The Sea Is Ours

by Jaymee Goh

  “You are early, Miss Ning,” said the head of the kongsi. “If you will excuse me my unfinished business, I will be with you in a moment.”

  He turned back to the table he was examining. On the table lay a carved tray carrying thirty or so fingers. Some of the fingers had gold rings on them and some had long scars. None was from the same hand. Ning popped kacang puteh into her mouth, discovered it was a dried pea and spat it out.

  “Make sure you wrap them nicely before they go to Penang,” Grandfather said to the waiting men. “I want the Hakka scum who fester there to be able to tell which is whose. Let them think twice before they interfere with our shipments again. Not that one,” he added, pointing at a finger in the corner which had had its nail gnawed something dreadful. “That one is from Eng Siok, whom I once thought of as a son. Send it to his family in Keong Saik, to show them he has spit on our sacred oaths. Perhaps it will help them remember to whom their allegiance is owed.”

  The tray of fingers was whisked away, replaced by two cups of steaming tea. “Forgive me the display, Miss Ning,” said Grandfather. “It is distasteful. I am but a humble businessman, trying to help my people get by. Unfortunately this makes me enemies, and they have—shall I say—forced my hand.”

  Ning crumpled up the empty paper cone and sat down. “Longjing,” she remarked of the tea. “You honour me, Grandfather.”

  “I have it shipped straight from Zhejiang,” replied Grandfather. “You have a good nose for teas, Miss Ning.”

  “I have a good nose for many things.” Ning picked up the teacup, passed it delicately back and forth beneath her nose.

  “So we hear.” Grandfather did the same. “We have need of such a skill now. There is a missing woman. Chinese, tall, heavily scarred about the body; you’ll know her when you see her. She was last seen near Kandahar Street.”

  “Ah,” said Ning. That explained some things. She was fluent in Malay and familiar with the Kampong Glam area; few in the kongsi could lay claim to either. “That hearse business, that was your doing.”

  Grandfather raised an eyebrow. “Quick of you, Miss Ning. Yes. The hearse was ours.”

  “Now I don’t pretend to be an expert on hearses,” went on Ning, “but usually the folk inside them, they’re dead.”

  “Shut your mouth!” came a voice from the back of the room. “No more of your lip to Grandfather, hybrid.”

  Ning glanced at the man hunched in the shadows. Chee the Younger, Grandfather’s great-nephew, slouched on a stool picking his nails with a pocketknife. “Someone’s touchy,” she mused. “Let me guess. The hearse was your idea. Takes a genius brain like yours to balls up an errand that simple. But what do I know, I’m just a simple working girl.”

  Chee leapt off his stool, came into the light. “Grandfather, I’ve said it already, there’s no need to bring in outsiders on our business, let alone a half-woman with no clan to her name, I said—”

  Grandfather slammed his fist down on the table. The teacups sloshed. “You’ve said enough, is what you’ve said! I’ve lost enough men on this fool’s venture.” He sighed heavily. “Bringing all these machines into the business. It’ll be the downfall of us all. In the old days you threw an axe at a white man and he went away. None of this mechanical devil-shit.”

  Ning sipped her tea and did not point out that throwing the axe at the British head of the Chinese Protectorate had indirectly resulted in the violent crackdown on the Chinese secret societies, under which business had suffered since. Eventually Grandfather continued. “The woman you are to look for is not…all flesh.”

  “A hybrid, then.”

  “So to speak.” Grandfather paused, then added, “More hybrid, in fact, than anyone you will ever have seen.”

  “Where’d you take her from?”

  “None of your business,” growled Chee.

  “It is my business,” retorted Ning, “because whoever that was, they’re going to want her back. And I need to know if they’ll get in my way.”

  Grandfather said, “She was government property.”

  Ning whistled. “Cheeky. You know I charge extra for tangling with British.”

  “You’ll be paid for your time,” snapped Grandfather. “And for your discretion. If you are compromised, nothing is to come back to us.”

