Spirits Abroad (ebook)

by Zen Cho

  But it was nowhere near as bad as her parents' carefully expressionless faces, as they had gone from day to day pretending nothing was happening. The day she fainted because she'd thrown up all her breakfast and had hidden in her room and refused to eat — they hadn't said anything. When she choked on her food because things tasted different now she was pregnant, they didn't say anything. She stopped going to school. Her parents stopped talking to her. Her world contracted.

  It was like being invisible. It was as if she had died and no one had noticed.

  Months of it, months of feeling sad and ashamed, but now that it had become serious enough that even her parents could not ignore it, now that she was in the hospital and somebody was looking after her, Ah Lee did not feel free, or relieved.

  She felt angry. She resented her parents wildly for breaking their promise that they would protect her, for failing to love her no matter what.

  And still she was sorry that the secret had to come out — the baby had to come out — and they would lose face. She wished she could be dying in some less embarrassing way. She could have drowned in a monsoon drain. She could have been run over by a car.

  She felt bad for them. But she wished they would stop hanging over her bed and crying.

  "I'm sorry, girl. Mummy's so sorry, girl."

  Sorry no cure, Ah Lee wanted to say.

  After a while it stopped. Somebody took her parents away. Ah Lee regretted her silent fury. She missed them. Somebody was doing something pointless down there. She was bleeding.

  When she died someone was holding her hand. Not a mother or a father, with their enormous burden of expectation. Someone calmer, their hands softer, wrinklier-skinned. At the very last moment Ah Lee opened her eyes and saw her grandmother, waiting for her.

  After death:

  The scent of frangipani — the stench of decay — revenge a red flame at the heart—

  Her hair whipped against her face, smelling of the mulch in a graveyard. Her nails were long and yellow. Her body was free. She got up on the bed and nothing hurt.

  She had lost all sense of the disgusting. She had bled so much that she would never flinch from blood again. She was made for tearing out kidneys, feasting on livers, pulling out strings of intestines. It would never again be her own blood that was spilt, her insides that were pulled inside out.

  She flew down the corridors of the hospital and there was no pain — or rather, everything was pain, but it spun outwards, knocking people over, ripping heads off. Blood sprayed on the walls. People were screaming.

  Someone grabbed the wrists of the hurricane. Someone slapped the face of the typhoon.

  "Enough! Stop now!" The voice was as familiar to her as her mother's. She would have killed anyone else, but the voice brought her down.

  "Angry already, har?" said the voice.

  "Just because you're angry doesn't mean everybody else must suffer!” scolded another voice.

  Blood was rolling down from her eyes. She blinked, but her eyes stung.

  The world was a smear. She couldn't see a thing.

  "Quieting down already."

  "Can listen now."

  "Can see now."

  "Close your eyes, Ah Lee."

  "Close your eyes, girl."

  Someone brushed a damp cloth over her eyelids. When she opened her eyes, she saw who it was.

  "No need to cry," said Ah Ma. "No need for all this. Come, we are going somewhere else. Then you can lie down, rest first. You'll feel nicer after that."

  "Where are we going?" said Ah Lee. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper, scraping her throat. It was sore from the screaming. "Where's Mummy and Daddy?"

  "Mummy and Daddy have to look after your brothers and sister," said an old lady in a baju kebaya. Ah Lee had never seen her before, but she leant her head trustingly against the old lady's chest when the old lady picked her up.

  She felt as tired as if she had just been born.

  "What about the baby?" she whispered.

  "The baby's gone," said Ah Chor. It was the first time they met. "Don't worry. We'll look after you now."

  "Ji Ee?" said Ah Lee blearily, as her eyes began to pick out familiar faces. "Tua Kim? Aunty Girl?"

  "I don't have children," said Ji Ee.

  "My children are all grown up," said Tua Kim.

  "How to let you go alone?" said Aunty Girl. "Now you don't need to worry. We'll be with you."

  There was something to tell them.

  "Ah Ma," said Ah Lee.

