The Catherine Lim Collection (58 page)

They waited, with held breath, their eyes
never leaving the Great House, so that they could be the first to run up and
lay claim to the booty. The waiting seemed interminable, and Raphaela, knowing
that their next meal would be from ghosts or never, began to fret and mutter
her fears out loud.

“The weather’s much hotter this year. The
soup will be the first to go, and then the vegetables. The roast pig may be
saved yet.”

She continued sullenly, “Some people who
have all the food they want, even when they are dead, have no thought for
others who go hungry all the time.”

She prayed to the saint whose name she bore,
and whose holy image she wore in a small brass medal on a string round her
neck: ‘O holy St Raphael, Helper of the Innocents and the Suffering, help me!’

The afternoon sun continued to beat down
pitilessly; Raphaela’s head began to spin giddily and when it cleared, she saw,
not the angel but Madam Teh Siew Po, exactly as she had appeared in the
photograph on the altar table: a plain, almost sad face, the severe hairstyle
of the time not detracting from the youthfulness of the features. She was
sitting, as in the photograph, in an ornate high-backed chair, small and
slim-looking despite the loose, long-sleeved black silk blouse and baggy black
silk trousers, her bejewelled fingers stiffly spread out on her knees, her tiny
feet in pointed, embroidered shoes.

Raphaela stared; she noted the perfect
plucked arches over the large sad eyes, the tiny lucky mole above the right
upper lip. Half a century separated the two women, and more than half of Fate’s
injustice, for one received only eggs and the other only scorpions: the wealthy
and protected Chinese woman who never knew a day of want in life or death, and
the Filipino slum woman, abandoned by her husband and lover, with seven
children to support and herself to die soon from a suppurating stomach wound
because she did not have the money to pay for an operation. But just now, the
concern was more immediate, for food in the stomach, and Raphaela Santos, with
all the energy she could muster, spoke to Madam Teh Siew Po across the immense
gulfs.

“I have been waiting for so long. Will you
please come, or it will be too late! It will spoil!”

She repeated, with mounting exasperation,
“Please come. We have not eaten for two days!” The sad, childlike face looked
back at her; Raphaela saw, with surprise, the intense friendly interest that
was suddenly irradiating the plain features, and felt ashamed of her own
ungraciousness.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, “I was
just so very hungry and desperate that I sounded rude but then – ,” with sudden
shrewdness, “we are sisters, are we not, and sisters can bare their sad hearts
to each other, can they not?”

The irradiated face nodded assent and
Raphaela, beginning to feel once more the oppression of the afternoon heat,
shook her head vigorously, rubbed her eyes, and opened them to see the face
gone and at her feet, a rabbit, sitting up, ears twitching.

“My, my!” she cried. “A rabbit. Enough food
for the whole family.” She was sure it was sent by that strange Chinese woman
whom she had just spoken to; no rabbit would ever be found in the vicinity, as
any four-footed population would have long ago been decimated by the slum
children.

“Come, rabbit dinner!” she said, struck by
the whimsicality of the dead woman. But the creature darted away, in the
direction of the Great House and was lost to sight. “Rabbit dinner gone,” she
said, shrugging her shoulders and playing up to the whimsicality but at the
same time thinking it rather unkind of the Chinese woman to play a trick like
that on her. She was going to make her sad, hungry way home when she heard the
caretaker calling her and beckoning to her.

“She’s come,” he said matter-of-factly, “so
you can have the food. You’re lucky it’s still good.” She saw the basis of his
confident announcement – four deep, certainly unmistakable, prints in the ash,
very small, like a woman’s bound feet, but also very, very like a rabbit’s paw
prints. She wanted to ask the caretaker, “Did you see a rabbit come in just
now?” but decided in a sudden access of new found joy that it ought to remain a
secret, a secret of loving sisters who could reach out to each other in
remembrance and compassion across great gulfs of time.

In the sacred texts of the Vedas, it is said:
where women are worshipped, the Gods will be pleased.

