CHAPTER 8
When we pick up the envelope of finished homework on Wednesday morning, I can’t help smiling.
Henry has simply circled each of the remainders that I deliberately forgot to include in my answers to the four long division questions, in the same red pencil that he wrote the questions in.
Amazingly, I didn’t get anything else wrong. So maybe it’s starting to make sense. And Henry doesn’t know this, but the remainders I actually got wrong on purpose.
When I turn the envelope over, my heart sinks to my shoes. Written on the back of the envelope is the longest long division question I’ve ever seen. Even Mum raises her eyebrows at how long it is. Now Henry is just being cruel. It’s going to take at least half of recess to get through this one.
There’s nothing else from Henry, though. No angry note about us maybe forgetting to leave him any dinner last night. No anatomically precise and detailed doodles of dragons or warriors that are always perfectly proportioned, which always put my messy people and animals to shame.
But at least Henry is still up to communicating in numbers and symbols, and that’s okay by me. I need to keep his thoughts away from that twisted apple tree in his backyard, whatever I do.
On an impulse, I slide out all of Henry’s finished homework, handing it to Mum to hold. Then I scribble my answer to the long division question on the empty envelope, right there and then.
‘Wen!’ Mum exclaims, looking at my messy working-out in dismay as I scrub out numbers and move things around, poking holes in the flimsy paper with my pen. ‘You’re going to be late.’
Thinking fast, I finish the thing with a messy flourish and shove the empty envelope back under the door. Miss Spencer can put today’s work in a new one, she’s got plenty.
Again, I’ve left off the remainder. It’s me giving Henry an extra annoying poke in the ribs. I’m trying to get a reaction. Something more from him than a circle drawn in red pencil.
‘Let’s see how he likes that!’ I tell Mum triumphantly as we start walking again towards school.
‘Maybe they still had something left over, from Monday, to eat,’ Mum’s voice is hopeful as we walk towards school. ‘It was quite a big serving, the Monday serving, and I’ll have money to buy groceries again by Friday, when your father gets paid. We can make the food we have last until then, Wen, if we make a big pot of congee for tonight, and tomorrow.’
I think about the single piece of pork belly defrosting in the fridge on a plate, and sigh. Congee, this savoury porridge you make out of rice and stock and whatever meat and dried food you have handy – like black mushrooms, preserved Chinese pork sausage, pickled vegetables or fried shallots – is not my favourite food. It’s too gloopy. And a bit tasteless. But Mum gets her housekeeping money on Friday with the start of the new month, so congee it will have to be for the next two days. For Mum and me, and Henry and his dad.
Hope they like it more than I do.
‘Make it a big pot,’ I tell Mum as she leaves me at the school gate. ‘Use lots of rice and stock. And give Henry and his dad all the meat.’
Mum squeezes my arm. ‘You have a good heart, Wen.’ She’s dressed in her lilac wool suit today, with uncomfortable-looking square-toed high-heeled dark brown shoes with a dark brown handbag to match. I think how her narrow feet must always hurt, the toes always pushed together into points.
‘So do you, Mum.’ I give her arm a return squeeze, trying to imagine what she does all day while she waits for me that isn’t some variation on cooking, cleaning, fetching or mending. While she walks away, her back very straight, her long, beautiful hair swinging, I wonder what she thinks of, what she dreams, once the shopping, cleaning, chopping and cooking are done.
At 3.42 pm exactly, we enter Mrs Xenakis’s pharmacy. Mr and Mrs Wu are already waiting for us, dressed like Mum is in their best clothes, even though all they’re doing is getting their injections done.
Mr Wu is in another dusty-looking three-piece suit, this time a navy pinstripe. Mrs Wu is wearing black silky pants, black silk slippers and a high-collared, long-sleeved blouse in a silky grey floral fabric with pearl buttons, her chin-length bob combed very neatly and secured on each side by a jewelled hair slide. They both look anxious, but their wrinkled faces relax when they see Mum walk in.
