A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Singapore is dead. Li says it in the aftershock of the first sighting of the red sun flag on the Cathay building, and Una felt the fervour, soul-achingly deep, but she doesn't know what it means. Not really.

And how, Una thinks now, could she? She watches the darting, bird-movements of Li around their sitting room as she snatches all and anything Chinese and hurtles it into the fire. Books, silks, anything with the writing of her girlhood.

Una opens her moth to say something – warning, injunction, prayer, she has no idea. She says nothing. Benediction tangles with Yeats, who trips over a psalm, and the psalm collides with commiserations and anguish. The words stick, treacle-dense and leaden in her soft palate. Una stands and gapes and cannot speak. Li, though, is everywhere. She is a whirlwind, rapid-fire and spinning. Liquid jazz in motion. That is Li.

Iris comes stumbling into the midst of this atypical chaos and punctures it with a cry. Una watches it rise up from the diaphragm of her niece and bubble and froth, as a water-jet on a fountain. Yesterday – was it only yesterday? – Iris's shout swung daffodil-glad and high, like delicate, fine-spun glass or wax flowers. Today it goes wild again, ricocheting off of the walls and Kuan Yin's jade head, off of the piano and the sun-catching lanterns with their rainbows in the windows. The scream slides from Middle C to High C to the C higher still, and it is shrill, guttural animal woundedness. It splits the air, shatters the silence and seers Una's eardrums. Oh to be nine again and succumb to the pure, undiluted catastrophe of the moment.

The tea things are on the table. Incarnadine red tea bowls with butterfly-stencil, no two the same. A wedding present from Carl. They are beautifully, irrevocably Chinese. Li does not spare them. She scoops the nearest one up in her hand and bowls it gazelle-fast, swan-graceful into the fire.

'Mama!' Iris says, confusion writ large over her wide-eyed, childish face. There's a split second in which Una blinks recognition, and so misses Iris dive. She dives fish-gasp clumsily for the tea bowl, her little hands plunging into the fire. And in the split second, wedding present becomes burning coal-ember and Iris screams as it brushes her hand. She screams a sharp, brutal scream. Una has no words for it.

The bowl falls fast, as fast as a hart or a heartbeat or a shooting star, and bounces, once, twice, three times on the floor before crashing against the leg of the coffee table. The sound of it shattering is the sound a firework makes. It crackles and zings and breaks like a ghost across the floor.

Iris gapes, red-scalded hands stretched out before her like aggrieved spectres. She doesn't seem to notice. Beside her Puck stands and shifts from foot to bemused foot. He opens his mouth to make his usual Puck-babble at them but no words come for him, either. He joins Una in mute stupefaction and she feels the ache of this kinship.

'Mama,' says Iris, 'what are you doing? Mama, that was a gift!'

She drops onto her knees and begins to scrabble for the shards of tea bowl.

'They will kill us,' says Li. 'The Japanese will kill us, Firecracker.'

The noise Iris makes is whistle-register piercing. It brings Akela galumphing into the room, where he stops short, obviously puzzled by the lack of overt threat to his youngest charge. Una reaches for Iris and pulls her close. She feels cold in the first, terrifying, red light of the day. Una and Iris both do. Iris pillows her head on Una's stomach and Una strokes her hair abstractedly.

Li turns round, sees them in tableau and sinks onto her knees. She reaches for Iris. But Iris has gone limp in Una's arms so Una shuffle-stumbles with the little girl until they can slip down onto the floor next to Li. She cradles Puck with one hand and with the other Li touches her fingers to her daughter's face. Iris climbs with puppy-clumsiness into her mother's lap.

'I shouldn't have said that,' Li says to Iris. 'We'll keep you safe. Always.'

'Puck too,' says Iris. 'He will protect us.'

'Puck, too,' Una says.

'And Akela,' says Li.

'Naturally,' Una says.

'But you're afraid,' says Iris.

