Читать книгу Two Dreams - Shirley Geok-lin Lim - Страница 9

Hunger

ONLY TWO DAYS since Mother left. The freedom seemed forever. More room for running. More time for staying awake, games, play. Was she glad? Was she sad? There was never time for thinking although the day was long, longer as the afternoon drew on and on towards meal time, longest in darkness when the odours of soy, pork, ginger, garlic and sweet cooked rice lingered on and on in the empty rooms downstairs, like a vague ache in her crotch, a burn in her chest, sensations that followed her to the bedroom to lie down beside her in the brown faded dark of the bottom half of the iron double-bunk bed that had been so fashionable only a few years ago.

Mother would be gone three days next morning.

Chai tightened the uniform belt and thought of Suleng. Suleng’s mother was a washerwoman, but in her hand Suleng had a piece of white bread spread thick with margarine and sprinkled with sugar. Suleng wasn’t in her A class. Suleng was a B class girl, but her uniform was starched and ironed, the creases sharp and straight, the folds thick like her slice of bread and the yellow margarine spread with a fat knife. The starch made Suleng’s royal blue cotton uniform gleam, like the fat sugar crystals glistening on the margarine on top of the bread.

She had watched Suleng eat that slice of bread as they walked across the bridge to school a few weeks ago, when she had first moved to Grandfather’s house. Even then Chai had been hungry. Mother had given her two marie-piah and some boiled water. Brown, crisp, flat, dry, round, pricked, sugary, crackling, each half the size of a palm—you could buy ten marie-piah for five cents. She watched Suleng eat her slice of thick, soft, oily bread. She walked beside her and began talking, watching as Suleng put the last wedge in her greasy mouth.

Now Chai waited for Suleng in the middle hall of Suleng’s house, and watched as Suleng’s mother spread the margarine on the bread. The margarine tub was huge, almost as large as those square tins of fancy English biscuits Mother bought when they had money and lived in the bank that Father managed. Now she didn’t even have those two marie-piah for breakfast.

Perhaps she hoped Suleng would not be able to finish her bread and would give her the leftover. Perhaps she hoped the washerwoman would offer her a slice. At every house, from every open and half-opened door, she smelled the fresh yeasty dough of white bread, the clean tang of sugar crystals. The morning was full of food, and she was hungry.

By the next week she had stopped walking with Suleng. She could walk faster, easier, without Suleng who strolled lazily munching her bread. Swiftly she passed the half-opened doors from where warm scents of toast and coconut cakes wafted towards her thin chest. She did not care to pause to breathe the full aromas of black coffee, that clear scent of pandan-scented coconut-boiled rice that made her stomach lurch. The houses were rich, concealed behind gold-leafed, carved doors and windows, like her grandfather’s house had been, even in her memory, which seemed now so short, so immediate of quick movement and sunshine.

This was freedom. To walk at a fast trot to school, to think ahead to the day, the play, the books, the next day, the play, the books. Not to think of where she was but how she must go. Quickly she crossed the little bridge, breathed the sulphuric smell of putrid riverine sediment. This is not it, she thought. The angsana trees were heavy with yellow blossoms. Their tiny petals littered a stretch of the park, the morning air was acid sharp with their efflorescence and decay. Yellow pollen like gold dust dotted the ground. To the right the Straits of Malacca was always blue or grey, colours as steadfast as her heart as she walked rapidly to school. I am steadfast, she thought, exhilarated. I am myself, no one is me, I am alone. She forgot she was hungry, walking between the weight of the blossoming angsana and the empty blue space of the morning sky and the Malacca Straits.

So quickly she had forgotten about Mother. Poor Mother who cried that morning in Auntie’s house after she had pulled her in as she was passing by on her way to school and had given her a glass of Ovaltine and a slice of bread and marmalade. Very good marmalade, from Sheffield, England. It had strips of bitter peel and was shining clear orange, just the way she liked marmalade. But that was only one morning. Mother wasn’t at the window of Auntie’s house the next day nor the next, nor the next, and so on. Mother had gone some place, gone away. Now she walked quickly past Auntie’s house with its closed gold-leafed, carved windows and doors and tried not to think about the marmalade.