Mrs Xenakis explains each of the steps to Mum in English, and Mum translates them into Shanghainese. The elderly couple nod to show that they understand, with Mr Wu offering to go first. He takes off his navy suit jacket and carefully places it over the back of the fold-out plastic chair that he is directed to sit on, rolling up his left shirt sleeve and exposing a sticklike, wrinkly arm. His stoic expression doesn’t change at all as Mrs Xenakis gives him his flu shot, his hollow-cheeked face breaking into laughter lines when Mrs Xenakis urges him to take a lollipop, or a small bag of licorice allsorts afterwards, from the big glass jar full of treats.
Clutching a bright bag of licorice cubes, Mr Wu stands and helps his wife into the seat. Mrs Wu, her expression pinched and frightened, reaches for Mum’s hand; grasping it tightly as the needle goes into the papery skin of her right arm. Mum helps Mrs Wu fold back down the sleeve of her thin blouse after Mrs Xenakis is finished, buttoning the cuff gently. The old lady pats the back of Mum’s hand gratefully as she takes a red lollipop. I giggle as she rips off the plastic covering immediately and sticks it into her mouth, smiling like a little kid.
Mrs Xenakis turns to Mum gratefully. ‘I have a lot of older Chinese customers,’ she says. ‘And it’s always very difficult for me to make them understand what I’m doing, or to feel less frightened. You’re a godsend, Mrs Zhou, thank you.’
‘Call me Teresa,’ Mum replies in her careful English, which I still find weird to listen to; her voice is familiar, but also unfamiliar, at the same time. ‘Mrs Zhou is my husband’s mother.’
I look at Mum, gobsmacked. Dad never let me pick an English name to use at school, even though I begged because no one was saying ‘Wen’ (kinda rhymes with ‘urn’, but shorter) properly. Everyone had been calling me ‘When’, and some kids still do. Whenever I asked, Dad would say something cheery like, The name I gave you is the name you’re taking to the grave! and that was that.
But Mum, whom I know as Mei Ling, has gone and picked Teresa for herself, and I wonder if she got it out of a Chinese celebrity magazine, or off the TV. I kind of … like it. I think.
Mum grins, suddenly, which makes her look much younger. ‘My husband’s mother is a very frightening woman who lives in Beijing. We do not get along. We do not see …’ Mum wrinkles up her face, concentrating hard on getting the phrase right, ‘eye to eye.’
Mrs Xenakis laughs. ‘I know a bit about that, being a childless “career woman” who cannot cook! Could you please tell Mr and Mrs Wu to wait fifteen minutes before they go home?’
Mum translates Mrs Xenakis’s words into Shanghainese, then her expression changes when she sees the time on her watch: 4.09 pm. The small, quick favour has taken longer than either of us expected.
‘Wen?’ she says breathlessly. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Xenakis, but Wen and I must go – we are late.’
Mum explains to the Wus that we are expected at home, and we practically run out of the shop, arriving home as the phone is ringing; possibly for the second or third time.
Mum’s ‘Wéi?’ sounds strained and unnatural. She’s puffed from running for the telephone as I lock the front door before trailing into the kitchen.
‘Why was I running?’ Mum says into the mouthpiece, looking at me. ‘Wen needed help with something in her bedroom. No, she’s fine,’ she adds hurriedly. ‘We’re both fine. No, there’s nothing wrong.’
After Mum hangs up, she sits at the kitchen table with me for a while, watching me finish a project on bacteria. ‘It needs a picture,’ Mum says suddenly. ‘There.’ She points at an empty spot in the lower left-hand corner.
She’s right. My piece of poster paper is a wall of boring words. Everything is always better with a picture.
I get a green pencil and a red pencil out of my pencil case and draw a cell in green with an arrow coming out of it, the same cell splitting with two more arrows coming out of each half, and then two separate cells. I invite Mum to pick up the red pencil, which she does expectantly, and instruct her to draw two sets of red squiggles in each blob, representing a nucleus and a bunch of chromosomes, pointing to the places in the diagram where they are needed. She does so with relish, and we look down on our picture with satisfaction.
Mum raises an eyebrow at me in enquiry. ‘Good?’ she says in English.
