by Yangsze Choo
While I gloomily picked away, my stepfather came home. He walked silently through the kitchen, then checked the courtyard, his nostrils turning white with anger. Shin had forgotten to bag and weigh the drying piles of tin ore. When he finally returned, his father took him to the back and caned him for every pile he’d forgotten.
The cane was four feet long and as thick as a man’s thumb, nothing like the weak rattan switch that my mother occasionally disciplined me with. Seizing Shin by the collar, his father wound his arm back as far as it would go. There was a hiss, then an explosive crack that resounded through the courtyard. Shin’s knees buckled. A choked cry squeezed out of his throat. I tried to tell myself that he deserved it, but by the second stroke, I was weeping.
“Stop!” I screamed. “He’s sorry! He won’t do it again!”
My stepfather looked at me in utter disbelief. For an instant I was terrified that he would cane me, too, but he glanced at his new wife who appeared, white-faced, behind me, and slowly put the cane down. He didn’t say a word, but went back into the store.
That night Shin cried and I couldn’t bear it. I pressed my mouth against the wooden wall that separated us.
“Does it hurt?”
He didn’t reply, but the sobs intensified.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said at last.
“Do you need ointment?” I had some Tiger Balm in my room, the all-purpose Chinese salve rumored to contain boiled tiger bones. It claimed to cure everything from mosquito bites to arthritis.
There was a pause. “All right.”
I slipped out into the dark corridor. Though I knew my stepfather and mother were safely in their bedroom at the front of the shophouse, I had to steel myself before opening the door to Shin’s small room. It was a mirror image of my own, the beds reversed against the wall. He was sitting up in bed. In the moonlight, he looked very young and small, even though we were about the same size. I unscrewed the jar of Tiger Balm, and in silence, helped him rub it on the welts on his legs. When I was done, he seized my sleeve.
“Don’t go.”
“Just for a bit, then.” There’d be trouble if I were discovered, but I lay down next to him. He curled up like a small animal, and without thinking, I patted his hair. I thought he might object, but he only said, “My mother used to sit with me sometimes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. Last year.”
Only a year, I thought. My father, my real father, had been gone for three years. If my mother had owned a big shophouse like this, she wouldn’t have had to remarry, I told myself. I imagined the two of us growing potted orchids in the courtyard, making nian gao, the sweet sticky new year’s rice cake together as we’d done before. We would have been just fine by ourselves.
“When I grow up, I’ll never get married,” I said.
I thought he might make fun of me. After all, that was what girls were supposed to do. But Shin considered it seriously. “Then I won’t get married either.”
“I suppose you’ll be all right. You’ll have the business.” My stepfather was keen for Shin to carry on. Although he himself was one of the smaller tin-ore dealers, others in his trade had done extremely well, and there was money to be made in reinvestments.
“You can have it. I’m leaving as soon as I can.”
I snorted. “Don’t want it. I’m the one who’s going to leave.”
He started to laugh, and buried his head under the pillow to muffle the sound. As he did so, a wrinkled piece of paper fell out. It had a single Chinese character written on it: 獏.
“What’s this?” In the wavering moonlight, it was hard to make out. “Is it an animal?”
Shin made a grab for it. “My mother wrote it for me,” he said gruffly. “It’s the character for mo—you know, tapir.”
I’d seen pictures of a tapir. It had a nose like a stunted elephant’s trunk, and black and white markings as if the front of the animal had been dipped in ink, while the back part had been heavily floured, like a rice dumpling. It was supposed to be quite large, almost six feet long, yet difficult to see in the jungle.
“Your mother’s writing was beautiful.” My own mother was illiterate, which was why she’d always been keen on sending me to school and to Chinese brush-writing classes on weekends.
“She came from the north of China. That paper is for me. When I have bad dreams. Mo is a dream-eater, don’t you know?”
“Do you mean a real tapir, from the jungle?” I wondered what sort of stories Shin’s mother had told him. My own family had been in Malaya for three generations; though we still spoke Chinese, we’d also adapted to life under British rule here.
