I don’t like you, either, I thought, overcome with anxiety for my mother. She’d never been strong and bearing three more children would be hard for her. Still, I’d no say in the matter, and within a month, the marriage negotiations were concluded and we were settled at my new stepfather’s shophouse in Falim.
Falim was a village on the outskirts of Ipoh, little more than a few lanes of Chinese shophouses, their long narrow bodies sandwiched next to each other with shared walls. My stepfather’s shop was on the main street, Lahat Road. It was dark and cool, with two open courtyards breaking up its serpentine length. The big upstairs bedroom over the front was for the newlyweds, and I was to have, for the first time in my life, my own room at the back, next to Shin’s. A windowless corridor ran lengthwise beside the two small rooms, which were stacked in front of each other like railway cars. Light entered the hallway only if our doors were open.
Shin had barely spoken to me during the whole rushed courtship and marriage, though he’d behaved very well. We were exactly the same age; in fact, it turned out that we were born on the same day, though I was older by five hours. To top it off, my stepfather’s surname was also “Lee,” so there was no need to even change names. The matchmaker was pleased with herself, though it seemed like a horrible trick of fate to me, shoehorning me into a new family where even my birthday would no longer be mine. Shin greeted my mother politely but coldly, and avoided me. I was convinced that he didn’t like us.
In private, I’d begged my mother to reconsider but she’d only touched my hair. “It’s better for us this way.” Besides, she seemed to have taken an odd liking to my stepfather. When his admiring gaze rested on her, her cheeks turned pink. He’d given us money in red packets to buy a simple trousseau for the wedding, and my mother had been unexpectedly excited about it. “New dresses—for you and for me!” she’d said, fanning the bank notes out on our worn cotton bedspread.
That first night at the new house, I was frightened. It was so much larger than the tiny wooden dwelling, one room with a step-down, earthen-floored kitchen, that my mother and I had lived in. This shophouse was both a business and a residence, and downstairs seemed a vast and hollow space. My new stepfather was a middleman who bought tin ore from small-time gravel pump miners and dulang washers, women who panned tin ore from old mines and streams, to resell to the large smelters like the Straits Trading Company.
It was a silent, dark shop. Prosperous, though my stepfather was tightlipped and tightfisted. Hardly anyone came unless they had business selling tin, and the front and back were shuttered with iron grates to prevent theft of the stockpiled ore. As the heavy double doors banged shut behind us that first day, my heart sank.
At bedtime, my mother gave me a kiss and told me to run along. She looked embarrassed, and I realized that from now on, she wouldn’t be sleeping in the same room with me. I could no longer drag my thin pallet next to hers or burrow into her arms. Instead, she belonged to my stepfather, who was watching us silently.
I glanced up at the wooden staircase that yawned into the darkness of the upper floor. I’d never slept in a two-story building before, but Shin went straight up. I hurried after him.
“Good night,” I said. I knew he could talk if he wanted to. That very morning, when we were moving our last few belongings in, I’d seen him laughing and running with his friends outside. Shin looked at me. I thought that if this were my house and some strange woman and her child moved in, I’d probably be angry, too, but he had a curious expression, almost pitying.
“It’s too late for you now,” he said. “But good night.”
* * *
Now as I examined the bottle that I’d taken from the salesman’s pocket, I wondered what Shin would make of it. It occurred to me that there were animals with fingers, too.
“Suppose this isn’t even human?” I said to Hui, who was mending her skirt.
“You mean, like a monkey’s finger?” Hui’s nose wrinkled. Clearly, this idea was just as repulsive to her.
“It would have to be big—a gibbon or maybe even an orangutan.”
“A doctor might be able to tell,” Hui bit off her thread thoughtfully. “Though I don’t know how you’d find one to examine it.”
But I did have someone to ask. Someone who was studying anatomy, even if he was only a second-year medical student. Someone who’d proven, over the years, that he could keep a secret.
