Charmaine Chan
From "The Magic Circle"
This is how my sister falls ill.
The disease first makes its appearance in May 2005. At the time, the world is doing its own thing - Michael Jackson is facing molestation charges and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has just been elected Pope Benedict XVI. Just a few months later, Hurricane Katrina would smash into New Orleans, decimating the city and much of the surrounding region.
When the story opens, my family is scattered across the world. My eldest sister Lorraine is living in the United States, a country she has called home for the past 15 years. Elaine is in New Zealand, where she has lived for 20 years. She is married to a New Zealander, with a daughter and works for Air New Zealand. My mother is in New Zealand, having moved there only a few years ago to help out with Elaine’s toddler daughter, Yazmin. My dad, who’d moved with my mother only to discover he didn’t much like New Zealand, is back in Singapore, where I live.
That year, Elaine discovers she has cancer of the bile duct, otherwise known as cholangiocarcinoma. It is a cancer as rare as it is aggressive, with a very low survival rate. She is diagnosed in May 2005, after collapsing on a plane en route to Los Angeles on a working trip. The doctors in the United States run a battery of tests on her – the results show nothing abnormal, except an elevated liver function.
When she returns to New Zealand, further tests reveal she has a growth in her bile duct – a congenital defect that is usually discovered in childhood and removed. But she has had no symptoms and the thing has grown inside her, malevolently, undisturbed. They perform major surgery on her, reorganising most of her major organs, removing not only her bile duct, but also her gall bladder, part of her pancreas and part of her liver. It is now mid-June.
In July, another blow – they analyse the tissue they cut out of her and find it cancerous. Stage 3 cancer.
In August, she begins chemotherapy.
By November, the cancer has spread to her liver and lungs.
At the end of January 2006, arriving for a chemotherapy session, she collapses on the steps of the hospital. Family converge, flying in from the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney. She stays in hospital for almost a month, before they release her in March.
A single agonised promise, extracted from me: "I won’t let Yazmin forget you."
She dies in April.
From diagnosis to death: nine months.
She was 36.
*
What happens to an unshared memory? What happens when the person who features the most, your partner in crime and time, is about to leave you, to become but a memory herself? What will become of you, left behind, with no one to turn to laughingly and say: "Do you remember?" No one to add details, to fill in the blanks. Will doubt start to creep in? "Maybe it didn’t happen exactly as I remembered it." "Maybe it was a figment of my imagination." "Maybe I made it all up, maybe I read it in a book or watched it in a movie instead." Might the day come when you wonder if such a moment ever existed at all?
Unless of course, you write them all down. Scribble these shared memories feverishly as you travel the distance between Hong Kong and Auckland. Pushing at the limits of your memory, dredging, sifting, and cherry-picking to see what jewel you can come up with to share with her. You think it might help her while away the interminable hours in bed, amuse her while she lies bored and listless on her hospital pillows.
But you would never have dreamed how precious this exercise would turn out to be for the both of you. You could never have guessed the eagerness of her response, the way her eyes would light up in her thin face at a particularly fond memory, as you both tumble back in time, back to somewhere without pain or suffering. So you talk and laugh, and she grips your hand and says, "Yes! We were crazy!" or "I'd forgotten all about that".
And you have never been more grateful for your memory, sitting with your sister by her bedside during those long afternoons in the last few months of her life.
You realise that this will be your biggest job here - to make those sterile hospital walls and her present harsh realities melt away through the power of your words and the equally strong power of your memories. Who would have known that that hastily scrawled list would acquire such poignancy and resonance? You will hold off her pain, speak until you have no voice, speak until you run out of words, stave off Death himself if you have to. You will enclose her in a soft web with the only magic you know - memory, words and music. With the songs you used to sing, the games you used to play, food you used to eat, things you used to do, people you used to know... Conjuring up the past and its attendant glories, making it all shimmering and new again for her, unfurling it before her very eyes, and sending it rippling across the room like a glorious carpet. This, then, will be your last gift to her, the only meaningful thing left you can give her.
It starts with three simple words. "Do you remember...?"
*
"Let’s play Lego," Elaine would lean down to me late at night, whisper in my ear while I was hovering at the edge of sleep. I would bolt upright, excited. “OK!”
“Ha ha - just kidding!” She would laugh with malicious glee at my ensuing look of chagrin.
I was seven. She was 11. It would be 10.30 at night. It would not have been the first time she would do this to me. And hopeful fool that I was, it would not be the last.
We were playmates from birth, in a family of three girls. I was the youngest, the baby of the family - cherished, spoiled, adored. My two older sisters were the twin axes of my world. Wherever they led, I would follow as fast as my little legs would carry me. I was always struggling to keep up as we splashed through a sunlit childhood. I learned to swim, bike, and climb trees, in a bid not to be left behind.
