As my weekends usually consisted of me lurking in my room and sleeping late, it wasn’t too much of a burden, it could even be fun to have someone around other than Dad to talk to.
And so it was settled. Suddenly, in the space of a day, I had a sister and a new home; I told Dad I wasn’t sure about coming home the following weekend, though, I’d had enough surprises today, God only knew what’d get sprung on me then! He laughed out loud, the first happy sound I’d heard from him in years.
Dad and I collected Sai Fong from Birmingham International, the escort from the airline checking our identity documents carefully against the photographs and documents Sai Fong had before releasing her into Dad’s custody; she hadn’t seen him since she was six, so she was a little scared, nervous. She and Dad cried a little, and she hugged me tentatively, probably feeling as weird about me as I was about her.
She was tiny, much shorter than I thought a ten-year old would be, but very cute, a little pixie of a girl, European features mixed nicely with her Chinese heritage, long wavy hair a deep chestnut like mine, soft and fine, not thick and straight like so many of the Chinese boys at school. She had grey-hazel eyes like me, with very fair, pink-tinged skin, and she looked like one of those porcelain dolls you buy in the heritage gift shops, or one of those little oriental super-hero girls on the Saturday morning cartoons.
I had asked Dad what was her proper ethnicity, as she obviously wasn’t pure Chinese, nor was she English, and Dad told me that, if people asked, and if I felt like telling them, the proper designation for Sai Fong was ‘Eurasian’, not that it was anybody’s business but her own.
I decided that, if I was going to be a proper big brother, I would have to watch out for her, and if anyone was rude enough to ask her a question like that, I would make sure to ask them why exactly they wanted to know.
The drive from the airport to Cosford wasn’t too bad, the M6 motorway behaving for a change, the M54 almost deserted, as usual, and we arrived home in about an hour. Our au-pair, Hanna, a friendly Danish teenager, quickly took charge of Sai Fong, getting her fed after her long flight, and into her pyjamas, being as big-sisterly as possible; they were going to be spending a lot of time together, after all.
Sai Fong sat with us for a while before bed, and we tried to talk. She was almost painfully shy and only answered in whispers, but I was surprised at her English — she spoke fluently, with no hesitation, but with an accent, of course. When Dad spoke to her in Cantonese she was a lot more forthcoming, and they chatted away, with Dad telling me what she was saying. He made me blush like a beetroot when he told me she had told him she was proud she had such a handsome older brother!
She told Dad about her mother’s funeral, and he had cried a little, Sai Fong sitting on his lap hugging him tightly around the neck, and even I had felt a little teary. Dad soon recovered, and took Sai Fong up to her room, to tuck her in and read to her until she fell asleep.
Gradually, as the weeks passed, Sai Fong lost her shyness around me, eventually actually looking me in the eyes when talking to me. I saw the changes in a series of snapshots, one weekend at a time, until at last she was completely at ease with me. Some evenings, she would sit upright on me, cross-legged on my lap, tracing my features with her fingers and comparing them with her own, pulling my nose and tugging at the corners of my eyes to make them look like hers, and giggling while she did it.
One time, trying to be more in-tune with her heritage, joking with her, I hugged her and told her I was her ‘Gwai Lo’ brother, a term I’d gotten from one of the boys at school; she gasped, saying it was a bad name, that it meant ‘Ghost’ or ‘Demon’ Person, that it was an insult, and that I must not say it again.
Other times, she would sit next to me and ask me to read her one of her stories, usually some kiddie story about goblins, or witches and wizards, magic, that sort of stuff, but I eventually managed to get her to listen to, and read, the Pooh stories, and my all-time favourite, ‘The Wind in the Willows’; every weekend she would request that I read her a chapter a night, and when we finished it, we went on to some of the other children’s classics I had loved so well as a little boy — The Hobbit, The Little Grey Men, The Narnia books, Carbonel. Dad was happy that we were bonding, and I was pleased that she took so much care of my old books, always waiting for me to come home so we could only read them together.
