As the Earth Turns Silver (21 page)

Sometimes Mei-lin would see him. Late at night when the shop was shut and everyone else was sleeping. She would wake, or perhaps she had never gone to sleep, watching the slight rise and fall of the bedclothes. She would look across at the father of her son, his face wrinkled yet childlike in sleep. Shadows would move across the pale ceiling. A morepork's call. She would rise and go down the stairs towards the kitchen.

Always something would make her turn and open the door into the shop. A flash of light perhaps, a shadow, a sense of someone moving. The first time she had almost cried out. He had been so full-bodied – as if made of muscle and skin and bone – that for a moment she had mistaken him for an intruder. And then she had recognised him. His long, aquiline nose, the way he moved as if at ease in his body.

She had seen him half a dozen times. Sometimes he was bending, looking at a stack of fruit, reaching out as if to take an apple in his hand. Sometimes he was walking away.

Afterwards she would always wonder why she did not call out to him, but he did not see her and, in the moment, somehow, she could not speak. Light would fall from the street lamp through the shop window, casting pools of brightness across the room, everywhere half-remembered shadows. She would look again and he would be gone.

She did not tell anyone. They had found another shop in Tory Street, a little smaller, but without lives that needed to be forgotten. She wondered what would happen after they left. Would he still reach out as if to take fruit in his hand and find only shoes or bottles of elixir or, perhaps, nothing? Would he know where to find them?

She would look out the window into darkness, into shadowed light, then turn and walk back again, close the door behind her. In the kitchen she would pour half a cup of cool boiled water from the kettle, drink, then slowly walk back up the stairs.

Katherine was surprised to see her at the door. ‘Please,' she said. ‘Come in.'

She made tea. Poured it weak and black.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I have no cake or biscuits to offer you. The children are gone and I . . .'

Mrs Wong smiled. Her eyes were soft, warm. It did not matter. ‘I see you,' she said. ‘By tree.'

‘Yes,' Katherine said. ‘I'm sorry.'

Mrs Wong smiled. ‘No sorry,' she said, then after a pause, ‘do you know Moon Festival?'

‘Yes,' Katherine said. Yung had told her about the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the night each year when the moon is fullest, when Chinese families come together to eat and drink and gaze at the moon. He'd shown her a Chinese calendar – a small, fat block of pages, one for each day, the years, months, days all signified by numbers. How do you live in two different times? she'd thought. In two different worlds.

‘I make moon cake,' Mrs Wong said. She took a brown paper bag from her basket, gave it to Katherine. ‘No good. No good cooking.'

Katherine saw the flush of pleasure on Mrs Wong's face. She understood that she had made the cakes herself, that this was something she did very well. There were two inside the bag, each of them wrapped in greaseproof.

Katherine brought out plates, a knife, napkins. Yung had given her moon cakes. He'd told her the Chinese gave them to family, to friends. Always an even number.

She cut one in half. They ate quietly.

Katherine did not know what to say and yet she realised she liked this woman.

As she left, Mrs Wong told her they were moving. ‘Tory Street,' she said. ‘By Stein's pawnshop.'

Katherine watched her open the gate and close it. She had not been back to the shop all these months. She raised a hand in the slightest wave, watched her walk away.

On the night of the full moon, Katherine walked through the city, through the gardens between Cambridge and Kent Terraces. She stopped at the statue of Queen Victoria and placed her cheek on the cold granite pedestal.

‘Come,' he'd said, and Katherine turned. She could almost feel the warmth of his hand.

She walked to the harbour and along the parade. What had he said? Why did people die? Not of drinking. Not of driving motorcars . . .

She climbed the steps of the band rotunda and gazed at the moon reflected in black water. At the scattered lights of the city.

People died because they failed to go out on dangerous water. Because they failed to gaze at the earth . . . as it turned overnight to silver . . .

She looked up at the stars in the great expanse of blackness.

Where are you? Where are you now?

