On the hillside overlooking Sandakan, there had once been hundreds of crosses and markers to remember the dead. Later, these graves were cleared to make room for the new houses. People said that on the ocean floor there were Allied planes shot from the skies, lying side by side with Japanese battleships, the twisted metal still holding their crew. The sea would always keep them.
In the reopened school, she had learned how to chart the course of the rainy season. During the monsoons, the skies cloud over at a precise moment and the mangroves sink a little farther into the sea. The roads wash away. In the new Sandakan, steamers round the northern tip of Borneo, and new roads link the coast to the interior towns. Commercial flights land at the aerodrome, lifting off to Kota Kinabalu, to Singapore and Hong Kong. She would sit at her desk in the schoolroom, holding her worn textbooks for English and Mathematics, staring at the letters and numbers until her eyes grew tired and the meaning slid from her grasp. The words edged themselves into her thoughts, set their roots down inside her memory, trying to ease out the old words that still remained.
Well past midnight, she rose in the dark and dressed quickly, then walked down to the harbour, where she found Lohkman and his brother gathering nets into the boat.
They spoke for a few minutes about the night’s work, then they pushed the boat away from shore, climbing deftly in. Lohkman pulled the cord, the engine stuttered to life, and they slid over the glassy water. From the bay, she could see the town for what it was, a small opening in the jungle, the cloth of the Union Jack moving to and fro above the neat white buildings and the green
padang
. To her right, stilt houses crowded out from the land, a water village balanced on floating docks. On every side, the green repetition of the trees, the
kendilong
, closed in on them.
Lohkman came from a family of fishermen. During the war, his family’s boats had been confiscated and they had hidden in the jungle. When the war ended, only Lohkman, his brother, Tajuddin, and Tajuddin’s wife remained, and they had built a small dwelling in the water village.
Lohkman cut the engine and the boat drifted. His brother crouched at the stern of the boat, slowly murmuring a prayer. Tajuddin was in his thirties, and his hair, already white, stirred in the wind. Tajuddin extended his leg over the side, touched his bare foot to the water. “There is but one God,” he said, his voice dissipating on the wind. Still wearing his clothes, he let his body fall overboard.
The sound of the water opening eventually turned into a hush and then silence. Ani watched the hand that still held tight to the gunwale, the rest of the body invisible beneath the surface. Lohkman kept the boat steady. Underneath the water, Tajuddin was listening for the shoals of fish. Each species had a distinctive sound, and if he waited and listened, he could recognize them and follow the sound to where they lay. Years ago, he had taught Lohkman all he knew of fish-craft, about the wind and currents, how to handle the boat and make use of the many types of nets. Lohkman had told Ani that for six months he had studied the art of listening for the fish. At first, he could not distinguish them from the sound of the sea and the waves, but over time the skill had come to him.
They heard his brother before they saw him, a ripple of water, and then his face, silver hair falling across his eyes. He climbed up into the boat, ignoring Lohkman’s outstretched hand, started the engine, and steered the boat west.
At the appointed place, she gathered the
jala
, a circular net weighted with metal rings. Turning her body, Ani opened her arms and cast the net. It bloomed in the air, unfurling in the shape of a bell, falling smooth and flat. The swaying movements of her arms swept the fish into the folds. Lohkman’s brother had taught her how to throw the casting net when she was only thirteen. She had a talent for it, and a love of the water, and so, even though girls rarely went out with the men, he had given her a place on his boat. Two or three nights each week, depending on the season and the tides, they went out together.
Once, Lohkman had taken her underwater. He had shown her how to release the air from her lungs, a stream of bubbles trailing from their lips, their weight sinking them to the sea floor. Schools of fish brushed their bodies, circling them in a well of colour. Below, weeds unfurled to touch them. When they came up for air, he told her how to listen for the sound of the
ikan selar kuning
, with its deep-yellow stripe, which made a noise like the wind. He touched the small of her back, bringing her attention to the waving sea life, the colours so bright it sent a slow thrill along the length of her body.
