by Yangsze Choo
I flung myself in front of Robert. There was a glancing blow to the side of my head, hard enough that my ears rang, though Shin must have held back at the last instant. I fell over, a tangle of limbs with Robert. Screams, a mad scramble. Discordant trumpet notes as the musicians wavered, then manfully started playing again. Shin was holding my face in his hands. “You idiot,” he said.
Hui was shrieking like a harpy, “What are you doing?”
“It’s all right.” Gasping, I struggled up. “He’s my brother.”
I tugged at him. Desperation numbed my stinging ear. The bouncers were heading over purposefully. In the corner, the Mama’s face was like thunder.
“Ji Lin!” Robert called, but I was running, slipping through the crowd that parted, surprised faces, mouths gaping in ohs and ahs. Dragging Shin with me, his hand in mine. Behind us, Kiong barreled his way through the dancing couples, colliding and apologizing. Through the side door, down the mint-green corridor marked private. The dressing-room door banged open. I grabbed my bag—the finger!
Kiong’s shout echoed as he burst into the corridor. Then we were out, through the back door into the dirt road behind the dance hall where we ran and ran as though the devil himself was chasing us.
38
Ipoh/Taiping
Saturday, June 27th
It was the end of everything, I thought. I don’t know what possessed us, but we ran like children, Shin and I. As though we were ten years old and had been caught stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s tree. We raced down street after street until I didn’t recognize where we were anymore and doubled over, gasping, against a wall.
“You know, there’s nobody chasing us,” said Shin.
Kiong had done no more than stick his head out of the back door and yell, “Louise! What’s wrong?” And likely nothing would have happened if I’d stopped and talked to him. Kiong was quite reasonable; arguments between customers happened all the time, and the only person who’d been injured was myself.
“Does it hurt?” Shin examined me, looking for bruises. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”
“I’m fine,” I said, shrugging off his hand.
“I’m sure you are,” he said drily. “Anyone who can run half a mile is probably in good health. Why were you running anyway?”
Shame burned my cheeks. “I couldn’t bear it. The look on Robert’s face. And all of you showing up together.” The words, like a prostitute, still rang in my ears.
Shin sank down against the roughly plastered wall. My mother had drummed it into us that only beggars, drunkards, and opium fiends sat in the street in broad daylight, but there was no one around right now, so I sat down, too.
“Why’d you jump in front of him like that?”
“Because you were going to hit him.”
“He deserved it. Bastard.”
I grimaced. “Are you angry with me, too?”
“What do you think?” He gave me a long look.
I stared hard at a crack in the pavement. It looked like a map of the Kinta River. “There weren’t many options. Not ones that paid well. But I’m not a prostitute.” It was a terrible conversation to be having with my stepbrother, whom I might be in love with, I thought. I ought to keep a diary of all the worst moments in my life. It might be amusing in fifty years’ time, but not now. Definitely not now.
“I didn’t think so. Places like that are pretty careful with their girls.”
“How do you know?” I watched him from under my lashes, frowning.
“I’ve been to dance halls before. There are lots of them in Singapore.”
Suddenly, I was so annoyed with Shin that I could barely look him in the eye. “I suppose I shouldn’t have worried about telling you, then.”
He tilted my face up. “You were worried about me?”
Too close, I thought. He was much too close, and that casual touch disarmed me. With a jerk, I pulled away. “Not just you,” I said. “My mother, Mrs. Tham. And Robert, of course. From his point of view, I’m ruined.”
Shin’s voice was icy. “He’s an ass if he can’t tell you’re obviously a virgin.”
I was so humiliated that I didn’t know where to look. Ears scorching, my face blazing. I supposed I ought to be pleased that Shin had never doubted my chastity, since chastity was so prized in a woman, but the way he was doing things was so high-handed, I wanted to slap him. “It’s none of your business,” I snapped, jumping up.
