The White Pearl (6 page)

She squatted on the ground in the red dust and sucked on the discarded skin of an orange. She closed her eyes and took her
time deciding which dream to unfold in her head today. The one where she married an old man who died suddenly – with a little
help from herself – and left her the richest woman in the whole of Malaya to do whatever she chose. Or the one where she was
paddling in the river, the water as cool as ice
cream on her hot shins, and she found a giant pearl as big as a kingfisher’s egg and when she showed it to Razak, like a
bright eye in the centre of the palm of her hand …

‘Get up!’ A kick landed firmly on her thigh, jarring the bone.

In less than a heartbeat she was on her feet, ready to run. ‘Piss off, Hakim.’

‘What the hell are you doing? I don’t pay you good money to sleep all day, you lazy slut.’

‘You don’t pay me anything, you liar,’ she retorted.

But she was careful not to push him too far. Hakim was the boss. He was the one who allocated the various roads to his street-sellers.
He was short and plump, and owned a network of businesses throughout Palur that always required a never-ending stream of cheap
labour. It was in his hands to give her a bad patch for the day or a good one, if he felt friendly. Today he had given her
a decent patch near the station because she’d allowed him to kiss her this morning. Just her lips, she’d insisted, nothing
more. She was strict about that. No one touched her body. Not ever. No one.

That, she had to admit, was the trouble with the rich-old-man dream. He’d want to put parts of himself inside her, and rub
his ancient lizard skin against hers. She shuddered.

Hakim clipped her around the ear and laughed, flashing a row of gold teeth as though he would take a bite out of her.

‘Don’t you get smart with me, Maya. Let’s see what you’ve got.’

He reached for her pouch. She knew better than to resist. She stood immobile, scowling at him while he emptied its contents
into his hand, counted it twice and pocketed the coins.

‘What about me?’ she demanded.

He dropped a meagre few cents back into the pouch.

‘That’s not enough!’

He laughed. Behind him, four gangly youths laughed with him, his pet wolf pack.

‘That’s all you get,’ he sneered. ‘You’ve been lazy today.’

She clamped her teeth on the inside of her cheek to shut herself up. With no comment she turned to scamper away, but Hakim
seized her hair and wound its long strands around his fist, dragging her head back, stretching her neck painfully. She squealed.
He leaned his face so close that the dark skin of his oily cheeks touched hers, but there was no
pleasure in it this time. His eyes were black and cold as a shark’s. His other hand shot down the front of her sarong, his
fingers groping her small breasts as he yanked out the silk fold of material fastened there. She moaned.

‘Thieving whore!’ he shouted.

He slapped a hand carelessly across her face. Not hard; she’d felt worse. But enough to knock her off balance, so that she
stumbled into one of the wolf pack. It was the one with a milky eye and knife scar across his throat. He was probably younger
than she was but already heavily muscled, and he twisted her arm almost out of its socket just for the fun of it. She whimpered
pitifully, but Hakim took no notice.

He removed the dollar bills from inside the silk. ‘Listen to me, you slut. Try to cheat me again and I will mark you so bad
that no one will want to look at your smile ever again.’ His gold teeth loomed over her. ‘Understand?’

She nodded and tried to squirm out of the wolf cub’s grip. Her bare feet scrabbled in the dirt.

Hakim slapped her again. ‘Shut up and listen. I want you at The Purple Pussy tonight. Leena is sick.’

‘No. Please, Hakim. I don’t like …’

He hit her, harder this time. She felt blood ripple down her chin.

‘Just be there.’ He raised his hand again.

She didn’t wait for it to land. She sank her teeth into the wolf cub’s cheek, sprang free when he screamed and was off racing
round the corner of the building when she heard Hakim’s final shout.

‘Be there or be dead, whore!’

She didn’t stop running. People looked at her. No one except little children ran in the tropics. It was too hot, and sweat
glistened on her limbs.
Damn Hakim. Damn the gold-fanged snake spawn to a thousand hells.
But as Maya wove her way through the crowded streets and lingered for a moment to catch her breath in the dusty shade of
a Buddhist temple, listening to the insistent wind chimes hanging from its swooping eaves, her hand clutched at the gold tiepin
fixed to the inside of the knot that held her sarong and she laughed, a wild, angry sound.

