The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read online

  “Are you thinking about Pépé?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I said.

  The phone rang and my mom grabbed the cordless, still holding the tiny comb. She stood in the doorway and nodded and asked my father eager unthinking questions, “How’s your mother? How’s your brother? How are you?”

  I watched my sister flip multiplication table flashcards that my mom let her laminate at the school board office. I liked to laminate pictures of whales from National Geographic. If you laminate something it says that thing is important and that you know how to take care of things that are important. We all loved the laminator. It was huge and it looked like a loom and it looked like a computer. Trimming the plastic edges with the paper cutter frightened me. I thought of a paper cutter as a finger guillotine and felt afraid of myself.

  “What are you thinking about, honey?” Mom asked.

  “Jane Eyre,” I said.

  “Which part are you at?” she asked.

  “There’s a big black dog, but I don’t know if it’s a real dog or if it’s in her head,” I said. I wanted to read but it would’ve been rude. I asked my mom how much she’d gone through and she tugged the section of my hair from my nape to my earlobes and said, “Baby, I’ve gotta go slow.” So I stared at my sister, staring at her flashcards, and wished my eyes were blue like hers. Mom quizzed her on her multiplication tables, from six to ten, and she looked pleased with herself, and I hated her, the way you hate your sister.

  I twisted up a tress of wet hair and imagined I could wring the lice out. I let it go and it clung to my neck, like a disgusting thing. If I were a Medusa I wouldn’t have lice. But I knew I wasn’t brave enough to be a Medusa. And I wanted to be pretty. I wondered what I would look like when I was a woman.

  Mom asked Nadine to put the radio on and it was smooth and she moaned along. Alan Almond played Sade, Marvin Gaye, that kind of thing. My favourite part was the requests. Someone loves Linda, in Flint, and so the listening audience knows that Linda, of Flint, is loved.

  The phone rang. This time my mom just left the comb hanging in my hair while she talked to Papa. After, she asked us about our funeral clothes and we pretended not to feel like funeral clothes are weird and boring to talk about. When they played “My Girl” we all sang along. Mom had the most gusto and Dini had the best voice and all our voices together made a mood.

  We didn’t talk for a while. I asked Mom how much hair she’d done and she drew a line on my scalp with the comb, way beneath the crown. My sister drew the same two-and-a-half-storey house with a fence that she always drew. The sun and the seagull were there, in each corner of the sky. Looking at her drawing, she asked, “What’s for dinner?”

  “You’re in charge,” Mom said. Nadine beamed because she was bossy. Mom knew how to appeal to us. She appealed to everyone, she always said, it’s not hard to be nice. There were no more frozen entrees so Nadine said, “Toast,” and we said, “Toast.” And I was grateful that she put the baguette under the broiler instead of toasting the Weight Watchers bread. I ate slowly, because I was hungry but disgusted. Mom kept pushing my head down and saying, “I’ve gotta get some light on the subject.” But it was hard to eat with my head bowed.

  “Shit,” Mom said. A louse fell out of my hair onto the dining room table. It scurried onto the napkin and onto my toast and got stuck in the peanut butter. Its posterior, which was most of it, twitched. We all stared at it. Against the rich ochre of the peanut butter you could see that my blood was very dark.

  Mom said, “Oh, honey.”

  The louse twitched still. I didn’t want my body anymore. White crumbs fell from my mouth, white louse eggs fell from my hair. Mom said, “Dini, throw away the toast,” and Dini whimpered with every breath until she dropped it in the bin.

  “Those lice are fuckers,” Mom said. Nadine’s eyebrows went up. “Call them what you want.”

  “They’re motherfuckers,” I said, and Mom grinned.

  “Motherfuckers,” Mom said. And I wanted to crawl into her grinning mouth.

  “Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers!” we screamed. We were all looking at the towel that was moist with what my mother had been wiping on it. The bugs and eggs she’d gathered from my damp hair in her comb. Mom touched the small of my back and I was glad she was touching me.

