by Yangsze Choo
“Of course.” William’s expression softens. “You may take three days off if you like. Check with Ah Long about the dates—there’ll be a dinner party here. You’d better wait until afterwards. Do you need train fare?”
Ren looks confused at this offer. William sighs. “I mean, I’ll pay for your trip. Put some flowers on poor MacFarlane’s grave for me.”
* * *
Dismissed, Ren walks back to the kitchen. Since the gruesome discovery of the body, Ren has frantically stepped up his search for the finger. He has now explored every room and opened every drawer in the house. Sometimes he thinks that Ah Long suspects him, as more than once, the cook surprised him with his silent approach. He’s like an old, grizzled cat, a resemblance even more pronounced when Ah Long sits on the kitchen steps, slitting his eyes against the sun. Still, Ah Long hasn’t said anything.
Ren has the uneasy feeling that the finger isn’t in this house. Has never been, perhaps. There’s no way to explain it, just a tingling twitch of cat whiskers. When Yi was alive, he often felt this sixth sense. People said it was magic, but Ren knows it’s because they were a matched pair. Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples. As children, Ren and Yi were perfect doubles of one another. Seeing them, people would break into smiles of delight. Twins, and boys—how fortunate! But all this came to an end when Yi died. If a chopstick breaks, the other is discarded. After all, half of a broken pair is one: the unlucky number of loneliness.
Dr. MacFarlane once explained radio signals to him, saying they needed both a transmitter and a receiver to work. Ren immediately understood what he meant. He and Yi always knew where the other was, so much so that the matron at the orphanage would send one boy on an errand and keep the other with her. At any delay, she’d ask the remaining twin how far away his brother was. It was a useful skill, though no more marvelous than Pak Idris, the blind Malay fisherman by the Perak River who caught fish by hearing them underwater.
“What is it like?” Ren had asked.
“Like pebbles dropping,” he’d said. “Like a mirror, in which the fish are reflected.”
A mirror full of fish. Over the years, Ren has often thought about that phrase. What were the fish like to Pak Idris, who couldn’t see them? Were they like stars, moving in a dark firmament, or a field of flowers blowing in the wind? With Yi’s death, Ren has lost his beacon in this world. He no longer has a good sense for distances, nor does he know what’s happening in a different location. Instead, his ability has dwindled so that he can only sense imminent events, like the crack of a branch that collapses just as Ren leaps out of the way. There have been many near accidents. Too many, perhaps.
Sometimes Ren thinks that he hasn’t lost his long-range ability at all. The signal is faint simply because Yi is so very far away. But where that is, he can’t say. He’s crossed over to another country, the land of the dead. In Ren’s search for the missing finger, his invisible cat whiskers have twitched only once in this house—at the tiger-skin rug in the study. But that’s not surprising, given the old doctor’s obsession with tigers and which, as Ren feared, William seems to share to some extent. Hurrying down the hallway, it occurs to Ren that there’s one more place to search: the Batu Gajah District Hospital. The place where William has an office.
Time is running out: there are only twenty days left before Dr. MacFarlane’s forty-nine days of the soul are over. If by then he can’t find the finger, he’ll have failed. How will his old master rest? Ren remembers Dr. MacFarlane’s last days, the shivering fevers. And then the dreams, the waking nightmares in which the old man would cry for mercy, or crawl slavering on all fours. If Auntie Kwan had still been with them, she would have taken charge, but in the end there was only Ren.
A gust of wind shivers through the house, banging all the doors simultaneously. To Ren, peering out of the window at the top of the stairs, the trees are a waving green ocean surrounding the bungalow. It’s a ship in a storm, and Ren is the cabin boy peeking out of a porthole. Clutching the windowsill like a life buoy, Ren wonders what secrets lurk in the jungle surrounding them, and if his old master is in fact doomed to roam this vast green expanse forever, trapped in the form of a tiger.
