Corridor

  And then she brings out my notepad and tells me to position the point of a pencil on it. She tells me that she will teach me how to draw the virus. So I can understand its dimensions. She holds my hand and then tells me to close my eyes. I tell her that I am afraid of going blind, I have read before that it is one of the complications. But she tells me to concentrate. She places her hand on mine and then keeps it there. She doesn’t move my hand at all, just holds it with the pencil snug between my fingers.

  “There,” she says, and at this point I wake up. I narrow my eyes to the harsh light in my room. I realise that I have been crying, and that tears have fallen down my face, not in the usual way, but down the sides of my eyes towards my ears. The eighth storey light is still on. I close my eyes for a few seconds and then open them. The light has still not gone out.

  I might not be around when it finally does. Or I just might. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  WINNERS

  It was Shirley who picked up the telephone. At that time she was in the study room (that was what her husband called it even though nobody did any serious studying inside it), folding clothes. She placed them into stacks: trousers (which kept slipping out of the pile because they were shiny polyester ones), blouses, panties, skirts, briefs. She noticed that on some of her husband’s briefs there was a bump at the front. She tried pressing it down but realised that the cloth was already set that way. She touched the deformed cotton again, like a child pressing her father’s bruise. She laughed a little and that was when the telephone rang.

  “Hello?” she went.

  “Hello, is this Mrs Lee Swee Lin? Hi, I am from East Lion Marketing and your number has been specially picked for our prize. We have two return tickets for you if you can come down to our office to collect it. Are you working Mrs Lee?” The voice was that of a woman’s and it went very fast.

  “I’m not working,” Shirley replied. “Sorry. Can you hold on please? Please hold on.” Shirley didn’t feel comfortable talking to a stranger in English. Even the name Shirley was something she had given herself while she was working as a salesgirl. They had wanted to make a name tag for her and she had asked that the name on it be Shirley. “Shirley is my Christian name,” she told everyone. After some thought she realised that it wasn’t right because she wasn’t Christian herself. She didn’t know what she was, just someone who didn’t believe or pray very much, there were so many other things to do. Even when she got ill she only thought of her grandma and her childhood. Shirley was just an English name. “Ingrish name,” her colleagues would say, “better to put on name tag, just one word, and if customer is tourist, won’t be shy to call you by your name.” Shirley reflected on how even with her name tag pinned on her red vest that went over her white blouse, nobody had ever called her by her name before. She was either “Miss” or they avoided addressing her altogether.

  Shirley walked into the master bedroom where her husband Edward was playing Super Mario Brothers on his Nintendo set. The screen was making gobbling and tinkling sounds. They had a television set in their bedroom, and Shirley recalled how they used to watch episodes of ‘Golden Girls’ together.

  “Edward!” she called.

  “Who’s it?” he asked her, not taking his eyes away from the screen.

  “Important!” We win something… this woman on the phone.”

  “Does she want to speak to me?”

  “You talk to her!”

  “Why can’t you do it… I’m busy.”

  “I don’t know how to say!”

  “You don’t know what to say?”

  “I don’t know how to say.”

  “You don’t know how to speak.”

  “Yah.”

  Edward pressed a button on his game pad and the screen froze. He took the telephone from Shirley’s hands. Shirley took a look at the screen and saw a small man with a moustache suspended in air, his short legs hovering over a manhole. She found herself wishing, “Don’t fall in. Don’t fall. Stay like that.” Edward walked out of the room, a habit of his. He liked walking around the house if he was on the phone, never settling down at one place, making circles around whatever furniture they had left. Shirley looked at the television screen again and then at the game pad. She wanted to press a button on it to see if she could make the manhole disappear, or even the man. Edward had shown her how to play the game once and she recalled laughing as the character on the screen smashed against spinning coins and made them vanish with a lilting tune.

  When Edward came back into the room he was frowning. He didn’t have to whisper, there was nobody else in the house who could hear them, but he did.

  “You know what?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “We just won something.”

  “What did we win?”

  Edward’s frown had gone and Shirley saw the smile that was hiding behind it.

  “You know we’ve always wanted to go on a holiday?” Edward asked.

  Shirley looked at her husband guardedly. She tried to read his eyes. She could only see the childlike enthusiasm in them. She breathed in. One thing she learnt during their eight years of marriage was that enthusiasm was all right, if only one of them had it. Once it was shared by both, then it would set the wheels of disappointment in motion.

  “Tell me,” said Shirley.

  “The woman on the phone, she gave me an address. If we go to their office on Saturday, they have two tickets for us. All we have to do is to go to their office. They picked our phone number out of all the rest from the phone book.”

  “Where are we going?” Shirley asked.

  “I’ll give you a clue.”

  “Oh, Edward, you know I’m not good at guessing.”

  “No, come on, where can you find the Sydney Opera House?”

  “Edward just tell me.”

  “We’re going to Australia!”

  Shirley kept silent. She wanted to ask, “Are you sure?”, but decided it wasn’t the right question. No, she shouldn’t ask anything at all.

  “Australia is good,” she said.

  “Yes,” Edward replied.

