Now That It's Over

12

AI LING

Two days after the tsunami, the weather is sultry, the sky a clear expanse with hardly any clouds. In mid-morning, as the sun parks itself above the horizon, the dewy lightness of dawn gives way to the intensifying warmth of a humid day. The seashell-littered sand glisters with a shine, reflecting winks of light, as the coconut trees sway in the breeze that sweeps across the small island.

The body of the woman on the beach has darkened into shades of blue-purple blotches, decorated in livid patterns; the tributaries of veins and arteries are mapped out clearly in red, green and black under the skin. Visceral fluids leak from the body, pooling around the woman’s ears and mouth, staining the front and back of her shorts. Under the heat of the sun, the body continues to execute its functions like clockwork, breaking down and tearing apart from within. Life, still persisting, still working, through death.

The sea breeze carries the smell of death across the island and ruffles the long, frizzled hair of the woman. The loose strands leap and dance in the breeze, as if charged with energy. The world around the woman’s body teems with little acts of movement, small signs of life.

The first thing Ai Ling noticed about the new boy was his hair—soft coils that hung like cursive loops on his forehead. She patted his head twice when he was brought into the class by the principal. The boy looked up at her, his eyes full of questions. For the rest of his first day at the childcare centre, Ai Ling watched him attentively. The boy was slow to come out of himself, and while the other children largely ignored him, the boy’s eyes never left them, watchful and observant as if making mental notes of what they were doing or saying. During mealtimes, he sat quietly by himself eating his porridge, never once staining his shirt or dirtying the table. During the afternoon games of tag and skipping, the boy fell but swiftly got up, brushed his knee once, and ran to the back of the queue, waiting for his turn again. When Ai Ling asked him whether he was okay, he nodded his head, barely lifting his eyes to look at her. The boy perspired freely, and his wet hair was plastered to his forehead like a row of inverted Cs. That day, Ai Ling stayed back late and waited with the boy for his parents. His mother came, a stout, wide-hipped woman with dull, darting eyes, and Ai Ling talked to her for a few minutes and told her about the boy’s first day. The mother nodded her head, saying little, before she picked up the boy’s haversack and hurried him out the door.

That night, while they were having dinner, Ai Ling told Wei Xiang about the new boy.

“He is really small for his age, the shortest in my class.”

“Boys are usually like that, shorter and smaller than the girls, until they hit puberty.”

“And he is too scrawny. His arms are so thin, that I’m afraid of pulling them off.”

“Maybe he has a higher metabolism than the others. I was a skinny monkey when I was young. A tiny body with a huge head. Try imagining how I looked.”

“But he’s really adorable and quite obedient. The rest of the children have not taken a liking to him yet, but I guess they will, sooner or later.”

“Children are like that, they take a long while to adapt to changes, to new people. I’m sure the boy will be fine, and will get along with the rest when he’s comfortable with them.”

“I hope so.”

In the days and weeks that followed, Ai Ling could not help but pay the boy more attention, keeping him within her sight, noting his movements and behaviours. Her interest was purely professional, she told herself; she was a teacher, and she had to look out for the children under her care. But deep inside, she was aware of something that went beyond her duties, something more instinctual, as if the boy had triggered a latent maternal impulse in her, a seed that had been sown and was now growing of its own will.

“Do you think I’ll make a good mother?” she had asked Wei Xiang once.

“Of course, no doubt, you’ll make a fantastic mother.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen you with kids. You are wonderful with them.”

“But that doesn’t mean I’ll be a good mother, even though I’m good with other people’s children.”

“Well, this shows that you possess some sort of a maternal instinct.”

“Having a maternal instinct doesn’t translate to being a good mother. I know a few teachers at the childcare centre, the younger ones, who are also good with children, but are happy being single, or happy being childless with their husbands.”

“Maybe you are at the age where you now want to consider having a child?” Wei Xiang looked at Ai Ling, searchingly.

“I don’t know. Are we ready?”

“We can be, if you are.”

Ai Ling knew Wei Xiang was being kind and accommodating; he had wanted to enjoy the first few years of their married life, just the two of them, before plunging into parenthood. He wanted to take it easy until they had everything in place: finances, the proper frame of mind, the ideal time. Ai Ling went along with his decision, only because she was still working out her own thoughts about being a mother. They were in their fifth year of marriage, and she was only thirty-two; the years stretched before them with other possibilities, other choices. Maybe she should give herself another year to think; maybe she would have a firmer decision by then. She had heard of women giving birth in their late thirties, even early forties, and the idea took the edge off her anxiety.

When Ai Ling had to stay late at the centre to catch up on her paperwork, she would look out for the boy’s mother so she could talk to her. From their brief, truncated conversations, Ai Ling found out that the boy was the eldest of four siblings, and that the mother was working as a part-time retail assistant at a chain supermarket. Nothing was said about the father. While Ai Ling was all praise for the boy’s good behaviour, the mother only cited incidents at home when he had misbehaved, how he could never sit still for a single moment, always climbing all over the furniture, how she was afraid one day he would fall and break his neck. The mother’s reproachful tone, whenever she spoke of these incidents, was nonetheless filled with bemused affection. It was clear to Ai Ling that the boy held a special place in the mother’s heart.

Once, when the mother came to pick up the boy later than usual, she would not look Ai Ling in the eyes, and busied herself with helping the boy put on his shoes. The boy’s mood changed in the presence of his mother, becoming more subdued. When the mother finally looked at her as she was leading the boy out, Ai Ling saw the dark bruises near her right eye. Ai Ling asked casually about the bruises, but the mother brushed it aside with a vague reason. She dared not meet Ai Ling’s gaze; the boy remained hidden behind a blank expression, his large, unblinking eyes moving between his mother and Ai Ling. The next day, when Ai Ling tried to find out about the family situation from the boy, he remained tight-lipped, turning his full attention to whatever he was doing—drawing with coloured pencils, building wobbly towers out of building blocks, or playing catching with his newfound friends. For a while, Ai Ling felt helpless at being merely an observer, and also angry at the woman for her passivity. But she knew her ambivalent, fluctuating sense of helplessness and anger was fuelled only by speculation—what did she actually know about the boy’s family? Nothing, except for the little she had seen. She was being a busybody, and it would do her no good to meddle in other people’s affairs. She knew she had to stay out of it.

Then one day, the mother did not turn up to pick up the boy, and after an hour of fretful waiting, Ai Ling decided to send the boy home herself. From his records, she found out where he lived, a housing block only three streets away. The boy, who had been sitting on the bench beside the shoe cupboard and glancing out the window, went submissively with Ai Ling. When she offered to carry his haversack, the boy shyly declined.

It took less than ten minutes to locate the block of flats. The boy seemed hesitant when they were in the lift, his hand clutching the long strap of his Winnie the Pooh water bottle. At the flat, the door was wide open; Ai Ling peeked in and saw a man lying on a sofa, watching a game show on TV, with two younger boys and a girl crowding in front of the screen. The mother was nowhere in sight. When Ai Ling said hello, the man jerked upright on the sofa, visibly annoyed. He stared at Ai Ling for a moment before noticing the boy standing beside her. Ai Ling explained the situation as the man opened the metal gate and invited her in. He was in his late thirties, a paunch evident behind his loose white singlet, with features that crowded in the middle of his long, pinched face. The man seemed friendly and cordial, though Ai Ling could sense a wall of guardedness behind his words and in the even tone of his voice. She asked about the boy’s mother, and the short reply she received was that she had to work overtime and had not been able to pick the boy up from the childcare centre. The other children sitting on the floor turned their attention to Ai Ling, curious about the interaction between her and their father. The boy, meanwhile, had disappeared into the kitchen. When Ai Ling left, she could detect a hint of censure from the sharp closing of the door.

When the mother turned up the next day, she thanked Ai Ling for her help and gave her a box of cream puffs. She wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and black slacks, a departure from her usual attire of T-shirt and shorts. When she declined the gift, the woman insisted, pushing the box into her hands. Ai Ling offered the boy a cream puff, which he took after receiving a look of approval from his mother. He ate in small bites, holding the puff in both hands, the cream leaking from the edges.

That was the last time Ai Ling saw the boy’s mother. After that, the father came to fetch him.

On some nights after work, and on weekends when Wei Xiang was in the office, Ai Ling would head down to the boy’s housing block and linger outside the flat, out of sight. She would stand against the wall, an eye out for any passing neighbours, and listen to whatever was happening inside. Mostly she heard the television and the voices of the children as they played, and several times the severe, scolding voice of the father; never once did she hear the mother’s voice. Ever since the mother’s disappearance, Ai Ling had tried to investigate the woman’s whereabouts, but received only empty stares and imposing silence from the boy or the father whenever she attempted to broach the topic. She had even appealed to the other teachers for more information, but they were as clueless as she was.

The children were often left alone at home on weekends; the father would be away, perhaps for work—Ai Ling did not know what he actually did, though he worked long odd hours and would sometimes fall asleep when he came home without changing out of his clothes. A few times, during periods of long silence in the flat, Ai Ling would walk past, peeking into the gap offered by the ajar front door, trying to see what the children were up to. She took great care not to be seen; only once, when she stepped out of hiding, she came face to face with the boy’s younger sister, who was picking up a ball near the metal gate. Ai Ling had to walk away quickly. If she had been discovered, Ai Ling never heard anything of it, at least not from the boy.

It was only when Wei Xiang started to get suspicious about her late-night wanderings and perpetual state of distraction that Ai Ling told him everything.

“Why are you doing this? What were you thinking?”

“I’m just curious about the mother, why she disappeared all of a sudden. The children are left alone most of the time.”

“But what you are doing is not right. You have no right to pry into their lives.”

“I’m not spying on them, if that’s what you’re saying. I just want to find out what happened to their mother.”

“But you’re going too far. You have to stop.”

“I know, I know.”

Even after Ai Ling stopped the visits, she still thought constantly about the boy and his mother. In her classes, the boy was still the same, behaving obediently, never drawing any attention to himself, yet alert to his surroundings, careful to stay out of trouble; he would relinquish any toy or game that the other kids wanted without a word. When the other children ignored him and excluded him from their games, he would retreat to a corner and read or play by himself. Ai Ling would often reward his good behaviour with sweets or packets of biscuits. Unwittingly, she had stepped into a role left vacant by the boy’s missing mother, a role she secretly relished. Of course, she knew being a mother was more than what she was doing, yet she enjoyed every moment of it, and drew a fair amount of satisfaction from performing every task that the role entailed.

When the boy did not turn up one morning at the childcare centre, Ai Ling did not think much of it, assuming he had fallen sick. She followed up with a phone call, but no one answered. When she finally reached the boy’s father, and found out that the boy had been out of the house since morning, she began to fret. The father, on the other hand, worked himself up into a rage at the thought of his son playing truant.

“That boy! He told me he would go to school on his own. And now this! He will get a good beating from me when he comes home.”

“Please calm down, sir. I’m sure he will return soon. Please call me once he does. I’ll leave you my number.”

When the father called her later in the evening and told her that his son had not come home yet, Ai Ling advised him to file a police report. The boy is only five, she reasoned, where could he possibly go? It was likely somewhere familiar, a place he knew well. Unable to sit still or keep herself calm after hearing the news, Ai Ling told Wei Xiang that she wanted to check around the boy’s neighbourhood. Though Wei Xiang offered to come along to help, Ai Ling assured him that she would be fine on her own, that she would be back soon. She could tell that Wei Xiang wanted to say more about the whole matter and her involvement, but he had held back his words, perhaps waiting for another opportunity to voice his concerns. Ai Ling was grateful for the delay of the confrontation she knew was inevitable, but which she did not have the means to deal with at the moment.

In the taxi, Ai Ling remembered an incident from her childhood, an episode which had been dislodged from the tangle of her memories. When she was nine, Ai Ling had run away from home, though her parents never knew about it. She waited for the right moment to make her escape, when the front door of the flat was left unlocked by her mother while watering the plants along the corridor. She had never been outside the flat without her parents, so the idea of venturing beyond her immediate world was a strange, bewildering experience. She took the staircase instead of the lift, and after reaching the void deck, she walked across the car park in a direction that would lead her to a nearby garden. Once there, she decided to go farther, to another part of the estate she had only seen from the school bus; she recalled seeing a playground with swings and a concrete slide. To her nine-year-old mind, it had seemed like a paradise, a place where she could have all her fun.

Even as Ai Ling tried to remember the reason for running away from home, she could not, for the life of her, recall exactly what had made her do it. She had never had any big issues with her parents when she was young, and she was not an unhappy child; what she had wanted was readily provided by her parents, and she was an undemanding child, simple in her needs. While she was curious, like any child would be at that age, Ai Ling could not see her curiosity as the main reason for her to stray out of the known perimeter of her world. Then what? And why? Ai Ling could not fathom her reasons now, across the span of over twenty years.

At the playground, she had sat on the swing, pushing herself outwards and upwards. There were other kids, but they were playing amongst themselves and left her alone. Sensing their wariness, she did not approach them, staying away from their noisy game of hide-and-seek. She did not know how long she stayed there, but soon she got tired and thirsty. Ai Ling had not brought any money, and the immediate reality of her situation began to dawn on her. She started to panic. She looked up and, as if for the first time, saw beyond the playground to the blocks of flats that stretched beyond her vision, the streets heavy with mid-morning traffic, the rows of tall imposing trees. Everything suddenly seemed ominous, full of potential danger. As the world grew out of proportion in her mind, looming like an ever-growing leviathan in her imagination, Ai Ling was also aware, however vaguely, that she was shrinking inwardly, reducing herself to something that was easy to manage, quick to take flight, like a bug burrowing itself into the earth, or a dragonfly taking flight. How small she felt then, how inconsequential, how easily she could lose who she was. Within minutes of this realisation, Ai Ling decided to retrace her footsteps, and in the end did manage to find her way home. When she knocked on the front door of the flat, her mother was surprised at her appearance. Her parents had assumed that she was in her room all this time, reading, and did not want to disturb her; her absence from the flat had been completely unnoticed. She quickly returned to her place in the only world she knew.

As the taxi stopped in the boy’s neighbourhood, Ai Ling’s thoughts returned to the task at hand. For the whole night, she searched the area, but with no success. She called out the boy’s name, whispered it into deserted alleyways, shouted it across dark empty fields; with each utterance, Ai Ling could sense the waning hold of his name, and she was gripped, again and again, by the premonition that something terrible had happened. The poor boy, her boy. She knew she mustn’t lose hope, yet hope was like an elusive bird, vanishing out of sight.

When the first light of the day started to seep up from the horizon, Ai Ling called the boy’s father; upon hearing his hoarse, sleepy voice, she could tell he had not fared any better.

“I’ve called her, but she denies knowing anything about this. That damn woman must have kidnapped him. What kind of a fucked-up mother is she? How can she even do this?” Yet his words lacked the heat of firm belief, carrying in them the dark hint of doubt. And Ai Ling suddenly pitied him.

“Maybe she didn’t do it.”

“You don’t know her, or what she is capable of. How could she just abandon her children and run off with another man? What kind of a mother does that, you tell me?”

Ai Ling could feel the weight of weariness finally descending on her, deadening her bones, and all she wanted to do was lie down where she was and never get up. She hung up the call and started her journey home, heartsick and wrecked.

