The Hungry Ghost

by H. S. Norup

  “I have wanton mee and carrot cake. It’s not actually cake, Freja. More like an omelette,” Cheryl Yi says. “You shouldn’t eat Indian food in Chinatown anyway, Sunitha.”

  “I know,” Sunitha says. “There wasn’t a line. Speaking of lines… How far is Kiera?”

  “She’s next.” Cheryl Yi points.

  Kiera’s standing by a triple-sized stall selling chicken rice. Behind her, in the queue that snakes around the corner, are at least fifty people. She arrives at the table with pale slices of chicken on fragrant rice, saying, “Good food comes to those who wait.”

  We share everything, and all the dishes are delicious. Sunitha even goes back to get more of the crispy one-bite tarts filled with salad and chopped shrimp.

  After eating, I feel better. Perhaps it was just hunger and thirst and heat that made me dizzy. At least, that’s what I tell the others.

  “Now for the fun,” Sunitha says, before we leave the hawker centre.

  We browse in the front part of the small shops that sell bracelets and glittering hairbands and pencils and chopsticks and other bits and pieces, starting from one dollar. It’s not my kind of fun! Shopping with Clementine would probably be better, because I’m sure she isn’t so indecisive.

  Kiera and Sunitha can’t get enough. They go back and forth between shops, comparing prices. Cheryl Yi waits with me on a street corner. A horrible smell of rotten onion mixed with forgotten gym socks wafts around us. I wrinkle my nose and glance sideways at Cheryl Yi.

  “Don’t look at me. It’s the durians,” she says and points at a nearby stall which sells green spiky fruits the size of honeydew melons.

  Behind the stall, I spot a street sign. Pagoda Street it says in English, with three Chinese symbols underneath. I survey the colourful houses on the narrow street, wondering where Ling used to live.

  “D’you know where the slum is? Or was?”

  “We can try in there,” Cheryl Yi says and points at a museum called the Chinatown Heritage Centre. She tells me they show how people lived in the old days.

  “They were definitely poor,” she says a few minutes later. We’re upstairs in the museum, studying a tiny room—as small as Maya’s—where up to six people slept on short shelf-like bunks. The toilet is shared with the whole floor and part of the kitchen.

  The “old days” turn out to be the 1950s, so not quite as far back as when I’m guessing Ling was here. At that time, my grandmother grew up on the farm where both she and Aunt Astrid and my uncle and cousins live now. I wonder how they would feel about being cramped in here with less space than egg-laying hens in battery cages. I wonder how much worse it was when Ling was alive.

  “Isn’t it funny,” Cheryl Yi says, “most people don’t realize this is here? They think we can just forget the past and rewrite our history. Everyone focuses on building the future.”

  When Sunitha texts to say they’ve spent their pocket money and are ready to go, I’m reading a sign about Pagoda Street. It used to be full of opium dens and slave traders and must have been the worst slum in the city.

  Before we descend the escalator to the MRT, I glance back towards the financial district, trying to spot Dad’s building. Skyscrapers and steel-and-glass office buildings rise up behind the old shophouses. On the surface, Singapore might look like a modern city, but it’s as if there’s a different world underneath the shiny varnish. A world populated by ghosts of the past.

  Haw Par Villa is a bizarre collection of painted statues. Many of them are bigger than me. Some are huge. Most are arranged to illustrate Chinese myths about curious characters I’ve never heard of. It’s like an outdoor Madame Tussauds, with mythical creatures instead of famous people.

  “You’ve never heard of Monkey God?” Cheryl Yi asks, in a tone that I would use with someone who’d never heard the story of The Little Mermaid. “Sun Wukong. Also called the Monkey King?”

  Both Sunitha and Kiera shake their heads with me.

  “He’s like the best hero ever. Incredibly strong and so fast that with one somersault he’s on the other side of the globe.” She drags us to a towering fake mountain, crawling with monkeys as big as us in colourful clothes. The crowned monkey reigns from the very top.

