The Rice Paper Diaries (17 page)

On the other side, there is nothing, at first. Only shadows. Then, as Elsa walks into the hall with Mari still holding her hand and Tommy gummed to her side, Mari blinks again and again until she starts to see shapes: the curve of a cloak, the bowed top of a trilby. There is a crowd of people facing away from her in the half
-
dark, looking towards a raised platform at the other end of the hall. From the stage comes a flare of light.

Mari can feel a rhythmical popping in her ears and the pulse of Elsa’s hand in hers.

A figure is running down the aisle between the coats and hats. She is wearing a white, gauzy dress with a skirt shaped like a tutu, and a tiara made of silver tinsel wrapped around a circle of wire to make a halo around her head. She turns this way and that, scattering sparks of light as she moves her head. Her feet must be skipping along towards Mari on the floor, but she looks as if she is floating. She has small bones and long limbs and wide eyes. She has a silver tinselled wand that she waves to her right and left as she makes her way down the aisle, and she laughs as she sprinkles her magic dust over the coats and hats as she goes, and they turn as she passes them.

Mari is getting used to the dim light. Over the stage behind the faces there is bunting, red dragons on one side and red, white and blue stripes on the other. On the platform are hordes of children lined up in a group, the tallest at the back, and the smallest, about the same age as Mari, at the front. They have their mouths open, as if they are about to sing, or recite. Their eyes are on the white angel.

Behind the angel, a voice says from the stage, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a big hand for our New Year Fairy 1947, Miss Iris Davies.’

And the room explodes with claps and shouts and whoops that burst open like firecrackers in the gaping rafters above Mari’s head, and everyone leaves their seats. The women are kissing each other and the men are shaking hands and they are all saying, ‘Happy Ne
w
Year, Happy New
Year!’ until someone catches sight of Mari and Elsa and Tommy standing there, and the noise fades away. Even the fairy angel stands as still as a frozen snowdrop, staring at Mari. And Mari doesn’t know who is more frightened, her or all these grown
-
ups, until the fairy stands over her imperiously and taps the top of her head with her wand.

‘And who are you?’ says the fairy.

‘Mari,’ she whispers.

‘Mari who?’

Mari looks up at her mother.

‘Jones.’
Tommy’s voice booms out behind her, out from the playing field, louder than everything, louder than the sea.

‘Well, Mari Jones,’ says the fairy. ‘Happy New Year to you.’

People are saying their names and milling around them, and throwing their arms around Elsa and Tommy, and asking questions. Some of the women are taking handkerchiefs out of their handbags and patting their eyes.

‘It’s too much,’ one of them says. ‘It’s just too much.’

‘I know,’ says Elsa. ‘I’m sorry.’

Mari wonders what it is Elsa has done, but before she can ask, the arms and elbows and pinching fingers pluck her away from her mother and carry her over to a trestle table. The lights are turned up and cloths lifted from the table and Mari sees that it is covered with dishes of food. There are corned
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beef sandwiches, sausage rolls, scones, cakes, milk puddings and jellies. Hands are holding out plates to her and she is taking whatever they offer her and stuffing what she can into her pockets. Someone gives her a bar of chocolate; someone else says, ‘Here, have a tangerine,’ and presses a soft orange round of fruit with skin on it into the palm of her hand.

‘What’s that?’ she says, pointing to a dish that smells sweet and hot.

‘Tapioca,’ says the fairy angel, serving some into a bowl for her, and then, when she sees that Mari doesn’t understand. ‘That’s frog’s eyes to you, Curly.’

It looks like coconut milk with pearls floating in it. Mari puts a spoonful in her mouth, expecting the pearls to hurt her teeth but they dissolve, sticky and sweet on the roof of her mouth. The angel dollops a spoonful of jam into the middle of the bowl; the next mouthful explodes with a sharp tang of something, maybe strawberry, and a seedy grit that gathers at the back of her throat. As soon as her mouth is empty she fills it again. Her spoon feels like a shovel, and her arms get tired.

