by Ho Sok Fong
“How do I look?” she asked. “Classy?”
Cui Yi grinned, then nodded.
The evening mist had turned the street soft and golden. The surface of the street was slick as a fish’s back. Her cousin Ah Feng sat behind the reception desk, watching a football match on a little television set. He had both arms flung wide and propped casually behind his neck, revealing luxurious clumps of underarm hair.
No one came in. Cui Yi was bored out of her mind. The light faded and mosquitoes hurled themselves against a halogen light in the five-foot way. Rain swooped in from the distance, as if all the town’s roofs were one broad mountain summit. The loudspeakers at the end of the street struggled against the downpour, their songs cutting in and out. Across the street, a shopkeeper unhooked a display of schoolbags with a long pole. Boxes of goods were dragged inside. Cars sped past like ships slicing waves. Every so often, the intense black of the sky was rent apart by a flash of lightning, illuminating the line of the clouds and mountains.
Before it was even ten o’clock, Cui Yi yawned and went to collapse in her aunt’s bedroom. It rained all through the night, pouring one moment and easing off the next, sending water gurgling through the drains that wrapped around the building. The house felt as if it were overrun with frogs. Cui Yi brought her knees to her chest, curling up under the quilt, and in her dreams the house rocked like a train carriage full of frogs.
The next morning, the guy came down to pay his bill. As usual, Cui Yi went up to check the room, assessing the situation with one expert glance. It was on the first floor. There was one big window, which was covered in a mosquito net and overlooked a junction. Cui Yi could see the traffic lights on the island in the middle, and a dotted white line that stretched on and on along the pavement, until it disappeared into the distance along with the cars and the buildings.
Something had fallen under the dressing table. It was about the size of a stamp. Cui Yi picked it up but still couldn’t tell what it was; after examining it for a while, she established that it was thicker than a stamp, more like a pebble worn down by a river. She rolled it around in her palm, feeling as though she could crush it with one hard squeeze of her fist. Then, in a rush of tenderness, she tucked it carefully into her pocket.
At the bend in the stairs on her way back down, the light through the window slats scattered her shadow across the steps.
“Took you long enough,” said her aunt.
Cui Yi did not have the energy to reply. Her legs gave way and she sank down into the shadows behind the front desk. The wood was sturdy; she could see the eyes and whorls of its grain, the lines pulling and stretching until they slackened and merged, fixing in wave after congealed wave. A drawer opened. Her aunt pulled out a few ten-ringgit notes and passed them over the counter.
Morning sunlight bounced off the cement floor, making Cui Yi’s eyes smart.
“What’s your problem?” asked her aunt.
“I’m tired,” she replied. “My legs are tired, my head is tired…”
Her aunt opened the account book and jotted down some figures, then turned to inspect the room keys hanging along the back wall. She did this periodically. So did Cui Yi. It was perfectly obvious which ones were left, but they still had to go through the whole tedious process of making sure. Maybe one day there would be a mistake, or maybe one would disappear; who knew.
For dinner they had takeout chicken feet loh mee, slurped in the dining room. The room was submerged in a pool of gray; when there were no guests around, her aunt kept the lights off to save electricity. Cui Yi felt as though their eyes and faces had been diluted, turning into granules and dispersing through the dullness of the afternoon, pixellated. On rainy days, the gray-green walls were still and cool, and she felt like one of those birds that stop flying in winter. Movement dropped to the bare minimum, body hunched up, ears alert. Her aunt spoke in the soft, high-pitched voice of a young girl.
“When I think about what that uncle of yours…”
After dinner, her aunt would always start reminiscing, lamenting her hardships. Soon she’d move on to crooning a few gloomy lines from her favorite song: All day wiping tears away…like a dream all gone astray…
Since her exams, Cui Yi had felt nothing but infinite exhaustion.
Ah Feng always slept during daylight hours. He woke up every so often for a bowl of noodles, or to light a cigarette and read a few pages of a martial arts novel, but quickly fell back asleep. He was a night owl. This worked out very well, as Cui Yi and her aunt could watch the desk during the day and let him take over in the evening. The main entrance was locked at midnight, but there was a side door by the stairs, which guests could access with their keys.
