The Rice Paper Diaries (9 page)

They were walking around the living room now, the sound of their boots muffled by the rug. Springs creaked as they sat down in the easy chairs. There was a tinkle of glasses.

I peeped out through the gaps in the laundry basket at the empty corridor. It looked as it always did. Framed photographs of the captain and Mrs Elsa hung on the wall, people dressed in winter coats standing on a beach next to a stormy sea, smiling at the camera. On the hall table was a black porcelain jug with inlaid flowers in gold lacquer. Next to it was an ornate clock.

I closed my eyes and willed this to be a normal day.
The kind of day when everything would turn out exactly as I had planned it; the laundry, Mari’s walk in the park, the pleasure of her nap
-
time before supper, when all I had to do was stay with her and let my thoughts wander. Mrs Elsa would be in the dressing room, while the captain sat out on the terrace enjoying a pink gin before dinner. I waited to hear the clink of ice cubes, the door to the sitting room opening and closing, and the silence of them kissing, before he served her a soda with lime, the way she has it every day when he comes home from work.

But when the sitting room door was opened again, the heels that tramped their way back out were even heavier than before, and unsteady. I don’t know if it was the whisky that had reminded them what it was they were here to do, that time was not to be wasted. The dressing room door was kicked open. There was a click.
A shot was fired.

Mrs Elsa didn’t scream or shout. There were noises: cupboard doors being opened, or kicked in.

Mari was awake now, her eyes unblinking, staring at me in the dark. She didn’t make a sound. The crown of her head smelled of sugar cane.

The door to the dressing room was flung open, and they came out again, the heavy boots. Their canvas trousers passed the laundry room door, which was still open. In the middle of them was Mrs Elsa, walking in her bare feet. I saw the lace trim bottom of her night gown. As they passed the hall table one of the men lifted an arm and casually pushed the porcelain jug. I heard the smash as it hit the floor.

The same thing had happened in the apartments all around us. People were being rounded up and herded out of the building. The soldiers shouted all the time, either at their prisoners or at each other, or both. I heard an engine outside, a lorry, or a truck.

One of them yelled in English: ‘In! Get in!’

There was the crack of something hard against flesh and bone, a man’s cry. Perhaps he hadn’t moved quickly enough. They must all have been moving quickly after that, because I didn’t hear it again. Doors were shut, a tailgate lifted and bolted into place. The engine chugged some more, shifted gear and moved off down the hill. Other trucks followed it, their tyres crunching through the wreckage from the blown
-
out cemetery.

Mari had fallen back to sleep. I kept on staring at the broken
-
up jigsaw view of the hallway from inside our cocoon. The thousand pieces of the shattered porcelain on the linoleum; the photographs on the wall above.
There was one of Mrs Elsa and the captain standing in a field with a man and woman with white hair. Even though the picture was black and white, you could tell that the plants billowing out in the wind around them had grown from rapeseed. The flowers were so full and ripe they had blurred into one velvet cloud under the glass. Father would have been proud of such a good crop. No wonder the white
-
haired man was grinning, his hand on the belly of a tractor. Mrs Elsa looked taller than the rest of them, as if she had been cut out of a magazine and glued onto the picture.

I wasn’t afraid any more. The men had gone.

My arms and legs were stiff from being curled up in the laundry basket with Mari. I limped straight into Mrs Elsa’s dressing room. Her clothes had been pulled out of closets and armoires and ripped apart or thrown to the floor and stamped on under their dirty boots. Her plum
-
coloured silk evening gown had been cut open down the middle. A white chiffon dress had mud on the tunic. Printed blouses had been torn off their hangers and thrown all over the room, as if the men had been looking for something.

I went over to the dressing table. Mrs Elsa’s jewellery box was open. She didn’t wear much jewellery: ‘You can’t take it with you, can you?’ was one of her favourite phrases. It was what she always said when Lam was helping her to get ready for a dinner at the Peninsula, or cocktails at the Gloucester. Lam said it meant there was no point spending big money on small items you’ll have to leave behind when you die. But Mrs Elsa was proud of her gold
-
and
-
diamond watch, and her engagement ring, a ruby set into a band that she said was made of something called Welsh gold. It was so pale that it had looked almost silver against the black velvet of the box. It wasn’t there now. The box was empty.

