by Yangsze Choo
I waved it under Shin’s nose. “This is it—the only finger so far that isn’t preserved in fluid!”
He read aloud as I peered over his shoulder. “Apparently this was a one-off, do-it-yourself preservation. Someone, a fellow doctor named—can’t quite read this—MacFarlane or MacGarland, who had a finger amputated on a jungle trip. Blood poisoning after an animal bite. I hope he didn’t do it himself.”
“No, it says W. Acton. William Acton—that surgeon who was just here. He told me he’d donated his friend’s finger.” The coincidence unsettled me, like a dark undertow.
“That’s a nice friendship,” said Shin drily.
I ignored him. “Packed in salt, which was probably all they had on them at the time. I wonder what they were doing.”
Discovering an actual record of the finger was a relief, I told myself. It had been removed by a proper doctor for medical reasons. The rest of it, the salesman’s obsession with luck, was just superstition.
“And here it is.” Shin took the now-familiar glass bottle out of his pocket and set it next to the other specimens we had already checked off.
“Put it behind, on the upper shelf,” I said with a shudder.
The sun sank lower, the light so golden that you could almost take a bite out of it, like the layered butter cake, kuih lapis, a cousin from Batavia in Dutch Indonesia had once brought to our house. Each moist slice had smelled like all the spices of the East Indies. The storeroom was almost done, the wooden racks wiped down and filled with rows of specimens. All the files had been put into filing cabinets and relabeled. Looking at the list of cross-tagged specimens, I felt a warm glow of achievement.
“Do you think Dr. Rawlings will pay extra for such a good job?” I asked Shin.
He was reading another file with a frown. “Doubt it. He agreed to one day’s overtime. That includes you, by the way.”
“We’ll split then?”
“Yes.” Shin said suddenly, “Are you having money problems?”
“There’s something I want to buy.” Changing the subject, I said, “What are you doing with your money?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. An opaque, don’t-ask-me-questions look. “Saving up.”
Not for the first time, I wondered why Shin was working so hard. He had a scholarship, and my stepfather had also given him a generous living stipend. Whatever truce they’d come to after that terrible night when Shin’s arm was broken, it had worked itself out into an agreement that I wasn’t privy to. My stepfather was a hard man but he kept his word.
But Shin had continued working during the university term. His sparse correspondence mentioned a part-time job, and last summer and Christmas, work had kept him from coming home. What was he doing with all that money? At the May Flower, you could easily run up a tab. It wasn’t just the dancing of course. Ordering drinks or asking girls privately for call-outs, which meant buying them dinners and who knew what else, could easily spiral out of hand. I’d seen it happen and hoped Shin wasn’t doing that for some girl down in Singapore. Should I say anything to him?
No, it wasn’t my business anyway.
17
Batu Gajah
Saturday, June 13th
After leaving the hospital, William takes Ren to a café downtown where foreigners like to congregate. Ren, hesitating over the choices, whispers that he’d like a ham sandwich, please. Ham is a Western delicacy, brought in tins from Cold Storage, but William seems to think nothing of it.
Ren takes his sandwich outside where Harun, the driver, is waiting patiently by the car, an Austin that William purchased from his predecessor, Dr. Merton. The same physician who’d passed along the tenancy of the white bungalow, Ah Long, and Harun. Harun takes pride in its gleaming bonnet, the gentle curves of its chassis. It’s not large but it suits a bachelor like William, who drives himself on weekends.
“The other doctor never drove,” Harun said, explaining that Europeans come and go. Some leave after two years while others become lifers, so comfortable in their lush tropical lifestyle with servants that they can no longer cope with returning to England.
Ah Long told Ren that Dr. Merton hadn’t been a real doctor anyway. He spent his time dissecting diseased organs and cutting up dead bodies: neither of which Ah Long approved of. All parts of the body should rest together, he’d muttered. None of this scattering here and there. That only led to trouble, like the hungry ghosts whose remains were dispersed among strangers. Bones should be claimed by some filial son, not left in that dreadful room at the hospital filled with body parts in jars, all collected by Dr. Merton.
