I did not take that drive with Ali to the countryside, but I did come to think of him differently, with those big eyes and that big body of his. Men and women are not the same, of course, but Grandfather Abdul’s warm and caring nature made me feel that my grandmother had been reborn and returned to me. Ali, on the other hand, was just an oversized, immature boy — and maybe that was why I was so comfortable with him from the get-go.
Eight
I had been working at Tongking for several months before Auntie Sarah, one of the salon’s regulars, requested a foot massage. At first she kept glancing over and watching as I massaged the feet of a customer sprawled out on the reclining salon chair, but as soon as I was done she motioned to me with her chin and waved me over.
“I’ll have one of those,” she said.
She was an attractive, dark-skinned woman with a high nose and big eyes, and had probably been a great beauty in her younger days. I found out later that she was mixed — Sri Lankan and white. She practiced Christianity, like her English father.
As usual, I held her long, thin feet in my hands and closed my eyes for a moment. In my mind’s eye I pictured the various twists and turns her life had taken, though none were violent: a white man walks out of a house while a woman holding a child leans against the door and cries. Another man appears; he’s black. Then the woman, who is alone again, is working in a hospital. Her daughter, now a toddler, crawls between the other children in a nursery.
“Why haven’t you started yet?”
At Auntie Sarah’s urging, I began the massage. She looked exhausted. I put everything I had into kneading and tapping her feet, plucking the joints of the toes and applying acupressure. She soon fell asleep. I closed my eyes again and pictured her as a grown woman, dating and breaking up with different men. Whenever a customer fell asleep we made a point of not disturbing her for a while, even after her session was complete.
Auntie Sarah always dressed well, wore expensive jewellery and tipped generously, so we regarded her as a wealthy woman completely out of our league. Whenever she came by, Tan treated her like royalty. But when I touched her feet, I realized that she wasn’t all that different from the rest of us.
Luna and Auntie Sarah did not get along at all. Luna hated the way Auntie Sarah, despite being a fellow person of colour, looked down on her and treated her like a servant. But I made a point of being extra polite as I washed Auntie Sarah’s feet, trimmed her toenails and cuticles and scraped the callused skin from her heels. When she woke, I served her warm tea and ended the session by massaging cream into her legs and feet and wrapping them with a warm towel. She tipped me ten pounds. Other customers usually only tipped us in change; at most you might receive a five-pound note.
As we began to get more customers looking for foot massages, Luna, who’d learned the basics from me, began giving them herself, along with a Vietnamese woman named Vinh who had quickly picked up the technique from watching me. Auntie Sarah became one of my regulars. She rarely spoke to any of us directly, but one day she asked Uncle Tan for a favour after paying her bill.
“I’d like to chat with the girl for a moment. Would that be okay? I’ll pay for her time.”
“No problem, madam,” he said. “You can talk to her as long as you want.”
Tan smiled at me and motioned with his chin for me to go with her. I followed her out of the shop. She looked around, her brow furrowed, and headed for a café across the street. She lit up a cigarette.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
I hesitated, then told her I was from China. She nodded.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from as long as it’s not Thailand.”
I had no idea what that meant, but just sat there quietly.
“I’d like to introduce you to someone. Naturally, I will speak with your employer about it, but let’s just say I’m hiring you for a job. All you have to say is that you’ll be working at my house. If you promise not to say anything stupid, I’ll see to it that you earn some good money.”
“Yes, madam.”
Auntie Sarah puffed away on her cigarette, deep in thought for a moment.
“How’s Wednesday?” she asked. “If she likes you, she’ll probably want to see you at least three times a week. I myself wouldn’t mind having one of your massages every day if I could.”
“As long as our boss allows me to, I don’t mind.”
“What’s your name?”
I told her, and she told me her own. She also asked whether or not I had any family, which neighbourhood I lived in, and how old I was. I answered all of her questions.
Then she said: “This is the most important question … Do you have a boyfriend?”
Later I thought it strange that Ali was the first person to come to mind when she asked me that; but all I said was: “I don’t even have any female friends, other than my roommate Luna, let alone a boyfriend.”
“Good! Well, except for that brat Luna.”
*
Auntie Sarah and Uncle Tan reached an agreement: I was allowed to leave the salon every Wednesday. Auntie Sarah drove me there herself the first day. As the only places I’d been were Piccadilly Circus near Chinatown and Elephant and Castle, I had no idea where she was taking me. It turned out to be a dazzling white three-storey mansion near Holland Park in Kensington. The garden was so lush with trees that from the outside only a few windows were visible. Next to the front door was a set of stairs that led down to the basement. Auntie Sarah took me downstairs first, past a kitchen, laundry room and maids’ quarters, then back up to the ground floor where we crossed a large reception hall, and up further to the second floor. There, in the second-floor living room, I met Lady Emily for the first time. She was a fifty-something woman with a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she’d just awoken from a nap. I knew nothing about the rich, the bluebloods of this country, but what I did catch on to right away was the fact that, aside from Lady Emily herself, every person in that house existed to serve a master or mistress. (I never did catch so much as a glimpse of the master of the house.) Lady Emily wore a white dress and sat at a table talking on the phone while Auntie Sarah and I stood in the doorway and waited a long time for her to finish. Finally she set the receiver down and stared at us.
“Madam, the masseuse has arrived,” Auntie Sarah said politely.
Lady Emily shuffled through some mail and receipts that were sitting on the table and asked absent-mindedly: “You say she’s Chinese?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Well, you’ve really talked her up. Let’s see how good she is.”
“I’ll prepare the things.”
We went into the bedroom. Next to a chaise longue, Auntie Sarah set out some towels and a basin for the footbath, and prepared the herbal oils. She whispered to me: “This is your job next time.”
Lady Emily entered and lay down at an angle on the chaise. I placed her feet in the warm water and slowly massaged her calf muscles. Then I dried her feet with a towel, warmed some herbal oil between my hands and gently massaged her feet. I began with long strokes from heel to toe, kneading the entire sole of the foot. Then I closed my eyes and opened my mind to her.
A dark, cloud-like something was wrapped around her. I saw her leaving a villa in the middle of a huge forest with her husband. It was not in England. The scene changed, and I saw a small Southeast Asian woman standing next to her husband. Lady Emily’s face was smudged with tears as she argued with him. Everything looked like an out-of-focus photograph; only Lady Emily’s face stood out clearly. What was that dark cloud? Another image began to take shape. Black women and children lay slumped in front of a clay house.