Remember the studio photograph Lam and I sent home to you, Third Sister, how you admired our black
-
and
-
white uniforms? You were awed by the fake flowers in vases that stood on a column between us, and the painted curtain that set the scene behind, the oily glimmer of the moon on the bark of a goat
-
horn tree. But it was our jewels you were most proud of, wasn’t it? We both wore identical rings, and a bracelet on one arm, mine on my right, and Lam’s on her left. Well, let me tell you a secret. Those jewels weren’t paid for by Mrs Elsa and the captain. They weren’t given to us in return for our hard work. They were painted on by the photographer’s assistant. All the girls pay a few cents extra to have it done.

One of Mrs Elsa’s pots of face cream had been left with its lid off. I put it back on so the flies wouldn’t get to it.

Mari started to cry then. It was time for her breakfast porridge and milk. I looked up at the mirror. There was a hole in the middle of it the size of a coin where the bullet must have hit it. I saw a confused face broken up into shards that ran from the centre to the edges of the kidney
-
shaped glass: an eye here, a cheekbone there. It took me a moment to recognise it as mine.

Footsteps, light and hesitant, were coming up the stairs from the lobby. Lam and Wang. I picked my way through the piles of clothes and stood in the hall and waited for them. Mari was howling.

On the wall the clock was still ticking. It was eight o’clock.

5

The bombing had stopped, although clouds of black smoke still hung low over the mountains on the other side of Kowloon.

Wang drove down from the Peak, his head lowered as if he expected sniper fire, with Lam and me in the back. It could have been any other morning, with French doors opened onto terraces and tables set for breakfast, but there were chairs that had been pushed back, fine bone china cups knocked out of their saucers, and shattered windows. And it was so quiet, quieter even than the early mornings on the Delta, with the paddy fields opening out in all directions, when they have been flooded and the mud levelled and all that needs to be done is to plant the spiky young plants and wait for them to push their way out of the earth and turn yellow. Even you, Third Sister, young as you are, know that once a finger of red stains the fields, it is time to harvest the ripened grains.

‘It won’t take long to get to the customs office,’
Wang said.
‘The captain will know what to do.’

Two military vans came round the corner, and drove straight at us on the wrong side of the road.
A Japanese soldier up front cocked his bayonet at Wang and gestured that he should pull over. Sweat prickled out of
Wang’s skin, running down the back of his neck, but by the time he’d parked, the vans were gone.

‘We’d better get out of the car,’ he said.

We walked the rest of the way to Central.
There were other people doing the same thing, not looking at each other, hurrying.

When we arrived at the customs building, the door was bolted and there were two young men in their shirt sleeves on the pavement outside running lengths of adhesive strip across the windows.

‘Please, Sir, where is everyone? Where’ve they gone?’
Wang said.

One of the young men bit off a strip of tape between his teeth before replying.

‘Building’s closed.’

The other one pointed to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building and some of the big hotels on the other side of the road.

In the Hong Kong Hotel people were sitting around the lobby in their good coats. Some of them had cases. A tall, thin waiter, his collar greying at the tips, was serving drinks from the bar. Behind him, a small boy was kneeling down, rolling a single pram wheel back and fore across the lobby using a stick. A couple of people looked up as we walked in, but that was all. I had thought I would recognise more of the faces, but the only person I knew was one of the captain’s colleagues, Mr Vernon.

‘Please Madam,’ I said, going over to his wife. Her face was like a flat, clean plate, without any expression. She was holding a toddler on her knee, who wriggled about in her lap like a basket of eels. Mrs Elsa called her Lizzie – ‘my good friend, Liz,’ she said when she was talking about her to other people, but she didn’t recognise me, or Mari, who was strapped onto my back, with her head close in to my neck. All you could see were the dark tufts of hair sticking out like paddy seedlings at the back. She could have been any baby.

‘Please can you tell me where Captain Jones is?’ I asked, and then, when she didn’t reply, ‘we are looking for Captain Tommy Jones. Japanese soldiers broke into the apartment this morning and took Mrs Jones away.’

