Читать книгу Two Dreams - Shirley Geok-lin Lim - Страница 11

Mr Tang’s Girls

KIM MEE CAUGHT HER SISTER smoking in the garden. It was a dry hot day with sunshine bouncing off the Straits. The mix of blue waves and light cast an unpleasant glare in the garden whose sandy soil seemed to burn and melt under her feet. Everyone stayed indoors on such Saturday afternoons; Ah Kong and Mother sleeping in the darkened sunroom and the girls reading magazines or doing homework throughout the house. Kim Mee had painted her toenails a new dark red colour; she was going to a picnic in Tanjong Bidara on Sunday and wanted to see the effect of the fresh colour on her feet bare on sand. The garden behind the house sloped down to the sea in a jungle of sea-almond trees and pandanus. A rusted barbed-wire fence and a broken gate were the only signs which marked when the garden stopped being a garden and became sea-wilderness. A large ciku tree grew by the fence, its branches half within the garden and half flung over the stretch of pebbles, driftwood, ground-down shells, and rotting organisms which lead shallowly down to the muddy tidal water. It was under the branches hidden by the trunk that Kim Li was smoking. She was taken by surprise, eyes half-shut, smoke gently trailing from her nostrils, and gazing almost tenderly at the horizon gleaming like a high-tension wire in the great distance.

“Ah ha! Since when did you start smoking?” Kim Mee said softly, coming suddenly around the tree trunk.

Unperturbed, without a start, Kim Li took another puff, elegantly holding the cigarette to the side of her mouth. Her fingers curled exaggeratedly as she slowly moved the cigarette away. She said with a drawl, “Why should I tell you?”

“Ah Kong will slap you.”

She snapped her head around and frowned furiously. “You sneak! Are you going to tell him?”

“No, of course not!” Kim Mee cried, half-afraid. There were only two years’ difference in age between them, but Kim Li was a strange one. She suffered from unpredictable moods which had recently grown more savage. “You’re so mean. Why do you think I’ll tell?” Kim Mee was angry now at having been frightened. In the last year, she had felt herself at an advantage over her eldest sister whose scenes, rages, tears, and silences were less and less credited. The youngest girl, Kim Yee, at twelve years old, already seemed more mature than Kim Li. And she, at fifteen, was clearly superior. She didn’t want to leave Kim Li smoking under the cool shade with eyes sophisticatedly glazed and looking advanced and remote. Moving closer, she asked, “Where did you get the cigarette?”

“Mind your own business,” Kim Li replied calmly.

“Is it Ah Kong’s cigarette? Yes, I can see it’s a Lucky Strike.”

Kim Li dropped the stub and kicked sand over it. Smoke still drifted from the burning end, all but buried under the mound. “What do you know of life?” she asked loftily and walked up the white glaring path past the bathhouse and up the wooden side-stairs.

Kim Mee felt herself abandoned as she watched her sister’s back vanish through the door. “Ugly witch!” She glanced at her feet where the blood-red toenails twinkled darkly.

Saturdays were, as long as she could remember, quiet days, heavy and slow with the grey masculine presence of their father who spent most of the day, with Mother beside him, resting, gathering strength in his green leather chaise in the sunroom. Only his bushy eyebrows, growing in a straight line like a scar across his forehead, seemed awake. The hair there was turning white, bristling in wisps that grew even more luxuriant as the hair on his head receded and left the tight high skin mottled with discoloured specks. Now and again he would speak in sonorous tones, but, chiefly, he dozed or gazed silently out of the windows which surrounded the room to the low flowering trees which Ah Chee, the family servant, tended, and, through the crisp green leaves, to his private thoughts.

They were his second family. Every Friday he drove down from Kuala Lumpur, where his first wife and children lived, in time for dinner. On Saturdays, the girls stayed home. No school activity, no friend, no party, no shopping trip took them out of the house. Their suppressed giggles, lazy talk, muted movements, and uncertain sighs constituted his sense of home, and every Saturday, the four girls played their part: they became daughters whose voices were to be heard like a cheerful music in the background, but never loudly or intrusively.