Maya bit into the warm chapatti she’d bought from a street stall with her morning’s pittance, and headed home. She found the
harbour busier than usual. She scoured the river, its surface the colour of a mud slide,
and spotted the newly arrived ships. Military ones, grey as river eels. So more British uniforms in town, more guns, more
drunks. Would the white man never tire of his game of war? It was like opium to their weak minds, exciting and addictive.
But Malaya didn’t want their gunboats any more than it wanted their chickenpox or their net curtains.

She shrugged her narrow shoulders and trotted along her street, eager to reach home now that she could be certain her mother
would not be there to shout at her or take a stick to her. Maya would have vanished from Palur years ago if it hadn’t been
for Razak. She glanced up at the sky. Good, she nodded, rain was coming. It meant she could wash her hair before … Something
twitched in her mind, and a cold sickness hit her stomach. At first she had no idea why and glanced quickly around her. What
had changed?

Then her eyes registered the blond head in the street. In this narrow, crowded world of jet-black hair, of skins darker than
tea, of broad cheekbones and wide nostrils, the woman with the golden hair and pale, delicate features stood out in sharp
contrast. Instead of the bright sarongs and
kebayas
that surrounded her, she wore a crisp cream linen dress and picked her way in white leather shoes. She looked like a fragile
egret in a world of crows.

Maya knew her at once, like she knew the lines on her own hand. It was the white woman who had driven the car that had killed
her mother. She had just walked out of her mother’s house and hurried past Maya, close enough to touch her arm, but the woman
saw only another dark anonymous face in a forest of dark anonymous faces.

‘Razak!’ Maya called, alarmed, and sprang quickly through the open door.

The room had been dipped in darkness. A black mood hung in the air and brushed against her face, as sticky as cobwebs. Whatever
had happened in here had changed everything, and she could sense her world tipping off centre.

‘Razak!’

Her twin brother was seated on the mat, surrounded by his butterfly cases, his hands clenched together as though holding themselves
from lashing out. He stared at her the way he’d stare at a stranger.

‘Razak, what did the white woman want?’

‘Forgiveness.’

‘Did she beg for it?’

He shook his head in an angry gesture. ‘No. She tried to buy it.’

Maya crouched down beside him, her voice eager. ‘How much?’

Razak scowled at her and turned away, but she seized his shoulder and shook him. ‘How much did you accept?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You fool!’

‘That white woman killed our family. We owe respect to our mother’s spirit.’

He glared blindly out at the street, seeing things that Maya could only guess at. She sighed softly. Razak had no idea how
beautiful he was, far more beautiful than she would ever be. The gods must have been drunk when they spotted the new-formed
twins in her mother’s womb, and decided to have some sport at the humans’ expense. They stirred their fingers in the mix and
gave all the beauty to the male twin and all the brains to the female one. Maya could still hear them laughing some nights,
harsh, rattling roars in the heavens, but she didn’t curse them. She loved her brother too much for that.

Each morning she enjoyed the sight of his deep golden skin, his impressive black eyes that were incapable of hiding any of
the emotions that poured through him, and his thick black hair and straight, strong limbs. Only his mouth let him down. It
was red and full, much softer than her own, more vulnerable. It upset her sometimes to look at it because it revealed how
easily he could be hurt. That frightened her. It was why she had stayed in Palur.

‘Respect?’ She demanded. ‘For our mother? For the woman who sold my body to the highest bidder when I was ten years old, and
who beat your legs with a stick till they were black and blue and you couldn’t stand? Respect for her?’

‘Shut up! Take back your words.’ He swung around to face her, his eyes wide with anger, but Maya knew it was not at her. It
was at their mother, for dying. For living. ‘She was not well,’ he insisted. ‘Not herself.’

‘How could she be well,’ Maya asked, running a soothing hand down his arm, ‘when every cent you or I could earn or beg or
steal she spent on the happy-pipe?’

He sank his chin on his chest. ‘Don’t, Maya. Show her spirit the respect it deserves as our mother.’

Maya fell silent. She didn’t want to upset him. That was when she noticed the straw hat on the floor, winking at her in the
dim light as if
calling her name. Maya picked it up, felt the quality of its brim and popped it on her own head, grinning at him.