Cui Yi had lost track of how many times she had flipped through the paper: Lee San Choon’s glorious rise, a Guanyin sighting, another report about zombies buried on the beach. Even the lucky number forecast was emblazoned on her memory. Without intending to, she nodded off.
“If you want to sleep, go and do it in the bedroom.” Her aunt’s voice sounded garbled and full of echoes, as if coming from inside a vat of water.
“Mmm,” she replied.
The street swept through her dreams like a tide.
When she woke up, her neck and shoulders were stiff. Her aunt was listening to the radio. “The time now is five minutes to three o’clock,” said the female presenter. Cui Yi wiped saliva from her mouth. The doorway was dark.
“I’m going into the back for a minute,” said her aunt. “Keep an eye on things.”
“Mmm,” said Cui Yi.
The sky was overcast again. A young man stepped into the lobby.
Cui Yi looked up in surprise. He had the same luggage as before, with the addition of an umbrella.
“I need a room,” he said.
Cui Yi should have called her aunt, but she didn’t.
“Let’s see your ID,” she replied.
He took it out. She opened the register and noted down the details.
“Same room as yesterday?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“The one you left this morning, do you want…” she trailed off.
It was the same bad-weather face as the previous day, but the eyes behind his glasses displayed no recognition at all. What does he take me for, she thought—the idiot next door?
She waited briefly but her aunt didn’t return, so she locked the cash drawer and led the guy upstairs. This was not allowed; her aunt had forbidden her from showing strange men to their rooms. But this one wasn’t much older than she was. They walked past the room overlooking the junction, number 102, where he’d stayed the day before. He made no comment. She opened the door to room 103, turned on the light, and left.
She turned back at the top of the stairs, noting the line of light that crept out from inside the room and gradually faded into the gloom of the corridor.
The rain came back in the afternoon. It hammered down with a force that seemed capable of cracking rocks. The five-foot way was a glistening sheet of water and the drains bubbled like anxious brooks. The gas delivery man dashed in, wearing a pale yellow rain suit. “Hey, Ma’am, pay up, quick, quick”—the words rubbed against one another, folding up and pressing close, becoming soaking wet and tangling up, sucking each other in, rustling past, and tearing wide open. Water sloshed in boots, on sidewalks, in plastic bags; everything was amplified. Outside, people huddled in the five-foot way, chattering, occasionally popping a head through the door to look around. The deluge scoured roofs and sewers.
At half past three, the guy came downstairs and went out, umbrella in hand, face still stony.
Cui Yi’s aunt was in the tea lounge, singing into the enormous full-length mirror. Ah… Love is like fog, love is like flowers…my foolish flowers. She loved to sing and would carry on even when guests came in for tea or a cigarette, absorbed in her own performance. If anything, having an audience only encouraged her. The guests clacked their applause. The ground was thick with peanut shells.
> “Back in Melaka, on stage at the Milky Way nightclub, oh, they loved me—the Indians, the Singaporeans, it didn’t matter, they all came backstage looking for me, sent me flowers, so many flowers that… oh, even my dreams smelled sweet!” she proclaimed. “The Japanese loved me too. They said I was Melaka’s Theresa Teng.”
Cui Yi sat beside the dish cupboard with her grandmother, Ah Nei; Cui Yi on a little stool, Ah Nei in a rattan chair. Cui Yi wore a pair of soggy wooden sandals. Both she and her aunt had bright red toenails. The skin of Ah Nei’s big toe had cracked and cleaved in two, and half was turning black; she blamed her nails, saying they were sharp as razors. Wherever Ah Nei went, her wooden sandals went too. She was only staying for a week, then she was going to pack them up and head north to visit her eldest daughter. She listened distractedly to her third daughter’s rendition of “Sayonara.” If a butterfly flew past, she’d have paid it the same half-hearted attention. Cui Yi often wondered how a woman like that could have given birth to a daughter like her aunt. Then again, none of Ah Nei’s children were much like her, other than her eldest.
