Fiction by Roger B Rueda
They’ve spent ages looking for Lucy’s body, but they've only found Boroboníka, a big smuggled girl mannequin her aunt from Manila gave her. Lucy would cuddle the mannequin, which was as big as she was, and carry it to their rented rice farm, which was a mile away from their house and to which there was a path through the grazing land. There, they would play Wendy house with the neighbourhood children.
A wealthy family from Iloilo City, who own all the plots of land in the barangay, built a manor house in the middle of the farm; they visit here once in a while. Some superstitious locals think that a sasquatch, commonly known as
kapre, lives there. So, no one would go there save us, who then were mischievous children, and some student pastors who would do missionary work for a Baptist church. Only once did I see the whole family at the manor house when their father, a famous fiddler, performed. His wife was perfectly made up and fashionably dressed. She had a fruity voice. Her hairstyle looked simply great. The two daughters behaved beautifully.
Lucy’s only brother, Amorsolo or Solo, all of three, saw Boroboníka’s head sticking out from the mud in the thickets. They thought it might be the corpse at first, but soon realised it was only a mannequin.
I certainly don’t remember how Boroboníka came to be with me. Perhaps, Lucy’s mother loathed it and squawked that she wanted it hidden from sight, because my brother found it in a dumping ground near our house. My brother salvaged the mannequin from a bonfire. Its dress got burned, so now Boroboníka has to dress up as angel or fairy or princess sometimes, and not as ordinary girl she used to be.
Twenty-three years later, Boroboníka lies latent on the ledge. It has been there ever since we cleared out my mother’s house.
Every so often, Boroboníka scares me. During the day it is just a tarnished old mannequin with lustrous eyes and a fading face. When viewed in the night, things change considerably. Night has a way of warping truth, taking everyday things and twisting them out of angle. I’d become a child again, a feeling of unclear dread turning my front as I stared through at it.
I recall the manor house as it had been before Lucy got lost. We would play Wendy house and I would ask her and her brother to gather hibiscus and okra from the garden near the thickets. But she went back and wanted to stay in the balcony. I got angry and pushed her and she fell off the balcony with her mannequin. Then, she fainted dead away. She cracked her head on the pavement and was bleeding. Uncle Raff was drying rice not far away. I was too nervous to speak and I went home, running fearfully. He saw me run away, scaring away the sparrows and the chickens coming to his grains of rice in bamboo mats. The next day, Lucy went missing. Her parents and the police subjected me to lengthy interrogations. Uncle Raff would look at me, his eyes were as if pinning the blame on me. I developed nervous problems after Uncle Raff began repeatedly blaming Lucy’s disappearance on me. I tried to commit suicide on several occasions. I was taken to casualty at a government hospital several times, too.
I had been watching it that morning, surveying the mannequin with bored rigid and weary eyes. Since leaving work, I spend most of my mornings in the same seat, watching the four walls about me. I had almost drifted off when I heard the phone. Its continual ringing quickly drowned my grisly thoughts, and I went out to the lobby to answer it.
A moment later, I picked up the handset. ‘Hello?’
The voice on the other end was an unfamiliar one. My cousin Virgie, who I met just once then and is my age, had a favour to ask. Her father, Uncle Raff, once a druggie, needed somewhere to stay while she went and pleasured herself with a five week trip with her church friends, in Kuala Lumpur. Virgie has little time for men because she’s married to her job at a sequestered TV station in Iloilo City. Five years ago when he had a minor stroke, which left him partly paralysed, Virgie went home from London to take care of his father. When Virgie were studying in Manila, Uncle Raff spent all his time working on the farm. Now, both of them live with a help who keeps house for them. Virgie’s mother died when she delivered her.
‘He says he’s OK to be left on his own,’ she said ‘but we all know he isn’t. We’d be so glad if you could.’
I shyly accepted. I’d never warmed to Uncle Raff, for reasons I can neither recall nor truly recognise. He’s a lone figure that walks through my childhood memories, with no ropes of sentiment or feeling binding him to me. I hadn’t seen him for decades, a state I remained entirely in two minds. Much as I opposed the idea, I didn’t want to seem standoffish, so it was decided he would come and stay. Pretending to be happy about this, I put the phone down.
Boroboníka, slumped as usual against the wall, stared at me. Mannequins can’t look at people, so I suppose I mean that I was staring at it. Either way, our eyes met. I know as much as the next sound person that she’s just a lifeless object, but there’s still something human about her that appeals to me. I suppose she makes me feel sentimental.
