‘You come tomorrow,’ said Hong Seung, showing a mouth full of gold teeth. Stupid girl, he thought, I would have paid her six if she had asked for it.
Hong Seung’s laundry was a traditional Chinese shop-house under a stucco arcade, with a slab of granite as a bridge over the deep monsoon drain and a red tin shrine tacked to a pillar with dying flowers and burning joss sticks on it. In the front of the shop four men in singlets and shorts ironed on tables, with modern irons wired to the electric lighting circuit in the ceiling.
At the back of the building was a courtyard where the laundry was washed and dried. At intervals bicycle carts drew up at the wrought-iron gate in the back alley, and huge bundles of sheets, table cloths and soiled uniforms were dragged inside the yard.
It was not easy work. First the bundles had to be sorted and counted. The washing was then boiled in huge old-fashioned coppers, with fragments of soap chopped with a cleaver from big brown blocks. When it was judged to be clean, Ayeshah had to reach into the boiling water with her bare hands and pull the linen out, then rinse it in clear water at the shallow sinks against the wall.
There was one tap at the side of the yard. The heavy, wet sheets were fed through a mangle, and stretched on bamboo poles to dry. There were two children to help her, a six-year-old to fan the fires under the coppers and keep them fed with charcoal, and a girl of eight.
At the end of the first day, Ayeshah’s hands were scalded red and her back ached painfully. She was tottering with exhaustion by the time she spread the last sheet on its pole. The courteous Hong Seung was not about, but his mother, a vastly fat woman with grey hair in a bun, glowered at her.
Next morning she was greeted by a screaming tirade from the old woman, most of which she could not understand. What, finally, she made out was that she had muddled up two bundles of laundry. There was no system of laundry marks, and she was expected to be able to tell each customer’s sheets by eye alone.
The older child went silently about her work, but the younger one watched her with something more than curiosity. Tired, demoralized, disoriented, with an inner core of numbness from a much greater wound, Ayeshah unresistingly let events take their course.
Somewhere in her thoughts she knew with complete certainty that she was being tricked, that she had been marked as a victim from the moment she met. Anna Maria at the quayside. Somewhere else in her mind she was willing to assign her destiny to others. Her will had been drained by a vast grief; while her physical being could be a puppet, her soul was hiding, repairing its wound. It was immaterial who pulled the strings.
At the end of the day a bundle of gravy-stained table cloths arrived, and Ayeshah left them soaking overnight. In the morning, she found that a blue amah’s blouse had been in the bundle, and had stained the entire copperful of white linen, which now included two fine gentlemen’s shirts.
‘Quickly,’ she ordered the elder child, ‘fill the copper with fresh water and boil these again – maybe we can get the stains out.’ The child shrugged and did what she asked without any sense of urgency.
Ayeshah battered frantically at the shirts on the washing stones, and got them back to an even, slightly tainted whiteness. By the evening the backs of her hands were covered with small blisters from repeated immersion in the scalding water. Larger blisters were swelling painfully under some of her cuticles. When she woke the next morning her hands were crusted where the blisters had wept. When she tried to move her fingers, the pain was like fire.
‘Where is Hong Seung?’ she asked the fat woman at the week’s end. To her surprise her employer materialized at once from the front of the shop.
‘Forgive my weakness and foolishness,’ she began, half muttering words she sensed were useless, ‘but I cannot do this work. It is too hard for me – now I can’t put my hands in the water at all, you see.’ She held her hands out, and Hong Seung made a show of turning on the single naked light bulb to examine them.
‘Bad.’ He nodded. ‘Hands no good, too soft.’
‘So I cannot work here any more,’ Ayeshah’s voice sounded a little more confident, now the Chinese had accepted her incapacity.
‘No more work,’ he agreed.
‘We agreed my wages would be five dollars,’ Ayeshah followed up nervously again.
‘You want money?’ Hong Seung reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a folded scrap of paper. Resting it on a three-legged table, he took a pencil stub from behind his ear and covered the paper with Chinese characters.
‘So – look,’ he motioned to Ayeshah to read over his shoulder.
