by Susan Barker
Wow, thought Sally, a bit filthy with jealousy herself. Both she and Delilah had dreamt of Mr Milnar. But only Delilah had had the courage to go out and spin reality from the intangible stuff of daydreams. Residual madness and heartbreak aside, it was one hell of an accomplishment.
‘Infatuation’s a bastard.’ Delilah sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the Christopher Milnar I’m obsessed with actually exists. If he is the same as the living, breathing man … If not, then who am I in love with? Where does this heartache come from? I’m trying to put it all behind me anyway,’ she swallowed, as if to choke back the unpleasantness, ‘but the pain won’t disappear overnight. That’s too much to ask. But at least I’m making a conscious effort to make myself better. To suck the poison out of the wound. That’s why I’m trying to make things up with you and Frances. I tried to apologize to Frances this morning but … let’s just say she was in a foul mood.’
‘She’s rather snappy today, isn’t she?’ agreed Sally.
‘I regret everything. I regret my behaviour on Saturday night. I regret the way I feel about Christopher. I’m trying not to be like this any more. I want to turn myself around. We are not who we are, but the self we seek. That’s how I console myself.’
Sally nodded, not quite understanding, but liking the noble ring to the words.
‘I’m not quite sure yet who I want to be. I’m figuring it out through a process of elimination. I know I don’t want to be the kind of girl who makes life miserable for a man who doesn’t care for her. Or throws stones at windows in the middle of the night. I don’t want to hold grudges. I just want to be well again.’
Delilah phoned Mr Hargreaves’s office and charmed him into letting his daughter stay for supper. Sally was jittery at first, afraid she was too dull for clever Delilah. But Delilah had a talent for coaxing Sally out of her shyness and the hours whizzed by in a blur of non-stop talking. Sally recounted the miserable boarding-school years and the chronic illnesses that had consigned her to the sick-bay. The home tutoring and reclusive bedroom years. She spoke of her adoration for Frances and the exhilarating friendship crudely interrupted by the evil Henry Leung (abusing his teaching position to brainwash a student!). And then Frances had viciously attacked her like a wildcat for God knows what, but Sally certainly had nothing to do with Mr Leung leaving the school if that was what it was about!
Delilah was full of wit and insight, transforming negatives to positives like a magician extracting ivory-winged doves from a seemingly empty top hat. From time to time Sally would be conscious of hogging the conversation, but a glance at Delilah’s warm and intelligent face reassured her. Delilah was fascinated. She hooted with laughter, as though Sally was a brilliant comedian, and perched, riveted, on the edge of her seat. Sally was sorry when it was time to go home. Talking to Delilah made her feel invigorated and alive. She loved Delilah’s frequent habit of introducing her name into the conversation (What do you think, Sally? Was that before or after boarding school, Sally?) so she flushed with pleasure, feeling special and cared for. Talking to Delilah showed Frances (who was never curious about Sally’s secret yearnings and ambitions) to be childish and self-absorbed. Talking to Delilah was like an initiation into the adult world.
On the journey home Sally realized that over the course of the evening her entire life story had poured out. Jumbled and non-chronological, like misshapen jigsaw pieces for Delilah to fit together. She blushed to think how little she’d learnt of Delilah’s life in return. How rude of her to have run away with the conversation like that. But Sally had been unable to help herself. To be the object of such furious attention was an addictive feeling, soothing her wounded ego and all but erasing the memory of the slap.
Sally was largely impervious to the battle for votes and the explosive violent aftermath, though thousands flocked to rallies in Petaling Jaya and manifestos loudspeakered streets near Sally’s home. The booming speeches and hot-blooded cheers occasionally woke her as she drowsed on Saturday afternoons.
The day before the general elections Sally got stuck in a traffic jam as she was driven home from school. The gridlock was caused by the funeral procession for a Chinese teenager, killed by the Malay police who caught him painting anti-election slogans on a wall. Ten thousand marchers waved banners and chanted that the blood debt must be repaid, showing the city the defiance and might of the Chinese. Trapped in the sweltering car, Sally had glared at them. Her throat was parched and there was nothing to drink. Frances had been absent from school every day that week, and Sally had kept an eye out for her in the crowds. They were her people after all.
