The Black Isle (16 page)

However the pontianak’s head came off—Li had been delirious; his testimony was unreliable—I couldn’t forget how her alien heartbeat had devoured mine, tying me to her, or was it the other way around? Who had colonized whom? One thing was certain: The jungle dead were not like any dead I’d known. They did not heed the same laws.

And though I refused to concede it at the time, Li was right: Anim did resemble me, not Mina. She had my eyes, my lips, my overlong arms, my knobby knees. What she told me was probably true. The pontianak had drunk my blood. The blood of my womb.

The thought made me shudder. I sucked down the rest of Robin’s gin and tried to forget the whole episode. Without letting anyone know, not even Li, I quietly packed my bags. I knew I would never find peace in the jungle aside from the peace of death.

In bright noon light, I cycled through the plantation one final time. Blood Hill was charred bald, really the way it should have been kept all along. The corpse of Mina’s father had been removed from the tembusu and cremated by the workers who had returned. The gargantuan tree itself was cut down and replaced by a small shrine—a simple wood crate smoldering with incense. The Melmoth estate was in shambles. Our family had certainly left its mark.

The black hut revealed no trace of itself, neither on the grassy knoll where I’d seen Li and his Milkmaid, nor behind our house.

At the hives, I bade farewell to my workers with cordial handshakes that startled most of them. Rani fled as soon as she saw me coming. It was a pity, as I’d intended to apologize. Following a quick shower, I grabbed my two canvas sacks and hitched a ride with the Gurkha policeman to Ulu Pandan, where I could find a bus that would take me back to the city.

Li followed a few days later. And then, unfortunately, Father.

If there’s one truth about life I’ve learned in all these years of running, it’s that there is no such thing as a clean escape.

DO I FEEL BETTER NOW
—or worse? Thirty, forty years younger—or a good deal older? My mood shifts from one memory to the next, like a sick pendulum.

This bloodletting is double-edged—toxins exit, but so does vigor. My throat’s dry. My muscles ache as if I’d run miles through jungle.

As I label my tapes, the telephone rings. I ignore it.

Chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6—the early years, the easy years. Juvenilia. Glad I’d stocked up on fresh tapes and batteries. I’ve always been ready for emergencies; I have the war to thank for that.

At long last, my answering machine intercepts the call.

“Ling,” she begins, saying my childhood name as if she actually knows me. “I can tell you’re there…Please pick up the phone.”

“You missed a damned good beheading,” I say to the room.

“I’m going to be a bit late. I’m being kept by…You remember our agreement? I had to make some final arrangements to fulfill my end of the bargain.”

Our agreement. Of course, I haven’t forgotten. Our agreement fires my every thought, my every memory.

“I’ll make the wait worth your while, I promise. I won’t disappoint you. So in the meantime”—she pauses—“percolate.”

I pick up the phone. “Are you here to torment me or to save me? The dam has already broken. I’ve already begun. I can’t stop now.”

I tear the phone jack from the wall and walk straight to my window. I draw open the curtains, lift up the sash, and stare out.

“Who’s there?” I call. It’s only the night. My friend, the night.

I am telling this story to remind myself how brave I was in my youth. I took on a pontianak—and won. Why can’t I be a brave girl once more?

I beat my fist against my chest.
Thump, thump.

My heart replies,
Thump, thump.

THE CITY HAD RESHAPED ITSELF
between 1934 and 1937. It was taller, much taller, like a bean sprout of a boy who’d had a growth spurt over the holidays and returned in the new term a giant. I came back gaping skyward.

Even Bullock Cart Water hadn’t been exempt from change. A fire had gutted our old row house soon after we left, snuffing out fifty in their sleep, just like that. It was torn down, leaving a gaping tooth on the block. Though all evidence pointed to arson, city officials refused to rule it as such, fearing copycats. A one-legged ghost stood at the site recounting the tragedy in a droning voice. I tried to ignore him but found I could not, so moved was I by his sense of duty and outrage. I’d like to think I’d do the same if I, too, had been so heartlessly killed.