‘Two loads washing you mix up – deliver late, customer angry, not pay. Ten dollar. Table cloths stain, no good any more. Eighteen dollar. Two shirts no good, very expensive shirt, customer very angry. Forty dollar. Use much soap, we say one dollar. Sixty-nine dollar. You earn five dollar, OK. You pay me sixty-four dollar now, please.’
One by one the other laundry workers gathered round. Ayeshah looked in horror from one angry face to another. They yammered at each other in Chinese, went over Hong Seung’s figures among themselves, nodded and smacked the paper emphatically to express their agreement. Ayeshah caught words she knew, ‘lazy’, ‘stupid girl’, ‘much money’. She began to cry. Finally Hong Seung marched her back to Anna Maria’s house.
‘Bad girl, she bad girl,’ he shouted, shoving her up the stairs, ‘she get money now, pay me.’
Choking back her tears, Ayeshah ran upstairs to her room and felt inside the pillow case. There was nothing there. Frantically she pulled out the pillow, turned the threadbare covering inside out and shook it. She looked under the bed, pulled the sheet off the grimy mattress, turned out her bag, scattered her clothes. Her money was gone.
Anna Maria was standing with Hong Seung in front of the littered desk when Ayeshah came down stairs. She was angry, but restrained by her harboured sense of predestination.
‘Anna Maria,’ she said, trying not to sniff. ‘Someone has stolen my money.’
‘Nonsense. You’re lying. You had no money,’ Anna Maria shouted in anger, no longer poised or sophisticated. ‘You came here with a handful of dollars and now you can’t pay me for the room. I’ve heard that story before, miss.’
‘But I had a lot of money – in my pillow.’
‘You had nothing. I know, I changed your linen. Stupid girl, you think you can swindle me? Or my friend Hong Seung? Prison is the place for girls like you.’
Roused by the shouting, two of the other lodgers appeared, sleep-smudged faces leaning over the top floor banister rail.
‘Susie! Get dressed and go and find a constable.’
‘No, no please,’ Ayeshah was so scared she could hardly put the words together. ‘I’ll pay you, both of you. My hands will be good soon, I’ll work hard …’
Hong Seung spat. ‘Hands no good, too soft.’
A lanky Chinese girl came down the stairs yawning and scrabbling inside a white plastic handbag.
‘You want I go to police house?’ she asked Anna Maria.
‘Yes – go now, tell them to come and arrest this little thief. Hurry up!’
Ayeshah screamed and flung herself at Anna Maria, who furiously shoved her away so she fell in a sobbing heap on the stairs. Three more girls watched from the top floor, muttering excitedly. Hong Seung, Anna Maria and the scrawny Chinese girl talked briskly, deciding something among themselves. Then Susie helped Ayeshah up.
‘OK. All fixed,’ Anna Maria announced. ‘You work with Susie at the dance hall. If you’re good and work hard, get lots of tips, you can pay us what you owe. You’re very lucky, Susie is sorry for you, she has asked us to be kind. Myself, I would have you arrested, but she says no. Do what she says and maybe you won’t have to go to prison.’
There was more discussion between Hong Seung and the Chinese girl, and eventually they seemed to reach an agreement and the laundry-owner left. Susie pulled Ayeshah upstairs with her and made her sit on her bed while she finished her preparations for the
night’s work. She scooped up swags of her coarse black hair and pinned them into a chignon like those worn by the European women, then began spitting into a little case of mascara, and stirring up a paste with a brush. Ayeshah was fascinated, in spite of the horrors of the argument with Hong Seung and Anna Maria. She had never seen a woman use makeup before.
Two other girls sat with her, smoking English cigarettes. They pinched her arms and the upper swell of her breast, laughed, and nodded encouragingly.
‘Pretty titties,’ said one, ‘Tommies will like.’ Susie smiled at her in the pink-tinted mirror. ‘We get brassière tomorrow. Tommies like brassière, make titties bigger.’ She rolled up her pink sweater and showed Ayeshah a white cotton bra of near-surgical strength hanging loose over her own concave chest and forming a bridge of greyish elastic between her sharp shoulder-blades.
