Spirit Play

by Barbara Ismail

  Kamal was tired. ‘What did you come here for, Dad?’

  ‘To see how you were.’

  ‘How did you think I would be?’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles,’ he answered. Behind him, two policemen entered and unlocked the remaining empty cell. They ushered him into it with little ceremony, ran their eyes along the three sets of bars and left.

  ‘You’re in jail?’ Kamal asked, shocked.

  His father sniffed. ‘I came to demand they release you, and they refused.’

  ‘So?’ asked Hamidah from the cell next to him.

  ‘You’re filthy!’ he informed her.

  ‘I know. Why are you here?’

  ‘I threw a rock through the window there.’ He waved towards Osman’s house.

  She nodded sagely. ‘And left a grasshopper?’

  ‘Don’t talk about it,’ he hissed at her. ‘Not in here.’

  ‘It’s just a grasshopper.’

  He glared at her, though it was difficult in side-by-side cells. She laughed at him, which clearly goaded him. ‘You still think you’re commanding the forces of evil?’

  ‘You’ve fed it yourself. Be quiet.’

  The tops of the walls were wire mesh, a half-hearted attempt to encourage the movement of air. It was a failure, but it allowed some contact among the cells, if indeed such contact was welcomed. Hamidah stepped onto her bench, which brought her to the mesh if she stood on tiptoe. She looked down into her husband’s cell and smiled.

  ‘It’s nice to see you here, all locked up like this. Like a rooster in a cage: your eyes are free, but your body confined.’

  ‘Get down from there.’ He looked up at her disgustedly. ‘Kamal, tell your mother to climb down off that bench. I can’t bear to look at her.’

  ‘Am I frightening you? How could that be?’

  ‘Not you, Midah. Just the way you look—like a vampire with that hair. And a dirty face. Is this what you’re really like?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed amiably. ‘This is the real me, feeding spirits with blood, drinking it myself. It’s what you made me. You should be proud to see it.’

  He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know how I stayed married to you for so long.’

  ‘I wonder the same thing; about myself, I mean.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Kamal ordered them. ‘Just be quiet.’

  ‘Kamal, it’s just a conversation. Just family time here. This is where your father’s taken us.’

  ‘Be quiet, Mom.’

  She leaned her elbows on the top of the wall. ‘No more. Not for anyone.’ She looked down at Murad. ‘Where is your familiar now? Is it coming to get us all out of here? I’m looking around and I don’t see anything.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Murad muttered again. ‘Let me relax.’

  ‘You can relax when you’re dead,’ she said with sudden vehemence. ‘Just like you killed Jamillah.’

  ‘Me?’ He seemed honestly surprised. ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘I know you did. And I’m telling them! You think Kamal and I will sit still and be accused of your crimes? No more. You can suffer on your own.’

  ‘Tell them what? There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘They think you did it anyway, because no one can stand you. When I tell them, they’ll be delighted to hear it. You’re their favorite suspect. Maybe they’ll hang you!’

  ‘Mom, stop it!’

  ‘Won’t Noriah be crushed,’ she taunted him. ‘She might never recover!’

  Murad was now furious. He pulled his bench over to the wall under the mesh and climbed up on it. The veins in his neck were pulsing, his face was red, his teeth gritted.

  ‘Leave Noriah out of this. This is just you being…vindictive. I always told you, Midah, you can’t always chase revenge.’

  ‘You tell me that! You!’

  They stood face to face through the wire, Murad’s revulsion clear on his face, Hamidah spitting fury. He poked his finger into her face. ‘I’m telling you to stop. You’re a spectacle.’

  She laughed at him, loud and long. ‘I’m free of you now. You’ll never get out of jail.’

  In a rage, he grabbed her hair, and she howled with pain.

  ‘Now listen! I divorce you! I divorce you! I divorce you! Kamal, do you hear it? Three talak! I never want to hear anything more from you.’

  He yanked her hard by her hair, pounding her head onto the top of the wall. She squirmed around, trying to get free, but succeeded only in twisting his hand deeper into her hair so that he couldn’t get loose.