“No, the dream-eater is a ghost animal. If you have nightmares, you can call it three times to eat the bad dreams. But you have to be careful. If you call it too often it will also gobble up your hopes and ambitions.”
There was silence while I digested this. I wanted to ask Shin whether this charm for dream-eaters really worked, and whether he’d ever seen one, but he’d fallen asleep, so I crept quietly back to my own bed.
* * *
When people who didn’t know our family circumstances discovered that Shin and I shared the same birthday, they assumed we were twins even though we didn’t look alike. My mother had a soft spot for him, and she’d touch our heads affectionately.
“It’s good you have a brother now, Ji Lin.”
“But he won’t call me Ah Jie,” I’d point out, aggrieved. It was my right to be called “older sister,” even if I held that advantage by only five hours. But Shin willfully ignored this, calling me by my given name and sticking out his tongue.
In some ways it would be better if he still did such things, but the last two years, Shin had grown strangely aloof. It was inevitable, I supposed, though it stung. But I was too proud to hang around like the other girls and so miserable over being forced to leave school before my Upper Sixth, that I’d had little time to worry about this change in him. If it came down to it, however, I thought I could still rely on Shin. To be my ally, to keep my secrets. And to identify severed fingers. At least, I hoped I could.
* * *
Dinner that night was a silent affair, despite the luxury of a whole steamed chicken rubbed with sesame oil. It sat, expertly chopped into bite-sized pieces, on a large platter. None of us had touched it; it was as mutely reproachful as Shin’s empty seat. My mother asked timidly after him.
“He said he’d be out tonight.” My stepfather shoveled food into his mouth, chewing methodically.
“I should have told him I was going to kill a chicken today.” My mother cast a worried glance at the bird, as though Shin would materialize behind it. I stifled a snort.
“How long is he back for?” I asked.
“He has a part-time job at the Batu Gajah hospital, so he’ll be here for the summer.” My mother looked pleased. Actually, there was no “summer” here in Malaya. It was the tropics, after all, though we’d adopted the vocabulary of summer holidays as a result of being a colony. But I didn’t say any of this aloud. It was always better to say less during mealtimes.
“Is Shin staying here?” Batu Gajah was more than ten miles away. I couldn’t imagine that Shin would choose to spend much time under the same roof as his father.
“The hospital has staff quarters. He said it was more convenient.” She glanced swiftly at my stepfather, who continued chewing in silence. He was in a good mood, I could tell. Ever since Shin had won a scholarship to study medicine, he’d been perversely proud of him. Being congratulated on such a clever son must have gone to his head.
It was odd that Shin would come to a district hospital like Batu Gajah when he could easily have worked as an orderly at the Singapore General Hospital, as he had over Christmas. I’d never been to Singapore, though I’d pored over postcards of St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the famous Raffles Hotel with its Long Bar that ladies weren’t supposed to go to.
; My mother gave another anguished look at the untouched chicken. “Whom did Shin go out with tonight?”
“Ming, and another friend. Robert, he said.” My stepfather helped himself to a piece of chicken, and with a sigh, my mother followed suit, placing it on my plate.
I looked down, embarrassed. Ming was the watchmaker’s son, Shin’s best friend. He was a year older than us, serious and mature, and wore thin, wire-framed spectacles. I’d been in love with him since I was twelve—a hopeless, awkward crush I’d hoped nobody noticed, though my mother’s sympathetic glance seemed a little too knowing. Ming had done well at school and we’d all expected him to go on to further studies, but he’d unexpectedly taken over his father’s business. And a few months ago, I’d heard he was engaged to a girl from Tapah.
Good for him, I told myself, stabbing the chicken with my chopsticks. Ming was a sincere person; I’d met his fiancée and she seemed like a nice girl, quiet and not flashy. Besides, despite Ming’s kindness to me growing up, he’d never been interested. I knew that very well and had given up on him. Still, hearing his name filled me with an inky, twilight gloom.
