The door opens. It’s Ah Long, his face creased with worry.
“Aiya! Are you hurt?”
Dizzy, Ren sits up. Ah Long feels his forehead. “I checked on you earlier—you had a high fever.”
“What time is it?” Ren’s voice is a dry croak. Ah Long wipes his face with a warm towel.
“About five in the morning.”
“It was so cold.” The memory of the freezing water makes the hairs on his arms stand up.
“That was the fever.”
Ren realizes that he feels fine. No chills, no burning weakness. He swings his legs experimentally. The dream recedes, like water flowing backwards, and most wonderful of all, his cat sense, that invisible, electric pulse which tells him about the world, is back, humming quietly in the background.
Ah Long wrinkles his brow, studying him. He looks like a grizzled old monkey. “You were shouting a lot. Who were you talking to?”
“My brother. My twin brother who died.”
Ah Long squats on his haunches so that his face is almost level with Ren’s.
“Do you often dream about him?”
“Not often. But it feels so real.” Ren explains about the train and the river, and how if he’d tried just a little harder he might have made it over to the other side.
“Has your brother ever asked you to come to him?”
“Why?”
Ah Long sighs and looks up at the ceiling. It’s quiet. So quiet in that dark and empty hour before dawn, when not even the birds are stirring. Malaya is situated near the equator; the sun doesn’t rise until seven in the morning, and the days are almost exactly twelve hours long.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” asks Ah Long.
Ren is surprised. Ah Long treats religion with the same suspicious necessity with which he regards electricity, radios, and motorcars.
“I don’t know,” says Ren. But the dreams aren’t the same as those stories he’s heard of pale apparitions that haunt banana trees, or women with long black hair and backward-pointing feet.
“I had an uncle who could see them,” says Ah Long. “He was a cook in a household in Malacca. A lot of peculiar things happened in that house, he said. They had a beautiful daughter who was supposed to marry a dead man.”
“Did she really?” Ren is so interested that he sits up straight.
“No, though he was from a very wealthy family. They wanted her to become a ghost bride.”
“What happened to her?”
“She ran away with someone else. But years later when my uncle was a very old man, he said she came back to visit him. And strangely enough, she looked exactly the same as when she left home at eighteen. Though that’s another story.
“My uncle saw ghosts all the time. It was very disturbing. Unlike the living, they were always in the same place. For example, there was one particular rickshaw that he said always had a passenger in it: a little boy who’d try to sit on people’s laps. And another time a woman sat next to his bed all night, combing her hair and crying. But he gave me some advice that I’m going to tell you right now, because I think you need it.”
“And what’s that?”
“Don’t talk to the dead.”
Ren is silent for a moment. Nobody has ever given him any advice on this. “Why not?”
Ah Long scratches his head. He looks tired and old. “Because the dead don’t belong in this world. Their story has ended—they have to move on. You can’t be obeying them from beyond the grave.”
Ren’s thoughts fly instantly to Dr. MacFarlane. “Won’t honoring their wishes make them happy?”
“Cheh, happy or not, that’s their business, not yours.” Ah Long gets up creakily. “If you’re feeling better, go back to bed.”
“But today is the party,” Ren suddenly remembers.
“I’ve been cooking for more years than you’ve been alive. As if I couldn’t manage without you!”
Ah Long sets a tin mug of warm Horlicks next to Ren and turns to go. He puts one hand briefly on Ren’s head. “Remember what I said,” he says gruffly.
After drinking the hot malted-milk drink, Ren lies down, pulling the thin cotton blanket over himself. Ah Long doesn’t understand, he thinks. There’s just a little more to be done, and then it will all be over.
24
Falim
Tuesday, June 16th
By the time Robert’s car stopped with a screech of brakes outside my stepfather’s shop, it was almost eight in the evening and quite dark. Robert jumped out but I was already at the front door, fumbling for my keys. All was dim behind the shutters; were things so bad that they’d taken my mother away? Wind stirred in the shadowy overhang, the ghosts of siblings waiting to be born. Or maybe they were already wandering this world somewhere.
