The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  I remembered how violently Kenneth once recoiled at the very mention of her name—and the frisson of delight I’d felt at having found someone who felt about her the way I did. How we had laughed together at the plump sourpuss and her demonic dog; our mutual dislike for Violet was the first thing that had united us.

  The half-page announcement Kenneth had bought in the pages of the establishment Tribune was every bit as gaudy as the advert for facial blotters that ran beneath it, its cursive font mimicking the twirls of a villain’s mustache. It answered a few of my questions about Violet, though not all. After the war, she’d apparently fled to family friends in Belgravia, London, and had stayed there all this time. It appeared likely that this London connection might have sealed the deal for our Anglophile Mr. Kee.

  You and me, Cassandra. We’re a team. I had been numbed by his peculiar brand of pillow talk into thinking we were two solitary people who saw eye to eye enough of the time to render us soul mates. I had to laugh at that notion now. More than rage at his betrayal, I felt shame at myself for having been so weak, so blind.

  Of course, I hadn’t been invited. I was glad for this, for it spared me the agony and the expense of a wedding present. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t attend.

  How could I not? I had to see for myself how Violet looked in her wedding finery and whether Kenneth had acquired, just for one day, the sense to go easy on the pomade.

  I went in the guise of a church mouse. I tucked myself into the stony folds of the St. Andrews graveyard, far from the parade of celebrants, dressed in a button-down cotton dress the same shade of gray as the headstones among which I stood. Lest anybody mistook me for part of the party, I brought along white chrysanthemums, the pompons of grief. I looked every bit the part of a woman mourning a death, which in a way I supposed I was. I was a widow many times over.

  There appeared to be two very different sets of guests: doddering Peranakan towkays in batik shirts with their long-faced wives, emanating prestige and entitlement, likely the old associates of the late Mr. Wee, and a more modest group united by familial traits—birdlike in build and touchingly unaccustomed to having car doors opened for them. I lumped this latter lot with the groom and tried to guess which of the elderly women was his mother. Surely the monthly recipient of his cash-stuffed envelopes, the silent witness to her son’s mounting successes, had to exude an unmistakable leonine pride? But men and women, young and old, Kenneth’s people all seemed cowed, overwhelmed, even grateful to be included in the occasion. I found their humility unexpectedly moving.

  The last sedan delivered two familiar faces—Cricket and Issa, looking self-conscious and stiff in their white, tailored suits. Issa’s movements had an added awkwardness because he was lame and had to be helped out of the backseat by Cricket. His impatient scowls told me that this disability shamed him. Also in this car were two women, both Indian, who I assumed from their pale purple dresses were Violet’s bridesmaids. It was only on closer observation that I realized they were Cricket’s wife and teenage daughter.

  Finally, a black Rolls-Royce drew up, the only such mastodon on the Isle. The Balmoral loaned it out at famously extortionate rates, and I was curious if Kenneth had managed to talk them down or if he paid full rate. Or did Violet foot the bill? From it the bride- and groom-to-be finally emerged. There were no flower girls, no fawning legions, and as much as I wanted to mock them for it, no hubristic fanfare.

  Despite their chariot, it was a quiet, unfussy entrance that they made. Kenneth in a tasteful, if plain, white suit and Violet, almost unrecognizably slim, in the most chic wedding dress I’d ever seen. It was something Audrey Hepburn would have gladly worn: a white shoulderless, figure-hugging bustier ending in a loose, flowing silk skirt. Her arms, once so rubbery, were sheathed in elbow-length silk gloves. In mien, this strange woman was essentially still Violet, but in physique she had become elegantly frail in the way only the rich knew how.

  They appeared cheerful, yet not overly so. I hated them for having such a surplus of joy that they could afford to rein it in on this most immoderate of days.

  They paused for a few photos by the Rolls-Royce and then for a few more at the church door. That was it. They disappeared inside. The only glaringly false note to this theater of reticence, the only tell-tale smudge of immodesty, was the adornment on Kenneth’s left wrist. Even from where I stood, I could see his outsize gold watch—as loose and ungainly as the heirloom he’d once so cherished and in all probability the one and the same.

