Teddy
by Krystalle Teh
Dark and in a hole and something is dragging me over mud filth rock shit gravel serrated grass blade. There’s no use resisting. I’m being dragged by a force so great I dream of my body cleaving into two from it, splitting cleanly and painlessly like the rind of an overripe fruit. When I awake with a start, I’m surprised by the solidity of my intact body—wings stiff, fur wet with dew. What hour is it? The tide laps gently against the concrete pillars of the house, slowly making its way across the mudflat beneath me. I can smell a storm coming, but I can’t tell if the tide is rising or falling, if it’s sunrise or sunset, because my instincts have turned to mush since I got here. There’s a pool of sludge in my brain and my tongue feels dry and lined with fur in my mouth. I’m desperate for the taste of brine from the sea. Out of the semidarkness I’m startled by a sudden ray of light shot right at me. It’s the syce, come to wake me now for my nightly duty. I hear him switch the torch off with a click before he strikes the rock against the ground, clattering the chain bound to my ankle. The same chain that had dragged me from unconsciousness into this filthy fruitfucking world. Bangun, bangun, the syce yells, and in that moment I wish I were dead. He yanks on the chain again, harder this time, and I jerk forward, unhooking my right claw from its grip so that I nearly lose my balance. Stop! I cry out, shrieking back at the syce with all my might. Stop! Stop! Stop! I could go on shrieking all night long. But what comes out of my mouth is only a squeak. To the syce’s human ear, it’s no different from the squeak of a rat as it scurries beneath the foot trampling upon it. The syce ignores my protests and drags me by chain to where he is squatted atop the stairs that lead down into the sea. It’s dark now, and I feel my sense of sight sharpening into clarity. I stare up into the syce’s face and drink in his eyeshine. There’s a gleam of fear in his eyes whenever I look right into them—pure animal fear. Each time the syce has to drag me across the estate, I know that deep down he is spooked. And like all animals that have been spooked, that is when he is at his most dangerous. When he is capable of lashing out in self-defence to smother his fear. Carefully I do as I’ve been taught. I don’t want to risk provoking the syce any further. In silence I unfurl my wings and fly overhead and I let him lead me by the leash into the house.
#
Since Mother was shot dead, I live alone with my captors. Nobody and nothing else knows this. Not the fact of my existence—that I’m even alive at all—or that I’m alive and all alone, howling into the dark cave of the night, dragged across earth every night to be slave, companion, plaything, bringer of good or bad human luck depending on who you ask. But the way I see it, humans are bad animal luck, pure and simple. And any sign of a human house, as with this one that takes its usual shape before me, a white single-storey pavilion that juts out from the shore on stilts, as pale and solitary as a sea eagle, is the sign of a death trap.
Inside, the darkness is at its most stifling, and my eyes, pulsating beneath their lids, scour the drawing room. The syce sets my anchor down on a small side table, and I fly up to the ceiling so I can watch my captor, the man of the house, from a better vantage point. The man of the house stares out the open window. The blonde hairs on his arm are standing on end as if he’s caught a chill or been spooked by something he sees in the distance, out there in the sea beyond us. He’s always somewhere else. From my perch overhead I smell where he’s been that day. The stink of tree sap clings to him like a carcass upon his back, redolent of the long afternoons he has been spending at the plantation since his return—his futile attempts to rescue the rubber trees already rotting at their roots. He doesn’t know what I know, that it’s no use. The trees are dying, and so is he. I know because every night I hear him breathe the ragged breaths of an animal not long for this world. Like the trees, something is killing him from the inside, and with every breath he takes I watch him die a little more.
Selamat petang, Tuan, the syce says before announcing my arrival. Keluang itu sudah disini.
The man looks in the syce’s direction but his eyes are blank, registering nothing. On the wall behind him a hunting gun sits on the shelf, pointed like a long accusatory finger at a spot above his head. Mother was killed by a bullet shot from this rifle. This man had fired it.
Selamat petang, the man wheezes as he gestures for us to enter.
