A Different Sky (9 page)

‘My pipe, my pipe,' Grandmother groaned, holding out her hand. Mei Lan held the needle steady; the drug was now bubbling hard and she carefully placed the hot pellet of
chandu
in the jade bowl of the pipe while Second Grandmother sucked hungrily at the ivory tip. Refilling the pipe was a laborious process and Gold soon took over the duty. Already, Second Grandmother's eyes had grown glassy as her dreams expanded.

Mei Lan looked around for Ah Siew but she had left the room on an errand. She made her way to Grandmother's great red lacquer bed and scrambled up to stretch out upon its soft pillows. Usually, a small stepping box was pushed up against the bed to enable Second Grandmother to climb in more easily. Now, the box stood to one side and Mei Lan pulled herself up as best she could. Settling upon the cool silk covers, she looked up at the carved bower of leaves and flowers on the wooden canopy above, a long-throated phoenix nesting at its centre. Only a single phoenix was allowed to exist in the world at any one time, Ah Siew had told her, and it never lived less than five hundred years. When death approached the phoenix built a nest, settled upon it and set it on fire. When the flames had almost consumed the poor creature, a new phoenix sprang to life from the smouldering pyre. Ah Siew said the phoenix was a creature for women to emulate and when things got really bad in your life, it should be remembered. Women were like phoenixes, always rising anew from the ashes of their lives, Ah Siew said. Mei Lan stared up at the phoenix, at the great wings and strong beak and fabulous tail and was stirred by its strange, wild soul, its power to transform death into life. She wished she had a phoenix to look down upon her each night, like Second Grandmother in her bed. Her mother had given her a fan with a delicate painting of the creature. The fan had belonged to First Grandmother, who had been Mei Lan's father's mother and who had died when he was ten. The subject of First Grandmother was rather like the subject of Second Grandmother's past. Nobody spoke about her.

While Second Grandmother dozed, Gold and Silver cleared the room chatting softly with each other. Mei Lan listened and her attention, drawn away from the phoenix, fell upon the Second Grandmother's foot-stool.
She saw it had a drawer in its side that was usually hidden against the bed. She knelt down beside it, curious to know what the drawer contained. Pulling it open she found a folded square of soft muslin wrapped about another set of sleeping slippers. The red silk was embroidered like all of Grandmother's shoes, but the lining of these secret slippers was equally adorned, painted with tiny scenes of an extraordinary nature. Mei Lan had to turn the shoes almost inside out to get a proper perspective. In the pictures men and women were coupled together in unbelievable postures. The same images were repeated in much larger detail in the book that lay at the back of the drawer. Here, within ricepaper covers were revealed paintings of a strange violence. People sat pressed together half clothed, an arm or a thigh flung out of a curtain of draperies. In other pictures their robes lay discarded and, divested of their colourful attire, naked bodies were white and vulnerable as larvae. In these pictures bare limbs were strangely entwined, bent almost double, spreadeagled apart or wrapped acrobatically about each other. The women wore the elaborate hairstyles and intricate robes of Chinese history and their expressions were always decorous. Yet they displayed the most secret parts of themselves with such flamboyance it caused Mei Lan's heart to beat and her cheeks to flame. All the men had the same long barb protruding from them and the women offered themselves up to be impaled upon it.

Absorbed in the book, Mei Lan did not hear Silver unexpectedly approaching until it was too late. Silver laughed, kneeling down beside Mei Lan.

‘That was Mistress's pillow book. It must have served her well in the brothel and also with Ancient Master,' Silver giggled, wrapping the muslin neatly about the slippers once more.

‘What is a brothel?' Mei Lan frowned in confusion. It was the second time in two days the word had been mentioned, she was determined to know where it was that Ah Siew's sisters had been sent.

‘It's a place where men go and pay money to do all these bad things to women.' Silver leaned forward so that her mouth was near Mei Lan's ear and pointed to the book Mei Lan had thrust back into the drawer.

‘It's where Ancient Mistress lived before she came to the House of Lim. She was sold to the brothel before she was five. In the brothel they called her Lustrous Pearl. When she came of age it is said Ancient
Master paid a great price for her because of her tiny feet. Even though it's illegal now, I've heard some girls in brothels still have their feet bound to please old men who want such things. They say Ancient Master paid also to be your grandmother's first man.'