The police never found the boy, and Ai Ling never saw the father again, except for the final time he came by the childcare centre to pay the outstanding school fees and collect the boy’s belongings. Ai Ling had packed everything—the boy’s slippers, blanket, his drawings—into a large shopping bag and placed it aside. She excused herself when she saw the father talking to the principal. He glanced in her direction, but did not make any sign of acknowledging her. He seemed diminished, his shoulders hunched, his eyes dull. Ai Ling tried to smile at him, but he turned away.

For weeks after the boy’s disappearance, Ai Ling forbade herself to think of him, putting a tight rein on her thoughts. She had glanced at the short newspaper report before putting it away, and the news soon trailed off; with that, the boy was gone a second time. Ai Ling went through her days at work as if in a daze, moving at a much slower pace, one simple task at a time. She taught new songs, words and games to the children, and wrote down their progress in the little blue books for their parents. She helped them put on their shoes and wiped them down after they dirtied themselves during mealtimes. She comforted those who were hurt and patted the shoulders of those who needed encouragement. She waited with them if their parents were late, and told them stories and fairy tales to pass the time. She did everything right, and the children adored her.

It was only in her dreams that Ai Ling was able to find the boy and bring him home with her and Wei Xiang; the boy would take to this new life with such joy that even Ai Ling was surprised by it. She would cook elaborate meals and give him any toy he wanted. She would watch over him, pat his head, and comb his curly hair. Even in her dreams, Ai Ling could feel the texture of his hair; the lightness and colour, the thickness and the darkness slipped through her fingers, like cool ribbons of water. How beautiful his laughter, chiming in Ai Ling’s ears. She would hold the boy, and the feeling that stirred in her was as natural as breathing, and as vital too. Yet the dreams always ended with the boy leaving her; she would turn her head for a second, and he would be gone, disappearing into the world, leaving not a single trace. Every dream had felt like a small death.

Ai Ling soon got used to these dreams and gradually they began to occur less frequently. Over time, her memory of the boy became fainter, receding further and further into her mind, until it became nothing more than a broken fragment of her past, one that no longer caused her unwanted pain.

13

CHEE SENG

I look out of the hut into the courtyard, narrowing my eyes against the morning glare. Drawn by the light, I step out of the hut, into the heat of the day. The old woman glances over at me, and returns to her chore of sweeping and weeding. I stretch out my arms, and turn my gaze to the shed beside the hut. The dead boy must still be in there.

The night before was a page torn out of time, and even as I try to recall aspects of it, everything feels unreal, impalpable: the old woman bending over the dead boy, her expression severe and watchful, motionless for a long time. Stunned with incomprehension, I stood frozen on the spot, failing to understand what was going on. Who was the boy—her kin perhaps, a grandson, or a stranger? Where had she found him—in the forest, or near the sea? What did she intend to do with the body?

The old woman unfolded the blanket from the boy’s body as if she were peeling a relic from its protective wrapping. The hard, marble-like skin, speckled with patches of dirt, shone with a luminescence in the light cast by the kerosene lamp. Eyes shut and mouth open, one could mistake the boy being in a deep slumber; his tousled hair, long eyelashes, and a tiny nub of a nose that held a disarming fragility. The deep, long scar.

Taking up a rag, the old woman wetted it in the bucket beside her and began to clean the body, starting with the face. Then she moved down the chest and stomach to the legs and feet, unhurried in her ministrations, as if she were executing a difficult task in precise, calculated steps. The old woman tried to pry open the fingers of the boy’s clenched fists, but they were closed as tight as a vise. Then, she tried to prop the boy’s body upright, struggling with his ungainly frame. Motioning in my direction, she gestured for me to hold up the body while she cleaned his back. I hesitated briefly before squatting down. The unyielding coldness of the hardened flesh was shocking; it was bewildering to imagine how the body of such a small boy could possess such a severe degree of rigidity.

I mustered the strength to not flinch and let go of the boy’s shoulders. The old woman finished cleaning his back. With a broken-toothed comb, she smoothed out the wild tangles of his hair, removing bits of sand and gravel. She hummed a song under her breath, timing each stroke of the comb to the rhythmic beat of it. Then she poured a coconut-smelling liquid from a bottle onto her hands and applied it to the boy’s hair from scalp to tip. Even after the hair shone from the strange oil, the old woman kept running her fingers through it, humming as if soothing a child to sleep. Patting down the stubborn screw-ends, she created a part on the left side, a tiny path through the mass of black hair.

Then taking up another bottle of oil, this one smelling of eucalyptus and sandalwood, she emptied the contents onto the body, rubbing it evenly over his skin, transforming him into a slick being, as if he had just been reborn into the world. With a nod, she signalled me to lower the body back down. In the dim light, I could not take my eyes off the boy’s face. The old woman cupped a palm over his eyes and uttered something that sounded like a chant or perhaps a prayer, authoritative yet hypnotic at the same time.

The timbre of the old woman’s voice coursed through the very marrow of my bones, resonating with a deep, ancient truth. In the silence between her words, I felt that I understood everything. Life begins, life flowers, and life ends: an endless cycle. I imagined her voice filling the shed as a physical thing, and then drifting away into the night, into the dark forest, to the edge of the sea and then over the waves, to distant, forgotten lands.

When she finally stopped, the shed fell into a deep silence. I was seized by a strange, crippling ache in my chest. The old woman started wrapping the boy in swathes of white cloth, binding his body tightly, leaving only the face exposed. Then, standing back, she looked at him for some time, before covering him with the blanket. She picked up the lamp, stepped out of the shed and nodded at me as she passed. I took a last backward glance at the dead boy, then followed her out.

What did the old woman plan to do with the boy? Did she intend to bury or cremate him? Or perhaps leave his body out in the forest? It was impossible to imagine leaving him in the shed for long, in this humid weather. In a day or two, even the strong smell of the oils would not be able to camouflage the rotting smell of death. Something would have to be done.

Stretching my arms to ease the tension in them, I push these thoughts to the back of my mind. The morning sun, warm and intimate on my skin, has lifted my spirits. I shuffle over to the garden plot, which consists of neat rows of flowering plants, adorned with green calamansi limes and bullet-shaped red chillies. I bend down and help the old woman with her tasks: sprinkling a fine layer of fertilizer on the topsoil, removing the weeds, watering the plants. Despite my weakened body, once my hands touch the damp earth, they slip smoothly into motion, and in no time, I’m working up a sweat. When I feel light-headed, I sit back and rest to gather my strength; the old woman scoops water from the bucket beside her in a cup and makes me drink it.

At midday, we have a meal of gruel, stir-fried long beans and salted cabbage. Then we are back in the garden again, picking up where we left off. Working silently, we manage to complete all the tasks by mid-afternoon. The old woman fetches a pail of water from the well, and we wash our hands and feet as best as we can—the dirt is encrusted under my nails, and has made its way into some of my wounds. The old woman gestures at me to take a break, and I retreat to the shade under the eaves of the hut. Even after the hours of labour, the old woman does not display any sign of fatigue as she starts cleaning out the coops, feeding the chickens and sweeping up their faeces. The chickens, alert to the scattering of dry feed on the ground, come rushing to the old woman’s feet. She reaches down and, in one fluid motion, grabs the chicken nearest to her. The other chickens go about their business, nonchalant, unbothered by the slight disturbance.

After walking back to the hut, the old woman takes out a large carving knife and a wooden chopping board and puts them on the ground, while holding firmly onto the struggling chicken with her other hand. Positioning the slender neck of the chicken between her hands, she gives it a quick wring, and the chicken stops moving, its body suddenly slack. She slits the throat and drains the blood into a small urn, filling it to the brim, before putting the lifeless body of the chicken away. Then she covers the urn with a lid and walks over to the shed, nodding at me to follow. In the dusty semidarkness of the shed, she removes the blanket from the boy and motions for me to carry the body. In the cradle of my arms, the boy’s body is solid and unremitting, heavy with death. I hold him close, feeling his weight against me. The sweet, cloying smell of the oils wafts up from the body.

Leading us out of the shed, the old woman picks up the urn of chicken blood and a hoe from a display of gardening tools, and walks behind the main hut. The thick, untamed foliage all around presses in tight around us; a narrow dirt path provides a route between the hut and the forest behind it.

A short distance away, about a hundred metres from the hut, we come to a rise in the land, a mound of red earth that rises up to a plateau, resembling the arched, muscled back of a huge sleeping bear. Climbing a dozen hardened-mud steps, we come to flat ground, where several piles of stones are stacked together, spaced unevenly apart. With a gesture from the old woman, I lower the body to the ground, and glance at the boy’s face, half-expecting him to open his eyes. Using the hoe, the old woman marks out a hole in the ground, then passes it to me. I begin to dig slowly. The old woman stands back to assess the hole after I have been digging for some time, and kneels down beside the dead boy. She takes his hand and pats it, then nods at me. I place the body gently into the grave.

Against the damp, reddish soil, the dead boy looks preternaturally radiant, serene in repose. The old woman throws in the first handful of earth, which lands on the boy’s chest, spattering outward in a firework of blood-coloured dirt. As we cover him with the soil, and he slowly disappears into the ground, something makes me stop for a moment and choke up; tremors go through me like an electric charge, stinging my eyes. When the boy is completely buried, the old woman pours the urn of blood on the small mound of soil, from one end to the other, staining it in dark streaks. The blood is swiftly absorbed into the earth.

The old woman looks out over the lush sweep of trees that stretches into the distance, to the ridge of hills that serrates the skyline like the teeth of a chainsaw. Then she begins to sing the prayer-chant I heard the night before. The soft cadence of her voice carries through the still, silent air, a sorrowful, primordial sound that seems to rise from the dark heart of the earth.

I close my eyes and listen; the song fills me completely, just as the soil swallowed the boy whole. It feels as if the song will never end, as if it will continue until the end of the world, but it does end, eventually. Even so, I can still hear the old woman’s voice in my head as I sit on the ground beside the boy’s grave, weeping inconsolably.

14

CODY

Growing up, Cody was often left alone, even though he had two elder sisters who doted on him. They were eight and ten years older, already in adolescence, when he started school. Distracted with other things—boys, make-up, clothes, exams, extra-curricular activities in school—they did not pay much attention to him. But Cody had not minded, as he was preoccupied with his green toy soldiers, paper planes, and Old Master Q comics. To him, his sisters were like the creatures he sometimes read about in his storybooks, aliens from another planet who looked human but had blue blood flowing under their skin.

Because their parents were often busy at the wet market, where they were fishmongers, they left him in the care of his two sisters, who had to make him breakfast every day before school and make sure he got to school on time. Their parents were out of the house by three in the morning and usually did not return until late morning after they had closed their stall. Given their profession, the fridge was well stocked with all types of fish and seafood: sea bass, red snapper, garoupas, tiger prawns, stingrays. They usually had a steamed or fried fish for lunch and dinner, and while Cody never grew sick of eating it, his two sisters were always complaining about eating the same thing. Their father would ignore them, but their mother would silence them with a stern, disapproving stare.

Because of the age gap, Cody was left by himself most of the time while at home, since his sisters were either still in school or out with their friends. His father had given him a key, which he wore around his neck in Primary Three, and his parents did not track his whereabouts, unlike his classmates who had to report their every movement to their parents at all times. When he came home from school at one-thirty in the afternoon, his parents would both be taking their naps, and his mother would tell him to eat whatever was left on the stove or dining table—a meal of sweet potato porridge or rice with stir-fried vegetables, braised egg or fish. When he was done with lunch, he would wash the plate and utensils, and lie on the sofa and read comics until his parents woke up, and then he would start on homework.

In school, Cody had friends, though there was nobody whom he was particularly close to. During recess, he would play with a group of boys from his class, usually football on the school pitch—he always played the defender role, since being a striker or midfielder was too strenuous, involving a lot of running and aggressive body contact, which he was not comfortable with—or a game of catching around the canteen and assembly area. Because of his small build, he was often chosen last, or second to last, when the bigger boys picked players. Standing in the dwindling group, he would look at his feet, pretending not to care, even while he could feel himself shrinking inside, diminishing into something insubstantial. Sometimes, he would look at the boys who were chosen after him, or at the boys who stood at the fringe of the school pitch, who, for one reason or another, did not want to play football or preferred to play zero-point or five stones with the girls. Sometimes, the boys who played football would point out this group of boys and laugh openly at them and call them names, and Cody would join in. Though he longed to be part of this clique of boys who was sporty and popular and interesting, his position in the hierarchy was often at the bottom; it was all too easy to be left out, and this fear—felt rather than spoken—was what kept him in line, constantly seeking the approval of those higher up.

In Primary Four, Cody was promoted to a new class after he received better-than-expected exam results. He was assigned to a desk beside Wee Boon, a quiet boy who sat ramrod-straight throughout the lessons, and brought his own food, prepared by his grandmother, for the recess breaks. Milk-pale and skinny, Wee Boon was one of those boys who did not like to play football or any kind of sports or games during recess; he was often alone, reading at the library corner under the stairwell, or walking about aimlessly in the school garden. He seemed happy to be left alone by himself, to do whatever he wanted. Whenever Cody bumped into him, by chance or intention, Wee Boon would break from his reverie and turn his full attention to him, always eager to do whatever Cody asked him to. Sometimes, when Cody grew bored of playing football, he would get Wee Boon to catch grasshoppers or dragonflies near the pond with him, and they would fill plastic bags full of these insects, clicking and beating against the surface like tiny bombs. They would keep these bags in the slots under their desks, and take them out from time to time to shake them up; sometimes they would forget about them, and when they did remember, the insects would all be dead. And they would catch a new batch.

Once, Cody asked Wee Boon to join in the football game, and he reluctantly agreed. The leader of the team chose Wee Boon last, eyeing him with a suspicious stare, and commanded him to take the defender position. Unathletic and uncoordinated in his movements, Wee Boon was slow to chase after the ball and too timid to block anyone who charged at him. Unlike him, Cody had learnt to hide his fear, to steel himself against any shot that was thrown in his direction, masking his clumsy footwork with a slide. He was never good at the game, but that was hardly a reason for not playing it. Wee Boon only played that one time and never again, and Cody did not ask him to join in any more.

Being an only child, Wee Boon was doted on by his parents and grandparents, and had everything he wanted: sticker cards for Dinosaurs of the Past, a box of rubber erasers that featured the flags of the world, new pencil cases and school bags every year. While Cody had to save up to buy a new pack of sticker cards every other week, skipping his recess break once or twice a week, Wee Boon would get a pack whenever he went out with his grandparents. His Dinosaurs of the Past book was three-quarters full within two months after they started, while Cody’s was still patchy, with many empty boxes. Wee Boon would give him any sticker cards he needed, though he was too shy to ask. In time, their booklets looked almost similar, lacking only those phantom sticker cards that never appeared in any packet they bought.

