The Black Isle (7 page)

He placed my bleeding hand over Li’s mouth, pressing my cut against it until his lips pulled apart. I felt Li’s teeth rubbing against my wound but his eyes remained shut. Was he really asleep or just pretending? Seeing my blood smeared across his mouth like lipstick, I felt ill.

“Drink,” Father whispered to his beloved son, tears forming in his eyes, too crystalline and proud to fall.

Li drank.

Although I couldn’t know it then, the balance of power between my twin and myself—a delicate, unspoken understanding natural only to those who’ve shared a womb—had begun to shift. I was now Li’s benefactor; it was my blood that kept him alive.

Maybe because he sensed this unsettling change, Father watched me hawkishly. We went as a pair to the cafeteria for our meals, ferrying food back to Li, who stayed in the room to rest. To improve my circulation, we took solemn, repetitive hikes together on the sports deck, circling the smoke stacks until I memorized every crack and ding in the paint. Each time he caught me looking at a stairway or door, he chastised me with a painful squeeze of my arm or with a harrumph if others happened to be watching. Back in the cabin, I received a hard smack for every liberty-seeking glance. Escape proved futile.

Yet it wasn’t exactly escape that I craved. I was thinking about Odell. I had so many questions for him: Was he like me? Could he always see the dead? Was he ever frightened? Would I be? Part of me prayed that he would come back to third class and rescue me, but an even greater part dreaded him seeing me like this, kept under lock and key by an unworthy guardian.

Every morning, under Father’s supervision, I fed Li his cafeteria breakfast and lunch. Every night, again under Father’s watch, Li fed on me, reopening the gash on my palm by first peeling off the scab with his teeth, then sucking on the clot until life flowed afresh from my veins to his and we became one continuous artery.

When Li felt better one evening after his “dinner,” Father was able to take him outside for some fresh air. Once they were safely gone, I saw my chance and stepped into the dusk.

The ship had entered an equatorial zone of dead calm in the South China Sea, an area that was known as the Doldrums because nothing there ever stirred. The air stayed warm and sticky day and night without variation. It was notorious for driving sailors mad with restlessness. But not just sailors. I felt the suffocating humidity burrowing deep into my pores like a pox that was impossible to scratch off.

Running breathlessly along the twilit promenade, I was instantly drenched. Sweat trickled down my chest and legs like tickly snakes. Every door to first class was now locked. My boundary crossing must have provoked these measures. I cursed the engineer. Why so much fuss over one little ghost girl? Why the fear?

Halfway down the walkway, I climbed up a ladder to the next deck, panting from the extra weight the Doldrums seemed to have piled onto me. Up there, my path lit by the most halfhearted moonlight imaginable, I faced a grim mechanical wasteland—spigots, the elbows of unfriendly pipes, the yawning mouths of massive ventilators.

Suddenly the floor shook with a low, vibrating blast, and my ears, bones, everything shattered. The call of Satan’s own trumpeter. I fell to the ground, plugging my ears. Eventually the noise ceased. Nerves still ringing, knees still soft, I ventured forth.

I looked out at the water. It was alit. Not with jellyfish this time but with undulating flecks of gold. Reflections! Adjusting my eyes, I glimpsed on the horizon a swath of land. Its modest hillocks were packed with the silhouettes of curious giraffes, their long necks bending to one side. Electric lights were ablaze on some kind of dock.

It had been days since I had seen anything but water, and even this unpromising atoll romanced me. It loomed closer and closer with each passing second. The giraffes turned out not to be animals after all but tropical palms, their trunks yielding to a nonexistent breeze. Firefly dots of light flickered in the blackness beyond, like a hundred children waving mirrors from dark windows.

“They’ll forget you,” said a child’s voice. It echoed strangely, as if it had come from yards away or from some forlorn corner of my mind. “They always forget you.”

