Shadow Theatre

by Fiona Cheong

  I smiled at her, at Shak, and nodded, glad that ours was a true friendship.

  Auntie Coco's sister was sitting underneath the awning over the front door, shelling peas and looking up now and then to watch as the cemetery leaves that Auntie Coco was sweeping off the roadside floated up and into the monsoon drain. Barbara, the sister's name was, but not even Auntie Coco called her that. She was sitting in a folding chair with the basket of peas in her lap, and a yellow Tupperware howl on the ground, at her feet. Her mouth hanging half open like always, as she watched Shak and me approach her house. It was her mouth that gave her away, you know. Because otherwise, who could tell just by looking, she was retarded? Auntie Coco always dressed her so nicely, the sister. Buying her clothes from Isetan, making sure her hair was always neatly combed. She even plucked her sister's eyebrows for her and helped her with a bit of lipstick.

  "Hello, how are you?" Auntie Coco was saying to Shak, as we were about to pass her gate. Her tone was friendly, and I didn't pick up on any hidden agenda. Besides, Auntie Coco wasn't the yakkity-yak sort, you know, although she may have been curious like everyone else, about the baby's father.

  "Hello," said Shak, while I noticed her glancing at the sister, who was watching us now as if we were on television.

  "Hello, Auntie Coco," I said, and Shak and I would have kept on walking, because there was no reason for us to stop, and also, Shak was getting tired, I could tell from the way she smiled at Auntie Coco. Because the heat was getting to her, I thought, when I saw her eyes had a wandering expression, as if she didn't have the energy to focus.

  But then, Auntie Coco asked us, "Eh, Rose, eh, you and your friend stop and talk a while, can?"

  So we stopped, out of politeness only.

  Different from when we were outside the doctor's gate, here there was no breeze blowing about, the asphalt sloping up hot and dry. The air ticking with frogs and insects, with mosquitoes and grasshoppers mostly, although in our schooldays there used to be butterflies also, fluttering their psychedelic wings over the gravesites in the cemetery, and in Gopal Dharma's garden.

  There were no other neighbors outside, as far as I could see, everyone else either preparing for dinner or not at home.

  "You just came back from America-ah?" Auntie Coco was asking Shak. "Are you back for good?"

  "No, just for a visit," replied Shak.

  "Ah, you have a good doctor here or not?" Auntie Coco went on.

  Shak hesitated for a moment, then said, "My mother's gynecologist." She looked taken aback at the question, as if in America, no one would ask this sort of thing, as if it might be considered rude.

  "Ah, who?" asked Auntie Coco.

  "Dr. Tay something."

  mm.

  Shak glanced at me, and I tried to smile back reassuringly, although whether or not it worked, I wasn't sure.

  "You didn't go to see him, yet, right?" Auntie Coco continued.

  "No, I have an appointment."

  "Ah, when?"

  Shak hesitated again, then said slowly, "Monday."

  Auntie Coco nodded as if to agree that Monday was the best day, or as if she had already sensed the appointment was on Monday, and now it was confirmed. She was known to be a bit clairvoyant, you know, Auntie Coco, and some people were saying she may have been born with a veil, which would mean she could see ghosts also. But why she would be clairvoyant about something like a doctor's appointment, it made no sense to me.

  "How's your health, Auntie Coco?" I asked, trying to change the subject, to help Shak out.

  "Oh, sama sama." She sighed. "My cholesterol's a hit highlah, so the doctor wants me to go on a diet. Aiya, I told him, how am I going to go on a diet at my age?" Auntie Coco shook her head, and when she looked at Shak, her eyes were full of concern, but I thought it was only because of Shak's pregnancy. "You are healthy?"

  Shak smiled. "Yes."

  "We should be going now," I started to say, but Auntie Coco was already calling to her sister, "Sabi, Babi, come out here for a while."

  The sister smiled, but didn't rise from the chair. She went on holding the basket of peas, smiling as if she didn't have a care in the world, as they say.

  "Auntie Coco," I started again.

  She swatted at my words like mosquitoes, and stepped closer to Shak, who stepped closer to me at once, which surprised both me and Auntie Coco, although for different reasons. And it made Auntie Coco say, "Eh?" and look at Shak as if suddenly she was realizing, clairvoyant or not, she didn't really know Shak. Like everyone else, she had been making assumptions about her.

