The Black Isle (55 page)

Kenneth’s sixth sense put mine to shame. The crowd loved it. His spontaneous-sounding complaint, with its perfectly calibrated blend of self-loathing and wishful thinking, would define him—and the Isle—for decades. It remains a key, perhaps
the
key, aspect of the Islander identity. For it expressed the right kind of dissatisfaction, the kind that inspires the relentless pursuit of prosperity.

I voted for him. Many, many others did the same.

In the general election of 1965, Kenneth won in a 66 percent landslide—according to the history books, anyway. In truth the figure was closer to 51. Still, I shouldn’t begrudge my old comrade his victory. At forty-five, he became the nation’s youngest leader, a vigorous boy wonder in a role previously filled by sweaty dinosaurs. And always by his side were his first mates, Issa and Cricket.

I smiled each time I thought about the countless hands he had to shake as prime minister, both in the hallways of power and on the street. He probably washed his hands ten times as fanatically as he used to, scrubbing at every groove until the lines began to fade. How apt, then, that his daughter should be born without fingerprints.

With Kenneth in power, slums and swamps began melting away. Low-cost, multistory coops took their place, each a bulwark against the encroaching jungle, each lit with the bravado of a shrine in the woods hoping to ward off the big unknown.

I knew it was only time before he’d call upon my services again. But he was patient. He waited four years.

It was three in the morning.

“Lady Midnight,” he purred through the telephone. “From now on, I’m calling you Lady Midnight. It’s safer this way.”

Lady Midnight, or Zi Ye in Mandarin, was the pseudonym of a fourth-century courtesan who wrote poems lamenting the comings and goings of her lovers. If anything, I felt temperamentally closer to Li Ho, the outsider Tang poet who wrote about demons, graveyards, and weeping statues.

“If you’re going to call in the middle of the night,” I said, “you’re not allowed to insult me. Lady Midnight—are you drunk?”

“No, no, just inspired…”

I could hear the rustling of pages being turned.

“That’s one of the verses Lady Midnight wrote from the male point of view, putting herself in the shoes of her lover. I always found her very understanding. So, far from insulting you—”

I sighed. But he went on.

“I think it’s only fair that you have a code name since I have to have one. The Prime Minister and Lady Midnight.” He chuckled phlegmatically. “Actually, never mind, that sounds a bit like a Victorian bodice-ripper. One that ends very badly.”

I sensed he
was
drunk. “Where are you, Kenneth?”

“Downstairs, in the kitchen, if you remember where that is in this house. I had a phone installed down here, next to the pantry. I told Vi it’s so we can call the grocer the instant we discover we’re out of milk. But this is the first time it’s ever been used. Because when you’re prime minister, you have people to make sure you
never
run out of milk.” He laughed. “You should see this place. Vi’s done a bang-up job. I told her to get rid of everything old and dark, basically everything the Wees had. That grotesque crucifix is gone, of course, and good riddance, too. We tore the whole place up. It’s really quite nice now. All modern, clean. Two television sets—both in the bedroom so I can compare how two stations cover the same story and decide which one to sue the next day. You should pop over for tea sometime. Actually, on second thought,” he snickered, “don’t. I’m sure there are guests in my house I never want to know about.”

“Where’s the wife?”

“Upstairs. Asleep.”

“And your daughter?”

“Upstairs, asleep as well.”

“You need something. That’s why you’re calling me at this unholy hour.”

“Yes, you’re right. I have needs. Immense, unholy needs. I miss having you under me, writhing and squealing. Oh, the moaning. You were so good at it, too—you knew how to submit. I still think about it all the time, by myself, in the bath. Nostalgia’s an incorrigible
snake
.”

“What do you really want, Kenneth Kee?”

He paused, sobering up. “I know you have a waiting list. But I’m hoping to pull some strings. I’ve got someone you may want to put at the top.”

“Some mighty big shot?”

“Not that you’d think so.”

“So who is it?”

“Me.” He laughed again, more carefully this time. “Heard of a li’l place called Redhill?”

