At the ticket office, the Malay stationmaster is kind enough to pencil Ren a map. He has a handsome mustache and trousers starched to knife-edge creases. “It’s quite far. Are you sure no one will fetch you?”
Ren shakes his head. “I can walk.”
Farther down, there’s a cluster of Chinese shophouses leaning against one another with their overhanging second floors and little sundry shops spilling out below. That way leads to town. But Ren takes a right instead, past the Government English School. He glances longingly at the wooden building with its whitewashed, graceful lines, imagining other boys his age studying in the high-ceilinged rooms or playing games on the green field. Doggedly, he keeps walking.
The hill climbs towards Changkat, where the Europeans live. There’s no time to admire the many colonial bungalows built in the style of the British Raj. His destination is on the far side of Changkat, right up against coffee and rubber plantations.
Rain splatters the red earth furiously. Gasping, Ren starts to run, clutching his carpetbag. He’s almost reached a large angsana tree when he hears the rattle of a goods lorry, engine rasping as it climbs the hill. The driver shouts from the window. “Get in!”
Breathless, Ren climbs into the cab. His savior is a fat man with a wart on the side of his face.
“Thank you, Uncle,” says Ren, using the polite term to address an elder. The man smiles. Water trickles down Ren’s trousers and onto the floor.
“The stationmaster told me you were going this way. To the young doctor’s house?”
“Is he young?”
“Not as young as you. How old are you?”
Ren considers telling him the truth. They’re speaking Cantonese, and this man looks kind. But he’s too cautious to relax his guard.
“Almost thirteen.”
“Small, aren’t you?”
Ren nods. He’s actually eleven. Even Dr. MacFarlane hadn’t known that. Ren added a year, as many Chinese did, when he entered the old doctor’s household.
“Got a job there?”
Ren hugs the carpetbag. “Delivery.”
Or a retrieval.
“That doctor lives further away than the other foreigners,” the driver says. “I wouldn’t walk here at night. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
“A lot of dogs have been eaten recently. Taken even when they were chained to the house. Only the collars and heads were left.”
Ren’s heart squeezes. There’s a buzzing in his ears. Is it possible that it has started again, so soon? “Was it a tiger?”
“Leopard’s more likely. The foreigners say they’ll hunt it. Anyway, you shouldn’t wander around when it gets dark.”
They pull up at the bottom of a long curving drive, past the clipped English lawn to a sprawling white bungalow. The driver honks the horn twice, and after a long pause, a skinny Chinese man emerges onto the covered veranda, wiping his hands on a white apron. As Ren clambers down, he thanks the lorry driver over the rattle of rain.
The man says, “Take care of yourself.”
Bracing himself, Ren makes a mad dash up the driveway into shelter. The pelting rain soaks him, and he hesitates at the door, worried about the water pooling on the wide teak planks. In the front room of the house, an Englishman is writing a letter. He’s seated at a table, but when Ren is shown in, he rises with an enquiring look. He’s thinner and younger than Dr. MacFarlane. It’s hard to gauge his expression behind the twin reflections of his glasses.
Ren sets the battered carpetbag down and reaches into it for the letter, presenting it politely with two hands. The new doctor slits the envelope precisely open with a silver letter opener. Dr. MacFarlane used to open letters with his stubby finger and thumb. Ren drops his eyes. It isn’t good to compare them.
Now that he has delivered the letter, Ren feels a great weariness in his legs. The instructions that he memorized seem hazy; the room tilts around him.
* * *
William Acton examines the piece of paper he’s been handed. It comes from Kamunting, that little village next to Taiping. The handwriting is spiky and tremulous, the hand of a sick man.
Dear Acton,
I write with little ceremony, I’m afraid. I’ve left it too long and can barely hold a pen. With no relatives worth recommending, I’m sending a bequest: one of my most interesting finds, to whom I hope you’ll give a good home. I sincerely recommend my Chinese houseboy, Ren. Though young, he is trained and trustworthy. It is only for a few years until he gains his majority. I think you will find yourselves well suited.
Yours, etc. etc.
John MacFarlane, M.D.
William reads the letter twice and looks up. The boy stands in front of him, water trickling through his cropped hair and down his thin neck.
“Is your name Ren?”
The boy nods.
“You used to work for Dr. MacFarlane?”
Again, the silent nod.
William considers him. “Well, now you work for me.”
As he examines the boy’s anxious young face, he wonders whether it is rain or tears running down his cheeks.
4
Ipoh
Friday, June 5th
Since I’d picked up that horrible souvenir from the salesman’s pocket, I was unable to think of much else. The shriveled finger haunted my thoughts, even though I hid it in a cardboard box in the dance-hall dressing room. I didn’t want to have it anywhere near me, let alone take it back to the dressmaker’s shop where I boarded.
Mrs. Tham, the tiny, beaky-faced dressmaker to whom I was apprenticed, was a friend of a friend of my mother’s, a tenuous connection that I was grateful for. Without it, my stepfather would never have allowed me to move out of the house. However, Mrs. Tham came with an unspoken condition: that she should have free access to my private possessions at any time. It was an annoying but small price to pay for freedom. So I said nothing, even when the little traps I set—thread caught in a drawer, a book open at a certain page—were invariably disturbed. She’d given me a room key, but since she obviously had her own, it was quite useless. Leaving a mummified finger in that room would be like throwing a lizard to a crow.
So it stayed in the dressing room of the May Flower, and I lived in constant fear that one of the cleaners would find it. I considered turning it in to the office, pretending that I’d discovered it on the floor. Several times I actually picked up the horrid thing and started down the corridor, yet somehow I always turned back. The longer I hesitated, the more suspicious the whole affair seemed. I remembered the Mama’s disapproving glance when we were dancing; she might think I was a pickpocket who’d had second thoughts. Or perhaps the finger itself held a dark magic that made it difficult to get rid of. A watery blue shadow, that made the glass vial colder than it should be.
I’d told Hui of course. Her plump, pretty face creased. “Ugh! How can you bear to touch it?”
Technically, I was only touching the glass bottle, but she was right—it was unsettling. The skin had blackened and shriveled so that the finger resembled a withered twig. Only the telltale crooked joint and yellowed fingernail prompted a lurch of recognition. There was a sticker on the metal lid with a number: 168, a lucky combination that sounded, in Cantonese, like “fortune all the way.”