Oh, to be back again in the city, where the dead spoke of their troubles rather than lash out in blood violence!

Our building wasn’t the only casualty of passing time. The pavement barber was gone, as were the sadhu and the
karang guni
man. I never liked them much before, but now I missed them all.

Spring Street, the main thoroughfare, was now lined with apartment buildings eight or nine stories high. The neighborhood certainly needed them. It was swarming with new arrivals. Japan’s invasion of China had pushed thousands onto our shores, and these lost souls aligned themselves according to whether they favored noodles (Northerners) or rice (Southerners). All of them chose Chinatown. I found myself looking for Mother and the twins in their midst, though I knew she’d be too proud to run to the city where Father lived. I kept a hopeful eye out anyway—if only for the twins. My eleven-year-old babies.

The refugees carried bad habits from the old country: prostitution, gambling, opium. Yet as before, the city did nothing when gangs came out with their knives; if no one scrubbed the blood off the pavement, it sat there blackening for weeks. In contrast, whenever a peaceful group of Chinese gathered to protest a shady Japanese business, the governor clamped down immediately, ordering curfews. Double standards in the colonial city we were accustomed to, but this protectiveness toward the Japanese was something new. Father surmised it was about face—and money. The Japanese were investing in shops, hotels, and restaurants and were so good at scratching British egos by mimicking them in dress, manner, and taste.

We lived on the top floor—the eighth—in one of the new apartment blocks on Spring Street. Though the rent was cheap, the upper floors remained largely empty. The night watchman told Father that most Chinese refused to live on the high floors because the local “singsong girls,” or prostitutes, often used them as springboards for their closing arias, as the watchman put it, diving through the air to their crimson doom below. The properties, Father told us with a small shiver, were considered “very dirty.”

“The eighth floor is popular for suicides because
eight
in Chinese, you recall, is a homonym for
prosperity
,” he explained to Li and me. “Whether this leads them to fortune in the afterlife or not, we’ll never know. What I
can
tell you is this: The Taoists believe that suicides make the most troublesome ghosts.” I cringed to hear him use the word. “All right, I didn’t always have time for this type of thing. But after the plantation, anything’s possible. So, to be on the safe side, I urge you to behave yourselves. Don’t do anything that might provoke them. And, here, keep these with you as an added precaution.”

He handed both of us identical sets of trinkets—a Buddhist bracelet with orange prayer beads, a Christian crucifix on a chain, a medallion of the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali, and a slip of paper with an Islamic tract in Arabic. I smirked but caught Li lowering his eyes in submission. The boy did like his charms; I knew these would join the desiccated toffee disk on his nightstand.

“I don’t know what each of them means,” Father said, “but they have to be kept together at all times. That’s what the old woman who sold them to me said. I’m carrying a set myself.”

“Oh no,” I groaned with mock anguish. “We’re missing a Star of David!”

Father glared at me, then glanced around the apartment. “This is not a joke,” he hissed. “Do you want to get us all killed?”

The night watchman was right. The majority of the suicides on our floor
were
women. Most were either depressed taxi dancers, weary from hiring themselves out as dance-hall partners, or the neglected wives of opium-wracked rickshaw men. These unhappy souls somehow managed to sneak past the watchman and up to the open-air hallway of the eighth floor. Perhaps bribes were involved. The lazier singsong girls, however, rarely bothered to climb the whole way—they usually leapt off the fourth or fifth floor, and often survived. The ones who didn’t survive lived with us.

There were five ghosts in our apartment when we moved in, six by the end of the first month. The irony didn’t escape me that the dead dancers and prostitutes spoke to me, whereas their living counterparts, dolled up in rouge and sparkles, snubbed me as if I were the human equivalent of a bug—a girl who wore no makeup and loped around town in flat heels.

Over and over, the ghosts told the same stories: They fell for unreliable men and then—surprise, surprise—had their worst fears about them proven true. They moped around our apartment, repeating their pitiable sagas like defendants in a courtroom, proving yet again that death never consoled anyone with new wisdom, only regret. Frustratingly, I couldn’t talk back or shoo them away; the channel of communication was strictly one way. Needless to say, Father’s trinkets were worthless. Not that I would ever tell him. He was so much easier to get along with when he believed he was in control.

