by Jaymee Goh
They only stop once, at mid-day, when the sun beats down so hot it seems to blister the very soot flakes as they cloud the thick air. Over their lunches of rice and pickles, they chat—about home, mostly, about the seven younger siblings Yip Soh left in her village, who she needs to send money to this week. About the unreliability of men: Man Lai, as usual, bares her bicep to show the burn scars from where her husband struck her with a boiling kettle, after which she fought her way onto a slow boat for the Straits of Malacca and never looked back. About the machines, how they get bigger every day, how they eat more coal. “If they keep bringing more in we’ll be out of a job,” grumbles Cheuk San. Yuk Hong, the tallest and broadest among them at over six feet, laughs. “They’ll never get in machines that work faster or better than us. They’ll have to keep paying us for all the crap they need done.” Ah Lei, the oldest and their de facto leader, does not laugh with the rest of them. “I don’t trust them, those machines. I hear they had an accident in Field Five the other day. Valve blew on a pumping engine. The men on the platform with it, their own mothers couldn’t recognize them now if they brought them over from the old country to sort the bits that are left.”
The women finish their meals, fill their bowls with water and slurp them clean so that they don’t leave a single grain uneaten in the bowl. They tighten the straps on their sandals, patched together from old car tyres, and head back to work. Today they are carrying coal to one of the giant drilling rigs, which makes a racket so deafening the women cannot talk; instead they follow Ah Lei’s quick hand signals with the ease of long practice.
It’s Cheuk San who sees the leak first. The engineers on the rig have not spotted it yet; they do not hear her shout. Ah Lei senses something is off; the women all down the line see her mouth open in a silent scream, see her slide the yoke from her shoulders and turn to run. What they do hear is the sound, the unmistakeable rumbling thunder, that seems to pour forth from her mouth and through their heads and into the hot, still air above them.
And then everything goes white.
~*~
She woke with a start to Khairunnisa shaking her. “You were crying. Bad dream?”
“In the dream,” she said slowly, “we are speaking. We are speaking but the words are lost to me.”
“You don’t know what they’re saying?’ murmured Khairunnisa.
“I know what they mean. I don’t know how they said it. The language—it’s gone.”
She rolled up her sleeve. There, the burn mark. She had known all along, in the incongruous moles and birthmarks, in her impossible height, in the scars that mapped her body in the uneasy badlands between memory and skin. And the memories, the memories, of her sisters skipping in the yard and the sun in the mountains and early rheumatism and weak rice and the sounds she made when the boiling kettle seared her skin. Of the ocean. Different boats, same ocean. The dozen moments she set foot on Singapore for the first time. She knew what she was.
She began to moan, rocking back and forth. “What, what,” begged Khairunnisa, trying to hush her before someone heard. She could not tell her; knew if she told that Khairunnisa would not want to fix her any more, would not lay a finger on her ever again. She wanted to tear her limbs from her shoulders, hands from wrists, heart from steam chamber, to put everything back in the charnel heap from whence it came. Somewhere out in the night, the rest of her lay festering, unburied. The ashes never to be sent back to the dozen villages she knew as home. And this body, this abominable patchwork of flesh and metal that should never have been. She dragged her fingernails down her collaged face and screamed. Khairunnisa bit her nails and did not know what to say.
~*~
Ning waited till all the lights in the house had gone out again. Then she scaled the drainpipe again and deftly unlatched the workshop window using a hairpin.
It was dark in the workshop. Ning trod carefully, but the floor betrayed her with a drawn-out creak.
Something moved, rose, silhouetted against the window. Ning stayed still. The sound of a match striking, then the flare of a candle.
A huge woman was staring at her. Her face odd, something off about it, like someone had described it to an artist who had never seen a woman before. Ning knew this was the woman she wanted. She levelled her crossbow at her.
“Easy now,” she said. “We’re just going to take a little walk.”
The woman moved towards her.
“This is a crossbow,” hissed Ning. “I will shoot you!” A lie: the kongsi would not pay for a dead woman. “Oh, for—”
The woman slapped the crossbow away. Ning turned to dive out of the window again, but the woman hauled her back. Then she punched Ning in the face. Stunned, Ning watched the world turn upside-down and bloom into agony.
