by Alison Wong
She used to grumble at Donald because he never gave enough for housekeeping. Now she had enough and still she was doing the mending. She smiled sadly. Then, unhappiness had coloured everything; now, it was merely the habits of a lifetime. ‘But Katie,’ her mother would say, ‘they’re perfectly good. All you need to do is apply a little thread and elbow grease.’
Katherine stared at her sewing basket. She did not want to think of her mother. She rose and went into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put it on the range. She walked up and down, her shoes ringing on the wooden floorboards. She made tea and sat at the table, holding the hot cup in her hands. It grew cold and she poured it away. She swept the floor. After ten minutes she realised she had been scattering coal dust, walking through it, spreading dust from one pile into many. She put the broom away. Sat down at the table. Stood up, started pacing again. Stopped. She climbed the stairs quietly and looked in at the children.
Edie lay, arms tossed up as if softly under arrest, but Robbie looked like he’d been running, fighting; he’d tangled himself in the bedding as if caught in a spider’s web. She’d untangled him so many times, ever since he was a wee boy. She picked his pillow up from the floor and placed it under his head, pulled the sheets and eiderdown gently, and tucked him in again as if he were still her baby, as if he were still four years old. She closed the door behind her and did not see his eyes flicker open.
Downstairs, she stared again at the mending. Surely there was more to life than elbow grease.
She put on her coat, pulled her biggest hat – the green one with the orange flowers – well down over her face, and secured it with a hatpin. She put a box of matches in her pocket, picked up the lantern, unlit, then stepped out the back door.
The cool of night enveloped her. A clouded sky. She stood there, almost walked back into the kitchen and closed the door again. Why was she doing this? She was crazy. She knew she was crazy.
She listened. The children were asleep.
She walked down the side of the house, through the gate, then over the road. She turned and stared at the darkness of the upstairs windows. She had to either walk straight back across the road or go on. She could feel his lips on her hair, her throat . . . with every step it seemed to get a little easier, her heart beating in her mouth.
She walked down Adelaide Road towards the shops. Everything was closed – except for the Tramways Hotel, which spilled gloomy yellow light and laughter onto the footpath. And the greengrocery. No, not him, but his brother carrying shelves of fruit and vegetables inside. She walked, holding the unlit lantern, knowing no one in the little wooden cottages saw her in the darkness, hoping no one she knew would stumble across her in the street. Opposite the Basin Reserve she turned right, quickly, away from the pale light of the street lamp, up the driveway to the College. Lights off in the dormitories, all those boys – some not much older than Robbie – lying in their beds whispering, sighing, dreaming. Past the big kitchens where servants still washed supper dishes and prepared the next day’s breakfast. Through the grounds of the school, up to the town belt.
Among the trees she hesitated. Long pine trunks, branches swayed and sang above her. She used to play here when she was a girl – as soon as he described it, she knew where he was meaning – but she’d never come at night. She paused to let her eyes adjust to the darkness, took a deep breath and walked slowly, feeling each step along the ground before she put her full weight on it. She could see shadows, degrees of black and black. At last, when she thought no one would see her through the pines, she fumbled with the matches and lit the lantern. Light escaped from just one glass side. Now she saw the earth rise and fall away, tree roots, ridges and valleys, carpets of pine needles, broken glass, pine cones, empty bottles. What was more frightening: blindness or the shadows cast by the flame?
She walked tentatively, searching for the tree, the only one half-burnt by lightning . . . there . . . she caught hold of the trunk and walked behind it straight into . . . she gasped and fell back, but hands caught her, pulled her up. She held on as if drowning in air, the lantern swinging, sending light zigzagging over branch and trunk and root. Across his sleeve, collar, face. She could smell him: soap, ginger and garlic, a man smell. Her feet found steady ground; she let go, and then he let go also, their bodies so close she could feel him breathing. She looked up and the brim of her hat swept across his face.
They fell back. She was apologising and he was saying something she could not understand. He was laughing, and laughter rose from her like a small skein of wool unravelling. Then silence: just the rustle of pine needles, the call of a morepork, the distant clatter of trams. ‘I suppose I should take it off,’ she said.
He said nothing.
She put down the lantern, suddenly wishing she’d blown out the flame. The hatpin. Her fingers felt thick, clumsy. She was pulling the pin from her hair, feeling that this was an extreme act of intimacy, like taking off one’s clothes, petticoat by petticoat, like being caught in moonlight naked. She dropped the hat, her hair falling over the back of her neck, over her face, felt his lips on her forehead, his hand cup and lift her chin, her mouth towards him . . .
Afterwards, she climbed into the coldness of her bed, felt the thin layer of sweat on her skin, stared at the ghost of a street lamp through her window.
She listened to the sounds of darkness, closed her eyes. Her mother’s face slipped under her eyelids, her voice through the ears she tried to squeeze shut: Why do you always bring home stray dogs and cats? What’s wrong with you? People will think I didn’t bring you up right.
It hadn’t been men. She hadn’t had any men before Donald – and anyway, even now her mother was still under Donald’s spell. It was Matilda Mulroney, who didn’t have any friends because she was dirty and had a vague off-putting smell but whose wicked sense of humour Katherine adored. It was the three-legged dog that followed her home.
