Shadow Theatre (9 page)

Fay nodded, and gave us a halfhearted smile.

"You're not going to back out of this deal now, are you?"
asked Phillipa.

Fay said no, she wasn't. She sighed, and I could feel Jo was
starting to feel sorry for her (because beneath the tough tomboy
exterior you might hear about from the nuns if you were to speak
to them, Jo was kind, and her heart could melt faster than butter
on an open flame). So I knew the die was cast. For Fay's sake, Jo
wouldn't back out, either, and that was why I was ready to say
yes later when we were alone, after Phillipa and Fay were gone.

If WAS AROU N I) half-past four that they left, and Auntie Helena
had stepped out shortly after for her weekly gambling game with
Father O'Hara and Sister Sylvia. (The three would gather every
Friday night in the parish house, and you'd see them huddling over their cards at one end of the dining table, the ceiling fan
whirring softly over their heads. They were supposed to be playing
just for fun, but everyone knew there was money involved.
People simply looked the other way because where was the harm
in letting three senior citizens exchange their money among
themselves? Sister Sylvia was the oldest, a firecracker of a nun in
her time, but that's another story. By the time we knew her, she
was already living at Holy Family, cooking and keeping house for
the priests. We used to think she'd outlive even Auntie Helena,
the youngest of the trio.)

Jo was starting to ask me if I was feeling shy about showing
my body to a boy when we heard Auntie Helena opening her
door next door. She may not have heard us, but she was home
at the time, for whatever it's worth.

We exchanged hellos through the fence and then Jo and I
watched her drive off in her car. I can't say I noticed anything
unusual about Auntie Helena that afternoon, nothing that
would point to what was about to happen to her, what she
would see in the morning ...

"ODD IN WHAI way?" I asked, when Jo said there was something odd about Auntie Helena when she was closing her gate.
But she simply shook her head and repeated, "Odd," as she
picked up her basket of weeds and carried it over to Mr.
Dharma's steps, her feet in sandals moving deftly through the
grass like fish underwater as she crossed the garden.

"So anyway, is that why you don't want to do it? Are you
feeling shy?" she asked me again.

I gathered the last of the stalks I'd dug up and stood up with
my basket. "What if they want to touch?" I asked, walking over
to join her at the steps.

"Dummy, that's why I want to see the agreement. We can
make sure it says no touching."

"But what if they insist? Who's going to stop them? Each of
us will be alone by then, right?"

No, we'll go off two at a time. Two girls with two boys at
a time. All you have to do is go behind some trees for privacy.
You don't have to go far. The rest of us will wait and if a boy
breaks the agreement, all you have to do is yell, and everything
will come to a halt. The whole agreement will be off. We'll
make sure Leonard knows that."

"What if Charlotte doesn't agree?"

"She'll agree. She needs us."

And that was all the discussion there was about Charlotte's
plan.

YOU DON'T NEED to know whether we really went through
with it. That, too, is another story. What matters is that you see
who we were, see what was in our hearts that August, our very
ordinary hearts.

You'll hear her story beckoning in the cemetery if you try.
Stand where we were and let her face brush yours, the unfinished
mask of her face hanging like wind off the branches, threading a
way through the coarse grass and among the gravesites,
whistling low in the lalang that used to grow deeper in.

You could see it in Jo's face that she was going to ask the
dang-ki to show us who the diamond woman was. (We had
sworn off the bomoh because she seemed too dangerous, but
the dang-ki was a medium of a different caliber. As his powers
were temporary, available to him only after a seven-day stint of
fasting and meditation, he seemed to us less aligned with the
spirit world, and so less of a risk. But then, all we had ever done
before was watch, and I wouldn't have thought to ask for his
help. I wouldn't have dared, without Jo.)

She wouldn't have done it, if I had stopped her. I could have
stopped her. You should know this about us, how we wouldn't have forced each other into anything. But I wanted to see it, to
watch the dang-ki sketch the diamond woman's features while
he was in a trance, mark the curve of her chin on one of his
thick, yellow squares of spirit paper ...

Jo was sure we had saved enough to pay him in full.

So when Saturday afternoon came around, I emptied my
share of our earnings onto my bed. I wrapped a rubber band
around the dollar notes and picked up the loose change.

Jo was leaning on the gate when I stepped out of the house,
her money pinned safely to the inside pocket of her yellow
knapsack, not in a purse which could get snatched. She grinned
when she saw me with my knapsack, too.

We were two foolish tycoons, about to embark on an
adventure with no inkling of the cost. We didn't even wonder if
perhaps we weren't the first ever to ask a dang-ki about the diamond woman.

I watched Jo slide the ribbon off her ponytail before we
started walking. She seldom wore her hair loose but when she
did, it was wavier and more gorgeous than Phillipa's, with a soft
black sheen like moonlight over water, and the power to get us
just about anything we desired.

"Ready?" she asked.

I said yes.

R 0 S E S I M

REMEMBER ms hair, blond like James Dean's, with the sun
filtering through the bougainvillea outside the windows to
our left lighting up the tips over his forehead. For some reason,
I wanted to touch it, the fellow's hair, which to this day I don't
know if I can explain, but there you have it. Maybe that's why
it's always the first thing I remember about the afternoon, Chandra's
boyfriend's hair, because up close, I could see that not only was it
blond, but also feathery. Like a yellow canary's feathers accidentally doused in Clorox, I was thinking, and not like hair at all.