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

In the very
short time
(a few seconds of earth time?) before her
soul detached from her body and started drifting away, her entire life was
presented to her eyes. It is true then, thought Dora Warren, Feminist
Extraordinaire, what they say about the drowning man in the last moments before
he goes under, or the leaping woman just before she hits the pavement: their
life appears before them in a sweep of intense colour and emotion. She had read
of the thrilling chronological rainbow – arc of life’s passages, from childhood
through adolescence to the mature and mellowing years, that made the departing
soul suddenly ache to come back to reclaim lost loves, but in her case, there
was none of this longing, only an impatience to have this presentation, clearly
a rite of passage, over and done with quickly, so that she could move on. She
was excited about the prospect of arriving at her destination.

Meanwhile, the obligatory review.

It came in clear, separate, hard-edged
pictures, one after the other – click, click – like slides projected on to a
screen by a slide-projector. The first one showed her as a little, pig-tailed
girl being coaxed away from her mother’s side by a visitor anxious to have her
play with a small belligerent-looking boy carrying a blue plastic gun. She saw
that while the visitor beamed indulgently as the gun-toting boy dragged her out
to play in the garden, her mother looked a little nervous and once or twice
craned her neck to look out and ascertain that all was well. Five minutes
later, her mother and the visitor came running out of the house upon hearing a
piercing scream, her mother exclaiming, “Oh, my poor little Dorrie, are you all
right?” and the visitor saying reassuringly, “It’s okay, Marge. Chuck only
frightens a little, he means no harm”, before they pulled themselves up in
front of the kennel at the bottom of the garden where the screams were coming
from, and let out a joint gasp: for cowering inside the kennel was the boy,
mere jelly in his terror, and standing guard over him with the gun pointed
between his eyes, was Dora Warren, aged five, her pigtails flying.

Dora chuckled.

Despite the incident, she had gone on to
marry Charles at age 19, mesmerised by his good looks, his enormous biceps, his
towering strength.

Click. Dora now watched, fascinated, as the
baby was slowly pulled out of her, raw and bloody and slimy, its small face
twisted in the rictus of birth.

“How beautiful! How simply beautiful!” cried
the exhausted mother on the hospital bed, but the father who had insisted on
witnessing the birth turned pale, gasped, swooned and fell upon the floor,
hitting his head with a loud thud. Attention had to be temporarily diverted
from the squalling new-born baby to its father knocked out cold on the floor
while Dora, raising herself to look, cried out anxiously, “Honey, are you
okay?”

That was probably the turning point in her
life. In an apocalyptic flash, she saw what she had only vaguely suspected all
along: that man was much weaker than woman. Thundering, marauding,
weapon-wielding man was far weaker than procreating, nurturing woman with her
baby at her breast.

Strip a man of his carapace and you saw a
soft quivering core of fears inside; the grown man fainting at the sight of the
woman giving birth, and the small boy throwing away his weapon in terror of the
little girl and hiding in the kennel, were one and the same. To hide their
fears they developed all sorts of myths and theories such as that of the
treacherous Eve and of Penis Envy, to confuse and intimidate women into a state
of subjugation.

The discovery was exhilarating, but it would
be years before she would develop it into a counter theory to present to the
world in a dramatic exposé of the male sex.

The celestial slide-projector cooperatively
skipped those humiliating years of fights and tears and the final divorce to
concentrate on the greatest triumph in her life. ‘Runaway Bestseller by
First-time Feminist Writer: Penis Envy and Pronoun Envy? Phooey to the Greatest
Phallacy ever Told!’ accompanied by a picture of her at the launching of her
book, beamingly autographing the 5,000th copy. It had been a thoroughly researched
book for which she had actually made an extensive trip to the Far East, having
heard of mysterious customs of women bowing and offering gifts to gods with
incredibly large priapuses, whether fashioned out of wood, stone or rice dough.
Everywhere she went, she saw evidence of this worship – gifts of boiled rice,
fruit and flowers in temples, shrines, caves, houses, the roadside – and
happily took pictures and made notes. She was stunned by the pervasiveness of
the belief but buoyant at the prospect of singlehandedly destroying it, and so
save fellow women at last from the worst form of enslavement by men. So the Far
East trip which took her through India, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and
Indonesia was thoroughly enjoyable, except for one small, frightening incident
in India, which, however, she soon dismissed from her mind.