14
Ipoh/Batu Gajah
Saturday, June 13th
A shrill whistle sounded. Up and down the track, doors began closing as steam billowed over the platform. It was so exciting that I glanced at Shin, laughing. He raised his eyebrows and grinned back. There was a jerk, then a bigger jolt as the train pulled slowly out of Ipoh Station. The platform slid away. People waved at departing passengers and I couldn’t resist waving back.
Shin rolled his eyes. “You don’t even know them.”
“Why not?” I said defensively. “The children like it.”
I remembered my dream of the little boy at the train station. That had seemed so real, though it had been nowhere near as grand as Ipoh’s palatial white railway station, now rapidly receding behind us.
The trip to Batu Gajah was fifteen miles or about twenty-five minutes, Shin told me. Sometimes though there were wild elephants on the track, or seladang, the huge jungle oxen said to stand six feet at the shoulder. Cool air rushed in from the open window, and I closed my eyes blissfully.
“That’s a yes, then?”
Shin’s glance burned through my lashes, making me feel self-conscious. Had he noticed the makeup I’d applied to hide my black eye? Well, it didn’t matter if my hair looked like a bird’s nest. It was only Shin.
“Yes to what?”
“To cleaning out the pathology storeroom this weekend.”
I opened my eyes. “As long as I get paid, too. But what makes you think we’ll find anything?”
“That finger definitely came from the hospital,” said Shin, “If you unscrew the bottle cap, it has the same mark as the other specimens in the hospital pathology lab. We should look through the records and see if there’s anything about amputated fingers.”
“Where’s the finger?”
In answer, he patted his pocket. The gesture reminded me of the salesman, and my spirits sank. That shadow again, staining the bright day. Why was Shin so enthusiastic about tracking down its owner, anyway? Perhaps we could just quietly replace the finger in the hospital. It occurred to me that I should also do some research for myself—tour the hospital, talk to the staff. I didn’t want to admit it to Shin, but if I couldn’t go to medical school, maybe I could become a nurse or a clerk. Anything was better than my current dismal prospects.
“You’re plotting something, aren’t you?” Shin said with a snort. “I can tell—you’re so predictable.”
“Nobody else says that,” I said crossly, thinking of the starry-eyed schoolboys and old men who lined up to dance with me. Nirman Singh had claimed that I was “shrouded in fateful mystery,” though I was fairly certain he was talking about the real Louise Brooks and not me—and also that he was all of fifteen years old and shouldn’t be spending his pocket money at a dance hall.
“Whom have you been keeping company with?”
I’d forgotten how sharp Shin was; it was the flip side of being on good terms with him again.
“No one.”
Shin was watching me with a thoughtful expression. “Do you like boarding at Mrs. Tham’s?”
“Well, you’ve seen what she’s like,” I said. “But it’s not that bad.”
“How much does she pay you?”
“She doesn’t pay me anything—I have to pay her. For my apprenticeship, you know.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “That’s ridiculous. You’re working there for free.”
“Actually she’s supposed to pay me a little for helping out, but there’s also my room and board and the teaching fees, so it’s all a wash.”
“And you’re happy with it?”
I debated telling him that of course I wasn�
��t happy. Two years ago I’d have said so with no reservations, but now the thought rolled around the tip of my tongue, like a glass marble that would fall out and shatter on the ground. Why ruin the first nice day we’d had in a long time? So I said nothing.
* * *
The railway station at Batu Gajah was modest: a simple rectangle with a thatched attap roof and a few wooden benches that faced the tracks on both sides. I gazed at it with uneasy déjà vu. Surely, I’d been sitting on one of these benches just last night in my dream. There was no river in sight, though according to the elderly Malay gentleman across the aisle, the railway line actually did cross the Kinta River.
“But you won’t see it until you pass this station.” He himself was going south to Lumut.
“We’re getting off here,” I said regretfully.
“Goodbye,” said the old man. And then to Shin, “Your wife is beautiful. Very modern and stylish.”