Lorraine was my hero. Eight years older, athletically and academically gifted, she was worshipped, not just by me but by an admiring horde of cousins, classmates, friends and relatives. She taught me to play tennis and how to say “sorry”, instilled an enduring love of Arthurian novels and historical fiction in me. She gave me piggyback rides and would swap my leaky mask with her own watertight one when snorkeling in unfamiliar seas.
Elaine was more my contemporary – five years older than me, she was not distanced by the lofty title of "Big Sister" that Lorraine had, nor the more adult concerns that started to increasingly preoccupy Lorraine as she entered adolescence – competitive sports, friends, studies. Elaine played with me, fought with me, shared a room with me. Our desks were side by side, as were our beds. We had tea parties with our stuffed animals, with miniature porcelain tea sets, dressed in clothes that had been hand sewn by our nannies. Our universe was more closely shared, intertwined in a way that seemed inescapable.
Together, the three of us formed a magic circle within which I felt safe, loved, protected. Growing up in an era where we saw the all-too successful fruits of a government campaign introduced in the 1970s to limit the number of children born, I knew so many families that comprised parents and two children. We were special, by virtue of the fact that we were three. The magic number in earliest legend – myth, fable or fairy tale. Three daughters, three caskets, three choices. Think The Merchant of Venice and its three caskets of gold, silver and bronze; Beauty and the Beast; King Lear; even Charlie's Angels. Indeed, we were Charlie’s Angels. My dad’s name was Charlie and one of his friends came up with the joke which stuck. Elaine declared herself Jaclyn Smith (prescient, as she grew up to be strikingly beautiful) and Lorraine was the appropriately tomboyish Kate Jackson. So I had to be Farrah Fawcett (later Cheryl Ladd), whether I liked it or not.
As children, our universe was defined by the things we played with and the games we came up with through the sheer force of our imaginations. In the early days, when Lorraine was still young enough to play with us, one of our favourite games was to pretend that we were members of a ship's crew. We spread out a mattress on the floor and placed a ladder right in the middle, Lorraine would perch right at the top of it with a pair of binoculars, enjoying her role as the captain, and making pronouncements like "Land ahoy!" The rest of us - younger siblings and cousins - would run about to perform her commands, being nothing more than lowly scullery boys.
Another game we loved to play, just Elaine and I, was a one she invented, called shipwreck. It had to be played at night because the darkness made it all the more thrilling. We'd creep into the bathroom without switching on the lights, and clamber up to the bathroom window, perching ourselves precariously on the rim of the bathtub. Then gripping the windowsill tightly, we would start to swing wildly from side to side, screaming, "Help! Shipwreck!" To increase the drama of the situation, Elaine would always pretend to slip and fall; whereupon I would have to reach down and pull her up with one hand as she shrieked like a banshee. I always wondered why no one ever came to shut us up; we must have made a racket.
Elaine's own affections were centred on Noddy, the character created by Enid Blyton about a little wooden boy who lives in Toyland. Someone had given her a Noddy doll when she had been little, quite a big doll quite unusually made of a spongy material. He had a bell buried inside his head, so that when you shook him, you could hear it ring faintly. Elaine had loved this doll and slept with it every night as a little girl, rubbing its nose to comfort herself as she drifted off to sleep. Not surprisingly, the material slowly wore away. By the time I came along and became old enough to know about Noddy, he had morphed into a grotesque version of his former self. The sponge had hardened and darkened. Worse, his face had completely worn away, so that you could see only the large bell and spring concealed in his head.
Her nanny had gone back to the store and bought a brand new Noddy doll for Elaine, hoping she could entice the child to transfer her affections and throw away the ruined doll. But Elaine dug in her heels and abjectly refused. The new Noddy doll stayed in the cupboard, pristine and untouched. Instead, she fashioned a nest for her old Noddy out of a sturdy white Valentino shoe box, lining it with a yellow satin pillow.
Lorraine doubled over in mirth when she saw the box. "Hahaha! That's perfect - you've made Noddy his own coffin!" Elaine wasn't amused. Her affections for him clearly remained undimmed, even though she had stopped rubbing away at his face. She would place the box in her bed at night, but put it in the cupboard in the day, as though acknowledging that he was not a pretty sight. As time went on, Noddy spent more and more time in the cupboard, but she could not bring herself to throw him away until she was well into her teens.
*
It was late June when I received a call from my mother.
