Shoreline of Infinity 18 Read online

Odette had been young when her parents died. She didn’t miss them as people – more as symbols of a warmth locked in the past, rendered forever inaccessible by their deaths.

  Her mother’s family were numerous, but lived in Indonesia. Though only a cousin of her father, Uncle Andrew staked his claim before any of her other relatives arrived on the scene. God had been good to them, he said, and he and Beatrice had never intended to waste their good fortune on themselves. Beatrice would enjoy having someone to fuss over. She regretted the fact that they had no children. Uncle Andrew made out that his wife had been the prime mover behind their offer to adopt Odette.

  Even then Odette had found this hard to believe. Auntie Beatrice was the quietest woman she had ever met. She never looked up. She spoke in a whisper. It was hard to imagine her daring to want anything.

  Uncle Andrew, on the other hand, impressed Odette with unfavourable force. She was still at an age where she only understood snatches of what grown-ups said to her. She watched his face instead of listening to his words, and what she saw worried her.

  Two weeks after her parents’ death, she was dozing in the back seat of his car as it wound up the hill towards his home.

  She always remembered her first sight of the house. Auntie Beatrice had bored her and Uncle Andrew frightened her, but she knew the house to be a friend the moment she laid eyes on it.

  How blue it had looked against the green velvet backdrop of the forest – the intense blue of the sea in paintings of summer days. The red tiles on its roof reflected the last of the setting sun; the lanterns hung under the eaves cast a golden glow over the deepening twilight. As she passed through its double doors her skin prickled with the shivery, delightful excitement of being on holiday.

  She was given a teak bed with white linen sheets and a headboard carved with peacocks. She slept soundly for the first time since her parents had died.

  The house had been made to be loved, but what lived in it was not a real family.

  Odette was the only person who knew what the house wanted. Uncle Andrew brooded over his possessions, indulged in tantrums, and tended his public persona as though it was a bonsai. Auntie Beatrice floated through the rooms, never denting a cushion or ruffling a rug.

  But Odette divined the house’s secrets. Nooks under staircases and crannies between sofas and walls, the perfect size for an eight-year-old to daydream in. Columns of light that moved around the house, picking whatever room suited their fancy. Wistful silences lying in wait in the concrete-floored courtyard, open to the sky.

  She watched birds build their nests in the eaves and spiders construct webs in forgotten corners. She knew the moods of the house as well as she knew Uncle Andrew’s.

  This made her life easier, as Uncle Andrew’s moods made her life harder. The house comforted her when Uncle Andrew tore up her homework, upbraided her for her stupidity and ugliness, told her she should have died when her parents did, that he never should have taken her in.

  It was not so bad living with Uncle Andrew. Other children got beaten. Other children had nothing to eat. Uncle Andrew usually aimed to miss. He gave her food and clothing and even gifts at birthdays and Christmases. She didn’t know how to articulate what was wrong until she heard a stranger’s offhand remark.

  “I always forget how beautiful your house is, Andrew,” said one of his friends. “It’s made for peace.”

  Odette looked past the friend at Uncle Andrew’s smiling face. Uncle Andrew did not know or want peace, in a house made for peace. He desecrated it by living there. She had not hated him before that moment.

  She didn’t cry whenUncle Andrew told her she would have to find somewhere else to live.

  “I looked after you long enough already,” he said. “People your age are married, have their own house, children! I’ve done my part. If by now you haven’t found a husband, you can only blame yourself.”

  Uncle Andrew was moving to Singapore.

  “I have a lot of friends there, and I know the pastor of my new church,” he told Auntie Poh Eng and the rest. “As a Christian in Malaysia, you never know... In Singapore the lifestyle is more convenient. An old man like me, I cannot be driving myself around forever. This Odette never learnt, she’s too scared to go on the roads. In Singapore at least you can rely on public transport, not like here.”

  Odette had not been allowed to learn to drive. She was 31 and she had never had a job.

  “Odette will like it,” said Auntie Poh Eng, smiling at her. “Singapore is nice for young people. More fun, yes?”

