a second I let my throbbing head rest on Alice’s shoulder, and the peals of laughter rock from her into me and back again. It’s good, so very good laughing like that with my sister Alice that I want to sob.
I watch many children come and go before Alice arrives. I observe them through the grid of an air-vent set high into the wall of the morgue.Their heads are dull and ordinary, and I know they cannot sustain me. True, I am curious. But when Alice comes I am spellbound. She appears one afternoon when all the other children have gone, and lies back on a patch of scrubby grass. She is a slip of a thing, pale as a creaming wave, her long hair always moving, her eyes moons of contemplation. It does not seem to worry her that the building above her is growing silent, that soon she will be alone. For a bit she stares up at the sky, follows the occasional fleecy cloud. Then she rolls over and sits up. As she does so, the golden-haired boy in the shadows fades away, as if he had never been.
Suddenly she notices the yawning mouth of the morgue, for the door is partly ajar. I cannot tell how long her eyes are trained on it, but the shadows are lengthening when at last she climbs to her feet. She walks straight to the entrance and shoulders open the rusty-hinged door. It shudders and grumbles and sticks a bit before swinging back. Alice slips through,under the nebulous mantle.She takes a few steps, and then waits for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She inhales a long, slow breath of stale, dead air. She fixes stains on the floor with her perceptive eyes. She let her fingers linger on walls where the paint is flaking, where the bricks are impregnated with the transience of life.As she listens to echoes of the past, I slide into her and instantly feel my strength returning. I become the scum in her blood. I garland myself with ropes of silver-stranded veins.And in the resonance of each heartbeat I know her every thought,her every memory, her every experience, her every twist and turn of emotion, often before she does, as if they are my own.
When at last she leaves, I go with her. We dawdle along Bowen Road. We wait for the Peak Tram, a funicular green cab with the cream roof to come and haul us up The Peak.We leave the terminus and stroll up a long road, past a shop called the Dairy Farm, then along a path to Alice’s home. All this is new to me. The people hurrying by, their clothes, their colour too, for up here most of them are white-skinned, the cars and buses and lorries, the houses and the flats. Hers is a top-floor flat, as large as a palace. Surely, I think, several families live here. But I am wrong. There is only one. The flat is filled with beautiful things too, the kind that an emperor might own. Carvings and paintings, jade and ivory, snuff bottles and fans, books and carpets, and shelves crowded with fine porcelain. But there is no emperor, just Alice’s family, the Saffords, and some servants to care for them, Ah Dang and Ah Lee. When I was alive there was only my father to care for me. And even then, as far back as I can recall, it had really been my job to look after him. Like me, Alice has a father, Ralph, but unlike me she has a mother too, Myrtle.And Alice has a younger brother, Harry, and a small dog she calls Bear. Alice has two sisters as well, who are being educated in England. It seems strange to me that, with so many people about, Alice should be lonely. But she is. I feel it. Still, it is lucky, because it means that she will probably welcome my company.
Together we decide that we do not like attending classes in the school that has been set up in my old army hospital. This is not because I believe education has no worth. My father was a wonderful storyteller and valued learning above all things. When we returned from a night’s fishing I would lie down, the rising sun warming the deck under me, and he’d sit beside me. He’d puff on his clay pipe and after a bit the stories would come. He taught me to read and write too, and together we delighted in the words of the great poets and philosophers.
But the smell of death emanating from the morgue has started to make me fret. No, it is life that beckons to me now. I find myself wondering if the novelty of being alive again, albeit through the medium of Alice, will ever wear off. Somehow, I doubt it. So we abandon dusty studies in favour of exploration.We have to be careful where we go, for there is trouble on the island. The tense atmosphere reminds me of the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war. I overhear Alice’s father saying that some of the Chinese people are unhappy about working conditions, and that they believe the British are taking advantage of them. Some days there are riots, people shouting slogans and fighting, even bombs exploding and causing dreadful injuries. It seems strange though that this time the enemy is not the Japanese, but the British.
Despite these disturbances, Alice and I do not curtail our outings. We visit the Tiger Balm Gardens, or we take a ferry to one of the outer islands, or we walk the length of Shek O Beach, or Silvermine Bay, kicking up the sand, or we catch a bus to Aberdeen and watch the boat people, my people, for a while.This last stirs up memories of Lin Shui for me. Sometimes I am certain I spot my father, scrambling about the rigging of one of the great junks, the rust-brown sails flapping and rippling under him, his long, silver hair swept up into a bun and skewered with a netting needle, as was his habit. Sometimes I see a young girl, just like me, her life shrunk to the wooden decks that enfold her, her days spent riding the waves, mending nets, patching sails, cooking, washing pots and pans, and doing her family’s laundry.And I wonder if she realises how fine this life of hers is, if she values it as she ought. Sometimes too, I see the shadows of my ancestors and I know they are lying in wait for me.
Of course there are some advantages to being ‘undead’,for example I no longer feel hunger. I share with Alice what it is to need neither food nor drink. She joins me, fasting for long periods, till her head is light as a feather, and she trips about as if she is stepping onto clouds.When she grows dizzy and black shapes detonate before her eyes, I have to remind myself that Alice is only human and must eat to live. I prompt her then to feed, reminding myself that I am leasing her body. But while Alice fasts, her brother Harry feasts until none of his clothes fit him.
The flat on the Peak is emptier than I thought it would be, reminding me sometimes of the morgue. Alice’s father is rarely at home, working constantly. Alice’s mother, though sometimes in the same room, feels far away. I am envious of Alice having not one but two sisters. But I find even this, when they return home for the holidays, is not as I imagined it. Late one night we chance upon Jillian in the kitchen. She is surrounded by tins and packets and jars. She is stuffing food into her mouth, slices of bread slathered in chocolate spread and jam and peanut butter, cramming in biscuits and cakes and crisps and chocolate. In between mouthfuls she is gulping juice and milk, and brightly coloured drinks that bubble and fizz, as if infused with life force. I amuse myself by causing one of the tube lights in the kitchen to flash for a time. Jillian barely glances up. Instead, as it flickers, Alice’s oldest sister looks as if she is jerking about like a gluttonous puppet, her blonde hair flying. Alice is pofaced, but I think it is very funny.
All the while, fearless nocturnal cockroaches scuttle about. Emerging from the drains they feast on smears and crumbs. Most are on the floor, though a few, braver than the rest, scrabble around on the work surfaces.Their antennae swivel.They are well fed these cockroaches, the size of Hong Kong dollars. Their beetle-brown bodies gleam in the glow cast by the fluorescent tubes. Fine hairs sprout from their busy, spindly legs. The wings of one that is trying to clamber up the slippery sides of a glass whirr madly. It lumbers into the air and flies about, rebounding off cupboard doors and tiled surfaces, before landing to gobble afresh on a fast-melting square of chocolate. They look as shiny as vinyl. Alice flinches. Jillian pauses in her gorging, just long enough to bring a clenched fist down on it. We hear the ‘squish’ as its mushy body is crushed. Jillian glances cursorily at the base of her fist. She wipes off the stuff that looks like yellow pus on a kitchen towel, and starts guzzling again.
‘What are you doing?’ Alice wants to know, the juices running into her own mouth at the sight of all that food.
Startled, Jillian jumps and turns on Alice. She cannot have known we were here, watching her.‘Shut up,’ she hisses, a chocolaty dribble running down her chin. ‘Shut up and get out.’ The face of one of the amahs appears like a ghostly apparition at the window in the back door. It is Ah Dang, her plait unravelled, the top buttons of her tunic undone. She looks first sleepy-eyed, then amazed, as if she thinks she might still be dreaming. Despite this, her face registers