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White Ghost Girls

Grove Atlantic Ltd

What can you give me?

Can you give me a back alley, a smoke-filled temple where white-hooded mourners burn offerings and wail for the dead? The single chime of a high-pitched temple bell? The knocking of a wooden fish?

Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes, infests my books? The smells of dried oysters, clove hair oil, tiger balm, joss burning to Kuan Yin in the back room of a Chinese amah? The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites? The translucent green of sun shining through elephant ear leaves?

Can you give me a handful of coloured silk? An empty pack of cigarettes? A tape recorder? Narrow, stepped streets, balconies hung with shop signs, laundry strung on bamboo poles, rattan birdcages? A ripened pomelo split open? The chalky bone of cuttlefish?

Can you give me my father's hand in mine, Frankie's in the other? Then take everything and go away?

Because if you can't, it's not enough. And if you can, I might leave anyhow. I'll head for cover. Disappear in jungles of triple canopy.

Out in the harbour, at the end of summer, fishermen feed the hungry ghosts. They float paper boats shaped like junks and steamships. One is double-prowed like the cross-harbour Star Ferry which plies its way back and forth between Hong Kong and Kowloon, never having to turn around. The fishermen load each tiny paper boat with some tea leaves, a drop of cooking oil, a spoonful of rice, a splash of petrol before setting it afloat. Boats for the lost at sea, for the drowned. They hire musicians to clang cymbals. Children throw burning spirit-money into the waves.

This summer, the one I'm going to tell you about, is the only time that matters. It's the time I'll think of when I'm dying, just as another might recall a lost lover or regret a love they never had. For me, there is one story. It's my sister's – Frankie's.

'Touched you last,' Frankie taunts. She runs out across the beach. Arms waving, shouting Indian war whoops, she plunges into the warm, green waves. Dares me to follow. Shaking off the stupor of the heat, I dash out after her.

Inside our shack, it's hot and close. Rank smells of sea salt, mould, sand. Air so wet, it trickles down the creases of our skin. Pools collect in the bends of our arms, behind our knees. Waves lap. Cicadas shriek. Barnacles and snails, stranded above the tide line, clamp tightly to rocks.

Frankie feeds me roe she's extracted from the belly of a purple-spined sea urchin, the way the boatman Ah Wong has taught us. I lick the soft yellow eggs off her finger. The taste is raw and salty-smooth. It's how explorers, castaways survive: Magellan, Columbus, Crusoe, eating the flesh of wild sea turtles, mangy gulls. Sometimes we dive for rubbery black sea slugs. Frankie squeezes one, shooting me with a film of sticky innards. It's the creature's only means of defence. It takes them a full year to rearm.

We're already too old for this, our games of castaway. We take them up self-consciously. Construct our shacks of flotsam and jetsam: rope, tin, fishing-net, Styrofoam, driftwood. Drag our finds back from rocks along the shore, step barefoot on crusty barnacles, rough granite, through tidal pools harbouring crabs and limpets. At the back of the beach, sharp vines clasp at our skin: vitex, rattlebox, morning glory. They criss-cross our ankles with scratches and scabs. Calluses grow thick on the soles of our feet. Startled, an ungainly coucal crashes through the undergrowth. Its echoing, whooping cry sounds like a monkey rather than a bird.

Then again, it's in our nature to gather, to scavenge. My mother hoards tubes of paints, charcoal pencils, erasers, inks, pens. Stores them in art boxes and Chinese baskets piled in her room with hard blocks of watercolour paper. My father keeps war relics in his darkroom, treasures my mother doesn't like to see: slivers of shrapnel he dug out of his leg, a grenade pin, a smuggled AK-47 stashed under the basin. A string of tiny temple bells that jangle on the door so you have to open it slowly, carefully, if you don't want anyone to hear you. A thin, tattered Vietnamese–English dictionary.

Secretly foraging, Frankie and I discover the Vietnamese words for nationalism and People's Democratic Revolution, dialectic materialism and exploitation. We find words for blood transfusion, guerrilla warfare and napalm. A bomb exploded and killed many people: Bom nô giet chet nhieu ngu'ò'i. Words for utopia, không tu'o'ng, and sexual intercourse, gió'i tính. We pronounce them phonetically, like witches' spells. We look at the pictures my father's taken. Photographs of war.

Secret sisters. Shipwrecked sisters. Viet Cong sisters is what we call ourselves.

Frankie's back is strong and dark. She ties her long brown hair in two braids. Although our mother pleads with her to wear a top, she swims only in cut-off shorts. Maybe she's not ready to grow up. More likely, she wants to upset our mother. Her breasts are already full and round, like mangosteens. They bounce when she runs. Voluptuous is the word McKenna used when he and my father last came out of Saigon. It made my mother wince.

Me, I am thinner, leaner. Miró or Giacometti, my mother calls me. My hair is fair and cropped like a boy. It mats to my head with sea salt. I wear a threadbare blue-and-white bikini, hiding pointy, childish nipples. My skin is sunburned. When my father takes photos of me, I stare straight at the camera. I am twelve, nearly thirteen.

