The Rice Mother (57 page)

Suddenly the beautiful stranger broke into a run. Small, mincing, feminine steps. She threw herself dramatically on the still body and began to sob. I drew back slightly in surprise.

Another one of Daddy’s little secrets come back for payment.

The somber crowd were quick to realize her curiosity value. People covertly stared at me, but I ignored them. For a moment the sight of the black figure sprawled over the thin yellow corpse made me think of a large, black female spider curving over and devouring her struggling lover. But whether it was only a wonderful performance was hardly the point. Even in death Luke Steadman was no struggling lover. My dear, dear father. True to the very end. Cold and certainly beyond silken webs.

The woman was not in his will.

His short will mentions nobody but me. His daughter. The one he gave the key to. The one he kept secrets from. As if the woman heard my unkind thoughts, she looked up and met my eyes. There was something strangely abandoned in the scarlet of her lipstick. Poor creature. In my chest I felt my heart melt a little. I couldn’t help it. I fancy I know what it means to be abandoned.

My poor mother’s body expelled me into the world and then bled to death. So my father fed her bloodless body to the beast with the yellow saliva in the crematorium, and I was left with Father. And he, he left me things—toys when I was younger and pieces of jewelry as I grew older—on a table outside my room just before he left for work. The stark truth was, he left them outside my door so I could never give in to the spontaneous urge to run into his arms or kiss him as any daughter might. And to further negate the messy possibility of the dreaded hug when he came home, my devious father phoned beforehand to ask if I liked my new present.

He withdrew behind a wall of polite expressions, “Please,” “May I,” and “Thank you.” Everyone believed in his great faultless act. Some even envied me the perfection of the tender love that they imagined existed between father and daughter. They held him up as an ideal. Only I stood behind the thick wall that he had built between us and sorrowed silently, horrified by its terrible perfection and the truly astonishing amount of detail that he had put into his distance. If only he would love me a little. But he never did.

I nodded, and people moved like obedient dolls. I was the new master. Sole heir to a king’s ransom. They pulled away the abandoned red mouth from the cologne-drenched body and guided her away, sobbing, to a corner. Gently, curiously.

Then they carried away his coffin on their shoulders. No one wept except the beautiful woman in black with the blood-red lips. People began to drift away, and I walked over to the sobbing woman. Up close she was not so young. Perhaps in her late thirties or even pouting at forty. Her eyes were startling, though. Huge and liquid. Like the glinting surface of a calm lake on a moonlit night. She, too, was full of secrets, and some were surely mine.

I invited her into my father’s study, away from the openly prying eyes. The woman followed silently. Had she been in the house before? In the study I turned around to face her.

“I’m Rosette, and it’s nice to finally meet you, Nisha,” she said quietly. Strangely, her voice matched her eyes. Cultivated to flow clear and liquid like honey.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked automatically.

“Tia Maria on ice, please.” A smile bled onto the red lips. Too red.

I walked to the drinks cabinet. Well, well, it seemed my father did stock up on Tia Maria. I had a sudden picture of their bodies twisted and joined on the hospital bed. A sunken, yellow corpse of a man and this beautiful creature. I shook my head to clear away the distasteful corruption of their coupling. What on earth was happening to me?

“Did you know my father well?”

I heard her take a deep breath.

“Fairly.” She was soft and feminine. And secretive. She was my father’s woman.

“Have you known him long?” I persisted.

“Twenty-five years.” She said it lightly.

I spun around in shock. “Did you know my mother?” The words ran out of my mouth before I could stop them.

Something rose out of the smooth moonlit lakes in her fair, carefully made-up face. It was alive and full of regret. The ugly lake creature looked at me sadly for a few seconds, then slid back into the gleaming water. Her face became blank again.

“No,” she denied, shaking her head. The honey in her voice had thickened into dusky sediment. She had just lied. Loyalty to a man who was now dead—what was the use of that? There was still the rent to be paid and clothes in different shades of black to be purchased. I concentrated on the task of Tia Maria on ice. Just outside my skull, a clock ticked into the silence.

“My father didn’t mention you in his will,” I said casually and heard the stillness that came to hug her. The clock ticked with determined precision. I let a few moments pass before I turned around, half smiling, and presented her drink to her.

Still wearing the dead man’s cologne, Rosette took the cold glass in her pale hands. Poor thing, it must be said she held it in her hand quite helplessly. The abandoned look returned. Oh dear, it was true the rent did need paying. As I watched, tears gathered in her lovely, sad eyes and slipped down her pale cheeks.

“The bastard,” she swore very, very softly before collapsing into a large stuffed sofa behind her. She looked very small and very white against the dark green of Daddy’s sofa. I liked her a little, then.

“I’m afraid I am the only person in his will. Not even the servants, some of whom have been here a lot longer than I can remember, are mentioned in it, but I’m giving them something on his behalf.” I paused for a moment. “The thing is, I didn’t know my father very well, and I didn’t know my mother at all. If you can help to fill in some of the blanks, I would be very pleased to help you with your finances.”

The lake creature undulated in the still dark lake. Perhaps with the realization that it was looking at the shape of its new source of bread and butter from here on. Did I relish this power? She had certainly recognized and bowed low to it. Suddenly she laughed. A harsh, bitter sound. It was the sound of a woman who has never been in control of her own destiny.

“Some things are better left in the dark. It is not the kind of memory you seek. It has the power to destroy you. Why do you think he hid it from you? Are you really certain you want to know?”

“Yes,” I replied instantly, surprised by the clear conviction in my voice.

