The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  Nor do I remember much of our subsequent trysts.

  What I do recall, and clearly, is that some other dynamic force drew us together, free of the usual conventions of physical attraction. Not since my cavorting with Li in the old plantation house had I felt such an intensity of shared understanding, such a mutual eradication of soul-loneliness. We canceled out each other’s alienation. Together, we felt radically normal. Well, I did, at any rate.

  Normalcy can be an addictive drug in any age, and during the edgy days of the emergency, when the streets were darkened with armed police, its hold was especially strong. I say this not to excuse myself but to help explain my otherwise inexplicable attachment to a capricious man I often found repellent.

  We coupled a few times a week, always in my room and always in secret. I knew that he didn’t want Issa or Cricket to find out about us; this was one of the myriad things he never needed to say but that I immediately sensed. I worked hard to keep our affair quiet, even though it made me complicit in his shame. For what else could it be but shame to be sleeping with a tainted courtesan, a dead man’s bride?

  The frequency with which he told me he hated me would have sent feminists up in flames. Early on, he said it with a wounding glee, later with irony, and finally as an incantation, until the word hate lost its original sting and meaning and became a kind of perverse mating call. I suspected he used that word only because he couldn’t face uttering its opposite.

  Very occasionally, however, he did indulge in bouts of expansiveness, and during these moments by his side in the dark, I savored my glimpses inside this very guarded man. I heard how he’d learned to drive at Oxford, where he worked as a chauffeur to several dons to help subsidize his studies. I learned, too, that had Mr. Wee not died, Kenneth would have gone back to finish his degree. He’d made good friends at Balliol, many of them students from Africa and the Middle East who, poetically enough, had been at Oxford to learn how to overthrow the Brits. If he’d graduated, he would have been the first in his family to have done so. Not that he was close to his family. The closest he ever came to talking about them was to say he rarely saw them. Instead, he stuffed the cash he made from odd jobs into a brown envelope and slipped it under the door of his parents’ house on the first of every month.

  Although none of his “secrets” were particularly intimate or illuminating, he had a way of making them seem like profound confessions, and I felt pressure to reciprocate.

  But when I told him, sobbing, about my lost sisters, he said nothing. When I admitted feeling conflicted that my trinity of pleasure—chocolate, cognac, and a good book—had been introduced to me by Taro, he only smirked. Then late one night as we lay in my bed, watching shadows from the street below crawl across the ceiling, I revealed more of myself than I perhaps ever meant to.

  “What do you know about ghosts?” I lit up a Red Lion cigarette to act casual.

  “I know I have a lot of them,” he replied, using the glowing tip of my cigarette to breathe life into a smoke of his own. “Why? Would you like to compare notes?”

  “I don’t mean it metaphorically.”

  “But those are the only ghosts worth our time. The other kind’s for cuckoos.”

  Cuckoos? Here he was again, dismissing something he knew nothing about. Why did I even bother?

  “Oh.” He paused. “You do mean the literal kind, don’t you?”

  I kept mum.

  “Why, do you see them or something?”

  Slowly, I said, “Or something.”

  “Ah”—he took a long drag—“I thought as much.” Whether this was true or he was bluffing, I couldn’t tell. “Go on, then. Don’t make me beg.”

  “And show myself to be cuckoo?”

  “Oh, don’t be so sensitive.” He handed me the ashtray and sat up, looking directly at me. His eyes gleamed in the dark. “So it’s true then?”

  “Since I was seven.”

  “And are they all around us?”

  “Always.”

  “What about right here, right now? In this room?”

  My eyes darted to the old coolie squatting in the corner. He’d been in the same spot since the beginning of my stay but had never posed a hindrance.

  “There’s one.”

  “Thought so.” He smiled, sitting up even straighter. “You know, I can see the ghost of the ghost in your eyes. Go on—describe him.”

  “Chinese, about sixty, skin and bones. Probably a coolie. He just sits there. No fuss. He’s looking at us but I don’t think he understands English.”