If she was honest – and oh, honesty was a taskmaster it was easier to avoid – Katherine had noticed the Chinese.
Why, for instance, were they almost exclusively men? And why did people call them celestials? Because they were aliens? Because no one knew anything about them? Apart from Haining Street, that is. Apart from opium and gambling.
Katherine noticed as they walked down the street or when she went into their greengroceries. Once, almost all of them had a long plait that fell down their back, that they sometimes coiled up under their hats, their foreheads shaved right up the scalp. But more and more were cutting their hair.
There were stories of danger and iniquity that seemed ludicrous if compelling. Yet most Chinamen seemed so thin and small. So polite and unassuming.
If they had not spoken such halting English, if their accent had not been so difficult, if they had not looked so out of place, so very foreign, perhaps she would not have noticed the Chinese at all.
It reminded her of the way she had been with Donald . . .
Yet this Chinaman was different. Chinamen were aberrations, and he, an aberration amongst them . . . She smiled. He had, she realised, Matilda’s mischievous grin.
She knew it was madness.
She would not go to him again. He would wait and wait and she would not come.
It was a dream – a beautiful, discomfortable dream. She would wake up. Of course, it was only a dream.
But she could still feel him inside her, the ache of him like a bruise.
It hadn’t been like this with Donald.
It was the tenderness.
He entered and she wept. Silently. She was not crying. It’s just that tears slipped from her eyes and she did not know why.
When he touched her it felt like wholeness. She forgot who he was. He was a man, he was this man, and now there was no other reason for being. Except for him to fill her. And fill her.
The intensity of their bodies filling the world.
*
Yung rose early. He could not keep still. He felt as if he had boundless energy. He walked to th
e markets composing short poems in his head, reciting them to himself, whistling old love ballads. His body no longer belonged to himself; it seemed so light, he felt like he could run up walls, perform miraculous feats of endurance.
Bidding hadn’t started yet. He walked through the cavernous buildings, past the auctioneers with their clipboards; through the throng of other buyers; past the huge concrete pillars and the timber-painted signs nailed to the walls or hanging from the ceiling – Sandy Pope, George Thomas, Leary, Thompson Bros, Townsend & Paul, D. Bowie, Market Gardeners; past the lines of produce, here a line of cauliflowers, there a line of cabbages, here lettuces, there apples or pears; past the stacks of wooden cases and jute super-sacks with the name of the grower written on paper tags. He hummed as he walked, only after some time realising what he was humming – a bawdy folk song about a bridegroom waiting with his friends for the bride. He laughed and kept humming, hunting out the produce from the best growers, calling out to his fellow clansmen, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ then smiling, ‘Yes, yes, I have eaten,’ even though he had eaten nothing since the night before; his shoes sounding out on the damp wooden floorboards, somewhere just above the hum of excited conversation, the yelling, the banging of wooden boxes, the clip-clop of horses on the road outside. Jonquils. He stood in Market Gardeners, smelling jonquils. He laughed. Today he would buy flowers.
*
Why did she meet him? Why? She knew she had to save herself.
She wanted to bury her face in his skin. She longed for his caresses, his fullness, his hardness pushing into her, through her. She longed for his desperation, the shudder of him, the gentleness of their fall into sleep.
She could not sleep. She could not eat.
‘Are you all right?’ Mrs Newman asked. ‘You look so tired and pale. Take the day off and go to bed. And don’t come back till you’re feeling better.’
She met him, fell into his arms. He entered and she cried out. She wanted to cry out I love you.
*
Sometimes in the early hours while the city slept and the only sounds were those of the lion and monkeys carried on the night air from the zoo, he accompanied her along the darkest side streets towards home, picking up and handing to her small mementos – a fragrant rambling rose stolen from Mrs Farrell’s garden, its colour only truly known once she’d brought it home and examined it in the light of her hallway. It was a game they played – pink, yellow, orange, red: ‘You say pink, I say yellow, no tricking, tomorrow you tell me yellow, yes?’
Once she plucked from the gutter a broken stone shaped like a heart and gave it to him. He turned it in his fingers, looked at her sideways, one eyebrow raised. ‘It’s a heart,’ she exclaimed, but still he did not understand. ‘Heart,’ she said, making a fist with her hand, beating her chest. Did he not know about the heart? About love?
‘Heart,’ he said, the word blooming in his mind. Sum, sum gon, my heart and liver. He held the stone in his palm, placed it his breast pocket. In truth, it looked nothing like a heart, nothing like two love knots intertwined, but now he understood what she was giving him.
He reached into a mass of foliage tumbling from a wooden fence. ‘In China,’ he said, ‘we have fa cha, flower tea. It tastes like this.’ He held the tiny flowers to her face and she inhaled deeply. Star-flowers, she thought, as if intoxicated.
Katherine examined the flowers in the light of her bedroom. A few were still slender pink buds, but others had opened delicate creamy petals. She laid them beside her pillow, and all night, and for several nights after, the fragrance filled the dark air and coloured the world of her dreams.
Boílíng Water
‘These smell nice, Mum. What are they?’