Shin grabbed me by the arm, pulling me down. “Of course it is,” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t like it. I don’t like you doing a job like that at all. It’s stupid and dangerous and you’re lucky that nothing’s happened—so far.”
“I didn’t have a choice!” How dare Shin tell me off, when he’d nothing to worry about other than studying and having a good time in Singapore? I buried my face in my knees.
Shin put his hand lightly on my head, as though he was afraid I’d shrug it off. “Why didn’t you write and tell me you needed money?”
“How could I, when you never wrote back?”
“That was because—” he bit his words off. Whatever it was—another girl, another world I didn’t know—he clearly didn’t want to say, and I didn’t press him. “I had a feeling you were doing something like this.”
“What do you mean?” My voice was muffled.
Shin shook his head. “Some sort of shady job. Mother told me about her mahjong debts, after the miscarriage. She said you were paying them for her by dressmaking, but there was no way you were making enough money.”
“Is that why you came today?”
“No, I’d no idea where you were working. It was Y. K. Wong who took me there.”
I straightened up. “Why?”
“Don’t know. But he’s been asking about you in a roundabout way. And also if I’d noticed any of the specimens in the pathology room were missing. I played dumb, of course. Told him that I hadn’t finished counting them.”
So Y. K. Wong hadn’t said anything to Shin yet about locking me into the storeroom. Was bringing Shin to the dance hall a way of putting pressure on me? A housewife came out from a neighboring gate and gave us a sideways glare. It was Saturday afternoon and able-bodied young people shouldn’t be sitting on the pavement like this, so we started walking again in a desultory way. If we hit a main street, we were bound to find a bus stop, and then, I supposed, Shin would go back to Batu Gajah. The thought filled me with desolation.
“He also asked whether I’d heard about a weretiger’s finger.”
“A what?”
“Apparently, the hospital is supposed to have the finger of a weretiger in its collection.”
My mind leaped to the night of the party and Ren’s peculiar reaction, how he’d bolted out into the darkness when he’d heard about the tiger. I frowned. “Koh Beng mentioned it when we were cleaning out the pathology storeroom.”
“Well, Y. K. said that people always wanted to buy it.”
We’d reached a bus stop. There were other people, so we had to stop talking about severed fingers and weretigers, but I wondered if Y. K. Wong was secretly selling off pathology specimens. I’d heard that the hard stone from a tiger’s eye and the bezoars formed in the bellies of goats and monitor lizards fetched outrageous sums on the black market. They were said to bring good fortune, bewitch a lover, or charm an enemy to death. I thought about the withered, blackened finger that had mysteriously returned to me and was, even now, rattling in my handbag.
“Shin,” I said, opening my bag so he could glimpse it.
His eyes widened. “Where’d you get that?”
At that moment, the bus arrived. We were lucky enough to find two seats and as it rattled onward, I told him everything that had happened. Everything, including the dreams and Ren and his lost twin, Yi, across the river. I had to lean over and speak softly in his ear so that no one else would hear. Sometimes I think I will never forget that journey across town. The baking heat of the afternoon sun, the dusty breeze blo
wing in on us, smelling like the crushed Kaffir lime leaves in the lap of the woman in front of us. Shin’s sharp profile as he gazed out of the window, listening intently to my words. I would never get tired of looking at him, I thought.
* * *
As luck would have it, this bus went across town to the Ipoh Railway Station, a white and gold imperial folly in the afternoon sunlight.
“I’ll see you off,” I said, trying to look cheerful.
“And where are you going?”
I clutched my handbag tighter. “Back to Mrs. Tham’s.”
“Liar,” he said, without rancor. “Where are you really going?”
There was no use dissembling. “I’m going to Taiping. There’s an afternoon train.” I couldn’t bear to go back to Mrs. Tham’s, lest Robert should turn up, all red-faced and indignant. Or worse, full of apologetic recriminations. Besides, there was something else I’d promised to do.
To my surprise, Shin just looked at me. “How much money do you have?”
