The Hungry Ghost

by H. S. Norup

  “I never thought I would taste anything ever again. Bananas used to be my favourite food!” Ling beams, with a happy smile shining out of her eyes.

  “You’re remembering something. That’s good.”

  She stares off into the distance. “There were banana trees behind the house. And a boy with hair like just-ripe bananas. Like yours.”

  “And the house… Do you remember the house? Did it have black-and-white striped blinds?” That would confirm my theory that she lived in one of the colonial bungalows and her mother was a maid.

  Ling nods.

  In the silence, we hear the cry far, far away. My legs are tired. I’m full in a good way. Mixed with the aroma of bananas is a peachy fragrance, like the scent of the frangipani trees in Dad’s garden at night. But it isn’t night and I can’t see any of the exotic flowers or any peach trees.

  I inhale, then almost retch. A light breeze carries a disgusting smell of rotten food, like an overfull rubbish bin on a hot summer’s day. Now, I have no problem getting up. Is it the smell of the vermillion bird? Has the bird taken the child, carrying it off, like a stork would carry a baby?

  “Come on! We have to find that baby.” I pull Ling to her feet.

  “Have you seen my baby?” a musical voice asks.

  Coming towards us, weaving her way through the banana trees, is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Like an Asian Snow White, her lips are blood-red and her hair falls in long, ebony-black, shining waves, which would make Clementine envious. Her long dress is white as snow, as if she’s stepped out of a detergent ad, instead of appearing from behind a banana tree in the middle of a rainforest.

  Ling clasps my hand, as if she’s afraid.

  “Do you know where my baby is?” the woman asks again.

  “We heard it cry. But it’s really far away.” I want Ling to let go of my hand so I’m ready if the woman needs me to give her a hug.

  “Did the vermillion bird take your baby?” I ask.

  “That terrible bird,” she mutters. Tears drip from her long lashes. “First it sets the forest on fire, and now it has kidnapped my baby.”

  In searching for the baby, I’d almost forgotten about the fire.

  “We’ll help you, right, Ling?”

  Ling nods slowly, reluctantly.

  “That is very kind of you.” The woman comes close to me. The smell of overripe peaches is strong. She smiles and raises a hand towards my face. Then she strokes my cheek—not with her fingers, but with the tips of her pointed nails. It sends a shiver down my back. I feel a trickle on my cheek and wipe it away, thinking it’s one of her tears. But the smear across my fingers is red.

  “Come this way,” she says briskly, before she turns and strides back in the direction she came from.

  Ling hesitates. “We should not go with her,” she whispers, as I pull her along through the banana grove. “There are stories… someone used to tell me—”

  “I’m glad you’re remembering,” I say. Right now, helping the woman seems far more important.

  At the edge of the grove, the woman stops and retrieves a net of lianas that have been knotted together with exceptional skill. “I shall catch the bird and save my baby,” she says.

  “Who are you?” I’m impressed she’s so well prepared.

  “You can call me Pontiana. Some people do.” She smiles and gazes at me with Mum’s eyes. The same love, the same twinkle, the exact same colour. Then I blink, and Pontiana’s irises are as dark as her pupils. I wonder how I could have thought her eyes were grey-green like Mum’s.

  “What do you need us to do?” I ask.

  “The fire has gotten out of control.” Pontiana brushes a stray leaf off her dress, which is still white and crisp. “Only one thing can stop it now. A tropical rainstorm.”

  “We were going to find the dragon…” Ling says.

  “That is wonderfully clever, dearest.”

  Ling blushes.

  “The azure dragon will come once he understands the vermillion bird is responsible for the inferno. The two have a history of strife. Let him know he can find her by the banyan tree on the hill.” Pontiana speaks in a sugar-coated voice that’s impossible to resist.

  “But don’t you need our help to save your baby from the bird first?” I ask.

  Pontiana responds with a little laugh that sounds like chiming bells, before she leans towards me and kisses my forehead. The spot her lips touch burns like I’ve been stung by a wasp.