Katherine looked up from the potatoes she was peeling. Edie held the flowers in her outstretched hand.
For a moment Katherine didn’t know what to say. She gazed at her daughter’s palm, at the delicate petals now wrinkled and edged with brown.
‘They . . . they’re called jasmine,’ she said.
‘Where did you get them from?’
Katherine shifted her weight from one foot to another, carried on peeling, tried to sound casual. ‘Haven’t you seen them before? They grow over fences, well, anywhere.’
‘Is that where you go at night?’
Katherine dropped the paring knife, just missed her foot. Damn! ‘Edie, can you pick it up?’
Edie picked up the knife and ran it under the tap. She handed it to her mother and waited.
‘I . . . I like to get some fresh air. Sometimes I need time to myself . . .’ Katherine chopped the potato in half, into quarters, dropped the pieces – too quickly – into the pot on the range. Boiling water splashed up and caught the back of her hand. Hell’s bells. She ran her hand under cold running water.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’
Katherine turned and gazed at her daughter. She had looked so like Edie at the same age, yet how different their lives were. Katherine had had to look after all her younger brothers and sisters. With her parents out or working, she’d be left to care for the ‘babies’.
Robbie would be thirteen in January and even Edie was older than she’d been.
She blushed. Her mother was not . . .
But it was never more than a couple of hours, was it? She had to remember to take her watch. She had to make sure she was away for no more than an hour – no, that wasn’t enough, not by the time she walked there and back – one and a half, two: surely the children would be all right for an hour and a half? Wouldn’t they?
‘Mum? Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine . . . You have to be careful with boiling water. Best to slip the vegetables in very gently . . .’ She turned off the tap and dried her hands, carried on peeling potatoes.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t used to.’
‘Didn’t used to what?’ She chopped and carried the potatoes on the wooden board to the pot. Carefully now. Don’t do it again.
‘You didn’t used to go out at night.’
Katherine stared at the boiling, thickening water. She could feel Edie staring. She did not look up.
*
Robbie would pretend he was asleep when his mother came into his room. He wanted to throw his arms around her, to beg her to stay.
He listened to her footsteps descend the staircase, heard the back door open and click shut, his ears so finely tuned he could imagine her footsteps, the gate opening and closing, the sound of her breathing, the way it drifted further and still further away in the night air.
One night, before the moon rose, he put his coat on over his nightgown, pulled on his shoes and crept out behind her, following her down Adelaide Road. Once she stopped and turned, looked back as if she knew someone was there. She looked for one long moment, past the telegraph pole, past wood and wool, skin and bone, now joined as one creature; she looked into thin air, then turned and continued walking.
He followed, careful to make no sound, turning into the College grounds, watching her walk up into the town belt. He followed a little way in but couldn’t see, worried that she’d hear the crackle of branches or broken bottles, worried that he’d trip and call out as he fell. And then in the distance he saw the lighted lamp, her silhouette, a man reach out towards her.
*
Edie heard Robbie slip out at night. She watched him from the darkness of their mother’s upstairs window, the bed still made from the morning, too neat, too cold. Empty. She looked over the street, watched the flicker of movement as he walked down Adelaide Road, then disappeared.
She lay in bed unable to sleep, listening.
Once, when she heard him climb back up the stairs, she went out to him. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Mum?’
He looked at her and said nothing. He went into his room and closed the door.
Puppet Show
When Yung opened the shop, the stink repelled him. Someone had urinated over the door during the
night. A drunk making his way from the Tramways, he thought, as he washed it down with a solution of carbolic acid and hot water.
It kept happening. Yung spoke to Mrs Paterson, Mr Mackenzie, Mr Wilson, Mr Krupp. No one else had a problem.
One morning it was faeces smeared in arcs over the front window. Afterwards Yung washed with soap and hot water, smelling his hands, then washing them again and again until his skin felt tight and pale and papery. Mei-lin offered him oil to rub in.
When they woke each morning, as they descended the stairs, each of them felt a certain dread. Even the relief of finding nothing never set them fully at ease.
Yung wanted to see Katherine every night, could tell by the way she held him and held him before they parted that she wanted this too. But she would not meet him more than two, perhaps three nights a week. The children, she said.
He sighed. She had changed his mindset. His vocabulary. He stopped himself now when he went to say gweilo; stopped himself mid-sentence and said, sai yan, westerner, instead.
There on the shop floor, surrounded by apples and pears and bananas, he’d spoken in his halting English and Katherine had listened. She’d spoken slowly, simply, choosing her words carefully, and he’d listened. He’d listened intensely, as if to music or a teacher who spoke an unfamiliar dialect. There were words he didn’t understand, words she didn’t understand. They would try to explain, their hands moving in the air like figures in a puppet show, their voices raised as if their lack of comprehension were the fault of a special kind of deafness. Yet over the years he had become more fluent.
And now, now that they met at night, now that they touched, everything had changed. She would come into the shop on her way back from work and they’d speak a little coolly, look at each other and try not to look, aware of other customers, even passersby on the footpath outside. He would hand her a paper bag of apples or a wrapped cabbage, and sometimes his hand would brush hers.