‘Binary fission!’ I tell her proudly, giving her two thumbs up.
Mum pulls the paper closer, studying the picture we’ve drawn together. ‘I wish I could do that,’ she replies wistfully in Chinese, ‘be in two places at once. Then four. Then everywhere. Taking up all the space.’
She tucks a bit of my hair behind my ear. Then she gets up to heat the pork and mushroom congee she made earlier in the day, ladling it into bowls for her and me, and filling a large thermos for Henry and his dad.
‘Eat quickly,’ Mum says. ‘I want to drop it off and be home before it gets too dark.’ She rubs her arms. ‘I’ve just had this strange feeling all day. Something sitting heavily, in my chest.’
When I open my mouth to ask if she’s all right, she cuts me off. ‘It’s just nonsense. A silly feeling. But let’s be quick, okay?’
While Mum is washing our dinner bowls and carefully storing the pot of remaining congee in the fridge for tomorrow’s dinner, I get my coloured pencils back out and draw Henry a quick cartoon of an aeroplane, with him in it, circling the world with Not too long to go! in a banner across the bottom. Then I stick it to the side of thermos.
Henry hasn’t been outside his house for almost two weeks now. I wonder if he and his dad have even spoken to each other properly in all that time, and if his dad ever listens to what he’s saying – really listens – or is just a walking, ranty lecture on two legs, like my dad. Those competitions that say No correspondence will be entered into sum up my dad perfectly.
I also wonder if Henry’s dad is made of disappointment like my dad is – at Henry, at the way life turned out.
The air is very cold as we turn the corner with the big thermos. The wind picks up the picture of Henry in the aeroplane, making it flutter against my hand as we pass Mrs Xenakis locking up the darkened pharmacy for the night.
‘Thanks again, Mrs, uh, Teresa,’ she says, touching Mum on the sleeve. ‘For today. It was very kind, what you did, volunteering your time like that.’
Mrs Xenakis is not wearing her white lab coat anymore, and is in a skirt suit and high-heeled shoes, just like Mum is. It’s lady armour, I realise suddenly. Not the most comfortable or practical kind. But clothes to face down the world in, nevertheless. Just for a second, it makes sense why Mum doggedly continues to do what she does – tries to save even those suits where the holes threaten to overwhelm what fabric is left. What would she be without them? Throwing even one of them away would be like throwing away some part of herself.
Mum inclines her head, embarrassed, and we move to walk on, but Mrs Xenakis tightens her grip on Mum’s jacket sleeve. ‘I was just wondering, if your schedule isn’t too busy …’
Mrs Xenakis stops, as if she’s fishing around for the right words.
Mum looks surprised, and I am too. Mrs Xenakis always knows what to say. She has to talk to people all day. She’s never lost for words, like she is now.
That’s Mum all the time, sometimes it’s even me – when I’m talking to Mum and can’t find the right word to use in Chinese so I have to stick an English word into the middle of a mostly Chinese sentence – but it’s never Mrs X.
‘Yes?’ Mum’s tone is enquiring, once the silence drags out a little too long.
We all look down at the battered thermos in Mum’s hands and Mrs Xenakis says with a rush, ‘I’ve noticed that you’re very good, you know, with Henry, and the Wus. I think you’d be a great asset to me, and to the doctor who works next door, during the day.’
Mum and I look at Mrs Xenakis, mystified.
‘I’m offering you a job, Mrs … Teresa …’ Mrs Xenakis explains in a rush. ‘Well, me and Doctor Gupta are. We talked about it just this morning, in fact, when I said you were coming in to help out in the afternoon. Just a few hours a day, maybe one or two days a week to start with? We’ll schedule all the doctor’s appointments for the old people on those days, so that you can be available to translate, if we need you to. I can put up a sign in the window, in English and Chinese – you can help me do that, if you like? Something that says you’ll be here, to talk to, to help. Just like you’re doing right now.’ Mrs Xenakis nods at the thermos in Mum’s hands. ‘It might involve you ducking in and out between my place, and the clinic, but you’d soon get the hang of it.’
