It was never a question. Her mother, who’d dropped out of school once the war started and didn’t know a thing about Shakespeare or Mayans or algebra, was adamant that her daughter make it to university. When her mother spoke like this, with ferocity, Adeline nodded. But really, something about that vision of the future only filled her with more malaise the closer she got to graduation. Who cared? Who cared about any of it. Having a good job, tittering about swimmer boys, making your way in the world, falling in love, making a home, whatever, whatever. Adeline would like to spend the rest of her life pretty and entertained, and could get all of that as she was, and why did she need anything else?
When they took the dress off, her mother examined her. She was in her underwear, and her mother was in her usual long-sleeved dress, covering nearly everything. Her mother had both hands on her shoulders and they were staring at the reflections of themselves and each other. “You should eat more. You’re too thin.”
Her mother was not conventionally beautiful—thin brows knitted over a flat nose that was cricked on the bridge as though once broken, and she had flat cheeks and a permanent pucker in her lips. Adeline had inherited her slightly wily features, but with an elevated edge: higher cheekbones, a stronger nose, double eyelids, thicker hair. She’d always wondered if her mother was conscious about her looks, and so didn’t like to appear in public. When the local news had begun wanting to cover the store, Adeline’s mother had turned the ambassadorship over to Genevieve Hwang, the glamorous rubber-tycoon wife who’d decided to bankroll her mother’s dreams, for reasons Adeline still could not comprehend. Auntie Genevieve got to be the enterprising female face of the store, and Adeline’s mother got to do the actual work unseen.
Her mother wasn’t often forthcoming on these business matters, even though it was all Adeline was really interested in. Adelinealmost asked about the White Orchid, but something told her she couldn’t let on that she’d overheard that part of the conversation.
“Ma Fan Tai Tai is here again,” Adeline said instead, finally putting her clothes back on.
Her mother paused. “Did she see you?”
“She asked me to find her a skirt.” She couldn’t read her mother’s expression. “What’s her husband’s business, anyway?”
“Land, mostly.” Her mother deftly braided her hair back. “We’ll leave in three hours. Go study.”
In the old store, she had once spent her after-school hours working behind the counter and hanging dresses. But now that they could pay for all the staff, and St. Mary’s academic standards needed more and more work, her mother had set up a spare office for her to study here instead. Adeline sat down and twirled in the chair but was not thinking much about school. The White Orchid, she thought idly, scribbling numbers on a worksheet. A supplier? A partner? Whoever her mother had been speaking to was clearly here in Singapore, if they were arranging clandestine meetings while Adeline was at school. Perhaps the White Orchid was local as well, and she could find it in the Yellow Pages. She should know what her mother was up to.
At 5:30 p.m. sharp, her mother emerged as promised to drive them both home. They opened opposite doors, sat, reached for seat belts. Adeline cranked the window down just a sliver. They were the only two in this car, in the city, in the world.
Her mother shook out a cigarette. Adeline cut a glance across in time to see her pull out a lighter. Flame sputtered from the metal mouth.
Coward, she thought.
This house was their third home in Adeline’s lifetime.
She had vague memories of the first place—winding tenement stairs and factory noise, and a pudgy boy who’d tried to scareher by showing her a scorpion in a jar. Then for about six years they’d moved to one of the new Housing Board estates, high-rise marvels housing three hundred families, mostly people rehomed from squatters and villages. Adeline had liked that one-room flat, and the playground at the foot of the apartment block.
Adeline had mostly played on the swings alone; even back then the other girls had seemed to find her off-putting. As such she’d had a lot of time to watch and learn: how the playground was run by older boys who claimed to be part of some gang or other and loitered at the top of the dragon slide, while secondary to them were the buzz-headed nine-year-olds, often shirtless, who crouched in the sandpit fighting spiders out of matchboxes when they weren’t running errands for their elders. She learnt which of the spider boys was a sniveling lackey and which would likely go on to join the dragon kings; which of those kings was flirting with which of the girls, and how when they got a little older they started hanging out under the slide instead, touching each other and smoking and drawing their initials on the wall. That estate had been comfortable. There had been places to get lost in the dozen floors of corridors and stairwells, people to watch at all times.
Then Jenny’s really took off and her mother had announced they were moving again. This house was much bigger than the two of them needed, but it was more appropriate for her new success, and closer to the neighborhoods where many St. Mary’s classmates lived. It had four bedrooms and two floors, a garden with a gate, and a fence that it did not share with its neighbors. It had a twenty-one-inch television and a washing machine. Adeline was used to competing for her mother’s affection with Jenny’s, and occasionally with Genevieve Hwang, whom her mother seemed to always be having meetings with. When they moved here, Adeline had realized she had a third rival. Not a speck of dust was allowed to settle in her mother’s newest pride and joy. They had made it, her mother had said, and it would be perfect.
