She wishes she was with her sister, sucking the colour from her neck in little sugary slurps. That taste. Just incredible. But that’s part of the problem too, isn’t it? She can’t bring the Macaque anywhere near Una. Macaque wants to drink the life clean from her sister, to finish what it started. For what purpose, Yi-Ti is unsure. She is sure, however, that Macaque wants her dead.
‘Girl, time is running thin – you’ll be gone very soon unless you feed!’
Barely more than a whisper: ‘…I don’t want to do this any more. Please, I’d rather die than hurt another person.’
Macaque climbs the dumpster and opines, droll, ‘Oh, words sound so sweet when you have a full belly and live the life of luxury, like the daughter of a Chinese businessman, fat from all the gold. Different story entirely when you’re faced with real hunger like this, no? Shhh.’ Macaque holds a sneaky finger to his lips, then points to the alleyway entrance. ‘Look. Someone nice and easy has strolled into your web…’
A man in a coat. That’s about as much description as Yi-Ti can discern from her spot next to the bin. He glows neon-fresh underneath the blue mosquito light, face hidden like a shadow’s avatar. In he walks, cautious, trying to make out her form in the darkness. Why did he come in? How did he sense her presence from the lip of the street? Arm out, calling, ‘Excuse me, miss, are you ok?’ Voice a little thick like chocolate.
Chocolate. Sweet on the lips and full in the tummy, all warm in the bottom of a cup and shared with a sister. Lusty and creamy, this figure all ripe and fresh with it. Go on. Try it. Just a little, girl, just a little bit of that colour inside you. It’ll be easy and painless, painless for the victim and for you. They will be fine, oh, don’t you worry, just indulge yourself a bit. Go on.
Go!
She has him. And in that brief moment just before Yi-Ting manages to sink her fangs into the man’s neck – straight through the shirt and coat – she sees that utter look of fear all crinkly and round in the eyes of her victim. But once the sucking starts, it is all over for the man. He slumps and lazily tries to shake the girl away but he is drunk from the puncture. The prey falls into the circle of light and Yi drinks, drinks in the flesh! It tastes foul like sewerage, foul with fear, and she catches herself, trying to pull away, trying to stop, but she is back for more like automatic lust, automatic orgasm. She cannot stop. She cannot stop. Please, don’t make me do this, she pleads with herself. Please, stop it! Stop it!
Yi-Ti staggers upwards and her stomach sloshes about like piss on a ship. Turns, staggers to the wall, vomits a fraction of the melanin down her front, swallows the rest. It dribbles out like cake mix. Yes, exactly like how Mum used to make it.
Her mind sets like cooling crystal and two figures metastasise from the shadows. Witnesses! Black and blacker, maybe sister and brother, with shock on their faces.
Don’t look at me! Yi-Ti roars and the sound scares her, scares the others, scares reality as the scene breaks and de-colours. Walls shatter and become fish, air turns to fire, everything glows and sings and—
A hook threads beneath her school clothes and pulls; Macaque has her by the nape and they are running through the streets of West-side District of Compton, Nebraska, Nagoya, Nowhere. Her eyesight falters and blurs to a streaky space full of sky. Vacuum fast, she moves through this unreal world and in a matter of seconds they are somewhere new and somewhere old. Another alley. Maybe far away from where the crime took place. Yi-Ti stumbles to a standstill and feels her stomach quiver and shake. As Macaque makes itself comfortable on a trashcan, Yi-Ti takes to the nearest wall and burns an acid hole through the bricks. Melanin as thick as tar pours from her mouth and she can’t hold it in, gagging and spluttering, more and more. It never stops. She closes her eyes and feels the tears sting as more of the stuff comes out, runny now, clear liquid.
‘I’ll be seeing you tomorrow then, child. Try not to die, if you can help it.’
Yi-Ti turns just in time to see Macaque widen his feral teeth and smile wicked. Smile. The spirit turns to night and vanishes with the sound of crashing trash cans. Yi-Ti hiccups and coughs up a remaining blob of gunk. Takes solace in the grain of the wall as she slithers down. This place holds no warmth, not in those lights in the mouth of the alley, no love from the stars, no comfort in the CCTV portal beside that fire escape door. Oh, Father and Sister, don’t see me like this…
Yi-Ti brings her knees to her chin and cuddles herself. Sniff and wait in the quiet. Not a soul around. No disturbance beyond the chain fence to her left, showing ghosts in the public park…no. She is alone.
