Page 58 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
The tide advances and retreats, advances and retreats. I am silence itself.
“I hope all humans forsake you, as you deserve,” Mami continues, fists clenched. “I hope you descend to the underworld and demons torment you forever! I hope—” She starts crying, the ranting choked off by her own tears.
In the tall grass, the cat looks up at me. It is the only being on this island who can perceive me, and its gaze is full of questions.
For a long moment, I’m tempted. Tempted to step forward and comfort a woman who was once a frightened child, even though I know I am the last face she wants to see right now. Tempted to kneel at her feet, seeking forgiveness. I would almost do it, just to make peace with the last living person in this place to remember me.
But Daiyu—your Mami—stopped believing in me a long time ago, and that makes it difficult to appear to her. Besides, it is not her forgiveness that matters; not any longer. A more powerful anger rules this island.
Her crying draws attention. Soon enough, the villager ghosts begin to gather at the cliffside. They stream down in their dripping clothes and bloated bodies, limbs like jelly, mouths open. Normally, they avoid coming too near the coast, but in this instance they will make an exception.
Mami is still kneeling in the sand, crying into her hands. They gather around her, whisper to her of their guilt, their longing, their suffering. She closes her eyes, and embraces them. The clouds roll back, allowing the moon to bathe the world in silvery light.
Welcome home, little one.
One of us…
Don’t leave!
Slowly, she stands, arms spread wide. The ghosts gather, pressing around her. And alone on that dark headland, she begins to dance with her dead beneath a darkly glittering sky.
Your Mami should know better; shedoesknow better. A child of three is wise enough to steer clear from the embrace of ghosts, because the past is an endless ocean on which we can sail forever without returning home. And the past is the only place the dead can take you, the only thing a spirit offers: moments long gone, days turned to dust.
But her future is a cold, narrow place. Ofcourseshe wants to sail on that endless ocean of the past, wants to spend her days lost in re-creations of a place where she felt happy. Tomorrow holds less and less interest for your mother.
Mami does not return home that night. She stays out beneath the star-wracked sky, hair tossed in a midnight wind and arms entwined with her ghosts. Only when the sun begins to creep shyly above the horizon line does she stagger reluctantly toward home, drawn by the one thread that still anchors her to the world of the living: you, her daughter.
I do not think that thread will keep her tethered very long.
19AND THEN YOU LOOK DOWN
Thirty-three years ago…
You wake in bed with the morning light streaming across your face, unaware of what has transpired in the night.
It is New Year’s Day, according to Hong Kong’s British calendar, though Lunar New Year is still a way off. Not that it means much. Time hardly seems to matter, on Shek Ham Chau. The world is far away in this place.
As you get up and walk through the house, you are shocked to discover ghosts milling around as if they belong, rifling through your things and leaving watery footprints on the floorboards. At least eight are thronging around the kitchen and poking through the garden.
“Hey!” you protest, and have to snatch a bowl away from a curious but clumsy ghost child.
It warbles at you plaintively, its face too bloated in death for you to work out whether it used to be a boy or girl.
An accident!
God’s will. God’s will.
The drowned priest is back, standing next to an old fisherwoman with seaweed in her hair. The pair of them drip in the kitchen as they repeat lines to each other endlessly. The fu talismans must have failed.
But when you go to check on them, they haven’t failed. They simply aren’t there. Someone has taken them all down.
It’s not exactly a mystery. There’s only one other person living in the house.
You stride outside furiously, in search of Mami. She’s hanging things on a washing line, basket of laundry on the ground.
Confronting a parent isn’t the natural order of things, not for a young woman of good Chinese upbringing. But neither is waking up to a house full of ghosts, apparently invited in on purpose.
And breathe. “Mami, there are ghosts in the house. Lots of them.”
