A Different Sky (11 page)

‘We could not risk moving her to hospital. The dengue must run its course. We can only hope now,' Boon Eng told his children in an unexpectedly contrite voice.

Mei Lan stared bitterly at her father; anger churned inside her, but when she opened her mouth to speak only a sob of pain emerged. In equal distress JJ turned and strode to the door, unable to stand any more, but his father called to him.

‘What kind of a filial son are you? It is your duty to sit by her side, to wait with her.'

‘You did not wait,' JJ burst out, tears in his eyes.

‘Earlier the doctor expected improvement,' Boon Eng answered in a low voice, accepting his son's admonition.

They waited in the meagre light from a pink satin lampshade, silent but for a clearing of the throat, the odd whispered order or exchange. Mei Lan stared at a framed photograph on a bedside table of herself as a two-year-old: in it she sat beside Ei Ling, arms about her mother's neck. Ei Ling wore a
sarong
and embroidered
kebaya,
her round eyes and the lift of her nose indicating a mix of origin as a Peranakan Straits Chinese. Her hair was fashionably coiled, pearls hung from her ears, diamonds encircled her fingers but her beautiful face wore a wistful expression, as if life held back its true harvest. In distress Mei Lan returned her gaze to her mother; the hollow-cheeked invalid labouring to breathe bore little likeness now to the real Ei Ling. Mei Lan found she was breathing in time with her mother, willing her own energy to her, willing the breath through her body. She had no words to shape the knowledge that had surfaced in her recently: that her
mother had made a poor bargain in life. Mei Lan pushed the thought away, concentrating on her breath, her eyes focused on her mother's exhausted body. At last, through the window she saw the first streak of pink crack open the sky. In that moment Second Grandmother stirred and let out a piercing wail. Little Sparrow followed with a loud cry of her own and Mei Lan knew the waiting was over.

Later, from her window Mei Lan looked down on the broad gravel drive and saw that already the servants had hung a white banner over the door, announcing the death; they must have had it ready, Mei Lan thought in horror. Now that it had happened she was numb, no tears came and her mother's delirious words of the night before echoed insistently in her head:
I will not. I will not
, the broken sounds wrenched up from deep within her. Mei Lan could not understand why the words stayed with her, or sounded so familiar.

The door opened and Ah Siew appeared with the new white mourning clothes the tailor had made in just a few hours, and the
xiao
, the mourning pin she must wear now for one hundred days; already the rituals of death had overtaken them. It was then that she remembered standing once outside her parents' bedroom door and listening with dread to the quarrel within. Her mother's voice came back to her,
I will not. I will not put up with it any longer.
At last the sentence completed itself. Mei Lan realised in new distress that Ei Ling had screamed out the words to Boon Eng as he strode away from her, dressed as always for a promiscuous evening, slamming the door behind him. He had not seen Mei Lan, who hurriedly flattened herself behind a tall cupboard beside the door. At this memory her tears welled up again and Ah Siew stepped forward. Mei Lan bent to sob on the
amah
's birdlike shoulder.

Within a week of the funeral JJ was gone. Second Grandmother had protested that he must fulfil his filial duty and stay for the required mourning period of one hundred days, but the boat was sailing and at Oxford the term would start. In the end Lim Hock An decided JJ should go as long as he observed some required rituals.

A week after JJ's departure the family moved from Lim Villa into Bougainvillaea House, squeezing into a home that seemed the size of a box after their previous palatial residence. A dividing fence was immediately put up along one side of Bougainvillaea House, cutting
it off from Lim Villa's grounds. Soon, in the distance, across manicured lawns, workmen were seen divesting the mansion of its ostentation and turning it into a school.