Out comes the phone and Yi-Ti already has her message composed before she can even think. Dear Carrie, dear lover, save me:
“Can I come over to your place? I want to see you ( ´•̥̥̥ω•̥̥̥` )”
Five teeth-chattering minutes later:
“Can we do tomorrow, please? I’ll be home by midnight. Really want you, but my dad’s making us stay with our auntie tonight ( ͒˃̩̩⌂˂̩̩ ͒). Fuck me. You ok? Tell me you’re safe.”
“I’m safe. See you tomorrow night. I love you.”
I. Love. You. Too.
A scuffle breaks out nearby; Yi-Ti hides her phone and keeps very still as the noise spills from the lip of the alley. She can’t make out the light very well, but she hears the heavy-set noise of a man stumble, cough (pained) and something slushy pouring to earth. Like melanin thrown onto bricks, like blood cut free and flying away. Footsteps flee the scene. Fear death-grips the young girl as someone approaches (perhaps the victor in the scuffle) and she resolves.
A she. A small she. A ghost with short hair and very tight clothes all colourful and defiant of winter’s snare. Arms relaxed and by her side as if she hadn’t just maimed somebody. “Daddy’s little”…something. Slut. White girl, white girl, slender but not tall. Younger than her? Girl says in a drawl, ‘Heya. Whatever you doin’ out here in the cold?’
Without warning, the girl continues forward and plonks herself down next to Yi-Ti. She notices then that this strange creature comes bearing a little bag over her shoulder. The girl finds her words as her new friend unzips the satchel, ‘Who are you?’
‘Name’s Janelle. An’ you, my frien’, nearly got yo’self raped. You know how many men come walking the streets at night with their dicks all hard an’ pointin’ like the needle of a compass? Guess what they after? Huh, no surprises. You think you alone, sure. That’s how they’re trained – to make you think youse alone. Here.’
A blanket. A little thermos. Kindness in the eyes. Twist the top off. Is that soup? Janelle extends the potion out to Yi-Ting. Still dizzy, unbelieving, she takes the mixture. Too hot on the tongue but it goes down and fills a deep need. Yet…her belly grumbles raw, uncomfortable. Maybe she should stop. She wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and turns. Why…
‘E’rbody goes through a rough patch every now and then. You got a particular troubling daemon on your shoulders. Wouldn’t mind havin’ a word with it. So I follow you from all the way across town to here. Hard to keep up with, must admit.’
Another supernatural oddity. But she’s kind at least. Yi-Ting says so.
Janelle rubs a hand behind her head, abashed, says softly, ‘My motives ain’t entirely altruistic, but hey. A good deed is a good deed. Unfortunately, it’s for one night only.’ One finger in the air like a lifeline.
Yi-Ti murmurs, ‘Will you stay with me?’
Janelle cocks her head.
‘I don’t want to be alone…’
The strange girl loses focus for a moment and says low to the bricks, ‘…okay,’ as if this is the first real kindness borne from her heart.
Yi-Ti doesn’t finish the soup – her throat protests with each new sip as if her body forgot what real food should feel like. Taking the blanket over her body, she curls up into the pit of the wall. Janelle asks her a question then, ‘Why you running from home, girl?’
‘Cos if I go back, the spirit haunting me will kill my sister.’
&nb
sp; Janelle thinks. ‘You really are a brave one.’
Power Down. The lights cut out and Yi-Ti falls from the face of earth, yet grounded, still here, for the simple warmth of another body beside her. She owes this strange spirit girl her life. Yes. She is not real – Yi knows this. A special sense about her, the way reality points down and stretches to accommodate her. A gravity she cannot shape or escape, but around her there is light. A good soul. A good person. A good motive, no matter what she says.
Sleep, girl…sleep…under the mist of prickly rain, snuggled next to someone warm. Sleep.
You are a good soul.
Eyes & Waves
Eyes
He doesn’t care one bit. Does he? Of course he does. He’s her father. Biological law dictates that he must.