Chuen and I were in the middle of getting ready for our move to Hong Kong. We’d already found an apartment we liked in the neighbourhood of Tsing Yi and was considered big by Hong Kong standards, at a little over a thousand square feet. What had sealed the deal were the astounding views out across the bay, to more apartments across the water and majestic mountains behind them.
Coming back to Singapore, we were confronted with all the loose ends that accompanied a move. I was serving one month's notice period, editing proofs and stories at my desk, when my mother called and the axis of my world shifted forever.
"Charmaine?" Her voice over the line was teary, high-pitched.
"Mom?" My breathing quickened. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"The tests just came back from the lab." Her words tumbled out in a rush. "The tissue they cut out of Elaine during the operation and sent for testing? The results have come back positive. She has cancer. It's stage three."
My brain went into deep freeze for a while. I didn't know much about cancer but stage three didn’t sound good to me. Didn’t that mean it was quite advanced? I must have repeated her words back to her like a dummy because my colleague, Yi Lian, whose desk faced mine, slowly raised her head till I could see her face over the top of the cubicle partition. She was looking at me with concern.
The rest of the conversation was a blur to me. I remember that when the information sank in, the tears finally hit. I was trying to comfort my mother, saying again and again "It's going to be alright" but not really believing it myself. By the time we hung up, I was crouched over my desk, weeping. Yi Lian came over, eyes wide as saucers, and put her arms round me and hugged me tight. I held on to her as if I were drowning.
How could this happen? We had grown up in a family that had been blessedly untouched by Death. Suffering, illness, accidents, injury and loss were things that happened in books, in movies or to Other People. The people in our circle, the people we knew and loved just were. We took it for granted, took each other for granted.
And my sisters were people I took very much for granted, especially since we had lived apart for so long, on three separate continents for the better parts of our lives. I never realised till then how much I relied on just knowing that they were there, like having the moon in the sky at night or the sun rise each morning. The three of us were a categorical imperative, the three legs of a tripod, the three points of a magic circle that had always been my safe zone. No longer. I knew then that the circle was about to be broken. Only then, on the cusp of losing one of my tripod legs, teetering as the balance of my life inexorably shifted, did I begin to realise how much that bond had undergirded my very existence.
It became clear to me what I had to do. I finished my notice period in early July, got on a plane and headed straight for Auckland, flying into the City of Sails on July 6th. I had a week to spend, all I could spare given the time frame of my move. I was familiar with the city, visiting it enough so that it was one of the few I counted as a spare home, no matter where I was in the world.
Elaine was skinnier than usual, tiring easily and unable to walk upright, but her spirit was strong. She refused to treat the diagnosis as a death knell and talked about all the things she would do when she got better. She was as prickly as ever, and did not hesitate to confront me about the lack of concern I had shown her with regard to her operation. So many people called to find out how she was doing, both before and after she went under the knife.
"Lorraine called, so did Leigh, often," she said accusingly. "Even my brother-in-law Scott called to find out how I was doing. But the one person i thought was closest to me didn't." I squirmed silently. "I kept wondering why. We kept thinking up reasons why you didn't. Lorraine kept saying you were busy, but how busy did you have to be to keep from picking up the phone?"
Suddenly, it all made sense. For so long, I had seen her as emotionally demanding and self-absorbed, always seeking attention. And so she had been. So I guess it had been easy for me, not understanding how grave the situation had been, to dismiss this whole episode as yet another one of her ploys to get attention. But this time I had been wrong. And I saw clearly for the first time how it had appeared to her, how hurt she must have been. My annoyed, guilty defensiveness vanished, replaced with an overwhelming remorse.
I looked across the room to where she was sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed. We were in Mum's house, in the guest bedroom where she often slept when she stayed over. Mum was knitting, and Yazmin absorbed in a colouring book. I wanted to rush over to her, kneel at her feet, bathe her lap in my tears and put my arms round her. But my feet had turned to stone. Ours had never been that type of relationship anyway. I stayed put. "I'm sorry," I said, tears starting to trickle down my face. "I'm sorry." I couldn’t say anymore, couldn’t explain further. All my words seemed stuck at the back of my throat.
Just as well that she didn't need them. "It doesn't matter," she shook her head, staring into space, focusing on something within her internal landscape. "After all, look who got the plane and came right over to see me? No one else has."
And in that, she had the last, and fittingly final, word. I had been forgiven and the matter was never raised again.
All in all, it turned out to be a strange week. Mum was on edge, which was understandable given the situation but the relationship between her and Elaine, never good at the best of times, strained to the point of breaking. I found myself playing policeman or peacemaker more often than I would have liked. When they had their spats, I usually got both sides of the story, and most of the time, the blame could be pretty evenly divided between the two of them. But that week, I have to say that Mum bore most of the blame. I couldn’t understand her. She seemed to function on some extreme edge of sensitivity – like her skin had been rubbed raw and anything Elaine did or said chafed her beyond endurance. Elaine couldn’t seem to do anything right - be it switching on the lights for Mum to knit, offering her a pear, asking her to watch a film, or seeking her help to cook a chicken stew.