After school each day, Wee Boon’s grandmother would be waiting for him outside the school gates. With her white hair held tightly in a bun, and wearing a rosewood samfoo with frog buttons, his grandmother was a gentle, smiling woman, who would reach first thing for Wee Boon’s school bag and water bottle when he came out of the gates. She would smile at Cody and, in a spiel of rapid Cantonese, ask whether they had been good. Wee Boon would look embarrassed and tell her that he was hungry and ask for a snack—an ice-cream or some White Rabbit candies from the provision shop. Since the boys lived in the same neighbourhood—their flats were only two blocks apart—they would walk home together, and Wee Boon’s grandmother would buy Cody whatever Wee Boon was having. When they reached Wee Boon’s block, he would sometimes invite Cody up to the flat, where he had his own room and several large boxes of toys and shelves of comic books. At his place, he would show Cody his latest toy figurines and allow him to play with them, and they would stage epic intergalactic fights that often ended with everyone but one last hero massacred. When they got bored with these fights, they would lie on the floor and read the latest Old Master Q comics. When it was time for Cody to leave, he would borrow a few comics, and promise to return them after he’d finished reading them. When he forgot or wanted to hold onto them, Wee Boon did not say anything or remind him to return them.

In class, Wee Boon was the kind of student that the teachers liked: obedient, quiet, giving all his attention to what was said or written on the chalkboard. He handed up his homework on time and his name was always among the top when the teachers announced the results of a test or examination. He was the form teacher’s pet student, the one she would count on to be reliable and submissive. This naturally meant that he was intensely disliked by the other students in the class, especially the boys, who would ransack his school bag and hide his textbooks. He, however, never did tell on anyone, and would bite his lips and smile away any discomfort or annoyance. Some of the girls would tease him for his shyness, but most of them would befriend him and invite him to join them for zero-point or hopscotch. Because Cody sat beside him in class, he would often copy Wee Boon’s homework; his parents had hired two tuition teachers, one to teach only Chinese, and the other English, maths and science. Cody had to seek help for his homework from his two sisters, who were less than helpful, being too impatient or busy. When Cody was ill-prepared for a test, Wee Boon would tilt his test papers in such a way that made it easy for him to see, and in this way, and many others, they became fast friends, with a hoard of each other’s secrets.

On weekends, after tuition classes, and if Wee Boon’s parents allowed, they would play at the void deck under his block, kicking a ball or taking turns on Wee Boon’s new bicycle, which he had received as a present for getting the highest marks in the midyear examinations. They rarely ventured farther than the void deck or the playground in front of the block of flats, coming up with imaginary battles and using the playground as the battlefield, dividing it up into different lands, fighting against each other, the hero against his enemy. Once, Wee Boon clamoured to be the hero, and Cody pushed him to the ground, telling him that he was too weak to be one, and Wee Boon turned away, his eyes brimming with tears. Sometimes, Cody would let him win the battle, only because he had pitied him. When it was time for dinner, Wee Boon’s grandmother would come down to fetch him, and he would shout at her to leave them alone. Cody would never have dared to raise his voice at any adult, especially his elders; the few times he had done so, he was punished with strokes of the cane. Wee Boon’s grandmother would wait patiently for their game to end, and when they were done, she would draw out a handkerchief from her pocket and wipe down Wee Boon’s reddened face and damp hair, which he would shake off with a brusque shrug.

Their friendship was never a balanced or fair one. While Cody often sought peer approval from the more popular boys in class, joining them whenever they asked him to play football or other games on the school pitch, Wee Boon would seek out only him when he wanted someone to play with. Even at that age, Cody knew better than to be seen playing with him all the time in school, and from time to time he would shun Wee Boon deliberately, or push him away whenever he saw the other boys glancing in their direction. They would make jokes about Wee Boon behind his back and tease him to his face, and even if Cody were standing there, he would pretend not to see or hear anything, and let their laughter run their course and die off. While he was sometimes angry with himself for not doing anything, he was angrier at Wee Boon for being such a pushover, a weakling with no backbone. During these times, in Cody’s dark moods, Wee Boon would stare at him, a look of hurt and incomprehension in his eyes. But Cody learnt soon enough to ignore these looks, pushing them into the background.

It was Cody’s idea to take up swimming as their extra-curricular activity in Primary Six. The swimming lessons were held twice a week after school, at a swimming pool only five minutes’ walk away. After lunch at the school canteen, Wee Boon and Cody would walk there and flash their school passes to gain free entry to the pool. They would change into their trunks at the changing room, and head for the main pool where the coach, a pot-bellied man with leathery skin, would be waiting, along with other students of the school’s swimming club. While Cody learnt to swim the breaststroke adequately after only three lessons, able to complete a lap without panicking, Wee Boon was still struggling to keep his body afloat and to regulate his breathing. After each lesson, he threatened to quit, though he never did. The boys were taught other strokes—freestyle, butterfly, backstroke—and practised these by swimming a few laps. While they swam, the coach would bark out instructions from the side of the pool, correcting arm or leg posture, or telling them not to slow down. When they finished their assigned laps, they would hang onto the edge of the pool, splashing water at each other or competing to see who could hold his breath underwater the longest. Sometimes they would tickle or punch each other in the water to make the other person give up, to let go of his breath. In most cases, Cody was the winner, but during those times, when they really wanted to know who could hold his breath the longest, without any trick or disturbance, Wee Boon would emerge the winner; his longest record: two minutes and fifty-one seconds.

After the lessons ended, Wee Boon and Cody would continue to swim or wait inside the pool, since the changing room would be crowded with their classmates and there were only a few showerheads. They would linger until most of the boys had left before they came out of the pool; most of the shower stalls would be empty by then.

One day, after a long and strenuous lesson, Wee Boon and Cody decided to forego the waiting and brave the crowd in the changing room. By the time they entered, all the stalls were occupied, and they had to wait, sitting on the damp wooden benches in front of the stalls. Wee Boon turned suddenly quiet, tapping his feet on the wet floor, his body radiating tension. The boy who was showering in the nearest stall, a fellow classmate, turned his body slightly towards them, and in a glimpse, Cody saw a neat turf of black, curly hair above the boy’s penis. He was not surprised, since he had seen other grown men showering in the changing room, and knew what their bodies had looked like. Around him, in school, he was vaguely aware of the changes that were taking place in the bodies of his classmates: the breaking of their voices, the growth of hair in their armpits and on their arms and legs. While it would be another year or two before these changes occurred to Cody, he knew that he was heading for some sort of a transformation, though the thought itself was not comforting in any way.

When the classmate was done showering, Cody told Wee Boon to go ahead, but he shook his head, telling Cody to go first, that he would wait for another available stall. Cody rinsed himself off; his skin felt sticky even after the shower. He quickly towelled off. Later, when he was busy packing his wet swimming trunk and goggles into his school bag, he did not notice Wee Boon coming out of the shower. It was only when he heard laughter coming from some of the classmates at the other benches that he turned to see what they were snickering at. Wee Boon, naked, was frantically searching through his bag for his towel, and even though he tried to hide it as best as he could, there was something odd about his penis at first glance. At first, Cody was surprised that Wee Boon too had grown some pubic hair, since they were the same age, but what was more surprising was that he was sporting a hard-on. Because it was a new sight to Cody’s eyes, it looked painful to bear: bent upwards, red, angry-looking. In his distress, and amidst the boisterous jeering, Wee Boon’s dick got even harder, stretching out of the foreskin, like a turtle’s head peeking out from its wrinkly neck.

The classmates’ taunting grew louder and more explicit, and Wee Boon snatched up his bag and ran to one of the toilet stalls, slamming the door. Even as they left the changing room, the boys continued to chant names at him; one of them even kicked the toilet door hard as a parting gesture. It was only when all of them had left that Cody offered his wet towel to Wee Boon and coaxed him out of the toilet stall. His face was livid with shame, and he did not look at Cody once while they were making their way home, not even stopping at the snack-food stall where they would usually buy a stick of fish balls or a curry puff to share between them. When Wee Boon reached his block of flats, he ran up the staircase without saying anything.

For the next few days, Wee Boon had to endure a battery of merciless teasing from the classmates who had witnessed his episode at the swimming pool. The news took less time to spread than a match catching fire; before the morning assembly was over, it seemed that everyone, including the girls in their class, was aware of what had happened. The girls giggled and whispered loudly among themselves, about how disgusting it was, how gross, so like him to do it, how dirty, how shameless; their taunting, unlike the boys’, was relentless and vicious. Wee Boon, on the other hand, kept up his composure and silence; the only sign that betrayed his distress was his lips, which were tightly pressed into a thin, quivering line. Sitting beside him those few days was like being near a seemingly calm dog with a muzzle over its jaws, contained and subdued, but only barely. He and Cody did not talk about what had happened; they hoped, separately, for all this to pass, which it did, after another episode of embarrassment from a different classmate, who was caught staring up some girls’ school skirts.

Yet the whole incident shifted something imperceptibly between Wee Boon and Cody, as subtle and permanent as a fissure left behind after an earthquake. They still talked, and still played whatever games they had played before, but there was a distinct, though unvoiced, divide that held them apart. It was as if, now that Cody was aware of Wee Boon’s undeniable transition into a different person, he could not not see who he was: a person who was no longer someone Cody could say he knew well, a stranger who had taken the place of a friend. Even in their closeness, they held a respective distance. It was only much later, when Cody discovered his own inclination towards other boys that he knew what he had been afraid of acknowledging then: attraction. Raw, open-faced desire.

Even after the incident, they did not stop attending the swimming lessons, though they had learnt to wait until all the classmates left before getting out of the pool and showering at the changing room. In their separate stalls, they showered and changed quickly, and avoided looking at each other’s bodies.

Even though the swimming lessons ended after the June school holidays, Wee Boon and Cody continued to swim whenever they could, on weekends and on days free from remedial classes or other school activities. Most of the time, they went together, but sometimes Wee Boon went by himself. At that stage, he had become a more consistent swimmer than Cody, and could easily beat him at freestyle. His body too had taken on a different proportion, lean and broad-shouldered, with hair growing intermittently on his lower calves; his voice had cracked in the midst of their final year in primary school.

One Saturday afternoon, Cody was there early and waited for twenty minutes at the entrance before deciding to go ahead without Wee Boon, thinking he must have forgotten about the appointment. After changing, Cody walked to a corner of the seating area, where there were fewer people, put down his bag and began his warm-up. Scanning the pool, he noticed someone getting out at the far end and stretching his legs. Wee Boon. Cody wanted to shout to him, to let him know he was there, but stopped when he saw Wee Boon staring at a man who had also got out of the pool and was walking towards the changing room. The man turned to look at Wee Boon when he walked past, and from where Cody was standing, he could sense something between them, a sort of tacit agreement, conveyed only by the briefest of glances. Wee Boon paused for a few seconds, and then stepped into the changing room. Cody followed them.

The changing room was quiet except for an occupied shower stall; Cody crept over and saw two pairs of feet in the gap of the stall door. A stream of chatter came from inside, and then there was a long period of silence, followed by some other unfamiliar sounds, as if someone were trying to steady his breathing—sharp exhalations, feral and animal-like. Cody stood there, unable to move, time measured only by the growing lump of bile in his throat that he had to force down.

And suddenly the toilet door burst open. Before Cody could think, his feet were already edging towards the exit. In his haste, he slipped and fell onto the wet floor. He looked back; the man and Wee Boon were staring down at him, a mutual look of alarm and panic on their faces. The man came towards Cody, offering his hand, as he struggled to his feet. Wee Boon stood absolutely still, and even as Cody avoided his look, in that brief moment he saw something in Wee Boon’s eyes that he could only interpret at that instance as: Please, no, don’t. Cody changed into his clothes at the seating area, grabbed his bag and left the pool.

Back in school on Monday, Cody and Wee Boon pretended nothing had happened, even as they went through the usual routines. But nothing was the same again after that. They plunged headlong into their studies, revisions and remedial classes—the PSLE was less than three months away—and left things as they were, unasked and unquestioned. Cody studied with some of the boys from the class, and spent more time playing with them, which meant seeing Wee Boon less.

They took the PSLE, and after the results were announced—Cody and Wee Boon got accepted to different secondary schools—they never contacted each other again. They sheared themselves clean of their past, their childhoods, and moved on. The friendship they had was cast aside quickly, heedlessly, as they began their new lives in their new schools.

15

WEI XIANG

For the past twenty minutes, Wei Xiang has followed a local man carrying a young girl in his arms—small in her pink Hello Kitty pyjamas, her limbs loose by her sides, blood flowing from an unseen wound on her head—as it is clear, even through the man’s visible grief, that he knows where he is going. The man’s face is tormented, his gaze far away, and the last two fingers on his left hand are missing and bleeding freely. His open anguish singles him out in the crowd, and Wei Xiang was drawn to him at first sight. They now approach the compound of a school cum emergency medical centre, circumscribed by a chain link fence crowded by adults and street kids, and a gate attended to by a guard, who lets the man through. Wei Xiang stands by a muddy puddle near the gate. In the courtyard are a number of dead bodies, and several volunteers are constructing a shelter with metal poles and tarps. A group of street kids lingers at the fence, whispering to one another; one of them stares at him with an undisguised curiosity, before his companion distracts him, pointing to something in the weedy shrubs at the edge of the school field. The growing crowd gawks at the commotion, sometimes letting out a collective cry or yell when another body is carried into the school, clearing a path for the procession.

Wei Xiang steps up to the school gate, and the guard stops him, jabbering at him in Thai. Wei Xiang points to the school assembly hall and, with a loud voice and a series of wild gestures, tries his best to convey his intentions. The guard stares at him, and Wei Xiang, exasperated, raises his voice. “My wife!” he screams into the guard’s face, finally losing his calm. He is aware of the attention he’s getting, the numerous pairs of eyes watching his outburst, but he ignores them. The guard finally backs down, moves aside and allows Wei Xiang to enter the school compound. When he looks back, the street kids are still staring at him from behind the fence.

Wei Xiang quickly makes his way through the entrance of the low-ceilinged hall, careful not to trip over any of the dead bodies lying on the sediment-encrusted floor, moving aside for the helpers making their rounds, scribbling on pieces of paper or separating the bodies according to gender and size. He passes through the men’s section, a marked-out area near the entrance, with most of the bodies left uncovered; only the worst cases are occluded by torn sections of cardboard, pieces of clothing or newspapers over their faces or severed limbs. Wei Xiang catches a glimpse of a man with a deep gash that has split open his chest, his face covered by a flimsy rag soaked through with blood, with a stone on top to weigh it down. He moves to the women’s section, near the raised platform at one end of the hall; a wood-and-copper plaque featuring the school insignia—branches of laurel and a yellow lamp—hangs on the peeling wall above the platform. Dead children have been placed on the platform, lined up in neat rows, with white plastic sheets and blankets covering their bodies.

Wei Xiang preps himself mentally as he starts to examine the first row of dead women’s bodies. The faces of the women—ashen, grim, distorted—imprint themselves like a hot branding iron into his frayed, exhausted mind. Every face is a torture, and every anticipation of possible recognition raised and thwarted leaves him stricken with a deepening sense of futility. After the fifth body, Wei Xiang blanks out unwittingly. For a fleeting moment, he can’t remember anything about Ai Ling—her face or any of her features; she has become a phantasm, a figure made up of a multitude of disembodied, indistinguishable parts. What kind of ears or eyebrows or lips does she have? Does she have a scar or a mole? Nothing comes to mind. All the faces he sees are the same to him, each possessing a similar death mask. He closes his eyes to pull himself together, to let the images of the faces fall away. Then, hardening his resolve, Wei Xiang continues down the line to the next row of bodies, lifting the coverings and taking quick glances. He holds his breath; the air in the hall has thickened, and the helpers who wear improvised face masks made of dirty rags and handkerchiefs are fanning themselves with cut-outs made of cardboard.

