The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

Mari pushes her spoon into the sorbet and pulls the sticky centre out. She holds it up before putting it in her mouth, examining the pellets of squashed fruit.

  ‘Have you finished?’ Nannon says to Mari. Mari hasn’t, but she gets down from the table.

  ‘I want you to go out and get some fresh air, cariad,’ Nannon says, getting up and making sure that Mari is wrapped up warm in her new grey school coat. ‘Go over to the fountain and sit on that bench there until Nannon comes to get you, there’s a good girl.’ And she puts a hand on either side of Mari’s head, and strokes her hair, then sits back down, holding her small coffee cup with both hands, her coat still over her shoulders.

  Gino is shouting orders into the kitchen.

  ‘Lasagna… Cawl, please… Open sandwich with ham.’

  Mari crosses the road and looks at the fountain. The dark stone makes the running water look black, but she drinks it anyway, just to see what it tastes like, cupping it in earthy handfuls and letting it dribble down the sides of her mouth. She stands back and reads the inscription, taking her time, because some of the English words are new to her: Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. She puts her fingers into the letters and runs them up and down, as if she’s writing them out for herself. She wonders what whosoever is. She looks over at Gino’s. Nannon has put her coffee cup back in its saucer and pushed it to one side. Mari can’t see her face, because Elsa is in the way, her shoulders jerking up and down.

  Mari runs over to the pavement on the other side of the road. She pushes the door of the café open.

  ‘And I swear to God,’ Elsa is saying loudly, rubbing her face with a hankie so that the make-up runs everywhere, leaving circles under her eyes the colour of blackberry pulp. ‘If I could drown it like a puppy, I would.’

  ‘There’s some would kill for a baby, you know that,’ Nannon says.

  Gino slams the till shut behind them and Nannon looks up and sees Mari. The solemn expression on her face stays the same, but she puts an arm out, and Mari runs to her.

  ‘Right then,’ she says loudly, her arm tight around Mari’s new coat. ‘Time for us to let our friend Gino clear the table and get on with our shopping.’

  Nannon and Elsa spend the afternoon playing with trunks and hatboxes, exclaiming over collapsible hangers and folding handles, while Mari stands in the shop window and looks across the street through the iron gates at the playing fields opposite, at the college girls chasing a ball with lacrosse sticks and shouting at each other, their bare legs red raw with cold.

  By the time all the errands have been seen to, the afternoon air is thickening into mist and Nannon says they should start to make tracks for home. As they pass the playing fields, Elsa stops to watch the girls in their gymslips flitting in and out of the shadows.

  ‘Come on,’ Nannon says, taking her arm.

  Mari walks behind them to the car, putting her hand into the pocket of her new coat and touching the stiff corners of the envelope inside, the one with Oscar’s name on it, just to make sure it is still there, safe, ready to give to Tommy when he asks for it.

  13

  She is to pretend that nothing is wrong. She is to walk with Nannon and Elsa past the Memorial Hall to Towyn Chapel. When they leave her at the vestry door and walk along to the chapel, she is to wait, pretending that she is putting her handkerchief back in her pocket. Once they’ve disappeared through the folding doors at the top, she is to turn around and walk back down the lane to Lewis Terrace. She’s to let herself into Gwelfor, because the door will be on the latch, and she’s to go straight to the kitchen, where he’ll be waiting for her to give him the letter. The worst that will happen is that she will get a telling-off for not going to Sunday school. And even if they do find out they won’t make too much of it, because they think it’s her last Sunday. They don’t know yet that she’s not going away. Only Tommy knows.

  ‘Mari!’ Elsa calls up the stairs. Mari lets the paper flower drop into a saucer of water and watches as the petals open one by one. She carries the saucer over to the dressing table next to the window. Even paper flowers need sunlight. That’s what Lin said when she wrote back. That if Mari takes good care of them, they will last a long, long time, just like real flowers. Perhaps longer. Perhaps forever. And ever. Amen.

  ‘Mari, dere ’mlaen, wnei di!’ Nannon shouts. Nannon doesn’t just save her English for certain people, schoolteachers, say, or tourists; she saves it for certain moods. Welsh is for the milkman, and naughty children, and late-night conversations with Elsa on the other side of the brocade wallpaper in Mari’s bedroom. Welsh is for when Nannon can’t wait any more: ‘Dere lawr nawr, neu fe awn ni hebddot ti!’ Mari runs down the stairs. She doesn’t want to be left behind.