But no more than five feet behind me, amidst the knots and necks of pipes, stood a girl in a red swimsuit. Rachel, of course. Again, I felt no fear. Water flowed from her nostrils and mouth and cascaded down her waxen, silvery skin. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks, possibly once rosy, were sallow. Here was a sweet girl made plain by chlorine and death, nothing at all like the carefree little Europeans I’d seen in Shanghai. She sighed with an old person’s sobriety and turned to leave.

“Wait!” I cried. “Who’s going to forget me?”

The look on her face sent a spear of ice through me: She had the eyes of the kitten in the park, soon after its fear had stilled, the eyes of one who had seen enough to not place any faith in human beings. Somehow I had already failed her.

From deep within its belly, the ship released another plangent, metallic wail. I felt subterranean brakes groaning into place and was thrown against a standing pipe. When I picked myself up, Rachel was gone. All that remained was a puddle where she had stood and the unmistakable scent of the swimming pool.

Cold panic tore through me.
They’ll forget you
. I dashed toward our cabin.

How long had I been gone? Hours? Third class was deserted. Nobody was in the cafeteria, not even the old codgers who usually sat around playing checkers and smoking Red Lion cigarettes. The reek of tobacco breath still hung in the air, telling me they couldn’t have strayed far—but where to? Down the entire third-class corridor, cabin doors had been left gaping, indecent, and through each I peered uneasily into unmade bunks, evidence of hasty departures. My legs wobbled as I approached ours.

Our room was empty; all our things were gone. Father and Li had abandoned me.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I was in pajamas, and embarrassing ones at that—pink flannel imprinted with bouncing rabbits, the left shoulder seam splitting, the underarms salty with perspiration. I had no idea where Father intended for us to lodge, no address, no names of distant relatives who might be standing on the pier in their grass skirts.

My legs were betraying me also. They now threatened to buckle. With a final surge of energy, I climbed to the top bunk and curled up against the hideous green wall, hoping the vines would emerge from it to fold me in, enmesh me in leaves and lichen until everything, everything, was over. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed; tears were pushing their way out.

Footsteps down the corridor. I jerked up. “Father?”

A face appeared in the doorway—not Father. It was the tanned sailor. “There you are!” He sighed. “Come, hurry.” He came directly to the bunk and seized me, flopping me over his shoulder as if I were a pig to market.

Over the shaky gangway from ship to land, I glimpsed a strip of dark water, teeming with what looked like luminous, fluctuating tulips. Baby jellyfish, still uncertain, still unformed.

Incense, the pious kind Mother despised, laced the air on land. But as soon as we entered the covered terminus, a dilapidated pavilion with wrought-iron pillars, all I smelled was rank body odor. Although electric ceiling fans buzzed far above our heads, it felt as though we’d entered an enormous oven. A teeming oven in which each person had distilled his or her entire life into a single trunk and consequently guarded it with unnatural and often undue hostility.

“Welcome home,” the sailor whispered in my ear as he set my jellied feet down on solid ground in the middle of thousands of people I’d never met. “Your father and brother are waiting for you under the big clock.”

He nudged me in the right direction. I couldn’t see them, but the pale yellow clock face loomed like a moon above the flurry of sticky elbows and sweat-mottled backs. The moon clock had but one arm. What a terrible place this was that even the port terminal clock would be missing an arm! Presently I realized my mistake: The minute hand was tucked behind its brother.

It was midnight.

THE BLACK ISLE
was the largest in a chain of some thirty or forty islands scattered along the equator, the smallest of which sprouted no more than a fishing shack and a cluster of palms. East to west it spanned fifty miles, north to south a hundred fifty.

Far from being the center of things, however, the Island—as it was called by the locals—sat like a dull guest in the northwestern corner of the Archipelago, itself an unpromising clutch of crumbs with only the pull of the earth holding it in place. This arrangement seemed entirely provisional, and you got the sense from looking at the map that even the Isle might someday wear thin gravity’s welcome and simply float away.

Yet the Black Isle’s place was as solid as Gibraltar. The British East India Company had owned and operated the Island since the early 1800s, running it as a city-state, much like Florence or Venice at their peak, albeit with Anglo-Saxon stoicism instead of Latinate bravura.

