Shadow Theatre (20 page)

On the nights that Malika didn't dream herself awake and
the man climbed onto her bed, she would feel his knees and
elbows clambering over her as if he were a child or an animal,
unequipped with the smooth and satiny touch one expected of
a lover. The first few times he had used his finger and as Malika
was sixteen and easily moistened by hormonal stirrings, it hadn't
hurt very much when she had felt her vagina pried open (after
some fumbling with her labia). There had been a slight sting
when the man's fingernail had scraped her hymen (Malika was
sure she had heard a pop when the membrane broke), and then
it was over. Intercourse would be painful at first, but after a
while Malika found herself growing accustomed to it and then
her skin no longer smarted and her pelvis no longer ached.

This was what I knew about Malika's nightmares that Sali
didn't know, and it was all I knew of their sexual nature.

What Sali knew and what worried Malika more as the
nightmares continued (sporadically, with no apparent pattern,
the man sometimes showing up once or twice a month and then
staying away for six to eight months) were the occasions on
which the appearance of the man in the songkok was followed
by a dream in which one of Madam's daughters would end up
bleeding from a head wound, usually Michelle or Caroline but
most often Michelle (perhaps because Michelle had seemed so
vulnerable as a child, shy and soft-spoken and always eager
to please, unlike Caroline, who from what I've heard was not
only wild, but tough from the time she was a toddler, and
Francesca, who hadn't been wild but had been clear-eyed and
determined, with a will like iron). Michelle was the baby Malika
had come upon in the worst of those dreams, playing underneath the coffee table while Madam and her husband were chatting with guests during a cocktail party-Malika could hear in
the dream the baby laughing, talking delightedly to herself, to
to to to ta. But when Malika had knelt down and peered under
the table, Michelle's face was drenched in blood, and there was
a gash on the back of her head where some blood had dried and
Malika could see tangled hair and bits of brain.

She had never known what to make of this dream, the last
and the worst. But as it had indeed been the last and Michelle
was no longer a baby by then (Malika had dreamt this dream on
the eve of Michelle's wedding), it and the other dreams were
now in that cottony realm of matters not quite forgotten, but no
longer urgent.

Perhaps it was after the wedding, too, that the man in the
songkok had ceased appearing. Malika was wondering about this
on the Friday night of our story as she screwed the new bulb into
its socket in the patio lamp. She couldn't say for sure when she
had last seen the man, only that her sleep had been undisturbed for many years and when she thought about the nightmares,
they were flimsy as a flicker on the horizon, an empty boat bobbing faraway in the past. Could the man have had anything to
do with the girl in the sugar cane? Malika didn't think so as he
had never come to her when she was fully awake or in the broad
light of day, only at night in her room or hovering outside by the
washing machine and the dryer (in the darkness she could never
be sure if he was Malay, although it seemed only the ghost of a
Malay man would be wearing a songkok). She switched on the
patio lamp to test the new bulb, then switched it off and turned
to leave with the old bulb in her hand (still forgetting her book,
which lay on the floor by the cane chair, and which in the morning Malika would convince herself Madam must have seen on
her way in from the car porch, even though Madam herself
would say nothing about having picked up the book and leaving
it on the kitchen table).

A light came on over the British neighbor's wall and Malika
saw the white pool outside his gate. She listened but no footsteps sounded on the slate path or on the road, and after a
minute or so the light went off, as if the gentleman or a visitor
of his in the house had had a change of mind. (Perhaps whoever it was had heard someone in the gentleman's garden, or
glimpsed a silhouette passing by a window, and thought there
was an intruder outside the house, but as the occasion would
never arise for the sort of casually reminiscent and vaguely intimate conversation in which Malika could ask the British gentleman about this night, we would never know for sure if that had
been the case.)

The next-door family's windows were dark. Whichever of
the children had been peering over the windowsill earlier was
gone. Malika could make out the grayish frame of the house
above the hibiscus bushes and papaya trees, the slope of the roof
against a starless sky and a resounding absence of motion within
the walls, as if the house had been abandoned, as if suddenly the family had packed up and left or perhaps had never arrived. She
gazed into the stillness of the surrounding foliage, the jagged
outlines and untamed crests of treetops looming out of the gardens of Madam's other neighbors, and before she turned away
and told herself that old age was starting to creep up on her, a
hand brushed past Malika's upper arm. Her heart skipped a beat
as someone breathed into her ear.

It wasn't the quick hot breath of a child but the slower, wearier breath of someone much older, and Malika would remember hearing a small gasp as she pulled the sliding door shut (but
perhaps it was herself she was hearing, she would wonder aloud
as she paused in the middle of her story) and snapped the tiny
steel lock into place. She switched on the overhead patio light.
A harsh white glare fell over the mosaic tiles and the furniture
outside (the coffee table would have to be taken to a carpenter
for reweaving soon, Malika noted as she caught sight of a curled
strip hanging loosely off the bottom of one of the legs).

