by Yangsze Choo
“What if it rains?”
Shin shrugged. “Don’t forget, this was all your idea.”
His dark eyes held mine, and despite all my willpower, I flushed. It made me feel dizzy, being looked at like that. There was a light in Shin’s eyes, a queer flicker that made my stomach knot as though I was falling down a hole. His gaze traveled slowly down my neck, the hollow of my throat. The canary-yellow dress I was wearing clung flatteringly, because it was cut on the bias. A new method, Mrs. Tham had explained, accentuating the natural figure. Involuntarily, I crossed my arms over my breasts.
“Do you always dress like this for work?” he asked.
“No.” I started to explain that this was a spare frock that I didn’t often wear. Shin listened as I stumbled over my words, and all the while he watched me with that unreadable gaze, so direct that it felt more like being touched than looked at. “Do you not like it?”
“I like it. I think a lot of men would.” He turned his head away, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
“I’m sure the girls in Singapore dress better than this,” I said, trying my best to make a joke.
“None of them look like you.”
I was suddenly keenly aware of how close we were sitting, and how his legs and mine were scissored beneath the small round marble-topped table. If I wanted to, I could reach my hand out under the table and place it on his thigh. Slide it up slowly, feel the hard muscles contract. But instead, I put both my hands on the table and stared fixedly at them.
“Shin—” I said.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry I’ve put you through so much trouble. I wish I were a better sister to you.” An unbearable sadness filled me.
“Are you really sorry?” His expression was sharp and fierce.
“Yes, I am.”
“Don’t be. I haven’t been a good brother to you, either.”
He got up abruptly and paid the bill.
39
Batu Gajah
Saturday, June 27th
William has been busy. Busy in a way that he dislikes, making small talk and ferreting out information, but he does it anyway, pressed by the memory of Lydia’s hungry, needy insistence, her eyes shining with emotion. We need to talk, she’d said in the hospital ward. What is she planning? Better to prepare an ambush than be trapped, he thinks.
The first person on his list is Leslie. If anyone has gossip, it will be him.
“Lydia?” says Leslie, looking up from his slice of pineapple. They’re on tea break at the hospital canteen. “Are you finally interested in her? I’ve always thought the two of you were a good match.”
William hides a grimace. Apparently Lydia isn’t the only one with this impression. “Why is she out here?”
“Isn’t she looking for a husband?”
“I wouldn’t think she’d have trouble on that front.” Lydia is attractive and there’s a bigger pool of men in London than in a small town in Malaya. It’s not even like Delhi or Hong Kong, where she could meet the rising stars of the Civil Service.
Leslie rubs his nose. “Well, there’s some talk about why she left. A broken engagement—apparently he died.”
“What did he die of?”
“Drowning. A boating accident.”
William thinks that he ought to be more sympathetic to Lydia, but the memory of her sharp eagerness, the way she said that the two of them were alike, still unnerves him. There has to be more. He can feel it.
Next is the wife of one of the plantation managers, a friend of Lydia’s mother. It’s easy enough to run into her in town when she’s buying groceries on Saturday morning with her Chinese cook. William suspects her cook is cheating her; the bill sounds far too high.
“Poor Lydia’s had a hard time,” she says as she writes down figures in her housekeeping notebook. “Such a pity about her fiancé.”
“I might have known him,” says William, lying through his teeth. “Andrews, was that his name?”
“No, it was a Mr. Grafton. A gentle, scholarly man—her parents were so fond of him.”
“Did he drown?”
“Oh no. It was heart failure, on a train of all places. Apparently he was quite sickly. Such a disappointment to the family.” And there’s nothing else she has to add, despite William enduring another half hour of chitchat.
The last person William speaks to is Rawlings.
“Lydia’s been a bit nervy recently. Says she wants to talk to me, though I’ve no idea why.” He dangles the bait, but Rawlings seems distracted. Perhaps it’s the heat, rising like a wet, suffocating blanket around them.