When the syce tugs on my chain again, I know better this time than to resist his pull under the eye of the gun. In the bedroom, the girl sits bolt upright and whispers excitedly, Teddy, Teddy, you’re awake. When she sees me, the light comes on in her eyes. A flash of pleasure—and obvious affection, too. I resent it all. Instead, I charge right at her, swerving sharply upwards at the last possible moment as a feint, narrowly steering clear of her face as I feel her hot, stale breath upon my fur. At this the girl gasps in delight and claps. The poor thing, how she always misunderstands me. She doesn’t know that I do it not for her amusement but wholly as a show of terror.
What should we do tonight, Teddy? The girl goes on whispering to me as if I have agreed to some wicked pact. Papa says a storm is coming. Then she opens her mouth dutifully for the amah, who douses her waiting tongue in a spoonful of castor oil.
I don’t answer. I haven’t figured out what her name for me means, if it’s toothless or sardonic, only that I will never answer to it. Silently I watch the girl swallow, the glob of liquid sliding down her white, vulnerable throat. One day I’d like to pierce her pale skin with my claw. I think about this as I squat upon the window ledge and groom myself, ignoring the girl as she tugs lightly on my chain. She doesn’t let go of the chain when she gets up to let the amah dress her, passing it from hand to hand as she slips one arm and then the other into each dress sleeve. By the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, I observe her naked and diseased body. The red scaly patches scattered across her back. The otherwise pale skin jaundiced from her strictly nocturnal existence. The stiff left foot which she has to lift slightly higher above the ground in an awkward gallop. But most of all, her right hand twisting with each night into a claw, the tendons already popping out from the back, the skin growing as gnarled as the bark of a tree.
Among the servants, it’s clear everyone knows exactly what’s going on, though I have noticed them discussing the girl’s condition only among themselves.
Yang ini, kita panggil ni ‘mah foong’, tau? I heard the amah say to the syce once. This one, we call it ‘mah foong’, you know?
For a moment the syce looked puzzled. Then he nodded in understanding. Ah. Kita panggil ini kusta.
Shh! The amah widened her eyes in alarm. She glanced nervously behind her. Lu cakap kercik—you have to speak softly. Nanti dia orang lengar ah. Later they’ll hear you.
Tapi sekarang orang putih tak ada kusta, the syce said, his gaze darkening. Mungkin ada hantu kacau dia. Dia orang semua ada simpan keluang. Tak bagus.
I did not understand much of what the syce had said, though I’d heard one of their names for me being mentioned—keluang. All was not well, that much I understood. The amah was silent as she swept the doorway with a broom. Orang kampung cakap-cakap banyak, she said. People in the kampung are talking among themselves. Then her voice grew low and quiet as words tumbled out of her mouth, laden with a secret and impenetrable meaning that remains forever closed to me. I don’t wish to know it well. Human language is not my language after all. If I understand the discordant human tongue in snatches, it is only because I’ve been forced to swallow it and choke it down for my survival.
What I know is this: that the servants speak of the girl’s illness as something deadly and poisonous. But I know from her breathing and her steady pulse that her disease isn’t serious. Like a permanent tear in a wing, her disease is a handicap, but in a colony she will survive. Still, she is careful not to be seen in the day and to avoid human suspicion. It is only at night when her deformities can be kept hidden in the dark that she emerges, like some lone scavenging bird.
The girl is dressed at last. She totters in my direction, all too human, wielding her right claw almost triumphantly at me. The amah has left the room. We’re alone now. Against the lamplight a harsh shadow passes across her face so that her grin appears nearly sinister. I shrink back against the ledge and steel myself for the inevitable human contact that must surely follow, for the possibility of violence.
Instead, the girl strokes the fur behind my ears. Teddy, she says, you and I, we are one and the same, each just as wretched as the other. Aren’t we, Teddy?
In spite of myself I shiver from her touch as if in pleasure.
In spite of myself I follow her like a dog at her heel, slavishly like a human pet, as she leads me out of the house for our nightly romp. I feel a wave of self-loathing burn right through me, leaving me with a hole in my chest that will never be large enough to bear my shame.
