One Whole and Perfect Day

by Judith Clarke

  Emerging from the park where he always went to eat his lunchtime sandwiches, Charlie Lee saw his only child, his once-precious daughter, kissing a great Australian lout in the middle of the street. A long-haired lout, the sort who, if employed at all, would always be late with his tax. Charlie stood stock-still, his fists clenched by his side, waves of rage and shock rolling through his blood. This was what they left home for, he thought bitterly, these girls . . .

  He wouldn’t tell Rose, he decided, crossing the road and striding down towards his office. He wouldn’t tell Rose because what Clara did now was none of their business, she wasn’t – she wasn’t their daughter anymore.

  23

  CHIKO ROLLS

  Stan was raging: the blasted fish and chip shop had gone, a brash new computer store in its place! He walked the length of Good Street like his mum had done seventy years back when she’d trudged from one greengrocer’s to another, looking for a penny off a pound of beans – only Stan was looking for a takeaway.

  And when he found one, it was the wrong sort. He realised this the very moment he entered the shop: posters with Chinese writing on the walls, and in the shining trays beneath the glass-topped counter, noodles and vegetables, bony objects in a thick black sauce, tiny white pastie things . . .

  The old woman behind the counter smiled at him. ‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘Yes?’

  Stan flushed and pointed to the pasties, they looked the safest. ‘Um, what’s in those?’ Now it was Marigold’s voice he heard in his ear; Marigold on the evening he always thought of as The Night of the Chooks’ Feet. May’s birthday, when Marigold had taken them to that big Chinese restaurant in town. She’d ordered the Banquet. Stan’s fork (he’d refused the chopsticks) had hovered above his bowl. ‘But they’re feet!’ he’d protested. ‘Something’s feet. I’m not eating feet!’ Though he couldn’t help noticing how May was tucking in quite happily, and Lily, and the boy who’d still been his grandson back then, so that Stan, fork down, arms folded sternly across his chest, had felt an odd little sense of being left behind.

  ‘In these?’ The small voice dragged him back to the present, to the old lady behind the counter beaming at him, pointing to the pastie things. ‘In these?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Wegetarian.’

  They were out, then. After the shock he’d suffered (the place where he’d grown up vanished while his back was turned) Stan felt he needed meat. Meat of some kind, anyway. ‘Got any Chiko rolls?’

  ‘Ah, chicken!’ She pointed to a tray of skewered meat. ‘Chilli or satay?’

  Stan didn’t fancy either. ‘Not chicken,’ he said. ‘Chiko.’

  ‘Chiko?’ She leaned her head to one side, eyes twinkling up at him. He had an uncomfortable feeling she thought he was a fool.

  ‘A Chiko roll,’ said Stan. His mouth filled with saliva. Even to say the words brought the taste of chewy yellow batter, and that unique and unforgettable grey mince. ‘You wonder what it is,’ May always said.

  ‘They’re yellow,’ Stan added helpfully. ‘Yellow rolls.’ He sketched a quick cylindrical shape with his hands.

  ‘Ah! Rolls!’

  ‘Yeah? You’ve got some?’ Stan felt an absurd pulse of relief, as if he’d feared even the food he’d once eaten might have vanished into history.

  ‘Spring rolls! There!’ She pointed.

  ‘No, not spring rolls. Chiko.’

  She looked puzzled, and Stan’s heart wasn’t in it anyway; he knew there was no place left round here where you could get a decent honest Chiko roll. ‘Okay, I’ll take two,’ he sighed, pointing to the spring rolls.

  Outside in the street, he thought they tasted funny. ‘Okay, not funny,’ he said to an invisible Lily, or perhaps it was Lonnie, or Marigold, or May – all of them somehow eager to make out he was some sort of bigot. ‘I didn’t mean funny, I meant different, that’s all. Different to what I’m used to, to what I – grew up with.’

  ‘Grew up with!’ He could almost hear Lily’s contemptuous snort.