Uncle Raff arrived a few weeks later, and it was clear he had succumbed to the pitfalls of age as much as the poor mannequin on the mantelpiece. His face was mapped with creases and dips, brown eyes sunk back into their sockets. His hair has been reduced to smoky grey tufts between canyons of bare scalp.
‘Randy -’ his greeting was unkind, aloof. ‘Nice of you to have me.’
‘A pleasure -’
He’d brought a stuffy grey lounger from home, and I seated him in it prudently. Dust clung to it like Bermuda grass. We seated him few feet away from the TV. Boroboníka was almost hidden from view, tucked away in the corner of his eye. I saw him turn, glance at it, and immediately pull out his stare.
We seldom spoke, quickly adopting the template of an embittered married couple. I brought him his food and helped him to the toilet, carrying out boring tasks that required no talk. Every now and then I’d close the door and eat my food in the kitchen just to avoid talking to him. I’d sit there, listening to him watch the TV. There was a tacit awkwardness between us, one neither of us could properly place. I couldn’t anyway. Not at first.
At the end of his first week, he mentioned the mannequin. I felt as though he had wanted to since arriving, I envisage the words had been nagging at his lips all day and night.
‘What’s that?’
He knew faithfully what it was. I glanced coolly upwards from vacuuming. My hand gripped the side of his lounger.
‘Did you forget what happened?’
‘Yes, I do remember,’ he said inaudibly, anger stirring in his face. “But I thought I’d have to be seeing things.’
I sighed through gnashed teeth. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s glowering, is what it is. Why on earth would you put something like that up for everyone to see?’
‘It reminds me of her,’ I replied meekly. ‘Does it cause you a lot of trouble?’
‘It’s very strange, Randy. Very strange.’
That stayed with me for days.
One night, we were watching TV. He’d dozed off in the chair, and I was about to join him. As my eyelids fell dense over my vision, I suddenly caught sight of the mannequin, its face turned pryingly at me. As I stared at it, half asleep, my uncle’s words from floated back in my mind.
‘Why on earth would you put something like that up for everyone to see?’
I had shrugged, continuing my tidying. But the words returned to me, each one chiming with a chilling new meaning. I bolted straight, the shackles of sleep falling fast away. My eyes glided from Beleleng to Uncle, and back. Speedily realising I was almost totally in the dark, I leapt to my feet and made for the light switch.
Uncle Raff stirred in his chair.
‘Hey! What are you doing?’
‘It’s nothing to worry about.’
***
The following day, I took the mannequin from its fair perch and marched it upstairs with me while Uncle Raff had fallen asleep watching Eat Bulaga. In my bedroom, I took a damp cardboard box from the wardrobe and spilt the contents over the mattress of my bed.
Curling at the edges like fusty rolls, yellowed newspaper clippings tumbled onto the sheets. I searched through them, spreading each one out in search of a pattern.
There were pictures too, snapshots of the two of us standing together in matching dresses. We were both smiling, innocent smiles. I remembered how we would play in the forests.
I made a sour face in his direction. I wanted to fight the thoughts that were creeping back into my head, but instead I let them flow over me.
What if it had been him? I knew I was acting on irrational impulses, namely the evidence of a child’s mannequin, but I couldn’t stop myself. He had always been unusual, never having married or held a steady job. I’d eavesdrop on my mother and aunts talk pityingly of him, wishing he’d find a nice girl to settle down with. Strange that he didn’t. Stranger still was his strained and awkward relationship with me.
I tried desperately to make something of it, trawling my memories for any hints or clues. My recollections of her death are hazy in the extreme, and I’ll only occasionally remember the odd scene or snatch of dialogue in passing. I could possibly have repressed some of it, perhaps because of him.
One thing I do recall is the day of her memorial, with everyone clad in black and crying in the family room. I had been sent to play with my cousins, and when I returned everyone was sitting in the chairs, eating sandwiches and drinking Pepsi.
I asked what was wrong, and my question hung in the room for infinity. Then Uncle Raff had looked at me, giving me an aloof and hard-hearted look. I felt as though he’d taken a cold, bony finger and prodded it into the back of my spine. Then I had started to cry.
Thirty-two years later, and I was still crying. Crouched over my collaged papers, I failed to prevent a steady stream of tears rolling down my cheeks and into my mouth. If these cloudy speculations formed into a hard truth then the repercussions were huge. It also meant I was sharing a house with a child murderer. My blood boiled, chilled, ran in cold streams through my tones. I ran to the door suddenly and bolted it.
