by S. P. Hozy
Annabelle began to fantasize about their lives, to write little stories about them in her head. She even gave them names: Elsie and Angel and Kitty. She imagined the tragic circumstances of their lives that had led them to this: losing a husband, losing a child, losing a lover. Always it was some loss, some unbearable loss.
One morning when she returned to the flat, Annabelle picked up a piece of paper — Francis’s writing paper — and a pencil and began to draw some of the faces she remembered. “This one is Elsie,” she said, remembering the story she had imagined, “and she is only twenty years old. She had a baby, a little boy, because she was raped by her uncle when she was only fifteen. Elsie’s father had died and his younger brother had taken in Elsie and her mother, making a big show of it in the village so he would look like a good man. But he wasn’t a good man, of course. He was a monster. And then Elsie became pregnant and her uncle threw her out of the house. The people in the village shunned her, and Elsie was forced to go to the city and beg for food. And all the time, her baby was growing inside her. She tried desperately to find a home for herself and her baby, but she had no money. She was only sixteen. Nobody took pity on her; nobody helped her. Occasionally she was able to scrounge scraps of food from hawkers and restaurants, but mostly they threw the waste food to the dogs because it was just slop. Elsie ate it anyway because she didn’t want her baby to die. When she finally had the baby, in an alley behind a row of shophouses, it was born dead with the cord wrapped around its neck. Elsie nearly bled to death as she lay in the alley for two days. Then an old man found her and brought her to his room. He gave her tea and bread and brought her water so she could wash herself. She stayed with him for a week and forced herself to leave because she knew she was eating half his food and he had barely enough for himself. That’s when she knew what she would have to do to survive.
Annabelle somehow managed to infuse her drawing with all the misfortune and misery that “Elsie” had suffered in her short life. It was in the eyes, mainly, and in the angle of the head. They said, “I am alive, but I do not live,” because that was what Annabelle saw and sensed. Elsie existed, as she, Annabelle, did, but nothing more. Gone were joy and passion; gone forever was meaning and significance.
Sutty had been trying to persuade her to go back to England with him, but Annabelle could not even contemplate leaving Singapore because it meant she would be leaving Francis. Whatever real happiness they had known had been here. Their first home together was here. Their child had been conceived here. Much as she had been loath to come to Singapore, Annabelle was now loath to leave.
“But don’t you want to have your baby at home?” Sutty had asked her.
“I don’t know that England is my home any longer,” she said. “If I go back there, I will be leaving our home, mine and Francis’s. And I can’t bear the thought of doing that. It would be like abandoning him. While I’m here, he still exists. I’m afraid that if I leave, he won’t go with me.”
Sutty didn’t know how to respond to this. It’s a kind of madness, he thought, brought on by grief. His only hope was that, given time, Annabelle might come through this phase of her anguish and come to her senses. He fervently wished it would happen before the baby was born. He couldn’t let her have the child here; it was much too dangerous. He knew women had babies every day in Singapore, and most of them survived, but he knew the risks were greater. With the heat, contaminated water, mosquitoes and other vermin, all that could go wrong was too horrible to contemplate.
As the months passed and Annabelle did not change her mind, Sutty began to look for a doctor and a hospital for her to have the baby in. He knew that most women had their babies at home but that was out of the question. The General Hospital had a maternity wing, he discovered, but Kandang Kerbau Hospital (referred to as KK Hospital or “Tek Kah”) was more convenient. It had recently been converted into a free maternity hospital with thirty beds. The head of obstetrics was Dr. Thomas Ashford, and Sutty set up an appointment to see what could be done for Annabelle.
“I should like to see the young woman before her term is up,” said Dr. Ashford. “It’s important to know if there might be complications on the day.”
“Of course,” said Sutty. “I understand. But, uh, she doesn’t know I’ve contacted you or that I’m making arrangements for the baby’s birth in the hospital. It’s a delicate situation and I shall have to find a way to persuade her to come in.” Sutty shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The doctor must surely think this a very odd case, but his face didn’t reveal what he was thinking. “There’s still time, of course, about three or four months, I think.”
“Try not to wait too much longer,” said Dr. Ashford. “If she’s malnourished and underweight, as you’ve suggested, then it’s imperative that she be checked.”
“Yes, I understand,” said Sutty. “I will do my best. I don’t want her to lose this baby. It could put her over the edge.”
“It sounds like she may already be over the edge, if not close to it,” the doctor said. “See what you can do.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
After six months in Canada, Maris decided to go back to Singapore. Whatever she had expected to happen hadn’t, but she acknowledged that some baby steps had been taken in another direction. She had been drawing but not painting. It was a beginning, she told herself. Or a “new” beginning, as people referred to it, as if there was such a thing as an “old” beginning. She was caught now in a no man’s land between life in Canada and life in Singapore: neither in one nor the other. It was like the time she decided to stop using sugar in her coffee. She tried it for a month but did not enjoy coffee without sugar. So she decided to start adding sugar to her coffee again, and discovered that she didn’t like it with sugar either. So she stopped using sugar again and persisted until she began to enjoy coffee without it. It did not occur to Maris to give up coffee, just like it did not occur to her to give up painting. She understood that it was about process, a necessary progression in stages from one state of being or activity to another. Process took time and often seemed unproductive, but when you looked back over a period of time, you realized that many things had, indeed, changed, and usually, although not always, for the better. She recognized that she was in the middle of some kind of change of state and she needed to trust both herself and the process to complete the transition.