When I came in on Friday evenings, she would scream and run to me, her little body cannoning into me, knocking the wind out of me, shouting “Harry, Harry, HARRY! Read to me!” So I would tell her ‘after supper, princess’, talk with her during supper, and wait for her to shower and get dressed for bed. Then I would sit on the bed next to her, and she would tell me about school, her friends, the latest ‘knock-knock’ jokes, and ask me to read to her while she leaned against me, her finger following the text as I read out loud, until she fell asleep; then I’d tuck her in, kiss her on the forehead and murmur “Goodnight princess, love you.” and go spend some time with Dad.
This became our evening ritual. I think it would be true to say that Sai Fong enabled dad and I to re-connect, as I fell into the role of Big Brother. I adored her, I enjoyed playing with her, reading to her, answering her questions about my school, my friends, and generally discovering that having a sister, this sister, was just the most wonderful thing; she was my little sister, I loved her, and I would move heaven and earth for her if she asked me.
She did have her moments, though, and here would be times when, having missed a home visit because of rugby house-match weekends or rugby training, or exam-prep, I’d find myself on the receiving end of a machine-gun stream of angry-sounding Cantonese the following weekend, followed by the slam of her bedroom door, and the sound of Dad laughing somewhere in the distance.
I tried to learn Cantonese, so I could talk to her in her own language, but I’m a natural dunce when it comes to languages, and the tutor Dad hired to teach me eventually told me in exasperation that she could not teach me, that I was actually unteachable, and that she would rather teach a cat to swim….
I went to university when I was eighteen, and spent the next two years learning about materials technology. I would come home the odd weekend, and, as I matured, I discovered I could talk to Dad, and so we spent a lot of our evenings together chatting about my life, his life, all subjects; besides, Sai was great company; she has a delightful, penetrating wit, an awesome command of the English language, and a lovely, melodic voice with a refined ‘Received-Pronunciation’ English accent that I, and my friends, find absolutely enthralling; when she’s in full-flow, her accent could cut glass at twenty paces.
I wanted to be an airframe designer, so I needed a good degree, and the university, the Imperial College, was sufficiently far from home that I had to remain away for extended periods, concentrating on my studies. All was going well, until one day I got a call from Dad.
“Harry, Sai Fong did a bunk, we had an argument this morning about her going to university, and she took off from school after lunch, have you heard from her?”
Jeez, four hours ago! I told dad I hadn’t, I would try and ring her, she’d pick-up if she saw it was me, and rang off. I called her mobile, and she picked up immediately.
“Harry! I was wondering when the other half of the double-act would show up!”
“Quit that,” I said, relief tempering the worry, “Dad’s worried sick, he only just found out you did a runner. Where the hell are you?”
“Look out the window, you silly arse!” she giggled, and I rushed over, sure enough, there she was, sitting on the bonnet of her battered Golf.
“Come on up, princess, tell me what happened,” I said, pressing the door release. “Door’s open, get up here and call Dad, just let him know you’re OK!”
Sai sat down, crossing her legs, me unable to look away as her very short skirt slid even further up her smooth pink thigh, then tearing my eyes away to look at the cheeky grin she had pasted on her face.
“Had a good stare? Eeeooow, I’m your sister, you pervo!” she grinned.
I grinned back unabashed, knowing full well this was just Sai being Sai; she was a beautiful girl, and I guess it was flattering, in a weird and disturbing kind of way, to be the object of such mild flirtatious attention, but it had to be said, I’d been getting the feeling for quite a while now that she was just practicing on me, building up to something, but what, I couldn’t guess; all I knew was that it made me feel I should perhaps be extra careful around her.
“So, talk to me. What possessed you to just disappear from Newport and end up in West London, posing outside my front door?” I asked her, knowing as I did what Dad had said, but waiting to hear what her side was.
“I told Dad I wanted to be a graphic artist, and he hit the roof, started going on about how we’d agreed I was going to study nursing at Staffordshire University, when what HE agreed was that I study nursing; I really don’t want to spend the rest of my working life staring at bed-sores and bare backsides, and I told him, if I wanted a life surrounded by low-pay, piss and puke, I’d become a pub cleaner, cue massive argument.”