Back with his mother’s drink, George notices Frankie touching the mannequin.
‘They were throwing her out at the Daimaru department store so I bought her for my aunt. I thought she’d appreciate it.’ He raises one eyebrow and looks at Miss Tipley suggestively. It’s as if he broadcasts our taboo. Shouts, Miss Tipley’s mo daofu, she kisses Miss Innis. I feel my mother shrink.
‘Come, let’s go out to the garden,’ Miss Tipley says, ignoring George. Because the house is built on a steep hill, you have to go down a flight of stairs, past the bedrooms.
Outside, the garden’s lit with coloured lanterns that stretch down towards the pool. I hear the formal, consonant-filled tones of Mandarin, the rapid, lively staccato of Cantonese, a woman arguing heatedly in French. At the far end, near the pool house, a small record player churns out rock-and-roll. Waiters in black suits bring drinks. Below us the dark, jungled hillside drops down towards the city with its strings of lights. Boats dart back and forth across the harbour like lighted water bugs.
We follow Miss Tipley. George is still talking. Like his mother, he’s loud but his voice is self-assured while hers is flighty, almost helpless. It’s hard to believe he’s just a few years older than us. I’ve never met a boy who wears a suit, brings drinks, has his own money to spend. If Frankie and I wanted that mannequin, we’d have to steal it. It doesn’t seem George needs to meet anyone or ask anything. He has nothing to find out.
Frankie saunters directly to the pool as if we’ve come for a swim, takes off her sandals, and sits dangling her legs in the warm water. She pulls her skirt high up her thighs. I sit down next to her, unsure whether to take off my own shoes or not. Ah Pak, Miss Tipley’s driver, dressed tonight in a black suit, offers us juice. Frankie takes two glasses of wine instead and Ah Pak giggles.
‘If her dog had died, Miss Tipley’s sister could have worn it over her shoulder,’ Frankie sneers. ‘She’s half-gone herself. I wonder if she uses the dog’s sedatives.’ I laugh. In this way, we reassert our world. Sirens of the pool. It’s the others who are strange, awkward, misplaced, not us.
‘Here comes George,’ I say.
‘Shall we ask him for a top-up?’ Frankie laughs.
It’s impressive how she manipulates George. He scurries off to get her another glass of wine. She tells him what records to play. The Rolling Stones, The Doors, records my father listens to when he’s back from Vietnam. Frankie acts as if they’re hers. When George talks dismissively about Cambridge, Frankie pours contempt on her future school in Massachusetts. ‘It’s my grandmother’s old school,’ she says. I never heard that before.
I want to tell Frankie to stop. It’s not worth impressing this boy. Despite her scorn, she flirts with George, seduced by her own exaggerations, her lies, her brown thighs, her needs.
You don’t need George, I want to tell her. You don’t need him or Humphries or Pym. Can’t you see, we’ll survive on our own? We’ve got the clothes under Ah Bing’s bed. We’ve got our shacks of flotsam and jetsam. We’re secret sisters. We don’t need a father. We don’t need to tell anyone anything.
The record whines – a Doors song about setting the night on f-i-r-e. That’s a Vietnam song, not yours, I want to tell Frankie. It’s about napalm, not sex. Frankie pulls her skirt higher up her thighs. She wraps George around her neck like a dead dog. I can’t stop her from doing what she wants.
˜ ˜ ˜
In the kitchen, Ah Bing smiles at me with her gold teeth. Ah Mei shoves tidbits my way. I’m safe here, an honoured guest, coddled by familiar sounds of scraping dishes, clattering silverware, Ah Bing and Ah Mei teasing, confiding in Cantonese. The Chinese kitchen is safe, my temple. The tiger I imagine when Ah Bing threatens us at night is not here. Perhaps he’s been let free, he’s outside roaming. I feel him crouching behind my mother when she comes to the door.
‘Could you run and find Frankie? It’s time to go home.’
I go down the stairs, turn inward towards the bedrooms, not the garden. I hear George’s mother in the hallway upstairs. ‘Oh that obscene mannequin. When I woke up yesterday morning, I saw it lying under the piano. I thought, good heavens, what has George done to some poor girl now?’ George said they were going to find more records.
The hallway is white with rush matting. Along the walls are nineteenth-century prints of the foreign factories at Canton, each flying its own flag: British, French, Dutch, American. I put my ear to the closed door. I don’t know whether to knock. I’d rather not make a noise.
