The Storm We Made, page 17
Abel supposed that things were much better now. Perhaps the boys should rise up, take over the camp, Abel would think, but then he would see Master Akiro and a group of soldiers cleaning their large rifles, and the thought would shrink away. Still, he wondered if it was worth the effort to try to escape, to make the long, dangerous journey home to his family. He traced the toilet-paper sketch that Freddie had done of Jasmin, but the toddy made it hard to conjure her face in his mind. It scared him to think what might have happened to her—he’d heard about the horrible brothels where the Japanese threw young girls and forced them to—to—He pressed his eyes shut; he couldn’t think about it. He’d even mustered up the courage once a few days before, gotten himself all the way to the edge of the camp, heart pounding, feet flying as though winged. He could do this. He would do this. He would leave. But as he stared out at the hot brown ground, flat as far as the eye could see, the toddy began to wear off and he was once again assailed by the curse of his memories: the rebar, the blood, the pain, the animal expression in Brother Luke’s eyes. Toddy was easier. It helped him reach inside himself for the simplicity of inaction; it curbed the urge inside of him that always wanted to strive for better. Because the only thing to reach for in the miserable life he’d been given was survival. So he stumbled back to the nearest tree he could find and poured the bottle down his throat. Toddy helped him survive.
“Come on, let’s go.” Freddie pulled Abel to his feet and scrunched up his nose at what Abel assumed was the combined staleness of vomit, alcohol, and being unbathed. Abel resented being up this early—the sun was still at an angle, and it wasn’t hot enough to be noon. He wanted to catch a few more hours of drunken sleep before the heat of midday made it impossible. He reached for a warm bottle on the floor.
“You don’t need that,” said Freddie, but Abel glared at him. Freddie should know better. Abel took a swig from the bottle, letting the warm liquid coat his esophagus, lighting a pathway through his body, bringing him back to life.
“Whatdoyouwant,” Abel muttered, finally able to speak.
Freddie shook his head, sucked his cheeks, in frustration, in irritation, Abel wasn’t sure. Swaying a little, Abel felt Freddie’s arm under his shoulder, propping him up, the steadying touch familiar, because it was what Freddie did every time he found Abel passed out somewhere, in the chicken coop, under trees, after eating, after taking a shit. Their movements were practiced now, Abel taller, stumbling as his eyes struggled to focus, Freddie, shorter, knees locked, arms outstretched, steering Abel.
They walked down the path, the grass still wet from dew that the sun hadn’t yet had the chance to dry. Looking down at his feet, Abel realized he was wearing slippers, but he didn’t remember putting them on. Freddie must have put them on his feet. They stumbled past the mess hall, empty except for the one or two early risers who were preparing breakfast. Abel spotted Siu Seng, one of the boys who had commandeered the kitchen since the Japanese had stopped caring about feeding them. Now their breakfasts smelled better, steaming broths that Siu Seng was able to create out of very few ingredients and whatever herbs he’d managed to plant and harvest around the camp. They walked farther along and past the chicken coop, and Abel shuddered. All the chickens were dead now, even the stubborn brown hen. Siu Seng had found her clucking on her side one day, eyes glassy. He had carved her up, and every boy at camp was the recipient of a tiny sliver of chicken that night. Then Siu Seng had used her bones to make a broth that everyone except Abel had raved about.
Abel stopped. Even though he knew through Freddie that he came here every night, the proximity to the coop made his skin burn. Again the haunted sound of rebar on bone, passing between his ears.
“I have to go back,” he said, struggling against Freddie’s arms.
“We’re not going in the coop, Abe, I promise. Just come with me.”
Abel pulled a little, tried half-heartedly to extricate himself from Freddie.
“Come on.”
Abel allowed himself to follow. Lately when Freddie spoke, it felt to Abel as though Freddie’s voice swept through him, unclenching all the knots that lived in his chest. If he felt like he was spinning out of control, all he had to do was concentrate on Freddie’s tenor, quiet, even, low.
