“Hang on to it,” he said. “It’ll look suspicious if you give it back after telling everyone we’re engaged.”
That was when I ought to have followed up and asked what his girlfriend was like and when he was bringing her back home, but somehow, I couldn’t. If you’d told me a month ago that I’d feel so awkward and sad about my stepbrother getting married, I’d have laughed it off, but now there was only a strange loneliness. It was like losing him all over again, like when he’d decided to shut me out. But there was a difference: it wasn’t simply that Shin was being friendly, as though whatever had troubled him before was now resolved. He’d become more reliable, more grown-up. More attractive.
There. I’d said it.
Well, Shin had always been attractive, just not to me. Or perhaps I’d willfully looked the other way. I tried my best to conjure up Ming’s long, gentle face, the stubborn cowlick on the back of his head, but it was useless. The infatuation that had sustained me for so many years had faded, leaving a vague sense of confusion and guilt.
So instead, I made up some excuse about getting back to Ipoh right away. I still hadn’t seen Pei Ling’s parcel, but by then we were standing in front of the hospital where Matron had left us, in full view of passersby. Best for Shin to keep it safe and unopened at the hospital and return it to Pei Ling when she recovered from her fall.
When I got on the train, I took off the ring and wrapped it in my handkerchief. It didn’t seem right to wear it since it wasn’t mine. I tucked the handkerchief into my rattan basket and felt the sharp edges of the card that I’d received from the foreign doctor. William Acton, General Surgeon. Curling my fingers around it, I’d thought perhaps I would contact him after all.
* * *
On Tuesday afternoon I went to see Hui, escaping dinner with Mrs. Tham’s family. She’d hinted that I ought to be there that evening because there was a young man she wanted me to meet: her husband’s nephew, who’d been jilted by some minx and was now determined to get married before the end of the year. Just to show that he could, apparently. I didn’t think this boded well for anybody.
I took Shin’s ring with me, as Mrs. Tham was bound to snoop while I was out. The garnets sparkled like pomegranate seeds. Garnets were the bloodstone, meant for protection. When I was a little girl, an Indian peddler had come by selling necklaces of round garnet beads strung on cotton thread.
“Keep your daughter safe from harm. From evil, nightmares, and wounds. Also good for love,” he’d said to my mother, and surprisingly, she’d bought me one.
I’d kept that string of garnets for years, until one day I’d gone wading in the river with Ming and the frayed cotton string had finally snapped. The tiny beads slipped into the running water, and were never found. Remembering this, I tucked the ring back in my pocket. It wasn’t mine to lose.
* * *
Hui was standing in front of her mirror, powdering her face with a look of determination. A good powdering was supposed to take at least ten minutes to apply, the powder puff not rubbed but slapped against the face, mouth, ears, eyelids, and neck. Slap, slap, slap, with lots of vigor. A really good application of powder should last for hours, so that your skin emerged “tinted, smooth, and lovely”—according to the magazines. I wouldn’t know, as I’d never managed to devote more than thirty seconds to my powder puff.
“Ji Lin! What are you doing here?” Hui looked pleased.
I sat on her bed. “Are you working tonight?” I’d hoped that she was free to have dinner at one of the roadside stalls that grilled stingray wrapped in banana leaves, but she was clearly getting ready for an evening out.
“No. It’s a call-out.”
Call-outs paid well, much better than dancing, and Hui had no day job like my dressmaking apprenticeship. She couldn’t bear it, she’d said. Snipping and measuring all day, though I’d pointed out that call-outs seemed worse.
“Not to me,” she’d said. She was always vague about what happened on call-outs; there was dinner and some form of physical contact though she said it was mostly kissing and being felt up. “It’s at a restaurant—there’s a limit to what they can do in public.”
I’d once asked her if she’d ever done anything else. She’d looked amused and closed her eyes in a long blink. “Of course not.” We’d both laughed uncomfortably. Sometimes I worried about her.
“You’re looking gloomy today,” said Hui.
