Then we hear it. The whine of a motorboat heading across the bay. An outboard, a boat with a single figure at the back.
‘Daddy!’ Frankie shouts. She stands up on the railing waving her arms. Waving as if he’s coming for her only and no one else. There’s no one else alive. She’ll make a performance as grand as his. My mother picks Frankie’s plate off the railing before it topples. My sister’s showiness makes her uncomfortable. Already she doesn’t like the way Frankie will jump all over my father, hang off him, demand his attention and everyone else’s. It’s something she doesn’t let herself do. She keeps her claims quiet.
Later, Humphries told me he’d felt sorry for my mother at that moment. ‘She hadn’t seen your father for five, maybe six weeks. Her face lit up when she saw him coming. She was in love with him,’ Humphries explained. ‘But there was Frankie making all the noise, demanding to come first.’
I’m smiling though because I see it really is him and he’s coming in, fast, dramatically. I can see he’s grinning now, waving back. Steering the boat with just one hand. His dark hair blows back in the wind. His khaki shirt billows off his thin shoulders. As he draws nearer, I see thick stubble on his face, the beginning of the beard he is always threatening to grow.
I want my father home. I want him to take care of Frankie, to make her happy. To make my mother stop worrying. I want him to make it all right for Frankie to go to boarding school, or maybe to let her stay. To make her stop punishing us, hurting herself. I will give Frankie to him. I will tell him I can’t look after her any more.
Then without warning, without looking back, Frankie jumps. She leaps off the railing, jumps into the air. I don’t know whether she means to or whether she’s just so carried away she can’t stop herself. She must get to him first. Make him love her most. Save me, Daddy. Catch me. Take me with you.
The boat’s too close, speeding neatly in. ‘Frankie!’ my mother shouts. My father shoves the throttle hard into reverse. But the shift’s too abrupt. The outboard strains, bucks up. Frankie’s falling. The boat hits Frankie with a loud thump. Then everything goes silent.
I watch my father silently scramble across the boat to reach her, to pull my sister from the sea. Frankie’s slack body soaks my father’s shirt. The blood from her head runs red all over the boat.
Swiftly, my father lays Frankie down across the bow of the motorboat. He puts his mouth on hers, kisses her, trying to suck the sea water from her lungs. His brown arms pump her chest but it only makes more blood come out. Pym clambers down to help him, throws the painter to Humphries to tie it down. High Auntie brings up towels. I think she wants to clean the blood off Frankie. On the beach, the lifeguard swings down from his perch, bathers stand to stare.
I see my father. I see him swear, cry out. I see in his eyes a look of ruin. Still I hear nothing. It’s completely silent, except I’m screaming. It’s a sound I didn’t make when the body floated up, when the pudgy man pushed Frankie up against the hot tin, when the lychees exploded killing the old woman, burning the boy. It rises out of me; Frankie’s cry. I don’t think it will ever stop.
Far away, I feel my mother, who never holds us. She is pulling my body to hers, cradling me in her arms. The way my father cradles Frankie now, no longer trying to make her breathe. My mother doesn’t ask me to stop. She doesn’t tell me not to look. She holds me close against her weeping body. I think I might fly away.
thirty-eight
What can you give me?
Can you give me the sound of funereal wailing by white-clad women from a back-alley temple? The single chime of a high-pitched bell, the knocking of a wooden fish?
Can you give me the translucent green of sun shining through elephant ear leaves? The heat, the heavy rain? Can you give me the smells inside a hot teak cupboard, dried oysters, clove hair oil, joss, tiger balm, steamed rice? The smell of wet cement, rattan baskets? The sound of jackhammers?
Can you give me a handful of coloured silk? An empty pack of cigarettes? A tape recorder? A smooth stone rounded by the sea? A bone of cuttlefish? A ripened pomelo split open?
Can you give me my father’s hand in mine? Frankie’s in the other? Then take everything and go away?
