The Colour of Tea (33 page)

“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “We can look after her. We can look after them both. There’s plenty of room.”

Pete says to Marjory, “You need to go home to Don; you look exhausted. We’ll take them back to our place and get them settled in.”

Marjory gives him a grateful look, then stands up. Her makeup has faded, and I can see faint age lines by her eyes. She takes the sunglasses off her head and folds them in one hand. As she turns to go, something strikes me. It’s a thought that feels like icy water down my back. My heart skips a beat.

“Marjory? You said something about Dubai …”

She turns.

“Did this happen to Rilla in Dubai?”

Marjory frowns. “Didn’t you wonder about the long sleeves?” Her voice is soft but pointed. “Yes. It happened to her in Dubai. You need to talk to her, Grace. I’ve been learning more and more about what can happen to these women. It’s not pretty, that’s for sure.” She sighs, then turns away again, promising to call early in the morning.

*   *   *

These days Lillian’s seems full even before the customers arrive. It is a hive, a coven, a sisterhood of women. Women all packed into the hot, tiny kitchen; working, laughing, talking, and looking after one another.

After a few days and nights, Rilla moves back to her apartment, but Jocelyn continues to stay with Pete and me. She walks to and from Lillian’s with me each day, barely saying a word and practically attaching herself to the kitchen sink when we get to the café. I tell her she doesn’t need to work, but she just shakes her head. She sways from counter to sink to counter again in a graceful rhythm. She washes everything slowly, purposefully,
cleaning the handles of the cups, gently wiping the crests on the bottoms of the saucers. The
macarons
are barely off the trays before she is rolling the metal sheets into the hot, soapy water. Occasionally she murmurs a tune. When I catch snippets of it, I realize she has a good voice, although the notes are so quiet they sound haunted.

Gigi too has grown quiet. Something I would have once thought was impossible. She comes in before our regulars are waiting at the counter for a morning coffee, or sneaking muffins into their little ones’ mouths, too rushed at home to have fed them breakfast. She is not yet due back from maternity leave, but I can’t keep her away. I’m sure Lillian’s is a friendlier place to be than home. Her face still has that slightly erased look, her skin the color of white socks washed too many times, her freckles standing out on her blanched cheeks. The whole of Gigi seems to have been washed too many times—her voice subdued, her spirits flagging. She talks with me about
macarons,
all she seems to want to discuss. I assume she has managed to hold at bay her mother’s threat to kick her out, although she doesn’t like to talk about that either. Perhaps she is lying to her mother about where she spends her days; it wouldn’t surprise me. The café and
macarons
seem to give her steel. She scribbles ideas and thoughts into a notebook she keeps tucked in her handbag, a tiny smile flashing across her face before it too quickly disappears.

After Gigi there is Rilla, rushing from the bus stop. She carries her head high, racing in to check that Jocelyn is safe. She helps her with the first load of dishes. There is a new strength in Rilla that is hard to explain, a sort of confidence. Marjory tells me Rilla has become known among the Filipinos for supporting girls who have been tricked by so-called recruitment agents or abused by bad employers. They’ve heard her story and have seen the cigarette burns on the insides of her arms. Since I asked she has started to
tell me about what happened to her in Dubai: paid much less than promised, indebted to agents for mysterious fees, beaten into submission and silence. She considers herself lucky—some girls are forced into prostitution, and some girls never escape.

These days she sometimes pushes up her sleeves, and I see the scars for myself. Moons of smooth, red skin tattooed into her. If it weren’t for her head held so high and the pride that radiates from her, they would make me cry. I apologize for the way I treated her and Jocelyn when I found them that morning, and she tells me not to think of it again. “You didn’t know.” I remember how cowed she had been by the businessman complaining about a cold coffee and think about how she would deal with him these days.
Look at her now.
It fills me with a motherly kind of pride. And somehow she seems to keep Jocelyn and Gigi just buoyant enough, like an emotional life raft.

Marjory is the last to join the gaggle, arriving in the afternoons, once the lunch rush is over. She settles in her usual seat and lingers over cappuccinos. She drags Jocelyn out from the kitchen to sit and talk with her, sliding a long arm around her shoulder and speaking in whispers. Marjory passes her tissues, and I see her sliding money into Jocelyn’s pockets when Jocelyn refuses to accept it from her directly. Marjory’s mornings are now spent at the Good Shepherd refuge. She talks rapturously about Sister Julietta, and I tease her about a woman with such good fashion sense hanging out with nuns.