Every Saturday they made high tea at five. The girls peeled hard-boiled eggs, the shells carefully cracked and coming clean off the firm whites, and mashed them with butter into a spread. They cut fresh loaves of bread into thick yellow slices and poured mugs of tea into which they stirred puddles of condensed milk and rounded teaspoons of sugar. Ah Kong would eat only fresh bread, thickly buttered and grained with sprinkles of sugar, but he enjoyed watching his daughters eat like European mems. He brought supplies from Kuala Lumpur: tomatoes, tins of devilled ham and Kraft Cheese, and packages of Birds’ Blancmange. Saturday tea was when he considered himself a successful father and fed on the vision of his four daughters eating toast and tomato slices while his quiet wife poured tea by his side.

“I say, Kim Bee,” Kim Yee said, swallowing a cracker, “are you going to give me your blouse?”

The two younger girls were almost identical in build and height, Kim Yee, in the last year shooting like a vine, in fact being slightly stockier and more long-waisted than Kim Bee. Teatime with Ah Kong was the occasion to ask for dresses, presents, money and other favours, and Kim Yee, being the youngest, was the least abashed in her approach.

“Yah! You’re always taking my clothes. Why don’t you ask for the blouse I’m wearing?”

“May I? It’s pretty, and I can wear it to Sunday School.”

Breathing indignation, Kim Bee shot a look of terrible fury and imploration to her mother, “She’s impossible ...” But she swallowed the rest of her speech, for she also had a request to make to Ah Kong who was finally paying attention to the squabble.

“Don’t you girls have enough to wear? Why must you take clothes from each other?”

Like a child who knows her part, Mother shifted in her chair and said good-naturedly, “Girls grow so fast, Peng. Their clothes are too small for them in six months. My goodness, Kim Yee’s dresses are so short she doesn’t look decent in them.”

“Me too, Ah Kong!” Kim Mee added. “I haven’t had a new dress since Chinese New Year.”

“Chinese New Year was only three months ago,” Ah Kong replied, shooting up his eyebrows, whether in surprise or annoyance no one knew.

“But I’ve grown an inch since then!”

“And I’ve grown three inches in one year,” Kim Bee said.

“Ah Kong, your daughters are becoming women,” Kim Li said in an aggressive voice. She was sitting to one side of her father, away from the table, not eating or drinking, kicking her long legs rhythmically throughout the meal. She wore her blue school shorts which fitted tightly above the thighs and stretched across the bottom, flattening the weight which ballooned curiously around her tall skinny frame. Her legs, like her chest, were skinny, almost fleshless. They were long and shapeless; the knees bumped out like rock-outcroppings, and the ankles rose to meet the backs of her knees with hardly a suggestion of a calf. In the tight shorts she didn’t appear feminine or provocative, merely unbalanced, as if the fat around the hips and bottom were a growth, a goitre draped on the lean trunk.

Everyone suddenly stopped talking. Mother opened her mouth and brought out a gasp; the sisters stopped chewing and looked away into different directions. Kim Mee was furious because Ah Kong’s face was reddening. There would be no money for new clothes if he lost his temper.

“And you, you are not dressed like a woman,” he replied without looking at her. “How dare you come to the table like a half-naked slut!” He had always been careful to avoid such language in his house, but her aggressive interruption aroused him.

“At least I don’t beg you for clothes. And what I wear is what you give me. It’s not ...”

“Shut up!” he roared. “You ...”

“Go to your room,” Mother said to Kim Li before he could finish. Her voice was placid as if such quarrels were an everyday occurrence. If Ah Kong’s bunched-up brows and protruding veins all balled up like a fist above his bony beak put her off, she didn’t show it. “Peng,” she continued, sweet-natured as ever, “maybe tomorrow we can go over the cost of some new clothes. The girls can shop for some cheap materials, and Ah Chee and I will sew a few simple skirts and blouses. We won’t have to pay a tailor. They’ll be very simple clothes, of course, because it’s been so long since I’ve stitched anything ...” So she chatted on, rolling a cosy domestic mat before him, and soon, they were spreading more butter and drinking fresh cups of tea.