She walked back down the steps and around to the water's edge. Dipped her hand in its coolness.

Among the rocks she found a patch of fine stones. She smoothed them with her palm, then wrote with her finger: three small words.

From her coat pocket she withdrew a paper bag. The cake was smooth, glossy, with a Chinese design – perhaps a word – pressed into the satiny pastry. She traced her finger along the grooves of language and wondered how it translated.

Again from her pocket she drew a small bone-handled knife. She sat down and carefully she cut the cake into quarters. Pieces of yellow moon fell from its centre. Salted duck egg, he'd told her. Sweet red bean paste surrounding a boiled, salty yolk. She looked up at the moon. Sometimes she'd seen it when it was yellow, but tonight it was white and very large.

The bean paste looked black, smooth as oily water. She took one quarter and tasted its sweetness, its heaviness on her tongue. The gritty saltiness of the moon. She licked her fingers.

The coolness of the stones seeped through her woollen coat, through her skirt and petticoats. The southerly was picking up, moving through her hair, over her cold face, her damp fingers. She placed the remaining three pieces of cake inside the O of the middle word in the stones, stood up, and put the knife into the paper bag and back in her right pocket. From the left she withdrew a sprig of jasmine. Breathed in the lingering sweetness, placed it on top of her offerings.

Would her words lift and travel over the harbour out to sea? North to Flanders, to the still-warm dead, the freshly shocked and the living? South to the dusty tomes of Dunedin? Out to that other place where he dwelt now, she knew not where?

She looked again at the moon, water, at the earth turned silver. She remembered the flutes he fashioned out of bamboo; the violin he'd played in his room one night (before his brother knocked on the door and yelled at him in Chinese), the small round belly of the instrument, one side covered with snakeskin – the dark patterning of the scales reminiscent of gardens, desire, the plucking of fruit – its belly held between his legs, the way his hand, arm, body moved the bow back and forth between the two strings. She could still hear the tune,
Butterfly Lovers
, he'd said, the way it haunted her dreams. But she could not sing it, hum it. All she could bring forth was something that rose out of her bones, her voice thrown out into the night air –
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should auld acquaintance be forgot in the days of auld lang syne . . .

Katherine knew it would happen, and yet as she passed by on Adelaide Road it still shocked her: the empty shop, its dark windows like dead eyes, the FOR LEASE sign fraying about the edges, like the edges of the mind.

To think of, to long for.
‘
Si
,' he'd said, the sound of the word in Chinese. Now she could not remember how it had started, how they'd come to this word. Somehow the reason had been lost – all she had left was the journey.

He'd come to her from behind, so that her back leaned into his body, his arms around her. He took her hand and wrote onto her palm with his finger – the word for
field
, and underneath,
heart
– and she remembered the characters of his name. Was this what the Chinese longed for, she thought, that piece of land called home always falling over the heart? She could feel the quaver in her voice, the smallness of it speaking into the air. ‘Do you . . .' she said, but now he was kissing her hair, the back of her neck, moving across to her ear, his tongue gentle, insistent, flicking over the lobe. She was shaking, just a little, a shoot coming up from darkness into a slight breeze. She could feel her body loosening, turning, his lips on her eyelid, her nose, the side of her mouth. And she was kissing him, small star-kisses that opened, unfurled inside her.

On the bed he asked if he was hurting her, the way he tugged her upper lip, tenderly, into the warmth of his mouth. ‘No,' she whispered, almost afraid to look into his face. Almost afraid to see the way he looked at her.

She stood outside the shop, staring in at the blank walls, the empty shelves.
There is nothing more empty than that which was full.
For a moment she thought she saw oranges piled high, apples, pears, the intense green of spinach and silver beet, bananas hanging from the window. For a moment she thought she saw movement: his hand cradling an apple, the long fingers that had written on her palm, traced her lips.

She closed her eyes. She'd always had so many thoughts inside her, thoughts that never came out. Always felt so awkward in her pale, freckled skin. But now she understood. He'd given her language: his language, a new opening into her own. And he'd brought her home in her body. He'd brought her home.