Sister Finnigan was a tall scarecrow. Her eyes were bright blue, little shifting chips of precious star sapphire behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Mother had taken her to many jewellery stores. She had sat in front of the long glassed-in counters and stared at the coloured stones, watery aquamarine, flushed pigeon rubies from Burma, the bland green jade best for carved peaches and Buddhas, and dense yellow tourmaline from Brazil. It was the colourless stones that cost the most: clear as nothing else in the world. No blue, no grey, no yellow, the hardest stone in the world, Mr Koh, the man behind the glass counters with his abacus and little magnifying glass, had told her. No-colour, clear as clear, like looking through water and seeing no bottom, no sky, no eyes looking back, the impossible clear that is still not nothing, that has been chipped and chipped till the planes tilt like crazy mirrors refracting each other and their cross-reflections catch dizzy fire, and what you saw then was this blaze, this spark that sprang up at you and pulled you in. But it was just a stone, a stone with no colour. Now Mother had been gone for weeks she was becoming like that stone, she was becoming no-mother, a memory clear as clear, and Chai knew she was forgetting her, as if Mother had no reflection in the bottom of her memory or in the sky above. Sister Finnigan’s blue star-sapphire eyes snapped and pulsed, although not as blue and steadfast as her own heart.

She sat on the floor by the classroom door and sewed a row of back-stitches, hemming handkerchiefs. She had to unpick the first row.

“You’re taking too much cloth in the stitch,” Sister Finnigan said, turning the handkerchief over to show the way the stitches bunched up on the seamless side. “Pick only a thread,” she said, her long white fingers pushing the needle smoothly through the cotton, sliding through a thread of the weave, “and don’t pull tight.” She turned the cloth over to show where the stitch had closed the seam, not even a faint shadow of the thread showing. “Invisible, it must be invisible,” she said.

Try as she would, Chai could not do it. The handkerchief was for her father. Invisible, she thought, pick only a thread, leave smooth. But the needle was huge and clumsy and wouldn’t obey her. It broke off the thread of the weave and left cloth scars. Her anxious fingers printed smudges of pencil grey lead and grime. After Mother left, she didn’t take a bath everyday, sometimes it was three days before she felt grubby enough to strip and pour buckets of well water over herself. There was no soap and Father rinsed their clothes and dried them on Saturdays and Sundays. Sister Finnigan fixed her chipped blue eyes on her crumpled uniform, the socks she slipped lower each day into the canvas shoes so as to hide the spreading grey heels. So she sat right by the doorway, as far as she could from Sister Finnigan’s stinky black robes as Sister perched on her desk showing the eager girls how to turn daisy petals, knot bachelor buttons, cross-stitch a satin oval, and ruffle and gather smocks and aprons. She could only hem a handkerchief, and she could not go beyond the second seam.

Still, sewing was alright. It was better sitting in class an A girl than in the room at night without Father or Mother there. Her brothers slept in a different corner. She never remembered in the afternoon if she had changed into pyjamas or had just fallen asleep in her skirt and blouse waiting for Father to come back. She kept the handkerchief in her desk, she had never finished it, and Sister Finnigan forgot about her poor back-stitches because she memorized the Book of Luke and recited each chapter that was asked for perfectly as if she had swallowed the book and had only to open her mouth to find the page and rattle off verse and chapter. Being an A girl in class was much better than being a girl at home.

Father had forgotten about her too. He forgot she walked to school every morning without breakfast, that he hadn’t given her money for lunch, and that she hadn’t taken her bath before he slipped out each night some place.

She was beginning to forget she was hungry. They must have eaten at night. Something some auntie gave them. In the morning she washed by the well with a bucket of water smelling slightly of sulphur and hurried past the splendid houses of gold-leafed, carved closed doors and across the bridge. It was the bridge that brought her to herself, across to the angsanas in the park and the long consoling line of blue and grey Straits water. Once across the bridge she began reciting the Book of Luke, long mouthfuls of words. Sister Finnigan loved her for the Book of Luke. She had this secret machine inside her that could eat up books, swallow them whole, then give them back in bits and pieces, as good almost as before she ate them.