“Were there any good Japanese?” asked Cui Yi, knowing Ah Nei had lived through that time. She was very old.
“Of course,” said Ah Nei. “What else would they be. They fought off the Malays. They saved us.”
She said that once the family had had to flee in the middle of the night, and made it as far as Brickfields, where two Malays made off with the cloth they were carrying with them. But, lucky for them, they bumped into some Japanese soldiers, who got it back.
If Cui Yi hadn’t asked, Ah Nei wouldn’t have brought it up. She had no interest in talking about a past no one else knew about; she only cared about family gossip. Failing that, even ants were of greater importance to her: the cupboard legs were each set in a bowl of water, and from time to time she would crouch down to monitor the water levels.
There were a few elderly guests in the lounge, their faces as wrinkled as steeped tea leaves and their voices hoarse from tobacco smoke. Cui Yi’s aunt seemed impervious to them, her voice ringing clear through the room. She sang for herself, but the guests seemed to enjoy following along.
At eight o’clock, the guy reappeared, squeezing through the wall of people sheltering in the five-foot way. He skirted around the bucket of mandarins beneath the window, went through the side door, and headed upstairs.
Outside the front door, the evening rain had dyed the street as ink-blue as the back of a whale.
Cui Yi glanced at the clock. It wasn’t quite eight. Days were long and nights were short. Her mother often sighed over this. “While there’s life, there’s work.” In all the weeks she’d been staying with her aunt, this was the first time Cui Yi had thought of her mother.
All night long, the rain pattered and the frogs croaked.
Five guests checked out the next morning, meaning five trips upstairs to inspect their rooms. The earliest departure was an old man who’d stayed for two days. When she entered his room, the sun was only just gracing the rod at the top of the curtain liner, casting weak ripples across the ceiling. The Malay cleaning ladies threw open the window, letting the street noise flood in, then started beating the pillows to get rid of the mildew and cigarette smoke.
Wednesday again. The Mun Sang Poh landed with a slap.
When the guy came to check out, Cui Yi’s aunt was in the bathroom. Cui Yi should have told him to wait, but he looked so impatient that she took his key and deposit receipt, opened the cash drawer, and gave him back his forty ringgit. She didn’t even check the room, just let him go.
It was still before noon.
Cui Yi browsed the Mun Sang Poh. More party disputes. A ghost in the Genting Hotel. A ghost in a school bathroom. Ah Feng had left a half-read novel under his canvas chair; Cui Yi picked it up and started leafing through it, just to kill time.
One o’clock, lunch. Two o’clock, shower.
Three o’clock and the sneakers were back, although their owner acted like it was the first time. He carefully examined the price list beneath the counter glass.
“How much for your cheapest room?” he asked.
What was his problem?
While she considered the question, her mouth robotically recited the requested information: “Single room without bathroom is twenty-five, with bathroom is forty, twelve o’clock checkout.”
She took his ID, made a copy.
“How many nights?” she asked, following the usual protocol.
“One.”
Her aunt was fast asleep in the canvas chair behind the desk. Her mouth kept dropping open, erupting into snores and incomprehensible sleep-talk. The arrival of a new guest had failed to rouse her. Cui Yi turned to select a room key from the wall—105 this time—and, clasping it in her palm, went to climb the stairs.
The room’s window was blocked by a building. It was darker than the last two. The guy entered without comment. Closed the door.
Cui Yi returned to reception, where she resumed her perusal of the Mun Sang Poh. In the Genting Hotel, you should absolutely never open the cupboard doors all the way, or you’d leave no space for the ghosts to hide. Her arms ached. They trembled on and off while she was holding the paper, though not because she was scared.