When the polls opened on Saturday 10 May, Sally hoisted the window blinds to a sky of blazing sun and cloudless blue. As she squeezed a pea-sized squirt of toothpaste on to her toothbrush, yawning in the bathroom mirror, on the other side of the city the Prime Minister prayed for election victory. As Sally spat the minty foam into the sink, the Tengku’s chain of prayer beads broke, scattering across the floor in a menacing omen. Throughout the morning, as local dignitaries stalked by journalists and flashing camera bulbs made public declarations of party loyalty, Sally tackled her chemistry homework, cursing the day the periodic table was ever invented. As millions of polling cards were marked, the location of the ‘X’ motivated by race, ideology, illiteracy and last-minute changes of mind, Sally did her thigh-slimming exercises on the bedroom floor. In the evening, as the polls closed and the count commenced, Sally went to bed, exhausted by her day of inactivity.
Throughout Kuala Lumpur the election-night vigil began, crowds gathering in streets, gardens and private members’ clubs, with beer and snacks and children up past their bedtime. The padang outside the Royal Selangor Club heaved with citizens waiting for results to flash up on the great illuminated signboard. As the city was wide awake, buzzing with election fever, Sally slept and dreamt. Results trickled in through the night, the Alliance losing seats, the Opposition coalition gaining them. As the Chinese and Indians celebrated the end of their political marginalization, the Malays sank into silence and gloom.
Sally woke on Sunday 11 May as the last revellers straggled home, the streets messy with streamers and celebratory confetti. She yawned and stretched, oblivious of the earthquake that had occurred, tearing apart the political landscape of Malaysia for good. She kicked the sheets off her body and contemplated the uneventful day ahead.
25
ADAM LAY BENEATH the gravity of shadows, his vertebrae pressed to the floor, the wood grain etched upon his back. The city heaved against the window shutters, and through the traffic vibrations and rattling of vendor carts he heard the skipping rope whacking concrete, the stomp of Reeboks and the chant of the playground rhyme Julia had taught the Harelip Twins:
Not last night but the night before,
Three masked robbers came knocking at the door,
And this is what they said … to … me …
Turn around, touch the ground,
Clap your hands, one, two, three …
Adam imagined the twins turning the rope handles, spinning loops for Julia to jump through; the flight of pigtails as her Reeboks lifted off the ground, wounded rabbit’s paw lifted to her chest as if secured in an invisible sling. Pedestrians tsk-tsked as they skirted the swinging rope, and the Good Fortune Fabric Emporium manageress came out to scold the nuisance girls, flames shooting from her dragon’s mouth. Giggling, the skipping party shuffled further down the street, but they always inched their way back, as if the tinkling of the bell above the shop door lured them, like the melody of the Pied Piper’s flute.
Adam thought of Frances, lying in the ruins of her nightdress, breathing her sourness in the next room. Two nights earlier Adam was woken by splashing, and followed the lapping of water to the wide-open bathroom door and his mother naked in the tub. The tap was blasting and a sheet of water spilled over the edge and pooled on the floor. Adam stepped carefully across the slippery tiles, reached across the bath and screwed the valve shut. He hadn’t seen Franc
es naked since he was about seven, and was disturbed by her scrawny ribs and sagging breasts, the mottled gooseflesh veined with blue. What are you doing? he said. The water’s freezing. The water dripped in reply. Frances didn’t even look at him, arms resting on the sides of the tub as she reclined; mute queen with the faraway look of solitude in her eyes. Bitch, thought Adam. He wanted to slap her, shake her by her knife-hacked hair. But he went instead to bed. The silence, the absence of splashing, kept him awake for hours. Frances was dead, he knew it. Drowned. Glassy-eyed as a doll, lungs water-soaked sponges. Adam passed out, exhausted by his vigilant listening. And in the morning, when he saw Frances eating breakfast in her decrepit nightie, he was only half relieved she was alive.