'Come, Kate,' Frankie calls me from the sea. I sprint. Feet, knees, legs fly across the sand, batter through the warm water. A wave rises up and slaps hard against my chest, then sweeps back, scratching my ankles with island sand, pulls as if to drag me down. I dive.

Underwater, it's cooler, quieter, green-blue. Purple-black sea urchins cling to rocks. Rough-skinned starfish stretch their arms in every direction. Fish dart past, swept along by the wash of waves. A pink sea anemone shudders fleshy tentacles. I hear the throbbing whine of a boat engine, an ancient kaido ferrying passengers to Yung Shue Wan, on the opposite end of Lamma Island.

Frankie grins, swims off; her arms pull broad, strong strokes, skimming the sandy bottom. I swim as fast as I can, knowing I won't beat her. Hold my breath until my chest aches, then kick to the surface, gasp in air. Frankie is faster, bigger, stronger. But she's also more needy. She needs my participation, my surrender in order to assert herself.

Breathless, I flip over. Floating upward, I dip my head back so the water licks my forehead. My eyes squint in the sun. From here, our shack looks like one of the squatter huts that catch fire or collapse down the muddy slopes of Hong Kong in sudden landslips.

Or maybe it's a Cubist painting in one of my mother's art books: a collage of forgotten items tacked on a cork-board.

The Chinese believe dragons lie curled asleep under these hills. Construction of new roads, the digging of foundations for apartment buildings can cut into the creatures' flesh. The earth bleeds red ochre. Then the great beasts must be appeased, offerings made, to avoid disease, bankruptcy or sudden, unexplained death. These bare, knobby hills are a dragon's vertebrae, spinal humps that might plunge under at any time, sucking us down with them.

All Hong Kong's islands look this way. Their forests cut down for firewood and shipbuilding. Their fertile valleys flooded at the end of the Ice Age, leaving steep mountains jutting out of the sea.

'Kate. Frances,' my mother calls our names from the stern of the junk. I roll over in the water and watch her stand up under the shade of the boat's canvas awning. She slips an elastic band around her watercolour pad, gathers her paints and tucks them into a big rattan bag. Her blonde hair is clipped back with a tortoiseshell pin to keep it off her neck. She wears a light Indian cloth tied modestly over her bathing suit, like a sarong. It puzzles me how she can sit so long without jumping into the sea. How, when she swims, she keeps her head above water, to keep her hair dry, rather than diving into the deep.

Ah Wong, in full sun, winds his fishing-line around a hand-held wooden frame. We could swim back to the junk perfectly well but Ah Wong always brings the dinghy out to fetch us. Squatting at the bow, he rows with a single oar, swivelling it along one side of the boat, then the other.

I swim, slowly at first so Frankie won't notice, then faster. Now's my chance to beat her because I'm closer and Frankie has caught a ride with Ah Wong. Hitching her arms over the dinghy's transom, she lets her brown legs trail heavily through the water behind. She's pretending not to notice me or maybe she doesn't. I know it's silly but I'm choking with triumph as I pull myself up the anchor line, launch my body on to the hot deck. My toes stretch wide over the rough, thick rope. Sea water streams down my face into my mouth, drips from my legs making rivulets in the dry, sun-baked wood. When I stand, my stomach leaves a dark curved stain between the prow and anchor chock.

At first I am the only one who sees it. A dark spot deep in the water, hidden by twinkling waves. The sun's reflection searing a momentary speck on my retina. Only when I blink, it's still there.

'Cheater,' Frankie objects. As the dinghy nears, she unhooks her arms and slips back easily into the sea. 'I was much further out. You didn't call it.' She glares up at me, waits for me to defend myself, knowing she can undo me. Only I'm not looking at Frankie but beneath her, where the spot is growing, taking shape. A shadow, distinctly darker than the milk-jade sea that cradles it. Rising up beneath my sister.

Shark is what I'm scared of. Now I remember the two other junks that anchored at Sham Wan for picnic lunches. Regret how Frankie and I scowled at them from the inside of our shack, scorning the plump English children jumping off the bow, threatening to invade our world. Both junks left hours ago. If it's a shark, racing up with open jaws, we're all alone. My heart races. My asthmatic lungs suck in air. I should shout. I need to warn her. But I cannot. Maybe if I don't move, hold my breath, I can stop time.

'What is it?' Frankie demands, still cross about the race. Dazzled by the sea's bright surface, she ducks down, peers through the green.

Now Ah Wong sees it too. Swiftly, he brings the dinghy back around. With his thin, sinewy arms, he hauls Frankie up like a huge, slippery fish.

'Fai di. Fai di.' Quickly, quickly.

The way the shadow hovers, floating up, it's like a jellyfish. In shape, an angel. But it's not until the body breaks the surface that I see it's dead, drowned.

Black hair, a tentacled halo, spreads along the ripples of the water's surface. Black rags, the clothes of a Chinese farmer, catch like seaweed. A sickly rot bursts upward, making us screw up our faces as we stare down from the two boats.