It was almost two o'clock, and Auntie Coco's sister was still
with her. That's the other thing I think about, whenever I look hack, how my shift at the library went till three on Fridays, and
that Friday, Shak and I had already made plans for me to go over
to her house after work.

Mundane facts, all mixed in with everything else.

By eight o'clock that night, Auntie Coco's sister would be
missing, and Auntie Coco would start wandering up and down
the road, dressed in her sarong and calling for her sister, her
voice carrying so much anguish, it would spin and somersault
over our rooftops and into the cemetery trees like a piece of her
actual heart, and Shak and I would not be able to look at each
other as we walked over to the door to look out. (We would be
in the living room when it happened. Shak's mother was making
mutton curry for dinner, I remember, and she had invited me to
stay and eat. Mutton curry used to he one of our favorite dishes, you know, Shak's and mine. Our favorite hawker was the one
who used to sell outside the convent, some fellow who always
wore a coolie hat and no shirt. You could get from him one
enormous bowl for fifty cents, which Shak and I would share
because neither of us could finish the howl by ourselves, but it
was cheaper than buying two small bowls.)

About Chandra's boyfriend, there was nothing unusual about
his being at the library that afternoon, since part of Chandra's
reason for dating angmos was to show off. What was unusual was
his coming over to talk to me, standing so close now that I could
see, for the first time, what angmo hair was like, downy like an
animal's. It would be like touching an animal, I thought, while he
was introducing himself. Like gently stroking the breast of a
canary, a bird so used to living in the cage, if it were to be set
free in the morning, by sunset it would be dead.

That's what I've heard, about the canary.

"Jason Hill." He had stretched out his hand, so what was
there for me to do but shake it?

So I shook his hand, his palm fleshy and heavy and slightly
sweaty.

Since this fellow was the first foreigner ever to come up and
introduce himself to me, I was a bit wary, wondering what he
wanted. Usually, foreigners went for other types, right? Not
someone like me. I wasn't sexy enough for most of them, and
definitely not pretty enough. Even those who came here to the
East, as they put it, hunting for a Chinese wife, even they passed
me up. Those ex-army types. Foreigners all wanted someone
who looked like Shak, or Serena Chan (who, by the way, had
bought the house next-door to Ivan Anthony a few years after
we were out of school, and now the two of them had something
hot and secret going on, which all the neighbors knew about),
or Isabella, if Isabella weren't a Sister. This was how they were,
the angmos. Not so different from Chinese men, the traditional kind. Even if, mostly, they were looking for wives to stay
barefoot and pregnant, as Shak used to say, when she was in her
feminist mood, even so, the wives must be sexy. Or pretty. At
least one or the ocher.

I don't remember how he got around to it, the fellow. One
minute he was telling me his name and saying, "You're Rose Sim,
aren't you?" and shaking my hand, while I looked past him to
where some teenagers were coming into the library, four or five
of them piling in through the revolving door and almost getting
stuck, and the next minute, he was asking me if it was true there
was a baby ghost following Shak around.

His exact words were, Is it true your friend's being followed
by a baby ghost, the woman who lives in America? Shakilah.
Did I say her name right?"

He hadn't said it right, so I pronounced it for him, and he
tried to imitate me, but his accent seemed to get in the way.
Still, it was better than his first attempt, so I didn't correct him
again.

Also, I didn't know what he was talking about. A baby ghost.
Following Shak around? I knew at once it must have been Chandra
who had passed the rumor on to him. But where had Chandra heard it? I was sure she hadn't started it herself, because I had never
known her to have the imagination.

"Rose? Do you mind my asking you?"

More teenagers were coming into the library, and the
revolving door kept swinging around in a zigzag pattern of sunlight and shadows.

We were near the bookshelves on the left side of that main
floor, in the PN section. I remember because of the bougainvillea outside the windows, flourishing so bright pink against the
glass. (The windows were closed because of the air conditioning, which was also why so many teenagers used our library,
because not many of the smaller branch libraries were airconditioned in those days.) I remember I had a cart with me, so
I must have been reshelving books when this Jason fellow had
come up and started talking to me. I could feel the metal handle against my fingers, and I could see, when the revolving door
slowed down, outside the air was moist, the heat shimmering
over the cement steps and the sago palms at the edge of the
library garden.

Sometimes the evocation of a spirit is enough to bring it
near, you know, but there was nothing. I saw and felt nothing.
So I asked this Jason fellow why he wanted to know about the
baby ghost.

"You have a lot of ghost stories," he said. He smiled, his eyes
bluer than the sea, I noticed. "You Singaporeans, I mean. You
tell a lot of ghost stories. Every Singaporean has a ghost story
in the family closet. Isn't that so, Rose?"

"Singapore has a lot of ghosts," I said, smiling so he would
think I was joking.

Angmos never know how to understand ghosts, you know,
calling everything superstition even in the face of eyewitness
accounts. This one, for instance. Even after hearing enough stories, and for sure, not all from Chandra, the fellow wasn't interested in the truth, I could tell. Because he was assuming there was no truth. Otherwise, he would have done some background
checking already, to find out more about our history, not only
the parts everyone knows (about the Europeans coming and
taking over the spice trade, and all that), but also the earlier
parts. At least if he knew enough to think about Srivijaya and
Majapahit, he could figure out for himself how as long ago as
that, people here were cutting deals with the spirits. (The
women, of course. Signing contracts by fasting and not combing
their hair, letting themselves look ugly and mad, all for the sake
of their husbands and sons, or sometimes, to protect their
fathers. Because there was so much fighting and killing, how
else could those empires have been built?)