  This trip back to the old place wasn’t working. The streets he’d walked with his mum had the same names, and that was about it; there was nothing else left to jog his memory, nothing left to bring back her face, and the forgotten colour of her eyes, which had seemed so important for him to remember. Stan slumped down on a grey metal bus seat – they’d been made of wood in his day – and stared across the road, where a Chinese woman with a basket over her arm was gazing into the window of a big white sweetshop. As he watched, a plump tabby cat strolled from the doorway and weaved itself around her legs. Stan smiled as she bent to stroke it, recalling how, seventy years ago, he and his mate Archie Lewis used to take the micky out of old Jimmy Chan down the fruit shop: ‘Fattening him up for Christmas dinner, eh Jimmy?’ Arch would say as Jimmy stood on his doorstep with Snowball, his beloved white Persian cat, cradled in his arms. And Stan would join in with, ‘Watch out, puss!’

  Geez, they’d been a pair of rough little buggers! ‘Watch out, puss!’ he chortled, remembering how Jimmy used to call back to them, ‘I save you his tail, boys! Best bit!’

  Across the road the Chinese woman turned from the sweetshop window and glared at him. Struth! He’d gone and said it right out loud! ‘Watch out, puss!’ And she’d heard and thought he was having a go at her, warning the cat she was after him for lunch. And now she was crossing the street, heading in his direction, still glaring. She was after him!

  Like the ten-year-old he’d been back in the days of Jimmy Chan, Stan sprang to his feet and bolted. Down the street and round the corner, through the yard of the Baptist Church and then down the dark little alley which mercifully hadn’t vanished with the rest of the place. Then out into the sunlight and the trampled scrubby grass of the park, where, winded, he sank down on the bench, took a big checked hanky from his pocket and dabbed it at his sweating face. He reckoned it’d been a full forty years since he’d run as fast as that. He glanced back towards the alley, the briefest of glances because the Chinese woman would never work out where he’d gone: you had to grow up round here to know about that alley.

  Why had he said such a thing?

  ‘Yes, why?’ Lily’s voice demanded in his head.

  ‘Didn’t mean to say it, did I?’ muttered Stan. ‘Not out loud, anyway. I was just remembering old times. Didn’t intend her to hear me, did I?’ Stan fought hard against a sudden chuckle. The look on that poor woman’s face! Thank God Lily hadn’t really been here with him; he’d never have heard the end of it. ‘You’re such a racist, Pop!’

  Stan leaned back against the seat. What did she know? Old Jimmy Chan had been a mate of his and Archie’s, not that Lil would ever believe it. Hadn’t they looked after Snowball that time Jimmy had to go off to Temora because his eldest daughter was having a baby there? Looked after him really well; fed him cooked liver, fish-heads, nothing but the best. And never – Stan couldn’t stop the chuckle now, it burst up from his throat, set his whole body rocking – never said a single racist word to him.

  ‘Aaargh!’ Stan pressed a hand to his ribs because a sudden pain had flowered there. Too far to the side to be a heart attack (they were in the middle): a stitch, this was, he thought, a simple stitch from running, that was all.

  Rose was furious. Absolutely furious. Didn’t they ever learn anything, these old Aussie racists, with their red faces and bristly soldier’s hair? Didn’t they know you couldn’t call out insults in the street?

  Because that’s what it had been; she wasn’t born yesterday. The kind of childish insult Rose remembered from her primary school because all the kids back then thought if you were Chinese you ate cats – and rats, and dogs and snakes and spiders, though especially, for some reason, cats. Well, that was then and this was now, and the old bigot wasn’t getting away with it! She’d had enough: this was the twenty-first century and she should be able to stroke a cat like anyone else, without having some backward old fool suggesting she was sizing it up for dinner. ‘Hey!’ she called, though t
he old guy was already halfway down the street. Heading for the alley, she’d take a bet on it! Rose smiled grimly. ‘Think I eat cats, do you?’ she muttered, and set off in hot pursuit, round the corner, through the churchyard, down the alley, out into the park, where she spotted him at once. ‘You!’ she cried, trotting briskly over the grass towards the bench, ‘Hey, you!’

  When he looked up his face was grey and she saw he was holding one hand against the side of his chest. At once Rose forgot about vengeance. ‘Are you all right?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Just a – bit of a stitch. That’s all it is.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Rose saw the colour was coming back into his cheeks. He was all right; she could still tell him off. Have a bit of him. ‘Run away too fast, eh?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  His colour grew deeper. ‘Look, I –’

  Rose could almost swear the scalp beneath his bristly hair was turning scarlet. ‘Calling out stuff!’ she scolded. ‘In the street! At your age! You ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, surprising her.