Kim Li did not leave the table till Ah Kong’s attention was unravelled; then she stretched herself out of the chair, hummed, and sauntered to her room, casual as a cat and grinning from ear to ear. Her humming wasn’t grating, but it was loud enough to reach the dining room. What could Ah Kong do about it? He had again slipped into silence, drowsing along with the buzz of feminine discussion, acknowledging that, Sunday, he would once again open his purse and drive off in the warm evening to their grateful goodbyes.

But there was Saturday night and the evening meal late at nine and the soft hours till eleven when his girls would sit in the living room with long washed hair reading Her World and Seventeen, selecting patterns for their new frocks. And by midnight, everyone would be asleep.

There was Ah Chee snoring in her back room among empty cracker tins and washed Ovaltine jars. He had acquired her when his second wife had finally given in to his determined courting and, contrary to her Methodist upbringing, married him in a small Chinese ceremony. The three of them had moved in immediately after the ceremony to this large wooden house on Old Beach Road, and, gradually, as the rooms filled up with beds and daughters, so also Ah Chee’s room had filled up with the remains of meals. She never threw out a tin, bottle or jar. The banged-up tins and tall bottles she sold to the junkman; those biscuit tins stamped with gaudy roses or toffee tins painted with ladies in crinoline gowns or Royal Guardsmen in fat fur hats she hoarded and produced each New Year to fill with love-letters, bean cakes, and kuih bulu. Ah Kong approved of her as much as, perhaps even more than, he approved of his wife. Her parsimonious craggy face, those strong bulging forearms, the loose folds of her black trousers flapping as she padded barefoot and cracked sole from kitchen to garden, from one tidied room to another waiting to be swept, these were elements he looked forward to each Friday as much as he looked forward to his wife’s vague smile and soft shape in bed. Ah Chee had lived in the house for seventeen years, yet her influence was perceivable in only a few rooms.

Ah Kong seldom looked into Ah Chee’s room which, he knew, was a junk heap gathered around a narrow board bed with a chicken wire strung across the bare window. But, at midnight, when he rose to check the fastenings at the back door and the bolts on the front, he looked into every room where his daughters slept. Here was Bee’s, connected to her parents’ through a bathroom. A Bible lay on her bed. She slept, passionately hugging a bolster to her face, half-suffocated, the pyjama-top riding high and showing a midriff concave and yellow in the dimness. Across the central corridor Kim Yee stretched corpse-like and rigid, as if she had willed herself to sleep or were still awake under the sleeping mask, the stuffed bear and rabbit exhibited at the foot of her bed like nursery props, unnecessary now that the play was over. He sniffed in Kim Mee’s room; it smelt of talcum and hairspray. The memory of other rooms came to mind, rooms which disgusted him as he wrestled to victory with their occupants. But no pink satin pillows or red paper flowers were here; a centrefold of the British singers, the Beatles, was taped to one wall and blue checked curtains swayed in the night breeze. Kim Mee slept curled against her bolster. In a frilly babydoll, her haunches curved and enveloped the pillow like a woman with her lover. He hated the sight but didn’t cover her in case she should wake. There was a time when he would walk through the house looking into every room, and each silent form would fill him with pleasure, that they should belong to him, depend on his homecoming, and fall asleep in his presence, innocent and pure. Now the harsh scent of hairspray stagnated in the air. Its metallic fragrance was clammy and chilled, a cheap and thin cover over the daughter whose delicate limbs were crowned with an idol’s head aureoled and agonized by bristling rollers. Again the recollection of disgust tinged his thoughts, and he hesitated before Kim Li’s room. He didn’t know what to expect any more of his daughters, one spending her allowance on lipstick, nail polish, Blue Grass Cologne, and this other somehow not seeming quite right.