  “That feels better,” she said. She liked to identify a mood to make sure it was a worthy one. It was an annoying habit, but right then it was right.

  Nadine’s eyes looked crazed. She didn’t even take the Lord’s name in vain. If someone said, Oh my god, she would say: God can hear you. Say, I’m sorry God. Mom kept trying to make her stop.

  “You said motherfucker,” I said. She blushed and tore a sheet of paper from her drawing pad.

  The phone rang. Mom gasped and said, “Take us off your list of people you call.”

  “You said motherfucker,” I said, all smug.

  “Mom made me,” she said and centred her sheet of paper on the “Map of the World” placemat that Mom had laminated.

  “Whatever,” I said, and Mom sighed. I hated myself for being small. Mom pushed my head down further and kept combing. Nadine drew two more houses, one was orange and one was purple. There was the sun and there was the seagull in each corner, did they strike a balance?

  Mom only had three sections left when Papa called to say Pépé was dead. She hugged my sister and then she hugged me, craning her neck away, and squeezing.

  “I’m gonna miss the way he ate,” Nadine said. Mémé would be unhappy with nobody to feed. Everybody was always saying how observant Nadine was. I thought of all the things I wouldn’t notice if she didn’t tell me to.

  “He always ate three muskrats,” Mom said. They were as big as a rabbit so I never knew how he could eat three at the muskrat boil, and sit there after like it was natural, when Mononcle Vic and Mononcle Zéphir and Papa and the others could only eat one. And I heard my sister and my mother talking the way you talk to someone you love, because their voice makes you feel safe.

  Mom finished and said, “We’re finished,” and put the towel in a garbage bag, and tied it off with a wretched bow. She said no one would want to use it, even after she washed it. I took it out back to the dog shit garbage, so the lice would freeze. I looked at the shed for a while, because I liked the way the slanting snow piled on one side and made it slouch. The porch roof collapsing made a very loud noise. A harrowing crack and then there was the whoosh of falling. Seeing the roof pull away from the house, and the sky filling the sky, was shocking.

  I remember feeling something spinal and unbearable. Like brain freeze without the freeze. I remember the porch roof covered most of the snowy yard—it looked like a smaller snowy yard. Now the larger yard was liminal.

  When Mom and Dini came out I was laughing. Dini stood before the roof and she turned to face us, and to face the roof, and to face us, her little body like a cup without a saucer.

  “It’s because we said motherfuckers,” she said.

  Mom laughed and I laughed too, and Dini didn’t mind for once that we were laughing at her. Mom held on to me, her long arms folded around my neck, her hands bracing my shoulders, the bare edges of me, her breasts a pillow for my brain, which was still in my strange skull, and she shook, and I shook, with laughter, and I felt the weirdness of this orb, how bulbous it felt in the back.

  Our faces rose with laughter, until we were all looking at the sky.

  After that, I no longer lay awake, afraid of dying in my sleep. I knew that dying would wake me up. This didn’t help me sleep. No, I lay awake still, for longer now than before, until the sun rose, sore in the red sky. I wanted to make my dreams, and I did. I dreamt I was the Lady of Shalott, floating along in my rickety rowboat, seated still as it dipped back and forth, pooling with water, finding its level below, until the rowboat was gone, and I was supine, but unsinking, floating still, because my gowns were made of gossamers’ wings and weighed nothing. They pulled me along a little, catching the curre
nts, making me look this way and that, like a little girl who’s got your fingers in her grip.

  I fought sleep still, because I felt like it.

  ANNA LING KAYE

  RED EGG AND GINGER

  Mei answers the phone call, though she knows it will make things worse.

  “Baby’s full-month party,” Mother says. “This weekend. Remember?”

  Yes. Worse. Mei scrunches up to the wall next to her bed, mobile phone threatening to slip from between her ear and shoulder. After the silence has gone on for too long, Mei has to fill it with something. “What’s the baby’s name in the meantime?”

  “Little Stinker.”

  “That’s what you called me.”

  “And the hungry ghosts never came for you, right?”

