by Sydney Gan
This was how it started—my becoming away.
It began in the womb of banana trees, in the cradle of midnight, in pursuit of a ghost. My mother was the one who told the tale, as mothers were wont to do with cautionary fables. To punish my disobedience of curfew, she instilled my dreams with the whispering of the pontianak: a vengeful ghost who died an ugly death, whose family forwent a decent burial. In her stories, the spectre drew to clean laundry hung up at night; to wayward boys and girls who strayed from the way home. The cloying sweetness of jasmine clung in her wake.
My mother used to push two fingers against my jugular, her pointed nails biting into my taut skin. Right there, she said, her hands still soapy from dishwashing. She will drain your blood until you are just skin, and she will keep on drinking. When I grasped enough courage to ask after the ghost’s insatiable thirst, my mother moved her finger over my belly.
She’s with child, my mother said, matter-of-factly. And it is always hungry.
I had continuous nightmares after that day, dreaming of the baby trapped inside a prison of fluid and ghostly skin. The racing terror had gotten so bad that it seseeped into my waking consciousness. After an episode in school of what I later came to recognize as the verge of a panic attack, my mother bid me to unlearn her stories.
Thus my life went on unhaunted, if only for a while. I learned to fear human men and their intentions more than any unsatisfied spirit, and eventually had to master that trepidation too. When I got to know the first man who alleviated those fears, I dug my claws into him and claimed him mine. He and his dull countenance wanted nothing more than to be desired, and he responded with enthusiastic acquiescence.
Our marriage was simple and quiet. Nothing was meant to change that, until three months ago. My hand drifted to my swollen stomach, the very place my mother poked when I was little. The little life hitched inside me seemed to sigh upon my touch, and I gingerly withdrew my fingers each time.
That was not all. As if the foetus’ jostling had dislodged something visceral and previously undiscovered, I found that the dormant ghost stories began to resurface again. Behind my eyelids, the pontianak lingered, and this time, she was no longer just words. She was real to the touch.
In the swathe of darkness, she visited me, drifting gently, her bare feet across from mine. Her sleek, tar hair smelled of putrid flowers, and her breath stank like a hound’s. The first few times, the ghost kept her distance, but eventually she appeared nearer, nose-first, sniffing curiously. When I eventually allowed it, she tipped my chin with her claw and touched my belly to her white sarong. She dissected and studied me as I did her, with a muted opal-eyed curiosity that issued an unusual humanness to her character. Her fangs bit through her red, red lip.
Twin reflections, trapped in our observations. I could not escape her even in my waking hours. She drove me into obsession. When the cravings of pregnancy struck, it arrived alongside a desperate want: an intense desire to behold her on my plane of reality. I found, as the baby grew inside me, that mere stories were becoming insufficient.
No one thought it was a good idea when I announced my plans to hunt the pontianak. Who would? I was a pregnant woman chasing a literal ghost story. Precious cargo, my husband reminded me, caressing the baby. What about me? I retorted. He rolled his eyes, and I left that very night.
The plantation around me was now shifting, the shadows swaying under pearlescent moonlight. They mimicked my movement almost in jest, flickering to the crunch of my footsteps. The sweltering night liked to perform tricks, and I was their exasperated audience. From the depths of the vegetation, so dense where beams scarcely touched, a birdish laughter echoed, pinging against the darkness.
Kekeke. Kekeke. If I strained my ears, it sounded faintly like childish delight.
I raised my camera to my eye and peered through the lens. The loamy ground of the plantation translated into an uneven, dark mass in the picture, the trees into blurry trunks that shadowed the composition. Nothing showed through, not in the darkest hour. I had traversed the night long enough to face the possibility that what I sought was not there.
A twinge of humiliation teethed at me, gnawing and biting. What was I doing here?
The ghostly giggle of the phantom corvid jeered in my face, forcing me to my knees. I was made to wonder if I would pass these delusions to my unborn child. I felt a deep-set ache within my belly that I failed to comfort and nurse. All I felt was remorse for him, her—it.
It seemed that with each polluted drag of air I took, I was infecting this sac of blood and matter. Whatever carcinogenic junk I woke up craving, the stale kisses I endured and the tears I swallowed, all went back to the pulse of life in my belly. I was constructing it into reality bit by bit, but where teapots were fastened together in gold, my baby was bound together with a black, viscous mucilage, all my faults glued in its seams.