  The transfiguration of Kenneth Kee was now complete.

  Standing in the St. Andrews churchyard, I was more than mildly tempted to call forth the denizens of its small collection of graves. But I did no such thing. I had too much respect for the dead to send them on the petty errands of a spurned woman.

  Beating my own unfussy retreat, I left the bouquet of white chrysanthemums on the step of the church, just as the old pipe organ began to moan.

  When I glanced back at the graveyard, I realized I hadn’t been alone. The dog-man had been leaning on a tomb a few feet behind me. And there he lingered. Unlike me, he seemed not to understand it was time to go.

  16

  Legacies

  WAS HE STILL MY FRIEND? Was he ever my friend? We never had time for labels. We had been content to be lovers, if never in word; we were phantom companions.

  My flesh, on the other hand, was all too real.

  The week after Kenneth’s wedding, I felt subtle changes in my body—the curvature of the belly, the rounding of the hips—as if I were the one who’d gone through the matrimonial rite. Dread trickled in when I missed that first monthly cycle, then another, but it was the doctor’s words, so routine for him, that took my breath away. Not that he’d been judgmental. I’d paid him very well to offer no opinion except the medical.

  I took to my bed for three days, furious at my body for its betrayal, unwilling to accept the invader growing larger inside me; then I wept for a few more days, but by this time, the tears had turned into those of joy. At forty, I realized this would probably be my last chance for a child.

  There was, however, the tricky matter of the father. The baby was half his.

  I resolved to raise the child alone, whether Kenneth wanted anything to do with it or not. This was less a brave decision than a self-protective one. In my heart of hearts, I knew I needn’t bother to ask. He had no interest in being a father. I’d seen him cower away from children on his walkabouts. “They’re so unreasonable,” he had said.

  In practical terms, being an unwed mother would cause me no problems. I had no relatives I could shame, no rigid social expectations to live up to. I was a woman of independent means who stayed out of the spotlight, and if worse came to worst, the Isle’s most powerful men would protect me—they needed my services.

  But I knew I had to tell Kenneth. Unlike him, I wanted our relationship to be as uncomplicated as possible. It was in this spirit that I had him over for dinner when my next client list was due. Personal feelings aside, and I took pains pushing them aside, we were still an enterprise—business partners, at the very least.

  You and I, we’re a team. Mutually beneficial, symbiotic, and now biological.

  When he turned up at my door, having rung the doorbell like any stranger, my stomach fluttered: He’d never looked so polished, so dapper. The shirt was Pierre Cardin. From his body language—shoulders pulled back, chin up—I knew there’d be nothing to discuss on the topic of his marriage. I almost lost my nerve.

  His smile retracted. “What is it?”

  “I’m having a baby.”

  “Is it mine?”

  I was stunned that he’d imagined any other possibility. “Yes, of course…But I don’t want you to feel you have to be responsible for anything. I’m perfectly capable—”

  He reached over suddenly and enclosed me in a wordless embrace, sinking his head into my shoulder. I heard jagged little intakes of breath, shudders, and felt a river of dampness down my neck. Ke
nneth was weeping. However, I couldn’t yet tell if these were happy or unhappy tears. He lowered his hands to my waist, rubbing his fingers along my midriff with a kind of neurotic nostalgia. I held my breath.

  “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “We’re going to have a child together.”

  When we pulled apart, I saw his shimmering eyes.

  “And you thought I wouldn’t want to share this…development with you. What kind of a monster do you take me for?”

  “A married man.”

  He laughed a deep-belly laugh, devoid of sarcasm or irony, and released another torrent down his dimpled cheeks.

  “After all this time, after all these years…Cassandra?” He spoke my name as if it were a thing of wonder. “We’ve lived with bigger secrets than this. Bigger, unhappier secrets. I will make sure you and…our child…are well taken care of. No matter what happens, I promise to be involved in your lives.”

