Five Bells (2 page)

Pei Xing had been here many times before, but she loved the elevated train, rattling through a grid of ironwork that resembled the old Waibaidu Bridge, and the press of the crowds, and the echoing noise as people descended to the quay. Westerners, she had heard, were lonely in crowds; but this seemed so wrong, somehow, since there was a vitality, a
chi
, moving between every body, a collective spirit, a complication. Jostling, touching, feeling the population in movement, this was a beautiful thing. No one saw her, she knew; just a nondescript grey-haired woman, and an Asian at that.

Can't tell us apart. All Ching-Chong-Chinaman
.

Her parents would not have understood this: living in Australia, finding a home here.

Pei Xing turned with those around her and descended on the
escalator. Before her stood a young man guiding his small daughter. He held her hand high as he nudged her forward. ‘Careful now, sweetheart.' The child placed her feet gingerly on the moving stairs, watching them all the way down, as if afraid she might slip. She was pretty, her hair divided in plaits in Chinese-style, her face aglow and tremulous with anticipation and excitement. Pei Xing thought she might be from the country, seeing all this for the very first time. There was something tentative in her movements, and something wholly innocent.

Pure heart of the peasant.

It might have been the ripple of a dragon moving thus, these figures sliding on the escalator, and the way they all turned as one body, sinuous and flicking slightly, through the tunnel of glare towards the water.

 

At quay level Pei Xing bought an ice-cream from her friend Aristos. They had known each other a long time and one of her pleasures in returning to the quay was to exchange a few sentences with the old man behind the counter. He had come to Sydney when she had, some time in the late 1980s.

‘Hey, China flower!'

‘Hey, old fisherman!'

‘Still too skinny, China flower.'

‘Still too fat!'

The old fisherman laughed. It was a ritual they shared, an idiom of solidarity.

Aristos scooped her favourite flavour – hazelnut – and pressed it with the back of his spoon into a messy double ball. As usual he refused payment, but detained her for a chat. His back was bad again, he said, and the arthritis was playing up. Voula was still nagging for a trip home he could not afford. Eleni was expecting their first grandchild, God be praised. And
Dimitris, good-for-nothing boy, still drank too much.

In return Pei Xing said Jimmy was still doing well in his business, a good boy, he tried hard. He was a loyal son. His girlfriend from Hong Kong, Cindy, was a lovely young woman.

When Pei Xing reached up over the counter, she saw the future. Aristos looked vulnerable. Death was swooping towards him. She saw it in an instant: grey wings, a feathery presence, hung over his tired, flushed face. She saw his eyes softly close, as if in slow motion, and a sinking of the supple animate face into a hard fixed mask. She heard a breath exhaled, the tiny wind that separates this life from the next. And in this half-second she saw too how he had laboured and suffered, and how he now entered his intractable dying.

There are things one knows but can never say. There are intuitions that rise up, irrefutably, and one can only bow one's head to Fate and stay sensibly silent. Flesh was always melting away, time was always churning in undertow. The history of peoples, and the slow dragging-under. For all this, the ice-cream, the crowd, the luxurious sunny day, no soul was exempt, Pei Xing knew, from sudden extinguishment. Aristos paused and closed his mouth, as if he had read her thoughts. He smiled, but was sorrowful. ‘Ay! What can you do?' he said, shrugging his shoulders with extravagant melancholy, waving his spoon, looking to the heavens, signalling his interrogation of all that lay before him, the ice-cream, the crowd, the luxurious sunny day.

 

Pei Xing looked into the multicoloured tubs arrayed in rows before her. They had beautiful labels:
nocciola, limone, bacio, fragola.

‘You feed people,' she said softly. ‘This is good. To feed people.'

It was the only benediction she could summon, this small tribute to his trade. She wanted simply to impart compassion, and to tell him that she knew. His lined face crumpled. His eyes
became moist. He knew too, she realised. Ah, he knew too.

Pei Xing said goodbye, perhaps for the last time, and moved away slowly, trying not to consolidate her vision or to grieve in anticipation. Aristos waved, looking like a Greek Orthodox priest. His open palm lifted to the sky and hung for a few seconds in the air. He might have been a saint in an icon, already long gone.

It was Pei Xing's lot to know things in advance, her particular burden. Even as a child she had known things, had seen death arrive early, had read what is yet to come written in the lines of a face. She turned, as one does when one glimpses the future. The body is intelligent in this way, instinctively facing and refuting. She moved from the two teenagers who had now claimed Aristos's attention. There was another old friend, Mary, whom she had wished to seek out. Mary slept with her belongings tucked in a corner under the railway arch, only partially hidden from the visitors to the quay. Her plastic bags were visible, but she was away somewhere, bedraggled and roaming, searching for a drink. The plastic pile looked flimsy, as though it could be dislodged with a sneeze. Pei Xing leant into the waste space that was Mary's home, flinching a little at some rotten decomposition smell, and tucked a ten-dollar note where she was sure that her friend would find it. Then she stood still for a minute, looking again at the plastic bags, the sorry heap of a life, feeling a swelling of sadness for the inverted order of things, for Mary, now lost, her whole life a craving, for Aristos, who would die and be no longer by the water, for his wife Voula, who would weep, and never again see her homeland.

 

Pei Xing waited in the queue and bought a ticket for the ferry. The man in the booth did not recognise her, though she had been his customer many times. She was glad it was one of the
old ferries, green and yellow and wooden, like something she might have seen as a girl on the Huangpu River; the newer white ones, sleek and gleaming, were simply not the same.
Supply
, the ferry was called.

