Five Bells Page 5

  It had occurred to Pei Xing more than once that she would like to learn Arabic, so that she could speak fluently to her neighbours and chitchat with the small children who played in the stairwell of their ugly block of flats. She could address the women in headscarves and ask what they thought of this place, and where they worked, and what kind of food they ate and how it was prepared. Her son Jimmy had tried to persuade her to move to the suburb of Ashfield, to the large Chinese community in which he lived. But Pei Xing liked it here, near the western Sydney University. Here she had a little work teaching her own language, and here, one day, she might yet learn Arabic.

  At the train station Mr Nguyen was settled in his glass booth. Ignoring the ticket machines that looked like the robots of an unfortunately boxy future era, Pei Xing preferred her friend, and his hasty chat.

  ‘Mrs Chang!’

  ‘Mr Nguyen!’ She folded her umbrella.

  ‘Hot enough for you?’

  It was a rhetorical question. Pei Xing had teased him before about the battery-run miniature fan that he held to his face. It was of pastel pink plastic and shaped like a rocket ship. It blew his fringe backwards into a glossy black fin.

  ‘You sound Australian, Mr Nguyen.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ he responded. ‘The usual?’

  Mr Nguyen knew that each Saturday morning Pei Xing made the long journey to Circular Quay, then to the North Shore, to meet someone from her past. He was too polite to ask any details, but recognised her reticent dignity and the lifelong habit of privacy. He had said once that she reminded him of a schoolteacher from his childhood in Saigon and Pei Xing accepted this disclosure as a verbal gift; the remembrance she inspired in him was spoken with affection.

  ‘The usual. Circular Quay.’

  Mr Nguyen brushed at his fin, in unconscious grooming, as he produced the ticket.

  These simple exchanges sustained Pei Xing. People put too little faith in modest conversation, she thought, and in what was known but remained silent or impossible to express. The veneration of small sentences, or a gesture, or even a single word; this was the fabric of civility, the basic social contract. One could die without it.

  Mr Nguyen reminded Pei Xing of no one in particular, but his face was generically kind and his tone solicitous. How did this kindly intelligent man end up here, locked in by timetables, and piles of change and an airless booth?

  The train station was noisy and busy, all brutalist steel, echoing with voices and the severe acoustics of hard tubular spaces. Rubbish blew along the platform, a McDonald’s carton for fries, a jangling aluminium can. Without hesitating, Pei Xing picked up both and deposited them in a metal garbage bin hanging from a pole. Waiting passengers watched suspiciously and with blank incomprehension.

  The train from Liverpool approached, slowing its roar, screeching to a halt; and when Pei Xing boarded, something that persisted as a trace from early morning returned as a complete image.

  Once she had sought her father at his desk and found him missing, then located him smoking on his bed, an ashtray balanced on his chest. He was lost in thought, gazing at the ceiling. Music was playing from the gramophone – something moody with wailing trumpets. The light was yellow; it was always yellow in her parents’ bedroom. This easy vision: of the great man at rest, a small blue brass and enamel vessel moving fractionally with his breath. The cigarette, Great China, dangling from two fingers. As a girl she had been caught by the quietness and solemnity of the moment, the knowledge that he had not seen her, his contemplative self-sufficiency, the mixture of aloneness and distance her spying implied. Children tell themselves things in a summarising mode: she told herself then, ‘I love my father.’

  Perhaps love rested more in images than in words. There was no memory of him speaking at this time, or even acknowledging her presence. It was a quiet, folded moment, entirely her own.

  Two young men, both wearing hoodies despite the heat, sat directly in front of Pei Xing and began talking in loud voices. One wore a pattern of human skulls on his fleecy jacket; the other had the tattoo of a Chinese character, fate, just visible on his neck. Odd to see these characters appearing as fashion on the skin of young men. Decoration Chinese. Empty Chinese. Pei Xing looked out the window and watched the buildings of Bankstown slide away.