It was the shiny opal in the empire’s Far Eastern crown—Britain’s only territory with a deep natural harbor
and
the right climate for the cultivation of such planter favorites as rubber, tobacco, and nutmeg. And being equidistant between India and China, the Island made an ideal stop for British ships ferrying opium. But as to the portentous timbre of its name, the mighty colonizers could not be blamed. It was a literal translation of the native Malay
Pulau Hitam
(Island Black), perhaps a bitter wink at its shadowy history as a pirate’s lair before the coming of the European.

It was this dark aspect that we saw on the night of our arrival at the tail end of 1929, dreaming of a better life.

The entryway into the Isle was flanked by a series of greeters, starting with poker-faced Chinese guards who divided up the thronging new arrivals. Those Chinese men who spoke fluent English and wore spectacles were pulled from the queue and directed to a separate, less busy area.

“Special treatment!” Father sputtered. He pulled out his comb to neaten his oily, unwashed hair, but then struck me with it instead. “Why did you run off without telling me? If I didn’t have to go looking for you, I would have cleaned up!”

Years later, I realized that
our
queue had been the lucky one. Because they looked educated, those well-groomed men were interrogated about that scourge of Eurasia, Bolshevism, and were given cavity probes for tell-tale proclivities. Those who gave the slightest cause for suspicion were promptly thrown back on the boat.

At a second checkpoint stood a corpulent British inspector whose sole duty it was to shake hands with us newcomers. This was no friendly gesture, however; he was on the lookout for smooth hands. Smooth hands, too, raised red flags. Father, with his fey, scholarly mien, fell into this category, but fortunately for him, his bedraggled tagalongs (me in torn pajamas, Li of the green face) allowed him to pass through unmolested.

We slept on hardwood benches in the terminal building until morning. At daybreak, packed and smelling like sardines, we were carted off in rickety buses and dropped off en masse at the main depot in the center of the city.

The city began on the Island’s southern tip, and from this Victorian crucible civilization boomed. What I saw that first dawn was a typical frontier town, much like what I would later see in pictures of Bombay, Sydney, Johannesburg: a clique of European wedding cakes standing close together, frowning valiantly through the heat and dust at the endless circuit of zigzagging trolleybuses. Everything was overwhelming—the noise from horns, engines, cursing in a dozen languages; the smell of coal smoke, frying oil, sewer rot; and even the people, who were all sizes and shades. Most terrifying of all were the rogue taxicabs that flew over curbs, sluicing in front of man, beast, and automobile, honking all the way. The moment we stepped into the street, one of these wild jalopies, puffing putrid black smoke, came within a foot of ramming us down; at the last second, it swerved away, its Klaxon horn battering our eardrums. I held on to Father and Li, jumping, squealing, and weeping at every honk. Finally, Father flagged down the most sedate one of them to whisk us away.

I gaped out the window. Along the edge of the road, unruly with meandering snack carts and billboards selling Vicks cough mixture and Flying Horse bicycle tires, moved a grave procession of twenty or thirty men. They wore thick black robes and marched two by two, their hooded heads piously bent, their pace in keeping with some shared bereavement. As we slowly glided past them, I saw that under each of their overhanging cowls was a solemn, unyielding darkness.

“Why so quiet all of a sudden?” Father asked me, not unkindly.

“Those men,” I whispered, pointing.

He looked. “What men?”

I shuddered and let the subject drop. Unlike the ghosts I’d met before, these men unnerved me; they were too remote. Worse, there was now nobody I could tell, not even Sister Kwan, who, for all her shortcomings, at least believed me. Would these visions never end? I curled up into a ball and shut my treacherous eyes.

A different kind of dread fell upon me when we reached Chinatown and the knot of lanes known as Bullock Cart Water, so called because a station for working beasts used to stand there. I knew Shanghai was gone forever when the cab pulled up to our narrow four-story row house: Jet-black mildew covered its walls, pink patches of brick exposed like bare skin. We had come all this way, endured the long voyage, for this? What’s more, we had to lug our own cases—no servants ran out to help us. No Sister Kwan, no Sister Choon, not even chubby, grouchy Cricket.