Redhill was the slum where Li and Father lived during the war, only it’d since been given a name by the government—red hill, like a bump or a sore, an irritant. Over the years, it had grown into by far the Island’s largest slum. Thousands lived there in nineteenth-century squalor. But the reason Redhill would attract Kenneth’s attention, of course, had less to do with its poverty or its sensational stabbings and acid disfigurations or even its residents—they never registered to vote. It was its location. The slum sat on fifty acres of prime land.

“Well?” he asked when I said nothing.

“Trouble getting those people to leave?”

He chortled. “Oh, you know it, then. I need say no more.”

“I’m not getting involved in this one. People actually
live
there.”

“Yes, that’s the problem: people. It’d be so much easier if they were just ghosts. We gave them two months and offered some incentive—enough to get them started elsewhere. No takers. It’s like some kind of a cult over there. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there’s a sacrificial pit in the middle of that thing. Vestal virgins, for all you know. A real bloody nuisance.”

“Have you gone to Issa?”

“You know how he stands on these things. He gets very…sonorous.” Pause. “So what do you say, Lady Midnight? Lord knows I’m not asking you to do anything
bad
. Couldn’t you just give the place a quick look-see and offer a tip or two? I mean, if I do the wrong thing, it’ll be a PR disaster. Not to mention it’d be
wrong
. What about a few words of sage advice, eh?”

“What do you want with the land?”

“Schools, hospitals, offices. Things we can actually use. But mainly roads. We can’t do anything or get anywhere without roads, and Redhill’s smack in the center of everything. We’ve got new flats up the road ready to house these people, all mod cons, fairly decent schools. I know these grub-eaters hate change, but once they’re moved, trust me, they’ll be so much happier. I’ll pay you just to take a look.”

I mulled it over. If I didn’t help, he was likely to strong-arm the tenants, and the clash could be ugly.

“A look?”

“Just one look.” He paused. “Does five thousand sound about fair?”

“Ten sounds fairer.”

“Ten it is, then. I’ll have a boy bring you the envelope in the morning.”

Despite its prime location, it wasn’t easy to get to Redhill. Kenneth’s minions had shut down its closest tram stop; buses no longer stopped within a mile of its walls. That was the plan: to isolate the slum, to make life there so inconvenient that sterile pigeon holes in high rises would seem like a godsend.

What Kenneth hadn’t reckoned with was that these people were hardy adapters. When their electricity was cut, they stole power from nearby poles—the slum still glowed by night. Water was not a problem either; it was collected from the sky, just as in olden times.

I got off the tram at Wonder World, now a deserted government-owned lot, and walked a half mile past more government-owned land before the wind brought along the first unmistakable odors of slum life—kerosene smoke, overused cooking oil, putrefying garbage, and human waste. It was another half mile before I saw the corrugated tin panels encasing the slum itself. My goodness, it had grown since Li and Father lived there. The slum was no longer a makeshift
kampung
but a patchwork city of grays, reds, and browns, and jammed with clotheslines. It announced,
We’re here to stay.

And so were its dead.

Hundreds stood at its perimeters, perhaps mistaking Redhill for a way station between purgatory and hell.

Instead of one entrance, the slum now had ten. I looked for the one I’d used all those years before to visit Li: It was still there, nearly hidden by a rusty metal door.

But there was something new. The passage was guarded by parang-wielding toughs, unshaven boys in dirty singlets—werewolf versions of what Li had been. They promenaded listlessly along the outer edges of the village, each with a Doberman on a leash. The dogs began snarling as soon as they smelled me, showing me their yellow, jagged teeth. Their animosity tugged their chains tight.

The boys stopped walking. All eyes were on me, full of suspicion. I was everything they were not—old, female, civilized.

“Are you from guvment?” a ruffian shouted in Hokkien. “My dog don’t like smelly guvment pussy.”

I offered him a serene smile. “I’m here to see my father.”

“Who the hell’s he?”

“Oh, you won’t know him. He’s from before your time. May I enter?”

“What d’you mean before my time? How would you know about my time?”

“He died many years ago. But his ghost still lives here.”

The boys seemed to find this uproarious. They cackled and swapped lewd, misogynistic phrases, colorful ones that worked only in Hokkien.