Li edges closer and Una gets an arm around her, too. They sit enmeshed and silent, dread a palpable, dense thing between them. It feels heavy the way Papatee is heavy, and lugubrious, the way Nenni could be in a sun-spot. But it lacks the sinuousness of their movements, the lightness and grace. It presses clumsy, awkward and painful upon the four of them, three women, a dog and a monkey anchored leadenly by the momentousness of their own private terror.

Akela schleps over and puts his nose, cool, wet and comforting, against Una's knees, effectively pinioning her in place. He huffs the breath of a concerned canine. He doesn't purr. Una always expects him to, and he never does. But the warm, comforting dog-snuffles emanating form him are the next best thing. Una tangles a stray hand in his fur and rubs his neck affectionately.

Una says, 'Do you remember, Firecracker, how when you were little, you dreamed of dragons?'

A smile threatens Li's mouth. Not her water-lily smile, Una sees, but a fragile, hummingbird-heartbeat smile. Fast, tentative, but there.

'And you were so frightened,' says Li. She strokes Iris's hair, oily now from lack of washing. There is no smell of coconut oil and orchids.

'But you, and Daddy and Auntie said you would save me.'

'Every time,' says Una. 'This…this is a bit like that. Except there aren't dragons, and because people are more complicated than dragons, so it takes longer to save you. But we're trying.'

She smiles and inhales the variegated scents of Iris's thick, unwashed hair.

Iris nods against Li's chest. Puck begins to chatter. Normalcy begins to creep, elephant-heavy and slow, into Una's blood. She offers to make tea.

'In Gladstone blue ribbon,' says Li. 'I can't face the other.'

Una's heart somersaults uncontrollably backwards on itself. Li loves those red tea bowls. They were a gift from Carl, back in 1929, their butterfly stencils no two the same. Once, there were a dozen of them. As of this morning, there are eleven Carl gave them to Li as a promise of life together, an omen. Red for luck. But now there is a red sun flying over the Cathay building and suddenly they are the wrong colour. The red of blood, vengeance, a cruelly capable enemy. One killed irrevocably by the Japanese occupation as surely as if a shell had struck it.

One by one, Una lifts the remaining red tea bowls down from their place in the china cabinet. One by one, she shrouds them in the paper left over from their lantern-making. They wink at her, scarlet in their paper nests, butterfly stencils no two the same. It is not a banishment, Una thinks. Not really. More that…more that they need this one good thing untrammelled by the horror of occupation. That's it. Li hands Una the eleventh off the coffee table like an apology, and Una nests it among its kindred. She nests the remnant's of the shattered bowl there too, in requiem or sympathy she can't say.

Behind her she hears Li say to Iris, 'Give me your hands, Firecracker. Let me bathe them. We still have tiger balm.'

Silence as their Firecracker atypically acquiesces, or so Una presumes. She dips the kettle into the still water in the sink. It's a brackish colour and she's sure it breeds mosquitoes. But at least they have water.

Kettle on the hob, Una fusses about with the tea. She does not use much. It is tea from Mr Razdan's tea shop, and it is good quality. Una and Li are playing a game with it, and the game is to make the tea last until Singapore is itself again. So, Una does not fill the Gladstone Blue Ribbon as per the old adage. She does not fill it one per person and one for the pot. She puts a pinch of Mr Razdan's high-grade Assam into the teapot instead, hearing as she does it the cadence of his voice mere months ago, Won't the British like it, when they come back? The teapot is not warmed by the brackish water because there is a war on and that would be unspeakably foolish. It doesn't matter. The tea is not the point. The point is…

The point, Una thinks wryly, and with a thought for Carl, is to be like Puck. When they drive up into the mountains, Una watches him in the trees, the way he swings tail over foot over hand over foot from tree limb to tree limb to vine to tree limb again. He never wavers. Just puts hand over tail over foot over tail in incalculable acrobatics. He has taught Iris to do the same, and it's breath-taking to watch. A stunning lesson in faith immoveable and unshakable. Una, making weak and imperfect tea out of rationed water, thinks this is what she and Li aspire to do in their own, particular way. To reach always for that next tree limb and feel not that they are careening from crisis to disaster to crisis, but that they will always have something to grab, a tether to anchor their world as they move through it. However bad it gets, there will always be something else to hold on to. Even if the something else is each other.

