He held his bony knees to his chest and sank through the hardwood floor, down amongst the concrete pillars that held the home above the ground and snakes, deep to the foundations amongst the bones of those the builders mixed in mortar to bless the building.Īll ghosts knew three things: that they were dead, that they were tragic and that they were alone. The old man seemed to draw himself together, become more distinct, but lost the battle with himself. “You never move, she must have passed by.” Ye Ye shook his head and gibbered, moving the rocking chair so hard that it raised clouds of sparkling dust. “Did you see the new girl, Ye Ye?” asked the ghost boy. It would have been hell if he had anything other than a mind like moth-ravaged curtain. When his body eventually, stubbornly, gave up life by the fingernails, he reappeared amongst wailing kin who hid their smiles and sighs of relief at his passing from the stern funerary portrait at the foot of his coffin. Fortunate that his mind had passed before his body, that he did not remember the tears of his family, the slow ossification of their hearts against the terror of a mind becoming unstuck in memories. Ye Ye, of all the ghosts, was the most fortunate. He’d lost definition around the edges, reduced to a little more than a smudge. Ye Ye loved the sitting room, a slow room for a slow unlife. Perhaps age would reveal something to the ghost boy that power did not so he sought out Ye Ye, the oldest ghost in the house in appearance, if not in haunting years. Seeing that he was no longer welcome, the ghost boy took his leave, wondering it if were possible for a ghost to be haunted. The lady of the house smiled a mirthless press of the lips. Unsatisfied, Bibik Neo called forth the flames from the cooker, singing the hands of the helper, who knocked the entire scalding pot to the floor in her haste to evade the fire. Force of habit her hand did not disturb the steam and ghosts could not smell. This is my place.” She leaned over the bubbling pot, waving steam to her face to check the cooking. “There is nothing new in this house, boy. A girl that tastes of static and smells like fresh plastic.” “There is a new one in the house, I’ve seen her. Her tongue hung low, down to her collarbone, as it was rumoured in life, so it was in death.īibik Neo sucked at her teeth. The lady of the house had a face that was immaculately powdered, ground talc filling up furrows like so much grout eyebrows delicately tattooed lips rouged blood red. The ghost boy, who had never cooked in his life, save the time his brain baked in his skull from the fever, said nothing, only looking at Bibik Neo for permission to continue. “Rendang cannot come out of a bag, you see, boy? No pounding of the rempah, no slow heat of charcoal,” she sighed. She watched over the servant girls cooking in the black and white and sepia days, she watched over the domestic help in the high definition days. Her throne room was the kitchen, the heart of a home, and that was where the lady of the house spent her afterlife. The dowager approved his salutation with the slightest of nods, inviting him closer with a crooked finger weighed with a heavy band of jade. According to her wishes (and such was her power that no one countermanded them), she was interred in the peony pink of a finest nyonya kebaya, slick across waist and hips, flowers twining round the waist, climbing to the collar and back down long sleeves. Bibik Neo was a colourful woman in life, and so she was in death. The ghost boy first consulted with the lady of the house, as was custom. On the thirtieth anniversary of his death, a new ghost came to the house. But the marrow of the house remained, so the living never stayed and the dead never left. Now, you can do that, strip a house down to the bone, flay the walls from it and pull tiles like teeth. The newest owners had furnished the house with a television screen the same size as a car door, computers in every room, tiny bulbs the size of candles with the glare of lighthouses ripped out the old worm-eaten flooring in favour of inky Burmese teak. Walls skinned with the colour of the ocean meeting the sky, a driveway of parched and cracked stone, girded with the garishness of bougainvillea and the shyness of orchids. The house called the dead unto itself, and so the boy persisted, him and the others, outnumbering the living. The house had stood for close to a century, waking to kiss the sea breeze decades before, still standing when the red dirt roads had hardened to dark tarmac and the state had stolen the sea from it. No one had said his name in thirty years, even though he’d scarred the house with it, carved onto a tree in the garden, scratched into the paint under the outdoor kitchen. The ghost boy was the colour of bone, of gossamer spider web, of salt trails of dried tears.
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