Girl
THEY DIDN'T TALK about that night ever again. Not about how Mama
had burst into the room, her face a mixture of shock and confusion at
the sound of Suraya's piercing screams. Not about how she'd had to
pry her daughter's stiff fingers from where they clutched the edge of
the desk so hard that the nails had gouged dents into the wood;
Suraya had had to pull out three splinters afterward, each long thin
sliver piercing through her skin like a tiny spear. Not about how the
sobs had stopped only so that Suraya could empty the contents of
her stomach—not that there'd been much in there to begin with—
down the front of Mama's batik kaftan.
Instead, Mama went into teacher mode, full of talk about
Actionable Next Steps. "You are clearly not well," she said, after
cleaning them both up and popping Suraya into her bed. "We will
see a doctor tomorrow."
She patted her daughter's pale cheek hesitantly, as if she'd
studied it in one of the books she taught her students. "You will be
okay," she said.
"Yes, Mama," Suraya murmured sleepily, exhausted from
wrestling with vomit and nightmares. Did doctors treat ghostly
maladies? It was worth a shot, she supposed.
The doctor's room was hot and humid, the only air coming from a
lone standing fan that whirred noisily as it rotated from left to right
and back again. "Sorry ah, air cond rosak," the plump nurse
murmured as she showed them in, pointing to an aging air-
conditioning unit that looked as if it had been there since air
conditioners were invented. Suraya's skin prickled in the heat, and
as she pushed the long sleeves of her baju kurung top up to her
elbows, she wondered how much sweat was trapped under the
nurse's black hijab. As the nurse walked away, the cloth covering her
head writhed and moved, revealing not hair beneath, but a wriggling
mass of dark snakes gasping for air. One hissed at Suraya primly—
What're you looking at?—before tugging the hijab back into place
with a fanged mouth.
Dr. Leong was a pleasant-faced older man, his dark hair streaked
with gray, his glasses thick and rimmed in tortoiseshell. He tutted as
he looked Suraya over, placing his cold stethoscope on her chest to
listen to her heartbeat, sticking a thermometer in her ear to check
her temperature. "Temperature okay," he said to Mama, who sat
clutching her purse on her lap. "No fever. But she looks quite skinny
for her height, and she's very pale. You eating, girl?" He poked her
gently in the ribs, smiling a toothy smile. "Not doing one of those diet
things you young girls like so much, right? Boys don't like girls too
skinny, you know."
Good thing I don't particularly like boys who have stupid opinions
about my body, Suraya thought to herself. She knew his type. So
many adults ask you questions without any real interest in listening
to your answers, and Dr. Leong was one of them.
So she just smiled weakly at the doctor and focused on the
posters on his wall: a faded food chart. What You Need to Know
about Shingles. A bright yellow poster with a harsh crimson line
slashed across a sinister-looking mosquito, bearing the slogan
Destroy Aedes, Defeat Denggue. She tried not to let the misspelling
bother her, and failed.
The mosquito turned its head to look at her. He'll destroy you, it
whispered. Suraya shivered.
"Watch her diet," Dr. Leong was saying to her mother. "Maybe
some supplements. She needs more iron." As expected, he spoke as if she wasn't even there.
Mama was nodding and gathering herself up to leave when he
coughed delicately.
"It also looks like she got some things on her mind," the doctor
said, with the air of a man who realizes he's tiptoeing through a field
of thorns. "Maybe you want to take her to a therapist? Some
counseling? I know not everyone believes in that kind of thing . . ."
Mama's face was like a window with its curtains tightly drawn.
"Thank you, Doctor," she said, rising and gesturing for Suraya to do
the same. "We will certainly take all your suggestions onboard."
"Sure, sure." He drew a neatly folded handkerchief out of his
pocket and mopped his forehead with it; Suraya had not known there
was a man left on the planet who still carried a handkerchief. As she
watched, the white square flopped forward slightly at the corner,
revealing an open, yawning mouth that began to gnaw at the
doctor's face. "Just a suggestion, you know."
"Of course."
He coughed again, this time with a note of apology. "Pay bill
outside, ya." He slipped the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket
and waved them goodbye, and Suraya tried to ignore the gaping
wound that bloomed on his cheek, painfully red and oozing blood.
It's not real, she told herself. It's not real, it's not real, it's not real.
As they walked to the car, Mama with her purse, Suraya with the
white plastic bag that held pills she knew would do her absolutely no
good at all in one hand and a small piece of paper excusing her from
school for a few days ("So you can get some rest," Dr. Leong had
said) in the other, she found her voice. "I don't need a therapist," she
told Mama. It surprised her how timid she sounded.
"We'll see," was all Mama said in response.
They got into the car. The afternoon heat had turned the seats
into searing hot flesh roasters, and Suraya was careful to keep her
hands away from the burning leather.
They baked gently all the way back home.