#
Before I was captured, this house had once promised safe harbour to Mother and I. Many moons ago, we would fly out here to forage, undisturbed by human presence, from our main roost further south of the island and far beyond the rubber plantation. The estate had been abandoned for a time and the fruit trees on its grounds had flourished in wild profusion. Large banana fronds bowed under our weight as we landed upon them, spreading themselves wide open to reveal their plenitude of fat, unplucked bananas. All around us, the landscaping had long grown over and become carpeted by tall grass that rattled with insects and the occasional snake. The house itself had, too, become empty and dilapidated, overtaken by a cluster of langur monkeys and nests of swallows taking refuge in its cornices. On clear and moonlit nights, with our mouths stuffed full of fruit, Mother and I would fly up to the roof to watch ships go down in loud explosions and long plumes of smoke further up along the coast. A human war was raging across the island. But it hadn’t mattered to us. We had wanted for nothing then, for whatever branch we fed on was promptly regrown.
Sometimes when I dream of the past in this way, I'm knocked over by that first heady rush of grief and right then I’m certain that I would give everything—both my wings and the mantle of red fur across my back—to return to that time of my life: when Mother was still alive. But just as quickly I find myself choking on the pain and disillusionment I’ve carried with me ever since. I choke and my breath catches in my throat when I survey the estate as it is now: the house, its garden, the plantation stretching all the way to the village, filled with the sounds of human servants scrubbing and scraping and grinding in the day, of human voices echoing off walls and between trees, of footsteps pounding steadily against the ground or concrete—and then I cry out in anguish. Had I known then that this once-beloved paradise would be reinvaded by human presence as if by a virulent disease, I would have spat out its poisoned fruit and begged Mother to never return to this forsaken place on earth.
But Mother had her own reasons for returning. In the distance, the dark hull of the opposite shore rises from the sea like the shadow of a long-forgotten memory. Somewhere along that far-off shore lies a dense mangrove forest where Mother had fled from her former colony. I've never been there since I was a pup. After I was born, Mother had been exiled for her violent squabbling, having clawed out the eye of another. And from then on it had been the two of us against the vast canopy of the world. Each time Mother had led us to forage in this stretch of coast, I was sure it had been a guise for her to keep an eye on the opposite shore. To bide her time and dream of a possible return. But for this she had died. And for this I’ll never forgive them. Not the man of the house who had fired that fatal bullet. Not the syce who regards me with animal fear and keeps his distance. Not the amah who is kind and respectful but utterly complicit. Least of all the girl who loves me with a vigour that turns her love violent, who had killed Mother not by her hand but simply by occupying this land over which we had once travelled so freely. No. I won’t forgive a single fruitfucking one of them.
#
Tonight, beneath the dark cover of trees in the plantation, the air is so dense with humidity it feels claustrophobic, as if the lines of trees are closing in upon us. The storm is almost here, though there’s nowhere else for me to go. I'm trapped here with the girl—her loud panting alongside the flapping of my wings, the vulgar acid sting of her breath, her uneven one-two one-two gallop. We are bound to each other, her hand gripped tightly onto my chain, but when we move, we move without rhyme or rhythm, stopping and starting with every gesture. The clatter of my chain ringing in our ears. Out here where she is blind in the dark, she has no choice but to rely on my ability to see well enough in the dark. She runs with wild abandon into the depths of the plantation, trusting that my animal instincts will kick in so that I’ll duck and dive and drag us both out of harm's way.
On other nights the girl has other schemes for me up her sleeve: stick-fetching, fruit-picking, crocodile-spotting in the mangrove forest that borders the estate, insect-preserving of all kinds of moths and earwigs and winged termites. But tonight it is a game she wants to play. A dare. She wants to see how much she can trust me: how close she can get to the precipice of real danger, and then how far I will go to save her from it. But she’s wrong to think I’ll want to save her in the first place.
Several times, I strain at my chain and drag us right into a web of branches only to veer suddenly away from it, nearly stabbing our eyes out. Several times on a night like this, the thought of luring her finally over the precipice occurs to me as ripe for vengeance, but something always reels me back in. Not yet, a voice whispers in my ear. Not just yet.
Teddy! That was close! the girl gasps, laughing breathlessly.
