Five Bells (14 page)

So he stood there listening to the disastrous ebbing of her
breath, he stood there, at her bedside, giving death its dominion, he stood there letting her slip into darkness without dragging her back, or following, or pretending – for whose sake? – that there might be a glow, a release, a transformation, he stood there in blasphemous misery hearing the priest's words as gibberish and his own shabby muteness as a self-accusation, he stood there willing her to die more quickly.

Go away, for Christ's sake, go away, go away.

Overhead a fluorescent tube quietly fizzed. The light it cast was knife-sharp and almost unbearable. There was nowhere to hide. James stood in silence under the shadowless fluorescence that already signified her absence.

Afterwards the priest clasped his hands in an automatic handshake, and James found almost comical his earnest tone. ‘She's with God,' the priest said. James wanted in return to give hysterical, ungodly offence, to argue for the medical impossibility of resurrection, to send this man and his ingratiating theories packing. But the nurse was beside him, with a cup of tea, and he drank down his feelings, calmed his own mutiny, grateful to have a solid object like a teacup to clutch on to.

 

The coffee arrived. Her flat white, his espresso. James drew his cup forward and looked up. Ellie was examining him.

‘You didn't marry?' she asked softly.

Only then, hearing her blunt inquiry, looking into her eyes, seeing the slight moisture there and the intensity of her concern, did James realise there was lingering desire in her voice. Her lips were still slightly parted. She lowered her gaze and tore open a small sachet of white sugar.

‘Well, you know …' he said vaguely. The noise in the restaurant rose, fell back, resumed its generalised clatter. He was distracted by the din and felt once again numb and dull. He glimpsed the threshold of what might be said, then retreated.
‘So what about this new government?' He was trying to find another topic.

‘I'm full of hope,' Ellie announced. ‘I believe, I really do, that the Apology will change everything. It will alter history. And it can't be bad having a polyglot prime minister.'

‘You think that matters?'

‘Has to. Has to open his horizons.'

James was silent. Ellie was still the optimist; she believed in redemptive futures. He repressed the impulse to lecture her on the necessity for political cynicism. Besides, they had reached that point in the conversation when both were disengaging, when too much remembering had eclipsed what it might be possible to say to each other. James was confused by his own responses to seeing Ellie so unchanged, and so self-possessed. This was her beauty, he reflected, her command of her own life, her staunch independence. Something about her concentrated presence was effortless and assured. And now Ellie was turning her silver rings on her slender fingers; she had the resigned, soft gaze of a passenger on a long-distance flight. He had bored her, he thought. He was an idiot, a fuckwit.

The lunch concluded. Ellie was sending her mobile number to James.

‘Let's talk again,' she said. ‘In another context. Give me a call. Any time.'

James's phone rang. He silenced it. ‘Got it,' he said. These were magical numbers. The code to find her by.

There was a moment of tense hesitation as Ellie looked into his eyes. What must she be thinking?

Her bright pink lips. Bob Dylan's ‘I Want You'; its facile declaration.

‘Of course. We'll talk tomorrow, if that's OK.' He looked down at his fingers, entering her name into the mysterious world of telephonic memory. ‘Thanks. For meeting up.' He
felt unworthy of her, a prisoner of his own skulking gloom and tongue-tied desire. A mug-shot of a man.

Ellie stepped forward and embraced him. This time James felt her shape, the sturdy curve of her back, the soft and confident press of her breasts. He made himself let go, made the embrace unsexual. It had been like a bad date, a couple attracted but inert, a conversation that turned from easy news to free-lance unhappiness.

‘Tomorrow,' she repeated.

James watched her walk away. He thought of the priest holding his hands, saying ‘With God'. He thought of René Magritte's painting of the lovers, their faces smothered in cloth. Then he thought of another painting, the giant red lipstick lips, ludicrous, dream-crazy, floating like a joke in the sky.

Pei Xing disembarked at Kurraba Point Wharf on the North Shore. She stepped lightly from the ferry onto the narrow gangplank, then onto the jetty, finding her land legs. Only a few other passengers ended their journeys here. She looked up at the high row of steps and the rim of houses overlooking the harbour, some of them teetering, it seemed, with the weight of their own importance. The wind was still fresh. She held her face to it, enjoying the sweep of scented air and the deep breaths of spirit. The Harbour was magnificent, and richly blue. From somewhere among the small yachts moored in the bay there was the clink-clink of metal hitting an aluminium mast. In her sudden lightheartedness Pei Xing paused to perform a Tai Chi gesture, right there, in the sunlight. And so, after placing her heavy handbag carefully to one side, she held out her right arm, lifted her left leg, leant sideways, swung back, swooping her arms in a restrained formal elegance
before her, moving into eternity for a few precious seconds. She held the pose, staring at nothing. She felt the shape of her body and the fine balances it could achieve, muscles taut, or relaxed, or forming a woven pattern of crimson chords tucked deep inside her. The left leg down, the weight moved, the arc of her arms afloat on the air.
Qigong
. The life of breath.

Then she began again, her arms upraised: the soft sway of a movement known as ‘cloud hands'.

Behind her the ferry lurched away with an animist tremor of departure.