  Kenneth gazed at the corner. “So he was here, while we were…He saw it all?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry. He doesn’t participate.”

  “You are cuckoo, you know. Just not the way I meant.” With a wide, incredulous grin, he hauled the bedcovers off, flopped onto his back, and directed a long sigh into the musty night air. “Blimey.” He drained the cigarette and lit up another, and then embarked on a kind of muttering monologue. “You’d better not be pulling my leg, I tell you.” He turned to squint at the corner again and then looked back at me. Puff, puff. “Bloody hell.” Deep suck and jagged exhalation, punctuated by a gleeful cackle. Fumes spewed from his nostrils and mouth. “All this time. You’re good at keeping secrets, I’ll say.” Another puff while his mind whirred. “Have you told anyone else?”

  “No.” I glanced away, not wanting him to discover Issa in my eyes.

  “You never told Daniel?”

  “No.”

  “Not ever?”

  “You’re the first, Kenneth.”

  He chuckled deeply, irrationally pleased. I’d felt an initial rush of relief from sharing the secret, but now his enthusiasm unnerved me.

  “Bloody hell,” he said again, laughing and displaying for me the length of his left arm. “Look at this. Goose bumps. I haven’t had these since I don’t know when.”

  I ran my fingers along the cool, scaly patches of his biceps—unlike me, he really did not sweat—and beneath my touch his skin sprouted yet more grains.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Your lizard skin?”

  He smacked my hand for being deliberately obtuse. “Having ghost eyes.”

  “Not really, no,” I said. “But it’s never been a choice, so I can’t think of it in those terms—or I can’t let myself anyway. There’ve been times I fought it. For years. But one grows up and adjusts to what’s there. It’s like a deformity. One adapts.”

  “A deformity?”

  I watched him squeeze his lips into a thin line; his mind was springing into action yet again. He tipped me back onto the pillow and pressed his lips to mine. I felt his tongue push in, overwhelming me from top and bottom, as if he had two tongues.

  “You’re a very strange girl, Cassandra. A very odd bird indeed.”

  One had to give the politician—or the reptile—in Kenneth full credit for playing it cool. He waited two more nights before mentioning what must have struck him the instant he heard my secret. Coolly, too, he chose the perfect setting to continue this discussion. For the first time, I was invited to his bed.

  His room was spare and tidy, as if he’d moved in only days ago and hadn’t properly unpacked. In fact, he owned too little to produce any clutter—a stack of dictionaries and a mug of sharpened pencils were all he had on his desk. His bed was a picture of monastic austerity: white case, white sheets, a single hard pillow that made my neck ache. So immaculate was the room that, unlike mine, it was even ghost-free.

  “Have you ever thought about utilizing this ‘deformity’ of yours?” His tone was light and casual, offhand. “I mean, in a way that might make you value it, rather than think it a burden?”

  “You mean, to get rich or save the world?”

  “So you have considered it.” He picked a bit of lint off my clavicle. “Ever spent much time with Issa?”

  “Not really. To be honest, I find him a little frightening.”

  “Well, maybe in the old days. He’s
more like a shriveled old scarecrow now.” He sat up and handed me a smoke. “During the war, when we were holed up in the jungle, he used to go on about his grandfather or great-great-grandfather being a kind of South Seas shaman. I always dismissed it as guff—never could stand people who boast about their forebears—and I chalked it up to bitterness over his people supposedly losing their land, their water, what have you. But as time passes, I’m more of the mind that maybe he did, or does, have some, I don’t know, connection to the spirit world. Like that Night of the Burning Trees. I’ve always had an inkling that Issa had something to do with it.”

  “Suppose he did,” I said carefully. “Wouldn’t he tell you?”

  “’Course not. Would a player reveal the ace up his sleeve? He’s not as stupid as he looks.”

  Was he implying I was stupid to have told him about my ability?

