The Hungry Ghost

by H. S. Norup

  “They’re hungry, Maya. But please don’t give them anything sweet before dinner.”

  “No, ma’am,” Maya says from the dining table, where she’s already placed the twins in their high chairs.

  Clementine inspects the leather soles of her high-heeled sandals. “Awful. Just awful. I thought I could get home before the rain, but the moment it started, PIE was one big traffic jam.”

  Maya’s in the kitchen, the boys are wailing, and I don’t know what to say.

  “Did you have a nice day in school, Freja?” Clementine asks, while she scrolls down the feed on her phone.

  “Yes,” I answer, before I tell her I have homework.

  In my room, I open the window and peer out through the sheets of rain. A flash of lightning splits the sky. Something Maya said nudges my memory. She said she had a room without a window at her last family—just like Ling remembered waking up next to her mother in a windowless room. What if Ling’s mother was a nanny or a helper like Maya?

  Perhaps she met a man with yellow hair through the family, fell in love and had Ling. But why would she then continue to be a nanny, with Ling sleeping by her side? Why would Ling end up forgotten in the pauper’s section of the graveyard?

  —24—

  The next two days, Kiera, Sunitha and Cheryl Yi lead me in and out of classrooms, up and down stairs, from chicken rice to roti prata. All three of them ask me over to their houses after school, but I can’t just forget about Ling. I want to be home if she returns, and ready for any opportunity to visit the graveyard if she doesn’t.

  I rush to the bus when the bell rings, so I can avoid sitting next to Jason. We still haven’t said a word to each other, and it’s starting to feel weird. I don’t know if he doesn’t want to talk to me because I’ll be moving away again soon or because of the offering, or something I said when I visited him.

  Like clockwork, on the way home from school, thunderstorms erupt and hurl water towards the ground. Claps of thunder boom so often, the dark sky rumbles constantly above the blinking flashes.

  After I’ve eaten Maya’s snacks, I say I have homework, to get away from Clementine and the twins. Then I sit at my desk by the window and doodle in my exercise books, trying to spot Lizzie in the room or Ling outside. I wish I could go to the graveyard to search for her, but lightning makes it unsafe to go into the forest. It’s not that I mind the rain.

  Outside on the landing, the twins keep asking, “Where Frej-ja?” and Maya shushes them and tells them not to disturb me.

  I can’t avoid Clementine and the twins at dinner time, but that’s not too bad. The boys are sitting safely in their high chairs. I even help cut their food into tiny squares, and happily give Eddie the broccoli on my plate, after he asks for more “trees”.

  When I ask Clementine how old the house is, she guesses it’s from the 1980s. So Ling can’t have lived here.

  “Obviously it’s been completely renovated a few years ago,” she says and begins to tell me everything she would do differently if they were to refurbish it now.

  “What kind of houses did people live in a hundred years ago?” I ask.

  “That depends on who you were.” She wipes Billy and Eddie’s hands, while Maya clears the table. “Many lived in huts or shacks in kampongs, or squeezed together in small upstairs rooms of the shophouses. Those who were well-off lived in the black-and-white bungalows, like the ones we drove past on the way to the beach.”

  “And did the rich people have Chinese helpers or nannies back then?” I ask, when the kitchen door has closed behind Maya.

  “I’m sure they did. I had a Chinese amah, while I was growing up. Is this for a school project?”

  “Uh huh.” I feel only the slightest flutter of guilt at the lie.

  On Wednesday evening, there’s an information meeting about our school trip to a Malaysian island in October. When we arrive at the school, Kiera comes running and drags me, with Clementine close behind, over to meet her mum. Until the meeting starts, Clementine’s chatting with Kiera’s mum and Sunitha’s and Cheryl Yi’s parents, as if she were my mum.

  “I’m glad you’ve found such nice friends,” she says later in the evening, on her way upstairs to check on the twins. “Kiera’s mum wanted you to come for a sleepover this weekend… And did you know Cheryl Yi is in the girl guides? I’m sure she’d love to take you along to a meeting.”