  Elsa holds her hand and walks quickly, as if she wants to get this over with. Elsa doesn’t like chapel, Mari knows that, but she goes because they have to, because everyone else does. Even Frank comes to chapel now. He wears a three-piece suit with his silver watch safe in the breast pocket of his jacket, and shakes hands with the minister. Tommy comes too, although he talks to no one and says nothing, not even mouthing his way through the service, like Frank does. He’s not coming today, though. When Nannon tells Mari that he’s staying home because he’s full of cold, Mari looks at Nannon’s arched eyebrows and thinks, I know.

  ‘People have started guessing,’ Elsa says over her head to Nannon. ‘I can’t face all the polite chit-chat. Not today.’

  ‘Well, it’s difficult not to notice. I can’t let that dress out any more for you.’

  ‘I know. I just thought that when I let Oscar know…’

  ‘Did you think he’d come and get you?’

  ‘No, but I thought he might at least help me get rid of it.’

  ‘You know you don’t mean that, not really.’

  Nannon stops and puts her hand on Elsa’s stomach, spreading her fingers out, as if she’s feeling for something.

  ‘You’re starting to pack in quite tidy now,’ she says.

  Elsa doesn’t reply.

  ‘What is it?’ Nannon says, taking her hands off Elsa’s swollen stomach and putting her gloves back on.

  Nannon puts an arm around Elsa’s back, as if she needs to be supported as she walks.

  ‘Look,’ she says to Elsa. ‘If Oscar didn’t even write back, what’s the point in thinking about ifs and maybes?’

  The envelope in Mari’s pocket rustles against the lining of her coat as she struggles to keep up. They are walking quickly past the hall. A woman in a smart beige coat with a fur trim around the neck rushes over to them, as if she’s been waiting for them. She is holding a handbag made of crocodile skin. Mari doesn’t like its rough, leathery surface. It’s hard to tell where her hand ends and the bag begins.

  ‘Well, Elsa, good news, I hear. You must be so pleased, after everything.’

  Nannon takes the woman’s arm.

  ‘And what about you Margaretta?’ she says. ‘I hear Alfie’s coming back next week. How long’s it been now?’

  The woman answers eagerly and Nannon walks her into the chapel. Elsa takes hold of Mari’s face in her hands and kisses her, a long kiss that lands half on her cheek and half on her lips, and tastes of perfume.

  ‘Off you go now,’ she says.

  The first time Mari looks back, Elsa is standing by the chapel door, looking around her as if she’s lost something, or left something at home, a glove maybe, or her prayer book, and is thinking of going back to get it. Mari waits. The next time she looks up, Elsa is gone.

  Mari doesn’t turn around and walk back down the lane as Tommy told her to. If she does, someone might see her and tell Elsa or Nannon. She walks round the side of the vestry into the trees behind. She ducks through a broken fence and keeps walking. She feels like the boy in the story going into the forest with his pop-gun to hunt down the wolf. When Frank reads it to her his voice drops to its lowest register like a bassoon, and she
feels safe, because she knows he won’t mess around, or play tricks on her, or use funny voices to try and make her laugh. He will just read the story from beginning to end, saying each word slowly and distinctly, waiting for the full meaning of the sentence to come to both of them. He will let her enjoy being lost out in the dangerous meadow, knowing that everything will end as it should. The wolf won’t eat the duck, not really. And when he closes the book he always whistles her a little tune, telling her that that is the bird’s way of letting her know that everyone will live happily ever after.

  So as Mari raises a leg to climb over a stile, she is excited. She raises one hand above her head, cocking her thumb and finger like a rifle and shouting ‘Pow! Pow!’ like the boys she’s seen playing on the beach, shooting and shooting, then playing dead.

  She kicks her way through the oak and sycamore leaves that lie ankle-deep under the trees, slowing her down. She hears a chirruping noise in one of the trees, and wonders if it is a bird like the one in the story, but when she looks up it’s gone. Through the bare branches there’s a ragged piece of paper floating on the air ahead, circling above her head. A buzzard. She’s seen them diving after field mice in the orchard at Gwelfor.