Wei Xiang pauses beside a body, the face concealed by strands of long hair but clearly missing both eyes and nose; his gaze glides down the body, to check its shape and proportions for any recognisable traits or features—does Ai Ling have a mole near her right breast? Or a pale crescent scar on her hip? He covers the body and catches his breath, emptying his mind of the image of the woman’s face. From somewhere, he hears a shout and sees men bringing in another dead body, dropping it on the floor with a dull thud. Two women rush to identify it, pointing to the platform; one of them speaks in a firm voice to a helper who is propping himself up with both hands on his thighs, panting visibly.

Wei Xiang presses on. Nobody has stopped him so far from looking at the bodies, though he notices one or two helpers giving him strange, puzzled glances. After examining the last body in the section—a heavyset woman in her late forties with half-shut eyes, white-purplish lips and a stunned scowl on her face—Wei Xiang stretches, feeling the tension in his neck and waist, the nagging ache in his lower back.

He looks back towards the entrance of the assembly hall and sees the silhouette of a young boy standing there alone, his small form dark against the harsh sunlight from outside. By the time Wei Xiang blinks and clears his vision, the boy is gone. He wonders how a kid could have sneaked into the school compound, with the guard at the gate.

Wei Xiang notes the time on his watch: already half past four in the afternoon. He has spent more than two hours searching the assembly hall for Ai Ling. The stale air barely stirs, permeated with a strong, unbearable stench; Wei Xiang feels his nausea getting worse, so he steps outside. The helpers have finished constructing the makeshift tent in the courtyard and have placed Red Cross signs on the dark green canvas. Several people carry bundles of blankets and large boxes of medical supplies into the tent, the flaps tied as wide as possible to allow unobstructed entry. A few wooden tables sit at the entrance, with a radio crackling with alternating bursts of static and voices. From where he stands, Wei Xiang can hear muffled voices. A blue pickup truck pulls into the school’s driveway and disgorges a few young men in uniforms, who move in swift strides to the tent, led by a stout man with a severe buzzcut. A young woman with dishevelled hair and tired features stands up nervously to speak to the soldier, and passes him a handful of documents.

Wei Xiang turns towards a covered pathway that leads to the back of the school, where there are three blocks of classrooms each two-storey high, a garden gone riotous, a scummy pond filled with floating aquatic plants, and a cobblestoned quadrangle. Along the corridors, a few men, thickly bandaged about the head and torso, are groaning and futilely swatting the flies from their bleeding wounds. Wei Xiang looks into the classrooms, giving them a thorough scan; most of the rooms are packed to capacity, and the walls and floors filthy, reeking with a fetid odour. The women’s and children’s quarters on the second floor are not any better; outside one of the classrooms, a woman carries a child swathed in rags on her back—a girl or a boy? sleeping or dead?—undecided over whether to place the child on the cramped floor inside. In another room, a young woman is weeping over a naked boy, her cries echoing off the walls. The bodies of those who have just died are dragged out of the rooms and stacked along the corridors, to make way for the incoming injured. After checking every classroom, Wei Xiang sits on the cement steps in a stairwell and rests his face in his palms. His head is starting to throb with a vicious intensity. He needs to head back to the school hall, he’s not done yet; there are bound to be more bodies now. He steels himself against the thought of this endless task, and then pushes himself to move.

Back in the assembly hall, the stench has become overwhelming, rushing out to hit Wei Xiang in the face before he has even stepped inside. Four standing oscillating fans have been set up to alleviate the situation, but they do nothing more than stir the miasma into a thick, putrid stew. Wei Xiang holds his shirtsleeve to his nose, trying to block out the smell, but it’s useless. Everywhere he turns, he is overcome by the corporeality of death. The helpers are still carrying in new bodies, forming additional lines that come up all the way to the entrance of the hall. A group of men with pens and clipboards and cameras is examining the corpses, taking snapshots and jotting down notes. On the concrete walls, beside the broken-paned windows, a woman is taping up sheets of paper, some of them showing grainy photographs.

Wei Xiang looks around, unsure where he has left off before. A pair of bloated legs with patches of dark bruises sticking out of a thin blanket catches his eye. He lifts the cover and recoils backward when he sees that a part of the head has been sheared away, revealing the mushy, wrinkled surface of the brain. Wei Xiang feels the bile rising at the back of his throat, and before he can take another step, the vomit gushes out of him and onto his shirt, his hands, the dead woman on the floor. He stumbles outside and squats at the clogged drain, puking and shaking in violent spasms, as if his body were trying to purge itself of something horrible inside him. He retches for a long time, then wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and sinks to the ground. It’s impossible. There is no way he can go back in. Fighting his growing despondency, Wei Xiang stares at the faces of the curious onlookers peeking through the chain link fence. Then he sees the boy again.

Standing next to two middle-aged local women dressed in floral-print blouses and dark pants, the boy is staring at him. The look on his scarred face is not hostile, but hovers in a state of neutrality and blankness. Standing motionless amongst the crowd at the fence, the boy seems composed, unruffled by the tide of noises and commotion around him. Wearing a dirty white singlet and a pair of drawstring khaki shorts, he looks like any other street kid in Phuket, who might be playing beside the busy lanes of traffic, or panhandling the passers-by for money or sweets or pens. Getting up from the ground, Wei Xiang moves towards the school gate, brushing past incoming stretchers and scores of arm-banded helpers shouting instructions at one another. He bumps into a bony young girl with jutting shoulders and elbows, barely a teenager but carrying a baby slung across her back, and sends her toppling to the muddy ground. She shows no sign of annoyance, but simply gets back to her feet and makes her way to the Red Cross tent. By the time he makes his way through the crowd and out the gate, the boy is no longer standing at the fence. Frantically, Wei Xiang scans the area and again spots the boy walking away at a brisk pace towards the main road. He trains his eyes on the boy’s retreating back as he manoeuvres through the crowd. When he thinks he has almost lost him again, Wei Xiang cries out and the boy stops in his tracks, turning to look at him. At a road junction, the boy stands against the flow of human traffic, as if waiting for Wei Xiang to catch up.

But no matter how fast Wei Xiang pursues him, he can never reach the boy, who disappears momentarily and materialises somewhere farther ahead of him, always drawing Wei Xiang to him with his presence. Wei Xiang chases him down a network of lanes and alleyways across town, determined to reach him no matter what it takes, his feverish mind fired up by this all-consuming task.

16

AI LING

As the sun begins to set on the third day after the tsunami, the tiny island falls into shadows, steeped in silence. Across the iridescent spread of the sea, the waves ripple, a skin of shimmering light. The breeze, blowing from the northeast, has turned a few degrees colder, stirring the tufts of grass on the island, caressing the topography of the sand dunes.

A fine layer of condensation has formed over the woman, cooling the body that has been baking under the sun for days. In the soft, forgiving dusk light, the woman’s body exudes a frail, otherworldly beauty, as if released from its struggle. Along the stretch of beach, more things have been deposited by the waves: a few broken planks, pockmarked with decay and tiny holes where the screws used to be; a rutted car tyre; half-filled soft drink bottles; a decapitated plastic doll head with half-closed eyes.

With her head tilted westward, facing the horizon, the woman seems to be contemplating the sunset, and the trembling lights pirouetting on the surface of the sea. With her lips parted, as if in mid-sentence, the unspoken words that have pooled in her mouth slowly leak out in dark, viscous drips. The wind carries her silenced words out into the sea, scattering them like dust.

“Look at this,” Ai Ling said on the evening of Christmas Day. “It looks amazing, right?”

The quartet of friends had just settled into their seats at the seafront restaurant, and the waiter had left them with the menus. The view from where they were seated opened out to a commanding, picturesque vista of Patong Bay, with the sun sinking down to the horizon. It had taken them nearly twenty minutes to find the restaurant, following the bad directions given by the hotel bellhop, and using the grainy map that Ai Ling had photocopied from the Lonely Planet guidebook, which only showed the main roads of Phuket, conveniently leaving out the many arteries that branched out into every perceivable nook and cranny of the city. Ai Ling had insisted that they walk instead of taking a taxi or tuk tuk, and by the time they found the restaurant along the stretch of Prabaramee Road, they were all covered with a thin coat of dust and perspiration, the collars and armpits of their clothes stained dark.

Wei Xiang turned to take in the view of the sea, while Cody and Chee Seng studied the menu and scanned the drinks list. The waiter, a waifish teenager with a gaunt, acne-ridden face, came over and filled up the stain-spotted glasses with ice water, leaving the almost-empty pitcher on the table, and waited with a pen and a dog-eared notepad, smiling awkwardly. Chee Seng dismissed her with a request for more time. Ai Ling allowed her vision to follow the vanishing line of the horizon from one end to the other, noting the gold-and-red swathes of light piercing through the heavy, low-lying clouds. From somewhere, hidden out of view, Ai Ling could hear the gentle bobbing of longtail boats and the occasional cawing of seagulls.

“What do you feel like having?” Wei Xiang spoke up, drawing her attention.

“You order. I’ll eat anything,” Ai Ling said, turning back to the sea.

Wei Xiang, in turn, deferred to Cody and Chee Seng when the waiter came around to take their orders for dinner. They picked papaya salad and fried spring rolls for starters; green curry, minced pork with basil leaves and sweet-and-sour tilapia for entreés; and held back on dessert, unsure whether they could finish what they had already ordered. The restaurant was sparsely decorated: a few old-looking tribal masks hung up on the wall, a Chinese scroll of unintelligible scribbling, and a bland painting of an island sunset. Couples and small groups trickled into the restaurant from time to time, and the din of chatter soon filled the room. The sun had submerged halfway into the sea, sending out its last rays of the day.

“Nice little place, great view,” Chee Seng said, taking out his Motorola phone from his pocket to snap a few pictures of the scenery. “You can never take a bad picture with such a view, it’s just impossible.” He previewed the pictures and showed them to Cody.

“Yes, you’re right. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing this,” Ai Ling said, and held Wei Xiang’s hand on the tabletop, giving it a gentle squeeze. She sipped from her glass of water. “See, I made the right choice in picking this place, right?” The guys chorused their approval in unison.

The food soon arrived, and the conversation turned to past relationships.

“You wouldn’t believe the kind of guys Cody dated before,” Ai Ling said. “Some of them were plain creepy.”

“Just one of them,” said Cody. “You make it seem like I dated so many guys, which I didn’t.”

Ai Ling went on: “Remember that one guy, the one who worked in the bank? He locked you out of his place one night when you came home late and refused to let you in, all because you forgot to tell him you would be late. You called me after that, so pissed off, and didn’t know what to do. I had to calm you down.”

“You’re just being overly dramatic with your storytelling. It didn’t happen that way. I just panicked, for no good reason. Okay, enough about him,” Cody said, noticing Chee Seng looking at him.

“You never told me this before,” Chee Seng said.

“There’s nothing to say. It all happened in the past, water under the bridge,” Cody said, and quickly changed the subject. “Wah, so much food left.”

“What I could not understand was why you stayed with him for another two months before you finally broke up with him,” Ai Ling said. “He was such an asshole, so overbearing, possessive and demanding. He bullied you into submission all the time.”

“But you’re seeing it from just one point of view. You don’t know unless you’re in my shoes. It’s hard to understand, even for me. He had a nice side to him, and he treated me well.”

“He pestered you for months after the break-up,” Ai Ling said, unable to stop herself. Cody glared at her, but was silent.

“Hey, why are we talking about all this?” Wei Xiang said.

“Ask your wife. She brought it up first. She always likes to make a big production out of my past,” Cody said.

“But your life is always filled with drama, and anyway, it’s way more exciting than mine. I live vicariously through you, you know that, right?” Ai Ling said, and Cody rolled his eyes.

“Well, you guys seem to be quite stable,” she said, nodding at Chee Seng. “How long have you been together now? Eight, nine years? You guys are doing well.”

“Ten years, come April next year,” Cody said, looking over at Chee Seng.

“You guys are like practically married, anyway. Ten years, that’s long, that’s like a lifetime,” Ai Ling said. The men laughed.

“Yup, and it feels like it, too,” Chee Seng said. Cody punched him lightly on the arm and creased his face into a mock-wounded expression.

“Maybe you should consider, you know, getting married. Maybe move somewhere, like Canada, to get hitched.”

“No lah, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not for us. Remember we are Singaporeans. We are too risk-averse,” Cody said. “I’m happy where we are now, with what we have. What’s the point of getting married, anyway?”

“Don’t you want your commitment to each other to be recognised, in one way or another?”

“In Singapore? Gays getting married and being lawfully recognised? Who are you kidding? You must be joking. It’ll never happen in a hundred years. And what’s the use of getting married overseas, and then coming back with a meaningless certificate that’s worth nothing here?”

A loud crash suddenly erupted from the entrance of the kitchen, where two waiters had collided into each other, sending a tray of empty glasses and a plate of fried chilli fish to the ground. The manager of the restaurant hurried over from the cash register and scolded the waiters loudly, instructing them to clear up the mess with a mop and some wet towels.

“I’m just saying, that’s all,” Ai Ling said. Wei Xiang waved a waiter over to refill the drinks.

“How about you two? How long have you been married now?” Chee Seng asked, taking a sip of water.

“Seven years. We dated for three years before getting married,” Wei Xiang said.

“That’s long too,” Chee Seng said.

“You know how it is with a woman like Ai Ling, the moment she set her eyes on me, she was head over heels in love and pursued me until she got me,” Wei Xiang said with a smirk.

“Says who? You bloody liar,” Ai Ling said, slapping Wei Xiang’s hand. “You’re the one who had to chase after me, okay? I didn’t make any move on you, just for the record.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cody said, grinning. “You were always so daring during university days, soliciting numbers from boys and asking them out.”

“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side. Don’t badmouth me. When did I ever do that? You must be talking about yourself.” Ai Ling scowled at Cody, who reacted on cue, frowning in shocked amusement. “Cody was the real flirt at university. You would not believe all the things he did, even if I told you.”

“I want to hear,” Chee Seng said.

“Some things are best left in the past. No point dragging them out again,” Cody said, laughing. Under the table, he slipped his hand onto Chee Seng’s thigh, stroking it.

“Okay okay, I let you off this time,” Ai Ling said. “I’m sure everyone has a part of their past that they’re not proud of. God, I know I’ve done so many things in the past that I wish I could forget. Why is it that we always remember so much about this bad stuff, and so little of the good in our lives? It’s almost like we’re punishing ourselves for every single thing that we’ve screwed up.” She turned to stare out at the sea again. The sky had deepened from a deep blue to a deeper purple. She could feel Wei Xiang’s eyes on her.

“Now you’re just being morose,” Cody said. Ai Ling turned to smile at him. The loud cawing of the squabbling seagulls in the distance reached their table.

“But you know what I’m talking about, right? This fixation on the past that all of us have,” Ai Ling said. Around them, the restaurant, now full, bustled with a hum of voices, laughter and the soft soundtrack of Thai pop songs playing over the audio system.

“Shall we order some Singha beer? I’m suddenly in the mood to drink,” Wei Xiang said. “Do you want one?” Ai Ling shook her head without looking at him. Cody and Chee Seng took Wei Xiang up on the suggestion, and Wei Xiang placed the order with the waiter.