‘Why is Little Sparrow fat and in a nunnery?' Mei Lan asked, swallowing hard, sensing this was the moment to secure the elusive replies to those questions no one would answer.

‘Because soon she will have a baby. Ancient Mistress is so angry she will not have her in the house.' Silver pushed the drawer shut and stood up.

‘Why can't she stay in the house?' Mei Lan was excited at the thought of Little Sparrow's baby.

‘Because it is Ancient Master's baby. If the baby is a boy Little Sparrow will become Ancient Master's concubine or maybe even his wife. Then Little Sparrow would be your Third Grandmother and her baby would be your uncle. If this happens then Little Sparrow too will wear jade earrings and an embroidered
sam
and eat bird's-nest soup like Ancient Mistress. Sometimes Ancient Master looks at me now in the way he used to look at Little Sparrow. One day, if I have a baby boy by Ancient Master, then maybe I will become your Fourth Grandmother.'

‘How do you get a baby?' Mei Lan's voice sank lower with each question she asked, for she was dreading now to hear the answers. Silver looked at her in some surprise.

‘Why, by doing what they are doing in those pictures of course, silly. Didn't you know that already?' Silver laughed out loud.

It was too horrible. Silver's laughing mouth grew wider. Mei Lan stared at the soft wet tongue, and the dark hollow of her throat leading down deep into her body, to secret places and secret processes. It was more than she could bear. Leaving Silver staring after her in surprise, Mei Lan ran from the room. On her opium bed Second Grandmother did not stir, her eyes wide but seeing nothing. Gold still sat before the lamp roasting the
chandu
over the flame, refilling the pipe that Grandmother grasped with her long red nails. The door stood open, but as she turned out into the dark corridor Mei Lan collided with Ah Siew, returning to the room.

‘What's the matter, Little Goose?' Ah Siew opened her arms, enfolding the child.

Against the familiar warmth of the
amah
's breast Mei Lan could at
last unravel the tangled threads knotted up within her. The words came out in no order and made no sense, although the thoughts were clear in her head. People could be sold like onions or fish or a length of cloth. Her own grandfather had paid money for children and then filled Little Sparrow's body with a baby. And Second Grandmother too had been sold at five and sold again at thirteen to Grandfather. Behind all these things were the pictures in Second Grandmother's pillow book, which could not now be erased from her mind. Grandmother knew about the things that must be done with men, even her feet had been broken to please them. Suddenly, Mei Lan remembered the trolleybus ride and the communists, heard again the crack of guns and saw the bleeding bodies in the street. Under the weight of other things she had almost forgotten that death as much as life had been included in these terrible two days. A weight of knowledge was settled within her for ever and she could never return to a time before it.

Ah Siew held her close, stroking her head, not minding the tears that wet her shoulder. ‘Too much growing up too quick,' she sighed.

T
HE SUN PUSHED IN
through the shutters to illuminate the glass cases in Lim Hock An's jade museum. The mysterious light came not from the sun but from the aqueous reflection of jade. Even as a child Mei Lan had entered this silent world in awe; it was no different now that she was sixteen. From the mountain of packing cases in the room came the raw smell of new wood, its astringency a relief after the fetid smells of the sickroom upstairs. There, the sight of her mother with her distraught face and unkempt hair lank from illness and fevered tossing alarmed her. Mei Lan had been happy to leave the room with JJ when the doctor arrived.

The floorboards creaked as she and her brother stepped into the jade museum. As children they had not been allowed into the room, but JJ had always known where the key was kept. Known too how to open that one special cabinet of frosted glass that held Lim Hock An's collection of erotic jade carvings. The things inside are not for girls to see, JJ always told her with a superior smile, locking the cabinet and pocketing the key almost before she had looked within. Now, Lim Hock An's secret collection was gone, the doors to the cabinet stood ajar, shelves empty of the miniature people in contorted postures and the men who sported giant phalluses. The family were soon to move out of Lim Villa, and the crating of valuables had already begun.

