Five Bells (24 page)

I am young, Pei Xing thought. I am still a young woman. She turned to look out of the back window to see the jet angling away.

 

At the police station she was asked to wait a few minutes. On the wall in the waiting area was a poster asking in many languages, including her own, if she needed a translator. There was another of missing people, six by six squares, melancholy portraits garnered from albums and passports. Pei Xing leant forward to examine them. Some were trapped in dead-eye snapshots, eternally misrepresented, some were animated at a party or cutaway from an embrace, some were neutered for passport protocol, lured prematurely to anonymity. The stylistic incoherence of the photos – when so much these days was blandly standardised – seemed to Pei Xing especially poignant. For one man the sign of his existence was a bleached, almost featureless face, resting like a mushroom in an unlit hollow. How could this image possibly help find him?

The door opened and the woman Pei Xing had seen at the wharf was shaking hands with a detective and being thanked for helping with their inquiries. She leant back from the portraits and saw the woman recognise her.

‘I saw you today,' she said. ‘At Kurraba Point Wharf.'

Her accent was what? Irish. A tourist, perhaps.

‘Yes.'

‘You waved.'

‘Yes.' And Pei Xing thought: she is seeking reassurance. This is a young woman, far from home, who cannot bear the thought of a lost child.

‘She's safe, you know, that little girl. She is safe.'

The woman sat beside her. They stared ahead.

‘She was happy, not afraid.'

‘Pardon?'

‘She was happy, not afraid.'

‘Ah, I didn't really notice.'

Pei Xing imagined she could hear the breathing of the woman beside her. They sat close, like relatives awaiting bad news. Like mother and daughter. The policewoman behind the reception counter shifted in her seat, to remind them both that she was there, superintending. Pei Xing gently touched the Irish woman's hand.

‘Safe,' she repeated.

The word would make it so. And then the young woman was called to a taxi and rose in a hesitating manner, as though she had a confession she was anxious to impart. In an instinctive movement she leant down and kissed Pei Xing on the cheek. So much, apparently, lay beneath this clumsy gesture. So much beneath a few exchanged words. It was the contraption they worked with, words, and it was insufficient.

‘Well, good luck.'

It was effortless good will. Pei Xing raised her hand in a small wave and watched the woman leave, half-turned back to her, through the sliding glass doors. She readied herself for the interview: to say
she seemed unafraid.

 

When, half an hour later, Pei Xing was driven home in a taxi, this time feeling disappointed and subdued, she reflected that she had not persuaded anyone at the police station that the child would be safe. They were already writing in a file somewhere that she was an unreliable witness; they were already tagging her as a helpless optimist, unrealistic and deluded. Chinese.
The Chinese woman was no help at all.
Perhaps the Irish
woman had seen something meaningful. She had appeared burdened and in need of solace; perhaps she had already imparted some crucial information and was dragging sorrow and a surer knowledge of what might have happened. Pei Xing leant her tired face against the cool glass of the car window. The night was humid, electrical. There was the buzz and hum of imminent lightning and a wavy disturbance in the sky as the weather assembled and shifted. Soon the wind would whip up, the sky become ocean, the streaming rainstorm obliterate all one might see.

Back through the perilous tunnels. Back towards Bankstown. This time she closed her eyes.

 

In her reading that day of
Doctor Zhivago,
Pei Xing had paused after the drawn-out account of his death. Hua was weeping through her expressionless, frozen face; a line of tears soaked her collar. Yuri Zhivago had a heart attack on a stalled tram. Feeling faint and in need of air, he had pulled and pulled again at the leather strap on the window, first down, then up, then roughly towards him, even though the crowd shouted at him that the windows had been nailed shut. He was so confused and in such pain that he did not understand. Something inside him simply broke. Somewhere in the heckle and jeer, his heart was bursting. He could hear nothing. He stumbled from the tram and fell beside it onto the hard cobblestones. A crowd gathered and someone announced that his heart had stopped.

Pei Xing knew what Hua was thinking, that it was an ignoble death. But they were both moved, and it was not possible to read any further. Pei Xing was not weeping, but felt choked and tight in the chest. She tended to Hua as if they were both bereaved, talking to her of other matters, fussing a little in her ministrations, pulling the hospital shawl closer as if wrapping her body against the chill wind of mortality.

But now, after the worrisome television news and her general unsettlement, after the futile trip to the police station and her implicit disqualification, Pei Xing opened the novel to read what she had not read to Hua, the Conclusion, and its redolent, distressing last paragraph. It concerned Zhivago's beloved, Lara, who had returned to the city to try to track down their lost daughter.

It was this section that prompted Pei Xing to weep. This paragraph summoned the fate of her mother and her father; this was the proxy tone of unremarked death, the impersonal sweep of fate and the atrocities it enacted. It was not all ‘struggle sessions' and mass criticism and public executions, sometimes there was just this, a quiet disappearance. A number mislaid. One person gone. Two.

