by Alfian Sa'at
Rosminah let Kala lean on her shoulder. She had watched people on TV doing it, offering their shoulders to one another. She was not sure how she felt with Kala’s body so close to her own, such that as Kala spoke in that low voice she could feel her own body resonate.
“Men are like that.”
“Ros, when I saw you that day, first time, with your stomach so big, I think, I also want something like that. One day. Have my own children. I don’t have parents, but who say cannot have children? I also think, this woman can be the godmother. Can teach me how to fold the napkin. Teach me how to burp the baby.”
Kala started laughing.
“Ros, last time I dream so much! I want the baby to hold my finger in his hand. I want to bathe it like see on TV, hold the head very carefully. But now, I got already, I don’t want anymore, Ros. I don’t want. I feel empty. How can something grow inside me?”
Kala sighed. She then carefully eased the ring off her finger and held it up between her forefinger and thumb.
“It’s my name,” Kala said. “My name means what in Malay? Lose. I always lose. I don’t know who give me this name.”
Rosminah couldn’t find anything to say. She looked around her and saw three bare-bodied men lowering fishing lines into the water. They were sweating and she could see their bodies gleam. The bridge that they were standing on was called Cavenagh Bridge. There were huge beams that stretched behind them, studded with gigantic rivets. Rosminah was reminded how on the first day at the factory a woman had told her that they were assembling a rocket. She looked up and saw a full moon. It struck her that the moon should not belong only to men in rockets.
“Kala,” Rosminah asked, “Kala, you have to know what you want. What do you want?”
Kala removed her weight from her friend’s shoulder. She smiled at Rosminah, and then removed the pressure of her fingers from her ring. As it dropped in front of a fluorescent tube, it flashed for a moment, before being swallowed up by the darkness and the river whose depth neither of them knew or understood.
“I want nothing.”
Rosminah asked her, “You don’t want anything?”
Kala said, “I want nothing.”
* * *
In an hour’s time, it will be dawn. The children will have to be woken up, and Siti Nuraini will ask Rosminah if she should wash her hair, and Rosminah will remind her that she had washed it the night before. Mohd Rosli will have to be woken up at the breakfast table where he will fall asleep. His mouth will be hanging open, with a piece of bread dangling from its edge, squeezed into the shape of his palate. If he isn’t woken up in time, it will fall out of his mouth, sending his little sister into fits of giggling.
Rosminah opens the cupboard in the children’s room and takes out a box of mosquito coils. She drags out the plastic and realises that three of the four coils are broken. Rosminah then starts cracking them up into even smaller pieces before realising that the rustle of plastic could wake her children. She stops herself firmly and thinks: I am not well. She looks at the broken fragments of mosquito coils in the plastic and tells herself: there is no happiness in this world. Even if there is, none of it is mine.
Rosminah then walks into her bedroom. Her husband is snoring. She realises that she has not slept for an entire night. Slowly, she settles into position by her husband’s side. His hair is thinning, and his forearm is placed near the top of his head. Under the hairs on his armpit is a large mole. Rosminah closes her eyes. She wants to catch some sleep, even if it is for half an hour, catch whatever night there is left before birds start making noises outside. Sometimes, when Rosminah happened to be awake just at dawn, she would hear the faint twitter of invisible birds and an occasional braggart crow. Rosminah wonders if birds can feel cold, whether they climbed the morning shaking off the dew from their wings.
Sleep does not come over her. Instead, Rosminah feels a numbness that creeps up her legs, like sap, up her thighs and stomach. She winces and wonders whether it was true what her mother told her last time, that if you feel your body being frozen, paralysed, it means that an evil spirit is sitting on you. She hears frantic echoes panting, in her ears, and struggles to steer her mind away to other things.
Her friend gave her something for her birthday. She will give something back for Kala’s birthday. It is only fair.
