The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  “Ah Por, protect us all,” prayed Golden Frond as she lit a joss-stick and stuck it in the urn on Ah Por’s altar. She lit another joss-stick in gratitude for her special good fortune and yet another for the success of her betrothed in his examinations in China.

  She was now 18 years old; Grandfather was 73; First Uncle was 51 and Older Cousin was 26, and in the 11th year of his imbecility.

  She moved unafraid among them, strengthened by the love and kindness of a man. There were no letters from him because she could not read, but in the third month of his absence, she received, through a friend who had met up with him in China, the gift of a beautiful, red silk jacket. She would not even try on the jacket, but let it remain in its box, taking it out now and then to gaze upon the sheen of the silk and the fine embroidery of the peonies on the sleeves.

  The news came with complete devastation. She was working on a beaded slipper, sewing on the eyes of a phoenix when she was told by Grandmother: Older Brother had died in China. He was midway through his examinations when he contracted a fever, got rapidly worse and died. She listened, then was aware of a numbness that locked up all powers of speech and movement so that only small, constricted sounds came from her throat and the eye-beads rolled away from her fingers, then of a penetrating chill and an enveloping darkness that sucked her into its centre making her gasp for breath.

  She lay in a stupor for days. Grandmother called in the temple medium to say prayers and administer a drink that would ward off the final terrible bout of madness, for women, when the scorpions massed for the final onslaught, were known to try to escape it by hurling themselves out of windows or into wells.

  She lay helpless on her bed, a pale and stricken ghost, making no sounds except the small groans of a misery too deep for tears. There were the dreams of her betrothed, alive and talking to her but these melted only too quickly into the dreams of him dead or in the throes of death, and there was always the dream, above all the tumult, of old Ah Por, benign and smiling and beckoning to her.

  In this state, she heard voices around her, not the voices of people in dreams, but voices of real people, in Grandmother’s room just next to hers.

  “The temple medium says she must be given a husband, or she will die.”

  “Older Cousin needs a wife. He is already 27.”

  “She will be married to Older Cousin.”

  She began to pray to the Goddess Kuan Yin, to old Ah Por, to Older Brother, one after the other: “Protect me, save me”, but it would appear that having given her protection and love for so long, they were now weary of her incessant calls and were leaving her to take care of herself.

  She put her forehead to the floor in utmost supplication, but it seemed they had abandoned her to the darkness.

  Older Cousin, grossly fat and leering, met her in the corridor as she was getting out of her room for the first time since her illness, and shrieked in gloating triumph.

  “You are to be my wife. The temple medium and Grandmother say so!”

  “Not so,” she said haughtily, though she could barely speak for weakness. “I must have a husband, but it will not be you.”

  “Oh! Oh!” The unwonted defiance robbed him of speech for a minute, and he gaped at her, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

  “Wait till I tell Grandmother!” he blurted.

  “I do not care who you tell,” she said with still greater hauteur, looking him all over with scorn. He danced around her in his rage and then ran off squeaking.

  He ran off to complain to Grandmother and to demand that the bondmaid be whipped for her insolence, since she was well enough recovered from her illness. When the two of them went up to her room, they were in time to see the flames springing up and enclosing her body in a fiery embrace, as she sat, cross-legged, with hands prayerfully clasped in front of a hastily set up altar on which was a framed photograph of her betrothed. Grandmother shouted for help, Older Cousin began to jump up and down in the manner of an overwrought child unable to control his excitement. Blubbering, he pointed a trembling finger at the perfectly still figure in the flames, radiant in the red silk jacket. At the moment when somebody dragged in a mat and tried to beat out the flames, the figure keeled over in a graceful arc and lay face down, the song of immolation still on her lips.

  The Solace Of Guilt

  In the Talmud and the Kabbalah are accounts of Lilith, the first wife of Adam. She had been made of the dust of the earth, as Adam had been made, and he was not pleased. He commanded her to lie beneath him, as a sign that she was inferior to him. But they said she refused to lie beneath him, insisting that the only love she would have was love with mutual respect. Angered by her pride, they began to deride her, and spread stories about her, insisting that she was the demon of the night, encouraging men to spill their sperm. She, the woman with strength, was transformed into a temptress of men.

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  He was 47 years old, and he was about to take his first prostitute: she was coming up to his room, as arranged, in half an hour.

  The thought amused him and brought on a slow ruminative smile. The amusement was not in the contemplation of an absurdly long postponement of a necessary rite of passage (“What? Never had one in your life? What sort of man are you?” Benny had said), or of the much-vaunted insecurity of the middle years, or even of the need of a virtuous man to take a break from virtue. Indeed, Andrew Chin was not sure why he was feeling so amused. Perhaps the word did not sufficiently describe the whole complex of pleasurable thoughts and sensations he was experiencing as he sat on the bed in the hotel room. Perhaps it was no more than the schoolboy’s sense of self-gratification at a first prank about to be carried out.