Taking turns now, moving from one side of the boat to the other, they cast their nets out, speaking little. They poured their catch into the hold beneath the floorboards of the boat. Occasionally, Tajuddin would dive again, surfacing to direct the boat to a different location.
In the quiet, she thought of Matthew, of that morning, last month, when she came off the boat at dawn and saw him standing on the shoreline. His bicycle leaned against his hip, his eyes searching the returning boats, the crowd of people, finally coming to rest on her. Later, she learned that when he had asked for news of her, people told him to come here, saying that it would be easy to find her on Tajuddin’s boat, with its red phoenix painted on the hull. She was carrying her take-home bundle of fish and prawns, and she held the bundle in the crook of one arm, awkwardly, surprise holding her still. He had been a child when she last saw him. Changed, she thought, yet utterly familiar. She stood on the sand, the tide running over her feet, and another lifetime flooded her memory.
Later that day, in the evening, they had walked along Leila Road, and then into the rubber plantation that had once been owned by Matthew’s father and now belonged to his uncle. It was why he had returned to Sandakan, Matthew said, to help his uncle manage the plantation. In four months, he would leave for Australia to begin university. The end of the war was still so vivid to them both, the day on which the Australian soldiers arrived, when the Japanese surrendered the town. She remembered that night, on the shore, when Matthew had described to her the burning cigarettes, his father running blindly, then pushed to his knees and shot. His face had seemed to her like a mask then, vacant, frightening to see. She had feared that if she reached out to touch him, he would splinter in her hands. And then, suddenly, he had disappeared from her life. Two days after his father’s murder, Matthew and his mother had fled Sandakan. They had taken the first steamer they could arrange passage on.
She told him about the orphanage, where her life had faded into a kind of stillness, an endless grieving, with all those that she loved disappeared. “There was a story that I told myself,” she said. “In my imagination, you had found a way into Sandakan, the way it once was. When the adults around me spoke of an afterlife, of wandering souls, this was the place I imagined. Not something in the future, but something known from before. A place that I, myself, had once seen.”
Behind them, the sun set, illuminating the ridges of the hills, trailing darkness behind it. The plantation lamps were lit, row by row, and she felt as if she were walking the corridors of an infinite house.
He described Tawau to her, his mother’s extended family, and the stilt house where they lived for three years. Then, the year he turned twelve, his mother had remarried, and the photographs of his father, the letters and writing pens, had been put into boxes and packed away. His mother, he said, needed to go on with her life, to leave the stigma of her first marriage behind. “But sometimes, at night,” Matthew said, “even now, my mother leaves the back door propped open with a stone. After the war, everything was left unfinished. We never found my father’s body and she never had the chance to bury him. He’s gone, of course. She knows this. And yet some part of her still believes he’ll come back again.”
He said that he remembered watching Ani sing the
Kimigayo
, the way she once traded stolen cigarettes for food. He could describe the sarong that she wore, the long braid of her hair. He remembered her when she had lived through the worst of her solitude.
They had walked between the rows of trees, stopping every now and then to catch their breath, to look up through the high leaves and thereby slow the passing of time. They talked about Mas and Halim, about the fishing boats and the peaceful routine of each day. In Sandakan, she had seen new buildings rise from the ground – the hospital and Magistrate’s Court, the administration offices – all the while unable to forget what had lain there before, the rubble and waste, and even further back, like something imagined, the old town.
In the plantation, that first kiss had surprised them both. She remembered the rush in her body, a trembling that grew, second by second, causing a pain that she didn’t recognize. The kiss lengthened, drew itself out, began again, the pain beginning to diminish, replaced by some greater feeling, hope, release.
Now, coming back to the shore, the sun was already free from the horizon. The engine hummed, and the boat sped through the water, carried by the tide. Tajuddin was murmuring a prayer, eyes half-closed, giving thanks for their nets full of scabbard fish, of mackerel and prawns. She listened to the noise of the hull, low and rumbling, like a ghost voice that could not speak above the water. From the shore, she could see the day boats heading out. A fleet of five
buatan barat
, painted a brilliant red, their sails taut against the wind. When Lohkman slid the boat against the sand, she looked immediately towards the road, searching for a glimpse of Matthew. “Dear Ani,” Lohkman said, as he helped her ashore. “Be careful.”
