by Sandi Tan
“I can’t find the right one.”
“But they’re all the same.”
“That’s the bladdy problem!”
She cackled, shrill with frustration now. With a balled-up fist, she punched one of the mannequins near her, sending it flying several feet. “I hate you!” she yelled after it.
I longed to comfort her. But wait, I warned myself. The girl doesn’t want my pity. She wants my help.
“What if I chose one for you? Would you accept it?”
She looked at me, surprised by my offer.
“But how will you know which one to choose?”
I pointed at a random doll. “I say this one. She’s a bit prettier than the others.”
The girl stared at the mannequin, skeptical. Protectiveness took over quickly. She leapt to its side and examined her potential shell from head to toe.
“I still can’t tell,” she said. “What if she’s the wrong one?”
“You asked me to choose, and I think she’s the right one.” I removed the black ribbon from my hair and tied it around the doll’s left wrist. “See, I’ve marked her. Now she’s not like the others.”
The girl nodded and lay herself atop the dummy, fidgeting until she locked into a favorable pose, her knees around the mannequin’s waist, her arms around its neck. Mother and desperate, clinging child. It didn’t look very comfortable but the girl yawned, and within a few minutes, began to fade. Her staring eyes were the last things to go.
I quarantined the occupied mannequin, carrying her outside and leaving her against the warehouse door. The Gurkha guards moved themselves away from her, afraid even to glance in her direction.
The following day, I met G. B. at his club and gave him instructions: Get the doll a good wig, find it the most fashionable dress from his store, and take it to a Hindu priest to have a traditional death rite conducted.
“The days of your dancing dolls are now over,” I assured him.
A single tear rolled down my client’s cheek. I still remember it vividly—satisfaction always made me very happy.
I filled my wardrobe with black clothes—smart and stylish, rather than drab and funereal.
Most times when I was called in, once or twice a month, I could have offered a diagnosis in a matter of minutes, but had I done so, my judgments would have been valued far less. My clients were captains and overlords who watched over buzzing personnel. They needed to believe they were paying for detailed analyses from an expert who took weeks to close each case, not snap judgments made by a dilettante, however highly touted, to whom it came as no effort.
I worked up an act. In a pantomime of precision and thoroughness, I would walk gravely through proposed building sites for hours, even days, poking my fingers into the soil, sniffing the air, caressing door frames. “Dirty,” I would say, shaking my head. “Very dirty.” While this was in part theatrics, I was no charlatan; I always gave my clients exactly the information they sought, including the sad truth: Male ghosts of an older generation did not welcome expulsion by a woman like me. They required extra cajoling—and additional threats, trade secrets I shall take to my grave.
Only once did I absolutely forbid anyone from setting up shop. The self-made “Tour-Bus King,” L. W. T. wanted to establish his “hotel with a view” atop Forbidden Hill. The location was first-class, to be sure, but I had promised the spirits there an eternal home. I told Kenneth, and he grudgingly acceded to my verdict.
Usually, I spelled out the relevant risks and left the ultimate decision to build or abandon up to the client. I was merely a facilitator. My job was to reduce the possibility of conflict and inconvenience to both parties, living and dead. And I never, ever forgot to keep an eye out for the dog-man, my fugitive badi. That we hadn’t met again in all these years meant he preyed on my thoughts more than the ghosts I did see.
Because the Isle was dirty, work was steady. When I finished with one job list, Kenneth promptly furnished me with another, always incanting, until it became a cliché, “A sorcerer’s work is never done.”
I deposited the cash in my savings account and watched it grow—six years of my old salary in less than a year—withdrawing only the amounts I needed to get by on and for occasional indulgences like cognac, chocolate, and leather-bound editions of my favorite books. With the memory of poverty still close, I didn’t spend my earnings all at once but instead luxuriated in the dreaming—Italian handbags and shoes, dresses from the pages of Vogue, dinners at the Ship.