  "I'm not going to eat you, girl," said Auntie Coco. "Why you scared of me like that?"

  "Oh, I didn't mean that." Shak shook her head and gave Auntie Coco an embarrassed smile. "I'm sorry." Then she looked at me, but I didn't know what to say.

  "Come, let me touch your baby."

  Before we knew it, Auntie Coco had laid her hands on Shak's womb, and I saw her sister putting down the basket and getting up.

  'Three months more. Make sure this Ur. Tay is a good doctor, okay? If you don't like him, come and see me. I give you someone." That was what she said, Auntie Coco, although Shak was only five months pregnant.

  'The baby's not due until the end of December, Auntie Coco," I said, since Shak wasn't saying anything.

  'Three months," she repeated, removing her hands quite solemnly. She looked at Shak. "You listen to me, okay, girl? You get ready-ah."

  Shak nodded and smiled. She didn't completely believe what Auntie Coco was saying, I could tell. I wondered whether to let her know about Auntie Coco and how she may have been born with a veil, but then I looked at that watermelon womb and thought, maybe it was better not to. In case the rumor about the baby ghost was indeed a rumor only, I didn't want to help Chandra to pantang Shak. Definitely, I didn't want to pantang her baby, such a helpless innocent.

  Auntie Coco's sister had come out to the gate by now, and was standing and staring at Shak's womb. She was wearing one of her prettier dresses that evening, a floral print, I remember. Blue and yellow splashes of Danish tulips on a white background, very bright and free, as if she were going out somewhere, as if she were meeting up with a hot date, as they say. I wouldn't want to own a dress like that now, since you never know what can bring you bad luck, but it was certainly pretty.

  "Howdee," said the sister, meaning "Howdy," of course, like a cowboy, only she couldn't speak that fast.

  Shak smiled at her and said, "Hi, how are you?" very kindly, which maybe was what made the sister decide it was safe to come out to the road.

  "She watch too much TV," said Auntie Coco, as her sister was opening the gate.

  "You want some peas?" the sister asked, looking only at Shak and ignoring me completely. She could be like that sometimes.

  "No, thank you." A few strands of hair fell over Shak's face as she shook her head, so gracefully, even in the heat. I saw both Auntie Coco and the sister noticing it, as if only now were they seeing the auburn hue of Shak's hair, not black like the rest of ours. But who could miss seeing her hair the first time they saw her? It used to drive the boys wild, that hair, all the boys, Chinese, Malay, Indian, European, their background didn't matter when it came to Shak. Because of her hair, and also what some of the lay teachers used to call, Shak's six-million-dollar eyelashes (the teachers were punning, of course, on the six-million-dollar man, Lee Majors, the American actor).

  "Sabi," said Auntie Coco. "See?" And she put her hands on Shak's womb again, moving them around this time, a bit gingerly, as if to make sure not to disturb the baby while she measured the length and width of its head. That was how it looked to me, what Auntie Coco was doing, although maybe she was measuring something else, somehow.

  The sister also put her hands on Shak's womb, and I looked at Shak to see if all this touching was making her uncomfortable. But Shak seemed quite at ease with it, you know. She was looking down, watching their hands, with her head tilted sideways, her beautiful hair falling against
her cheek.

  Other neighbors may have seen us out there, although there was still no one else outside, and Evelina Thumboo had gone back into her house.

  I remember looking over at the jacaranda, its violet flowers spreading so delicately in the evening light. Evelina Thumboo's lamp was on, the usual one by her living-room window. Her curtains were open, I remember, and so were the curtains in most of our other neighbors' houses.

  "Babi, what do you say?" Auntie Coco was asking.

  "Boy," her sister replied, with a giggle. "Boy baby."

  Auntie Coco smiled, looking pleased, and for some reason, I noticed the wrinkles around her eyes, as if she might be older than I used to think she was.

  "You want a boy?" she asked Shak.

  I already knew Shak's answer, although we hadn't talked much about her baby, you know.