  “Ah, Odette won’t be coming with me,” said Uncle Andrew. “So boring for her to live with an old man. She’s going to find her own place. These young people want to be independent. You give them your sweat and blood and at the end of the day, they go off and do what they want.”

  “That’s the way of life,” said Auntie Gladys. “But what are you going to do with the house, Andrew? Are you keeping it? It’s been in your family for so long.”

  Uncle Andrew shook his head. “Selling. My grandfather would be upset, but things have changed since his day. A big old house, you must spend so much for upkeep. I’m not earning anymore. I don’t want to worry about it in my old age. There’s a developer who’s very interested. Not many heritage buildings around that are so well-preserved. He wants to turn it into a hotel. The Mat Salleh like all this kind of thing.”

  Most of the friends nodded, but Auntie Poh Eng looked at Uncle Andrew as if for the first time her belief in him had wavered.

  “You’re selling to a developer?” she said. “To make it into a hotel?” But she remembered herself almost at once. “Of course most people cannot afford such a beautiful house. Maybe it’s nice for them to have the chance to stay here also, even if it’s for one or two nights only.”

  “I haven’t answered the developer yet. I’m hoping to find someone who wants to live here,” said Uncle Andrew smoothly. “It’s very sad to have a home turned into something commercialised. Next best thing would be if the government buys it. Make it into a museum for everybody to visit.”

  Auntie Poh Eng beamed, her belief in Uncle Andrew restored.

  “That would be perfect,” she said.

  It wasn’t Odette’s idea. She was standing in the kitchen wiping her hands when she saw a strand of hair on the countertop.

  Hair in his food was the greatest sin anyone could commit against Uncle Andrew. Odette picked up the strand of hair and put it in the bin.

  The idea was given to her.

  Odette already knew Uncle Andrew’s birth date. It was easy to find out the time. He kept his birth certificate in the second drawer of the desk in his study, along with his passport and IC.

  It was easy, too, to get strands of his hair. She peeled them off his pillows and dug them out of the drain in the shower. She was unflinching in her preparations. She gathered fingernail clippings and even saved a scab he’d picked at absently and discarded on one of the ugly coffee tables.

  She’d never done magic before, but she knew how it was done. You went into all that was too close, too sticky, the things human beings didn’t share with one another – that was what the hair and fingernails were for. You did it with strong love or strong hatred.

  She poured malice into Uncle Andrew, a patient poison that impregnated the food he ate and released fumes into the air he breathed. And it worked. He sickened. His breath grew short and he could no longer enjoy his meals. He became thin and weak and his body was racked with pain.

  The doctors said it was cancer, but Odette knew what was killing him. Sometimes she was even a little afraid of the house.

  The manner in which Uncle Andrew chose to depart this life was appropriately Victorian. It was a still hot afternoon and Odette was refilling his glass of water when he opened his eyes and said:

  “Jesus is calling me.”

  Odette paused with the glass in her hand, unsure of how to respond.

  “Do you want a drink, Uncle?” she ventured.

&nbs
p; “Sit down, girl,” snapped Uncle Andrew. “People are dying and you still want to do housework. Remember, Mary, not Martha, was praised by the Lord.”

  Odette sat down. Uncle Andrew was still speaking, more to himself than to her.

  “I’m still young. If not for this cancer, I could have been useful to my fellow men for many years. But His will be done. In Heaven,” he added contemplatively, “I will see Beatrice again.”

  It wasn’t clear whether the prospect gave him any pleasure.

  Odette felt called upon to fill the gap left by the absence of his friends.

  “Don’t talk like that, Uncle,” she said. “There’s still hope. The doctor said –”

  “Doctors! What do doctors know?” said Uncle Andrew. “Of course there’s still hope. What is better than the hope of the Kingdom of Heaven? I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

  His wandering eyes settled on her with some of their former keenness.

  “Nothing,” he repeated. “Will you be able to give the account of yourself to Him that I will be able to give? Look into your conscience. Ask yourself.”