I watched as Elaine grew angrier and angrier, trying to control her fury, until one day it burst right out. We were at Elaine's house in Piha. Elaine wanted to go to town and window shop, but Mum was cooking something and reluctant to go. They traded words until Elaine's self control broke. She screamed at Mum: "I am dying, do you understand? Why are you still doing this to me?" She stood at the top of the stairs, her slight form shaking with fury.
I ran upstairs to Elaine. I acted instinctively, out of the pure need to protect my sister and defend her. As Mum screamed back at her, I put my hands over Elaine's ears.
Then I started speaking to her. I had no idea what I was going to say until the words came out, but I just had the most awful glimpse into my sister’s life as it was then – caught between a mother who didn’t know how to pull back her love from the edge of angry self-destruction and a husband whose egocentric, unreasonable ways drove everyone around him crazy. If anyone needed a boost of positive energy at that moment it was my sister. Because she needed it to stay sane amidst this insanity; because she needed to be armed for her fight against the illness that was eating her up alive; because I didn’t know the last time anyone had told her anything good about herself.
“Listen to me,” I said, my eyes meeting and locking with hers in desperation. “I love you.”
“You’ve been the best sister in the world to me,” I continued as tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“You mean the world to me,” I enunciated this clearly, as she nodded, trembling within my grasp.
I repeated every good thing I could think of, using my words as a shield to keep out the negative words that were coming from my mother. When Mum finally ran silent, I turned to her and said coldly, "If you don't want to come, we can go without you." She kept quiet, then started up the stairs. Elaine sighed and rested her forehead against mine for a moment, giving my fingers a quick squeeze. Then we all got into the car.
*
I was relieved when my week in Auckland drew to a close. The stressful situation made me miss my cheerful husband all the more and there were so many things I had to take care of back home – we were in the middle of all the preparations of packing up our lives in Singapore. Yet, I knew that I’d never regret taking the time to come out to see her.
I also worried about how Elaine would cope with Mum after I left, seeing the toll of stress it was taking on their relationship. Still, it wasn’t something Elaine wasn’t used to handling. Indeed, listening to her talk about the future, I marvelled at her bravery. She always used the word "when", never "if" when she spoke of what she would do when she got back to work, places she wanted to travel to, the fact that she planned to come see me in Hong Kong. She was so excited about my move, maybe even more excited than I was.
"When are you due to be in Hong Kong?" she asked.
"Next month," I said.
"I can come and stay with you whenever I fly into Hong Kong!" she exclaimed. "We can go shopping and eat all that wonderful food!" She loved Hong Kong, had been there often enough as a flight attendant for Air New Zealand. "Do you know where you are going to live?"
"Tsing Yi," I replied. "We went there last month on a trip to have a look at the properties and we really liked that area. So we have already chosen the apartment - it has great views of the water."
"Tsing Yi? Is it near that big bridge on the way from the airport to the city?" she asked. I shouldn't have been surprised that out of all the people we had mentioned the area to, it was only my travel-savvy sister who had an immediate inkling of where it was.
"Yup. We liked it because it was so spacious. We looked at properties on the Island, but so many of them were so congested. Our place has three bedrooms, one of which will be for guests so there will be more than enough room for you to come visit and stay."
We were strolling along Piha Beach, near Elaine's home north of Auckland City. It was winter and the wind was brisk, so the beach was deserted. Yazmin and my mother were walking ahead of us. Elaine was still recovering from her operation so she had to move slowly, slightly hunched over because of the big scar that ran across her belly. Occasionally, she had to hold on to my arm for support but we were in high spirits that day, enjoying the crisp bite of the air and believing that she would find a way to beat the cancer that had just been diagnosed.
"I can't wait to come and see you. It's been a while since I was in Hong Kong," she said. "I really like the street food – I always buy the fish balls and tofu from those stalls they have along the road. I pour on all the sauces - it is SO good! Oh, I am so excited!"
I can still see her profile, etched against the brilliant clarity of that winter afternoon as sand, sea and sky merged into a blinding whole. Hearing her talk like that, how could I not be optimistic? Of course she would recover from this cancer, of course she would soon be back at work, of course she would soon be in Hong Kong to visit me. The alternative would be unthinkable.
This is how my sister falls ill.
