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