by Yangsze Choo
“So are you going to tell me about this finger?”
There was no point holding out as Shin was clearly planning to follow me, so I gave him an edited version of events. How the salesman had come by my (unnamed) place of work and dropped the bottle with the finger, and how the next day he had died.
“And that’s all,” I said. “Now will you please go home? It’s rude of you to ditch Ming.”
“I didn’t leave him alone. Or are you worried that Ah Kum will make a move on him?”
“He’s engaged!” I snapped. “And besides, Ah Kum is only interested in you, not Ming.”
He turned his head to look out of the window. I felt rather guilty. Shin was, in his own way, looking out for me.
“Friends?” I said, holding out my hand after a while. Shin could stay quiet for days but I could never hold a grudge against him. There wouldn’t be anyone to talk to in that house if we didn’t make up. He didn’t look at me, but stuck out his right hand, and we shook, a little too heartily, to show that everything really was all right between us.
The bus deposited us on the main road in Papan and roared off in a cloud of dust. I coughed violently. Never mind the face powder I’d applied—I was now covered with white dust. Shin’s lips twitched, but mercifully, he didn’t laugh. We had to ask around for the address, as Papan had quite a few streets with small houses on them.
“That’s the Chan house,” an old lady said. She studied my grey cheongsam and bouquet of white flowers. “Did you mean to come for the funeral?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re too late. It was yesterday.” Seeing my crestfallen face, she said, “The newspaper misprinted the date, but they told all the family ahead of time. Didn’t you know?”
“We’d still like to pay our respects.” Shin smiled at the old lady, and she succumbed, giving us detailed instructions. Deflecting her questions, we hurried off.
The house was a small, single-story wooden building with a guava tree in the front yard and a skinny yellow dog tied to it. There were still signs of the funeral that had taken place, though the two large white paper lanterns with the name of the deceased written on them no longer hung on the sides of the door. Ash and scraps of partly burned colored paper blew around the compound—the remains of paper funeral goods burned for the deceased. I wondered whether they had burned plenty of dancing girls and garlicky chicken rice for the salesman in the Afterlife, then felt remorse for such irreverent thoughts.
At our approach, the dog hurled itself at us, barking madly. The guava tree shook, and I nervously eyed the rope that held the animal back.
“Excuse me!” I called out.
An older woman came out, shushing the dog. She looked enquiringly at us. “Oh dear, I told Ah Yoke that the date was wrong in the newspaper! Are you here to see her?”
I had no idea who Ah Yoke was, but I nodded. We took off our shoes as the woman showed us into the front room of the little house, dominated by a family altar wreathed with joss sticks and offerings. I placed the bouquet of white chrysanthemums on the altar. Bowing, we paid our respects to the deceased, the same portrait used in the newspaper obituary. The salesman stared out of the picture, stiff and formal. Chan Yew Cheung had been twenty-eight years old, to which had been added, as was customary, three more years to increase his life span. One year from the earth, one from heaven, and one from man. Soberly, I thought that even with the borrowed years, his time here hadn’t been very long.
Setting down two cups of tea, the woman said, “I’m his aunt. Were you friends of Yew Cheung? It was such a shock. He was always so strong—I never thought I’d outlive him.” Her face creased, and I was afraid she was going to start crying. I felt more and more uncomfortable.
“What happened to him?” asked Shin.
“He went to see a friend in Batu Gajah, but it got late and he still hadn’t come home. Ah Yoke was upset. You know how she can be. The next morning a passerby found him. He must have slipped and fallen into a storm drain. They said he broke his neck.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was. I hadn’t liked the salesman much, but sitting in the house where he had lived, on a rattan armchair that he must have used, I felt a cold shadow settle on me.
“Actually, I didn’t know Mr. Chan well,” I said. “He was a customer at our shop and he happened to leave something behind. Then I read he’d passed away and thought I should return it.”