The disease first makes its appearance in May 2005. At the time, the world is doing its own thing - Michael Jackson is facing molestation charges and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has just been elected Pope Benedict XVI. Just a few months later, Hurricane Katrina would smash into New Orleans, decimating the city and much of the surrounding region.
When the story opens, my family is scattered across the world. My eldest sister Lorraine is living in the United States, a country she has called home for the past 15 years. Elaine is in New Zealand, where she has lived for 20 years. She is married to a New Zealander, with a daughter and works for Air New Zealand. My mother is in New Zealand, having moved there only a few years ago to help out with Elaine’s toddler daughter, Yazmin. My dad, who’d moved with my mother only to discover he didn’t much like New Zealand, is back in Singapore, where I live.
That year, Elaine discovers she has cancer of the bile duct, otherwise known as cholangiocarcinoma. It is a cancer as rare as it is aggressive, with a very low survival rate. She is diagnosed in May 2005, after collapsing on a plane en route to Los Angeles on a working trip. The doctors in the United States run a battery of tests on her – the results show nothing abnormal, except an elevated liver function.
When she returns to New Zealand, further tests reveal she has a growth in her bile duct – a congenital defect that is usually discovered in childhood and removed. But she has had no symptoms and the thing has grown inside her, malevolently, undisturbed. They perform major surgery on her, reorganising most of her major organs, removing not only her bile duct, but also her gall bladder, part of her pancreas and part of her liver. It is now mid-June.
In July, another blow – they analyse the tissue they cut out of her and find it cancerous. Stage 3 cancer.
In August, she begins chemotherapy.
By November, the cancer has spread to her liver and lungs.
At the end of January 2006, arriving for a chemotherapy session, she collapses on the steps of the hospital. Family converge, flying in from the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney. She stays in hospital for almost a month, before they release her in March.
A single agonised promise, extracted from me: "I won’t let Yazmin forget you."
She dies in April.
From diagnosis to death: nine months.
She was 36.
*
What happens to an unshared memory? What happens when the person who features the most, your partner in crime and time, is about to leave you, to become but a memory herself? What will become of you, left behind, with no one to turn to laughingly and say: "Do you remember?" No one to add details, to fill in the blanks. Will doubt start to creep in? "Maybe it didn’t happen exactly as I remembered it." "Maybe it was a figment of my imagination." "Maybe I made it all up, maybe I read it in a book or watched it in a movie instead." Might the day come when you wonder if such a moment ever existed at all?
Unless of course, you write them all down. Scribble these shared memories feverishly as you travel the distance between Hong Kong and Auckland. Pushing at the limits of your memory, dredging, sifting, and cherry-picking to see what jewel you can come up with to share with her. You think it might help her while away the interminable hours in bed, amuse her while she lies bored and listless on her hospital pillows.
But you would never have dreamed how precious this exercise would turn out to be for the both of you. You could never have guessed the eagerness of her response, the way her eyes would light up in her thin face at a particularly fond memory, as you both tumble back in time, back to somewhere without pain or suffering. So you talk and laugh, and she grips your hand and says, "Yes! We were crazy!" or "I'd forgotten all about that".
And you have never been more grateful for your memory, sitting with your sister by her bedside during those long afternoons in the last few months of her life.
You realise that this will be your biggest job here - to make those sterile hospital walls and her present harsh realities melt away through the power of your words and the equally strong power of your memories. Who would have known that that hastily scrawled list would acquire such poignancy and resonance? You will hold off her pain, speak until you have no voice, speak until you run out of words, stave off Death himself if you have to. You will enclose her in a soft web with the only magic you know - memory, words and music. With the songs you used to sing, the games you used to play, food you used to eat, things you used to do, people you used to know... Conjuring up the past and its attendant glories, making it all shimmering and new again for her, unfurling it before her very eyes, and sending it rippling across the room like a glorious carpet. This, then, will be your last gift to her, the only meaningful thing left you can give her.
It starts with three simple words. "Do you remember...?"
*
"Let’s play Lego," Elaine would lean down to me late at night, whisper in my ear while I was hovering at the edge of sleep. I would bolt upright, excited. “OK!”
“Ha ha - just kidding!” She would laugh with malicious glee at my ensuing look of chagrin.
I was seven. She was 11. It would be 10.30 at night. It would not have been the first time she would do this to me. And hopeful fool that I was, it would not be the last.
We were playmates from birth, in a family of three girls. I was the youngest, the baby of the family - cherished, spoiled, adored. My two older sisters were the twin axes of my world. Wherever they led, I would follow as fast as my little legs would carry me. I was always struggling to keep up as we splashed through a sunlit childhood. I learned to swim, bike, and climb trees, in a bid not to be left behind.
