And it has been a relief. I never connected with any of the women here. They are too confident and pristine. Most are very slender. Entirely thin, resembling anaemic sticks of celery. Or less often they are huge, gargantuan and rolling with flesh. Shopping, like I did, with acute embarrassment for larger ladies’ clothes in BHS and Marks, pretending that they were content with being chubby and that their husbands loved it. Heaving shapeless sacks and grossly misshapen blouses out of suitcases hoping wildly that something might look a little fashionable. And as they hang there, desolate and saddened by their cheapness, rubbing up against something smaller from long ago when we had figures that were effortless and careless, the truth of a fat woman’s self-deception weighs heavy.
I was never happy being fat but it was a useful way to shut people out. A truly physical barrier against a hurtful society and a life that had taken a spectacular wrong turn. I think back to that first dinner party and, even with the wonder of it all, of being courted and seduced, it was not long before the cracks began to show and Ralph presented the malevolent and syphilitic Dorian Gray replica that has haunted me most of my married life.
SHAMMI
112 Sabre Green
Today I had to go to the doctor’s because something isn’t right down there. There is blood and it still hurts. I have cramps that double me over with pain and leave tears hanging from my lids like acid. The Chinese doctor is brusque and rough. Pushing and pulling and prodding. He doesn’t prepare me for the physical examination and as he pushes the speculum in, my thighs clamp automatically round his hands. He slaps my thighs apart with a stream of furious Mandarin and I bite my lip until scarlet beads pop up desecrating the pinkness like sin.
He pushes his fingers inside me and I experience a flashback so intense I think that I will die from fear. I can hear the keening sound around me and my body rocks and rocks itself – the doctor is staring at me without empathy, more perhaps curiosity mixed with irritation.
‘You lost virginity. Understand? No hymen. No virgin any more. I will write your Ma’am. Take bloods for pregnancy test. You wait here. Stop crying. No good crying. Should have thought before acting.’
He bangs the door as he leaves and I pull my trousers up and sit underneath the examination table, my knees pulled up tight to my chest and my eyes protected by my forearm. I can’t hold a thought in my head; it is too messy. Although the casual way that I have been spoken to has inadvertently helped in some strange way because I feel too numb to keen any more. But I am frozen stiff with shame and loss. I hear the door open and squeeze myself tighter, hoping that I won’t be humiliated by the doctor again, pulling me out by my arm and shouting instructions that I can’t follow. It is in fact a young woman.
Her English isn’t very good but neither is mine and we make do with just holding hands for a while. In the end she kisses my forehead and gazes at me unhappily.
‘Sorry, lah.’
I bite my lip and nod and the woman leaves as quickly as she arrived. I stay for a while on the white-tiled floor underneath the safety of the examination table. What am I supposed to do? I start to chew the raw skin around my nails, frozen by indecision. I am teetering on the edge of a chasm. Shall I fall and embrace a hellish death or trudge on hoping that I will somehow be saved?
I begin listing escape hatches in my head. One is to go home. Just to leave, plead illness of a close relative or my own terminal disease. I think I once heard about transferring to another employer, but it was in a language I didn’t understand. Even my own contract was gibberish to me. I signed it because there was nothing else to do. Sign or you sent home. Think of your parents, the shame you will bring with you.
I could escape on a junk and sail the South China Sea until I reach our village on the coast. I would cook for the crew, fresh fish and seaweed rice, and I would learn how to be useful. I imagine being captured by pirates in the Sulu Sea and being held prisoner but the captain, a bronze-skinned schemer who is attracted to baubles and gold, becomes infatuated with me with one glimpse and we sail the endless water, pursued by the authorities. Never resting or staying still. Our only constant being the moon and our promises of devotion to each other.