‘You can wait here if you want, make sure no one comes,’ Frankie had said as she shut the door and shut me out. I shook my head.
I turn the handle slowly until it stops, then gently push the door open, just a fraction, just enough to see into the gloom. The curtains are drawn. Inside, I see Frankie. She’s flattened on the bed, her skirt pulled all the way up now. Above her, George’s large white bottom. His trousers are pulled down to his knees. He’s shed his shoes but he still has his socks on.
Frankie’s head whips around. I think she’s been crying; her mascara’s smudged, her shirt’s untied. She looks small, crushed beneath George’s large body. She glares at the door, open just a fraction, not enough to see out. George grunts, noticing nothing. I shut the door quickly, slowly release the handle, letting the catch slip silently into its groove.
A few minutes later, when Frankie comes upstairs, she’s washed her face. She’s tied her shirt. She looks calm, defiant. How could my mother ever know she’s houh hoi? How could she know about the bomb, the butcher shop? We disguise ourselves so well.
‘We have to go,’ I say apologetically. Before we can escape, George strides into the room, gives Frankie’s shoulders a too familiar squeeze, like the one he gave his mother earlier. I see Frankie hates him for that. He could give her away. Expose her. He keeps no secrets. On the drive home, Frankie is silent, sullen. Ah Bing chatters in the front seat. ‘Aiyah, Ah Mei gave me too much food, too many leftovers.’ She pats the basket at her feet contentedly.
‘He seemed like such a nice boy, Miss Tipley’s nephew,’ my mother says.
thirty-four
Fucked is the word Frankie uses. Fucked George. She says it coarsely, implying the metaphorical sense of the word. She had sex but, more importantly, she hurt him, beat him, conquered him. She left him scarred, damaged for life. I’d like to believe her. I’m sure she’s capable of it. But I also know what I saw.
No, I want to shout at her. I saw you crying. Your make-up was smudged. You looked squashed. I saw George squeeze your shoulder, put you in your place. You’re as pathetic as his mother, as her little dog Fifi.
To my surprise, I wish Frankie had fucked Humphries instead. Humphries would have been kinder, more gentle. Why George? I don’t want to be secret sisters if what you tell me is lies. If you never ask me about the lychees. I don’t want to be asked to see things the way you want me to, it’s not true. I don’t want to be doorkeeper for you and George.
‘It’ll teach her to make me go to parties,’ Frankie says. That Frankie seduced George, had sex with him, for revenge, shocks me. Now I see, it’s not the pudgy man she’s after, it’s not Humphries, it’s my mother, it’s me. She hates my mother for wanting her to be different than she is. She hates me for keeping her secrets, for being her confidante, her alibi, her sister, without being able to help her or protect her. I am too young.
If my mother forces her to meet nice boys, she’ll pull up her skirt, take down their trousers.
˜ ˜ ˜
‘So now you can tell me if you did it with Fish,’ Frankie demands.
‘Did what?’ I ask, dissembling.
‘You know, fuck him.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I don’t even like Fish. He’s deaf.
‘Being deaf doesn’t mean he can’t do it,’ Frankie taunts.
It’s like this for Frankie. A race, a competition, a dare. Who will do it first? Who loves who more? Is it my fault she fucked George? Was she worried I’d already gone fi
rst?
More crucial, do we love Frankie? Do we love her enough? Can we? Do I? Does my father? My mother? She isn’t sure. That’s why she boasts, throws herself at men: George, my father’s friends. That’s why she runs after Red Guards. She wants to see if we can stop her.
If the deaf boy swims over to me, if my father sits too close to me on the junk, I betray her. I shouldn’t allow it. I should disappear, let her go first. Frankie has to be careful now, vigilant because she knows what I’ve done, what I’m capable of. She has to keep a constant lookout in case I usurp her position, switch my allegiance, desert her. In case I am more loved.
I’m Kate, muimui, little sister. I’m not supposed to have my own secrets, my own needs, my own desires. I’m supposed to be swamped with hers. There’s not enough room for both of us.
I don’t want to be awed by Frankie any more. I don’t want to be the fine weight on the balance board that keeps Frankie from toppling over. Quietly, without warning, I step off.
thirty-five
I go to the deaf boy’s house. It is dark, shady, with lacquered wood floors, high bookshelves. Coloured silk pillows glint from low benches. A ceiling fan throbs overhead. It is dark but when I step forward a sharp ray of sunlight pierces through a high window, blinds me. I can’t see. But I feel my own face lit up, white, scared, exposed.