  On the way to the exhibit of the underworld, we pass grotesque statues—like Pigsy, a man with a pig’s head, and others of human heads attached to the bodies of spiders or turtles or crabs. Some are spooky, but not scary.

  Tigers prowl on every corner, but none of them are white. I stop to stroke a blue-green dragon on the bump between its eyes. Although it doesn’t look much like the real azure dragon, it makes me wonder if he has put out the fire, and how the other mythical creatures will ever get out of the pit if we don’t help them.

  We shouldn’t have left that world in such a mess. At the thought, the cobwebs in my memory loft flutter.

  “Wake up, Freja.” Sunitha shakes my shoulder. “You’re miles away.”

  I pat the dragon one last time, before I follow her to the Ten Courts of Hell. The Hell Guards, Ox-head and Horse-face, watch over the entrance. Their bodies are human and powerful, but one has the head of a bull, the other the head of a horse. They glare down at us. Ox-head frowns. Horse-face’s nostrils flare, his teeth bared in a menacing sneer.

  “They chase spirits into the realm of the dead with their spears and make sure they don’t escape,” Cheryl Yi says.

  Sunitha shudders. “I’m glad I’m not a ghost.”

  “Someone should repaint them,” Kiera says. “Then they might be a bit creepy.” She picks at a flake of peeling paint on horse-face’s cloak.

  “Don’t touch them!” I yell. The strange buzzing in my ears is back.

  Kiera stares back at me with a raised eyebrow.

  The others enter the realm of the dead, but I’m scared of going inside. I can’t help fearing that somehow the Hell Guards will raise their spears and block the entrance, so I can’t ever leave.

  I’m also feeling dizzy again and take a swig of my water bottle.

  Cheryl Yi pops back out. “What are you waiting for, Freja? Sunitha and Kiera are on their way out on the other side.”

  Holding my hands like blinkers, I slip past the two guards, in through the open gates.

  Ahead, Sunitha says, “Ewww.”

  Kiera answers, “It’s only red paint.”

  I hurry past the displays, hardly looking into the glass showcases where small figures are being decapitated, thrown into volcanos, having their hearts cut out or their intestines removed, or suffering other terrifying punishments.

  Ling’s only a child, and she hasn’t committed any crimes, so she can’t have been in a place like this. And I’ll do everything to ensure she won’t be returning to one.

  —32—

  “Tonight, of all nights. Why does your daddy have to be sick tonight?” Clementine’s saying to Billy and Eddie, when I get home. “Can you come and take the boys, Maya?” she calls. She’s standing by the dining table, her back turned to me.

  Billy has grabbed a handful of her floor-length, glittering-gold dress.

  Eddie holds a board book towards her, yelling, “Stor-ry, stor-ry.”

  “Maya!”

  Maya’s bare feet pitter-patter across the marble floor, before she unclenches Billy’s fist and frees the dress.

  “Frej-ja,” Eddie says when he sees me.

  Clementine turns. “There you are, Freja. Did you have a nice time?” Before I can answer, she’s already turned back to the table and is trying to fit things from an oversized handbag into a small sparkly clutch.

  “It was great,” I say, walking past her to the stairs, holding the crinkled plastic bag from the paper-offering shop out of sight.

  “I’d love to hear all about it, but my driver’s here. It’s so annoying your daddy has food poisoning.
I was counting on his support.” In her high-heeled sandals, she click-clacks out of the door and into the waiting limousine.

  Upstairs, I sneak a peek into the master bedroom where Dad’s sleeping. When I open my own door, Lizzie flitters across the floor. Ling’s sitting on my bed.

  “Did you find the house?” I ask and stuff the plastic bag into my wardrobe. I want to keep it as a surprise.

  “I am not sure… I found a house that looked almost like it, on a street called Goodwood Hill. But everything is different from what I remember. Where there used to be rainforest, there are houses and they are so tall they reach the clouds.”

  While Ling is speaking, I’ve already turned on my laptop and searched for Goodwood Hill. On the satellite map, it’s a green island in a sea of skyscrapers. I skim the first websites and read the important bits aloud.