Shin would be back from Singapore next week. He hadn’t been home for almost a year, and even then, only briefly. The last holiday he’d worked as a hospital orderly in Singapore for extra income. His letters to me, never frequent, had petered out, and I’d stopped waiting for them. Perhaps it was better not to hear about his new friends or the lectures he attended. I was so envious of Shin that sometimes a bitter taste would flood my mouth. Yet I should be happy for him. He’d managed to get away.
Since I’d left school, my life had been a complete waste of time. A scheme to train as a teacher had fallen through when my stepfather discovered that new teachers could potentially be dispatched to any village or town in Malaya. Out of the question, he said, for an unmarried girl. Nurse-training was even more unsuitable. I’d have to sponge-bathe strangers and dispose of their body fluids. In any case, I didn’t have the money. My stepfather offered the cold reminder that I’d been permitted to stay on at school at his expense, long after most girls had dropped out. His opinion was that I ought to stay decently at home, clerking for him until I got married; it was only grudgingly that he’d even allowed my dressmaking apprenticeship.
* * *
There was a knock at the dressing-room door. I tucked the glass vial into my handkerchief.
“Come in!” Hui sang out.
It was one of the doormen, the younger one. He pushed the door open with an embarrassed air. The dressing room was dance-hostess territory, though at the moment only Hui and I were there.
“You know that salesman you asked me about the other day?”
I was instantly alert. “Did he come back again?”
His eyes shied away from the dresses draped over the backs of chairs, the traces of spilled powder on the dressing table.
“Is this him?” He held out a newspaper, folded open to the obituary section. Chan Yew Cheung, twenty-eight years old. Suddenly, on June 4th. Beloved husband. And there was a grainy photograph, obviously a formal portrait. His hair was slicked back and his expression serious, the confident smirk laid aside, but it was the same man.
I pressed my hand against my mouth. All this time the stolen finger had been weighing on my mind, the man himself had been lying cold and stiff in a mortuary somewhere.
“Did you know him well?” asked the doorman.
I shook my head.
The obituary was a small notice, but the word “suddenly” had an ominous air. So the salesman’s prediction about being lucky had been wrong. Because according to my calculations, he’d died the day after our encounter.
With a shudder, I put the glass bottle, wrapped in my handkerchief, on the table. It seemed heavier than it ought to have been.
Hui said, “You don’t think it’s witchcraft, do you?”
“Of course not.” But I couldn’t help recalling a Buddhist statue I’d seen as a child. It was a little thing made of ivory, no bigger than this finger. The monk who’d shown it to us had said that a thief had once stolen it, but no matter how often he tried to sell or throw it away, it reappeared in his possession until, guilt-stricken, he’d returned it to the temple. There were other local tales as well, such as the toyol, a child spirit made from the bone of a murdered infant. Kept by a sorcerer, it was used to steal, run errands, and even commit murder. Once invoked, it was almost impossible to get rid of, save by proper burial.
I studied the newspaper carefully. The funeral would be held this weekend in the nearby town of Papan, a bit farther out from my family home in Falim. I was due back for a visit; perhaps I could return the finger. Give it to his family, or drop it in his coffin so it could be buried with him, though I wasn’t sure how to manage it. What I was certain about, however, was that I didn’t want to keep it.
5
Batu Gajah
Wednesday, June 3rd
The person who really runs the new doctor’s household is a taciturn Chinese cook named Ah Long. He’s the one who takes charge of Ren, dripping wet as he is, and ushers him through the bowels of the house to the servants’ quarters in the back. The outbuildings are separated by a covered walkway, but it’s raining so hard that the spray wets them to the knees.
It’s difficult for Ren to judge adults’ ages, but Ah Long seems old to him. A wiry man with knotted arms, he offers Ren a rough cotton towel.
“Dry up,” he says in Cantonese. “You can have this room.”
The room is small, barely eight feet across, with a narrow window of louvered glass panes. In the blue gloom, Ren can make out a single cot bed. The household is eerily silent and he wonders where the other servants are.