“We’re siblings!” I said hastily.
Shin was quiet as we got off the train. It was the second time that someone had mistaken us, and I was afraid he’d found it irritating.
“Of course I’m annoyed,” he said. “Who wants to be related to you?”
Relieved, I burst out laughing. Shin rolled his eyes. “You’re supposed to get offended, like other girls. Not snort like that.”
I fell silent. One of the reasons I was popular at the May Flower was because I wasn’t afraid of joking around with the customers, but was that how decent young women behaved? Ming’s fiancée had been so soft-spoken, so genteel—the sort of girl who wouldn’t be caught making stupid jokes by the roadside.
The walk to the Batu Gajah District Hospital was uphill to the European quarter of Changkat. Oleander shrubs with their pink and white fluffy blooms and pointed oval leaves were everywhere, as were fragrant frangipani trees, the graveyard flower of the Malays. The English were mad about gardening—we all knew that from our history books—and had carried their passion to every corner of the Empire.
By the time we arrived at the hospital, it was almost eleven o’clock in the morning and quite hot. The hospital was a series of tropical white and black Tudor-style wooden buildings connected by shady verandas and clipped grass lawns. Glancing up, I noticed that the terra-cotta tiles on the roofed walkways had come all the way from France and were stamped underneath with the name of their maker: SACCOMAN FRÈRES, ST. HENRI MARSEILLE.
Shin led me past the administrative offices to the back of one of the outbuildings. Taking out a key, he unlocked a door. “Here we go. We’ll have to get this into some sort of order.”
It was a large room, airy and high-ceilinged. Tall windows let in the light from behind stacks of boxes and filing cabinets. Specimen jars were jammed next to cartons overflowing with papers, while five-gallon glass carboys stood on the floor amid a litter of old medical journals. Staring at this mountain, I was no longer surprised that Dr. Rawlings, whoever he was, had suggested that Shin commandeer some extra help.
“Are we supposed to do all of this today?”
“Well, it’s a good chance to check if they have any missing fingers,” said Shin. “They wanted it moved, and I’ve done most of that. We just need to organize the specimens. Want to have lunch first?”
I glanced at the jars of gruesome-looking specimens. Bits of entrails floated in murky baths, together with bottles of rattling vertebrae.
“No,” I said. “Let’s start now.”
What was the purpose of this collection anyway? Shin said he’d no idea. Despite doing all the heavy lifting, he was in a good mood. I could tell from the way he whistled in the corridor as he trundled boxes over. We got along best when there was a job to be done, just as we’d done the housework swiftly and efficiently when we were younger. If we were both hired as janitors, I thought, there would be no disagreements between us.
* * *
My mother was an exemplary housewife; on this, my stepfather could never fault her. She was obsessively clean, taking the wooden bedframes outside to pour boiling water over every cranny, so that we never had bedbugs.
When we first moved to the shophouse, she was reluctant to ask Shin to do housework. He was a boy after all, though he was willing enough. She poured out her affection on us, softhearted to the point of foolishness even. Stray dogs and beggars made a beeline for her, and more than once she gave away our dinner and had to beg us not to tell my stepfather. I’d hold out, bargaining for something better, but Shin always capitulated. I could read him easily; the quick nod, the hopeful expression. He was hungry for affection.
I think my mother would have liked more children. Certainly, my stepfather was disappointed in that. Several times the local midwife was called in because my mother had miscarried. But no one would ever tell me exactly what had happened or why.
The matchmaker had made such a fuss about how Shin and I were destined to be siblings, how we were practically twins since we were born on the same day and were named after two of the five Confucian Virtues, that I felt sure that the other three children—Ren, Yi, and Li to give them their rightful names—must be waiting impatiently to be born. I pictured them jostling each other in the dark, waiting to be let out into the world. But they never came. And each bloody episode increased my fear that they would steal my mother away with them.