When the beer came and they had taken swigs straight from the bottles—Wei Xiang had declined drinking glasses and a bucket of ice—Ai Ling spoke again: “Actually it doesn’t matter how long a couple has been together, to show the kind of love they have. Though of course, the longer you know someone, the more you know about him, what makes him tick, what makes him happy. But is that all we can know about him? How can we claim to know anyone, a lover, a husband or a boyfriend, fully, completely, when there’s always a part that is hidden from us, maybe a side of him that even he is not aware of? Every man is a mystery, to himself, to others.

“Maybe that’s why we can continue to love someone after so many years, because we can never get to the end of this mystery. But I don’t want to pretend to know anything about love, when it’s hardly the case, when I’m still trying to understand what it’s all about. Don’t laugh at me, I know I sound silly, but seriously, what do we actually know about love? What is it exactly about this person we profess to love that we actually love? What, really?”

“Are you drunk? What’s in that calamansi lime drink you had? Did they spike it with something?” Cody said.

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying,” Ai Ling said, keeping her voice level, before continuing. “Just hear me out. I have this aunt, my mother’s younger sister, who lost her husband to a heart attack while he was driving. One moment he was signalling to turn right at a junction, talking to my aunt, and the next moment he was clutching his chest. The car was still moving and slammed right into the back of a truck. He was dead before he reached the hospital.”

Cody sneaked a look at Chee Seng, and then back at Ai Ling and Wei Xiang. Nobody spoke.

Ai Ling tapped her fingers on the red-checked tablecloth and took in a long breath.

“I’m very close to my aunt. My mum used to ask her to babysit me when I was much younger, when she had to work an extra shift at the factory. Maybe because they were childless, my uncle and aunt doted on me a lot, always giving in to my requests for anything: snacks, toys, colouring books. They treated me as if I were their own daughter.

“Right after the accident, I rushed to the hospital. My aunt had suffered a few broken ribs and some bruises, and was in a coma for a few days, but otherwise she was okay. I can still remember when she finally woke up, the look on her face, this raw, open confusion, like an exposed wound. Nobody wanted to tell her about the death of my uncle at first, but I think somehow she knew, from the way we were keeping a guilty silence around her. We thought we could spare her the pain for as long as we could.”

Ai Ling caught her breath, brought Wei Xiang’s beer to her lips and took a long swig. Wei Xiang covered her hand with his and held it. Ai Ling smiled at him.

“This tastes great, I should order one,” she said. Her eyes shone in the semi-darkness of the restaurant. The waiters were flitting about, lighting the tea light in the flask-lamp on every table. Tiny buds of flame came to life from every part of the room, a field of hovering fireflies. Outside, the waves fell and crashed in gentle, lulling succession; moonlight dappled across the inky surface of the sea, tracing the outline of each wave as it pushed onto the shore.

“So what happened to your aunt after she knew? I mean, she would have known everything later on, right?” Chee Seng said.

“Of course she knew everything, my parents had to tell her. My aunt took in the news with composure, but underneath you could tell she was not herself at all. She seemed so lost and helpless then, stuck in her grief. The doctor said it was only natural, and that we should be patient and just let her take her time to come around.”

Ai Ling paused to take another sip of the beer, to clear her throat.

“I’m not sure she will ever get over it. She was married to my uncle for over forty years. How can anyone survive that kind of loss? How can anyone get over this? It’s like having two arms chopped off and someone telling you to get over it, move on, live a normal life, go back to the life you used to have? It’s ridiculous.”

“But people do get over these things, and move on,” Cody said.

“No, not entirely. All this nice talk about getting over death and moving on is just bullshit. If you’re truly frank with yourself, you won’t get over these things so easily. It will hit you again and again, and you won’t know what to do with it, this terrible grief that’s inside you, that’s fucking you up inside out. How can you stop loving someone just because he’s dead?”

“Now, who’s the one being melodramatic?” Cody said.

“Anyway, let me finish the story. Shortly after my aunt went back home, I got a call from her in the middle of the night. She was distraught over the phone, trying to say something to me. I rushed over to her place and found her on the floor, clenching my uncle’s reading spectacles. I had to pry her off the floor and coax her back into bed. The spectacles were crushed in her grip and the broken glass had cut deep into her palm. I bandaged the cut and stayed with her until she finally calmed down. It was a long time before she returned to herself. That was the only time it happened, and we never talked about it.” Ai Ling stopped and shook her head.

“Dear, don’t…” Wei Xiang said.

Ai Ling continued: “Some nights, I dreamt that I was my aunt, sitting in the car, watching my uncle die before my eyes. The car still moving, just about to crash into the other vehicle, my uncle with a fist to his chest, head on the steering wheel, losing control of the car. I could not move a single muscle while watching all this unfold before me. I could not understand a single thing of what was happening. The whole event took only a split second, everything flashing forward and playing out in slow motion. And then the crash finally came, and in my head, or maybe my aunt’s, all I could hear was just: Why didn’t I die with him?”

“Ai Ling…” Wei Xiang brought his arm around Ai Ling’s shoulders. Under the table, Cody felt Chee Seng’s hand tighten on his, fingernails digging into his flesh.

“Okay,” Ai Ling said. “I’m just being incoherent now. I’ve talked too much. I’ll shut up now.”

The waiter came over to suggest some desserts, but nobody was in the mood for any. Wei Xiang asked for the bill and took out his wallet. Chee Seng offered to pay but Wei Xiang declined. “You can pay tomorrow,” Wei Xiang said.

Cody brought up his bottle of beer and proposed a toast. “For our trip, for the next few days. And also, Merry Christmas!”

“Yes, to us, to what we have now,” Ai Ling said, tapping her glass against Cody’s bottle.

When the waiter came and put Wei Xiang’s change on their table, he barely looked at it. Even when everyone had finished their drinks, nobody made a move to go. A silence had settled between them.

“Where shall we go next?” Wei Xiang said, eventually.

Ai Ling looked at him, not registering anything, her eyes blank. She held Wei Xiang’s gaze. Chee Seng turned to look at the dark sea; Cody closed his eyes for a moment, stifling a yawn. Sitting in the noisy restaurant, separated from the other patrons, none of them wanted to make the first move to leave.

17

CHEE SENG

We leave the burial mound and head back to the hut in silence, treading through the dark, the night air chilly on my skin. The old woman has taken the lead, and I try to stay in step with her, not wanting to lose sight. She moves with the certainty of a person who knows her way through the forest—a dark maze of rocky, dirt paths—even with her eyes closed. Around us, the forest is a discordant chorus of nocturnal sounds: buzzing, clicking, and the occasional throaty drone of an unseen bird that sounds like a prolonged burst of pellets shot from a pistol. Even with my eyes open, I can’t see much, except for the dark moving form of the old woman before me; the darkness is full and material, a presence that envelops me from all sides. My legs are covered with scratches, my arms and neck dotted with mosquito bites.

When I look up, I see the silhouettes of trees against the satin deep-blue sky, glittering with stars. The hue of the sky is like nothing I have ever seen before—rich and velvety. I crane my neck to see what lies ahead of the old woman; the small hut slowly materialises. I sense the old woman hastening her steps, her footfalls light, almost soundless. We stop at the well and she draws up a pail of water and splashes both our feet, a biting relief. I plunge my hands into the pail and splash the water all over my face, feeling my sweaty skin bristle.

After crossing the threshold and entering the hut, it takes me a few moments to adjust to the dimness of the room. The smell of paraffin oil fumes from the lamp hangs heavily in the air, and, along with it, I detect the faint burning of dry wood. The old woman is at the brick stove, setting a kettle to boil, fanning the flames. The red-orange glow casts a halo of soft amber light around her, agitating her shadows on the wall. She takes up a flask and puts some dry leaves—tea? herbs?—into it.

I sit on the wooden bench and lower my head onto the table, burying my face in the crook of my arm. I can feel my body losing its tension, unwinding; a numbing fatigue soon takes hold, spreading across my body. Draining slowly of energy, I can’t keep my eyes open, though my thoughts are creating a racket in my head. The old woman sets a bowl before me. The soothing scent of jasmine fills my nose, and I take a few sips. She sits beside me and watches me drink. With the shadows flickering on her face, her eyes seem like empty pits that draw me into them—a deathly calm, the gravity of darkness.

It would be easier to stay where I am, somewhere up in the hills with the old woman, distanced from the rest of the world. Nobody knows whether I’m dead or alive, and this realisation is harsh but sobering. I could live like this for as long as I want. Maybe in some ways, I’m avoiding the need to take the next step; maybe I’m hoping to delay the decision to head back, to return to where I’m expected. Nobody can stay still, or hidden, for long; life always demands action, movement, choices, a nudge to take the next step.

In the days I have spent in the hut, recovering under the care of the old woman, I think about the life I used to have, about Ai Ling and Wei Xiang, and of course Cody. They are the people I care about and love the most, but now, after all that has happened, I can’t summon anything in me to feel for them. They have become, over the last few days, immaterial, mere shadows from the past, stripped of any history or connection to the reality of my current existence. It’s as if I have conjured them up from my own imagination, from different fragments of other people I have known—wisps of smoke rising into the air, fading into nothing. I have almost no desire to return to them, or to whatever is waiting for me.

The old woman, on the other hand, is already preparing for my eventual departure. She feeds me another round of the bitter brew, changes the wound dressings, and mends the rips in my clothes, going about these tasks with her usual efficiency and silence. From time to time, she checks on me, putting her hand to my forehead or applying a lotion to my bruises. She takes out a cloth bag from the larder and puts in a few vegetable buns that she has prepared, a bottle of water and a small jar of medicinal lotion. She secures the opening of the cloth bag with a piece of rattan string and leaves it at the foot of the bed.

Watching her move about in the small, dimly lit hut with a single-minded focus stirs up memories of my maternal grandmother who passed away six years ago. She was the one who took care of my siblings and me when my mother was holding down two jobs, after she and my father were divorced. Every day after school, my grandmother would keep me in the kitchen for hours, seated at the dining table to have my meals or work on my homework, as she busied herself with the scrubbing of pots and pans, preparing the spices for her special bak kut teh soup, or cleaning out the fridge, which was always packed to the gills with plastic bags of varying size and colour, the contents known only by my grandmother. She never wasted or threw away food, even when it was past the expiry date. For snacks, she would give me stale cream crackers that tasted like dry cardboard, which she kept in a large tin can. The day after she died of a sudden stroke, I peeked into the fridge and saw that it was as full as it had always been.

In my dreams—sleeping and waking in an unending cycle—I sometimes confuse what is there with what isn’t—my long-gone past and the elusive present, the old woman and my dead grandmother. At one point, when the old woman put her hand on my forehead, and I opened my eyes, I could see my grandmother’s features superimposed on her face—the scattering of age spots on her cheeks, the sharp creases around her eyes and mouth like knife cuts, her perceptive stare. Words came pouring from me in a jumble of hard consonants as if I were learning to speak in tongues, harsh and guttural. And always, a presence hovering near me, a shadow cast over the wavy landscape of my dreams.

Towards evening, when the light outside the hut has gradually turned mellow, easing from a fiery red to a deepening shade of blue, I finally wake up from my spot at the table. My mind feels empty, my body light and incorporeal. From where I sit, I watch the changing sky through the doorway, and beyond the sweep of the trees, the satiny cloak of the dark sea. When dinner is ready, the old woman motions to me to join her. We eat in silence, and by the time we are done, night has fully descended, the lamps in the hut providing our only illumination.

Once the old woman has washed the dishes and put them away, she comes over to me, reaching into the side pocket of her threadbare shirt to pull out a ring. It catches the light from the lamp. It’s a simple, unadorned ring, perhaps a wedding band—where did she find it? Putting it in my palm, the old woman looks at me, pats my wrist once, and turns away. I try on the ring, but it can’t fit any of my fingers except the last one on my right hand. Whoever owned the ring must have had slim fingers, and it occurs to me that perhaps it belonged to a woman. I wrap it in a torn rag and put it in the pocket of my jeans.

For our fifth anniversary, Cody bought me a ring and hid it between the pages of a book that I was reading. That night, as I was picking up the book, a collection of stories by Alice Munro, the ring fell into my lap. For a while, holding the ring between my fingers, I wondered whether the ring was Cody’s, that perhaps he had misplaced it. From across the bed, Cody grabbed my hand.

“Happy anniversary,” he said.

“Happy anniversary. What is this?”

“A ring.”

“Yes, I know that. Why did you buy me a ring? So tacky.”

“No, it’s actually quite nice. Don’t you like it?”

“Yes, but still. A ring. You want to propose to me?”

“Yes, but only if you want to marry me.”

“No, take it back. I don’t want to marry you.”

“Why not? I know you want to.” Cody pressed closer to me, took the ring and slipped it on my index finger.

“Okay, now you are married. To me,” he said. “You can kiss the groom.”

I wore the ring whenever I was with Cody, so he could see it. But I was never interested in accessories; maybe a watch, but only because I needed it to time my regular runs, and even then it was a cheap, plastic Casio. And if I received gifts from friends—a chain, bracelet, leather wristband—I would put them aside for re-gifting, and if they started to clutter up the drawer, I would put them all in a box and give them away to the Salvation Army. Occasionally, when Cody saw a piece he liked, I would give it to him.

But the ring that Cody bought was a different thing altogether. It had meant something, at least to Cody, a commitment of sorts, a symbol of the years we had been together; but for me, it was nothing more than an inanimate object made to embody some significance that existed only in the mind of the giver, and divorced from this, it was nothing more than a piece of metal. So to counter my initial reluctance, and mostly for Cody’s sake, I wore it as if it really mattered, as if it were something that carried the weight of importance for both of us. I wore it when I went to bed, when we had breakfast, when we went out with friends, when we had sex. But when Cody was not around, or when I had to go for my runs, I would take it off and leave it in the drawer. By then the ring had already left its mark on me, the slight indent that went around the base of my finger, the skin a tone lighter as if drained of blood.

When Ai Ling saw the ring during one of our dinners, she looked puzzled.

“Thought you didn’t like to wear accessories?” she said, holding up my hand to examine the ring.

“No, but Cody bought this for me. I would never buy it myself.”

“Does it mean what I think it means?”

“No, it’s just an anniversary gift.”

“Can’t be that simple.”

“It is, don’t overthink it. You women are so drama, always imagining things.”

“I don’t think so. The ring has to mean something. You don’t buy a ring for someone without a reason.” Ai Ling looked at me, widening her eyes in feigned surprise. “Oh my god, he proposed to you, didn’t he?”

“No, don’t be crazy!” I protested, and laughed, and pushed our conversation in another direction.

I’m the eldest son in my family—my father was a car mechanic, and my mother a coffee-shop assistant—and I have three younger brothers. My parents were divorced when I was in primary school, but they kept this from us for a long time. My father continued to stay with us even after, and when he moved out, he took only what he needed, leaving behind many personal items. Because of this, we did not feel his dwindling absence in the house, and subsequent abandonment, for some time. Because my father stayed out late most nights, drinking with his friends, my brothers and I never thought anything was amiss. Only the look on my mother’s face told a different story, but we did not know how to read it. She held back, and carried on: a cycle of housework and chores, taking care of us, cooking our meals. We would not see our father for a day, and we would think nothing of it, perhaps he was busy and had spent the night at the car repair shop. Then it became two nights, but still we held up the illusion; we looked to our mother for a word or some sign, but she did not let on. My father’s absence stretched to a week, and then a month. My brothers and I did not hear from him after that, and whenever the house phone rang, it was usually my mother who picked it up and spoke into it with a moderated tone, turning her back to us. When she hung up, she would avoid our stares, her expression inscrutable.