My mother’s debts, Ming’s marriage, and my lack of a future were cold weights on a string of bad luck. And that wasn’t even counting the mummified bottled finger tucked at the very bottom of my traveling basket.
* * *
My stepfather always went to bed early. My mother had also adopted this habit, and soon enough, they retired to their room upstairs. I washed the dishes and put the leftovers into the mesh-screened food cupboard to keep lizards and cockroaches out. Each cupboard leg stood in a small saucer filled with water, so that ants couldn’t climb up. Finally, I collected the food scraps and took them into the back alley for the stray cats.
It had cooled down, though the sides of the buildings still radiated the heat of the day. The night sky was sprinkled with stars and a thin crackle of music wafted into the evening air. Somewhere, someone was listening to a radio. It was a foxtrot, a dance that I could do with my eyes closed now, humming under my breath.
The music ended in a smattering of applause. Startled, I turned.
“Since when have you been able to dance?”
He was a shadow in the darkness of the alley, leaning against the wall, but I’d know him anywhere.
“How long have you been here?” I said indignantly.
“Long enough.” Detaching himself from the wall, his dim outline seemed taller, his shoulders wider than before. I couldn’t see the expression on his face and felt suddenly shy. I hadn’t seen Shin for almost a year.
“Why didn’t you stay in Singapore?” I asked.
“Oh, so you didn’t want me to come back?” He was laughing, and I felt a rush of relief. It was the old Shin, my childhood friend.
“Who’d want you? Well, maybe Ah Kum does.”
“You mean the new girl at the shop?” He shook his head. “My heart belongs to the medical profession.”
The neighbor’s window banged shut. We were making too much noise in the alley. I headed back towards the fan of light spilling from the kitchen door.
“You cut your hair,” he said in surprise.
My hand flew to the shorn nape of my neck. Let the jokes begin, I thought grimly. But surprisingly, Shin didn’t say anything else. He sat down at the table and watched as I fidgeted, wiping down an already clean counter. The oil lamp had burned low and the kitchen was full of shadows. I hurriedly asked one question after another about what Singapore was like.
“But what have you been doing?” he asked. “Some poor woman probably has a dress that’s sewn inside out.”
I threw the dishtowel at him. “I sew very well. I’m extremely talented, according to Mrs. Beaky Tham.”
“Is her name really Beaky?”
“No, but it should be. She looks like a tiny crow, and she likes to walk into my room and open all the drawers whenever I’m out.”
“I’m sorry,” Shin said, laughing. And then he really did look sorry.
“What for?”
“Because you should be the one in medical school.”
“I could never go.” I turned away. It was still a sore spot for me. I’d been the one who’d first thought of being a doctor, or some kind of medical aide. Anything to heal the bruises on my mother’s arms, the sprains that she mysteriously developed. “I heard you saw Ming tonight.”
“And Robert.” Robert Chiu was Ming’s friend. His father was a barrister who’d been trained in England. All his children had English names—Robert, Emily, Mary, and Eunice—and they had a piano and a gramophone in their large house, which was teeming with servants. Robert and Shin had never really got along. I wondered why the three of them had been together.
“Ming asked about you—are you joining us for lunch tomorrow?” said Shin. Was it pity in his eyes? I didn’t want sympathy.
“I have to attend a funeral.”
“Whose funeral?”
I was annoyed with myself for not making up another excuse. “Nobody you know. Just an acquaintance.”
Shin frowned, but he didn’t question me further. In the lamplight, the angles of his cheekbones and jaw were the same, yet sharper, more mature.
“I need your help,” I said. Now was as good a time as any to show him the finger, without my mother or stepfather around to interfere. “It’s an anatomy question. Can you take a look?”
His eyebrows rose. “Don’t you think you should ask someone else?”
“It’s a secret. I can’t really ask anyone else.”
