Shadow Theatre (3 page)

ALIKA \ AS OPENING the windows in Madam's living
room when she saw the girl. Or rather, what caught her
eye and made her pause long enough to set the new copper kettle shrieking like an emergency alarm on the kitchen stove was
Madam's friend, dressed in a pair of Madam's sleeveless pajamas,
pale green with flecks of white petals (because it had been a
last-minute idea for the friend to spend the night), slipping into
the house through the sliding glass doors of the study, which
was the room Madam had added on to the house for herself
back in 1985, after the children were all married and Madam's
husband had passed away.

Since it was half-past five in the morning, the air still bluey
bluey and crisp as dead leaves and noisy with calling birds, as
Malika would describe it (as if Sali and I wouldn't have been
awake ourselves at half-past five in the morning, but then that
was how Malika talked, fancying herself our storyteller), and
since Madam and her friend had stayed up quite late chatting
(Madam with her usual bedtime glass of whiskey and the friend
sipping iced water with lime because, as Malika had heard her
telling Madam, she was almost in her sixth month), Malika was
surprised to see the friend up so early, which was not to say she
was expecting anything odd to happen, not on such an ordinary
morning, and she herself had been doing nothing unusual, just
going around the house, opening Madam's windows to let in the
fresh air, as was her routine every morning, ever since Madam
had started closing the windows at night.

The study extended from the side of the house, towards the
back where Madam's bedroom was. It wasn't that far from
the living room, but we agreed with Malika that it was possible
Madam's friend hadn't noticed her or heard her unlocking
the iron clasp on the windows. I remember there was a mango
tree growing outside the living room, close to the windows. It
could have blocked Malika from sight with its thick trunk. Or
perhaps Madam's friend was so plagued by her dilemma that
morning, over the book she was writing (she was a novelist, like
Charlotte Bronte and Danielle Steele), she wasn't noticing anything around her.

'That's why I thought she didn't notice the girl," said
Malika, when she was telling us about it.

I hadn't told her or Sali what else I knew about Madam's
friend. I wasn't going to tell them, in case Madam found out that
I had and thought of me as a busybody. At the moment, I was just
one of Malika's friends, and perhaps because Madam was both
kind and not paying attention to us, Sali and I were free to come
and go as we pleased. No need to rock the boat, as I saw it.

So all Malika knew was what she remembered, coupled
with some new details given to her by Madam (who from then
on, particularly after what was about to happen had happened
and her friend's visit started fading just like her daughters and
her marriage into a sealed and sweetened past, would glow with
both pride and sorrow whenever she reminisced about the days
when Miss Shakilah had been a pupil at St. Agnes, and Madam
had taught her, because as she would tell Malika, she both
hoped and didn't hope she had had a hand in moulding Miss
Shakilah into the success she had become in America-a
famous writer and a university professor on top of that).

Needless to say, Madam herself didn't address Miss
Shakilah as Miss Shakilah when the two of them were in conversation. That was only how she would refer to her in front of
Malika. With Miss Shakilah directly, Madam would say, Shak,
my dear, or Darling, you don't understand, with the same tenderness
in her voice as when she was speaking on the phone with
Caroline or Michelle (the eldest one, Francesca, was a stockbroker in London and never called home, although like the
other two, she would fly back with Madam's grandchildren
once a year, usually during the Christmas holidays, and as with
the other two, sometimes the husband would come along and
sometimes not).

Malika thought Madam could not have seen the girl in the
garden because she was taking a shower at the time, although
when Sali asked if she was sure about that, Malika couldn't say
she was. "Madam always takes her shower at that time," was as
close as Malika could get to pinpointing where Madam may
have been at half-past five, somewhere else in the house or in
the study with Miss Shakilah.

The girl looked Chinese, around nine or ten years old, and
was standing behind Madam's sugar cane near the fence. Malika
saw her after Miss Shakilah had stepped into the study, while
Miss Shakilah was pulling the glass door shut (Malika could hear the rubbery glide of the door in its steel groove just before
the kettle started whistling). The girl was very thin, her arms
bony like bamboo. Malika wasn't sure at first if there was really
someone there, until a small breeze came and the sugar cane
leaves swayed a little to the left, and the girl didn't move.

Her stillness was also what aroused Malika's suspicion,
because since when did a child ever stay still of her own accord?
Having been with Madam since the birth of the second one,
Caroline, Malika knew how little girls were if they were left
free, if they weren't boxed away into sugar and spice and everything nice.

But the kettle was whistling (Malika hadn't known it was
that sort of kettle, since Madam had just taken it out of the
shopping hag yesterday when they had heard the doorbell ring,
and in her excitement over seeing her friend, Madam had forgotten to tell Malika, and as usual, Malika had thrown away the
box without reading it).

By the time she had turned off the stove and returned to the
living room to look out of the windows again, the girl was gone.

I I WAS ON Wednesday that Malika saw the girl, and Friday
when she told us, so Sali and I believed the gist of her story
and wondered only what Malika might have embellished, not
what she might have forgotten (as would happen at times with
her other stories, the ones involving Madam's daughters, for
instance, or stories about Madam and her husband, which
Malika could never tell the same way twice). I had every
Friday afternoon off and Sali had it every other week, so we
had gone over to Madam's house as usual, taking the eight
o'clock bus to Bukit Timah from Changi Road. (That bus didn't
turn onto River Road. Sali wished it did but I didn't mind, as
it was only a twenty-five-minute walk for us to the Changi
Road bus stop, and then less than an hour's ride almost directly to Madam's house). Malika wasn't off on Fridays, but it was just
as if she were, since Madam was at school until six o'clock,
leaving us the whole house to ourselves. (Other days, Madam
would come home between half-past three and four o'clock,
but on Fridays the school choir met for practice and Madam
was in charge of the choir, as she had been ever since she had
started teaching thirty-three years ago. In fact, the choir was
what had kept her going after Michelle got married and left,
the last one.)