That must be the pathology storeroom, Ren thinks urgently. The one that made his invisible cat whiskers flicker. He’s sure that’s where the finger is. But who was the shadowy figure in the door this morning? Perhaps it was Dr. Rawlings, the pathologist who replaced Dr. Merton.
Dr. Rawlings is a family man, which is why he didn’t take over Dr. Merton’s bachelor quarters. Instead, he’d requested a larger bungalow for his wife and children. But they didn’t stay. One year—a year of monsoons and biting heat and scorpions found in shoes—was enough for them and they went back to England. Ah Long said that many of the foreigners here are a bit peculiar. Why else would they live like this in exile, with their families half a world away, he said darkly.
“Even the ladies?” asked Ren.
“Of course!” said Ah Long with a snort. “Like that daughter of the Thomsons. Lydia, they call her. There was a big scandal about her in England.” What it was exactly, Ah Long wouldn’t say. Now, Ren thinks about Miss Lydia helping out at the hospital earlier, and wonders what she’s run away from.
* * *
Ren watches a knot of boys playing SEPAK TAKRAW with a woven rattan ball. The ball flies out, almost striking the car. Ren grabs it in time. The boys come running, glancing guiltily at the gleaming car and Ren’s white houseboy’s uniform.
“Here you go.” He tosses it back. They’re younger than him, about eight or nine, the same age as Yi was when he died. One of them offers him a peppermint, dug from the depths of his pocket. It has bits of fluff on it, but Ren accepts it with grave ceremony.
“Do you work for the gwai lo?” the boy asks in Cantonese.
“My master’s a doctor.” Ren rubs the peppermint surreptitiously on his sleeve before popping it into his mouth. It tastes cold and furry.
“You work at the hospital?” Ren shakes his head, but the boy continues. “Have you seen the ghost there?”
“Lots of people have died in that hospital,” says another boy.
“I’ve never seen a ghost.” Except Yi, thinks Ren, but only in dreams so it doesn’t count.
“Did you hear that a woman was killed by a tiger just last week?”
“But that wasn’t in the hospital,” says the other boy. “That was in a rubber estate.”
“It’s a ghost tiger, a white one you know?”
“No, it’s a weretiger—it turns into an old man.”
Ren’s stomach clenches in alarm; this account of an old man who turns into a tiger is all his fears come true. “Who said it turns into an old man?”
The smallest boy pipes up, “Someone saw an old man walking in the rubber estate in the dark. But when they went to look, there were only tiger prints.”
Ren can’t help asking, “Did he have a missing finger?”
The boys look at each other. Ren can see their minds busily working, no doubt adding that detail to the story.
Unbidden, a memory wells up in Ren. The crooked shadows of a plantation at dusk, the figure of an old man, dressed in white. It’s too far to see his face but he walks with that familiar stiff gait. The gloom deepens, the trees closing in like silent figures, the only light the whiteness of the old man’s clothes. Ren runs after his master, calling Dr. MacFarlane to come back to the house. It’s one of his master’s fits, when he shivers with cold, sweats feverishly, and doesn’t seem right in his mind.
It’s so dark that Ren can b
arely see his own feet. There’s the familiar suffocating panic, the fear that the old doctor will fall down or get lost or turn to show him a snarling, unrecognizable face, and Ren will be all alone again in the dark.
Now Ren shivers despite the blazing sun. The boys are just repeating a local story, he tells himself. Still, how long has it been since Dr. MacFarlane died? He counts anxiously. There are now only fifteen days left. He must get the finger back this evening. Then he’ll bury it in Dr. MacFarlane’s grave and make things right.
The little boys drift away. After buying the items on Ah Long’s shopping list, Ren and Harun wait in the shade. To pass the time, Ren learns to roll cigarettes, though the thin paper is fiddly and the tobacco falls out. Harun is patient, not complaining when Ren makes ugly, stumpy cigarettes that look like carrots, rolling and rerolling the same piece of paper so as not to waste.
“You mustn’t smoke though,” says Harun, taking it away. “How old are you again?”
Ren swallows. “Thirteen.”
Harun studies him carefully. “I started working when I was twelve years old. There were nine children in our family and I was the oldest. It’s not easy.”