“In that case, you’d better talk to his wife.” She got up and parted the curtain of wooden beads in the rear of the house. “Ah Yoke!” she called. “This young lady has something from Yew Cheung.”
There was a long pause. Shin and I shifted uncomfortably in our seats. The aunt had just begun to say, “She’s very upset, as you can expect—” when a woman rushed into the room, hair wild and face swollen with crying. She flew straight at me.
“Bitch!” she shrieked. “How dare you come here?”
Shocked, I could barely block her with my arms, even as she slapped and scratched hysterically. Shin leaped up and dragged her off me. She fell in a heap on the floor and started to scream. It was a horrible noise, like a pig being slaughtered.
The aunt said, “Ah Yoke, what’s wrong with you? I’m so sorry! She’s been like this since yesterday. Are you hurt?”
Shaken, I put my hand to my throat. Ah Yoke was still lying on the floor. Her screams had died down into whimpers. “Give it,” she said. “Give it back to me.”
“What does she want?” I asked, horrified.
“Ah Yoke,” said the aunt, “you’re mistaken. This young lady works at a shop. She’s not one of Yew Cheung’s girls.” Darting a quick glance at me, she said, “You’re not, are you?”
I shook my head. “I only met him once.”
“See?” The aunt was patting Ah Yoke’s head. “She didn’t know him. And look, she came with her young man today.”
Ah Yoke continued to sob and writhe on the ground, her hands clenching and unclenching. Her body contorted unnaturally, her movements like a snake. She didn’t seem human anymore. I felt dizzy; if not for Shin’s grip, I’d have fallen to my knees.
“You’d better go,” the aunt said quietly. “Yew Cheung was my nephew, but he wasn’t a saint. He played around. And yesterday, you know, there were some girls here. Bar girls and prostitutes. They wanted to pay their respects, but they shouldn’t have come. I guess she mistook you for one of them.”
Shame colored my face. A dance hostess wasn’t anything to be proud of, either. I’d made my own troubles when I took the finger, and now I had to get out of them myself. Taking out the glass bottle, I set it on the floor.
“Do you recognize this?” I asked Ah Yoke.
She sat up slowly, her long black hair straggling over her face like drowned strands of riverweed. “It’s his,” she said dully.
“Was this what you were looking for?” I said.
Shaking her head, she started to cry, making no attempt to brush away the tears running down her white, swollen face. It felt indecent to watch her; her face was so raw and naked. I stood up, but she snatched at the hem of my skirt.
“Did he give you anything else? A gold pendant?”
“No.”
Oddly, she seemed to take heart at this. “Last week he bought a pendant for another woman. That’s what I wanted to know about. Not this.” She jerked her head towards the finger. She hadn’t touched it once. Her eyes were puffy, the lids painfully pink. “It was his good luck charm. Since he had it, his sales record improved a lot.”
“When did he get it?” asked Shin. She stared at him as though registering his presence for the first time.
“Three … maybe four months ago. He got it from a friend. Actually, I think he stole it.” Ah Yoke made a face as though there was a bad taste in her mouth.
“I’d like to return it to you,” I said. In that neat little wooden house, amid the utterly ordinary furniture and daily objects—a crocheted doily on the table, a palm-leaf food cover
to keep off the flies—the withered finger looked even grimmer and out of place. I glanced at the aunt and realized that she didn’t look surprised. She’s seen it before, I thought.
Ah Yoke shook her head wildly. “Don’t leave it with me!” I was afraid she was going to start screaming again.
The aunt hustled us to the door. “You’d better go now.”
“But what about the finger?”
She tucked it firmly into my basket again. “Do whatever you like. Or give it back to whoever he got it from.”
“And who was that?” asked Shin.
“He told me it was a nurse at the Batu Gajah hospital,” said the aunt, in an undertone. Shin’s ears pricked up at this. “That’s all I know. Now please leave.”
We walked back to the bus stop in silence. It was past noon now, and the glare from the road was so dazzling that I wanted to cover my eyes. My face was tender where Ah Yoke had attacked me. Shin stopped under a large tree.
