The Night Tiger(78)
“Father wants to know where the receipts are,” he said to my mother.
“Oh, I’ll get them.” She got up and so did I. I didn’t want to be left alone with Shin. Remembering how I’d lifted my face expectantly in the moonlight, and how he’d paused and released me instead, filled me with hot humiliation.
“Ji Lin,” he said in a low voice as I brushed past in the narrow hallway. Even though it was noon, only a little light filtered into the corridor that ran alongside our two small rooms. It was so gloomy in this shophouse, so long and narrow, like living in the belly of a snake.
“What?”
“I need to talk to you.” Shin bent his dark head towards me.
“Not when you were so rude to me downstairs.”
For an instant, he frowned. Then the corner of his mouth twitched.
“You really are blunt,” he said. “Don’t you know how to act like a girl?”
Indignant, I opened my mouth to inform him that I was in fact the number two girl at the May Flower on Wednesdays and Fridays, but closed it without saying anything.
“But that’s what I like about you.”
A knife twist. Yes, he was fond of me. So fond that he didn’t even see me as female.
Shin said more seriously, “Did my father really promise that he wouldn’t interfere with you if you got married?”
“He said he didn’t care who it was as long as he had a decent job.”
“I see. That’s good, isn’t it?”
Why was Shin so pleased about that?
“Are you all right?” He peered closely at me, and I forced myself to look cheerful.
“I opened the package you got from Pei Ling,” I said, changing the subject.
He raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“I think you should tell Dr. Rawlings about the missing fingers. They’re hospital property after all.”
“I was going to,” said Shin, “Except when I went back to the storeroom to look for the original finger—the one you put away—it had disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
Shin put a hand over my mouth. “Not so loud.”
“I put it on the shelf, behind the two-headed rat,” I said softly, not wanting my mother to overhear us.
“Well, it’s not there anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “If I inform Dr. Rawlings that I managed to locate one of the missing fingers but now it’s disappeared again, he’ll think I’m mad. Or that I stole them myself. Best not to say anything.”
“But if someone checks the catalog, they’ll find that specimens are missing. And the last person who tidied the room was you.”
I never heard his answer because at that moment, a heavy tread on the stairs warned us of my stepfather’s approach. Hastily, we sprang apart. Shin disappeared into his room, and I made my way downstairs, coolly passing my stepfather as though I hadn’t just been standing in the hallway discussing stolen body parts with his son.
* * *
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even as I sat in the hired car that Saturday night, listening to Hui and Rose chatter with only half an ear. And then the car was pulling up a long curving driveway. It was very quiet and dark, just as most of the journey had been, down empty roads fringed with jungle trees and the rustling leaves of rubber and coffee estates.
When the car stopped behind a row of vehicles, there was a moment of silence. Then Rose and Pearl spilled out, adjusting their dresses and smoothing their hair. I’d never been to such a large private bungalow before. Lights blazed from the front windows so that the surrounding trees and long expanse of black lawn pressed in on the house. Faint sounds of laughter and the tinny music of a gramophone wafted out through the open windows. I glanced at Hui, but she was looking at the door. There was a hard expression on her face, and I realized that she was nerving herself up to go in. We were used to locals, but foreigners were a different matter. Frankly, I was terrified.
“Front door or back?” she asked Kiong.
He consulted a piece of paper. It was so dark that he had to hold it up and squint. “Front,” he grunted.
Kiong knocked on the door and handled the introductions. I stood behind Anna, the only girl who was taller than me, and blindly followed the others in. There was a rush of noise. I hardly knew where to look, but it was all right since we were being ushered through to the side.
“Ren, show the ladies into the study.”
The hair on the back of my neck turned to needles. I had a good memory for voices, their pitch and timbre, and there was no use telling myself that all Englishmen sounded the same. I should have considered the possibility that William Acton, surgeon at the Batu Gajah District Hospital, might be at this private party. And now I was stuck.
We waited in another room until they were ready to have us, which was quite normal, said Pearl. Besides, we were a little early. Kiong was always a stickler for punctuality. The room was somebody’s study: a very neat person, judging from the desk with its exact angles of ink jar and blotting paper. There was a tiger skin—a real one—on the floor. Rose said it gave her the shivers, but I thought it looked rather sad with its green glass eyes fixed in a petrified stare. That would be me, I thought, after William Acton recognized me. Goodbye to any chance of a nursing career, at least at this particular hospital.