As they stopped in the living room now, having shut both gate and front door behind them, Adeline’s mother kissed her on the forehead. Her lips were unusually warm. “Study hard. It’s important.”
Adeline felt like sayingif you say so, but instead she said, “I know.”
As a child she’d often secured her mother’s attention with destruction. She had learned quickly that the pretty warm light on her fingers would catch when touched to anything else, and that, like a moth, her mother would drop everything to come running the moment something began to smoke. It was like she could sense it from across the house, or even if she was beyond the gate. She would stamp it out, or fetch the pail if it had gotten big enough, and then she would fetch the cane. Eventually she’d realized Adeline would not—could not—stop, which was when she’d set the rules: small and hidden.
Now Adeline was old enough to realize her mother was just weak. She had not always been so avoidant of the fire—it used to be a game between them, warm glows in the dark to help Adeline fall asleep. Her mother had once prayed every day, lighting joss sticks with her fingers. Now the altar cabinet was just a cabinet, all the items that made it sacred left behind in the last move, and she was buying lighters for her cigarettes, and she was paranoid about dust and smudges. Her caution wasn’t prudent, like Adeline had once believed. It was fear, plain and simple. Adeline didn’t know what had changed her behavior, but didn’t need to. The moment Adeline had realized this fact, she’d been freed. So what if she snuck out in the evenings to go to the cinema, so what if she stole things sometimes, so what if she burned things in the school toilets or dressed more grown-up than her mother liked?
Let her find out. She was afraid, and Adeline was not.
The familiar sound of a beeping pager sent Adeline’s mother away once more to her home office. Adeline watched her go, felt the lingering imprint of her lips on her forehead. She touched it.
Upstairs, Adeline’s room was decorated with film posters. They were rescued from the Roxy’s trash heap, cut from magazines, or purchased with meticulously saved pocket money from the specialty store: Audrey Hepburn and Jane Fonda and Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot and Ivy Ling Po, Vivian Leigh in the plunging red dress forGone with the Wind,Valley of the Dollswith Sharon Tate’s throat bared to the man bent over her. Adeline tossed her schoolbag at Vivian’s skirts, thought for half a minute about opening a textbook, and then decided against it. Instead, she located the Yellow Pages and brought it back to her room.
As she scanned the directory for the White Orchid, she switched on the radio, landing onKillerwatch. She’d stumbled across the program during the Tate murders, but their regular programming was local crime, which meant they were devout reporters on the kongsi.
“… shooting of Low Lee Meng earlier this year. You know, Queens Circus, shot goes off, woman goes down in the middle of a crowd. No one sees anything. Police are baffled. But Gunmetal Goh, right, of the Three Steel Triad—we know he can fly bullets from his fingers.”
The hosts liked the sensational: dead bodies in various gruesome states, tales of drugs and vice and kidnappings, and magic. Lots of magic, all more bizarre than the last. One kongsi that could turn into crabs. Malay shamans on Pulau Ubin who commanded an army of crocodiles to tear an enemy to shreds. A medium who channeled Sun Wukong and killed his wife by crushing her skull. A missing pastor whose office was discovered with pentagrams drawn in blood. A kongsi with arms that could turn to knives, and another that was secretly orang minyaks, going around raping waitresses. The truth was theirs to make up; the police and the official news were sparse on details of the magic, focusing instead on the casualties, the debris, the crimes, the wreckage said magic left behind.
TheKillerwatchhosts believed—and Adeline was inclined toagree—that the police refused to name the kongsi because names made something exist. They romanticized miscreants, made legends of scoundrels. A name was an anchor to form around. While the official papers maintained decorum, shows likeKillerwatchtook reports of “three gang members” and turned them into “the Bedok Wranglers,” into Four-Eyed Chan and Dragon Kong, and all of a sudden these men who’d only existed as letters in print were so real you could touch them. And if you could touch them, you could know them. You could love them.
“Now, they said Low didn’t have anything to do with the kongsi, but at this point, if something unexplainable happens, there’s an explanation! It’s magic.”
“Right, right. We went through this with the Hainanese Boy. Birds dying everywhere? Magic, my dude. Anyway, Hainanese Boy is still on the run; they say he might be in Europe now.”
“Right, right, well, we wish them all the best hunting him down. But rumors that surfaced in the past few weeks about a kongsi with the power to drain the blood from your body are unequivocallyfalse—that’s a pontianak, ladies and gentlemen. If it’s very pretty and smells good, that’s not a gangster, but you might want to run away anyway. If she lets you.”
