The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  A sickening sensation of the hideousness of it all condensed into a tight constriction of throat and stomach, and he leaned against the wall, to steady himself. He had paid for a child and taken her to bed. The child was probably no older than his younger daughter, Adeline, aged 13. He and his wife escorted Adeline to her school parties, forbade her to stay late and watched over her with greatest parental care and tenderness. If Porntip had been his daughter, she would have had the same loving protection. With his money he had made this child, working as a prostitute in a hotel, do unspeakable things for his pleasure, and she had complied fully, smiling, knowing that any complaint from him would mean the whip and lash. He had noticed a healed scar on her left thigh, probably the price she had paid for a flare of the child’s rebelliousness that was never repeated.

  She was singing a song softly to herself and he thought he understood the words.

  Stones, pretty stones

  Bright stones

  Fingers, nimble fingers

  But why did you have to open

  Like legs?

  He moved; he was not sure what he was going to do or say, except that an overpowering feeling of compassion for her and loathing for himself needed expression. The involuntary movement caused the child to look up with a start; she saw him and let out a loud gasp. The stones fell from her fingers and she stood up trembling, staring at him with the terror-stricken look of someone caught in a heinous act and for whom escape was impossible. He pushed open the door, said “Porntip” and she fell down on her knees and began to cry, rocking her small body to and fro in her terror. He tried to touch her, to say comforting words, but the child’s panic had gathered into one obsessive thought, that here was another thing done wrong, for which punishment would be immediate and painful, so that all his efforts to calm and reassure by tone or touch were futile and washed uselessly over her. She became hysterical, speaking very rapidly in her own language, still on her knees and alternately holding out her hands pleadingly and wringing them.

  “Oh, please, please – ” cried Andrew, and then thinking to get her out of her hysteria more effectively, he said, in a sharp voice, “Now, now, no need for all this,” at the same time firmly gripping her shoulders to pull her up from the absurd kneeling position. She screamed, and began struggling with him as with an adversary, finally breaking free and running out of the bathroom and out of the room, in choked sobbing.

  “Oh my God,” cried Andrew, pale with shock at this sudden turn ofevents. He sat down on the bed, breathing heavily, in a turbulence of emotions from which two, guilt and fear, detached themselves to shape into an overpowering certainty that this would not be the end of the adventure, that something was about to happen to him soon. The sense of dread overcame him, and he fell back on the bed, gasping.

  He jumped up upon hearing loud shouts coming from the street below, and without understanding what they were all about, he knew they were in some way connected with him. He listened, horrified. The shouts grew; he could visualise a massing of people in the scene of the tragedy, whatever it was, in the light of the street lamps. He put on his shirt and his trousers and heard a soft polite knock on the door. It was the young polite-looking man again, and this time the man’s smile was strained by the seriousness of the news he had come to give, and by his earnest desire that his valued guest should not be at all inconvenienced by it. The girl, Porntip, in a quite unaccountable fit of madness, had run to the hotel balcony and fallen over a ledge. Quite unaccountable, the young man emphasised, and smiling reassuringly at Andrew, repeated that he was not to worry about it at all, as these things happened. It was best that they kept quiet about it and went on as if nothing had happened. Andrew rushed past him through the open door and he said, “Sir, but – ”

  Andrew stood with the cluster of onlookers, but the body on the wet road was already covered with a piece of canvas, a small foot peeping out from it. He felt a tide of nausea rising, and returned quickly to the hotel to throw up in the bathroom. He saw the five stones still on the floor and he began to cry. The next day, he left for home.

  “You what – ” Benny was aghast. He repeated, “That’s utterly crazy, Andrew, and I advise you not to do it.” For Andrew had told him the whole story and confided to him his decision for reparation. Guilt needed reparation which was its only solace.

  When he was a very small child, probably no more than five or six, he suffered enormous guilt over the death of a sister. He had nightmares of his little sister’s ghost coming to haunt him; it did not help that one of the bondmaids who took care of him, a young spiteful woman, often told him the story of how he was responsible for the baby’s death, embellishing her narration to frighten the little hypersensitive boy into a state of sheer terror. What had happened was that during the post-war years when he was a mere toddler, milk was scarce, and whatever milk could be obtained was first given to sons, then only to daughters, if there was any remaining. He being the only male child had first preference; while he grew sleek and chubby, his sister dwindled away and finally died from an illness brought on by malnutrition. He had a recurring dream in which he saw a pan of milk being heated on the stove, then poured into a bottle, then put in a bucket of water to cool. His little sister cried for the milk but each time she tried to reach it, she was slapped down and finally pulled away. He saw himself drinking from the bottle of milk and being carried in a bondmaid’s arms, and urging the bondmaid to take him to the window to look out upon the yard outside where he was sure his sister had been taken. Still drinking his milk, he looked out and saw her dead on the hard earth of the yard, like an enormous insect on its back, her arms and legs stiffly sticking out.

  When he was older, he found out that there was a way by which the living could feed the dead and thus make atonement: every year, during the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, people went to the graves of their relatives and laid out enormous feasts of food and drink.