Time oozed by slowly that day, and the day after, and the day after
that. Mama went to work as usual, though not without a long list of
instructions for Suraya. "Rest well. Don't forget to eat. And take your medicine like a good girl." There were no hugs or kisses; but then
again, there rarely were.
The heat, the smell, and the constant struggle to maintain her
grip on reality made Suraya's head ache. Still she battled grimly
against her visions, turning her head when the shadows the trees
outside threw on the wall melded together into something that
grinned menacingly at her, gritting her teeth when Mama presented
her with a plate of staring eyeballs where meatballs should have
been, ignoring the flesh that melted off the faces on the TV show
they watched after dinner, leaving only the perfect teeth of the actors
gleaming in their clean white skulls.
He can't go on like this forever, she thought to herself. He loves
me. Pink loves me. But with each fresh horror, she believed it a little
less.
Drawing helped. She spent many an afternoon at her desk,
bathed in sunlight, hunched as usual over her sketchbook. Opening
it—touching it, even—had been a struggle after her nightmare, but
she told herself she was being silly. It was a dream. Dreams weren't
real.
Her pen flew busily over the book, comfortably familiar in the
crook of her hand. She was working on a study of hands—she never
could get hands right, they were such tricky things—and the page
was filled with them: hands with fingers spread apart; hands
clenched into tight fists, each knuckle carefully shaded; hands with
long, elegant fingers; hands with stubby fingers and nails caked in
dirt; hands reaching out as though asking for help.
It was a relief to think about something other than Pink, for once.
She leaned back with a sigh, rubbing her aching back, satisfied
with the work she'd produced. The last hand was the best one so far,
she thought, the play of light and shadow perfectly rendered, the
position of the fingers poised, natural. "Good job," she told herself
aloud.
On the page, the fingers twitched.
She did her best not to notice. "All done," she said quickly,
slamming the book shut. "Why am I even talking to myself?" she
muttered.
But she knew it wasn't herself she was talking to.
The sketchbook moved on her desk, very slightly.
She stared at it. It looked unassuming enough, its familiar black
cover scratched and slightly dented from use.
As she watched, it moved again, shifting ever so slightly closer to
the edge of the desk.
She got up then, walking quickly to the window. Outside, the sun
shone almost unbearably bright on the village, bleaching everything
white and making her eyes water. "Nothing is happening," she
whispered. "Everything is fine. Nothing is happening. Everything is
fine." If she said it often enough, it might come true.
There was a bang, so loud that it made her whirl around, her
heart pounding in her throat.
The sketchbook was on the floor, open to the page filled with
hands. And the hands were moving.
Not just moving; they were reaching up and out of the book,
pushing past the paper barrier, beckoning her closer.
Suraya ran.
She leaped over the book, feeling the phantom hands just graze
her right foot as she flew over them, and ran straight for the door,
banging it shut behind her, leaning all her weight against it as she
breathed hard, palms clammy, heart still banging in her chest like a
drum solo.
From behind the door, there was silence.
And then there wasn't.
It was a strange sound, a sort of rhythmic thump and scrape that
she couldn't quite work out. Slowly, she kneeled on the floor and
bent down to peer through the sliver of space beneath the door.
The hands were making their way closer and closer, gripping the
floor for purchase and dragging her sketchbook along inch by inch
behind them.
She leaped up and backed away. There was no way for them to
open the door, surely? Her thoughts swung wildly first one way, then
the other. Should she scream? Should she run?
And then suddenly, she felt a wave of anger wash over her.
She was tired of running.
And she was tired of this.
"Come and get me, you jerks!" she yelled.
The thumping stopped.
Then one by one, she saw them burst out from beneath the door:
a dozen paper-white hands straining to reach her. The air was filled
with agonized, angry shrieks, a hundred high-pitched voices raised
in fury and frustration. Suraya put her fingers over her ears, trying to
block out the sound, but there was no escaping it.
Her eyes fell on where the iron stood on its board in the corridor,
between Mama's room and her own, just so they could each get to it
whenever they needed to without disturbing the other. It was black
and old-fashioned, so heavy that lifting it made her arms ache.
She could use it now.
With the shrieks and screams ringing in her ears, Suraya
grabbed the iron and brought it down with all her strength on the
outstretched hands trying their best to swipe at her ankles, mashing
them into the floor. And then she did it again. Then again. She didn't
stop until all that was left was a mess of paper and ink puddling on
the floor like blood.
The final scream was long and terrible and filled with so much
rage that it made her tremble.
When it finally died away, when nothing was left but silence, she
let the iron slip from her quivering fingers with a clang and slithered
to the ground, her knees suddenly too weak to hold her weight.
"I can't do this anymore, Pink," she said, and her voice was sad
and broken. "I can't keep going on like this. You have to stop doing
this to me."
But this time there was no reply, not even from the mosquitoes
that buzzed around her.