  I was speechless.

  Again he embraced me tightly, caressing my spine, my waist, my thighs, pulling our growing child into himself until we three became one. Bound like this, I had a strange thought: The child was really more his than mine. If the fetus had any choice, it would surely leap from my belly to his, cleaving to the parent who loved it better, the parent who greeted the news of its existence with joy.

  “I feel closer than ever to you,” said Kenneth. “I feel like I’ve been suffering a disease and that I’ve been cured. This is the happiest moment of my life.”

  I could have wept. But experience warned me not to let my heart trust my ears until I had time to parse his words.

  He lowered himself into a chair and pulled me toward him. There he lifted my blouse to nuzzle my belly.

  “We’ll have to make plans,” he said. Swift as lightning, he lifted his face and I saw his eyes. Puckish delight. “We’ll have to prepare.”

  “Ken, I don’t want to…I’m perfectly capable of having this child on my own.”

  He didn’t seem to register my words—or want to. “I was wondering how, if at all, your condition is affecting your acuity.”

  “My acuity?” I quickly took his meaning. “I don’t think it’s made a difference. Apart from the morning sickness and the fact that I’ll have to get used to running around with a little person inside me.”

  “Well, so long as your eyes are as effective.”

  “They are. This won’t compromise my work, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He reached into his pocket, and I had every expectation he’d whisk out a new set of clients’ names and utter his usual line. Instead, his hand stopped short and he shook his head, smiling, almost bashful.

  “What am I doing? Let’s not sully this special night with business. I’ll bring you the list tomorrow.”

  We sat silent for a while. I glimpsed us in the mirror on the wall, each of us staring in a different direction, our faces revealing our true state: slack, exhausted, confused. No doubt our minds were still digesting the news, but we looked like a couple who’d just had a row.

  I wanted nothing more than for Kenneth to be out of my apartment. I didn’t want to witness the changing of his mind, the expressions of regret, the formation of excuses, and especially not the nervous drinking; I wouldn’t have been able to bear that. He knew it, too.

  “She was a war hero, you know,” he murmured at the door. “Three years at Wonder World.”

  What was I to make of this information? That he’d married Violet out of guilt? Pity? Admiration?

  When I said nothing, he tried again. “Will you manage all right?”

  I nodded, and he left.

  Early the next morning, I found a brown envelope slipped under my door. I knew it was the new list, dropped off by Kenneth the same way he dispatched money to his mother every month. Just looking at the envelope—no doubt the same kind he used in those deliveries—made me queasy. Would I, too, become a recipient of his cold, scheduled largesse?

  The name atop the list was Hiram Desker, meaning he was most important. I’d never before heard the name, but that wasn’t unusual—he may have been as secretive as me. We were to meet at the old opium warehouse on the Black River, known best to me as the former HQ of one very vicious Rat Brigade.

  Kenneth had no cause for concern. My eyes were perfectly fine.

  The taxi dropped me off on Edinburgh Bridge at noon, and I walked across the river. With the sun directly overhead, neither the living nor the dead there created shadows and so were at first glance indistinguishable. But I could always tell the ghost boatmen, vegetable haulers, and fat-bellied merchants from their living kin. The dead exuded nostalgia; it burned in their eyes as they watched their old colleagues. They longed to sweat again, to join in the clamor, the exertion, the grunting camaraderie. The action was all they knew, and only in death did they realize it was all they loved.

  Did I feel strange walking through this valley of death while carrying a child within me? Yes, but not in any way I could have predicted. I became more aware than ever of the new power in my possession, a power that was growing by the day: life. It was the ultimate rebuke to death and perhaps still the closest thing we know to a cure.

  At the tail end of the river, the old opium warehouse stood, faded and worn. Its painted letters were barely readable: U—T-D CO-PANY OF M—CHANTS OF E-GL-ND. A panel of its slanted tin roof had collapsed inward and was drooping like the broken wing of some monstrous metallic bird. The word AWAS—Malay for “DANGER”—had been spray-painted across the rusty gate in black. You might think that this desolation would make it the perfect home for ghosts, yet none roosted here. They wanted no part of its gruesome legacy.

