Spirits Abroad (ebook)

by Zen Cho

  "Don't you know anything about dragons?" said Zheng Yi.

  Well, it was like having any other kind of roommate. Zheng Yi looked human most of the time anyway.

  "What about the time the dragon was seen drinking up half the Serpentine and the Daily Mail said he should be deported back to where he came from?" said Angela.

  "He was hungover! I made beef stew and you know I don't drink. So he had to drink up the rest of the red wine," said Prudence. "Anyway, the Daily Mail says that about everybody."

  "True," said Angela.

  It was a relief to have made up with Angela. It turned out that the falling out, like everything else, was really Zheng Yi's fault. A few days after they had returned from the Lake District, Angela had come to visit. She brought pandan-flavored cupcakes with gula melaka icing that she'd made, and they talked as if nothing had happened, until Angela said suddenly,

  "I don't even like him. He's not even my type. I don't know what happened."

  "Oh," said Prudence, in a voice full of cupcake.

  "No, that's a lie," said Angela. "I think I know what happened. It's not a good excuse, though."

  Prudence swallowed.

  "It's OK, we don't have to talk about it," she said quickly. She did not want to talk about feelings. To have Angela back and pretend that nothing had happened was her idea of a happy ending.

  "I think," said Angela, "it's because he was glamouring super hard. I really never felt like that before. It was like when he was around I couldn't think. And then when you all went away, it was like a cloud went away. Suddenly I could see clearly again."

  "You think it was magic?" said Prudence.

  "Oh, I wouldn't accuse your boyfriend just based on what I think," said Angela. "I went to a thaumaturge and she confirmed my magic levels were super high. I don't have any talent myself so she say probably I kena secondary glamour."

  "But why would Zheng Yi want to glamour you?" said Prudence. Angela thwapped her on the back of the head.

  "You never listen. I got secondary glamour. It was a side-effect of hanging out with you. He was glamouring to impress you lah. Did it work?"

  Prudence tilted her head from side to side. Her thoughts shot around and bumped into each other inside her skull, as lively as ever.

  "I think I can think. Don't feel like there's any cloud," said Prudence. "But Pik Mun, sorry. What did you call Zheng Yi?"

  "What?" said Angela. "'Your boyfriend', is it?"

  "Oh," said Prudence. So that was what it was.

  Return to Table of Contents

  The Perseverance of Angela's Past Life

  Angela was stalking herself.

  She was packing for Japan and she had better things to worry about than doppelgangers, so she was trying to pretend her self wasn't there.

  She thought she would probably need one pair of formal shoes, but she couldn't decide whether she should pack the new fancy shoes — which were beautiful and appropriate, but untried — or the old stalwart black peeptoes. They were a little manky, but they had seen her through May Balls and medsoc dinners alike.

  "Bring both," said her old self.

  Her old self could not enter the room without Angela's permission. She hovered at the window, peering in.

  Angela was not going to invite her in. It was a cold night, but the dead don't feel the cold.

  "I'm travelling light," said Angela. She set the new shoes down and picked up the old pair. What did it matter if they were scuffed? They had never let her down before. "I'm not bringing you also. All the more I shouldn't be bringing extra shoes."

  "What lah, not bringing me," said her old self. "I'm part of you what."

  The thaumaturge had confirmed this.

  The problem was that Angela's best friend was dating a dragon. Initially Angela hadn't noticed any side-effects. Just the usual sort of thing. Outrage that her best friend was no longer as available as she used to be, that Angela was no longer the first person she called when she wanted to watch a musical or go to the park.

  But these were ordinary incidents of the readjustment of a best friendship. Angela had got over it in time.

  She was having difficulty getting over being split into two people, though.

  "Considering you're in constant contact with a dragon, it's no surprise that your blood magic levels are so high," the thaumaturge had said. "But they're not at a level where I would usually be concerned about the impact on your health. You'd be surprised at the human body's tolerance for atmospheric magic. You hear of people living on the border of Fairyland all their lives and never coming to any harm of it. Their children are all engineers and accountants."

