by Yangsze Choo
“Is there anything that you need, sir?” Shin asked.
“You’re one of the summer orderlies. A medical student, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
They were like two dogs sizing each other up, but I paid little heed. A door to a career that I’d thought was closed had cracked open, and perhaps I might squeeze through.
“Tell Rawlings I came by,” and with a brief nod, the doctor was gone.
Shin stood in the doorway watching him for a moment.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Of course I was. A year ago I’d have been more shy, but working at the May Flower had inured me to strangers. And he hadn’t really tried anything. Not like the various buayas whose wandering hands I slapped away. Though if, like Rose or Pearl, I had a hungry child waiting for me at home, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of refusal. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother’s decision to remarry was my fault. Had she, staring at my too-short clothes and the empty sack of rice in the corner, decided that marriage was her best option? But no, she’d liked my stepfather as well. There was something about him that appealed to her, I couldn’t deny it.
“Let’s take a break for lunch,” said Shin. “The canteen’s still open.”
He locked up and we crossed the grass to another building. The red earth broke apart in coarse warm crumbs, and large black ants, each the length of the top joint of my finger, scattered frantically underfoot. Shin was very quiet; his earlier good mood seemed to have evaporated.
“He said they have at least a dozen fingers in the pathology collection,” I said, pleased to have something to report. “We ought to cross-check the records to see if any of them are missing.”
It was a relief to reach the shaded walkway, out of the burning glare. An orderly in a white uniform wheeling an old man in a wheelchair gave Shin a friendly thumbs-up as they passed.
Shin nodded glumly. “Is that all you talked about?”
“Why?”
“There are rumors about that doctor.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a good surgeon, very competent. But they say he has an eye for local girls.”
“That’s not surprising—they’re all like that.”
He shot me a swift glance. “You’ve changed.”
Of course I had. Things like love affairs and call-outs and mistresses no longer shocked me; I’d learned more about them in a week from the other girls at the May Flower than I ever had in my school days, even if Hui said I was still hopelessly naïve.
“How do you know about him anyway?” I asked.
“My roommate told me.”
The card William Acton had given me lay in my pocket, like a train ticket to a long-awaited destination. I wanted to tell Shin about the possibility of nurse-training but he didn’t seem particularly encouraging. We weren’t equals anymore, I thought resentfully. I didn’t have a scholarship to medical school, or the luxury of choosing summer jobs.
At the canteen, I wanted to try the exotic Western food—sardine sandwiches, chicken chops, and mulligatawny soup—listed on the blackboard. Shin said patronizingly, “You should see the mess hall at our college. There’s a much better selection.” Then he stopped, remembering, I supposed, how much I’d wanted to go to university. I fixed a stiff smile on my face to hide my irritation.
It was now two in the afternoon, and the tables were mostly deserted. When we were almost done, we were joined by the orderly who’d been wheeling the old man earlier. He had a jowly face, like a cheerful piglet. Drops of perspiration trembled on his upper lip.
“How come you’re here on your day off?” he asked Shin, plonking down a steaming bowl of fishball noodles. “Wah! You even brought your girlfriend. What kind of cheap date is this?”
I couldn’t help smiling; his small eyes were so humorous. “I’m Shin’s sister. He’s making me work for him today.”
“I didn’t know you had such a beautiful sister. Why didn’t you introduce us earlier? I’m Koh Beng and I’m single.” We shook hands across the table. His palm, as I feared, was sweaty. “What kind of work are you doing?”
“Cleaning out the pathology storeroom,” said Shin.
“Nobody wanted that job. Don’t you find pickled organs frightening?”
“Sorting the files might be worse,” I said.
“Have you seen the preserved head? Apparently if you hold it up at midnight, it talks.”
I gave him a skeptical look, and he winked. “There are other strange things locked up in that room: a sorcerer’s pelesit that looks like a grasshopper in a glass bottle and has to be fed blood every month, and a finger from a weretiger—one of the harimau jadian who can put on a human skin and walk around in daylight.” Turning to Shin, he said, “How about I help your sister clean up?”
Shin looked exasperated. I said quickly, “We’re almost done,” though it wasn’t true at all. “What time is the last train to Ipoh?”
“I’ll take you back,” said the irrepressible Koh Beng. “I’m heading there this evening. I’m single, by the way.”
“So you mentioned.”
“Just making sure.” Koh Beng might look like a piglet but I couldn’t help finding him amusing. What’s more, he clearly knew it.
“I’ll take her back myself,” said Shin coldly. “Or you can stay over if you want. My friend said you could bunk with her for tonight.”
“Who’s this friend?” asked Koh Beng, taking the words out of my mouth.
“A nurse.”
“Your brother’s only been here a week but he’s already caused so much drama among the nurses.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Still smiling, I felt vaguely irritated. But it was true, there was nothing surprising about Shin acquiring yet another girlfriend.
* * *
Shin’s first girlfriend was two years older than us, the cousin of one of my school friends. To be honest, I hadn’t expected him to pick her, though she was nice enough. What I’d liked about her, however, was that she seemed so mature and even-keeled, though I didn’t realize he was dating her until almost a month had passed.
