The Black Isle (32 page)

“I can’t believe you still have it.”

“It’s my only souvenir,” he said. “Aside from you and
him
, of course.” He caressed the disk and slipped it into his pocket.

A flurry of footsteps raced past the tin shack, bodies scraping against a wall and making the whole hut rattle. Li’s attention, like a dog’s, instantly shifted.

I grabbed his calloused brown hands. “Listen to me. Stay with us. You’ll have your own room and you can take baths. You can protect these people from there.”

“Protect the slum, from a mansion?” he scoffed. “Even if I wanted to, I—”

More fleeting figures passed the shack, along with anguished cries of
“Lopak-tau lei lo!”
—the “Turnipheads are here,”
Turniphead
being the slang for a Japanese soldier.

Li moved his sleek frame to the doorway and peered out. His jaw tightened when Father appeared, panting.

“They’ve come in!” Father said. He didn’t register my presence. “They’re asking for healthy Chinese men. Nobody knows what they really want.”

Li picked up his parang.

“They have guns, my boy,” Father cautioned. “The slum is surrounded.”

“I don’t care. I’ll go down fighting.”

“You’ll get everyone killed,” I said.

Father finally turned to me and the blood drained from his face. “Oh! My little girl.”

“I want you both to come with me,” I told him. “Before it’s too late.”

Father threw a helpless look at Li, as if he’d given up his own free will and ceded all decision-making to his son.

“It’s already too late.” Li’s words remained absolute, even as doubt began to cloud his eyes. “You better go home. I can take care of myself.”

I embraced him once more, my fingers slowly easing the parang out of his grip. This was the most I knew I could do. I whispered into his ear, “If they try to take you, tell them you’re Malay.”

He put his face next to my cheek and sniffed at the air—or rather, he inhaled me so deeply that I felt my pores quiver. I knew what he was stealing, what he was trying to capture forever in a lungful: the scent of shampoo, perfumed soap and fresh towels, relics from a world now lost to him. He brushed his lips against my skin as if I were an exotic flower to be savored, not kissing me only because Father was present. Then he did it anyway—right on the lips. His lips were every bit as soft as I remembered.

“China man…China boy! China man…China boy!”

The refrain being bellowed up and down the alleys grew louder as the soldiers waded deeper into the pitiful maze at the very center of which we stood. They were closing in. Their calls reminded me of the old
karang guni
man from Bullock Cart Water, the one Li and I hid from as children. Only there was no hiding to be done now.

“China boy!” This voice was curt and close and accompanied by the sudden glare of a flashlight. I froze, expecting gunfire. Through the doorway, I saw a soldier’s muddy boots and the glinting tip of his bayonet.

Li gently withdrew from my arms and nodded at Father, who gave me a wince of apologetic regret—
he
wanted to come with me.

“Let’s see what they want,” Li said. Before I could say or do anything, he and Father surrendered themselves. When I ran to the door to look, it was as if they’d been devoured by the disembodied voice. They had already disappeared.

Winding my way out of the slum, I saw lorries roar away from the cluster of shacks, bursting with human cargo. The men were penned in like pigs, watchful and passive, holding on to each other to keep from falling off as the lorries rocked along the bumpy, unpaved road. I’m sure that if I’d seen Li among them, I would have run after the trucks, screaming like a banshee. In the past hour, the roiling clouds had grown denser, darker. I pictured Li and Father in their open lorry bed. Soon, the deluge would soak them completely.

As I got on my bicycle, a little boy raced across a muddy field toward me. He was about six years old, his delicate round face stained with dirt and tears.

“They’re going to kill them all,” he shouted.

Then he, like Camel and Bitter Gourd, vanished, just as the first drops of rain came plummeting down.

Back at the house, my legs could feel no sensation. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t contain my heaving sobs.

“But what on earth were they doing in that awful place?” asked Mr. Wee.

Mr. Wee, it turned out, had known beforehand about the raid on the slum. What he hadn’t known, and found inexplicable, was that Father and Li had chosen to live there. Of course, I’d been too ashamed to tell him, or Daniel. Trying to be kind, Mr. Wee vowed he would work on extricating my people, as he called them, from Queenstown Prison, where thousands of Chinese were being “processed.” Then he ordered me upstairs to bed like an invalid child.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Cassandra,” he said, “but my colleagues are very particular, and I must respect their wishes. Every little misstep these days is the difference between life and death.”

