The Yellow Papers (9 page)

He felt her presence and denied its possibility, but it insisted. Still he refused to open his eyes, unwilling to face the disappointment of reality. For just a moment he wanted to imagine her here, floating beside him.

Her fingers trailed burning patterns on his belly and he felt himself swell in spite of the cold water, but still he didn't open his eyes. He wanted this moment to last forever. He knew he must be dreaming. Her fingers traced little snail-trails on his belly, slowly working down towards his groin, and instinctively he thrust his hips slowly back and forth.

Sahira laughed and pushed his head under water.

Chen Mu kicked to the surface and spluttered, flaccid and angry, his fantasy shattered. She laughed once more. Anger turned to embarrassment. He swam towards the bank.

‘Mu, wait! I'm sorry, Mu! Please wait …'

Chen Mu looked around for his clothes. He had to get away from her, from her laughter, from his shame. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his chest. He could feel her breasts, her belly pressing against his back through her thin chemise.

‘Mu, I'm sorry … I shouldn't have laughed. But it did look funny …'

He could still hear the laughter in her voice and so denied the warmth of her wet skin against his.

‘What did?'

‘Your … well, it looked like a little fish trying to catch insects, bobbing in and out of the water like that.'

Above them a kookaburra laughed and Sahira suppressed a giggle.

He tensed even further, pulling away from her body. She was laughing at him. Shattering every dream he'd ever had. Even the birds were laughing at him. If he were not a man he would cry. He tried to move away but she held him tighter.

‘Mu?' Sahira stroked his chest, his belly. Her hands moved down the front of his thighs. Teased him by moving back up to his chest then down again. ‘Mu?' Her hand moved slowly to his groin. Soft butterfly-wing caresses. ‘It was a very
nice
little fish …' His stomach muscles tightened and he felt himself growing, swelling beneath her fingers. ‘… a very,
very
nice fish,' she mumbled, kissing his back. Chen Mu groaned with pleasure and reached back, his fingers grasping her buttocks, pulling her closer still. ‘… and not so
little
a fish, after all …'

She pulled him down to the ground and sat astride of him. Took off her chemise. Leaning forwards so that her breasts brushed his lips, she swayed gently from side to side to tease him as his mouth sought to grasp them. He breathed deep her scent. Twigs and rocks dug into his back but he ignored them. She felt his breath come faster and guessed he would not last much longer, so she lowered herself onto him and he gasped at the moist warmth of her. He wanted to go deeper, to crawl right inside of her, to never come out. He arched up against her, lost in a vortex of ecstasy as she rose and sank above him. The ground beneath him no longer existed, the river no longer existed, even Sahira no longer existed as he exploded inside her in a series of spasms that left him trembling.

She lay curled beside him with her head on his chest as he stroked her still damp hair. He felt sleepy. Content. Happy even. Wounded pride forgotten, the vision of his erect penis as a fish jumping for insects brought forth a smile, and he kissed the top of her head. She shivered and he realised it would soon be dark. Time to go back.

Next morning, even before sunrise, Chen Mu was awakened by the kelpie's bark and the sound of a horse and sulky approaching the homestead at a fast pace. He rose and looked out. The whole house was lit up, and he recognised the doctor hurrying into the house. He dressed and crossed the yard to the kitchen.

He found Mrs Hannigan and Sahira at the kitchen table, gazing into their tea, sombre looks on their faces. Nora was sitting on the floor in a corner of the kitchen, sobbing, her apron over her head. Sahira looked up as he walked in and gave him a weak smile.

‘What's wrong?'

‘It's the Mistress,' Mrs Hannigan answered. ‘She's real poorly. Turned bad during the night.'

The housekeeper came into the kitchen. ‘Doctor says its childbed fever, poor woman. And the Master up the high country and all ….' She shook her head and sighed. ‘I suppose you'd better make her some broth,' she told Mrs Hannigan, ‘though she won't even be wanting that before too long …' She left, mumbling something about having to send someone to fetch the Master back.

That evening when Chen Mu went to the river to swim, he expected Sahira to join him but she didn't come. He went to the kitchen for his evening meal with the other servants, expecting to see her, only to find she was relieving Mrs Dawson's personal maid. The talk around the servants' table centred on Mrs Dawson's rapid decline. He went back to his hut and sat on the front step, waiting. Willing Sahira to come. And though he waited till well after nightfall still she did not come.

He lay in his bed listening to the sounds of the night, tormenting himself. To him, their lovemaking had been more than just a joining of two bodies, but did Sahira feel the same? He remembered her laughter at his penis bobbing in and out of the water. Maybe that was how she saw him – a joke, something to make fun of. She had probably told Mrs Hannigan all about it. They would have laughed together, and now every time they saw him they would smile, and though they wouldn't say anything he'd know they were remembering. He'd been a fool. He should have saved face. Insisted she leave the river. Turn around while he dressed. He should have kept his dignity. Reprimanded her for behaving in such a shameless manner. But now it was too late. He would become a laughing stock and had no options but to leave as soon as possible. He heard footsteps outside his hut. The door opened.

‘Mu?' Sahira whispered.