This time I yank her abruptly to the right so she trips over something large and bulky, knocking it over. White pools of liquid seep out onto the ground, so white they appear to glow faintly even in the dark. The smell of tree sap is unmistakable. A pail of it had been left behind, freshly foraged during the day by lines of men weaving between the trees. Immediately I brace myself for the girl’s blame as she sticks a finger into the pool of sap and sniffs it. Her face screws up in anger.
Oh dear, Teddy, she says, you’ve done it now. You’ve really done it now. Papa is going to be mad.
Before I have time to get away, the girl grabs the pail and flings it at me. I ascend sharply into the air, avoiding the sap that splatters everywhere, whitening patches of grass and wood like flecks of blood. Then she yanks my chain towards her and pulls me down to her face, which is hard and mean like the stone from a fruit, before shoving her fist full of dirt into my mouth. I cry out in anger and surprise, but the dirt muffles my tongue. The girl giggles, amused by what she considers to be a harmless prank. Now we’re even, she says. Then she reaches over.
Each time the girl runs her fingers over my matted fur, I have a strong urge to bite my tongue, beat my wings and shrink away. But each time against all instinct I yield completely to her touch. I tremble but I don't resist, I’m nervous about what comes next. Tonight there’s a crueller edge to her games, a taste for danger that’s more ravenous than usual. The girl grins, a glint of mischief in her eyes. That’s enough now, Teddy, she says, then turns and drags me back towards the house.
We lurch past the lines of trees, my chest heaving with dirt. It almost hurts to breathe. To my relief when we reach the shore, the sky is darkening. Soon the night will be over and I will be left in peace for the day. Sooner, still, the storm will break and we’ll have to take cover indoors where the girl’s passions can be contained. In the air there is already the smell of rain, but there is something else too. The scent of something wild and foetid like a beast on the prowl, stifling the night with its hot and humid breath. It trails us from the trees to the sea. This seems to set the girl on edge. She’s skittish and she’s restless and there’s no telling what she’ll do next. I should have known from the first sign of the storm that it would be a bad sign. Her cheeks still flushed from sprinting through the plantation, the girl darts over to the edge of the sea and pulls me along with her. Now she wades into the water and splashes at me. Now she hums a melody under her breath and bursts into laughter for no reason. Now she takes a deep breath and her words tumble out in one long breathless rush, rising up in a cloud of confusion, Teddy—
—oh Teddy I hate that I’m sick I hate that I have to stay inside all the time when I wake up and the day is so hot it burns rings of light into my eyes I feel my back turn cold and numb and when I touch the skin on my back I don’t feel anything at all the skin is dead as if I have shed it like a snake or lizard maybe my body is shedding itself and slowly I’m turning into something else something not quite human like an animal or an insect and I see it in the servants’ eyes all the time Teddy how they pretend to look away or see past me and I hear them whispering among themselves that I should be sent to the asylum or be locked up or else I’ll infect everyone here and in the plantation and the village too and I know some of them think it’s because Papa has been cursed after his time in the war oh what nonsense they spread among themselves as if god knows what Papa went through in that camp wasn’t enough and I know it still haunts him how he wakes up some nights and finds himself digging a trench in the ground for no good reason sometimes when I think about it I want to weep but no tears come to my eyes maybe because an animal doesn’t cry so maybe they’re right but I know some of them think it’s because Teddy you’re a bad omen or we should have never kept you or accidentally shot your mother I confess I won’t ever know what that’s like because Mama died when I was five but oh Teddy the night I met you I thought only of the time at boarding school in Sussex when Margaret and I often climbed into the attic above the science labs where there was a colony of bats roosting and we would lie there in the attic for what felt like hours floating on the soft black wings of sleep when I dreamed I was flying or I had no legs and I felt I was neither girl nor woman neither human nor animal without body or mind only that I was alive as a throb or a pulse or like a light flickering just beyond the black furred edge of consciousness I was all too alive after everything Teddy I was Teddy what is that what are you looking at—
The girl goes quiet and stares at me. I freeze. She scans the sea, its dark, impenetrable surface admitting nothing. When she turns back to me, that same look from before when she shoved a fistful of dirt down my throat has crept back into her face. That same hardening of her eyes, then a wicked flash just before she picks up my rock and hurls it as far as she can into the sea.