  “Bye! Be good!” his wife had said at the airport. The parting advice was more in the nature of the teasing raillery between husband and wife completely at ease with each other, than of any serious admonition to a departing spouse.

  “Bye,” he had said cheerfully, adding, “I should not be good in a place like Bangkok, no man’s supposed to be good in Bangkok,” echoing the irrepressible Benny who visited the city at least once a month and made no secret of it. His wife, laughing good-naturedly, kissed him and he was off.

  And now the teasing words were about to become fact, for he was about to have his first prostitute. It had not been intended this way. He had planned, in the one day left after completing the business for his company, to explore the city’s famed temples, markets and shops and pick up the obligatory Thai silk for his wife, gifts for his daughters and souvenirs for his secretary and the other girls at the office. The brochures at the hotel hinted of more exotic enjoyment, but these were not part of his world (“What!” Benny would have expostulated. “Go to Bangkok and not see these? What sort of tourist are you? Why, when I was there the last time, I went to the – Go, man. You won’t believe until you see with your own eyes. My God! You know what the dancing girls do? They have these bottle caps, see – It’s incredible, man – ”, finishing with his famous guffaw). So it was to be innocuous temples, markets and shops. But entering his room after lunch, he noticed a slip of pink paper under the door. He picked it up and read with increasing amusement: ‘Virgin Prostitutes. Genuine. No Fake. With Good Proof in Certificate of Virgin, has signature of 2 doctor. If not satisfy, can refund.’

  Andrew put the pink slip into his pocket, intending to take it home to show his wife who was an English Language teacher. But the little advertisement had a curious power which began to work on him, so that as he sat on his bed, he began to think strange thoughts which translated into strange sensations.

  When he was a little boy of eight and staying with his grandparents, he hid himself one day behind the curtains when he heard his grandfather come in from the rain and speaking to a bondmaid who happened to be the only one in the house then, apart from himself. He knew for a certainty that his grandfather had never intended to go out at all, and would be back as soon as the others were out of the house. He
also knew that his grandfather’s curt order to the maid to take up a cup of hot tea to him in his room was no routine instruction.

  Something was about to happen, and as soon as he heard the door softly closing after them, he darted out from behind the curtains, climbed the stairs noiselessly, then lay flat on his stomach outside the locked room to peep up through the convenient slit between door and floor. He watched, fascinated, and was later to connect the intense pleasure, approaching ecstasy, that he had seen oil his grandfather’s face, with the appropriation of virginity. A physiological intricacy beyond his little mind to grasp, he nevertheless understood its tremendous value through listening in on the many adult conversations in that large household of women. The knowledge, with the myriad trivia of childhood, had faded away as he grew up, but now in the tantalising pronouncements of the pink paper slipped under his door in the Bangkok hotel, it came back with vividness and power and insinuated itself into his very being, climaxing always with the recollection of pure ecstasy on his grandfather’s face.

  Andrew paced the room with the pink paper in his hand, his face mobile with a hundred flitting expressions. He was interested, awed, fascinated, alarmed at his own daring, and so curious about an experience at once commonplace and unique that no less than direct personal experience, he decided, could satisfy that curiosity. The realisation that he was 47 years old and with perhaps but a short time left for initiation into that experience, contributed to the decision. Having made up his mind, he was aware of a new lightness of being and of his whole body being suffused with a tingling glow of most delicious anticipation. He looked at the telephone number on the pink paper and realised that the simple act of his picking up the phone would be his induction into a totally new world. He wondered what he should say and how he should react if the pink paper people got crude or demanding, and as if to spare him all the hassle, a polite knock was heard on the door and a very polite-looking young man appeared and asked if he could be of any help.

  So the girl was to come in precisely half an hour. And she was to spend the night with him.

  Like the prankish schoolboy who longs for an audience, Andrew wondered, “What would Benny say?” He knew what Benny would say: The coarse, florid face with the raucous laugh loomed before his eyes, and made him shake his head and smile to himself. What would his wife say? The thought was totally irrelevant to and therefore had no place in this unique, tantalising, once-in-a-life-time, just-for-the-experience adventure, which of course he had no intention of repeating.

  There came a very timid knock, and the girl was admitted.

  She was very young-looking, was probably no more than 16. She stood before him uncertainly, then took out a roll of paper from her pocket to give to him; it was the Virginity Certificate, attesting to her pristine state, signed by two doctors, one signature beside the other, in a corner of the gold-bordered scroll.