She didn’t look up at the angsanas anymore, all their flowers were gone and only dry brown rustling seeds hung down and scattered by her feet. Some auntie, her mother’s sister, had told her that the seeds were devils’ shoes. The auntie had peeled the tough fibrous brown covering and showed her the tiny shoe-shaped seed. “Don’t you put any in your pocket,” Mother’s sister said. “The devil will come to your house looking for his shoes.” She had been afraid when the auntie told her this, and she had put that little shoe in the pocket of her pyjamas that night. Mother was still with them then, she had not been hungry, only naughty. She fell asleep frightened that the devil would come, but the next morning the shoe was still in her pocket and then the pyjamas had been washed and the shoe disappeared.

Things disappeared all the time now. First it was Mother, then her doll with the round blue eyes over which pink plastic lids tufted with tough bristle-lashes could fall as you pushed her head down. She had forgotten about her doll in the freedom which Mother’s disappearance brought. All those hours of afternoon play by the river’s muddy flats, the grubbiness between her toes that nobody scolded her for. Then she saw her cousin Ah Lan carrying the doll. Ah Lan said it was her doll, but she recognized the red blemish on one upper arm which she had always pretended was a vaccination mark. It was her own doll, with shining yellow stringy hair springing in clumps from the hard plastic head, and the straight fat legs that could move only from the hip like the German soldiers in the old war movies. She was sad the doll no longer belonged to her, it had been her doll and she never saw it again after that afternoon she asked Ah Lan to show her its upper arm and pointed out the red patch on it. And Second Auntie, Ah Lan’s mother, didn’t allow her to play in her rooms any more.

But Chai went to school every day. Sister Finnigan loved her. Chai sat in the front row and read all the books. One day, after recess, it was so hot she felt faint. She thought she saw Sister spread out her arms. The black robe fell like a cloak from Sister’s arms, it ballooned like a cape, like furry black wings, and Sister rose towards the ceiling, her face still calm and smiling, the blue eyes glinting like pieces of sky. There was a little dribble of saliva by the corner of her mouth; she had fallen asleep and Sister Finnigan was still leaning against the desk reading a passage about the Seven Years’ War. She had felt really hungry then, as if she would die if she didn’t have something to eat immediately, but she knew she wouldn’t. She hoped Sister Finnigan would not catch her sleeping in class, so she stretched her eyes wide open and rolled the pupils around like marbles to keep awake. Instead she felt nauseous. She kept her eyes on the page and tried drinking in the words. The next period was library hour and she knew there were all kinds of adventure books in the cupboard she hadn’t read yet, so if she could wait till then she would be able to forget about being hungry.

It was getting harder to play in the afternoon. She was tired and weak a lot. She waited every evening for Father to come home from work. Then Second Auntie gave them their meal. Her brothers ate so much rice, three plates full of rice. She couldn’t eat that much. Her stomach hurt after the food, although she had been waiting all day to eat.

She waited in the morning as she walked past the park with its long green sweep of grass lying beside the pulsing Straits waves. Now it was a kind of loneliness. She sang to herself as she walked, and kept her head down as she passed the crowded areas where other children who went to other schools were noisily crowding around the ice-cream man, the Indian peanut seller, the pushcart on which the peddler was quickly grilling peanut waffles. The fruitsellers had baskets of golden langsats, egg-shaped crimson rambutans, spiky with dark hair. They had split open dark red juicy watermelons dotted with shiny black seeds, gleaming yellow jackfruit, plump and ribbed, and light green guavas with pink seedy hearts. She kept her head down as she past, only lifting it high to sing to herself when she was safely alone under the umbrella angsanas.

But she still had to go through recess every day. She waited till the girls had rushed out and pushed their way to their favourite stalls. Some bought fried noodles or sardine sandwiches or rice cakes. Others had brought bread and jam and spent their money on syrupy ice drinks or sweets. She waited in the classroom till she thought they had finished eating, then she went out to play with them.