 

In the inhuman dark Pei Xing could not sleep. The encumbering past was too much with her. The little girl on the television was too much with her. In the unresolvable story she had been given to live there was no guarantee that everything finally and securely would repair. She realised too what it was in the television photograph that had bothered her: it was the four heads, ringed so emphatically in red. Four was a bad luck number in Chinese, four was the homophone of ‘death'.
Four people
, the television announcer said;
four people,
he repeated.
Four.
So she must remember
five
. There might be four adults, all come together in failed witness or a
momentary pattern, but there was always too a fifth, a child who must be disposed finally to life, not death. She was aware of her casuistry, her number superstition, aware she wanted, in her sleepiness, just to make things settle and become right. But it seemed to her a neat formulation.
Five.
Only the inclusion of the child promises something in the future. The humid darkness held Pei Xing in her bed. She lay still, quiet, sifting her day. She could hear traffic on the M5 and the distant sound of aircraft. So many were lost. So many.

But there was snowfall, and the Opera House, and
Doctor Zhivago.
There was the sound of the pipa, ever so lightly plucked. Not everything, surely, was known through
four.
Every pattern broke open into mystery, and what is yet to come. She told herself this, still anxious in the darkness. She told herself
five.

After the inquest into the death of Amy Brown, after the scrawled, childish-looking note from her mother, James decided to write a letter in reply. He was unable to face the parents, unable to drive out to their dusty farm and knock on the door, bend to pat the dogs, smile weakly in embarrassment at the dire cause of his mission, fumble for words while Mrs Brown offered tea and cried. So it was the least he could do. In the little wheat-belt town where he had known such happiness, he sat in his room and composed a note to try to make things right. He can still see himself in the act of writing the letter, sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up and a pillow tucked behind him, hunchbacked, sleepless, half-destroyed.

He sent the letter, and almost immediately regretted its inane formality. He had made grief tedious, had stuffed it like a cleaned corpse into a freezer of stiff words.

James had wanted to say:
Forgive me, forgive me, something went wrong. The world collapsed and Amy was under it. There is no word I can offer, there is nothing I can say, that will make things right. I, a poor son, who ceased visiting his own mother, can only tell you that I tried on the beach to bring her back, I tried and tried but she was already gone, and I shall never forget this, oh God, oh God, this wanting to breathe into her and bring her back, and the desperation I felt and the God-awful failure. And my own grief, I know, is nothing compared to yours, but it is huge and it is dark and I am not sure how to go on.

If he could have retrieved the letter, and sent a symbol or an image or some other wordless emblem, he would have felt more honest. At the funeral there were flowers, and suddenly it made sense, why this might be so. In this town with no florist, this tiny town on the edge of nowhere, somehow roses and lilies had turned up, somehow there were elaborate wreaths and cellophane-wrapped bunches, and he had no idea how or from whence they had arrived. Yet it made sense. Something offered so that everything did not have to rest inside words. Something silent delivered from the living world. Something with no purpose other than to declare that the beautiful exists and will not last.

Rough farmers were standing around in hot suits; many,
James guessed, retrieved the suit they'd been married in, and left it unbuttoned to accommodate their older body. The women were also dressed up, and some wore hats that looked as if they too belonged to an older generation. Mr and Mrs Brown, broken-hearted, stood silently holding hands.

James does not remember anything that was said, not a single word. Only this: the flowers wilting beneath a sheen of sunlight and cellophane, and what people wore, the way they stood looking down, and the heat on their heads, and the absence of children.

 

At Circular Quay James was now at a loss. Having met with Ellie, having gulped back the words he might have said, he felt aimless and without purpose. All around him were families in a kind of festive mood, and couples strolling together, looking at the sights. He glanced up at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and could see a line of people, barely visible, climbing its bow. What must they see, he wondered. There would be the Harbour below them, and all the wake-patterns on the water, there would be a bird's eye view of boats and of the meringue peaks of the Opera House, and perhaps there would be a view much further, out eastwards to the ocean. Flags flapped on the summit, in a playful image of triumph.

 

James's attention was caught by a family he overheard to be Italian. They had spread a rug on the grass and were unloading a late picnic, and there were three generations, a Nonno, a Nonna, a Papa, a Mama, and two small children. One of the children, a boy about four, kept breaking away and chasing seagulls from the grass, so that they flapped messily about him, rose upwards and squawked. The little boy was pleased to have such evident effect in the world, to stir birds into the sky and scare them with his arms. And then the Nonna called out:
Matteo,
Matteo,
and the boy turned and ran on his fat little legs into her arms. She said
Matteo, bello; Matteo, bello
, and the child sank into her lap with a lump of bread she had torn for him. His little sister, about two, reached over to take the bread, and he pulled it back, kicking and wriggling, setting off a squeal. But then the mother intervened and found bread for her daughter. The child flopped back into her mother's lap and Mama cuddled her, and blew on her hair, and took up her toddler toes and sucked them.

It was a simple little drama, everyday, unremarkable. But what had snagged in James's heart was
Matteo, bello
. It was as if he had heard it before, in the distant past. His own true name, given by his father, was
Gennaro, Gennaro DeMello.

He had never told anyone, not even Ellie. At some stage his father had left and when he was enrolled in school someone persuaded his mother to call him James. And so he became James, a fake Anglo translation. But on his birth certificate and passport, there it was,
Gennaro DeMello,
symbol of something he had one day lost. The sing-song of someone he used to be, but now orphaned and contracted and misidentified.