by Sandi Tan
“But he’s very generous.”
“That he is. That he is.” He paused, and I sensed a peculiar hint of disapproval. “Actually, if I’d gone to study in England like I was supposed to, there’d probably be a flat for us in London, too.”
“You were supposed to go to England?” I hadn’t known this. “Why on earth didn’t you go?”
He banished the topic with a shrug and flopped down into an armchair. “Know what I like best about being in this house?”
“What?”
“No servants.” He grabbed my waist and pulled me down onto him. This was the amorous side of Daniel that I adored, that I wanted more of. I curled up on his lap and we locked lips until he groaned under my weight. Together, still entwined, we migrated to the settee, where I allowed myself to be pinned against the backrest.
Kissing Daniel was like coasting on air—light, pleasurable, slightly precarious. It was a plane we could have remained on indefinitely without either backing down or venturing any further. I wanted, of course, to venture much further, but each time I tried to slide myself beneath him, he pulled me upright again. I chaperoned his hand up my inner thigh, and though his breath grew heavy, he broke loose and planted his fingers on my head, combing my hair as one would a beloved Maltese. And so we merely kissed and kissed.
“But I want you, Daniel.”
“I want you, too. But we can’t.”
After about two hours of pleasant but increasingly frustrating caresses, I insisted that we step outside for air. I ran barefoot on the white sand ahead of him while he ambled along in leather sandals, as if afraid of what sensual urges the beach might arouse on his naked feet.
The sand was soft and warm. The sea began a hundred yards behind the villa, and I pictured the water kissing the lip of the threshold at high tide.
“Does it ever flood?”
Daniel shook his head. “This is a strait. It’s the most docile water imaginable.”
Indeed. I thought of leaping nude into the clear turquoise water. There were no other houses for at least a mile in either direction. Far to the right, a villa perched on a rocky promontory like a pelican, and to the left was a limestone castle nearly hidden in a grove of coconuts. The singular lighthouse loomed yonder.
“You own this entire beach?”
“Not all of it,” he laughed. “Just this two-mile stretch or so. Truthfully, I still prefer the swimming club.”
“Why?”
“There are no surprises there. You know exactly how far it is from Point A to Point B—no sand, no waves, no jellyfish, no variables. After a good swim, all I want is a clean, fluffy towel, and the club has plenty of them. Cold drinks, too.”
“But no islands.” I pointed to the small atolls across the strait that appeared to be bobbing on the water’s surface.
“Oh, those are the Spice Islands. They’re Dutch. Cinnamon Bay is the one closest to us. My grandfather used to tell me it would be his one day. Sadly, not so.”
I strolled to the waterline and let the waves wash up to me. Their cool foam nipped at my toes like hundreds of tiny mouths. Immediately I felt a giddy passion for the water and everything related to it, as if the fine sand between my toes, the wet breeze in my hair, and the faint scent of nutmeg in my nose were all part of my most natural state and that all of my previous life spent inland and without access to the sea was a travesty, an abomination. I wanted to live in Daniel’s villa. No, not just wanted—I craved it.
We walked, holding hands, occasionally pausing to press our mouths together and brush away the hair that had blown into each other’s eyes. We aimed for the black rocks near the lighthouse because I wanted to see what they were. To my surprise, Daniel had never wandered that far. As we drew nearer, I spotted an undulating speck on the beach ahead. Driftwood? Kelp? No, more likely a ghost. I said nothing and tried to act natural.
The closer we came to the thing, the more clearly I made out the shape of a head on the sand. It was vaguely humanoid and attached to a bulbous mass of deepest purple, perhaps the carcass of a sea lion. Each time the waves came up and lapped at it, the whole blob shook as if electrified.
“Do you see that?” Daniel asked.
My heart jumped. “See what?”
“That.” He pointed at the creature. “Looks like a giant turtle or something. Maybe a stranded dugong.”
He started jogging toward it and I followed, relieved that it wasn’t a ghoul I had to pretend I didn’t see.