Ren keeps his head down. First he must complete his task. “Do you think the tiger killed the woman in the rubber estate?”
Harun rubs his chin. “No matter what the magistrate says, it’s strange. Tigers become man-eaters when they’re old or sick and can’t hunt, but who ever heard of a tiger that stopped partway and refused to eat its kill? There must have been something wrong with the body.”
“Do you think a man can become a tiger?” It’s the same question that Ren has asked Ah Long and William in turn.
Harun takes a long drag on his cigarette. The end of it glows bright red. “My grandmother told me about a tiger village, near Gunung Ledang in Malacca. The posts of the houses are made of jelatang, the stinging tree nettle, the walls of men’s skin, the rafters of bones, and the roofs are thatched with human hair. That’s where the weretigers live, the harimau jadian who change their shapes. Some people say that they’re beasts possessed by the souls of dead people.”
Ren doesn’t like this story. It’s too much like the ramblings of Dr. MacFarlane in his last days, when the old man would rouse himself from his fits, giving fragmented accounts of where he’d been and what he’d done.
“I went far this time,” he said to Ren once, his pale eyes wandering. “I killed a tapir six miles away.”
“Yes,” Ren said soothingly. “Yes, I know.”
“I’m afraid,” he muttered, clutching Ren’s small square hand. “One of these days, I won’t return to my body.”
Ren doesn’t like to remember Dr. MacFarlane like that, all rheumy-eyed and shaking, his pink scalp visible through the strands of grey hair. He wants to remember him cradling a sick baby, taking apart a wireless to explain how the batteries work. It was malarial fever, that was all. Soon Dr. MacFarlane would recover, take large doses of quinine, and all would be back to normal. But two days later, a local hunter stopped by to show off the tufted ears and tail of a tapir. He said it was a tiger’s kill, partly eaten, that he’d found six miles away and Ren had stiffened at the news, glancing at Dr. MacFarlane, who was silently writing in his notebook.
“Is that so?” the old man had said, his eyes placid and hooded. But Ren, remembering his remarks, had wondered.
Now, Ren regards Harun with a worried expression. “Is that a real story?” he asks, “About the tigers with human souls?”
Harun exhales; a thin stream of smoke drifts out of his nostrils. “My grandmother would never say if it was true or not. She used it to frighten us into going to bed.” He stubs the cigarette out. “I think Tuan will go to the Club next for dinner. If you want to go home, I’ll give you a lift. Better not walk until after the hunt.”
“Will there be a tiger hunt?”
“Tonight. There’s a goat tied up in the rubber plantation and a local hunter, Pak Ibrahim, will lie in wait for it with Tuan Price and Tuan Reynolds. The others will sit up late at the Club, waiting for news.”
Spotting William’s lanky figure, they both scramble to attention. He’s deep in conversation with another foreigner, a man with a toothbrush mustache. Ren listens covertly as they mention tigers.
“Apparently Rawlings had a bee up his bonnet at the inquest. Wanted to make it a suspicious death,” says the man.
“Yes, I heard,” William says. “The magistrate overruled him.”
“What else could it have been except a tiger? Farrell hasn’t any patience for tall tales.”
Ren’s heart sinks. They’ve decided it was a tiger after all.
Harun opens the car door as William folds his legs into the back of the Austin, and just as Harun predicted, tells him to drive to the Kinta Club at the top of the hill in Changkat.
“Harun can send you back after he’s dropped me at the Club,” he says to Ren as an afterthought. “Or do you want to stay to hear if they catch a tiger tonight?”
Ren explains that he forgot something at the hospital, but yes, he’d like to wait. In the mirror, he sees William and Harun exchange an amused glance. It’s the indulgent look that grown-ups give to children’s whims, and it makes Ren feel hot and embarrassed, though he tells himself he has a task to complete.
* * *
Ren finds himself back at the Batu Gajah District Hospital at that odd hour when late afternoon is turning into evening. The sky beyond the covered walkway is powdery pink, the sun burning low between spectacular clouds that float like cream cakes. But Ren has no time to admire them; the fizzing tingle he sensed this morning at the hospital is still there, running like a live wire. Who or what can be sending him a signal, if it isn’t Yi?