  “What do you want her for, anyway?” Ning demanded. “If she’s got that much gear in her, there’s not a decent engineer in Chinatown who’ll know how to sort out her insides.”

  “Now that,” said Grandfather, “is none of your business. Deliver her, that’s all you’re to do.”

  Ning held her tongue. It was not hard to envision what the kongsi might want with a top-secret government experiment. The British crackdown had significantly crippled their activity; they were still searching for ways to hit back. Even if they didn’t know what to do with their prize, holding it ransom would deal enough of a blow to the government.

  “We’ll expect to hear from you daily,” Grandfather went on. “I like to know what I’m paying for. And I don’t enjoy being kept waiting.”

  He traced idly with his finger a pattern in the table’s wood where years of scrubbing had evidently failed to remove the bloodstains from the grain. “Naturally,” said Ning. “I am very prompt.”

  “I should hope so,” said Grandfather. “Bring the woman. You’ll get your money then.”

  “I’ll need some advance,” pointed out Ning. “Information costs.”

  Grandfather paused, then motioned irritably. Chee came forward grudgingly with an envelope, which he dropped on the table before her.

  “She likes the feel of money, I bet,” he sneered. “Of course, a girl who’s been sold for silver would know about that kind of thing.”

  Ning said nothing. Grandfather coughed and said, “Thank you for your time, Miss Ning. We’ll be hearing from you.”

  Ning said, “Thank you for the tea,” picked up the envelope and walked out. She walked past the dreaming smokers, through the hot noise of the gambling room, out into a street full of early monsoon rain.

  ~*~

  Khairunnisa ran downstairs. She locked and barred the shop door. She did the same to the back door in the kitchen. She drew all the curtains.

  There was a crash upstairs. Khairunnisa paused, then made herself turn and climb the stairs.

  Khairunnisa’s life had not been very exciting since the event of her widowing. Nor had it been before that, but at least having a husband to talk to from time to time made things less monotonous, even if they had not quite succeeded in transcending social awkwardness in the one and a half years of their arranged marriage. This was punctuated by two surprises: first, when an ornihopter fell out of the sky in Batavia and hit, of all people, her husband trying to cross the street to a toy convention; second, when he left her the house and the toy shop in his will despite the simmering unhappiness of his family and hers. Still, she had been better at it than he had ever been. She made beautiful things, and they always worked. So she shut herself up in the workshop while people talked, about her living alone and running her husband’s business without a thought for his family; she made it so she could not hear them over the whirring of the gears and the tinkling of the music boxes. And the children loved what she made, and people would come from the ends of the island to Bussorah Street for her clockwork Javanese dancers and wayang singers, her tiny motorcars and rickshaw robots, her intricate mobile of glittering tin dirigibles floating lazily in circles on an engine she promised would last three years on guarantee. And it had been all very nice and calm, until a crazy Chinese woman had come in through her back door, covered in blood and raving in a language she could not understand.

  The woman was thrashing in the corner of the workshop where Khairunnisa had left her. “No, please be still,” begged Khairunnisa, “someone will hear, I don’t think you’re even supposed to be here.” The woman stared at her, not understanding. She was immense, Khairunnisa realized, hulking shoulders, had to be nearly two metres tall. Sh
e wore odd clothes, dark blue and ill-fitting, torn in places through which Khairunnisa glimpsed scars lying thick on her flesh. She began shouting in what was definitely not Malay, but did not sound like Chinese either. Against all odds, it sounded like English.