˜ ˜ ˜
That night I dream of blue swallowtail butterflies. They hover in the air like a kaleidoscope, alight on my body, drinking sweat from my skin. In the twilight, the Viet Cong sit around a wet fire. They lean their guns up against the feet of a huge stone Buddha. The ones who still have them take off their rubber sandals, massage their sore, bitten, feet. Frankie’s feet are smooth and clean. The others look at her amazed. How did she manage it, walking barefoot through the jungle? I laugh at them. Don’t they know she’s a ghost?
thirty-nine
Soon we will leave Hong Kong. In our kitchen, men wrap each plate, each bowl in sheets of Chinese newspaper, stack them, tie the stacks and pack them in boxes, like ammunition for the war. It’s an art, the way they work, so quick, so neat. If you look again, they might be gone, carry all our belongings down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
My mother calls the place we’re going home. I don’t. Neither does my father. Our blood cries out for the tangled, dripping vines of the jungle, trees, elephant ear leaves. Its orange earth, muddy now because the rain has finally come.
My mother takes charge. She arranges everything, the packing, the airplanes that will take us away, Frankie’s funeral. She looks after my father, massages his hands, his face, brings him blankets, hot tea. She is strong and able. Who would have thought it? There is no one to thwart her.
My father shivers in the heat. He swathes himself in sweaters, drapes a blanket around him, wears it like a coloured robe as he moves around the house. ‘It’s so cold,’ he says. ‘Don’t you feel cold, Katenick?’ If I stumble, he pulls me up quick. He’s shaking with fright. When my mother cuts her finger with a kitchen knife, he weeps like a baby. During Frankie’s funeral service, my mother has to lead him out of St John’s. He says he’ll walk up and see the animals in the Botanical Gardens. My mother asks me to go with him. We look at the green and red parrots, pink flamingos, the lone black panther pacing his cement rocks, the gibbons from Sumatra. I wonder what would happen if we set them free like General Maltby’s white cockatoos.
I tell my father I would like to hear gibbons howl in the jungle. I would like to watch Viet Cong pass silently through the shadows of a leafy village without making a sound. I tell him it’s a better funeral for Frankie up here with the animals. I think it’s too late now to ever tell him about Lantau, the lychees.
‘If you’re happy here, why wasn’t Frankie?’ my father asks.
˜ ˜ ˜
The war in Vietnam goes on without him. Enemy engagements. Helicopter blades. Night patrols in phosphorescent jungle. The war he loved. His country. At the end of the year, the Tet offensive, the big story, the beginning of the end. Viet Cong commandos penetrate the centre of Saigon, forcing their way into the concrete, sandbagged American Embassy. There is fighting in Nha Trang, Danang, Pleiku, Khesanh, Hue, all the places he knows. Especially Hue, where the Viet Cong fire rockets and machine guns down from the massively thick walls of the citadel of Nguyen emperors. My father’s heartbroken for it. He longs for the rose-brick palaces along the Perfume River. But his body rebels. Because now he can’t stand the sight of blood. He can’t stand loud noises. Helicopters, motors revving make him cower like a dog. At night, he shouts out.
Ah Bing mocks my father behind his back, the same way she mocks my asthma, breathing roughly in and out. Hardships are to be endured, then left behind.
‘There are other stories. Other places,’ McKenna tells him the evening after Frankie’s funeral. ‘When this is all over, when you’re ready, we’ll find another place for you. Rome. Paris. London. Wherever you want.’
My father wants Vietnam. He wants Frankie. He wants to be able to reverse the motorboat in time. He wants the dead to come back to life.
forty
‘Frankie will
be a naughty ghost,’ Ah Bing says. ‘Just like she was a naughty girl. Always upsetting your mother, running off, leaving her shirt open like houh hoi.’
That’s what the taitais are worried about. It’s why they’re so bossy, leaning over the top balcony, clucking their approval, telling Ah Bing what to do as she lights a small fire down on the front patio. They’re hoping she’ll be able to soothe Frankie’s ghost, keep her at bay.
Ah Bing sets out a bowl of rice, a plate of oranges, some buns with red bean paste, a small cup of tea for the hungry ghosts who, at the end of each summer, are let out of hell to wander the earth. When she lights her joss sticks and prays, the food multiplies until there is enough for all. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes.
‘You have to feed them,’ Ah Bing tells me. ‘Give them presents so they don’t make trouble.’
Americans don’t know what to do with the dead. A Chinese funeral service is better. You have to wail, cry, shout out. You need musicians to clang cymbals, blow flutes to send the spirit on its way.