  "Yes, girl?"

  Shame washed over her. It had been bad enough with her parents. How could you tell your grandmother something like this?

  "The baby," she said. "The father. I didn't purposely — at the start, I wasn't thinking about all that. I just liked him. We were dating, and it just happened. When I found out I was pregnant, I didn't know what to do. I was scared to tell anybody. And then, Mummy and Daddy—"

  She didn't know what to say about that worst betrayal. She still felt sorry. She had not had the chance to apologize, to explain.

  "Can you tell them?" she said. "Tell them it was an accident. I didn't purposely — I just didn't think. I didn't think this would happen. Tell them I'm sorry."

  They were walking down the hospital corridor. Ah Chor cradled Ah Lee to her chest, stepping over the bodies.

  "Ah Ma already said there's no need to cry," said Ah Ma. "It's not your fault. Your Mummy and Daddy should have looked after you. Ah Ma tried to teach your Mummy to bring up her children right, but there's no need to be so strict. You are her daughter, whether you are good or naughty. Ah Ma should have explained."

  "We all should be saying sorry," said Sa Ee Poh. She didn't mean just the aunts. "You are only a child."

  "Never mind. It's over already," said Ah Chor. "Don't worry about it anymore."

  When they reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor, Ah Lee was already half-asleep. When they smashed through the glass and jumped out the window, seven floors up, she was sleeping. She didn't feel the night wind on her skin, or see the starlight on the aunts' faces.

  When she woke up she was a new person. She was dead, but she wasn't alone. There was nothing to be scared of in this new life. With six aunts behind you, you can be anything.

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  There

  One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland

  Two hours into the siege, Adeline's nerve broke.

  "Where's the Maggi mee?" she said. She tore open the packet of instant noodles with the viciousness of a stray dog.

  "Eh, that's our provisions leh," Hui Ann protested. "Cannot simply eat!"

  "I need a snack," said Adeline. "Cannot tahan. I gotta do something or I'm gonna freak out."

  "Can't you just sing a song or something," Hui Ann began to say, but their argument was interrupted by an explosion.

  Everyone flung themselves flat. Hui Ann knocked her forehead against the stone floor and felt woozy for a moment. But she scrambled up again. This was no time to lie on the floor cowering for her life.

  "They're coming in," wailed somebody, but one of the boys raised his hand.

  "It's my firecracker," he said. "I dropped it outside when we were running here. Must be they picked it up and figured out how to use it. I brought it from home."

  "Har," said Hui Ann blankly. "Is that even legal?"

  Mun Kit, that was his name. "I thought because I won't be home for Chinese New Year mah," he explained. "Don't worry. No way it'll get through the door. It's a cheap one only. I bought it for RM2 from the kedai runcit."

  "You should have told the kedai runcit guy firecrackers are banned in Malaysia," said Adeline.

  "I was going to play in UK, what, not Malaysia," argued Mun Kit. "Anyway, the firecrackers all got wet when we got off the bus yesterday. I'm surprised they even got it to work. I bet you the others won't go off."

  He seemed to be right. They waited another half an hour, their hearts in thei
r throats, but there were no more explosions. In fact there was no noise whatsoever.

  You could almost have imagined there was nothing beyond the door, and they were hiding in the library for no reason.

  Almost.

  Outside, the fairies waited.

  It had been drizzling when they arrived in England. The air outside the airport had been cold beyond belief, but the bus had been warm — not an honest sticky heat, but a stultifying man-made warmth that smelled of dusty upholstery.

  The drive along the winding country roads had been brutal. Dark hedges had risen on both sides of the bus as it burrowed deeper into the countryside. Once in a while the leaf-walls dropped away and Hui Ann got a glimpse of near-fluorescent green fields, smeared with rain.

  She sat huddled in her scratchy new coat, feeling sicker and sicker.

  When she staggered out of the bus, she'd begun to regret that she'd ever thought of going overseas to do her A-levels. Her parents had agreed because they'd thought it would help her get into a good university.