I think it must be a hopeful sign if I am still able to harbour fanciful notions in my head. There must be a certain amount of living left in me if I can still imagine a future, however absurd. And I cling to this tiny piece of life that honours my beating heart. A life raft in a sink hole, a sturdy vine in quicksand. I feel like a child misplaced in a frantic crowd. So for now I will place my secret shame in a small corner of my mind. There is so much else I have to keep inside me, and a time will come when I have to make a journey into that painful place to look at what is hidden there. Yes, a time will come and I will try to be ready for it.
Eventually the door pushes open and the doctor appears again. He is less brusque. He says I should rest. The bleeding will stop. He seems anxious for me to leave.
I take the MRT the long way round, not really caring that Madam will be angry. It takes so little to make her furious I think she must enjoy the feeling.
Ebu always said there were two types of women in the village. The ones who fed off anger, who felt empowered by it and drew strength from its fire, and those who were made numb by it, chilled by its fury, who turned the other way whenever it approached them. I am the latter. Confrontation has always bothered me. I don’t enjoy seeing another’s rage. It is unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, like a drunk whose internal hate becomes a war with the world. Angry people seethe like maggots on a corpse. Their eyes bulge and their skin changes colour. You feel a distinct change in the atmosphere, like lightning recharging or the smell of madness. When they move, odourless vapours follow them; they trail wrath like hot coals. True anger changes the face of a person and that is too otherworldly for me. I trust the constant and the usual. Even my employer, who is so hard on me and finds new ways to punish me every week, is consistent and unbroken in her enmity. It is oddly comforting. I can’t pretend to understand the rituals of her inhumanity, but I don’t fear them any more.
Sitting on the MRT I feel the nearest to the human race that I’ve felt in a long while; it is crowded with schoolchildren returning home and teachers from the western schools looking flushed and grumpy. I can buy anonymity along with my ticket. Nobody knows anything about me on the train. They may guess, if they have a bored moment or two, but I am not worthy of consideration. A young Indian mother sits passively as chubby children pull on her braids and nose rings. She winces through the pain adoringly. These woman are too beautiful with their saris in bright caterpillar colours and their kohl-rimmed eyes. Endless glinting bracelets stack along the lovely burnt-butter skin of their arms, and when they move or shift a harmonious tinkling accompanies them. I often look for Ebony Ma’am who lives next door to me.
But she is rich and has a driver that takes her smoothly through the city to a destination unknown. Sometimes, I think about bumping into her and she is shocked to see my thin body and sadness and furnishes my room with sweetmeats and deep soft covers and buttered crumpets like the Little Princess. Except I have no room of my own, just a mattress outside the children’s room. And I’m not even sure what crumpets are but I often wonder how my mother came into possession of that very western book she read to us both every night. On the inside of the cover there was a stamp in English.
The Strand Hotel
Rangoon 1941
When I held the book close and felt its fragile pages with my fingertips I wondered who else had heard this story, who else had found such peace with the saving of Sara Crewe. Ebu used to call me a dreamer but when she was unwell she would lie with her head on my lap while I smoothed her long hair from her face, my fingers drawing shapes on her rough, familiar skin, and wove stories of animal changers and princesses who are abducted as babies and then found again.
And so I breathed the magic of hope into my Ebu, wishing her strength and love through my stories. Hoping the describing how it
would be to fly, like an eagle, to have that freedom as a natural, daily choice, would free her from the bondage of her ill health and her worries about her children. She wanted better for us all, but how could we achieve it? To push us to improve ourselves was a lost cause. Village children do not become successful and wealthy. Our lot is to serve and die and seek happiness only if it is within reach. It is a simple and effective way of staying as safe as possible. If you don’t reach for too much then you are less likely to lose what you do have.
I wonder when I will be able to see my parents again. A savage burst of homesickness on this modern train circling and backtracking its way through the day. I watch older couples sitting together, maybe a hand clasped or a smile between them, and feel naked with grief.