I hurtle through the air, shrieking as I’m pulled forward by my chain. I don’t know what happens next, only that my body takes over. I hear the flap of my wings just as I pitch face-forward into the sea, my breast and belly dipping below the surface. The water is a cold shock to my senses, and I’m left gasping as I climb sharply into the air and regain my balance.
From the shore laughter rises up towards me. The girl is standing at the water’s edge, her head thrown back, her teeth flashing in the dark. Oh dear, Teddy, you do look so much like a wet dog! Oh, oh, I have an idea. Stay there, will you? I’ll be right back, she says, before vanishing across the garden into the house.
Stranded in the middle of the sea, there’s nowhere for me to go except to drift in small, slow circles, my chain swinging below me as a long gleaming tail tethered to the seabed. I breathe steadily, trying not to panic. Since my captivity I’ve lost the ability to fly long distances. At this rate it won’t be long before my wings grow tired. Above me, the sky cracks open in a sudden streak of lightning and the air grows charged with electricity.
By the time the girl reappears, my fur is slick with the first drops of rain and my wings feel heavy. In the girl’s hand is a tree branch, which I can barely make out past the thickening veil of rain as a manmade device of some sort, having been whittled down the middle so it forks into two with a loop of rope tied around its ends. I recognise it immediately for what it is: a deadly weapon used upon me once by a group of small children roaming through the jungle. I watch her gather a small pile of stones from the gravelled shore and feel something skittering and cold run down my spine.
Don’t move, Teddy, she yells into the open sea, and fires a stone from the weapon. I squawk in alarm as it whizzes past me, grazing my fur ever so slightly. Every hair on my body is standing on end, and my eyes feel as if they’re bulging from their too-tight sockets.
When the next spray of stones arrives, they appear to me as bullets, darting at me like heavy raindrops from the storm. Overhead, I feel something soft and dark extending its cover over me. When I look up, I recognise Mother’s left wing, the small hook-shaped scar just under her thumb claw. For a moment I’m not at sea anymore. It’s the night Mother was shot and we’re flying through the plantation beneath a blazing full moon. Gunshots ring out around us. In the trees I feel the eyes of a thousand tiny creatures upon us, bearing silent testimony to our pursuit by the hunters.
As the sound of the next gunshot rips through the air, I hear Mother’s keening cry slicing through the air with the clarity of a whip: Eeee!
Eeee!
Eeee!
It goes on ringing
in my ears even when
the gunfire has ceased.
Even when the stones stop
pelting down upon me.
By now, the girl has laid her weapon down on the sand. I can’t tell if I’m hurt, only that there is a loud roar in my head. The beast from the trees is growling wildly, madly, into my ears. When the girl splashes into the water, beaming innocently as she reaches out to grab hold of my chain, I don’t think twice this time. I don’t hold back anymore. In silence I swoop down and pounce upon her, digging my talons sharply into her skin. The girl cries out as she hits the water, and in that moment I feel what she feels—the sharp sting of the seawater against her torn skin. Then she pulls me under.
#
That night, everything had felt awfully loud after Mother was shot. All around us a cacophony of alarm rose up from the crickets and termites and bullfrogs and mynas hiding in the rows of rubber trees. And yet, Mother who was lying next to me on the ground seemed so completely still. I got up, surprised to find I wasn’t hurt and that I could move freely, and I crawled towards her. Then the trees grew suddenly quiet, and I could hear human footfall amid the crackle of twigs. Two men appeared, towering over us from a wingspan’s distance away. I bared my teeth and screeched at them, hacking at the air between us with my talons.
Oh, one of them said, catching his breath. It was the man of the house, though I did not know it then. His hunting gun remained poised in his hands. He narrowed his eyes in confusion. Oh, itu seekor kelawar sahaja, saya fikir itu… itu… The gun slipped out of his hands and he fell to his knees with it, his eyes turned glassy with a faraway look. Even then, he was already thin and pale, hunched over as if he’d long been nursing a grievance lodged within his chest.
Itu bukan kelawar sembarangan, tetapi keluang, the other man without a gun—the syce—said, spreading his hands wide. Hati-hati Tuan, itu ibu keluang dengan anaknya.