A fair amount, as a matter of fact. The Mama had handed me not only the money from the party but also my back pay.
“I’ve got money, too. Let’s go.” He started walking swiftly, long legs eating up the tiled floor of the station. “Time to do some grave-robbing.”
* * *
Of course we weren’t going to be digging up corpses, I said indignantly, after Shin had bought us tickets. We were going to put something back, so it was more like grave-restoring. Shin said it was pretty much the same thing. I didn’t know how to explain it, this urgent conviction that if I did what Ren asked, perhaps he wouldn’t die.
“Yi said that the order was all messed up, and that we should try to fix it.”
“What order?”
“The way things have been done. Like a ritual.” I frowned, trying to recall what I knew about Confucianism.
“Has it occurred to you that you might just be hallucinating all of this?”
We got on the northbound train this time. Another third-class carriage with hard wooden seats, but my spirits rose. I loved trains.
“But what else can I do? And how do you explain the dreams, and Yi?”
“He only tells you what you already know,” said Shin maddeningly. “It’s like a conversation with yourself.”
“What about Ren, then? He looks exactly like Yi, only older. And he recognized me that night.”
“Coincidence. All small Chinese boys look the same.”
“Dr. MacFarlane and his finger? The five of us and our names, and how everything fits together—how do you explain all of that?”
He shrugged. “I can’t.”
“If Ren dies, at least I’ll have done what he asked.” I shivered. Yi’s words, his master’s business, echoed in my head. Darkness. Rustling leaves. I thought of the newspaper article about a headless female torso discovered in a plantation. Who, or what, was Ren’s master?
“And the thumb from Pei Ling’s parcel?”
“You should tell Dr. Rawlings about it. Say that you suspect someone, maybe Y. K. Wong, is stealing body parts.”
Shin said, fierce and low, “I’m going to kill Y. K. when I see him again. Locking you in like that.”
“Don’t!” Alarmed, I glanced at him. “But you ought to report him. If he’s been selling weretiger fingers and goodness knows what else as amulets, that explains why the salesman had a finger in his pocket. They were friends—Pei Ling said as much, that her lover had a friend at the hospital who she didn’t much like.”
“And what about the rest of Pei Ling’s package?”
That was more complicated. Perhaps it was blackmail, or they’d had a falling out of sorts. Dimly, I was aware that the patterns were moving, shifting into a new configuration, like the image of fingers I’d had in my head. Five fingers, playing an unknown tune. I had the uneasy feeling that it was a dirge.
* * *
The note next to the name J. MacFarlane on the handwritten list in Pei Ling’s package had said Taiping/Kamunting. I was sure that he must be the person Ren had referred to when he’d run out into the darkness that night. And I was equally certain that he was dead, since Ren had mentioned a grave.
Taiping was a quiet little town, the state capital of Perak though there was talk that Ipoh would soon receive that honor. I wasn’t quite sure where Kamunting was. Perhaps it was one of the satellite villages around Taiping, just as Falim was to Ipoh. If Dr. MacFarlane was a foreigner who’d died in that area, there was only one place he could be: the Anglican cemetery.
I explained this to Shin, and he nodded, which made me suspicious. He was being far too docile about this spur-of-the-moment trip.
“Do you have work tomorrow?” I asked. Taiping was more than forty miles from Ipoh by rail, but it would take a while to get there because of the winding track and all the stops at Chemor and Kuala Kangsar. At this rate, we wouldn’t arrive until five o’clock in the afternoon. There was a late train starting back at eight, more than enough time to visit the cemetery, but I was worried about Shin.
“I don’t start my shift until tomorrow afternoon,” he said, closing his eyes. “Stop talking. I need to think.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was just using it as an excuse to go to sleep, but I left him alone. The train jolted along slowly, the trees passing in a steady green blur. The breeze from the open window blew away the cobwebs in my brain.