In a strange room, in a strange house, bereft at one blow of her mother and brother and also her home, Mei Lan woke often at night. Sometimes, hearing the crack of thunder or the splash of rain, she knew she would never again listen to these everyday sounds without remembering that night of waiting beside her mother's bed. Life was now full of missing parts: her mother, Lim Villa, JJ – all familiarity was gone. The solitariness she felt was not new to her, but was compounded by the suddenness of the change in her life. At school other girls talked about family outings and shared emotions but Mei Lan could only recount the formality of her home, each person locked into a life of their own, each separate from the others. She was never part of the giggling knots of girls who invariably fell silent when she appeared; teachers spoke of her as self-contained and possessing an exceptional brain. Each year on Mei Lan's birthday her mother had arranged a party, and all her class was invited. The great ballroom of Lim Villa had been festooned with decorations, while magicians and jugglers and dancers were called to entertain the children. Mei Lan had hated the fuss and tried to fall ill, but was always forced to attend her own party. It was useless to tell her mother that although everyone waited for the event, it only helped distance her further from her classmates. In the end she immersed herself in the solitary world of study, placing herself amongst the elite in a more effective way.

The school holidays had begun as Ei Ling fell ill, and without her mother the time lay heavy upon Mei Lan. Although usually unavailable, during school holidays Ei Ling had always taken care to arrange a special treat for Mei Lan and herself. They sometimes went to the cinema, shopped at Robinsons or visited the Botanic Gardens where concerts were performed on the bandstand; sometimes they visited an aunt in Penang. Mei Lan found herself missing these holiday treats almost more than she missed her mother, yet, she thought guiltily, if it had been Ah Siew who had died she would have been inconsolable.

Now, it shocked her to find that already, within days of her death, she could not clearly remember her mother's face, could only sense her in fragments of memory. She recalled the intoxicating smell of her perfume and the strains of the dance music that Ei Ling played on a
gramophone with a great brass ear. There were the flounces of gauzy Western clothes, and the silks of her form-fitting
sarong
,
kebaya
or
cheongsam
. Her mother had flitted in and out of the day always unreachable in those moments when Mei Lan needed her most. Through an open crack of door or through the banisters on the stairs, Mei Lan observed her mother from a distance as Ei Ling turned before a mirror at the fitting of a dress, span on her toes in the arms of her dance instructor in the ballroom of Lim Villa, or laughed with her friends at the mah-jong table with its constant clack of ivory counters.

Her father was now rarely seen. As a residence, Boon Eng considered Bougainvillaea House shamefully mean, and he preferred to stay away, living at his club, pursuing his usual diversions with ever more reckless vigour. Lim Hock An and Second Grandmother could be heard quarrelling continuously, for they found the close proximity in which they must now live distasteful. Both knew it was in these very rooms that Lim Hock An had lain with Little Sparrow to the pique of his Senior Wife. His huge Blackwood bed with its mother-of-pearl inlay and Second Grandmother's red and gold phoenix bed were fitted with much difficulty into the tiny rooms.

Without direction to the day, Mei Lan felt by turn anger, abandonment and grief as much for herself as for her mother. Rules of mourning forbade her to leave the house and, restless, she looked for diversion. Bougainvillaea House was not a place Mei Lan had ever explored, and its terrain was different from the cultivated dignity of Lim Villa with its army of gardeners forever pruning trees and weeding lawns. Bougainvillaea House had been left half wild with papaya trees, mango, wild orchid, spider lilies and an abundance of the bougainvillaea after which the house was named. At the back was a wide storm canal that channelled torrential rain and prevented flooding. The canal also harvested a nearby underground stream and was usually half filled by a sluggish flow of water. Its grassy banks ended in coarse
lallang
upon which monitor lizards sometimes sunned themselves. A metal service ladder descended into the water to one side of the house. Mei Lan had seen minnows, and crabs and crayfish stalking about amongst the weeds.

Sometimes, on those first days in Bougainvillaea House, Mei Lan heard a saxophone playing down by the canal; a volley of scales, a sad wail of sound or a fragment of melody floated to her. The notes
echoed through her, capturing the sense of solitariness that deepened in her day by day. Leaning out of her second-storey window, she tried to discover who played the music. Across the canal she saw only the overgrown garden and orchard of mangosteen trees that belonged to the rambling house, its shutters closed against the sun, which sat at the top of the slope beyond the water. In the evening shouts of laughter and the soft thud of balls from a tennis court could be heard. Ah Siew said it was a boarding house for European men run by a Eurasian woman, and added sternly that Mei Lan should not look in its direction as curious male eyes might rest upon her.

