The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  I told myself that ghosts were just another facet of its lush, equatorial diversity—the dead walking among the living, everybody sharing the same air, the same soil. This die-and-let-live attitude was part of the Island’s social contract. As much as some of them frightened me, I had to learn to get used to them.

  From my perch on the Spring Street traffic island, I witnessed the stirring of this cosmopolitan mélange. It was sitting here that I felt myself becoming an Islander and not just any old immigrant, any old Overseas Chinese who continued to dream of the Middle Kingdom. My day felt incomplete if I didn’t greet passersby in at least four languages—vellikum to the Tamil road sweeper, cho sun to the Cantonese butcher, selamat to the Malay watchman, shalom to the Jewish money changer. To the random lost soul, I trained myself to look away and solemnly nod, which was a language unto itself.

  The ghosts of the aged Samsui women troubled me the most. Shipped away from their villages in Canton to haul stone on the Isle, these unmarried women, with their uniform of red head cloth and blue pajamas, seemed like nuns forever betrothed to the dust. I always felt butterflies in their presence even though, thank goodness, none of them addressed me. The sickly feeling would fade a few minutes after they did, and I would once again be reabsorbed into Spring Street’s bustling human swirl.

  On my braver days, which typically meant after I’d been puffed up with praise or high marks from school, I would force myself to walk home via the dreaded death houses of Sago Lane, where the loneliest amahs and coolies went to die. On these confident afternoons, I felt the same nauseating emptiness I associated with Sister Yeung’s first visit, yet I saw no ghosts. Rather it was on my bluer days, when things had gone less well at school, that I would see them. The barred windows of the death houses would be crowded with the faces of the migrant dead, staring out like passengers on a motionless train. Was rubbish-strewn Sago Lane the view they’d chosen for all eternity or did they not have a choice? I had nobody to ask.

  And on my worst days, when I felt particularly put upon, there was even more. I could hear them—a soft, murmuring stew of regional dialects, like a sonic compass to rural China. I could never make out the individual voices, but the emotions transcended them all the same: desolation, nostalgia, regret. In a word, homesickness. Their pain was so powerful I tried to imagine my way into it.

  Feel, I told myself. Think of the twins growing bigger without me, think of all the smells that had made our old house home—orange peel, soy milk, jasmine water, mothballs. I slowed down my breathing, tried to parse the world from the exiles’ perspective. Yes, I was an Islander, but I understood their loss.

  Gradually, my good days and my bad days made no difference. They were always there, and I always saw them.

  Because this was the tropics, Spring Street had other exotic visitors as well. One day, as I was sitting on the island, the afternoon traffic inexplicably began dividing into two streams. From his already high vantage point, Mr. Singh the traffic controller stood on tiptoes and brought a sun-shielding hand to his brow. He widened his eyes and began waving his canvas wings, looking as if he were trying to fly away.

  “Tiger!” he gasped. “Tiger!” But the more he flapped those wings, the more he attracted attention to himself.

  Before we could even think of fleeing, a bushy-jowled beast materialized between the parted rows of cars and buses, his orange fur luminous against the blacks and grays.

  “Stop waving your arms, Uncle!” I shouted at my frantic companion. “He’ll think you’re calling him!”

  The tiger sauntered down the center of Spring Street, its eyes aimed at our island.

  The bustling street went silent as the king of the jungle made his approach, the pads of his mighty paws sounding thup…thup…thup on the scorching concrete. Although I knew I should have been scared, there was something very soothing about his ease. I was riveted by his magnificent slouch, the black stripes on his face that looked at once lazy and so artfully inked, and the effortless intensity of his yellow-green eyes—eyes that locked onto me as if I were the only person who mattered in the world. I don’t remember what Mr. Singh was doing when I reached out, hoping to stroke the great cat’s whiskery cheeks, but I will never forget the luxuriant purr the creature gave me, nor the tilt of his snout as his pink tongue leapt out and snapped at the air.

