The Colour of Tea Read online

  I adjust my position on the stool, the bones in my backside starting to ache, as the fortune-teller leans forward to take one of my hands. She reviews the lines on my palm, her eyes focused and her breath damp and warm against my skin.

  “Aunty says you have a love. I guess it’s your husband, right? Only one, she says.”

  I nod again. That wasn’t a difficult guess; we’ve been married long enough for the rose-gold wedding band on my left hand to practically mold to the finger, the skin underneath milk-pale and indented.

  “Pretty good man, but there is a bit of sadness. For him and for you. Carrying it around here.” My translator points toward her chest, I presume at her heart.

  I nod slowly.

  “You will have a good, healthy life. No problem with money. You’ll stay in Macau for some time, but not too long.”

  The older woman frowns, looks up at me and then back down at my hand. I swallow. The young woman puts her mobile phone into her pocket and leans forward. The volleying of Cantonese starts up again, the volume cranked up a notch. I lean in also, as if I might catch a word or two, but it is meaningless to me. The aunt shakes a finger at her niece.

  “All right, all right.” She rolls her eyes. “She does this. It’s like one thing or maybe another thing totally opposite.” She frowns. “She’s talking about children.”

  I take a quick breath and hope they haven’t heard me, wishing I could snatch my hand from the older woman’s grip. But she is still staring down at my palm.

  “Maybe there will be one …”

  The pause seems to hang, the dust motes swirling and spinning around us.

  “It’s a faint line. She is saying something like one, or not one.”

  The fortune-teller is stroking the side of my pinkie emphatically, as if to illustrate her point. I look back and forth between the two women.

  “Go figure.” The younger woman shrugs.

  “I don’t understand,” I say hesitantly.

  “Yeah, she’s saying it as if it all makes sense, but she doesn’t make sense. Then she says that the most important thing is don’t worry. Maybe a baby is what she says.”

  I feel sad and seasick again. Telling me not to worry is ridiculous advice. I want to ask more; a thousand questions tumble over one another in my mind. I open my mouth, but the fortune-teller is speaking again. She has turned to face her niece. She drops my hand as the young woman shakes her head and waves her aunt’s glare away. The aunt leans toward her and raises her voice.

  “Excuse me …” I say, but they don’t hear.

  Now the aunt has her palm against her niece’s knee, and she is pointing a finger at her. The young woman’s face pales and she turns her cheek. More Cantonese, rough and choppy. I look from one to the other as their voices grow angrier and more urgent. I feel like I am watching something I shouldn’t. As her aunt gets louder, the girl lifts her eyes to me. The pupils are dark and hard, like black beads, looking right into me.

  “Can I ask …” I start.

  “That’s all—finished,” she says too quickly, getting to her feet. The fortune-teller is still talking, but the young woman gives me a forced smile and ignores her.

  I get the hint. I stand up slowly, my legs almost buckling, stiff from crouching and the cold. She doesn’t reach out to help me up. I sway as I shuffle through the items in my bag, hunting for my wallet.

  “One fifty?”

  “Yeah.” Then she adds, “That’s not including tip.”

  “Uh, sure.” I pass two Hong Kong hundred-dollar notes toward her. They are new and starchy. She takes them with both hands and pauses, staring at me with those dark eyes. Her aunt is still muttering, now shaking her head. My translator still doesn’t turn around, keeping her glassy stare on me.

  “Keep the change,” I say.

  “Thanks,” she replies in a flat voice.

  Heading through the temple, back out to the sweet smell of incense, I can feel my eyes watering, perhaps from the brightness of the light outside. My chest is tight too; I take in a big gulp of air.

  Outside a crowd is still moving like one beast, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The sun has split like a yolk through the white sky. As I head back to the main road, I avoid the bus stops and flag down a taxi. I say the only thing I know in Cantonese to the driver.

  “Gee Jun Far Sing.”

