“Do I know your brother?” My head felt heavy. I could barely keep my eyes open.
“You will when you see him.” The little boy turned, his eyes widening in alarm. “Please don’t fall asleep! If you do, you’ll fall through.”
“Fall through to what?” I was having difficulty understanding him.
“To the level below. This is Station One, you see. Oh please don’t! Wake up!”
He was making quite a racket. The banging got louder and louder until I forced my eyes open blearily.
“Wake up! Ji Lin, wake up!” It was Mrs. Tham, hammering on the door of my room.
Light streamed in through the slats. Disoriented, I found myself lying in bed. Mrs. Tham burst in, her feathers ruffled. Something was up; she was positively simmering with excitement.
“He’s downstairs. Your brother, that is. I think he’s come to take you home to Falim.”
“He is?”
“I told him I knew that he was your brother and why didn’t he say so yesterday? He’s waiting for you in the front room.”
“Is my mother all right?” Fear gripped me. Something must have happened, otherwise why would Shin come to fetch me away?
I’d always been afraid of receiving a message like this and the terror must have shown in my eyes, because Mrs. Tham said quite kindly, “No, there’s nothing wrong. That was the first thing I asked him. It’s just a family get-together to celebrate.”
Our family almost never had get-togethers, let alone celebrations. If we did, they were stiff affairs in which my stepfather’s friends were invited over and the men would sit and talk for hours while my mother and I served them endless cups of tea. Shin knew perfectly well how I felt about them; I couldn’t imagine that he’d come to fetch me away to such purgatory.
“If it’s a special occasion,” said Mrs. Tham, “why don’t you wear something nice? Show your mother what you’ve been learning.”
Despite her fussiness (or perhaps because of it), Mrs. Tham was a talented dressmaker and a shrewd businesswoman. Sending me off nicely dressed was good advertising for her shop. Now she was busy inspecting the clothes I’d made, twitching them off hangers and muttering, “No, not this one. Maybe this one. Here. Show the other girls in Falim what Ipoh clothes look like.”
It was a Western-style frock, a deceptively simple yet elegant design that Mrs. Tham had copied from a magazine picture. She had good taste, I had to admit.
“And if anyone asks you about your dress, be sure to give our shop’s name!” she said on her way out. “Oh, and fix your face!” she hissed, pointing significantly at my eye.
I washed up and packed a simple overnight kit. What could possibly be happening at home? Pulling back my bangs, I stared gloomily at the small round mirror above the washstand. My black eye was still vaguely purple and yellow. I couldn’t possibly show this to my mother, so I did my best with a little pan-stick makeup and a smudge of kohl.
I could hear Shin’s low voice in the front room of the shop. Clutching my rattan basket, I stood hesitantly in the doorway. It was embarrassing to be so dressed up early in the morning, but Mrs. Tham jumped up, dislodging her little dog, Dolly, from her lap, and greeted me with a cry of delight.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, turning me to one side and then the other. “This pattern turned out so well. And your sister is as good as a professional mannequin. I always like her to model my dresses.”
I signaled Shin with my eyes. Time to leave! But he was enjoying himself at my expense.
“I can’t tell,” he said. “Make her twirl a bit more.”
To my horror, Mrs. Tham actually started to spin me around. Dolly barked hysterically.
“No, no. He’s just joking. And we have to leave now.”
“But Mr. Tham has just gone to the coffee shop to buy some char siew bao!” she said, forcing me to sit down. I glared at Shin as he bit back his amusement.
“Now!” said Mrs. Tham, fixing us both with a beady eye. “Which one of you is older?”
“I am,” I said quickly.
“We were born on the same day.” Shin hated being my younger brother and would deny it at every opportunity.
“So you’re twins!” Mrs. Tham looked pleased. “How nice for your mother.” I was about to tell her that Shin was my stepbrother but she chattered on relentlessly. “Twins are special, I suppose. Especially boy-girl dragon and phoenix twins. Do you know that the Chinese believe that boy and girl twins were husband and wife in a former life? And that they couldn’t bear to be separated, so they were reborn together?”
