The Black Isle (46 page)

I stood up to leave. He looked surprised that his barbs had so offended me.

“Don’t you, too?” he asked.

“What?”

“Owe him.” He gazed at my plate. “You’re wasteful to boot. You might as well finish it. You’ve already paid.”

I should have left. My story could be happier if I had. But I just stood there.

Kenneth was infuriating. I’d begun the dinner on
my
terms, in a position of strength, yet he’d managed to rile me until he was back in control. If I walked out on him now, it was admitting defeat. Finally, hunger decided. And in the moment that I sat back down, my fate was sealed. Because a plate of chicken rice had beckoned to me, because I had nothing better to do, and perhaps most of all because I’d seen him cry, I failed to flee the sticky threads of Kenneth Kee’s ever-spiraling web.

We finished the meal in silence. We were both ravenous—the boiled yam dinners at the boarding house had been uniformly atrocious. With each mouthful, I was sucked back into Kenneth’s dominion of pregnant pauses, doublespeak, and roundabout thinking.

“Do you think things will ever get better?” he asked when the last bite was gone. His voice was calm, as if we’d been chatting amiably the whole time. “Do you think what we’ve gone through has been worth it?”

Despite myself, I was touched. He was, in his willfully opaque way, asking to be reassured.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Good.” He smiled. “I thought so, too, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

We wandered slowly back to our boarding house at the edge of Chinatown, now a labyrinth of cheap rooming houses, many of them also serving as bordellos. The zoning laws had been relaxed, as part of the government’s last-ditch effort to quell the restless natives. Ludicrous as this might sound—using prostitution to quash dissent—the lawmakers were convinced it would work. And perhaps it did. In the past weeks, there had been next to no rioting.

The curfew was nine o’clock, so although it was only half past eight, men of all ages on our street were kissing their escorts good night before scurrying to catch the last ride home. Kenneth eyed them dispassionately, as if they were anthropological specimens placed in his path expressly for his study. I expected him to say something caustic about the aging courtesans or the resilience of the world’s oldest profession, but he remained quiet all the way to our ramshackle house.

We both had rooms on the third floor. When we neared mine, I said good night.

“Good night?” he asked, smiling oddly.

He reached over and pulled me into the clumsy embrace of a man unaccustomed to giving hugs. All his weight shifted onto me, and I had to lean back against the wall to steady myself. It was like holding up a collapsing suit of armor. But the instant I relaxed and gave in, his embrace turned eloquent. He thanked me for the meal, apologized for his eruptions, rejoiced that our jungle days were over, and worried about the fate of our beloved city. Anyone who saw us would have thought we were conducting some kind of strange communion in the hallway.

They wouldn’t have been completely wrong. When Kenneth’s garlic-scented mouth brushed against my ear and neck, I realized that his outburst at Mitzi’s had indeed been personal.

It was a lamentable seduction. More an attack than a wooing. Nevertheless, I unlocked the door to my room and removed us from the view of potential gossips.

Given all that would happen, it seems incredible that I remember nothing else about my first night with Kenneth Kee. I’d never thought of him as handsome or erotic, and I’m certain that even as he lay in my bed that evening, I did not think of him in those terms. Truth be told, Kenneth had only ever struck me as alluring when he was animated by the badi, who, drawing on my own nature, knew how to arouse me. Inhabited by his own self, he was an odd collection of angles, a bit sharp-jawed and narrow-featured for my taste. His eyes were too close together. He reeked of Brylcreem. To top it all, he was short—no taller than me. I continued to see all the faults I had noticed in him the first time we met in the Wees’ library.

Nor do I remember much of our subsequent trysts.

What I do recall, and clearly, is that some other dynamic force drew us together, free of the usual conventions of physical attraction. Not since my cavorting with Li in the old plantation house had I felt such an intensity of shared understanding, such a mutual eradication of soul-loneliness. We canceled out each other’s alienation. Together, we felt radically normal. Well,
I
did, at any rate.

Normalcy can be an addictive drug in any age, and during the edgy days of the emergency, when the streets were darkened with armed police, its hold was especially strong. I say this not to excuse myself but to help explain my otherwise inexplicable attachment to a capricious man I often found repellent.