She took his hand gratefully, jumping into the shallow water.
On Jalan Satu, Matthew was waiting for her, his bicycle leaning against the fence. When she came up to him, he put away the magazine he had been reading and they began to walk together, past the stores and restaurants where the long shutters were being lifted off in preparation for the day ahead. Eventually, Matthew climbed onto his bicycle, beginning to pedal, and when he had picked up enough speed, she hopped lightly onto the back carrier. She crossed her ankles, and placed one hand on Matthew’s hip to steady herself. As they rose higher, the trees parted, and Ani could see the calmness of the bay, a silver mirror on which the clouds rested. Above them, the low moon was still visible, though pale as smoke.
Ani described the night fishing to him, and the baskets of fish and prawns that Lohkman would take to market this morning. He laughed at her description of the envious gazes that had followed them as they unloaded their catch. How the other fishermen had hurried to decorate their boats with garlands of flowers, knowing that a well-kept vessel would appease the spirits. “And it encourages the fish, too,” she said, “because if they must be caught, they’d prefer to be caught by something beautiful.”
As he pedalled, Matthew told her he had been awake for hours, had accompanied the rubber tappers through the plantation, helping to collect tins of syrup. In a few hours, when the syrup had thickened, he would return to help wash the latex and roll it into sheets, which they would hang to dry, smoking the rubber over a wood fire.
When they reached Halim’s house, he coasted towards the front door, and she slid off the back of the bicycle. It was a weekday morning, and the house was quiet, everyone had left to begin their day. Inside, Ani lit the charcoal brazier and set a pot of water to boil. Matthew had brought her a paper bag full of warm bread and pastries from the market, and he took one out, placing it in her hand. “Eat a little something first,” he said.
He took over the coffee-making, and after she had eaten, she carried the rest of the boiling water into the
mandi
. She filled the basin, adding a little hot water, and began by washing the saltwater from her hair. She could hear Matthew in the kitchen, taking the bundle of fish and prawns from her basket and setting them in the cool box. When her hair was clean, she twisted the length of it, then coiled it over her shoulder. She found a square of soap and began to wash herself.
He stood on the other side of the door, talking about acquaintances he had met, about his stepfather’s sons, who might come up to visit from Tawau. They were interested in helping out on the rubber plantation. “Barely ten, and they want to be landowners already.”
She tied a clean sarong around her waist and pulled on a cotton shirt. When she came out, he smiled to see her, and she went to him immediately.
“Ani,” he said. “You look happier than I’ve ever seen you.”
They came together, as they had often during the last month, their hands moving over each other’s body. She unbuttoned his shirt, and he slipped his hand beneath the edge of her sarong, moving it across her stomach, cradling her hips. She felt her body relaxing, warmth spilling through her limbs. They did not rush as they had the first time, returning again to the plantation, barely concealed by the trees. There was no hurry now, no fear that the other might vanish. In her bedroom at the back of the house, she helped him undress, then she undid her own sarong. They lay in bed together, their movements slowing, kissing, then holding back.
Outside, they could hear people walking on the gravel road, trucks passing, a bicycle bell. Nothing had prepared her for love, the physical ache that overwhelmed her body, that diminished the world around her to sense, to touch. He was so close, moving on top of her, she had to fight to hold the sound in. She trapped her breath against his skin.
For a long time, he rested his head in the curve of her neck. Their breathing ran together, the slow, even comfort of it. Last night, he said, he couldn’t sleep, thinking of all that he still wanted to tell her, about Tawau and of the terrible days after his father was killed, how he and his mother seemed invisible to all who knew them. Yet now that it was daylight, he found that words were useless to describe what had happened. She was already half dreaming by then, and the sound of his voice travelled in her thoughts, as if they were her own. He said that sometimes when he walked on Leila Road, he became confused, and he did not know where he was in time. “The houses, the buildings, everything is different,” he said, “but the way the sun sets over the hill, the way it reflects off the sea, reminds me of being a child again. It reminds me of things I thought I had put away long ago.”