A few months after our return, in late 1937, the city opened an amusement park, like a miracle salve for everybody’s woes. Wonder World sat in the no-man’s-land between Chinatown and the docks and was the first social venue where the different races could mix freely, all in the name of fun and games—and, of course, vice. I tried in vain to remember what had been in that location before; Father thought it might have been a squatters’ colony, Li a scrap-metal yard, but neither could recall for sure. Wonder World’s presence was so pungently vibrant—a veritable lotus flower blooming in a muddy trough—that it wiped out all traces of what had come before.

Above its high vermilion walls, loudspeakers blared out its jumbled inventory: “Three cinemas! Two dance halls! Burlesque cabaret! Boxing ring! Silk underwear! Come and see live penguins! Come and taste our fish-ball soup! Beautiful Siamese girls! Beautiful Siamese cats! Two miles of games, three miles of food!”

The papers insisted that the honeymooning Charlie Chaplin had stopped by incognito—no mustache, no bowler—and on our first visit, a canny entrepreneur was already gaining from this unverified tidbit. He stood at the entrance, peddling souvenir cards in the Tramp’s silhouette. Li and I watched him sell twenty in just five minutes.

It was from the gate that we had to observe all the fun. As Li and I wouldn’t be allowed inside until we were eighteen, we gawked from the periphery as Father sauntered in, promising to return with presents. The sweet aroma of honeyed pork jerky wafting from within made us swoon. Salivating, we watched couples emerge dizzy with satisfaction, toting stuffed panda mascots the size of infants and drums of powdered milk—game prizes that seemed to suggest they should go home and instantly start making babies. We also saw drunken British sailors being shown the way out, but there would always be drunken sailors on the Black Isle.

When Father finally resurfaced after two hours, he smelled of cheap beer and even cheaper perfume. Not surprisingly, he was empty-handed.

“The ball-toss hoops are rigged,” he laughed, forcing a tone of outrage. “They’re all out of reach!”

Judging from the lipstick mark on his neck, the singsong girls were, alas, not.

St. Anne’s had changed, too. When I returned to reenroll myself, I thought the old building had been torn down and replaced by a spotless, somewhat drab replica.

“It’s the same old pile, minus the guano,” beamed Sister O’Hara, the reading teacher I had once called a giraffe. “Sister Nesbit decided it was about time. A chunk of it fell off during the last Visitors Day and struck one of our donors on the noggin. You look disappointed. Don’t you like it?”

The truth was the old version had more character. Thankfully, the nuns were as welcoming as ever. Aside from their equine body odor, they were almost supernatural—none of them seemed to have aged. The spring-footed headmistress, Sister Nesbit, was delighted at the return of the prodigal daughter, as she called me, and ushered me straight to class. She had always treated me with kindness, and seeing that old familiar smile, I found myself quite moved.

Although I’d dreamt of my return, I hadn’t realized how starved I had been for knowledge until I reentered the school library. I devoured whatever I could lay my hands on. My new favorite was the saturnine Baudelaire, and I lingered in the stacks long past daylight hours, alone with books and ghosts.

There were far fewer of the latter at St. Anne’s now, perhaps because Sister Nesbit had installed bright lights throughout the building. The writhing maidens of the toilet were gone—as was poor Dora Conceição. The hanging girl, however, continued to convulse from the fan during assembly, but I now found her presence weirdly reassuring.

On weekends, I followed my guides Hugo, Balzac, and Maupassant. They led me away from our narrow rooms to salons and factories filled with conversation and smoke. In my reading, I discovered some of the qualities that made the French great romantic figures but quite deluded colonials: They were short-term thinkers, impetuous, vain, thoroughly at the mercy of immediate, especially sensual, pleasures. While I loved the French for their style, I thanked my stars we had the British, who at least parlayed their stoical love of dull duty into constructing roads and schools.

