at all. When it’s light Glyn gets up and goes out and does the milking and sees to the fields and closes gates and mends fences. When it gets dark he goes back to the house and has something to eat and goes to bed. That way there’s nothing for him to think about, not a single thing.’

  ‘What do they do with the balls?’ Mari asks.

  ‘What balls?’

  There is a shout from just under the window. Mari gets down from her chair and looks over the frame of the sash. Underneath, on the other side of the glass, is a boy a bit bigger than her, crouched over his marbles in the gutter.

  Nannon comes up behind her, her shadow throwing Mari’s view of the boy into a crescent of darkness.

  She raps on the window.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ she says. ‘Go away. You’re making my shopfront look untidy.’

  The boy stands up. He has a scarf wrapped round his neck, even though it’s too warm for a coat. Nannon keeps her eye on him.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ she says.

  ‘Sore throat,’ the boy says through the glass. He does a mime for her and Mari, cupping his hands around his neck as if he is about to strangle himself, then pointing at his Adam’s apple, muffled in the layers of his scarf.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Nannon says. ‘Off you go.’

  The boy picks up his marbles and moves down the road, towards the butcher’s. The bell above Henry’s door rings again, loudly, and Mari sees Frank coming out. He gets into the van, taking his time while Glyn starts the engine.

  They move slowly along the top of Hill Street
, towards Mari’s window. The boy is standing between her and the van. Next to Glyn, Frank looks even more animated than usual, as if he is talking to himself, continuing some conversation that he’d started with Henry. His lips move and his eyes roll around; he looks as if he’s weighing up some news Henry had put out on the chopping board for him to sample, chewing things over. Then he catches sight of the boy, standing almost in the path of the van, and his expression changes. He reaches out for the driving wheel, putting his arms across Glyn’s, steering it away from the boy, just as the boy throws his marbles at him, each one ricocheting off the van’s rusty bonnet with a crack before rolling back into the gutter under Mari’s window.

  ‘Bloody Jerry!’ the boy shouts, as the van swerves past him, picking up speed. He stretches his arm out above his head and holds his fist in a ball above his head.

  Nannon knocks on the window furiously.

  ‘Get inside, right now! Or I’ll be having words with Eluned.’

  The boy goose-steps through the door of the porch next to Bristol House, his right fist still raised.

  By the end of the afternoon, rain is beating against the shop window. When Mari is tidying up her things, she sees the boy again. He is bent down on his knees on the street outside, his hands out in front of him, his face turned away from the wind and rain coming off the sea, picking up his marbles one by one.

  Mari taps on the window, quietly, so Nannon doesn’t hear. The boy comes right up to the glass, frowning.

  ‘They’s lambs’ balls, they are,’ she said.

  ‘Damn, bloody damn you, you bugger,’ the boy shouts, so that Nannon comes. When she sees the boy, she says, ‘Oh don’t you mind Richard. His mother didn’t want him back after the war, so poor Eluned is stuck with him, and she won’t put him in the home in Carmarthen.’

  ‘What home?’ Mari says. She’s hungry, but she doesn’t want to think about supper, in case it makes her think about lambs’ balls diced up with gravy on her plate, how they might stick in her throat.

  ‘The children’s home,’ says Nannon, banging drawers shut and putting her reels of coloured cotton thread away in their basket. ‘Come along now.’

  Mari gets up off her chair and turns away from the window without looking up, because she can sense that the boy is still there on the other side of the glass, and she doesn’t want to see the look on his face.

  8

  The post office smells of beeswax and adhesive. There is wood everywhere, set in panels the length and breadth of the walls, and the counter is higher than Mari’s head. There is someone on the other side though, she knows that, because she can hear the muted banging sound of a rubber stamp.

  Elsa pulls her forward. There are two people in front of them. A woman stands at the counter, whispering instructions about a delivery to Shrewsbury. The man behind her is the man from the boat on the quay, with the trousers held up with twine. When he sees the woman at the head of the queue struggling to lift a parcel onto the counter, he reaches out and picks it up by its knotted string.

  ‘Here, let me help you.’

  A woman in blue-and-red uniform comes out from the other side, lifting a hinged stretch of the counter and doubling it back on itself. She takes the parcel back round to the other side and closes the counter again, disappearing from view.

  ‘Hot for the time of year, isn’t it?’ says the woman at the head of the queue. ‘At least it brings in the holidaymakers.’ She turns round, either to include Elsa and Mari, or to make sure they aren’t the people she’s talking about. ‘Mind you, you can’t move on the beach for their picnics and their blankets and their towels.’

  Elsa bends down to Mari and says, ‘That’s where we’re going, afterwards. You can have a swim and an ice cream if you like.’

  Mari shakes her head. She doesn’t want to go to the beach.

  ‘That’s me all done, then, for today,’ says the woman with the parcel, gathering up her purse and bank book. ‘Many thanks, Sheila.’

  She walks past Mari and Elsa towards the door. As it opens it lets in a sliver of midday sun, and voices from the shop next door. Mari is wearing a poplin blouse with short sleeves, and she can feel the skin on her forearms tingling in the heat.

  It is almost their turn.

  ‘It’s money I’m wanting from you today, Sheila,’ the man in front says.

  ‘Well, I’ll give you what I’ve got, Alun, but I’m running a bit short.’