  Although the trees are almost bare, they are so close to each other that the branches have grown into tight knots over her head in places and she can hardly see. A streak of silver fur runs across the path ahead of her. She stops again. She knows it’s only a fox but it feels like bad luck. She starts to run, her heels knocking loudly on the path where the leaves have packed into a tight layer. The trees disappear and she comes out by the edge of the road leading up to the cemetery, and she runs back along the empty streets to Gwelfor.

  When she lets herself in and calls ‘Hello,’ the door closes behind her with a bang, but no one calls back. As she passes the parlour she remembers to look round the door at the battened-down trunk and to think, I won’t need it now. Nannon will have to unpack it, when she finds out that Mari isn’t going away after all.

  In the kitchen, Tommy has fallen asleep sitting at the table.

  She coughs.

  He sits up with a start, a look of terror on his face, the turns in the wood cut into his forehead, Mari doesn’t know how many years’ worth of life in this house imprinted on his face, then jumps up, looks behind the door and slams it shut.

  Then he gets angry. He points at the clock.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? They’ll be back any minute.’

  ‘I got lost,’ she whispers.

  ‘Well, then. Where is it? Give it to me now.’

  ‘What?’ she says. Did the boy in the story leave his pop-gun in the meadow? She tries to remember the cartoon Frank took her to see at the Memorial Hall, his big arm around her as the boy marched his way home again. The wolf didn’t eat the duck, not really.

  Tommy’s face is huge and red, right up against her face.

  ‘The letter,’ he says. ‘I want the letter.’

  And then Mari remembers. She is to give him the letter that her mother wrote to Oscar. The letter that she was told to take to the post office but didn’t. She puts her hand in her pocket. When she takes her hand out again it is empty. It can’t have fallen out. It can’t have.

  ‘Where – the hell – is – it?’ he yells. And then he sees her eyes following a shadow over his shoulder and he turns around. Frank is looking in, frowning, as he passes the window. His mouth opens, as if he’s saying ‘What?’ and she hears his hand on the doorknob. Everything will be all right, she thinks, because in a minute Frank will be on this side of the door.

  ‘Everything will be all right Uncle Frank, won’t it?’ she shouts out.

  The doorknob rattles, then it goes silent.

  Tommy looks back at her. His breath smells of cheese rind.

  ‘Uncle Frank?’ she calls out again.

  The doorknob doesn’t move.

  Tommy moves away from her and opens the back door, onto the slate yard behind the house. Frank’s body has fallen to the ground like a sheet folded up on itself. His head is facing down. He says something, she doesn’t know what, and then he’s quiet. A blackbird sings from a tree at the top of the garden, or it could be a robin, and she can hear Elsa and Nannon walking towards the back door, talking to each other as they always do, each one picking up the end of the other’s sentences, before sighing, and starting all over again, not knowing yet that Frank is dead.

  14

  When Mari asks why Frank died on the wrong side of the kitchen door, Elsa says it was his heart.

  Nannon takes Mari with her to the post office to send a telegram to 38, Galskarth Road. Mari isn’t to say a word to Tommy, Nannon says, or she’ll see the back of Nannon’s hand.

  They are sitting at the end of the pier, Nannon, Elsa and Mari, waiting for the men to come back from the cemetery so they can have tea in the Penwig. Nannon and Elsa look like mirror images of each other, their mouths turned down, Nannon thinner than she was, and Elsa fatter. They sit facing away from the sea, towards the three terraces. There is no sun, and the houses are drained of colour. Even the stones of the quay seem black and lifeless. The sea in the bay and the buoys on its surface are grey and solid, frozen over by Nannon’s still face. The wind blows their words out of their mouths and all around them, so that in the end even Nannon doesn’t speak.

  Mari looks along the pier to the hotel. Nannon had said that the landlady was going to turn the lights on when the men get back from the cemetery, to let Nannon know when it’s time to come in for the tea.