  Odette stayed silent, but she could not help a quick intake of breath then. She was so close.

  “Hah,” said Uncle Andrew triumphantly. “You see! Look to yourself! Look to yourself before it’s too late!”

  He didn’t die then – only later, after his shouting had sent him into a coughing fit and Odette had given him water and been snarled at for spilling some on him. Finding fault with her put him in such a good mood that he went to sleep with little trouble after that. The next morning Odette found him cold in his bed.

  When Uncle Andrew had realised he was dying he’d willed the house to the church. Odette would get a legacy – an annuity of RM8,000 a year.

  “More than a lot of people earn by their own hard work,” said Uncle Andrew. “You are lucky.”

  Odette agreed with Uncle Andrew that this was generous. She resented him no more for this than for anything else, though the bulk of his wealth would go to a successful nephew in Canada who hadn’t visited in years.

  “Jit Beng has children,” said Uncle Andrew.

  Jit Beng had an Ivy League degree and a big job in a multinational company. Uncle Andrew yearned over Jit Beng with a stifled affection he had never shown his wife or Odette.

  Odette didn’t care about the money. It was the house she wanted, and it was easy enough to alter the will. She was the one who had filled out the blanks while Uncle Andrew dictated. She’d bought the will-making kit for him from a bookshop. Uncle Andrew didn’t believe in lawyers.

  Nobody questioned the result. Everyone except Uncle Andrew had thought Odette should get the house. The church got the RM8,000 a year, a generous donation from a faithful servant of the Lord.

  Even Jit Beng got something. Odette willed him a kamcheng, part of a Nyonyaware set that had mostly been destroyed when Uncle Andrew had thrown the pieces at her for going to a friend’s house after school. She swathed the kamcheng in layers of bubble wrap and posted it to Jit Beng herself.

  After the funeral she came home and lay on the chaise longue in the front hall, gazing up at the gorgeous wooden screens that blocked the heat of the sun.

  She would have the coffee tables removed. The gigantic TV, that would go. Maybe she could sell it. She’d already put most of the sculptures and paintings away when Uncle Andrew got too ill to come downstairs to see them, but there were a couple she liked and that she would keep.

  She would clear away the clutter, give the house space. Let it breathe.

  Her eyes were shut, but if she opened them she would see the light shining through her skin, like moonlight through the filigreed vents. For the first time in her life she gave herself up to happiness.

  Uncle Andrew walked his usual route. Down the driveway, up the slope to the top of the hill, then back down again to the back gate, where he let himself in.

  Odette had been standing by the pillars at the entrance, waiting for him. Her hand curled around a pillar, drawing strength from the house. Perhaps she hadn’t really seen him, she told herself. He wouldn’t come back. She had just imagined it.

  She knew this was a lie. It was not a surprise to see him return. When he lifted the latch on the gate, the sunlight shone through his arm.

  If he had been alive she would have felt the movement of air on her skin as he walked past her. He didn’t so much as glance at her, though he knew she was there. Temper held him, its weight crumpling his forehead, pulling his mouth taut.

  He would be silent for days, pointedly ignoring her in his pique. His anger would fill the house like dark oily smoke. The stench would get into everything.

  Life would be the same as it had always been.

  Odette saw that the house needed Uncle Andrew more than it loved her. It needed him as much, perhaps, as she did. It would never let either of them go.

  The harsh glare of the sun hurt her eyes. It was too hot to be outside. She let go of the pillar and saw that a splinter had driven itself into her palm.

  She turned and went into the house. The shade enveloped her, cool as the air in a crypt. The doors swung shut, closing her in.

  Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia, and lives in the UK. She is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short-story collection Spirits Abroad.

  You can listen to Zen reading an extract from Odette at

  www.shorelineofinfinity.com/zen-cho-reads-from-odette/

  Mobay Woods

  K. M. McKenzie

  Art: Mark Toner

  The women in our family never live past sixty.