Li fought back his tears as we lugged our possessions up steep, dark, creaking stairs to the third floor. It was a small but real comfort that I wasn’t alone in my dismay. I kept waiting for him to say something to Father, but he never did.

When we came to door 31A, its red paint flaking off where vandals had scratched a huge and ominous
X
, Father pulled me aside.

“Your brother’s not feeling well,” he said softly, slipping me a few coins. “Go downstairs and buy some
baos
. They will cheer him up.”

I knew pork buns were Li’s favorite, but where was I to find them? This wasn’t Shanghai. Did people even eat
baos
here? Nevertheless, I did as I was told. The longer I could delay facing the squalor of our apartment, the better. I ran all the way downstairs, taking care to avoid the festering mound of feces I’d spotted on the second-floor landing. A rat hissed at me from some unseen hole.

The shop on the ground floor of our row house was named House of Great Hope. It didn’t sell
baos
; what it had in its tall glass cabinets were male-potency elixirs made from deer antlers and cobra hearts. The sidewalk in front of the building had been commandeered by a wordless duo: a barber who cut hair in the open and a coffee man who used an old sock as his strainer. No
baos
. I ran down the street reading the signs—Long Last Incense, Great Eastern Fortune-Teller, Gold Star Herbalist. At the end of the pavement clustered five women with no faces. I rubbed my eyes, but it did no good; each still had a creamy blur in place of features. Though they looked Chinese in their white pajamas, their frenzied chatter was no dialect I’d ever heard. It was closer to shushing, the admonishments of stern librarians.

I turned back before any of them could spot me. But no sooner did I move away than something raced up behind me and tapped my shoulder. I shrieked.

It was not a ghost, just a man who seemed like one—a scrawny, white-haired Indian sadhu with gray-black skin and a pale smear of volcanic ash between his eyes. He was barefoot and wore no more than a muslin loincloth. Each time he waved his arms, he unleashed the reek of rotting meat.

I clutched the coins tightly but he didn’t want money. No, he fixed his magnetic, bloodshot eyes on me and shook his dirt-encrusted fist at the cosmos.

“
Very dirty
, this island…This island,
very dirty
.”

Having uttered this strange greeting, he nodded at me and ambled away at a leisurely pace, taking his fleas with him.

We shared apartment 31A with two other newcomer families, the Cantonese Wongs and the Hakka Koos—both half families, torn down the middle like ours. Each clan made do with a room of two bunk beds and a wardrobe. Ours had me nostalgic for the ship. There was just one window and it overlooked an alley favored by whistling, lip-smacking pimps. Luckily, there wasn’t any room here left for ghosts.

The common area was just wide enough for a table and a single bench, so the families ate in turn, which was just as well. The drab monotony of our dinners—rice, salt fish, pickled vegetables—was a constant source of shame. With these dismal dinners gurgling in our bellies, Li and I spent every dusk hiding from the black-skinned Tamil who went shirtless from door to door, chanting:
“Karang guni…Karang guni…”
We had talked ourselves into believing he was a jailer coming for naughty boys and girls. It was only after speaking to the Koos that we discovered our foolishness:
karang guni
meant “discards,” not “children.” He was only the dustman.

In that tight space, a tense, unspoken rivalry grew between the three fathers for jobs, schools, food. There were always unhappy looks whenever a child from one family was caught playing with one from another. After a while I realized why. We had entered a kind of limbo, a transitional period in which we were meant to form no ties, exchange no secrets; it was the loathsome interregnum we were never to speak of again once we settled into our
real
lives as respectable Islanders with our own private apartments. Already we never spoke of our passage on the ship. The collective amnesia Father, Li, and I feigned just had to keep on expanding.

And so our first weeks passed.

Mosquitoes sucked at our blood, geckoes shat in our food, and we fell asleep—even in the stony heart of Chinatown, with no sea view and nary a sprig of green—to the howls of wild dogs and the arias of ten thousand insects. Still, we dreamed.

