Wong Chung-yung
My heart is a string of firecrackers. It explodes at random: a mixed bag of Tom Thumbs, Double Happys, Mighty Cannons. Sky rockets whiz and flare, sparklers, Jumping Jacks head over heels. Not even Spring Festival, yet I hold all of this within me. I press my lips in a crooked smile, try to stop a songburst, a whoop, a torrent of blessings and curses.
I cannot understand this.
All for a devil woman. A devil woman.
Her nose is too big, and her breasts, and her feet. She doesn’t walk like a woman. She has red devil hair. And yet she has kind, sad, beautiful blue-green eyes and full, luscious lips – and she calls me by name. Mr Wong, she says, as if I am a man and not a Chinaman.
Firecrackers are to frighten away devils. But she walks into the shop, and these explosions go off inside me, and she does not run away.
Today she comes with her daughter. I show them the best apples. ‘Red Delicious nice and red but what is taste? No taste la! Red Delicious soft, like old wet cake. But Jonathan, crisp and juicy. Good taste. Try some la, please try.’
I cut off slices and wait for them to smile, to nod in agreement. She turns and calls to her son. Only then do I see him. He loiters by the doorway and does not want to come in. She insists. Taste apple, she tells him. Come and choose fruit.
I hold open the brown paper bag and let her daughter choose four, five, six apples, weighing them on the scales. ‘One and threepence,’ I say, adding one more apple to the bag, swinging it round, twisting the corners like cat’s ears.
‘Robbie,’ she is calling. And at last he comes, holding a diabolo his father gave him. ‘This was a craze,’ she says, ‘everyone played it.’ But she doesn’t know how.
‘We play in China,’ I say. ‘Uncle bring from Peking.’ And I’m crazy, going crazy – I show her.
I flick the string and send the wooden reel spinning into the air.
When I was a boy I could throw the diabolo high, do a cartwheel, a somersault or a backward flip, and then I’d catch it again. But now my body moves this much more slowly. I can still throw it in the air and catch it behind me, I know I can. But this shop is small and the ceiling low: the reel would plummet – a bird struck by stone.
The boy stares at me with a curled lip, a lip you could rest an oil bottle on. He holds one hand in his pocket, and now I know what it is. I have seen this boy. With his fatboy friend. They run behind horses and scoop up horse shit with iron shovels. ‘Penny a bucket! Penny a bucket!’ they shout. ‘Do yer garden good!’ I know this boy. I know what he hides in his pocket.
A grey day, brown dust, the gust of a northerly. Fraser’s milk cart, the tired old horse pulling the steel urns. The rock came out of nowhere. The houses across the street, the horses, and kicked-up, blown-up dust. My beautiful window with the best polished fruit: the apples turned to show the reddest cheeks, the oranges, bananas and pears. My shatter-webbed window, my gorgeous fruit, sliced with glass. I ran out and there he was, smirking, running away, slingshot in his hand.
‘Thank you, Mr Wong,’ she says. ‘Say thank you, Edie, Robbie.’
The girl hesitates, says thank you. I give the diabolo to her.
Mrs McKechnie. Kind-heart, bad-luck woman. Mother of a redhead, bad-heart boy. Wife of a dead man.