These Days of Ours (32 page)

Kylie Minogue is a blameless individual but Kate had had her fill of
Spinning Around
. The smaller children had learned the song phonetically; with no idea what they were
saying they belted out the lyrics as they gyrated in the canteen.

‘Xiao yi xiao!’ Chow, the caretaker, aimed a camera at Kate and the various small individuals piled on her.

Kate’s minimal Mandarin vocabulary recognised this as ‘smile’. The kids shouted, ‘Cheese!’ just as she’d trained them.

They took countless photographs at Yulan House, but there was a poignant edge to these ‘last opportunity’ snaps. Little Fan wouldn’t let go of Kate’s leg, clinging on and
having to be prised away by her friends.

There were fifty orphans or abandoned children in Jia Tang’s care. A nice round number, it would grow or reduce as youngsters arrived or left, but right now each of them wanted to dance.
Jerky, ecstatic, they seethed with uninhibited joy. Gao pumped the air with her tiny fists as her friends whirled her in her wheelchair. Even Song, recovering from an operation to fix her cleft
palate, was present in the arms of a trusted older child, Sammi.

On the edge of the action, Sammi seemed immune to the lure of the music. He was quiet, as he generally was. Before Yulan House took over his care (Jia Tang had refused to take no for an answer
when dealing with his parents) Sammi saw things he was just beginning to talk about. He put his face close to Song’s and pulled the blanket over the baby’s sleeping face.

Laughing as Rocky, the most flamboyant of Yulan House’s office staff, spun her round – for a seventy year old he had moves – Kate fixed the scene in her mind. The low ceilinged
canteen in the building’s signature cream was the heart of the orphanage. Food happened here, and lessons and impromptu theatricals. Kate had already decided to apply the Yulan palette to her
own home. Cream. Moss green. A dull, knocked back red. Accustomed now to fewer things around her, she would de-clutter; when Kate saw Charlie’s home on Skype the fussy backgrounds sparked a
fuzz of static in her head.

A scuffle broke out. High pitched screams in the corner. Egg tart on the floor. Kate dashed over to adjudicate. She made peace in pidgin Mandarin, exploiting her special status with the
children. She was the foreigner, the strange one. And they loved her for it. Her funny-coloured skin. Her peculiar hair that kinked and waved. Her sky-coloured eyes. None of them stayed belligerent
for long when she talked their language: natural gigglers, they fell about at her attempts to wrap her lips around their words. It was all in the intonation; each time she took off Kate wondered
where she would land. She knew the word for
friends
, however. ‘Pengyou?’ she asked, squatting down to their level.

‘Pengyou!’ the abbreviated pugilists agreed.

With little experience around kids, apart from her time spent lolling with Flo, Kate had been stiff at first, unsure how to relate to the little characters pulling at her, chattering to her,
ignoring her. Jia Tang had given her some advice which unlocked the door to each of their hearts.
Treat them like individuals.

In the centre of the room, barely taller than her older charges and radiating warmth like a mobile sun, Jia Tang clapped and wriggled arthritically. Ageless – Kate never dared ask –
she had the same combustible energy as the small fry. Jia Tang had confided that the children were the secret to her endlessly recycled zeal.

‘When I tire,’ Jia Tang said, ‘I kneel down with the little ones, hold their hands, sing their songs with them, or just listen. And I am renewed.’

Massive, far too sweet, a celebration cake stood proud on a stand, obliterated with icing and held in the peripheral vision of every juvenile in the room. Kate could sense their anticipation.
After months as an
ayi
– Yulan’s term for a volunteer prepared to do anything and everything that was asked of them – Kate knew their quirks. She’d doled out dinner,
shampooed their blue-black hair, tucked them up and shushed them in their long dormitories, woken them up, read to them, listened to them read to her. Mother, sister, friend, not only to the
delightful dots like Dishi, who was sunny and sweet and as fat as a doughnut, but Li who stabbed her companions with a fork if their hands came too near her supper tray.

Each of them deserved love just for
being
, not for being good or kind or pretty; the ethos of Yulan House correlated with Kate’s own. Each of them was a disparate thread Jia Tang
had gathered up and knitted into one unusual but warm garment.

‘We’ll miss you,’ said the young teacher who’d travelled one and a half thousand miles from Guangzhou to offer her services for nothing. The cook, a paradoxically thin
woman, said, with the help of the teacher to translate, ‘Think of my Smacked Cucumber when you’re eating horrible Yorkshire pudding and chips!’

Accepting so much carefully expressed goodwill was exhausting for a composite of Irish repression and English restraint like Kate. She felt herself fill up with complex emotion, feelings
she’d been fending off. It was becoming real: tomorrow she would leave this place.

The magnolia tree in the courtyard offered consolation and peace, as it so often had. She settled into a spot at its base that knew her bottom so well they might have been made for each other.
Kate had woken up to this tree every morning – shockingly early: Yulan House kept monastery hours – and fallen asleep in its shadow every night. It had taken her breath away when
she’d first seen it, for real, after all the photographs.

The tree was where naughty children were sent to ponder their sins. Troubled children cried against the trunk. Happy ones ran round and round it. Kate had spent hours with the tree, sometimes
with a baby on her knees, often alone, as she endeavoured to borrow some of the magnolia’s patience.