  As I took a step closer to him, the black hood of a Ford Model T rattled into view and slammed into my feline friend with a loud crack, sending him flopping to the ground ten feet away.

  “Take that, you bugger!” came a cry from the driver’s seat.

  I feared the beast had been killed, but he was back on his paws in seconds. Shaking his majestic head, almost sighing, he padded toward his aggressor, the car now backing away, and stared down the driver, a quivering Englishman. No roar, no claws, just a look of deep disapproval. Then my tiger turned, shot me a parting glance, and bounded in orange flight back to the forest.

  Flush with adrenaline, I could feel my attachment to the old country evaporating. Even if I’d fought it—and I really didn’t—Shanghai never stood a chance.

  During my fifth year at St. Anne’s, in 1934, I was made class prefect.

  Sister Nesbit anointed me at assembly, while the hanging girl of Shaw Hall writhed and twitched just above our heads.

  “For your leadership qualities and good marks.” Sister Nesbit smiled as she affixed the blue rectangular pin on my pinafore. “For being cheerful and brave.”

  Cheerful and brave? It hadn’t occurred to me that this was how the world now saw me, so immaculate had my act become. Cheerful and brave—I liked that. Finally, somebody had grasped that I was special. For the privilege of junior sainthood, I was to continue what I did so well: exhibiting model conduct and being an exemplar of Positive Thinking. In other words, be a shining light in the dim, dark corridors of our frightening institution. I smiled until my cheeks ached.

  Following my coronation, I became a heroine to the meek at the primary school. I showed them how to tie their shoelaces and how to protest when the drinks seller short-changed them. “Pharisees!” I taught them to shout.

  My afternoons were spent proselytizing on behalf of the school library, for which I was paid with an extra borrower’s card. I was friendless anyhow and regarded the work as character-building time well spent. Not only did reading distract me from the school’s more disturbing ghosts, but also books were perfect shields against the condescension of the wealthy Peranakan girls, mercantile blood flowing thick in their boorish veins, who flocked together at recess and went out of their way to tell me, “You know, you speak quite good English for someone from Chinatown.” They never invited me to their parties, so I held my own with Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women, and in these fictional stars found true and fast friends.

  One morning, Sister Nesbit interrupted one of my bookish communions to place me in charge of a new girl, a tiny person with a runny nose. She looked all of seven, though Sister Nesbit said she was my age, twelve, and a refugee from St. Hilda’s, whose rural setting had ill suited her.

  The girl reached for my hand. It was like being touched by the paw of a dead rabbit, that was how small and cold her hand was.

  “My name is Dora Conceição,” she peeped in a toddler’s voice. “I have a heart murmur.”

  As soon as our headmistress left us, I snatched my hand away—I was too old for such sentimentality. Nevertheless, a well-intentioned comradeship was formed. Her isolation reminded me of my earlier self.

  “Sister Nesbit told me you have no friends,” she said. “I was like you at St. Hilda’s. It was lonely for me there. Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  “No.” I smiled. “I’ve got books.”

  Dora Conceição was of Portuguese, Chinese, Indian, and Malay stock, “with a touch of Dutch,” she said proudly, which explained her wavy hair and milk-tea complexion—a custom, made-on-the-Black-Isle blend. But her genes had not imbued her with the sixth-generation native’s
careless ease. She followed me everywhere like a lost puppy, her dolefulness contaminating my every joy. You see, I had worked so hard to evict my fear, to betray no trace of my weakness, and Dora Conceição was afraid of everything, especially things she could not see.

  Her fearfulness might have been bearable in another, less “dirty” environment, but because our schoolhouse was so full of dark corners, locked rooms, and endless staircases, her whimpers tested my charity, over and over.

  “I feel queasy,” she would complain as she ascended the stairs, clinging to the banister that in my eyes was slick with blood.

  “Do you think someone died here?” she would ask me in the musty music room, exactly three feet from the ghost of a naked old crone standing in the corner, rocking herself back and forth.