Lorraine was my hero. Eight years older, athletically and academically gifted, she was worshipped, not just by me but by an admiring horde of cousins, classmates, friends and relatives. She taught me to play tennis and how to say “sorry”, instilled an enduring love of Arthurian novels and historical fiction in me. She gave me piggyback rides and would swap my leaky mask with her own watertight one when snorkeling in unfamiliar seas.
Elaine was more my contemporary – five years older than me, she was not distanced by the lofty title of "Big Sister" that Lorraine had, nor the more adult concerns that started to increasingly preoccupy Lorraine as she entered adolescence – competitive sports, friends, studies. Elaine played with me, fought with me, shared a room with me. Our desks were side by side, as were our beds. We had tea parties with our stuffed animals, with miniature porcelain tea sets, dressed in clothes that had been hand sewn by our nannies. Our universe was more closely shared, intertwined in a way that seemed inescapable.
Together, the three of us formed a magic circle within which I felt safe, loved, protected. Growing up in an era where we saw the all-too successful fruits of a government campaign introduced in the 1970s to limit the number of children born, I knew so many families that comprised parents and two children. We were special, by virtue of the fact that we were three. The magic number in earliest legend – myth, fable or fairy tale. Three daughters, three caskets, three choices. Think The Merchant of Venice and its three caskets of gold, silver and bronze; Beauty and the Beast; King Lear; even Charlie's Angels. Indeed, we were Charlie’s Angels. My dad’s name was Charlie and one of his friends came up with the joke which stuck. Elaine declared herself Jaclyn Smith (prescient, as she grew up to be strikingly beautiful) and Lorraine was the appropriately tomboyish Kate Jackson. So I had to be Farrah Fawcett (later Cheryl Ladd), whether I liked it or not.
As children, our universe was defined by the things we played with and the games we came up with through the sheer force of our imaginations. In the early days, when Lorraine was still young enough to play with us, one of our favourite games was to pretend that we were members of a ship's crew. We spread out a mattress on the floor and placed a ladder right in the middle, Lorraine would perch right at the top of it with a pair of binoculars, enjoying her role as the captain, and making pronouncements like "Land ahoy!" The rest of us - younger siblings and cousins - would run about to perform her commands, being nothing more than lowly scullery boys.
Another game we loved to play, just Elaine and I, was a one she invented, called shipwreck. It had to be played at night because the darkness made it all the more thrilling. We'd creep into the bathroom without switching on the lights, and clamber up to the bathroom window, perching ourselves precariously on the rim of the bathtub. Then gripping the windowsill tightly, we would start to swing wildly from side to side, screaming, "Help! Shipwreck!" To increase the drama of the situation, Elaine would always pretend to slip and fall; whereupon I would have to reach down and pull her up with one hand as she shrieked like a banshee. I always wondered why no one ever came to shut us up; we must have made a racket.
Elaine's own affections were centred on Noddy, the character created by Enid Blyton about a little wooden boy who lives in Toyland. Someone had given her a Noddy doll when she had been little, quite a big doll quite unusually made of a spongy material. He had a bell buried inside his head, so that when you shook him, you could hear it ring faintly. Elaine had loved this doll and slept with it every night as a little girl, rubbing its nose to comfort herself as she drifted off to sleep. Not surprisingly, the material slowly wore away. By the time I came along and became old enough to know about Noddy, he had morphed into a grotesque version of his former self. The sponge had hardened and darkened. Worse, his face had completely worn away, so that you could see only the large bell and spring concealed in his head.
Her nanny had gone back to the store and bought a brand new Noddy doll for Elaine, hoping she could entice the child to transfer her affections and throw away the ruined doll. But Elaine dug in her heels and abjectly refused. The new Noddy doll stayed in the cupboard, pristine and untouched. Instead, she fashioned a nest for her old Noddy out of a sturdy white Valentino shoe box, lining it with a yellow satin pillow.
Lorraine doubled over in mirth when she saw the box. "Hahaha! That's perfect - you've made Noddy his own coffin!" Elaine wasn't amused. Her affections for him clearly remained undimmed, even though she had stopped rubbing away at his face. She would place the box in her bed at night, but put it in the cupboard in the day, as though acknowledging that he was not a pretty sight. As time went on, Noddy spent more and more time in the cupboard, but she could not bring herself to throw him away until she was well into her teens.
*
It was late June when I received a call from my mother.
Chuen and I were in the middle of getting ready for our move to Hong Kong. We’d already found an apartment we liked in the neighbourhood of Tsing Yi and was considered big by Hong Kong standards, at a little over a thousand square feet. What had sealed the deal were the astounding views out across the bay, to more apartments across the water and majestic mountains behind them.