The truth was worse. This was no turtle or manatee but a beautiful woman, naked, on her back, being crushed alive by a giant octopus. Its legs were coiled around her fair torso and its slimy head—the size of two pillows—had pressed itself against her face, so close that they were eye to eye. The monster had trapped her so absolutely it was hard to tell if she was still breathing. We were twenty feet away when Daniel stopped; his head jerked back in shock.
“Mrs. Nakamura!” he gasped, then turned to me. “That’s the lighthouse operator’s wife. I have to do something.”
I grabbed his arm. He would need at least a long crowbar to pry off the beast, and there wasn’t anything like it near us.
“Mrs. Nakamura!” Daniel called out to her.
The woman did not respond but remained on the ground, motionless. We waited. When the next wave pulled in, all of a sudden she moaned in agony, an eerie bovine lowing, and the octopus went into a mad convulsion, tightening its grip on her and throbbing like one gigantic muscle. As it contracted and revealed more of Mrs. Nakamura, we discovered that the creature’s mouth—an obscene beak at the base of its greasy head—was clamped over the poor woman’s breast, leaving viscous trickles down her side as it sucked.
Daniel squeezed my hand. “It’s devouring her!”
As the surf swept up once more, Mrs. Nakamura moaned again, this time a human-sounding moan. Daniel and I experienced a second wave of horror: Mrs. Nakamura was in ecstasy. We watched her hand clutch the creature’s arm and guide it into the glistening crevice between her thighs, forcibly dictating its terms of conduct. With each thrust, she gave out a high-pitched whinny, reserving the shudders and moans only for when the cool sea foam drew up the sand and soaked her hair, her back, her legs. Her aquatic friend, too, was happy. As it closed its big cloudy eyes, the suction caps on its arms puckered up in unison and the tips of its seven remaining tentacles writhed in the air, each conducting its own lewd symphony. When the convulsions ceased, black rivers of ink flowed down the pale sides of the woman’s thighs and into the receding tide. Before long, the cycle began again, both lovers goading themselves to a new state of exquisite tension until the next big wave.
“Mrs. Nakamura…,” Daniel murmured with strange wonder. Blushing furiously, he avoided my gaze.
We watched longer than we should have, confused and afraid. Silently, we continued our stroll to the cluster of black rocks. Again, looks proved deceiving. The rocks turned out to be massive prehistoric boulders, each rugged block propped against the other to form caves and catacombs. On an ordinary day, we might have worried about pirates hiding in them, but our day had revealed itself to be anything but usual.
We ducked into one of the alcoves to listen to the waves echo in its melancholy womb. The air was cool and smelled of the ocean. We found ourselves standing on a tapestry of seaweed—red, green, brown, maroon. Some of these spongy alveoli housed families of tiny crabs, three of which tried to climb up my shins.
“This is why I wear sandals,” said Daniel, smiling as he plucked the little scramblers off me.
A flat rock near the entrance seemed the ideal spot to rest our tired legs. We collapsed upon it, lifting our feet off the sand. The tide must have rolled in across it for millennia and sculpted the rock face to its present smoothness. It was coated with algae, as feathery as down against our skin. When we realized our hands hadn’t parted since finding Mrs. Nakamura, we laughed with jittery tenderness and kissed, first lightly, then with greater conviction. The cave amplified every sound, ev
ery scent, every touch. This time, Daniel didn’t pull away but pressed himself insistently against me, acting on every amorous impulse he’d been holding back.
His eyes shone with a vivid new selfishness, that of a brute who wouldn’t stop until he was satisfied—and this transformed him, made him even handsomer. The force and urgency with which he tore off my clothes thrilled me. I whimpered as he clamped my wrists down and thrust his tongue into my ear.
My back pressed against the green plane of our waterside bed, we did the most natural thing to be done by a boy and a girl bound by the unnatural mystery they had just witnessed together: We made love for the very first time.
After nineteen years of fits, starts, and multiple disruptions, my real life was finally beginning in earnest. To mark my rebirth, I decided to give myself a new name. Selecting one was trickier than I thought. I started with Pandora—but this was Odell’s name for me, not one that I found for myself. It had to go. Then came Miranda and Cassandra, both ringing of hubris, and Scarlett (as in O’Hara), which on me would have sounded too significantly red, too crushingly Oriental. So I considered ordinary names—unobtrusive, forgettable names like Susan and Sarah and…
Exhausted by their drabness, I returned to Cassandra. Cassandra, the girl of Greek myth who saw things nobody else did. Since no one on the Isle knew much about the Greeks, I thought this could be my own little private joke. And lo, Cassandra I became.