  “Let’s see,” I say.

  The moment I enter my room, I smell bonfire smoke. I shut the door, while my eyes flick to the closed window. Ling’s sitting on the window seat.

  “Ling!” I lower my voice and whisper, “I’m so glad you’re back. What happened? Where did you go?”

  “Somewhere else. I got lost and could not find the banyan tree for a while.”

  “A while? It was days ago…”

  “Was it?” Ling shrugs, as if four days means nothing. “Then I thought I remembered where I used to live… but a getai distracted me. Afterwards, when I tried to find the house, I could not remember where to go.”

  “The house with the windowless room? I’ve been thinking… Could your mum have been a nanny or a helper?”

  “I do not know.” She follows me into the bathroom.

  “Is this only for you?” she asks, wide-eyed. “I remember standing in a queue to use the toilet… but that was another place. Another windowless room with other people. Oh, I remember how Ma cried herself to sleep every night.”

  I stop in the middle of brushing my teeth. “My mum used to cry herself to sleep. Sometimes when I came and snuggled up to her during the night her pillow was wet. And so was Dad’s. I can’t remember why they were crying. Perhaps it was after granddad died. Why did your Mum cry?”

  Ling shrugs again. When I pull off my clothes and get into the shower, she sits down on my laundry basket. Lizzie flitters up the wall behind her.

  The water drums on my head. I think back to a day with rain clouds inside the house. I remember hiding in the small space under the terrace. Sunshine filtered through the cracks between the boards onto my green trainers.

  While I’m detangling my hair, I tell Ling about that day.

  “I must’ve been six because I got those trainers in first grade. Suddenly, there was a girl next to me. She had dark curly hair and brown eyes. ‘If we sing a song, we can’t hear the crying,’ she said. ‘And you don’t have to think it’s your fault.’

  “When all was quiet, we made tea and cakes in our den out of dandelions we picked on the overgrown lawn. A little later, Mum came outside. She couldn’t get under the terrace, but she lay down on her stomach and watched us play. ‘Oh, how I’ve missed hearing your voice, skat.’ She smiled with her red-rimmed eyes. Skat means treasure in Danish, and that’s what she usually calls me. Dad used to call me his blue titmouse.”

  She missed my voice? How long hadn’t I been talking? Days? Weeks?

  “Treasure,” Ling says. “I like that. What was the other girl called?”

  “Mum suggested I call her Gullveig. ‘It’s from Norse mythology and believed to be another name for Freja,’ Mum said. She went along with everything, set four places at the table and tucked Gullveig in at night, even though Dad was against it. He didn’t like my imaginary friend.”

  “So this girl was not real?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t realize it at the time.” We go back into my room, and I crawl under the duvet. “Dad thinks you’re imaginary too.”

  “I’m sorry. I called your father into the garden. I hoped he could see me.”

  “You made him sleepwalk? He never saw you, but I think maybe he dreamt about you.”

  “Sorry,” she says again, and settles in the bed next to me. “I have stopped calling him.”

  —25—

  Ling tells me that during the day, when I’m in school, she retur
ns to the little grove. To her gravestone. She doesn’t like the sun or too much light, and there are offerings in the cemetery she can feed on. She wanders the streets at night, while I’m sleeping, searching for the house, her old home. It’s an impossible task—all she remembers is a windowless room.

  By Friday afternoon, I’m beginning to panic. Tomorrow there’s only a week until the end of the Hungry Ghost Festival. If we can’t find out who she was before next Saturday, then Ling must return to the realm of the dead, unremembered.

  She’s lying on my bed, stroking the pink bedspread with both hands. Her black hair fans out around her head.

  “I wish I could touch this softness,” she says. I’m not sure she’s talking about the bed or the fabric. To jog her memory, I ask her who taught her Morse code and question her about that windowless room, her mum and why she felt the need to check if it was safe to go into the nursery. Nothing helps.

