The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  Nannon, for once, doesn’t fill the silence with words. Mari closes her eyes and breathes in the smell of Nannon’s love that clings all about her: the scent of dried egg and braised liver on her apron, lavender water around her cleavage, the soft mass of her overheated flesh under her plain cotton dress, the care in her fingertips on Elsa’s skin.

  Then there is a scream from outside and the sound of tennis balls falling to the floor, and a girl crying. Mari opens her eyes. She runs to the back porch. The jamb of the door is swollen and cracked, and she has to pull the handle hard to open it.

  Tommy is standing with the axe raised, blood dripping off it, pieces of sawn wood on the ground all around him. On the trunk they’ve been using to split the logs is a rat, its head separated from its body.

  Mari hears Elsa and Nannon coming up behind her, but she can’t turn round. She can’t stop looking at the rat’s red eyes, its headless torso still twitching, its worm-pink tail. Tommy and Frank are staring at it too. Frank has one hand at his neck over the little red marks, as if they’ve started itching. The yard next door is empty.

  Mari stands in between them – Frank, Nannon, Elsa and Tommy – feeling the end of the afternoon closing in all around them like the hot bricks of the garden wall.

  11

  Mari knows the names of all the months now, in Welsh as well as English. Sometimes she gets them mixed up, although she can’t see how that can be her fault, for there seems to be nothing about ‘July’ that might make it the same as ‘Gorffennaf’. ‘Gorffennaf’ – the end of the summer – seems the wrong word to Mari, anyway, for when July arrives it isn’t the end of the summer at all, far from it. Come August, there are still holidaymakers everywhere, promenading up and down the pier in black jackets. They strip down to their bathing suits and lay out bath towels and blankets on the hard, baked sand of the beach below. Heat blisters out of their uncovered skin, and in the evenings the scent of calamine lotion attracts the midges.

  And in August there is the regatta – bunting and fancy sundresses on show, and a warm breeze smelling of tar and candyfloss blowing through the crowds. Mari sits on her knees near the lifeboat shed eating wilting cucumber sandwiches from a wicker hamper and watching the races. Boats run stern to stern and people’s cries carry on the wind as the damp sand under Mari’s feet dries into crinkles that burn the skin between her toes. Elsa and Nannon drink tots of a brown sugary liquid out of egg cups, until they laugh at the way the bay winds out around them, and sit back against the warm smooth cliff-face jutting out from the sand, and fall asleep with their hats over their faces and their skirts hitched up. Mari sits up straight as a mast on the blanket, waving the wasps away from the abandoned egg cups, making sure that she doesn’t fall asleep too before the tide comes in.

  She doesn’t want August to end, because August keeps her close to Elsa and Nannon, and August keeps Tommy at a distance, busy with Frank up at Pwllbach rolling up hay into bales, or lending a hand on other farms in return for help with their own. She doesn’t want August to be over just yet, because when it is there will only be four weeks left before she is sent away to school in Cardiff.

  Nannon takes her into the shop on a Sunday afternoon, and makes her up a new night gown with her initals stitched into it: MJ – she doesn’t want it getting mixed up with the other girls’ clothes in the laundry, Nannon says. She tells Mari about the department stores in Cardiff, says that she and Elsa will take the train and visit Mari and go shopping. Often. And Mari will spend the holidays at home.

  When Nannon says the word ‘home’ Mari finds herself trying hard to catch her breath, like the day when Tommy had smacked her, but she doesn’t ask any more questions. She has been afraid to, ever since she heard Tommy and Frank and Elsa and Nannon talking about Kenya behind the kitchen door. She’d opened the door and gone in and they’d fallen silent. She hadn’t known what Kenya was, if it was English or Welsh, like July or Gorffennaf, so she’d looked it up in one of the encyclopaedias in the parlour. She’d put her fingers to the photographs of savannas covered in acacia trees with fluffy, feathered tops that looked like an old woman’s hair, and then she’d closed the book, and shut her eyes, and tried to conjure up what she could of Stanley, an afternoon spent with Elsa and Oscar sitting on the hill above the cemetery, playing noughts and crosses in the earth. But although Oscar was still there in her mind’s eye, marking out an X in the sand with a stick, he was as indeterminately monochrome as the zebras and leopards in the reference book, his eyes a washed-out tint that looked like no colour at all.