Chen Mu lay still. Quiet. Should he tell her to leave? Pretend to sleep? She came into the hut, bumped into the table that was the only other piece of furniture beside his bed, and swore quietly. He felt her hand on the corner of his bed, over his feet as she felt her way around, but still he didn't move. A rustle of fabric, then no sound.

She slipped into his bed and lay still. Now Chen Mu wished he'd spoken earlier – if he spoke now, she'd know he'd been pretending to sleep. But he couldn't pretend for much longer. Already he could feel himself grow hard against her warm skin.

‘I couldn't come earlier,' she whispered.

Still Chen Mu didn't answer, unsure of how to react.

‘I had to.…' she kissed his chest, dozens of little soft kisses barely touching his skin, then put her lips around a nipple and played with it with her tongue ‘… take my turn …' she moved down to his belly and Chen Mu groaned and arched with pleasure ‘… looking after Mrs Dawson … ‘ and she wriggled further down the bed and licked the inside of each thigh. Chen Mu forgot about losing face, and gave himself up instead to the heightened sensations of moist lips on hot flesh, and the musky odour of passion mingled with sweat.

Each night, as Matthew Dawson sat beside his wife's bed, watching her fight for breath and slide into delirium, Sahira slipped into Chen Mu's bed and guided him through the mysteries of her sex. Then they would talk, often till dawn, and she told him of her life as a child in India and on the goldfields, where both her parents died of typhoid, and how she entered service when barely ten years old in order to survive.

‘I didn't cry, you know, when my father died. And I didn't cry when my mother died, either … Do you think I'm heartless?'

Chen Mu shook his head and continued stroking her hair.

‘So many were dying, you see. You could tell the tents that had typhoid – that horrid pea-soup smell of the diarrhoea … And when someone close to you got it, well, you knew what was coming. But you were too busy looking after them, trying to cool their fever, changing their bedclothes … No, I didn't cry then. And I didn't cry when the missionary women came and took some of us to Sydney – to the Randwick Asylum for orphans. Do you know when I cried?'

‘When?'

‘When they cut my hair, that very first day. They said we had lice. I never had lice! They sat us on a stool and they hacked away at it and I looked at my long plait lying on the floor, and all the extra hair beside it, and that's when I finally realised my mother was dead. Does that sound silly? But you see, my mother used to spend hours brushing my hair in the evenings, and as she brushed she would tell me stories, and tell me what her dreams were for me. It was always a special time, her brushing my hair. And if she'd been alive, she would have never allowed them to cut it off like they did …'

‘My mother cut her hair. For me. To sell so that she could give me money for my journey.'

‘She must have loved you very much …'

Chen Mu nodded. ‘I think that's when I first realised that she must. She wasn't an affectionate woman, my mother. Not like your mother. She was always very strict – cold, almost. I didn't understand, then, that she had to be.' And Chen Mu told her about his life in China. He told about his village, and about his father and brothers following the great Tso Tsungt'ang to the northwest provinces, never to return. He told her of the famine that followed and his sisters being sold as slaves, and he – only four years old – sent to work in the fields until that fateful day three years later when he had been chosen for the Mission.

‘I can still remember that trip down the river. It took three days from my village to Shanghai, and they were the most miserable three days I ever spent. I'd never been outside of my village before, so I should have been excited, but I wasn't. I remember soon after we left, a river dolphin started swimming by the junk. The snows had started to melt further west, making the water turbulent, but the dolphin still gambolled beside the junk. It made me angry – I didn't want anyone, anything, enjoying themselves when I felt so miserable!'

‘Poor boy! Seven isn't very old …'

‘Oh, it's not so young for people like you and me …' Chen Mu said, smiling gently at Sahira and stroking her cheek. ‘But this was the very first time ever I was on my own. And though I'd never have admitted it, I was scared. Then thunder began to rumble, and rain covered the river like a grey curtain, and the dolphin disappeared. The rain continued, so thick you couldn't see the banks, and still I sat there in my misery, wet and shivering. When the rain finally stopped we were passing a village, and the sight of the market stalls, the pigs and the chickens in bamboo cages and people going about their business – it reminded me of my own village, and made me feel so lost and alone that I crept to the back of the junk where no one would see me, to the rows of fish drying on bamboo poles, and there I finally cried.'

Then he told her of his anger and frustration in Connecticut, when he'd found out his mother had died. And he told her about old Yu Ping and of the backbreaking work in the heat of the desert, and the stench of night soil that seemed to ooze from his very pores. He even told her of his resentment that no matter what he thought, what he learned, all people would ever see were his Chinese features, so that he felt he had two faces: a private one and a public one. But he never told her of the man he had killed.

By the time they buried the Mistress next to those small graves on the hill, Chen Mu could not imagine living without Sahira. He would gladly have done anything for her. He decided to leave his fate to the gods – the universal order of things. After the funeral he waylaid the Baptist pastor and asked that he marry them, the next time the pastor came this way.

When Sahira came to his bed that night, he told her what he had done. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her, and pulled from under his bed a large Chinese tea caddy he'd rescued from Silverton, which he used to protect his most valued possessions from the mice and the rats. He took the lid off and withdrew the little brush-rest made of translucent apple-green jade

‘What's that?' Sahira asked, but Chen Mu didn't answer.