The Rice Paper Diaries by Francesca Rhydderch

from him, like a waiter accepting a night’s wages by way of a tip from a generous customer. He gestured for Wei to come over to where I was standing with Wang and Lam, each of us with one of the packed suitcases at our feet.
    Mr Tommy saw Wang, and walked over to us, slowly, so that he wouldn’t attract too much attention from anyone apart from the soldier who’d given permission for this exchange to take place. He put a hand to Mari’s cheek.
    ‘Sir,’ said Wang. ‘I’m sorry.’
    The captain shook his head.
    ‘You couldn’t have stopped them.’
    ‘Where are they taking you, Sir?’ Wang asked. His voice was full of a concern which I suspected was as much for himself as for anyone else.
    ‘No one knows,’ said the captain. He swallowed once or twice in quick succession, as if he needed a drink of water. ‘They’ve had us under lock and key in a bloody slum for the past week.’
    ‘Sir,’ I said, showing him the bags at our feet. ‘We went back to the apartment. We have clothes for you.’
    Mari’s breath on the back of my neck was hotter than the morning air around us.
    ‘God bless you,’ Mr Tommy said. ‘I’ll take the bags and one of you follow a few paces behind with Mari. We don’t want to antagonise the bastards.’
    He picked up all three of the bags.
    I had been trying to imagine how this moment would feel, when I would have to say goodbye to Mari, but I couldn’t feel anything. The air was already filled with the scent of her leaving: her special baby shampoo, her formula milk, and soap flakes – the comforting mixed - up smells that always stuck to the skin under my fingernails after a day spent taking care of her.
    Wei seemed to know all this as if I had been sitting there with him at his stall dictating it to him for a cent. Before I knew it, his swollen, callused fingers had undone the strap and taken her off my back and he was gone, through the crowd after the captain like a pickpocket, light on his feet.
    I held my breath as he made his way with the captain over to Mrs Elsa, but she had moved, shifted by the surge of the crowd all around her. I looked back at Wei, but he had disappeared from sight too, lost among lowered heads and trails of cigarette smoke. Then I caught sight of Mrs Elsa again, picked out from the crowd by a weak ray of winter sun that reminded me of the dusty bands of light in the shuttered bars Ryan used to favour. She stood with her arms held out, her eyes dry, waiting. As Wei came back into view, slipping Mari into her arms, I felt as if my own skin was being unpeeled from my flesh, strip by strip. I thought of the dead woman on the pavement outside the bombed arcade, her hand in her dead son’s.
    Mari was awake, her hands grabbing at Mrs Elsa’s hair, and they were smiling at each other. I could only see them from the side now, half of Mrs Elsa’s smile, and half of Mari’s: two halves of the same smile.
    The soldier Wei had paid off seemed to have lost the goodwill we had paid him for.
    ‘Hurry up,’ he called over. Within seconds Wei was back at my side. He didn’t even seem short of breath.
    My back was cold.
    Lam and Wang were arguing with Wei, saying that he should have kept some of the money for us, that we needed it too, but all my attention was taken up by Mari. She looked different from a distance. I stared at her, trying to impress upon my memory the dense blue of her eyes, the red patch of eczema on her chin that always bothers her unless I put cream on it, her fingers that open and close constantly, trying to hold all of the life that surrounds her in her hungry, uncertain grasp.
    The soldiers had given up on the task of taking names and papers. A command went out for everyone to dispose of their identification, and to start marching. As the prisoners shuffled off the ground they left behind them a mosaic of navy - blue squares speckled across the lush grass.
    ‘British passports,’ said Wei.
    We followed, and the soldiers did nothing to