  Her father, Chang Yong, had met her mother, Nan Anyi, in London some time in 1935. He had been at Birkbeck College in London, studying for a doctorate in English Literature; she was a student of piano, at the Royal Academy. They met through a mutual friend, Wu Xingfu, who was one of those energetic expatriates for whom linking with others was an exciting and essential duty; he was always organising get-togethers in pubs and picnics in parks. Londoners gazed at the motley crowd of Chinese students, incurious as to their histories but also – they sensed – dimly hostile to their presence.

  Chang Yong owned a Box Brownie camera, his prized possession, and there once existed a series of cheesy photographs of their group posed before various London landmarks, the lions in Trafalgar Square, rows of pansies in Hyde Park, the twisty decorated gates of Buckingham Palace. There was a particularly askew image of Yong and Anyi standing with palace guards in their pillar-high bearskin hats; both look dwarfed, innocent and silly with pleasure. They had their chins raised to Wu Xingfu as he took the photo; he must have been kneeling in order to show the comic dimensions of the guards. Soon after there was a formal photograph of their marriage, also by Wu Xingfu and also slightly off-centre. The couple were standing on the steps of the registry office in Camden, both now unsmiling, as was the convention. Anyi wore a tailored suit and her hair was styled as a black sea-shell in a neat wavy bob, glistening as if wet; Yong wore pinstripes and a self-consciously slanted fedora. They were glamorous, and they knew it. What the photographs told Pei Xing was that they had loved each other, that London had emboldened them, and that they saw, in their nascent marriage, limitless days ahead.

  None of these images survived the Cultural Revolution. None of their group. Wu Xingfu, who had a doctorate from the London School of Economics, was murdered in the early days, after being expelled from Beijing Normal University and denounced as a ‘rightist and snake-demon revisionist’. A son of the ‘landlord class’, educated abroad, there was little he could say in his own defence. His wife, who worked as a doctor at the Peiping Union Medical College, renamed the Anti-Imperialist Hospital during the Revolution, committed suicide a few days after she learned of his death. Pei Xing had seen a note in the newspaper announcing Wu Xingfu’s posthumous rehabilitation under the Deng regime, during the long weeks and months in which she searched lists for her parents’ details. She read the names of the dead carefully, with filial piety. Her greatest fear was that she would look forever, with utmost care, and never find them.

  Her parents’ names at last appeared. Pei Xing’s first thought was for herself; that she was no longer ‘politically black’, that she could now leave the country. Chang Yong and Chang Anyi were both rehabilitated, twenty-two years after their disappearance. Their names appeared in a list in the paper, in the column of political resurrections, and a formal letter from the Public Security Bureau followed.

  Pei Xing felt nothing when at last she read it. She applied for the return of their property and possessions, and received instead a small amount of money. Then she wrote to her brother in Australia asking if she might join him. When she went to the Xuijiahui office for papers for herself and her son, she had difficulty speaking of a ‘family reunion’ without betraying excitement. The official behind the desk, a stalk-thin man with the face of a dried peach, wrote down her birth-date – 26th December, Chairman Mao’s birthday – and raised an eyebrow and smiled. Pei Xing was accustomed to comments on the auspicious date of her birth. But the official said nothing. He signed the papers. He handed them over. Pei Xing left the office briskly, and without pausing to thank him.

  There is a section of Doctor Zhivago that is full of snow. Zhivago is with his wife, Tonya, travelling in the freight
truck of a train, and the journey is remarkable for the snowfall that impedes their progress and enters the hero’s thinking as a series of metaphors. The snowf lakes begin as woolly but thicken to a white stage curtain as wide as the street, one slowly descending and swinging its fringe. Snow is a swirling fire in the headlight of the train. Snow covers the land as a child in a cot, his head beneath an eiderdown. And then there was a section her father had read to her. Zhivago is lying in the stalled train, hearing a sound like that of a waterfall, and realises all at once that spring is in the air, the time when the snowflakes turn black as they fall to the earth.

  The poet thinks: transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry.