  Maybe not, but Mei remembers being confused as a child about why Mother thought she smelled so bad, no matter how well she washed.

  Cousin gets on the line. Every sentence is an exclamation. “The banquet your mother’s preparing, Mei! She’s candying the ginger herself, dyeing the eggs! God, we’re lucky she’s here to help out!”

  Mei imagines Mother sitting next to Cousin on Big Aunt’s lacy couch, shaking her head to deny the compliments. If Mei wasn’t so fond of Cousin, she would be jealous of all the attention she is getting. Mother’s even moved in to Big Aunt’s for the baby’s first month, the better to help Cousin with her healing regimen. Papaya soup, wood ear tea, fish maw with black bean sauce. Mei taps a cigarette out of the box. She mouths the word cousin to S., who is lying across the bed from her. His combat boots and socks neatly arranged on the floor. Looking at his bare feet, Mei realizes that even after all these months she can be caught off-guard by the near-translucence of his white skin. The first time she’d seen those feet, she had traced the raised blue veins on them, marvelling at the tributaries. Blood tangible where hers is not. Now Mei busies her fingers with the cigarettes, the phone.

  S. raises himself on an elbow. He points at Mei’s stomach, and points at the phone. Mei shakes her head. She tries to focus on Cousin’s happy chatter until Baby cries and Cousin needs to hang up.

  S. doesn’t understand Cantonese, but he can tell Mei didn’t share her news with Cousin. He asks why, forehead wrinkled, pupils widened into marbles of sea-glass green. When Mei asks for a light, he takes the cigarette out of her mouth and throws it out her window. They watch the white paper disappear down the shaft of grimy wall between Mei’s building and the office tower ten feet away. Downstairs, the tram to Sheung Wan clatters by, bells warning jaywalkers out of the way.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He drags a hand through his hair. Mei watches the brown curls spring back into coils. She used to love when that happened. But today, the hand, the hair, she wants to smack them. “I just want you to have support,” S. says. “This is a big decision.”

  “She just had a baby,” Mei says. “I’m a big girl. I can handle this.”

  The truth is, Mei can’t afford to lose any more face to Cousin. “Your English is so good,” Mother once said, soon after Mei graduated from university. “Why don’t you work in private banking?” The next year, Cousin had done just that, graduating in accounting and landing a steady position at HSBC Finance.

  Meanwhile, Mei had spent a few years trying to make it in performance art. Her grandest project was a piece for the anniversary of the 1997 Handover. This involved painting her practically naked body China-red with yellow stars and lying in front of the British Consulate with other fellow artists. It had been a costly statement: the press response was underwhelming, and soon after Father cut off Mei’s monthly stipend.

  “Get a nice job,” Mother had said. “Get settled.” By then, Cousin had just married a nice Cantonese bank manager.

  “No one changes the world by managing money,” Mei had shouted. She had moved out in protest. Soon, tired of the sleeping bags and mildewed towels of her equally destitute friends, Mei took a training position at Hype. She could approach hair as living sculpture, she decided. She would style hair to fund art, use art to fuel change. She always thought she would move to Italy by the time she was twenty-six, study mask-making and shape-shifting from the last inheritors of commedia dell’arte. Instead, Mei moved into the staff dormitory above Hype, a room shared with three other trainees. Her bed is an upper bunk with a curtain drawn across it for privacy.

  Now, a year later, Cousin has delivered every Chinese grandparent’s fondest hope: a healthy boy. Meanwhile, the only global impact Mei’s achieved has been seducing Hype’s star stylist from Montreal. Mei only ever addresses him by his nickname, “S.” It was a tease to catch his attention at first, s for syrup, as in maple, because that was all she knew about Canada. But now it marks him, sweet and stuck to her, available to no other. This makes the other salon girls cry into their pillows with envy. As for the latest news, only S. and Mei know.

  S. gives Mei a brief, brave smile. His hand moves over the rubble of sheets, hesitating in the air between them. Then he rests it on her stomach, gently. The soft pat recalls Mother’s hands soothing tummy aches. As a child, Mei used to close her eyes and pretend to still feel bad long after Mother’s hands had accomplished their work.

