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