“Shin’s out a lot, isn’t he?” I’d remarked to my mother one evening.
We were sitting at the kitchen table in companionable silence. The oil lamp shone on her sewing and my library book. I’d given up on poisoning and was now reading Sherlock Holmes purely for entertainment. All was calm and ordinary. You could scarcely believe that Shin and my stepfather had traded blows here, wrecking the old table, and then smashing out into the back courtyard, or whatever finally happened that terrible evening. But that’s the way people are, I think. We forget all the bad things in favor of what’s normal, what feels safe.
My mother bit off her sewing thread. “He’s probably seeing Fong Lan home.” Fong Lan was the daughter of the carpenter who’d built my mother’s new kitchen table—my stepfather’s way of apologizing to her after the fight with Shin.
“That’s nice of him.”
My mother gave me an odd look. “He’s going steady with her, you know.”
I was taken aback, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Eventually Shin was bound to find a girl he liked.
Fong Lan had a round face and gently slanted eyebrows, and she adored Shin. People were surprised that he’d chosen her out of all the girls who mooned after him. There were disparaging remarks, like “her calves look like lo bak,” the giant white radishes, but if Fong Lan heard, she didn’t seem to care. That was part of her appeal, that mature sincerity of hers. Sometimes she was so good that it made me want to scream. Yet I, too, was drawn to her. When she talked to me in her soft, serious voice, I felt that I wanted an older sister like her to comfort me. To cherish me and love me.
Once, coming home unexpectedly early, I’d caught her with Shin. It was a quiet, empty afternoon, so still I’d thought no one was home. I could whistle loudly, meddle with all the things that my stepfather didn’t like us to disturb. Stupid restrictions
like tearing the next page off the daily calendar, or changing the radio dial to a different station. I could do all of them, but instead, I walked decorously upstairs.
At the top of the stairs, I cast my schoolbag aside and slid noiselessly down the corridor in my socks. And then I stopped at an unfamiliar sound—a gasp and a soft moan. A girl’s voice, coming from Shin’s room. I froze. There was a tingling sensation, as though my skin was seizing up, shrinking too small for me. And through the open door, I saw them.
They were on the floor of Shin’s room, that space I was no longer permitted to enter. Fong Lan was leaning against his bed. The front of her blouse was open revealing the pale, heavy swell of her bare breasts as she bent over him, her hair parted like a shining curtain. Shin’s head was cradled in her lap. One of her hands splayed possessively on his chest. His face was turned away, but I could see hers. She looked entranced, as though she’d never seen anything so beautiful as Shin. And he was beautiful. It was obvious even to me at that moment, the lean careless length of his body, the sharp tilt of his chin.
In that instant, I understood a great deal. About Shin, and about me. And how there were some things that you could never have. In all the years I’d lived in that house, I’d never seen Shin so relaxed, without the watchful tension that wound his body like a spring. When I’d held him in the darkness behind the chicken coop, I’d felt it: the rigidity and anger that wouldn’t go away. But here, in the soft hazy afternoon light, was a different Shin, one that I’d never seen before. And I felt horribly, sickeningly inadequate. No matter how close we were or what secrets we shared, I could never give him this peace.
A choked gasp forced its way out of my throat. Fong Lan lifted her head but I was already gone, running down the long corridor. When I think about that shophouse in my memories, it’s always a dark, endless tunnel both upstairs and downstairs. Not knowing what to do, I ended up wandering around in a daze, and only returned when I was sure my mother and stepfather were back. Shin had acted as though nothing had happened. He showed no reaction when I came home, so late that the lamps were already lit and my mother was scolding me in fear and relief. But Fong Lan talked to me a few days later.
“I know you saw us the other day,” she said. “It must have been awkward for you.”
Her very softness and meekness felt like a stab to the heart.
I tried to shrug it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
But she said seriously, “I really do love him, you know. We haven’t done it yet. I don’t want to tie him down if I got pregnant. But I will if he wants to.”
I wanted to shake her. What kind of thinking was this? My mother had warned me, stamped it into my head. Chastity was one of the few bargaining chips women had. No matter how good-looking Shin was, Fong Lan was a fool. And yet, part of me couldn’t help admiring her. She really did love him, I thought.
Haltingly, I tried to give her advice even though she was two years older than me. She listened patiently, then shook her head. “I know what it’s like in your family,” she said. So he’s really told her everything, I thought in amazed resentment. “But I want to make Shin happy. And if it means giving myself to him, that’s all right with me.”
Was that love or stupidity? But maybe that was just the hardheaded part of me, calculating my chances of survival. I wouldn’t give myself away to some man, become one of his possessions. Not without the economic assurance of a wedding ring. Even then, from what I could see of my mother’s choice, perhaps the price was too high.
* * *
I never did find out what happened with Fong Lan because not long after, Shin broke up with her. And strangely enough, when it was all over I found myself defending her.
“You’re supposed to be loyal and faithful,” I’d said, six months before Shin left for Singapore. We were sitting at the round marble-topped table studying. At least Shin was. I had nothing to prepare for, no university to go on to. “You’re not like your name at all.”