‘They've gone already,' Mei Lan said staring at the empty shelves that had once housed the lewd carvings. Only one showcase remained to be packed and Mei Lan stared sorrowfully at the remaining jade cabbage, translucent Ming goblets, and a pink jade mother and child. Soon these familiar things would join the mountain of wooden crates stacked at one end of the room.

‘I'm glad I'll have sailed for England before we move out,' JJ said in a low voice. Behind wide-set eyes, his expression was suddenly uncertain and he looked at his sister for encouragement. In preparation for
the travel ahead the barber had cut JJ's thick hair in a pudding-bowl shape, leaving his ears looking vulnerable. He ran his hand over his head in distress, trying to flatten a disobedient tuft of hair on his crown.

‘It will grow,' Mei Lan reassured him. She was tempted to take his hand as she had done when they were much younger and he was unhappy, but she knew he would push her away. There were just two years between them but the gap appeared more for he spoke to her now condescendingly, as if already he had entered the world of men. Their father had introduced him into his own clubs and she suspected might have arranged for JJ to visit a prostitute. This thought filled her with angry revulsion; she had been left far behind. Soon he would leave for university in England, sailing out of her life. Too many things were changing too quickly.

Lim Hock An had been forced to sell his grand mansion, Lim Villa; it was soon to become a Methodist girls' school. His fortune had been one of many that had not survived the recent years of severe economic depression. The price of rubber and tin, in which Lim Hock An had invested the bulk of his fortune, had dipped to unbearable lows. As he slashed and sold off to save his name, Lim Hock An was unaware to what extent the extravagant gambling of his son, Boon Eng, had already undermined him. When eventually the day of reckoning came, the great House of Lim collapsed like a fragile pack of cards around Boon Eng's monstrous debts.

Through the windows of the jade museum, Mei Lan could see Bougainvillaea House, the small home Lim Hock An had built for Little Sparrow on the edge of the Lim Villa grounds, when he had made her Third Wife. Now, Little Sparrow was being sent to a cottage on the East Coast, and within days Mei Lan and her parents, with Lim Hock An and Second Grandmother, would move into Little Sparrow's house. How would they fit into the tiny place? Mei Lan wondered. How could they stare from its windows at Lim Villa, never to enter it again? Mei Lan sat down on a hard wooden bench beside JJ. The raw smell of the packing cases was a painful reminder that change was already upon them.

‘All men gamble,' JJ said as if picking up a conversation, referring in a low, fierce voice to their father. Side by side on the wooden bench they stared at the empty glass cases before them.

‘But Father knew the situation, why couldn't he control himself?' Mei Lan's voice was full of resentment; her father's gambling had ruined their lives and made their mother sick. Lim Hock An's old friend Tan Kah Kee, who himself had troubles because of the Depression, had generously offered to arrange JJ's fees at Oxford, much to everyone's relief and embarrassment. The shame of it all was in Lim Hock An's face, and it shocked Mei Lan to see such vulnerability in her grandfather.

All her childhood her grandfather had been a distant figure, but when she entered her teens an unexpected bond had developed between them. She was not afraid to speak her mind; she did not swallow her words in fear before him like JJ or their father, Boon Eng. Even when small, Mei Lan had looked directly into his face, querying his commands. When she grew older he seemed to seek her company; he spoke to her of his early years and once took her with him to the Chinese Opera, leaving Second Grandmother behind much to her displeasure. Once, he told her he wished she were a boy. Once, on an outing, as they passed the docks Lim Hock An had ordered the car to stop and from the window observed the great ships berthed along the quay.

‘Once, I was like those men,' Lim Hock An said, pointing to lines of coolies carrying coal to a lighter, bent low beneath the weight on their backs. He spoke softly near Mei Lan's ear and she had the feeling he had admitted this to no one before.

‘You look like
her
,' he told her another time, staring at Mei Lan so hard that she felt uncomfortable. She knew he referred to First Grandmother whose name had been Chwee Gek, but Mei Lan could not tell if the resemblance to her grandmother was a positive or negative attribute, for nobody ever spoke of her.

‘It's shameful. We've lost face before everyone,' Mei Lan said to JJ, kicking the dusty floor, seeing again the weary expression on her grandfather's face, and repeating words her mother had spoken. Her parents, between whom there was always a frosty space, were now no longer talking.