  His grandmother, taking him with her on her rounds of the graves, was surprised to see something drop out of his shirt and fall clanking to the ground where it hit a stone. It was a tin of condensed milk.

  “Why, little grandson!” she had laughed. “Whatever have you got there?” He did not tell her, but it was an offering of propitiation to the dead sister who had died because of him.

  The frightening dream disappeared. The ghost must have drunk the milk and forgiven him.

  There was to be more guilt and more need of the solace of expiation.

  His mother employed a servant, a remote relative who had a little adopted daughter. The child must have been about eight then, but was very small for her years, looking no more than five or six, and he was 12. The Clever Scholar, the women in the household called him as they looked at him with pride, and all their energies were put to the service of his comfort and pleasure, he being the sole male child. Their attentiveness embarrassed him; their readiness to punish the servant’s child on his account embarrassed him even more. Thus if the child followed him around in hopes of being given some of the bread-and-jam he was eating, or stood and watched him while he was doing his school homework and he frowned for her to go away, her mother would appear in a noisy display of the deference expected of the poor relative, shrilly scolding the child or slapping her till she cried. Between his genuine pity for this unfortunate little girl who was always sickly and never without scabs on her spindly legs, and his utter revulsion at her idiotic adulation of him, he grew irritable and difficult, often locking himself in his room for hours. One day he lost a favourite colouring pen, and was certain that the girl had taken it because he had seen her looking at it with intense interest. He asked her sternly, if she had taken his pen; the child blubbered, and immediately the incident was taken to a high level of adult antagonisms, his mother making insinuating remarks and the relative responding by beating the child in a frenzy of transferred hate. The child began to vomit and the distressed relative would still go on with the beating, until his mother coldly went up and removed the p
iece of firewood from her hand. He had meanwhile found the missing colouring pen; he had put it away in a drawer and had forgotten about it. Lacking the courage to tell the truth, he brooded in his room for days. The child was taken ill, and he remembered that his guilt was so keen that he emptied his money-box of its coins and went out to buy an enormous packet of biscuits which he hurriedly left beside the mattress on which the sick child was lying. He never saw her again and was told that she had died in hospital.

  He did not tell Benny of these two childhood incidents, but he said, running his fingers through his hair in his deep distress, “You know three females have died on my account, and they were all children. I have been responsible for the deaths of three innocent children. How can I forgive myself?” Ignoring the histrionics, Benny said, “But Andrew, listen. You can’t go to the family and offer money. They would fleece you dry. I know their kind; you would be a heaven-sent opportunity to them.” For Andrew had told him of his secret intention to return to Bangkok and get the help of the hotel manager to locate the girl’s family. He would then visit them and offer to pay for the funeral expenses and for whatever else was needed.

  “That’s the least I can do,” said Andrew sorrowfully. The incident had changed him drastically. His wife wondered and agonised about this sudden change in her husband – his hair was greyer and he had aged overnight – but he would not tell her.

  “Listen,” said Benny again, with greater urgency in his voice. He worried about Andrew being mercilessly exploited by ‘those people’ and tried to dissuade him with all the horror stories he could muster: the American engineer who befriended a Thai bar waitress, sent her money faithfully for three years, only to be dumped by her; an Englishman who was cleaned out by his Thai wife and her family; a Singaporean businessman who returned from a trip totally disoriented and was later found to have been the victim of a magic potion administered by his Thai mistress.

  “Don’t,” pleaded Benny, and this time there was exasperation in his voice: here was a guy making a big to-do over nothing and possibly ruining it for the other guys.

  “Planeloads of Japanese go there every day,” he said, still trying hard to dissuade Andrew from a patently futile mission, “and planeloads of French too. You only have to read the newspapers to know. It happens everywhere in the world. Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that each and every one of us should come home weeping with guilt and sorrow?”

  It was with great difficulty and a considerable sum of money that Andrew managed to persuade the polite young man at the hotel to take him to see Porntip’s family. He looked around at the squalor of the huts clustered on the muddy banks of a river; they seemed to be constructed of the same foetid substance as the debris washed up by the river. A group of small children with large, round bellies, matted hair and dirty faces gathered round him, giggling, and he began to dispense coins from his pocket. The group rapidly swelled into a crowd, and the children, jostling with each other, and tugging at his hands, shirt and trousers, clamoured for more. The young man shooed them off with both hands and led Andrew hurriedly to a small, ramshackle hut some distance from the river. Porntip had no father; he had died in an accident in a stone quarry a year back. Porntip’s mother, a thin, dried woman with a grief-pinched face pointed to a table on which stood a picture of Porntip, smiling, with a frangipani in her hair, side by side with a picture of the dead father, and in front of the portraits, a saucer with flower petals and a lit candle. Porntip’s mother began to weep; the tragedy of her life condensed into a long, thin wail as she sat beside the pictures of her husband and daughter and began beating on her chest. Pale with shock, Andrew drew out from his pocket some money, handed it to the young man beside him and requested him to explain to the woman that he would be grateful to be allowed to help out in the funeral and other expenses. The woman looked up sharply, looked from one face to the other and stared at the wad of money which represented remission from years of back-breaking work at the quarry; her cluster of children, similarly attracted, gathered round her to watch silently.