  Angela cast a sideways glance at the girl who had followed her to the clinic.

  "What about her, then?" she said.

  "Eh, I have a name, OK," said the girl. "Pik Mun."

  "That's my name," said Angela to the thaumaturge. "That's my self, actually. She's me. That's not normal, is it?"

  "Yes, well," said the thaumaturge. "As I said, your blood magic levels are in the normal range, but I'm afraid you seem abnormally susceptible to thaumaturgical influence. Have you noticed any other symptoms of disproportionate magic uptake?"

  "Besides suddenly having an evil twin, you mean?"

  "I'm not evil," said Pik Mun belligerently. "I'm just you."

  The thaumaturge politely ignored their bickering.

  "Waking up several feet above your bed, for example," she said. "Sleep flying is a very common symptom. Or transmutations of ordinary household objects into magical creatures, or vice versa."

  "Vice versa?"

  "I had a patient with a similar complaint, whose main symptom was the ability to see pixies in her garden," said the thaumaturge. "Unfortunately her other symptom was the ability to turn pixies into spoons. She found it very distressing. She had to sell up and move when the pixies declared war. You could hardly blame them, of course."

  "No," said Angela. "This is the only symptom I've noticed. How come my best friend isn't showing any signs of magic absorption? She's the one who's going out with the magical dragon."

  "From what you've told me, it sounds like she's immune to magic," said the thaumaturge. "That's probably why you were drawn to each other. Magic often likes to work that way."

  She pulled a sympathetic face. She was really a very pretty woman, with pale brown skin, short hair in lots of springy curls and a charming sprinkle of freckles on her nose.

  She'd offered no remedies, however, save for suggesting that Angela remove herself from the source of exposure.

  Angela wasn't going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two. But a language camp in Japan had sounded like the ideal opportunity to reduce her blood magic levels and try to get some thinking space, away from her pestersome other self.

  She had to leave for Heathrow early the next morning. Angela finished packing, ignoring the heckling from the window, and got to bed by eleven. But it took her a long time to fall asleep.

  She shouldn't have looked up her thaumaturge on Facebook. She'd done it because she was wondering about her name. Misola: such a pretty name. If she hadn't looked her up she wouldn't have found out that Misola was dating a woman.

  Particularly susceptible, indeed.

  "You're so scared for what?" said the voice at the window.

  "Can you please go away or not?" said Angela. She rolled over and buried her face under a pillow.

  In Japan they put her in a sleek grey building on top of a hill. Below it lay the city, nestled in the green cup of a valley which poured out a brilliant blue sea.

  It was summer and the air was as close and sticky as it would have been back home in Malaysia. The nearest convenience store was 45 minutes' walk away, along a path winding past houses and rows of vending machines down the hill.

  The hostel was sonorously empty. Angela and the other English teachers were the only ones staying there. In the mornings they taught English lessons; in the afte
rnoons they learnt Japanese. The day finished at four and after that Angela was free.

  There was something magical about that hill, but it was a magic that had nothing to do with dragons or pixies or doppelgangers. It breathed from the trees and the silence and the early-morning mist.

  Up here, Angela thought, she would escape herself.

  "Sometimes past selves come back to seek closure," the thaumaturge had explained. "They're not unlike real ghosts. They hang around because of unfinished business. Was there any trauma — any unanswered questions — associated with that time of your life?"

  Angela hadn't been sure what to say.

  Like everyone else, she had improved beyond recognition after secondary school. She'd benefited from the usual remedies for unattractiveness: self-confidence, freedom from school uniforms, and a decent hair-cut. She'd discovered that she was sociable, competent, and interested in other people. Her twenties had been a dream of pleasantness, and that was even though she'd spent most of it at clinical school.

  But her adolescence hadn't been unhappy either. It had just been normal. Being 25 was a lot better than being 15, but wasn't that true for everyone?