The kettle sings to itself in treble key. Una turns the tap to top up their water supply. Nothing happens. Una thinks No, the velvet-shod metal of her soul's steel glove protesting the evidence of her eyes. She turns the tap the other way. Nothing.

No, Una thinks. Panic begins to bubble in time with the kettle. It is rising in decibel now, climbing towards boiling point. Una breathes through her nose, slow and deep. Counts to ten. Counts to thirty. She takes the kettle off the hob because it is at fever pitch and screaming its blood-boiling-fury at the world. She pours it into the teapot, which is Gladstone Blue Ribbon, and watches the handful of tea leaves float on its surface. She cannot smell the tannin-tart smell of Assam.

It might, Una thinks, looking at the tap, be a quirk of this sink. So, she calls to Li. She says, 'Can you try the tap upstairs?' Una takes care to keep her voice even as she says it.

She hears Li pad-pad up the stairs, still in silk-shot slippers. Akela galumphs after her, and Iris with him. Iris takes the stairs four at a time. Una wants to laugh and then to cry in relief that still Iris is young and unconcerned enough about gracefulness to mind that young ladies should not take the stairs on their hands and knees.

Li's voice overhead is muffled. But then Una hears the tearaway sound of Iris on the stairs and the almighty rattle of the outdoor pump.

'Mama,' Iris shouts, oblivious to the fact Li cannot hear her through a closed window, 'Mama, there's nothing!'

No, thinks Una. No, sounds the chord of her soul. No like the closing cadence of a symphony, an organ with its stops pulled out. No, No, No, like a tattoo, a drum-beat, like the pulse of a rock, resolute and unyielding. But it's happened at last. The water has given out. She stands at the kitchen sink, teapot full of dilute tea in hand and does not take in her kitchen faucet's monumental failure to produce water. She must look bemused, because enlightenment comes in the shape of Iris, who announces that Mrs Bowen next door saw her at the pump and said her house had no water either. Neither do their neighbours on the other side or the family opposite Trinity House.

'Upstairs, too,' says Li, unaccountably making Una's heart sink. This cannot be, is not, happening. It is happening, thinks some traitorous part of Una's brain, acceptance seeping in like water. But still the plagal cadence of her soul says stubbornly No. This cannot be.

In the name of something to do, Una sets her mother's Gladstone Blue Ribbon teapot on the table in the next room. She did not think to bring coasters and Li follows behind her, armed with them. Una goes back for the teacups, one for her, one for Iris, Puck's special cup for Puck. She lines the cups up with impeccable straightness on the table, careful to set them atop Li's equally straight rows of coasters. Iris trots into the room.

'Auntie?' says Iris, 'Mama? Is something wrong?'

'Darling girl,' says Una.

'Not a thing, Firecracker,' says Li, and sweeps her girl into her arms. Iris's eyebrows knit together in credible impression of her mother.

'But you have no water, Mama. How can Auntie make the tea if there is no water?'

Una suddenly, unaccountably, wants to laugh. Instead she turns and kisses Iris's sunkissed forehead.

Li gestures, swan-elegant at the army of Gladstone Blue Ribbon on the table.

'We have tea,' she says. Then, with a smile for Una, 'After a fashion.'

Iris's eyes go wide. She sees the cups, counts them. 'Do I have one?' she says. 'I thought I had to be all grown up to touch Grandmother Cecilia's special china.'

'I told you on your birthday,' says Una, 'Nine is practically a young lady.'

Iris grins a Puckish grin and scrambles and tumbles her way out of Li's arms to sit at the table. She pulls a teacup towards her and sits with impeccable, iron-straightened posture.

Her hands are still heat-raddled from the fire and mother and aunt say in unthinking unison, 'Mind your hands. The heat will sting.'

Puck, who Una could have sworn was playing Patience against himself in the parlour, appears from nowhere, sees an opportunity, and seizes it to pluck three lumps of sugar out of the sugar dish before skittering away, gleefully chattering to himself.