  “You are deliciously sweet, my dear,” she says. Without another word she strolls south, with the net of lianas over her shoulder.

  “She doesn’t seem to be like us. Like me. A real human,” I whisper.

  Ling shakes her head. “There was one story about a woman in a grove of banana trees and the scent of night flowers… Oh, I wish I could remember…”

  “Who told you? Your mum?” I’m thinking about my own mum and her happy smile in the beach photo I found in Dad’s office. I still can’t remember that day, but I think I remember a time when she wasn’t sad.

  “I used to run after Ma through the house, from the nursery and downstairs to the kitchen. The Malay cook would lift me up to sit on her lap. She is the one who told me stories, while Ma washed the sheets.” Ling rubs her eyes. “Come. We must find the dragon.”

  —27—

  We jog and run and walk through the rainforest for hours. Twice, we swim across lazy rivers. I keep checking my compass to make sure we’re heading south-east. When we reach the shore, we stand on the empty beach, breathing the salty air, scanning the horizon.

  White-capped waves churn under the clear sky. Faraway islands, like green boils, interrupt the blue perfection. Parallel to the shore, a set of three spectacular arches curve in and out of the sea. Their brightness is blinding.

  “Dragon!” Ling calls. “Esteemed dragon. We request a favour.”

  The arches shift direction and flow towards us, fluidly, as if they’re made entirely of water. As it approaches, the metallic blue-green scales that are reflecting the sunlight become distinguishable, and I can make out the shape of the creature.

  I’m staring, trying to grasp how this can possibly be a dragon. It looks more like a giant sea serpent, perhaps the Midgard Serpent in Norse mythology, who will bring about the end of the world.

  I want to run as far from the shore as possible, but Ling walks into the sea, smiling, like it’s her lucky day.

  When a huge head slides out of the water right next to her, she giggles and pats it, as if it was a puppy. Like a dog, the dragon sticks its tongue out. Unlike a dog’s, the dragon’s tongue is longer than Ling’s waist-length hair.

  Gingerly, I wade after Ling.

  The long snake-like neck rises further out of the sea. A million deep-blue fish scales gleam. The dragon dips its head, tipping its stag antlers towards me in a polite greeting. I rub it behind its fluffy, tea-cosy-sized ears, while I try to decide if the head itself more resembles a cow’s or a camel’s.

  “Venerable dragon. The forest in the north-west of the island is burning. We need a rainstorm to extinguish the blaze.” Ling goes on to tell him that the vermillion bird started the fire, but that we expect she’s been captured by now and taken to the hill with the banyan tree.

  At the mention of the vermillion bird, the eyes of the dragon darken. The skin above the bump between them contracts.

  “Could you perhaps drop us off on the hill, esteemed dragon, before you… er… unleash the… torrents?” I ask, remembering at the last minute to speak in the same respectful tone and formal language as Ling.

  The dragon bows again. Out of the water, he pulls a bird-like leg with a clawed foot and lifts first Ling, then me, up onto the second of the three arches that curve out of the surface. I copy Ling and lie down, wrapping my legs and arm
s around his neck.

  With a forceful push-off, the dragon frees himself from the water. He doesn’t have any wings, but moves through the air with the same smooth wave-like motion as he swam in the sea. The scales are too bright to look at directly and extremely slippery. Every rise causes us to glide backwards, while the falls make us slide forward.

  At first my eyes are closed, but soon I get used to the rhythm of his flight and stop worrying about falling. Ling is tittering and squealing in front of me. Below lies the blue sea and, on one side, an endless ocean. On the other side, smoke from the fire chokes the red-glowing island beneath a blanket of grey haze.

  The dragon stays above the water, following the coastline south of Singapore. I wonder if he has misunderstood us and is taking us somewhere else. But when I glance back over my shoulder, I see what’s behind us. At the end of his tail, wispy white threads are pulling ever-growing clouds along.