  The name change had been a purely pragmatic decision. She'd started going by Angela in her first year at uni, to make it easier on British tutors who stumbled over her real name. It had stuck. There was no denying "Angela" was more euphonious than "Pik Mun".

  She wasn't running away from anything in her past. She'd lived through her past, hadn't she? She'd been Pik Mun already. What was wrong with being Angela now?

  A sign outside the hostel asked you politely to close the gate after entering or leaving "so the wild boars will not enter".

  If you walked around with food at night the wild boars came out. Despite their wildness they were not aggressive — one of the other teachers had managed to take a picture of one before it fled.

  Angela took to striding around the park with fragrant boxes of takeaway in plastic bags banging against her knee. She did it out of competitiveness as much as anything else. She was the only one of the teachers not to have seen a wild boar.

  She was eating chicken karaage in the park when it happened. She speared a piece of fried chicken with a chopstick and looked up. The boar was right in front of her.

  It was smaller than she'd expected, about the size of a collie, with longish dark fur and amber eyes.

  Moving slowly, Angela fumbled around in her bag until she felt her camera. She took a photo of the boar one-handed, the chicken wobbling on her chopstick.

  She'd forgotten to turn off the flash. It went off like a bolt of lightning. Angela started and dropped her chicken. The boar scooped it up neatly.

  "Wah, flash some more," it said in a muffled voice. It swallowed. "You not scared meh? The zoo always say don't use flash when you take photo."

  "You — you can talk?" stammered Angela, until she realised that it was her own voice that had spoken.

  "Yah, it's me," said the boar. "Pig Mun." It snorted with pleasure.

  "You're a wild boar now?" said Angela. "How come you're a wild boar? I thought you're suppose to be me!"

  Angela had never seen a boar shrug before, but the image was not as jarring as she would've thought. All those anthropomorphized Disney animals she'd watched in childhood had obviously left their mark.

  "I don't like planes," said Pig Mun.

  "I got over that already," said Angela.

  "No, we didn't," said Pig Mun. "You still don't like planes. You just put up with it. Since I can do magic, I might as well use another route what, right?"

  "You keep following me for what?" said Angela. "Can't you go back to where you belong?"

  "That's nice," said Pig Mun. "You sound like BNP like that. I have a valid three-month visa, OK. You should know what. You applied for it."

  "You know what I mean," snapped Angela. "Back to the past."

  "I don't belong in the past," said Pig Mun.

  "Where, then?"

  Angela recoiled, but not far enough. Pig Mun's bristly snout brushed her chest.

  "There," said Pig Mun. "Inside you."

  "No," said Angela. "No, no, no. I've been you already. What's your problem? I'm grown up now! Not even our parents want me to be a kid anymore!"

  "I don't want you to go back to being me," said Pig Mun. She didn't say what she did want, but she didn't need to. After all, they were the same person — even if one of them was a wild boar.

  "Isn't everybody embarrassed about their teenage selves?" said Angela. "What's wrong with that?"

  "Everything is wrong," said Pig Mun. "If you're the teenage self."

  Angela smashed the plastic cover down onto her bento and shoved it into the plastic bag. She got up. "Well, who ask you to come back anyway?"

  "You lah!" Pig Mun shouted behind her. "You asked. You're me, remember?"

  It wasn't that Angela disliked Pik Mun. They would have got along in other circumstances. If they had met as separate people, for instance. She wouldn't have noticed the width of her hips, the roll of fat at her belly, the daikon thighs. The accent and awkwardness would have endeared Pik Mun to her.

  That sort of thing was all right on other people. But if you'd managed to grow out of that awkward stage and shed the accent and even worked off the fat, then fate shoving all of that back onto you just seemed petty.

  Angela refused to go back to that. What she liked about being an adult was being able to control her life.