Sometimes, it hits me like that. A pain so fierce and clinical I fear my voice has been lost for ever. I grieve for my parents who are still alive. For the children I haven’t had yet, now for my purity that has been punctured, for my husband who remains a figment. I feel weak from pain and grasp the sleek, metal pole to stop myself from falling. My eyes feel wet with tears but I’m too tired to brush them away and they fall unchecked onto my dusty cheeks and dripping onto my shirt.
A Caucasian man, young and ruddy, is standing in front of me and is gesturing to his seat. Please, please. He takes my hand and helps me to the seat. This act of kindness renders me more vulnerable than the generalised bullying of my daily life. It threatens to give me hope, comfort. I bow my head and can’t even thank him. He just pushes a soft paper tissue into my hand and looks out of the window above my head until the train stops at Outram Park where he steps off.
I stare at the floor, memorising the specks and inconsistencies on the vinyl, willing the pain to fade away. The tissue is sky-blue and as yielding as a baby’s skin. I hold onto it tightly and possessively as the train speeds onwards oblivious of the humanity inside.
MADAM EUNICE
Zhouzhang, Jiangsu province, China
It was a terrible mistake to come here and whatever comfort I thought that I might receive is invisible to me. The children are being spoiled and have become tetchy and demanding and I feel as if I am an outsider in my own family. It’s easy to forget the differences between us. The shabbiness of my mother’s local pyjamas. The frayed cuffs of my father’s ugly shirt. The mouldering environment within which they make their home.
But I have spent hours walking along the clifftops and shores of my birthplace. The countryside is astonishingly beautiful, unspoilt and uncomplicated. This is a fertile province that has produced fish and rice for centuries. Zhouzang, where my parents have lived all their lives, is crisscrossed by canals and I worry about how they will steer the heavy barges when they become too infirm to hoist the poles. But I have misjudged the strength and tenacity of my mother before, with bloody results.
My mother was a believer in firm discipline. Like many Chinese, she viewed the cane as an essential part of child rearing and not in the least unkind. In a vast country with no social services and where infanticide is still practised particularly in rural areas, children learnt quickly to respect their parents and obey without question. My father was too detached ever to become involved in our punishments, but my mother performed them with gusto. The livid stripes and the crusted blood on the backs of thin, pale legs were displayed with pride by schoolchildren, us included. We showed off our wounds and tried to outdo each other with stories about our bravery and the length of the beatings. We always had this common ground; our quiet friendships blossomed from our weals and we took a strange comfort from the ever-present tart, metallic odour of drying blood. Our teachers would remain unconcerned about our injuries, preferring instead to preach about the party and its greatness, impressing on us heavily the need for obedience and thoughtful endeavour.
We were stoical about our lives, and even growing up during the complicated 1970s we never felt we were hard done by or lacking something. This was our existence, and the total sanction on foreign media meant we had nothing to compare it with. All the books, text books and novels were approved by the party. Our school clothes were uniform smocks and trousers and our haircuts were pudding-bowl, hatchet jobs. It was as if the government wanted us to resemble each other like mannequins.
In the same way as some mothers dress twins identically to protect their sameness, the party insisted on this for all its children. If I hadn’t been able to escape to Singapore when I did, embracing capitalism and establishing myself as an ornament to wealth, I would have stayed much like my mother. My cuffs fraying and my hair greying as the years sped by towards death.
Returning was always difficult. I had carried a lacquered casket of guilt for years, admonishing myself for not removing my parents from the poverty they seemed to revel in but simultaneously aware that they would never leave their beloved China even for a visit. The longer I was away the less they trusted and the more they venerated me. I was paraded past gaggles of their friends with my mother beckoning each and every one to feel the softness of this or the cost of that. And I would be pushed and jostled and on one occasion actually scratched down my arm, while disbelieving and disapproving elderly Chinese inspected me and found me wanting. The fact that I had left the province for the temptations of Singapore marked me as maverick and, because my parents were not now living in a golden palace with servants, this indicated my lack of filial piety.