She jumped up and screamed, then started to cry, hysterical.

M
r
Vernon got up and shouted, ‘For God’s sake, she’s terrified enough as it is, can’t you see?’

Everyone in the lobby stopped talking and stared at us.
The little boy’s wheel rolled along the floor, the rubber hum of its tyre cutting through the quiet; then it hit the waxed panelling of the reception desk, and bounced away, back on itself.

‘Just quit messing around, will you?’

I had never heard Mr Vernon sound so angry before.

The boy stopped short.

‘Yes, Sir,’ he whispered.

He crept towards the pillar where the wheel had come to rest, picked it up, and walked away on tiptoe.

Wang, who had been looking about the lobby, beckoned for Lam and I to follow him through to the covered walkway that led directly to the Gloucester, but there were hundreds of Chinese jammed in it end to end and there was no way for us to get through. They were sitting on the floor, talking quickly over each other’s heads, passing things to each other – blankets, rice bowls, paper packages of food.

Wang pressed his way into the crowd and spoke to a man with a beard of fine white hair. After a few minutes he came back to where we were waiting.

‘Dragon Arcade has been bombed,’ he said. ‘They’re still taking the bodies away.’

Dragon Arcade is just off Des Voeux Road, exactly where my letter
-
writer sits, seven days a week, hoping for passing trade. There hasn’t been a day that I’ve gone looking for him that he hasn’t been there.

As we made our way back out of the lobby, a young man in a jacket who had been sitting with the Vernons came up to us. He looked like an office boy.

‘Captain Jones is at the harbour office. He went to try to get tickets for the next passage out. But we’ve just heard that they’ve stopped the ships.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’
Wang said.

We went back to the car, but someone else had got to it first. One of the wing mirrors had been ripped off and the other one shot at. The windscreen had shattered. The smell of urine hung in the air, and when Wang opened the door on the driver’s side and put his head in, he brought it out again straightaway, his hand covering his nose and mouth. I looked through the window and saw the brown smears that covered the cream leather, the flies that had gathered already.

You’d imagine that we would have been panicking and scared, wouldn’t you? Not just walking along Jubilee Street, as if we were going to market for Mrs Elsa. But the truth is that we didn’t know where to go or what to do and so we were just following our usual route through Sheung Wan back to the
kongsi fong
. I knew that Lam would want to collect her things. She had a ring that Ryan had given her, along with a red packet holding money.
They really were going to get married, you see; Ryan was going to prove himself. Lam was sobbing as she walked behind me.

And then, with a rush as sudden as a click of the fingers, the streets were full again. Outside a fishmonger’s, a man was desperately trying to push trolleys of skinned fish back inside, and to draw the metal shutters across, but he was surrounded by people helping themselves without paying. Wang shoved his way through to help. We followed him, but got caught up in the crowd. I felt them all around us, arms, elbows, hands, jostling and grabbing at what they could – white fish, crocodiles’ tails, dried prawns – and making off with their overloaded baskets and panniers. I heard Lam’s voice behind me, but there were people all around us now, moving off in haste once they’d taken what they could, and we were carried with them almost to the intersection with Bonham Road. Then I felt a hand in mine and Lam pulled me back into an empty doorway. The chaos around us continued: feet on pavements, voices close up to us shouting almost in my ear. A thickset man carrying a long stave and a smaller man with an axe in his hand came up to us and demanded our pocket books without delay.
They weren’t Japanese. They weren’t soldiers. I knew one of them: the one with the axe owned the spice shop across the road from the
kongsi fong
. Every time he came out to shake out his shallow spice pan at the end of the day he used to look up at the sky before shutting up shop. It was him. There was no mistake. I was so shocked that I couldn’t get my fingers to work quickly enough to bring my purse out and they shouted again, and the spice
-
seller grabbed the front of my tunic
and tore it open. I stayed quiet, terrified they would spot Mari’s blue eyes peeping out over my shoulder, although the shame I felt as they looked at my bodice hanging through the ripped tunic felt worse than anything I had ever felt before.