“She does the most amazing work, Gracie,” Marjory gushes. “We’re working with a group in Hong Kong that might be able to bust some of the agents bringing these poor girls in for domestic work. Domestic work, my arse.” A ferocious look crosses her face. “It’s modern-day slavery and they know it.”

She even shares her frustrations and stories with Yok Lan, who listens patiently, not understanding a single word. Marjory
tells me that they are close to being able to send Jocelyn home to the Philippines, back to her children.

Gigi brings Faith in with her, swaddled in puffy jackets and woolen hats, the air now chilled with winter. She settles her in a corner by the counter where we can all watch her like a big pack of mamas. Faith blinks at us from her pram, round eyes like currants and cheeks rosy red from the cold. Sometimes she gurgles or stretches out unconsciously in her sleep, hands closed into fists above her soft, dark hair. I am transfixed by her pink mouth and pale skin, even when she is awake and crying the roof off the place. Her babyness seems fresh and hopeful against all the sadness and violence of the last few weeks. I lift her up to hold her close, breathe in the talc and baby scent of her, and tell her stories that Mama used to tell me. Fairies, queens, poisoned apples, princes and flying carpets. I can feel my heart filling up on love and hope when I am with her.

Yok Lan and I take it in turns to rock her pram and change her nappies. Gigi leaves us to it, passing warmed bottles of formula for her feeds and taking over the till when I tend to her. Part of me feels guilty for latching on to Faith while Gigi works, but she looks at me with relief; serving her regulars seems to make her more like herself, brings a little color to her face. It is like some kind of therapy for her that I can’t explain. And maybe Faith is the same for me.

Dearest Mama,

There are some ugly people in this world, aren’t there? People who will kick a person when she is down or throw her out on the street or wring out her dignity, her spirit, till there’s nothing left. How do people get to be like this? So damn rotten inside. Did they learn to be this way? Were they born this way?

Every day I look at two mothers who have been beaten down
like they were no good at all to the world. They’ve been told that they’re useless. Hopeless. Lashed with a tongue or a fist. The very same women who are working so hard I can barely get them to leave at the end of the day. And it’s not just that. They’re trying so hard to be good mothers, in the only way they know how. It’s like they’re swimming and swimming just to keep from drowning and never reaching a shore.

This is what you were doing, isn’t it, Mama? Swimming and swimming, just to keep from drowning? I wish I could tell you to your face—I know how hard you tried. I see it now. I forgive everything else. Will you forgive me?

Your loving daughter,
Grace

Le Retour—Going Home

Tart Mango with Buttercream Filling

I
pad through the house as quietly as I can, but the floorboards squeak in the cold. In the kitchen I drop two pieces of bread in the toaster and put the kettle on for tea. I don’t want to wake Jocelyn, who is still sleeping. I notice she has dried and put away the dishes I left in the rack. As much as I beg her not to, tidying seems to be her nervous habit; she is always restlessly folding tea towels or organizing cupboards, her gaze falling into the spaces between objects. It’s as if she hopes that by keeping her hands busy she will keep her mind from straying into dark memories. The kinds of memories I don’t like to imagine. Only Rilla seems to know how to really comfort her. She is full of small kindnesses, as if Jocelyn is a younger sister. She brings her packed lunches with boiled eggs, smiling faces drawn on the shells, or puts little bouquets of wild daisies next to Jocelyn’s sandwiches. At Lillian’s she pats Jocelyn’s back, whispers in Tagalog, and guides her to the bathroom to cry when she needs to.

My toast bounces on the springs, brown and hot. I reach to turn off the jug before it whistles, steam curling out of the spout. Behind me I hear a lazy yawn.

“You don’t need to be up,” I say softly.

Pete runs his hand through his hair. He is striped from head to toe in blue and red and green pajamas. His left cheek is lined with the creases of his pillow. He smiles lopsidedly.

“Thought I’d have an early breakfast with you,” he whispers, glancing at Jocelyn’s closed door.

“It’s okay, she is still asleep.”