~*~
This is the dream from before she was Ning. Ah Mui is the name they call her in the dream.
Ah Mui thinks she should leave. She should leave the house now, because she has scratched the tempat sireh. The bibik has said before that if Ah Mui ruins any more of her things, she will beat her to death. And the tempat sireh, with its delicate gold leaf, is a favourite of the bibik, who likes to have her friends admire it while they chew betel until their mouths are red as if they have drunk blood.
Ah Mui thinks she should leave, but where will she go? She has never been outside the house, from as long as she remembers. She has barely even been allowed upstairs. And now the bibik is coming, she is coming down into the kitchen, calling for Ah Mui. From where she is hiding in the woodpile, Ah Mui sees her feet first, in their beaded slippers, then the print of her sarong, then her beautiful kebaya. The bibik has seen the scratched tempat sireh. She stops in the middle of the kitchen. Then she begins to shriek and overturn the kitchen to look for Ah Mui. The kitchen is not large. Ah Mui is dragged sobbing from the woodpile and the bibik begins to slap her, crying stupid girl, bastard girl, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you and nobody will notice. You are not anything to anyone. Your parents sold you for money. Even then they charged too much and I should have got you for cheaper because you are not worth the food I have to feed you, you get nothing right.
Ah Mui is trying to curl up, to hide her face with her arms. The bibik pulls her hair to force her head up. Ah Mui sees herself reflected in the polished sides of the stove, the bruises rising to her skin, the tears leaking from both her eyes. Then the bibik smashes the right side of her face into the corner of the table, over and over. Pestle and mortar. When she comes back up, Ah Mui can no longer see anything of herself. There is nothing left to see.
~*~
Ning swam in and out of consciousness, hovering above the horror of the old memory. Someone was talking. A young woman in Malay.
“…this is incredible. It’s European make, I think, but there have been so many modifications it’s hard to tell what it used to be—the lensing is marvellous, you don’t get that sort of work anywhere off the black market. Where on earth you would get something like this—”
“I got if off a Bugis pirate,” mumbled Ning. She was sitting down, she realized, tied to a chair. Her head felt like it had been mined for tin ore. “He couldn’t pay me, but luckily for him I’d taken a liking to his eye. Most of the extra work I got done by a watchmaker in Geylang. I could give you his address, if you liked.”
The Malay woman—Khairunnisa Al-Jazari, if she wasn’t wrong—was staring at her open-mouthed. She seized Ning’s crossbow and aimed it at her. “Tell us who sent you!”
“You don’t even know how to take off the safety catch,” said Ning. She tried her hands, but they were well and truly bound behind the chair.
The other woman rose from where she had been squatting in a corner. She was truly immense. Closing her fingers around Ning’s throat, she rasped, “Who sent you?”
“The people who stole you,” Ning choked out. “Surely that’s obvious.”
From the expression on both their faces, neither woman had any idea who that was. Ning attempted to change the conversation.
“How come you speak Malay?”
“So? You speak Malay,” pointed out the tall woman.
“I am gifted beyond your wildest dreams,” said Ning. “But I’m guessing you picked it up even quicker than me, no?”
Both of them ignored her. “What do they want her for?” demanded Khairunnisa.
“I actually have no idea,” said Ning. “I’m just the delivery girl, right? I hand you over. They pay me. Nobody needs to lose any eyeballs. Speaking of which, can I have mine back now?”
“No,” snapped Khairunnisa, hiding the eyeball somewhere in her sleeve.
“Oh well,” said Ning. “You should let me take her, you know. Not one, but two surprise Chinese women appearing in your house. Headache, I tell you.”
This earned her a slap from the tall one. Ning’s head rang with it like a bell.
“We’re doing this the wrong way,” Ning went on blithely, ignoring the risk of being throttled. “Let’s be nice. Hello, my name’s Ning Lam. What’s yours?”
The other stared at her a moment, then walked off brusquely. She returned holding one of the dolls, a Chinese bride in scarlet robes. “You speak the language I’m meant to speak, yes?”
“Chinese?” hazarded Ning. “Cantonese? Probably.”
