Beatrice Cho once gave her daughter a small handwritten note with a number on it. "//For emergencies only//", it read.

"What kind of emergencies? Can't I call 999?" she asked.

"You'll know it when it happens," replied her mother.

"Why, mommy? When what happens?"

"When I won't be around to help you any more, dearie."

Between sobs, Hannah Cho e

They'd kept the note throughout the years. It would have been a frivolous childhood memento, and nothing more than that, especially when Hannah herself grew up and married and moved out of her mother's house. But Mother never forgot, and always kept the note, crossing out the old number and replacing it with a new one every few years. The yellowed, dog-eared note was one of the things Hannah had salvaged from the old house, its surface crisscrossed with marks from half a dozen ballpoint pens. It was running out of space: the latest number had barely managed to fit near the bottom-right corner, even in Mother's miniscule scrawl. In the thirty-seven years that the note existed, she'd never once been told who the number belonged to. Nevertheless, unwilling to throw it away, she kept it on her fridge, anticipating/dreading the day it would presumably come into use.

And so for the third and final phone call of that morning, Hannah Cho taps out this number on her screen. Miles away, in the otherwise-quiet Penang Public Library, an old Nokia buzzes to life, nearly falling off the edge of the table before being caught by a pair of deft hands and pressed to hushed lips:

"Who is this?" the voice on the line whispers. "… Beatrice? It's been too long."

"Um - " Hannah squints at the crooked handwriting in her journal - "Isa? Noorizan?"

"It is." Then, "You must be her daughter. Hannah, yes?" She doesn't ask that question as much as she tells it to her like a fact. Her voice is smooth, clipped, yet ragged at the edges, as if spoken from well-wrinkled lips.

"Mother left behind a note saying to call you if anything… untoward, happened," says Hannah, choosing her words carefully.

"You're calling because something bad's happened to your mother and you don't know anyone else who can help."

Well, then. No point hiding it. "Mother's disappeared. Completely - pictures, every mention of her. I - I don't think this is something the police usually work with."

She hears silence. Then, softly but harshly, "I can't talk here. I'm in a library. Give me a minute."

There is the sound of shuffling papers, and closing books. Meanwhile, morning sunlight filters through the tinted window of Hannah's kitchen. A bird chirps. The refrigerator hums. Presently, Isa Noorizan resumes:

"You think I can help. You think just because something inexplicable has happened, that an old friend of your mother can simply provide all the answers to a world you can't understand, as if it were a single monolithic question answerable to anyone remotely in-the-know."

"That wasn't what I implied…"

"If you'd just followed in her footsteps like she'd wanted -"

"So you're saying it's my fault now? Is that what you're saying?" She feels a growing defensiveness rising in her throat, bubbling behind her eyes again.

"Her art died when she retired. Then she lost her mind. Beatrice was one-of-a-kind, and she died two years ago. When she forgot for the first time- " Isa swallows, almost sounding like a dry sob. "… I'm sorry. I let myself go. All that was a long time ago."

"Well, I'm sorry I wasn't more involved in my mother's life," Hannah replies, her anger subsiding. "You say what she was - what she made - was lost a long time ago. But if there's any chance of finding her again, then…"

"… Alright. I'll help. If anything, it's one last favour to an old acquaintance," says Isa, after a long pause. "If the world has forgotten her, then we must try our best to remember."

"But where do we go to look?"

"The old house, of course. Nothing is as good at remembering as an old house."

It makes sense to Hannah, in a way. Every person leaves a mark. Every disappearance leaves a trace. "At what time?"

"Three o'clock is good. I know a place nearby with good cake."

…

When Hannah was ten, she picked up a clay figurine on the floor of her mother's studio and screamed when it twisted, bent the air around it, wriggled out of her fingers and disappeared. She went crying to Mother, who scooped her into her lap and gently nuzzled her cheek: "Shhh, shhh, it's nothing, //sayang//." Only when she was brought to the (name) hotel years later and saw a forest unfold from a cornucopia of gilded marble did she realise that the figurine was merely a sketch, a prelude, a mere folly for Mother's idle hands. She turned to her mother with terrified, bewildered, eyes, who simply stood and smiled upon her masterpiece, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now, twenty-nine years later, she feels like the events of the ballroom are happening to her all over again, inside the confines of her Toyota as drives towards (place name). A sensation of broadening. Of falling - no, of ascending, inevitably, as a balloon does, towards a mystery greater than herself. By making the call, she has put herself into motion, into action, towards - what, exactly?
^ tighten that part up A BIT TO LINK TO THE SITUATION

An answer. Solace, and perhaps not just of one sort.

