The Rice Paper Diaries (20 page)

Mari jumps. The face from the window is at the door of the farmhouse.

‘It was Mr Pendry’s fault,’ says Nannon. ‘There was an awful lot of sin to get through at Towyn this morning.’

The woman’s face softens into a nest of wrinkles as she walks over to them, her heavy boots wading through the mud, her hands out towards Mari. She is wearing a grey scarf wrapped around her hair anyhow, and an apron tied loosely over her droopy breasts. The roses on her apron have hardly any colour left in them, and there is a splash of something, gravy or soup perhaps, across the front.

The woman grips Mari’s hands, but her fingers are greasy and she smells of lard that has been used for cooking and left to settle in the pan and then used again, until it stinks of
burned gristle. Mari pulls away.

‘Funny little thing,’ the woman says. ‘You’re never six years old.’ She looks cross.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Mari,’ Elsa says.

‘That hair of yours, it’s a mess, all over the place.’ And then to Elsa, ‘You should cut it.’

‘We like it just as it is, Sara,’ Nannon says, her voice more polite than Mari has ever heard it.

‘Well, you’d better come in,’ says Sara. ‘Glyn’s up in Cae Melyn, planting. He’ll be back shortly.’

She takes them round to the back of the farmhouse. Inside it is dark and too hot. Mari blinks, trying to get her bearings, but there is only one window, the size of
Tommy’s hand, and the fire throws a pale light over everything, giving the room a shape, but no definition. The bubbled
-
up paper on the wall looks wet.

‘Come and sit down,’ Sara says, pulling Mari towards the fire.

Mari takes her coat off as Sara presses her down on a wooden settle with a high back. Sara pushes Tommy down next to her, but he only stays still for a moment before getting up again. He makes his way through the smoky air towards a door that leads out into a passage. The door is open. Tommy stands by it for a moment, like a hare about to leap up on his hind legs. Then he dives towards it and slams it shut. No one says anything, but Mari sees Sara looking at him, her black eyes glistening. Tommy comes back towards the settle and sits back between Mari and Elsa. Nannon and Frank sit at a low bench next to a trestle table.

There are two plates on the table, one loaded up with sandwiches, and the other one with a fruit loaf. It has already been cut into, and looks dry, apart from the glacé cherries.

Sara goes over to a dresser that fills the wall next to the window. It isn’t like Nannon’s dresser at home, decorated with tea services dipped in gold lacquer, and a doll from the Galapagos Islands made out of shells, and a wooden figurine from Japan with one hand bent up to hold her pointed hat straight on her head. Sara’s dresser is laid with mismatching, chipped plates banged down any old how, and bundles of letters stuffed behind other bundles.

Sara sits down on a chair with a high, spoked back next to the dresser. She groans with relief, as if she’s forgotten that the rest of them are there.

The back door opens and an old man comes in. He is holding a stick and wearing a cap flat on his head. His body bends over the stick like a crumpled
-
up piece of paper.

‘
Shw mae
,’ he says.

Everyone murmurs in return, apart from Mari. It’s like being in chapel and not knowing what to say, and sitting there feeling stupid while everyone else speaks together, looking at the wall above the
seiat
.
The fire is making her hot and dizzy and she’s tempted to make a run for it out into the
buarth
while the door is open. Sara gets up slowly, leaning one hand against the arm of the chair.

The man shuts the door and takes off his coat before sitting down in an armchair close to the fire with a shiny patch on the back. Elsa and Nannon start moving around the room with Sara, slicing into the
bara brith
, pouring hot water into the teapot and letting it draw, taking plates and cups round to the men before sitting down themselves to eat.

‘
Diolch
,’ Frank says.

‘You took your time,’ Sara says, settling down in her chair again.

Mari wonders who she’s talking to, but everyone else turns to Elsa. She seems young, sitting back on the low settle with her legs bent up. She looks as if she would bolt too if someone opened the door.