She feeds the flames with piles of tiny paper jackets, cutout watches, spirit-money of $100,000 notes printed with the Chinese characters for Bank of Hell. I watch her poke each object down into the fire with a stick. The painted paper is cheap and doesn’t burn well. Small sparks leap into the air. Bits of blackened banknotes drift across the garden. This morning, my mother asked her to come to America with us.
˜ ˜ ˜
I would like to burn presents for Frankie. I would send her small coloured scarves, miniature packages of chewing gum, cigarettes boxes, Coca-Cola, television programmes from America, lavender fingernail polish. I would send her rice cakes wrapped in iris leaves, tied with silk threads of five colours. But there are too many ghosts. They drift up over the misty headland from the sea, skulk through the garden. They collect in the dark, mouldy corners of the low cement wall, brush by the house like blown leaves or thin plastic bags, charred paper. Lost, unhappy ghosts. Spirits of people who died suddenly, violently, inauspiciously. Unmarried women. Dead children. Murdered. Drowned. Ghosts without descendants to worship them. Some of the ghosts wail like babies. Others are angry, dangerous, seeking revenge. I see the drowned woman, her hair floating around her, her eye-sockets full of fish. An old woman without teeth.
˜ ˜ ˜
When Ah Bing was a girl, her mother said she would become a hungry ghost. She’d wished that the miracle of the food multiplying would really happen so there would be a red bean bun for her too, not just for her no-good brothers Opium Kuan and Opium Dum.
‘Jumping off the boat. How careless!’ Ah Bing would like to scold Frankie for that. For making our family suffer. For making us leave Hong Kong too. Unless, of course, it was on purpose.
In China, it is honourable for girls to kill themselves if, for instance, they have sworn to follow Kuan Yin and then are forced into marriage, or their husbands beat them, or their in-laws make their life too hard, Ah Bing says. But if Frankie killed herself, what was it for? ‘Pak tuali! American girls too much spoiled.’ Frankie always had enough food. She could read. She was about to go to a good school in America. ‘American girls have everything. Po! Bad things happen, even in rich families.’ Best to feed her now. Pray to Kuan Yin to look after her. Even naughty children need looking after.
‘Aiyah, Katie, ghosts very happy today. Plenty money. Plenty food.’ She tosses me a bun the ghosts have already eaten. ‘Frankie likes this one,’ Ah Bing says. The bun is thick and glutinous. It sticks to the roof of my mouth.
Out at sea, it’s milky green, the colour of a lucky jade bracelet. A fishing boat chugs past heading out to deep water, its trawling booms extended so it looks like a giant bug. The fishermen feed the hungry ghosts too. They set paper boats afloat in the harbour and at the entrances to typhoon shelters.
forty-one
I think of it over and over. Frankie jumping, the thud of the boat hitting her. I hear myself scream. Sometimes I play it differently. I reach out and catch her. I hold her over the side of the boat, drop her into my father’s arms. My father reverses the engine in time. He hits Frankie, she is paralysed. I take care of her for the rest of my life.
Sometimes I look at my father and he’s seeing the same things. Then I want to smack Frankie. I want to spit her name like Ah Bing. Houh hoi! Ham ga chang! I want to push her up against the dead pig, the burning metal of the butcher shop until she cries, begs me for forgiveness. It’s not just about you, I want to tell her. Then I would take my father’s hand, sit down with him on the temple patio, tell him it’s all right. It wasn’t his fault.
Other times, I just let Frankie go. Up she floats, her freckled face grins wildly down at me until she’s a mere speck. I can see she’s delighted. I rejoice with her. She’s jumping free. For a single moment, I see her suspended in the air above me, for ever. Sometimes I confuse the two events in my mind. It’s the bomb that killed Frankie. She died in the butcher shop after all, blown up by lychees.
It’s inevitable, Frankie’s death. The result of carefully laid plans. She uses her young body, strong, brown, voluptuous, like a weapon, like a grenade, to wreak her revenge because she thinks we don’t love her enough, we can’t. I won’t be able to stop her. Even my mother’s afraid. Afraid of Frankie’s body, the raw, animal power of her daughter’s want. Overwhelming. Devouring. So hungry, it excludes everything else.
