‘I am sorry, Noor,’ she says as the door opens.
Noor Abi is old and heavy; she’s lost more sons than she can count and she’s still giving birth to an infant every year. She cries over each new death, sobbing until her milk dries up and her breasts shrivel and her latest baby weans itself in disgust. Noor’s sons are daredevils, and they’ve always had a streak of rebellion. Two are off in the jungle fighting with the Tiga Bintang, three are running rice-smuggling operations in Terengganu and one’s up in Kedah launching a suicide attack on the Japanese water supplies. Noor Abi knows immediately what’s in that thin white envelope. She’s no postman, but she knows that bad news takes up less space than good, and nearly always comes typewritten.
‘Agnes!’ Noor calls. ‘Find the camphor-water.’
But Agnes is there already. She’s already lowering the chick blinds and setting out mourning clothes. She keeps camphor-water on hand now, ready to wash the body of the latest son to be carried back dead from the mountains.
‘Hello, Agnes,’ Mary says.
Agnes is working at Noor Abi’s house every day, in an attempt to stretch the tiny convent rations further by looking after Noor’s children. She comes forward, breathing sympathy, and scribbles a line for Mary in her exercise book.
Any news of your husband yet?
Mary swallows a flutter and plummet in her throat, and shakes her head.
‘Oh, my dear …’ Noor Abi comes out of her own monumental grief to sympathize too. ‘You must be worried sick. Those Japanese … those Kempetai. They’re – they’re bastards.’
The word pops plump from her dignified lips and is immediately snatched up by Anil. Although he can talk now, he doesn’t tend to except when it makes trouble.
‘Bastards, bastards,’ he begins to sing. ‘Kempetai bastards.’
Mary hurries down the steps to hush him. Noor and Agnes stand on the porch, arm in arm and sadness trickling right to their soles. If I could talk, Agnes might be thinking, I’d use my voice for something better than swearing – and I wouldn’t slap people either – as Mary cuffs Anil round the ear to keep him quiet. No, Agnes disapproves of violence, and despite her liking for Mary she feels a surge of spite. One day, she thinks, Mary will get her comeuppance.
Mary slings one leg over the bicycle and starts pedalling off with Anil perched behind. Their next delivery’s at the convent, which means a hill to climb first.
‘Bastard, Kempetai bastards,’ Anil sings, and lights start to flicker on in the houses that line the steep street.
‘Hush! People will be awake soon,’ Mary hisses.
Everything starts early in Malaya these days, now all the clocks have moved on to Japanese time. Alarms ring two hours before dawn, housewives begin to cook supper while lunch is still on the table and children rush screeching out to the kampong school before even the most conscientious chickens have untucked their heads. By the time Mary and Anil reach the convent walls the whole world is astir.
‘Mary?’ Anil taps his sister on the shoulder as they turn in at the gate. The convent sits in the middle of the compound, surrounded by the fishbone trunks of palm trees. ‘Mary, where is Joseph?’
Mary’s puzzled for a second, and then remembers just in time. ‘She … uh, he’s at home, Anil. He’s safe in bed.’
Joseph, of course, being the name little Francesca still goes by. Even here in Pahang, where the Japanese soldiers are disciplined and regimented, Mary’s wary of letting anyone know Francesca’s a girl. For the last couple of years, Francesca’s been thoroughly enjoying her life as a boy, spending her whole days running about with a gang of tot-sized neighbourhood toughs. All Mary’s half-hearted attempts to reintroduce dresses and dolls have failed, and now it seems as though she’s stuck with a son. It could be worse, she thinks now, remembering Noor Abi. Plenty of women in Pahang are running out of sons.
‘Kempetai bastards.’ Anil bursts into song again and Mary frowns. The Kempetai may be bastards – and she agrees with that, though she wouldn’t say it out loud – but she doesn’t blame them for Rajan’s disappearance. She doesn’t blame the rebel Tiga Bintang fighters either, nor the Koreans who are press-ganging men into the Thai railway work. No, she blames Rajan himself. Mary suspects it’s his own choice to stay away. And on his own head be the consequences, she thinks rather wildly, and shouts over her shoulder in a voice tart as pickled limes that Anil should shut up now.
As they wheel through the convent gate Mary wipes her forehead and shakes her aching legs. The convent’s shabby these days and there are only a few nuns left. But Sister Gerta’s still here, and she comes hurrying out of the front door as soon as she hears the bicycle wheels. Her skirts whip around her skinny legs and her habit billows in the snatching wind.
‘Mary!’ she exclaims with pleasure.
Every month since the Occupation began, Mary’s heaved a bagful of letters up here for the nuns. Begging letters, all of them, asking for help or charity or prayers. There’ve been so many that Mary’s had to stitch a special postbag for them, embroidering it with a tiny crucifix. That bag reeks of misery from the letters inside it, and if any joyful note – say, a wedding invitation – is accidentally placed there the consequences are calamitous: jilting, adultery, divorce of the groom and all his brothers. As Mary sorts those letters the envelopes stick to her fingers in a peeling, damp way that has nothing to do with the weather. The people who write them are desperate, and that’s an easy thing to catch.
‘Some extra ones today, Sister,’ she says cheerily and Anil joins in again.
‘Extra, extra, Kempetai extra bastards.’
Sister Gerta gasps. ‘You should