  Perhaps as she gets bigger, she thinks, as July turns into August and then September, life will become greyer and less distinct, until she won’t remember the smudged-out features of Oscar’s face at all.

  But when August does come to an end Mari finds it isn’t that simple: after a light covering of frost like finely bobinned crochet across the terraced lawns, the days heat up rapidly, and the blues and greens of the bay below become brutally sharp. Nannon calls it haf bach Mihangel. An Indian summer. More words that sound nothing like themselves. All Mari knows is that it isn’t time to leave yet.

  Elsa and Nannon are making sloe gin. They stand in the kitchen pricking the sloes with silver needles. They’ve set everything out first so they can get them bottled up before lunch. On one side of the low sink is the pyramid of purple-blue fruit they carried home with Mari along the new road the day before. The bloom on their skins looks mildewed, but it’s better that way than to pick them too early, Nannon had said, her fingers pecking like beaks in and out of the bushes, slinging handfuls of sloes into her basket without stopping, until she said she needed a breather and reached for her thermos flask. Although the sloes will never be sweet, she told Mari, as they sat on the grass verge taking long gulps of tepid tea from the same cup, at least the first frost has bitten into the sour edge that lies just under their skins.

  Mari pushes her head up from the table by her elbows. On the other side of the draining board, set out on an old tea cloth, are three empty bottles and a heap of sugar in a covered bowl. Nannon starts pushing the sloes into the empty bottles. Elsa has lit the range, and the room is filled with the scent of ginger tea and woodsmoke.

  ‘No dozing at this time of day,’ says Nannon, nudging Mari’s head gently out of her hands. She goes to fetch a basket from the scullery and comes back in and puts it on the table.

  ‘Damsons,’ she says. ‘Up in the orchard. I want you to strip the two big bushes of them before they get too ripe and start falling off.’

  Mari hardly ever goes into the back garden that falls in dug-out terraces to the back door. Usually it is hidden from view by clothes drying in the wind. Frank has put in two washing lines running from the top to bottom of the garden, and the pegged-up sheets hang down at sharp angles. She knows where the orchard is, though, through the gate and behind the air-raid shelter.

  ‘What did you need a shelter for here?’ Tommy had asked when he’d seen it.

  ‘Swansea was bombed and half-burned out, wasn’t it?’ Nannon answered without hesitating. ‘They said all ports were vulnerable, even here.’ She’d turned to Elsa. ‘You could see the glow in the sky from Pwllbach.’

  They don’t need the shelter now, Elsa tells Mari, but it is still there between her and the orchard, a bank of earth and corrugated iron with a gaping mouth that makes it look like Twm Siôn Cati’s cave. It scares her. This is the reason she doesn’t like going out into the garden. She doesn’t like having to go past that silent hump of dead soil, with the outlines of ghosts moving about in the sheets behind, half-formed shapes that stutter in the wind like a broken news reel.

  She tries to pretend it isn’t there as she pushes the dripping sheets out of the way to get up to the orchard.

  ‘Hello.’ Tommy is sitting under an apple tree, his hair made wild by the breeze, his face fuller now that he’s been eating Nannon’s food, his eyes bulging.

  She sets to picking damsons off the bush, some of which have star
ted falling already, just as Nannon said. They have burst open on the grass underfoot and lie face-up, their yellow insides grimacing at Mari like Sara’s jaundiced smiles. Mari doesn’t want to go to Pwllbach again. And she doesn’t want to get another hiding from Tommy. She puts the basket down and carries on collecting the damsons. They are a deep purple, deeper than the sloes, almost black and they are big too, so that she can only pick them one by one.

  Tommy gets up and helps her, his hands moving quickly, his blunt fingers holding the damsons as carefully as she does, making sure they reach the bottom of the basket without being spoiled.