“Wait here.” Crossing the road to a small shop, he returned with an enamel mug of water and a bottle of iodine. He tilted my face to examine it. I closed my eyes. His hands were cool and deft.
“You’re going to have a black eye and some spectacular scratches.”
I winced. One of Ah Yoke’s flailing elbows must have caught me in the eye. “I suppose that serves me right for slapping you on the bus.”
Shin didn’t laugh but continued to study my face. I pulled away.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “Is it very bad?”
“Those scratches should be disinfected.”
Obediently, I stood still as he rinsed his handkerchief and cleaned my face. How was I going to explain this to Mrs. Tham, let alone show up for work at the May Flower? If I skipped work, I wouldn’t be able to make the next payment for my mother; my stepfather would skin us alive if a debt collector showed up at the house. I calculated furiously. At five cents a dance, could I make up the shortfall?
“Stop thinking so hard,” said Shin. “You’ll wear out your tiny brain.”
I opened my eyes indignantly. “How rude! When I beat you at almost every exam in school!”
In answer, he just wiped harder.
“You’re wiping off all my face powder,” I complained.
“Makeup won’t improve someone like you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He applied iodine to the scratches and it stung. Or perhaps it was my pride.
“I’m quite popular, thank you.” I thought about some of my regulars at the May Flower—the ones who were at least putting in a credible effort to dance. Mr. Wong, the optometrist from Tiger Lane who only liked waltzes; old Mr. Khoo, who’d told me his doctor had advised him to get some exercise; Nirman Singh, the tall skinny Sikh whom I was certain was a schoolboy although he vehemently denied it. They’d all find other girls to dance with this week. Maybe they’d prefer them.
“So what are you worried about?” Shin rinsed his handkerchief with the last of the water.
I shook my head, unwilling to involve him further. “I need to get back to work.”
“You’re not going home?”
“Mother will only worry if I show up like this.” It would raise uncomfortable questions in Falim, with its network of gossip. Everyone knew about my stepfather’s temper.
Shin returned the mug to the shop, and we caught the bus back without speaking. There were too many people around, in any case, to discuss the bizarre events of that morning. Self-conscious about my scratched face, I kept my eyes on my lap. Shin got off at Falim, but not before slipping the glass bottle with the dried finger into his pocket.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, forestalling my objections. And with that, he jumped off.
A sense of unease descended upon me; I shivered as a plump woman carrying a live chicken squeezed in. It was a white rooster with yellow eyes, the pupils angry dots. At Chinese funerals, a white rooster was released into the graveyard at the end of the ceremony. Of course, this lady might just be taking it home for dinner, but the sight of the white bird on Shin’s recently vacated seat filled me with dismay. As though the chill, liquid shadow haunting me had passed onto Shin.
9
Batu Gajah
Friday, June 5th
On rainy days, the new doctor, William Acton, writes letters. They’re all to his fiancée, Iris, though he knows she hasn’t read a single one.
Dear Iris, I think of you every day. The rain peters out and a weak sun appears. William puts down his pen.
On days when it doesn’t rain, he goes for long walks early in the morning with a pair of binoculars, ostensibly for bird-watching. William hesitates before taking the familiar detour through the neighboring rubber estate. He’s been secretly seeing a local woman, the wife of a plantation laborer. Her name is Ambika, and she’s Tamil, with smooth brown skin and long curling hair that smells like coconut oil. There’s a raised scar—a keloid—on her left breast in the shape of a butterfly. How many times has he pressed his lips against it? He finds it beautiful, although Ambika covers it up.
William always pays her, yet he thinks she likes him. At least, her smile is warm, though she never refuses his money. He thinks their meetings are a secret, and perhaps they are to the European community and even her husband, who drinks too much.
