Second Sister

by Chan Ho-Kei

  “Should we go somewhere else?” asked Talya. She was flushed, her footsteps unsteady. Although she spoke without slurring, it was clear she was far gone. After the margarita, she’d had a Long Island iced tea and a negroni.

  Well, she was serving herself up on a plate. Talya might not be his type, but he needed to reclaim some ground. He would take Mr. Szeto’s suggestion and “make do” with her.

  “I have alcohol at home. Why don’t we carry on there?” he said.

  “Fine, where’s your car?”

  “I … didn’t drive.”

  “Oh.” Talya frowned for a second, then smiled again. “It’s okay, we’ll get a cab. Taxi!”

  She waved wildly even though there wasn’t a single cab on the road. Chung-Nam started to wonder if she was even drunker than he’d thought.

  “Hey, Charles, what kind of car do you drive?”

  “I told you, I don’t drive.”

  “I know you didn’t drive today. I’m asking about normally.”

  “I don’t own a car.”

  “No car?” Her face was a picture of shock. “Your American colleague Wade has a fancy sports car. You must have a Porsche or two?”

  “American colleague? We don’t work for the same firm. We’re more like—business partners.” Chung-Nam had thought of lying, but he was in a bad mood, and allowed the alcohol to tell the truth.

  “You’re not the tech director of a multinational firm?”

  Now he understood. When Szeto Wai called him a “colleague,” Talya must have assumed that meant he was working in the Hong Kong branch of an American company.

  “No, it’s a Hong Kong firm.”

  “Oh my god, I thought you were just being modest when you called it a small firm.” She looked disbelieving. She raised her voice. “How many people work there? How many of them work under you?”

  “Six.”

  “You only have six subordinates!” she shrieked. “You’re just a department manager?”

  “No. There are six people in the whole company. Only one of them works under me.”

  Talya was looking at him as if he were a con man.

  “Bastard! Good thing I wasn’t born yesterday, or you’d have tricked me into bed,” Talya screeched, pointing at him, ignoring the stares of passersby.

  “Fucking whore, I’m not interested in a dried-out hag like you.” If she was going to scream at him in public, he would give as good as he got.

  “Beggar. Piss on the ground and have a good look at your reflection. No one would want you unless you had money.”

  “I wouldn’t touch you if you paid me.”

  The quarrel lasted barely half a minute. A taxi passed by, and Talya hailed it, tossing a couple more swear words Chung-Nam’s way as she clambered in.

  “Damn it.” Chung-Nam walked through Lam Kwai Fong toward Queen’s Road Central. All around him were drunkards, playboys, and sexy women, their smiles holding all sorts of meanings. He was the only one scowling.

  When I’ve made it big, that female will be offering herself up to me like a bitch in heat, he thought. When he got to the MTR station on Theatre Lane, he discovered that misfortunes come in pairs: the last train had left, and the employees were just pulling down the metal shutters.

  He sat down heavily at the steps by the entrance, wishing he had some way to let out all the anger inside him.

  Then he gradually calmed down, reaching into his briefcase and pulling out the document he’d shown Szeto Wai earlier. This was the most important thing. Getting rejected by a woman and shouted at in public were trivial next to this.

  As he put the document away again, he caught sight of his phone and pulled it out.

  Not a single message. He quickly typed out a few words and sent them off. It was past one in the morning, but he thought the recipient would still be awake.

  Stuffing the phone into his pocket, he walked over to Pedder Street to wait for a taxi. An empty one showed up before too long, and he hailed it.

  “Lung Poon Street in Diamond Hill,” he said as he got in. The driver nodded somberly and started the meter.

  As they moved off, Ching-Nam took out his phone and glanced at the screen. The message he’d just sent had been read, but there was no reply. The phone remained silent all the way into the underwater tunnel. This was a little strange. He’d given strict instructions that his messages were to be responded to right away.

  As he waited, he suddenly remembered Hao’s words that afternoon, implying that he was “a pedo.”