I trudged upstairs, still shaken by the little ghoul’s words at the slum. Daniel came to the bedroom a few minutes later and was no more consoling than his father. He carried a glass of water and a sleeping tablet and placed them meaningfully by the bed.

“Get some rest, dearest,” he said.

“You were there at the meetings…You must have heard about the raid. Why didn’t you tell me anything?”

“Hundreds of things are said; one can never keep track of what’s what. Mostly they turn out to be rumors. The men are mainly concerned with keeping the power stations and water supply free from tampering, and their own families safe.”

Self-interest—but of course! I’d seen no evidence of any organized resistance against the invaders in the city, and it suddenly dawned on me that Mr. Wee and his gilded chums might have been playing it both ways: accommodation—that is,
collaboration
—by day, subterfuge by night. Hence the obsessive secrecy, hence the paranoia, hence Kenneth’s and Issa’s hasty departure to the jungle. At least Li and Father had stayed true to their principles.

“You don’t understand, do you?” I cried. “If
I
had been at those stupid meetings, I could have saved my family!”

“But you never said a word about them. So how can you possibly blame us for not knowing!” Daniel was losing his temper. He took a deep breath, calmed himself. “I know you’re very cross. But give Daddy time and don’t ask too many questions. He’s doing all he can to make sure we’re safe. He’ll solve things. I promise you he will. And anyway, remember—
we’re
your family now.”

“I wish Kenneth were here,” I heard myself say before I could stop it.

The color seeped from Daniel’s face. “Why?”

I shook my head. I had lashed out thoughtlessly, cruelly, when it was my own propensity for keeping secrets that had led us all to this. I embraced Daniel and prayed that it was apology enough. It took him a few minutes to forgive me.

I cultivated my little corner of freedom. I was sent to Fatty Wai’s shop three times a week, and three times a week, I decided to make the most of my time away from the house. At this point, the city’s dead harassed me more than the soldiers did. I’d mastered the art of dressing drably and looking inconspicuous with my wares, so the guards never paid me any mind. The spirits were a different story. They rushed up with missing limbs, pressing their bleeding bellies against me, shouting demands—revive them, find their relatives, locate their disintegrated bodies. They weren’t malevolent—far from it. Their situation was only grotesque because their lives were finished and they couldn’t accept it. If only I had completed my lesson with Issa. I might have known how to bring them peace. As it was, all I could do was look away.

To avoid them, I took a route that passed through the checkpoints. Instinctively, the dead stayed away from the enemy. The young soldiers were usually too busy fiddling with some stolen toy or another to bother me. The quieter ones even read books.

 One morning, things changed. As usual, I had asked the shifty, sweat-soaked Fatty Wai for chicken, but today all he would give me were two odiferous, wriggling slabs he claimed were horse mackerel but were certainly live eels and a weeping block of tofu. These meant I’d have to make my way home as briskly as possible.

As luck would have it, the checkpoint guards were absent that morning. Enemy-free, the dead swarmed, grabbing at me as I headed to my tram stop. Cursing the soldiers, I elbowed my way through the throng of mendicant dead, hardening my heart with every step, closing my eyes to their open wounds.
There’s nothing I can do for you, Uncle. Madam, please, I don’t know how to help you.

Approaching the tram stop, I discovered it was where the soldiers had gone. Ten or twelve were gathered around the shelter, locked in some new excitement. One of them, a bespectacled boy I’d earlier seen delighting over a pocket watch, was playing with a toy of a wholly different kind: a girl.

And not just any girl. She was the one with the shorn hair I’d met just a few days ago, the one who thought the bicycling soldiers were here to save us. I thought it couldn’t be—the irony was too harsh—but indeed it was that same girl with her big, naïve eyes. She’d been stripped naked and was being spread-eagled on the wood bench by four giggling soldiers her own age, about seventeen, while their bespectacled leader unwrapped her shopping, layer by layer, with his pale, skinny fingers. From the slime-soaked newspapers, he pulled out a drooping eel. The girl had clearly been to Fatty Wai’s, too.

