Chapter 6 #2
In the early mornings, when the girls were at their most tired, slowly washing off their makeup, Gigi made up stories as she sewed up the rips and loose buttons of everyone’s dresses (long rips from particularly rough nights, missing buttons for tolerable ones).
At first she only told them to Xuan, stories she built from the fragments she had heard at school about headless women and death and hauntings.
But as the weeks wore on, the others overheard and crept closer to listen.
Gigi’s stories grew bigger, more colourful, fantastical.
“The owner of this house,” she said, “he loved exotic animals. You have all seen the elephants on the wallpaper, the paintings with giraffes and parrots. Well, in one room, deep within the east wing, there is a real tiger pelt rug. If you run your hands over it, you can feel the fur, like needles, all running in the same direction. The owner himself shot that same tiger when he travelled the Silk Road on a hunting expedition, with guides and explorers and camels, his head covered in a scarf against the desert sand.”
“You’re making this up, right?”
Gigi shrugged as she wiped the persimmon red off her lips.
“Does it matter? I want to believe he was a brave man, who would fight tigers or soldiers or ghosts. Maybe he was a man who would fight for us, if he was here, in the memory of his daughter.” And she kept talking until some of the girls fell asleep on her bed, like a litter of kittens, and she lay down on the chaise instead.
The family who had lived here, what an existence that would have been.
Did they know, she wondered, what had happened to their house?
Did they ever imagine that soldiers would force all the girls to take off their clothes and stand in a line in the ballroom, so they could probe them with their fingers and, sometimes, their guns?
Did they know the girls stood at the locked windows and calculated the possibility of death, should they jump?
“The house is not tall enough,” the girls whispered to each other. “We would only be injured and then they would torture us even more.”
The family had lost a daughter and this house, but Gigi hoped they had never learned the rest. The sharing of that knowledge could never help anybody, could never ease a troubled soul or take away the gnawing pain of loss. She didn’t need to tell anyone. She had enough to do, just living it.
one evening, daisuke returned from three months overseas and Gigi shivered when she saw him in the drawing room, his posture straight as ever, his boots shined to an impossible lustre.
She could only imagine what had soiled them while he was in battle—mud, blood, shit, the brown-grey goo that squelched under his soles when he walked through a destroyed farm littered with dead chickens and other, bigger corpses.
Surrounded by the other girls, Gigi tried to make herself smaller, shrink in her chair, but it didn’t do any good.
He nodded once at her and walked behind her as she led the way to her room, as if determined to watch her ass with every step she took.
Gigi gestured to the chaise. “Please sit.”
Daisuke only stood and shook his head. “I’m here to talk to you.”
“Of course, we can talk, whatever you like.”
He reached out and grabbed her arm, too tightly. “You must listen. I know your brother.”
Gigi froze and stared at Daisuke’s mouth, which was saying words in a slow, simplified Japanese. She had to concentrate to understand anything at all.
“We met in Burma. I can’t tell you why or how, only that we became friends, of a sort. I told him about this place, about a girl I liked very much. About you.”
Gigi nodded. She should just keep nodding.
“We figured out you are his sister. He asked me to come back here and tell you that he will come for you when he is able.” Daisuke paused, took a breath. “You should also know that your mother died. Not long after you came here.”
Gigi couldn’t think of what to say. Her head suddenly felt heavy, as if her brain had liquefied and was sloshing back and forth.
She bent over at the waist, heaving, but nothing was expelled, nothing was better.
Then, with a gentleness she didn’t know he was capable of, Daisuke led her to the bed, where she sat.
“Dead? How?”
“Pneumonia.”
There was nowhere to go, no escape to be planned, only this place where she was warm and fed, where she was sentenced to wait for a brother who could also die, who might be dying right now. She put a hand on Daisuke’s shoulder.
“What am I supposed to do?”