  ‘You know? What kind of answer’s that?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Stan wiped the back of his hand across his flaming forehead. ‘I know how I sounded.’

  ‘Sounded? That all? Making out I eat cats because I’m Chinese!’

  ‘Ah no, it wasn’t that. It was only, I was remembering –’

  Suddenly it was all too much effort to explain. It would take an age to tell her about Jimmy Chan and Snowball, and Lily always saying he was racist, and the old place vanishing, like Chiko rolls and the colour of Mum’s eyes, and friends he’d grown up with, and Lonnie –

  ‘Don’t know what came over me,’ he offered simply. ‘Saying stuff like that.’

  ‘Something stupid,’ the Chinese lady said to him. Then she smiled and sat down beside him, her eyes studying his face. ‘You from round here?’

  ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘But I grew up here.’

  ‘Same here,’ she told him, stabbing a small shoe into the dusty grass in front of their bench, as if she meant, right there, so that Stan imagined a tiny Chinese baby in a lacy shawl, lying on the grass.

  ‘Long time ago now,’ Rose sighed, remembering the little house on Troy Street and how her mum used to wait at the gate for her to come home from school. Too much had happened since then, so much she could never tell it all; though for some odd reason she’d have liked to pass a little bit on to this dopey old Australian who’d grown up where she was born.

  ‘Ah, you’re a chicken compared to me,’ said Stan gallantly.

  ‘Not so young. Got a grown-up daughter at the university. Clara.’ Rose’s eyes filled suddenly with tears.

  Clara. The name rang a distant bell for Stan. Where had he heard it, recently? He stared out at the horizon and concentrated until it came to him: May calling out through the kitchen window while he was mowing the lawn. ‘Lonnie’s got a girlfriend! She’s called Clara.’

  Only this wouldn’t be the same Clara. Couldn’t be . . .

  There was a small sniffly sound beside him and he saw the Chinese lady was crying, big slow tears rolling from her eyes.

  Stan was horrified. It was his fault, it must be. He’d upset her back there in the street. He took the big checked hanky from his pocket again, pressing it into her hand. ‘Sorry it’s a bit crumpled. Look, what I said back there, um, about cats –’

  ‘As if I’m crying about that,’ she scoffed, dabbing at her eyes.

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘What do you take me for? I’m crying about my Clara.’

  ‘She got a rubbish boyfriend?’ Stan didn’t know why he’d said that and the Chinese lady looked at him in surprise. ‘Boyfriend? I don’t think so. I – oh, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know anything, see? That’s the trouble. She left home in the summer, and –’ she was in tears again. ‘I’ve never even seen her room!’

  ‘Her room?’

  ‘In that hall of residence where she lives. I keep on worrying it’s a lonely kind of room. You know, the sort that echoes –’

  Like Lonnie’s place might be. ‘Well, go and have a gander at it then,’ he told her. ‘Set your mind at rest.’

  ‘She hasn’t invited me.’

  There was no way in the world that Lonnie would ever invite him over. Not the way things stood.

  ‘Invitation be blowed!’ he said stoutly. ‘You’re her mum, you’ve got a right.’

  She looked up at him and her big glossy eyes reminded Stan of his mum’s; they had exactly that same bright soft expression, though they were a different shape and colour. Mum’s eyes had been . . . they’d been a deep blue, almost navy, and other times dark grey; that colour you saw in the sea on certain stormy days.

  Like Lon’s eyes.

  Of course! Lonnie had Mum’s eyes! How had he forgotten?

  Because Lon wasn’t his grandson anymore, that’s why! He didn’t want to think of Lon: he didn’t want to think he’d come all the way here because it was the colour of Lon’s eyes he was really trying to remember. Of course he hadn’t! Stan was glad when the Chinese lady touched his arm and asked, ‘You really think I’ve got the right? To go there? You don’t think it would be – invasive?’

  ‘Invasive!’ Stan snorted. ‘Invasive’ was the kind of word he’d heard from Lil and Lonnie. ‘Who do they think we are? The enemy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply, and they both laughed, and she handed him the checked hanky so he too could wipe his eyes, and Stan had the definite feeling that he’d made a friend.

  24 THE DRAMA SOCIETY

  Lily knocked on the door of the staffroom and waited.

  No one came.