  ‘Can you give me ten, by any chance?’

  Mari doesn’t hear her reply but it must be what the man wanted because he gives a satisfied grunt and leans on the counter, waiting. The room falls silent as the postmistress sets to counting her way through a bankroll, licking her thumb and forefinger, crisping up the new notes between them as she counts them out loud, too quickly for Mari to follow.

  As he opens the door out onto the street a streak of blind heat hits the back of Mari’s neck, and she steps out of it, forward with her mother, right up to the counter, even though it means that her nose is almost pressed into the wood.

  Elsa takes the letter out of her bag.

  ‘Pop it on the scales,’ the woman says.

  Mari cranes her neck as Elsa puts the letter onto the scales above her. It is face down, with the address facing the wrong way round. She pulls on Elsa’s arm. Elsa ignores her.

  ‘Where’s it going to?’ the woman’s voice sounds distant, as if she’s moved away to get something.

  ‘Inland.’ Mari loves her mother’s voice. When Elsa speaks, people move in closer to her, put their heads on one side, and listen. Except this woman.

  ‘Where to?’ the woman’s voice sounds impatient now.

  ‘London,’ Elsa says.

  ‘Pass it over.’

  Elsa takes it off the scales and holds it between her fingers, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It is still upside-down, and Mari can make out the address for herself.

  ‘R-A-C-S-O,’ she says out loud, spelling out the letters.

  ‘Quiet, please, Mari,’ Elsa says, the smooth depths of her voice lifting sharply, making her sound like Nannon. Mari runs her fingers over the wood panelling in front of her, examining the grain of it, the contours of lakes and countries and oceans and bottomless pools all petrified into its surface. But when she puts out her fingers to touch the wood it is impossible to get a grip on it. It feels flat and smooth, and her fingers slip off it.

  ‘You must be feeling quite settled now,’ the woman says. ‘Back to normal.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Sheila.’

  ‘Is it a nice area of London?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Clap-ham,’ The woman’s voice sounds as if she’s reading it off a piece of paper.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ says Elsa. ‘I haven’t been there.’ And then quickly, as if she’s just remembered, she opens her bag. ‘I’ve got another one, for Hong Kong. How much will that be, airmail?’ she says, reaching out Mari’s letter to Lin, written on paper that was see-through and rustled like tissue paper, and was hard to write on.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Elsa had said, when Mari’s pencil had made a hole in it. ‘Lin will understand.’

  Mari had been sitting on Elsa’s knee drawing a picture for Lin, while Elsa wrote her own letter, dipping her fountain pen into a pot of ink, then writing without hesitating, in one drawn-out rush. When she’d finished the letter and held it down against the blotter, she sat still for a moment, hugging Mari. Mari carried on drawing her picture for Lin, a pretend photograph of her, Elsa and Oscar sitting on the beach at Stanley, her playing with a twig making shapes on the surface of the sand, while Elsa sat up on her knees, and Oscar stretched back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the toes.

  ‘Can I have a pet bunny?’ Mari said, her eyes still on her picture.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Elsa. ‘Frank would skin it, and Nannon would put it in a pot.’

  Elsa’s breath felt warm against her ear. Mari watched as she took her letter off the blotte
r, folded it up carefully and sealed it in an envelope. Underneath, on the blotter, the words took a long time to dry off. They looked odd, the wrong way round.

  ‘All my love,’ she says out loud, and then, when nobody says anything. ‘All my love.’

  Sheila’s head pokes out from above the counter.

  ‘You’re a sweet little girl, aren’t you? Mind you, not so little any more, is she?’

  Mari looks down at her shoes, tight on her feet.

  ‘No school for you yet, then?’ Sheila’s voice comes at Mari again.

  ‘She’s starting after Whitsun,’ Elsa says.

  Sheila comes out from behind the counter to lock up after them. ‘Early closing today,’ she says to Mari. ‘I’m off down the beach like everyone else.’

  By the time Elsa and Mari have been back to Gwelfor and collected their things and settled down on the rocks off the end of the pier, they see Sheila sitting alone in the middle of the beach, surrounded by clusters of women and children. A group of boys are making a racket, racing each other, wincing as the balls of their feet hit the burning sand,

  ‘Fancy a dip?’ Elsa says to Mari, in the water already. ‘I’ll hold you tight.’

  But Mari shakes her head and stays put on the rocks while Elsa dives under and disappears for a long time before popping up, spraying out water like a dolphin. She dives under and swims away again for too long. Mari is afraid to count in case she reaches a hundred and Elsa isn’t there, at the surface of the water. Instead she keeps her eyes on the rocks, on the tightly bunched limpets that grip to their edges, like paper cocktail umbrellas bleached of their colour until all that is left are their paper-brown spindles, clinging to the rock for dear life.

  9

  Mari can hear voices in the kitchen from the porch. She takes off her shoes and puts them into the top of Frank’s wellingtons, where no one will see them. She knows the door won’t make a noise, not if she’s careful, nor the hinges either, because Frank is good at keeping things in order. He spends his Sunday afternoons on odd jobs for Nannon, buffing up the door knocker, oiling hinges, fixing bits of fence at the top of the orchard. She stands on the striped red-and-white runner in the hall and holds her breath.