The body is swollen and bloated like a buoy. Like a dead pig I once saw floating in the harbour, its skin so tight I thought it might pop. Frankie scuttles to the centre of the dinghy as if afraid the corpse could reach out and touch her. She covers her mouth and nose with her hands. That close, the smell must be even stronger.

'It's a woman!' My mother's voice at my side startles me. I can see that for myself, where the clothes are torn, but I don't know if this makes it better or worse.

We're caught, rapt, unable to look away. It's as if we expect the body to roll over in the sea and speak, tell us her story. Instead she stares blankly, strangely expressionless, until I realize she has no eyeballs. In their place, her eye-sockets swarm with tiny white fish carried up from the deep. The fish thrash frenzied in the hot, bright sun but unwilling to let go the sweet, rotten strands of flesh.

Only Ah Wong knows what to do. Muttering, he pulls the dinghy alongside the junk while Frankie climbs up. Then retrieves a rope. Tying a quick noose, he loops it around the dead woman's feet and tows her body quickly to shore.

We should turn away, refuse to look. My mother orders us down into the cabin as if she could erase what we've seen. When we get back to Hong Kong, she'll call the police or the coast guard.

Down here, it's hot, it smells like diesel and pitch. Waves lick the hull. We hear Ah Wong return, hear him pull up the anchor, plunge it into the water to wash it clean, the sound of chain clanking on the deck, the deafening splutter of the engine roaring to life. A welcome waft of air cools us as the junk turns, heads out of the bay.

My mother throws up over the gunnel. She keeps her head covered with a towel, bent over a plastic bucket, all the way back to Aberdeen.

We should be sick too. Maybe that's why she sent us down into the airless cabin. Instead, we creep past her, assume our usual lookout at the prow, perching either side of the bowsprit. Looking back at the beach, I see the body stranded just above the tide line. Thrifty though he is, Ah Wong has left his rope.

'Christ, it stank,' Frankie says. Her words re-establish her composure, her command. Down in the cabin, she hasn't said a thing. Neither have I.

'You just stared, goggle-eyed. You should have seen yourself. God, I could have been eaten up by a giant squid.' Her eyes widen in imitation. She's teasing me. But at the same time, her voice trembles with eagerness and excitement. Her hot thigh presses against mine. Our salty shoulders brush.

'Secret sisters,' Frankie whispers.

'Secret sisters,' I reply. Our bodies quietly share the thrill of it, the repulsion. The sudden change in everything.

I didn't mean to begin here. I wanted to tell you about Frankie and me alone on the beach as we often were that summer. How we liked to sit at the bow of the boat, kick at the sea. I can feel it now, if I close my eyes, breathe deeply. The sea, the smell of dried fish, of cooking fires wafting from Chinese villages or passing junks. The warm wind fanning our hot bodies as the wooden boat rises and dips, ploughing its way back through the green. The slow darkening of sky and islands. How we dare the water to catch our feet, our shins, tug, up to our thighs, hissing, until the junk rears up again on the next wave and the sea lets go.

The body floats up in these pages the same way it did in the sea that day, unexpected, shocking. I see now, it's something we were waiting for.

The body changes us. That's why my mother doesn't want us to see it, is sick in a red bucket. It marks the end of our innocence, exposes the impossibility of her efforts to protect us.

We've seen what my father sees in Vietnam. Mined, napalmed, fire-bombed, shot, burned. We have a body now too. Drowned.

My father knows about dead people. He photographs the war for Time magazine in New York.

In the morning, I spread the paper across the living-room table. There's a black-and-white photo of American soldiers wading through a stream lined with mangrove trees. The soldiers walk thigh-deep through the muddy water, equipment hanging off them, faces alert, guns bristling. I look for my father.

It's early but already hot. The French doors to the veranda open wide to let in the night air, which isn't any cooler. Frankie and I whisper so as not to wake my mother. We hear the splutter of junks returning from night fishing-grounds. Diesel engines cut in and out as they chug their way through the channel between Hong Kong and Lamma Island. Ah Bing sings, high-pitched, in her back room.

Our apartment's near Pok Fu Lam village. We rent the middle floor of a three-storey, slightly greying stucco house. Below us, Mr Mok, our landlord, lives on the ground floor. Above us, the taitais, the three elderly wives of his late father. We're the cheese in the sandwich, my father says. A buffer for Mr Mok. But it's because of the trees that my father chose the apartment. The trees and the view west over Lamma, Cheung Chau and Lantau islands.

'Just wait until you see it, Marianne, the flame of the forest trees, the jade-green sea,' my father crowed when he came to collect us from New York two summers ago. Hong Kong would be safer than Saigon; an old-fashioned British enclave, he called it. That was before the trouble started this summer.

My father was sent to Vietnam in time to photograph the Marines landing on the beach at Danang, America's first combat troops. The soldiers carried their equipment up the sand like World War II heroes. A few months later, after the fighting in the Ia Drang Valley, he photographed stacks of body bags lining the runway at Pleiku.

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Excerpted from White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway. Copyright © 2006 Alice Greenway. Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
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