  "I want my baby," she told Auntie Coco. "Boy or girl, I don't care. I want my child." And there was something about the way she was looking at Auntie Coco, I remember it now. I saw it even then, but I couldn't place my finger on what was so odd about her expression, only that maybe, she was starting to believe Auntie Coco a bit.

  "You have a boy. Ambitious also."

  "How do you know?" I interrupted them, feeling a bit left out.

  "Always kicking, right or not?" Auntie Coco went on, still talking to Shak.

  'That's why you think it's a boy?" I asked, just to see what she would say. "Girl babies don't kick?"

  Auntie Coco turned to me and asked, "You want to learn?" but her tone implied she knew I wouldn't go for it. "You want to learn, I can teach you."

  I looked at Shak, who was watching me as if she were holding her tongue about something. But about what, I wasn't sure.

  "We have to go," she said suddenly, to Auntie Coco and her sister. "My mum, you know. She doesn't like it when people are late for dinner."

  "Ah, okay-lah," said Auntie Coco. "We talk some more another time. Go, better go-ah."

  "Go," echoed the sister, and she reached out and patted Shak's womb as if for one last time.

  And that was how we left them.

  I THOUGHT SHAK would want to start talking right away about Auntie Coco. I thought she was going to ask me right away, whether or not I believed what Auntie Coco had foretold, but as it turned out, Shak didn't speak until we were almost at her house, and then, what she asked me was, "Do you know how Laura Timmerman's doing?"

  Shak knew I wasn't in touch with most of our classmates, but I hadn't told her it was by intent. Because then I would have to tell her why, which would only drag up the fifteen years and how much I had missed her, and she hadn't found time even for a postcard. What would be the point, right? Better to move on with life, as they say.

  So I lied a hit, although I felt uncomfortable doing it, since Shak and I weren't the sort to lie to each other. "She's fine," I said, and fortunately I had seen Laura's two children from afar once, when they were visiting their grandfather. So I was able to refer to them, only not by name. I told Shak, "She has two daughters. They're happy living in Australia."

  'That's good," she murmured, and I wasn't sure which part she was remembering, but I thought, since she had asked about Laura Timmerman, perhaps her mind had drifted past that night to the following morning. To our school tuckshop where Laura Timmerman had told us (while Isabella was also there), how the doctor and his wife had made their son strip off his pajamas in the driveway, first the shirt, then the trousers, right where all the neighbors could see, as well as anyone passing by the house, man or woman, boy or girl.

  All Laura's neighbors could do was stay away from their windows. Keep their own faces out of sight. Laura and her cousin who was visiting, they had heard everything from upstairs in Laura's bedroom, how the son kept begging and begging, "Please-lah Daddy, please don't make me do it," when his father was telling him to take off his trousers.

  By the time Shak and I were stepping off the bus, he was already fully naked, the son, and whimpering as he was being dragged towards the gate. Thirteen years old, I remember, younger than us. A St. Peter's boy. His hips so pale in the amber light, his penis sticking out like a carrot every time the doctor grabbed his arm to prevent him from covering himself.

  "How could a father do that to his own child?" Shak was saying, as if she were reading my mind. It was the same thing she had said on the night itself, when finally, we were able to make ourselves walk away.

  "1 don't know," I said, just as I had said before. Had Shak been thinking about the doctor's son, the whole time Auntie Coco and her sister had been touching her womb, and making predictions about her baby? I wondered about it, but I couldn't make myself ask the question. Not that I had forgotten anything, certainly not what Shak and I had grown up hearing about the boy's sister, how she had been kidnapped when she was four, and molested and then murdered. (Her body wasn't found for two weeks, another of our unsolved cases. Maybe that was why, because there was no one else to blame, the parents kept punishing the son.) But I knew how to put things on the back burner, so to speak. Because I didn't want to become obsessed with the past. I wanted to move on, not be like Americans, everyone going into therapy.

  But the other side to the story was that at fifteen, Shak wasn't meeting boys in the cemetery, yet. Neither of us had ever seen a naked boy, you know. We hadn't even seen naked girls, because in school, for P.E. everyone would change into shorts and T-shirts in the bathroom stalls, all of us protecting our modesty in those days.

  So being Americanized, maybe that was why, even after we had seen the doctors house, Shak couldn't put it behind her easily.