  For no reason at all, he was beginning to feel a glimmer of unease.

  2.

  Violet To opened her eyes to the silent white ceiling. She turned to glance at the alarm clock. Short hand between eight and nine. A gentle breeze ruffled the pale blue curtain, allowing in darts of soft dawn light that spilled over her calves.

  So quiet, she thought.

  Now that summer vacation had started, she hadn’t bothered setting the alarm, allowing herself to wake up naturally. She was usually up before it went off, anyway, disturbed by the pigeons that congregated on the aircon ledge outside. Today they seemed to have read her mind and had left off their cooing so she could sleep in peace.

  Sleep in peace. It had been a long time since she’d done that.

  For the last two months her nerves had been wound tight. She’d never expected Au Siu-Man to kill herself.

  On May 5, she sent off the final anonymous message. When there was no reply after a long time, she assumed she’d won. Siu-Man must have deleted all the messages, she thought, burying her head in the sand. But there was no avoiding the truth. She’d wanted to make Siu-Man realize that actions have consequences, and the powers that be use mortals as their weapons to teach the guilty a lesson.

  How could she have known that by that point, Siu-Man was no longer in this world?

  When she’d read the news of Siu-Man’s suicide online, her mind had gone blank. She thought it must be someone of the same name, or some mistake. Then she looked at the brief report more carefully, again and again, and realized what she’d done. Siu-Man had killed herself as a result of Violet’s messages. Even if she hadn’t pushed her out the window with her own hands, she still had to bear the guilt.

  I’m a murderer.

  Two warring voices started tussling for control inside her.

  It’s not your responsibility. You didn’t hold a gun to her head and force her to jump.

  Stop lying to yourself. You wrote her a message telling her to die, and she did.

  Violet kept trying to absolve herself of Au Siu-Man’s death, but the voice known as reason gradually overcame the other. Over and over, it made the same accusation in her ear: You’re a murderer.

  When she came back to her senses, she was leaning over the toilet bowl, vomiting.

  She’d never known life could weigh so heavily on a person.

  That day, just like this one, her father had gone on a business trip up north, leaving her alone in their large home. They lived on Broadcast Drive in Kowloon City, one of the few fancy residential neighborhoods in Kowloon. Starting at the intersection of Junction and Chuk Yuen Roads, the half-mile-long Broadcast Drive started and ended at the same point, like an ouroboros, carving out a heart-shaped zone on Beacon Hill. All of Hong Kong’s radio and TV stations used to be here—the two roads that ran through it were named Marconi and Fessenden, after the radio pioneers—but they had moved away one after another. Now all that remained were Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and Commercial Radio Hong Kong, as well as many exorbitantly priced condos. The To family lived in a ten-story building where there were two apartments per floor, more than a thousand square feet for the two of them. The living room opened out onto an east-facing balcony, and the master bedroom had its own bathroom. This was a life most office workers in Hong Kong could only dream of.

  When Siu-Man died, though, Violet felt suffocated by the place. She turned on all the lights, the TV, and the radio, but that couldn’t change the fact th
at she was all alone at home, consumed by anxiety, with no one she could talk to. They used to have a Filipino housekeeper named Rosalie, who’d been with them for so many years that Violet treated her as family. Then, last May, her father fired Rosalie and started using contract cleaners instead, isolating Violet even more.

  That evening, Violet had taken a deep breath and, with trembling fingers, sent a text to the only person she trusted: her brother.

  The female is dead!!!

  Click. Violet’s reminiscences were interrupted by the door opening and closing. Every morning at nine, their housekeeper, Miss Wong, would come and clean up. She returned at six in the evening to make dinner for Violet and her father. When Violet wasn’t at school, she’d also make her a simple lunch. They got breakfast on their own: Violet had bread, while her dad left early and went to a diner.

  There’d been a time when breakfast looked very different in the To household.