Daniel liked it. In fact, he liked it so well he soon asked me to be the future Mrs. Cassandra Wee.
As expected, both Li and Father refused their invitations to our engagement party, offering the most unimaginative excuses. Both insisted they had to work. I was relieved. What if Li threw one of his tantrums? Or made remarks about “the rich”? But their tacit disapproval did weigh on me. I had cast off my old life—meaning them.
Daniel and I decided on a quiet, understated get-together at home because Mr. Wee felt that anything grander—a champagne-laden banquet at the Metropole, say—would be inappropriate, considering the anxious political mood. He had already begun to ration our restaurant feasts. We dined out just once a week, and only in private rooms, away from prying eyes.
Amidst talk that Japan was about to invade the Dutch Indies, our Isle was seeing an influx of blond settlers who’d fled their plantations in Batavia. They felt they would be safe from the Japs here—the place the British called their “indomitable fortress”—but our locals weren’t so sure. Everyone had read about the atrocities happening in Nanking. To calm the nervous populace of Chinatown, the government held practice air raids. There were no bomb shelters, of course, but it was hoped that these calls for lights-out would keep the masses busy until the rumblings of war went away.
I barely noticed what was going on in the city, let alone the world, because there was another major change in my life, as monumental as my engagement to Daniel: I had stopped seeing ghosts. I didn’t know exactly when the shift occurred, so preoccupied had I been with joy. I can only guess it was soon after he proposed.
Until I stopped seeing them, I never fully realized how much their presence had oppressed me. Privacy was something I had rarely taken for granted, even when alone. Until I could ascertain that no ghost was present—hovering silently in the corner of the bathroom while I washed or standing over my shoulder in the library while I read—I carried with me a constant, low-level awareness of being watched.
It might have been true once that seeing these souls made me feel less alone, but I was no longer lonely. I had Daniel. Now every excursion I made was filled not with quiet apprehension but unbridled joy—an adult innocence.
We took romantic strolls along the banyan-shrouded trails of Forbidden Hill, where not so long ago, I had seen the ghosts of two centuries. We spent nights in expensive old hotel rooms that a year before would have made my hair stand on end and found nothing there to impede our lovemaking but our own exhaustion. We even coupled in a Christian cemetery in the isolated west, the only visible creatures around us being sparrows, crickets, and butterflies. Bit by bit, I was reclaiming the benighted Isle, with pleasure as my beacon of light.
I burned to begin a new chapter as a conventional young wife. Mrs. Cassandra Wee. I believed that love had saved—nay, cured—me and I looked upon Daniel as the source of my salvation. Sweet, devoted, and refreshingly uncomplicated, he was the antidote to all the darkness that had come before. By earning his love, I had truly freed myself from my past.
At our garden party, we served tea, lemonade, three types of éclair, four types of cake, and champagne for the friends—Daniel’s friends, that is—who knew where to look for it. I’d like to blame my peripatetic past for my lack of friends, but to be honest, after Dora Conceição, I had not cared to make any new ones. I had my books, my matinees, and my ghosts, and they seemed like more than enough.
About thirty or forty guests attended, mostly Daniel’s old schoolmates and his father’s colleagues, serious men who used the occasion to discuss politics as they distractedly pushed slices of chiffon cake into their mouths. Violet had been encouraged to invite her classmates, but she spent the entire afternoon sitting by Agnes’s cage, alternately sulking and giggling at some private joke only she and the awful dog shared. She, too, as far as I knew, was friendless.
