Adeline knew she meant less the actual face and more her bearings, maybe the tattoos, maybe the yellowed eyes. She had never looked much like her mother otherwise, although it was getting harder to remember, since she didn’t have any photographs. She wondered if Genevieve was thinking of her mother as a girl in the dress shop, before the war, or as a young woman with a fire goddess, reappearing in her life after years apart.
Though maybe it wasn’t a good thing. Adeline looked a wreck. Last night Tian hadn’t slept at all, smoking and burning and drinking through the entire stash Genevieve kept for special guests until Adeline and Christina forced her to stop, because she had started accusing all of them of lying to her. Then she’d just sat in a corner and prayed. Meanwhile, Adeline had dreamed about Su Han the few times she tried to shut her eyes. Always a variation on the same. They walked into the bedroom of the Blackhill house and Su Han sat there with a different person’s head on her shoulders: Adeline’s mother, Hsien, Rosario, different dead girls. From the rafters hung nooses, and sometimes there would be more bodies in them.
Genevieve’s arrival at a prompt 8 a.m. before store opening had jolted Adeline out of her stupor. Instead of being horrified, however, Genevieve just wanted to know if Adeline would finally take her offer to get her an apartment.
Adeline surprised herself with the answer. “Maybe. Chinatown is getting squeezed out.”
Genevieve nodded slowly. “I know you’re too young to think about it yet—but you should use the chances you have where you have them, if you don’t intend on getting married.”
Adeline glanced at her. Tian had been around when Genevieve arrived; she wasn’t sure what had given it away. “Will your husband know?”
“What, two friends living together? What’s there to tell?” Genevieve rubbed her chin. “I followed the trial for the Blackhill Brothersclosely. I guess I felt responsible, in a way. I remember hearing that there was a daughter. I even thought about trying to reach out, but your mother convinced me otherwise. Said that it was cruel to ask a teenage girl to absolve my guilt. I had just been trying to save my family, you know. I hadn’t thought about anyone else’s. I’ve thought about her every now and then. I always hoped she ended up in a better place than her brothers and father.”
Adeline ran her nail along the edge of the desk, now decorated with the photograph of some stranger’s family. “Tian will kill her. You know.”
“Well.” Genevieve didn’t do her the insult of trying to convinceherotherwise. “She’s a grown woman now.”
Adeline was about the same age Su Han had been, but there didn’t seem a point in saying that. Discomfited by the silence, Genevieve continued: “Your exams are over.”
Adeline almost laughed before she realized Genevieve was serious, and then she had the strange, anguished dissonance of seeing herself from two sides at once. Inside she felt so transformed she could never conceive of fitting into a uniform again. Outside, of course, it had only been a few months, in Genevieve’s eyes, a little lapse into freedom with time still to reel it back, a beloved friend’s daughter who could still be made recognizable. But time worked differently for Adeline now, and she understood she had truly abandoned everything her mother had wanted her to be, in exchange for everything her mother had thought about leaving. Fire, bloody girls, landscapes of constant destruction, even this tenuous relationship with Genevieve that would go no further if Adeline insisted on staying put.
So Adeline replied: “My friends might be dead. Who cares about exams?”
They were speaking in Hokkien, and so while she theoretically meantfriends, she’d used the terms that everyone in the kongsiused, which wassisters, and she saw it flash across Genevieve’s face. It felt right. A bond that existed outside traditional definition, blood shared by choice and not by fate. She didn’t care if Genevieve understood.
The Butterflies had to make themselves scarce during the day. It was for the best anyway, since so many different people came through the doors of Jenny’s that they felt on edge, wondering if one of them would turn out to be an enemy. Monsoon season had indeed arrived, though. The sky perpetually shuttered between white and pregnant gray, and it was raining so often the sidewalks barely dried before they were poured on again.
Some girls hung out at Red Butterfly joints in case Three Steel started a fight there. A few more girls had shown up at Jenny’s since the raid, each of them proving they were Butterfly with fire. But everyone else was a ghost, either in detention or hiding somewhere. There was no way to know until they announced themselves, or until Tian took it upon herself to have them found.
The raid had appeared in the newspapers, in a small column.Woman and 9-year-old son rescued from gang kidnapping. Red Butterfly was not mentioned—names never were—but it had prompted several readers’ letters in the last two days praising the valiant police, expressing relief at the safety of such innocents, and debating about gang threats and how such crime reflected on their nation going into its eighth year. Genevieve had delivered the papers, but Adeline had chosen not to tell the others about it. It wasn’t the kind of being written about Christina had been looking for.