  Breakfast time used to be the moment Violet most looked forward to. Rosalie would be busily cooking in the kitchen as her father drank coffee and watched the TV news while her mom complained about Rosalie’s fried eggs. It wasn’t a moment of great family unity or anything like that, just a chance for Violet and her parents to sit around the same table. Much of the time, Violet’s dad was away on trips or working overtime, and her mom was often out. Then, six years ago, her mom had left a note stating simply that she was leaving her silent husband, and she never returned home again.

  Violet’s father was an engineer and had been working for the same large construction firm since college. He’d risen to join management, and now earned a respectable salary. He’d bought the Broadcast Drive place when the housing market was at its lowest, reaping the profits when it rose again. He had been close to fifty when he married. Violet suspected that her mother had been after his money and had cut him loose when she realized that wealth couldn’t make up for the sheer monotony of being married to a workaholic who never spoke. Instead, she sought an unrealistic happiness in the arms of other men.

  The weirdest thing was, Violet’s father didn’t react to his wife’s departure.

  He didn’t even seem upset, just continued going to work with the same regularity as before. Nothing in his life changed. Perhaps his wife and children were completely unimportant to him. Violet’s aunt, who’d died a few years earlier, once told Violet that her father had had no interest in marriage, but simply gave in to her mother’s desire.

  As a result, Violet’s feelings for this man were fairly complicated. On one hand, she didn’t have any kind of family warmth; her father seemed more like a roommate than anything else. Still, she was grateful to him for providing for all her needs. She had much more than many others in material terms, yet much less emotionally.

  Whenever she saw a father with his child or a happy family, she couldn’t help fantasizing what a different person she’d be if she were part of a normal family.

  After washing up, she wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water. “Good morning,” said Miss Wong, who was cleaning the extractor fan.

  “Morning.”

  “Want some fresh-baked buns?” she asked, pointing at a plastic bag on the table.

  “No need—there’s still some left over from yesterday.” Violet got a walnut bun from the fridge and warmed it in the microwave.

  The housekeeper smiled approvingly at this sign of frugality. Violet wasn’t being particularly virtuous, though—she just didn’t want to spend a cent more of her father’s money than she had to. She was trying to be as unlike her mother as possible.

  As she grew up, Violet dreaded the way her appearance was changing. When she looked in the mirror, she could see herself growing more like her mother with each passing day. Violet’s mother had been a beauty, and even in her thirties she was always being chatted up by men who thought she was a college student. When she smiled, enchanting dimples appeared on her cheeks. Violet inherited these dimples, along with a pair of dewy eyes. She wouldn’t let herself admit it, but she was becoming a beauty too. Thinking of how her faithless mother had brought nothing but misery to her husband and children, Violet started to hate the way she looked. She wore square-framed glasses, which didn’t suit her, and kept a lid on her emotions, so she hardly ever smiled.

  “A girl your age ought to dress up a bit. No sin in being beautiful,” her brother once said to her.

  He was the only spiritual support in her life.

  She returned to her bedroom with a glass of water and the walnut bun. She often hid in here—the enormous living room made her feel lonelier. Her bedroom was more spacious than many low-income households’ entire apartments. Apart from the bed, wardrobe, and desk, there was a chaise longue and a low table where she could relax as she enjoyed her beloved novels. She placed the glass on her desk and returned a book to the shelf—a Japanese detective novel she’d pulled out yesterday. Though she’d read it many times, she wanted to look at the ending one more time, thanks to a new comment on her reading blog.

  Dear Blogmistress, I just read this book and I’m shook. Went online for reviews and found ur blog. U r a brilliant writer! U said everything I felt. So sad abt the 2 main characters, I cried at the end. But I don’t understand why the guy had to kill himself. If he was the girl’s secret lover or something I cld still understand, but I don’t think they were? Why would he sacrifice his life like that? Redemption? But he didn’t do anything wrong! Pls enlighten me, Blogmistress! Thank u!!

