Certainty (11 page)

Ansel stands at his bedside reading the chart for several minutes before either man speaks.

“Streptomycin is out.”

“Yes, in your case, streptomycin is out.”

“What have you got for me then?”

“I don’t know, Al. Let’s wait for the tests to come back.”

“tb is consumption, right?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s an old disease. Strange to think of yourself as a modern person saddled with an old disease.”

Ansel tries to remember the exact lines from Gail’s documentary. Kafka, diagnosed with consumption, had imagined a dialogue between his brain and his lungs. He tells the story to Al, the words returning to him as he speaks. “‘The brain found itself in a position where it could no longer sustain its burden of pain and affliction. It said, “I give up, but if there is still anyone here who cares at all for the preservation of the whole, let him then lessen my burden, and I’ll be able to carry on for a while yet.” At that point, the lung came forward; it didn’t have much to lose.’”

Al smiles, a lovely ghost of a smile, of something remembered. He shifts his arms, then pushes himself to sitting.

“Do you have kids, Ansel?”

“No.”

“Do you want some?”

“Yes.”

“Am I prying too much?”

Ansel puts the chart down beside the bed. A feeling comes, like a pressure against his skin, then slowly, inexplicably, gives way. “No, you’re not prying.”

Al pulls the sheets up against his body. He says, “I think that I’ve accepted it, that I’ve come to terms with everything. But when I wake up the next day, that peace vanishes like it was never there, or as if it were all an illusion. That’s what I find so difficult. I just want to accept it and be at rest. No more questions, no more doubt.”

Ansel nods, unable to speak. He feels that he could put his hand out, reach her, hold on for one moment. Don’t go, he thinks. She doesn’t say anything, because they both know how it ends, they always knew they could not change it.
Gail.
He stands half turned away from Al, afraid of his emotion.

“Am I allowed a phone call? This isn’t like jail, is it?”

Ansel hands him his phone. “You know the number?”

Al nods.

“Okay. This one’s on the clinic.” He returns Al’s chart to the foot of the bed.

When Ansel leaves the room, Al Cameron is lying on his side, the covers up over his body.

“I’m here,” he is saying. “I’m here.” He and the phone inside a small cave of stillness.

4

Aloft

C
lara sits beneath the skylight of her sewing room, a square of light falling through the window, marking a border around her. It is early morning, still but for the occasional birdsong, and an animal, a squirrel, she thinks, scurrying across the roof. The day is open in front of her, a pocket of space to fill. She will finish her sewing this morning, and then, later on, she will gather flowers from the garden and take them to the cemetery for her daughter.

She runs her hand across the newspaper, blinking the sleep from her eyes. The article she is reading tells how scientists in Austria have measured the shortest interval of time ever observed, one hundred attoseconds, or a quintillionth of a second.
To imagine how long this is
, the article says,
if 100 attoseconds is stretched so long it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale
. Time, Clara believes, is the great mystery. Since Einstein, physicists have argued that time is merely a convention, that only the speed of light is constant everywhere in the universe. If one travelled fast enough, time would bend, and one person’s past could theoretically become another person’s future.

In her workroom, a dozen costumes hang from a clothes rail. The show, a children’s production of
The Nutcracker
, is scheduled for September, completely out of season, but the children from the dance school don’t seem to mind. Over the last few weeks, they have trooped in for their fittings, girls in frothy tutus skipping down the hallway, the Snow Queen waiting, aloof, hands on her hips, in a sequined dress. Clara is putting the finishing touches on a giant head for King Rat. On her table is a stack of pipe cleaners which she plans to shape into whiskers.

From her window, she can see Matthew standing in the garden. He looks up at the August sky, the low sweep of clouds, then lowers his head, surveying the last of the summer flowers. Because of the arthritis in his knees, her husband walks slowly, with the aid of a cane. She is tempted to put down her coffee, to join him outside, but work cannot wait. The garden has always been Matthew’s domain. There, he loses track of himself and the hours. He can coax the most stubborn flowers into bloom.

In another hour or so, he will come back inside the house. Each morning is the same. They will put the kettle on for tea, prepare a light breakfast. Every act, every routine, helps, the way sitting in a car travelling along the highway can seem a comfort, a motion to fall back on, to keep their thoughts contained as they move into another place.

She had grown up in her father’s restaurant in Kowloon, and the Hong Kong that Clara remembers is cramped and vibrant, a city heated by the press of bodies. On Reclamation Street, where they lived, the buildings, crowded shoulder to shoulder, seemed to jostle for space. Laundry shook in the wind, people overflowed onto balconies, onto the sidewalks.