  “We don’t have to speak another language. They all speak English there, right?”

  “Yes. And these are return air tickets,” Edward said. “I’m glad we still have the camera. And you wanted to sell the camera.”

  Shirley had more questions to ask, but kept them to herself. Why us? Why now? Why just one phone call to change everything?

  “Edward, your game how?”

  “What game?”

  “Nintendo.”

  “Just turn it off.”

  “Okay.”

  Shirley switched the television set off and then went to her dressing table. She dipped her fingers into a tub of cream and then rubbed some on her cheeks. Edward watched her very carefully. He had so many things to say, but knew it was best to say them once the lights were out.

  In the dark, Edward inched closer to Shirley and ran his hand up from under her T-shirt. He could feel the warmth of his wife’s torso. Suddenly, he heard Shirley clear her throat. He withdrew his hand, not in frustration, and then decided to let it stay on her shoulder instead. He allowed it to cup and caress the slope of his wife’s shoulder. He gave it a gentle squeeze but by that time Shirley was already pretending to be asleep.

  “We won something, Shirley,” he said.

  * * *

  Shirley had a dream. In that dream she was a salesgirl. Some time in the afternoon, she had served a Caucasian woman who wore one of those large, gold-framed sunglasses and who kept calling her “sweetheart”. The woman was also wearing a big batik dress with a cloth string around her waist.

  It was the end of the shift and Shirley was at her lockers. Doreen had gone into the locker room to tell Shirley that the manager wanted to see her. She was wondering why as she walked down the narrow corridors towards the manager’s office. Had someone made a complaint against her? It couldn’t have been the Caucasian woman, because she had called Shirley
“sweetheart”. Or maybe it was, you couldn’t tell with some people. Shirley still had her uniform on when she knocked on the manager’s door. She knocked with the knuckle of one finger.

  “Shirley, come in,” went the manager’s voice.

  The manager made Shirley sit on one of his enormous plush office chairs. Shirley didn’t know if she should place her elbows on the armrest, and when she did, it made her feel very small.

  “Shirley, you know that everyone who works with us, we monitor his or her performance?”

  “Yes.”

  The manager was speaking with the same voice he had used to sell shoes for 11 years. He kept emphasising his T’s and S’s. He leaned forward across his desk and clasped his hands together.

  “To cut the story short, I have evidence on camera that you have been stealing money during your cashier shifts.”

  Shirley was getting breathless.

  “I promise to pay it all back,” she said.

  “But why did you take the money? I mean, if you needed any help, you could have asked one of us.”

  Shirley let her hands drop into her lap. She had served the Caucasian woman really well, she thought. The woman had bought two pairs of shoes and had promised to bring her friends down.

  “Shirley,” the manager said. “Now’s not really a good time to keep quiet.”

  “My husband.” Shirley said. “His business didn’t work out. I was supposed to quit this job and help him. But things didn’t work out. We lost contact with this man who ran away with our money. My husband borrowed from a lot of people. Even my parents.”

  “You’re married, Shirley?”

  Shirley nodded.

  “Because if you’re not married all this could be easier for you. You know that even if you pay me the money, I’m still obliged to report you to the police?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place tonight and then we can talk about it. This is pretty serious, Shirley. Something like this can get you in a lot of trouble, you know that, right? I can drive you home after we talk.”

  At the manager’s house, Shirley excused herself once to go to the toilet. She didn’t dare look into mirror. She sat on the edge of the bath-tub and took out a lipstick from her purse. She put it on, not knowing how it looked on her. She put on several layers. When she walked out the bedside lamps were on, and the manager was sitting on the bed completely naked.

  “Shirley, no, don’t come near yet. I just want you to stand there first. Open the bathroom door so there’s some light on you. Okay, now why don’t you take that off?”

  Shirley did as she was told. She was told to show her side profile, cross her arms, take a deep breath and hold it there, bend over, cross her arms behind her head and hold on to a bundle of her hair. Then she was asked to climb onto the bed. For the first time in her life she kissed a man with a moustache. She had her hands led by the wrist and then her grip corrected several times.

  “Bigger than your husband’s one, right?”

  After she had paid her debts, Shirley sat on the toilet bowl and wept. Her stomach was hurting. She had allowed her manager to force himself on her in another way because he insisted that she could possibly get herself pregnant if it was done the way she was used to. And he had then barked at her as he pulled back on her hair like a rein, demanding to know how much she had taken altogether from the cash register. After some time, Shirley stood up and opened the bathroom cabinet. If she found any pills she was going to swallow them. But there weren’t any. She found a toothbrush though, and she dipped it into the blood-flecked water in the toilet bowl. She stirred for some time and even whisked the water. By the time she was finished, she was also done with her crying.

  When Shirley woke up from her dream she realised that the bed was moving. Edward was turned away from her and his hips were jerking. Maybe he was having a wet dream. Shirley opened her eyes wide and wondered why she didn’t have dreams like other people. Where they could wake up, grope their way back to reality, and then tell themselves “that never happened” instead of “why did I ever let that happen”.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning Shirley had a shower that lasted more than the five minutes she usually kept herself to. Edward waited for his turn patiently outside the bathroom and when Shirley stepped out he told her that she smelt wonderful.