The night after that they were woken by the three a.m. heart-attack shrill of the doorbell. It was the father of the Harelip Twins, with Frances in tow. He’d heard a disturbance in his furniture shop, gone down to investigate and found Frances sitting in a rocking chair. They were lucky he hadn’t knocked her out cold with the badminton racket he was carrying! They were lucky he hadn’t called the police! What was wrong with her anyway? Why didn’t she speak? They should take her to the doctors, he advised. The Harelip Twins’ father spoke crossly to the children as if Frances was a pet they’d let escape. And Adam nodded gravely, and Julia chewed saliva-wetted strands of hair. Then he spoke to Madame Tay in Malay for a very long time, while the children stared at Frances as she stood, dazed, in the parlour, indifferent to the trouble she’d caused.
She came to him as he slept, the mosquito nets rustling like dead leaves, the mattress springs barely creaking under the weight of her small body. Lifting the thin sheet and sliding beneath, she fumbled to him like a drunken lover. The ragged cord of his spine hunched against her, she buried her face in his shoulders, pushed her knees in the small of his back. The pressure of her, the heat seeping from her body into his, did not wake Adam. She burrowed deeper, trying to overcome her terrible loneliness, trying to disappear inside him like a baby marsupial burrowing into its mother’s pouch. Adam jerked silently awake and flipped over, frozen for the moment it took to realize that the intruder in his bed was his sister. He shoved her and she whimpered, her hair like seaweed draped across her eyes, briny and damp, as if she’d washed up on a shore. He clicked on the lamp, saw she was wearing a dress and her Reeboks. Another shove, and he told her to get out of his bed.
‘Can I sleep here, please?’ she asked meekly. ‘Please?’
The brackish smell coming off Julia sharpened, caustic as urine. It was urine. She’d wet her knickers; the mattress was soggy and stinking of wee.
‘Urgh! Julia, that’s disgusting. Get out!’ Adam punched her chest, kicked her shin, and Julia sobbed. ‘Why’re you wearing your trainers? You been outside?’
Julia nodded. ‘Please let me stay here.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Mum,’ she whispered. ‘She’s in the furniture shop again. I followed her there. I saw her through the window. She was taller. Her head was up by the ceiling and her feet were off the floor. She’d done it with my skipping rope.’
Adam lunged at Julia, tore her wrists apart. It was her voice that infuriated him most, the pathetic frailty of it. He shook her wrists, shook her limp bonelessness, and her head rolled from side to side, her eyes never meeting his. Liar, he spat, and it was the accusation rather than the shaking that made her scream.
‘Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me!’
The doorbell rang and Julia shut her eyes. Adam let her go, left her there as he got out of bed.
Madame Tay rushed down the hall, her nightdress billowing yards of cotton. She flapped her hand impatiently at Adam, shooing him back to bed. Adam crept after her, past the emptiness of his mother’s room, and squatted at the top of the stairs. Madame Tay opened the door and beneath the overhang of ceiling Adam saw the furniture-shop man’s string vest and slack belly. He hadn’t even finished what he was saying when Madame Tay started to howl.
26
THE DAY AFTER the general elections a clip of the Opposition parties’ victory parade was shown on the news. Crouched before the TV, Sally had searched for Frances in the triumphant flag-waving cavalcade, imagined that she’d spotted her once or twice. When Frances’s desk was empty on Monday morning, Sally guessed she’d taken the day off to recover from the celebrations. Not that she’d had much time to speculate about Frances’s absence, for that same day the Amethyst clique swept Sally off her feet, beckoning to her between lessons and making room for her on their special bench in the courtyard. Rebecca shared with Sally the juicy segments of an orange and Francesca smiled encouragingly as she puffed a cigarette in the toilets (patting her shoulders when she creased up, coughing, windpipe garrotted by the smoke). The clique’s vocabulary was a patois of tune-in drop-out counter-culture speak and archaic boarding-school slang. They punctuated sentences with groovy and man in clipped British accents and shrieked Vile! and Horribilious! about anything they disliked. Sally grinned, too shy to join in their banter, though they refused to let her recede into silence, consulting her opinion in their good-natured disputes (Don’t be a troglodyte, Lillian! What do you think, Sally? Doesn’t she deserve a kick in the derrière?).