  She waited longer, a little uneasily, for there were girls who developed crushes on teachers, and came to the staff-room door pretending they had homework problems, simply for the delight of speaking to Mr Hallam or Mr James. Lily glanced nervously up and down the corridor – surely no one could mistake her for that kind of person? After all, it was Mr Corcoran she needed to see, and no one could suspect any girl, even a weird Year 8, of having a crush on Mr Corcoran, who was stout and middle-aged, and quite bald except for a tuft of gingery hair perched above each ear. He looked like a dozy old koala.

  Mr Corcoran taught Drama, he ran the Drama Society, he organised the school production.

  Daniel Steadman was in the Drama Society; Daniel Steadman was playing Hamlet in the school production. ‘Share his interests,’ Bestie said.

  Lily knocked on the door again, and this time it opened, the merest little slit, and the cold grey eye of Ms Jossop, the Phys Ed teacher, peered out at Lily. ‘Yup?’

  ‘I – I’d like to talk to Mr Corcoran.’

  Ms Jossop chuckled. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s about the school production,’ said Lily quickly.

  ‘School production, eh? Good excuse.’ Ms Jossop winked at her.

  ‘What?’

  Ms Jossop winked again.

  ‘No, really,’ protested Lily. Was Ms Jossop mad? Or was she simply joking? ‘I just want to ask him about joining up,’ she said, trying to keep a note of exasperation from her voice. ‘I don’t take Drama so I couldn’t ask him in class and –’

  ‘Jerry!’ Ms Jossop hollered back into the room. ‘Fan of yours out here!’

  A fan. Lily’s face flamed. It was still flaming when Mr Corcoran appeared at the door, wobbling a little, as if his ample flesh hadn’t settled from the effort of rising from his orange vinyl chair. ‘Yup?’

  Why did they all say ‘yup’?

  ‘I’m Lily Samson, Mr Corcoran, from 10B.’

  ‘Don’t take that lot.’

  ‘I know, Mr Corcoran. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Too late in the year to change classes.’

  ‘I know. I’ve come about joining the Drama Society, and the school production. It says on the noticeboard, ‘New members welcome.’


  ‘Old notice, that. Cast list for the production’s already filled.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean the cast, Mr Corcoran. I meant, something sort of – subsidiary.’

  ‘Subsidiary?’ Mr Corcoran scratched at an orange tuft, as if he wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of the word, or, had he been a real koala, the right kind of gum leaf to chew. Wasn’t Drama like English? Shouldn’t he know what ‘subsidiary’ meant? ‘Something sort of minor,’ Lily amended, just in case.

  ‘No miners in Hamlet, lassie. Only gentlemen and soldiers.’

  Could he be serious? ‘I meant something like scene painting,’ she ventured. ‘Do you need anyone for scene painting?’

  ‘Year 7 has that dubious pleasure, lassie. Thursday nights, it is, in the art room.’ He snorted, his broad chest expanding slightly beneath a T-shirt which said, ‘Yorick Rules.’ ‘Reckon their parents think they’re safely down the pub. You want to join in, you’re welcome.’

  Year 7s! Lily swallowed. Not even for Daniel Steadman would she spend an evening with Year 7s! Not for love, or money, or even life itself. Besides, she wanted Wednesday afternoons, in the school auditorium, when the play was rehearsing and Daniel would be there. ‘Lighting?’ she asked.

  ‘Bunch of weirdos from Year 9 Advanced Science. Wouldn’t recommend it, lassie. Not if you value your personal safety.’

  What did that mean? Lily knew she didn’t want to find out. ‘Well, perhaps I –’ She tailed off, noticing uneasily that Mr Corcoran was staring at her. Male teachers of Mr Corcoran’s age always made her feel uneasy. Her dad had been a teacher; that’s where her mum had met him, when they were both at teachers college, before Mum had changed over to Psychology. If Mum had studied Psychology before she’d met Oliver DeZoto, would she have married him?

  Lily had no idea, but whenever a male teacher of middle age stared at her she half expected him to say, ‘Lily Samson? I was at college with your dad.’ Then he might start telling her all kinds of stuff she really didn’t want to know, because why would you want to know stuff about someone who’d left home before you were even born? Who couldn’t even wait round to see if you’d be a girl or boy? Who always got your birthday three months late?