“It’s too late for you now,” he said. “But good night.”
* * *
Now as I examined the bottle that I’d taken from the salesman’s pocket, I wondered what Shin would make of it. It occurred to me that there were animals with fingers, too.
“Suppose this isn’t even human?” I said to Hui, who was mending her skirt.
“You mean, like a monkey’s finger?” Hui’s nose wrinkled. Clearly, this idea was just as repulsive to her.
“It would have to be big—a gibbon or maybe even an orangutan.”
“A doctor might be able to tell,” Hui bit off her thread thoughtfully. “Though I don’t know how you’d find one to examine it.”
But I did have someone to ask. Someone who was studying anatomy, even if he was only a second-year medical student. Someone who’d proven, over the years, that he could keep a secret.
Shin would be back from Singapore next week. He hadn’t been home for almost a year, and even then, only briefly. The last holiday he’d worked as a hospital orderly in Singapore for extra income. His letters to me, never frequent, had petered out, and I’d stopped waiting for them. Perhaps it was better not to hear about his new friends or the lectures he attended. I was so envious of Shin that sometimes a bitter taste would flood my mouth. Yet I should be happy for him. He’d managed to get away.
Since I’d left school, my life had been a complete waste of time. A scheme to train as a teacher had fallen through when my stepfather discovered that new teachers could potentially be dispatched to any village or town in Malaya. Out of the question, he said, for an unmarried girl. Nurse-training was even more unsuitable. I’d have to sponge-bathe strangers and dispose of their body fluids. In any case, I didn’t have the money. My stepfather offered the cold reminder that I’d been permitted to stay on at school at his expense, long after most girls had dropped out. His opinion was that I ought to stay decently at home, clerking for him until I got married; it was only grudgingly that he’d even allowed my dressmaking apprenticeship.
* * *
There was a knock at the dressing-room door. I tucked the glass vial into my handkerchief.
“Come in!” Hui sang out.
It was one of the doormen, the younger one. He pushed the door open with an embarrassed air. The dressing room was dance-hostess territory, though at the moment only Hui and I were there.
“You know that salesman you asked me about the other day?”
I was instantly alert. “Did he come back again?”
His eyes shied away from the dresses draped over the backs of chairs, the traces of spilled powder on the dressing table.
“Is this him?” He held out a newspaper, folded open to the obituary section. Chan Yew Cheung, twenty-eight years old. Suddenly, on June 4th. Beloved husband. And there was a grainy photograph, obviously a formal portrait. His hair was slicked back and his expression serious, the confident smirk laid aside, but it was the same man.
I pressed my hand against my mouth. All this time the stolen finger had been weighing on my mind, the man himself had been lying cold and stiff in a mortuary somewhere.
“Did you know him well?” asked the doorman.
I shook my head.
The obituary was a small notice, but the word “suddenly” had an ominous air. So the salesman’s prediction about being lucky had been wrong. Because according to my calculations, he’d died the day after our encounter.
With a shudder, I put the glass bottle, wrapped in my handkerchief, on the table. It seemed heavier than it ought to have been.
Hui said, “You don’t think it’s witchcraft, do you?”
“Of course not.” But I couldn’t help recalling a Buddhist statue I’d seen as a child. It was a little thing made of ivory, no bigger than this finger. The monk who’d shown it to us had said that a thief had once stolen it, but no matter how often he tried to sell or throw it away, it reappeared in his possession until, guilt-stricken, he’d returned it to the temple. There were other local tales as well, such as the toyol, a child spirit made from the bone of a murdered infant. Kept by a sorcerer, it was used to steal, run errands, and even commit murder. Once invoked, it was almost impossible to get rid of, save by proper burial.
I studied the newspaper carefully. The funeral would be held this weekend in the nearby town of Papan, a bit farther out from my family home in Falim. I was due back for a visit; perhaps I could return the finger. Give it to his family, or drop it in his coffin so it could be buried with him, though I wasn’t sure how to manage it. What I was certain about, however, was that I didn’t want to keep it.
5
Batu Gajah
Wednesday, June 3rd
The person who really runs the new doctor’s household is a taciturn Chinese cook named Ah Long. He’s the one who takes charge of Ren, dripping wet as he is, and ushers him through the bowels of the house to the servants’ quarters in the back. The outbuildings are separated by a covered walkway, but it’s raining so hard that the spray wets them to the knees.
It’s difficult for Ren to judge adults’ ages, but Ah Long seems old to him. A wiry man with knotted arms, he offers Ren a rough cotton towel.
“Dry up,” he says in Cantonese. “You can have this room.”
The room is small, barely eight feet across, with a narrow window of louvered glass panes. In the blue gloom, Ren can make out a single cot bed. The household is eerily silent and he wonders where the other servants are.
Ah Long asks if he’s hungry. “I have to prepare the master’s dinner. Come to the kitchen when you’re done.”
At that moment, there’s a blinding flash of lightning and a boom. The electricity in the main house flickers and blinks out. Ah Long clicks his tongue in annoyance and hurries off.
Alone in the gathering darkness, Ren unpacks his meager belongings and sits timidly on the cot. The thin mattress sags. A finger—a single digit—is so small that it could be hidden anywhere in this large house. His stomach knots with anxiety as he counts in his head. Time is passing; since Dr. MacFarlane’s death three weeks ago, he has only twenty-five days left to find the finger. But Ren is tired, so bone weary from his long journey and the heavy carpetbag that he’s been carrying, that he closes his eyes and falls into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
The next morning, Ah Long prepares William’s breakfast of a boiled egg and two dried-up pieces of toast barely smeared with butter, even though there are at least three tins of Golden Churn lined up in the pantry. The butter comes from Australia by way of Cold Storage. Soft at room temperature, it’s a beautiful yellow color. Ah Long doesn’t eat butter himself, but he still rations it for his master.
“Like this,” he explains to Ren in the kitchen. “No need to buy so much.”
He resembles the toast he prepares, crusty and hard-hearted. But Ah Long is also honest, and if he’s frugal with William’s food, he’s just as stingy about his own rations. At the old doctor’s house, they ate thick slices of Hainanese white bread, toasted over charcoal and spread with butter and kaya, a caramelized custard made from eggs, sugar, and coconut milk. Ren can only think that this new doctor, William Acton, has a rather sad-looking breakfast.