  This was why she she agreed to go to the Obon festival celebrations with the other English teachers when the Japanese students invited them. Anyone would think that Angela would avoid something as magical as the celebration of a festival, in a season as heavy with humid, thunderous magic as the tropical summer.

  But it was the sort of thing she would have gone in for with enthusiasm if she was not being pursued by her dead teenage self. She wouldn't let herself be constrained by the shadow of Pik Mun.

  The Obon festival turned out to be like a carnival. Angela drank half a pint of beer and the world lit up. She floated along in her borrowed yukata, feeling beautiful and attachless, smiling beatifically upon the crowd.

  It was all reassuringly human. There were alleys of stalls selling delightful-smelling food. The stream of humanity was not offensive and sour-tempered, as humanity taken in the mass tends to be, but beautiful and individual — exquisite girls and boys in yukata; parents with toddlers on their shoulders; old people strolling along, arm-in-arm with their children.

  There was a high wooden platform reared up in the middle of the field, on top of which there was a band and a very enthusiastic emcee. When Angela got close enough she realised the people encircling the platform were dancing.

  "Come and dance," said her students.

  "Oh no," said Angela, hanging back. She'd bought some takoyaki to offset the half-pint of beer and her hands were sticky with grease and mayonnaise.

  It was a simple routine, a bit like line dancing — repeated movements of the head and hands and feet, nothing fancy with the hips. The dance was led by a group of older women wearing blue-and-white yukata: they danced with the focus of surgeons carrying out a delicate operation, with the superhuman intensity of star ballerinas.

  Angela was so charmed she let herself be bullied into joining, despite her sticky hands and bonito-flaked mouth. She was craning her head to try to see what the nearest Japanese auntie was doing when Pik Mun's face hove into view.

  "Argh!" said Angela.

  "I didn't know you're into this kind of thing," said Pik Mun. "I thought we hated dancing."

  "I told you, I've grown out of all that," said Angela. "Dancing is fun. Especially if you're a bit drunk."

  "Become like a Mat Salleh already, huh," said Pik Mun.

  She was wearing the unflattering turquoise pinafore and white shirt of the Malaysian secondary school uniform. It didn't suit her. It looked especially incongruous because she was dancing as well, with mechanical perfection, never putting a step
wrong.

  "How come you know how to do that?" said Angela, trying to watch Pik Mun's feet while clapping her hands and bobbing her head in the prescribed pattern.

  "Don't you know what this festival is?" said Pik Mun. "You didn't even ask what it's all about before you happy-happy put on your Japanese baju and join in? Angela, what happened to your curiosity? You think you know everything, is it? Grown ups are so dungu!"

  It was the first time Pik Mun had ever addressed her as Angela. It was the first time she'd really scolded her, though Angela had told her off plenty of times.

  They fell quiet. The music went on. People's voices bounced off their bubble of awkwardness.

  "Soran, soran!" roared the crowd, following the lead of the singer on the platform.

  Angela and Pik Mun kept dancing, moving in their circle with clockwork regularity.

  "Sorry," said Pik Mun.

  "They told me there'll be dancing and fireworks," said Angela. "I thought it was just for fun."

  "It's the Hungry Ghost Festival," said Pik Mun, not unkindly. "Japanese is a bit different, they have it at a different time because they don't follow the lunar calendar. What lah you."

  "Oh," said Angela. She looked around. "This is nicer than our celebrations."

  Traditionally, of course, the Hungry Ghost Festival had been celebrated with Cantonese opera performances to entertain the returning dead. Nowadays people put miniskirted girls on open-air stages to belt out raucous Cantopop. It was like any other concert, except the first line of chairs was left empty for the ghosts.

  "Here everybody gets to join," said Angela.

  "Back home everybody gets to join," said Pik Mun. "If they don't want to listen also, they can't get away from it. Hah! Remember when Dad called the police and tried to get them to ask the temple people to turn down the volume, and the police told him he should pray to the gods and say sorry for offending the dead?"

  Angela laughed at the memory.