I picked up our photograph again, the snapshot in the lives of two little children. I was wearing a smug smile, my thick black hair bound in clumps. She presented a gap-toothed smile to the camera. Boroboníka hung from her hand, lopsided head and also looking inattentively into the lens.
I stroked it, a combination of faith and dreadfulness sluicing in the pits of my stomach.
***
I dropped the tray of food onto his lap and broke it on the floor. He winced with pain, and looked up at me with a flash of anger.
‘Do you mind not dropping it on me like that?’
‘I’m really sorry -’
I opened the draperies in a rush, and unwelcome light scattered into the room. That morning I decided that I should probe Uncle Raff about the subject which had irritated him so much the previous day. I sat down on the sofa opposite his armchair, and our eyes inexorably drifted towards Boroboníka.
‘Why didn’t you want me to have that mannequin up there?’
He grumbled into the hollow globe of his teacup. ‘It’s morbid, that’s all.’
‘How so?’
The wrath snuck up on his voice. ‘Because it’s the mannequin of a dead child. And it was used at the debriefing.’
I pounced on a particular word he had chosen. ‘Dead? You contented yourself by assuming she’s dead then?’
‘Of course she’s gone. We held a funeral.’
‘I know, but they never found her body, did they? You don’t think she - ran away?’
He turned, his wrinkled face taking an age to incline towards me. He raised his eyebrow slowly.
‘Do you think she ran away?’
I stopped his gaze. ‘Maybe -’
We both returned to watching the TV. A myriad of colours were thrown onto the face of the mannequin, which became animated under the rapidly changing lights. We sat in silence for a few hours, and then I helped him into bed. I returned to the living room, and watched the mannequin. It seemed unusual to find the pieces falling into place so long after the jigsaw had been thrown away, but perhaps things had been overlooked or rushed at the time. Uncle Raff had certainly been questioned by the police initially, but released due to lack of evidence.
Sitting alone with my thoughts, I quickly fell asleep and began to dream. I was walking through a farm, and everything was in sepia. Uncle Raff was calling to me from somewhere, but I only saw flashes of his face through the trees. I’m not sure whether he moved towards me or vice versa, but his white, wrinkled face was suddenly leering into my face behind a mask of branches and leaves.
Suddenly back in my house, we watched the TV and I told him not to scare me like that again. He chuckled stridently and his laughs mutated into knocks at the door. As I got up to answer, I shot a casual glance at the ledge. The mannequin was gone, and in its place a little girl. A dead girl. With empty eyes and a blood-spattered mouth and pale as a funeral parlour slab. I remember trying to yell.
When I awoke, the sitting room was cold and my mouth was dry. Dirty hair jutting out over the face, the mannequin was slumped forward. I heard shouting, vague and mimed, and ran to Uncle Raff’s room. He was sat in bed, looking helpless and weak. His whimpering face stared up at me like a scared child.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Sleeping. I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t get out of bed by myself.’
‘I know -’
I felt a pang of sympathy for him, a brief interval that quickly dissipated. I jerked him upright suddenly, and his face winced in pain.
‘What?’
‘Nothing - just my limb -’
I wasn’t thinking rationally at this point, already starting to satisfy myself that he had been held up in her death. I felt drawn to the mystery surrounding her, as though a shard of my own life was trapped there too. The two of us were inseparable as children, and it’s possible that he was involved with both of us. I realise now how twisted and perverted these thoughts were, but they seemed so vivid and real at the time.
‘Will you wash me and change my clothes?’
There was a painfully long silence.
‘I told Virgie I could manage by myself - but I’ve realised I can’t. I need a wash - could you help me in and out of the bath?’
The initial thought filled me with disgust, but then something got on at the back of mind.
‘Yes - no problem-’
It seemed perfect. A time for questions.
We agreed to have a bath the following night.
This gave me time to decide my questions, to confirm that I was doing the right thing. All that time, one empty mind spinning with fresh ideas. Within days I had decided he was the murderer. It felt like such a fitting assumption, and I wondered how it had not occurred to me before. After all, it was fact that murder victims were very likely to know their murderers.
My own childhood was also particularly dim. There were so many gaps, patches of white that I desperately wanted filled in. I suppose I can see now that I was searching for myself as much as I was her.
The following morning, I placed a ham sandwich on his lap. He murmured thanks, our conversations having slowed to bare minimum. Looking up at me, his eyes conveying an uncertainty.
