Chapter 1
The Woman Who Read Objects
People brought Beatrice Khoo broken things the way they brought other women secrets, which is to say carefully, in cloth, and only after deciding she could be trusted.
Her shop stood third from the corner on Naning Row, George Town, under a black signboard whose gold letters had been repainted so many times they sat slightly proud of the wood: THE MENDING HOUSE, EST. 1936, KHOO BENG HUAT AND DESCENDANTS. Her grandfather had mended jewellery through the war, her father had mended watches and spectacles and fountain pens through everything after, and Beatrice, fifty-two years old and the last Khoo on the signboard, mended whatever love had worn out and grief could not throw away.
She did not advertise the other thing she did, because there was no honest way to put it on a signboard. Beatrice read objects. Not mystically. She would have laughed at the word. She read them the way harbour pilots read water, by long practice and small signs: wear patterns, resoldered joints, replaced clasps, the bright scratch of a recent screwdriver against the soft bloom of an old one. Hand her a wedding ring and she could tell you whether the marriage had been long, whether the owner had gardened, whether the ring had spent years off the finger in a drawer. Objects did not lie. Their owners did, sometimes gently, sometimes to themselves, but the objects always kept the true account.