As they stumbled away from the chicken coop, Abel began to feel stronger, standing straighter. “Where are you taking me, kiddo?” He punched Freddie in the shoulder, noting ruefully that he was so weak, it barely registered to Freddie. Before, his punch would’ve caused Freddie to double over.
“For a drunk, you talk too much.” Freddie cracked a smile, and Abel felt the weight loosen from his stomach.
A few minutes later, they reached a tall structure, like a shed, palm fronds on the roof, held up by long poles of wood. The sides were open-air, but the ground was covered with more palm fronds, some lashed together like mats and others loose. At one end was an elevated “stage” made of crates, and behind it, brown-stained pieces of cloth, perhaps old shirts, that had been pulled over string to form a makeshift backstage curtain.
“Wow, they finished the theater!” Abel looked around in surprise.
“We just used some of the railway supplies. No one cares anymore. Come here, I have something to show you.”
“This isn’t what you’re showing me?” Abel raised an eyebrow, but Freddie was already running to the other end of the shed.
Abel walked as quickly as he could to catch up with Freddie, but the effort winded him. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. As he neared the curtain, a sound caught his ear, groaning, soft.
“Freddie, stop, there’s someone behind the curtain.”
“I know,” said Freddie, clambering onto the stage. “Ready?”
Freddie drew back the curtain, and curled up on the floor, cuts on his face and arms, leaves stuffed in his mouth, wrists tied to ankles like a hog, lay a groaning Master Akiro, naked but for an undershirt.
“Freddie, what the—?”
“Abe. You can make him pay now. Get it all out.”
“What do you even expect me to do?” Abel pulled himself onto the stage and squatted there, the loose palm fronds swishing beneath his slippers. He held his head in his hands.
“You can show this fool who’s boss,” Freddie said.
Abel stood up and backed away from Freddie, but he realized that the shed had become more crowded, the boys had gathered around like bees to honey, the prospect of a violent show bringing out the same carnal impulses that he had seen with Brother Luke in the chicken coop. Their eyes were trained on him, feet beginning their thundering.
“Are you a coward, Abel?” Freddie’s voice was hard, higher than Abel remembered, not the low, calm tones that had always brought him back.
“You can’t expect me to.” Abel felt like falling and gripped one of the shaky poles holding up the tent for support. This was his fault. He’d become so pathetic that he’d made Freddie think this was the only way.
“He deserves it. Like Brother Luke did,” said Freddie.
“I didn’t—Brother Luke—That was for you!” Abel screamed.
Freddie’s eyes clouded over, the blue darkening like a stormy sky. “You can’t sleep. You can’t go on like this. I didn’t think—didn’t know it would be this bad for you.”
Abel wondered if that was why Freddie had stuck with him so religiously, dragged him from the depths of his despair. Maybe it was the guilt gnawing away at Freddie.
“Are you mad?” Abel yelled, surprised at the volume of his voice. “There are still Japanese here! Freddie, the Japanese will come for us.”
“See, I told you he couldn’t!” Rama yelled from the crowd.
“Look,” said Freddie. “We’ll do it together. All of us, you, me, the others. There’s more of us than them now. It can be for all of us.”
Master Akiro moaned from the floor, his eyes, those narrow close-set eyes that used to terrify Abel, filled with their own terror. Abel had to admit, there was something thrilling about seeing the pain in Master Akiro’s face, the knowledge that something bad was coming, the same look Abel was sure Master Akiro had seen in Abel’s own face many times.
Freddie lowered his voice, barely above a whisper. “I know what he did to you in the coop. He made you a dog. Forced you. You have to make him pay, Abe; you can’t let him get away with something like that.”
Abel felt the bottom leave his stomach, humiliation rushing through his body. So Freddie did know.
“I didn’t tell anyone, Abe. But you need to show them—show me—you’re… strong. I need you to get better.” Freddie’s eyes shone with the intensity of his plea.
He picked up a large stick off a pile in the corner, Master Akiro’s uniform, and handed it to Abel. Because Abel was so weak, he needed to grasp the stick with both hands.
“A-BEL! A-BEL! A-BEL!” the boys began chanting, their pitch feverish, the shed hot with sweat, their shouts reverberating through his head.