First, he must check the pathology storeroom. Near the outbuilding, now striped with the long shadows of trees, he hesitates. The door that was ajar this morning is closed. Ren tries the handle softly; it gives way under his hand.
Inside is a large, high-ceilinged space with windows that open onto the other side of the building. From William’s offhand remark about storerooms and moving boxes, Ren imagined a warehouse piled with relics, but this room is very orderly. Late shafts of sun slant in, although there’s a growing dimness in the corners, as though tiny unseen creatures are gathering in the shadows.
Ignoring the faint buzzing in his ears, Ren steps farther in. This is the room he imagined, when the task of finding Dr. MacFarlane’s missing finger fell upon him. This room, with its rows and rows of specimens in every conceivable kind of glass container. Next to the tall windows is an empty box and a step stool, as though someone has just left it. The impression is so strong that Ren can almost see a slim figure unpacking the last box. No, the way the stool is positioned makes him think that it was used to place something high up on a shelf.
The finger is definitely here; he only has to close his eyes to feel the tingle. High on that shelf. He pushes the stool closer and climbs up. Past the bigger containers with their hideous, floating contents, past a jar with a two-headed rat in it. It’s hard to feel with his cat sense now, there’s too much static. He never imagined there’d be so many specimens. Straining precariously on tiptoe, Ren’s eyes are barely level with the shelf he wants.
He moves a few of the bottles, peering behind them. The light is fading fast now, lavender and grey. Ren has the feeling that he isn’t alone. “Yi,” he says aloud. The sound of his voice hangs in the air and there’s an expectant hush, as though fine pale grains of silence are trickling through a giant hourglass.
Fighting anxiety, Ren patiently shifts the glass specimen jars to peer behind them. They clink softly; it’s on this shelf, or maybe the next one. He can’t quite tell. He slides his hand in and scrabbles around. His cat whiskers twitch hopefully. Pulling his fist out, Ren opens it to find a glass vial. Inside is a finger, dried to a blackish color like a twig.
Heart pounding with mingled relief and horror, Ren climbs down and examines his prize. It’s almost ex
actly the way that Dr. MacFarlane described. “Preserved in salt,” he’d said. “It will likely be the only one of its kind—the other specimens should be in alcohol or formaldehyde.”
Ren stuffs it in his pocket. It’s the first act of theft he’s ever committed and he mumbles a guilty apology under his breath, though he’s not sure whether it’s to God, or Yi, or Dr. MacFarlane for taking so long to find the finger.
The shadows are darker now, heavy as though a veil has dropped on the room. The stolen finger is a dead weight in his pocket. He’s outstayed his welcome. Furtively, Ren shuts the door behind him, skin prickling, the short hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Once outside, he walks, then trots, and finally, when no one stops him, breaks into a run all the way back, down the covered walkways and long corridors, as though he’s fleeing for his life.
18
Batu Gajah District Hospital
Saturday, June 13th
“So, out of all the specimens in that room, only the fingers are missing,” I said.
After returning the bucket and cleaning rags borrowed from the janitor’s closet, Shin and I cut back between some angsana trees with their falling gold petals.
Shin frowned. “How many fingers were on the original list?”
“Fourteen.”
I didn’t want to say it was a bad number. Shin had no patience for things like that, but I could see from the brief twitch of his jaw that it had, of course, registered. For Cantonese speakers, thirteen was a good number. Sup sam sounded a lot like the words sut sang, which meant “always survive.” Fourteen, on the other hand, was terrible because it sounded like “certain death.”
“I should inform Dr. Rawlings,” said Shin. “It’s bizarre to have so many missing fingers.”
An orderly in a white uniform emerged from a distant building, carrying a tiffin container. Turning, he shielded his face against the low-setting sun. Something familiar about his gait and angular figure made my throat constrict. Nearer and nearer the white figure came. When he was about forty feet away, he lifted the hand that was shielding his face to squint at us. My heart sank as I recognized the slant-jawed man from the dance hall last night: Mr. Y. K. Wong himself.