  “You’re a bit happy, right?” S. asks. “Excited?”

  “You’re insane.”

  Still, Mei lets S. pull her close. She folds into the comforting warmth of her usual position in his arms—their first real touch since finding out.

  The next day, on the subway train to Family Planning, Mei thinks about the quaintness of full-month parties. Back in the farming days, she could understand why waiting a month to name a child made sense. A baby surviving sickness and death that first crucial month would have been a good reason for all the ritual and celebration. But in modern Hong Kong, only unborn babies really need to be nameless. The shock of this thought thumps in Mei’s chest. She turns to S., who is leaning against the glass doors of the train. His jacket is camouflage green, which just makes him more obvious against all the chrome and glass.

  “I didn’t like the way you threw my cigarette out yesterday,” Mei says. “Those cost money, you know?”

  Mei watches the apology surface in his clear eyes. It was this contradiction between his sensitivity and guerilla gear that had first gotten her curious about him. She had wanted to know what made him laugh, what made him cry. Even now, riding the train to Family Planning together, she is fascinated with what she is learning about him every day. Charmed, even.

  “Sorry,” S. says. “I was stressed out. You know what they say about smoking and babies.”

  This is not what Mei wants to hear. “You think I’m not stressed out? That’s why I needed a cigarette, right?”

  He shrugs.

  “If you can’t deal with this, you don’t have to come.” Mei wishes her voice didn’t sound so harsh, but she needs to be clear. “This isn’t just a check-up, you know.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  Mei sets her jaw and looks out the train window. What she’d love right now is that cigarette. And an egg-tart, flaky with a sun of gold in the middle.

  The counsellor’s office is dark and smells like bleach. The narrow-faced woman behind the desk looks too much like Mei’s mother: a tight perm crowding her face, her body rigid with efficiency. When the counsellor sees S.’s white skin, her eyes flicker into momentary confusion. She speaks to Mei in Cantonese.

  “Is this the father?”

  “No,” Mei says. “Moral support.” In desperation, she adds, “He’s gay.” Mei’s face warms.

  The counsellor’s mouth makes a tight line as she reads Mei’s file. Mei almost expects the counsellor to say something like “your clothes are too tight.” Instead, the counsellor asks how she can help. Mei asks, and the counsellor tells her the fetus has to be at least seven-to-nine weeks before there can be a procedure. The counsellor calls it a “termination.” They will put a tube into Mei and suck the egg off her uterus wall. It will hurt.

  The worst part of the vis
it is the grainy ultrasound, where the counsellor locates a pulsating pimple in the green shadows that apparently represent Mei’s womb. “Baby’s heartbeat,” says the counsellor.

  S.’s face blooms into a startled smile. “Wow.”

  Mei is surprised to see the counsellor smiling back at him.

  Mei, who has to crane her neck from a reclining position to see the image, has a hard time believing it represents what’s going on inside her. It is so two-dimensional. Monochrome. She shakes her head at the counsellor’s offer to make a printout for home, and is mortified when S. asks for one in English. Mei is hasty wiping the cold goop from her stomach. She feels safer with her shirt pulled down again. The counsellor sees them to the door, presses the printout into S.’s hand.

  Back in the bustle of the street, Mei decides to be upbeat. “She said fifty percent of pregnancies don’t make it past the first three months. Maybe we should buy a big bag of pot, smoke it out of me.”

  S. laughs. “Or you could drink four gallons of water, and it will swim out.”

  “I know. Let’s have a really great party, with some good music, and it will just dance out.”

  S. takes her hand in his, kisses the top of her wrist. “Or we could wait nine months. It’ll slip out on its own.”

  Mei pulls her hand back.

  He pulls the sleeve of her jacket, playful. “Come on, Mei. Think about it. I can support us all.”

  She swats his arm away. “We’re not even married.”

  He drops to one knee with his arms thrown open. “Marry me then, Mei.”