He did not answer, but he held her until she stopped crying. Later, when she was well enough to drink the whisky he poured for her, he laid her down and had sex with her silent, soft, unmoving body.
there was an hour during the day, wedged between the unforgiving light of mid-afternoon and the pink and burnt orange of sunset, when Gigi thought that she could see things that others might have called magical, or might have thought of as simply beautiful because of the angle of the sun or the shadows that were transparent and fetal.
If she opened her eyes and looked, really looked, at the growing shadows cast by the sun falling rapidly in the west, what could she see that wasn’t there during the cold edge of morning?
What had she been too content, too peaceful, too self-satisfied to see before?
She knew, deep down, if she looked, it would be there.
This was Gigi’s favourite time to walk the halls and rooms of Nam Koo, and, at first, it filled her with a pleasant, numbing sensation, as if everything she felt from the night before and everything she would feel during the coming evening had ceased to cause pain or humiliation or shame.
She could be empty of mind as she passed her fingers over old banisters, polished smooth by other hands that had come before hers.
The light slipped from its afternoon heights and trailed beside and behind her, like a liquid entity, a companion only she knew to appreciate.
One day, as she walked down a carpeted hallway in the east wing, she watched as the sun slipped behind the branches of trees outside and the light flickered through a window, the shadows of leaves appearing on the walls and then disappearing, dark and then light and then dark again.
As Gigi blinked and squinted, the shadows seemed to coalesce, fusing together so that they were no longer individual leaves but a solid mass sweeping across the walls, down toward an unassuming closet door at the end of the hall.
Before Gigi could make sense of what she was seeing, the shadow slipped through the narrow crack beneath the door and disappeared.
She glanced back over her shoulder toward the window at the sun, now even lower in the sky.
Behind her was the mansion with its walls and locked doors, the girls she had come to know, some of them defiant, some of them still and quiet, but all of them terrified beyond words.
The world behind her was violent and cruel.
Nothing, especially not what was in front of her, could possibly be worse.
Gigi stepped forward, pulling open the closet door, wincing when she heard the long-unoiled hinges squeaking in the silence.
Inside, she pushed aside a row of hanging coats and coveralls (once worn, she guessed, by a gardener who had long since fled, who was maybe fighting in the war, who might be dead) to reveal a door and a set of steps leading up.
At the top was another door, slightly ajar.
She walked down another short hallway, her steps muffled by the dark red carpet runner.
Finally, she came to the biggest door she had ever seen, painted a still-glossy green.
When Gigi placed her palm against its surface, she could feel how solid it was, how thick the planks must have been cut to make something so daunting.
The knob was brass and half tarnished. She turned it and pushed with all her strength and walked into what appeared to be a woman’s grand bedroom.
The windows were hung with velvet curtains but not the same ones Gigi had seen in the rest of the house.
These were plum-coloured, made of a burnt velvet that made a sheer background for the pattern of lush, deeply purple lilies.
The golden sconces on the walls held old candles, with wax that had melted and solidified in long dripping shapes.
Like daggers. The bed frame was a wooden box, with three walls made of an intricate lattice of carved rosewood and one open side, hung with drapes that were tightly tied back.
Gigi knew it was a marriage bed, the kind the wealthy used on their wedding nights or whenever they were supposed to conceive children.
She reached in and touched the faded silk sheets with her fingertips and shivered at the nap of the fabric, the weave just barely perceptible on her fingertips.
The embroidered peonies, once pink, were now an unsettling fleshy colour, the shade of skin that had never been seen in direct light, that folded in on itself in secret.
Gigi sat on the hard mattress and then lay on her side, her feet against the wooden wall at the foot.
Across the room, she saw her own reflection in a gold-framed mirror, tall enough for someone to see her whole body, every stitch on her gown.
This was not a room for a wife and mother.
It was miles away from the rest of the house, from the rooms that were still filled with dusty porcelain dolls and teddy bears with mangy fur and missing eyes.
It was too far from the main bedroom, which Auntie had taken for herself, that still held a closet full of a man’s resplendent dressing gowns and a shelf of hair pomades and colognes.
This bedroom was all by itself and would not be found unless someone knew it was here.