  After we have circled the whole island, he spirals towards its centre. The swelling ring of clouds fill the sky, and darken. The wind rises. Holding on is getting more and more difficult.

  It’s a relief when the dragon hovers near the ground to let us slide down. We’re at the bottom of the hill, where the tiger emerged. Everything has become hazy. Smoke billows around us. Cracks and sizzles from a thousand campfires advance towards us. The rainforest moans.

  While we’re running up towards the tree, to get under cover, it begins to rain. Behind us, the azure dragon flies faster and faster in circles above the wildfire.

  The wind tears at us. I notice the pit and grab hold of Ling, in time to stop her from falling into the gaping hole. The white tiger looks up at us and growls, before it resumes licking its fur. It isn’t alone.

  The vermillion bird, trussed up in a net of lianas, cowers next to the tiger. On the bird’s other side, and bigger even than the tiger, lies a giant black tortoise.

  The liana net Pontiana used to capture the bird resembles the grass-woven net used to camouflage the pit. It makes me wonder if Pontiana has trapped all three creatures. But why would she do that?

  Leaves and twigs swirl around us. I can’t see Pontiana anywhere. I can’t even make out the banyan tree, through the torrents.

  “I thought it would just rain,” I shout.

  “The Chinese words for tornado mean ‘dragon twisting wind’,” Ling yells back.

  Fighting to move forward in the wind, we creep uphill on hands and feet, towards the tree. It’s the nearest place to seek cover.

  When I detect Ling isn’t next to me, I pause. She’s sitting back on her knees, grinning from ear to ear, with rain sliding down over her closed eyes and hair whipping wildly around her head.

  “I remember,” she yells. Behind her, the red glow has dulled to a weaker orange. “I remember William. My brother. The boy with banana-yellow hair. He called me ‘beloved sister’.”

  At that moment, it feels like something clears in my head. I have the weirdest sensation: my mind has been transformed into a loft full of memory boxes, and I’m standing on a ladder, looking at them. Some are small, transparent and accurately tagged: Canoe trip to Sweden; Seeing the newborn twins in London; Easter scouting camp. Bigger, half-open boxes contain jumbles of memories. They’re labelled things like: Mum; Dad; Beach days; Tree climbing. At the far end of the gabled space, weak light shines through cracks in a tiny, grimy window. A dusty ray hits a box completely covered by cobwebs.

  As I’m watching, a gust of wind sweeps through the loft. The flaps of the open boxes flutter. A few threads of the cobweb snap. The wind lifts the right-hand bottom corner of the tangled web, revealing an animal letter. An alligator. Drawn in pencil, without colour. It looks gloomy.

  Suddenly I’m certain that whatever’s in the box is the reason Mum’s unhappy. Is it me? The box could be labelled ‘FREJA’.

  “Come on, Ling!” I hold my hand out to her. I have to leave this place, before the cobweb is swept away and frees the flaps of the box.

  Lightning flashes behind us. Ling’s too far away to reach and too light. She doesn’t stand a chance against the gale. I throw back one end of the root-rope and yell at her to hold on. Together we make it up to the tree. I’m fighting the urge to peep at the hidden box as much as I’m fighting the storm.

  “It’s not safe here,” I say, when we’re leaning against the trunk. The wind howls and sweeps through the gaps between the roots, all the way into my mind. I take her hand.

  “But the fire is dying, the north-west is less red. I am remembering.” Ling holds me back. “William promised he would never forget—”

  “Lightning might strike the tree,” I say, and tug at her. “And then… And then we’d be stuck.” I’m so scared, I’m shaking. I hope she’s remembered enough for us to discover who she was, but even if she hasn’t, I can’t stay. “Please, Ling. Please, let’s go.”

  She gazes at me, and I think she sees the storm behind my eyes, because she nods and pulls me into a run.

  My last thought before we start spinning is that I hope the box never opens. Whatever’s inside must be something I don’t want to ever remember.