Through the glass of the sliding doors came the rumble of a
bus on the main road. Malika sighed with relief at the ordinariness of the sound, but she would confess later that as she stepped
away from the doors to start closing Madam's windows around
the house, something or someone moved from the car porch
onto the grass, and for a moment she felt as if a crowd were gathering in Madam's garden, and the night was webbed with souls.

Sali's point made sense, however (that if Madam's house were
haunted, or sat on a haunted plot of land, this fact would have
been revealed long ago) and Malika repeated it to herself as
she locked the iron clasp on the window above the rosewood
stand.

She did look through the glass towards the sugar cane, but
the girl wasn't there. Malika was sure of this, and it would remain
in the years to come a detail of which she would always be sure.

R 0 S E S I M

HAK HAD HER hand on the iron bar of the doctor's gate.
I could see the emerald bracelet around her wrist, the green
stones so clear and deep, so clean, so simple. We used to share
our jewelry, you know, although mostly it was Shak's jewelry,
whatever her mother would dare to let us wear. Some would be
her grandmother's bracelets, beautiful Peranakan antique pieces
with rubies and jade set in twenty-two carat gold, I remember.
Shak, she had manipulated her mother into letting her wear
them by saying, "If you hadn't quarrelled with my grandmother, she wouldn't have kicked us out of the family." That was
how she used to be when she wanted something, even though she knew it was because of her father that her grandmother had
kicked her mother out. (Because Shak's mother had gone against
Shak's grandmother's will and gotten married even after Shak's
grandmother had said no. Because the grandmother was prejudiced against anyone who wasn't Chinese, especially when it
came to marriage. Or so I've heard.) So Shak used to wear her
grandmother's bracelets, and although I had never seen this
emerald one, I assumed that was where it had come from.

"He saw us," she was saying, and when I didn't respond right
away, she looked at me as if to check whether I was listening, as
if I would ever not listen to her. I was the one who had remained
faithful and loyal to her, no matter what. "Do you remember
that night? Rose?"

Her accent was almost like that Jason fellow's, the sounds in
her words flopping about, and every r chasing the air. (Not that I
minded, of course. Because Shak wasn't doing it on purpose, trying to sound angmo.) I could hear her voice drifting off into the
doctor's garden, familiar almost as if we were young girls again,
even with her sounding American. She was still Shak to me, you
know, and deep down inside, I was sure I was still Rose to her. Even
if she was carrying in her watermelon womb a child everyone suspected was mixed. Even if everyone couldn't help wondering how
she could manage to make love to an angmo. I especially. Maybe
because I didn't want to imagine it, her fingers stroking that canary
hair. That animal hair, with the pale skin underneath.

"Rose?"

A breeze was blowing about in the garden, the grass and
weeds swaying at the tips, overgrown and deep. I tried to feel
whether there was someone watching us, but there was only the
breeze, and shadows appearing and disappearing like a dance as
some afternoon clouds moved into the pathway of the sun.

Shak was almost holding her breath, I could feel it. Not desperately, but as if the world might stop spinning on its axis if she
were to hear me say I didn't know what night she was referring to, which wouldn't have been the truth, but let bygones be bygones,
as I've said. Why dig up what's best left buried? Although I had
known from the moment she had said she wanted to see the doctor's house, what she was really talking about, I must have thought
that seeing the house would be enough. Because it would confirm
for her everything had existed, we had existed, on that long ago
night when the doctor was dragging his son out to the gate, and
we had happened to be stepping off the bus.

Whether that was what had kept her away, or brought her
back, I didn't want to ask. I was afraid to ask, although I wouldn't
have been able to tell you what, exactly, frightened me about it.

Just seeing the house felt enough to me. Standing there
with Shak, actually looking through the gate at the dingy white
walls, the red door with the brass knocker imported from overseas, the dirty windows.

For nine years already, the house had been empty, although
the doctor and his wife still owned it (because they hadn't managed to sell it, for some reason). Even the brass plate with the
doctor's name that used to hang on the gate was gone, and with
the garden so untidy and the cement driveway littered with
leaves, the property looked quite forlorn. Nothing like the way
it used to look, when the doctor's servants used to take care of
everything, and yet, I would avert my eyes whenever I passed it.

Life goes on, you know, and out of the blue, here we were.

"Yes, I remember." I spoke quickly before I could change my
mind, and I was glad about it, because there was such relief in
Shak's eyes, and the way she smiled at me, as if to say thank you.

But I didn't understand enough, you know. And the next
time, I wouldn't be as brave, because I didn't understand enough.

WHAT I REMEMBER about that night. The amber porch light in
the driveway, and the beautiful mandarin orange plant, still
healthy, growing in the earthen pot beside the front door. (The son would pluck all the mini oranges off one morning in the
future, you know. For no apparent reason, was what the amah had
said when people asked. Because that was the kind of child he was,
so naughty, you couldn't imagine. Not at all like his sister. His
younger sister, even if only by a year. She had been a perfect child.
I)id the amah really believe it, or was she trying to be faithful to
the doctor and his wife? For job security? Who could blame her,
either way?) The front door wide open, the doctor's wife standing
and watching with her arms folded across her chest. Bougainvillea
petals tipping over the edges of earthen pots along the fence.