Shin’s face turned red, or perhaps it was just the low light. “Maybe you should ask a nurse. I’m not really qualified, and it’s better if a woman examines you.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not for me, silly.”
“Well, how was I to know?” Shin rubbed his face, now even more flushed.
“Wait here,” I said. “It’s in my room.”
I hurried upstairs, treading softly to avoid the creaky floorboards, and slipped down the corridor to my room at the back of the house. Moonlight flooded the shutters like pale water. Nothing about that room had changed, not even the position of the bed, still wedged against the wall that separated Shin’s room from mine.
When I was fourteen, my stepfather had considered moving Shin downstairs, swapping his bedroom for my stepfather’s office, but it proved too inconvenient. He was afraid that Shin and I might sneak into each other’s rooms, which was ridiculous. Shin never came to my room. If we wanted to whisper we crept into the corridor outside or sat on his floor, but my room was mine alone. It was the sole concession to the fact that I was a girl.
Thrusting my arm into the rattan basket that I used as a traveling bag, I fished out the glass vial, tucked in a handkerchief because I didn’t like to look at it.
Downstairs, I laid it next to the oil lamp. “Tell me what you think.”
Shin unwrapped the handkerchief, his long clever fingers untying the knot. When he saw the finger, he stopped.
“Where did you get this?”
Looking at his dark brows knitted together, I realized I couldn’t possibly let Shin know that I’d lifted it out of a stranger’s pocket while working as a dance-hall hostess. No matter how I tried to rationalize the faded gentility of the May Flower or the hardworking girls, it sounded wretched. Worse still, it would reveal my mother’s gambling debts.
“I found it. It came out of someone’s pocket.”
Shin turned the bottle from side to side, narrowing his eyes.
“Well?” I squeezed my own hands under the table.
“I’d say it’s the distal and middle phalanges of a finger. Possibly the pinky, from the size.”
“Could it be an orangutan’s?”
“The proportions look human to me. Besides, look at the fingernail. Doesn’t it look trimmed?”
I’d noticed that myself. “Why does it look mummified?”
“It’s dried out, so maybe it happened naturally, like beef jerky.”
“Don’t talk about beef jerky,” I said gloomily.
“So how exactly did you get this again?”
“I told you, I found it.” Pushing my chair back, I said hastily, “Don’t worry, I’ll return it. Thanks for taking a look. Good night.”
As I retreated up the stairs, I felt his opaque gaze following me.
7
Batu Gajah
Friday, June 5th
Since his arrival, Ren has learned two important things about his new master. First, Ah Long informs him that William is a surgeon and therefore should be referred to as “Mr.” or Tuan Acton instead of “Dr.”
“Why’s that?” asks Ren.
“No idea. Is a British thing.” Ah Long is shelling giant river prawns. “But that’s how you address him.”
The second thing he’s learned is that his new employer prefers a tidy environment, worlds away from the lively and chaotic household Ren left in Kamunting. Dr. MacFarlane often left half-eaten sandwiches and banana skins in the muddle of papers on his desk. This new doctor, William Acton, places his utensils neatly on the edge of the plate. The shining surface of his desk is broken only by the archipelago of inkwell, blotting paper, and pen.
Ren has already memorized the exact position of each object and replaces it correctly each time he dusts. Maybe it’s a waste of time as he doesn’t know how long he’ll stay here. Until his task is done—though what comes after finding the finger and returning it to his grave, Ren has no idea. Dr. MacFarlane gave no further instructions. A wave of homesickness strikes him, so intense that tears well shamefully in his eyes. Ren tells himself that he’s too old to cry. Twenty-six days have passed since his old master’s death and he feels a rising panic. But nobody else has died. Unless dogs count.
Yesterday, Ah Long mentioned that the neighbor two houses over had lost a pedigreed terrier: a yappy, scrappy creature, worth more than a month’s salary. A tuft of fur attached to a stumpy white tail was all that was discarded. “Leopard,” grunted Ah Long. Ren hopes so. Not tiger.
