Chapter Two. Dressing for the Age #3
Upstairs, Adeline’s room was decorated with film posters.
They were rescued from the Roxy’s trash heap, cut from magazines, or purchased with meticulously saved pocket money from the specialty store: Audrey Hepburn and Jane Fonda and Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot and Ivy Ling Po, Vivian Leigh in the plunging red dress for Gone with the Wind, Valley of the Dolls with Sharon Tate’s throat bared to the man bent over her.
Adeline tossed her schoolbag at Vivian’s skirts, thought for half a minute about opening a textbook, and then decided against it.
Instead, she located the Yellow Pages and brought it back to her room.
As she scanned the directory for the White Orchid, she switched on the radio, landing on Killerwatch. She’d stumbled across the program during the Tate murders, but their regular programming was local crime, which meant they were devout reporters on the kongsi.
“… shooting of Low Lee Meng earlier this year. You know, Queens Circus, shot goes off, woman goes down in the middle of a crowd. No one sees anything. Police are baffled. But Gunmetal Goh, right, of the Three Steel Triad—we know he can fly bullets from his fingers.”
The hosts liked the sensational: dead bodies in various gruesome states, tales of drugs and vice and kidnappings, and magic.
Lots of magic, all more bizarre than the last. One kongsi that could turn into crabs.
Malay shamans on Pulau Ubin who commanded an army of crocodiles to tear an enemy to shreds.
A medium who channeled Sun Wukong and killed his wife by crushing her skull.
A missing pastor whose office was discovered with pentagrams drawn in blood.
A kongsi with arms that could turn to knives, and another that was secretly orang minyaks, going around raping waitresses.
The truth was theirs to make up; the police and the official news were sparse on details of the magic, focusing instead on the casualties, the debris, the crimes, the wreckage said magic left behind.
The Killerwatch hosts believed—and Adeline was inclined to agree—that the police refused to name the kongsi because names made something exist. They romanticized miscreants, made legends of scoundrels.
A name was an anchor to form around. While the official papers maintained decorum, shows like Killerwatch took reports of “three gang members” and turned them into “the Bedok Wranglers,” into Four-Eyed Chan and Dragon Kong, and all of a sudden these men who’d only existed as letters in print were so real you could touch them.
And if you could touch them, you could know them. You could love them.
“Now, they said Low didn’t have anything to do with the kongsi, but at this point, if something unexplainable happens, there’s an explanation! It’s magic.”
“Right, right. We went through this with the Hainanese Boy. Birds dying everywhere? Magic, my dude. Anyway, Hainanese Boy is still on the run; they say he might be in Europe now.”
“Right, right, well, we wish them all the best hunting him down. But rumors that surfaced in the past few weeks about a kongsi with the power to drain the blood from your body are unequivocally false—that’s a pontianak, ladies and gentlemen.
If it’s very pretty and smells good, that’s not a gangster, but you might want to run away anyway. If she lets you.”
There was a White Orchid bar on Neil Road.
Adeline paused with her finger on the page, turning the radio down to make sure she wasn’t reading it wrong.
She was not. She fetched the map book and found the bar’s exact location—it was along a string of other bars and eating houses that opened late, not far from the red-light district.
As if following along, the radio quipped:
“We’ve got a nonsense fella calling in saying he got attacked by a pretty girl at Jiak Chuan Road. Sir, isn’t that what you’re going there for?”
The other host snickered. “Maybe he should have been paying her, hor? Anyway, you can complain to your local brothers, I’m sure they’ll get her sorted out.”
Jiak Chuan Road was in the same area as the White Orchid. Was this what her mother had been referring to? Why would she be involved in business with a bar?
Adeline enjoyed bars. She’d first ventured into one after an evening showing of some sleek thriller, when she’d felt a little dangerous and like she didn’t want the night to end quite yet.
If you picked the right place, dressed the right way, had enough confidence, a sixteen-year-old could be twenty for all they cared.
She had never heard of the Orchid and could not guarantee it would be one of those places, but there was no harm, was there? In going to look?
Adeline set out to finding something to wear.
Her hands dipped in and out of her clothes, as much searching for an outfit as feeling the material over her hands.
Eventually she chose jeans and a yellow blouse, but it was a little big, and the safety pin slipped as she was trying to cinch it.
Blood welled on her thumb. “Damn it.” She sucked it quickly and secured the pin, then moved on to jewelry and makeup.
She decided to wear Fan Tai Tai’s bracelet, to add to the impression of being older.
She didn’t usually have a chance to wear much makeup out, and she stared at her face in the mirror for a moment, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with it.
She had a resting expression with a naturally down-turned mouth, but she knew how to smile so she became the kind of pretty that made adults generous.
Push up the cheeks, show teeth but not too much, make her eyes widen and shine—a sunny guilelessness that almost blushed.
She remembered the first time she’d realized how instantly people’s response to her changed, and filed it away in her muscles as a weapon.
Smile like that, dress the right way, and these people would smile back at you even as you strolled into their bar or picked their pockets.
There was a reason that above God, the St. Mary’s girls prayed first of all to be pretty, pretty, pretty, to be released from the awkward in-between of teenage girlhood and blossom into their fervent transformations.
In the meantime, they learned artificial tricks.
Adeline, not going for guileless tonight, curled her hair, put on dots of stolen blush, brushed and daubed and set and painted her lips until she found an older person in the mirror.
She liked who she felt like with all of it on.
A little more like the women displayed on her walls, if you could forget they were human, too.
Adeline checked that her mother wasn’t outside before slipping downstairs, treading on the sides of the steps to lessen noise.
The living room was soft and dark, and the guinea pigs they’d once kept here were long gone, but for the first time in a while Adeline thought she heard rustling.
She frowned, turning toward the noise and finding the cabinet that had once been the altar.
It seemed clearer than it should, in these shadows.
When she touched it, pain sparked in her left thumb.
In the moonlight outside she found the wound to be a small splinter driven into the wound the safety pin had left earlier. Adeline didn’t even remember that cabinet having a crack in it, but it had been neglected for years.
She managed to work the splinter out with her nails, which promptly left her thumb bleeding again. Pressing it with her handkerchief until it stopped welling, she started the walk to the bus.