  “There’s nothing here,” I would say. “It’s just dusty, that’s all.” Or: “Maybe it’s those beans you ate.” Oh, the false denials I had to make. Eventually, she’d believe me. She had to.

  No such luck. A few weeks into being saddled with this inconvenient ward, I noticed that she’d begun to neglect basic hygiene. Every day now, stains appeared on the skirt of her blue pinafore—yellowish blotches that dried and slowly browned.

  “You smell!” I told her at lunch one afternoon after a frustrating art class in which every apple I tried to paint turned out looking rotted.

  To her credit, Dora did not burst into tears. She simply sat there on the canteen bench, her legs too pathetically short to touch the ground.

  “It’s just that I am so frightened,” she said quietly.

  “What’s there to be frightened of?” I shot her a bright grin. “Are you mad?” After the failure of denial, I felt shame was the key. The girl would be shamed into bravery.

  “The rooms, the darkness, the entire school. Something’s not right.” She clasped the crucifix on her necklace and her eyes reddened. “I can feel it in my heart.”

  “I thought you said your heart was defective.”

  “My heart is very sensitive. I can feel things other people can’t. At St. Hilda’s, when I was in certain corridors, my heart would beat so fast. One time, I felt a cold hand brushing my hair.”

  “This is not St. Hilda’s. We’re in the city, surrounded by thousands of people. You have to rise above that kind of superstitious nonsense.” I knew I sounded like Mother, but I had no choice. I was class prefect; I had to keep up some semblance of order. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Her tears gushed now. I looked around to make sure no one was watching—a prefect who made the new girl cry was not likely to remain prefect for long. A few busybodies glanced over, but most of the girls in the canteen were busy eating their noodles and chicken wings and chatting. Nobody cared about Dora Conceição.

  “I don’t like the toilet here,” she mumbled. The truth behind her smells was being unveiled. “There are things there…I just know. My heart can feel them.”

  “Stop that. You are twelve years old—or so you say. Yet you’re so terrified of our school’s toilet that you’d rather wet yourself.” I clucked my tongue. “Gracious!”

  “But there are—”

  “All right, let’s go.” I pulled her to her feet. There was no other option. I had to perform the charade myself—take her to the haunted toilet and show her there was absolutely nothing to fear.

  At the toilet, no other girls were present—no living ones, at any rate. Dora Conceição clutched at the door frame for dear life while I pulled at her blue pinafore. I had intended to coax her but my irritation resulted in this forceful tug-of-war.

  “Come on, you cowardly custard! There’s nothing here!”

  “I can’t,” she whined. “Oh, my heart…”

  “Stop it!”

  One of the naked women on the floor decided to writhe her way toward the entrance. I repositioned my foot so she wouldn’t brush against my ankle. Not that I would have felt anything.

  “Why did you do that?” moaned my smelly protégée.

  “Do what?”

  “You moved your leg. Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything. You’re being crazy again!”

  Garnering my ruffian strength, I ripped her from the doorway and dragged her to the nearest stall. That little twig could really kick; my shins would be black and blue.

  “Don’t! Please, don’t!”

  I did it anyway. I pushed her into the back of the putrid cubicle and held the door shut from the outside. As she begged and yanked at the door, the lonely bare bulb began to sizzle and strobe, sending eerie flickers across the room. Thankfully, its buzzing helped to camouflage her yowls.

  “Don’t come out until you’re done. Have some respect for yourself!”

  I held the door until I felt her resistance fade. The poor thing had finally recovered her good sense. I washed my hands, stepped over the blue-gray bodies wriggling sluggardly on the floor, and went off to history class, proud that I’d accomplished a task worthy of my prefect’s badge.