He’d barely looked up from his textbook. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you break up with Fong Lan? She cried buckets afterwards. I know she did.”
“Are you telling me to date her again?” He looked annoyed.
“She seems a lot more serious than whoever it is you’re with now,” I’d said defensively.
“And what about you? You think that being serious will change Ming’s mind?”
That was a low blow. Shin narrowed his eyes and turned a page. “Did Fong Lan ask you to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Then don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.” His face flamed, as though someone had pressed a burning brand across his cheekbones. “And stop talking about names! I have been faithful. As much as I can!”
Furious, he slammed his textbook shut and left.
* * *
After lunch at the canteen, we went back to the storeroom and started on the files. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; most of them were quite straightforward. But sorting out the pathology samples was a headache since they were in no semblance of order at all.
The collection was highly eccentric; I supposed that in this far-flung corner of the Empire, whoever was running the pathology department probably felt like God. We didn’t find the preserved head or blood-drinking grasshopper that Koh Beng had mentioned, but there was a two-headed rat, its naked tail a drifting worm in amber liquid. Dr. Rawlings’s predecessor, a Dr. Merton, had apparently promised a number of patients that they could have their body parts back after he’d studied them. These were denoted by a little red X in the corner of his crabbed records.
“Who’d want to come back for a gallbladder?” I said.
“Some people want to be buried whole,” Shin said seriously.
I shivered, remembering what the salesman, Chan Yew Cheung, had said when I’d danced with him—about witchcraft, and how a body must be buried in its original form to rest in peace.
“Here we go,” said Shin, reading from a file. “Finger, left ring, Indian male laborer infected with parasite. Preserved in formaldehyde.”
I combed through the shelves of specimens. Almost everything had been unpacked, and I still hadn’t seen any actual jars of severed fingers.
“Another one—right forefinger from a double-jointed female contortionist.”
“Not here, either,” I announced.
In fact, despite records indicating at least twelve amputated digits in the hospital collection, we could not locate a single one.
“How’s that possible?” I pored over the ledger again. People made jokes about doctors’ handwriting but in this case it was no laughing matter. Dr. Merton’s scrawl was a conga line of ants, the hasty loops of someone who didn’t care if it never got transcribed.
“Anything else missing besides fingers?”
“I checked. So far nothing else is missing.” I waved the ledger triumphantly at him from where I perched on a cardboard box, amid a sea of papers.
“Still so competitive,” he complained. “I thought of it first.”
“No, you didn’t.” I turned back to the file.
“Spider. On your hair.”
I froze, eyes closed while Shin removed it. In the past, he’d have flicked it off, stinging my forehead smartly. Now, he handled it delicately and impersonally, like a stranger.
“It’s really disappointing how you don’t scream about things like this,” he murmured.
“Why should I?” I opened my eyes.
Shin’s face, that familiar set of planes that made up his nose and cheekbones, was so close that I could reach out and touch it. What made someone good-looking? Was it the symmetry of features, or the sharp shadows of his brows and lashes, the mobile curl of his mouth? In the very center of his eyes, so much darker than mine, I could see a tiny light, a gleam that sparked. Then it winked out and I was falling, drawn into a tunnel. Images flickered. Railway tracks submerged underwater. A ticket to nowhere. Fish swimming in a mirror. Somewhere,
a midnight shape stirred, shadow rising from the depths of a river. The air thickened, a clot in my lungs. I gasped. Toppled forward.
“What’s wrong?”
Shin caught me as I fell, my thoughts tangled like riverweed, slippery and coiling. Dizzy, I steadied myself, pushing back. Sliding my hands along the width of his shoulders, the hard muscles that were those of a man and not a boy. My heart was racing like a horse on treacherous ground. If I weren’t careful, I’d make a fatal stumble.
He watched me with concern, dark brows frowning. Whatever it was I’d seen in his eyes—reflected shadows, a looking glass linked to another realm—was gone. There was only Shin and even then he was half a stranger to me.
“Do you often have spells like this?”
Spells. That was the right word. Dizzy spells, magic spells. The crooked twitch of a severed finger that had led us somewhere strange. I couldn’t speak, could only nod.
Shin’s hands gripped my shoulders. The pressure made me feel better. Then he was loosening my collar, working the top buttons quickly and deftly. Dazed, I wondered how many women he’d undressed. But he was careful, touching only the material of the dress. Careful not to touch me.
“Have you been tested for anemia? Lots of girls your age have it.”
Practical as always. I inhaled. Sunlight flooded back into the room, and the spell, whatever it was, lifted.
“Shin, have you ever dreamed about a little boy and a railway station?”
“No.” He sat down with a sigh, ignoring the dust.
“Well, I do. And it’s very odd because he talks to me. I feel as though I’ve met him before.”
“A little boy—is that me?”
I swatted him with a file. “Stop being so egotistical.”
He laughed and dodged. The file flew out of my hand and papers exploded everywhere, thin loose sheets covered with crabbed handwriting. It was Dr. Merton’s writing—lists and more lists of things mixed in with supplies that he’d ordered. Formaldehyde, spirits of tincture, scalpels. Fixatives for glass slides. And then I saw it: Finger donated by European patient. Dry preservation in salt.