  Remède de Délivrance—Rescue Remedy

  Violet with Cream and Bitter Black Currant Filling

  Three days later, our couches finally arrive. A man rings our doorbell unannounced and stands there with two sweaty companions, two boxed couches, and a look as if to say, “So what?” He has them dragged in and unpacked, then taps on the sheet of paper where I should sign and is gone. Now I can sit in my living room and look out the window.

  We live on the sixth floor of Gee Jun Far Sing, Supreme Flower City. The apartments are surprisingly spacious; our furniture barely fills ours up. There is a Super Flower City and a Grand Flower City and there will be a Prince Flower City, but our bright purple apartment building is Supreme. It is hard to ignore a forty-something-story purple building, rearing into the sky like a gawky exotic lily. On closer inspection it is not painted that color but tiled in tiny purple squares, like pixels. It turns out that almost all of the apartment buildings are clad the same way. I imagine the tiles are laid on in sheets, smoothed like wallpaper or icing on a wedding cake.

  The view from the couches is of the residents’ car park below us on the fourth floor, an empty block of land, and Nova City apartment block directly across from us. Nova City is an older building. It must have been white once, but now it is as gray as the sky on a pollution-filled day and striped with the dirty exhaust of leaking air-conditioning units. The empty block is supposed to become a park sometime soon, or so I have been told. Every week there are new rumors—it will become an underground car park, it is a station for a new light-rail system, they’ll make it into another casino. Nothing happens. The block remains empty, tussocky, and worn.

  The phone rings while I am gazing out at that lonely piece of land and doing what I do best. Waiting. My heart leaps out of my chest on the first ring. I try to breathe normally. Just answer the phone, Grace. My heart thunders on like a racehorse in the Grand National. I imagine my file in his hands, a folder with red and yellow stickers down one side that read G. Miller. I wait for the sound of his voice to reveal everything in the tone and pause, but the line is poor. I hear him clear his throat.

  “Hi, Dr. Lee,” I say.

  I imagine him on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the world. Dr. Lee is younger than he looks, I think from all the smiling. The few wrinkles in his round face gather by his cheeks as though he has been dishing out good news for years. I think of him with his wide grin, armfuls of fleshy, giggling babies in rose pink and swallow blue booties. Although he is calling from an office in London, he is originally from Hong Kong, so he knows Macau, only a stone’s throw away. He used to spend his summer holidays here.

  Two years of crossed fingers and timely sex passed by before I even went to see him in that sea green office with the fake silk poppies in the reception area. There had already been a registered endocrinologist before him. My follicle-stimulating-hormone levels were high, and we knew what that meant. It was easier to talk about FSH than use the dreaded M word. Worse was when they mentioned “infertility.” Casually, carelessly. It always made me feel sick.

  “We’ll try someone else. One more,” I had said to Pete.

  Dr. Lee gave us that smile of his, and we felt a new flickering of hope. There were junior Lees. That was a good sign, right? They smiled from the photos on his desk, sensitively turned away from clients but reflecting off the glass in the shelves behind him. A childless woman sees these things, she sees everything.

  With his encouragement I tried acupuncture, yoga, gave up wheat, lost five kilos, and crossed my fingers on both hands before every test. The blue lines betrayed me every time; too many
tears in that bathroom, falling into the white sink. I wished so hard for pregnancy. Then I just wished for a normal period. I wished and prayed, but nothing changed. There was just one more test. Even Pete whispered, “No more after this, love. Please.”

  He had put up with so much. The hormones, mood swings, tears. I wasn’t going to argue with him, I was exhausted too. The last FSH test.

  Now, looking out at Macau, I feel a desperate urge to put off whatever the doctor is going to say.

  “Grace, I have the results back.”

  I can tell from his voice. Children in frames, their smiles reflected in the glass. Not mine.