Kim Li was not yet asleep. With knees raised up, she sat in bed reading in the minute diagonal light of the bedlamp. He stopped at the door but could not retreat quickly enough. She turned a baleful look. “What do you want?”

“It’s twelve o’clock. Go to sleep,” he said curtly, feeling that that was not exactly what he should say; however, he seldom had to think about what to say in this house, and his self-consciousness was extreme. Suddenly he noticed her. She had cut her hair short, when he couldn’t tell. He remembered once noticing that her hair was long and that she had put it up in a ponytail which made her unpretty face as small as his palm. Tonight, her hair was cropped short carelessly in the front and sides so that what might have been curls shot away from her head like bits of string. She’s ugly! he thought and turned away, not staying to see if she would obey him.

He stayed awake most of the night. This was true every Saturday night for many years. Sleeping through the mornings, drowsing in the lounge-chair through the afternoons, and sitting somnolent through tea and dinner hours, his life, all expended in the noise, heat, and rackety shuttle of the mines during the week, would gradually flow back to being. The weakness that overcame him as soon as he arrived at the front door each Friday night would ebb away. Slowly, the movements of women through the rooms returned to him a masculine vitality. Their gaiety aroused him to strength, and his mind began turning again, although at first numb and weary.

He was supine and passive all through Saturday, but by nightfall he was filled with nervous energy. After his shower he would enter his bedroom with head and shoulders erect. His round soft wife in her faded nightgown was exactly what he wanted then; he was firm next to her slack hips, lean against her plump rolling breasts; he could sink into her submissive form like a bull sinking into a mudbank, groaning with pleasure. Later, after she was asleep, his mind kept churning. Plans for the week ahead were meticulously laid: the lawyer to visit on Monday; the old klong to be shut and the machinery moved to the new site; Jason, his eldest son, to be talked to about his absences from the office; the monthly remittance to be sent to Wanda, his second daughter, in Melbourne; old Chong to be retired. His mind worked thus, energetically and unhesitatingly, while he listened to his daughters settle for the night, the bathrooms eventually quiet, Ah Chee dragging across the corridor to bolt the doors, and soft clicks as one light and then another was switched off. Then, after the clock struck its twelve slow chimes, he walked through the house, looking into each room while his mind and body ran in electrical fusion, each female form in bed renewing his pleasure with his life, leaving each room with a fresh vibrancy to his body. So he would lie awake till the early hours of Sunday, calm yet vibrating strongly, breathing deeply, for he believed in the medicinal value of fresh night air, while his mind struggled with problems and resolved them for the next week.

Tonight, however, his sleeplessness was not pleasurable. Old, he thought, old and wasted his daughters had made him. He couldn’t lie relaxed and immobile; the bodies of women surrounded him in an irritating swarm. He heard Kim Li slapping a book shut, footsteps moving towards the dining room; a refrigerator door opening and its motor running. “Stupid girl!” he muttered, thinking of the cold flooding out of the machine, ice melting in trays, the tropical heat corrupting the rectangles of butter still hard and satiny in their paper wrappers. But he didn’t get up to reprimand her.

All day Ah Kong would not speak to Kim Li. This wouldn’t have appeared out of the ordinary except that she sat in the sunroom with him most of the morning.

Kim Bee and Kim Yee escaped to church at nine. In white and pink, wearing their grownup heels and hair parted in braids, they looked like bridesmaids, ceremoniously stiff with a sparkle of excitement softening their faces. The Methodist Church was ten minutes’ walk away. Mother no longer went to church, but her younger daughters went every Sunday, since it was still their mother’s faith, and were greeted by women their mother’s age, who sent regards but never visited themselves. The pastor was especially nice to them, having participated in the drama eighteen years ago.