  Rahman and another officer came into the jail, drawn by Hamidah’s screams, paralyzed by the tableau before them. They could hardly credit what they saw.

  With a piercing scream, Hamidah desperately fought free a wicked-looking small dagger folded into her sarong, reached around and stabbed Murad in the neck. He could not jump away with his hand securely tangled in her hair, so she stabbed him again, blood now covering them both from the shoulders up.

  He coughed and pulled his head back, but she kept the knife buried, and with a deft movement, slit his throat, and while Kamal shrieked and the policemen tried to drag them apart, Murad died. His knees buckled and his head flung back. He hung from his hand and his wife’s hair, which had to be cut off in order to free him.

  The only thing she asked for was a bath.

  Chapter 28

  THE POLICE STATION HAD BEEN in an uproar. Hamidah was taken roughly from her cell after having her hair hacked off to free Murad. The policeman who did the hacking, an older man named Salleh, swore he would have nightmares about it for the rest of his life and retired to a corner to drink coffee with his eyes closed. His comrades took turns sitting down next to him in silent communion.

  She was placed in the interrogation room, under Rahman’s watchful eye. He kept his distance lest she also come after him with a knife, but thankfully she sat quietly, calmly, softly humming under her breath. All in all, she seemed at ease, and quite pleased with her afternoon’s work. She would occasionally catch Rahman’s eye and give him a pleasant smile, which terrified him all the more because it seemed so natural.

  Kamal remained in a state of shock, shaking and crying, unable to process what he’d seen. And who could blame him? It was an act no one should ever have to witness. The coroner who came to pronounce Murad dead—‘really dead’, as he described it—gave Kamal a sedative to calm him. He looked in on Hamidah to see if she needed one, and determined she was by far the calmest person in the building. She gave him a friendly wave as he left her.

  Several men, together with the cleaning staff, scrubbed the cells. There was blood everywhere—more than anyone had seen in one place outside the ritual slaughter of goats on Hari Raya Haji. And even then, it might have been a toss-up between the religious ritual and this slaughter.

  Maryam was dumbstruck. She was called to the station; the officer driving the car was trembling and sweaty and refused to give any information on why she was wanted.

  Upon arriving, she took in Murad’s lifeless body lying on a table, covered with a sheet, awaiting transport to the hospital. She looked under the sheet: Murad was bled white, like a wax figure. She saw Salleh in the corner and heard the sounds of mops and buckets in the cells. She peeked in the doorway and gasped at the mayhem which had left behind such blood.

  Stumbling backward, she almost fell into a sobbing Kamal, but Osman grabbed her arm and led her into his office.

  He spoke urgently. ‘She killed him. Grabbed him through the mesh and slit his throat. Mak Chik, we have to question her!’ And with that, he propelled her into the room where Hamidah waited.

  Hamidah sat on the chair behind the table, her arm leaning against the back, her feet crossed. Her attitude was that of supreme sophistication, at odds with her newly chopped hair and filthy clothes. She smiled ruefully.

  ‘I really should change now, shouldn’t I, Kakak? I look a sight: a complete crazy woman. By the way, and excuse me for asking, do you have a
cigarette?’

  Like an automaton, Maryam offered her a pack of cigarettes, originally Mamat’s, she had secreted in the folds of her sarong. She lit one for each of them. Hamidah threw her head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said gratefully. ‘Alamak! I can’t wait to bathe. So, Kakak, what would you like to ask me?’

  Maryam gaped at her. ‘What happened to you?’

  Hamidah shrugged. ‘I’m out from under Murad. How many years has it been? My whole life wasted. I felt like the familiar myself, kept in a bottle and fed blood. I might as well have been. And frightened? Terrified.

  ‘It’s funny now, but I can’t think why. He’s just a man like any other man, and now he’s harmless. But for so long, I just kept my mouth shut and looked smaller and smaller so he wouldn’t notice me.

  ‘And his sister, too. What a pair. You know when I decided I had to get out?’ Maryam shook her head. ‘When Kamal married Hayati. If I didn’t do something, he was going to become his father all over again. My sweet little boy. I couldn’t let it happen.’

  ‘But why…?’