A tree shifts in the wind, just a little, the way a southerly presses its shape into the trunk, traces its coolness over branches, messes with the dark and light of leaves. Blood-flowers. Day after day, needles of blood fall, a scattering of red on the earth.

Katherine McKechnie

Robbie can still hear the shelling, can still see the flares – crimson, yellow, green – the earth vomiting flame. They're coated with mud; it fills their kit and boots and plasters their clothes to the skin; it stops up their rifles. They're wading through black water up to the waist, the duckboards washed away. With each step, mud sucks them to the knees. A few days ago the man in front, Tracy, fell in a shell hole and disappeared, and they couldn't find him, just two bubbles that broke the black surface. There are arms, legs sticking out of the mud walls, sometimes a black face with its staring white eyes. Rats as big as rabbits slip over the parapets, their fat oily bodies slow from feasting. The putrefaction makes you gag, but you've got to inhale. The smell clings to your skin and you never wash it out.

The rain won't stop falling. With each shell the mud shakes like black blancmange. Robbie can't feel his feet any more, despite the greasing with whale-oil. Jimmy's feet swelled double, and then the screaming started as the toes turned putrid and the flesh fell away.

They're cold. They're hungry and wet and bloody cold. And the lice drive them crazy – they crawl out of the seams, out of every seam, you run your nail over your seams, crack, crack, crack, to break their backs, they crawl over the skin, and if you crack them with your nail blood comes out. Your own blood. One minute Robbie's talking to Billy, they're talking about getting out of this hell-hole, getting back to Billy's girl, Linda, she's got a dimple just here, you've never met her have you, Rob, you know, he says, you won't believe this but she's got red hair, she looks a bit like your . . . and the next, a flare's gone up lighting the whole goddamned landscape – shell holes, water, barbed wire – everything bathed in silver light. The sound of shells, artillery, dirt flying up. Robbie feels something warm, soft on his cheek. He drops, turns to Billy. He's got a look of surprise on his face, Billy, staring eyes, a mash of brains spilling out.

Robbie. Robbie. It's raining, it's always raining, and the walls keep on shifting and the doors hang loose. A woman is calling, she's calling your name, and you know that voice, you know it, but you can't work out who.

The doctor told Edie it could be on account of the shells. ‘A bursting shell creates a vacuum, and when the air rushes back in it disturbs the cerebro-spinal fluid.' He told her this as though he were breaking good news, as though he had just won a large sum of money. He grinned from a mouth jammed too full of teeth.

Edie tried not to stare. His mouth reminded her of an ill-kept graveyard, tombstones untended and falling over. She stared at the top button of his white coat. She still had a year and a half left at Medical School and felt flattered that he spoke as a colleague. After all, how did his enthusiasms differ from her own? Yet Dr Fisher's lack of tact in his diagnosis of her brother seemed almost indecent, or as Mrs Newman would have said, it indicated a certain lack of breeding.

‘Geoffrey,' he said, ‘call me Geoffrey.' He looked into her eyes, shook her hand again, holding it longer than necessary. ‘There are, of course, other possible explanations,' he said as she extricated her fingers. ‘French and German neurologists don't believe it's caused by organic trauma any more. They say shell-shock's a
functional nervous disorder arising in a premorbid personality . . .
'

Premorbid personality.
Edie had never thought to apply such principles to her family.

‘The symptoms,' Dr Fisher continued, ‘are actually the same as for traumatic neurasthenia.' He smiled. ‘What the common man might call hysteria.

‘The latest opinion is that any circumstance, including shells exploding, might bring about onset. But the predisposing cause is fear combined with gradual psychic exhaustion . . . of course, here we are dealing with a neuropathic individual.'

Edie thought about Robbie.
Neuropathic?

‘So what is the course of treatment?' she asked.