  When I run out of questions, I flop down on the bed next to Ling to rest a moment. But, like the last few nights, or whenever I close my eyes, visions of the wildfire appear. The red-orange light of the sky-high flames fill my mind. I can’t erase the image, and I can’t think of a way to smother the fire. Even if there isn’t a feng shui link between the fire—the red colour in the north-west—and Ling’s missing memories, I wish we could save the white tiger.

  My phone rings. While I rummage through my school bag to find it, I wonder who it might be. Dad has called me every night from whichever M-city he’s in, but he’s coming home today, so it can’t be him. Clementine has taken the twins to a play date, and I’m not answering if it’s her.

  The number’s unknown but begins with +45, so I know it’s from Denmark.

  “Hallo,” I say in Danish.

  “Hi, skat!”

  “Mum!”

  “I’ve missed you so much!” She tells me she’s feeling better, and that it helps to talk to outsiders. I want to ask if she talks about me, but I don’t.

  It’s a voice call. She says her connection isn’t good enough for video, but I think that’s a fib. It’s much easier to lie to people if they can’t see your eyes. At least it works both ways.

  “How’s the house? And your room? I want to know everything.”

  “It’s great.” Suddenly, I don’t know what to tell Mum. The room’s much bigger than my room at home. All the furniture is new. I don’t want to tell her that Clementine has bought me lots of clothes and that Dad gave me the phone I’ve begged her for since before Christmas. It might make her sad if she believes I’m better off being here than at home. And I definitely don’t want her to worry that I like Clementine. But I also don’t want her to know that Dad has left me here and gone on a business trip—that might make her upset. And I can’t tell her how much I miss her, as that will only make her cry.

  I try to describe everything in a neutral tone.

  “And the… the little boys?” Mum asks.

  “They’re okay. Cute, I guess. Billy’s rather bossy. Eddie’s quieter, except when he wants someone to read to him.” I smile, recalling how he kept asking, “Again, Frej-ja?” with a puppy face.

  “You read to them?” There’s an unusual tightness to Mum’s voice.

  “Only once. In the car. I don’t want… I don’t have time to play with them.”

  Mum sounds normal when she asks if Clementine’s nice to me.

  “Really nice,” I say. “Obviously not as nice as you, Mum.”

  “It’s okay, skat,” she says. “I want her to be nicer than me, because I haven’t—” Mum’s voice breaks into a sob.

  I hurry to change the subject and tell her about my new school and friends. She likes the sound of them. And I love the sound of her voice and especially her giggles, when I report some of the funny things Kiera says.

  After we hang up, I sit for a while, staring at the phone. Mum hadn’t forgotten me, just like I hadn’t forgotten her. But it’s strange, being on opposite sides of the world and in different time zones. When I’m awake and it’s the middle of the night in Denmark, it sometimes feels like we’re not even living in the same universe.

  “Who was that?” Ling asks. “You look happy, but I did not understand a word you said.”

  “My mum.” I can’t help smiling. She seems so much better.

  It gives me new energy and determination. Despite the dangers, we must return to the world with the mythical creatures.

  “We have to free the white tiger,” I say out loud. “Perhaps we can use the net of lianas to pull it out… I just wish there was a way to save the forest.” I try to explain the idea of a link between the red fire in the north-west and Ling’s memory loss. It sounds mad and far-fetched, so I turn my focus back to more practical matters. “It’s not like the black tortoise can bring us water from the lake, is it?”

  “No, the tortoise cannot help us,” Ling says. “We need rain.”

  It’s pouring down outside. But in the mythical world there wasn’t a single cloud in sight.

  “Are you suggesting we bring rain clouds along through the banyan tree?”

  “Of course not,” Ling says. “But we could ask the dragon for help.”

  There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I list them, counting them out on my fingers. “One: how are we supposed to find a dragon? Two: how can we ask him? Three: why would he do what we ask him? Four: dragon’s usually spew fire, not rain. And five: have you gone mad?”