When we were alone, my brothers and I would speculate about the disappearance of my father—it was the early eighties, and divorce was a rare thing, something nobody talked about, and we did not know anyone in school whose parents were divorced—and came up with many reasons: that he had killed someone and was on the run, or worse, in jail; that he was suffering from some hideous disease and had to stay away because he did not want to infect us. Not once, in all our speculations over the months and years, did we think that our father had deserted us. It was only years later that we found out that he had returned to Malaysia, to his hometown of Ipoh, with another woman, to start another family. By then, we had not heard from him for so long that he no longer mattered in our lives, a marginal figure that hovered in a corner of our memories. We did not even know he died from prostate cancer until my mother told us and asked one of us to accompany her to Ipoh to attend his funeral; none of us wanted to go until my youngest brother relented. For me, it was a matter of pride: he had abandoned us, and I did not want anything to do with him, even when he was dead. I had banished him to the farthest reach of my mind, but the act of forgetting was never an easy task.

For many years, I could not understand my mother’s actions, how she had behaved so civilly to someone who had cheated on her and deserted the family. She never felt the need to explain her actions or feelings to us. Perhaps she had thought it was better to maintain a link with my father for our sake, or because of their past and the ties that went beyond what we could see. How she had kept up the correspondence with my father over the years was something she did behind our backs, without our knowledge. She never remarried, and led a quiet life that hardly stepped out of the boundaries of my brothers’ lives and mine. In a stolid, unwavering way, she led her life for our sake, and growing up, we could not get away fast enough from the different ways she was smothering us, keeping us under her fierce watch. Our little acts of rebellion were forms of betrayal to her, manifested in the cold wars that raged between us and her, the long silences broken only when one of us finally gave in, or gave up. Even my coming out was a sign of aggravation towards her, another telltale mark of how she had, once again, failed as a mother. Whatever secret pains she nursed were invisible to us, a self-serving defence, an impenetrable fortress she put up against her own children.

So, whenever I held up the ring, my mind would dredge up these thoughts about my parents and their failed marriage, and I would have to resist the urge to associate the ring with something I had never truly believed in, an object meant to represent the fragile, breakable bonds between the ones you loved. What was the point of it, after all? I would have given it more credit if it were purely decorative; at least then it would have served a particular function. I wore it less and less, if I could help it, and Cody did not seem to notice.

One time, I lost the ring at the gym. I was not aware of the loss at the time, and it was only when I was on the train heading home that I felt its absence on my finger. I had picked up the habit of twirling the ring whenever I was deep in thought, an absent-minded gesture that had become second nature to me. So when I could not feel it on my finger, I panicked. Rushing back to the gym, I tore through the changing area, heading for the showers; the ring was where I had left it, on the ledge between the shower stalls. Days after this, when I thought about how I had felt then, I found myself embarrassed at the excessive display of feelings, which ran counter to how I had felt about wearing the ring in the first place. So what if I had lost the ring? Would it have mattered? Cody might chide me for my carelessness, but at least the whole issue would be off my mind, something I would not have to struggle with anymore. This, too, could be a form of immense relief. But I never did find the courage to do what felt like the right thing to do.

“Do you want me to get a ring for you, too?” I asked, around eight months after he had given me the ring.

“No,” Cody replied, looking at me to see where I was going with the question.

“Why not? You bought one for me.”

“Because if you wanted to, you would have done it a long time ago.”

“It didn’t cross my mind then. Maybe I can get one for you, if you want.”

“I don’t need one.”

“Seems kind of pointless if I’m the only one wearing it, right?”

“It suits you better.”

“Nonsense. You know exactly how I feel about accessories.”

“Anyway, you have got used to the ring now, haven’t you?”

“It’s just weird for me to wear it if you are not wearing one.”

“So it would make you feel better if I get one too?”

“Yes.”

“Then get me one.”

“But do you really want one?”

“Not really.”

After this, we never brought up the issue of the ring again.

Lying on the mat in the darkened hut, I can’t sleep, my eyes glued to the ceiling. Light from the table lamp throws long shaky shadows across the floor of the hut. The lonesome moth that has flown in remains stock-still on the wall near the stove, the pattern on its wings like the unblinking eyes of a nocturnal beast. Toads drone mechanically, along with the insistent chirping of the cicadas. Darkness lurks like a predator outside the hut.

The old woman sits on a wooden stool at the threshold of the hut, fanning herself with a straw fan, looking out into the courtyard, into the dark forest. From where I’m lying, looking at her arched back, she seems vulnerable. Under her breath, she mutters something rhythmic to herself, perhaps a song. The sound comes to me, in a mellifluous cadence, and I strain to catch the notes. In my mind, I play out memories of my dead grandmother, my head on her lap on warm, lazy afternoons, her hand patting me gently on my back, coaxing me to sleep. She would always sing to me in Hokkien, always a song about a lonely, tragic woman pining for her faraway lover, and waiting for him to come back to her. I would tried my best to decipher the lyrics with my limited knowledge of the dialect, waiting for the song to end before asking my grandmother about the things I did not understand. Why couldn’t the woman in the song go and find her lover? How could she not have eaten for so many days, wasn’t she hungry at all? Why did she drink the poisonous potion? My grandmother would answer some of my questions, and then tell me to hush and close my eyes. I would try to think of the ways I could save the woman from her misery.

Now, with the night sounds pressing in on us, I wonder about the old woman’s life in the middle of this deep forest, high up in the hills, surviving all on her own. How can she live the way she does, with nothing except for the barest of necessities? Yet, she can, and she has, for god knows how long. Does she have a family, or someone who’s aware of her existence? Over the past few days, I have seen no other person in the vicinity. For all I know, she might have lived this way for a very long time, without the need for anyone, or anything else.

And in imagining her life, I recall my grandmother’s, who lived alone for twenty-two years after my grandfather passed away. While she had taken care of my brothers and me on days that my mother was at work, she was often alone, occupied with her own life. She did not trouble my mother, her second daughter, with anything, even on occasions when she was sick; one time she even admitted herself into the hospital after she had a bad fall, and did not inform my mother until the day she was checking out. She claimed she did not want to inconvenience anyone, to make my mother take time off from her job, seeing how busy she already was with us four boys. She did not say much when my parents got divorced, and it was hard to tell how she felt over the whole thing, given the stoic front she put up before us. She kept our lives going on track, and did not let up her tough discipline and punishment whenever one of us misbehaved. In a way, my grandmother had taken the role of our missing father, writ large by her actions and influence over us. She died when she was eighty-five.

The old woman gets up from where she is sitting and closes the wooden door. She steps towards me, and with the weak light behind her, I can’t see her face clearly. Again, she places her palm on my forehead and utters something. Then she moves to turn off the lamp, reducing the hut to a near-complete darkness. I hear her getting into her bed—a structure made of long wooden planks tied together with ropes—and within minutes she is asleep, her breaths light and even. In the dark, I listen to her breathing and measure it against mine. I stay up for as long as I can, trying to stay afloat against the irresistible pull of the unknown.

18

WEI XIANG

Wei Xiang wakes with a start, the memory of a hand brushing across his face lingering on his skin, and looks around the hotel room. He has slept in the clothes he wore yesterday, which reek of sour perspiration, and have hardened with dirt stains. He feels disoriented; he can’t remember how he managed to get himself back to the hotel and into bed the night before. He lifts his heavy head from the sticky, stale-smelling bedsheet, before letting it fall back again. Wrecked with exhaustion, he rubs his temples, feeling the start of a low-grade headache.

In his half-awake state, his thoughts run immediately to the strange boy who eluded him the day before in the streets of Phuket. Wei Xiang can’t remember how long he trailed him, always just missing him. Sometimes the boy was right in front of him, and at other times appearing far away, a lonesome figure amidst the thronging, agitated crowd. It was as if the boy were playing a game of cat-and-mouse, teasing and frustrating Wei Xiang at the same time.

Yet, as he tries to recall what the boy looks like, his mind draws up only fractured images—a mop of wild hair, small seashell ears, skinny legs, dirty unshod feet, a deep scar across his left eye—an incomplete picture. Even when he attempts to put the different parts of the boy together, the resulting image is incoherent, indistinct, an out-of-focus photograph.

Wiping the dried saliva from his cheek, Wei Xiang checks the time on his watch. 10.45am. The morning is almost over. He rolls out of bed, shocking his body into action. In the toilet, looking into the mirror, he sees his reflection: days-old stubble, dark eye-bags, deeply creased lines across his forehead. His eyes are dull, the light gone out of them. He slaps his cheeks hard, trying to wake himself up fully, his body still steeped in lethargy. He notices Ai Ling’s barrette lying beside the bottles of hand cream and body lotion, and sweeps everything into her toiletries bag on the counter, putting them out of sight. Then he wets a hand towel, rubs his face roughly with it, and steps back into the bedroom to change his clothes.

At the hotel lobby, Wei Xiang notes that the level of water has dropped significantly, barely at ankle-height now, and a coarse layer of sediment has settled on the exposed surfaces. There is a water-level stain on the walls; the wallpaper has peeled and curled into long stiffened strips. Large flakes of paint have fallen off as well, floating on the water like wood shavings. The furniture has been arranged back to its original layout, though there is something amiss about the placement, as if nothing fits the scene any longer, incorrect props in a stage setup. Stripped of the usual accoutrements—flower vases, throw pillows, travel magazines, mural paintings—the lobby looks like a shell of a room. Nobody seems to be around, not even behind the front desk, a sharp contrast to the commotion the day before, when the noisy hotel guests hounded the staff for updates and whereabouts and flight changes.

As Wei Xiang walks through the lobby, a man appears from a walkway, carrying a metal pail. Wearing a dirty uniform, he seems surprised to find Wei Xiang standing there, his brows coming together in a crease. It’s the same porter who advised him to stay in the hotel yesterday, to wait till things were better.

“Morning, sir. How are you today?” the man says, hiding the pail behind him.

“Okay. How come there’s nobody around? Where are the other guests?” Wei Xiang asks. A face pops out from behind the reception, a sleepy-looking girl with frizzy hair, and looks around nervously. She gives Wei Xiang a wan smile and ducks her head under the countertop.

“Many people gone yesterday. Only few left.” He hesitates, darting glances to his side, before saying, “Do sir want breakfast? I can get.”

“No, no, I’m heading out now.”

“Where sir go today? Outside messy, no good to go out today.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where I’ll go.”

“Then stay in hotel. I bring sir breakfast.”

“No, no need. I have to find someone.”

Wei Xiang moves away, his eyes already on the exit. The shattered glass panes and metal frame of the doors have been removed, leaving only a gaping entryway, through which the late-morning sunlight pours in mercilessly, blinding Wei Xiang temporarily to the outside.

“Wait, sir.” The porter runs off and returns with a bottle of water, handing it to Wei Xiang. He thanks the man, takes the bottle and leaves.

Out on the street, he feels an uncanny sense of déjà vu, with the crush of people pushing in opposite directions, the scene before him familiar, and Wei Xiang can’t tell whether he is reliving the same day again. The only difference is that the sea water in the street has largely subsided overnight, though many side lanes are still impassable. The salty air holds a rank fetidness—is it the sea? or the smell of rotting flesh? Instantly the images of the dead bodies he saw yesterday flash through his mind, and he has to fight off a sudden urge to retch. He spins the cap off the bottle and gulps down several mouthfuls of water. In the humid heat, Wei Xiang has already started to perspire, his armpits and forehead damp. He assesses the scene before him: an elderly man driving a bullock cart on which sits a family of six; a trio of shirtless street kids—the boy he has been following is not one of them—nosily dousing one another with toy pails of water; and a young woman sitting on a high stool opposite the hotel, staring blankly into space, biting her nails.

From somewhere across the town, a high-pitched siren blares. Wei Xiang swivels his head in the direction of the sea and holds his breath. Except for the wreckage of collapsed buildings, telephone poles and uprooted trees, there is only stagnant water all around. Lumpy clouds hang low in the azure sky. He waits for a few seconds, anticipating a sudden change in the density of the air, or for something ominous to appear on the horizon. Nothing but the stream of people dispersing into the alleyways and lanes, each moving with a sense of purpose.

Then he hears the words in his head: You’re not really looking; you are not seeing what’s there.

Ai Ling uttered these words to him on their first day in Phuket, after they checked into the hotel and were planning to take a short stroll to Bangla Road, the main thoroughfare in Patong, before meeting Cody and Chee Seng for dinner. She pointed to something in the sky, but Wei Xiang could not see what it was at first. Then she told him: a flock of seagulls gliding back and forth in the distance, over a patch of sea. The sharpness of the memory causes his insides to tighten: You are not seeing what’s there.

Shaking off his thoughts, Wei Xiang heads back to the school, where he can check for updates. He refuses to entertain any thoughts that might pull him asunder; as long as he acts decisively, things will come around or take a fortuitous turn. Everything will be all right in the end. Life is unpredictable this way, he reasons, and it’s no excuse to lose hope and despair. He only needs to press on, and to have faith in his own actions.

At a bend along Sai Nam Yen Road, near a row of boarded-up restaurants, Wei Xiang feels an odd sensation rippling under his skin, of being observed. He whips his head around, and comes eye to eye with the boy with the scar, who is standing several metres away from him beside a pile of fallen bricks. The boy tilts his head as though he’s hearing something interesting in the commotion around him. His feet are coal-dark with dirt and grime, and his skinny arms hang from his body like the long limbs of a marionette doll. Despite his shoddy appearance, he is calm and composed. Not wanting to scare him off, Wei Xiang crosses the street without any visible hurry, and walks up to him. The boy does not run away this time, but remains where he is, looking up at Wei Xiang with a steady gaze.

The previous day, he was plagued with questions about the boy—who is he? where has he come from? why isn’t he accompanied by an adult?—but now, standing close enough to touch him, Wei Xiang finds himself dumbstruck, unable to speak. He mutters a simple greeting in Thai, but it does not elicit any response from the boy. He utters another phrase, but still nothing. Apart from these pleasantries, Wei Xiang does not know how to break the silence between them. Looking around, he hopes to find someone who might be able to interpret on his behalf, but the stricken looks on the passers-by hold him back.

The thoroughfare where they are standing has been closed off to traffic, with roadblocks on both ends, only allowing in medical supply trucks and ambulances. The media has descended on Phuket—Wei Xiang notices a small television crew setting up their equipment near a toppled two-storey shophouse, and a swarm of photographers, wearing vests with many pockets and carrying bulky bags, aiming their long-lens cameras at every sign of destruction—and for a moment he imagines himself watching these captured images and videos on the nine o’clock news back at home in Singapore, with Ai Ling beside him. Then the spell breaks: he’s still here and Ai Ling’s still missing. The present moment sucks him right back in, demanding his full attention: the noise, the heat, and the water that is everywhere he walks.