We coupled a few times a week, always in my room and always in secret. I knew that he didn’t want Issa or Cricket to find out about us; this was one of the myriad things he never needed to say but that I immediately sensed. I worked hard to keep our affair quiet, even though it made me complicit in his shame. For what else could it be but shame to be sleeping with a tainted courtesan, a dead man’s bride?

The frequency with which he told me he hated me would have sent feminists up in flames. Early on, he said it with a wounding glee, later with irony, and finally as an incantation, until the word
hate
lost its original sting and meaning and became a kind of perverse mating call. I suspected he used that word only because he couldn’t face uttering its opposite.

Very occasionally, however, he did indulge in bouts of expansiveness, and during these moments by his side in the dark, I savored my glimpses inside this very guarded man. I heard how he’d learned to drive at Oxford, where he worked as a chauffeur to several dons to help subsidize his studies. I learned, too, that had Mr. Wee not died, Kenneth would have gone back to finish his degree. He’d made good friends at Balliol, many of them students from Africa and the Middle East who, poetically enough, had been at Oxford to learn how to overthrow the Brits. If he’d graduated, he would have been the first in his family to have done so. Not that he was close to his family. The closest he ever came to talking about them was to say he rarely saw them. Instead, he stuffed the cash he made from odd jobs into a brown envelope and slipped it under the door of his parents’ house on the first of every month.

Although none of his “secrets” were particularly intimate or illuminating, he had a way of making them seem like profound confessions, and I felt pressure to reciprocate.

But when I told him, sobbing, about my lost sisters, he said nothing. When I admitted feeling conflicted that my trinity of pleasure—chocolate, cognac, and a good book—had been introduced to me by Taro, he only smirked. Then late one night as we lay in my bed, watching shadows from the street below crawl across the ceiling, I revealed more of myself than I perhaps ever meant to.

“What do you know about ghosts?” I lit up a Red Lion cigarette to act casual.

“I know I have a lot of them,” he replied, using the glowing tip of my cigarette to breathe life into a smoke of his own. “Why? Would you like to compare notes?”

“I don’t mean it metaphorically.”

“But those are the only ghosts worth our time. The other kind’s for cuckoos.”

Cuckoos? Here he was again, dismissing something he knew nothing about. Why did I even bother?

“Oh.” He paused. “You
do
mean the literal kind, don’t you?”

I kept mum.

“Why, do you see them or something?”

Slowly, I said, “Or something.”

“Ah”—he took a long drag—“I thought as much.” Whether this was true or he was bluffing, I couldn’t tell. “Go on, then. Don’t make me beg.”

“And show myself to be cuckoo?”

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive.” He handed me the ashtray and sat up, looking directly at me. His eyes gleamed in the dark. “So it’s true then?”

“Since I was seven.”

“And are they all around us?”

“Always.”

“What about right here, right now? In this room?”

My eyes darted to the old coolie squatting in the corner. He’d been in the same spot since the beginning of my stay but had never posed a hindrance.

“There’s one.”

“Thought so.” He smiled, sitting up even straighter. “You know, I can see the ghost of the ghost in your eyes. Go on—describe him.”

“Chinese, about sixty, skin and bones. Probably a coolie. He just sits there. No fuss. He’s looking at us but I don’t think he understands English.”

Kenneth gazed at the corner. “So he was here, while we were…He saw it all?”

“Yes, but don’t worry. He doesn’t participate.”

“You
are
cuckoo, you know. Just not the way I meant.” With a wide, incredulous grin, he hauled the bedcovers off, flopped onto his back, and directed a long sigh into the musty night air. “Blimey.” He drained the cigarette and lit up another, and then embarked on a kind of muttering monologue. “You’d better not be pulling my leg, I tell you.” He turned to squint at the corner again and then looked back at me. Puff, puff. “Bloody hell.” Deep suck and jagged exhalation, punctuated by a gleeful cackle. Fumes spewed from his nostrils and mouth. “All this time. You’re good at keeping secrets, I’ll say.” Another puff while his mind whirred. “Have you told anyone else?”

“No.” I glanced away, not wanting him to discover Issa in my eyes.