At least one other person knows, however. One of William’s former appendectomy patients—a Chinese salesman. It was pure bad luck that he caught Ambika and William together a few weeks ago when his car broke down near the rubber estate, leading him to cut through for help. They sprang apart as soon as they became aware of the intruder and the salesman said nothing, but he’d given William a look. That was the worst part, the knowing in his eyes. For unlike other locals, he knows William’s name and exactly where he works. Talk is bad for William, especially after what happened in England. To make matters worse, Ambika recently asked for more money. When William hesitated, she gave him a sullen stare, an expression that she’d never shown him before.
Walking through the rubber estate, he admires the neat rows of slender trees, imported from South America. Each tree has thin cuttings on its trunk and a small cup into which the milky latex sap drips. Before dawn, the tappers make their rounds, emptying each cup into a bucket. Ambika is one of them, though it’s her husband who takes the buckets to the processing center afterwards, making this a convenient time to meet her. Checking his watch, William quickens his pace.
But the familiar lean-to, with its corrugated metal roof, is empty. It was the same when he stopped by a few days ago. Where has she gone? With no one to ask, he has little choice but to continue on to work at the Batu Gajah District Hospital, where the staff thinks he sometimes takes the long walk for exercise.
* * *
In his office, William is out of sorts. He pulls out the letter he started that morning.
Dear Iris,
I’ve inherited a new Chinese houseboy. His name is Ren and I’d put his age at ten if not for the assurance that he’s almost thirteen. He comes to me from poor MacFarlane. Hard to believe he’s gone—I still remember when we went to Korinchi to look for tiger-men, harimau jadian, as the natives call them.
Malaya, with its mix of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, is full of spirits: a looking-glass world governed by unsettling rules. The European werewolf is a man who, when the moon is full, turns his skin inside out and becomes a beast. He then leaves the village and goes into the forest to kill. But for the natives here, the weretiger is not a man, but a beast who, when he chooses, puts on a human skin and comes from the jungle into the village to prey on humans. It’s almost exactly the reverse situation, and in some ways more disturbing.
There’s a rumor that when we colonials came to this part of the world, the natives considered us beast-men as well, though nobody has said that to my face.
William scratches the bridge of his nose.
Of all the things MacFarlane has presented me with over the years, this houseboy has to be one of the stra
ngest. After all, a boy isn’t a pet or an animal. He seems grateful for the work and has tidied my study obsessively, opening every cupboard—
A knock on the door. Time to make the rounds at the wards and afterwards there’s an incisional hernia surgery.
* * *
Later that afternoon, William returns to find a surprise visitor waiting in his office. She sits on the edge of his desk swinging a sandaled foot. William is moderately acquainted with Lydia Thomson, the daughter of a rubber planter, although he has the feeling she’d like to change that.
The papers on his desk are disarranged, whether through her choice of seating, or because she’s been looking through them. William, tired from hours of standing in surgery, has difficulty adjusting his expression from irritated to pleasantly neutral.
“What can I do for you, Lydia?” he says, pulling out a chair for her.
They’re on first-name terms, as almost all the foreigners in this little town are. Batu Gajah—no, the whole of colonial Malaya—is full of Europeans who’ve fled half a world away for some personal reason or other. Many are lonely; Lydia is clearly one of them. Gossip says she’s here to find a husband. She isn’t too old, perhaps twenty-five or -six, though she’s entering the dangerous years. Still, she’s one of the local belles, volunteering often at the hospital
“You forgot your notes from the panel,” she says.
They’re both on a local committee to combat beriberi, that elusive disease that sickens Chinese laborers in the tin mines, swelling their limbs and causing heart congestion, though less prevalent, as Lydia pointed out, among Malay or Tamil workers. She’s been passionate about educating them, trying to get them to eat less white rice. “It’s lack of vitamin B that causes it,” she explained earnestly at their last meeting. William, gazing at the stoic faces of the locals, wondered whether Lydia understands how much white rice is a status symbol. Afterwards, an older Chinese man had nodded at him and said, “Your wife cares a lot.”