  “It says the black-and-whites on Goodwood Hill were some of the oldest… from 1903… built for civil servants of the British colonial administration and senior military personnel…” I turn to Ling. “Are doctors civil servants? Then it would fit with your dad being a doctor.”

  It’s only now that I notice her staring at my laptop. I guess they didn’t even have TV when she was alive.

  “It’s a computer. It’s like… like a library of information. Do you know what a library is?” When she nods, I go on. “A library of all the information in the whole world. Unfortunately, there isn’t a real librarian, so it can be hard to find what you’re looking for.”

  After I try searching for doctors in Singapore and get about a million hits, I slam the laptop lid down. Perhaps I should go to Goodwood Hill. I’d much rather be outside investigating, like Kalle Blomkvist, my favourite detective, than sitting in front of a computer screen. But it’s too late and I’m too tired to go anywhere now.

  “I was in Pagoda Street today.” I show Ling photos on my phone of the colourful shophouses. “Recognize any of them?”

  “It is all so different now…”

  “But there isn’t a… wait…” I flip through my notebook until I get to the page where I’ve jotted down details Ling has told me. “There isn’t a Macao Street in Singapore. Are you sure that was the name?”

  “Yes. I was there every day, asking for work. I remember the smells and the noise. Sawdust and stone dust filled the air. Sawing and hammering and chiselling could be heard from every shop. And weeping widows and daughters and mothers.”

  “I believe you,” I hurry to say.

  On my computer, I find out that Macao Street was renamed to Pickering Street, but no matter what I try, I can’t find out when it happened. I sink back in my chair.

  “Right now, an internet librarian would be helpful.”

  “I always wanted to go to the library,” Ling says after a quiet pause. “William told me about the rows of bookshelves. Sir used to take him to Raffles Library on Saturday afternoons. Afterwards, I would sit with William on the steps of the veranda. He would make me read aloud from the books he had borrowed and help me learn new words. Sir would be in a chair under the fan, reading his newspaper. He was always reading the newspaper. Sometimes, I would sneak behind him and read over his shoulder about rubber prices and which ships were in the harbour. But after Sir remarried, my life changed.”

  “You don’t remember seeing a date anywhere on a newspaper, do you?”

  After a moment, she shakes her head.

  “Wait a minute… My class went to the Royal Danish Library and saw these ancient machines where you used to read microfilm of old newspapers. Now, they’re all on computers. Perhaps it’s the same here! Let’s see.”

  A moment later, I’m on the website for the National Library Board of Singapore. They have local newspapers from the last two hundred years available online. It takes me less than five minutes to find what we need.

  “You’re a genius, Ling! Look! This is brilliant. Here’s an article where it says that Macao Street will be renamed to Pickering Street on 1. January 1925. So now we are much closer to knowing when you died. It must’ve been between 1922 when the cemetery opened and 1925 when the street was renamed. The puzzle pieces are falling into place. We’re master detectives!” I hold my right hand up for a high-five, but of course Ling doesn’t know what to do, and my hand would pass right through hers anyway.

  “I think… perhaps… Sir was called William too,” Ling says hesitantly. “Ma cried out for him that evening.”

  I immediately try searching the 1920s newspapers for someone named William Brimsten, like Dad, but I get no results, and searching for William gives me thousands of hits. “Was everyone called William back then?” I mutter.

  Then I notice that Ling has slid down and is kneeling on the floor.

  “I remember that evening… We were sitting like this on the lawn—William, my brother, and I—with one of the big library books. The sweet scent of the night flowers was heavy in the air. It was dark, but we had a lantern…”

  Ling’s voice is low and husky. Her eyes are open, but it’s almost like she’s in a trance. Reacting quickly, I switch off the lights, and sit down on the floor across from her, placing my opened biology book between us. I turn my torch on at the dimmest setting and hold it over the text.