Only after she got home did she feel hunger. Her stomach made so much noise crying for some food that she shouted louder as she played to hide its noise. Her brothers played more and more in the streets. They ran further and further beyond the house. They always came home before Father did, before it became night. Away from their house and the other gold-leafed covered doorways, the streets were narrow and the houses crowded and small. She was running down the narrow street going home when the old man waved at her. He was very old and thin, an opium smoker, she thought, like her uncle in the big house. She hurried after her brothers; she was so hungry, she didn’t wave back.

The old man was sitting on a bench outside the small house the next afternoon.

Her brothers had found some seahorses in the Straits water beside the seawall. They knew it was dangerous to walk that far out on the seawall, but a whole crowd of children had gone anyway. She was timid at the close sight of so much water. The seawall was about eight feet high and the Straits came up almost to the top of the wall. On the landward side of the wall it was all steaming mud. Wrinkled mudskippers leapt from mudhole to mudhole like her bad dreams in the morning; they were grey like the mud come alive, and they had loose flaps of warty skin, flopping open mouths and waggling tails; they were creatures from the stinking revolting mud. Immediately on the other side of the wall was the clear Straits waves, so bright in the burning afternoon sun that it hurt her eyes to look at them too long. They were blue like the sky brought close to hand, yet they were no-colour when she put her face down to look.

Her brothers had found a Players Cigarette tin and had tied a string through a rusted hole in its side. They had thrown the tin into the water and dragged it alongside as they walked along the seawall. Then they found two tiny seahorses swimming in the tin when they fished it out.

The seahorses swam bravely up, their horseheads held up high. From their curving flanks fringed fins fluttered like mermaids’ fans. She fancied they were ladies dressed for a ball; there they would dance and never ask about dinner the way she would never ask her aunties about food. She was a machine like the sea, churning her own salt, licking the sweet salty flavour of her body in secret at night when hunger woke her. The seahorses waltzed, strange tiny women in a tinful of water. She wanted them thrown back into the huge sea, she wanted to keep them to show Father, she wanted them to wink at her, she knew them very well. But they curled like grey grubs and died, floating in the leaking tin, ugly things.

She was running away from her brothers who had caught and killed the seahorses and who wanted to stay by the wall to catch more of them. Whatever for? They would only sail for a few beautiful moments, then turn on their sides like capsized boats, only they were already in the water, and die. So there. She wasn’t staying to watch that. Then she saw the old man sitting on the bench just like yesterday. Only this time he had a giant guava in his hand, as big as her two hands, and he was smiling. She could see he didn’t have a tooth in his mouth, he was so old, he must be somebody’s grandfather.

He waved the guava, saw her stop, held it out to her. It was light green, ripe, that’s when they’re the sweetest. She knew because of the times Mother had taken her to Grandmother’s house and she had picked the fallen guavas in the garden. Now Mother was gone, and she would never visit Grandmother’s house. Had Grandmother died and no one told her? But that was because she was only eight. Grandmother’s guavas were never so large. She wanted it not to bring home to Father but to eat it like she ate all those little sweet guavas in Grandmother’s guarden when Grandmother was alive.

The old man handed her the guava and tugged at her to follow him. The front room was empty and dim, it didn’t look like anyone lived there. He put his hand under her dress and stroked her front. She didn’t think anything of it. He was shivering, the folds of his face matching the folds of his arms. She didn’t know skin and flesh could drip and drape like spotted grey cloth over a body. He put one hand through her sleeve and twisted her nipple. It didn’t hurt, but she moved away, then ran out.

The next day, he was sitting by the bench waiting for her. This time he had a ten-cent coin, all shiny and new, and she stayed just a little longer while he stroked her arms and chest, his eyes shut mysteriously. But when he called to her the day after, and the days following that, she ran past without looking. He had only money to give her, and the ten-cent coin did not make up for the terrible pleasure of ignoring his pleading eyes and wavering hand.