“Did he give you the key?”

I stared at her in amazement. She even knew about the key.

“Yes,” I said, stunned by how close this composed woman had been to my father. Truly I had never known my own father. The red lips smiled. I really couldn’t stand that blood red. The color was like a knife in my eye.

She drained her drink and stood before me. In her eyes was the knowledge that from here on was only old age and death, and the sad regrets of bad choices. Even I could have told her that my father was a bad choice.

“After you have listened to the tapes, come and see me.” She walked up to Daddy’s desk and scribbled her address and telephone number on a memo pad. “Good-bye, Nisha.” The door closed.

I picked up the notepad. She lived in Bangsar, not far away. Her writing was feminine and strangely inviting. I wondered at her origins. She had the thin, very fair skin of a certain class of Arabic women. The type that have bodyguards waiting outside the changing rooms of Emporio Armani.

I tore the address off the pad and headed for home.

Inside my apartment it was stiflingly hot. The delicate pink roses on the coffee table drooped. Pink petals lay where they had fallen. Time’s up. Death waits everywhere.

Ignoring the muted rings of the telephone, I turned on the air-conditioning, and chilled, dry air poured silently into the room. Without changing out of my black mourning dress, I switched on the tape recorder and closed my weary eyes. The voice of someone called Lakshmi filled the cooling room with shadows from an unknown past.

The next morning I jerked awake, surrounded by cassettes and startled by the doorbell buzzing.

“Special Delivery letter,” a man’s disembodied voiced floated out of the intercom. I signed for the letter from Father’s solicitors. They needed to see me immediately about a matter of the utmost importance. I called and made an appointment with the senior partner of De Cruz, Rajan & Rahim.

Mr. De Cruz came forward and completely enveloped my hand in his large, leathery ones. In his veins ran the Portuguese blood that manifested itself as a high nose in his proud face and a condescending attitude toward the “locals.” His hair sat like polished silver on his skull. From cavernous sockets his eyes shone with the merciless greed that made his forefathers famous. Underneath his skin, I imagined, writhed a creature deeply unwholesome.

I had met him once before at a dinner in the Stock Exchange. He had smiled with great charm but had not introduced the tall girl with the blank eyes who stood beside him. I found him like all lawyers of my acquaintance, arrogant and too proud of his ability to have enslaved words to do exactly as he bid. He kept them inside his mouth and brought them out at the right time with the right inflection added. And look how rich it had made him.

“I’m so sorry about your father,” he commiserated in his deep baritone voice. I couldn’t help but be impressed. It was surely a gift, this ability to sound so sincere at a moment’s notice.

“Thank you. And thank you for the flowers too,” I said automatically.

He nodded sagely. The words waited inside his mouth for the right moment. He indicated that I should sit. The office was large and cool. There was a well-stocked bar in one corner. I had heard the rumor that he drank. Heavily. At the Selangor club.

He dropped into a large leather chair behind his table. For a moment he paused and studied me sitting in front of him. I imagined his thoughts.
Very pretty, if only she would make more of herself.
Then he let the words that had been waiting in his mouth jump out and scare the living daylights out of the poor thing who had not made more of herself. It was hardly his fault. It wasn’t he who had made all those bad investments that had brought her father to bankruptcy as he died in the hospital. It was the economy. The whole damn economy had fallen on its face after that fiasco with George Soros taking on the Malaysian ringgit and destroying the share prices like a fist on a house of cards.

Blankly I listened as Mr. De Cruz used all the right words to tell me about the stock market crash, and the inevitable losses the high-risk investment portfolio favored by Father had incurred. Basically, he said, there was nothing left to will over to me but enormous debts. In fact even my expensive apartment would have to go.

“Do you have any jewelry that you can sell?”

Horrified, I stared at him. “But Father was a multimillionaire! How is this possible?”

Mr. De Cruz shrugged eloquently. “The economy, as I said. Some unwise investments. A few sour deals. . . .” All kinds of soothing words slipped out of his mobile mouth. “There was even mention of fraud. . . .”

“So basically I am homeless.”

“Not quite.” Mr. De Cruz flashed an uncomfortable, oddly guilty smile. I gazed at him expectantly. The smile broadened, and the flash of guilt removed its unwelcome presence. No decent lawyer should suffer the likes of guilt too long on his person.

“Well, your mother left a house for you. You were meant to come into it when you were twenty-one, but as you were comfortably ensconced in your apartment by then, your father decided not to concern you with the running of a decrepit old house. But as your circumstances have now changed, perhaps you should take a look at your inheritance.”

“My mother left me a house?” I repeated stupidly.

“Yes, a house in Ampang. Naturally the building itself is probably in a state of terrible disrepair, but the land is another matter. . . . Considering its location, it is quite a pile you are sitting on. The sale would solve all your problems, and of course this firm is perfectly qualified to dispose of it for you.” He set his lips in a businesslike manner and opened a file in front of him.

I should have been told about the house when I turned twenty-one, but Mr. Cruz had suppressed the information because my father had asked him to.

“Who has been paying the ground rent on the property?” I asked.

“There was an inheritance from your maternal great-grandmother that automatically paid the required amount, but that inheritance has been almost used up. There is also the matter of a sealed letter that your father left for you in the event of his death. Here are the keys and the address to your property.” He handed me a bunch of keys, a deed with the address and my name on it, and a sealed letter.

I was speechless. My mother had left me a house, and he had sat on such a vital piece of information all these years. Words were still pouring out of the man when I stood up suddenly. He stopped speaking.