“Well, she’s always had an interest in you. When she first came out, she asked if you were the same Acton as someone she knew.”
That would be the connection to Iris, William thinks. So she’s known who he is for a while. Has she been investigating him? The thought makes the back of his neck burn. How dare she. He bites down on the thought, says genially, “I had no idea. Perhaps we’ve friends in common.”
“Be kind to her,” says Rawlings. “She’s got a bit of a savior complex, but she means well. And she’s good at what she does. I’ve said before that the hospital ought to be paying her for all that volunteering.”
Yes, Lydia is trying hard, in her amateur way, to connect with him. The question is: how to parlay that into an advantage?
“Why is she in Malaya, anyway?”
“Ah, she was engaged to some rough fellow and came out to avoid him. My wife knows her people—they said it was a bad match.”
William barely recalls that Rawlings has a wife, since she’s back in England with the children. Still, none of the information that he’s gathered about Lydia adds up. There’s no doubt that she’s lost a fiancé, but the facts all contradict each other.
He wants to ask Rawlings more, but Rawlings is preoccupied.
“Do you trust the local staff?” he says abruptly.
William laughs. “I don’t trust anyone.” Except Ah Long in some respects. And, of course, Ren. The boy still isn’t recovering, but William mustn’t think about that right now.
He steers the conversation back to Lydia. “You said she had a difficult relationship?”
“Apparently he tried to assault her during an argument. Poor girl. That’s probably why she’s so highly strung.”
So Lydia has been a victim. Interesting how that term changes the way he views her. Why is she so interested in William? What does she know about him? He thinks rapidly: Lydia’s father runs the rubber estate that Ambika worked on. Yes, he can imagine that in Lydia’s busybody, do-gooding way she might have known Ambika, even counseled her about her alcoholic husband. But she also said she knew Iris. That’s worse. Ambika and Nandani are just two local women he’s been involved with, but the talk around Iris is something that’s hounded him out of England already.
He takes a breath. Has Lydia heard the tale he’s told of how he tried to save Iris? He’s deeply ashamed of it, but it’s too late to retract. Besides, most people seem to believe it. Even he does, most days. Except when those dreams come again, the dreams of Iris by the river, her skirts heavy and dripping with riverweed. Lank hair clinging to her bony white forehead.
What had that girl Louise said when he’d given her a lift? She’d said that she dreamed of a river: like a story that unfolded. William doesn’t want that. He never wants to see what comes next in his dreams of Iris.
40
Taiping
Saturday, June 27th
We took a trishaw to the Anglican graveyard at All Saints’ Church. It was a pretty ride through the low and pleasant town, with its white colonial buildings and shophouses, and great angsana trees in bloom, their golden petals drifting like showers. The thick grey clouds that had swallowed up the afternoon gave the grass on the padang in front of the barracks an eerily vivid green cast. On impulse, I’d stopped to buy a bunch of flowers, white and purple chrysanthemums. It was the second time this month that I’d bought flowe
rs for the dead.
At the graveyard, Shin paid the trishaw man, and I went in, looking for Dr. MacFarlane’s resting place. The church itself was a large wooden building with a steeply pitched roof and carved Gothic arches. Some of the graves were elaborate affairs with carved angels and stonework boxes, while others were simple crosses. They seemed to be placed in a somewhat haphazard order, and I looked about for a newer section.
Shin walked across the clipped grass. “Find it?”
“Not yet.”
There was no one around. Not a bird stirred in the enormous hushed silence, the grey sky a bowl, as though the whole world was waiting for the rain to come.
“Actually, Robert had some information—he said you’d showed him the lists,” said Shin, after a pause. “That’s why he was looking for you.”
“Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”
“I thought you’d be heartbroken over him, but you must be fine since you managed to eat so much.”
I rolled my eyes. “What did he find?”