So why did I come this time, despite knowing deep down it would be a failure and an acute disappointment? Every time I returned I harboured a secret belief that they would see me as deserving of their love and pride. It is a waste of my energy and continually frustrating but I can’t let it go. An unseen force propels me towards their displeasure over and over. A Hainan gunship churning the waters of my familial ties.
The coastline yawns upwards towards Shanghai and the weather is slightly more temperate than Singapore, whose humidity is legendary. I have brought walking shoes with me – brand new and agonising as my feet break them in with the resulting bloody froth of blisters. But I stride on regardless through the scrub and marsh flowers, watching the common rose and red lacewings weave their way through, and trying to discover calm from the natural beauty of my surroundings.
As I stand on the path using my hand as a sun guard, I notice somebody standing in the distance. I think perhaps a fisherman or walker, although the Chinese mainlanders are not known for their admiration of nature. I begin to slow and the wind drops suddenly and completely. I try, strain, to hear the world about me, but silence clings like a sticky malevolence. It is as if the world is concentrated around me and time has stopped. The figure is still blurry in the distance – half rubbed out on the horizon – but I can see it turn towards me. My mouth is as dry as a cuttlefish and I shiver in the noonday sun. The figure flickers like a faulty bulb and then begins to drift across the stubby grass and salty rocks in my direction. Rooted to the spot, I can only watch and wait as it makes its diabolical way towards me.
As it comes closer I can see a face of melted wax, eyeless with only black crosses covering the empty sockets, and its mouth – a scarlet slash of a mouth with what seems like icicles hanging from it. The fear is so overwhelming that afterwards, huddled like a child who has been whipped unfairly, I realise my trousers are damp and I have wet myself.
Sobbing and humiliated, I run for home not caring about the curious gazes of fisherman and villagers. When I appear in the doorway my mother draws in a harsh breath and the children stop their playing. Mama? Bernard asks. I can only stare at him, incapable of words. But it is my father’s reaction that scares me most. A man incapable of engaging with the world on any level, he raises himself slowly from his chair and points at me. His face ashen and his eyes bulging with terror. Mogui! Mogui! Demon! Demon! he screams.
The children begin to sob and my mother pulls me through the door and pushes me into the back room.
‘Wash yourself! Wash yourself and then you go. There is something travelling with you, daughter. Ta
ke it away.’
I find myself with the children in a taxi that has seen much better days, shuffling to the nearest airport in Zhejiang. The children are sniffly and I hug them fiercely. As they burrow into me I inhale the fragrance of their hair and skin not bothering to try to make sense of what has happened. I just try to concentrate on the present and on expanding this tiny moment of peace. I spend the rest of the short journey staring out of the window noting every mountain and wave and ship that I can see.
Flashbacks of my father collapsed, pale and shaken, refusing to meet my eyes and turning his head from me. Was my mother right? Did evil travel with me? Something malign and otherworldly intent on my downfall? I should be in a strange way both comforted by my father’s terror and ability to see the ‘ghost’, because it suggests that unless we are sharing a unique episode of madness, I am not being threatened by another breakdown, and also terrified, because out there is something much more unsettling.
I will have to contact Little Ping and confide in her. I am hoping that she, ever the manipulator, will be swayed by my need and fallen circumstances and will fall over herself to help me. While gossiping wildly behind my back, naturally. I am beyond caring to what lengths Little Ping might go in order to revel in my precarious position; I will take care of that later. Reducing her once again to a supplicant who heeds my every word and seeks approval at every opportunity. I need to see the fortune teller that Little Ping visited to find out more about what he told her. I don’t relish the idea of four hours in a run-down HBD but this is my only avenue to the truth. Something is happening around me and I need clarification.
My father saw something and I have to conclude that this time the spectre seemed intent on doing me harm. Its initial reluctance to show itself and the distance it has kept from me has gone, and the subsequent violence with which it has launched itself into my path indicates a much more troubling time ahead. I need advice and some protection and I will happily endure the sexist, insane ramblings of the man who is at the centre of this conspiracy against me.
Bitter Leaves Page 13