There had, however, been a shock segment onKillerwatch, when Adeline happened to tune in the other day, for the first time in a long while. “If you heard about that big house fire in Bukit Timah recently, rumor has it that it’s connected to the Chinatown kidnapping two days ago. A gang war. That Bukit Timah house has alot of history. Back in 1958, there was another raid there. A gang kidnapped Mr. Hwang Wai Boon—yes, the rubber magnate—and were demanding a million-dollar ransom. The police got a tip-off and managed to rescue Mr. Hwang and round up all the leaders of the gang, who were executed in the few years after that.”
“They were called the Blackhill Brothers,” said the other host. “Supposedly they ran rackets around the quarries and could sense things in the earth. Did you know there’s a lot of tunnels in the hills? They were used some during the war.”
“Anyway, the Blackhill Brothers don’t exist anymore, which makes us ask the question—who are the new big bads? We have some ideas for you. Stay tuned tomorrow for more.”
When had their reporting started to involve so many actual facts? When had they even come upon the Blackhill Brothers, when the name hadn’t appeared in any official sources? Had they actually connected Red Butterfly with the fire? They had a new writer or a new investigator, one who was actually interested in doing the job. Adeline had switched the station, disturbed. It was news instead; at one of the shipyards, two hundred apprentices had been staging a sit-in, because their colleague had been suspended for refusing to cut his hair. This was following a university protest a few months prior. An officer was live on the radio. “Hippieism will trample our clean and green island. Once again, we remind everyone that the men’s long hair ban is about keeping this denigrating and obscene lifestyle off our shores.”
Ang Khaw was supposed to be back in the country later today, along with two other White Bones. How and precisely when they were crossing the border the Butterflies weren’t sure, but ever since they’d gotten the call Tian had been even more volatile and a little needy, and since the sun was back out Adeline decided to walk her down to the waterfront instead of letting her sit around waiting for Three Steel to try something and taking it out on herself in the meantime.
Wind toyed with Adeline’s hair as they crossed the mouth of the river on Anderson Bridge, boats flowing uptown to their left, and then from there strolled down the green promenade of Queen Elizabeth Walk. Adeline had taken this route before, water on the right and old town on the left: the Victoria Theatre and the government’s Empress Place, the Assembly House, the Cricket Club behind Connaught Drive, all white and square and colonial. Tian never had, though—had never seen where the river opened up into the bay and the ocean beyond—and she looked a little stunned by the openness. This had been a good choice, Adeline decided, looking at the way the sky hit Tian’s eyes. Even if the smell on the air promised this weather wouldn’t last long.
There was a new addition on the riverbanks, in front of the Fullerton Building. They’d glimpsed the back of it crossing the bridge, but now they saw the whole creature perched on the promontory jutting over the water: a beast with a coiled scaly tail affixed to a lion’s head, from the mouth of which poured a stream of continuous water.
Adeline had been perhaps nine or ten years old when the merlions began cropping up on stamps and banners. The Tourism Board had needed a symbol for Singapore in order to sell it, so they had stitched earth and sea together to make one.
Its image gave the idea of the country shape. Long ago they said a prince had come here and seen a lion and thus named the land Lion City. No one else had ever seen this beast, but they all chose to believe it, and continue naming themselves such.Singapura, Singapore, Singaporean. Well, if you couldn’t see it, you could always build it, and so apparently they had decided to sculpt one here where all the boats would be greeted. If the New York harbor stood for liberty, and the Eiffel Tower the resilient avant-garde of Paris, what did their avatar wish to impart upon its home? Hybridity, perhaps; transcendence in a transformed wildness. Genesis of the ocean; invented jungle kings; princes with too-heavy crowns. The statue must havebeen almost ten meters high, done in white stone. The water spout frothed the bay like something was about to emerge. The city made new myths at will. It was boundless.
Tian and Adeline sat on a bench admiring it. Not too close, but if there was no one passing by—families, cuddling couples—they would brush fingers in the space between them and act like it was enough. “How do you feel about seeing your brother again?” Adeline asked.
Tian leaned onto her knees, watching the water, maybe trying to connect the glittering bay with the cluttered river upstream. “He hasn’t seen me since I was a little girl with pigtails and dresses from my cousins. He knows I was at the brothel and he knows I’m in Red Butterfly, but I feel like in his head I’m still that girl. I don’t know what he’ll think when he sees me again.”
“It’s been seven years. He’ll have changed, too.”
“My mother hasn’t. I went to visit her a few months ago to try to fix things. She asked me for money, then said I didn’t have enough, then said I should have stayed at the brothel because at least I’d still be a woman.” She shrugged unconvincingly. “The first time I cut my hair, Pek Mun’s mother beat me so badly I couldn’t walk for a day, and Pek Mun took care of me. Men say different things about me now than they used to. I used to run after my brother. I liked being his little sister. I think I’m afraid to find out he’ll just leave again if I’m not what he remembers.”
“He doesn’t deserve you if he does,” Adeline said. “And I can remind you how beautiful I think you are whenever you want.”