Finding a seat towards the back, Pei Xing settled in and finished her ice-cream. The boat strained and creaked around her, rocking gently, then lurched away with a throbbing pulse she now and then thought of as human. People settled, talked on mobile phones, sent text messages that reduced the world and its vast feelings to a few shiny codes. All those swift, fidget fingers tapping into enigmatic circuits. All those micro-processed signs and electronic hallos. The man who claimed the seat beside her opened a book-sized laptop. It sounded a pleasant chime, G major, and lit up like a personal lamp.

I am old, she thought, and turned her face to look through the window. Yes, I am old.

There it was, jade-white, lifting above the water. She never tired of seeing this form. It was a fixture she relied on. The shapes rested, like porcelain bowls, stacked one upon the other, fragile, tipped, in an unexpected harmony.

‘
He': harmony
.

She saw the Chinese character, wheat and a mouth; she saw the flourish of eight strokes of the wolf-hair brush. She felt her father's hand on her back correcting her posture, as he taught her calligraphy. Sometimes he corrected the angle of her chin, with the slightest of touches, with just the tip of one finger, then watched as she dipped, caught the ink, and tried a difficult character.

The monument glided past. Pei Xing experienced the illusion that it was moving and that she was staying still. She looked back to see it floating away, diminishing, becoming an ornament, small enough to hold in the well of her hand. Someone leaning against the railing outside moved to block her view.

Mary, where was Mary? Ah, poor soul. And Aristos, poor Aristos.

Pei Xing felt the tremor of the ferry and heard the murmurous hum of its engine. She closed her eyes. She saw herself as others might: miniature, a Chinese woman with an inscrutable air. A kind of type, or an absence. Then she saw herself from the inside: those layers of self slowly, gently, time-travelling across the water, the child receiving a white thin-lipped teacup from the hands of her mother, the student in plaits taught to sit still with her hands in her lap, the lover opening arched spaces to the engulfment of a man's body, the mother bent, cloudy with joy, over her infant son's head. In the wilderness of leaving Shanghai, these selves had blended and folded; now, in meditation, she was able to fan them apart. This was her habit, these days, to see herself in this way, the concertina of a life in which she saw her own folds and crevices.
I have lived many lives.
There was something reassuring in this, not to be single but many, not to be of one language but several, not to have but one discrete past but a skein, and multiple.

 

She must have dozed a little. When she woke, blinking, the ferry was at the north shore and the passengers were standing and ready to leave. There was a ruffle of bodies departing, voices lifting with their destination, handbags slung, or opened, or reached into for a mobile phone. Mozart sounded somewhere – or was she imagining it? – a trail of Cherubino's aria floating in the air. Outside was luminous. High trees moved in a breeze from the water. There were rich people's houses, and the concave sweep of a steep slope garlanded with creepers and flowers.

The ferry bumped the small jetty of a paradise everyone took for granted.

When Catherine stepped from the train, she dropped her ticket.
Fuck;
she needed it to exit.

It fluttered under someone's running shoes in the transitional light of the station. But then the ticket rested and she lunged for it, and rose up holding it aloft like a botanical specimen, the papery petal of a rare orchid, found only in railway stations.

On a wet black bough
.

She descended on the escalator and moved as one body with the crowd.

‘Careful now, sweetheart,' she heard a voice say to a child, and she was filled with poetic impulse and a disposition to tenderness. The child was a girl with sparkly pink clips in her divided hair. Her father held her hand above her head as he guided her forward and down. Catherine watched her swaying dress and her bare legs and the straps of her sandals. Some scrap of memory had been stirred that she could not quite capture.

On ground level – quay level – Catherine looked for it immediately. She asked an Arab-looking man at a newspaper stand; he smiled kindly and stretched his chubby arm to the right. That way, he indicated, without saying a word.

Catherine walked past serried ferry ports and cafés and the casual, milling crowds. There were lines for tickets on cute, old-fashioned ferries, painted uniformly in emerald and gold, and people just wandering, or standing, or having their photographs taken. There was a human statue, stiffly inhuman, posing as a Roman god.

And beyond the farthest, and down a curving wharf, there it was, nestling before her, its folded forms stretching upwards, its petal life extending. The peaked shapes might have derived from a bowl of white roses, from the moment when they're tired and leaning, just about to subside.
Blown
, that strange
term,
a bowl of blown roses.
She had not expected intimations of wind and flowers from something so essentially hard and bright. She had not expected to be reminded, obscurely, of her own body.

‘Gis a kiss!'

Catherine heard a Scottish accent, a trace of tipsy hilarity.

And then: ‘Up shit creek, that car; bloody cactus, that's what, done for, I reckon mate, trade it or what? yeah? what-do-ya-reckon? eh? what-do-ya-say?' Spoken in an overloud voice to a mobile phone.

Catherine loved Australian accents, the way they rasped in the air. The conversation unrolled in a friendly snarl. There was French, too – she recognised the syllables she had first heard as a schoolgirl in Dublin – and fragments, what was it? – of sing-songy Mandarin. Catherine saw a young man lunge for his girlfriend. He took her by the waist, swung her around, and kissed her dramatically, with a succulent smack. He was the Scot, another visitor, like herself. He wore a NYC cap on his head and had the indiscreet, restive confidence of someone newly in love.