Chapter One
The Longest Holiday
The holiday started badly, which Mei thought was at least honest of it.
She sat in the back of the car with her chin on her backpack and watched her own street slide away, her window, her mango tree, the drain she had fallen into once and never told anyone about, and she did not cry, because she was ten and crying was for babies and for people who did not understand that the whole thing was deeply unfair.
“Three weeks,” her mother had said, not quite turning around. “Maybe four. Just until the new place is sorted.” Her father said nothing at all, which was worse, because her father was a man who normally had something to say about everything, including the correct way to eat a curry puff.
The new place. That was the trouble with the whole holiday: it had a new place in it, and Mei had not been asked whether she wanted one.
Nenek lived in the old part of town where the shophouses leaned on each other like tired uncles and the streets smelled of coffee and drains and, somewhere, always, of something frying. Her house was the blue one, the narrowest on the row, squeezed between a shop that sold nothing but rope and a shop that sold nothing at all any more and simply stayed shut, dreaming.
Nenek was on the step before the car had stopped. She was small and round and quick, with a bun of white hair skewered by a single pin, and she wore the flowered apron she had worn since before Mei was born and possibly since before the invention of colour photography.