Coming back to Singapore, we were confronted with all the loose ends that accompanied a move. I was serving one month's notice period, editing proofs and stories at my desk, when my mother called and the axis of my world shifted forever.
"Charmaine?" Her voice over the line was teary, high-pitched.
"Mom?" My breathing quickened. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"The tests just came back from the lab." Her words tumbled out in a rush. "The tissue they cut out of Elaine during the operation and sent for testing? The results have come back positive. She has cancer. It's stage three."
My brain went into deep freeze for a while. I didn't know much about cancer but stage three didn’t sound good to me. Didn’t that mean it was quite advanced? I must have repeated her words back to her like a dummy because my colleague, Yi Lian, whose desk faced mine, slowly raised her head till I could see her face over the top of the cubicle partition. She was looking at me with concern.
The rest of the conversation was a blur to me. I remember that when the information sank in, the tears finally hit. I was trying to comfort my mother, saying again and again "It's going to be alright" but not really believing it myself. By the time we hung up, I was crouched over my desk, weeping. Yi Lian came over, eyes wide as saucers, and put her arms round me and hugged me tight. I held on to her as if I were drowning.
How could this happen? We had grown up in a family that had been blessedly untouched by Death. Suffering, illness, accidents, injury and loss were things that happened in books, in movies or to Other People. The people in our circle, the people we knew and loved just were. We took it for granted, took each other for granted.
And my sisters were people I took very much for granted, especially since we had lived apart for so long, on three separate continents for the better parts of our lives. I never realised till then how much I relied on just knowing that they were there, like having the moon in the sky at night or the sun rise each morning. The three of us were a categorical imperative, the three legs of a tripod, the three points of a magic circle that had always been my safe zone. No longer. I knew then that the circle was about to be broken. Only then, on the cusp of losing one of my tripod legs, teetering as the balance of my life inexorably shifted, did I begin to realise how much that bond had undergirded my very existence.
It became clear to me what I had to do. I finished my notice period in early July, got on a plane and headed straight for Auckland, flying into the City of Sails on July 6th. I had a week to spend, all I could spare given the time frame of my move. I was familiar with the city, visiting it enough so that it was one of the few I counted as a spare home, no matter where I was in the world.
Elaine was skinnier than usual, tiring easily and unable to walk upright, but her spirit was strong. She refused to treat the diagnosis as a death knell and talked about all the things she would do when she got better. She was as prickly as ever, and did not hesitate to confront me about the lack of concern I had shown her with regard to her operation. So many people called to find out how she was doing, both before and after she went under the knife.
"Lorraine called, so did Leigh, often," she said accusingly. "Even my brother-in-law Scott called to find out how I was doing. But the one person i thought was closest to me didn't." I squirmed silently. "I kept wondering why. We kept thinking up reasons why you didn't. Lorraine kept saying you were busy, but how busy did you have to be to keep from picking up the phone?"
Suddenly, it all made sense. For so long, I had seen her as emotionally demanding and self-absorbed, always seeking attention. And so she had been. So I guess it had been easy for me, not understanding how grave the situation had been, to dismiss this whole episode as yet another one of her ploys to get attention. But this time I had been wrong. And I saw clearly for the first time how it had appeared to her, how hurt she must have been. My annoyed, guilty defensiveness vanished, replaced with an overwhelming remorse.
I looked across the room to where she was sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed. We were in Mum's house, in the guest bedroom where she often slept when she stayed over. Mum was knitting, and Yazmin absorbed in a colouring book. I wanted to rush over to her, kneel at her feet, bathe her lap in my tears and put my arms round her. But my feet had turned to stone. Ours had never been that type of relationship anyway. I stayed put. "I'm sorry," I said, tears starting to trickle down my face. "I'm sorry." I couldn’t say anymore, couldn’t explain further. All my words seemed stuck at the back of my throat.
Just as well that she didn't need them. "It doesn't matter," she shook her head, staring into space, focusing on something within her internal landscape. "After all, look who got the plane and came right over to see me? No one else has."
And in that, she had the last, and fittingly final, word. I had been forgiven and the matter was never raised again.
All in all, it turned out to be a strange week. Mum was on edge, which was understandable given the situation but the relationship between her and Elaine, never good at the best of times, strained to the point of breaking. I found myself playing policeman or peacemaker more often than I would have liked. When they had their spats, I usually got both sides of the story, and most of the time, the blame could be pretty evenly divided between the two of them. But that week, I have to say that Mum bore most of the blame. I couldn’t understand her. She seemed to function on some extreme edge of sensitivity – like her skin had been rubbed raw and anything Elaine did or said chafed her beyond endurance. Elaine couldn’t seem to do anything right - be it switching on the lights for Mum to knit, offering her a pear, asking her to watch a film, or seeking her help to cook a chicken stew.