  When the basket is full he takes it off her and puts it down on the grass at the base of the apple tree before sitting down again.

  ‘Come and sit next to me,’ he says, patting the mossy patch next to him.

  They look out over the roofs of Lewis Terrace. Mari’s bottom is starting to feel damp through her skirt, and she tries to lever herself up onto one of the apple tree’s protruding roots.

  ‘You can see all the way up to Snowdon today,’ Tommy says. ‘It’s a shame I didn’t bring the binoculars out with me.’

  Mari wonders if he means that she should run and get them. She makes as if to get up off the ground, but Tommy puts out one of his big hands and rests it on her arm until she sits back against the tree trunk again. She looks straight ahead, at the distant houses painted in strong reds and yellows on the promontory of Aberaeron, then to the north, at Llanon, a low topple of cottages and a church as small as the miniature heads of cow parsley that she cuts up to make bouquets for her dolls’ house. Last of all there is the long seafront at Aberystwyth, with the peaks of Snowdonia beyond.

  It is cold in the shade of the tree and she wishes she’d put her jumper on to come out instead of skipping away, pretending she couldn’t hear Elsa’s voice carrying up into the garden from the scullery behind her.

  ‘What does she write in those letters?’ Tommy says lightly, as if the answer doesn’t matter at all.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you think we can find out?’

  ‘I’m going away to school.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe not if you can help me find out what she writes about.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Next time she sends you to the post office, you come and see me. You bring me the letter.’

  ‘And then I won’t have to go away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Promise. Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes, I promise.’

  Mari looks out over the sea. She feels sorry for the boy who lives next door to Bristol House, Richard, because he has to go to the orphanage in Carmarthen next week, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He doesn’t whistle when he delivers the papers any more; instead he flings the Cambrian News into the porch so hard that it hits the bottom of the front door with a thwack.

  Tommy takes his hand away from her wrist and she gets to her feet.

  ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She takes the basket and starts to pick her way down the path between the sheets hung out to dry.

  The soles of her shoes are still wet from the orchard. She knows she’s going to fall before it happens. She doesn’t trip; she just slithers off one of the slate steps and lands on her knees in the back yard. She sees the basket dropping from her hands and rolling down to the back of the house, with damsons flying out of it. Some of them land on the kitchen window, leaving marks on the panes. She wonders why Elsa doesn’t come away from the sink and open the back door to see if she’s all right. Still on her knees, she looks through the smeared glass at her mother. But Elsa isn’t rinsing or pricking sloes or stirring them into the gin; she is bent over, clutching her sides and retching into the basin while Nannon stands at her side with her arm around her, pulling Elsa in close, looking straight ahead over Mari’s head, taking no notice of the split open ugly faces of the damsons against the grass.

  12

  Nannon and Elsa are in a strange mood, fussing around the leftovers on the breakfast table, and looking up at the clock above the range again and again. Nannon says they will take the car to Lampeter, and when Elsa asks about the petrol coupons she says the petrol coupons can go to hell for one day.

  ‘Am I coming?’ Mari asks.

  ‘What?’ Nannon says. She is busy taking a wad of notes out of a jug on the dresser and counting them. She puts some of them in her purse and the rest back in the jug. ‘Yes, yes, of course. You can go and put your coat on, if you’ve finished your toast.’

  Mari runs to the coat hooks in the hall, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She waits on the road outside for a long time, while Elsa and Nannon get themselves ready. She can hear a wireless crackling in one of the houses further up the terrace, and someone shouting down on the quay, although when she leans over the wall she can’t see anything apart from the roofs below and the navy of the sea.

  When Nannon and Elsa come out of the house wearing lipstick and sunglasses, they look like photographs of themselves. Nannon sits in the driver’s seat, with Elsa next to her, and Mari behind. Mari could lie lengthways if she wanted to and fall asleep, but she doesn’t feel sleepy, so she sits up and looks out of the window.