After school, during the dinner hour, she would work the floor of the restaurant, greeting customers as they stepped through the shuttered doors: elderly men, newspapers tucked under their arms, young women in shifts and trousers towing a line of children. In the kitchen, behind glass, cooks appeared and disappeared in the steamy air. “Ching Yun,” her father would say proudly, calling her by her Chinese name. “Hurry and bring this gentleman a glass of tea.” Always, she had felt at ease in the ebb and flow of the restaurant, chopsticks clicking against porcelain bowls, the clatter of her father’s abacus. She balanced a half-dozen plates in her arms, listening sympathetically when a customer complained about the state of the world, his children or simply the weather. Leftover food she carried to the back door, where the very old and the very young would congregate, carrying tin plates.

Behind the kitchen, faded linoleum stairs led up to their living space. She and her four younger sisters lived in one room, one on top of the other, sharing their clothes, their hairbrushes and slippers. Her sisters spent their days working in the restaurant, but Clara, as the eldest, had been enrolled at St. Mary’s School. In the evenings, while her sisters finished their chores, she sat at the dining table, writing essays or laboratory notes, or helping her mother with the sewing. She worked quickly, impatient to join her father in the sitting room, where each night he would open a novel and step away from the world. She gathered what lay discarded at his feet, reading, in English or Chinese,
Father Goriot
,
A Tale of Two Cities
,
Journey to the West
. Hours later, while the rest of the household slept, she remained awake, reading by candlelight. Her sisters sighed in their sleep, breathed in unison, while she, turning pages, shuddered or wept or shook with laughter.

In
Journey to the West
, the young monk Xuanzang is called by the Bodhisattva on a pilgrimage to India. He is joined on his travels by three disciples who have each been given the task of accompanying him in order to atone for past mistakes. To make amends. The stories that make up
Journey to the West
are enshrined in countless Chinese operas. On Sundays, she and her father would take the bus to the theatre, a converted temple, where they bought their tickets from an old whiskered man who slept in the booth with one eye open. Like a dolphin, her father said once, awake just enough to stay afloat. In the open auditorium that day, Clara made her way to the front, past the grandmothers seated on stools, drinking tea, littering the ground with sunflower seeds. She stood so close to the stage that the sound of the gongs exploded in her ears, tingling up her spine; she could see the stitching of the Monkey King’s yellow robes as he somersaulted across the stage. All the while, her father, beside her, followed the undercurrent of the story. The quest for enlightenment, the spiritual journey that remained at the core.

She was twelve years old the day, the moment, the city became altered for her. When she herself suddenly became clear.

The evening of the accident, her father had the radio on. From where she stood, sweeping the entrance to the restaurant, she heard the first chiming notes, a clang of cymbals. Inside the restaurant, an elderly man, his voice scratchy with age, began to sing. The diners clapped, calling encouragement, joining their voices with his.

It was twilight. She stood outside listening, the broom in her hand. A crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk, looking up at the apartment building across the street. When she craned her neck back and lifted her eyes, she saw a boy pacing back and forth on the flat roof. A flash of colour slid across the sky, a kite high above him. The wind picked it up and twisted it round, a dragon with a long and flickering tail, spiralling.

She saw the edge of the roof, the boy walking without seeing it. Her throat caught.

It happened in the space of a second. The boy, head tilted up, watched the progress of his kite. He stepped backwards into air. Someone beside her screamed, and then she heard only silence. For a moment as he fell, his body unfurled, hands darting out, legs kicking away.

The crowd surged forward, and she began to run, reaching her arms out as if she could catch him. A few steps away, in front of her, the boy hit the sidewalk.

Voices cried out, a screaming that rose in volume, the sound travelling over her. The side of his head was badly crushed, his legs twisted grotesquely beneath him. The boy’s eyes were open, but she did not think he could see. People moved towards him, stopping when they saw blood staining the ground.

Seconds passed. Around her, nobody moved.

The air was thick. She had to push against it, fighting the sickness that rose in her chest. She forced herself to go and kneel beside him. Gently, she placed one hand on his forehead, and then carefully she took his hand.

Behind her, someone asked, “Is he still breathing?”

Clara nodded but she didn’t look up. “Call an ambulance.”

Footsteps hurried away. She heard a girl sobbing, calling for her parents, but nobody answered. The parents were not there, someone said, they had gone this morning to Hong Kong Island. At the sound of the girl’s voice, something changed in the boy’s expression, and Clara knew that he was looking at her, seeing her face. He was younger than she, perhaps ten years old. She held his hand tighter. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. His hair was matted and glistening, the blood still running out. She told him that this was only the beginning of a long walk, an important journey. He blinked up at her, seeming to understand, seeming to trust her. She said that she would stay with him for as long as she could.