‘About that bath?’
‘Yes, tonight.’
I began to walk away, casting a casual glance towards the back. He was doing exactly the same to me. Our eyes met in an awkward stare, and we both quickly returned to our separate activities.
I drew him a bath that night. I watched as the cool ceramic was filled with piping hot water.
Mist rose to the air and into my eyes. The mirrors turned silvery as they steamed over.
The temperature of the room rose inch by inch; the sweat running down my arms and mingling with the bathwater before I could stop it. I heard him coming. I heard the deep thuds of his walking frame as he made his way across the landing towards me. When he did finally emerge, our eyes refused to meet. Walking slowly to the bath, his cane fell from his grasping hands and hit the cool white tiles of the floor. The sound it produced made me feel like I’d been smacked in the teeth.
I had to take his clothes off him, working through each layer of clothes until we reached his bare and wizened flesh. Watching him standing in the cold sent a shiver down my spine. Age was a cruel, circular thing and in Uncle Raff’s spotted, stretched body I was seeing the worst it had to offer. I lowered him into the tub, the clear water making his body sway and ripple as though it wasn’t actually real.
‘I’ll just come back in a few minutes.’
I descended the staircase, entering the living room at an angle so that the mannequin was looking right at me. I walked over, lifting her from the seat she had occupied for almost forty years. A ring of dust remained as I raised the mannequin into my arms and carried her out of the room. Her head lolled in my lap, decaying face nodding against my heaving chest. I stroked the dress, stared hopelessly at the optimistic curve of her lips. For one awful moment I felt I was holding her, the dead child in my arms. It’s difficult to describe, but I felt the mannequin needed so desperately to be there, to hear whatever he had to say for himself.
I opened the bathroom door once more and saw the look of terror shadow his face as I brought her over the edge. His eyes darted about gracelessly.
‘What the hell are you holding that for?’
I ignored him, and placed the mannequin on the ridge. He was watching it, rather than me, as I stepped back to the bath and knelt down beside it. His head turned to me unexpectedly, still waiting for an answer.
‘Well?’
‘I want answers, Uncle Raff.’
‘I don't quite know what to say in answer to your question. Answers about what?’
‘About her.’
The muscles about his mouth twitched, his tongue stroking empty words. He spoke cautiously, each syllable sensibly vocalised.
‘What do you want to know, Randy?’
I felt my confidence failing. The sheer idiocy of the situation knocked me sick in the stomach, and I almost laughed with embarrassment. I almost stopped dead, but then I saw her face. The face that has always lived on in my memory, long after the death and decay of the original. I paused for what seemed like endless time, before finally soldiering on.
‘I think there might be something you’ve not told me. I think you may have been involved in her death.’
His eyes widened in what appeared to be genuine shock. Then, his face sunk back down. He didn’t answer my accusations, but rather directed a question back to me.
‘Do you remember her, Randy? Do you really remember her?’
I was puzzled by the question. Rather than bringing him back to my point, I decided to answer.
‘I remember her about as well as anybody else. Obviously, there are gaps.’
‘Really? And how much do you remember about her?’
A yearning smile wet my lips. ‘Ooh, a lot. Her crimped hair, her cute little garbs, her giggle - I really loved her -’
He sneered. Gooseflesh hove across my arm.
‘Are you - laughing?’
His clawed hand reached from the bathtub and grabbed my hand. Water ran from his skin to mine. His eyes were afire, more life burning inside of them than I had seen in many years.
‘You loathed her. Hated. You went out of your way to make her life a misery, didn’t you?’
I balked at the idea. ‘You’re lying! None of that’s true.’
‘You pushed her, you kicked her, and you tore her hair because it was nicer than yours. You were an absolute bitch to her, Randy, and only I ever seemed to notice…’
I shook my head in utter disrespect, pulling away from his limp grip on my arm.
‘You’re just taking attention away from yourself! You’re making all this up!’
‘And that mannequin - , you were so envious of that thing - you used to actually pull it out of her grasp, poor thing -’
A change had fallen over Boroboníka’s face. Before I had viewed it as a living being, the personification of her killer’s guilt. Now I saw only a child’s mannequin, an empty thing.
‘Can you really look me in the eye and tell me you’ve forgotten?’
I met his exasperated stare. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You were a horrid, malevolent little boy,’ his lip curled over with a strong and biting hate. ‘I always said that something would happen - ’
He was leading me somewhere with these questions, down a dark and dusty path. I let him take me there, dragged into his poisonous re-imagining of our past.