Rosminah then reaches her hands out as if in fear that the numbness would finally reach them. She gathers them from the quicksand of her body and brings them, trembling, to her face. She whispers, “Help me God,” before reaching out with her left hand towards her husband’s side. In the darkness she feels for his pocket, gently. She slips in her fingers and feels the crisp 50-dollar note tucked inside. Just as she is about to pull it out, her husband clasps her hand with his own and then sighs. He says something, and then Rosminah realises that the numbness has gone, has leaked away as if through a hole that has been punctured in her side. She hears a sharp ring and knows it is the sound of the alarm clock in the children’s room.
In the kitchen, all Rosminah can concentrate on are her hands. Open the bread bin. Take out the butter and kaya˚ from the refrigerator. Scoop the Milo into the washed-out Nutella mugs. As she is tying Siti Nuraini’s hair, she hears Mohd Rosli asking her:
“Mak, why are you smiling?”
After sending her children off at the door, Rosminah walks into the kitchen again. She looks out of the window and sees a sweeper pushing a trolley with rubbish bins on it. Rosminah opens the window grilles. She then leans out and feels a strange wind blowing. She walks back to the cabinet and unplugs the sandwich maker, the same one she had used to prepare her children’s breakfast. Her 50 dollars is still in her husband’s pocket. When he held her hand, he had asked, “Rosminah, sayang,˚ you never sleep one whole night?”
Rosminah stretches her arms out of the window. The sandwich maker is heavy in her hands. Then she lets her fingers go. They obey her will. The sandwich maker falls, followed by its wire and plug trailing behind it, and for a moment, Rosminah thinks that she sees Kala’s ponytail plummeting downwards. Rosminah closes her eyes and clenches her fists against the ledge. She feels something within her fly out: a lightness that lasts as long as is necessary until a bang and a shout force her to open her eyes.
She looks down to see Mohd Rosli comforting Siti Nuraini, and she sees the wreckage she has made, an enamelled casing splintered into innumerable pieces. Siti Nuraini is crying, partly because of the shock but mostly because she had recognised the sandwich maker. Mohd Rosli looks up at his kitchen window and sees Rosminah, looking down. Their eyes meet from that distance, and Rosminah mouths something. She sees on her son’s face the expression she had wanted to see on Kala’s; that disbelief, the shock of identifying her as Rosminah, quiet Rosminah, a birthday wish stuck between her sobs.
DISCO
Sometimes when the wind was low outside the house, Robert would lie on his bed wondering if he had done the right thing. He thought about the woman who had been his wife for five years and he thought about the night he had packed his suitcase to leave. He remembered the look on her face when he had told her. He had not actually told her, he had written a note which he left at her dressing table under a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream. After he came home from his office, she confronted him about it. That was when he decided to tell the truth. What Robert remembered most was folding his clothes inside their bedroom (mostly shirts he would need to wear to work for the next few weeks; he did not believe in taking leave for what was just a domestic crisis) and hearing her cry in the living room. It seemed then that they were living in separate houses and he was listening to a neighbour making inaudible noises, so plaintive and private, that to eavesdrop would have been a childish and insensitive thing to do. She did not even have the lights on.
Being 35, Robert knew how late it was to have arrived at such decisions. But it was something that had always stood at the back of his mind. Robert always thought to himself that it was a tumour, and the only way to heal was
to admit to himself that it was there and that if he did not do something about it then it would keep growing. It would take over his body, and one day his wife would find him balled up on the bed, caved in by the realisation that the life he had assumed was false. Everything in his house: from the albums (embossed with titles like Sweet Memories and Floral Design Co.) under the coffee table, to the Pomeranian that had to be fitted with a bell as if its barking was not enough to fill the room’s silence, to the appointment cards from the fertility clinics, was corrupted with a sense of regret. It had to be done.