The noise of the siren came to her then, a sound enveloping her like heat. The medics, a blur of white, surged forward. She saw them remove the boy’s hand from hers, and then someone placed their hands on her shoulders, pulling her gradually away.

When the ambulance had disappeared, she found herself alone, the bystanders gaping at the pool of blood, her stained clothes. She saw her father, the panicked expression on his face, as he made his way to where she stood. She began to walk in the direction that the ambulance had gone, but her father reached out, caught her hand, held her still.

Two nights later, he sat with her in a corner of the restaurant. He told her that the boy, in the presence of his parents and his sister, had died a few hours ago.

She nodded but said nothing.

“What are you thinking, Ching Yun?”

Around them, chairs scraped, voices rose and fell. “We all stood and watched it happen,” she said, at last. “If I had thought to call out to him, I could have stopped it. If I had only tried to reach him.”

He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. Then he said that what she believed was false. The boy had been too far up, he had been lost in a world of his own.

She shook her head and pushed her chair back, standing up. Her father let her go. She went outside into the cool evening air. On the sidewalk, she smelled tobacco smoke and looked up to see the mechanics next door sitting on crates, cigarettes pinched between their lips. Fluorescent signs arced over the street, glowing bridges of colour. From the dwellings above, raucous laughter tumbled down. She heard the clatter of mahjong tiles, a chorus of radios.

She kept walking, across the street, up the stairs of the apartment building, until, finally, she reached the rooftop. This morning, she had learned from the boy’s sister that this had been his favourite place. He always wanted to be alone, his sister said, flying his kites, and when he was older, he wanted to find work on the merchant ships, to travel from port to port, seeing the world.

Below, the ground was neon, an electric river. In the distance, Kowloon Harbour was a series of tiny lights surrounded by a flood of dark, a breath away from Hong Kong Island. In her mind, she could fill in the emptiness, temples clouded by the smoke of burning joss sticks, streets reaching up like ladders, composed entirely of stone steps. At the summit, she imagined children setting their kites aloft.

Farther away were countries she had never set foot in, but which filtered through her imagination. Britain and China, India and America. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be anywhere but where she stood. She wanted to come to all things with the clarity in which she had seen the boy, and in which she had been seen by him.

When Clara was nineteen years old, her father took her aside to that same table. He set an envelope in front of her, the letter that she had been waiting for, an answer from the University of Melbourne. Her hands shook as she read the lines, then handed the sheet of paper back to him. Her father leapt to his feet, shouting the news to everyone in the restaurant. The cooks came out from behind the glass, her mother and sisters rushed to embrace her.

On that day, she gave herself an English name, as many young women were choosing to do, on their departure from Hong Kong. Leung Ching Yun, Clearest Spring, the name of her childhood slipped away from her, into the past. She wrote her new name out in the letter she sent to the University of Melbourne.
Clara Leung.

As a young woman, when describing Matthew to friends, she would often speak of fate, of how she and Matthew had crossed paths on the narrow, snow-covered walkways of the university, of their chance meetings as they hurried from one class to another. They had the same group of friends, expatriate Asians in Melbourne, from as far away as Malaya, North Borneo, Thailand and Hong Kong.

She and Matthew had stood out from the group – the men mostly enrolled in science programs, the women taking classes at the secretarial college. She studied literature, hoping one day to be a schoolteacher. Matthew had started a degree in civil engineering, but a year shy of completion, he had given in to his longing and transferred to the history department.

She can still see him as he was then, a young man of twenty-three, his hair carefully combed, his expression serious. The first time Matthew came to the boarding house where she lived, he carried a bouquet of flowers in each hand.
I couldn’t decide
, he had told her, his eyes pensive.
I couldn’t choose.
He was wearing his usual clothes, slacks, a white shirt and a sports jacket. They spent the day in the kitchen, trying to recreate the dishes of their childhoods: laksas, dumplings, fragrant breads. Eleanor Henley, Clara’s landlady, was in charge of the turntable. She played Elvis and Slim Dusty, “A Pub with No Beer.” Eleanor watching Clara and Matthew with a knowing, motherly smile.

Standing over the stove, he asked about her family, about Kowloon. Clara described the restaurant, the crowded rooms where she and her sisters had amused themselves, dressing up in their parents’ finery. Each week, her mother would light sticks of incense and pour wine into tiny porcelain cups. She held whispered conversations with the ancestors, urging them to drink freely, to live well.

From the time of her adolescence, she told Matthew, she had known she would leave Hong Kong, she would go into the world beyond.
Too many books
, her mother had said, chiding her,
too many idle dreams
. And yet her parents had not tried to dissuade her.