Today, though, has started out badly. By nine o’clock Mary and Cecelia have both bitten their mothers in a fight over bread and milk at breakfast, stamped out of their back doors, and attempted to drop their kitchen cats into the froggy depths of the well.
Neither girl has quite wanted to do all this. Mary loves her kittens and Cecelia, for her part, likes bread and milk. But Cecelia and Mary share a strange, unwanted bond, one that developed as soon as they met. When Mary claps her hands, Cecelia’s own palms begin to sting, and when Cecelia outgrows her shoes, Mary’s feet develop blisters. So neither girl is surprised that Mary’s breakfast of bread and milk caused Cecelia to retch three doors away, or that Cecelia’s scream of rage as her cat clawed her arm convinced Mary, with helpless sobs, to try and drown her own docile pets.
So now, having left two quarrelsome houses and a couple of dripping cats, the girls thrust Anil head-first through the nursery window and climb out after him. It’s a hot day, right in the middle of the dry season, and as she carries him down the driveway Mary’s arms begin to itch from the wool in Anil’s blanket. Stephen insists on that blanket – no son of his is going to grow up like a half-naked savage – and without an amah to replace Ah Sim, nobody’s thought to question the rash that’s spread over Anil’s delicate skin.
According to playground rumours, the bomohs live in a secret hut deep in the jungle that can’t be reached without a map. Neither girl is quite sure she believes this – Mary wonders who drew the first map, Cecelia wonders what the bomohs eat – but at nine years old they’re far too brave to suggest calling the adventure off. Mary navigates a flooded section of the river with Anil tucked under one arm while Cecelia scratches her elbows raw, and then Cecelia follows while grazes blossom on the skin of Mary’s wrists. Anil, blissfully single-minded and with only one body to worry about, sucks on his thumb and watches the rustling leaves. If he were able to talk, he’d point out that the girls are going in circles. They’ve jumped this rocky outcrop twice already, and he’s seen the thicket of hibiscus behind it at least three times. But he rather likes the look of those petal-soft flowers against the waxy green leaves, so he lies back placidly on Mary’s shoulder and waits for them to appear again.
‘Stop! You there, stop.’
Mary, in the lead, stops short and peers up into the leaves. Ten feet above her she sees a dark-skinned Indian boy – who will one day be my grandfather Rajan – astride the lowest branch and half-obscured by flame-tree blossom. Mary doesn’t know this is a momentous occasion, and so her heart doesn’t skip a beat, her stomach doesn’t drop and her hand doesn’t fly to cover a smile. Rajan looks put out. He hasn’t climbed a ten-foot tree to be disregarded.
‘Stop. I told you.’ And then, when this doesn’t have any effect, he adds, ‘If you come any closer, I’ll chop the branch off.’
Mary peers up at him and shrugs. She’s only known him a few minutes, so she’s clear-eyed enough to think he wouldn’t really chop off the branch he’s sitting on just to spite her. After a few years, she’ll have learnt better.
‘No, you won’t,’ she tells him.
She pats forward, Anil under one arm and the other hand on her hip. Her patent-leather shoes tap under ruffled socks, she’s small and sweet and for the last time in her life she’s on her best behaviour. The worst thing that can happen, she knows, is that in a few minutes the boy will make good on his threat. He’ll tumble down onto her amid a mass of burnt-bright flowers and knock her to the ground where they’ll live happily ever after, she thinks. She’s read her fairy tales; she knows how the stories go.
‘Stop! Mary, he’ll do it!’
Cecelia comes panting up the hill, plump with baby-fat and good intentions. Seen from Rajan’s perspective, through a screen of flowers and ten foot below – in other words, at a safe enough distance – she’s even sweeter than Mary. Down on the ground the two girls glare at each other for a second like tomcats in a cage.
‘He’ll fall! You’ll kill him!’ Cecelia insists.
‘Leave her alone.’ Rajan veers round to Mary’s defence. He’s twelve years old and his family only arrived in the district a week ago, after his father was appointed as a government doctor in Pahang. The entire Balakrishnan family have been whirled up from Singapore on the very first passenger train ever to cross the Straits causeway and young Rajan considers that sets him ten feet above everyone else without any need for tree trunks.
But Cecelia knows how to get her own way. She ignores Mary and turns her lovely eyes up to the tree, pleading for him to hold on just one more minute.
‘I’ll come up,’ she tells him and Mary, taken aback, stares with her mouth open.
‘We’re supposed to be taking Anil to the bomohs,’ she says. ‘You promised!’
Cecelia shrugs, and gives Mary an impish, provocative smile. ‘Move over,’ she calls to Rajan. ‘I’m coming up.’
He frowns. This is all moving slightly too fast for him. Like he’ll do so many times in future, he gives in to the snarling undercurrents between Mary and Cecelia.
‘Both of you? Come on then,’ he demands. ‘I can’t wait for you all day.’
‘Oh.’ Cecelia jerks a thumb towards Mary and Anil, all red and rashy in his heavy wool blanket.