She’s a stray lamb. Those were barbaric times after the Japanese Occupation; otherwise, she would probably not have consented to live in sinful relationship as a second wife. And, although I suppose it doesn’t matter who the sin is committed with, Mr Tang is a well-known, respectable man. Her situation is more understandable when you know how careful and correct Mr Tang is with everything concerning himself and his family. It’s a pity he is so Chinese, although, of course, divorces weren’t as acceptable until a few years ago, and, even now, one shouldn’t encourage it. Yet, if only he would divorce his first wife, she could return to the Church and the children ... They’re lovely girls, all of them, although the oldest hasn’t been to service in a while, and the second seems excitable. The two young ones are so good, volunteering for the Sunday School Drive, singing in the choir (they have such sweet tones!) and so cheerful. A little anxious about the Scriptures. They want to know especially what has been written about the day of Judgement, which isn’t surprising seeing ... Now, if Mr Tang weren’t a pagan, he couldn’t maintain this terrible life, keeping two households in separate towns, but, of course, he’s old-fashioned and believes in the propriety of polygamy. Pagans have their own faith, I have no doubt, and Christ will consider this when the Day comes, but for the mother ...

For Kim Bee and Kim Yee, Sunday service was one of the more enjoyable events in a dull weekend. Fresh as frangipani wreaths, they walked companionably to church, for once in full charge of themselves. They radiated health and cheerfulness from the hours of imposed rest, from their gladness at meeting the friends their parents never met but still approved of, and from the simple encouraging emotions of welcome, love, and forgiveness which welled up in hymns, and which were the open subjects of the pastor’s sermon.

“Love, love, love,” sang the choir. “Our Father, Our Father,” they murmured and flooded their hearts with gratitude, with desire. Radiant, they returned from church at noon, in time for lunch and, later, to say goodbye to Ah Kong who drove back to Kuala Lumpur every Sunday at two.

All morning Kim Li sat cross-legged on the floor next to Ah Kong’s chair. Now and again she attempted to clip a toenail, but her toes seemed to have been too awkwardly placed, or, perhaps, she had grown too ungainly; she could not grip the foot securely. It wasn’t unusual for the girls to sit on the floor by Ah Kong’s feet. As children they had read the Sunday comics sprawled on the sunroom floor. Or mother would bake scones, and they would eat them hot from the oven around their father. It was a scene he particularly savoured, a floury, milling hour when he was most quiescent, feeling himself almost a baby held in the arms of his womanly family. This morning, however, Kim Li’s struggles to clip her toenails forced his attention. Her silent contortions exaggerated by the shorts she was wearing bemused him. Was she already a woman as she had claimed last evening? Ah Kong felt a curious pity for her mixed with anger. Yes, he would have to marry her off. She moved her skinny legs and shot a look at him slyly as if to catch him staring. If she weren’t his daughter, he thought, he could almost believe she was trying to arouse him. But he couldn’t send her out of the room without admitting that she disturbed him. Once he had watched a bitch in heat lick itself and had kicked it in disgust. He watched her now and was nauseous at the prospect of his future: all his good little girls turning to bitches and licking themselves.

Leaving promptly at two, Mr Tang told his wife that he might not be coming next Friday. He had unexpected business and would call. He didn’t tell her he was planning to find a husband for Kim Li. Complaisant as his wife was, he suspected she might not like the idea of an arranged marriage, nor would the girls. By midweek, he had found a man for Kim Li, the assistant to his general manager, a capable, China-born, Chinese-educated worker who had left his wife and family in Fukien eleven years ago and now couldn’t get them out. He’d been without a woman since and had recently advised his Clan Association that he was looking for a second wife. Chan Kow had worked well for Mr Tang for eight years. What greater compliment to his employees than to marry one of them, albeit one in a supervisory position, to his daughter? Chan Kow was overwhelmed by the proposal. He wasn’t worthy of the match; besides, he was thirty-three and Mr Tang’s young daughter may not want him. But he would be honoured, deeply honoured.