The woman pointed at the doll’s garments. “What colour is this? In that language.”
“Red? Um—hong, I suppose—”
“Right then. That’s what I want to be called.”
“That’s nice,” said Ning. “Hong. Ah Hong. Nice to meet you. You too, Khairunnisa. We’re going to get along so well.”
“There’ll be more like her coming,” said Ah Hong to Khairunnisa. “We ought to kill her. I can carry the body, easy.”
“Oh for your mother’s sake,” muttered Ning.
“I would really rather not kill anybody,” whispered Khairunnisa.
“Me too,” added Ning. “I wasn’t going to kill anyone to begin with. I was just going to bring you to these nice people, they don’t want you really, they just want to have you so that the British or whoever made you get mad.”
“Look me in the eye,” said Khairunnisa. “Look me in the eye and tell me they won’t hurt her.”
Ning tried to hold her gaze. “Well—”
Khairunnisa turned away coldly. Ah Hong said, “I won’t be given away. I won’t be taken apart like a dead thing. I won’t be bought and I won’t be sold. You don’t know what that’s like.”
Ning was silent for a while. Then she said, quietly, “You’d be surprised.”
Ah Hong squatted in front of her, till she was almost nose to nose with Ning. “If you had even the slightest idea, then you wouldn’t be about to do it to someone else.”
Ning said nothing.
There was a knock on the door.
“Don’t open that,” said Ning, instinctively.
Khairunnisa hesitated. “Maybe… one of the neighbors…”
“At this hour?’
“I’ll just go see…” The knock came again. Khairunnisa headed for the stairs. “Don’t make any sound.”
She was at the foot of the stairs when the door crashed open.
“Untie me,” hissed Ning. “Untie me now.” Ah Hong stared at her, wordless with panic.
From downstairs Khairunnisa screamed. “I have to—” gasped Ah Hong, starting for the door. Khairunnisa’s scream was cut short. Ah Hong froze as footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Ning began, without subterfuge, to scratch at the rope with the tiny blade hidden in her fake jade ring.
A man came through the door. A Gurkha, judging from his uniform and the curved Kukri blade he held lightly before him. “Number 24,” he said in English.
Ah Hong had begun to shake. “No,” she said. It was the first time Ning had heard her speak English. “You will not call me that.”
“Number 24,” repeated the Gurkha, “everything is fine. I’m taking you home.”
“Where’s Nisa?”
“She’s fine,” said the Gurkha. “She’s just unconscious. We want her alive too.”
Ah Hong howled. Lowering her head, she charged the Gurkha. She was at least two heads taller, but the Gurkha did not flinch. Moving fast—faster than anyone Ning had ever seen—he slid out of Ah Hong’s path and dropped her with a blow to the back of her knee with his kukri handle. As she stumbled, he was suddenly behind her; with a flash of his blade he opened a huge gash at the back of her head before she could grab for him. Ah Hong screamed. Grabbing her in an expert armlock, the Gurkha reached inside her head, feeling about, and ripped something out.
“No,” gasped Ah Hong, “n-n-n-n-n-n—” She crumpled face-first into the ground.
The Gurkha ignored Ning and called a command down the stairs. Two other men entered nervously and carried Ah Hong’s body out. The Gurkha walked over to Ning and calmly removed the ring from her finger.
“I know who you are,” he said simply. “You’re like me. The hired help.”
“I expect I’m paid a damn sight better than you,” snarled Ning.
“It’s not about the money. And you won’t be paid this time.” The Gurkha leaned over her. “Take this message from my master to yours. Don’t come for her again. We know how they did it. We know who they are. There will be blood. You understand?”
Ning bit his ear.
The Gurkha yelled in pain and backhanded Ning so hard she flew across the room into Khairunnisa’s workbench. The chair legs snapped under her. Teeth buried in her lip, Ning scrabbled behind her till she felt a file in her fingers.
The Gurkha came on, his kukri a blur. Ning barely ducked the first blow and rolled under the bench, the remnants of the chair crunching. The file clenched between bleeding fingers, she scraped furiously. Little clockwork dancers went flying as the Gurkha upended the bench to get at her. She felt the last strand give just as his blade caught her in the thigh. Ning hissed, tore herself free of the chair and sprang for her crossbow, lying in the debris of the bench.