‘Slow down, dear,’ says a woman shaped like a rolled
-
up pancake with a squidgy middle.

The angel fairy is still over her shoulder, pressing a mince pie into her hand and watching her break the pastry open before it’s barely in her mouth. She can feel specks of raisins and orange peel sticking to her chin.

‘Eat up,’ says the fairy. She never takes her eyes off Mari. She stares at her without smiling, watching the way her hand wraps itself around each mince pie and then tries to cram it whole into her mouth. Each time Mari has finished the fairy gives her another one, until a voice over her shoulder shouts out, ‘Iris, come over here, please.’
The angel backs away, her blackcurrant eyes still fixed to Mari’s, watching her lick her lips and suck the sugar off her fingers.

Mari sits on one of the chairs and leans back against the wall. She tries to take her time but she can see food disappearing; all those children who had been on the stage are helping themselves to egg custard and sausage rolls. There is bread and dripping right next to her on the table and its suet smell fills her head. The heat circulating between the jackets and waistcoats and dresses around her gets thicker and hotter, and she looks up to ask for help, but the faces are blank again, the eyes and made
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up lips all moving oddly, warped out of shape, and she can’t make out what they are saying, their voices too loud and then too quiet, until she feels it again, that popping in her ears, and she creeps to the door and looks out at the black playing field and throws up, a stream of green vomit that tastes of rice that has gone off. Her mother has told her she will never have to eat rice again. Her mother is right, she thinks as the vomit forces itself up into her throat and spatters out into another puddle on the lane outside the hall, lit up only by the backs of the houses behind. Her mother is always right. But under the tang of tapioca and corned beef, she can still taste it on the back of her tongue.

3

‘Frank, could you go and get some more wood from the outhouse,
calon
?’

In Gwelfor
there are just the six of them, counting Nannon, Frank and the cat. Mari has made a den for herself under the table, behind the green chenille cloth that hangs over its edges. She is nursing the black
-
and
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white cat in her arms like a baby and cuddling it. The cat holds its four paws up in the air without protest and closes its eyes.

Elsa lifts the cloth from time to time and bends down. She looks too tall, like a giant; or perhaps it’s the house that’s shrinking around her. Her head seems to touch the chiselled glass of the lightshade above, and everything else – the footstool in front of the fire, the gilt
-
edged mirror on the wall – seems reduced.

‘Are you all right?’

Mari’s eyelids are heavy.
The air is dark and soft under the table; the sounds beyond her den are muffled by the fringed tablecloth and the red woollen rug. Her mother is holding back the tablecloth. On the other side there is a fire going under a mantelpiece with a china dog at each end. There are two easy chairs either side of the fire.

‘Why the hell did he leave it open like that?’

Tommy is standing by the door, his hand on the doorknob.

‘Tommy,’ Elsa says.

He leans around the door, peering into the shadows behind it, as if he expects to see someone there.

‘Tommy dear, sit yourself down,’ says Nannon. ‘Frank will stoke up the fire, make everything cosy for you.’

Mari tries not to stare at Nannon, but she looks so much like Elsa that it’s difficult not to. But while Elsa is long and thin, Nannon is plump all over, with arms and legs that poke out almost at right angles. She has lines across her forehead, maybe because she seems to keep her eyebrows raised all the time, as if someone has just told her something she never expected to hear. Her eyes are grey like Elsa’s but they are shot through with ruptured blood vessels that run in red lines across the whites of her eyeballs. She looks very tired, although she can’t be, because she doesn’t stop moving from one side of the room to the other, puffing up cushions to get Tommy comfortable in one of the easy chairs, then making her way straight back to the table to offer Elsa a sandwich, or a jam tart. She doesn’t stop talking either, except when Tommy cuts across her.

‘Shouldn’t that be Franz?’ he says.

Nannon puts a plate down hard on the table above Mari’s head.