  After the final bell rang, the sisters were atwitter in the staff room. I felt their anxiety all the way from the library, at the opposite end of the building, and I couldn’t concentrate—on reading, on writing, on anything. As the emissary between the teachers and the flock, I knew it was my duty to investigate. I raced down the unlit corridor, flicking on the lights as I came through, straining to hear the words echoing through the building. Scandal…reputation…Literacy Council…

  The nuns were gathered in the darkness, six senior teachers sitting around Mother Hen Nesbit’s desk, six junior teachers standing behind them. Lit by an oil lamp at Sister Nesbit’s side, the group resembled a cabal posing for Rembrandt’s brush. I clicked on the overhead light, and all eyes turned to me, squinting.

  “This doesn’t concern you,” said Sister O’Hara, the old giraffe who taught reading. “Do go away. This is not the time.”

  I looked for support. “Sister Nesbit?”

  With an ominous sigh, my protector emerged from behind her gargantuan table. She walked up to me and placed a somber hand on my shoulder.

  “Did you not hear Sister O’Hara? This isn’t the time, child.”

  “But I’m a prefect! I’m not like the other girls.”

  With quick fingers, Sister Nesbit unpinned the badge from my uniform. “Now you are.” There was a new hardness to her face that made her seem very English.

  I was struck dumb by this unexpected robbery. Tears welled up in my eyes but I vowed to stand my ground. Sister Nesbit returned to her seat.

  “The parents have been informed,” one of the young sisters reported, sniffing. “They’ve been told to collect her body from the mortuary.”

  “Whose body?” I cried. “Who are you talking about?”

  Not Dora Conceição, please. Not her.

  Sister Nesbit’s chair screeched as she leapt to her feet. “That’s quite enough from you!” Her eyes were now red. “If you must know, a girl died in our school today—the new girl, Dora Conceição. Does her name ring a bell? I had specifically asked you to look after her, and you did not. She died because you failed to look after her…”

  The world went pitch-black.

  When I came to, I was in the sick bay. Sister Nesbit was at my side, kneading her rosary. She tenderly made the sign of the cross.

  “I apologize for my harsh words earlier. It really wasn’t your fault at all, and I was wrong to suggest it was. It’s just that her passing came as such a terrible, terrible shock to us. I do hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “How…What happened to her?”

  “Dora had a weak heart…and it suddenly gave out. In the toilet, of all places. It’s probably more my fault than anyone else’s. I knew she was frail. But even I could never have imagined…I mean, the toilet!” She shook her head. “Sister Fernandez found her lying on the floor in one of the stalls. Curled up like a sleeping babe, Sister said, her thumb in her mouth. The poor, poor lamb. May her soul forever rest in peace.”

 
I wanted the whole world to fade away again. But consciousness refused to leave me, and I was sent home to Bullock Cart Water with tram fare and smelling salts, doubly bereft—robbed of my prefect’s badge and my self-respect. I knew I was to be blamed, of course. I’d been blind and arrogant.

  At home, neither Father nor Li noticed the new empty spot on my chest, and it dawned on me that neither had ever registered my appointment in the first place.

  The next few days at school were filled with prayers for Dora Conceição. The Union Flag was even lowered to half-mast. Girls who had never paused to give her the time of day sobbed into their handkerchiefs, as if they’d lost their favorite cousin, and Sister Nesbit announced she would install more lights in the toilet. Still, in the corridors, the dead went grimly on and on.

  She had joined the mournful chorus in the toilet, of course. I saw her in that damned cubicle every time, staring back at me with lifeless saucer eyes, her modesty setting her apart from the others. She wore her stained blue pinafore.

  Being a good convent girl, I found something to be thankful for even in the midst of this tragedy. It was the fact that Dora, like her otherworldly colleagues, no longer possessed a mouth. My crime would go unreported.

  Forgive me, Dora Conceição, for my sin of pride.

  A few days later, Father returned home all smiles.

  “I found a job. A real job.” He handed out parcels of hot, fluffy pork baos. One bite and I knew they were the good, meaty kind, not the usual ones stuffed with sauce and gristle. This meant Father was confident in his self-deceit. “I signed a contract. We will leave for up-country next week.”

  Li threw me a skeptical look, then turned back to Father. “Up-country? But isn’t that all jungle?”