I was taken aback, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Eventually Shin was bound to find a girl he liked.
Fong Lan had a round face and gently slanted eyebrows, and she adored Shin. People were surprised that he’d chosen her out of all the girls who mooned after him. There were disparaging remarks, like “her calves look like lo bak,” the giant white radishes, but if Fong Lan heard, she didn’t seem to care. That was part of her appeal, that mature sincerity of hers. Sometimes she was so good that it made me want to scream. Yet I, too, was drawn to her. When she talked to me in her soft, serious voice, I felt that I wanted an older sister like her to comfort me. To cherish me and love me.
Once, coming home unexpectedly early, I’d caught her with Shin. It was a quiet, empty afternoon, so still I’d thought no one was home. I could whistle loudly, meddle with all the things that my stepfather didn’t like us to disturb. Stupid restrictions like tearing the next page off the daily calendar, or changing the radio dial to a different station. I could do all of them, but instead, I walked decorously upstairs.
At the top of the stairs, I cast my schoolbag aside and slid noiselessly down the corridor in my socks. And then I stopped at an unfamiliar sound—a gasp and a soft moan. A girl’s voice, coming from Shin’s room. I froze. There was a tingling sensation, as though my skin was seizing up, shrinking too small for me. And through the open door, I saw them.
They were on the floor of Shin’s room, that space I was no longer permitted to enter. Fong Lan was leaning against his bed. The front of her blouse was open revealing the pale, heavy swell of her bare breasts as she bent over him, her hair parted like a shining curtain. Shin’s head was cradled in her lap. One of her hands splayed possessively on his chest. His face was turned away, but I could see hers. She looked entranced, as though she’d never seen anything so beautiful as Shin. And he was beautiful. It was obvious even to me at that moment, the lean careless length of his body, the sharp tilt of his chin.
In that instant, I understood a great deal. About Shin, and about me. And how there were some things that you could never have. In all the years I’d lived in that house, I’d never seen Shin so relaxed, without the watchful tension that wound his body like a spring. When I’d held him in the darkness behind the chicken coop, I’d felt it: the rigidity and anger that wouldn’t go away. But here, in the soft hazy afternoon light, was a different Shin, one that I’d never seen before. And I felt horribly, sickeningly inadequate. No matter how close we were or what secrets we shared, I could never give him this peace.
A choked gasp forced its way out of my throat. Fong Lan lifted her head but I was already gone, running down the long corridor. When I think about that shophouse in my memories, it’s always a dark, endless tunnel both upstairs and downstairs. Not knowing what to do, I ended up wandering around in a daze, and only returned when I was sure my mother and stepfather were back. Shin had acted as though nothing had happened. He showed no reaction when I came home, so late that the lamps were already lit and my mother was scolding me in fear and relief. But Fong Lan talked to me a few days later.
“I know you saw us the other day,” she said. “It must have been awkward for you.”
Her very softness and meekness felt like a stab to the heart.
I tried to shrug it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
But she said seriously, “I really do love him, you know. We haven’t done it yet. I don’t want to tie him down if I got pregnant. But I will if he wants to.”
I wanted to shake her. What kind of thinking was this? My mother had warned me, stamped it into my head. Chastity was one of the few bargaining chips women had. No matter how good-looking Shin was, Fong Lan was a fool. And yet, part of me couldn’t help admiring her. She really did love him, I thought.
Haltingly, I tried to give her advice even though she was two years older than me. She listened patiently, then shook her head. “I know what it’s like in your family,” she said. So he’s really told her everything, I thought in amazed resentment. “But I want to make Shin happy. And if it means giving myself to him, that’s all right with me.”
Was that love or stupidity? But maybe that was just the hardheaded part of me, calculating my chances of survival. I wouldn’t give myself away to some man, become one of his possessions. Not without the economic assurance of a wedding ring. Even then, from what I could see of my mother’s choice, perhaps the price was too high.
* * *
I never did find out what happened with Fong Lan because not long after, Shin broke up with her. And strangely enough, when it was all over I found myself defending her.
“You’re supposed to be loyal and faithful,” I’d said, six months before Shin left for Singapore. We were sitting at the round marble-topped table studying. At least Shin was. I had nothing to prepare for, no university to go on to. “You’re not like your name at all.”
He’d barely looked up from his textbook. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you break up with Fong Lan? She cried buckets afterwards. I know she did.”
“Are you telling me to date her again?” He looked annoyed.
“She seems a lot more serious than whoever it is you’re with now,” I’d said defensively.
“And what about you? You think that being serious will change Ming’s mind?”
That was a low blow. Shin narrowed his eyes and turned a page. “Did Fong Lan ask you to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Then don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.” His face flamed, as though someone had pressed a burning brand across his cheekbones. “And stop talking about names! I have been faithful. As much as I can!”
Furious, he slammed his textbook shut and left.
* * *
After lunch at the canteen, we went back to the storeroom and started on the files. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; most of them were quite straightforward. But sorting out the pathology samples was a headache since they were in no semblance of order at all.
The collection was highly eccentric; I supposed that in this far-flung corner of the Empire, whoever was running the pathology department probably felt like God. We didn’t find the preserved head or blood-drinking grasshopper that Koh Beng had mentioned, but there was a two-headed rat, its naked tail a drifting worm in amber liquid. Dr. Rawlings’s predecessor, a Dr. Merton, had apparently promised a number of patients that they could have their body parts back after he’d studied them. These were denoted by a little red X in the corner of his crabbed records.
“Who’d want to come back for a gallbladder?” I said.
“Some people want to be buried whole,” Shin said seriously.
I shivered, remembering what the salesman, Chan Yew Cheung, had said when I’d danced with him—about witchcraft, and how a body must be buried in its original form to rest in peace.
“Here we go,” said Shin, reading from a file. “Finger, left ring, Indian male laborer infected with parasite. Preserved in formaldehyde.”
I combed through the shelves of specimens. Almost everything had been unpacked, and I still hadn’t seen any actual jars of severed fingers.
“Another one—right forefinger from a double-jointed female contortionist.”
“Not here, either,” I announced.
In fact, despite records indicating at least twelve amputated digits in the hospital collection, we could not locate a single one.
“How’s that possible?” I pored over the ledger again. People made jokes about doctors’ handwriting but in this case it was no laughing matter. Dr. Merton’s scrawl was a conga line of ants, the hasty loops of someone who didn’t care if it never got transcribed.
“Anything else missing besides fingers?”
“I checked. So far nothing else is missing.” I waved the ledger triumphantly at him from where I perched on a cardboard box, amid a sea of papers.
“Still so competitive,” he complained. “I thought of it first.”
“No, you didn’t.” I turned back to the file.
“Spider. On your hair.”
I froze, eyes closed while Shin removed it. In the past, he’d have flicked it off, stinging my forehead smartly. Now, he handled it delicately and impersonally, like a stranger.
“It’s really disappointing how you don’t scream about things like this,” he murmured.
“Why should I?” I opened my eyes.
Shin’s face, that familiar set of planes that made up his nose and cheekbones, was so close that I could reach out and touch it. What made someone good-looking? Was it the symmetry of features, or the sharp shadows of his brows and lashes, the mobile curl of his mouth? In the very center of his eyes, so much darker than mine, I could see a tiny light, a gleam that sparked. Then it winked out and I was falling, drawn into a tunnel. Images flickered. Railway tracks submerged underwater. A ticket to nowhere. Fish swimming in a mirror. Somewhere, a midnight shape stirred, shadow rising from the depths of a river. The air thickened, a clot in my lungs. I gasped. Toppled forward.