  Pei Xing remembered this phrase because her father taught it to her like a poem, after he had discussed the translation of ‘snow’. When she was in distress she recited it: transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry. There were so many – mostly improbable – words for snow; the melody of the phrase mysteriously nourished and sustained her.

  There was no distress here, here and now. There was just this unbidden recall and the suburbs of Sydney flashing past. But what Pei Xing saw from the train was mostly unbeautiful. The backs of houses with their collapsing fences, the power-lines, the graffiti, the drifting glimpses of mortgaged lives. There were car bodies, rusted out, and the tangle of weeds around rubbish, riotous greenery and lush urban wastelands. A shopping trolley had been tossed with guilty haste into a gulley; it looked like an animal cage as the train whizzed past. More graffiti, scrawled in puzzling, illegible messages. A young man, perhaps, a bold young man, had climbed wire fences at night to ego-mark the city and try, with a ritzy signature, to make it his own.

  Pei Xing did not enjoy this train journey and often buried herself in reading. But motion she liked. She liked a sense of moving forward.

  Catherine Healy woke that morning to dazzling light. To be in a city so shining. A city so bright. She stood on the small balcony, enwreathed by warm air, her face lifted to the sunshine. There never was a light like this in Dublin. Not on the sunniest day.

  Catherine had woken by eight in the apartment in Darlinghurst, which was situated, obscured, behind a vast Coca-Cola sign. There was a glimpse of William Street, leading to the city, but no Harbour view. Here, everyone asked: do you have a Harbour view?

  She wanted to ring Luc just to say: my, but the sun shines! And by dark there’s this billboard, old-fashioned kitsch, a fluorescent wall of shifting crimson stripes and curly white lettering, like something from an all-American movie, directed by Altman … and it stands out for miles and miles, my own personal landmark, my own electric advertisement … and who would have thought it, a girl from the Pearse Tower, a girl from Ballymun …

  In the air hung diesel fume and petrol stink and the roar of traffic streaming down and up the slope of William Street, to and from the centre. Catherine had been in Sydney for only two weeks, and her accommodation was borrowed and temporary. Someone from the newspaper office where she worked had invited her to flat-sit; she would soon need to begin looking for a place of her own. But in the meantime she liked this fake version of camping, living with unfamiliar furniture and knick-knacks, and someone else’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe. It was like a holiday, or a dream, or something that allowed her to feel contingent and uncommitted. When she thought of her four sisters and her mother back in Dublin, and her dear brother Brendan, God-rest-his-soul, she believed she was the free one. The only one who had escaped.

  Catherine rose, showered, and pulled a loose indigo sundress over her head. She surveyed herself in the mirror briefly and decided against lipstick. She would have breakfast on Macleay Street, then walk back to the train station. She would visit Circular Quay, she would become a Saturday tourist, she would acquire a sun-tan.

  Beside a fountain that resembled a dandelion, a sphere of rent water, ablaze and extravagant, Catherine drank a glass of soy latte and picked at a flaking croissant. There was a waitress in black trousers and dreadlocks who was casually chirpy and a clientele of good-looking, mostly youngish couples, the kind who start the day at the gym, or walking fast with a tiny dog. Tracksuits, ponytails, a perky little cap – they were everywhere, this tribe, in Ranelagh and Rathgar, in Camden and Notting Hill, in Potts Point in the sunshine with the Saturday papers.

  Catherine would sit here quietly considering her good fortune, as though some part of her felt it was ill-deserved, like a lottery win, mere chance, that made her instantly enriched. She enjoyed the astonishing weather and the nature of her freedom. Might a migrant feel this way? For all that trailed behind, lost families and countries, there was a sense too that a new sky might cast a light of revelation. The fountain beside Catherine blinked and she found it a contemplative object. Mammy would love this. And Mary. And Philomena. And Claire. And Ruthy. Especially Ruthy. And Brendan too, before the accident took him and he ended up, before his time, at Glasnevin Cemetery.