Li and I were sent to free day schools run by missionaries—Oldham Boys for him, St. Anne’s for me—but contrary to literary cliché, we were not put to work weaving rugs, nor were we set upon with paddles and canes by mad, grinning nuns. We paid in prayer, yes, but lucky for us, the good brothers and sisters wanted first and foremost to turn the children of the Black Isle into learned little people—catechism came only after Chaucer, mass only after math.

St. Anne’s was a two-story Victorian box on Emerald Hill, just beyond the business district. Its founding donor was one Ignatius Wee, the rare philanthropist of Chinese descent who did not demand the place be named after him nor that a pair of snaggletoothed
foo
dogs flank the entryway. The only visible marker of Mr. Wee’s generosity was a plain brass plaque outside the staff room with the simple legend
IGNATIUS WEE, PATRON
. The somber gray building could have passed for a tourist landmark had it not been for its notorious former life as an asylum, a memory the nuns had done nothing to rub out.

On my first day there, I learned a new word, which, I suppose, boded well for my education.

“Guano,” announced Sister Enid Nesbit, the apple-cheeked and uncommonly kind headmistress, anticipating what must have been the question most asked of her. “That’s not frosting or candle wax. It’s just guano.”

We were standing outside in the midday sun. She was pointing at the school’s roof, from which weird gray spears hung from the eaves like stalactites, blackening with each successive monsoon.

“Guano?” I asked meekly, every bit the new girl whose father was so underinformed as to enroll her in the middle of term.

“Guano is feces, or more specifically, bat feces.” Sister Nesbit beamed, almost house-proud. “There are pigeon droppings mixed in there, too, of course, but it is still mainly bats. We’ve loads of bats. You could almost say we’re quite—”

“Batty?”

She laughed. “Could be…though I was actually going to say we’re quite well fortified for a convent school, because guano makes for excellent gunpowder.”

Sister Nesbit, I would later learn, was the product of a Calcutta birth and fifty-odd years spent shuffling between the port towns of the empire, a history that helped explain her ability to turn every mishap or disgrace into an opportunity for learning.

In truth, I had not paid much heed to the discolored walls. Instead my eyes were transfixed by what I saw through the windows: waxen European women, clearly not students or teachers, staring out of the classrooms like dress shop dummies. They did have faces, or at least partially—gray-rimmed eyes and smudged noses, no mouths—and they were naked, their bare breasts varying in shape and sag.

There were
so many
of them. My school was a gallery of dead women.

Sister Nesbit was oblivious, but my arms were covered in gooseflesh. I was ashamed for these women, yet also terrified, and tried to conceal my nerves with excessive smiling.

“I can tell you’re going to do very well here,” Sister Nesbit said, all maternal encouragement as she led me inside the building whose darkness her bright attitude had scant prepared me for.

What saved me was the nuns’ generosity of spirit, which forced me to put on a brave front, day after day. Was I terrified of the mouthless, naked specters that crisscrossed the classrooms? Of course I was. Did I dread morning assembly at Shaw Hall, with the long-haired schoolgirl dangling from the ceiling fan, shaking out her final spasms inches from Sister Nesbit’s wimple? I felt sick every time. I even grew numb whenever the nuns spoke of “the Holy Ghost” in prayer.

The most dreadful room in the building was also the one impossible to avoid: the toilet. Windowless, pungent in the extreme, and lit by a lone bare bulb, it had five mossy stalls, each fitted with an oval hollow in the tiled floor that always became clogged by noon. A low bank of sinks lined one wall, their mirrors cracked and smeared with dark, unwashable stains that looked suspiciously like old blood. One didn’t need a special gift to know that unspeakable things had happened here. The first time I stepped into the gloomy room, I saw four naked European women lying on the grimy white tiles, their bluish, milky rib cages marred by cuts and bruises, their eyes staring at me. The stalls were worse—each had its own phantom guardian crouching behind the door. Every time I entered, I thought of the sadhu’s words—
very dirty
.