I watched as Elaine grew angrier and angrier, trying to control her fury, until one day it burst right out. We were at Elaine's house in Piha. Elaine wanted to go to town and window shop, but Mum was cooking something and reluctant to go. They traded words until Elaine's self control broke. She screamed at Mum: "I am dying, do you understand? Why are you still doing this to me?" She stood at the top of the stairs, her slight form shaking with fury.
I ran upstairs to Elaine. I acted instinctively, out of the pure need to protect my sister and defend her. As Mum screamed back at her, I put my hands over Elaine's ears.
Then I started speaking to her. I had no idea what I was going to say until the words came out, but I just had the most awful glimpse into my sister’s life as it was then – caught between a mother who didn’t know how to pull back her love from the edge of angry self-destruction and a husband whose egocentric, unreasonable ways drove everyone around him crazy. If anyone needed a boost of positive energy at that moment it was my sister. Because she needed it to stay sane amidst this insanity; because she needed to be armed for her fight against the illness that was eating her up alive; because I didn’t know the last time anyone had told her anything good about herself.
“Listen to me,” I said, my eyes meeting and locking with hers in desperation. “I love you.”
“You’ve been the best sister in the world to me,” I continued as tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“You mean the world to me,” I enunciated this clearly, as she nodded, trembling within my grasp.
I repeated every good thing I could think of, using my words as a shield to keep out the negative words that were coming from my mother. When Mum finally ran silent, I turned to her and said coldly, "If you don't want to come, we can go without you." She kept quiet, then started up the stairs. Elaine sighed and rested her forehead against mine for a moment, giving my fingers a quick squeeze. Then we all got into the car.
*
I was relieved when my week in Auckland drew to a close. The stressful situation made me miss my cheerful husband all the more and there were so many things I had to take care of back home – we were in the middle of all the preparations of packing up our lives in Singapore. Yet, I knew that I’d never regret taking the time to come out to see her.
I also worried about how Elaine would cope with Mum after I left, seeing the toll of stress it was taking on their relationship. Still, it wasn’t something Elaine wasn’t used to handling. Indeed, listening to her talk about the future, I marvelled at her bravery. She always used the word "when", never "if" when she spoke of what she would do when she got back to work, places she wanted to travel to, the fact that she planned to come see me in Hong Kong. She was so excited about my move, maybe even more excited than I was.
"When are you due to be in Hong Kong?" she asked.
"Next month," I said.
"I can come and stay with you whenever I fly into Hong Kong!" she exclaimed. "We can go shopping and eat all that wonderful food!" She loved Hong Kong, had been there often enough as a flight attendant for Air New Zealand. "Do you know where you are going to live?"
"Tsing Yi," I replied. "We went there last month on a trip to have a look at the properties and we really liked that area. So we have already chosen the apartment - it has great views of the water."
"Tsing Yi? Is it near that big bridge on the way from the airport to the city?" she asked. I shouldn't have been surprised that out of all the people we had mentioned the area to, it was only my travel-savvy sister who had an immediate inkling of where it was.
"Yup. We liked it because it was so spacious. We looked at properties on the Island, but so many of them were so congested. Our place has three bedrooms, one of which will be for guests so there will be more than enough room for you to come visit and stay."
We were strolling along Piha Beach, near Elaine's home north of Auckland City. It was winter and the wind was brisk, so the beach was deserted. Yazmin and my mother were walking ahead of us. Elaine was still recovering from her operation so she had to move slowly, slightly hunched over because of the big scar that ran across her belly. Occasionally, she had to hold on to my arm for support but we were in high spirits that day, enjoying the crisp bite of the air and believing that she would find a way to beat the cancer that had just been diagnosed.
"I can't wait to come and see you. It's been a while since I was in Hong Kong," she said. "I really like the street food – I always buy the fish balls and tofu from those stalls they have along the road. I pour on all the sauces - it is SO good! Oh, I am so excited!"
I can still see her profile, etched against the brilliant clarity of that winter afternoon as sand, sea and sky merged into a blinding whole. Hearing her talk like that, how could I not be optimistic? Of course she would recover from this cancer, of course she would soon be back at work, of course she would soon be in Hong Kong to visit me. The alternative would be unthinkable.
Charmaine Chan is a freelance copy- and sub-editor currently based in Shanghai. In her previous lives, she has been a lawyer in Singapore, a church worker in Hong Kong and a journalist in Guam. She has a passion for travel, dogs and curry puffs. The Magic Circle is her first book.
