The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  Sometimes I feel my blood is spilling out

  in sobs, the way a fountain overflows.

  After a week, Little Girl took me aside. She was all smiles as usual, but I sensed a touch of jealousy. Shanghai girls are skilled at camouflaging poisonous thoughts, but we’re equally gifted at spotting them.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but it’s obviously working,” she said. “I haven’t seen Mrs. Wee so calm, so refreshed in the mornings. You must work some kind of jungle magic.”

  After this barbed praise, she handed me my first pay envelope, the largest sum I’d ever held in my young life.

  I celebrated my small triumph by taking Li out for a lunch of Russian shashlik at the Troika on High Street, in the heart of the shopping district. Russian imperial cuisine was all the rage on the Isle because it had been all the rage in Shanghai ten years before, and it didn’t matter that the version we got here was prepared by Hainanese cooks who’d never once set foot in Leningrad.

  The restaurant’s circular driveway was filled with deluxe sedans—gleaming Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Studebakers—their Malay drivers chatting and smoking away in the shade of a banyan tree. Li and I slouched toward the entrance, feeling underdressed and underchauffeured. Once inside, the maître d’s surliness did nothing to assuage our unease.

  Li turned back toward the door. “Let’s just scram.”

  I grabbed his arm. “I’m treating you to lunch and I say we stay.”

  We were seated at a romantic horseshoe booth, wedged awkwardly against the music stage. Two elderly, bearded Jews were perched on bar stools, strumming balalaikas as the lunch crowd chattered on, paying them no attention.

  Minutes later, ironically, it was I who became eager to leave.

  “I went to see him last week,” Li said. “He needs us.”

  My stomach tightened. “Can we not discuss him until we finish eating?”

  “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  He sighed as if I were being childish. “You have to know what’s happening.”

  “Can’t it wait? We’re celebrating.”

  But Li couldn’t wait. He launched into a story that I only partially heard. “He’s got a stall at Wonder World now…Takes water, melts rock sugar in it, then throws in some pounded-up agar. Calls it bird’s nest water…has a sign extolling its virtues and all that. Profit’s not too bad, but not great either.”

  “So?”

  “Thing is, he’s in debt. Deep in debt. He owes the Triads. Seems like everyone in Wonder World owes them something.”

  “That’s his problem.”

  “No. It’s ours.”

  “It never ends, does it?” I stopped a waiter passing by our table. “Please bring me your most expensive vodka. It needn’t be any good—just the most expensive.” I would sooner squander my pay on drink than give Father a cent. Li shook his head.

  When my drink arrived—my first vodka and it was a generous double shot—I downed it at one go, my eyes fixed defiantly on Li. My throat burned worse than after Mrs. Wee’s cognac. I coughed, annoyed at myself for showing weakness.

  Li sucked in his breath, waiting to resume, and intensify, his lecture. So when the same waiter walked by again, I asked for more vodka. The waiter gave me a patronizing chortle, but I was determined not to be cowed. “Now,” I barked.

  Li leaned into the table. “At Wonder World they’re hiring psychics, clairvoyants, that sort of thing. They’re looking for girls who can talk to spirits—or who can act like they can.” He looked at me significantly. “Pay’s not bad. And it’s not all that shady.”

  “Not all that shady?”

  He pursed his lips. “We both know you…I mean, the pontianak…”

  “You saw nothing. You were delirious.”

  When my second drink arrived, Li tried to snatch it away. I stopped him with my napkin and gulped the vodka down before he could do it again. The alcohol burned, even more harshly, but I was starting to like it.

  “Why don’t you volunteer?” I said. “Why does it have to be me?”

  “Because”—he paused—“they want to attract male customers.”

  “You can go to hell!”

  The balalaika duo stopped and the room went silent. I had shouted perhaps more loudly than I was aware of. I lowered my voice, and the musicians, after exchanging wry looks, resumed their plucking.

  “I’m not doing anything for that man. He’s brought this upon himself.”