Sitting there on the opposite spectrum of the table: Father in the red sunshine and Una in the blue of curtain shade. Look at him, look at his gaze, daggering the furling newspaper as if his daughter were on the front cover of the business times. Una digs a grave into her cereal and all the Cheerio corpses wash in. Scrit. Scrit. Hunger bites at her, nibbles away. It’s like before, long ago, when she was plagued by the Macaque. Hunger, and no way to sate it. That same feeling. Eat the Cheerios, vomit them all up later. Why even bother. Why even bother if it’s all going to shit, anyway. Scrit. Scrit. But Una’s eyes stay on her father. He senses her from across the colour-coded room. ‘What.’ Matter of fact.
‘I can’t believe you.’
‘There’s no cause for panic. Your sister has gone missing before; she’s usually at a friend’s and turns up after a few days.’
‘If you cared one bit about her welfare then you’d notice her recent change in behaviour.’
‘The change is nothing more than an adolescent storm. Much in the same way as her fascination with this high school girl, with whom I believe she is spending the night.’
‘Oh, good, for a minute there you had me worried, but it seems like you’re on the ball with her whereabouts.’ Una crushes the skull of a corn soldier and mutters, ‘Do you have one of your cameras inside the Cài household? Can you see her there right now? Maybe not. Maybe that’s why you’ve called the police.’
Father rests the spoiled business day on the table and says over a sip of lacquer-black coffee, ‘I have my eyes watching her. Eyes are only effective with a pair of hands attached.’
‘I’m so relieved to see that you’re doing as much as fatherly possibly to ensure the welfare of—’
‘Enough,’ says Father. It’s an unconvincing attempt at authority…or, rather, an attempt that carries the same immediacy afforded to a minor problem. Shoo, fly. Shoo. Enough. And the man leaves Una to stew; she glares at his exit, resisting the urge to take the spoon to his face and remove the very pieces of equipment he treasures so much. To see, to control. To remove that control and bask in the torturous outflow…
Something cuts across her vision and a Shandain tablet slides neatly in beside her cereal bowl. Ding goes the porcelain. Father’s beside her, looking down with crinkles in his eyes, a sheen of sweat dotting that bald dome. A finger to the computer – see, witness, look through my eyes. So Una looks.
And she sees the Macaque. Instantly, she knows. There, the creature sits on the front porch of a house that Una thinks is familiar. Maybe Carrie Cài’s single-storey affair with the neat lawn and bulb flowers like Edison’s creations, like stars in the streets. But there sits the creature on the porch, looking directly up into the Eyes of Father, the CCTV module dotted just across the road under the old, useless streetlights. Macaque…stirs a horror inside her she would rather forget. No change whatsoever. All watery and prickly on the eyes like an abomination…like a beautiful piece of art ruined by tar lines drawn to deface and decry the original. Look at me and forget everything you knew about Yi-Ting. You won’t be needing her any more.
Father murmurs with disinterest, ‘You think I’d be so stupid as to let my daughter out of my sight?’
‘But…’
This is not your daughter. Una thinks to voice these words but holds back and realises, takes stock and assesses the situation. The way the Macaque stares straight at her through the camera, tail swashbuckling in anarchy. It knows. Una knows. Father thinks she is she.
Father is blind.
‘Are you satisfied?’
Una excuses herself from the table. She doesn’t want to look any more at that thing. Two horrible thoughts ghost her head: her sister is not safe, is not there; that monster wants her head removed from her shoulders. How does she know? Well…some problems are simply familial, aren’t they, Una?
A quick detour by her father’s room of eyes. A peep inside. Quick. What’s on the screens that encase the walls in their blue-tone glow of the world outside? Angles and dimensions, shades and traces, trajectories. Every screen now. All of a single suburb, a single street, a single house, a single target. A singular monster smiling bright at Una in place of the sister she loves so dearly. Macaque everywhere. Una bites her lip and slams the door shut before fetching her schoolbag.
He does care.
No goodbyes for Father. No goodbyes for home or street as she cycles clear from her blocky mansion-esque home. It’d be a dream to leave all of her problems at home, or at school, and have somewhere nice to turn to for the day’s events. Places like that exist in the realm of fantasy, however, and are prohibited to girls such as Una.
It seems she will have to search for her sister by herself, before the Macaque wins and they both lose. It’s nothing but a game of spiritual warfare that, as of right now, she must fight alone.