˜ ˜ ˜
In Vermont, my father fixes things. He drives new stakes for a fence, he takes the boiler apart in the basement and puts it back together, he mends the barn roof. Usually he’s all right. When McKenna writes after Tet to say Saigon Duck disappeared, he starts sobbing. ‘Someone made a good soup,’ Ah Bing says. I slip the photograph he sent from Saigon into my top drawer, the photo of my father holding up Saigon Duck.
My mother says she always wanted to be married to a man who’s handy about the house. But I can see she misses Hong Kong sometimes, the wet, the heat, the tangled green, the burst of red flowers in flame of the forest trees. She misses my father too, how he told war stories on the poop deck. How thin he was, wild, unruly, unpredictable, electric, like Frankie. She’ll be happier when he’s happy, when he starts taking photos again. We have our own war here: Martin Luther King gunned down, Robert Kennedy, sniper fire, burning, riots, federal troops, national guards, four students killed at Kent State. We watch television footage of Americans evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the Embassy in Saigon. Nixon visiting China.
My mother doesn’t tell me what she thinks, what she misses. At the end of summer, she makes paper offerings, little painted jackets, school books, a bicycle for Ah Bing to burn. She constructs a tiny paper replica of our house, exact with its white clapboards, curtains in the windows, the front porch screened to keep out mosquitoes, the red barn with its mended roof, silhouettes of chickens, prettily painted, carefully cut out. She puts those in the fire too.
I float a water lily for Frankie on the pond so she can sail away on it like Kuan Yin to Hsiang-shan Monastery on the island of Putuo. She wears a blue dress. A silver chain around her waist. I float another one for the deaf boy and hope it reaches him halfway across the world. If I sit quietly enough, not moving, I may see a fish or turtle swim past in the murky water. A red-winged black bird will call from the rushes. A chipmunk might run across my foot.
I think about my father’s question: ‘If you are happy here, why wasn’t Frankie?’ I still can’t find an answer.
forty-two
Before we leave Hong Kong, I go to the deaf boy’s house.
‘Fuck me. I want you to.’ I say it quietly though I could scream. Fuck me the way Frankie was fucked. It’s your fault too, I want to tell him. You should not have loved me. You should not have sought me out. I am invisible, white ghost, gwaimui, Viet Cong. I betrayed Frankie when I loved you. Because I loved you more.
The deaf boy takes me to his room with the rocks and shells and snakeskins and books. The room where we undress each other. A hot wind catches at the
rattan shade, flapping it against the wall. Typhoon Kate, my namesake, is predicted to pass close enough to the colony tonight to bring gales and heavy rain, enough to fill Hong Kong’s reservoirs.
Before he can touch me, I tell the deaf boy about the bomb at Lantau. We kneel on the bed, face to face.
‘It’s because of me,’ I say. ‘I killed a woman. I burned a boy. I dropped the lychees into an oilcan near the stall that exploded. I couldn’t stop Frankie jumping off the boat.’ I move my lips slowly to make sure he can see what I’m saying. He’s the only person I’ve ever told. Then I reach out as if to touch the scars on the burned boy’s face, the hard ridges of his skin. The deaf boy doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look away. His face is smooth and wet. He cries for what happened to Frankie, what’s happened to me. He doesn’t want me to go.
Now I feel the whole length of the deaf boy’s body, his skin soft, moist with sweat, the thin bones of his feet, the sharp points of his knees, the tautness of his chest. His body trembling. He desires me even if I am gwaimui, white ghost girl, a killer.
I loved you, Frankie. I lived you. Breathed your breath. Felt your leg thrown heavily over me in sleep. I followed your every scheme. Climbed jungles after you. I held my breath underwater for as long as I could. I carried a bomb for you. I listened to your lies and threats. Tried to clean up after you. I wanted to protect you, to keep you safe. I didn’t know how. I was too little. I wasn’t strong enough.
I press my eyes shut as the deaf boy pushes into me. I feel a sharp pain. In this darkness, my body thrusts up against the dead, shipwrecked bodies, floating planks. I am oily with spilled diesel, plastic bags catch on my feet. I cling to the deaf boy, clamber up him gasping for air. Cry out. It seems I don’t want to drown, I don’t want to be punished or killed after all, not the way Frankie was. I don’t ever want to leave Hong Kong, this dark house, the room with shells and snakeskins. The hot, heavy rain pounding outside.
White Ghost Girls Page 12