“Apparently there was a Dr. John MacFarlane in the Taiping area. An old Malaya hand who’d been out here for twenty years; before that he was in Burma. He’d a loose connection to the Batu Gajah District Hospital—subbed in occasionally when needed. A bit of an eccentric with no wife or family. And as we saw from the pathology records, he donated one of his fingers about five years ago, after a trip upriver with Acton.”
“So what was he doing here in Taiping?”
“Not Taiping, but somewhere farther out. One of the neighboring villages.”
“Kamunting,” I said at once. “That was the name on the paper.”
“Out here, he lived a semiretired life with a private practice. Said he’d never go back to Scotland, which he’d fled forty years ago, leaving three assertive sisters behind. And that’s all.”
“What? There must be more.”
Ren had said my master, though the way he had pronounced it, with unthinking fidelity, sent a shiver down my spine. Who was his real master—was it William Acton or this Dr. MacFarlane whose directive he had followed without questioning?
“That’s all the hard information that Robert could find. He did say there was gossip, too, but it could have been slander, etcetera, etcetera. Very conscientious, our Robert.”
“Robert is a decent person.”
“So decent that he dropped you like a hot potato today,” he said bitterly.
I didn’t reply because I’d found it. A fresh grave with a thin fur of grass, the few words on the headstone sharply cut as though they had been chiseled yesterday:
John Alexander MacFarlane
b. July 15th, 1862 d. May 10th, 1931
Deliver us, O Lord.
I stiffened, calculating the dates. Yesterday, Ren had whispered there were only two days left; taking them into account, it added up to exactly forty-nine days since his death. My mother had told me that the soul wandered for those forty-nine days, restlessly weighing up its sins.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“Malaria, apparently. He’d had it on and off for years.”
I laid the bunch of flowers on the grave, since there was no vase or crevice. They looked naked and forlorn lying on the bare ground, the leggy stems stripped of leaves. There was something peculiar about the grave: a wooden stick had been driven into it at an angle. It was about six inches long and looked like part of a broom handle. I didn’t dare touch it—it looked so deliberate—but I’d never seen anything like this before.
“Pass me the spade,” I said. Shin shook his head warningly. “Why?” Then I saw the elderly Tamil lady, her thin hair knotted in a bun, wearing a deep brown sarong. She was making her way over to us and shouting something. “Does she want us to leave?”
We stepped back from the grave, but the woman kept advancing. It turned out that she was waving a welcome to us. Apparently there weren’t many visitors to the cemetery, and she was pleased that we’d come.
“Tinggal, ya, tinggal!” she said in Malay. “Stay, stay. Do you want water for the flowers?” She was the caretaker’s mother; her son was out at the moment. “Going to rain,” she said, looking at the sky. “How come you came so late? You friends? Patients?”
I didn’t know what to say, but Shin just smiled. “Did you know him?”
To my surprise, she gave a quick nod. “We know who all the orang puteh around here are, though he lived farther out on the Kamunting side. He treated my nephew for ringworm. Such a pity he died. He was younger than me.”
She shuffled off to get some water for the flowers. It seemed to distress her that they were just lying on the grave, so I carefully gathered them up again. Returning with a jam jar, she said, “So where are you two from?”
“Ipoh,” said Shin. “I’m a medical student. I’m sorry to hear that Dr. MacFarlane died.”
“Oh, one of his students. Well, he was sick for a while. In fact, people said he lost his mind. His housekeeper left, you know, and then it was just the old man and that Chinese boy.”
My ears pricked up. “Was his name Ren?”
“I don’t know. A small houseboy, about ten or eleven years old. He was a good boy. Took care of everything in the house when the housekeeper left. Can’t have been easy with the doctor like that. I saw him at the funeral. All shaken up and trying not to cry, poor thing. You know him?”
“Yes, he’s a relative,” I said slowly. Shin gave me a look.
“How was the old doctor at the end?” he asked.