✽ ✽ ✽
Being alone isn’t out of the ordinary, although in recent years the word has taken on another skin: to be alone and yet surrounded by people. Like now, during the lunchtime rush with the cafeteria on fire with activity. A hundred and one voices squabbling in between mashy mouthfuls of government approved micronutrient paste also referred to as mash potatoes. Even in a place as loud as this. Yes, even here. Una can’t be certain of when this loneliness began in her life or when she first noticed it. But the source is all too clear, isn’t it, Una Lian?
A clatter saves Una from her thoughts; Sammi sits down opposite the lunch bench and scrapes her tray into position. Smile on her face underneath bangs, short boy-hair jet-black and neat. Nice. Sammi points with her fork and asks in Mandarin, ‘Like it?’
Una, English, ‘Suits you.’
Alone?
After a mouthful of mash her friend intones, ‘Here sits a girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders.’
‘It’s my sister. Missing again.’ Una tries to swallow her mash but the stuff catches in her throat and burns; a gulp of salty water can’t help her enjoy the lunch or settle her mind. She continues, ‘Wish it was as simple as missing. Missing is binary, right? Yes or no. What’s happening with Yi is beyond that.’
Sammi nods without understanding but offers, ‘If you’re going to search for her again today after school, I can tag along.’
‘That’d be nice.’
Una swirls her mash into a whirlpool, feeling a strange weight on her shoulders…as if all eyes in the cafeteria turn to Una Lian and look her up and down. Oh, there’s the rich girl. Rich and Chinese. They are mutually inclusive, for one cannot exist without the other.
Chinese people, I swear…what will you guys do next? You’ve already surpassed this country in GDP, Human Development Index, Representative Democracy Index. Your fattest moguls now belong in the corporate domes of America, buying all the utilities like oil, gas, coal, poles and wires and pipes and CCTV lines and trains and buses and ferries and roads and banks and hospitals and schools and national debt and oh, wow, aren’t you just something with your two names? One for the stupids, one for the Chinese.
But wait, what’s she doing here in this place? This is a ghetto school – just look at all them black faces and white trash! She should be in that snooty private school one hour’s drive away where they don’t have
to wear uniforms and the education runs like gold down a river. Silver spoons on silver platters on a bed of caviar – any measure of rich stereotypes. That’s where you belong, girl, that’s where your kind of people belong. Not here with the ordinary kids. Oh, wait. You must be one of those peasanty Chinese immigrants who came from some unpronounceable province with a sackload of uncle’s grey-market factory cash but no education or English under your belt. Oh, I see how it is. Una Lian. From where? Taiwan? Sounds like a peasant state to me. Yeah, that explains why you’re here and why your best friend is the same as you, because you guys only stick with your kind.
That’s Una. Forever an immigrant girl. The hyphenated American.
She spoons her noodles lunch into her mouth and keeps quiet. [RE this section. Touchy subject, tread carefully, Lilly. I also noticed that when Sammi sat down, she speaks to Una in Hokkien. Change this to Mandarin – only older people in Taiwan speak Hokkien, all the youth speak Mandarin. Also, go back to Part 1 and change the ‘schoolyard fight’ meta-commentary accordingly.]
Sammi flicks Una on the knuckles, gives her a smile that says: “I am with you.”
Hang on. Is Una Alone? Really, is it that bad? She has friends. Good friends. She can’t complain. She’s not allowed to!
But how’s this for loneliness:
“Sammi, a ghostly Macaque wants me and my vampire sister dead.”
Right.
Alone. That fits the bill.
✽ ✽ ✽
After school now. Una has a checklist of places she should visit:
Ice creamery.
Park.
Arcade.
Sammi seems pleased by at least one of those prospects. ‘We’re going to the ice cream place?’
‘I’ll us cycle there.’
Una waits until her friend is secure on the back portion of the seat, arms firm around her and locked, then pushes off from the school yard. Past the silver slug buses with their bellies full of children working on the assembly lines, and out into the non-traffic of day. As they round a corner and enter a leafy street, heading to the only good part of Stallwind, Sammi calls over the wind, ‘What’s the longest your sister has ever been away?’
After Hope Dies Page 19