I understand maybe a beat before Mum does. ‘That’s great, Mrs X!’ I exclaim, pinching Mum’s sleeve and giving her arm a shake. ‘Mā!’ I say in Mandarin, because Mum hasn’t said a word in reply, she’s too shocked. ‘She wants to ask you to work in the pharmacy, and that clinic.’ I point out the two darkened buildings sitting side by side. ‘Isn’t that great? They’re just around the corner from home. It’s perfect. You could earn a bit of money. Not be by yourself all day.’
I think of Fay Xiao, frozen in her chair in a dark house. Cut off from everyone, from life outside.
Mum shakes her head finally. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Xenakis,’ she stumbles over the pharmacist’s surname. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘He won’t even know!’ I insist hotly. ‘And it will get you out of the house.’
‘I’m out of the house now,’ Mum hisses at me in Chinese, distressed. ‘And I would like to get back to the house before it gets too dark. You heard what he said yesterday. We should not even be doing this, Wen. It is asking too much. I can’t.’
Mrs Xenakis takes a step back at the look on Mum’s face, the sound of Mum’s voice. Even though she can’t understand a word of what Mum’s just said, she’s heard and seen the fear.
Con Xenakis tells us proudly at school that his aunt chases shoplifters clear down the street and deals with drunk people and violent people all the time on her own. Maybe Mrs Xenakis doesn’t understand Mum’s terror, but even she recognises it.
‘Will you just think about it?’ Mrs Xenakis tells Mum hastily now. ‘No pressure, Teresa, but we could really use you around here. We’ll pay in advance for the week to help you get started, see how you find it. You can start right away, tomorrow, in fact. And stop any time, no questions asked. Doctor Gupta, she’s the GP next door,’ Mrs Xenakis explains, ‘she says all the time that we badly need help. Says she’s no good at charades, that there must be a better way to go about doing things. I can speak to your husband, if you’d like … ?’
I think about how silly that sounds. That Mum needs Dad’s permission – as if a part-time job with Mrs Xenakis is something like a school excursion form that Dad has to sign. After the last school excursion form he signed, I almost died. The school told my parents I fell in the water and had a bit of a shock, but to this day, he still has no idea I was carried out to sea so far that I almost drowned.
Mum shakes her head violently, her sleek hair falling around her face.
‘We’ll think about it, Mrs X,’ I say quickly. ‘Thanks.’
I pull Mum away up the street, as Mrs Xenakis lifts one hand hesitantly in farewell and unlocks her car, staring up the road after us.
‘We need to get home,’ Mum says in Chinese, her voice very tight and anxious. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this. Someone will see us. Someone will talk. We’ve done too much already.’
I ring the doorbell at Henry’s house quickly twice, leaving the thermos on the doormat, right at the base of the security door. The cartoon aeroplane is facing inwards, so that it will be the first thing Henry sees. To remind him that he needs to be strong enough to step outside; to step into the cockpit of the aeroplane he’ll build one day and be ready to go.
I push down the thought that maybe, one day, I won’t be ready myself. That I will need someone’s permission to do things, just like Mum does, for the rest of my life; even when I’m old. Losing the ability, by slow degrees, to decide for myself: what I want to wear, what I want to eat, what I want to think, how I want to be. The thought makes me shudder.
I can’t let that happen to me. I won’t.
Even though it’s not quite dark yet, Mum and I walk twice as fast home today, this nameless dread hanging over the two of us. Mum’s right hand is placed flat over her heart the whole way. When we reach the front of the pharmacy, Mum actually puts her arm through mine and pulls me in closer, leaning on me, as if she’s very cold or very tired, or very old.
When we turn the corner and see our house, Mum and I actually stop and hug each other tight because our driveway isn’t empty like it usually is.
I have to remind myself: It’s Wednesday. Not Tuesday.
But Dad’s old, but immaculately maintained, navy blue Toyota is in the carport. It’s not even 8 pm – the dinner rush is happening right now, over two kilometres away, without Dad.
Something bad must have happened at the restaurant.