Though it had taken over a decade, I had finally pulled myself out of the postwar inertia. My destiny—and the Isle’s—was finally blossoming.
With my secret guidance, buildings were rising everywhere, ten, twelve, fifteen stories high. Thanks to me, there was clean land for the Balmoral Hotel’s expansion, accommodating new package-tour clientele from England, America, even Germany. But I was proudest of my contribution to Holland Halt, a low-cost housing estate that has continued to put roofs over ten thousand heads ever since its completion in 1964.
Kenneth proved to be less thrilled about my success than I thought he would be. The shadow, he decided, was getting too grand for its master, even as the master took credit for everything the shadow did.
“You’re gloating!” he said to me one night in my bed. “I saw your new shoes.”
“I’m not at all gloating. It’s just two pairs.”
“And both Christian Dior. God knows what else you’ve got hidden away.”
“You should talk. You’re the one who now plays golf.”
“Don’t change the subject. These assignments are supposed to be secret, Cassandra. Sub rosa.”
“And they are—I’ve not told a soul. And my clients, our clients, certainly aren’t going to be blathering about me around town. They’re always incredibly embarrassed by their problems. Sometimes I feel like a sex doctor.”
“I’m sure you do. I’ve heard the way they talk about you afterward. So sated.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
He grew quiet. “I’d like thirty percent. Finder’s fee.”
“But you already skim the cream off the top…don’t you?”
He said nothing.
“Ten percent,” I said.
“Twenty-five.”
“Fifteen.”
“Done.”
On the night of Kenneth’s forty-second birthday in 1962, we celebrated quietly in his apartment. I brought him a Black Forest cake from the Balmoral’s bakery and, of course, a bottle of his esteemed Dom Pérignon. I could have invited Issa and Cricket, but it had become an unspoken custom with Kenneth that we celebrated our birthdays as a couple.
“Enjoy the view,” Kenneth said cheerily as we tucked into the cake at his wobbly excuse of a dining table. “Because very soon, all this will be no more.”
“What, your girlish figure?”
“Alas, no.” He smiled, his upper lip smeared with cream. “I mean this measly flat with its measly rooms and measly walls and measly cooking smells from the measly flat below and the measly old Sikh asleep in the measly guardhouse no matter the time of measly day or measly night.”
I burst out laughing. “Are they knocking this measly place down? I mean, I’ve a measly right to know. I live practically next door.”
“I’m moving at the end of the month. Found a nice new place by the Gardens. Two bedrooms, two baths, wraparound balcony. All mod-cons, as they say. And I’m buying, not renting.”
“Oh.” I tried to keep the wariness from creeping into my voice. “You never said a word. It sounds expensive.”
The area around the Botanic Gardens had been a highfliers’ enclave since the days of the British; it was still the dominion of diplomats and politicians, and their black-and-white mansions. Evidently, new apartments had been put up for arrivistes, though not under my advice.
“Expensive it is, but the down payment’s doable. I know, I know, I should have asked you to suss the place out before I signed all the papers, but”—he shrugged—“I suppose I got
smitten. Didn’t want anyone telling me about the headless sadhu stationed in my kitchen or whatever it might be. You know how it is.”
“I wouldn’t tell you anything you didn’t want to know.”
“Ah, but I can always see it in your eyes.” He squeezed my hand. “The ghost of a ghost, ever visible.”
I let him finish his cake before I spoke again.
“I had no idea you were looking. This is secretive even by your standards.”
His eyes grew glassy, almost sentimental. “I ran into an old friend the other day, from prehistoric times. And it got me thinking, you know, about growing older, about having to grab hold of things. I mean, I’m forty-two. High time I made the commitment, don’t you think?” He gave me doe eyes, but as ever, he looked more wolf than doe.
“Who’s the friend from ‘prehistoric times’?” For some irrational reason, I thought of Taro and felt slightly ill.
He deflected my question with a spirited jangle of his keys. “Do you want to see the flat or not? We can take a quick drive over there right now.”
I shook my head.