'That monkey….'Una begins, but cannot find heat or energy enough to go on. He's probably earned his three sugar lumps.

It does not come as a surprise, therefore, when Carl greats them in the evening with the unlikely salvo, 'They shot the Johor water supply.'

'Oh,' says Li.

'Is that what happened?' says Una.

Iris, running to meet him says, 'Daddy, no one has any water! Only what we saved in the sink and the bath and the other sink. Wasn't Auntie clever to think of it?'

'Mama too,' says Una.

'Very clever,' says Carl. He swoops Iris up into a bear-hug then flips her over and tickles her stomach. She squeals until she is breathless with laughter. Were we like that? Una wonders. Was Jims, during the last war? She thinks not. But Iris must get it from somewhere. Carl sets her down and Iris, arms flung wide, runs whirling and swirling off up the stairs, Puck and Akela in tow. Li, Una decides. She must get that unruffled spirit from Li.

'What else are they saying?' Li asks, joining the pair of them on the settle. Simultaneously Carl says, 'Are you all right?'

'We'll be fine,' says Li. 'As soon as London is better, the British will help us.' Yes, Iris definitely comes by her sheer optimism through her mother.

'And because Carl never answered the question, Li reiterates, 'What else do they say?'

They say the Japanese are coming, but this is not news. They have been coming for months. More than months. They have been coming ever since their shops started up in and around Middle Alley, years ago. They realise this now. It wasn't just about immigrating, but about assessing the terrain. So that, eventually, they would know it as the Australian soldiers never could. A fact the Japanese are only just now discovering, right alongside Una and her family, but that hardly matters. This is why the Japanese ride bicycles zip-zip around Singapore effortlessly and why the Australians struggle on foot and horseback. Why they look exhausted whenever Una sees them.

Carl grimaces, and Una sees he is thinking all these things, too. He gets an arm around Li and leans back against the robin's egg blue of the sofa. 'Dare we run to tea?' he asks Una.

Una does the mental calculus. She decides that today they will be extravagant. She goes back into the kitchen and portions out water for tea. Not a full pot, but enough for one cup each. Enough to create a hollow echo of olden day teatimes.

She carries her ghostly tea service back into the sitting room and watches Carl visible startle at the sight of their mother's china.

'My fault,' says Li. 'I couldn't…The red…'

'Of course,' says Carl.

'Someday,' says Li. 'We'll use them again some day, I promise.'

Carl enfolds one of Li's hands in his and interlinks their fingers. Then he raises their entwined hands to his lips and kisses them. The gesture feels boundlessly intimate and Una fusses with the teapot so as not to intrude.

Finally, teacup in hand, Carl says, 'They're going to bring in a guard. A Japanese one, obviously. It's going to keep you and Una and our Firecracker really safe, apparently.'

Li raises her eyebrows. So does Una. Carl shrugs. His unpatched eye looks murky with exhaustion.

'Apparently they promised we wouldn't be raped and pillaged, and this is them keeping their promise.'

'And we believe them?' asks Li.

'They put a wreath on The Repulse,' Una says. 'And the Prince of Wales. Of course, that was much earlier in the war.'

'Yes,' says Li. 'I think probably that kind of honour is dead.'

'Well, failing that,' says Carl, 'you have me, Akela and Puck. We're from the old school of honour.' He gives them a mock-bow, one hand folded behind his back and all. It's awkward, because he's sitting and the other hand still holds a teacup.

'Now that,' says Una, with a smile, 'I believe.'

'Even of Puck?' asks Li, and suddenly, the sun comes out and they are all three of them laughing over weak tea in Gladstone Blue Ribbon.

'Even of Puck,' says Una.

When the paper arrives the next morning, Una comes down, finally, on the side of unbelief. With it comes a terrible edict. Una stares at it, not comprehending. She can still smell the freshness of the ink and this adds to the unreality. Give it time and it will dry different. The words will rearrange. They will not say what they say now, bold and brazen like trumpets. Una reads the headline again. Her blood curdles and her stomach plummets. Her heart, by comparison, launches itself up into her lungs, and higher still, into her throat, where it beat with piano-hammer precision in cut time.