They took a taxi to the dance hall, an extravagance which hinted to Ayeshah that she was moving into a more lavish world. The Miss Chatterbox Rendez-Vous was a big smoke-tainted room with flapping Shanghai doors at the entrance like the doorway of a cowboy saloon. There was a space cleared for dancing in the middle of the room, a modern jukebox, and a row of tin tables, some covered with oilcloth. Each girl planted her handbag by a seat at the table before joining the gossiping group around the jukebox. They played wailing Chinese ballads until the first British soldiers began to slope in, then switched to Western big band music.
Susie rapidly instructed her in the art of making ‘plenty dollar’ as a taxi-dance girl.
‘Choose young boy only,’ she advised, ‘he come quick, no trouble. Be sweet with him, when he say “Missy, you pretty,” you ask him if he like long time, all night. Ask ten dollar for make love, five more dollar all night. You must get money first very important.’
She opened the white plastic handbag and groped among the mess of cosmetics inside. ‘Here. Put rubber johnny, then you never get sick.’ She put a packet of three contraceptives in Ayeshah’s barely comprehending hand, looking at her curiously. Pretty girl, but very quiet. No wonder the Chinese were the best taxi-dance girls; they knew it was important to smile a lot and be brisk and businesslike.
Ayeshah watched blandly as Susie began work. A meaty middle-aged sergeant approached her with a book of paper tickets in his hand. She tore one out, tucked it into her handbag and danced with him, gazing blankly into space and holding him at arms’length. When the song finished, she returned quickly to her seat and took a ticket from a skinny private with the prematurely aged look of lifelong borderline malnutrition. She snaked her body close to him, grinding her pelvis into his. She gazed glaze-eyed over the boy’s shoulder, but her right hand, Ayeshah noticed, was between their bodies, hard at work. At the end of the music they had a short discussion and Susie triumphantly came back to collect her handbag.
‘Be lucky!’ she called to Ayeshah, giving her a wink over her shoulder as she tripped out of the door on the boy’s arm. Ayeshah smiled a tight, nervous grimace and looked up to see another soldier, slight with curled fair hair, with a dance ticket in his outstretched hand. She took it and, having no handbag, rolled it into the waist of her sarong.
Western dancing was not so different from the Malay joget, she found, but harder to do with your bodies pressed together. The fair soldier smelt nauseatingly of beer; he was sweating and breathing heavily; his penis was hardening fast – she could feel it against her body. Timidly, Ayeshah slid her hand to the man’s crotch as she had seen Susie do, wincing with pain as she scraped her blistered skin. Fortunately, he seemed not to notice her clumsy hesitancy.
‘How much is it?’ he asked, giving her a smile and pulling away a little to look at her with those funny blue eyes. She said ten dollars, and he nodded and turned for the door, wrapping her arm over his proprietorially. The men she assumed were his friends shouted things as they walked into the street.
In the taxi he at once unzipped his trousers and pulled her hand to his crotch, not seeming to notice the weeping blisters. He flipped half the buttons of her blouse open, muttering ‘Gor!’ as he felt her naked breasts. Was this the time to make him pay for all night, she wondered, fumbling desperately in the mess of unfamiliar garments for the slim, rubbery penis, which was already oozing drops of fluid. Susie was right about choosing the young ones.
In her room, breathing louder still, he helped her undo the remaining buttons, impatiently tugged the sarong off, then tore frantically at his own clothes, in his impatience getting his trousers tangled with his heavy boots. Ayeshah remembered Susie’s advice, and reached for the packet of contraceptives which had fallen to the floor from the sarong folds. He snatched the packet from her and pulled the sleeve of powdered rubber over his penis with shaking fingers.
‘You pay now, please,’ she half whispered, and he stuffed notes in her hand. Then he was on top of her, stabbing wildly around her soft entrance, muttering incoherently with the anxiety that he was going to climax before getting inside the body he had hired. Ayeshah felt no pleasure, no pain, nothing beyond the discomfort of the prodding penis. He was much clumsier than her husband and automatically she helped him.
‘Easy does it,’ she said, the English phrase rising like a forgotten memory. With delicate fingers she guided him, and after a few violent plunges it was over. She slid from beneath him and got off the bed at once, not quite believing that she had done what she had done. The man too sat up, found cigarettes and matches, lit up, doubled the pillow over and lay back, an arm behind his head. He looked at her.