“I’ve spoiled the mood, haven’t I?” He sighed. “I hoped you’d be happy for me.”
“I am, for you. But…I like having you near.”
He walked over and hugged me in my chair, stroking my head as he pressed my temple against his chest. I had seen him administer this same embrace to terminal patients in the cancer ward; he later explained it was so he didn’t have to look them in the eye.
“There, there,” he said.
I broke out of his arms. “If you wanted to get away from me, if you wanted for us to end, all you had to do was tell me.”
“For us to end?” He looked astonished. “I want no such thing. What would I do without you? What would the Isle do without you? We’ve been through thick and thin together. You and I, we’re a team.”
A team. That was stunningly unromantic, even for Kenneth Kee.
“Look, why don’t we go out for a drive? Some fresh air would do us good. This Black Forest cake…maybe there’s a reason why Germans are always in a foul mood.”
“I told you. I don’t want to see your bloody apartment.”
“Nobody’s going to make you. Let’s just take a little spin.” He smiled, his cheeks flushed from champagne. “Humor me.”
Kenneth led me to his car, a three-week-old 1962 MG convertible in seaweed green. He adored it more than anything. Perhaps I should have taken its purchase as a portent of changes to come, but having no interest in motoring, I’d only seen his car as a car and little more.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“That’s what the scoundrel always says before flinging his fiancée off a cliff.”
“Hah!” he said happily. “It is, isn’t it?”
We sped with the top down, headed not toward the Gardens but east toward the sea, the car radio blasting “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. It was an apt anthem—an incantatory ode to the tropics, all trilling flutes and lush, watery harps mimicking the wind and the waves. The best part, of course, was the unearthly banshee chorus: Here am I, your special island, Come to me, come to me…
Just as Bloody Mary’s voice swelled to a bewitched crescendo, coconut palms began popping up in the horizon. Goose bumps blossomed on my arms. We were driving, it seemed, into somebody else’s fantasia.
When I saw the silhouettes of the casuarinas, Kenneth’s motives became clear. The looming lighthouse only confirmed it: We were hurtling toward the Wees’ old beach house.
Kenneth knew full well that I never wanted to see it again. Not the ruins, not the boulders where I sought shelter, and certainly not the ghosts. If I ever saw Taro among them, there’s no telling the lengths to which I’d go to cause his ghost a moment’s pain.
“Why’ve you taken me here?” I must have sounded enraged; in truth, I was much more unsettled than angry.
Kenneth shut off the radio. “I want to show you something.”
“Turn back right now! You know I don’t want to be here.”
“Calm down. I want you to see what I’ve been working on—for you.”
“I hate you.”
“Ah, so you finally admit it.”
We slowed down at the mouth of the old road, which had benefited from new construction. No longer private, it was now two lanes, each wide enough for a bus and very freshly paved. Ahead of us, a young Malay family of five traipsed along, the father carrying the youngest on his back. Kenneth gave them a friendly wave when they turned, momentarily stunned by our headlights. Grasping that we meant no harm, the father waved back, with a wide, easygoing smile. Slung over the wife’s shoulder was a rattan bag with two long protrusions: badminton rackets.
“So?” Kenneth asked me. “Still want to turn back?”
I didn’t answer. He drove on, a grin tickling the edge of his lips. We came upon other families walking by the side of the dark road and slowed down as we passed them. The luxurious beach houses had been flattened, as had most of the casuarinas that once lined the lane, leaving no trace of the gentlemen’s retreat the coast had once been. To my relief, the Wee property, including its papaya trees, was completely gone.
Now it was a clear shot from the road to the surf.
The beachfront had been transformed into a kind of futuristic playground. Jutting out of the sand like gargantuan mushrooms were concrete barbeque pits. A dozen light posts stood, tall as telegraph poles, with bulbs so bright that the beach appeared to be made of snow, not sand. Between the posts, youths had stretched out nets and were playing badminton. Others kicked balls. Everyone looked happy; the light was so intense that it gave them all halos. I couldn’t help but find the scene eerie and jarring, especially coming upon it after miles of unlit road.