‘No, it’s Frank these days. And I’m Mrs Meyer.’

Nannon sounds as if she is pursing her lips, like someone who is on the verge of beginning a story, someone who expects everyone to listen, so Mari does.

‘Frank and I got married on Christmas Day,’ she says.

The burned
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out remnants of the logs in the grate hiss and spark as they collapse into each other. A single flame shoots up the chimney and dies away, and the charred wood underneath starts to smoke.

‘Good to get warm, isn’t it?’ says Frank as he walks into the room. He puts a rush basket full of chopped wood next to the fireplace and flings a couple of
logs onto the fire. Each time he lifts a log, Mari sees a muscle bulging through the sleeves of his jumper. He takes a small brush with a long gold handle out of a stand by the grate and brushes away the ash and specks of dirt from the slate slab underneath. When he has finished he slots the brush back into place and shifts the fire
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set to one side, out of the way. It has a brass front that gleams as if it has just been polished, its smooth texture interrupted by hammered
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in pictures of ships in full sail. Frank stands next to the coal bucket with his hands clasped behind his back.

Nannon walks over him. They are the same height, like the man and woman in the weathervane in Gwelfor’s glass porch.

‘Frank and I met at Pwllbach, like you and Elsa.’

‘How lovely,’ Elsa says loudly. ‘Tommy, why don’t you come and help yourself to a Scotch?’

‘Because you can bring it to me over here.’

Elsa lets the baize
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coloured cloth fall back into place and everything beyond becomes blurred and indistinct again. There is a ripple in the surface of the chenille, the clink of ice cubes hitting the side of a glass and the sound of
liquid being poured over them.

Elsa has borrowed a pair of Nannon’s house shoes and they are too big for her. On the way back to the table she lifts her heels, so that she looks as if she is paddling through water.

‘So you were here working on the farms with the others? The Italians and Germans?’ she says to Frank.

Mari would like to pull the fringed tablecloth back the way her mother had but she doesn’t want them all to look at her. Through the green fronds she can see four pairs of feet: each time someone speaks, the feet move. Frank’s feet shift as he answers Elsa’s question. He changed his shoes to go and get the wood from the garden, as Nannon told him to; his garden shoes are old and badly mended, and a tongue lolls out from one of them.

‘You didn’t fancy going home at the end of the war then,’ Tommy says. ‘Like the rest of us.’ He uncrosses his legs and crosses them again. All Mari can see is the one shoe that’s still on the rug. It is a brand new shoe, bought in London when Elsa bought her gloves. The three of them all have new shoes. Mari’s rub against her toes, and she takes them off whenever she can.

‘You took your time, too, didn’t you?’ says Frank.

‘There were things to sort out, after the war,’ says Tommy. He says it as if there had been a mess in Hong Kong, and he, Elsa, Oscar and Lin had all set to and tidied up the place, until everything was just the way it had been before. Mari doesn’t remember it like that. Everything was old or broken, it was true, but there were smiles on faces and plenty to eat. She didn’t know what it was like before, in any case. All she knew before that was Stanley, the slow pendulum of night and day, and waiting for something to end, and when she asked her mother what, her mother saying, ‘The war,’ and waving her hand out around her, taking in the turquoise sweep of Stanley Peninsula, the low hills and crags the colour of uncooked dough, and the water’s edge at Stanley beach, which shone white in the morning sun.

Nannon steps into the centre of the room. She is wearing a pair of sandals that would be better suited to a hot summer’s day in Stanley, worn without socks as they clambered down from the compound to the beach where they were allowed to swim, while the guards watched. But she’s wearing them with nylons to keep warm, and her toenails look as brown as thick coffee.

‘I think we should have a toast,’ Elsa says. ‘New Year, new beginnings.’

‘You needn’t worry.’ Nannon sounds agitated, as if her eyebrows are flitting up and down again. ‘We’re moving into the flat above Bristol House. You three must stay here. Together.’