  Catherine experienced a momentary longing for sponge cake and potatoes, saw the ring road stretch out, all grey desolation and over-sized lorries, charging devil-may-care through rain-slick and blur.

  The man sitting closest to Catherine flapped open his paper and she glimpsed the front page. Another bombing somewhere. This much she knew, that there were always bombings. On Catherine’s tenth birthday, 12th October 1984, the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, hoping to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, and her birthday was ever after linked to this history, usurped, really, by politics and men and the absolute shite of all that bombing. For days it was in the papers and on the television screen – five dead, nothing of course compared to Iraq now – but Catherine discovered then how all she had longed for on her birthday meant nothing in the wider scheme of things. Being the second youngest of five sisters was bad enough; she would always feel overwhelmed by the designs of others. But this was the day she began to think about Irish politics, to think about a history that was other than Irish-eyes-a’smilin’. She and Brendan, who were close, though he was five years older, huddled together imagining the birthday death of Margaret Thatcher and considering like grown-ups the meaning of life.

  A few months earlier Brendan had marched against the visit of President Reagan to the village of Ballyporeen. Catherine was the only one at the dinner table who spoke in Brendan’s support, even though she did not really understand what the demonstration was about. Mam slammed down the serving spoon on the tablecloth and said there will be no politics in my house! And Da had just sat there, eating his peas, and the others had all giggled.

  Brendan and Catherine were the serious ones, the clever ones, Mam said, when she was in a better mood. Brendan was on the television; you could see him in O’Connell Street, shouting at the top of his voice with the other rascals, making a holy show of himself and wanting to be famous. He was shouting that Reagan was a warmonger and feckin evil and would bring Star Wars to the world, zapping innocents from the sky. Catherine was thrilled to see him there, in the streets, doing something noisy in the centre of Dublin. Familiar city images flashed past, and before them his face, floating in a crowd whose mouths opened and closed in unison.

  Her big brother, ah lovely, and with the gift of the gab.

  A few days later Brendan showed her a newspaper article that said Reagan had presented a paperweight to the Irish President: he thought this hilarious. He mimed the presentation, put on an incompetent American accent and mocked the weightiness of what was needed to hold down the bothersome papers of the state. Catherine had to shush Brendan when his laughing became hysterical – Mam would want to know what they found so funny. But it was a wonderful moment, when they knew their complicity, when they leant against each other’s bodies and decided wordlessly and instantly, in sibling love and in the apprehension of a shared future, that they might form a team.

  In Sydney, people on the streets seemed contented and relaxed. Perhaps it was the sunshine. Perhaps sad people hid. Catherine thought of the fourteen-year-old
mothers begging at the end of O’Connell Bridge, their pallid skinny babes resting sideways in their laps, and decided there’s nothing of this here, no girls ruined before their time, or none that were obvious anyway, not sitting where everyone could see them, showing off their sorry lives. There were no frazzled wives with vertical lines between their eyes, standing in cold slanting rain outside Dunnes Stores, moaning with their shopping. Or those who had made it in IT, sweeping the city in sleek European cars; or the tough-looking men with shaved heads and leather jackets and south Dublin confidence.

  Catherine realised that she was missing her home. Even though she had been living in London since she was twenty-two, Dublin, which she visited annually, was still her default comparison. She had left Ireland just after the murder of the investigative reporter, Veronica Guerin, when she decided journalism would be better pursued abroad. Here now, her comparisons were still with her own city. In the Holy Spirit School she was always the top student in her class, just as Brendan was, in the Holy Cross, and some time around her tenth birthday they both knew they would leave. Catherine lived in anticipation of the day she would take the ferry at Dun Laoghaire and sail over the waters. Away from her entangling sisters and the misery of Ballymun housing, away from North Dublin sorrow, which was unlike any other, away from the ring road that strangled them and lassoed them all in. To dirty London, as it turned out. City-of-Sin, Mam called it. City-of-Sin. But it had to be better, they reasoned, better than dreary Ballymun.