  The math’s easy to do – count the names going back twelve generations to when the first of us arrived in Mobay Woods.

  Mama said it was a weird thing and not to think about it too much. Papa said someone down the line pissed off the devil. Mama said he was stupid.

  Mobay Woods made the rules.

  The connection between my family and the forty acres of woods that spread out around our house was never explored.

  Granny had called our bond, a “sense.” We gave to it and it gave to us, and when our lives ended, it took our bodies.

  Mobay Woods was the final resting place for all Perry women. Cousin Jenny died on the front porch. Mama cussed out her corpse, letting her body stink for a week. Papa had woken up in the middle of the night, terrified that wild dogs were chewing the flesh off her. Papa had argued about what Jenny did to deserve this treatment. Mama had reminded him of the article she had written about Mobay Woods that nearly ruined the sanctity of the family’s sacred place.

  Mama, at fifty-eight, had reached the end of her years. Papa was waiting when I walked up to the front porch, stepping foot on property I hadn’t been on since I was nineteen, some fifteen years ago. I had always found some excuse not to come home. My three most convincing were a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or work. None really got to the heart of the matter of why I stayed away.

  Mama resented me for leaving, but I’d been dogged by the determination to become more than another Perry woman.

  “Evangeline,” Papa hugged me. “She not doing so good.” Papa’s voice was deeply grieved, craggier than I had heard it in the past.

  Mama was sweating and turning in bed, clinging to a mortuary rock. The Perry women clung to the black quartz from the Mobay Woods instead of crosses and rosaries.

  Mama’s chest moved up and down and she wheezed. She still looked like Mama, unchanged from when I last saw her over a decade ago. This was another Perry woman trait.

  Our skin didn’t wrinkle, nor did we grey. Our years, maturity and wisdom flourished entirely in our eyes and voice. We were an anomaly. Been here since the days of slavery, runaways who never got captured, but lived in the backwoods.

  “No need to leave. Everything we need is here. As long as we nurture the land, it will keep us,” Granny had said.

  With the rock in my own hand, I squ
eezed Mama’s hand, rough from years of physical chores.

  “Evie,” she murmured my name.

  I pulled a chair, and sat down to watch her small body crumple on the bed.

  “Evie,” Mama said again, clamping down on my hand so tightly, I questioned, just for a moment, if she’d gotten her strength back. But her eyes wouldn’t even open. She took so long to speak I leaned forward, just to make sure she was breathing.

  “There’s a reason we die young,” she said at last.

  “Mama,” I tried to tell her she didn’t have to explain, but she was already speaking: “We bargained with the woods.”

  “It’s not the woods,” I said, almost desperately.

  She shook her head weakly, “It’s in our blood.”

  Papa wouldn’t hear me out about bringing Mama to seek modern medicine. “It’s against her wishes,” he said. Perry women didn’t like modern medicine. We refused trained doctors and hospitals. Granny nearly lost Mama to foster care because of her refusal to seek treatment in a hospital. My colds, flus and fevers were treated by ointment from plants that grew in Mobay Woods.

  When I pushed Papa on the topic, he pushed back: “You forget who you are.”

  I resented those words. All my life I was torn between my Perry identity and belonging to the world. Mama allowed me to attend regular schools, but barred me from inviting anyone home. Mama wouldn’t allow modern technology to grip its tentacles into us. It all drove me mad, defiant. When I got the chance to run away, far away, I did, and never came back until now.

  Mama took her last breath that night. I didn’t cry, but walked out to the back porch to smoke, only to be surprised when a wooden chair to the right of me squeaked. Papa was sitting there, weeping.

  After a short silence, I said, “Can you tell me what she valued?”

  “You’re a Perry woman, Evangeline,” he said coolly.

  I was following three generations of broken mother–daughter relationships, but I couldn’t recall Mama struggling to find something precious to bury her mama with, no matter how much they hated each other. There was something I had lost, something amiss, after fifteen years away, a kind of ripping of the soul. The fact that I couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t understand what my mother valued was an indictment on my identity.