  “It wasn’t what we were hoping for, I’m afraid. With the extra hormone support, the alternative therapies, I thought we might have a chance. But …”

  This voice I have been waiting for becomes a strange hum against the bowl of my ear. I can’t follow what he is saying, and it doesn’t matter. All I hear is Failure. Premature ovarian failure. I am an old woman in my thirties.

  * * *

  When Pete comes home, I am still on the couch. The sky is dark, but the curtains are open. I hadn’t called him, although I’d thought about it.

  He squints at me while taking off his shoes. “Grace?”

  I imagine what he is seeing. His wife, curled up, face old and tired. He sits down beside me and takes my hand. Leaning back, he lets out a sigh. We both stare at the television because it is the focal point of the room, but it is switched off. The black square is like the third person in our conversation.

  After a long time he says, “We should talk about it. There could be things, things we could do …” His voice is strong and encouraging. His alpha male voice. This is the voice that makes men gravitate toward him like wolves to the leader of the pack. I guess it is why he makes such a good manager. Or perhaps it is some kind of pheromone. He never wears aftershave, so the natural smell of salt is always thick on him. That scent used to make me giddy. But not now.

  I shake my head.

  “Gracie, what did he say exactly?” He squeezes my fingers comfortingly, but he sounds patronizing.

  I shake my head; I don’t want to be coddled.

  He says something else, but I don’t hear him, although I do turn to look at him. The thick hair, loose and curly, made for a musician or an artist, not a businessman. It needs a cut as always, and I make a mental note of this. It has been so long since I have really looked at him, and I realize, through the fog of sadness, just how much we have drifted apart. He looks foreign to me somehow. The last few years of trying for a baby have had us walking more and more separate paths. I take in his dark eyebrows and the soft, sagging skin under his eyes betraying a lack of sleep. Two deep lines frame his lips, one on each cheek, like parentheses. He puts his head to one side and frowns. There is so much pity in his face that it makes me feel nauseous. What is there to say?

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say dully.

  * * *

  A new talent. I go from waiting to sleeping. Pete gets someone to write a prescription for sleeping tablets, and I ingest them instead of meals. I take them at regular intervals, to keep from being awake. I do not want to be awake.

  But a few days later I am wrenched from my sleep, covered in a greasy sweat. I have dreamed about Mama.

  We were in a field of poppies, their fat and luscious red heads moving about in the breeze as we walked through them. Mama was a few feet from me and singing. I think she was singing. Maybe she was talking to the flowers. Her head was tilted toward them, and she had an openmouthed smile on her face. She tucked her hair behind her ear. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, and her happy face seemed to say, “I love you, my Gracie,” just the way she used to say it when she tucked me in at night. Like everything was all right with the world. But then there was a loud sound, like a crack of lightning, or a whip against dry earth, and a flock of birds flashed across the sky. We looked at each other, Mama’s face turning pale and still. She looked lighter, not smaller but slightly transparent.

  I think I saw her mouth the word Sorry. Dread filled my stomach. I stumbled toward her, my skirt catching on the poppies. Mama was still singing, but it was so quiet I could only see her painted red lips moving. She was fading away. I started to cry. As I caught her up in my arms and put my ear next to her mouth, my tears fell onto her neck and ran down to her blouse. Then I caught her whispering, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy …”

  I sit up in bed and wish for the dream to leave me. Her face, her voice, even the smell of her favorite perfume are spinning around and around in my head, leaving me dizzy and breathless. I reach over to the bedside table and take another sleeping tablet. It won’t work for a half hour at least, but being awake is too painful. My muscles ache, but my heart is worse. I wince at the sunlight coming in the window. Spring is coming, and the Year of the Golden Pig is almost gone. Now what? Now what?

