The feeling in our house has changed. This afternoon, the air in our home is calm and still because everyone has gone to their rooms and shut their doors. The quiet feels soft around me, like fur touching my skin.
Below my feet are wooden floorboards where my Mum’s piano used to be. I close my eyes and hear her music like it was before. White and black keys sing to one another.
‘Hello, Mum,’ I say. ‘I love you, Mum.’
I walk through the house to my second-most favourite place, which is Wài Pó’s kitchen. There are so many colours and smells: Wài Pó’s salty, dried fish that are hanging by the window and all her jars of pickled chillies and vegetables in orange, red and green. We have a little yellow chirping bird in a cage near the pantry. I call him Prince William after the very handsome prince in the United Kingdom.
I place my storybook flat on the kitchen table and prepare my special fountain pen. In front of me there is a bowl. It is full of fresh plums that Wài Pó bought from the market. My fingertips feel the smoothness, as soft as the skin behind my ears.
The silver tip of my pen is touching paper. Ink drops. A small spot of black water spreads. I write:
Plums are shiny and the colour of blood.
Being a writer is hard. I wonder if Shakespeare also had this thought in his brain. I bite into a plum and its skin cracks open. Plum juice covers my whole mouth and drips down all the tubes in my body to my stomach. I feel like I am standing under the air conditioner on a day when the sun is making fire.
I chew and the insides of my cheeks fizz. I know all about plums and how they are made because of the plum trees in Zhōngshān Park, Shanghai. Marlowe told me about the stages of a plum being born from its tree; first it is a bud, then a blossom, then a fruit to be picked and put into a mouth. Delicious!
A bit of plum blood swims down my chin and drops onto the paper next to the ink spot. It all becomes clear to me now. I see my body as if I am a tree. I have roots that reach all the way into the earth. And just like in the hospital, on the plastic model of the heart, I have veins that reach all over me like branches and my blood is like red juice. My heart is like a plum.
I pick up my pen. I must write quickly now because the story words are spilling out of me all in one go.
The Plum Hart
1 time there was a beutiful yung lady.
Her hart was sick but she still new how to love.
Her 外婆wài pó told her a story with the word death imm- or-tal in it.
Imm-or-tal is a very speshel word.
She could get beter if she went to find a speshel plum on a tree – a speshel tree like in zhōngshān park, Shang-hi.
If she eats one bite of the plum she will be imm-or-tal. Imm-or-tal meens her body will live. Her body will not die.
Now I understand more about what a transplant is. It is like taking a bite of the plum heart.