In 1940, when I turned eighteen, Sister Nesbit delivered the news I’d been most dreading. I had officially outgrown St. Anne’s, and unless I wanted to try for university—which I could not afford—it was time for me to leave. To soften the blow of my exile, she found me a position as governess to the Chew family, who lived in Monks Hill, a leafy neighborhood favored by bourgeois Peranakans. “See if you like teaching,” Sister Nesbit said, “and if you do, apply to the teacher’s college.”

The Chews offered me room and board (dank closet and seat at the family table next to my ten-year-old ward). Happy for any excuse to avoid my family and the chatterbox wraiths of the eighth floor, I immediately accepted, though I resented the idea of being an equatorial Jane Eyre. I believed, with no evidence, that I was destined for better.

For his part, Li worked as an errand boy for a large family in the west of the Island. Though his job horrified me—he was essentially what that boy Cricket had been for us in Shanghai—he seemed disturbingly contented. I supposed his master’s demands kept him too busy to feel anything more than passive numbness. Gone was his earlier spark. It was as if our up-country debacle had taught him it was hubris to dream or even desire. I felt that he ought to have been wanting more—and doing better. Doing what, however, I had no idea.

Hoping to enjoy what free time we had together, we steered clear of tricky subjects—Shanghai, the plantation, our uncertain future—and talked pleasantries. Going to the pictures suited us perfectly. On our days off, we would meet at the Rex, a salmon-pink Art Deco cinema near Little India, or at the Pavilion, which was more staid but had the crunchiest chili peanuts in town. I loved how American movie characters always spoke their minds, completely uninhibited. Bogart, Cagney, Astaire, Rogers—we liked them all, but our favorites were the best talkers: Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Bringing Up Baby
and
Holiday
we must have seen ten times, with undimmed pleasure.

After a while, I could detect in our voices traces of the luscious “transatlantic” diction spoken only on Hollywood soundstages. Li made a habit of tagging on “Say” and “Look” before he began a sentence, like a newsman pitching story ideas to his girl Friday. I never pointed this out to him in case he got self-conscious; I was just happy to know I wasn’t the only one mouthing along with our heroes in the dark.

Away from the movie palace, I was far from a wisecracking ingénue. I made a terrible governess. Despite her mother’s assurances that she was “bright” and “forthright”—meaning, of course, spoiled and rude—I hated the Chew girl, whose Christian name was Rosalind. The antipathy was mutual. She kicked me twice and called me a witch.

I resigned, having lasted all of five weeks.

Father, of course, was furious, telling me, “Teaching is the only honest work you’ll find on this Island!” But quitting liberated my soul to new possibilities. At the tail end of 1940, I was glancing at a newspaper abandoned on the tram when a notice in an old-fashioned, genteel typeface caught my eye:

It was through this fortuitous ad that I would ultimately meet the man who would transform my life.

The old woman lived in a hulking mock Tudor in the Tanglewood estate, painted completely white. As my taxi approached, I felt certain I’d seen it before, perhaps on Father’s infamous “bus” tour. Then I realized, with a mixed feeling, that this was the home of the philanthropist Ignatius Wee, patron of St. Anne’s. This was where my education at his school had led me: to be his maid.

The grounds were crowded with Indian gardeners tending to the sprawling lawn, by hand. Backs bent over the grass, they made me think of the gleaners in Millet’s painting, faceless and powerless. I might soon join their ranks—if I was lucky. It was a far cry from the plantation, where I was once boss. The thought of my decline filled me with anguish as I rang the doorbell.

An elderly Chinese butler led me into the foyer and vanished. I walked myself into the sitting room. The Wee family was Peranakan and possessed that tribe’s weakness for all things European. Indeed, someone had gone through considerable trouble doing up the Wees’ parlor in high Belle Époque style. Its puffy damask curtains and dragonfly-shaped Tiffany lamps verged on being over the top, but the slim-legged Viennese tables and chairs kept the room elegant—perhaps even too elegant for actual use. A mournful old crucifix (Peranakans tend to be Catholic) completed the scene with its bleeding Christ hovering above the ornamental fireplace, an eerie vision of suffering against all the opulence.