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