‘Well?’ Sara says.

Frank reaches out to the cake dish.

‘This is good, Sara. Mind if I have some more?’

Sara nods, a sour look on her face.

Nannon draws herself up to the table.

‘Don’t you like Frank sharing your kitchen, Sara? After everything he’s done for you? Keeping the place going?’

Glyn coughs, sending a spittled arc of crumbs and chewed fruit over Mari.

Nannon turns to him.

‘Why are you all being like this to my sister? She’s home isn’t she? She and Tommy are here aren’t they? Together? With Frank and me.’

‘Oh yes, indeed,’ says Sara. ‘No wonder I don’t come down to the village no more. Bloody Germans making themselves at home. And you.’ She points at Elsa. Glyn is staring into the fire, chewing his food painfully, as if even the cherries hurt his teeth. ‘Fashion plate. Some help you are. Poor Tommy.’

Sara sniffs loudly, ending with a snort.

Mari puts her plate down on the shelf next to the grate, spilling crumbs. She gets up, relief running through her as she moves away from the heat of the fire. She walks past everyone, straight to the table. She turns the sandwiches over first, tipping the bread and butter and loosely
cut ham onto the floor, and then she up
-
ends the plate holding the
bara brith
, sinking her fist into it as it rolls over and hits the table, pummelling at it until its dry surface breaks, scattering fruit and crumbs over the tablecloth. She turns to Sara, stares into her moleskin eyes, and says in English, ‘I don’t want you to be my
mam-gu
.’

She runs to the back door and fiddles with the latch until it opens and she sloshes her way around the muddy
buarth
, first this way and that, not quite sure where to go, and then she runs away from the noise of pigs squealing into the barn, deep into the bales of straw, and hides behind one of them, under a row of curved sickles hanging on the far wall. A pair of heavy shoes is coming towards her, making a sucking, slurping noise as they are drawn in and out of the wet mud.
They reach the slate floor of the barn, their heavy heels hardly muffled by the wisps of straw that lie everywhere.

They come to a halt. Mari stays crouched down, waiting. Tommy lifts her up onto one of the bales and turns her over onto her front and smacks her backside.

All the way home, Mari remembers not to complain, although her bottom is still sore. She walks behind the rest of them, the hedges getting taller and darker to either side of
her. They reach the brow of the hill and the sea comes into view, unsteady on the horizon, with the houses swaying, reflected in the darkening water.

There are no stars and no moon. The others walk ahead of her, shoulders bent, not looking back.

7

They don’t go to Pwllbach again after that, not all together. Tommy and Frank leave early in the morning to milk the cows before breakfast, and if Mari is up early she sits in the kitchen watching Frank binding his feet with strips of cotton before he puts his hard
-
toed boots on; ‘
Fußlappen
,’ he says to her, putting one hand on the top of her head, before going out the back way, letting the door bang shut behind him. But Elsa and Nannon stay in New Quay, and Mari stays with them. She gets used to having breakfast on the scarred kitchen table in Gwelfor, then lunch in the back kitchen at Bristol House, when Nannon has turned the sign from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ saying, ‘You’ll get junket for pudding today if you eat your greens.’

At first it is enough to follow Nannon around, picking up offcuts of material from the floor, using her magnet to collect pins that have spilled out over the counter, turning trims of lace back on their cardboard rolls. If Mari happens to look up out of the window and see children going by on their way to school, she hides behind the counter where Nannon keeps her paper patterns until their whistles and catcalls have moved on down the road.

Nannon moves the mannequin to one side and puts a table in the big bay window. She brings out her sewing machine and her tailor’s belt and lays the belt to the right of the machine. That’s where it should always be, she tells Mari. She says that before she can even let Mari touch the machine she needs to learn about cutting. She gives Mari a piece of chalk and a pair of sharp scissors and tells her to draw shapes on old bits of material. Mari likes the feel of the scissor handles, the sound the material makes as it gives way under the sharpened blades. She cuts out starfish in plain calico, pigs made of sprigged cotton, mustard pods of herringbone gorse. As she gets better at it, Nannon lets her use the pinking shears. She chops out waves with jagged tops through reams of old linen.