“If you’re trying to scare us, you’re wasting your breath.” He raised his rusted parang, eager that I register—and fear—its blood-spattered blade. “We live, eat, and sleep with ghosts.”

I pointed to the blade. “In my day, I carried one of those, too.”

Again, my young friends broke into high-pitched laughter.

“You’re a wonderful comedian, old woman!” someone said.

“Doesn’t this place feel like hell? Just an observation, not a judgment. Why live here when there are brand-new flats waiting for you?”

“Because we’re one big family here,” the first boy said. “We look after one another. If we move into flats, do you think they’ll let us all stay together? ’Course not! They’ll split us up, make us live next to Indians, Malays, Arabs, and who knows what! A big family don’t like to be split up. That’s how others take advantage of us.”

“What about crime?”

He hacked out a gob of phlegm. “That’s outsiders! Outsiders come in, do bad things, then blame everything on us. That’s why we got these.” He yanked on his dog’s chain and made it yelp. “And these.” Again he brandished the parang.

“I swear I’ve no interest in stealing anyone’s wallet. I just want to pay my respects to my father. May I?” I nodded at the entrance.

“No.” The boy stated this soberly. His face suddenly grew solemn, adding years to my initial estimate of his age; he could have been thirty. He walked toward me with his sleek black beast, which paced ahead of him, growling, impatient to sink its fangs into my flesh. The boy’s arm flexed as the tightened leash started to jerk.

In a second, the Doberman was barely a foot from me, so close that I felt the wet waves of heat from its mouth.

“There is something not right with you. You’re dirty. Our dogs can tell. They don’t like you. So I suggest you leave now, before anything bad happens.” He issued this warning coldly, hoping to send me scampering, but I caught a trace of fear in his eyes. He snapped the dog back. “There are worse things in this world than ghosts. You, for one.”

I would never be allowed inside; this much had been made clear. But I’d gotten my answer. The people of Redhill weren’t afraid of being haunted.

“Thank you,” I said to the boy, and nodded my farewell. “If you happen to see my father, tell him I tried.”

As I walked away, his friends sent me their best, over the gnashing teeth of their canine wards.

“You’re old!”

“You’re ugly!”

“Your cunt stinks like squid!”

Kenneth called me that night, again far too late. But this time I was waiting.

“Well?” he asked.

“You’re not going to like what I have to say. The place is packed with ghosts.”

“And?”

“The people who live there are used to them. So even if you got me to give them a good scare—and I won’t—it’s not going to work.”

“Bloody parasites. They’re all Chinese, aren’t they?”

“Mainly. It was that way even during wartime.”

“Knew it! Low-class Chinks are the worst. Tenacious rat bastards. They probably get all their ideas from Red China. Just for that, I’m going to make English our official language. It’ll be my gift to that lost constituency. No more of that everybody-speaks-his-own. How can we afford such freedoms when we’re still made up of cretins fresh from the bog?” He paused to catch his breath, calm himself. “What do you propose I do?”

“Give them time to get used to the idea of moving. They’ll buckle. They’ll see how much easier their lives could be and they’ll go. It’s the only way. On your part, make them
trust
you. They think you’re going to break their village up and cut off their ties.”

“’Course, I’m going to cut off their ties!” he shot back. “How else will I prevent them from conspiring against me? They sow unhappiness, these squatters. They feed on each other’s discontent—and they fester. I can’t afford to give them time. My bulldozers are waiting.”

I was dismayed that he was taking their rejection so personally. Yet I was not surprised.

“Well, Prime Minister, you asked for my diagnosis and I gave it to you. I would caution against the use of force—they’re very much on the defensive. They have dogs and machetes.”

“Dogs and machetes—you joking? Any decent army’s got to at least have guns.”

“They might have those, too. Just give them time, Ken. Give them time.”

“Why are you on their side?” he snapped, and the phone went very, very quiet.

I woke two days later, in a sweat, rays of sunlight cutting past the window shades and striking my eyes. They were especially bright, especially intense, and they knifed in at a weird angle. In my nightshirt, I walked to the living room and clicked on the radio news, as I did every morning.