  As I approached the gate, I began shaking. Uncontrollably.

  When I accepted this assignment, I hadn’t realized how powerful a hold the warehouse still had over me. My successes had left me overconfident. Here was a site unlike any other.

  “Daniel,” I whispered, in case he was here, lingering by the river. Of course he wasn’t.

  What did Hiram Desker hope to build here on this soiled spot? Was he a magnate of shopping arcades? A housing developer? The possibilities might have seemed endless to an ambitious industrialist, but my own narrow mind registered only misery.

  I already had my diagnosis for this client. The only proper use of this plot was to burn everything to the ground, salt the earth, fence it off, and entomb it under concrete. The moment he arrived, this was what I’d tell him.

  The sun blazed down on me as I waited for him at the high metal gate. The noonday heat would have been hard on anybody, but being pregnant, I felt almost baked alive. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and still nobody. My impulse was to flee the accursed place, but I couldn’t, not until I saw Desker. His perch atop the list meant he was enormously influential, and I didn’t want to make a powerful enemy.

  After another five minutes, my patience was gone. I kicked the rusted gate, which swung open with a low, mournful yawn. The interior yard lay in shadow. The instant I stepped through that threshold, I knew: I was no longer alone.

  I was being watched—by many pairs of eyes.

  The rusted gate shut itself behind me with a clang.

  From within, the old warehouse loomed far darker than it had from the road, blackened with dirt, mold, and soot. One enormous panel of the wall had been sliced off, revealing the building’s gaping black innards. I felt life pulsing within it, although I couldn’t be sure it was human. It drew me deeper nevertheless.

  “Mr. Desker?” I called, my words reverberating in the hollow darkness. “Hiram Desker! Are you here?”

  I made my way into the hangar. It was even more cavernous than I remembered. Inside, there was no sound, just the air’s poised stillness, as if a great being were holding its breath. Thankfully, none of the formaldehyde reek of the Rat Brigade remained. I smelled only the coppery dampness of rust, rain, and animal waste, odors I’d grown used to in my ghost-hunting.

  The place was bare, but it felt odd
ly full, with its undulating shadows, floating motes, and the golden square on the ground formed by the sun pouring through the skylight. In a religious painting of yore, some prophet might have stood in such a corridor of light—pate glistening, palms turned up. With nobody there, the picture looked incomplete.

  I eased myself into that tunnel of light, letting the sunbeams gild my skin.

  As I moved, footsteps sounded, mimicking mine. But they weren’t mine. They came from the deep murkiness, impenetrable to my sun-dazzled eyes.

  “Hello?” I cried.

  I stared into the darkness. The hangar seemed infinite. But nothing could intimidate me now. I was safe in my box of light, my invigorating womb. I must have glowed not just with the promise of one life, but two.

  Again, footsteps.

  “Mr. Desker!” I waved at the darkness, while a voice within me warned, Taro.

  And a ghost did appear as I focused my eyes—vague, then brighter, whiter, until it assumed a radiant silhouette, becoming someone whose beauty left me breathless.

  Daniel—as young as before.

  Fair skin, thick brows, a look of gentle inquiry. So it was he who Hiram Desker wanted me to evict. It seemed cruelly poetic that my work should reunite us.

  “Have you been here all this time?” My voice cracked.

  He nodded. A weird worm of a smile formed across his lips, buckling into a twitching, ungainly rictus. Was he struggling to speak? Or was he sneering?

  “Oh, Dan, speak to me!” I cried. “I’ve missed you.”

  I was moving toward him when a series of unnatural whines sounded overhead, the tragic yowls of rusty things parting ways. I peered up at the sun through the roof. The ball of fire winked at me—winked, because something solid dangled between us, flapping with the lightness of a paper kite.

  But of course it weighed more, much more. And with the full force of gravity, this traitorous piece of old roof plunged down upon me.