  Andrew looked at her with increasing curiosity, then pleasure. A grotesquely made-up harridan with jangling earrings, low-cut skin-tight dress and stiletto heels and working the chewing gum endlessly in her cheeks (a portrait he derived exclusively from American TV) would have repulsed him. This girl who stood before him was young and pretty and innocent-looking, with a round face, large round eyes and a small mouth. Her abundance of dark curly hair was swept back and kept in place by a yellow head-band from under which a cluster of small tendrils escaped to frame her face in the most appealing way. She was wearing a frilly yellow dress which was one or two sizes too large, and high heels too high, so that she tottered a little as she walked up to him to show him the virginity certificate. He suddenly had a fleeting vision of her in another setting, her native village, divested of make-up, frilly dress and high heels, wearing the native sarong and walking barefoot with a water-pot on her head, a pink frangipani in her hair.

  He gestured to her to sit down and she sat in the chair opposite him, balancing on the edge, in continuing deferential timidity. He began to speak to her slowly and gently, in English, asking simple questions. In response, she rattled off a string of rehearsed sentences in English, the only intelligible ones being “My name Porntip” and “I am virgin”, the second followed by what sounded like a statement of a virgin’s fee. They smiled continuously at each other and now and then laughed with shy amiability.

  The sense of exhilaration on the approaching consummation of the ultimate frolic could not be resisted any longer and shedding whatever remaining tentativeness, Andrew got up, walked to Porntip and led her decisively to the bed. This was the cue, clearly, for her to initiate the process of disrobing: she pulled down the back zipper of her dress, stepped out of it and out of her high heels, in one movement of practised efficiency and ease. Then with the same sense of purpose, she lay down on the bed in her black lace bra and panties, watching him closely for the second cue as to who should be the one to effect the last stage of the disrobing, for a more enjoyable preliminary. He watched with mounting excitement and interest, all the while marvelling at the novelty of the experience. He was 47 and about to take his first prostitute, and so far everything had been exactly as he would have wished.

  The girl looked at him, then decided to take the initiative, unclasping her bra, pulling down her panties and coming close to him in the full warmth of her naked beauties. He immediately pulled her down with a grunt of intense desire, rivalling even his grandfather’s.

  At the moment of the breaking, she gave the inevitable sharp cry, then when he had rolled off her and was quietly contemplating her from his easeful position on a mound of pillows, his arms behind his head, she pulled up from somewhere under her body the proof of the stained white cloth, and showed it to him, smiling. The crude contrivance, not just of the cloth, but of the practised sharp cry of pain, and of the forced orgiastic contortions of face and limbs irritated him. The irritation was not directed at the girl but at the whole set-up of parasites intent upon living off her, from the manager of the hotel to the young polite-looking pimp who had come to his door, to her parents who had probably already sold her, body and soul, to the hotel. The girl’s total naturalness and simplicity left her untouched in any way by the sordid business so that whatever she did from obedience, no matter how crude, only enhanced her appeal.

  He wanted to talk to her, to find out more about her, but her ability in the language had ended with the rattled off string of sentences and now, having been previously instructed to be with the man throughout the night, she settled compliantly by his side and watched for his every wish. His last thought, before he finally fell asleep, with the girl nestling against him, was of a very satisfactory first adventure and of the possibility that it need not be the last.

  He woke up in the middle of the night with a start, thinking he was at home. Then he remembered and stretched out his hand to touch the girl beside him. He propped himself up on his elbow in alarm, for she was no longer there. He stretched out his hand quickly to feel for his watch and wallet on the beside table (“Never leave your watch or wallet or other valuables lying around in the room,” Benny had cautioned, “And never accept any drink from a prostitute. It’s sure to be spiked, and you’ll wake up to find yourself stripped bare.”) They were there, intact. Where could Porntip be? He had paid for a full night. She should not have left. He would have to complain to the manager.

  He noticed the light in the bathroom and heard some very small sounds coming from it. Getting noiselessly out of bed, he padded across the room to peep through the imperfectly closed door.

  Porntip was squatting on the bathroom floor, playing ‘Five Stones’. She scattered five small pebbles on the floor in front of her, picked one up, threw it high into the air, scooped up the remaining four from the floor in one swift sweep, and was in time to catch the falling pebble, to complete the set of five in her little palm. She repeated the process, scattering the pebbles yet further apart, to challenge herself to higher levels of dexterity. With each success, she laughed softly to herself, with each failure, she frowned and mutt
ered scolding words to the errant pebble that had not allowed itself to be scooped up in time with the others, or that had perversely slipped out between her fingers. With a child’s total absorption at play, she did not see him watching her.

  She was just that, a child. She was a child forced into an occupation that she understood only in terms of what she must do and say to please men and what she must not do and say to avoid the beatings from managers, pimps and parents. Her childhood had been stolen from her, but she stole back whatever bits of it she could, waiting till the men were asleep and snoring, to go into the bathroom, bring out her five stones and play by herself. While the men mauled her in bed, she pretended to smile and giggle and let out pleasing cries of pleasure, but all the time she was thinking about the five little pebbles hidden in the pocket of her dress.