Kate had been slow to admit what was happening. She’d fought it. The Kate who’d arrived at Yulan House had lost her belief in transformative love, love that made better people of
those it touched. Watching the tree’s abundant waxy blossoms bloom into cups, drop, get swept away, she felt her faith return.

‘This tree is a good friend to us.’ Jia Tang was at her side, dressed in her best, a neat navy uniform-style garment that Becca wouldn’t wear to do housework. Her breath was
scented with the chrysanthemum tea she favoured. ‘As you know, we named our whole community after the Yulan, what you would call a magnolia. He always listens. Never interrupts.’

‘Are you poetic because English is your second language?’ Kate regarded the much smaller woman. ‘Or are you poetic in Mandarin, too?’

‘Actually, English is my
fourth
language.’ Black teardrop eyes beneath smooth lids met Kate’s slyly.

The formality of the English spoken by those of the staff who were multilingual had alienated Kate. She’d longed for slang, lazy pronunciation and less-than-respectful greetings. In time
the decorous expressions felt soothing, just like the orphanage routines. Jia Tang insisted on structure, in order to reassure the children that, whatever their lives may have been like before,
they could expect consistency from Yulan House.

During their late chats in Jia Tang’s sparse office, Kate had asked how she dared to make the promise implicit in Yulan House’s welcome. ‘The children believe you’ll look
after them as long as they need you to. But this place is in continual need of money and resources. I see you holding your breath when you do the books.’

‘Yes, we live hand to mouth,’ admitted Jia Tang. Despite the solidity of the compound, the loud clang of the iron gates and the comforting smell of mu shu pork curling through the
corridors, Yulan House got by on a wing and a prayer. ‘We’ve kept going for thirty-six years. The orphanage works because it has to.’

Poetry again. Kate knew better. She’d witnessed the small hard-headed woman haggle with tradesmen until they were almost paying
her
to take their goods. She’d seen Jia Tang
stare down shifty officials who stood between her and a little soul in need of her help.

That night, beneath the tree, Kate asked, with a note of anxiety in her voice she wouldn’t allow anybody else to hear, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’

Inside, Kylie had given way to Rihanna. Dishi gyrated on a trolley.

‘You’ll find the answer inside yourself.’ Jai Tang rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to turn off the oriental whimsy.’ She produced a small wrapped
package from the folds of her outfit, like a conjuror. ‘Open this,’ she said, ‘and think of me when you’re back in rainy London.’

Reluctant to leave the tree, Kate went back to the party. Normally so rational, Kate had found herself entertaining notions that she’d offended some goddess of love. What other explanation
could there be for a lifetime of near misses? The minxy goddess whisked Charlie away each time the music changed.

Now that Kate had duped the goddess and found a love without any divine help, perhaps she could accept Charlie’s friendship as the prize it was, without wishing it was something other,
something
more
. He, after all, had managed to convert his fervour for her into platonic love.

‘Yam sing!’ A fellow volunteer, Xu, touched her on the shoulder.

‘What does that mean?’ Kate touched her hair, wishing it was in better nick; Xu was dashing, with ripe lips and a slender, androgynous body.

‘It means cheers,’ said Jia Tang.

‘But,’ said Xu, in his dancing accent, ‘it can also mean have a safe journey home.’

‘Home,’ said Kate, liking the shape of the soft word on her lips.

‘Yam sing,’ said Jia Tang. ‘To you both.’

Kate could imagine the disgruntled mutters, the tutting that she shouldn’t be alone. She had no intention of being alone; if they knew the identity of her only guest it
would cause a stampede. There would be disapproval and gratuitous advice, all of which could wait until Sunday, over a leg of lamb.

The house smelled all wrong. It felt neglected. Slowly, Kate reclaimed her home, lighting candles, roasting a chicken. The perfectly ordinary decor seemed opulent, the ensemble of texture and
tone overwhelming her. As her first full day back in London went by, she became acclimatised and could see the beauty of it again. After all, she’d chosen every element herself. The house was
hers, her footprint on the Earth. Yulan House had proved to Kate the value of home.

Jet lag made a mockery of routine. Energy peaks had to be utilised because dips followed close behind. Any minute now and Kate would be sleepy as a kitten, so she opened her laptop to bash out
the email she’d been composing.

Kate didn’t quite trust Angus’s rehabilitation. He flaunted his sobriety the way he used to flaunt his boozing. The recovery felt brittle.

She empathised with Angus’s sense of being left behind by the tide, of knowing that what he most wanted was not going to happen, so she was gentle with him.

And firm. Life with an alcoholic had been grim. There had been laughs and luxury and real love, but mainly it had been a slog, a coal mining of the heart. Kate didn’t regret her decision
to scram.

Sometimes Kate asked herself
If Charlie and I were together, would I leave him if he was an alcoholic?
It was a rhetorical question: Kate would be at his shoulder throughout. She was full
of such pointless self-knowledge.

A dense, damp November night had already closed in by seven o’clock. If Becca had had her way, the sitting room would be fizzing with music now. Flo would be refusing to dance; Becca would
be refusing to stop.

Savouring the calm, Kate picked at something on a tray and eyed the undemanding pap on the television. After seven months with no blaring box she wanted to shout
Look at all the
colours!

Sleep began to steal over her. Kate felt obliged to fight it. She should get up, shake herself, and root around for the photograph of Dad. Kate was always careful with the treasured snap and she
remembered, or thought she did, slipping it in the side pocket of her suitcase. It hadn’t been there when she unpacked.