Chapter 21 Island Dreams #2
After lunch, you both drift apart to separate worlds. You don’t even make excuses to Mami anymore, nor does she in reverse. Simply disappear to swim, and she hardly notices. Mami spends her free time talking or dancing with the dead, locked in a fantasy where you are not welcome or needed.
It would bother you more, if you didn’t have Sea Sister.
Always, you seek out the isolated places, the bits of coastline that require a scramble in low tide across slippery rocks—and you’re mindful of those barnacles now, having learned your lesson there—to reach little strips of shore where the riptide is a fiendish trickster and where your friend, your Sea Sister, is likely to lurk.
You arrive at the beach to find, always and every time, that Sea Sister is waiting as usual. She circles in the depths like an ocean serpent.
“I’m here,” you call out, feet planted in the sand.
Beneath the water, she smiles wide in answer.
Step free of your shirt and trousers. Throw your hair into a tucked bun, tie it tight, and leap into the cool green sea with hands splayed and knees bent.
As the currents swirl round, you reach out, taking her extended hand; she pulls you close and the pair of you cut through the water at her knifing, lurching speed.
You play tag games in the water most afternoons, which of course you cannot ever win, even when she closes her eyes and twists a hand behind her back.
Still, it’s fun. She catches fish, caging them in her long-fingered hands so that you can see them up close.
Sometimes urchins, too, and once an octopus.
The octopus isn’t afraid, and wraps a tentacle thoughtfully around your wrist before jetting off.
Sea Sister is as dangerous as the ocean itself.
Logically, you know this. She has those teeth for a reason, and once or twice—when meeting a shark in the open waters—she has snapped her jaws in their direction.
None of them stick around; animals have enough sense to recognize death when they see it.
But also like the ocean, Sea Sister is magical and beautiful, and you can’t get enough of her. Of the two options—spending time with a monster, or spending time with ghosts—you know which you’d rather choose.
Sometimes, she peers through the tendrils of her dark, water-logged hair, and you glimpse how others might see her: lurking, cruel, dangerous.
A twisted and hungry creature. Sometimes, she will dance by spinning through the water in a whirl of gaunt limbs, a sight as terrifying as it is fascinating.
Then she smiles, dives, cavorts, and there is only Sea Sister again. Fierce and fiercely lonely, savage and savagely beautiful. She belongs only to you; the light that dazzles your eyes alone.
And you know with every filament of your being that these are the good days, the bright hours and best moments of your life, and that their like will never come again.
There is only one thing amiss: communication is difficult.
You can hear her just fine, but she cannot hear you so well. Human speech is not meant for watery atmospheres, and sound carries with difficulty. Whatever anatomy that allows her voice to carry is something you don’t possess.
You develop a system, of sorts. When you have something complex to say, you make a sign, indicating she should come close. Sea Sister swims right beneath the surface, ear cocked toward you, while you murmur words just above the water line.
Increasingly, you find yourself talking to her a lot. Sometimes you’ll spend a whole afternoon just floating in the water, or clinging to rocks, whispering to her about yourself, almost skin-to-skin. She is the sister you never had, the mother you always wanted; that alone is addictive.
You tell her about growing up in the city, how your first memory is of the small, cramped flat, exhausted parents and pollution and streetlights.
Later, a memory of playing on a sticky floor with the neighbors’ children.
They are quiet and well-behaved; you are rambunctious and restless, earning frustrated scolds from Mami.
Even then, you were slowly realizing that the world didn’t want your noise and movement; it wanted your silence, your easy presence. Society desired that you never make yourself heard, never be inconvenient.
You talk to Sea Sister about school, and the stern nuns who followed a faith that bored and confused you, of their Western deity who eschewed wealth and animal sacrifices, yet demanded tithing and killed his own son.
About your mother, difficult and sad and struggling, who forgot how to be happy and never remembered. Her anger, her unfairness, her wild reactions and unnatural attachment to the ghost villagers.
About the war that overshadows everything, about the jewel of China—Shanghai, that is—falling and taking all its culture, its Eastern jazz and modern poetry, its trade and glitz and glamour, into fire and ruin forever.
About the agonized ghosts who multiply across the country, millions upon millions of traumatized dead inflicting fresh woe on those left behind. About the air raid sirens that scream like demons, about the torture and starvation of Chinese people in other cities.
You talk about Baba’s abandonment. He would have joined you here by now if he were still alive. Something must have happened to the city, after you left. Mami thinks so, certainly; it is driving her mad.
You talk about the disconnection and surreality of it all.
And Sea Sister puts her hand on your cheek, nodding with sorrowful understanding. She murmurs in liquid tones: Lonely girl. Sad girl. Ghost girl, living on a ghost island.
A lump forms in your throat. You feel like a ghost girl, certainly.
Partly deflecting, mostly curious, you whisper, “Are you lonely, too?” The first real question you’ve dared to ask her.
Sea Sister flashes away from the rocks, swims a long slow loop, then returns to say softly, In the ocean, no one can cry without drowning. Sorrow is silent beneath the waves.
Her answer makes your heart hurt.
Unsure what to say, you tell her that in the city, all the noise drowns out the sorrow. A girl can cry there, but no one will hear it over the noise of people, traffic, vehicles. And that’s before the air raid sirens, the bombs exploding.
Talking about the city interests her a lot, and soon you’re describing Hong Kong in-depth.
Streets, cars, buses, thronging crowds, docks full of ships are alien concepts to Sea Sister.
You wonder why she never ventures past the coast of Sai Kung, why she doesn’t just swim down to the harbor, but you decide not to mention it.
Selfishly, you’re afraid that putting such an idea in her head will encourage her to abandon you for other adventures.
Whatever the reason, she eats up your chatter about the city eagerly enough, and you get the sense that it appeals to her. She isn’t sharing your indifference to that cancerous urban sprawl.
When you get tired of describing it, you bring her clippings from old newspapers—Mami used them to pack fragile things in your luggage—and show them to her.
The first time you give her a photograph clipping, passing it to her underneath the water, she stares and stares, those sea lion eyes grown huge and round in her face. Her fingers tremble as they trace the outlines of a burgeoning cityscape that she has never seen.
It doesn’t take long before the thin paper crumbles from the ocean’s wet erosion, taking her delighted smile with it.
The sea washes everything away, she says, and looks so mournful and listless that you can’t help but want to fix it for her. Anything to see your closest ever friend smile.
It’s then that you have your best idea yet: glass bottles.
“Wait here,” you tell her. “I’ll be right back!”