No one, Una thinks, as she stares and stares at the announcement blazoned across the front page like a flag, like a banner, an epitaph on a tomb, no one does this. No one has done it, ever. Not since Harrod. Things like this do not happen.

They will kill us, Firecracker, says the ghost of Li's voice in Una's ear and she understands suddenly Li's panic of yesterday morning. They will kill us.

Una tries to think of Puck, going hand over tail over foot over hand as he swings through the trees. To emulate him. But her soul quavers, plagal cadence - this cannot be - fracturing and she from one crisis into the next. Still the headline is unchanged.

Una stretches out a hand to stroke Nenni's fur, to find reassurance in that thick, beautiful coat, and her hand glides off the sheer, slippery robin's egg blue of the sofa. Of course it does. Nenni is dead. And now…

Don't. A steely voice deep in the heart of Una's brain gives this order. Don't think like that.

Una cannot remember summoning it. She remembers it though, from the days after her mother died and the world fell apart. The way it picked up the pieces of her and stuck them back into imperfect cohesion, all trembling nerves, fiery pride and fiercer spirit, until only the gaping wound of Mama was left. She remembers it too from the days after Dog Monday's requiem mass for a boy he did not love but Una did, and now the dread trumpets of impending disaster rouse it.

'All right?' says Carl, and Una wonders when he joined her. She did not see, much less hear him come in.

'No,' says Una, not thinking. She hands him the paper because she cannot hold it any longer. It's ink is on her hands, fresh-smelling and she feels sick. The fresh-ink smell of it sears her nostrils, but that isn't it. It is not even that the paper is evil, although Una thinks this is not an inaccurate assessment, but because emblazoned across the front is a slogan proclaiming that all Chinese citizens of Singapore will be rounded up and counted.

Not since Harrod, thinks the softer part of Una's brain, the part not tempered in steel and touched with refiner's fire. But then, when Una built her world she did not factor in this scenario; That the Japanese would occupy Singapore.

'Christ.' Succinct and to the point.

Una should startle. She should blanch. She should tell Carl off for blaspheming. It's what Aunt Martha would do. Una is not Aunt Martha. It terrifies Una to think that if she puts Li and Iris in a queue at the specified destination, she may never - will never? - see them again and neither will Carl. And frankly, that is far worse than the nigh-prayerful petition by Carl to his God.

'Quite,' Una says.

Beside her Carl flinches at the unexpected rejoinder and a smile overtakes Una in spite of herself. She is steel-veined and silk-gloved, fire and blood and iron resolve welded together. Una, Li told her once, belongs, like Iris, to the year of the Monkey and perhaps this is why Una sees so much of her own mettle in the girl and perhaps also it is why she clashes with Puck, two equally resolved, differently flexible brains rucking up against each other. And she cannot, Una realises, sit here in idleness confronted with the Japanese proclamation as issued by the morning paper.

'We'll look after them,' she says to Carl and squeezes his hand.

Many people go into hiding. They hide, improbably, in the Cathay building. In the ruins of the shelled cinema. Una half-thinks of slipping Iris overnight into the ACS on the off-chance it offers her better protection.

On the other hand, Rev Peach refuses to sew, as so many are even now desperately sewing, a Japanese flag to fly from the flagpole. Li refuses too, because this is Singapore and it's flag does not feature a blood-red sun. Una understands, and understanding brushes her fingers unthinking against the white poppy she never did unpin after that day at the Anglo-Chinese School. It's getting tattered and if she ever gets time again, Una will sew a new one. They drift seamlessly, unthinkingly, down to the circling silver fish in their everlasting orbit. I hooked a berry in the steam/ And caught a little silver tout…But first…

'I'll take Iris,' says Li.