‘Look, Razak, do I look like the white lady?’

‘Take it off. It’s bad luck.’

She took it off quickly. ‘What did she offer?’

‘Money. I burned it. And she offered a job.’

‘A job?’

‘On the Hadley Estate.’

‘Did you accept?’

‘No. I would not dishonour our mother’s peace of soul.’

‘Did she offer anything for me?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. She’s forgotten me and remembered only you.’

‘She spoke to you at the accident so she wouldn’t forget.’ His voice held pity. She’d have preferred anger.

She undid the knot on her sarong and extracted the gold pin. ‘Look.’

He stared at it without asking where it came from. ‘It will pay for our mother’s funeral.’

‘No.’ It came out of her as a wail of dismay.

‘Yes.’ He reached over and took it from her. ‘Thank you, Maya.
Terimah kasih.
It will help the journey our mother’s soul must make.’

It will line the priests’ pockets, Maya thought, but kept it miserably to herself. For a long time the two of them sat in
silence, indifferent to the heat and the insects, their thoughts entwining together. Gradually Maya sensed the blackness lift
in the dingy little room.

‘So you didn’t accept a job from her either?’

‘No. I will not work for this Constance Hadley, nor help her in any way.’

Maya shifted closer to him on the mat, pushing aside his pieces of wood, and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘We will not
help her, my brother.’ She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, ‘But if you do as I say, we will destroy her.’

‘Don’t you want it?’

A drunk hung onto the edge of the shoddy stage, his head wobbling unsteadily, and wafted a dollar bill in the air as if the
smell of it would entice Maya over. She gyrated her tiny hips playfully in his direction, and he added another dollar to the
offering.

The stink of cigarette smoke and the musky odour of cheap sex stifled the air in The Purple Pussy nightclub. It was a trashy
place, its lights kept low to hide the seediness of its interior, and its prices kept high to line Hakim’s pockets. Its beer
was watered. Maya hated it here. The stench, the sweat, the stares. Already naked from the waist up, and moving in time to
the music that seeped out of an upright piano at the side of the stage, she spun on the spot, so that her gauzy little skirt
lifted up high enough to reveal that she wore nothing underneath. The flash of dark, secret hair between her thighs made the
drunk groan and hurl a ten-dollar note onto the stage.

Slowly, tantalisingly, she lifted it from the floor with her toes and, standing on one leg, she raised the foot clutching
the money high in the air behind her, stretching her legs wide apart, at the same time dropping her head and arms to the floor,
the curtain of her hair masking her face. Applause and shouts rattled the walls, and the drunk banged his fists on the stage.
It was what they wanted. No face. No name. Just a female body. It wasn’t just Malays who came to The Purple Pussy; at least
half the patrons were white. The two men at the front table were obviously military types, though out of uniform, and the
quiet one who invariably sat at a table in the far corner, his back to the wall, had a married look about him. He never drank
more than two whiskies and never applauded, just watched the stage with sad eyes.

The Purple Pussy prided itself on providing something for all tastes. There were strippers of all skin colours: black, brown,
yellow and even white – a skinny Russian girl who had travelled down from China. There were ladyboys more beautiful than the
girls, and an assortment of acts of young men, oiled and acrobatic, who wrestled and threw each other across the stage. One
Siamese girl performed a python act, and a tall Ethiopian strutted the stage with a whip and a submissive band of naked slaves,
male and female, who whimpered and moaned.

She flicked off her tiny skirt to roars of approval, and performed a slow, sensuous dance for them which always heated their
blood and got them ordering more drinks. Hakim would be pleased with that. He may even let her keep the ten dollars. She left
the stage and scurried, still naked, to the communal changing room backstage. Everyone was crammed into it, taking clothes
on or off, men, boys and girls all fighting for the mirrors. No one took any notice of nudity. The odour of sweating bodies
was intense.

Maya rescued her sarong from the floor. She wanted to make her escape with the ten dollars before Hakim caught her, but as
she started to push her way to the door she saw the Russian girl crying in front of a broken scrap of mirror propped on a
shelf. As she dabbed at her tears she was coating her cheek with a heavy layer of face paint, covering a dirty bruise that
looked fresh.