  ‘Kill him?’ Hamidah finished helpfully. ‘It was the only way to escape. Otherwise I’d always fear he’d come after me. I was so trapped! My parents wouldn’t help me, they were thrilled with the marriage. A prestigious family and lots of money. It’s such a shortsighted view.

  ‘Well, I can’t blame them for thinking that at first. But they should have helped me, taken me home. They knew how evil he was, but they wanted me to stay.

  ‘I always liked Aziz. I thought he would have been a much nicer husband…well, anyone would. That’s why I wanted Kamal to marry his daughter, the younger one. Then he’d be out of his father’s influence. I thought Aziz would want to have my son in his family, you know, as a remembrance of me. So we would be joined in the end; you know, the same grandchildren.’

  She sighed regretfully. ‘I was wrong, it seems. He didn’t want anything to do with Murad, not that I blame him, and he certainly didn’t want grandchildren with Murad’s blood.

  ‘Well, before I could do anything about it, poor Kamal was married to Yati. She’s just like her mother: not a drop spilled, and this is not a good thing. She’ll drive him crazy. I’ve already asked him to divorce her.’

  She tapped the ashes on the floor. Maryam didn’t dare interrupt: she didn’t even know if she could speak at all.

  ‘I was jealous, you know,’ she added, conversationally. ‘Jamillah had Aziz, her girls, her job at the market. I mean, a normal life. And I was locked up with Murad and his familiar. Can you imagine?’

  She removed another cigarette from the pack. ‘About six months after we got married, he started talking about this spirit. It was enough to make me crazy for real. A grasshopper in a bottle. He fed it blood, and he wanted me to feed it blood, too. But do you know what I did? I always changed the grasshopper,’ she finished triumphantly. ‘He thought it was the same bug for years and years. No, I let it go and caught another one. That was my revenge: catching grasshoppers. It isn’t a life.

  ‘And it wasn’t even a real familiar! Just a grasshopper. A harmless grasshopper. And he thought he knew so much about black magic.’ She laughed raucously. It was as if this was her final triumph. ‘You should never confuse plain meanness with black magic. It’s a good thing to remember.’

  ‘What happened to your hair?’ She couldn’t believe that was her first question, but she could not drag her eyes away from hair which looked like it had been hacked off with a machete. As it turned out, it had.

  ‘I know, it looks awful,’ Hamidah said mournfully. ‘You know, Murad grabbed my hair through that mesh on top of the wall and started banging my head against the bricks.’ Now Maryam noticed the bruises along the side of her head, which was also swelling.

  ‘You need some ice,’ she said automatically. Osman went to the door. ‘And then?’

  ‘I must have twisted and his hand got tangled. It was all matted, you know.’ She patted what was left of her locks. ‘Then I stabbed him and slit his throat. And he died, of course, and his hand was still in my hair. He was hanging off it, really, and it hurt! And I couldn’t move, so one of the policemen very kindly cut it off to get me free of him.’

  ‘The knife?’ Maryam gulped. She couldn’t seem to put together a full sentence.

  ‘Oh that. It was hidden, in my underwear. Because you never know.’

  ‘Indeed not.’

  She turned to Osman. ‘So you see, I couldn’t let anyone bathe me. They’d take away my knife, and I was saving it to kill him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Maryam felt she would never be able to get the stunned look from her face or keep her jaw from hanging open.

  ‘Did you…Jamillah?’ Maryam could barely form the words.

  Hamidah interpreted this correctly. ‘Did I kill her? Certainly not!’ Her expression implied it was Maryam who might well be the crazy one. ‘Murad did,’ she explained calmly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh yes. He smothered her with a towel.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘How would I know?’ she replied tartly. ‘He told me.’

  Maryam turned to look at Osman in wonderment. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  ‘Surely you suspected,’ Hamidah continued, unperturbed. ‘I know Aziz thought it was Murad who did it—to exact some kind of revenge. For what exactly, I don’t think he knew. But that was Murad all over, just revenge without any reason for it.

  ‘I think, and of course,’ she said confidentially, ‘it’s just my opinion, that Murad wanted to get back at him for the fight over the boat. He thought everyone should happily accept whatever he gave them and be grateful. You’ve never seen anyone so mad as he was after that fight.’