Once, in the village, a Japanese truck had killed one of her father’s buffalo. By the time she and her brother had found the stiff-legged carcase, a monitor lizard had already gorged on it and was standing aggressively over the remainder. They had laughed to see the great jungle scavenger, already stuffed with food, greedily raking the meat with its swivelling reptile eyes, too full to eat more but too obsessed with the prospect of plenty to know that it had eaten enough. The lizard had been as big as a man. This man was looking at her now with the same greedy fascination.
‘Well, kitten,’ he said, blowing out a stream of blue smoke. ‘How about all night, then?’
‘Ten dollars.’ Ayeshah hardly knew she’d said it. He licked his lips, his eyes roaming hungrily over her flesh.
‘The other girls ask five.’ The pained tone in his voice pleased her. So it hurt to give money – well it felt good to hurt a man, especially a white man.
‘I ask ten.’ She smiled, exhilarated. Ayeshah had animation now, the puppet no longer needed her strings to be pulled.
‘I’ll want my money’s worth.’
‘Of course.’ She walked back to the bed and sat on the hard edge, picked the cigarette from between his fingers, put his hand on her breast and crushed her flesh into his fingers. ‘Give me all the money now.’ He gave it to her, feeling a big man, enhanced in his reputation as a jammy sod, having found a more expensive, better-looking tart than those Chinese bints with toastrack ribs.
Susie took Ayeshah to the Chinese doctor who gave her a bottle of blackish liquid to heal her hands. The wound in her soul seemed to mend as fast, as she acquired the skill of getting money out of men, Western men. Every dollar Ayeshah tucked into her new red plastic handbag seemed to give her more drive. Her aptitude was astonishing, Hong Seung told Anna Maria. His brother (who owned the Miss Chatterbox Rendez-Vous) reported that she was the most popular girl there, making so much money she barely bothered to collect the 20 cents per ticket that she earned for the dancing only. His brother didn’t like it, when she turned up every few weeks with a stack of tickets to demand her dollars.
The other girls didn’t like her either. When they tried to charge her prices, the soldiers just laughed. They were in awe of her ability to do business. Ayeshah was so unlike the lazy Malay girls; they were never good whores, they always had a bad conscience about the work and a sort of wistful apathy that the Tommies did not like.
‘She is more like a Chinese, she thinks only of good busines
s.’ Anna Maria approved. ‘But she sees with Western eyes. I have noticed this. I too, see that-way. Now she buys clothes and she chooses what pleases the British. But to the Chinese I think she looks ugly.’ Hong Seung nodded, holding out his cup for more tea. Ayeshah’s working dress was a skintight, scarlet silk cheong-sam embroidered with chrysanthemums, an old-fashioned party dress to his eyes. The Chinese girls mostly wore Western dress, but sweaters and skirts looked wrong on them, accentuating their bow legs or concave chests. The cheongsam made Ayeshah look even less oriental, setting off the poise of her head and her rounded breasts, but it matched exactly the British boys’vision of an exotic oriental woman. In addition she had developed a proud, mysterious smile which seemed to promise numerous delights. The boys were too young and too drunk to find those delights, but this did not seem important.
Money gave Ayeshah an almost physical thrill. In the village, money had been almost irrelevant. The padi fields, the chickens, her little garden had provided a rich abundance of food; your husband made anything you needed, or you traded something you had for it. Before leaving the village, she had scarcely ever handled more than two dollars. But in the city, she realized by instinct, money was everything, and so easy to get.
Once or twice, when an unusually drunk soldier had passed out in her room, she had got dressed again and gone out to work Bugis Street, perching at the food-hawkers’tables to pick up merchant seamen and taking customers into a side alley for sex in a doorway. They liked you to do it with your mouth, and were older and slower than the soldiers, but she could double her money for the night with two or three of them.
The Chinese doctor gave her a medicine she served to her clients as snake wine, the famous Eastern aphrodisiac. It was expensive, and all it did was to make them sleep, but they dreamed orgiastically and never complained. The doctor treated her with extreme courtesy because she was a good customer, but in private he despised her as an unenlightened amateur courtesan who had no interest in the erotic arts. This was because she showed no interest in the medicine which he himself had formulated which could prolong the rigidity of the Jade Stalk all night.
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