I’d told Shin about this when we were talking quietly one night. He was lying on the floor in his room and I was sitting in the narrow corridor, the open doorway between us. This was just in case my stepfather should suddenly emerge from his room. We must have been about thirteen at the time, and he’d become increasingly strict. I could no longer set foot in Shin’s room, and he, of course, was never allowed in mine.
The moon was very bright that night, a sharp slice of white. It was too hot to be in bed and the only relief was the cool wooden floor planks.
“Do you think they’ll have more children?” I asked.
“No. It’s harder when you get older.” From time to time, Shin would display a kind of calm rationality that I envied.
“But I’m afraid.”
Shin rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. “Of what?”
I told him my fear of losing my mother and how I couldn’t help thinking there should be three more of us, like the matchmaker had said.
He was quiet for a while. “That’s rubbish.”
“Why?” I said, stung. “Is it any more rubbish than what you said about the mo and dream-eaters?”
Immediately, I was sorry for my words, since I knew how Shin treasured that scrap of paper from his own mother. But he only said, “I haven’t had bad dreams in a long time. I don’t think I dream at all in fact. Besides, all this talk about three more siblings is stupid. Why should there be any more?”
“Because there are only two of us right now.”
Shin sat up abruptly. “Don’t count me in. I’m not really your brother, you know.”
Climbing into his bed, he turned his back on me. Rejected, I retreated to my own room. It worried me sometimes that perhaps he was just putting up with me. That he’d wanted a different kind of sister, not someone who argued with him all the time and outscored him on tests. Whenever I felt bad, I thought about numbers. In Cantonese, two was a good number because it made a pair. Three was also good because it was a homophone for sang, or life. Four, of course, was bad because it sounded like death. Five was good again because it made a complete set, not just of the Confucian Virtues, but also for the elements of wood, fire, water, metal, and earth. In any case, it didn’t matter how prickly Shin was. Whether he liked it or not, he was still the only brother I had.
* * *
The door of the pathology storeroom opened abruptly. Thinking it was Shin back with another load, I said without turning round, “Don’t put it there. Put it on the other side.”
Silence. An odd tingling alerted me that something was wrong. I turned to see a stranger in the doorway. A foreigner. Tall and raw-boned, he wore glasses. The rest—pale
face, pale hair, pale arms burned unevenly by the sun—looked like all the other Europeans to me.
“I’m looking for Dr. Rawlings.”
Shin had said that Rawlings was the resident pathologist, but I’d no idea whether he was here on a quiet Saturday or not. The man gave me a sharp look. His colorless eyes pierced like needles behind the glass lenses. I feared they would soon see that I wasn’t hospital staff at all.
“If he comes back, please tell him that I came by. My name’s William Acton.”
15
Batu Gajah
Saturday, June 13th
Ren gets his chance to look for the finger at Saturday lunchtime, when William announces that he’s going into town and will drop by the hospital. Ah Long immediately asks if he will pick up supplies: tinned goods, washing powder, and brown shoe polish.
Glancing at Ren, who’s holding the car door open, William says, “Hop in. You can take a list to the store, can’t you?”
Ren’s eyes widen at this unexpected opportunity. William shouts over his shoulder at Ah Long. “I’m taking the boy. Anything else you need?”
There’s a brief scramble as lists are made. Ah Long presses a cent into Ren’s hand. “Buy something for yourself,” he says gruffly. “Sometimes he drinks at the Club. If it gets late, stay with the car. He’ll come home by morning one way or the other.” His wiry figure, stiffly disapproving, waits on the gravel driveway.
“Selamat jalan,” he says to William. Good travels.
Harun, the Malay driver, is a plump, comfortable-looking man with three children of his own, and he smiles as Ren climbs excitedly into the front passenger seat, clutching a rattan market basket lined with old newspaper in case of spills. William sits in the back. Ren keeps quiet though he’d love to ask Harun about the car. There’s an intimidating array of switches and dials on the Austin’s dashboard, and Ren watches carefully as Harun changes gears.