“I convinced the Ministry to let me turn this place into a workers’ paradise. The official opening’s not till next week, but I was told people have already been finding their way here. You know me—I had to see it for myself.” Kenneth turned off the engine and we sat in the shadows, surveying the beach. He was beaming. “This is only the prototype. If my plan goes through, we’ll have one of these in Woodlands, Kampung Klang, Taman Seletar, and then someday, maybe even in place of that awful slum next to Wonder World. People are tired of the dark.”
“I’m happy for you, Ken, really I am. But I don’t see how this has to do with me.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned close, staring into my eyes. “You don’t say.”
“Stop being so bloody obscure.”
“You don’t see them, do you?”
“What?”
“Ghosts. I don’t see them in your eyes.”
I stepped out of the car and scanned the shoreline for the eternal martyrs, those rebels I once resented for ignoring my cries of help. I expected to find them frozen shoulder-deep in the high tide, oblivious to the changes that have come to the beach. But the beach appeared to be pristine.
I strained my eyes some more, bracing for the sight of Taro—Taro, my shame and sorrow—whose soul, I was sure, would never have surrendered quietly to the night. But under the glare of the blazing lights, as waves frothed in and out across the sand, the most I saw were hazy, powdery shadows.
“Well?” said Kenneth, grinning with great mirth. “Very clean, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t bear to crush his joy with the more nuanced truth—that they weren’t actually gone, only nicely hidden.
“Now do you realize how silly it is for you to question our bond? We are bound, Cassandra. You and I. Darkness and light.”
“How did you do this?”
“Experimental bulbs, from Japan. Nobody there’s even given them a go yet. They burn much brighter than traditional bulbs and last much longer. We got the first shipment to leave Hiroshima. The chap who developed it said he was inspired by the blast.” He chuckled bleakly. “The extreme brightness, you see, alters the landscape, thereby wiping out all the old associations p
eople might have with a certain place—erasing its memory, in other words. With nothing for us to remember them by and nothing for them to remember us by, the dead cease to exist. Or that was my theory, in any case—a theory now proven positive, thanks to you.”
“And the Japanese invented this?”
“Don’t be small-minded. They, too, want to move on with their lives. They’ve become experts at reinvention. In the end, it’s good business for everyone.”
I squinted at the blazing white beach. I saw more shadows amongst the fun-seekers. Faint and vague, probably harmless, yet undeniably still there. Loitering.
“Do these bulbs create a kind of visual”—I searched for the word—“sieve?”
“No, no. It’s just light, pure light.” He sighed, contented. “You and I, we’ve never just sat around, passively accepting the hand fate has dealt us. You and I, we’ve always fought for our own destinies. It’s the same principle here. Strip away the darkness, the negativity, and even the worst places will forget their wounds. They’ll begin to heal. The Isle shouldn’t have to stay dirty. Ghosts don’t have to live forever.”
We watched the badminton players for a while. Could he not see that the lights turned them into paler, grayer—ghostlier—versions of themselves?
“Feeling sentimental?” He reached over and fondled my chin.
“Not at all.”
“See?” he said, leaning in for a kiss. “I told you fresh air would do you good.”
One of the many things I learned about Kenneth over the years was that he was at his most treacherous when he seemed at his happiest.
In retrospect, I must say I’m glad I learned about his impending nuptials by reading it in the papers. This allowed me to digest the news alone at home. If he’d told me in person at a restaurant, say, I would have had to rein in my shock and fury, offer congratulations, et cetera. He would’ve had the pleasure of watching me flail as my act wore thin—and I would have had to plunge my steak knife into him.
The cruelest stroke, alas, was that the winner of his hand should be a particularly horrible ghost from the past, one I hadn’t seen returning: Violet Wee. Was she the “old friend” he’d run into, from “prehistoric times”? Probably.