The Gurkha only just eluded the first volley of bolts by diving to the ground. Ning rocked up and fired again as he scrambled for the door. Lights came on in the neighbouring windows, and people were shouting.
The Gurkha made it down the stairs, Ning storming after him, and leapt into the waiting motorcar at Khairunnisa’s door. It clattered off down the street and out of sight before she even cleared the threshold.
Ning swore profusely in Hokkien, the dialect she favoured for profanity. Then, as the neighbours started flooding into the street to see what was happening, she too had to slip away.
~*~
“Extraordinary,” said Dr. Horace Bradford. “Simply extraordinary. You’re quite sure it was her?”
“Her alone, sir,” replied the Gurkha. “I was watching the house. They had no visitors till the Chinese agent. When I entered to retrieve 24, it had been reactivated and was speaking Malay.”
They were in Bradford’s laboratory, staring down at the prone form of Khairunnisa on one of the operating tables.
“But such work from a native,” marveled Bradford. “And a slip of a girl, at that.” He removed his goggles and began to polish them absent-mindedly with a fistful of his coat. “Why, I doubt my so-called colleagues in Bencoolen could get 24 to even twitch a finger. We’ll have to keep her around, this girl, see what makes her tick.”
“Her disappearance will have raised some alarm,” said the Gurkha. “I fear that in retrieving them I was… indiscreet.”
“Ah, someone will take care of it, I’m sure,” muttered Bradford. “A pity you had to disable 24 though, Narayan, I’ll have to cobble together its spinal cord all over again.”
“Apologies, sir.”
“Astonishingly tenacious though,” went on Bradford, “the bodies of these, er, samsui women.” He had turned to where Ah Hong lay in shambles on another table, peering into her various ruptures. “I must say, they are eminently suited as subjects. We’ll have to put in an order for some more.”
Khairunnisa
had begun to stir. As she took in her surroundings, she let out a whimper.
“The girl’s awake.” Bradford donned his goggles and advanced upon Khairunnisa, who flinched from him and began to call desperately for Ah Hong. “Have you a clue what she’s saying, Narayan? I haven’t the faintest.”
“I believe it’s the name she has for 24, sir.”
“How quaint,” said Bradford, trying to keep Khairunnisa pinned to the table. “Women have such funny ways. I say, my dear, would you keep still a moment? Narayan, do give us a hand.”
A bell started to ring. The Gurkha went over to the speaking tube on the laboratory wall. “Yes?” After a while, he said, “Sir, somebody to see you.”
“I have no appointments,” snapped Bradford, as Khairunnisa toppled off the table and scrambled behind a cabinet. “Tell them I’m indisposed.”
“It’s Mr. Stroud and Mr. Murchison, sir.”
“Well, that’s bloody tedious of them.” Bradford fumbled irritably with his goggles and leather apron. “See that you lock her in.”
They left, the Gurkha bolting the door after them. After a while, Khairunnisa crept out from behind the cabinet.
She tried the door first, but of course it would not give. Then she checked the lifeless Ah Hong, running shivering fingers over the ruin of her. She cast her eyes around the laboratory, and froze.
There were other bodies. Lying on slabs or in glass drawers, stacked on top of one another. Some of them, like Ah Hong, had machinery worked into them. Some were in pieces.
Khairunnisa turned to look at the cabinet she had taken refuge behind. When she opened it, it gave off an icy gust. Inside, packed in ice like cuts of meat, were body parts sorted neatly in rows. Arms, thighs, livers, tubes.
Khairunnisa fell back against the table. Her trembling hand brushed against Ah Hong’s limp one. Slowly, unwillingly, her eyes moved from the cabinet of flesh to the scars on Ah Hong’s body, multitudinous. To the odd discolorations of her skin. Khairunnisa clapped her hand to her mouth and was sick on the laboratory’s smooth white tiles.
~*~
Ning limped stubbornly through the night. Her lip was split; her trouser leg was stiff with blood. Occasionally she pulled out the abacus device and checked it, before hobbling on. When she passed under gas-lamps, her eye socket gaped harsh and empty.