Not wanting to explain all the details of the weekend, I simply said we’d returned the finger to the hospital. I thought she’d be glad to hear that, but she lifted her eyebrows.
“And who is ‘we’?”
“My brother and I.” I remembered Shin’s breath against the nape of my neck when he’d held me, reluctantly, under the angsana trees. The blood rose in my face, and the more I tried to will it away, the worse it got.
Hui examined me carefully. “This is your stepbrother, correct?”
“Yes. He’s getting married. Or at least, he’s serious about someone. I’m glad for him.”
I was afraid Hui would make fun of me, but instead she put her arm around me. “Oh, darling. Men are beasts, aren’t they?”
“It makes me feel lonely, that’s all. We’ve known each other since we were ten years old. I’m … I’m very fond of him.” Such inadequate words. They couldn’t even begin to explain how restless and disturbed I felt. And perhaps I was confusing simple affection with something else. “It’s ridiculous, anyway.”
Hui got up and walked over to her dressing table. “But you’re not related.” Her eyes watched me in the mirror. She was playing with the rouge pot, opening and closing the lid absently. “I’d like to meet him, this stepbrother of yours.”
“Why?”
“Because men are liars.” There was a sharpness in her tone I’d never heard before. I knew Hui had left some village to come to Ipoh and that she rarely went home, but other than that I’d tried not to pry, accepting whatever she wanted to share. She’d done the same for me, after all.
Hui glanced up. “Don’t look so worried about me, Ji Lin. You really are sweet.”
Touched, I tried to laugh it off, changing the subject. “Can you tell the Mama that I won’t be in this week?”
“Why not?”
I explained about Y. K. Wong following me after work last Friday and then almost running into him twice at the hospital this weekend. It was too many coincidences for comfort.
“Tell her my mother’s ill or something.” And I really needed to find another job, though it didn’t seem like a good time to bring that up.
“What about the private party in Batu Gajah this Saturday?”
“I’ll do that.” It would pay well.
We talked about the arrangements for the party, though my heart wasn’t really in it. It might be the last time I worked with Hui and Rose and Pearl. Perhaps it’s for the best. Especially if I wanted to become a nurse. Still, melancholy settled over me, like a personal rain cloud. Goodbyes were always like that.
Hui said, “Let’s practice drawing your mouth.” A cupid’s bow was tricky, and I never had the patience to do it properly.
“Don’t bother with me—won’t you be late?” I said, as Hui, pleased with her handiwork, brushed cake mascara on my eyelashes.
“Let him wait.”
“Who is it?”
“That bank manager who comes in on Wednesdays.”
He was in his late fifties, liver-spotted like a toad with a habit of licking his lips. “Don’t you mind?”
“Old is better,” she said carelessly. “Young men expect you to fall for them and do all sorts of things for free.”
“Hui!” I said, laughing. “You’re terrible.”
“Don’t trust men, Ji Lin,” she said sadly. “Not even that charming brother of yours.”
* * *
Hui told me not to wait for her. She wasn’t done with her toilette, though I’d hoped to walk out with her to her date, but she shook her head, “It’s getting late,” and so I went downstairs.
It wasn’t actually late at all. In fact, it was still early enough that I’d be just in time to sit down for dinner with Mrs. Tham and her husband’s nephew. Not wanting to go home, I turned up Belfield Street instead. Trishaws and bicycles rushed by, squeezing past bullock carts and the occasional motorcar. At the corner of Brewster Road and the wide green space of the Ipoh padang, a cricket field built by the local Chinese community to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, I stopped in front of the FMS Bar and Restaurant. FMS stood for “Federated Malayan States,” and both locals and expatriates came to drink at the long bar and order Western dishes prepared by a Hainanese chef: sizzling steaks and chicken chops, washed down with icy beer. I’d never been inside, though I’d passed its gracious, colonial fa?ade many times.
One day, I decided, I’d go in and buy myself a steak. Though I wasn’t sure if they allowed single women. As I turned to go, the wooden doors of the FMS Bar swung open. My heart jumped as someone caught me by the arm.