  “Issa’s one of your closest friends,” I said.

  “He’s a comrade…for now.” He registered my dismay. “Don’t act naïve, Cassandra. It doesn’t become you.”

  “I’m far from naïve, Kenneth.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “Back to using your talent for good.” He looked at me with tenderness. “This is merely a suggestion, but perhaps you might consider getting to know Issa. Maybe you two could, I don’t know, collaborate.”

  “On what? Holding séances?”

  “There are people in this city who need to be scared into putting things right, and you know exactly who and what I mean. If we could accelerate the process, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. God knows our people are restless. We can’t afford to let this momentum pass.” His eyes suddenly turned sharp and cold. “Obviously, I hope you two will have the courtesy to consult me before you do any unnecessary damage this time.”

  The next afternoon, I paid my monthly visit to Woodbridge—not as often as a doting sister might have gone, perhaps. Then again, time stood still for Li. When I had rushed to see him after my years in the jungle, his nonchalance made me realize: He hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.

  He was the antidote to Kenneth’s mercurial moods and secret agendas. As long as I didn’t provoke him to remember what he couldn’t, he remained a boy of seven.

  I found him traipsing around the garden in the hospital’s blue pajamas, sniffing at the hibiscus shrubs as if they were roses, when of course hibiscus gave off no scent at all. As always, my first glimpse of him was unnerving—a child’s exaggerated tics affixed on a grown man’s face. But I had trained myself to readjust my expectations, even to welcome his simplicity.

  When he spotted me, he rushed over.

  “I passed with flying colors,” he announced, flapping his arms like a bird. The armpits of his pajamas were drenched in sweat.

  “Did you take an exam?”

  “The test, silly!” He rolled up his left sleeve and showed off the bandage on his arm. “Miss Joseph says I’m not sick anymore. I have good blood now.”

  I wondered if this was true or another of his fantasies. “How do you feel?”

  He did a little soft-shoe, all elbows and two left feet, and spun a sloppy cartwheel that had him nearly crashing into three catatonic women in wheelchairs. He landed in a hedgerow of ixoras. A middle-aged nurse came running over, gesturing with a half-eaten ham sandwich.

  “I can’t leave you alone for even one minute!” she barked, and then turned to me. “This one’s got so much energy we should be putting him to work. Always running all over the place. At night, when we do our rounds and don’t see him, we’ll come outside, and sure enough, he’ll be sound asleep on the grass.”

  “Sorry, Missy,” Li told her, holding his hands behind his back, barely able to contain his mischievous grin. He called all the nurses Missy because it was what the older Cantonese patients called them—and because he knew this nurse in particular bristled at the term.

  “Did he really take a blood test?” I asked the nurse.

  “Yes, spectacular results. His blood count’s better than anybody’s. Probably explains his incredible energy.”

  Li grinned. “I told you!”

  The nurse gave him a pat on the back and went off to finish her lunch. I sat down with Li on a stone bench in the low-hanging shade of a rain tree.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” Li leapt up. “I almost forgot to tell you. I talked to the twins.” He crinkled his index fingers. “Xiaowen, Bao-Bao, Xiaowen, Bao-Bao, Xiaowen, Bao-Bao.”

  Those names. I hadn’t heard them in years.

  “They came to see me.” He pointed at the gap between two red hibiscus bushes. “They were there!”

  There was nothing there. But the space was just wide enough for two little girls.

  “When did you see them?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I was sleeping and they woke me up. I was sleeping inside but they woke me up outside. They told me to tell you not to worry. They said they’re happy because they’re together.”

  “Li…” I tried to tread gently. “Were they ghosts?”

  “No!” He shrieked with laughter. “How can you say something like that?”

  “How old did they look?”

  He thought for a second. “Like you. They look just like you.” He nodded, reinforcing the memory. “Their arms are still furry, like when they were babies.”

  “Did they say anything about Mother?”