The caretaker’s mother fixed her eyes on the grave. I’d noticed she kept glancing at the stick that was buried in it, and finally she made a sharp tch sound and pulled it out. Now I could see that it was quite a bit longer than I’d thought, part of a broom handle about four feet long, with the end sharpened like a stake.
She tossed it aside contemptuously. “Well, he was always odd, but no more than the other orang puteh. He’d buy any rare animal that a hunter brought in. A kind man, though. He treated many people for free. But towards the end, he got so strange that people didn’t want to go anymore.” The caretaker’s mother was clearly enjoying this conversation. “In fact, before he died, I heard that he went to the local police station and confessed to all sorts of crimes.”
“What sort of crimes?”
“Let’s see, I think it was cattle stealing, or killing livestock. Even dogs were taken in this area. Didn’t matter if they were chained close to the house or not. He also said he’d killed those two women who went missing. Both of them rubber tappers who worked at the nearby estate.”
Alarmed, I glanced at Shin; neither of us had expected anything like this.
“So did they arrest him?”
“They sent him home. There was something wrong with his head. He’d have these fits from time to time.” She looked exasperated. “All those things that happened, those were done by a tiger. A man-eating tiger. There were many sightings. Didn’t it come out in the newspapers?”
“That must have been terrible for you.” Shin put on his most sympathetic look, and the old lady couldn’t help simpering.
“They said it was an old male that could no longer hunt. Anyway, it’s gone now.”
“Did they get it?”
“No, although they set traps and even had a pawang come in to charm it. In the end, it just disappeared. Right around the time the old doctor died.”
My thoughts flew to the tiger in the garden, in Batu Gajah last weekend. The man-killer that they said had already taken an estate worker a few weeks ago. Unreasonably, I also recalled the salesman’s death from a broken neck and wondered if something had chased him that dark night until he fell into a ditch. But this was wild speculation. A distance of sixty miles or more separated Batu Gajah from Taiping. Could a tiger range so far?
“What’s that stick for?” asked Shin, pointing at the broom handle that she’d pulled out of the grave.
The caretaker’s mother looked embarrassed. “That’s just stupidity. From time
to time it happens. Local people, you know. My son always pulls it out. He says it’s disrespectful to the dead.”
“But why do they do it?”
“Two or three days after the old doctor died, someone or something tried to dig him up. My son found a hole near the grave, like a child or an animal had been working all night. It didn’t get all the way down—we bury them deep. He sat up and kept watch for a few nights, but it never happened again. When the locals heard about it, they said the old man wanted to get out of his grave. Such rubbish, because if you’d seen the hole, it was clearly something trying to get in, not out! But from time to time, people put stakes in his grave to make sure he doesn’t come out. I’m not worried myself; I’m Church of England,” she said proudly.
The light was fading, the grey sky pressed down with almost palpable weight. I couldn’t see how we could possibly bury the finger in the grave with the caretaker’s mother hovering around like this. Would we have to come back at night? The thought filled me with unease.
Shin said, “Is there a public restroom?”
“The vestry’s still open, though I was just about to close it up.”
“Go ahead,” I said quickly. “I’d like to read the inscriptions.”
As soon as they were out of sight, I was on my knees, digging the loose earth up with the spade. Thank goodness Shin had thought to buy one! The earth on the grave was red clay from the tin ore that had made this region’s name. I chose the spot where she’d removed the stake from, since the soil was already disturbed there. Hurry! Pulse racing, I hastily scooped the earth aside, all the while keeping an eye out for the old lady’s return. It had to be deep enough that it wouldn’t be easily found, especially if people kept poking sticks into the grave.
When I’d dug about an arm’s depth in, I took out the glass bottle. It seemed colder and heavier than before. Today was the forty-eighth day since Dr. MacFarlane’s death. Had I made it in time for whatever Ren had wanted? A shadow moved at the corner of my eye. The branch of a tree, whipping in the breeze, but it spurred me into action. Lifting the finger that I’d taken from the salesman’s pocket, I dropped it deep into the hole.