Arms shaking from the effort, Abel lifted the stick over his head and Master Akiro screamed, choking through his mouthful of dried leaves, the muffled yell sounding almost childlike. Again Abel saw the blood pool at his feet, heard the crack of the rebar as it hit Brother Luke’s face, all of it coming back to him in the right order, one after the other. Abel dropped the stick and pushed blindly past the boys, running as the retch of bile coursed through him. No one stopped him. As he vomited into the grass outside, he heard the thumps of kicking feet and the snapping of broken bones coming from the theater.
Master Akiro was dead anyway.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CECILY
Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
1937
Eight years earlier, British-occupied Malaya
Cecily wondered if the only reason to endure frustrating men was to become friends with their better wives. Lina Chan was her opposite in all the ways that showed. Where Cecily felt unseen in crowds, Lina couldn’t help but be noticed; where Cecily never said much and, when she did, never said what she meant, Lina couldn’t help but blurt out every artless thought that popped into her head, tact be damned; where Cecily found it difficult to socialize with the others, blaming her isolation on their snobbery, Lina wafted her way through every room, leaving a cloud of entranced and charmed people in her wake. Still, as the August heat seeped into pores and sweated through clothes, Cecily found that with each other, she and Lina were their own opposites. It was as though Lina’s exuberance and Cecily’s reticence were disguises they could shed only when they were together.
They spent many afternoons in each other’s houses, chattering so fast and so loud that sometimes they talked over each other. They gossiped shamelessly about other women. They talked about the shared loneliness of being a daughter who could not turn to her mother when life betrayed her. And they confided in each other. Lina talked about a new aching pain she felt in her chest when she saw children running around, when she was handed newborn babies of friends to hold and coo over, and how sudden this feeling was, how new and perplexing the ache was for someone who had never enjoyed the presence and pastimes of children. Cecily found herself asking Lina how it was possible to love and hate the domesticity of one’s life at the same time, and how guilty it all made her feel. They consoled each other, held warm bodies together in long, strong hugs. They whiled away these warm afternoons, sometimes forgetting to sip their sweet tea until the mugs were cold, the sugar and milk separated, chalky and sinking to the bottom, until the orange glow of dusky sunsets crept into the room. When it was time for them to separate, leave for their individual homes and the dinners they had to make for their families, Cecily always felt heavy and filled with a sort of dread, as though a spell had been broken and real life was an unwelcome intrusion. Perhaps this is what love is, she thought—a relationship that didn’t require constant vigilance. With Fujiwara, she had to agonize over what he was thinking, but with Lina, she always knew. Without the burden of inscrutability, the women’s friendship bloomed, easy and bright.
“You know, even though all these bad things happened, I wouldn’t change anything,” Lina said as she flounced through the door on one of these many afternoons, all perfume and breath.
“Well, hello to you,” Cecily said. “Jujube, please watch your brother! Aunty Lina is here!”
“Hello, Aunty Lina,” Jujube intoned from the kitchen, barely looking up from her book. Abel scampered through the door to say hello, then pulled himself away, shy at the last minute, peeping and waving from the doorway before running back to his sister.
Lina laughed at Abel before resuming. “I’m serious. I was thinking about it today. I think”—she paused to take a bite of the kuih that Cecily offered her—“that everything was preordained. Happened for a reason. One thing led to another…”
“You have no regrets? And you’re not angry about what happened to you when they came for Kapitan Yap?” Cecily’s body clenched. It had been a long time since she’d thought about Kapitan Yap, the price he’d paid for what she had done.
“I think… I think I had to go through all of that so I could meet Bingley. And then I got to know you! And it was worth it.” Lina arranged herself on her favorite chair in Cecily’s house, tucked her feet under her like a child. She sipped a mouth of tea. “Ouch, hot!” she squeaked, then laughed at herself.
What a strange and wonderful way to live, Cecily thought, to find the sun in all things. In Cecily, discontent was a constant state of being. She lived with a persistent gurgle of want, of longing for more of everything she could see but did not yet have. To be just content, Cecily thought. How simple it must be.