  “Choose something for me to wear,” Edward told his wife after he saw her in her dress. “You never do that for me anymore.”

  Shirley chose for him a white shirt and pin-striped polyester trousers. When they were out in the corridor, Shirley went back into the house to check if the iron had been switched off. Edward watched her and then asked himself what he had possibly done to deserve such a woman. His parents were not very keen on Shirley because she had not gone to university. But there was something simple about her that caught Edward’s heart. There was the sad way she laughed, and the way she took pains over small things, like removing lint off his collar or helping him to pluck a freak strand of white hair from his head. He couldn’t reconcile all this with the fact that he had actually planned their initial years of marriage so that she would not bear children before his business took off the ground.

  When Shirley came back out to the corridor, she had something in her hand. It was a koala. Her sister had given it to her when their family got back from a holiday in Melbourne. Three months ago it was clipped to the side of the rear-view mirror on their Subaru, before they sold it.

  “What’s that for?” Edward asked.

  Shirley clipped the koala to her index finger and held it up as if she were testing the wind. She then wiggled it, its silhouette doing a pantomime against they sky.

  “This is for luck,” she said.

  * * *

  On the ride home they sat at the top deck of a double-decker bus. Shirley still had the koala, but it was inside her purse, where she had torn off the felt. She found out that there was a plastic clothes-peg inside the koala. She had allowed herself to get carried away. When they reached the office, they found that there were so many people around, some married couples, some whole families, bringing their children along. She then asked her husband, “Edward, our prize is what number prize?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First prize or second prize or what?”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  When they sat down, Edward held Shirley’s hand tightly in his. Beside them was an Indian family. The Indian father had asked Edward whether he was informed about winning the prize through mail or telephone. When Edward answered him he said, “For us also, same thing. But for us they got my daughter’s pager number. But she passed the telephone over to me. We know we only get two air tickets, but we want to see how, when is the flight, because I want to bring the whole family along. Later see how lah, if anyone maybe want to sell their tickets for discount or what.”

  Edward was thinking then that nothing could make him part from his. He was not going to let his wife down anymore. A speaker then went up to the microphone and addressed everyone. There was an atmosphere of goodwill and people clapped enthusiastically when he called the people in attendance “lucky families”. And there was a slide-show regarding investments in Australian property. The person kept saying the words, “No obligations”. They were allowed to invest any amount between 6,000 to 10,000 dollars. After 10 minutes Edward realised that he was not going to collect his air tickets. When the presentation was over, Edward loaded his paper plate with some fruit tarts from the reception. Shirley refused to touch any of them. In fact after a while she just walked away, and Edward had to skip on the coffee. When he finally caught up with her he passed her a brochure that had a koala on it. It read ‘Australia – Where the magic begins.’ He told her, “Maybe in a few years’ time,” and Shirley had replied, “I don’t think I have that long left in me.” And then she kept quiet and remained that way for the entire duration of the bus ride.

  When
they were at their doorstep, Shirley thought about how she should have left the iron on. So it would burn down a house like theirs, so empty, the walls decorated with failure, like paintings at a gallery. Each painting was a portrait of a husband who never doubted himself and who loved his wife so much she was powerless and incapable of anything but blind trust.

  When they were in the living room, Shirley mentioned something in a whisper, a whisper that didn’t conceal anything, not excitement or hope, a whisper that was the only thing left when everything else had been stripped and revealed.

  “Edward, how can you do this to me?”

  * * *

  At night, the couple took turns to brush their teeth. Edward was wearing pyjamas, and each time his eyes fell on his wife, something inside him mumbled “I’m sorry.” He felt each “sorry” plucked from him like the petals from a flower that he had been preserving to give to Shirley at some opportune moment. The next day he would start reading the classifieds again. Every day they were talking about the slump, the recession, retrenchment. He made up his mind to rewrite his resume. Maybe there wasn’t so much to rewrite, but he could just reformat it, try a different font. To do that he would have to borrow the computer at his brother’s house. Suddenly, Edward felt Shirley’s hand on his thigh. Before he knew it, his pyjama trousers were down to his knees. Shirley was undressing. She smiled at Edward and said, “Let’s go.”

  Edward asked, “What do you want to do?” and she replied, “Let’s make a baby.”

  Shirley made a fuss about the sex, the first kind of fuss she had made in a long time. There were times when she said some dirty things, times when she laughed and threw her head back and started moaning. There were times when she was so moony that Edward couldn’t see her irises. When Edward finally entered her, she was turning her head left to right on her rumpled pillow and thinking of that little man on the TV screen who was suspended over a manhole, his red-gloved fists (right), his bulbous nose (left), his moustache (right). And then she wrapped her legs around Edward. She reached out and felt the small knuckles on her husband’s spine. She clung on to him desperately as he did what he did to her, almost squeezing out tears because an absurd thought flashed through her mind; she was the koala on that brochure, the koala with a clothes-peg for ribs, the koala with that empty embrace.