It was 4.30 when she came in on her way home from work. She said he looked tired. He remembered smiling weakly. He’d been up at six to go to the market, spent all day unloading the cart, washing and trimming vegetables. Another six hours to go, bringing in the cauliflowers, cabbages, onions, shutting the shop, tidying up.
She was surprised. Did he always have to work such long hours? What about his brother? Of course they took turns: he finished early on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, at about seven when they had dinner and his brother took over. And what did he do then? He might have said that he went down Tongyangai and met up with friends like Fong-man, occasionally played a game of dominoes or cards, mostly drank tea and argued about politics, but then he looked at her again and remembered Haining Street was a swear word in English, something like bastard or whore, a place that gweilo used at night to frighten their children. He remembered she knew nothing of China, or Sun Yat-sen and the Revolution, and maybe – probably – she didn’t care. He felt a nervous laugh rising in his throat.
‘Do you like knitting?’ she asked. ‘I hear that sea captains enjoy knitting. It’s supposed to be good when there’s nothing else to do.’
‘Nitting?’
She mimed some kind of action with her hands, but he didn’t understand.
‘Don’t worry, just kidding.’ She saw his bewilderment. ‘Joking. I was only joking.’
He saw the twinkle in her eyes. He was still curious – what was this nitting she joked about, and what was the other word, did she say kidding? – but he did not ask again. Sometimes he’d sidetrack her with his questions and they’d forget what they’d been talking about. Sometimes he was too plain tired.
‘So what do you do when you’re not working?’ she asked again.
‘I walk,’ he said. Already he’d forgotten the new words. Instead he was swallowed by night, the rocking of one foot in front of the other, everything full of shadow and half-light – moon, star, lamplight – the streets emptied of people and filled with ghosts, dreams, strange possibilities.
‘I like walking too,’ she said, and he was surprised, and didn’t know what he’d told her and what he’d only thought, because there was always a gap between thought and its expression, especially in another language. ‘It’s a good time to think,’ he heard her say, and he looked up from the cauliflower he’d chosen because it was the biggest and freshest and whitest, and he asked her where she liked to walk.
‘Sometimes we walk to Oriental Parade or even down to the beach at Island Bay. If it’s fine, that is. The children like to play in the water.
‘Robbie kicks a ball or if there are other boys down there he’ll join them for cricket . . . Edie makes elaborate – big – sandcastles . . . Sometimes we just go to the Basin. It’s so much closer . . .’
She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think I need time to myself. Away from Mrs Newman telling me what to do. Away from the children . . .’ She smiled.
He nodded. He needed time away from the shop too. Away from his brother. But perhaps he had too much time. Alone.
There was silence, just the crinkling and rustling of newspaper. As he handed the wrapped cauliflower to her, the small bag of Brussels sprouts, he told her about the place at the Basin, under the cabbage trees, where he liked to lie down and think and look at the night sky.
The next evening, Thursday, he did not go down Haining Street or Frederick or Taranaki. He walked to the Basin. There was no one under the pine or cabbage trees. He walked a circuit, then another, and another. Then he lay down under a tree and looked up at the moonless sky, at the stars shining out of darkness.
It was different here. The stars made unrecognisable pictures; they told other stories.
He could feel the damp coming through his clothes from the grass underneath, even from the air. His mother would scold. Cold-to-death, she’d call. Rice bucket, is that all you can do? Eat rice and nothing else? Your brother can’t read but is he so stupid?
Yung laughed and gazed at the stars, which glowed larger and more wondrously fuzzy because of myopia.
He thought about how far away they were. He thought about the cowherd and spinning-maid, of whom the heavens disapproved because passion interfered with their work – two lovers whom the Jade Emperor turned into stars, whose paths crossed only once every year, on the seventh day of the seventh month.
He sighed. Who could understand women and their complicated thinking – especially a foreign woman. He could feel the damp moving through his clothes, through his skin, even through his flesh to the marrow at the heart of his bones, when he heard her voice.
‘Hello,’ she called from a distance.
He lifted his head and saw her silhouette. ‘Hello,’ he said, and realising that she might not be sure whether it was him, he stood up and tipped his hat in the manner of a gweilo to a lady. ‘Mrs McKechnie,’ he said.