  She shook her head, remembering. ‘Too bad he didn’t fall and break his neck.’ She shrugged, a what-can-you-do gesture.

  ‘But how did he…?’

  ‘Kill her? I just told you! Everyone knew there would be a main puteri. He went to the village and then…’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was he alone?’

  Now Hamidah was not nearly as chatty. ‘I don’t know,’ she said thoughtfully, as though trying to recall an event long ago. ‘I don’t know who might have been there with him.’

  ‘Kamal?’ Maryam suggested, speaking very softly.

  ‘Kamal? No.’ She clamped her mouth shut as though she might never open it again.

  ‘But he came with you to my village?’

  ‘I’m his mother. I needed his help!’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Kakak …’ She leaned on the table and snaked another cigarette out of the box. She looked up and turned again to Osman, eyes downcast and a small, polite smile on her lips. ‘May I have some coffee, please?’

  He got up, whispered through the door and came back with ice in a towel, which Hamidah applied to her head with murmured thanks. He settled himself in his chair, looking at the prisoner expectantly. She took a deep drag on her cigarette.

  ‘Kakak,’ she repeated, ‘Murad didn’t like you, I’m afraid.’

  Maryam smothered her amusement, it simply wouldn’t do for her to laugh out loud now. ‘Did you think it would bother me?’

  ‘Oh, not at all, not at all,’ she waved her cigarette in the air. ‘But if he didn’t like you, it was a very short distance to harming you. I know it! He might think of sending his grasshopper after you,’ she smirked, greatly enjoying her final joke on him. ‘Or he might help the grasshopper. You annoyed him.’

  ‘How?’ Maryam asked, though she could easily guess.

  ‘Well, let me see.’ She counted on her fingers, cigarette held firmly between her lips. ‘You work in the market. You talk to people, even men. You talked to him!

  ‘And, you were helping the police, and he told me you had no right to. He said the police using you was like throwing salt into the ocean. You were just pretending
to be important, and the police would never listen to you.’

  Maryam was insulted, even given the source.

  ‘He didn’t know what he was talking about,’ Osman’s mild, flat-accented voice was firm. ‘Mak Chik Maryam is the police force’s greatest asset!’

  Maryam smiled at him, grateful that he came immediately to her defense, even if he was defending her against a lunatic.

  ‘You’ve convinced me your husband didn’t like me. Not a problem. But Kakak, it wasn’t your husband climbing into my window, it was Kamal, and you were there.’

  ‘Oh that.’ She seemed supremely indifferent. ‘Well, you know, Kamal is his son.’

  Maryam stayed silent, her eyebrows raised, awaiting clarification.

  ‘Well, he told him to go! Can’t you see that? Kamal would never have done such a thing on his own. He’s not like that.’

  Maryam and Osman looked at each other. Kamal seemed very much like that indeed.

  ‘And…?’ Osman prompted.

  Now Hamidah seemed exasperated. ‘So Murad told him to go. And Kamal, he’s a good boy, he told me where he was going. Murad told him to climb in and smother you, in the same way Jamillah died. Then it would look like this happened every time there was a main puteri in Penambang. It’s clever when you think about it. I hated him, but he could be clever.’

  ‘It wasn’t that clever, since everyone was expecting it—and it didn’t work,’ Maryam pointed out.

  ‘Well, as I told you, Kamal is not that kind of boy. He really didn’t want to do it, so he made sure he got caught.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that at all, Mak Chik,’ Osman interjected. ‘He seemed pretty determined.’

  ‘I was there too,’ she replied loftily. ‘If Kamal really wanted it done, it would have been.’

  ‘Don’t even argue,’ Maryam advised him. ‘There isn’t any reason.’ Osman shrugged, and frowned at his notebook.

  ‘So you see,’ Hamidah continued, believing she had won that round, ‘Kamal was just going through the motions so he wouldn’t have disobeyed his father. Who, I can tell you now, was waiting not far away to see if everything was done correctly. But he must have heard the commotion, so he ran back to Semut Api, the coward, and left us two with the police.’