Carl looks horrified. Una hopes she doesn't mirror him. She rubs absent-mindedly at the slender, spiky-tailed fish. They are sitting at the dinner table, late. Iris is asleep, Puck like an unlikely angel at the foot of her bed. Una saw him there when she came up to give Iris her ritual kiss goodnight. She did not give her her usual kiss, in the event, because the paper rattled Una still. So she kissed Iris the way Cecilia Meredith used to kiss her children; Once on the forehead to say goodnight, and once on each eyelid to wish them sweet dreams and happy thoughts. Once on the nose to sleep through the night, and a kiss for each cheek so their guardian angels would find and know them. Then the forehead again for joy on waking. Seven kisses to see them through the night. Una hadn't thought about it in years.

'That tickles, Aunty!' Iris's only comment. As it should be.

Now Una holds court with Carl and Li, the Gladstone Blue Ribbon amassed between them like an army about to be sent to battle and Una's fingers worrying her little, circling silver fish into prayerfulness and protection.

'We don't know what they want,' says Carl, now.

'Or how long it will take. There must be…'he cannot quantify the populace with a number.

They have not yet cleared away the detritus of dinner. Wheat flour is a distant memory, and rice might as well be, so the air smells of tapioca, sweet potatoes and cornbread. Awful food. It makes a poor counterpoint to Cecilia Meredith's beloved tea service. Una's beloved tea service.

'If I'm lucky,' says Li, with unmissable wryness, 'we might see my mother. Iris might get to know her grandmother after all.'

No one says that it's equally likely Li's mother died when the Japanese bombed Chinatown. Una, who remembers Li guessing as much, does not remind her. Nor does Una say that Li's mother disavowed her years ago and is unlikely to speak to her, even after long, baking hours in a queue awaiting counting by the Japanese at God-knows-where for God-knows-what-reason.

Inanely, illogically, Una hears herself say, 'Take Iris's caul, when you go.'

Li nods. 'For luck,' she says.

'And protection,' says Una.

Carl sits between them and looks like a statue. A horrified statue. His face, Una sees, is a rictus of dread. She cannot, can never unsee it's anguish.

'Carl,' says Li, 'think how much worse it will be if they find us hiding. If they find you hiding us.'

Silence unspools between them, like a runaway skein of wool. The Gladstone Blue Ribbon does not move. It observes the silent parry with equal silence. Una's head aches. Maybe with hunger, maybe with nerves, maybe with the sickening dread that what Li means is You need to stay alive in case I do not and only Iris comes back. The tapioca smell cloys immeasurably.

Una wraps cold hands around her cooling teacup in Gladstone Blue Ribbon. The British have failed them immeasurably. It is unthinkable, impossible and actual. But Una's faith is not so shallowly tethered. She has other stores of treasure, not on earth. She hugs them close and considers her next words.

'Keep her safe,' says Una. 'And go with God.'

'Always,' says Li.

Now seems like a good time to stress I do recognise there were multiple sides to this war and so many more shades of grey than Una's limited third person has left me space to explore. There are some wonderful renderings of the Japanese point of view of the occupation. The one at my elbow on the desk is Syonan, My Story, but there's also the longer The Killer They Called God and many others

Parnokianlipstic- You've sent me back through all my favourite parts of EC this week, so thank you! That was such a treat to write, because without egging on from others I'd have never have gone there, and if I hadn't I'd have missed so much of the depth of this world. It's got much more shade to it, I think, than the other universe, and that came to the fore in EC, everyone always battling something, politics or church politics, polio, grief...but sharing joy, too, and poetry. Getting The Magi in there delighted me.

Onegin is another favourite, you of all people will have noticed it sneaking in at every turn :) And that opening scene is such a lovely introduction to what's about to happen, and perfect for the unfolding catastrophe. But I enjoyed the excuse to give them a bit of levity. It's al lbalance, this story, and we need the respite as much as the high drama. Or maybe that's just me. Iris could well be musical, but I confess, my inner teacher mostly remembered how high little girls shrill. My poor parents suffered years of Queen of the Night if I couldn't sleep. Apparently I was raised by saints;)

Lots more Christmas music here, but the thing I'm listening to endlessly is This is the Record of John. It's my Advent anthem of choice and it never wears out.