by H. S. Norup
Ling says she isn’t sure exactly when she’ll be forced to end her holiday, but she needs to feed on some offerings first. She promises to stay until I’ve fallen asleep.
I promise to remember her and come back to Singapore next year during the seventh month.
None of us mention the underworld. She doesn’t ask me what I remembered inside the gates. And I’m afraid to ask if she’ll have to return there. Instead, I try to replace my memory of that horrible place with an image of Ling and her mother together on a fluffy cloud.
We say goodbye, just in case. Afterwards, we lie in silence, turned towards each other on my bed, her hand covering mine like a little cooling cloud.
I want to tell her about Emma, but I can’t find the words. Because how can I explain to Ling that, just like her brother, I’d forgotten my little sister?
—44—
It’s early morning, and the house is quiet when I sneak downstairs. Before anyone wakes up, I want to hose down my clothes and hiking boots in the garden. Last night, I left everything among the branches of the tree, and climbed up to my room in my vest and knickers.
The bottom stair creaks.
“Is that you, Maya?” Clementine calls from the office.
“No, it’s me,” I answer. The garden hose will have to wait.
Clementine’s sitting on the floor, dressed in yoga clothes, surrounded by stacks of books. She lifts more out of a shopping bag and places them on a pile of picture books. There are stacks with books for older children and a tumbled heap of paperbacks with crinkled covers, for grown-ups.
“What’re all those books for?” I ask. Behind her are at least ten full paper bags.
“My project,” she says, continuing to sort. “These are the English books people here in Singapore have donated. Obviously, I’ll be buying books in Khmer when I go to Cambodia in two weeks. Can you believe we raised more than twenty thousand dollars at the event last week? After I’ve paid for the building materials, that still leaves a lot of money for books.”
“But who are they for?”
“One moment, Freja. I just need to post an update.” With her phone held close to the floor, so the stacks appear to be mountains, she takes a short video clip. While typing, she mumbles, “Thank you for the generous book donations to our new libraries in Cambodia. Keep them coming! Please share this post.” She copies both video and message onto her different profiles.
I’m not sure what I imagined she was posting online, but not this.
“Come here and bring my laptop. It’s on the desk. Then I’ll show you what it’s all about,” she says.
When I’m sitting next to her, while she’s searching for photos, she starts telling me about her charity organization and the libraries they’re building in rural Cambodia.
“Ah, here we go. These are from the library we built in Kampong Khleang in March.”
I’m silent while she flips through the photos. They show a group of women who literally are building a library, which is a shack made of corrugated iron on high wooden stilts. Clementine’s standing on a ladder, wearing grimy clothes and protective gloves, hammering nails into a green plate.
The library resembles many of the houses around it. Some have walls of straw, but they’re all on raised platforms. The packed dirt underneath them is littered with plastic and rubbish.
“They have terrible floods in the rainy season,” Clementine says to explain the stilts.
In another photo, barefooted children in grubby vests and shorts flock around Clementine. She crouches, a black chicken pecking at her hiking boot, while she hands out books.
I peek sideways at Clementine. She really is a completely different person than I thought.
“So… when we were at that restaurant with the sponsor…” I say, beginning to understand why it was so important for her.
“He made generous donations to our auction.” She’s smiling that big, happy, lipstick smile. “What’s up with you, Freja?”
I stare down at a picture book with a happy family on the cover.
“I understand if you’re having a difficult time. And I want you to know that I’m here for you. I know I’m not your mum, and I’m not trying to take her place, but I would love to play a bigger part in your life. As a stepmother—a third parent—or a friend. It’s up to you.”
There’s also a dog on the picture book. It’s wagging its tail. I’m sure there aren’t any stepmothers in this story. But if there was one, she would be a cheerful person, like Clementine.
“A real friend.”
“I have real friends,” I say quietly. For the first time in for ever, I have real friends: Kiera and Sunitha and Cheryl Yi and Jason.
“That’s great. I’m so happy for you. Then…” she hesitates. “Then you don’t need imaginary friends. We’re so worried about you, Freja.”
“You really don’t have to be. I don’t have a new imaginary friend…” The worst thing that can happen is that she laughs at me and thinks I have too much imagination. “Ling isn’t imaginary. She’s a hungry ghost… a dead relative we’ve all forgotten about… Do you think that’s ridiculous?”
Clementine isn’t laughing. “No. Don’t forget I grew up in Hong Kong, where the aunties warned me about being outside at night during the seventh month. Tell me about this ghost.”
“We’ve discovered that she’s my great-great-grandfather’s little sister. Half-sister. And she was left here when the family moved back to England in 1922. She believes everyone forgot her. That’s why she’s so unhappy. If I could just find proof that someone remembered her…”
“What was your great-great-great-grandfather’s name?” Clementine asks.
“William Thomas Davidson. But he died. I even have a photo of the obituary.”
“Where? On your phone?” She gets up and retrieves my phone from a drawer.
It should’ve synchronized from my laptop. On the locked screen, there’s a message from Granny.
I found a memoir by William Henry. Your dad is bringing it back to Singapore.