  ~posted by Franny, 6/30/2015 20:13

  This was in response to her post about a novel by Keigo Higashino. Violet wasn’t that fond of his work, but this book was one of her favorites. She’d taken more time than usual with this review, which went up last spring, and this was the first comment after more than a year. Violet’s blog didn’t get a lot of traffic—after all, most Hong Kongers were not readers. According to the analytics, quite a few of her readers were actually from Taiwan. From her IP address, this Franny was Taiwanese too.

  Ever since seeing this comment yesterday, Violet had been pondering how she should reply. She wanted to tell Franny that what lay between the two main characters wasn’t romantic love, that they’d ascended to a different plane. This was hard to explain. There were certain things Violet was meticulous about, and she never allowed herself to dash off a slipshod answer. Seeing as someone had actually responded to her, she wanted to make this a proper exchange.

  As she chewed on her bun and let her eyes run across her bookshelf, she was a little surprised at how peaceful she felt—almost as if she’d spent the last few days shedding a layer of skin and had left all the pain and trouble behind her. Her soul had been renewed. Perhaps this was time healing all wounds, perhaps it was because summer vacation meant she no longer had to see Au Siu-Man’s empty seat in their classroom, or perhaps the blog comment had simply distracted her. The main reason for her serenity, though, was that she’d burned the page from Siu-Man’s suicide note with her own hands.

  The appearance of that note had thrown her mind into chaos. She’d managed to stay calm in front of everyone, all the while frantically thinking of how to deal with this new threat. She was glad she’d been able to think on her feet, which was all down to her brother’s constant encouragement. She’d turned the situation to her advantage and avoided being exposed by the crucial page from Siu-Man’s letter. True, she hadn’t read it, but she thought there was a good chance that her name appeared in the note.

  Violet had read somewhere that in the course of human civilizations developing, people often used external practices like ritual to bring about changes in their thinking—adjusting to shifting social hierarchies or receiving spiritual protection. Perhaps the action of burning the letter was the ritual she needed to feel absolved.

  When she met her brother the other day, he’d praised her for finally setting herself free. She knew very well that Au Siu-Man had been a thorn in his side as well, he just hadn’t shown it, because he needed to stay strong and be her only re
fuge.

  “It’s like I told you—you need to learn to be more selfish. Grow a thicker skin,” he’d said to her. “We live in a cruel society, and anyone who shows weakness will be mercilessly attacked. That Au girl didn’t die because of you. If we all jumped off a building when someone wrote a couple of things about us, there’d be thousands of suicides every day. She died because she wasn’t strong enough. It was the only way she could escape the stress of this ridiculous society.”

  Even though this sounded like twisted logic, his words made Violet feel better.

  As she picked up her glass of water, she almost splashed the report card she’d received the day before. Her results this semester weren’t as good—she’d gone from thirteenth to seventeenth in the class—which was understandable, given that she hadn’t been able to concentrate on her studies recently. Violet was no longer as obsessed with academic grades. She’d topped her class last year, and even though her parents never pushed her, she’d always forced herself to work hard, in the mistaken belief that if she could only do well enough at school, her parents might start caring about her. She was in elementary school when her mother walked out, and Violet told herself that if she came first in her class just once, her mother would come home. Even when she got old enough to realize this was a fantasy, she couldn’t let go of the relentless drive. The pressure she put on herself was eating her from the inside. She could barely breathe.

  In the end, it was her brother who changed her mind-set and allowed her to let go.

  After her mind cleared, Violet was grateful that, unlike most of her classmates, she didn’t need to account for herself to her parents. Her father was completely indifferent—he neither rewarded her for doing well nor scolded her for doing badly. He was two days into the current business trip and hadn’t called home yet.

  Ping. Just as Violet was thinking about her father, a notification flashed up on her phone:

  Reminder from Enoch Secondary School Library. Your items １, ３, ．, ６, ７ are due in three days. For more information or to renew, please visit http://www.enochss.edu.hk/lib/q?s=71926