So, given Cecelia’s inclinations for half-truths, it’s hardly a surprise that Mary doesn’t believe her when Cecelia says Anil won’t die.
‘How can you know that?’ she sniffs.
‘Rajan told me,’ Cecelia answers. ‘They’re not going to do anything at the hospital. There isn’t anything they can do.’
She sits down cross-legged on the grass just as wheels rattle up to the front of the house. A rickshaw’s been hired to take Mary’s parents with Anil to the train station. They’ll be whisked to a KL hospital where a tired doctor will peer down Anil’s throat, tap on his knees and pronounce him perfectly fit in everything but his brain. That doctor will be overworked and seeing a quiet child will be quite a relief for him.
‘They can do something,’ Mary insists. ‘Anil’s going to get better.’
‘Rajan said you’d say that.’ Cecelia beams, wriggling her plump shoulders under the lace of her second-best dress. She looks sweet in that dress, yellow cotton that’s been trimmed with a bit of ribbon and the hem turned up above her fat little knees. She looks so sweet, in fact, that Mary starts to bristle.
‘Why were you talking to Rajan, anyway?’ she demands.
Cecelia shrugs again and gives her a charming smile. Neither girl is quite as much in love as she thinks, but they won’t let the other one win. They’re at an age to fight over anything, and the more vicious the better.
‘Oh, I see him quite a lot these days,’ Cecelia confides, oily with hormones and malice. ‘He comes to my house, you know.’ She examines her fingernails, scratches one of those rosy knees. ‘My mother says she can hardly keep him away.’
Cecelia’s mother, Yoke Yee, married late in life after working as a brothel-girl in the mountains of Shanxi province and spending her days doing finger-knitting to make ends meet. Yoke Yee’s a cookhouse worker now and she wants something better for Cecelia. ‘You know what’ll happen if you don’t marry,’ she’s told her daughter, ‘you’ll end up with sores on your fingers and God-knows-what everywhere else.’ So Cecelia obediently invites the village boys home for tea, pressing them to take another bourbon cream, a vanilla wafer, a scarf from the finger-knitting she does on those afternoons she’s not ruining her reputation in the flame trees. And then, when Yoke Yee walks out of the room, Cecelia presses the boys to kisses and liberties.
‘You oughtn’t to hang over Rajan so much,’ Mary says coldly. ‘He hates girls who do that.’
Cecelia flushes, tosses her head. ‘Don’t be jealous,’ she says. ‘Just because he doesn’t visit you.’
This doesn’t go down well with Mary. She’s cross; she’s worried about Anil and she’s secretly jealous of that yellow lace dress that she thinks would look a lot nicer on her own slim frame.
‘Leave Rajan alone,’ she orders Cecelia. ‘He’s told me all about what you get up to with boys, and we think it’s – just silly! As though he’d have anything to do with a … with a Chinese jam tart.’
Inaccurate, perhaps – Mary’s been listening at doors – but heartfelt. Just for good measure, too, she spits on the ground by Cecelia’s feet. It’s a gesture she’s learnt from the beggar children and rubber-estate brats she admires, and she thinks it rather daring.
Cecelia pauses, raises one eyebrow. ‘Eew,’ she says, brushing her dainty skirts. ‘That’s disgusting.’
She rises neatly and walks into Mary’s house, flicking grass off that coveted lace skirt. Mary isn’t often at a loss for words and it only takes a few seconds before she’s bounding up to the back door cursing. She jabs at the handle, tugs and twists, and it’s only then she understands exactly what’s happened. Cecelia’s locked her out.
Three hours later, the sun’s plummeted below the horizon and a brisk wind’s sprung up. The air tastes of tin and grit and the ground has a soggy slap to it. Mary’s crouched in the half-built annexes at the end of the garden, the ones her father put up with a few nails and some hope. She’s given up trying to sleep, and she’s thinking up diabolical revenges for Cecelia. She’ll climb up the bougainvillaea and strangle her; she’ll slip oleander leaves into Cecelia’s morning cups of milk, she’ll pull her hair out and steal her yellow dress.
Perhaps Mary will do these things, now or in some other time. Perhaps Cecelia – who, after all, by Mary’s account (and what other account could there be sixty years later?) might not even have been there at all – will walk away, happy and healthy, to live to a great age and bring up her own ungrateful grandchildren. But before any of this can happen there’s a noise, echoing over the sound of distant rain. It’s a tidal noise, one she recognizes from her afternoons playing crocodile-bait down by the river. It’s the noise of riverbanks breaking away, of surprised raindrops that had expected to fall on dry land. Mary panics, scrambles up onto a pile of wood and then one bare foot slips down again and this time she feels water.
The Jelai river, slinking past the garden wall, has oozed over its banks and begun to crawl up the path. It licks Mary’s heels in a friendly sort of way in passing; it takes a breath, it swells, it darkens, and then it surges over Pahang in a