The man widened his eyes in horror. Ibu keluang? He stared at Mother who remained sprawled on the ground, her wing tucked awkwardly under her foot. I saw for the first time then that she was covered in blood. The man started crawling towards her on his knees.
Instantly I flew at him and clawed at his face with a terrible screech, prompting him to shout in pain and flail at me in self-defence. But I clung onto his arm with a vice-like grip and refused to let go, wrapping my wings around my body to guard against his blunt and reckless strikes. I didn’t care if my wings were pounded to a crisp or if I died from his beatings, only that I was shot through with a white-hot rage, as pure and lucid as moonlight, and it pierced through everything I touched. I wanted my anger to pierce him too. I lowered my head and sunk my teeth into his arm, drawing blood.
The man wailed out in pain, his cry sounding as if it was welling up from somewhere deep and ancient within him. I looked him right in the eye then and saw the crazed look of an animal trapped. In a frenzy we tumbled to the ground, writhing in a heap of fur and flesh and blood, driven by nothing more than the fierce throb of animal instincts. I don’t know how long this went on for, it must have only gone on briefly. But in the thick of it, it had felt as if we’d been locked in a deadly embrace for an entire night. Finally, the syce pulled us apart and I was lifted away while still flapping my wings vigorously, still lashing out to get at the man. The syce swung me upside down by the ankles of my feet, which suspended me in mid-air. The world tilted. On the ground the man had reached my mother at last. His breath was still ragged from our brawl, but he was calm now. Whatever fury I’d ignited in him was fast dissolving, already overtaken by the shadow of an ever-present agony visible on his face. Wincing slightly, the man lifted Mother up from the ground as if she weighed nothing, like she was a leaf that had been blown loose by the wind. Then he bent over her body and sobbed.
#
Dark and in a hole and I’m dragging something over mud filth rock shit gravel serrated grass blade. There’s no use resisting. The girl’s body is limp and heavy. So heavy I wince from the burden of her weight, her hands clasped tightly around my ankle so I can't shake her loose. She doesn't let go, she never lets go. That is exactly the problem. My wings ache. My fur is sodden and scratched from our tussle in the water. The girl moans in complaint, her wet hair sticking to her face like weeds. When I've dragged her to shore at last, she coughs, spluttering the brackish water that has filled her mouth and throat and lungs. I don’t know why I dragged her out of the water, why I ended up saving her after I’ve long sworn that I would never trust her, much less love her back. Every animal deserves to survive after all—even her. Especially her. Gasping for breath, I collapse next to the girl on the sand. She strokes me weakly and starts crying. I’m sorry, Teddy, she says. In the distance, I hear the sounds of the other humans rousing from their sleep. Someone is shouting as if in distress. The amah is the first to appear from the servants’ quarters, her face crestfallen at the sight of our bedraggled selves shipwrecked upon the shore. She’s followed by the syce, and then the man of the house, who is merely waiting for any excuse to take the gun down from the shelf and hold it in his hands.
Calmly I perch on the sand and wait. I’m ready now. The moment Mother died was when I should have died too. The spray of bullets should have killed us both. But it didn’t, and I remain alive among our enemies. My hunger for survival is a kind of greed and I've been spoiled by it. I want to go on living at all costs when I should have the courage to slam my body against the gravel, drown myself in mud, wrap the chain around my neck until it finally smothers me. Instead, some animal instinct persists within me, compelling me to go on. To scrape at the vast black void that lies before me with my one good claw, trying desperately to hang on. Now, as I crawl slowly across the wet black sand, I’m waiting for the final bullet to come, the one I’ve been waiting for a long time. The one that should have been shot right into my heart when my mother died. In the aftermath, I will dream of vast colonies of winged creatures flying freely in the dark all along the opposite shore, the tips of their wings brushing gently over my face.
Krystalle Teh is a writer from Singapore. Her film criticism has appeared online with Asian Film Archive and the Singapore International Film Festival. She is currently at work on short fiction about violent desires. This will be her first published short story.
What is it like to be exiled from a colony, tribe, group and to be chained to a false name? Read the new story by Krystalle Teh.