My doctor loved to remind us of the baby’s size as she slathered cold jelly across my skin. The size of a lentil, she had exclaimed on my first appointment. Upon our second meeting, she observed that the baby was as big as a peapod. She had held up her index finger to indicate the length.
I could not, then nor now, think of the baby as anything but a rapid outgrowing. The more it grew, siphoning my feeble life through its umbilical cord, the more afraid I became of it. It would shift inside me, sometimes, and I would think that was it. It was going to expand and expand and expand until the elasticity of my skin stretched taut and I burst. The nurses, my husband, drenched with my insides, cooing over this Frankenstein’s monster, goo-covered and weeping. My body, the vessel, finally spent to no one’s dismay.
I was demoted to a mere addendum the moment it had formed into an embryo. There was no mistake about it. My husband only kissed my stomach now, and strangers only perceived my bump. When I told my mother of my pregnancy, she had taken me in her arms wordlessly; I had heard a sigh in my ear as if to say Congratulations and I’m sorry.
I felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the pontianak, for the perpetual weight she carried in her belly. Maybe she chose to keep the baby lodged within so it could not take what was left of her. Maybe she did not obsess over the living to exact retribution. Why did ghosts have to be bitter to haunt? Was it not sufficient to linger just to leave something behind? I am here. I haunt you because I am here. That is enough.
The banana trees twisted above me in their drooping posture. A low branch stroked the top of my head when I shakily found my footing again. It was bursting with fruit, dangling in yellow bunches and at its end, topped with a single flower bud, larger than my cupped hands. The burnt burgundy bud was framed by shell-like bracts, enclosing the bulbous core within their folds. Florets of white and pink were already beginning to shoot from its stem, soon to grow into fruit; more and more until the tree dried out.
The flower crowned me sardonically as I inhaled the smell of overripe bananas. A scorching chill shot down my spine.
I heard my name reverberating through the crowded plantation, the cries resonant and familiar. My feet, light as if I was treading air, took a step and then another. Brambles caught my shins, the wind tousled my skirts, the air began to taste different on my tongue. The forest had lost its earthiness but retained its desolate blackness. Still I traversed, the shouts sending a scatter of night-birds across the inky expanse of sky.
My husband’s voice shattered my trance, close enough to hear him wrestle through the trees to retrieve me. I dismissed the urge to lecture his callous summons. My mother heeded me to keep my name to myself in nature, in fear of ghosts learning my identity, but as I found my husband with hands cupped around his mouth, I realized I was no longer afraid of them.
He was flushed from exertion, his mouth gasping down drags of humid air. At the sight of me, the extension of his arms seized at the protrusion of my belly, jerking me in. His embrace was a cage: he did not notice the violence in his grasp, for he was breathless and ranting. “What were you thinking? Everybody has been searching all night for you and the baby! I didn’t think you were serious when you said you sought to hunt a ghost. A ghost? What has gotten into you? What is wrong with you? You can’t go out like this, risking the baby’s life like that! What if you had fallen in the dark, or hit your head, or—”
My head slumped upon the crook of his shoulder, heavy and cold. His tirade of words trickled to a confused tableau before he released a heavy exhale. I felt the shell of his ear against unbound hair.
“What happened?” he whispered. He caressed my skin, moon-bleached white. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I’m hungry,” I said simply. It was true. “I want to go home, please.”
My husband held me, uncertain of my response. I had a fistful of his shirt, a starched and ironed button-down he had picked out of the laundry hamper this morning. He smelled like his new car and a little bit like copper. He must have realized my sniffing, for that broke the tension like a knife to a tendon. He pulled away to study my face, cocking his head at my irregular behaviour. “What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. You smell different.”
“Do I?” He shrugged, dipping into the tight embrace again. My hand was trapped between our entwined bodies; I could feel his abdomen against my palm. It pressed against my touch with a soft give. “You ought to come home now.”
I looked up at my husband, exhausted yet invigorated. There was something new about him, about us, that made my mouth water and my teeth ache. Without thinking, I reached out and entrapped his lips with mine. He floundered a little; I hadn’t initiated affection for a while. His fingers brushed my bump and held it.
I took him in like a thirsty man in a desert, yet the keening want thrumming in my blood refused to be sated. I began to feel the agitation of an unmet appetite. I wanted to consume and destroy if it meant satiation. It felt impossible to imagine being without hunger ever again.
“You know what?” he said when we broke apart. I barely heard his words. “I think you smell different too.”
“Oh?” I said distantly. My nails dug into the space between his ribs.
“Mm.” He framed my face, softly, possessively. “Like jasmines.”