In a show of encouragement, his enablers yelled, “Banzai!”

Unlike his accomplices, Bespectacled Boy did not laugh. With frowning, almost bookish devotion, he gripped the eel’s head and rammed it into the crevice between the girl’s thighs. She screamed hoarsely, retching a dribble of white froth down the side of her mouth. The boy continued to feed the eel deeper inside her until his hands were coated in blood. As the girl began to choke on her vomit, he shut his eyes, luxuriating in the effects delivered by his sexual surrogate.

I turned to run, fearing his friends would spot me—and discover my own eels—but fate intervened. A band of Chinese men burst out of a nearby shop house wielding rocks and knives. A brick whipped through the air and cracked Bespectacled Boy square in the head, knocking off his glasses and sending him sprawling to the ground. The other soldiers released the girl and reached for their guns. These looked like children’s toys until one of the boys raised his and fired a crackling shot.

This was a call to arms. Yelling like men possessed, the Chinese militia rushed past me and fell on the soldiers, swinging their weapons. More shots rang out, and bodies fell on both sides. The battle then spilled onto the tracks. In the midst of this, I heard the clanging of the approaching tram. I rushed forward, preparing to hop on. But as the driver slowed down, repeatedly sounding his bell to warn those fighting on the rails, the violence spiraled instead onto the tram. Both sides leapt aboard and began clashing anew, forcing the driver to abandon ship with his hands in the air.

“Miss…” Somebody reached for my waist.

I panicked. Without glancing back, I sprinted down an alley that I knew to be infested with souls. My assailant quickly caught up and netted me in his arms. I struggled, heart pounding, but couldn’t break loose.

“Shhh…Don’t worry,” he cooed in English. “I’m not part of that fracas.”

Nor was he one of the dead. He was obviously a civilian like myself, caught in the crosshairs. When he released me, I was grateful for his company, as the ghosts around us scattered. I turned around to look at him. Not only did my rescuer possess a regal Oxonian accent as startling as Kenneth’s, but also he was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick brows and a light beard—not a man to be trifled with.

He bowed his head slightly. “Forgive me if I frightened you.”

I examined him more closely. He was fair-skinned, rather Northern Chinese in his features and old-fashioned formality. I sensed Peking in him—genteel, gold brocade Peking, not the Peking of bureaucrats and petty civil servants.

“I worried that you’d be caught in that fray. And I couldn’t not intervene.”

“Thank you.” I was still panting. Gazing down quickly at my package, I discovered that the wrappings had come loose. The smelly, slimy pieces of eel were now sloshing around the bottom of my market bag.

“You’re carrying fish,” the man said matter-of-factly.

“It’s not fish and it’s not mine. I’m carrying this for somebody else.”

“Lucky them.” He smiled. “May I offer you a lift somewhere? My car is just here.” He pointed out a black Ford, parked on the side of the road. “The tram’s obviously not a wise choice today.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t.” Of course I could—the eels even demanded it—but his chivalry felt too good to be true. “Were you following me?”

He blushed, and my fears were somewhat allayed. “I didn’t intend to,” he said. “But once in a while, a beautiful woman comes along and takes my breath away. My only regret is that I didn’t act sooner, so you needn’t have seen what those monsters did.”

What those monsters did.

“Please accept my offer. It’s not safe for a girl to be walking around like this. I’ll drive you to your destination and shan’t bother you after, charming though you are.”

I looked at the car, mere steps away, and then back at the man, with his kindly, gentle eyes. The heavy, disgusting eels, for which I had paid Fatty Wai a small fortune, eventually decided things for me.

“Thank you.”

As we drove, I marveled at his calm. He clucked at the sight of armed soldiers guarding Wonder World, whose tall red walls the Turnipheads had turned into some kind of a fortress. But other than these mild objections, my new friend showed little distress over what had become of our city, even as we drove around intersections blocked by blackened buses and fallen walls. His detachment reminded me again of Kenneth; he simply refused to let the horrors overcome him.

Once we emerged from the city and plunged into the leafy suburbs, with their scent of orchid and fern, I relaxed.