I put two more pieces of bread in the toaster and offer him a slice of my toast, swiped with butter that has pooled in the pores of bread. He accepts it, and we eat leaning against the stovetop. I take a sip of my green tea, the liquid finding the corners of my body and warming them. I let out a yawn in symphony to his.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says, swallowing a mouthful of toast. “They’re closing some of the restaurants …”

There’s an awkward pause.

“You’re going to tell me it’s Aurora, aren’t you?”

He nods and slides an arm behind my back, giving my waist a squeeze. I let out a breath. It’s been so long since I have thought of Léon, helped by the fact that he has stopped coming to Lillian’s so regularly. Thinking of my old feelings for him makes me feel so ashamed. It’s like he was some delirious fever that shivered over me and then subsided, leaving me stripped bare and embarrassed. I bite into my toast. Feeling Pete’s warm arm around me calms me. His eyes shine green and gold in the early-morning light.

I lift my chin. “What will happen to Léon?”

Pete looks at me, into me, as if searching behind my eyes for something. I know what he is looking for, but he does not find it. His gaze softens, and he shakes his head, brushing crumbs from his fingers on the leg of his pajamas. Reaching for the kettle, he pours a cup of tea for himself.

“I don’t know. I’m going to call him, find out what’s going on. It’s not my area, but … well, I probably owe him a phone call anyway.” There is embarrassment in his voice too.

“Poor Celine,” I say. Then I think of their girls.

“Yeah. I think they can move him on to another project somewhere else if he wants, but I don’t know, the rumors are that he’ll stay. He likes it here in Macau apparently. The casinos, the lifestyle.”

My mind wanders back to the brunch we had in Aurora, the tables laden with food, the honey dripping and bread fresh and hot. I shake my head. Time feels strange and elastic, as if we were there just yesterday and also years ago. Back then there was no Lillian’s; no Marjory, no Rilla, no Gigi, no Yok Lan in our lives. I assemble these people in my mind like pieces of a quilt. Sewn close so their edges line up beside one another. Memories duck and weave between the pieces, stitching them together. Gigi looking for Yok Lan after the earthquake, Rilla and Gigi humming and singing and laughing at Lil’s.

Pete puts down his cup and stands in front of me. He takes both my hands in his and looks into my face. It is such a solemn gesture, and it feels like the room just got dimmer. I inhale quickly and hold my breath in my chest until it aches with the effort. His smile is a grim line across his face; he seems a little nervous.

“Grace, I’m not sure how long …”

I break away from his gaze to look down at the floor. My feet are cold, toes pale against the bright red polish on the nails. He looks down at them too, lining his own toes against the ends of mine and then pressing his forehead gently against my own.

“Grace …” he whispers but doesn’t finish his sentence. His breath is warm against my face, and sweet from the smells of toast and sleep. He leans into me and then rocks back on his heels. He plants a soft kiss above my right eyebrow and frowns. “I know how much this place means to you now.”

My throat feels like I have swallowed a handful of pebbles.
“When will we have to leave?” I say, in a voice so quiet I can barely hear myself.

*   *   *

The end of the year rushes by us in a strange blur as we prepare for Jocelyn’s departure to the Philippines. She might have to come back to Macau if there is a trial, but the lawyer friend of Don’s has warned us that often these kinds of cases fall apart at the seams. He’s not convinced a Filipino maid is going to be believed in court. It’s her word against her employers’, and they will paint a picture of her as a lying, untrustworthy immigrant. It hurts to realize how easily that story could be swallowed. If I could come to doubt Rilla so easily, then who will believe Jocelyn? It makes us all furious that the employers may not be held accountable, but we try to focus on what is really important right now, which is getting Jocelyn home safe to her children.

Marjory says she has to be ready to leave at any time, so there is always a packed shoulder bag by the foot of her perfectly made bed. Christmas is upon us, but it is hard to have a normal kind of festive season when we all jump at the sound of a knock at the door or a ringing phone. I give Rilla, Marjory, Gigi, and Jocelyn little silver ornaments with their names engraved at the bottom; for Faith I have bought a soft, stuffed gold and white angel. On Christmas Day we have a bottle of champagne at Lil’s with some truffle-centered chocolates I have made, and later Pete, Jocelyn, and I have a roast chicken dinner, but it is a quiet affair. One minute it is Christmas and the next minute it isn’t, that is what it seems like. Jocelyn puts her ornament carefully into the side pocket of her bag, and I catch her checking it is still there every so often.