Each afternoon Mei Lan took a walk or sat beside the canal, which she now regarded as her own private stream. One day she found an old wooden chair by the kitchen door and pulled it up to the edge of the canal. The fusty odour of the water came to her, golden orioles flitted between the trees and their sweet song in the dying afternoon filled her with emotion. A kingfisher flashed by, paused on a branch and was gone, disturbed by a sudden splashing. Mei Lan looked up in annoyance to see a man, his face hidden beneath a wide straw hat, wading about with a long-handled net. She wondered if he was one of the lodgers in the boarding house Ah Siew had warned her about. All at once, the man gave a cry and began hopping comically around on one foot.

‘I've been bitten by a crayfish!' he shouted in annoyance when Mei Lan began to laugh, hobbling towards her through the water. Scrambling up the bank, he sat down on the grass near her chair to examine the bite. He wore a white shirt and old patched shorts and his long narrow feet gleamed wetly, a few drops of blood smudging the wounded toe. Mei Lan saw that in spite of his height he was no more than eighteen or nineteen, no older than JJ.

‘I'll bring some Mercurochrome,' Mei Lan said in apology, standing up abruptly, embarrassed. She turned her cheek away from him in an effort to hide the birthmark.

He raised his head and smiled, his face open to her as if they already knew each other. Beneath thick and untidy brows his dark eyes regarded her quizzically. When she returned from the house with the antiseptic he was lying stretched out with the hat over his face to shade himself from the sun, but sat up as he heard her approach.

‘We haven't introduced ourselves; I'm Howard Burns. I live over
there, in Belvedere. We're neighbours,' he said and pointed to the dilapidated house across the canal.

‘We used to live over there in Lim Villa, but now we've moved into Bougainvillaea House,' Mei Lan explained pointing to the distant shape of Lim Hock An's mansion and then to the small house behind her. Howard looked gravely from one residence to the other with an expression of query; Mei Lan felt bound to reply.

‘Changed circumstances; Grandfather crashed in the Depression.' She was surprised at how easily she could admit this to him.

Howard nodded sympathetically. When he had moved to Belvedere after his father died, Lim Villa had just been built. He knew something about the wealthy family with its two wives, and its numerous cars and rickshaws parked in a garage that he could see from a window of Belvedere. His mother was always commenting on the careless wealth of their neighbours and the ugliness of their great home. She had pointed scornfully to Bougainvillaea House, ‘the Second Wife's house', and described its polygamous use as wilfully immoral. Howard had regularly watched the children of Lim Villa being taken to school in a private rickshaw or one of the many cars in the garage. He did not tell Mei Lan now of the absorbing hours spent studying her home and its comings and goings, or the way he had kept her in view. One birthday, he remembered, he had asked for a pair of binoculars with which to see her better.

He stared at the girl before him, and marvelled at the reality of her: the feathering of her brows, the fullness of her upper lip and the birthmark on her jaw that she was trying to hide. Seeing his eyes settle upon the hated mark, Mei Lan was sure he would be repulsed.

‘It's my lucky mark, my protection,' she told him, pushing up her chin defiantly, remembering Ah Siew's
fong
and Yong Gui's pronouncement so many years before.

‘You shouldn't worry about it,' he shrugged, brushing the flaw aside with such certainty that she suddenly felt no need to hide it. Her hair was thick and straight and burnished by the sun that emptied down upon them. She held the small bottle of Mercurochrome forgotten in her hand. Howard remembered a recent funeral hearse.

‘My mother died a few weeks ago,' she replied quietly when he asked about it. Her face saddened, and he was distressed that he should have been so blunt.

‘I don't mind telling you,' she said and looked down at the grass, preferring not to see the sympathy in his eyes. The death of his father and the painful move to Belvedere was imprinted for ever on his memory. How much worse it was for her, he thought, left almost bereft of everything familiar.

‘It makes you feel ill,' he said, hoping she would know he understood and was rewarded by the emotion that shadowed her face. Hurriedly, to cover the awkward moment he began to explain about his life and how they came to Belvedere. As he spoke he glanced across the canal, hoping his mother was not at one of Belvedere's windows to see him.