  Currer Brundall College had seemed like the ideal school. 70% of their student population was international, 50% Asian. The principal visited Kuala Lumpur every year and understood Hui Ann's parents perfectly.

  "There's practically no crime in the area," he assured them. "We're right out in the countryside. The worse thing that happens is mobile phone theft in the school."

  "Hui Ann is very careful with her things," said her parents.

  They'd seen her off at the airport in a spirit of optimism, but this was forgotten in nausea and fatigue by the time Hui Ann had her first look at the school. It was a seventeenth-century manor house and it rose out of the green fields and gray skies like a tombstone.

  But it wasn't the school that had turned out to be dangerous. What was really to blame was her own stupid two feet.

  They'd taken refuge in the library because it used to be a chapel. It was Adeline who thought of it, when the fairies started bubbling into the main hall from the chimney.

  Hui Ann had been too busy shouting to think. She'd strained her back pushing the sofas against the door and strained her temper trying to get everyone else to help, and it seemed outrageous to her that all their efforts should have been foiled by a chimney.

  "What for go and put a freaking hole in the ceiling?" she was yelling. "What kind of stupid idea is that?"

  She took off her shoe and threw it at a fairy. Adeline only got her attention when she snatched Hui Ann's other shoe out of her hand.

  "Because they're fallen angels," Adeline was saying urgently. "Not 100% fallen, but they're the ones who stop halfway between demons and angels. That's why they really don't like all the heaven stuff."

  "What're you talking about?"

  "You know the statue of the dead guy in the library?" said Adeline. "It's a tomb! They buried the guy underneath."

  "Yer, I don't need to know that!" Hui Ann had just thought it was a statue. "Who buries people inside a building? A school some more!"

  "It wasn't a school back then. It was a house," said Adeline. "Back then the library was a chapel. The family used to pray there. Hui Ann, that means it's a holy place. Fairies won't go there! Like vampires and holy water, you know?"

  Behind them a boy screamed and fell to his knees, his head bristling with fairies. Someone had broken a window and a group of kids were tussling amidst the broken glass, trying to get out. One girl, fleeing, tripped over a chair leg and went down shrieking as the fairies converged on her.

  Hui Ann didn't need to think twice.

  "Fall back!" she shouted. "Run! Go to the library! We'll fight them off there!"

  Hui Ann had noticed Adeline on the first day, during the English test. Her pen had run out of ink and Adeline was sitting next to her.

  Adeline had a pale, soft-chinned face and furious red eyes with hardly anything in the way of eyelashes. She looked like a Chinese vampire reborn as a seventeen-year-old girl. She was the last person Hui Ann would have wanted to disturb during a test, but she was the only one whose attention Hui Ann could catch without disrupting the entire class — and she had four extra pens lined up on her desk.

  Hui Ann reached out. She lost her nerve just before she would have made contact with Adeline's shoulder, and touched the back of her chair instead.

  "Eh, 'scuse."

  Adeline frowned at her.

  "Can you borrow me one of your pens?" said Hui Ann.

  The glower intensified. "Black or blue?"

  For a moment Hui Ann quailed. But Adeline was referring to nothing more sinister than ink.

  "Oh, anything — blue — no, black — sorry, anything—" She retreated to her desk, clutching the pen and covered in embarrassment.

  She breezed through the multiple-choice section, but the essay question had her stumped. It asked her to describe her home.

  An image of her house rose up before her, a semi-detached. Nothing like the houses here: strange narrow rectangles with windows like eyes, colored brick red and brown as in children's drawings of houses.

  Her house was sort of beige and it had a bulgy bit at the side where her parents had added an extension. There was a balcony on the first floor, but they hardly ever used it because who would want to sit outside in the heat?

  There was nothing much to describe in this. Hui Ann fiddled with the cap on the pen, frowning in thought.

  This was when she broke scary Adeline's pen.

  They brought the dead fairy to the library with them. Adeline kicked up a stink when she cottoned on.