‘Encouragement, persuasion, fresh air, exercise, nutritious food, work – yes, it's the work that's important, that's what Dr King would say . . .'

Dr Truby King.
After Mrs Newman's ravings, it was a disappointment the superintendent was away in England. Edie wanted to see for herself, to compare the myth with the man. Now she would have to wait until their class visit next year. She'd heard Dr King would discuss cases of insanity, even parade his favourite patient – the infamous Lionel Terry. Apparently, Terry would put on quite a show. With guards on either side, he'd give a speech, recite poetry and have students calling for more, wondering what he was in for.

‘. . . we'll get Robert out in the garden,' Dr Fisher – Geoffrey – was saying, ‘digging round the rhododendrons, tending the beans and lettuces.' He grinned. ‘By the time he gets out of here, he'll be a right Chinaman, you'll see. Come, I'll take you to him.'

He was sitting in an armchair, staring out the windows onto the garden. Even with sunlight falling across his face, his thin body, he looked cold. He had a greyish pallor that seemed inconsistent with the brightness of his hair, his freckled skin. And his clothes fell over him as if loosely wrapping a collection of bones.

Edie spoke his name, but he did not turn his head. ‘Robbie,' she said, her voice an echo. She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him, searched his face, looked into the opaque blue of his eyes.

Even after Dr Fisher's descriptive lecture, it was a shock. Robbie had always been so annoying, so full of himself. She remembered a game they played after dinner, their father conjuring words like a magician. She should have loved it. After all, she was the one who got up quietly in the night, took the dilapidated dictionary down from the shelf and read it by flickering candlelight. But she could see her father's impatience – letters and words already forming on his tongue, archaic derivations, obscure meanings ready to leap in ambush from behind his waxed moustache – and even as a word and its meanings rose in her throat, she'd swallow them down again, almost crying for the lack of something amusing to say.

It was Robbie who loved the game. Robbie and their father. She would watch the delight in her father's eyes at Robbie's
stupid
responses, the way he praised him, laughed with him, played with him, and she'd hope and pray that her brother would die or be crippled or simply disappear, that her father would forget he ever existed, that now he'd tell
her
his jokes and outrageous tales, make
her
toys from balsa wood and empty cotton reels, take
her
to cricket at the Basin.

Even after their father died, Edie still resented her brother. Their mother fussed over him, worried about him, fought with him. He was the braggart, the larrikin, by his loudness the centre of the known world.

She looked into Robbie's blank eyes. He was like the leather cover she'd wiped dirt from, wrapped in tissue and hidden at the bottom of her drawer – all its words ripped out.

She took Robbie's hand, but he did not respond.

This was what she studied. Life. Medical disorders. Death.

The day before at the anatomy museum she'd studied wax models of the human embryo. One had a round, protruding forehead, wide-set eyes, a squat nose, and an open mouth with tongue poking out. The bulbous face reminded her of something she couldn't quite put her finger on – some mythical beast, something not human . . .

She pressed Robbie's hand. He turned, but there was no flicker of recognition.

She had worked at the hospital and seen horrific injuries and diseases. During the flu epidemic she'd watched patients spit pus and phlegm, greyish-white and bloody; watched them drown in their own secretions. They lost their hair, fingernails, toenails; lapsed into coma or delirium. Great strapping lads and men in their prime, boys like George McAlister, the varsity wrestling champ, the suddenness of it all, his skin translating to deep crimson then, just one look away, and he'd turned, in an instant, jet-black . . .

And yet this was worse. This was her punishment – her prayer had been answered.

She stared at Robbie and did not know what to say. Realised she didn't know what she'd say even if he were well.

She'd stood on the wharf waving goodbye to Dr Bennett, just as she knew her mother must have done to Robbie. What had this war done? Dr Bennett had risked everything serving the wounded in Serbia. Bombs landed beside her, she contracted malaria, her beloved brother died at Passchendaele . . .

Edie held Robbie's hand. She opened her mouth, let words stumble out.