The deaf boy takes my hand and pulls me gently forward into the dark. Our wet feet leave silvery footprints on the black floor, up the stairs, glinting like fish scales.
The deaf boy lays me on his bed. Unwraps me slowly, the way I’ve watched him pry a starfish from a rock. Kneeling beside me, he slips my bathing suit top over my arms, my head, exposing my small breasts. He pulls the pants down over my gangly legs, revealing a blonde triangle of hair, my white skin.
Naked, I lie completely still. Close my eyes. I pretend I am an object he carried in from the beach. A bone washed up, a sun-bleached cuttlefish, a ridged cowrie shell. I am thin, hard. I am not voluptuous. I am a rock with edges, unsmoothed. White quartz, veins of dark obsidian where the rattan shade casts lines of sun and shadow across the bed.
The deaf boy examines my naked body. He runs his hands slowly over me from my mouth down to my navel, as if I were a shell, Janthina globosa. He runs his fingers between my legs, feels where it is wet, trails the wetness down my thighs, exploring. I feel my breath become fast and short. I grow full of desire. Desire for the deaf boy’s kisses, for death, for drowning. Outside the village sounds are muted, far away. It’s midday, too hot to work.
I undress the deaf boy. I do the things he has done to me. I lie him down and touch him until he moans with pleasure. I lick him. The deaf boy’s skin is smooth, salty. I trace the lines of his ribs and collar-bone with my tongue. We touch each other this way, nothing more. Then we lie down, we don’t speak, don’t move.
thirty-six
When my father goes out on a mission, he flies in a MedEvac helicopter. It’s empty on the way out, it’s going to pick up the wounded. On the way back, he catches a ride with a resupply helicopter that’s delivered its load. The Viet Cong carry their rice and guns and medicine hundreds of miles through the mountainous jungles along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They carry their wounded to makeshift underground hospitals. The Americans fly in beer and spare ribs for the Fourth of July. Also Coca-Cola, soap, shaving cream, cigarettes, chewing gum. These luxuries don’t make it any easier to be shot at, kill, watch someone die.
Flying, though, puts you above it. It gives a distance that makes you feel you know the country, understand it in a way you don’t always on the ground. The helicopters are huge, ungainly, great iron birds, the Viet Cong call them, but from up high you see the whole country. The blue mountains of the Annamite Cordillera, the sea, the rice paddies, green as a parrot’s wing. You smell the smoke of charcoal cooking fires, burnt sugar, jasmine flowers. It’s luscious. The door of the helicopter is open. The wind is hot. It makes you want to laugh, you’re so lucky. Cry, because you have a deep sense of longing, nostalgia. It feels as if you’re a boy again. It feels like love.
Then you look down, more carefully. You hold your breath. What’s there? Burned villages, blackened jungle, palm trees blown out of the ground. Families hide at the entrance to a tunnel. A frightened water buffalo careens down the beach. Craters everywhere.
Small three-foot craters blasted out by artillery fire. Star-shaped craters, the work of anti-personnel bombs. Forty-foot holes left by delayed-fuse bombs. Worst of all, the mile-long lines of huge thirty-foot craters running through fields, up mountains. Blown out by pay-loads of six-hundred-pound bombs, dropped from 40,000 feet in the air by the Arc Lights, the B-52s. My father can identify them all.
I imagine looking down, the deafening chop chop of the helicopter blades. If I close my eyes, I see a dead body floating up from the sea. I see my sister. I see Lantau. ‘Don’t look down,’ my mother says. ‘Don’t look at what she’s doing now. Don’t look at the Red Guards.’
˜ ˜ ˜
Once my father hitched a ride back to Danang. The helicopter was ready to leave when the Marine captain decided to load it with bodies. His unit had run out of body bags so the men wrapped the dead in ponchos. The helicopter took off with the door open. Even so the stench was awful. Then the wind pulled the ponchos off. When my father looked around him, he saw dead faces, blown-apart faces, faces that had turned black in the heat. Blood and mucus flew out from under the ponchos, splattering his clothes, his face. At a thousand feet, my father wanted to jump out. That was the worst he’d seen, the closest he’d come.
thirty-seven
It’s the end of summer, Frankie’s last week in Hong Kong, before my mother will take her to boarding school. My father is coming back from Vietnam to put them on the plane. Only he hasn’t arrived yet. We crowd on to the small, half-eroded rock pier like sea birds drying their wings, waiting for Ah Wong to row in. He makes several trips back and forth from the anchored junk.