‘Good,’ says Nannon, looking at her handiwork over her glasses. ‘We’ll be able to move on to stitching next.’ Mari wants to use the sewing machine, but Nannon says that must wait until she’s learned how to do things by hand, so Mari practises making patchwork pieces, hexagons tacked onto firm paper, then sewn to each other.

When she has spent weeks being a good girl, and more weeks doing as she has been told, she is allowed to thread the machine and turn the wheel by its handle, listening to it clacking as it goes, ignoring the women’s voices as they pass the shop window on their way to the butcher’s. She only looks up once they have gone, her hand on the wheel. Bristol House is the highest house in the village, says Nannon, with the worst view. The bay is almost completely blocked out by the houses below, apart from a gap where the road turns down into Picton Terrace. There’s a block of dark
-
blue sea the size of Mari’s patchwork pieces, and the backs of houses, and the butcher’s more or less opposite. She can see straight into the back of the butcher’s, past the umbrella stand and ceramic tiles, through to the glass
-
fronted cabinet behind the counter.

After lunch Mari watches from her sewing table as Henry the butcher stands at the window making sure that the blind is rolled all the way up, and the sign on the door turned from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. Women go past Bristol House holding empty baskets and string bags. Mari sees them crowding into the butcher’s, picking over the rabbits piled up on a tray, not skinned yet. One of the women puts a hand out and squeezes their kidneys, one after the other, until their eyes pop open. Mari can see the women’s mouths moving through the glass, and Henry taking their tickets and money and slamming the till shut. The tray holding the rabbits shakes, and they look as if they are dreaming violent dreams that almost wake them up, making them shudder before they settle back down again. Henry’s red fingers reach out for them one by one and he skins them on the chopping board on the counter. By the time the women pass under Mari’s window again all that will be left in Henry’s shop will be an untidy mound of grey fur.

But today there is an interruption. Mari knows the sound of the van before she sees it, the racket it makes as it struggles up the hill, the choke pulling back before the driver puts his foot down one more time in an attempt to reach the top. It is full and heavy today, she knows that from listening to Nannon and Elsa chatting over breakfast. It’s on its way down from Pwllbach with slaughtered lambs in the back, their testicles cut off, according to Nannon – ‘to make them sweeter,’ she said to Elsa, pulling a face. People have been waiting weeks for this delivery, Nannon said. ‘There’s going to be a riot, I tell you.’ Not a
rabbit riot
, though, Mari thinks. She likes the sound of the words, rubbed up against each other like that.

The exhaust backfires as Glyn parks outside Henry’s, obscuring the women and their rabbit riot. Frank is sitting next to him, the window wound down, his elbow resting on its frame. He sees her and Nannon look out at him and he gives them a little salute.

‘I don’t think I can bear to watch those women elbowing each other out of the way to get at my Frank,’ Nannon says. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’

But Mari stays where she is, watching as Frank gets out and opens the back of the van. He carries the lambs’ carcasses wrapped in newspaper, oozing blood onto the pavement. Glyn is sitting completely still in the driver’s seat, his eyes straight ahead of him. When Nannon comes back, Mari asks her what he’s thinking about and she says straightaway, ‘Nothing at all. When it’s light Glyn gets up and goes out and does the milking and sees to the fields and closes gates and mends fences. When it gets dark he goes back to the house and has something to eat and goes to bed.
That way there’s nothing for him to think about, not a single thing.’

‘What do they do with the balls?’ Mari asks.

‘What balls?’

There is a shout from just under the window. Mari gets down from her chair and looks over the frame of the sash. Underneath, on the other side of the glass, is a boy a bit bigger than her, crouched over his marbles in the gutter.