I show both the message and the obituary to Clementine.
“Hmm… I think I might’ve seen that memoir when we moved in…” She gets up and stands by the bookcase, scanning the titles. “It’s called something like ‘Singapore and the Colonies’…”
I spot it first. A Life in the Colonies—from Singapore to The West Indies by William Henry Davidson. There’s a painting of a bungalow on the front cover. A black-and-white in a tropical garden.
After Clementine has brought us cushions from one of the white sofas, we lie down between the stacks on the floor, our heads close together, and turn the pages. We’re both reading, and whenever one of us notices something that might be relevant, we add a sticky-note and read aloud to the other.
Clementine skips her yoga class and asks Maya to entertain the boys and bring us a plate of sandwiches. When we’re done, a fan of sticky notes juts out of the book.
Afterwards, we lie on our backs and talk about Ling and William. It’s nice to lie here with Clementine. I like that she believed me. I like that she helped me find and read the book. I like her. And it’s okay to like her. That doesn’t mean she’ll ever replace Mum.
—45—
I hike up to the cemetery late in the afternoon. Dad will be landing soon. Clementine has been out to buy me joss sticks and hell banknotes. She even offered to come with me, but I told both her, and later Jason, that I had to do this on my own. I’m crossing my fingers so hard they hurt, hoping I’ll find Ling before it’s too late.
My Swiss Army knife—the new one—is in my pocket, and I’m using the map on my phone to find the grove. I slosh up to the rainforest in my soaked hiking boots.
After I’ve placed an offering plate on the gravestone, I stick burning joss sticks into a thick pumpki
n slice. Next to it, I place a bundle of the paper money and light it with a match. I sit upwind of the fire and wait.
When the air cools and the cicada noise mutes, the flames flicker.
Ling appears. She stands on the other side of the gravestone. Tendrils of smoke curl around her hair and her long neck.
“William never forgot you, Ling. This book is proof. He wrote it. Look!” I hold the memoir towards her, so she can see his name and the house on the cover. “He mentions you so many times. Do you want me to read to you?”
She’s listening, while I read snippets to her about William’s childhood.
“When I was almost four, my amah gave birth to a girl. Ling. From the first time I laid eyes on her, I adored her, long before I discovered she was my half-sister. I can only imagine the scandal a child of a Chinese nursemaid and a British officer would have caused at the time. Still, I wish my father had had the courage to acknowledge Ling as his daughter.
“It was a happy childhood, in that black-and-white bungalow at the edge of the rainforest. After school, I played with Ling in the garden, and taught her to read and write both English and our father’s secret ‘dot-dash language’, as Ling called Morse code.
“After the admiral’s wife persuaded my father to marry the widow of another officer, everything changed. When my stepmother discovered the truth about Ling, she dismissed her mother and only kept Ling on as a kitchen maid to appease me and the cook. By then my father was so ill with malaria that he could not intervene. In the hopes of restoring his health, we travelled by ship home to England.”
I gaze across at Ling.
“We already know what happened on board that ship. In England, William was sent to boarding school. He ran away to sea before he was supposed to start university.” I flip to the next sticky-note and hold the text towards her.
“On this page, he describes how he searched for you, going door-to-door through Chinatown, asking if anyone knew what had happened to you or your mother. But that was in 1928, and you had both been dead for years by then.”
I tell her the gist of the places marked by the next few sticky-notes. How throughout his years with the foreign office, her brother continued his search in archives and whenever his travels took him to Singapore.
The last chapter of William’s memoir ends with:
My sole regret is that I was forced to leave Ling behind, and never during my later enquiries discovered what had become of her after we left the colony. My deepest hope is that she married a good man, changed her name and led a long, happy life with healthy children.
I close the book. “So, you see, Ling, even if no one made offerings, you were never forgotten.”
Ling’s crying. I don’t try to stop her. She’s smiling at the same time.
When I take the paper school bag out, she smiles even wider. “D’you like it?”
She nods. With its red and yellow swirly pattern, it’s almost too pretty to burn. But that’s the only way she can take it with her: like a smoke memory.
Ling inhales the school bag fumes. “Now that I know William did not forget me, I am happy,” she says. “Are you happy, Freja? Will you tell me what you did not want to remember?”
“I had a little sister. Her name was Emma. She died.” The last word grates in my throat. “It was that day, the day we stopped being a happy family, that I didn’t want to remember.”
Ling stretches her arm across the gravestone and touches my shoulder with her coolness.
“I was six. Emma was two, like the twins. It was summer. We were visiting my friend Christopher. Denise, my other best friend, was also there with her parents. The three of us ran around inside the house, chasing each other through the kitchen, where the mums were arranging salads. Outside on the terrace, the dads shooed us away from the hot barbecue. Christopher said he would show us his tree house. Emma toddled after us, but I said she couldn’t come. I knew she couldn’t climb the ladder.”
Ling nods as if she knows too.
