The White Amah (7 page)

Oh my god, this can’t be happening, thought Crystal when the band at the bottom of the test strip turned a deep blue. She couldn’t be pregnant. Having a baby would spoil everything. She was still crying when Aryn put his head round the door. He made her get up and wash her face, and he insisted she tell Tom right away.

‘There’s no way you’re laying this on me,’ Tom yelled when Crystal announced she was pregnant. ‘You’ve got
no
idea who the father is.’

‘It could as easily be Josh’s or one of your johns,’ sneered Willie.

Crystal’s face flushed with colour. It had been a mistake telling Tom that she was a former White Diamond. It had slipped out when their trial began and the scandalous details were being churned out daily. But she’d never have believed that the man she loved would betray her trust by telling Willie.

‘It’s yours. You
know
it is.’

‘What I want to know is, are you going to marry her?’ Aryn said, barging in before Tom had time to reply.

‘Are you fucking crazy? She knew the score. It’s not like she was a virgin.’

Aryn couldn’t decide if he should comfort Crystal or smack Tom in the mouth.

In the months that followed Tom partied hard, with Willie his constant companion. More often than not he stayed out all night with the groupies who hung round the band. Tired, sick and frightened, Crystal tossed and turned in their king-sized bed. I
hate
him, she thought. How dare he treat me like this? Who did he think he was? He couldn’t have suddenly stopped loving her. It had to be the baby that was freaking him.

Every morning Aryn would bring her in a cup of tea and a dry biscuit, the only thing she could keep down. He was her sounding board. She didn’t know how she would have got by without the tea and sympathy.

‘I can understand why Tom is furious with me,’ she reasoned to Aryn. ‘We were making a name for ourselves and he thinks the baby is going to spoil everything for us. Of course he’s feeling angry. But he must have feelings for me or he wouldn’t still be around.’

Aryn didn’t have the nerve to tell her that Tom had bragged there was no way she was going to trap him. He could have told her she’d never been more than a bit of fun to Tom, just like the girls he and Willie bedded night after night. In Aryn’s opinion, the only reason he was still stringing her along was because she was the drawcard who got them the gigs.

‘I think you should go home,’ Aryn said, ‘at least until the baby’s born.’

Crystal swirled the tea leaves around the inside of her cup. Auntie Rose used to read the tea leaves as a bit of fun, a way of amusing her as a child. She’d stopped playing the game when Crystal kept asking her when her mother was coming back. Crystal put down the cup. She didn’t need tea leaves to tell her what her future would be like back home. She could picture everyone pointing at her, sniggering about how she’d boasted she was going to come back as a star.

She snapped at Aryn. ‘How many times do I have to tell you I don’t have a home? There’s no one who gives a damn about me in Australia.’

She didn’t know that her distraught father had employed a private detective to search for her. After he drew a blank in Singapore, the detective had widened his search to the ashrams and spiritual sects, the haunts of disaffected Western youth, but no one had seen or heard of her. It was as if she had been swallowed up by the arcane, predatory dragon that was Asia.

‘You poor girl,’ said Aryn, and he put his arm round her and patted her awkwardly.’ You could marry me. I love you, you know, and I’d love your baby too.’

Crystal didn’t laugh. Maybe I should take him up on his offer, she thought. She stared at him – his mousy hair, long nose and spotty complexion – and knew she couldn’t wake up with his needy face on the adjacent pillow every morning for the rest of her life.

Working out with weights had forged an abdomen as confining as a heavy-duty, reinforced girdle, and it wasn’t until well
into the final trimester that Crystal’s baby bump finally popped out. Horror struck, she looked from her bulging stomach to the halter-neck lace corset and skin-tight leather pants. She laughed hysterically as she flung the entire contents of her wardrobe on the bed.

‘No going back now, kiddo,’ she said to the mirror, and her face twisted and crumpled.

Crystal’s wardrobe meltdown was the first in a series of catastrophes that culminated in the manager tearing up Speed’s contract.

Ignoring Aryn’s advice, one night Tom maxed the volume on every amp loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss. Some of the audience got up and headed for the lounge, but Crystal’s fan club stayed long enough to boo when she appeared on stage in a baggy cotton caftan. Then, halfway into the first set, the overloaded main board fused. Ranting and raving about the sub-standard conditions, Tom stormed off with Willie. When the power was restored, they couldn’t be found anywhere. Aryn hunted them down in a local dive, stoned – too stoned – to be bothered returning.

The manager was furious, but it was the opportunity his wife had been waiting for. There was a new Filipino group in town, ABBA impersonators.

‘You’ll be sorry if you don’t sign the new group,’ she told her husband, ‘and they end up playing across the road and we lose all our customers. That Crystal isn’t going to pull the crowds with a belly bigger than Buddha’s.’

They moved into a cheaper hotel and Tom did the rounds of hotels, bars and clubs, but word had got around and the band
had acquired a reputation for being unreliable. It had been three weeks since they’d played a gig when Aryn got talking to Stephen Chan in the hotel’s karaoke bar. Stephen’s brother managed the Adelphi Hotel in Miri, in northern Sarawak on the island of Borneo. The third largest island in the world, Borneo was a land of steamy, rain-sodden jungles and home to the Dayaks, fierce tribes who worshipped pagan gods and spirits and whose name was synonymous with headhunting.

‘It’s a boomtown,’ Stephen told Aryn, ‘and my brother’s always on the lookout for new acts. I’ll call him for you.’

Thirty-six hours later the group had arrived in Miri, the home of the state’s oil industry.

‘I know it’s not much,’ Aryn had said nervously when they were shown into their quarters, ‘but for the moment we’ve got a roof over our heads and that’s the main thing, what with the baby being nearly due.’