I help load the picnic baskets into the dinghy. Frankie wears her cut-off shorts, a shirt that shows her belly button with a silver chain around her middle. Where did she get it?
It’s still, humid, hazy. The rocky coast smells damp, overripe, seaweed stews in the sun. Nevertheless, I wear one of Ah Bing’s lumpy green sweaters, knitted with leftover yarn, large buttons and pockets in the front. I am cold. I wait for Ah Wong’s last trip in case my father arrives. I look for him in the dark shadows of banyans that line the road, tiny altars tucked among their roots.
‘He might have missed the plane or it might just be late,’ Pym says kindly. ‘Anyway, we’ll leave the motorboat for him, in case he makes it.’ The motorboat’s a fast, two-hundred-horsepower outboard that belongs to Pym; sometimes he takes us water-skiing. He swings the last rattan bag into the dinghy and waits for me to climb in. I trail my fingers in the water, watch the ripples they make, look back into the trees once more. Pym’s boat left tied to the pier.
My father might be dead. Maybe the Viet Cong got him after all. If he doesn’t come, Frankie won’t be able to say goodbye. He won’t be able to fix things before she goes. Pray to Kuan Yin.
My mother doesn’t say anything. She busies herself with the bags. It’s our last picnic of the summer. She’s invited my father’s friends. When my mother returns from America, she’ll come back without Frankie. I’ll be at school here, the Prisoner of War School. She’ll busy herself with her painting. Maybe she’ll stop being scared of what Frankie will do. Maybe she’ll change her mind, let Frankie stay. It’s just that Frankie has grown so wild, so unruly, she said. She said she doesn’t know how to be Frankie’s mother. Maybe she’s just worrying about my father.
We set off without him, even though Frankie swings angrily off the awning poles, hanging out over the water, scowling. Bare feet, bare arms, bare middle. He’s deserted her again.
We anchor at Middle Bay, which is just around the headland, a pretty beach fronting green jungle. Concrete steps and a railing descend from Repulse Bay
Road. We’ll wait here, have our picnic. Later, we’ll head off to Lamma or Po Toi, one of the outlying islands. If my father comes, he’ll bring with him the excitement, the contagious adrenalin of war. Then, we’ll be Marco Polo, Cortez, Cook, surveying, mapping, exploring. We’ll walk through villages, seek out wrinkled women who dry fish in rattan baskets and stand off mangy dogs that run at us, teeth bared. We’ll be Viet Cong, keep to the shadows, walk noiselessly past bombed houses in rubber sandals. My father will camouflage our helmets with leaves.
˜ ˜ ˜
Middle Bay is already full of bathers. Young couples splash out to a bathing float. Families congregate in cool circles of shade cast by elephant ear trees, dark circles on white sand. They lay out picnics. At the back of the beach, a huge banyan sends tangles of roots into the earth. There is a white, concrete boathouse where skiffs are kept. A small shop sells red bean icecream and cold chrysanthemum tea. A lifeguard perched in his high tower wears a red-and-yellow bathing suit and a whistle around his neck. A white triangular flag flutters in the breeze, showing it’s safe to swim.
My mother unpacks the picnic, lays out her wares on colourful cloths spread along the deck: cold cucumber soup, barbecued ribs wrapped in tinfoil, freshly cut French bread, lemon bars, chocolate cake, bottles of wine, a canteen of hot jasmine tea, salt and pepper shakers. These are things that help her keep going: order, perfection, colour. Even if my father’s not there. Her own prettiness. Her picnics as picturesque as her paintings.
Humphries is here too, with a new girlfriend. At the bow, Pym talks earnestly to High Auntie. Frankie ignores them, glaring at the water. Perhaps these are other reasons she’s angry: the secret sister perch usurped, Humphries off-limits, although I think he’s only trying to protect himself from Frankie. Pym pours wine for the grown-ups. Humphries wraps his arms around his girlfriend’s waist, holding her closer than my mother would like.
White Ghost Girls Page 11