  It had been in those moments, all those times I was in the bathroom, waiting for those magical blue lines, I had started to think of Mama again. Now she is here with me in Macau, running into my dreams. Daughters never understand mothers until they become mothers, that’s what a woman at work said to me once. Maybe she was right. Mama had come back into my thoughts as I sat in specialists’ waiting rooms and stared at women with children in prams. I’d pushed her and her mysteries out of my memory for so long, but there she was again, dancing with my child hands in hers, making mud cakes, giggling, crying. Scenes from our past stringing themselves together like a crooked daisy chain. I couldn’t stop thinking of her. Some days I’d imagine I saw her at the butcher’s or getting onto a train. But I know one thing for sure: that woman was wrong about the understanding part. I will never understand Mama. I press my fingers to my temples and lean back into the pillow.

  Pete has put a sandwich beside the bed, the crusts drying against the white plate. Underneath is a pad of writing paper. I can’t help it. It’s become a habit. I pick up the pad and look for a pen. I started writing notes to her when we began trying to become parents. Something about it calms me; makes me feel better. At least for a while. I guess some women have a journal; I have Mama. Ruby-red-haired Mama. Wild as a tomcat. The one person who knows the best and the worst of me. Never far from my mind.

  Dearest Mama,

  Do you remember that time the bird flew into the window when we were living in Borough? We were baking—meringues, tarts, something sweet and French. We were in the kitchen and we heard that sick-sounding thud and looked up, and you said, “Oh dear, sounds like an angel has fallen.”

  I thought for sure it was a real angel and tried to climb up onto the edge of the sink to see out. I think I expected to see a blond, curly-haired lady rubbing her bruised head and straightening her long, blue, glittering dress. You know, just like the angel on the top of the Christmas tree? But instead there was a tiny, frightened bird lying in the window box, on top of the soil.

  Do you remember how we picked that bird up and put it in a cleaned-out ice cream container lined with a couple of socks? It lay on its side and stared up at us with one eye roving and blinking. You could see its little heart beating so fast and so hard I was terrified it would explode with shock. Then you took the box over to the bed and sat down next to it and started humming. Humming “Amazing Grace.”

  You unscrewed the top of a bottle of Rescue Remedy and put the dripper next to the bird’s small orange beak. I was sure it wouldn’t open its mouth, but it did, just a little bit. Some of the remedy got in, and some fell down its breast, onto the waxy feathers. You kept humming, and finally, after what seemed like such a long time but probably wasn’t, it wriggled up and onto its feet. One eye looking at you and one eye looking at me. We took him up to the garden on the roof, do you remember? As soon as we got up there, he leapt out of the ice cream container and wobbled off into the sky. How quickly he remembered how to fly.

  Mama, I don’t know what to do or say or think or feel. All I can think about is other things. Lik
e that bird. If I think about the real thing, it is as if I am drowning. It is as if I can’t breathe. My heart starts to jump about like that little bird’s and I wish you were here. To bake with me. To sing to me. To stroke my hair.

  Your loving daughter,

  Grace

  * * *

  Later that night, I am lying on the couch without the television on, staring out the window.

  “Grace? You awake?” Pete asks. He has arrived home to find the apartment dark. I have forgotten to turn on the lights. He flicks the switch closest to the door while easing out of his shoes.

  I give him a small smile; he looks so worried it is the least I can offer him. When he comes over, I reach up and touch his mouth with the tips of my fingers. It is the same mouth I kissed goodbye this morning, and yet how strange it feels. I lean into his face and kiss his lips again, like trying a new fruit.

  He will never be a father.

  When I pull away, he is staring at me, his frown softening.

  He will never be a father and it is my fault.

  I lean forward into him and kiss him so hard I can taste the iron in his blood. I must have knocked his gum, and I want to bite his lip. He makes a soft whine and struggles free to look at me again. I push him back into the sofa, the dark cushions swallowing up the contours of his face. He is blurry now, in the half dark, but I find his mouth and press my lips firm up against his so I can feel the shape of his teeth through them. I am sitting on him when I pull back for air. I can tell he is still staring at me, but he says nothing. The sound between us is of warm, short breaths and nothing else.