  Khairunnisa tried to make hand gestures to be quiet, which seemed to work until she realized the woman had been pacified not by her hands but by the sight of the Javanese dancer on the workbench, slowly articulating its feet in neat patterns, gently wobbling its elaborate gold foil headdress. “You like that?” said Khairunnisa, relieved. “I have lots. Here, look!” She wound up more dancers, which moved their arms and flexed delicate, shining fingers in uncanny synchrony. The woman was fascinated at first, but then her face clenched and she started to shudder. Her own fingers twitched in something like horror and she began to mutter, to point at Khairunnisa and the dancers and to claw at her own throat. “Please, what do you want,” begged Khairunnisa, “I can’t understand you, I can’t—”

  The back of the woman’s neck had begun to run blood again. There was a nasty open wound on the back of her head, which Khairunnisa could not bring herself to look at. But now she glimpsed something flashing inside the pulped flesh, heard a familiar whirr and click beneath the incomprehensible cries. “Shhh,” she said, approaching slowly, trying to get behind the woman without her noticing. She had to stand on tiptoe to reach the wound. “Shhh,” she said again, and the woman made a confused expression halfway between a smile and a wince, as Khairunnisa reached deftly inside the wound, found what she knew had been there all along and pulled it, hard.

  The woman collapsed onto her, heavy, something she had not been expecting. Blood pumped from the wound onto Khairunnisa’s face. She was looking up, into the intricate mess of wheels and discs inside the woman’s head, nestled tightly within her living flesh. Khairunnisa thought briefly of her dolls. But this was so much more.

  ~*~

  The smell of food awakened her. Someone was in the room, singing softly, snatches of some song about an old bird. She forced her eyes open and saw the singing woman crouched at a low table, laying out dishes.

  “You’re awake!” The woman put the food down and came over to her; she flinched, and the woman paused, then got down on her knees and put out her hand tentatively. After a while she allowed the woman to edge closer, touch her face, feel the back of her neck. “Is there pain? Can you hear me?”

  “No,” she heard herself say. “No pain.”

  “I reconfigured the language punch-cards in your head.” The words made no sense. “I didn’t understand anything you wanted, I was worried. Your punch-card was in English for some reason, but luckily I had a Malay sample I was trying out on some of the dolls. It’s not very developed, there are lots of things you still won’t understand.”

  “There’s something else I should be speaking. Some other tongue.”

  The other woman looked away sadly. “Chinese, yes. Or your home dialect. I don’t know. It was overwritten when they programmed you, I think. I’m sorry.”

  Overwritten?

  “My name is Khairunnisa,” continued the other, rising and moving over to the table. “Or Nisa, if you want. Yours?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know.”

  “I feared so.” Khairunnisa knelt by the table and beckoned. “I got us some food from the padang stall. Lucky they were still open. I thought you might be hungry, you slept so long after I fixed your head.”

  Nothing made sense still, but the food smelled better than anything she could remember eating. Not that she could remember eating, or remember anything. Khairunnisa pointed out chicken rendang, jackfruit curry, vegetables in coconut milk. Uncertain, she tried to copy Khairunnisa eating expertly with her right hand.

  “You don’t remember where you came from? Who you are?”

  She thought hard, trying to get a grip on a slithery chunk of unripe jackfruit. “I was in a box. Moving. I was trying to get out.”

  “A hearse crashed into the cemetery near here,” said Khairunnisa. “I think you were in it. But why they were taking you to be buried I don’t know. You’re not dead. You can’t…I don’t think you would die in the normal way.”

  “I’m like them.” She pointed at the clockwork toys that watched them eat from the bench. “Inside.”

  “No,” said Khairunnisa. “You’re better than them. You’re better than anything I’ve ever seen. I don’t know, of course, I haven’t really looked inside you. But you’re talking to me. You’re eating my food. I don’t know if you’re a living person whose inside has been entirely replaced by clockwork organs, or if you’re a machine who somehow does living people things. Or both. It’s incredible. Have you tried the sayur lodeh?”

  “You knew how to fix me.”

  Khairunnisa shrugged. “It was simpler than I thought. These things make sense to me—more than words, or numbers, or cooking—gears always speak the same language.”

  “If I sleep tonight will you fix me again?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  She thought about it. “If somebody has to open me up, better it’s you. But I don’t like it.”

