The Rice Paper Diaries (8 page)

I could see Wang’s eyes in the mirror. He looked angry. He banged the double doors to the garage as he put the car away.

‘She’s playing a dangerous game,’ he said to me, sitting over his tea in the kitchen. ‘If they see her with him that will be the end of things for all of us. They’ll think we’re not to be trusted.’

When we got back I had nothing to do. Mrs Elsa said she would look after Mari until bedtime. She went into the living room and closed the door, and I clacked my way up and down the passage like an abandoned mah
-
jong tile.

I went into the kitchen and stood next to Lam while she washed up. She told me the man’s name was Ryan. He drank Mexican beer and had deep pockets. He was a Canadian soldier. Mrs Elsa and the captain spent all their time chasing happiness, didn’t they, Lam said to me, so why not us? I didn’t have the heart to disagree with her.

She soaped and rinsed the plates with absent
-
minded strokes, staring out of the window, dreaming of a long voyage on a steam ship to Canada, a house to call her own, and a life far away from this one.

3

It was just a practice, the air
-
raid siren. A dummy run, the captain called it. I liked the way he said it, nice and gentle, reassuring. We were supposed to carry on as usual.

The papers hanging off newsstands ran big headlines alongside photographs of the new air
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raid shelters they’ve put up downtown. It looked like a scene from a street opera: wardens in uniform stood in a line while a crowd of
Wan Chai shoppers looked on open
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mouthed. Above the low concrete blocks, which had 500 PERSONS daubed on them in oily paint, were hoardings pasted with man
-
sized advertisements for soft drinks and flower cakes. There must have been at least five hundred people right there on the street. A hawker had set up shop at the head of the crowd, facing away from the shelter, selling produce directly from her basket.

I wanted to buy the newspaper to show the letter
-
writer the next time I saw him, so he could read me the story that went with the picture, but I had just posted what was left of my month’s wages home, sending everything I had left because of Mother’s cough.

I walked around in a daze. Mari had just started teething and I was getting no sleep. She would be settled down as usual, but after an hour or so she would scream loudly out of the blue; the noise would slice into my dreams like the air
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raid sirens, waking me instantly. At first I didn’t know what to do, what could be wrong, so I stood helplessly over her cot and watched her cry, as she wouldn’t let me touch her. When I realised what it might be, I rubbed poppy syrup into her gums to soothe them, feeling the enamel of her milk teeth about to push through the skin, hard against my fingers. I washed and changed her and gave her a fresh nappy.
Then we would sit in the nursing chair by the window for a while watching gunboats passing up the channel under the low moon; I would put a few drops of gripe water on the tip of a teaspoon and get Mari to swallow them, and then, once she had calmed down, I’d put her back to sleep. She was over nine months old by this time though, with teeth coming through one after the other. When she had been through a bad week, I would sigh with relief to see the sharp tip of a tooth poking out of the bloody gum like a tiny white fin, only to be woken a few nights later by the next one. I got used to it. I got up and applied the necessary treatments all in the same order each time without thinking. When it was over I fell back to sleep, only to be woken after two hours to go through the whole thing again. In the mornings we slept late and woke up with our eyes dry and itchy: it was as if Mari and I had been on a long journey through dreams peopled with vague grey shapes that moved silently past us, alone with each other. I think she felt it too. She pulled in close to me, holding onto the ends of my hair. ‘Ta
-
da, Ta
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da, Ta
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da,’ she said, over and over. ‘Shhh!’ I said to her, giggling, because it was a joke between Mrs Elsa and the captain that Mari had decided she was only going to say one word, for the moment at least, and that word was going to be something that sounded like ‘Daddy’.

I no longer spent my days off in the
kongsi fong
looking out of the window; instead I walked around Victoria and Central and Sheung Wan, breathing in as much cool air as I could. It wasn’t always clean air, especially if I was walking along the waterfront, past the ferry terminal and the cargo jetties, but it felt fresh after the long nights in Mari’s nursery. I told myself I didn’t want company, but I went to see the letter
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writer more and more, just to talk. He seemed to understand that I didn’t need him to talk back, and I began to spend longer at his stall. I enjoyed the open, honest expression on his face, and the peaceful scraping sound that his pen made on the paper. When the letter was finished and folded away in its envelope, he would take his glasses off and rub the inner corners of his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. Then he would sit back with his hands clasped in his lap.

Today, though, he kept his hands on the table. His fingers weren’t touching mine, but as he looked at me, I wondered what it might feel like if they were, if this was how Lam felt when she was with Ryan.

He pointed up at one of his signs, hung up alongside the calendars and illuminated scripts.

‘You see that saying up there?’

I nodded, although of course both he and I knew it meant nothing to me.

‘To Choose A Lucky Day,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t intended on working on the day you came to me first. But then a feeling came over me that this was going to be a special day, and that I must work, even though I was tired. So I came and set up stall as usual. I hung up my work as you see it now, unfolded my table, set out the stools, took four small bricks and put them under the table legs so it wouldn’t wobble as I wrote. I did everything exactly as I always do it. And then something happened. You arrived. And I realised that I had indeed chosen my lucky day, Lin.’

But I didn’t know what to say. I still felt it, that unfurling inside me, as I watched his still face, with one eyelid that hung down just a little lower than the other, and I wanted him to keep on looking at me across the table that didn’t shake on its legs, but I was thinking of the spring day when I came to Hong Kong. I had left Canton to make money for you, that’s the truth, but also to see something other than the relentless furrows of our fields, the tireless wriggling of the silkworms, more demanding than babies. I wanted to get away, and have no one to think about but myself, once my money was safely on its way to you every month. I wanted to sit in the botanical gardens in the company of friends, with showers of water spraying out of hoses in the background. I wanted to look at the beautiful clothes of women like Mrs Elsa, and to care for a baby like Mari, who has everything already, so all I have to give her is love. I had never thought about a man before I left Canton, except Father, and when I left I was glad not to have to think about him any more.