She probably saw you and ran off before you could catch
her," suggested Sali, as she lifted the lid on one of Madam's jewelry boxes to find her favorite brooch of Madam's, a small diamond peacock about to spread its feathers. (Madam kept it in
the red lacquered box that sat on the left side of the dressing
table, behind the photograph of her grandsons, Francesca's and
Caroline's children, which had been taken during Michelle's
wedding in 1981, two years before Madam's husband started
complaining about his headaches. Sali always went for the peacock, sooner or later, when we were at the house. We saw no
harm in it, since Madam herself had worn the brooch only
once, perhaps because it was the last thing her husband had
bought for her on his own. Madam's husband had given her the
peacock for their silver wedding anniversary. After that, everything had gone downhill, his health plummeting like a pebble
kicked off a precipice, although as Malika remembered, the
signs were there even before the first diagnosis, before anyone was willing to see them).

"How could she have run off so fast? I didn't even hear the
gate opening or closing," she said, responding to Sali's implication that perhaps the girl was just a neighbor's unruly child.
"Don't tell me she just slipped out between the bars. As thin as
she was, no child is that thin."

"You go and look at the gate," said Sali, even though she
knew how long Malika had been with Madam, and how many times she had opened and closed the gate for Madam's husband
if it was raining when he came home from work.

"You go and look yourself," said Malika, and she picked up
one of Madam's hairbrushes and tapped Sali on the back of the
head with it. (She was sitting on a square stool near the dressing
table, while I was on Madam's bed, away from the dressing table
and the jewelry, remaining as uninvolved as possible in all of
this.) Sali laughed, with the peacock glittering on her blouse
like an extra giggle, pinned just above her breast. She looked at
Malika in the mirror, and then they both looked at me.

Malika put down the hairbrush and reached for Madam's
diamond bracelet, which was lying on top of another red lacquered box (they were a set of three, brought back long ago
from a vacation in Hong Kong). She held the bracelet up to the
dusty sunrays coming through Madam's bedroom window to
her right, and Safi turned her head and stared at the circle of
diamonds dangling from Malika's finger as if she had never seen
them before, as if we didn't do this every few months (she and
Malika going through Madam's jewelry to see if anything new
had shown up, while I kept my ears open for the sound of
Madam's car, in case she came home unexpectedly, which had
happened twice so far).

"What do you think, Lu?" asked Malika, as she slipped the
bracelet over Sali's right wrist and locked the tiny gold clasp.

"You mean, about the girl?" I asked, although of course that
was what she meant.

"Yes, the girl." Malika turned her head towards me as Safi
lifted her hand and pretended to brush her hair back with her
fingers, the bracelet sliding like a ring of stars against her skin
in the mirror.

"I don't know what to think," I said. If it wasn't a real girl,
why would she be appearing now? And why here?"

"Ya-lah, if this were a haunted house, you would have
found out long before this," said Sali, taking a few steps back from the dressing table. She nodded and smiled at her reflection in the mirror. Then, slowly, she stretched out her hand, as
if someone else had reached for it and was lifting it to his lips
to kiss her fingers, Western style, probably the Hollywood film
director Sali believed she was destined to meet one day, who
would fall in love with her and whisk her away to California,
where she would become the next Marilyn Monroe. (I'm not
saying Sali had a plan. But she was still young enough to
believe in her hopes and dreams.) I watched as she touched the
diamonds on her wrist, her lips moving as if she were explaining
to the film director, the fellow who had kissed her fingers, how
the bracelet had once belonged to her grandmother and how
she, Sali, would wear it now and then to draw her grandmother's spirit near. (Sali had heard from Madam Albuquerque's
daughter that Westerners were gullible about stories like that.)
She was only twenty-three on this afternoon, five years
younger than I, without a serious boyfriend in sight but several hopeful ones in tow.

Both of us were younger than Malika, who was closer to
Madam's age, and Madam, I remember, would celebrate her
fifty-sixth birthday that November. Malika was eleven years
younger, although neither of them showed it. (Now that
Madam's husband, who had married her when she was nineteen,
was gone, Madam was starting to gather her share of broken
hearts, even at her age. Malika couldn't believe how persistent
some old men could be, including those who didn't have much
to offer Madam, not even their own real teeth.)

She would have been forty-five on the morning she saw the
girl. Forty-five and unmarried, a fact as plain and simple as the
single bead Malika wore on a thin gold chain around her neck,
the oval red bead holding for her a sentimental value, as she put
it, and since it was obvious she didn't want to say more, we had
left it at that. What I remember is that Malika had never worried openly about whether she was ever going to have the chance to have her own baby. Caroline and Michelle were like
her own children, she would say, and even when we didn't ask
her about it, from time to time Malika would remind us out of
the blue that Francesca, too, always brought something back for
her when she visited, and so what was there to regret? Yet, the
fact that she was forty-five and unmarried may have been why
the girl had chosen her.

Malika had turned her attention back to Sali, who was continuing to woo the film director after he had kissed her fingers.

A wind blew into the room as Sali tilted back her head and
laughed into the mirror. Outside, some branches in Madam's
garden creaked, probably those in the two banyan trees, which
were the trees nearest that part of the house.