And the boy still stands before him, motionless, waiting.

Wei Xiang offers the bottle of water, but the boy only stares at it, not moving to take it. Houseflies whir about the boy’s head, but he does not swat them away. Wei Xiang studies the face in detail; unlike the other street kids he has seen over the past few days, with their flat noses and wide-set eyes, the boy has a sharper set of features and a fair complexion. Perhaps he’s of mixed ethnicity, Thai-Chinese. And the deep scar across his left eye. Wei Xiang can’t shake off the impression that he finds the boy familiar, that there’s something about him that triggers a vague recognition. Maybe he has got the boy’s face mixed up with the numerous faces of the dead children he has seen. Yes, he must have been confused by all those faces. Yet when he looks into the boy’s face, Wei Xiang is very certain that he has seen him before—in a different place or time.

The boy regards Wei Xiang with the same interest, a smile raising the corners of his mouth. It’s a strange, knowing smile, one that holds a deeper meaning unknown to Wei Xiang. He returns the smile. The noises in the background come and go—the sporadic shouting, the honking of trucks, and the desolate blast of the siren. Wei Xiang and the boy seem to be in their own bubble, surrounded but untouched by the sea of people around them.

“Who are you?” Wei Xiang finally blurts out in English. The question hangs in the air, an invisible buffer between them, before fading away.

The boy remains silent. Then suddenly he extends his left hand and slips it into Wei Xiang’s. It’s small, light and bony, like a tiny sparrow, frail and vulnerable in his hand. He could easily crush it with little effort. The boy glances down the crowded road, turns on his heel, and steps in the direction opposite from where Wei Xiang was planning to go, towards the southern end of Phuket. The boy’s gentle tug breaks Wei Xiang’s flow of thoughts, overcoming his hesitation. He quickly follows the boy’s lead, a small seed of hope sprouting inside him.

19

AI LING

Back in 2002, Ai Ling visited her aunt in the hospital daily after the car accident. She knew it was not required or expected, but the act of visiting made her feel useful, as if she were helping in her aunt’s recovery through her presence. While her aunt slept, comatose, Ai Ling would keep up a steady one-sided conversation, careful to enunciate each word slowly, keeping the topics light. With plastic tubes running to the machines that stood to the side of the bed, beeping with stubborn regularity, her aunt looked like a creature entangled in its own mess of tentacles. Ai Ling would study the numbers displayed on these machines, trying to understand what they indicated.

No matter how she was feeling on any day, upon entering the hospital room where her aunt was staying, Ai Ling would feel a quickening sense of calm, as if she were entering a temporal state where things stood still, unchanging. She had never felt this way—whether at the childcare centre or at home with Wei Xiang—and the sense of serenity had continued to stay with her, deepening with each visit. Sitting on the bus on the way to the hospital, surrounded by other commuters, she could sense her body readying itself in anticipation, like someone preparing for an underwater dive. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine her aunt on the other side of where she was going, and if Ai Ling continued to stay very still, she could get a glimpse of her late uncle—a lonely figure in her mind’s eye, staring absently at her. These daydreams, Ai Ling told herself, were nothing more than illusions, mere flights of fancy. Yet the memory of her uncle was always at the back of her mind, a shadow hovering behind her consciousness; at times, she was afraid of confusing it with the other memories she had hoarded. Whenever she thought of her uncle or aunt, Ai Ling had to suppress the sadness, the sly encroachment of grief. She felt divided, like having many different selves working in tandem inside her, directing her down different paths. Still she was able to find the middle ground to exist, without breaking up over every stirred-up recollection. To her parents, who seemed to be having a worse time over her uncle’s death, Ai Ling was the embodiment of steadfastness. Yet, inwardly, Ai Ling knew she was barely holding everything together, always fearful of her moods running awry despite her self-control.

After the accident, Ai Ling had tried to distract herself with reading books and articles that dealt with situations like this, and picking up pointers on how to help a person in times of trauma, though she was still unsure how she could help her aunt when she would finally wake up. Looking at her aunt’s face—placid and peaceful in sleep—Ai Ling could hardly imagine what her response would be when she later heard the news about her husband’s death. In her darker moods, Ai Ling wished her aunt would remain in her slumber and never wake up, or if her memories were all wiped clean so that she would never even know who her husband was.

Unlike Ai Ling, her parents were industrious, keeping themselves busy with tasks and follow-ups. They would consult the doctors and nurses, arrange for further checks and scans and medication, and bring the necessary items to the hospital: a blanket, a change of clothes, packets of Milo, body and hand lotion. They barely stopped to stay in place for more than a few minutes, before they were onto their next task, keeping themselves occupied. Only once did Ai Ling see her mother standing quietly by the bed and looking down at her sister, but when she heard Ai Ling entering the room, she quickly excused herself, muttering about something she had forgotten to pick up on her way to the hospital. Ai Ling tried not to notice that her mother’s eyes were red and puffy when she picked up her shoulder bag and left the room.

Her parents had wanted to hold the funeral without any delay. Ai Ling protested, but later dropped it when she knew it would not change her parents’ minds or decision. During the entire period of the wake—three long, seamless days—Ai Ling prayed for her aunt not to wake up from her coma, to remain in her blissfully undisturbed dream. For three days, Ai Ling was a bundle of tired nerves and fraught emotions, moving from the hospital to the funeral parlour, and vice versa, several times a day. She felt strangely disembodied, cut out of time.

It was during those days—Ai Ling had taken a week of compassionate leave, and gone home only to sleep and shower—that she sometimes imagined the kind of conversations she would have with her aunt when she woke up. Her aunt had a measured manner of speaking, as if she were always weighing her words for the correct tone or delivery. She never seemed to hurry when she talked, and it was this particular trait of hers that Ai Ling was drawn to. She could tell her aunt anything about her life, and she would listen patiently, never once jumping in to interrupt her with her opinions or views. Though her aunt’s replies were occasionally clichéd—”You have to be more patient with him…” “A married life is full of ups and downs…” “Give him time and his own space, and he will come back to himself…”—Ai Ling had never felt patronised or brushed over by her aunt’s advice or encouragement.

On the last day of her uncle’s funeral, after they had cremated him, Ai Ling went straight home with Wei Xiang. When they were alone in the bedroom, Ai Ling laid her head on Wei Xiang’s chest and wrapped her arms around him. The warmth of Wei Xiang’s skin brought tears to her eyes. When she kissed Wei Xiang and started to take off her clothes, he was taken aback.

“Are you sure? Don’t you want to rest?” he asked.

“No, no need.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Ai Ling then led Wei Xiang to the bed, holding her body to his, reaching for his physical presence—a weight to hold her down when all she could feel was a benumbing sense of lightness, of being unmoored from everything around her. She felt lost, and had a terrifying desire to regain what was missing from her, to seize it back for herself. She needed Wei Xiang’s body, his physicality, to make her feel she was still alive.

“Please, I want this,” Ai Ling said, breathlessly.

In their lovemaking, Wei Xiang was gentle, almost too careful, with her. But Ai Ling wanted it rougher. She clamped her legs tightly around his waist, forcing him to thrust deeper into her. Still Wei Xiang remained cautious. At one point, she saw his face registering signs of held-back pain.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, when Wei Xiang finally came inside her.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, his breath warm on her chest.

Ai Ling held onto him until he fell asleep. In the dark, she listened to his light snoring and watched his body move through the quiet stages of sleep.

It was easy to forget that other people existed outside one’s own realm of existence. In her preoccupation with her own thoughts, Ai Ling sometimes failed to see how her aunt’s current state was also affecting her parents, especially her mother. It did not help that her mother was never one to wear her emotions on her sleeve, unlike her father, who was much more open to expressing his feelings. Ai Ling had often wondered whether the trait—the reticence—ran in her mother’s side of the family, and in her too.

Whenever she was in the hospital, her mother tended to her aunt with minimum fuss—covering her with another blanket, dabbing her dry lips with lip balm, changing the socks on her feet, combing her hair—and mostly when Ai Ling was out of the room, so when Ai Ling returned to the bedside, she would always notice something different about her aunt. One time, behind the closed door of the hospital room’s toilet, Ai Ling heard her mother crying, though she had tried to mask it by running the sink tap.

A day before her aunt woke up, Ai Ling and her mother were in the hospital room—her father had returned home to rest, after a night of keeping watch—and in the midst of wiping down the mobile side table, her mother looked out of the window, staring into the distance.

“Your aunt loves the outdoors. She would have loved the weather today.”

Ai Ling glanced out the window and saw the leaves of the trees fluttering in the breeze, lusciously green, the sky full of clouds.

“I’m sure she would.”

“When she was younger, when we were still living in the kampong, she never wanted to stay indoors for long, always clamouring to go out, to the vegetable fields where my father and uncles worked, to the stream where she would catch tadpoles and small fish. Nobody could stop her. She was very stubborn.”

“Really? But she always seems so agreeable.”

“Don’t be fooled.” Ai Ling’s mother smiled and glanced at her sister before turning back to what was outside the window. “She hurt herself badly one time, but never told anyone. Got her foot cut by a nail. Didn’t once mention it to anyone, until she started limping the next day. The infection was really bad, took almost a week to heal properly. It was just like her to keep everything to herself until it got worse.”

Ai Ling’s mother moved nearer to the bed. She tucked her sister’s hand under the blanket, patted it over the covers. “Why are hospitals always so cold?”

“I’ll raise the temperature.”

Ai Ling got up from her chair and adjusted the thermostat with the remote control. The air-con, perched over the bed, beeped once and lowered its louvres. Silence descended on the room, making it feel more confined.

“She will come around soon.”

The crack in Ai Ling’s mother’s voice was magnified in the quietness of the room, and Ai Ling started to cry, holding her hands up to her face, unable to halt the rapid transition from sobbing to wailing. She could feel her mother’s hand on her shoulder, light and steady, an anchor keeping her still. Her mother did not say anything, but waited till Ai Ling had finally finished before withdrawing her hand. She then left the room, leaving Ai Ling alone with her aunt.

“Let’s go home,” Wei Xiang said later that day. He had stayed by Ai Ling’s side from the moment he stepped into the room. From time to time, he would bring Ai Ling a cup of coffee or massage her shoulders or go to the nurses with minor requests. Ai Ling would smile at him, to acknowledge what he was doing.

“Yes, go home and rest, I’m here,” Ai Ling’s mother said. “If there’s anything, I’ll call you.”

While walking through the hospital ward, Ai Ling peeked into some of the rooms and glanced at the faces of the relatives of the other patients. While most were serious and glum, there was sometimes laughter from a few, a snatch of cheerful dialogue or conversation. Evening was approaching fast, as the exhausted daylight slowly extinguished over the horizon. Crossing the garden compound to the hospital entrance, Ai Ling could smell the sweet leafy scent coming from the recently watered patch of grass. She found herself taking deep, long breaths, as if she had been barely able to breathe while she was in the room with her aunt.

“She’ll be all right, the doctor said so,” said Wei Xiang.

“I don’t know. What will she do when she hears the news, when she wakes up?”

“One step at a time. First she needs to recover, and then you can break the news to her. It’ll take a long time for her to accept this.” In his voice, Ai Ling could sense Wei Xiang’s optimism. He had always believed in keeping his hopes up, especially when things were going wrong. Ai Ling had never had what came so naturally to Wei Xiang: an easy, buoyant sanguinity.

“What would you do if I died?” Ai Ling asked.

“Statistically, I’ll die before you, husbands going before wives…”

“No, I’m serious. What would you do?”

Wei Xiang stopped in his tracks and turned to Ai Ling.

“I wouldn’t know what to do,” he finally said.

That night, Ai Ling woke from a long dream in a state of panic, gripping the sheet in fistfuls. In the dream, she had been held down by something huge that loomed darkly over her, a force that broke down all her defences, despite her fight to break through. The stretch of thin light that arched over her, hovering above the darkness, was out of reach, holding out a promise—of what? salvation? survival?—something she could never come near to. When the fingers of the surrounding cold crept into her, she had let go—and only then was she able to break out of her dream and wake in her bed. She steadied her breathing until it was manageable, then got up, went to the wardrobe and changed into a new T-shirt, throwing aside the drenched one. In the kitchen, she drank two full glasses of cold water. Her mind was alert to her surroundings; the milky shafts of moonlight coming through the windows offered little illumination. Ai Ling felt a deep relief, as if she had survived some sort of test.

Finding herself unable to sleep, Ai Ling sat on the sofa in the living room for some time. Then she went into the study and searched through the cabinet where she kept all the important documents; near the bottom, she found what she was looking for: the marriage certificate, in a cylindrical container. Unrolling the certificate, stiff and resistant with age, she noted the date and signatures, before putting it back.

Ai Ling thought about her marriage to Wei Xiang and was reminded again by how short it was compared to her aunt’s—how little she knew about living with Wei Xiang, despite their similarities and compromises. She knew, of course, that life was fickle and irrational, that whatever one built was subject to the pulverizing effects of time. Yet the knowledge brought little comfort. No matter how much she fretted about the future—about Wei Xiang, or her aunt—she could only live one moment at a time, one day followed by another. And Ai Ling suddenly felt terribly weighed down by it all.

She knew there was no comparison between her marriage and her aunt’s. She and Wei Xiang had only been married for five years, while her aunt and her late uncle had spent over forty years together. Those decades made all the difference: their history, seasoned with joys and miseries, hopes and wasted opportunities; the years had borne them along, carried them through, and now this, a rupture, a death. How was one supposed to deal with the fact of death? It cast a long, unwavering shadow over everything, and Ai Ling had felt its hand on her in her dream, scorching the edges of her self.

She looked at the framed portrait of her wedding photograph on a long wooden shelf beside the study table. For the shoot, they had opted for a dressed-down, everyday look: a light blue tailored shirt and dark pleated pants for Wei Xiang, and a red floral dress with an empire waistline for Ai Ling. Their faces were beaming with happiness. Ai Ling stared at her own face in the photograph, trying to bridge who she was at that moment with the woman she was now, the divide invisible but deep. What had she been thinking then? She tried to extract the memory, but could only recall the flashes of the camera, the encouraging instructions of the photographer to smile brighter. Remember, you’re happy, so must smile more! She had quietly and obediently done what she was told.

Standing in the study, Ai Ling did not know how to make sense of the happiness she had once felt. She shook her head, then turned off the light and stood in the dark for a long time.

The next morning, Ai Ling was reading a magazine in her aunt’s hospital room, seated on a chair facing the room’s entrance, and when she glanced up, she saw her aunt’s eyes wide open, staring at her. Ai Ling jolted up out of the chair, tossed down the magazine, and rushed to the bed, careful not to touch the tubes when she held her aunt’s hands. Her aunt smiled weakly, but did not say anything.

Barely an hour after she called her parents to inform them about the news, they were there beside her aunt’s bed, attending to her needs, and skirting the growing puzzlement gnawing at her features. Ai Ling’s mother gently hushed her with admonishment to rest, to have some food, a hot Milo drink. A few times, her aunt looked at Ai Ling for answers, but she was quick to avert her stares. The following afternoon, Ai Ling’s mother told her aunt about the death of her husband in a truncated account of the accident. By the end of that day, her aunt was ready to leave the hospital. Ai Ling and her mother made the arrangements to take her back to her parents’ place, where she would stay until she was well enough to return home. Her aunt did not offer any protest. “She’s still in shock,” her mother said.