‘Would you like me to teach you to write your name, Lin?’ the letter
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writer said. ‘And then,’ he whispered, putting the tips of his fingers very lightly on my nails, ‘I can teach you how to write mine.’

The stool screeched against the pavement as I got to my feet. I walked quickly the way I had come, back to the
kongsi fong
. I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see his puzzled face.

The streets were quieter than I had ever seen them; shops were closed and doors to buildings usually kept open were securely barred. Washing, hung to dry on ropes that ran above the street from one building to the block opposite, flapped in the breeze like paper birds. In the
kongsi fong
my feet made an empty sound against the wooden stairs, as if there was no one else in the building, and when I got to our room I saw that some of the other girls had cleared out their belongings and gone. I sat in my cubicle and surveyed the contents of my life: three bags of clothes and a bottle of lavender water that Mrs Elsa had given me. I thought to myself, even if I wanted to go home now, where would that be – the Pearl River Delta, Sheung Wan, the Peak? There’s a little of me that has been scattered through them all and taken root there, and to try to cut the shoots that have pushed their way out like sweet potato leaves and bring them together in one harvest would make me someone else entirely.
Whoever that person would be, she wouldn’t be me.

4

I was up on the roof terrace hanging out the washing when the bombing started. Although I had wrung the sheets out by winding them tight, they were still heavy with water and awkward to pull up onto the line without letting the other end drag on the dusty tiles underfoot. The early morning sky was misty above Victoria, and over in Kowloon the rows of windows along the wharf glinted in the sun. At the bottom of the hill was the race course, the grass cut so short it looked like a green lake. I was happy, although it was cool and I had come up without a coat, and hanging wet sheets was always hard work. I enjoyed the peace of these few moments on the terrace alone, when I could think about the rest of the day, about what Mari was going to wear, when we would go to the park, and the noodles and fresh fruit Lam and I had bought for our supper.

The first thing I heard was the drone of aeroplanes from the other side of the hill. I turned round to look, but my hands were full of damp linen so I couldn’t shade my eyes and had to scrunch them up against the sun. Flying in over the Peak like squat, gorged mosquitoes were six planes, so low I could see the burning red circles painted on their sides. As they flew over the apartment their undercarriages started to open. They must have been about halfway down the hill when they released their load. The first bomb fell on the cemetery on Ko Chiu Road, and the earth opened up like a flower, sending out a shower
-
burst of chipped slabs, metal vases, bits of wood and incense sticks.

After that there was another boom, and another, more smoke and debris floating up through the wooded hill that separated us from the rest of the city. I ran down the steps from the roof, through the apartment to the living room, pegs snapping against the linoleum as they scattered all around me,
a bundle of washing still in my arms.

There was no one there. The captain had gone to the customs office early. It was Christmas morning, and he needed to deal with some urgent business before the festivities began, he’d said.

There were more hammering bangs – not from outside this time, but from inside, then the wrenching, splintering noise of doors being broken in. Down on the ground floor, then the second floor, then the apartment next door.

I ran to Mrs Elsa’s dressing room, where she was sitting at her mirror doing her hair. She was still in her negligee, covered up by a house coat wrapped around her middle with one of her elegant sashes. She hadn’t done her make
-
up and her face looked young.

‘Hide!’ she said straightaway. ‘Hide Mari.’
There was fear in her voice but no hesitation.

I went to the nursery and lifted Mari from her cot without my usual clucking and shushing and took her straight to the laundry room. The brass locks on the front door of our apartment were strong, and by the time the door had been kicked in I was crouched over in the empty clothes basket with Mari in my arms. I slotted the lid into place over our heads and hoped she wouldn’t wake after being lifted so suddenly from her cot. I heard the back door of the apartment being pulled to, and thought that Lam and Wang must have decided to risk going the back way down to the garage, to hide in the Bentley’s generous boot.

The laundry basket was made of wicker, with tiny slats all the way round. I sat and waited. There were men inside the apartment now. There were shouts, and the sound of heavy boots along the passageway, I didn’t know how many pairs, maybe four or five. I heard someone kicking doors open in turn: the captain and Mrs Elsa’s bedroom, Lam’s tiny room. Mine. Wang’s. The laundry room.

A pair of green canvas trousers came in, stopping next to the basket. I could smell sweat, men’s sweat, bodies that needed washing. Every time I breathed, the darkened inside of the basket jumped and shook around me, like a volcano about to explode. I thought of the worst thing they might do. I remembered Mother’s story about the Japanese soldier who liked to take the babies of his enemies, throw them in the air and watch them land on his raised sword, for fun. The victor’s pleasure.

The green trousers were so close to me that I could see the bumps and shapes made by the textured khaki, craters and hollows forming and re
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forming as he took each step towards the middle of the room. His view must have been obscured by some of the towels hung up to dry from a pulley; I heard him tut as he pushed them aside.

Mari opened one of her small fists in her sleep. Her fingers stretched out one by one. She grabbed onto my plait and pulled it like a horse’s tail, her eyes still shut. I sank my teeth into my tongue to bury the pain.

The soldier had turned around and was making his way out of the room, pushing towels aside as he went.

They kicked the kitchen door open. I heard glass breaking, plates being thrown to the floor. Mari turned her head towards me in her sleep. I stroked her cheek with trembling fingers. She took a deep breath and settled back into her dreams again.