  Nannon waves a gloved hand at a woman standing on the corner of Lewis Terrace and Water Street. The woman gapes through the window. ‘Going somewhere for the day, are you?’ she calls out.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Nannon beams back at her.

  The woman opens her mouth to say something else, but Nannon has pulled the throttle out and turned up Water Street, and the noise of the engine is louder than anything the woman might have said. As they drive up the hill Mari turns around and puts a hand over the leather seat and looks out of the back window but all she can see are the woman’s ankles and shoes sticking out below a cloud of dirty smoke.

  ‘No one makes me laugh like you do, Nannon,’ Elsa says.

  ‘She deserved it.’

  Nannon waves her hand again airily, and Mari grabs onto the handle of the car door in case they run into a hedge. They pass a house below the cemetery gates with a wire cage in the front garden, like the chicken run Frank has built in the orchard for Nannon to keep hens. Mari presses her face to the glass as they pass the cottage, hoping to see the pet monkey with his sad, wrinkled face, but the run is empty.

  ‘It’s probably too cold for it to be let out today,’ Elsa says, before Mari can ask, and the way she says it makes Mari think that her mother doesn’t want to talk any more, so she pushes herself right back on the seat and stares out at the world from an angle, the yew hedge of the cemetery appearing and disappearing, trees and chimney pots petering out, until there is just her face reflected in the glass, moving across the sky. On the hilltop roads there are trees with bare branches, doubled-up by the wind. When the car begins to dip downwards again, the flat fields spotted with sheep between the road and the valley bed tilt back and fore, as if they are on a boat caught in an unexpected swell, pushing them up off the surface. Before long, though, the sea of green around them becomes steady, and houses start to fly by the windows, quickly at first, then slowing down until the car comes to a halt on a street with shops all along one side and a high sandstone wall and a pair of black wrought-iron gates on the other. Nannon sighs as the engine whines away to nothing, and sits back in her seat, her tweed coat sliding about on its leather surface. It makes a rude, belching noise when she shifts her weight around, but she takes no notice.

  ‘Shall we get to Gino’s before the rush?’ she says to Elsa.

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ says Elsa, smiling.

  The café is all marble and mirrors. There is a tall man behind the counter wearing a collar and tie, and a plain white apron. He smiles broadly, as if he’s been waiting for them.

  ‘Hello, Gino,’ says Nannon.

  ‘What a wonderful surprise,’ the man says in a staccato voice. ‘It’s been too long since we saw our friends from New Quay. Please, take a
seat by the window.’

  Elsa and Mari sit facing each other, and Nannon has the view of the street outside. Mari looks at Gino’s bald spot moving about in the mirror, and the pictures of opera singers on the walls, their mouths wide open. Nannon sighs and spreads her arms out across the table.

  ‘Isn’t this wonderful, getting away for the day?’ she says.

  ‘Here we are,’ says Gino. He puts two small, thick cups and saucers on the table, and moves the sugar pot from the centre closer to Nannon. He goes back behind the counter and brings out a dish set with cut sandwiches and a tall glass filled with something that looks like crushed ice, with blackberries sprinkled over the top.

  ‘And for the young lady, a sorbet made with fruits of the season. Our own new recipe.’

  ‘What do you say, Mari?’ says Nannon.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, eyeing the blackberries as they start to collapse into the melting sorbet. She takes the long spoon which came with it and starts eating straightaway. The cold tang of it hurts her mouth, but it is moist and sweet, better than chocolate.

  Nannon stirs a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. Gino has gone back behind the counter and is washing cups at a sink against the wall. Elsa is staring at the grey veins of the marble table top.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Nannon says to her. ‘I’m going to treat you both. I’m going to get a proper trunk for Mari, a good one for school, and you can choose whatever you like – maybe a valise? They’ve got lovely leather ones in that place next to the ironmonger’s. Nice and light for travelling overseas.’ She looks straight out of the window down the high street. ‘I think I’ve got everything ready for Mari, at least. Maybe we could do with a few more handkerchiefs, though.’

  ‘I can’t stop it happening, though, can I?’ says Elsa. ‘Any of it.’