‘You’ve got some nerve - accusing me of something! We both know what happened to her - ’
I spat out an unspeaking reply, mouthing only the ghosts of the words I had planned to say. Memories were slowly coming back to me, developing like darkroom photographs. Everything coloured, memories were bright and vivacious again.
His face was soured, lips snarling.
‘I knew, I knew it all along - I knew you were a spiteful child - but the police wouldn’t listen - they thought I was deranged - I tried - I tried to tell them that it was - you - ’
My hand slipped against the wet surface of the bath and I lost my balance. My head missed the porcelain by inches. I tried to steady myself again, trembling.
‘No, I wouldn’t - I would never -’
I would and I had. I remembered the childhood possessiveness stirring inside me, the plans hatching in my mind, and the day where I told her we were going to play a little game in the forest. She had laughed, and skipped behind me as we entered the woods.
‘There were so many of those old mines in those thickets - so old people had forgotten they were there - ’
He described the story as a despairing teller of tales, carelessly retracing my own gory steps.
‘I don’t know what occurred, I wasn’t there. My speculation at the time, and my speculation now, is that you lead her into the farm - and -’
His eyes were shining with tears. I gagged and my mouth filled abruptly with warm and cloying sourness. I spat it out against the cold, grey floor.
I wanted to shout out my disowning, to screech at him that he was a dirty little liar. I couldn’t because I knew he was telling the truth. Everything was clear now, all the vivid memories forcing themselves against my skull. It was like peeling off layers of my skin, revealing a rotten inner self. I wasn’t a murderer. Randy Aguirre was not a murderer. Certainly not.
I remembered my delightedly merciless behaviour towards her. I loved to tease and torment her; it gave me some simple sense of power over frailer beings. All the compassion, all the anguish had been a creation of my own guilt-ridden inner self. Even my rumination of leaving her entombment crying had suddenly been altered, I remembered it properly now. I had been told to leave because I couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Only now you’re remembering?’ Uncle Raff said, reminding me he was still in the room. ‘I don’t believe you.’
I didn’t answer because there was nothing left to say. My whole life I had let her bloody murder scab over with concocted memories and thought up stories, trying to fool everybody so dreadfully that in time even I fell for it. He rose from the bath, and the water ran in snakes across his body.
I turned about and stared at the mannequin, shaking my head. Running towards it, I picked it up and held it against the light. I remembered burying her, covering her pretty white face with trickles of dirt. It had stuck under my nails, and I’d cleaned them in the pool.
A cry of horror broke from me. Boroboníka looked at me blankly, giving me the same blank look it had for the past thirty-two years. It had known all along.
A look of disgust came over his face. ‘You clearly disgust me!’
I ran from the loo. My head seemed to vibrate fast, and I felt as though my whole body was pumping with pain. I stopped, closely laughed, and remembered that all this was truly happening. I tried to make it fiction, but truth was screaming in my skull.
I didn’t know what’d happened to him. I’d left him in the bath. Perhaps he’d get out or perhaps he’d just give up and go under. I didn’t know. I couldn’t care.
I was burying myself in the broadsheet clippings in my room. In my one hand was Boroboníka, and in the other I clutched my mobile, ready to call the police. I had to drop one of them. I didn’t know what to tell them if I should. Randy Aguirre didn’t murder anybody, at least not the Randy he had thought he was. I’ve changed so much. I’m not the same person any longer.
Very thin streaks appeared on Boroboníka as she fell flat on her face on the floor.
I could hear Uncle Raff crying in the lavatory. I ran to him and cuddled him and eventually he stopped crying. ‘I raped Lucy - and smothered her with her own scarf and her body dumped in the thickets.’
Relief saw the light of day. A siren went off at a distance. When I answered the door, Solo, in police uniform, and a barangay squad greeted me.
A taxi drew up in front of the house. A woman got off the taxi and reached forward and gave Uncle Raff a slap. Virgie is fully recovered from amnesia. Solo gave her a cry of recognition. They were sort of crying for joy and embracing each other.
‘Virgie was raped and smothered with her own scarf and her body dumped in the thickets. I buried her in the ground I had made in her room. Her untimely death had a catastrophic effect on me. I kept Lucy for several days and sent her to a boarding school in Manila.’ Uncle Raff slumped to the ground in a faint, as he was being led away to gaol in handcuffs.