The door opened with its familiar creak. My stepfather’s face peered out. Deep fissures between his mouth and nose underscored his resemblance to a stone carving. To my surprise, he looked relieved, even pleased to see me.
“Where’s my mother?” I asked, my heart in my mouth.
“Resting. She’s all right.”
He stared at Robert, then at the car that was beached on the curb like a gleaming whale. Robert offered his hand, introducing himself, as I ducked past anxiously. A shadow appeared behind my stepfather. Shin.
I’d always told myself that Shin didn’t look like his father, but from certain angles, there was an eerie similarity. The flickering oil lamp my stepfather carried made their features swim, so that for a nightmarish instant, they looked like the past and future of the same person. I mumbled something about wanting to see my mother, but couldn’t disguise my brief recoil.
Shin must have noticed because he turned away. “She’s resting in the downstairs office—it’s best if she doesn’t climb stairs right now.”
My stepfather’s office was a narrow, gloomy room halfway through the long shophouse. He kept his accounts there along with a metal filing cabinet and a large black abacus. As we hurried through the dark shophouse, I said, “Why didn’t you light more lamps?”
“After the doctor and Auntie Wong left, my father put the lights out. You know how he is.”
I did know. My stepfather had a propensity for sitting in the dark, especially when he was troubled. I remembered again that terrible night when he’d broken Shin’s arm. Then, too, the house had been dark and silent.
“What did Auntie Wong say?”
Auntie Wong wasn’t related to any of us but had lived next door since before my mother and I had moved in. She was the neighborhood busybody, but she was fond of my mother.
“Apparently there was a lot of bleeding. She called the doctor. He was gone before I arrived, but it sounded like an early-term miscarriage.” Shin spoke deliberately, in a tone that reminded me that he was partway through his medical training. But this was my mother, not some stranger, and I ran the last few yards to the room and opened the door.
A single lamp burned on the desk, illuminating a makeshift pallet on the floor. My mother’s face looked paler than usual, her forehead high and bare, as though her skull was pushing its way through the thin veil of flesh.
Her hand was dry and cold, but she forced a weak smile. “Ji Lin, I told them not to worry you. I just felt a bit faint so Auntie Wong called the doctor.”
I squeezed her hand. “Did you know that you were pregnant?”
She glanced at Shin, embarrassed. Taking his cue, he quietly left.
“I didn’t think so. I’ve always been irregular, you know. Besides, I’m too old to have a baby.” She was forty-two. It was still possible; some of my friends had siblings who were decades younger.
“You need to keep him away from you.” Why couldn’t my stepfather leave her alone? I could barely speak, I was so angry. My mouth was filled with bitterness.
“Don’t say that. It’s his right. I’m the one who’s failed, not giving him more children.”
I bit my lip hard. There was no point berating her in this frail state. I’d have to find another way, and I thought again about how I’d wanted to poison my stepfather.
* * *
Later that evening, when my mother was resting and my stepfather had gone up to his room, Shin and I went out to eat. It was suffocatingly hot. Most places were closed already, but Shin took me to a roadside stall that served hor fun, wide flat rice noodles, in soup. We sat down at a rickety folding table, one corner of which was propped up on a brick, next to three men who were taking a break from an all-night mahjong party.
As Shin went to order, I listened with half an ear to the men discussing their mahjong debts. My mother, too, must have joined such parties to run up a debt of forty Malayan dollars. Thinking of the money made my stomach turn, and when Shin set a bowl of steaming sar hor fun in front of me, I could only stir it listlessly with my chopsticks.
He sat down opposite and began to wolf his noodles. Under the hissing carbide lamp, with its fluttering circle of moths, he looked nothing like my stepfather and I felt a surge of relief. I pushed my untouched bowl across to him.
“I need you to talk to your father.”
“About what?”