Katherine made the children’s lunches – slices of bread spread with jam or dripping, broken biscuits, half an apple – and placed them in brown paper bags on the kitchen table. She set the table for breakfast, left out bread, jam, dripping, then climbed the stairs to bed.
She lay awake listening to Edie sleep beside her, listening to her own heartbeat, to the hours as they drained slowly from her. She woke head thick, limbs heavy, every movement as if through water. Some mornings she rose and made the children porridge and sprinkled it with sugar; some mornings the children came up to her bed and kissed her before they left for school.
Sometimes she did not rise till early afternoon, when she forced herself out of bed and down Adelaide Road. If she could bring herself to, she’d look for work. Other times she looked in shop windows, coveting the things she could not afford. She might go into Paterson’s for day-old bread. Not that she liked Mrs Paterson especially – the old biddy seemed to like Donald more than seemed decent – but she was well meaning enough and at least she was someone to talk to.
Katherine’d had a few good friends at school. But she’d lost touch with Matilda Mulroney when her family moved to Melbourne. Then there was Minnie Ferguson, but she’d married a farmer and moved to the Waikato. At Gilbys, Katherine studied stenography, typing and book-keeping with Felicity Baker, and they’d certainly had fun together, but Felicity had married an accountant and moved to Wanganui.
Sometimes for want of something better to do, Katherine wandered into Wong Chung Bros. People said Chinamen all looked alike, but there was no mistaking these two. One was younger, more her own age. And he was tall. Unusually tall for a Chinaman. His hair was cut short in the western style, and he had straight white teeth – nothing like the buck-toothed caricatures you saw in the newspapers. Katherine had nothing against the other Mr Wong, but he never smiled, at least not in a way that seemed like he meant it; and even if, on the rare occasion she paid full price, sometimes the fruit he gave her softened into decay in just a few days.
The younger Mr Wong had a warm, generous smile that half closed and softened his eyes. And he liked to linger in conversation. She’d come into the shop to find him chatting with Mr or Mrs Paterson or with Mr Krupp from the pharmacy across the road. It seemed anyone with a friendly face was fair game. His accent was strong and his English limited, but he liked to gesticulate, laugh, commiserate. And not just about the wind and the weather, which in Wellington was always a likely topic of conversation.
One day he pointed at a photograph in the newspaper. ‘Who this man?’ he asked. ‘People talking.’
She looked at the man in his motorcar, read the caption. ‘He’s the first to drive all around the North Island,’ she said. ‘In a motorcar.’
He grinned. ‘You drive motorcar?’
‘Me?’ She laughed. ‘You’re joking!’
‘Joking?’
‘You make me laugh.’
He looked her in the eyes, and his face crinkled into a smile. ‘You sit motorcar?’
‘No.’ She laughed again. ‘I’ve never sat in a motorcar.’
‘Motorcar good,’ he said as he wrapped her cabbage. ‘I like drive motorcar.’
‘You’ve driven a motorcar?’ How many were there in Wellington? You could probably count on your fingers.
‘One day,’ he said as he handed her the vegetables.
She walked out into the southerly. She could see him with his big grin, slender fingers around the steering wheel. How long had it been since she’d laughed? Her mother always said if the wind changed she’d be stuck like that, with that same stupid look on her face. She laughed again.
Let the wind change. For once, let it change.