Her aunt loved the stage and was going to Melaka at the end of the month to perform with the Mayflower singing troupe. This meant Cui Yi would have to go home. She tried to imagine what would happen if she didn’t—if her aunt wasn’t there and it was just her and Ah Feng, what would they talk about? As children they’d been close, but over the past couple of years had grown apart. Cui Yi missed two years because she was cramming for exams, and when she finally came back, Ah Feng was gloomy and withdrawn, a completely different person. Once he’d locked up the front door for the night, he went out until three or four in the morning. If she ever happened to brush past him, in the kitchen or on the way to the bathroom, Cui Yi felt her neck shrink into her shoulders. One evening, she came out of the bathroom and saw him stirring malted chocolate into milk. She froze, unable to step any closer. He seemed to sense something too—he immediately picked up his drink and walked off, without even glancing at Cui Yi.
He was just like his father. More and more so.
Half past three, and sneakers brushed the doorstep. The guy had gone out again. No umbrella this time. The sun was in full force and the five-foot way glittered like the sea.
The two lower drawers of the reception desk were for items left behind by guests. Newspapers and toothbrushes went straight in the trash, but diaries, shoes, clothes, cosmetics, umbrellas, and the like went into the drawers; some had been languishing there for six or seven years. Cui Yi pulled out an abandoned novel. It had no cover, and no indication who the author was. She opened it at random somewhere in the middle and found a stream of sickly dialogue. For decades, the protagonists had endured long journeys, traversed whole continents, gone back and forth like those migratory birds and fish that move between the northern and southern hemispheres… The end remained a mystery, because after page 300 all the rest of the pages had fallen out.
The weather could shift in an instant. Rain came out of nowhere in the afternoons, arriving as a flood, threatening to submerge the town. It drenched the towels drying on the side of the courtyard. You had to be quick with the waterproof awnings. Cui Yi pulled the strings taut, looking up at the tiny rollers above her head.
The guy came back dripping wet and raced up the stairs like there was a ghost on his heels.
Thursday morning. The New Life Post at the foot of the roller shutter over the front door. Cui Yi’s aunt went out to pick up wanton mee for breakfast. Ah Feng was there and, as always, he and his mother bickered across the table.
“You don’t understand anything,” said Ah Feng. “All you ever do is sing.”
His mother was instantly furious.
“Oh, and you’re so clever, are you? Haven’t even passed your SRP, and already you’re thinking of an MBA? They’re filling yo
ur brain with shit…”
Ah Feng stormed out and raced away on his scooter, spewing white exhaust fumes down the street.
“Better off raising pigs,” said Cui Yi’s aunt. She went to wash the dishes.
The sky was cloudy and dark. It hung low, filling the house with a heavy gray light.
Three o’clock, the guy again. Cui Yi noted that his clothes were still spotlessly clean and neatly pressed. She handed him a key but didn’t show him to the room this time.
“I’ll leave that to you, sir,” she said. Her right arm and leg felt like underwater seaweed; they wouldn’t stop shaking.
Him again. And again. He always checked out before noon and returned at three o’clock. No one notices him but me, thought Cui Yi. Her aunt continued her inspections of the keys hanging on the wall, ensuring they matched the entries in the guest register. How had she missed this? Had she really not noticed that Cui Yi was checking in guests behind her back?
The second Wednesday in March, a Mun Sang Poh day. Cui Yi couldn’t bear the uncertainty of the situation; it rolled through her in bone-chilling waves, traveling from her shoulders down to her toes. When the guy handed her a fifty-ringgit note and she passed him back his change, she only just resisted the urge to reach out and grab him by the neck, to check if he was really there.
“One, two, three… Sorry, we don’t have any small bills,” she said.
Eight 50-sen coins, seven 20-sen, sixteen 10-sen. She counted them out in front of him, then scooped them up and let them clatter into his outstretched hand.
She added the three single notes on top, folded small. His fingers were barely visible beneath the coins, but he managed to hold the bills in place with a fingernail as he walked off.
The second Thursday in March. At half past three, the guy went out carrying an umbrella. And so Cui Yi did too, trailing him like a detective.
Sunlight pummeled the street and the pavement gleamed. A warm March breeze carried off newspapers. The guy drifted as aimlessly as a ghost. He paused by the entrance to the Odeon but didn’t buy a ticket. Instead, he paused and sat on the railing that ran along the sidewalk outside.