“Here.” Lina put her cup of tea on the table and blew on her fingertips. “Give me your hand. My ah mah used to say that you can tell a person’s whole life by the lines on their palm.”
Cecily laughed and opened her palm. She didn’t believe in things like this, but it was hard to say no when Lina was in one of these joyous moods. Her brightness was contagious. Lina ran a thin index finger over the longest line on Cecily’s hand, the calluses on her fingertip leaving a pleasurable tickle.
“See here. Your lifeline is deep and long. My ah mah would say you’ll live a very long time.”
“Are you sure it isn’t deep because I don’t use enough hand cream? Maybe it’s just dry,” Cecily said.
“No joking!” Lina said. “This is serious. See here. Look how your lifeline separates into two.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you have two sides, become two different people. And see here. That’s the love line”—she pointed at the line closest to Cecily’s fingers—“and that’s the child line, and of course that’s the lifeline we talked about. And wah, see here, that big line? It crosses all three lines at an angle.”
“And what does that mean?”
“A big disturbance.” Lina pursed her mouth so her bottom lip puckered.
“Sounds ominous,” Cecily said.
“It means a big betrayal. Or a disruption. A lack of peace. So you better watch out!” She opened her mouth wide in mock fear. Then all the seriousness faded from Lina’s demeanor. She started laughing hard, short, happy breaths pushing from her lungs. Cecily wished Lina knew, wished that maybe this whole time she’d been only playacting the silly ingenue whom no one took seriously. It would be so wonderful to bring Lina on, have Lina’s wonder and excitement infused into Fujiwara’s and her plan—the world would be so much brighter with her in it.
“Don’t be scared, Cecily. Palm reading is a lie. See mine?” Lina flourished her hand at Cecily, tilted the palm under Cecily’s nose. It smelled faintly like jasmine. “My lifeline is so short, see, it means I’m basically already dead.” She flapped her hands in front of her face in a terrible approximation of a ghost. “Maybe I’m haunting you now, Cecily, woo!”
Cecily caught Lina’s palms in her own. Lina was right. You couldn’t read a person’s future from her hand. Still, she enjoyed sitting here, pretending to be girls, laughing about the disruptions their palms were intuiting for their lives.
* * *
Around this time, Cecily and Fujiwara resumed their meetings at Oriental Horizons. Their first meeting was a stilted, nearly soundless pantomime. Cecily walked into room 7A with a sheaf of reports she’d taken from Gordon’s desk, and Fujiwara thumbed through them before leaving in a cloud of sweat and mint without once making eye contact. The second time it was she who left first, refusing the role of the anguished, helpless woman gazing at the back of a retreating man. As she turned to go, she caught Fujiwara’s face—eyes narrowed, cheeks pinched. He was biting the inside of his mouth; the gesture made her ache with want.
Their third meeting was the first time they slept together. It was bound to happen, she supposed, all that tension and anger with no place to go, though perhaps Lina was right—some women just weren’t made for a peaceful life; she was someone who needed the simmering possibility of chaos. This time when Cecily arrived in 7A, she let him meet her eye, watched the cloud of desire break in his face. “It’s happening,” her body said to her as she felt her pelvis clench, then open, ready to receive.
Fujiwara was a considerate lover. For Cecily, unfortunately, this made the sex wan and mediocre. He was gentle when he laid on her on the musty bed, the sheets pilled and scratchy. He was slow when he extricated her from her undergarments, watching her intently, for what, she didn’t know. She nodded encouragingly as he pushed into her, so tenderly and with so much care that she had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.
“Are you all right,” he whispered, soft fingertips brushing her cheek. “I can stop if you want.”
“Don’t stop,” she breathed. She closed her eyes and recalled the rage of the man who had thrown her against the grimy wall and wound his fingers around her throat, willing her desire back into her body, allowing it to push her beyond her cliff. She gasped as her body tried to reach for its climax, almost—almost. She opened her eyes just in time to watch the ripples of his orgasm crest through his body as he bucked against her, powerless, depleted.