Just making the decision to go back seemed to energize her and Maris felt a sense of excitement she hadn’t felt since Peter’s death. The police had been unable to solve his murder and, after six months, the case remained open but no new evidence had come to light. Maris wondered if it would ever be solved. It wasn’t like television or the movies where there was always a resolution at the end. Life wasn’t like that. Some murders were never solved. They still didn’t know for certain who Jack the Ripper was, even after more than a hundred years. How do you live with something like that? she wondered. Never knowing. She didn’t believe there was such a thing as closure, but Maris did think that knowing was better than not knowing, even if the truth was horrible. You can live with certainty, she thought. It’s uncertainty that can drive you crazy. Certainty you could file away, bury, do whatever, and try and move on. But uncertainty kept returning, popping up to disturb whatever thin veneer you had covered it with. Uncertainty was like a sink hole that could never be filled, no matter how many truckloads of gravel and dirt you poured into it.
Her mother was disappointed, of course, because she wanted Maris to be closer to home. “Do you have to go so far away?” she asked. “Can’t you just go to California or Mexico?”
“It’s not about the distance,” she told Spirit. “It’s about my connection to the place. I don’t know what it is. A past life, maybe?” Maris said it in jest, but she knew Spirit believed in those things.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking for a home — a physical home and a spiritual home. How can I stop you from doing that? It’s what I would want. What I’ve alway
s wanted, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. They were sharing a bottle of wine again, this time a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with wonderful undertones of lime, grapefruit, and a zinger of lemongrass. I’m going to miss this, thought Spirit. Drinking wine with my daughter. But Spirit had learned you can’t hold on to your children. God knows her own parents had disapproved of her marriage to Freedom Man. “Just trust me,” she had wanted to say to them.
* * *
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subject: Back to Singapore
Hi Dinah,
I’m coming back — don’t try to stop me! I’m pretty sure that whatever I needed to find isn’t here, although I needed to be here to realize that. I’m not the same person I was when I left Canada (well, duh), and whoever I’ve become or am becoming in my life’s journey, I’m not ready to get off the train yet. For a while there, I honestly thought the journey was over. I now know it’s not and I’m glad. Peter’s death (still can’t use the M-word) threw me off course and I’m sure I would have been further ahead had he still been here. But he’s not and I have to keep going.
Are you sick of the metaphor yet? Because I am.
I’m going to Vancouver to spend a bit more time with my brother and my nieces before I leave, but will send you info as soon as my travel plans are confirmed. Trying to get a cheap flight but Air Canada and Singapore Airlines are not co-operating. The pigs.
Love,
Maris
* * *
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subject: Re: Back to Singapore
Maris,
Yahoo! I cannot wait to see you again. Should I tell Angela?
Dinah
* * *
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subject: Re: Back to Singapore
No, let’s surprise her. Would she really give a flying bleep?
I wonder if she’d give me a job …
* * *
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subject: Re: Back to Singapore
Okay, no, and probably not. (I’m so excited!)
* * *
Maris arrived in Singapore a month later and took a taxi with her stuff — including Peter’s trunk — straight to Dinah’s apartment in Yew Tee. It was northwest of the business district and had access to the MRT public transit. It still cost a fortune, even though just a couple of decades before farmers were raising chickens and ducks in what was a bustling village of three hundred inhabitants. There were no cheap apartments in Singapore.
Dinah had bought new sheets for the guest bedroom and prepared a five-course meal of all of Maris’s favourite foods. Even though Maris had been travelling for twenty-four hours, Dinah wouldn’t let her go to bed until well after dark. “It will help with the jet lag,” she said. “Your internal clock won’t be so turned around if you manage to sleep through the night and wake up in the daylight.”
Exhausted as she was, Maris obeyed and slept through the night, waking only once in the dark, and getting up at ten the next morning. Dinah had already left for the gallery, but there was fresh fruit in the kitchen and the coffeemaker was ready to be turned on whenever Maris got up.
Maris felt a little fuzzy headed, but did not feel like sleeping all day, which would have been a sure sign of jet lag. She turned on the coffeemaker and took a shower, then took her coffee, some fruit, and a custard-filled bun out onto Dinah’s postage-stamp balcony. Breathing in the steamy, slightly salty air, she thought, I don’t know why, but this feels like home.