That seemed both silly and rather tragic to me. If I loved someone, I wouldn’t want to be reincarnated as his sibling, but it wasn’t worth arguing with Mrs. Tham. She had an uncanny knack of sucking you into her orbit. Shin, too, seemed to have had enough. Smiling, he said that it was time to get going as we’d miss the bus.
* * *
“So why are you here?” I asked him as soon as we were away from the shop. “Did anything happen at home?”
“No.”
I had to run a little to catch up with Shin’s long stride, as he suddenly seemed to be in quite a hurry and was heading in the wrong direction for the bus.
“We’re not taking the bus,” he said. “We’re taking the train. Don’t look so worried—it’s nothing to do with home. In fact, they think I’m in Batu Gajah.”
It was half a mile to the railway station from Mrs. Tham’s and Shin showed no sign of slowing down as we turned up Belfield and took a left on Hugh Low Street.
“What’s the hurry?” I asked as we cut in front of a bullock cart, narrowly avoiding a cyclist who rang his bell angrily at us.
“It’s later than I thought.” Shin seized my traveling basket, and there was nothing to do but hurry after him.
Though I’d taken a train only a few times in my life, everyone knew the railway station. Famously known as the Taj Mahal of Ipoh and designed by a British government architect who’d come to Malaya by way of Calcutta, it was an enormous, sprawling white building that looked like a wedding cake or a Moghul palace. Domes and minarets topped curved archways that led to marble-tiled corridors, a hotel for travelers with a bar and café, and tunnels and stairs that went up and down and led to railway platforms.
Shin headed straight into the station. Breathless, I caught up with him at the ticket window.
“Two tickets to Batu Gajah,” he said, sliding the money across the counter.
I was filled with unreasonable excitement and delight. Why were we going? Not wanting to ask too many questions in front of strangers, I squeezed Shin’s arm instead, my face bright.
“Honeymooners?” said the ticket seller, looking at my smart frock.
I dropped Shin’s arm as though it burned. A crimson stain appeared on the back of his neck, all the way up to his ears, but he didn’t say anything.
“Platform Two. Ten minutes till the train leaves,” said the ticket seller. We ran down the marble stairs under the tracks to the other side and then into the train that was already beginning to blow steam.
“It’s a third-class carriage, I’m afraid,” said Shin.
I didn’t care. I was so excited that I had to stop myself from jumping up to look at everything, from the hard wooden seats to the windows that slid up and down. Amused, Shin put my basket on the rack above the seat and I noticed for the first time that he’d brought nothing with him.
“Were you in town last night?” I asked. “Mrs. Tham said she saw you.”
“I stayed with a friend.”
I wondered who it was—maybe a woman—but felt I shouldn’t pry.
“So why are we going to Batu Gajah?” I’d been there once to visit one of my mother’s relatives. It was a pretty little town, sleepily satisfied with its position as the center of colonial administration for the Kinta district. “It’s not because of the finger, is it?” My face fell.
The train gave a final, ear-splitting whistle. “Of course it’s because of the finger,” said Shin. “Don’t you want to find out where it came from?”
I considered telling him about narrow-faced Mr. Y. K. Wong, but couldn’t explain without mentioning the dance-hall part. Instead, I nodded.
“Anyway,” said Shin, “I went down to Batu Gajah early on Monday. They’re a bit short-staffed and were glad enough to have me.” He was looking out of the window, but I understood, without his saying anything, that Shin couldn’t stand being in the same house as his father. No doubt that was why he’d stayed in Singapore during the last holiday break.
“How is it?” I asked.
“I’m bunking with another orderly—he’s friendly enough. The first thing I did was to look up that salesman, Chan Yew Cheung. His aunt said he’d been close to a nurse at the hospital, so I tried to find out if he’d been a patient. Unfortunately, the patient registrations are locked up in the records department. But I lucked into something else.”