What Sutty didn’t know was that Annabelle had taken to roaming the streets after dark. During the day she rarely went out, except to the local shops if she was hungry. She seemed to be sleeping most of the day, because whenever Sutty came over, she would be in bed, whether it was at eleven o’clock in the morning or four in the afternoon. He thought she was probably depressed, but it didn’t occur to him that she wasn’t sleeping at night.
She couldn’t sleep at night because that was when she missed Francis the most. She felt like she was in a tomb. The flat was stifling and she could barely breathe. She could feel Francis’s presence around her, but it was the memory of his last days and hours that still haunted her, and she couldn’t close her eyes without seeing his pale face, the beads of sweat running into his eyes, his hair matted to his skull, and the cracked skin of his dry lips as he tried to drink from a cup of water. During the day, at least, she could ward off some of the worst memories simply because of the sunlight and the street noises, which interrupted her thoughts and allowed her to close her eyes long enough to fall into an exhausted sleep.
Strangely enough, she felt no fear as she wandered the streets at night. After the first time, when she simply couldn’t stand being in the flat another minute and had fled as if escaping from prison, she didn’t care if there was danger. She almost wished someone would knock her down and kill her, then the pain would be over and maybe she’d find peace. She would walk for hours because she couldn’t be still. Her eyes devoured everything she saw, whether it was a café full of late-night diners, or a shop that stayed open hoping to pick up some business from those same late-night diners on their way home. She passed bars and fruit stalls, nightclubs and the occasional cinema, temples, and bakeries. Often she came upon a night market and she would wander around, gazing at all the items for sale: dried mushrooms and herbs, fresh vegetables, bolts of cloth, cigarettes, hairnets, shoes, and cooking utensils. It was all a distraction from the thoughts she didn’t want to think, the images she didn’t want to see. Singapore was alive at night because after the sun went down, the temperature dropped a few degrees and it was so much more pleasant to eat and shop when the sun wasn’t beating down on your head.
Occasionally she wandered into a district populated by prostitutes and opium addicts. Opium dens were a fact of life in Singapore, Annabelle knew that, and she knew that prostitution existed everywhere in the world. But she had never been exposed to it before. She became fascinated by the women and men who populated this world. They didn’t seem to notice her, or more likely they didn’t care, so she sometimes looked right at their faces to see what they might tell her. Would she find pain like her own, suffering, loneliness, boredom, despair, bitterness? She wanted to know what kept these people going, because surely they were worse off than her. They could not have been here by choice. Or could they? Was this a life someone would choose? And if so, why? She could only imagine that they had been forced by circumstances to turn to drugs and prostitution to stay alive. Or was it the other way around? They stayed alive, despite turning to drugs and prostitution.
Annabelle could almost understand that. She knew what it felt like not to want to be alive, yet to wake up every day and still be breathing, heart beating, mouth dry and wanting to drink, stomach empty and needing to eat. It was not of her choosing. It just was. This was how it was when you didn’t care anymore. You couldn’t feel anything so it didn’t matter what happened to you. Prostitution and opium addiction were passive occupations requiring only that you acquiesce. Still, she shuddered to think of being one of those women who stood in doorways or on street corners and went with any man who approached them.
It was their faces that fascinated her the most. They were painted on like masks with black eyebrows, white powder, and red lipstick. Their eyes were evasive, dark and lifeless, and inscrutable. Or else they looked straight at you, cold and glaring. That was when she started to notice that each girl was different in her own way and that they had personalities, even if they didn’t express them there on the street at night.
Annabelle began to fantasize about their lives, to write little stories about them in her head. She even gave them names: Elsie and Angel and Kitty. She imagined the tragic circumstances of their lives that had led them to this: losing a husband, losing a child, losing a lover. Always it was some loss, some unbearable loss.
