there she is, her bright hair recognizable from a distance.
Lydia stands on the wet grass beside the building, head turned towards a young Chinese man with a crooked jaw. Judging from his white uniform, he’s an orderly coming off the night shift, but the tension in the way they face each other alerts William. In the dim light, they don’t notice his quiet approach.
“—nothing to do with me,” says Lydia. “You can tell Dr. Rawlings all you like.”
The man opens his mouth, but William never hears what he says because there’s a crash. A flickering shadow that plummets, smashing into the young man’s head. He drops, dead weight crumpling. William runs. Gets on his knees, but it’s no good. He can see it right away. The skull has been smashed in, there are bits of nameless splatter on his hands, his shirt. The iron smell of blood and brains. Someone is screaming, a high hysterical sound. Whatever fell has shattered, but William recognizes the fragments. A heavy terra-cotta roof tile, the kind on the roofs in the hospital, the covered walkways, and wards. He stares upward. There’s nothing to be seen, only the open windows on the second floor and above them, the unbroken ridge of the roofline.
* * *
The whole affair is horrible, shocking even to William to whom blood and open wounds are no strangers. He can’t imagine what it’s like for Lydia, who’s led, crying and trembling, from the scene. The police arrive and take statements. They go up on the roof and note that a couple of tiles are missing, though whether that’s due to last night’s storm or whether they were gone months earlier, no one can say.
“Looks like the roof was being repaired,” says the sergeant, pointing out some tiles stacked in a corner of the building. “It might have hit you, sir.”
“Miss Thomson is the lucky one.” Indeed, Lydia could have easily been killed. A mere two feet separated her from the unfortunate orderly whose head was split like a watermelon.
“Did you know him?” asks the sergeant. “Wong Yun Kiong, also known as Y. K. Wong. Aged twenty-three.”
“He did a lot of work for Dr. Rawlings, I believe.” Remembering Lydia’s words, you can tell Dr. Rawlings all you like, he wonders at this.
“Will you take the day off?”
William shakes his head. “I’ve patients to see.”
When he’s finally released, he notes the tremor in his hands, the weakness in his knees. It’s a tragic, freak accident, but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong. The instinct that told him, just as the shadow fell, that doom was coming. For after the shock of seeing the body, his first reaction was that the wrong person had died. It should have been Lydia, he thinks, even as he’s filled with sickening guilt. That dark fortune that follows him, rearranging events to save him, has taken an inexplicable turn. Something’s wrong with the pattern, he thinks, even as he walks, dazed and nauseated, back to his office. Or has he been seeing everything upside down?
He stops. There is indeed something wrong, something that registered as a flicker in his vision even in the dimness of the early morning. William turns back to the police officer.
44
Taiping/Falim
Sunday, June 28th
I lay in that double bed with its unyielding pillows, my head on Shin’s chest and wished that time would stop, in this moment, forever. It was morning. The rain had ceased, and there was a clear, bright hush in the air. Shin was asleep.
The darkness was gone. As though the months and years that we’d lived in that long, narrow shophouse over the tin-ore dealership had turned into something else, though what it was exactly, I couldn’t say. I only knew that I was happier than I’d ever been. Dangerously happy. I pressed my lips to Shin’s collarbone. His skin was warm and tasted like salt.
Suddenly worried, I sat up, but the shirt I was wearing was still buttoned and my underwear was in place. In the bathroom, I examined myself seriously in the black-speckled mirror. Love hadn’t done anything miraculous, though my cheeks went pink when I recalled how Shin had pinned me down last night. If he’d kept insisting, I might well have given in though I gave myself a stern talking-to. What were we going to do? I couldn’t see any clear path for us.
When I went back into the room, Shin was still lying in bed. I bent over him, admiring his long lashes,