The other three looked at him glumly, too demoralised by the shabby, seedy-looking hotel to argue. There were a great many international hotels that were eager to provide entertainment to the large, wealthy expatriate community that worked in the petroleum industry, but the Adelphi wasn’t one of them. Built some thirty years earlier, it was rundown, and catered to a humbler clientele that would rather sacrifice flashy decor and entertainment for the sake of cheap drinks.

During the first fortnight, the power had gone off at least four times.

Today they’d been without electricity for six hours. Aryn was lying on the hard, narrow bed in the steamy room he shared with Willie, feeling hot, sticky and miserable. When Crystal
burst through the door he took one look at her tear-stained face and poured a generous measure of scotch into a chipped mug.

‘Medicinal,’ he said. ‘Get that down you, luv. Now tell me what’s bothering you. Slowly, from the beginning.’

Crystal gulped down a mouthful, grimaced and put the mug down on the bedside cabinet.

‘Don’t cry, luv, it’s not good for you,’ he said, trying to cheer her up. ‘You’ll get your figure back once you’ve had the kid. Tom’ll come round. He’s not used to roughing it. It’ll be better once you’re back performing with us. We’ll get a well-paid booking at one of the top hotels and we’ll be in clover.’ But the words of consolation brought on another flood of tears. ‘Crystal, please, what’s the matter? I need to know if I’m going to help.’

‘You can’t help,’ moaned Crystal, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, her arms crossed protectively over her huge belly. ‘Tom says I can’t be in the band if I keep the baby. He says I’ve got to have it adopted and if I don’t he’s going to leave me.’

‘The shit.’ Aryn put his arms round her shoulders and patted her awkwardly. ‘I wish you’d change your mind and marry me. I love you and I’d love your baby too.’

‘You can’t expect Tom to want the baby when he thinks Josh is the father.’ Crystal said, not bothering to acknowledge Aryn’s proposal. ‘It’ll be different when we have one of our own.’

‘Don’t tell me he loves you or I’ll throw up everything I’ve had for lunch,’ yelled Aryn. He couldn’t understand why she was so gullible where Tom was concerned.

Crystal glared at him. She was on the point of walking out but she had to tell someone and there was no one else. ‘Tom knows someone who can arrange the whole thing for us. Her
name is Michelle Kong. She was at the show last night and she and Tom got talking. Michelle’s husband is an obstetrician and she said they often helped out girls like me. She told him there are a lot of wealthy couples who can’t have a baby of their own who would be willing to adopt our baby.’

Aryn was fuming by the time Crystal had finished telling him about the business arrangement Tom had made with this Michelle Kong. He could hardly contain himself when she told him that the adoptive parents had agreed to compensate them for their expenses – twenty thousand ringgit, a godsend for the impoverished band.

‘It’s not right. You can’t sell your baby, Crystal. Surely you can see that.’

‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. The baby’s going to be adopted either way. Why shouldn’t I get some money out of it? They can afford it.’

‘But you don’t know anything about these people. It all sounds dodgy to me. If you’ve really decided to have the baby adopted, go back to Australia. That’s the best thing to do.’

‘But this is the perfect solution. The baby gets a good home and the cash takes the pressure off us. We’ll be able to pick and choose our gigs. No more playing in dives like this.’

Aryn stared at her bleakly; he’d never seen her look so hard and calculating. ‘If you go through with it, I’m leaving,’ he said through clenched teeth.

‘Go, then. Who needs you? It’s like Tom says, you’re nothing but a hanger-on.’

‘You can’t believe that. I only stayed because of you.’ The colour drained out of Aryn’s face and he sank down on the bed, holding his head in his hands.

‘More fool you, then.’ She stormed off, slamming the door behind her.

She sank with relief onto her own bed. In a few days it would all be over. The baby would be gone to rich, loving parents and there’d be enough money to make a fresh start. She closed her eyes. Five minutes later she felt her first pain …

R
UBIAH NURSED THE BABY GIRL EXPERTLY; SHE’D HAD PLENTY OF PRACTICE.
In her tribe unmarried girls were expected to keep an eye on their younger siblings while they practised their weaving. Weaving was as vital for a Dayak maiden as carving was for a man. A newly wedded couple had to produce all the items needed to survive in the wild, formidable jungle.

‘Skilful weavers never lack for suitors,’ her mother had often chided her when she caught Rubiah daydreaming, the pile of reeds collected from the riverbank uncut beside her on the floor.

Rubiah would roll her eyes and pick up her small knife again. Why should she spend her life stagnating in a backwater like her parents and grandparents? The time of the headhunters was over. There was an exciting new world beyond the jungle that she longed for.

Rubiah was a Dayak, one of the indigenous tribes that inhabited the steamy rainforests of Borneo and lived in communal longhouses along the main rivers and their tributaries. Her family were seafarers who supplemented their income with the sale of excess fish her father caught in the South China Sea, and the ginger and pepper her mother grew in her equatorial garden.

Ever since she’d been a small child she’d listened to the stories travellers told about Miri, the fabled city where a wide river flowed with black gold, and bold adventurers made their
fortunes on the foreign rigs that pumped the oil that gushed rich, thick and black from the seabed. At night she’d lie on a rattan mat on the bare boards of the hut next to her parents and siblings and dream of the bright lights of Miri, a place where a pretty girl could live in a house like a palace and wear a different dress every day, not made from cloth she’d woven herself but purchased from glitzy shops crammed with jewels, creams and perfume, shops with every delight imaginable to make her beautiful for the parties where she’d dance and laugh all night.