One morning when she returned to the flat, Annabelle picked up a piece of paper — Francis’s writing paper — and a pencil and began to draw some of the faces she remembered. “This one is Elsie,” she said, remembering the story she had imagined, “and she is only twenty years old. She had a baby, a little boy, because she was raped by her uncle when she was only fifteen. Elsie’s father had died and his younger brother had taken in Elsie and her mother, making a big show of it in the village so he would look like a good man. But he wasn’t a good man, of course. He was a monster. And then Elsie became pregnant and her uncle threw her out of the house. The people in the village shunned her, and Elsie was forced to go to the city and beg for food. And all the time, her baby was growing inside her. She tried desperately to find a home for herself and her baby, but she had no money. She was only sixteen. Nobody took pity on her; nobody helped her. Occasionally she was able to scrounge scraps of food from hawkers and restaurants, but mostly they threw the waste food to the dogs because it was just slop. Elsie ate it anyway because she didn’t want her baby to die. When she finally had the baby, in an alley behind a row of shophouses, it was born dead with the cord wrapped around its neck. Elsie nearly bled to death as she lay in the alley for two days. Then an old man found her and brought her to his room. He gave her tea and bread and brought her water so she could wash herself. She stayed with him for a week and forced herself to leave because she knew she was eating half his food and he had barely enough for himself. That’s when she knew what she would have to do to survive.
Annabelle somehow managed to infuse her drawing with all the misfortune and misery that “Elsie” had suffered in her short life. It was in the eyes, mainly, and in the angle of the head. They said, “I am alive, but I do not live,” because that was what Annabelle saw and sensed. Elsie existed, as she, Annabelle, did, but nothing more. Gone were joy and passion; gone forever was meaning and significance.
Sutty had been trying to persuade her to go back to England with him, but Annabelle could not even contemplate leaving Singapore because it meant she would be leaving Francis. Whatever real happiness they had known had been here. Their first home together was here. Their child had been conceived here. Much as she had been loath to come to Singapore, Annabelle was now loath to leave.
“But don’t you want to have your baby at home?” Sutty had asked her.
“I don’t know that England is my home any longer,” she said. “If I go back there, I will be leaving our home, mine and Francis’s. And I can’t bear the thought of doing that. It would be like abandoning him. While I’m here, he still exists. I’m afraid that if I leave, he won’t go with me.”
Sutty didn’t know how to respond to this. It’s a kind of madness, he thought, brought on by grief. His only hope was that, given time, Annabelle might come through this phase of her anguish and come to her senses. He fervently wished it would happen before the baby was born. He couldn’t let her have the child here; it was much too dangerous. He knew women had babies every day in Singapore, and most of them survived, but he knew the risks were greater. With the heat, contaminated water, mosquitoes and other vermin, all that could go wrong was too horrible to contemplate.
As the months passed and Annabelle did not change her mind, Sutty began to look for a doctor and a hospital for her to have the baby in. He knew that most women had their babies at home but that was out of the question. The General Hospital had a maternity wing, he discovered, but Kandang Kerbau Hospital (referred to as KK Hospital or “Tek Kah”) was more convenient. It had recently been converted into a free maternity hospital with thirty beds. The head of obstetrics was Dr. Thomas Ashford, and Sutty set up an appointment to see what could be done for Annabelle.
“I should like to see the young woman before her term is up,” said Dr. Ashford. “It’s important to know if there might be complications on the day.”
“Of course,” said Sutty. “I understand. But, uh, she doesn’t know I’ve contacted you or that I’m making arrangements for the baby’s birth in the hospital. It’s a delicate situation and I shall have to find a way to persuade her to come in.” Sutty shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The doctor must surely think this a very odd case, but his face didn’t reveal what he was thinking. “There’s still time, of course, about three or four months, I think.”
“Try not to wait too much longer,” said Dr. Ashford. “If she’s malnourished and underweight, as you’ve suggested, then it’s imperative that she be checked.”
“Yes, I understand,” said Sutty. “I will do my best. I don’t want her to lose this baby. It could put her over the edge.”
“It sounds like she may already be over the edge, if not close to it,” the doctor said. “See what you can do.”