  “Ma’am—William’s stepmother—came out on the veranda and watched us. I thought she would berate William for spending time with a servant and teaching me to read, like she always did. Instead, she started screeching and ran into the house. She hauled Ma from the kitchen to the street by Ma’s hair, which she had twisted out of its bun. Ma wept while Ma’am screamed English words I had never heard before. She wanted to throw me out too, but Cook complained and said she needed her kitchen maid.

  “I did not understand what had happened until later that night. When the house was dark and Cook was snoring, William found me and led me to the looking glass in the hallway. He kneeled so our heads were next to each other, then he held a candle between us and the mirror and told me to look. The flame threw our faces into colourless contours of light and darkness. Identical shadows of square chins showed on our necks. Four eyebrows with the exact same shape rose in surprise. Dimples made black holes on both our cheeks. Our twin reflections smiled. William embraced me and called me his beloved sister…”

  “Beloved sister,” I repeat in a whisper. The words bounce around inside me, like an echo.

  “The next day, hidden by the banana trees, Ma told me the truth. She said she had always loved William, and at that moment she didn’t mean my brother.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “Nothing. I do not think anyone told him. He was seriously ill. I remember that now. That was the reason they sailed for England. When they left, William promised to come back. But he forgot his promise. He forgot he had a beloved sister.”

  —33—

  On Sunday morning, I stay in bed with my laptop, and skim through newspaper articles and notices from a hundred years ago about people called William. Hearing Ling’s story has made me more determined than ever to discover how we’re related. If we’re related. I’m not sure I’d be proud of having Ling’s brother as my ancestor. After all his promises, he just left her to die.

  I exit my room with perfect timing; as I close my door, Dad comes upstairs with a twin under each arm.

  “Hello sleepy-head,” he says. He still looks like he ought to be in bed. “These two are ready for a nap and so am I. We’ve been up since six, haven’t we, boys? And Mummy says we’ve watched too much telly.”

  “Tel-ly,” Eddie says, drooling on the floor. Billy giggles and wiggles against Dad’s hold.

  “Stay here, Billy!”

  It’s stupid that I’ve never thought about it, but I suddenly realize that Billy is short for William. “Granddad’s first name was also William, right?” I ask. “What about his father?”

  “His father
…” Dad pushes the door to the twins’ room open with his foot, “…was called Robert and my grandma was called Mina.” He drops Billy in his cot, before he deposits Eddie on the changing table.

  I stay by the open door. “And Robert’s father?”

  “Frej-ja, Frej-ja,” Billy chants until it’s his turn. While Dad is changing his nappy, Billy struggles.

  “I don’t remember. Are you doing a genealogy chart for scho—”

  Billy kicks the container of baby powder Dad’s holding. It flies across the room and lands in a puff of white. A snow-like sprinkle settles on the wooden floor.

  “Just what I needed.” Dad sighs.

  “I can help, Dad. D’you need me to get the hoover?”

  “I’ll wipe it up. But if you could read them their story, that’d be great.”

  “Let me do the cleaning,” I say, but Dad’s already on his knees with a bunch of wet wipes.

  “Stor-ry!” Eddie waves with a picture book.

  “You’re staying here, right?” I ask, and Dad nods, before I make my way around him and the white dust to the beanbag in the corner, between the two cots.

  While I’m reading the story for the second time, even Billy quiets down and stops shoving toys through the bars. Eddie falls asleep, clutching the neck-hem of my T-shirt, his warm breath on my arm. I feel myself relaxing.

  When I glance up after finishing the book, Dad’s watching me and smiling. He picks up a soft doggy and tucks it under Billy’s arm. I gently unfold Eddie’s fingers, before we tiptoe out of the room.

  On his way into the master bedroom, Dad yawns. I skip downstairs. He’s given me an idea.

  Clementine sits at the dining table. Her laptop’s open, showing a photo collage of men with bow ties and women in long, shimmering dresses.

  “The event was perfect,” she says, although I haven’t asked. “We almost doubled the amount of money from last year. In the end, it didn’t matter that Will couldn’t make it.” She chats on about the perfect crayfish starter, the brilliant band and the full dance floor, as if I’m one of her girlfriends. As if she’s forgotten how she screamed at me two days ago.