At her parents’ flat, Ai Ling watched her aunt even more intently, as if observing a trapped, terrified animal, though she kept an appropriate distance, not wanting to draw attention to herself, even as she stayed alert to her aunt’s presence whenever she paid a visit, every night after work. Her aunt showed little emotion. Once, when Ai Ling saw her aunt standing by the window, staring into space, she approached her and stood by her side, waiting for her aunt to notice her. When she did not, Ai Ling spoke up.

“Are you okay?” Ai Ling said. Her aunt, startled, turned to look at her, rearranging the expression on her face to something less fearful.

“Yes, I am, of course,” her aunt answered.

With the bruises on her face and arms slowly fading, her aunt convinced Ai Ling’s parents that she had recovered and wanted to go back home. After thanking all of them for their caregiving and also for helping to settle her late husband’s funeral, her aunt packed her things and made a quiet departure. Ai Ling offered to help her aunt settle back in. She swept and cleaned and put everything back in place, while her aunt glanced at every item in the flat with a detached gaze, as if she did not know how they had got there in the first place. She left Ai Ling to the tidying up and went to lie down in the spare bedroom, which had a single bed for visiting relatives or friends, closing the door behind her. When she had finished her tasks—the day had slipped into a dusky, warm evening—Ai Ling knocked on the bedroom door and entered when she heard no reply. Her aunt was lying on her side, facing the wall, seemingly asleep. Not wanting to wake her, Ai Ling left the flat quietly.

For a long time after her aunt had moved back home, Ai Ling lived in a state of constant anxiety, and it diverted her attention from the other things in her life that had come to somehow feel trivial and narrow, even petty. Then one night, as she was getting ready to sleep, her mobile phone rang.

“Hello, Aunt Jenny?” Ai Ling said, but there was no reply. For a brief moment, Ai Ling thought that maybe she had mistaken the caller’s detail and glanced again at the screen. It was her aunt’s home number.

“Hello, can you hear me? Is everything okay?” Ai Ling said, fear rising in her voice. Finally, she thought she heard something on the line, a few words, or maybe a cry—she could not tell exactly. Then there was a long, pitiable groan that seemed to reach deep inside her, clenching her in a tight, suffocating grip.

Ai Ling clung to the phone, listening, waiting for a voice to speak to her, to tell her what to do.

20

CODY

The year Cody turned sixteen, his mother was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and was sick for eight months before she died. He was taking his O-Level examinations that year, and his mind was distracted during the hazy, indefinite period of her dying. She had known about the cancer after going for a regular check-up at the polyclinic. It was only when the cancer reached the third stage and Cody and his sisters became suspicious of the frequent hospital visits and their mother’s dwindling frame and thinning hair that the parents broke the news over dinner one night. Cody lowered his chopsticks and stared at his parents, who carried on eating from their bowls of rice, unperturbed by what they just said. His mother spoke up after a few unbearable seconds and assured them that everything was okay, and that they would talk about it in due time, after everything was settled. After this, she did not say another word.

Because he was the youngest in the family, Cody was not expected to do much except stay at home after school and study for the impending examinations, while everyone else did whatever they could for his mother. His eldest sister accompanied her to the hospital for her check-ups while his second sister helped their father out at the fish stall from time to time. When she was at home, Cody would stay by her side and talk to her about the latest Channel 8 drama serials, the actors who were in them, the gossip and the scandals, and she would sometimes ask him about school, homework, his preparation for the O-Levels, and his friends. He would skip from topic to topic with as much lightness as he could muster, not wanting to trouble her in any way. Though there were many things on his mind, Cody could not get the words out.

He often wondered how he could tell his mother about what was going on in his life then: that he was struggling with his studies, that he was failing class tests even though he had studied for them, that he had a crush on a boy in his class, that he was confused about his feelings, and how he had become fearful and anxious all the time about who he was and who he was becoming. She did not need to know all this. Even before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, his mother had a forceful and domineering personality, and raised the children with the same authority and discipline employed by her own parents. She was the disciplinarian in the family, and would watch over their comings and goings, making sure that they did not get into any trouble, that they knew exactly why they were punished, that she did not raise them to be spoilt or ungrateful children. She would mete out her punishments—ten strokes of the cane, five slaps on calves or thighs—and tell them to reflect on their actions, to think carefully about their wrongdoings. Only fools repeat their mistake, she would intone. Growing up under the unbreakable spell she cast over them, Cody’s love for his mother was mired with fear and awe, spiked with thorns.

The boy Cody had a crush on, Cedric, was in his form class, and they had been friends since Secondary One, though it had never gone beyond simple exchanges and basketball games and smiles-and-nods of acquaintanceship. Though they hung out together with other classmates on many occasions, he hardly knew Cedric except for the fact that he had a younger sister and his father was an accountant. It was only in Secondary Three that Cody began to become aware of his attraction to boys and to Cedric specifically. It was hard to know when all this first started, and by the time he grew aware of it, it had become something that took up most of his waking thoughts, like a terrible secret had taken up residence in his head. At thirteen, his body had grown into a new one, and he was constantly conscious of its demands and urges and vanity. His first erection was a shock; he was surprised by how little he was able to control something that seemed so natural. His first wet dream when he was fourteen shamed him so thoroughly that he threw his soiled underwear and shorts into the rubbish chute. The first time he touched himself and produced an instant erection and later a quick ejaculation, he was overcome by the intense sensation and complexity of feelings that his body could generate over such a private, secret act. In the jail of his changing body, this act alone was his only constant, an escape into something that his other life, public and visible, was unable to provide.

Cody and Cedric were about the same height, though the shape and size of their bodies were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Cody was skinny, with a long torso and gangly limbs, while Cedric wore his mass of lean muscles comfortably and proudly. Like some of their classmates, Cedric would play basketball without a shirt, his pants riding low on his slender hips, the pelvic bones making a V that disappeared under the waistband of his underwear. Sitting at the side of the court, Cody would pretend to watch the game enthusiastically while, at the same time, ingraining his memory with as many images of Cedric’s body as he could, which he would replay later in his head while masturbating in the school toilet or at home. He never went far with these images; they were only the means to an end, to the pleasure he wanted to extract from them, and he never considered where they could lead him, to recognise something in himself that he was evading. At fifteen, Cody was far from knowing what he wanted, or who he was, or whether there were other boys like him; yet under this murky, impenetrable surface, he was deeply aware of the burden he was carrying and the secrecy that enshrouded it, and he took great pains to hide it. He presented another self to the world to appear normal—a self that was remote and detached, yet accommodating and highly adaptive to its surroundings, changing its shape and form to survive.

Towards the end of her life, Cody’s mother would lie in bed all day long, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, mumbling to herself; when he entered the room, she would turn and stare as if registering him for the first time, a person who had materialised from nowhere. It was the medicine taking effect, his father would say. Cody would bring her simple meals of sweet potato porridge or herbal chicken broth and feed her in small spoonfuls, which she would refuse after two to three mouthfuls. “Enough, enough, you eat,” she would say, lying back on the bed, the exertions deepening the lines around her eyes.

On more lucid days, she would tell stories about her past, how she had wanted to be a teacher but her father’s disapproval—he needed her to help out at home and at the fish stall he owned, and also to take care of her nine siblings—led to her discarding her ambition. She took great pride in her responsibilities towards her younger siblings, a no-nonsense role that had shaped her into the woman she became. Yet, when she told Cody how she and his father had met, she got more bashful. Helping her father at the fish stall in the mornings, she was always conscious of how she smelled. “The stench of fish went into everything, into my clothes, under my nails, into my skin; no matter how I cleaned or showered, it’s always there.”

So when Cody’s father asked her out one day—he was the delivery driver for the vendor who supplied fish to her father—she was caught off-guard, though her doubt did not stop her from going out with him. She was twenty and of marriageable age, and Cody’s father was the first man to ask her out; she was curious about this shy, sinewy man who had never said more than good morning when he handed her the daily invoice. They dated for four months before he proposed marriage, and then they were married for twenty-five years.

“So fast,” Cody said. “How come you never considered other guys, or dated more before deciding?”

“What was the point?” she said, amused. “Waste of time. I knew he was the one I wanted to marry, a good man, stable and reliable. Unlike young people these days, talk about love and romance all the time, have so many choices but still can’t make any good decision, breaking up here, divorcing there.” She then closed her eyes, slipping into other thoughts.

Sometimes, after taking her afternoon medicine, Cody’s mother would turn pensive while she mused. She would remind Cody that she had not got married because she loved Cody’s father from the start—“none of that nonsense”—but because of the realistic, steadfast qualities that marked him as a man of conviction. The love came later, years after they were married.

“Love does not always have to be the first thing,” she said. “Use your head first, and the heart will follow later.”

Love was not the word Cody would use to describe how he felt about Cedric, which was something more evasive, more illicit—lust, infatuation, or something else? It only took a sneak peek in class for Cody’s whole being to be wrapped up for the rest of the day in a confounding state of confusion, shame, and deep unabated longing. He felt sharply alive, and at the same time, terribly conflicted.

In school during recess, Cody would sometimes head to a deserted boys’ toilet located in a quiet corner on the third floor of the Technical block where they had their weekly two-hour Design and Technology lessons. The toilet was used as a storage room for broken toilet bowls and covers, ruined tables and chairs, and cracked mirrors, the floor covered with a brown carpet of dried leaves, animal faeces, and the shrivelled carcasses of cockroaches, beetles, and even a sparrow that had flown in through the broken window slats. He had tried the taps the first time he was in there, but the water supply had been cut. He had pissed into the sink while staring at his reflection in the cracked mirror, emboldened by the little act of subversion. The toilet soon became the one place in school he escaped to whenever he needed to be alone.

Sometimes he would bring a book to read, but because the air in the toilet was stale and dusty, he could not concentrate for long. A few times he gathered the dried leaves into small piles, set fire to them with matches and watched them burn; when the smoke became too thick, he would stamp the fire out. When the mood struck, he would strip down and masturbate in front of the row of mirrors, and come very quickly onto the dirty floor.

Then one day, he heard someone outside while he was masturbating to mental images of Cedric, and ran into the nearest stall with his shorts still down. Just as he slammed the stall door closed, he heard the person enter the toilet.

“I saw you, Cody,” said Cedric. “What are you doing here?”

Cody gasped, but stayed silent, his heart hammering in double-time. He was still holding onto his erection, which had become even stiffer. He willed it to subside, but no luck.

“Come out now, why are you hiding?”

“Go away, please,” Cody whimpered.

“What are you doing in there?” Cedric knocked on the door, and in that sudden moment, Cody came furiously in thick, milky spurts that hit the graffitied wall of the toilet stall and slowly dripped downward. He bit his lips to suppress the cry.

“Nothing,” Cody whispered. “Just go away.”

Cedric laughed and slapped his palm once on the toilet door before leaving. In the ensuing silence, Cody let out a long breath, bristling with heat and shame from his own foolishness—how precariously close he had come to ruin.

After recovering, Cody left the toilet and went to one of the school administrators to report the faulty lock to the deserted toilet. In no time, the lock was changed, and, after that, he never went near the toilet again. When Cedric broached the topic later on, Cody laughed off the whole matter, brushing it aside as nothing more than a childish indiscretion, an innocuous act. Cedric cocked his eyebrows and looked doubtful, but did not inquire further.

Cody was in school the day his mother passed away. He was called out of class by the school clerk, informed of the news and excused for the rest of the day. As he made his way home, his mind stayed vacant. There were a few relatives already present in the flat when he finally got back. His father was talking to them while his sisters went around serving tea and packet drinks. Cody slipped past them, catching snatches of words here and there, and paused at the entrance to his parents’ bedroom. His mother lay on the bed, her eyes closed, hands by her sides. For a brief moment, Cody thought she was deep in sleep, her features undisturbed, but there was an absence that was palpable in its stillness. As he walked up to her, he could not look away from her face. Cody stood by her side for some time before his father entered the room with a relative, prompting him to leave quickly.

The period between the wake and the cremation was unending, an unbroken series of activities, filled with noise, smoke and condolences. People came up to Cody, took his hands and offered their words of comfort. He listened, nodded his head and returned their smiles. With his silence perceived as grief, he was able to retreat into himself, into the space where words no longer meant anything. Even when he was surrounded by people, he felt cut off, removed from whatever was happening at the moment, and the sensation that it brought was strangely comforting, as if he were slowly becoming invisible, and all he had to do was sit or kneel or stand, and nothing more was expected of him.

After they brought back his mother’s ashes, Cody went into his room and did not come out for a week. At first, he thought that he was just exhausted from the frictional effect that people had on him, from an extended period of contact and proximity. He slept for eighteen hours, dead to the world, and even after he woke up, he could not bring himself to leave the bed or come out of the bedroom. His father and sisters left him alone for a while, thinking that it was a phase, but after two days they became alarmed. His sisters came to sit beside him, patting his head and shoulders, reassuring him with their soft, cajoling words. He closed his eyes and turned to the wall, tensing his body at their touch. They brought food, leaving it on the side table beside the bed, dishes of rice and vegetables and meat that turned cold after being left untouched.

He slept for most of each day; when he could not, he would stare out the window at the narrow fragment of the sky, listening to the muffled sounds of the world outside the flat. He was not able to hold onto any thought that flitted through his mind. Occasionally, a memory would dislodge itself and force its way into his consciousness: a face, a word, a repeated montage of images. He could not shut these memories down, so he let them pass through him. When he slept, these thoughts would slip into his dreams, and in them he could see himself trying to make sense of what he could not hold on to. His mother featured in most of these dreams—standing at the stove and stirring a pot of pork ribs and lotus root soup, or listening to a radio programme on the Rediffusion. Cody would hover at the edge of these visions, observing her, unable to touch her even if he wanted to, his mother existing in a realm beyond his reach. These dreams would haunt him while he was awake, leaving him helpless in discerning the real from imaginary.

Sometimes his father would come into the room. He would lay his hand on Cody’s head and whisper his name, as if trying to call him back from wherever he had gone. Cody could hear his name clearly, but he did not respond, restrained by his own silence. His father would sit quietly beside Cody and stay there for a long time. Some nights, he would bring a face towel and wipe down Cody’s face, arms and legs, and change his clothes. Cody did not put up any resistance as his father carried out these tasks.

One night, after waking from a recurring nightmare, his body racked with painful spasms, Cody looked over and saw his father sitting on a chair beside the bed, sleeping. In the light of the bedside lamp, he saw a sea of white hair against his scalp; how his father had aged just over a short period of time, how frail he seemed now. Looking at him asleep, Cody could feel the years that had passed between his parents, years that stretched all the way back before he and his sisters were born, to a time that existed only between them and no one else. How this immense weight of time and history was now left to his father, who had to bear the burden all on his own.

As Cody laid his hand on his father’s head, he stirred lightly in his sleep, letting out a small cry. For a long moment, Cody imagined the thoughts running through his father’s mind, thoughts that followed their own logic, their own outcomes, into places only he would know—dark, oceanic places, teeming with life. He would never know what went on in there, in this secret place inside his father, but he would keep vigil over him, just as his father had done—watching over him, waiting for him to surface once again.