Chapter Eight. Oil and Steel
CHAPTER EIGHT
OIL AND STEEL
It was a street that would be unrecognizable in six years’ time, victim to repossessions, redevelopments, at least one inheritance dispute, and one bad case of termites, but for now all the tenants on either side of the shophouse where the Butterflies lived had been there long enough to understand the nature of the girls that came in and out.
They paid requisite fees accordingly to be left alone and even got along quite well with the Butterflies—the seedy hotel two units down brought in cases of a good Thai beer that the housekeeper was willing to pass along under the table, and the assistant cook at the eating house opposite would sometimes give Tian packets of leftover dim sum.
There were shops that were open only in the day and establishments that were open only at night, and so the storefronts and windows were checkerboarded no matter what time it was.
Adeline was trying to guess which was the Butterflies’ until Tian pointed out a dark window that appeared from the dress forms, wearing outdated cheongsams, to be a run-down tailor’s shop.
At least, a shop was a generous name. The inside barely had space for a counter, squeezed between rickety cabinets stuffed with rolled fabric and papered with faded posters of elegant women.
“Surely no one actually comes here,” Adeline said.
“Sometimes. You’d be surprised. Anyway—it keeps the girls busy.”
“Not you?”
Tian’s teeth were white in the dark. “Would you believe I was a seamstress?”
A curious firelit scan revealed the posters were equally out of fashion as the mildewed cheongsams in the window, Shanghai models from the fifties in dresses with scandalous thigh slits and tiny waists.
It couldn’t be the actual shop from her mother’s funeral picture, but Adeline nonetheless felt like she was wading through a memory of a memory, a place recreated from a recreation.
“If people ask about all the girls,” Tian said, “the upstairs is a boardinghouse.”
She opened a second door in the back corner—amazing, that there was space for the door at all, between the cramped furniture—and this opened to illuminate a living area taking up the remaining rear of the shophouse.
There was a sitting area with sofa, television, and dining table; farther on there was a vestibule for a spiral staircase, and beyond that a kitchen.
It was plain, a little stuffy, the wall peeling in one place.
Well-lived and well-kept, certainly, but Adeline was distracted by a more internal heat that had suddenly swelled in her senses.
An almost tangible fury that was familiar, but for once it did not belong to Adeline. She grasped her chest. “What is that?”
Tian seemed to understand, gesturing for her to come farther into the living room light.
“There’s a rumor that this used to be a brothel until a prostitute was horribly killed.
Or else a man killed his wife and hid the body here somewhere.
Or that a mother was struggling to birth her baby, so they cut it out and the mother died…
” Tian spoke of violent ghosts gently. “Lady Butterfly feels places where people were hurt, especially women. She draws them. It gives us power. But the story can be whatever you want,” she added. “No one who knew is still here.”
The house was larger than Adeline would have guessed, narrow but long.
The top two floors, accessed through a spiral staircase, had been partitioned into small rooms. Effort had been made to brighten the space: a slightly droopy potted plant under the window at the far end, one wall that someone had painted Tiffany blue and another featuring a mural of butterflies and rivers.
Some occupants had decorated their doors with couplets or wreaths hung off doorknobs, and one hand-lettered sign that said CHRISTINA IS DOWNSTAIRS.
The mural paint was slightly peeling, but it was almost enough to distract Adeline from the simmering between her ribs.
Tian kept looking around as though she’d never seen the place before. “It’s not what you’re used to.”
Adeline was barely listening. A sensation had been tugging at her since they got on this third floor. She traced it down to a room that seemed particularly still, a door that did not look like it had been opened for a while. Dust had collected along the edge. “What’s in there?”
“That belonged to the rogue Butterfly,” Tian responded after a beat.
“The one who did Bukit Ho Swee. She was kidnapped during the war and brought to one of the stations. Then her family wouldn’t take her back afterward because of the shame, so she ended up in Red Butterfly.