She was alone at a railway station in
Allahabad late at night and was walking along a wooden platform in the dim
orange light when she became aware of large bundles of rags strewn along the
side. As she watched, curious, one stirred, opened, and a face appeared, that
of a young woman, skeletal in its deep hollows, and then another, that of a
small child with large, unmoving eyes. The woman crawled out of the bundle of
rags towards her, carrying the child in one arm and stretching out the other to
her, in an infinity of pleading, and she saw, to her further horror, that the
arm was a mere stump, hacked at the elbow. The woman crawled closer, looked up
at her and smiled, her arm stretched out in an enormous effort to touch her.
Recoiling in terror, Dora opened her bag, pulled out a sheaf of money, flung it
down upon the ground between herself and the woman, and fled, turning round
just once, to see the woman still crawling towards her and past the money, arm
still stretched out for the touch of sisterliness. Dora fled into the darkness
and very soon left the country, and the incident was forgotten back home in the
whirl of excitement that attended the publication of her sensational book.

Dora chuckled as she saw herself borne aloft
in a churning sea of women, her long blonde hair shaved off in a gesture of
defiance, and beside her, fluttering in the evening breeze, the banner
proclaiming ‘The Bald Truth about Man’s Oppression of Woman’. She stopped
chuckling, stared and said, “Oh my Josie, my poor little Josie,” for she had
noticed a small, five-year-old girl in a red coat, standing forlornly in the
crowd, clutching a rag doll.

“Mother! Mother!” the child screamed, but
the screams were drowned in the wild hurrahs.

Thoroughly intoxicated by her success, she
had gone on to produce a giddy string of equally successful books: Woman: The
Foundation Of Society That Should Not Have Got Laid, Her story Of The World, In
Definitely More Than 10 1/2 Chapters, Adam And Even, the last carrying the
definitive message that the time for redress was now or never.

Click. Click. Click.

Dora Warren. Dora Warren. Dora Warren.

She had become a household name.

You are our voice.

You have saved us.

From now onwards, women’s issues can only be
meaningfully discussed in terms of two categories, B.D.W. and A.D.W. – Before
Dora Warren and After Dora Warren.

Dora, thank you.

Thank you for daring to be the lone voice in
the wilderness.

The familiar face on TV, with the wide eyes
and Wife of Bath gap-tooth raised cheers.

She loved the adulation.

And then things began to go wrong, terribly
wrong. She was inclined to put the blame on Josie.

“My mother’s the most bizarre person I have
ever met,” said the self-assured young lady in an interview in her college
during the long period when Dora went into seclusion in the Mexican desert to
reflect and work on the final grand theory about man’s victimisation of woman.
The newspaper proclaimed with glee the next day: “‘My Mother’s the Most Bizarre
Person I have Ever Met’, says Feminist Dora Warren’s Daughter.”

In the quiet of the desert, she meditated
and worked and had her second apocalyptic flash: man’s most enduring weapon
against woman was not the phallus, as she had previously believed, but
language. Man had been using language to enslave woman for hundreds of years
and he did it with such cunning that woman suspected nothing and fell into his
trap, so that each time she opened her mouth to speak, she fell deeper. Man’s
privileging of language, the most precious human heritage, was his most
successful ploy to hide his weakness and perpetuate the myth of his strength.

Awe-struck by the ingenuity of her own
intellectual processes that had led to the unlocking of this secret, Dora Warren
was soon galvanised into feverish activity to make it known to the world. She
searched the language for proof and came up with armfuls which she triumphantly
flung at her stunned audiences.