“I told her to find Mummy, that it was too dangerous for her. Before I followed my friends up into the tree house, I went back and pushed her towards the kitchen. I even pulled the ladder up after me so she wouldn’t try to crawl up and fall down. For a while she stood below, calling, ‘Fei-fei,’ and crying. I yelled at her to go away, to leave me alone. I remember being so relieved when she finally toddled off.” The fire flares when I feed it banknotes. “I’m sure William never told you to go away.”
“If he did, I have forgotten,” Ling says quietly.
“I never thought Emma wasn’t with Mum. I didn’t even think about the tiny pond behind the house, where Christopher and I used to catch tadpoles. The water only came up to my knees.” I study the dirty, worn patches, where my knees are now. They’re much higher up than six-year-old knees. But not nearly as high as a two-year-old’s head.
“We were sitting at the table, blowing bubbles with our straws, while the adults kept calling Emma’s name. Then Mum screamed. I held my hands to my ears to block the too-loud sounds: Mum’s screams, the ocean waves crashing in my head, the sirens of the ambulance. Blue light flooded the garden. The adults were crying. I was crying. The crying went on and on, for days and weeks and months. But all the tears in the world couldn’t bring Emma back.” I rub my eyes. They’re itching.
“You locked the memory of that day away in a safe place,” Ling says. “Without meaning to, you locked Emma away too. And then you lost the key.”
“Thank you for helping me find the key.” I try to smile. “I promise I won’t lose it again. I’ll always remember my little sister.”
Ling’s standing completely still, while a rush of cool air swirls around me, like a flutter of angel wings.
—46—
In the evening, I’m sitting on a blanket in the garden with Dad. A portable, bowl-shaped fireplace that Clementine’s borrowed stands in front of us. On it, I’ve built a small pyramid of coal and twigs and pieces of wood from sticks I’ve found in Bukit Brown.
After I tell Dad about Ling and how she’s related to us through my great-great-grandfather, he leafs through the memoir with all the sticky-notes. The photos he brought back from Granny are inside a well-used copy of the same book.
The second photo makes me gasp. On the back, in joined-up letters is written: William Henry, 1918. But the photo isn’t only of William. He’s sitting on the steps leading up to a veranda, next to a young Chinese woman with her hair in a tight bun. On his other side, a girl with long, dark hair stands, with her hand on his shoulder. Both children are smiling. Identical dimples, like little commas, make dents in their cheeks.
I hold the photo up to show it to Ling, and she comes and sits next to me. Dad doesn’t notice.
“So, can we burn the money, Dad? Tonight’s the last night of the Hungry Ghost Festival.”
“You have a very lively imagination, Freja.” He sighs. “I’m sorry I’ve been travelling so much. Now the Manila contracts are done, I promise I’ll take some time off.”
“It’s not fantasy. Ling isn’t imaginary. You needn’t worry about me.”
“I don’t suppose it can harm to burn a bit of paper.”
Although his attitude isn’t quite right, I’m glad he’s willing to make an effort. When the little bonfire’s burning, I use it to light the joss sticks and push them into the ground in a large circle around us. I give him half of the bundle of money. He studies a banknote in the firelight.
“Hell Bank Note,” he reads. “At least it’s honest. Perhaps they should print it as a warning, on all currencies.”
One by one, we feed the money to the fire and our hungry ghost. The edges of the notes glow, lighting up the colourful pictures of birds, before the paper money turns into nectar for Ling. Smoke with the right bonfire smell floats towards the frangipani trees, where Ling’s da
ncing.
That was the easy part.
I suck in the smoky air and say, “I remember Emma. I remember the day she drowned.”
Dad’s eyes are deep pools with orange glints from the bonfire.
I’m glad he doesn’t say anything, because it’s hard enough to speak without him interrupting.
“I was supposed to look after her. But she couldn’t climb up to the tree house—”
Dad grips my arm. “Never for one second believe that it was your fault.” He crushes me in a bearhug, and mumbles into my hair. “My little blue titmouse, of course it wasn’t your fault. You were such a tiny thing yourself. It happened so fast. I never blamed anyone but myself. And your mum blames herself. But you… no one, no one ever blamed you.”
There’s a lump in my throat. “I yelled at Emma to leave me alone. It was the last thing I ever said to her.”
Everything’s blurry. My cheeks are wet. I don’t remember tears being so salty.
Warm splashes land on my forehead. Dad’s holding me tight. We’re both shaking.
And I know that he’s right. I was only six years old. It wasn’t my fault. Blaming myself almost crushed me. It’s what’s crushing Mum, too. It isn’t me. I’m not the reason she’s sad. I’m not the reason our family wasn’t happy.
“Te… tell me about Em… ma,” I hiccup. “What was she li… like?”
Dad sniffs and lets go of me to wipe his face on the front of his T-shirt. “She was a wild little thing,” he begins and encloses me in his arms again. “She worshipped you. Followed you like a shadow from the moment she could crawl—”
“Calling ‘Fei-fei’,” I interrupt.
“Ah yes. ‘Fei-fei’. You were so patient with her. You played with her for hours, read her stories and had endless tea parties. Mum and I would lie on the sofa, exhausted, and watch how she giggled every time you pretended to drink from the miniature teacups.”