Better than ending up a prostitute like some of the others did.
But I think the kind of pain she had should never have been fed by the fire.
It drove her insane. Your mother had to stop her. ”
“How do you know all this?”
“I just heard. But—” Tian picked up Adeline’s wrist and pressed both their hands against the top of Adeline’s stomach, where heat in the body sat.
Adeline stiffened. “You can feel it here, if you concentrate. If you reach in and pay attention, you can feel … emotions and shapes. Usually the fresher the pain is, the clearer the imprint.”
As she spoke, Adeline did what she said and reached in.
She had never tried pushing inward before; the fire was usually something she drew out, gave a channel to.
But now she found it worked in reverse. With every breath she could sink into it and let it pull her through it.
And there, like it was just waiting for her to come close: a grief that was not hers.
It was hard-edged, overflowing. Torment and then outcast and then anger and then adrenaline and then—
“Whoa!” Tian caught Adeline as she stumbled a second time. She tasted blood on her lips; she’d bitten her tongue. Adeline wiped it off with the back of her hand. Tian’s eyes lingered for a moment there. “You feel it, don’t you. The wanting.”
Adeline didn’t know if she could have called it that, at first. What thrummed from the closed door was more like agony.
She could trace its outlines still as it slipped away, and as it receded she came to accept that Tian was right.
It was both agony and wanting: wanting fire, wanting a goddess, wanting to burn the world down.
Tian put Adeline up in a room on the second floor instead. There was a narrow mattress folded against the wall and a rickety chest of drawers, upon which were a wash basin and an old fan. The paint on the far wall was peeling.
Tian chewed her lip. “I’ll get you some things to wash, and some cream for the burn.”
Adeline lay on her back and studied the spot on the wall where a previous occupant had scratched some initials.
She should have taken spare clothes from Jenny’s, but never mind.
She was thinking about here. This stretching shophouse buried in Chinatown.
These girls with inked arms and bared teeth and knives in their sleeves. These girls with fire.
Fires burned differently. Paper and wood fires collapsed under water, bled into smoke.
But oil fires met water and lunged. They flared even brighter, spat even hotter, spread even quicker.
Tragedy could fuel revenge with the right conditions to move it along.
She couldn’t have said at the time why she’d run away from her mother’s body, or why she’d fixated on finding Tian the way she had.
But perhaps it had been, even then, the echo of keep it hidden still dancing in the devouring flames, the instinctive knowledge that her mother had revealed something she’d tried all her life to keep from even Adeline.
Perhaps she’d wanted to follow this secret she’d never been allowed access to until now.
It thrummed around her, a destination reached.
Tian returned with an armful of things. None of them were new. Adeline didn’t care, but Tian hesitated as she handed them over. “It’s not what you’re used to,” she started again.
“I don’t know who you think I am,” Adeline sniped.
Tian propped her shoulder on the doorframe.
“Before I joined Red Butterfly, I was working at Pek Mun’s mother’s brothel.
Just all the small jobs,” she said, seeing the flinch Adeline hadn’t managed to hide.
“I was thirteen then, but I knew my time would come, so I left and Pek Mun left after me. Before that, I shared a mattress with my brother and my father was in prison, and we were always in some kind of debt. Don’t feel bad, everyone here has some kind of story.
We’re just … different from you. So if you’re regretting this already, you can tell me. ”
She said it magnanimously, but it had become more and more evident how much she’d put herself on the line for Adeline to stay.
If Adeline left now, she’d have damaged her reputation for nothing.
Fortunate for both of them, then, that Adeline regretted nothing.
If anything, the run-down shophouse had felt immediately more like a recognizable home than the house her mother had bought. It was lived in.
“I already said I want to be here. So what’s next? What are we going to do about Three Steel?”
That expression again, Tian pushing her tongue into the inside of her cheek as though propping up a smile from the inside. It was a wry look, recognizably entertained. “You don’t waste time, do you?”