  “At the end of the day, he’s still our father,” Li said quietly. “At least he’s always predictable. Even in his failings. He never means any harm. He’s not even asked us for any help. But I’ve seen him—I’ve seen how hard he struggles.”

  I reached into my handbag and slapped a handful of change onto the table. “That’s all he’s getting from me!”

  As the waiter arrived bearing two sizzling platters, I sprang to my feet and pushed past the cabals of smug businessmen. The exit, to the exit. Once clear of the restaurant’s driveway, I staggered breathlessly down the street until I caught up with the nearest tram.

  On the East-West Express, a passenger at the back of the car peered at me strangely; I glared back at him. His forehead was stamped with a funny birthmark—pink and shaped like the male member, only partially concealed by his cheap fedora. I was reminded immediately of our servant boy Cricket. Little Girl was right: Everybody here did look like somebody back home.

  It was only when I reached the Wee mansion and tumbled drunkenly into bed that I realized I’d abandoned poor Li with the restaurant bill.

  In the middle of my sleep, Little Girl burst into the room. My head was throbbing. Reality was returning to me only in patches. It was still afternoon. I could hear Agnes barking furiously in her cage; farther off, Mrs. Wee was barking from hers.

  “She says you stole her earrings!” Little Girl searched my face for telltale hints of guilt, anxious because she felt responsible for my hire. “You better not have!”

  Seconds later, she was shunted aside by two aged Chinese servants I’d never seen before, one male and one female, who began rummaging through my things, starting with the most intimate. They shook out my undergarments one by one. Neither stopped to address me. Little Girl ran out of the room with red-rimmed eyes, looking betrayed.

  “So many white devil books,” the male servant muttered to the female in the most toxic Cantonese. “What does a girl hope to do with this many books?”

  “They warned us she was peculiar,” she replied.

  They found nothing, of course. When the ruckus was over, I was summoned to Mrs. Wee’s lair. The familiar route up the staircase was now made strange by three new players lining the way, each eyeing me with varying degrees of skepticism. The family. Because we’d kept different hours, this was my auspicious introduction to the Wees. Here was gray-haired Ignatius Wee, the short, compact man I’d mistaken for a butler when he let me in on my first day, dressed now in shirtsleeves and possessing an air of strange detachment. Then his two children—a tall boy about my age whose lazy posture did nothing to diminish his striking good looks, and a younger teenage girl, plump and scowling.

  The family had emerged from the shadows to put me on trial. It was as good a time as any, I told myself, to get acquainted with this invisible tribe. I was no thief, after all. They watched me walk into Mrs. Wee’s room and followed, as if they didn’t trust me not to pick their pockets from behind. Only the boy had the decency to seem embarrassed by all this. He shot me a lightning smile, then glanced away. Little Girl and the four house servants, all potential witnesses, trailed the family group.

  “I trusted you, Shadow!” Mrs. Wee screamed from her bed. She was still in the silk pajamas of the previous night. “Where did you take my earrings?”

  The proprietary way she said “my earrings” only made me dislike her more.

  “Has the cat got your tongue? I asked you a question, girl!” She flung one of her frilly pillows
at me, which the boy intercepted with athletic speed.

  “Auntie Betsy,” the boy spoke up, his voice surprisingly deep, “they found nothing in her room. You can’t just accuse her like that.”

  “She’s probably sold them,” interjected the sullen sister. “These Shanghai girls are very cunning. She may even have a partner in crime.” She glared at Little Girl, who withered visibly.

  “Daniel, Violet has a point.” Mrs. Wee gave the boy the evil eye. “If you were thinking with your brain and not some baser part of you, you wouldn’t be quite so quick to defend this eel. She’s probably taken my earrings to some pawnshop in Chinatown to pay off her father’s gambling debt. Who knows, she may even be in cahoots with the Triads. Am I right, Shadow?”

  I looked away, furious. I was prepared to resign, rather than face such indignity. The boy, Daniel, met my eyes again for a flicker of a second. I could tell he was on my side, but he didn’t seem forceful enough to change anything.