This is not her world. Her world is the world of common sense, of reassuring concrete buildings and cool office air. But this is now a world of unknowns, Mother's world, of inexplicabilities and mysteries and impossibilities, a world where sculptures spoke in more ways than one and art wove wonders, where an old woman leaves no trace but her name.

…

Kwok's Bakery is a low-key affair, with a nondescript engraved signboard on the front and mosaic-tiled flooring that looks as if it hasn't been changed in decades. Pastel blue paint coats the walls, peeling in some places. The door is a metal grate. Hannah Cho has passed it by several times before, but has never given it much thought. Behind the counter is, presumably, Mdm. Kwok - a plump Chinese woman seated comfortably in a wooden armchair, seemingly more interested in the soap opera playing on the small wall-mounted television than her own customers.

Hannah walks into the equally spartan interior and seats herself down at the only table (ornate, carved, wood; they don't make them anymore, she notes). Already on the table are two plates, with a slice of orange cake on each.

Seated at the table is a cantankerous Malay woman, wearing a bright floraltudung that, paradoxically, makes her look all the more ancient in its garishness. Her eyes, Hannah notes, are young eyes, despite the rest of her looking as if she's over sixty. They pierce into Hannah's own through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

"Your mother used to love this place," observes Isa Noorizan, pushing a plate ever-so-slightly towards Hannah. "She missed it so much when she went away for her studies. It's been open since the fifties, you know - though the current owner's not around anymore. Her daughter Guangling runs the show now."

"Mother's never brought it up," replies Hannah.

Isa sighs. "No, I don't suppose she did. Coffee or tea?"

"Neither, thanks. How does this place stay in business anyway? I've never seen a crowd."

Isa waves to the counter with her index finger, mouthing the words "one, please". The plump Chinese woman manages to pull away from the soap opera on the small wall-mounted TV and disappear into a back room. Isa turns around, explaining, "Mdm. Kwok's only takes reservations. You have to phone ahead a few days in advance - she doesn't abide walk-in customers."

"Like us?"

Isa spears a mouthful of cake on a fork and consumes it. "Oh, no. She just owes me many favours." Hannah swears that she shows a grin, but only barely, on the edges of her crinkled mouth.

"Anyway," continues Isa, "that's none of your business. Besides, that's not what we're here for."

"My mother. Yes."

Hannah thinks for a moment, chewing on a mouthful of (admittedly delicious) cake. "If I may ask - what was she like?"

"She's your mother, isn't she?"

"Well, she never let on much about her side of the world." Hannah shrugs. "All I saw were her sculptures, and the visitors she had, and the occasional exhibitions she dragged me to. She never liked to talk about her past."

"I've put her past behind me." A movement from the counter: Mdm. Kwok appears with a mug of steaming tea, placing it almost-grudgingly on the table with an audible clang. Isa takes a few sips, and gently places it back down on the table. "What Beatrice - your mother - she did a great many things. Many of them amazing. Some of them, not so much."

"Such as?"

"The 60s and 70s were turbulent times, you have to understand. Student rallies, demonstrations, insurgents in the north… And we were just young twenty-somethings, some fresh from the horrors of the war, others, born into the remains of it. We wanted to make things right. Your mother did so, in her own way, through her art. I was merely an observer borne along for the ride. I loved her as a friend. That does not mean I agree with everything she did."

She looks into Hannah's eyes again, and those young, old eyes seem to stare at her from a million miles away.

"Tell me why you want Beatrice Cho to be found," Isa says, with nary a hint of accusation in her voice. It is an open question, patiently worded, and it takes Hannah by surprise.

"Don't you?" she manages to reply.

"I do not mourn her. The her I believed in has long been gone. To me, she has died a great many times over before this day. I have no reason to find her."

"Don't I have an obligation to my own mother?"

"I don't know. Do you?"

Hannah thinks, and imagines her mother, her black-dyed hair set in little plastic curlers, skeletal hands tirelessly chipping away at a small tangled knot of clay, switching between scalpel and needle and God knows what else with a watchmaker's calculated precision, ignoring the daughter tugging at her sleeve. That same mother, at a fish market, in a hotel ballroom, and, lastly, in her house again, gnarled with age, endlessly pacing back and forth through the wide-open doors of her big house. The black-and-white memories of race riots and the Emergency seem a world away, dizzyingly so. Try as she might, the Mother in her head remains as such - her mother. Always on the sidelines, always preoccupied. Always somehow distant. But nonetheless still her mother.

