Five Bells (11 page)

Pei Xing gazed with moist delight at the world anew. Her big brother grabbed snow and moulded shapes and flung it
around him, or tipped the branches of trees so that he created his own snowfall. But Pei Xing wanted the snow to remain forever as it first was, a damp hush and a pale shadow, just fallen, undisturbed.

Within hours it became slippery mush, dismally dissolving. But the early morning vision was enough to confirm the bright promise of the scarlet coat.

 

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Pei Xing's teacher who so loved the tales of the Great March was one of the first to be attacked and then disappear. By chance she had seen him in the winter of 1967, assembled with other schoolteachers on a basketball court. He had been badly beaten, and one of his eyes had been crushed. Eye matter and blood ran down his face. He wore a dunce's hat, a high white cone, and a board around his neck that announced his crime as being a ‘running dog imperialist'. By then Pei Xing was no longer surprised. Her parents had been taken, the schools had been closed, everyone for whom she had felt affection was experiencing persecution. But this teacher – Comrade Lu – who had conducted their singing with such enthusiasm, who had been moved to tears telling of the 170,000 souls who died on the Great March, seemed somehow more unlikely as a generalised target.

Comrade Teacher Lu was made to kneel with the others, his eyes downcast, and a crowd of Red Guards surrounded them and shouted slogans of hate. Pei Xing had retreated. She did not want to witness another denunciation of ‘black counter-revolutionaries'. Nor did she want some quiver of complicity to arise between her and Comrade Lu. Sympathy was dangerous in those dark and volatile times. Afterwards she was haunted by what her fellow students had done – so many had participated in beatings and murders. And afterwards it was not only what she had witnessed but what she
had heard, that she could not forget. Her literature teacher was found dead, covered with bruises, her mouth was stuffed with torn pages from an English language book. Her arms were tied backwards in the excruciating ‘flying a plane' position. With scant details, this was still unbearable knowledge.

 

Afraid to attract attention, Pei Xing walked quickly past the large character posters flapping in the wind, and when she was out of sight of the Red Guards broke into a panicked run. She felt she was running into shadows and from all she held dear, but she was only one of many, very many, who were told to repudiate past histories. The campaign of the Four Olds – destroying Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas – was already well under way; the slogans of the Four Olds were daubed all over the city.

On the door of her home had appeared the sign: ‘
Breaking down the Four Olds; setting up the Four News!
' after which the Red Guards had entered, tearing photographs, smashing vinyl records, crushing underfoot her parents' small collection of porcelain figurines. She heard a man call out the slogan on their door, as if reciting Tang Dynasty poetry or a line of sutras from a holy book.

Lao was not at home that day and Pei Xing had worried about his absence. Her mother was crying. Her father was brave. But she saw him tremble with distress when they pulled the books from the shelves and hurled them through the window to be consumed in a bonfire. He had always believed in ideas, not things, words, not new overcoats, but the violent destruction of his possessions must have been more painful than he could show. And they all had yet to learn that possessions would be the least of the destruction.

The visit to the First Department Store in 1958, the purchase of the coat and the advent of snow, was the last period, for many years, of unalloyed happiness. Years of famine followed. The snack sellers disappeared from the streets, even the markets of Shanghai became places of scarcity. Black-market trading depleted the little money her parents had saved. Pei Xing's father, always a thin man, became even thinner, living, it seemed, only on cigarettes, so that when the Cultural Revolution began and the Red Guards came to take him away, he was already half gone. As someone educated abroad and used to negotiating meanings in English and Russian, he was bound to be considered a class traitor and a running dog of imperialists. The weighty terms written in large characters on banners outside their house, the line on the door about the Four Olds, all seemed to bear no relation to her harried parents, but more especially to her father, whose skin was like parchment and who was already translating himself into another world when the Revolution began. He was already thinning in Chinese style, like lines of brushstrokes, a narrow falling vertical, and right to left.

On the train from Kings Cross they were sweeping around a bay. There were so many bays, peninsulas and headlands in central Sydney. The city geography was fashioned by the irregular shape of the Harbour. It was vaster than Catherine had anticipated, and an improbable cornflower blue. She glimpsed the scintillating water, and the old houses of Woolloomooloo. She saw the pearly backs of the Finger Wharves and a scarf of green grass, rising gently, that was called The Domain.

Woolloomooloo
; she must look it up somewhere. What could it possibly mean? It had to be Aboriginal, she supposed. Would
she Google Woolloomooloo? Brendan would have liked that: to Google Woolloomooloo. Brendan would have made a joke of it, or written a neat lyric poem. Or a song, perhaps:

By the time Catherine arrived at Central Station she realised she should have walked; it was a sunny day, downhill, and with much to explore. But she found the Inner West line and set off for the Quay. This was her London habit, to assume that the Tube was the Way, to dive underground, then up again, when one might just as well have walked. Central Station was abuzz with the Saturday morning crowd. Calls rang out, loud voices, random vowels and consonants. In what must have been, she later realised, a synesthesic moment, the voices seemed orange, bright orange, and gleaming like graphite.