  The paterfamilias, Ignatius Wee, had been standing by wordlessly up to this point. Finally, he spoke. “Let’s not fling about accusations.” He sounded like an actor who was reading his lines, dutifully but without conviction. His accent was silky and posh, and the words seemed odd coming from the mouth of someone who looked as unassuming as a Chinatown rice merchant. “I’ll make some phone calls to a few jewelers in town. If those earrings surface, they’re sure to know. So let me go to work on this. Until then, let’s all keep our heads about us. And by this I include you, Betsy. You really do need the rest.”

  “But my earrings,” Mrs. Wee wailed, “you don’t know how much they’re worth!”

  “I do know exactly,” Mr. Wee said. “I bought them. Now, hush. Please.” He mouthed the word morphine to Little Girl. She nodded in acquiescence.

  I was escorted back to my room by the old servant couple. Little Girl appeared a few minutes later, her face tense.

  “Mr. Wee has decided that you’ll be barred from leaving the compound until the matter is resolved.” She had taken on his stiff way of speaking—it let me know the order had come from the horse’s mouth. “Obviously, you’re not expected to watch Mrs. Wee.”

  “But you believe me, don’t you?”

  “Believe what? You stood there like a deaf mute, not saying a single word. How should I know what to believe?”

  I heard my door lock behind her and the key withdrawn. Once again, I was alone.

  Those “white devil books” helped to stave off my restlessness. And when reading proved ineffective, I tried to engage the old Sikh ghost in conversation. (The feeling wasn’t mutual; he eventually fled for good.) Little Girl came by twice a day, at idiosyncratic times, bearing cold leftovers and bitter sighs, convinced I had ruined her good name simply because we’d come from the same town.

  To my surprise, Daniel, too, came by to visit the sorry detainee. He brought cheese-flavored biscuits wrapped in silk handkerchiefs, which their oils instantly stained, and an adventure novel about American frontiersmen that bored me silly from paragraph one.

  “It’s one of my favorite books,” he’d said. Here was a boy who’d never understand me in a million years.

  In spite of this, I found myself looking forward to his next visit, cherishing the kind impulses and apologetic eyes that seemed to promise he’d be a stronger man someday—if only one had the time to wait.

  In my prison cell, I had nothing but time.

  8

  Limbo

  THREE DAYS OF WAITING, three days of indecision on the part of my captors.

  Mr. Wee had heard nothing from his jewelry contacts, yet with a rich man’s arrogance felt entitled to keep me locked up anyway. I had no choice. Were I to mention the ghost of his late wife, he’d surely have me carted off to the Woodbridge asylum.

  I slept as much as I could, curled up facing the wall, refusing food, refusing drink, and finally refusing all communication, even with Daniel. I prayed for many things—escape, vindication, revenge—and day bled into night. For hours on end, I stared at a vertical crack in the paint, twisting and buckling like a tectonic wrinkle along a white and barren plain.

  Finally on the third day, I was exhausted even from looking. I closed my eyes.

  A tickle in my nose roused me. This became a burn. Liquid had filled my nostrils. I was breathing in water. The second I opened my eyes, raindrops, plummeting from the black sky like diaphanous bombs, blinded me with their explosions. My arms were heavy and cold—no, my clothes were heavy and cold, completely soaked through. The coppery smell around me was…earth. It was mud I was lying in, mud weighted down in rain!

  I was being buried alive. I took a gulp of air and sprang upright to battle my undertaker. But there wasn’t a soul. I was standing in the back garden somehow, alone.

  Free.

  Spotting the rosebushes, I knew the first thing I had to do. I reeled toward the reddest one and collapsed on my hands and knees, digging at its base with my fingers. The rain sabotaged these efforts, creating a swamp where I was expecting a treasure. I dug under a second bush, then a third, nearly uprooting them, and was ready to howl when someone—something—howled for me instead.

  Agnes!

  Five feet behind me, her bared fangs glistened a fair warning. Her black fur, slick in the rain, gave her the hauteur of a panther—a beauty she lacked in dry weather.