"I will do what I feel is right. And you may have had your closure, but I haven't - not when I don't even have the slightest idea of what you're talking about," says Hannah, her voice trembling.

"Nor do you want to. For now, we have a disappearance to resolve. Thank you, Guangling," - she nods to Mdm. Kwok, who nods curtly back - "tell your mother I came by, will you?"

She drops a twenty-ringgit note on the counter, turns, and leaves without another word. So Hannah finishes the last of the cake, gets up from her seat, and follows the older woman out.

…

By three-thirty, they have arrived at the old house on foot. Hannah is panting heavily, but the older woman seems none the worse for wear. Together, they approach the house.

"Bungalow" is, really, a charitable description of (address).  Back in the day, when the street was lined with single-storey huts and semi-detacheds, the additional floor of number 32 towered above its surroundings. Now, hemmed in on both sides by newly-renovated developments, the old house looks as if it is shrinking away from the high concrete walls of its neighbours, despite it actually taking up more land than either of the houses beside it. The house itself sits in the middle of the plot, its windows shuttered, brooding, dreaming the dreams of old buildings and other abandoned things.

The gate stands closed before them. It is exactly as Hannah remembers it, plain, black-barred, no-frills - with the exception of a brand-new padlock and chain securing it from the outside.

"That's new," she says.

"Wouldn't you have noticed if someone placed a lock on your own mother's front door?"

"I haven't been here in months. What's going on?" She gives the gate a loud rattle.

Isa sighs. "Let me at it," she says, pushing the younger woman aside. She inspects the lock and chain, running over it with her fingers, and her fingers trace a kind of pattern in the metal. For a second, Hannah swears that a pattern does appear, as if scratched out with her fingernails, but it's only for a moment. There is a shower of white sparks, and Isa swears - "Goddamned arthritis." - and she tries again. This time, with a clatter, the lock and chain falls to the ground, as if it had never been locked in the first place.

"What the hell was that?" asks Hannah.

"Basic black-line working. You could probably learn it too, with enough practice. Don't see what a woman like you could do with it, though." Isa unlatches the gate, and the two of them step onto the driveway.

"Did mother teach you this?"

"No. Her art tended to be mostly on the white-line side of the spectrum - not that she'd ever use such terminology for herself, of course." The old woman wrings her hands and cracks her knuckles. "Her friends were quite the bunch. They taught me a thing or two about breaking and entering."

They walk down the driveway, which is drowned out in a wash of coarse grass and weeds, onto the black-and-white mosaic-tiled patio, with the cracks in the tiles where Hannah remembers, and quite a few more where she doesn't. The porch roof sags. Without Mother, the house always gave her a feeling that it didn't quite fit together like it used to, falling together and pushing up against each other at all the wrong places. Was it some last remaining charm of Mother's, some arcane entwining of the craftswoman's heart and home, or is she herself merely misperceiving? Does her mind's eye, still reeling from Mother's absence, begin to see the house fall?

The front door is locked; they unlock it, this time with Hannah's keys.

Immediately, there is a loud shrill ringing of a burglar alarm. Hannah looks up in confusion - she's never installed one, Mother never let her. The sound knifes into her ears.

"Can you deal with //that thing//?" she screams to Isa.

"I can." Isa stops, tilts her head towards the alarm. She raises her hands towards it and contorts her fingers, seeming to focus intensely on something just beyond the reach of her vision. Then, abruptly, she puts her hand down. The ringing continues, unabated. "But I'd rather not. My fingers hurt."

"Aren't the neighbours going to complain? Somebody's going to hear us!"

"You make a lot of fuss considering you've just only broken into your own house." Isa trots down the hall, wringing her hands. Hannah stands, scowls, follows. What other choice has she?

"Besides," continues Isa, "what makes you think I don't want us to be heard?"

She stops in front of a large mirror in the living room. A series of ornate design marks its edges. Isa takes off her glasses and inspects them curiously. Then she knocks on the frame five times, shave-and-a-haircut, and there is the sound of stone scraping stone.

The mirror flickers, and Hannah sees a passage in the reflection. Sloping rays of afternoon sun shine through, illuminating the interior. Isa turns to her and smiles. "After you?"