  “Then I won’t fix you unless I have to,” said Khairunnisa, getting up. “I’ll have to open your sternum to load some coal in, but that won’t be for a while, and anyway I can teach you so you can do it yourself.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Nisa. For this.”

  Khairunnisa laughed lightly. “It’s nothing. You can sleep in here. I’ll get a mat.”

  She waited alone before the food-stained dishes and the silent toys. A bottle of red saga seeds on the windowsill kept catching her eye. The colour reminded her of something, she just could not think what.

  ~*~

  Ning did not enjoy speaking Malay. She had been forced to learn Baba Malay during her years of bondage in a Peranakan house; it had been over a decade since, but the sound of it still left the taste of beatings in her mouth. However, the language was now part of her stock-in-trade, and here in Kampong Glam she chatted up perfume-sellers, shisha smokers, anyone who might have seen a six-foot-tall Chinese woman with scars running around after the hearse crash. People were hesitant towards this uncanny woman with one eye, for all she might joke about in their tongue, but Ning was known to some and charming to others, and above all assured money under the counter for the good stuff. The old men at the teashop had maybe seen one such woman heading for Bussorah Street, though as they had been afternoon-sleepy they could not say which household she had graced. The owner of the Sufi bookstore on Bussorah allowed that perhaps some screaming had been heard from the shophouse of the late toymaker Al-Jazari, may Allah rest his soul in peace. A sweeper at the nasi padang stall on the corner recalled the widow Al-Jazari making a late-night trip to their premises to buy food for two. “But what to expect, her living alone like that?” she lamented to Ning. “Bound to be trouble sooner or later. You know what I mean?”

  Ning watched the toy shop, waited till dusk when she would be less visible, and then did a little climbing until she sat straddling the roof of the Al-Jazari domicile. Delicately, she reached up and pushed two fingertips into her right eye, her fingernails found the faint grooves in the glassy surface above the irises. With a pop, the eye came loose from her head.

  From her waist pouch, Ning pulled a device that seemed to be composed of multiple tiny abaci. The first two rows she deftly manipulated with a hairpin; this set the rest of the wooden beads snapping into motion of their own accord. With the same hairpin, she pried open a panel on the bottom of the eyeball and flipped a few minuscule levers, then replaced the panel and dropped the eye in the roof gutter.

  The eye began to roll. It rolled along the gutter and dropped down onto the parapet below, where it swivelled rapidly to regain its balance. From there it rolled on industriously out of sight.

  Ning got off the roof and went round the corner to the drinks stall, where she sat drinking black coffee for an hour.

  Then she st
rolled back to a grassy patch near the Al-Jazari house, where the eye lay, slightly grimy.

  Ning polished it on her blouse. Then she sat down, braced her back against a tree for good measure, and pushed the eye back into its socket.

  The kickback nearly floored her. Her back arched from the shock of it, as volleys of images jittered through her brain, an hour’s memory registered in a second. Ning tried to ignore the resultant headache, piecing together what the eye had seen on its reconnaissance.

  “Oh yes,” she said aloud, to the eyeball if nobody else. “That’s the house.”

  ~*~

  The women get up at four in the morning to walk to the fields. The road is not well-made, but their feet are hard and they no longer feel it when the cracks bleed. When the sun rises, they are already hauling rock, shovelling coal, watching the great machines as they hiss and pummel the earth and vent columns of steam into the grey, humid dawn.

  These are the dirigible fields of Changi. Vaster yet than anything the island has raised from its virgin swamps. Every day they call for more workers, more hands, and the fields seethe with blackened figures roaring work commands in half a dozen dialects. Among these masses, the women always know each other by the red headdresses they wear, bobbing brightly here and there across the treacherous walkways like saga seeds in the mud.

  The oldest among them is well over fifty, the youngest just shy of her sixteenth birthday. Still unused to balancing her yoke while navigating the flimsy walkways, she stumbles sometimes, little Chai Sum, and the others watch her like hawks because if one falls, they all fall.