  Ling giggles. “You are funny,” she says. “I am talking about a Chinese dragon, not one of your western fairy-tale creatures.” Then she’s suddenly serious. “I remember hiding behind a chair and listening to stories about dragons and princesses.”

  “What kind of chair? Close your eyes. Tell me what you see.”

  “Er… A small rattan chair next to a big one.”

  “What else?” Eagerly, I move to sit on a corner of the bed. The weave of the pink bedspread is visible through Ling’s thin arm.

  After a while, she says, “Yellow hair.”

  I close my eyes and try to imagine what she’s seeing. It’s like I’m remembering something similar. I’m sitting behind a chair, but it’s a rocking chair, not a rattan chair. Tufts of Dad’s yellow hair stick out through gaps in the chair’s high back. He’s rocking, while he’s speaking in a low, soothing voice. I wonder why I’m sitting behind the chair instead of on his lap, if he’s reading me a bedtime story.

  “A man’s voice,” Ling says.

  “Reading to you or someone else?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps both.”

  Perhaps both. A shiver makes my shoulders tense up. To evade the rocking-chair memory, I ask, “And you think the dragon can extinguish that wildfire?”

  Ling nods. “And then, when all the red is gone, I will remember everything.”

  Her eyes shine with a new-found hope I don’t want to snuff out. Dad isn’t landing from his M-city until later tonight. Clementine and the twins aren’t home yet.

  “Okay,” I say, “let’s go.” I pull on my long combat trousers and check I have my Swiss Army knife, the compass and the map with the white folds. My phone’s almost out of battery, but it won’t work where we’re going anyway, so I leave it in the charger.

  Ling’s already waiting in the garden, when I unfurl the rope. I take a last look around the room. I have a feeling of being unprepared, like there’s a vital piece of equipment I’ve forgotten. While I’m running up the road after Ling, with the root rope slapping against my thigh, I realize that my keys are still in my school bag.

  —26—

  Once we’re inside the hushed den, I hesitate.

  “You have to take my hand as soon as you feel solid, okay?” Getting separated from Ling is one of many parts of our plan that could go wrong. Chief among them is my fear that the flames have engulfed th
e banyan tree, so we’ll be going from the frying pan into an actual fire. No amount of preparation could help us out of that situation.

  “Can you picture the mythical world?”

  Ling nods, and I don’t doubt her. My own memories of that place are vivid.

  After we start running, I shout, “We wish to return to the vermillion bird and the white tiger and the wildfire!” The banyan tree should have no doubts about our destination.

  Before I know it, we’re spinning. My hair escapes the scrunchy and whips my face. I’m pressed against the root cage, with my eyes closed and the eerie sounds of the dead in my ears, when Ling clutches my hand. She keeps on squeezing, until we stop moving and all is quiet. And cool. The tree is unharmed!

  It doesn’t take long to discover that so are the eastern and southern parts of the island. North and west of us, though, the forest is ablaze. But at least the flames haven’t yet reached our grassy hill.

  “Come,” Ling says. “We must go east.”

  We run down the hill until the rainforest slows our progress. This time, I’m in front, holding my compass, and Ling’s the one struggling to keep up.

  We’re jogging through the dense greenery, when we hear a high-pitched wail nearby.

  “Is that a baby?” It can’t be the vermillion bird. I veer off course, in the direction of the sound.

  “Wait, Freja.”

  But I won’t wait. The sound reminds me of something. Of some time, long ago. Someone was crying, and I ignored it.

  The baby cries again, but now the sound is much further away. I speed up.

  “Wait,” Ling calls again from behind, “I cannot run any more.”

  The next muted cry is so distant, I can’t tell where it’s coming from. I stop and wait for Ling.

  We’re standing in a grove of banana trees. The large oval leaves make a shady canopy between the pole-like trunks. Ling picks bananas from one of the low-hanging clusters that are hanging upside down above our heads. We sink against two trunks, sitting across from each other, tearing banana skins off and eating the ripe mush inside the small bananas in two bites. This will give us energy.