a wheelbarrow full of blood. “Are you studying to be a doctor?”
“I’d like to.”
“You will be a good doctor.” Her eyes drift to William. “Is your master kind to you?”
Ren realizes, with a feeling of surprise, that yes, William has been good to him.
“He’s nice,” she says. There it is again, that invisible spark between her and William. It flies out with a tiny sizzle, so that Ren half expects to see it flare in the air.
William turns round to Nandani again. “Where do you live?” he asks.
Shyly, she tells him her address.
He writes it down in the little notebook he carries in his breast pocket. “You’re quite close to my place. If you stop by, I’ll look at your leg again next week. No need to come to the hospital.”
Behind William, Lydia sorts her book trolley industriously.
Ren can’t sense anything from her at all. Perhaps because she’s an unknown quantity—a foreigner and a lady—and he has almost no experience with this combination. She and William make a well-matched pair. They’re both so tall, with light eyes and skin mottled from the fierce sun, not smooth and evenly colored like Nandani’s. Ren feels sorry for the foreign lady; she’s trying so hard. Why doesn’t William like her?
* * *
Done with the wards, Ren trots along next to William. He’s giddy with his cat sense, that long-lost sensation of feeling the invisible, as though he’s regained a limb or an extra set of eyes and ears. What is it about the hospital that’s so special? William says he’ll stop by pathology to see his colleague Dr. Rawlings. He has a question for him about an autopsy report. Ren knows that pathology means organs and bits of dead people and animals, a good sign that it’s where the finger is. Buzzing with excitement, he’s confident that even with his eyes closed, he’ll finally be able to locate it.
As they navigate the covered walkways, lined with beds of day lilies on one side, Ren discovers he can read William now in a way he never could before. William’s interest is like a taut string. It snaps around, but mostly it’s drawn to women. Nurses passing, a lady visitor bending over a bed. Certainly, William doesn’t pay attention to the things that Ren notices, like the spider behind the door, or the perfectly round pebble under the lilies that Ren would like to put in his pocket but doesn’t dare to because it’s probably hospital property.
As they draw nearer the pathology department, the twitch of invisible filaments grows so strong that Ren is tense with excitement. It’s never been like this before, not even with Yi. They turn a corner. William pats his breast pocket, then rummages in his trousers with annoyance. “Ren, go back and fetch my fountain pen. The ward sister will have it.”
With a wrench, Ren watches as William crosses to another building, opens the door, and goes in. Something in that room is calling Ren, drawing him, even at fifty feet, like a magnet. He must enter that room.
But retrieving William’s fountain pen is an order he can’t disobey. The name of the pen, William has explained, is that of the highest mountain in Europe, Mont Blanc. The white, rounded star on the pen represents the snow-covered peak, and it has an engraved nib made out of real gold. It’s the pen he uses to write letters every day. If he doesn’t find it, William will be very unhappy.
Rushing back, Ren gets confused and takes a wrong turn. It’s hard to filter out the flood of signals that assail him. Like a mirror full of fish, he recalls the blind fisherman Pak Idris saying. You must know their song. Though what he senses right now is more like fireflies darting in the darkness. They move in odd and random patterns of people’s interests and emotions, and Ren thinks that if only he can find a still, quiet place, he’ll able to sort them out. But first, he must retrieve the pen. The ward sister on duty tells him that she’s given it to Matron.
Matron, like most of the senior staff, is a foreigner. A sharp-faced Australian woman, she’s all elbows and briskness and looks doubtfully at him when he finally arrives at her office. “This is an expensive pen. You’d best not drop it.” Her white, starched headdress stands out like stiff wings. Clutching the pen, Ren hastens anxiously back to the pathology storeroom. At one point he breaks into