 

The weekly visit was a source of argument between Pei Xing and her son Jimmy. Even Cindy, his girlfriend, did not understand, but was quieter about it and less confronting. Why would a woman want to visit her former prison guard? Why reattach to that history? Why torment herself so? And Pei Xing would pause, and collect her thoughts and say again that it was something difficult to explain, but that there were forms of forgiveness that make life go on, and forms of reproach that hold history still. She needed, she told them, to live in the aura of forgiveness. At this announcement Jimmy had almost guffawed. He had been sloshing noodles into his mouth, his chopsticks quickly scooping, and he threw his head back in an exaggerated, groaning laugh. He was eating pork heart and bok choy cooked in an aniseed broth, topped with glass noodles. Pei Xing looked into the bowl at his half-eaten meal and saw before her
xin
, the character radical of
heart
. One of the very first characters her father had taught her. She must have been only three years old. Four strokes of the brush. Simplicity itself. He had guided her hand. And almost immediately Pei Xing saw the character ‘heart' everywhere, in ‘love', in ‘mind', in ‘remember', in ‘forget'.

Cindy looked critically at Jimmy, but said nothing. In the restaurant in Chinatown they had been enjoying their meal;
now, Jimmy implied, she had spoiled it once again with all this talk of the old country, with all this returning to the past and her refusal to let go. Pei Xing considered continuing the argument (‘this is how one lets go, in sympathetic reconciliation'), but remained silent. She could not bring her words to her mouth from her own lumpish heart.

It occurred to Pei Xing that there were things her son would never understand because he was not a reader. Reading had taught her that actors in history must find a logic beyond violence. When Jimmy was smaller they had watched action movies together; it was the one activity he allowed her to join. Now she wondered if, seeking his company, she had also encouraged his ignorance.

Cindy was also eating like a starving peasant. Pei Xing flinched at their manners, at the voracity of their consumption. She averted her gaze. Another dish arrived, steaming mushrooms with shallots, and Jimmy stabbed at it with his chopsticks even before it hit the table.

All around them were happy young men and women, many of them students, or like Jimmy, children of migrants who left China in the 1980s. Hong Kong businessmen, Guangzhou entrepreneurs. Dissidents, perhaps, from Beijing and Shanghai, even minority Uighars, a group of whom ran a small restaurant in a side-street not far from where they sat. They were gambling, every one of them, on another kind of life. Chinese people liked to gamble. You only had to go to Star City Casino on a Saturday night to see Chinese at the roulette tables, mesmerised by the wheel, or betting their savings on the capricious turn of a single card. They were the regulars, hailing each other in the timeless light, wandering the cavernous, cacophonous spaces, wondering what they were doing there and what happened to the dreams of their ancestors.

Pei Xing had been tempted herself when she had first arrived
in Australia. Incapacitated by migrancy, she had sought a dollar-sign solution. And after her brother's sudden death, within weeks of her arrival, she lost most of her savings in a single, utterly desolate night.

 

Pei Xing began the long walk up the hill towards the nursing home. Dong Hua would be waiting. Although she had experienced a stroke, the nurses said that she could still understand what was going on. She couldn't speak and was paralysed in most of her body, but she waited, they said, she waited for each visit. The weekend duty nurse was a plump, efficient woman who ushered her in and the staff knew by now that Pei Xing visited every Saturday, bringing her lunch with her, to sit with Mrs Dong and read to her in English, or to talk softly in Chinese. They indulged and liked her; they brought her cups of green tea.

 

Hua sat propped in a wheelchair, tilted to one side. Her face was pulled back towards the bone, burnished and hard, like beaten bronze. Pei Xing saw the twitch of the mouth on the right side that indicated recognition. Hua, or one of the nurses, must somehow keep track of the days, since she was always there, in a clean blouse, with her long hair brushed, parked beside the empty visitor's chair.

Pei Xing crossed the room and lightly touched Hua's hand. Then she straightened her collar, which had folded under. A tear sprang from the corner of the patient's eye; more lightly Pei Xing wiped it away with her finger.

She did not ask the usual rhetorical questions – ‘so how are you today?' – these only upset Hua. Instead, she announced matter-of-factly:

‘We are almost at the end of
Doctor Zhivago.
Chapter Fifteen. Conclusion. But don't be fooled. After Conclusion there is
Epilogue, then sixty pages of Zhivago's poems. So we have a few weeks yet.'

Pei Xing flicked though her book – another fifty pages of story. ‘The Conclusion is seventeen chapters,' she said. ‘Let's see how we go. It takes Mr Pasternak a long time to finish his story.'

In truth, she was pleased with Mr Pasternak's delay, with the story that went on and on and on. She always remembered her joy as a young woman when she discovered that after the Conclusion, after Zhivago's death, which she now approached with serious trepidation, there was the story of his discovered daughter, the laundrywoman Tonya, living in a labour camp.

Pei Xing made herself comfortable and held the large volume before her:

Pei Xing glanced up at Hua. She was staring into the distance, but was certainly concentrating. Hua looked over as if to ask: why have you stopped? So Pei Xing resumed:

Pei Xing read from an English edition, and in the beginning had paused every now and then to explain a word or a phrase
she thought Hua might not know. But she quickly discovered that Hua preferred her to read right through. She may have been guessing the meaning from context, or learning as she went; she may have had a better knowledge of English than Pei Xing had surmised. Pei Xing recalled how many words she had looked up in the dictionary, the first time she read it, and how many idiomatic translations she had found difficult to understand. ‘
He went more and more to seed
': how unintelligible that had sounded. From
Doctor Zhivago
she had learnt a smattering of English phrases, formal syntax and a broad and rather old-fashioned vocabulary.

After five minutes or so they had entered their rhythm: the reader's voice in a steady current, the tone even, firm, and Russia, textual Russia, entered the room, seeping under the door, flying through the window, infusing the summer air, bringing to North Sydney the Red Army and the spring of 1922. The plump nurse quietly placed a cup of tea at Pei Xing's elbow, and she sipped as she read, kept up the cadence, and pronounced as confidently as she could all the polysyllabic names.