  "What's that doing here?" she said.

  The fairy lay in a shoebox Hui Ann had scrounged from her luggage. Its eyes were shut, but its skin was so translucent, like that of a young tadpole, that you could see through the lids to the eyeballs. They'd covered its body with a tea towel, to show respect.

  "Why, what's wrong with it?" said Hui Ann.

  "What's the point of seeking sanctuary in a sacred place if you bring unsacred stuff in?" said Adeline. "It's gonna spoil the holiness!"

  "It's dead liao, it can't be unsacred," snapped Hui Ann. "Who made you the boss of holiness? If that guy doesn't mind, why should you?" She jerked a thumb at the statue of the dead person.

  It was true Sir Thomas Elphinstone didn't seem to have noticed the fairy. His statue slumbered undisturbed, its hands folded in eternal prayer.

  He probably liked having another dead person around. The years must have felt very long when his only company had been students falling asleep on their textbooks and teachers telling kids off for whispering.

  "Anyway, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead," said Hui Ann. "'Specially when it's our fault they're dead."

  Adeline's shoulders slumped. "Why didn't you leave it for the other fairies? For all you know they're attacking us because they want the body."

  "Doesn't seem right to do it like that," said Hui Ann. "Leave it in the middle of all the fighting. I want to pass it back to them, but we have to figure out how to communicate first."

  Adeline gazed down at the dead fairy. "I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language."

  "If they're British fairies, should be they can speak English what," said Hui Ann. "If they don't speak English, must be they don't speak human language at all."

  Nothing the fairies said was comprehensible. Most of them spoke in nature sounds, like a New Age music CD — donkey squeals, feline hisses, wind-howl, ocean-roar and fire-crackle. But some of them spoke machine as well, in siren shrieks, fire alarm wails, engine growls and dial-up burbles.

  Their faces — when they had faces — moved as if they were talking, but they didn't use words.

  And yet there was meaning there. Even now, when it was quiet, the silence on the other side of the door was the silence of still muddy water, full of life and growth. On the other side of the library door, a hundred conversations were happening.

  She hadn't meant to kill the fairy. It was because of the pen.

  You could still write with
it — Hui Ann had only snapped the clip off — but this didn't make her feel any better about it. It had been a beautiful pen: the Pilot G-1 gel ink rollerball in lush deep blue, with a perfect 0.7 mm tip. Bereft of its clip, it looked noseless and ineffective.

  She didn't have the nerve to tell Adeline when she found her after the test.

  "How'd you find it?" she said instead.

  "OK lah," said Adeline in an unexpectedly mild voice. She sounded pleased that Hui Ann had talked to her, though she looked as angry as ever. "Hopefully won't have to take the extra tuition. I tuition until want to die already. I came here 'cos I thought UK don't have."

  "Tuition sucks," Hui Ann agreed. "What do we have next?"

  "Free period, I think," said Adeline. She unfolded the schedule they'd been given. "Dinner served from six to seven in the canteen."

  Guilt rid Hui Ann of shyness.

  "You want to go find the canteen?" she suggested. "It's early, but we can check out the rest of the campus also."

  She could work up the courage to tell Adeline about the pen on the way. The broken-off clip poked her palm in silent reproof as they walked out of the exam hall.

  Adeline surprised Hui Ann by being easy to talk to. She was extremely religious.

  "I gave up prawns to thank God for making my parents send me to UK," Adeline said. "But I was thinking of sacrificing something else. My cousin works here and he says British food doesn't really have prawn one."

  Hui Ann didn't see the logic in this. "But if they don't serve prawn then it's easier to not eat prawn."

  "It's not supposed to be easy," said Adeline severely. "It's supposed to be hard. That's the whole point. Why will God care if you sacrifice something you don't miss?"

  Hui Ann wasn't sure why God would care even if you sacrificed something you would miss, but she refrained from saying this. She didn't feel like getting embroiled in a theological debate. The sunlight was fading even though it was only mid-afternoon —and they were lost.