  That was what I told myself, because I didn't want to think she might be holding on to it on purpose. Because I wanted to move on, as I've said.

  So I brought us back to Auntie Coco.

  "What do you think about what Auntie Coco said?" I asked Shak. "You think the baby might be born early?"

  "Maybe," she said. "But the baby's not a boy."

  "You've already found out?"

  No. I just have a feeling."

  We were passing Willy Coleman's house, I remember, his front door closed, curtains drawn across all the windows downstairs as usual. (Because he was a very private man, that Willy Coleman, and his wife, being from China, she had never tried to have much say about anything, and their son was only eleven years old. He had even less say, that poor Matthew. Always getting caned for one thing or another, you know.)

  Next door to Willy Coleman's house was his mother's house, and I could see Adelaide Coleman's other grandson, the older one who lived with her, Nathan, talking on the telephone in the living room. He was standing near a window, smiling and laughing and shrugging his shoulders this way and that. Probably talking to a girl, and no wonder. Because he was becoming quite a heart-throb, that boy. Like Ivan Anthony in our time, I could see it coming already, and I wondered vaguely whether Adelaide would be able to control him, or was it true that every child needed at least two parents?

  Shak hadn't told me anything about the baby's father, but I was sure she would tell me eventually. Maybe she could sense I didn't want to talk about it, yet, which I myself wasn't aware of. Only looking back now, I see it may have been what was going on with me.

  "Do you think she's right?" Shak asked me, as we reached her gate.

  I was surprised, because I thought for sure, she would remember why Auntie Coco might call the baby a boy if the baby was actually a girl. To deceive the spirits, of course, to confuse them in case they came looking for a newborn. Which sometimes, spirits would do, come looking for a newborn, for whatever reason.

  So I told her, "Yes, Auntie Coco's right. She's one of those women, okay? She can tell about things like that."

  Shak looked at me for a moment, and I could feel her uncertainty over what to say, as if again, she was holding something back. Then she asked, "Are you sure about her? This Auntie Coco. She's reliable?"

  And I was relieved. Because we shouldn't have been talking so openly about it
, you know, especially standing on the road like that.

  Not that the cemetery, which was only several feet away, the air there dusky with the approaching night, with the aroma of frangipani and jasmine damp like dew on the leaves, not that it was anything to fear, or Che' Halimah even. But who could tell who or what might be listening?

  Whether the baby ghost was more than a rumor, or not.

  "Yes," I told Shak. "Auntie Coco's reliable."

  And it seemed to be all she needed to hear.

  MOST OF THE neighbors were home that evening, Evelina Thumboo, as I've already said, and Gopal Dharma, his car was parked in the driveway when we had passed by his house. Also, the baskets left by the two girls were gone by then. (We hadn't seen the girls that afternoon, but their baskets had been there when Shak and I had passed the house earlier. Jo and Susanna, who would come every Friday to weed Gopal Dharma's garden. We had seen their baskets on the front step, so they must have left by the time we were leaving for our walk.) My mother wasn't home, since she was at Holy Family, playing gin rummy with Father O'Hara and Sister Sylvia. Because that was her act of charity, as my mother would say, and every Friday evening, it was where she went, to Holy Family, and she would stay there sometimes as late as ten o'clock. Willy Coleman was home, and Adelaide, too, and Wong Siew Chin and her husband Jeremy, and Serena and Ivan. All of them would come outside later, I remember, when Auntie Coco started calling for her sister.

  Sally Soo-Tho would come out as well, and Bernadette Tan, who was good friends with my mother (even though my mother was always complaining about her). Wong Siew Chin was also friends with my mother, but she was closer friends with Dorothy Nco (who I don't think was home). Those were the yakkity-yaks, the main ones. Sally Soo-Tho and Bernadette Tan couldn't have seen Shak and me when we were outside Auntie Coco's house, because their houses were too far up the slope. But they were only a few doors away from Shak's house, you know. They may have seen us outside Shak's gate, since we were there talking for a while.

  Later, when people were going over the night, no one would say anything about a baby ghost, or about any girl hovering nearby. As if none of our neighbors could see her, not one of them, not even Auntie Coco.