  —28—

  We emerge into a dark, starless evening. On the walk back to the house, I try to come up with a way to get into the garden without my key. Anything to avoid thinking about the box under the cobwebs.

  Ling floats alongside me, telling me things she’s remembering about her brother, William.

  “… Blue eyes. The soft patter of his feet across the nursery floor early in the morning, while it was still dark. The feeling of his hand when he took mine and we ran through the garden. His voice when he read me stories and taught me to read and write. He was the best brother in the world.”

  “D’you remember your surname?” I pant.

  Ling’s silent for a moment before she answers, “No.”

  The car stands in the driveway, so Clementine must be home. I stop on the pavement outside. “What was your father’s name?”

  “I… I called him ‘Sir’.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I do not remember his name.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll come to you.”

  “He looked like your father, except for his white clothes. Sir always wore white.”

  “Perhaps he was a doctor.”

  “Doctor…” Ling mutters. “Someone was always asking for the doctor.”

  As I’m trying to climb the fence at the back of the garden, I wonder if we left the mythical world too early; if Ling remembers enough. If we’ll be forced to return.

  I shiver. My skin crawls with a clutter of spiders. They’re dispersing, tearing at the cobweb that’s hiding the memory box. I’ll do anything to avoid going back.

  Ling wants to pull me up, but here in the real world my hand slides right through hers. I wish she could hold on to something, so she could fetch my house key.

  After I’ve given up, I press the buzzer, hoping Maya will be letting me in.

  No such luck. Before the buzzing noise has stopped, Clementine opens the front door.

  “Where have you been? I tried to call you,” she screeches. “You can’t leave the house without telling anyone! You’re not in a Danish village.”

  Ling flees around the corner of the house.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “I just went for a walk, and I left my phone so it could charge.”

  “A walk? You’re drenched and completely muddy. It isn’t even raining.” She wrinkles her nose. “And it smells like you’ve been to a bonfire.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” I sit down on the veranda steps, with my back to Clementine, to untie my mud-caked hiking boots.

  “You went to Bukit Brown, didn’t you?”

  The double knot on one of my boots is so wet it’s impossible to loosen. I take my knife out, unfold the screwdriver and bore it into the lump. “It
really isn’t dangerous,” I reply, although I’m not so sure any more.

  “That’s not the point. We told you to stay away from the cemetery.”

  “You told me,” I say under my breath. The knot has come undone, and I put the knife down to untie the laces.

  “Is that a knife? Don’t tell me you’re running around Singapore with a weapon.” Clementine bends and picks up my Swiss Army knife. “That could get us all in trouble with the authorities.”

  “It’s not a weapon.”

  “I’ll have to talk to your daddy about this. From now on it stays in your room.” She drops my knife on the veranda before she points at my hiking boots. “And leave those outside,” she says, turning away.

  I untie the tree-root rope from my waist and dump it next to the veranda. She won’t want that in the house either. I’m brushing the worst of the dirt off my combat trousers, when Clementine screams. It’s a high-pitched, ear-splitting scream, which morphs into the word “snake”. She’s pointing at the driveway, while trying to pull me into the house.

  The twins come running from the sofa, one of them with a remote control in his little hand. She lets go of me to block their way and screams for them to get back. Eddie begins wailing.

  “It’s not a snake,” I call above the din, picking up the root-rope I left next to the veranda. In the dim light, it actually does resemble the striped bronzeback I saw at the zoo. “It’s just an aerial root from a tree.” I hold it towards Clementine in my smudged green and brown hand. “And if it was a bronzeback, then they’re not venomous.”

  “Get. That. Out.” Clementine’s staring from the root to my face.

  “Rooooot,” Billy says, stretching his arms towards me. “Frej-ja, want root!”

  “No, Billy. It’s dirty,” she says in a tone I haven’t heard before, and she yanks both of them back to the lounge. “Freja, take those filthy trousers and socks off down here. I don’t want you to drag dirt all over the house.”