  There is something flickering on the damp surface of the stone underneath the old toll boards. Mari thinks at first it’s a reflected light from the hotel, or a boy playing with a torch as the afternoon draws in early. But it keeps on flickering, moving along the quay towards them. As it moves, the air around it seems to open up. She can hear the sea again, and the gulls overhead. The flicker becomes a shape, moving towards them, growing arms and legs in a black suit, and black polished shoes and hands that wave and a head with rust-coloured hair like corrugated iron, and a freckled face and a mouth that shouts out, ‘Mari, Mari’.The head and legs and waving arms make no sense to her separately, but the voice she knows inside and out. She starts running towards it. She can hear Nannon and Elsa walking quickly behind her. She hears Elsa make a sound that she knows but cannot put a name to. As she runs she feels Frank’s silver watch in her coat pocket ticking out the seconds that separate her and Oscar – slowly, very slowly – counting down until there’s no more time left to wait.

  London, 1996

  Elsa is drifting in and out of sleep, plucking at the eiderdown. Houses, faces, photograph albums and dinner sets clatter by, as if they are being pushed on a tea trolley, and she is shaken along with them, before falling back into her hospital bed.

  She sees Liz, sitting on her trunk at Victoria Station, crying. She touches her on the shoulder. ‘Aren’t you glad to be home?’

  Liz looks up at her. Her face is still tanned, although it is weeks since they were shipped out of Hong Kong.

  ‘Is this home?’ she says. She gestures around her, at the man on the other side of the platform shouting ‘Evening Standard’, in a long wail, looking all around him and at no one in particular, accompanied by the thrumming beat of heels and soles pressing past him to get to the Underground. Some people thrust a coin at him as they go, and fold a paper under one arm. ‘Evening Standard!’ Everything is grey: his voice, their faces, the newsprint. If she didn’t have Oscar she wouldn’t be here; she would have stayed in Hong Kong.

  But she doesn’t have Oscar, she thinks, with a start, as the grey wave of faces comes towards her and passes her by, leaving a misty smudge in their wake where Liz was sitting.

  She has Tommy, and Mari, and they are going home to New Quay and Tommy is talking quickly to her as they make their way to their platform, his voice sharp. Mari follows behind, crying out, ‘Wait for me! Wait for me!’ anxious and fearful.

  Did he think he coul
d buy her off with a pair of suede gloves? Elsa shakes her head again as she picks at the thin hospital blanket. She sees herself getting onto a train with Tommy and finding a place in the restaurant car, still arguing, with a small figure standing behind them, her head down, not whining any more.

  ‘Mari,’ she says.

  ‘What about Mari?’

  It is a man’s voice, not Tommy’s, cheerful, trying to sound cheerful. Tommy’s dead. Buried with full naval pomp in Kenya, the newspapers said, survived by a second wife.

  Elsa opens her eyes. The man is sitting on one of the plastic chairs. He has taken off his camel coat and folded it over the back of the chair, but he is still wearing his scarf. The blue suits his wrinkled, freckled skin and his white hair.

  ‘She studied fashion at college, you know.’ It’s coming back to her now.

  ‘Yes, Elsa dear.’

  ‘Nannon was so proud. Said it was all her doing. She was probably right, too.’

  She looks again at the man for his approval, to check she has said the right thing, and he gives it, nodding quickly, although he looks tired, rubbing his face with the palm of his hand in one downward movement. Elsa remembers the day of Mari’s graduation, the buzz and light on the streets outside the gallery, the knots of people gathered around Mari’s designs. She listens to them talking. ‘And what are you going to do next, young lady?’ someone asks Mari, who is standing with a hand on one hip, dressed in a mini-shift made of tweed with a brash, exposed zip up the back. ‘I’m going to open a shop on the King’s Road, of course.’ Mari’s voice is young, younger than Elsa remembers it.

  ‘Where’s Mari?’ she says. ‘I’ve been trying to phone her.’

  The man coughs, and puts one hand on hers. His wrists and fingers are covered in sunspots, his nails clean. She likes the feel of his skin.

  ‘She’s always like this,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’ says Elsa, and then she sees him, a younger man sitting the other side of the bed. And she lifts a hand instinctively, as if she has seen a ghost, or a man dressed up in a ribboned sheet for a bit of fun on New Year’s Eve, a Mari Lwyd rearing out of the night into her dreams.