There was a White Orchid bar on Neil Road.
Adeline paused with her finger on the page, turning the radio down to make sure she wasn’t reading it wrong. She was not. She fetched the map book and found the bar’s exact location—it was along a string of other bars and eating houses that opened late, not far from the red-light district. As if following along, the radio quipped:
“We’ve got a nonsense fella calling in saying he got attacked by a pretty girl at Jiak Chuan Road. Sir, isn’t that what you’re going there for?”
The other host snickered. “Maybe he should have been payingher, hor? Anyway, you can complain to your local brothers, I’m sure they’ll get her sorted out.”
Jiak Chuan Road was in the same area as the White Orchid. Was this what her mother had been referring to? Why would she be involved in business with a bar?
Adeline enjoyed bars. She’d first ventured into one after an evening showing of some sleek thriller, when she’d felt a little dangerous and like she didn’t want the night to end quite yet. If you picked the right place, dressed the right way, had enough confidence, a sixteen-year-old could be twenty for all they cared. She had never heard of the Orchid and could not guarantee it would be one of those places, but there was no harm, was there? In going to look?
Adeline set out to finding something to wear. Her hands dipped in and out of her clothes, as much searching for an outfit as feeling the material over her hands. Eventually she chose jeans and a yellow blouse, but it was a little big, and the safety pin slipped as she was trying to cinch it. Blood welled on her thumb. “Damn it.” She sucked it quickly and secured the pin, then moved on to jewelry and makeup. She decided to wear Fan Tai Tai’s bracelet, to add to the impression of being older. She didn’t usually have a chance to wear much makeup out, and she stared at her face in the mirror for a moment, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with it.
She had a resting expression with a naturally down-turned mouth, but she knew how to smile so she became the kind of pretty that made adults generous. Push up the cheeks, show teeth but not too much, make her eyes widen and shine—a sunny guilelessness that almost blushed. She remembered the first time she’d realized how instantly people’s response to her changed, and filed it away in her muscles as a weapon. Smile like that, dress the right way, and these people would smile back at you even as you strolled into their bar or picked their pockets. There was a reason that above God, the St. Mary’s girls prayed first of all to be pretty, pretty, pretty,to be released from the awkward in-between of teenage girlhood and blossom into their fervent transformations.
In the meantime, they learned artificial tricks. Adeline, not going for guileless tonight, curled her hair, put on dots of stolen blush, brushed and daubed and set and painted her lips until she found an older person in the mirror. She liked who she felt like with all of it on. A little more like the women displayed on her walls, if you could forget they were human, too.
Adeline checked that her mother wasn’t outside before slipping downstairs, treading on the sides of the steps to lessen noise. The living room was soft and dark, and the guinea pigs they’d once kept here were long gone, but for the first time in a while Adeline thought she heard rustling. She frowned, turning toward the noise and finding the cabinet that had once been the altar. It seemed clearer than it should, in these shadows. When she touched it, pain sparked in her left thumb.
In the moonlight outside she found the wound to be a small splinter driven into the wound the safety pin had left earlier. Adeline didn’t even remember that cabinet having a crack in it, but ithadbeen neglected for years.
She managed to work the splinter out with her nails, which promptly left her thumb bleeding again. Pressing it with her handkerchief until it stopped welling, she started the walk to the bus.
CHAPTER THREETHE WHITE ORCHID
The White Orchid turned out to be a cabaret club. Three girls in tight, sparkling dresses were doing a sultry number, and more weaved through the dimmed floor serving drinks and chatting to customers.
As Adeline made her way to the bar, an anonymous hand grazed her thigh. She fantasized, again, about just grabbing hold and starting a fire. She rubbed her thumb over her fingerpads, but let it go. Too many witnesses, her mother would flay her, and fires were too dangerous in dense places like this, buildings and bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder.
The bartender was attending to some loutish gangster as Adeline approached—tattoos all down the arms, and the sort of choppy hippie hair well past the chin that the government had banned. Staying clear of the man, Adeline veered to the other end of the bar, making the bartender come over to her. “Tiger,” she said, cash already extended.
The bartender gave her a shrewd glance, but turned away without statement. Low lights and dolled-up confidence had yet to lead her wrong. This wasn’t the discos at the Shangri-La or the Mandarin, where the clientele required more discernment. Places like these wanted more girls in them. The managers wouldn’t look closely until the police came knocking.
“That group’s gotten a bit rowdy,” came the bartender’s continued conversation at the other end of the bar, as he rummaged in a fridge for Adeline. “Might have to cut them off.”
“Keep an eye on them,” came the response, and the distinctly female tenor of it turned Adeline’s head.
The tattooed man was not a man at all, but a tall and particularly striking girl dressed in loose trousers and a white singlet, which exposed leanly muscular, colorfully inked arms propped on the counter as she chatted to the bartender and occasionally watched the show. Her tanned face was bare, revealing her youth—she couldn’t have been much older than Adeline—but there was a certain wolfishness to her eyes and the way she pushed her tongue against the inside of her cheek at something the bartender was saying, exposing her teeth.
She raked her short hair out of her face and happened to catch Adeline’s eye. She raised her eyebrows with an aggressive jerk of the head:What’s your problem?
Adeline looked away as the bartender handed over her beer and change. “Thanks.” She grabbed the bottle and coins and left quickly, getting all the way to a table in the corner before realizing she should have tried asking the bartender about this contact of her mother’s she’d come all the way for.
But she was distracted now—from this corner she could safely observe the girl at the bar behind her back. Adeline had never seen anyone who looked like that before. A thick copper ring sat on the girl’s right hand; Adeline almost wondered if it was a wedding ring before realizing it was on the wrong finger. The girl didn’t wear any other jewelry except plain black studs in her ears. Adeline wondered if she could get close enough to the girl to pocket her ring. She wouldn’t be an easy mark, but perhaps with the right distraction…?
Probably some gangster’s girlfriend, Adeline reminded herself, and not worth the risk. Chinatown and its adjacent areas were divvied up by the unofficial lines of the kongsi brotherhoods. Queenstown, where the Hong Lim cemetery used to sprawl over the swampy hills; Tanjong Pagar, where the railway station rolledout its arteries to the Malaysian hinterlands; Bugis Street, with its debauchery and oozing red signs promising flesh. If you didn’t go looking for the gangs, the gangs usually wouldn’t look for you. But they were recognizable—each inked with the symbols of their loyalty. The girls that hung with them might wear some of these symbols as well. Adeline tried to make out the shapes on the girl’s arms and connect them to stories she’d heard. But it was too dark to distinguish most of the icons, and it was stupid to trust thatKillerwatchhad any real information. There was one tattoo that was clear, however, even in the dark and from a distance: a large butterfly just under the girl’s left shoulder.
Eventually, however, the girl caught her staring again. Their eyes locked across the bar; Adeline turned rapidly back to the stage, only to find the performance had just ended. She was left without an excuse as the girl set her hands on the table, looming over Adeline.
“You got a problem?”
Adeline froze. “No.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“Who said I was looking at you?” She was dimly aware that this probably wasn’t someone she wanted to provoke, but couldn’t seem to help herself. Fortunately, the girl seemed faintly amused by the bald-faced lie. She did that thing with her tongue again, lips curving, and glanced around at the unoccupied chairs.
“Your boyfriend stood you up?”