Ren, I thought. Are you still alive? Yi had said he’d discovered that as long as he lingered on that shore, he could draw Ren to the other world. The world of the dead. Perhaps the finger, that dried blackened digit that rattled in my bag, exerted the same weighty pull. Ren seemed driven to obey whatever promise he’d made, to the point of running out into the night when there was a tiger outside. Or perhaps he’d been lured out to be shot and killed in the dark.
The best I could do was to complete the task for him and bury that finger. Sever at least one lingering attachment that drew him towards the dead. The other one, however, I feared was too strong. The train rattled onward, the jungle passing like a dream, and I closed my eyes.
There was a grinding hiss. With a start, I discovered that the train had shuddered to a stop.
“Sleep well?” Shin looked amused. I had, in fact, though I realized with embarrassment that my head was pillowed on his shoulder. People were lifting their luggage off the racks overhead. We were the only two without belongings.
“You were knocked out, too,” I said, as we clambered off the train. “Or were you just ‘thinking’?”
He seemed to be in a remarkably good mood. “No, I’m done with that. By the way, who was that girl at the dance hall? The one who tried to pull my hair out?”
“That was my friend Hui,” I said.
Somehow, I felt uneasy about this interest. Please, Shin, I thought, not Hui. So far, Shin had never dated any of my good friends, no matter how they made eyes at him. It hadn’t mattered to me before, wrapped up as I’d been with Ming, but it did now.
* * *
The Taiping Railway Station was a low, pretty building, built along the same colonial lines as the station in Batu Gajah with deep shady eaves and gables. Taiping, situated in a lush basin at the foot of limestone hills, was famous for being one of the rainiest towns in Malaya, as well as for its proximity to Maxwell Hill, a small hill resort popular with honeymooning couples. Not that that would have anything to do with me, since it was highly unlikely that I’d become Mrs. Robert Chiu in the near future.
Shin said, “What are you grimacing about?”
“Robert,” I said. “It’s all over with him.”
“Does it matter to you?”
“I was hoping he’d lend me some money. To pay off my mother’s debts.”
Shin stopped. “Don’t ask him. If you need money, I’ve got some.” Irritated, he started walking again.
“Why was he with you today anyway?” I asked, running to catch up.
“He came looking for you at Mrs Tham’s, then kept following
me. I couldn’t get rid of him if I tried.”
“I suppose he was bound to find out. Though I told him long ago that we weren’t a good match.”
“What do you mean, ‘long ago’?”
Too late, I remembered how Ming had told me not to mention Robert’s kiss. “Before you went to medical school.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told Ming,” I said defensively.
For some reason, this seemed to annoy Shin even more, but he didn’t say anything. Why did he care anyway, when he’d told me last week that it would be good if I got married? We walked along in silence; I was sorry because we were arguing again.
* * *
According to the ticket seller, the Anglican cemetery was about a mile away, near the Botanical Gardens. Shin stopped at a couple of different shops near the station and emerged with a brown paper bag. I hadn’t accompanied him in because I was still wearing my emergency spare frock that I’d changed into at the May Flower, a canary-yellow slip of a dress. It looked more suited to going to a party than traveling around on the Federated Malay States Railways.
“What did you buy?”
He opened the paper bag. Inside was a brand new spade. There were other things too—a toothbrush, sticking plasters, and another flat package—and I asked him why he’d bought all of it.
“Because it looks suspicious to buy just a spade. They’ll be wondering what I’m planning to dig up.”
“I always knew you had a criminal mind,” I said.
Shin laughed and the unease between us dissipated. We had a quick bite at a nearby coffee shop, though I was itching to get to the cemetery. What if Dr. MacFarlane wasn’t buried there at all? But Shin said he wouldn’t go on without eating and neither should I.
“Later is better. Fewer people around,” he said as he polished off a plate of char kway teow, fried rice noodles garnished with bean sprouts, eggs, and cockles.
“What if it rains?”