  I knew that if I stayed very still, there was a chance she’d let me walk away. But in panic I chose flight. I threw a fistful of mud in her mean eyes and made a dash for the servants’ quarters.

  Her panting quickened behind me, right at my heels. Thirty yards had never seemed so far. I could almost feel her teeth tearing into my back. Then, all of a sudden, the sound of her footsteps were replaced by frightened whimpering. I kept on running.

  The servants’ wing had been transformed. Raindrops slid off its walls as if the building had been dipped in oil. But the door was ajar. I kicked it open and stepped into darkness.

  The erasure of all sensations was instant and absolute. There was no Agnes, no rain, no roses. No temperature, even. My ears quickly grew used to the silence and began to pick up new sounds. I heard—or did I intuit?—the liquid whoosh of fresh blood coursing through my veins after a systolic kick from my heart. No, it was the boom and shush of ocean waves in the distance.

  A light appeared far away and the ground beneath me began to rock, gently. My muscles, shifting weight to keep my balance, seemed to already know the rhythm.

  The spot of light grew and a man stepped into it, celestial radiance flaring at his head.

  “Hallo.” He sounded as if he were at the end of an enormous, empty chamber.

  The enormous and empty chamber materialized. Gilded in sumptuous Art Deco detail—blue peacocks everywhere—it made even the Rex cinema look shabby. I dragged my feet over the plush, endless burgundy carpet.

  “Step out from the shadows…Pandora.”

  It all came back to me. We were in the ballroom aboard the SS Prosperity. Mr. Odell walked steadily toward me in a gray silk suit and a sky-blue tie. On his feet were black leather wingtips. More suave than I’d known him to be, he also hadn’t aged a day since our last encounter.

  “Mr. Odell!”

  I saw my reflection in the brass wainscoting. Alas, I had not traveled back in time. I was every bit my nineteen years, yet perfectly clean and dry.

  “So you remember me.”

  “Of course!” Oh, the surging joy of this surprise reunion.

  “I have to thank you for putting me in this suit.” He tugged at his lapels. “It’s a little Cary Grant for me, but I’ll try my best to live up to it.”

  Before I could respond to this strange remark, I felt firm pressure against my right heel. This grew into a cold tightening around the ankle, as if a snake were coiling around it. I looked down and saw a green vine, thickening: The entire wall behind me was being engulfed by a botanical monster that was spilling and spreading across the floor.

  I looked to Mr. Odell.
“Where are we? What’s happening?”

  “Step away from the wall and come toward me. I have things to tell you.”

  “It’s got my foot.”

  “Just walk.”

  He was right. The instant I lifted my foot, the vine surrendered its hold. The green swarm withered and began to recede.

  “Don’t look back. Just keep walking.”

  “Have I died?”

  “Again with the morbidity! Oh, Pandora. You are not a ghost.”

  I stepped off the carpet and onto the polished, intricate parquet of the dance floor. We met in the center, beneath a hulking chandelier that looked like a tarantula made of crystal swords. The foot-long spears clinked against one another as the ship rocked. If any of them plunged, we’d be finished.

  “They’re not going to fall,” Mr. Odell said, his eyes calm. “Trust me.”

  It was shocking how attractive I found him—effortlessly gallant, effortlessly wise, yet with no trace of sanctimony or arrogance. I couldn’t have gauged it at the time of our first encounter, but he looked to be about thirty. Little crow’s-feet around his eyes accentuated his smile, giving him an old-world type of grace I’d seen only in the movies, never on the Isle. He was the platonic ideal of a man at his peak—handsome, courteous, kind.

  He extended a hand. Such a manly hand he had, too. This was the first time we’d actually touched. The faintest hint of a clarinet sounded, then a bassoon, then strings, emerging out of the waves. An orchestra had started up for us from some unseen pit.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  I took his hand and he glided me into a waltz. My first dance. He placed one hand delicately on my waist, palm first, followed by fingers, and I leaned in toward him until I felt the sweet warmth of his breath on my forehead. If I made a terrible partner, he gave no indication of it. We moved as if this was second nature, as if we’d danced together a thousand times.