  “They built her a big, big house. It’s all completely white and there’s a rose garden and big, big fields and a maze. They said when we go and visit them, we can stay there. But they’re very busy now because they have to shake hands with everyone.”

  “Did they shake hands with you?”

  “Of course!” He heaved a grandiose sigh at my expense. “Don’t tell me you still think they’re ghosts. Only mad people can see ghosts, jie jie.”

  He showed me his right palm—it was stained bright red with the juices of some stubborn alien bloom.

  I couldn’t wait to talk to Issa, but ever since we returned to the city, he’d grown distant. Within a few weeks, he moved out of our Chinatown boarding house and into a hostel in the Islamic quarter at the other end of the city, saying he felt more comfortable being “among his own people.” Had this to do with the Night of the Burning Trees? Even Kenneth never seemed to know what he was up to half the time. Curfews and roadblocks made traversing the city an ordeal we all tried to avoid.

  After several calls, Issa agreed to meet me in the Kandahar coffee shop by the white-walled Sultan mosque. His lodgings, he said, were close by. The colonials never came to these narrow, cobblestone streets, not even to gawk at the gold minarets and jade floor tiles of the celebrated old mosque. The lanes weren’t wide enough for cars, and colonials didn’t like being on foot in strange neighborhoods. Once here, I understood completely.

  It was Friday, just after afternoon Jumu’ah. The curry and spice in the air made the day seem even warmer and stickier than it was, yet the men emerging prayer-fresh from the mosque wore long white robes. When several of these pious gents, many wearing the white skullcaps of the hajj, cast me poisonous stares, I realized that the streets in this section of town were segregated along gender lines; women were unwelcome on this one.

  Their looks were still less hostile, however, than those from a quartet of Gurkha policemen stationed at the nearby cross-junction. Cops had become ubiquitous around the city since the emergency began. The four had their hands on their pistols, somehow perceiving my presence as a threat.

  Before any of them could make their way toward me, I spotted in the crowd Issa’s long, gray mane and the pink scars on his upper arms. It was the first time I’d seen him in a short-sleeved shirt. He still looked like a pirate or genie, but Kenneth was right, there was now a bit of the old scarecrow about him, too.

  “Iskandar!” I called.

  He turned and smiled. “Welcome to the ghetto.”

  What did the policemen and the devotees think of me now? Was it better or worse that I’d come to meet a man? Issa led m
e into the dark cave that was the Kandahar, taking a table in the corner.

  “He knows,” I said when we sat down.

  Issa nodded. “I suppose it was inevitable.”

  “He wants us to work together.”

  Issa laughed. “He wants to play us off against each other.”

  “It’s nothing like that. We all want the same thing—the world wants the same thing. Let’s drive them out. They’re already itching to leave. They just need one final push. Small-scale, minimal fuss, maximum impact. It’s the time, Issa.”

  We let my proposition hang in the air. He sipped his milk tea and I sipped mine.

  “Tell me,” he said, “are you in love with him?”

  The question took me by surprise. Was I? In any case, it was certainly none of Issa’s business, and I wasn’t going to let him change the subject.

  “Don’t you want to take the Isle back?” I said. “I thought we want the same thing.”

  He smiled. “Where you are correct is that I’m worried for the Isle. But what concerns me, perhaps just as much, is how you seem to have given him authority over you, letting him send you on little errands like this.”

  “I’m here of my own free will.”

  “He knows where I live. He knows how to find me. In fact, this is where he and I meet once a week. We were here just yesterday—at this very table, talking this over.”

  So Kenneth had already arranged everything. Why, then, had he sent me here?

  “Look,” Issa said. “I’m too old for his games. When I first met you, you were the most confident, headstrong young woman I knew. Very stubborn, I should say. And now…” He gazed at me with tender concern.

  “I was a stupid child. Now I’ve found a cause greater than myself. Now I’ve found a way to be useful.”

  “Cassandra, you are the one with the power, not him. Don’t ever forget that.”