 

Patrick Kavanagh, that was one of his favourites. Brendan loved Kavanagh's poem ‘On Raglan Road' and the way it was sung in pubs and by motley, all-and-sundry Irish bands.

All those Dublin poets. A'moanin' and a'groanin' and thinking forever about love, letting grief be a fallen leaf and crying into their beer.

Brendan had taught her the words of ‘On Raglan Road'; it
was one of hundreds of poems he had committed to memory. A ‘deathless ditty,' he called it.

‘When I die,' he said, ‘my brain will be riddled with poetry. You should get some surgeon to cut it into lacey slices and find the poetry there.'

They talked about death a lot, when they were young. It was easy then, so daft and distant, and so unimaginable.

‘It's Irish,' he said. ‘We're a sad-hearted lot, it's why we sing; it's why we rhyme.'

‘And you're a walkin'-talkin' all-Irish cliché,' she responded.

Brendan laughed, pleased his little sister was so cheeky and bolshie.

As a university student Catherine moved into a shared house not far from Raglan Road, just to be located where the song had arisen. Brendan said it was fucking brilliant,
fucking brilliant, it was!
to walk each day up Raglan Road, Patrick Kavanagh's road.

Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, Ireland, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, the radiant mess of blinking stars, the deep black, the filigree night, the whole endless Universe.

She would walk up the road humming the song, turn left at Pembroke, into Upper Baggot and Lower Baggot and on to St Stephen's Green; she would waste time there when she should be studying, meet her friends at Tonehenge or at the bandstand behind the bust of James Joyce. She wandered the tidy pathways, fancy-free, gallivanting, smooching, mucking about and canoodling. With her friend Dymphna Doyle she met boys at the pub, at Hartigan's, and drank too much. Her mother, had she known, would have said she had a ‘reputation'. And with her brother she sat in shady corners with a packet of digestives and a thermos of tea and listened to him talk about politics and poetry.

 

Once – she must have been twelve or thirteen – they had caught the bus together to Phoenix Park and visited the Dublin
Zoo to see the Giant Pandas that had arrived as a gift from China. The Pandas were called (how she enjoyed this!) Ming Ming and Ping Ping. There were images on the telly and photographs in the newspaper. Brendan bought the tickets and borrowed somebody's camera, so there exist mad snaps of them larking about in front of the imported bears.

Ming Ming and Ping Ping were melancholy in the curious way of the obese, plonked there, ungainly, stuck God-only-knows-why on the Emerald Isle. Their gigantic heads turned slowly, as though impossibly heavy, and their movements were blunt and affectionate, like those of infants. Their black eyes were Gothic, and weirdly unnatural. They sat and ate, ate and sat. But all Dublin was charmed. The crowds at the bear enclosure were well behaved and unprecedented. Everyone said so. It was in the
Irish Times.
Even Brendan, with a cynical streak as wide as the Irish Sea, loved the surreal element of displacement and the sense of exotic intervention.

‘We'll go to China,' he announced. ‘Just you and me. We'll become foreigners, reverse Pandas, and be ridiculously bold!'

How we cherish those who give us our dreams. In the struggle against dispersion, how we value the casual, cohering suggestion.

In a single sentence Brendan produced this wild ambition for both of them and presented his sister with wanderlust associations: the Great Wall, cups of tea, bamboo brushes, twirly noodles.
China
was a machine of formula images and folkloric associations. Pagodas with curled roofs, willow pattern plates. Firecrackers. Red banners. Portraits of Chairman Mao. Catherine loved the idea of becoming a foreigner in the faraway East. Better than a secretary or a schoolteacher, better than a shop-girl in Bewley's, serving currant buns to old farts and complaining ladies with arthritis and lipstick on their teeth, wedded to their god-awful ailments and imperfections.

Brendan asked a fellow gawker to take a photograph, there and then. To this day it was the only image Catherine possessed that contained just the two of them. There were family snaps of course, blurry birthdays and weddings and out-of-focus holy communions, but only this one, this special occasion which caught them together, vigorously happy and kooky, mugging with large smiles under a bunting of bright leaves. A piece of panda was just visible: there was one black eye, hanging like a Goth decoration in the bottom left-hand corner.

It was about that time they all realised that Da was ill. He had always been a smoker, sucking so many that the tips of his fingers looked scorched and he seemed always wreathed, like an idol, in a dim nimbus of smoke. He hacked up muck and had brass-coloured teeth. There was tobacco on his shirt-front and burn holes in his cardigans. But that was Da: they loved him just the same.

It must have been a sinister alchemy that turned the outer signs inwards, all that grubby stain and brown discoloration, because one day, after breakfast, he simply keeled over, coming to rest on the kitchen floor, clutching at his chest. Mam looked down upon the man she had shared her life with, and slowly turned him over on his back to face her. He was alive, but gasping, his face magenta and mottled like streaky bacon. Brendan had already left home, but the girls crowded round and exclaimed, shocked to see their mother so calm and Da so unmanned, shaken by the appeal of his fear and the intimation of his mortality. Ruthy cried. Ruthy always cried. Mam called for the ambulance, knowing they came slowly to the Ballymun Estate, but without much choice; and the five sisters were posted in turns at the window to watch for its saviour arrival.