  “It’s the least I can do,” said Andrew gently, and the young man translated. Andrew’s eyes wandered and rested, with horror, on a young girl by the side of the hut, visible from the doorway, squatting on the hard earth, playing Five Stones. It was the same round face, the same abundance of hair, the same dexterity of hand in the sweeping up of the four pebbles to catch the falling fifth. Andrew stared, and a strangled sound came from his throat, as he raised a finger to point at her. The mother, following his finger, raised her voice and called shrilly. The name sounded like “Porntip.” The girl heard, looked up, gathered her five stones and came in. She stood shyly before Andrew. The mother, smiling through her tears, introduced her. Her name was Wantip, and she was Porntip’s younger sister. She smiled shyly and looked on the ground. The mother said something to the young man and he translated: “She says that you are a good and generous man. You can have Wantip. She is a virgin and will be a very good woman to you. She says she knows you will treat Wantip very well. She says – ”

  “No, you don’t understand,” blurted Andrew. The woman who understood very well, again said something to the young man who translated: “She says another man has already come to ask for her, and if you don’t take her now – ”

  Wantip, on cue, walked up to Andrew, and stood before him, head bowed, hands reverentially clasped, then looked up at him with that mixture of pleading and promise in her large eyes and soft mouth.

  The Revenge

  Various are the legends of how Attis, the son-lover of the great goddess Cybele of Anatolia, met his death. The most appealing is the one that tells how one day as the young Attis was looking after his grazing sheep and playing his flute, unknown to him, the monster Agdistus was watching his youthful beauty with lustful eyes. Unable to control his passion any longer, Agdistus tried to force himself upon Attis. Utterly revolted, the pure Attis tore the genitals from his own body, bleeding to death under a free rather than be unfaithful to his great goddess mother. The goddess on seeing the lifeless, emasculated body of her son-lover wept with sorrow. Picking him up gently from the ground that had sprung a thousand violets where the blood had spilt, she carried him, wrapped in woollen mourning bands to the mountain cave where she lived. She also took with her the tree under which he had died, planting it at the entrance to the cave and burying the body in the earth beneath. Every year, sitting under this tree on the anniversary of his death, she mourned for him, this faithful, loyal, devoted lover of hers who would rather deprive himself of his maleness than betray her.

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  The daughter came home from the date tearful, and the mother guessed what had happened.

  “He’s not going to marry you after all, right?” she allowed herself some malice through the maternal concern. “Am I right or not?” And when the daughter set up a howl of desolation, she knew she was right.

  “I told you so! I told you a hundred times that as soon as he had his way with you, he would dump you. They’re all like that!” – remembering the time when her own husband would have dumped her once the disgrace of her growing belly was discovered, except that, upon the secret administration of the temple medium’s magic potion in his drink, he suddenly turned docile and married her.

  “How many times did he have his way with you?” she asked sharply.

  The girl said, “Four.”

  The mother shook her head in exasperation. “I told you, didn’t I, to be careful. A girl’s gift is not for foolish squandering, and now you’ve spent it on a brute of a man who then leaves you, smacking his lips in search of others! You young women will never learn.”

  Her daughter wept noisily, unable to bear the loss of the young man and the folly of a squandered gift.

  “Will you be seeing him again?” asked the mother after a while, and the daughter, hearing purpose in her voice, looked up and asked, “No – but why do you ask?”

  “Because,”
said the mother, “you will need to put something in his drink.”

  It was a small packet of very fine ash, sifted from the remains of a prayer paper burnt together with a piece of the napkin that had touched the most secret part of the daughter’s body.

  The magic did not work. On the contrary, it hardened the young man’s resolution not to marry the girl, but not before he had had his way with her again, making it the fifth time.

  The daughter was disconsolate, and the mother furious. She paced the house at night, as restless as a caged animal. She had to take revenge on behalf of her daughter. Since the magic did not work, she would have to move to the next weapon in her arsenal. It was going to be extremely difficult, but she would know no peace till it had been accomplished.

  Mother and daughter got together to work out the plan carefully, the daughter by now galvanised to an irrevocable fury and pitch of bloodthirstiness. The plan was in five steps: Step 1, invite him to dinner, lulling any suspicion with a show of genuine friendship and desire to forget the past; Step 2, he comes for dinner, feed him with his favourite food; Step 3, ply him with his favourite drink, but in a way as not to arouse any suspicion; Step 4, he feels sleepy, invite him to sleep on his favourite sofa in the sitting room, promising to wake him up soon; Step 5, he is snoring in his sleep, strike.

  Everything went according to plan, until Step 5, when instead of snoring, he seemed to be sleeping fitfully, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and tossing about. However, after a while, the full effect of the drink was felt, and he began to be still and to snore loudly, his mouth wide open, one arm dangling at the side.

  “Just a few minutes more, we need to be sure,” said the mother, and the daughter stood by, on the ready, her blood up. The mother held the knife, sharp, shining and deadly, in her hand.