“You never told Daniel?”

“No.”

“Not ever?”

“You’re the first, Kenneth.”

He chuckled deeply, irrationally pleased. I’d felt an initial rush of relief from sharing the secret, but now his enthusiasm unnerved me.

“Bloody hell,” he said again, laughing and displaying for me the length of his left arm. “Look at this. Goose bumps. I haven’t had these since I don’t know when.”

I ran my fingers along the cool, scaly patches of his biceps—unlike me, he really did not sweat—and beneath my touch his skin sprouted yet more grains.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Your lizard skin?”

He smacked my hand for being deliberately obtuse. “Having ghost eyes.”

“Not really, no,” I said. “But it’s never been a choice, so I can’t think of it in those terms—or I can’t
let
myself anyway. There’ve been times I fought it. For years. But one grows up and adjusts to what’s there. It’s like a deformity. One adapts.”

“A deformity?”

I watched him squeeze his lips into a thin line; his mind was springing into action yet again. He tipped me back onto the pillow and pressed his lips to mine. I felt his tongue push in, overwhelming me from top and bottom, as if he had two tongues.

“You’re a very strange girl, Cassandra. A very odd bird indeed.”

One had to give the politician—or the reptile—in Kenneth full credit for playing it cool. He waited two more nights before mentioning what must have struck him the instant he heard my secret. Coolly, too, he chose the perfect setting to continue this discussion. For the first time, I was invited to
his
bed.

His room was spare and tidy, as if he’d moved in only days ago and hadn’t properly unpacked. In fact, he owned too little to produce any clutter—a stack of dictionaries and a mug of sharpened pencils were all he had on his desk. His bed was a picture of monastic austerity: white case, white sheets, a single hard pillow that made my neck ache. So immaculate was the room that, unlike mine, it was even ghost-free.

“Have you ever thought about utilizing this ‘deformity’ of yours?” His tone was light and casual, offhand. “I mean, in a way that might make you value it, rather than think it a burden?”

“You mean, to get rich or save the world?”

“So you have considered it.” He picked a bit of lint off my clavicle. “Ever spent much time with Issa?”

“Not really. To be honest, I find him a little frightening.”

“Well, maybe in the old days. He’s more like a shriveled old scarecrow now.” He sat up and handed me a smoke. “During the war, when we were holed up in the jungle, he used to go on about his grandfather or great-great-grandfather being a kind of South Seas shaman. I always dismissed it as guff—never could stand people who boast about their forebears—and I chalked it up to bitterness over his people supposedly losing their land, their water, what have you. But as time passes, I’m more of the mind that maybe he did, or does, have some, I don’t know, connection to the spirit world. Like that Night of the Burning Trees. I’ve always had an inkling that Issa had something to do with it.”

“Suppose he did,” I said carefully. “Wouldn’t he tell you?”

“’Course not. Would a player reveal the ace up his sleeve? He’s not as stupid as he looks.”

Was he implying
I
was stupid to have told him about my ability?

“Issa’s one of your closest friends,” I said.

“He’s a
comrade
…for now.” He registered my dismay. “Don’t act naïve, Cassandra. It doesn’t become you.”

“I’m far from naïve, Kenneth.”

He lit a cigarette.

“Back to using your talent for good.” He looked at me with tenderness. “This is merely a suggestion, but perhaps you might consider getting to know Issa. Maybe you two could, I don’t know, collaborate.”

“On what? Holding séances?”

“There are people in this city who need to be scared into putting things right, and you know exactly who and what I mean. If we could
accelerate
the process, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. God knows our people are restless. We can’t afford to let this momentum pass.” His eyes suddenly turned sharp and cold. “Obviously, I hope you two will have the courtesy to consult me before you do any unnecessary damage
this time
.”

The next afternoon, I paid my monthly visit to Woodbridge—not as often as a doting sister might have gone, perhaps. Then again, time stood still for Li. When I had rushed to see him after my years in the jungle, his nonchalance made me realize: He hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.

He was the antidote to Kenneth’s mercurial moods and secret agendas. As long as I didn’t provoke him to remember what he couldn’t, he remained a boy of seven.