Beyond the staff room the Amethyst school was a politics-free zone and Sally didn’t think of the elections again until that evening, when she and Mr Hargreaves were having supper together, the radio burbling in the background. In the eight o’clock news bulletin was an item about some DAP supporters who’d broken away from the main procession on Sunday night to hurl stones and abuse at the State Chief Minister’s residence in north Kuala Lumpur.
‘There’s no need for that kind of carry-on,’ said Mr Hargreaves, pouring Bisto over his Yorkshire pudding and peas, ‘no need for all that bragging and telling the Malays to go back to the countryside. It’s the young riff-raff who let the Opposition down … Just because they’ve won a few seats they think they own Kuala Lumpur! The Malays are very bitter about the political stalemate in Selangor. They really shouldn’t rub it in. Things are volatile enough already. I want you to come straight home from school tomorrow, Petal. I don’t want you caught up in any of this … Aren’t these spuds nice? Why don’t you take a few more, Petal – go on, you’re a growing girl.’
Sally chewed her roast beef and wondered if Frances was among the troublemakers outside the Mentri Besar’s residence, shouting: Melayu sekarang ta ’ada kuosa lagi! (The Malays no longer have power), or Melayu boleh balek kampong! (The Malays must return to the villages) or Kuala Lumpur sekerang China punya! (Kuala Lumpur now belongs to the Chinese). She didn’t think so. Though Frances had become very militant, she was far from being a common hooligan.
Frances’s desk was empty again on Tuesday. Was she sick? Had she eloped with Henry Leung? The sting of the slap hadn’t yet faded and Sally reminded herself that Frances’s well-being, or lack thereof, was not her concern. But her thoughts strayed to Frances again and again. She couldn’t concentrate in lessons. The day was long and the minutes limped by as if time itself was languorous and hot.
Early in the afternoon static hissed into the classroom as the tannoy system came to life, the tap, tap of the headmistress’s finger on the microphone interrupting Miss Ng’s account of the geological forces that transform igneous rock to metamorphic.
‘Attention, students!’ said Mrs Pritchett. ‘Due to the United Malays National Organization procession planned for this evening, and the traffic and public transportation problems predicted, school is closing early today.’
There were shouts of Yesss and smatterings of applause. Hooray for the UMNO procession! Hooray for political unrest! The headmistress’s office was next door to the first-year classroom, where the cheering was loudest.
‘Girls! Just because I cannot see you doesn’t mean I don’t know who you are! You will remain silent while I am speaking or I will keep you all here indefinitely … Never mind the UMNO procession!’
There were a few sniggers, but most took her threat seriously.
‘That’s better. Now, after this announcement the day pupils are to go straight home. Boarders, you shall all go to your dormitories until further notice. After-school clubs are cancelled and any pupils caught loitering will be punished. You have been warned!’
When the public address was over the fifth form was a babble of excitement.
‘I saw a load of Malays coming in for the demonstration this morning on my way to school. Dozens of them, hanging off the back of a truck. They’d come all the way from the countryside and had axes and knives and stuff you use for farming.’
‘They’ve come to teach the Chinese a lesson. They want to show them who’s boss.’
‘The British should never have left. That’s what my father says. They wouldn’t be fighting one another if the British were still here.’
Sally fetched some books from her locker and tagged on to the queue to use the telephone in the secretary’s office. Anxious mothers hovered at the school gates, collecting their daughters early after heeding the ominous warnings of Malay servants, suitcases piled on luggage racks as they prepared to flee the city. Girls skipped out into the courtyard, giddy with freedom, and, as promised, Mrs Pritchett had a zero-tolerance policy towards stragglers, barking at those who’d stopped to chat or play hopscotch and driving them out of the gates.
Sally for one had no intention of hanging about. She had a headache and wanted to go home and lie quietly in a darkened room. But as she neared the front of the telephone queue, there was a tap on her shoulder. Delilah had queue-jumped behind her (eliciting no complaint from the twenty girls she’d pushed in front of). ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ she drawled with a flirtatious arch of the eyebrow. Sally noted with interest that Delilah wasn’t as perfect as usual, but sweaty and dishevelled, an ink stain the shape of Africa on her blouse and her French plait half undone.