A Talent for Painting
A Short Story
by
E. Sutcliffe Moresby
I had occasion to be back in Singapore after spending a very pleasant summer in Monte Carlo with the Countess Adessa daVinci. She introduced me to an old friend of hers who had lived in Singapore for many years and was the chief officer of a company trading in tea and spices. He and his wife were returning to Singapore in a month’s time on the P&O and he asked if I’d be interested in travelling with them. They would be happy to put me up in Singapore, he said, for as long as I wanted to stay. As I had no pressing reason to stay in Europe, and winter was coming, I gladly accepted his offer and booked passage.
The journey was pleasant with remarkably calm seas most of the way, except for a brief storm early on near Port Said. As my hosts had a first-class cabin, we often took drinks there before dinner. We swapped stories of Singapore and Malaya and discovered we had a few mutual friends, among them an enterprising young man who had told my host an intriguing story about a British woman who was sometimes seen wandering the streets of Chinatown late at night and who often drew portraits of the prostitutes.
“You know,” I said, “I think I’ve heard of this woman. She had a child, I believe.”
“So they say,” my host replied, “but nobody recalls seeing the child, and apparently she asks everyone she encounters if they know where her little boy is. It’s most strange.”
“And disturbing,” I said. “What if there really was a child? What could have happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Some say he died at birth. Others that he was taken back to England by a friend of the woman’s husband.”
“There was a husband?”
“Apparently. But he died before the child was born.”
I was intrigued enough by this tale that I determined I would look for this woman once I was in Singapore, and try to get her story. And there was a part of me, knowing the perils that can befall one in Asia, that wondered if I could help her, although it was easy to think that in the comfort of a first-class cabin on an ocean liner. When one is at sea, one may as well be in a time capsule twenty thousand leagues under the sea. You will see nothing for weeks except the sea, the sky, and the occasional school of playful dolphins or flying fish. It is easy to imagine a perfect world where there are no wars, no parliaments, no disagreeable people, and no poverty and despair. What I thought I could do for this woman, if I ever found her, was not an idea that was fully formed. It was a vague, fuzzy-around-the-edges notion of altruism that got fuzzier and more vague with every cocktail I consumed.
Nevertheless, I held firm to my idea of at least finding the woman who had become a phantom of the night to many of the colonial residents of Singapore.
When we disembarked in Singapore, a car was waiting for us and we were driven to the spacious and quite elegant home of my hosts, whom I see I have thus far failed to name. They were Andrew and Edith Anthony-Fairchild, a fortunate couple whose marriage was sound (you learn a lot about people when you observe them for several weeks on a sea voyage) and whose financial stability was assured. They appeared to live a charmed life, and indeed, Edith Anthony-Fairchild confided to me once that she felt blessed in the life she’d been given — that was how she put it, “been given.” I queried her use of the verb, especially its passive voice.
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I was born to wealthy and caring parents, and I married a wealthy and caring man — and it was virtually an arranged marriage as Andrew is the son of my parents’ best friends. All I’ve ever had to do was show up.” She laughed at this and I was reminded again — for she had laughed often on the journey — of the musicality of her laughter and the sunny quality of her disposition. She was a statuesque woman with large shoulders, hands, and feet, and not particularly pretty, but she had a great sense of style, as many French women do but many Englishwomen do not, that made her both attractive and appealing to both men and women. She knew how to dress to advantage and she wore expensive, well-cut clothes. Her husband was not so handsome, either, but he had a slightly shabby casualness that made you comfortable in his company. He was completely unpretentious and, I believe, an honest man.
I co
nfided in Edith at one point that I had been intrigued enough by Andrew’s story of the phantom Englishwoman to want to try and find her.
“Oh, how exciting,” she said. “I should like to tag along, if I may. If the poor child exists, I wonder if anything can be done for her.”
I hesitated for a moment to consider Edith’s proposition and she immediately said, “Oh, of course, how rude of me. Here I am, jumping in on your adventure without thinking that you might want to do this on your own. I’m so sorry.”
“No,” I said, “not at all. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to have a woman along. She might not be willing to speak to a man alone.”
“Possibly,” said Edith, “but isn’t she a prostitute?”
“I hadn’t heard that,” I said, “but I suppose any-thing’s possible.”
“Well, we shall take it one step at a time,” said Edith. “What should our first step be?”
I suggested that we go to Chinatown one evening and simply wander around, see what was up and whether there was an Englishwoman to be found among the Chinese girls. So we did this, for several nights, in fact, because we saw no sign of the so-called phantom lady. Andrew thought we were mad but didn’t try to interfere. He was used to indulging his wife’s whims and as long as a responsible man accompanied her (I took that to be me), then he did not object.
On our fifth night of slumming through the streets of Chinatown, we decided it was time to talk to somebody. We tried a couple of barmen first, asking if they knew of such a woman and if they’d seen her. One of them nodded his head and said, “Yes,” but added “she come very late at night so not see much.” Whereabouts had he seen her, we asked.