I wore a pale pink sheath dress—again, not too showy, at Mr. Wee’s insistence—but Daniel’s friends arrived in elaborate fashions imported from Paris and London, and eyed me with polite bemusement. None were unkind, yet I felt unsteady in their swirl. They were a tight, air-kissing clique who had been mingling since birth and ran with the same moneyed frames of reference. Had I seen the Italian leather pumps just in at Robinsons? Had I heard how disgracefully the sultan’s son behaved at so-and-so’s soiree? What’s to become of the poor horsies at the Turf Club if the Japs rolled in? These bright young men and women chain-smoked and abandoned their plates on the bushes for the servants, leaving a trail of ash and crumbs as they sauntered from hedge to hedge. Daniel hadn’t seen most of them since secondary school at St. Patrick’s and, to his credit, moved among them shyly, like an awkward newcomer shaking their hands for the first time. One would never have guessed he was once rugby captain two years running.
Thinking that some champagne would help ease my nerves, I slinked into the library, where Mr. Wee had left a magnum chilling on ice.
A young man had beaten me to it. I caught him drinking straight from the bottle as he stared at the calfskin spines on the shelves, his nose almost touching them. He was wiry in the Cantonese manner, his features slightly epicene, and he reeked of hair oil; I could smell him all the way from the door. I cleared my throat loudly to make him jump. He didn’t.
“Too much Dickens, don’t you think?” he said coolly, flaunting an English accent that sounded freshly clipped. “Picturesque paupers, benefactors with hearts of gold, funny names—we mustn’t forget those funny names—all adding up to a formula of one hundred percent pap.”
When I didn’t answer, he raised the bottle. “Am I disgracing the vintage or myself by guzzling it like this?”
“A bit of both, I should imagine.”
“Fair enough.” He saluted me and went bottoms up again. Champagne frothed down his chin, but before I could worry about the carpet, he wiped himself on his sleeve. A provocateur, apparently.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“The question is”—he smiled mockingly—“who are you?”
I was offended, and flustered. “Why, I’m Daniel’s fiancée…”
“Only joking! Of course I know who you are.” He snatched my hand and kissed it like a deranged knight. The drink gave his lips an icy, reptilian edge. “Felicitations. My name is Kenneth, Kenneth Kee. Dan’s great chum from school.”
Kenneth Kee? I couldn’t remember Daniel ever mentioning him. But then Daniel hated talking about his childhood, which was another reason we got along—I didn’t talk about mine either. Was it possible they’d really been “great chums”? I could
hardly imagine two less similar boys. Daniel was all smooth predictability, and this Kenneth Kee was anything but. He moved as if he answered to a different, more restless god, as if he breathed in different air from those around him, myself included. And, strange in the tropics on a warm afternoon, this young man did not sweat.
“Why aren’t you outside?”
He shrugged. “I don’t mix well.”
“Well, I grant you you’ve an outlandish accent.”
“As do you. Been studying at Miss Hepburn’s academy, have we, Cassandra?”
He hissed out my name like a snake, making it sound desperate and cheap, as if he were embarrassed on my behalf. I found his manner deeply irritating and thrust him my empty flute so he wouldn’t try to finish the bottle on his own. He filled it to the brim, daring me to spill. I didn’t, sipping steadily as he watched.
“I’m on loan to Oxford, on loan from Oxford…whatever it may be. Hence the aggravated lisp. God help me if I not only looked funny but spoke funny, too. You see, people over there have no imagination. Were I to speak with a foreign accent, they’d immediately assume I was unable to think or write intelligently in English. So in order to save myself the trouble of dealing with my fury about their lack of imagination, I decided to speak in the only way they understand, which is to say, like them. Does this answer your question, the one you’re too polite to ask?”
“Y-yes…I think so.” Silly me, I was stuttering.
“This would have been my third year if it hadn’t been for the bloody war. Didn’t Dan tell you? It should have been him who’s over there at Balliol, but he sent me off in his place.”
In fact, Daniel always refused to discuss why he hadn’t gone to England. He’d never even struck me as the Oxbridge type.
“Why didn’t he go?” I asked. “I mean, I’d like to hear your side of it.”
“’Cause he’s a timorous bastard, that’s why.” This provoked wild laughter in him and he took another swig. “Seriously, the boy’s a sentimental fool. Couldn’t bear to leave the old homestead. Though I suppose it’s worked out all right for him. He caught you.”