However, in his head Robert still kept the sound of his wife weeping in the living room. He heard the abrasive sounds of tissue being ripped out of its box, two or three at a time, raging fistfuls, like gauze from a sticky yellow wound. He had asked himself how anyone could cry so much. The next morning when Robert woke up (after deciding against leaving with his packed suitcase; he didn’t want to knock at someone’s door in the middle of the night and cause trouble), he found that his wife was gone. She left behind her tissue papers, each one crumpled like a carnation from a wake. Robert sometimes wondered if that memory of his wife wailing in the dark, and that dismantled garland of grief littered on the table and carpet, was a new kind of tumour.
On Sunday nights, Robert would go to a club where most people were younger than him (or so he believed). Some of them wore eye shadow, and yet some carried what looked like handbags, but with straps to wear on their backs. Then there were those with chests so big they looked like fossilised pillows. When Robert looked at them, he was scared and thrilled at the same time. He imagined what it was like to have those pectorals, how soft or hard they were. Robert believed that they were firm, like breastplates, but he recalled that when he saw his muscular neighbour jogging bare-bodied across the front of his house, he caught them shaking like soft flesh. Robert wondered if it would be possible to pay someone during the night just to let him touch his chest, to see how it would yield to Robert’s curious, probing fingers. He would do it not like the way one would press fish in the market but with the same tenderness in which he would soothe a headache at the temples.
Robert would sit in his car first, watching the queue and waiting for it to shorten as the night wore on. He didn’t want to be part of the queue. For one thing, he was not dressed properly. He didn’t have a tight top on, his hair wasn’t gelled in lethal spikes and he didn’t have a cigarette as an accessory. To Robert, this was how he saw the boys in the queue, and sometimes, he even caught some of them throwing glances at him. He liked to imagine that they were looking at him inside the car, although it was pitch dark, rather than at his Rover. The Rover he had managed to secure, whereas his wife got the house. At the moment, Robert was living in an apartment in Holland Village but it was only a temporary arrangement. He was simply caretaker there until his friend, Wan Tung (the one who had told him to taste the fresh air, and who often nagged like a broken recorder that “closets are for mothballs”), came back from a holiday in Australia where he had gone to ‘observe’ the Sydney Mardi Gras.
At about 12 midnight, Robert, finally tired of the deejay babbling inanities on the car radio, walked out of his car. He fingered into his wallet and fished out 15 dollars at the door, glancing away from the bouncers and offering his hand to be stamped.
One of them was telling a joke to the other and they were both laughing. The bouncer who stamped Robert’s hand held his wrist clinically, as if Robert was about to donate blood. When Robert looked at the bouncer, he smiled and said, “Enjoy yourself.” He was bald, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone. His teeth were large enough to inscribe letters on them, like a billboard on a game show.
It was his fourth time at the club, and still Robert did not know how to make an entrance. He felt the music blast into his face like the rush from an oven. The thumping bassline invaded his stomach. Robert took a deep breath and walked up the steps that led into the club, and he placed his hands in his pockets to check if his car keys were still with him, although he knew that it was just an excuse to hide them. He had no idea what to do with his hands. To hold on to the handrails was something too childish for him, and he did not believe he had the rhythm to swing them by his sides without any selfconsciousness.
As Robert looked around him he was again filled with wonder. He had never seen so many beautiful men before. Where did they come from? What did they do in the day? Robert walked around, still with his hands in his pockets, and was disappointed to find that his usual spot had been occupied by a group of teenagers. There were four of them, coolly surveying their surroundings. Two of them were smoking, and when one wanted to light his cigarette he would turn towards his friend and let his friend’s lit cigarette end touch his like a godly fingernail.
Robert remembered a movie he had watched a long time ago, when a glowing finger touched a human one, and a cut was healed. It was a date movie, and Robert smiled as he recalled the elbow graze, the shoulders leaning against each other, and then two hands suddenly finding grooves in each other. He remembered the long hair and his cheek pressing into it, strumming like fingers against a broken harp, and not understanding any of it. But at the present moment he could not remember the name of the movie, nor the subsequent wedding, even trivial details like how many tiers there were on the cake. And he forced himself not to remember her name, because he would have to shut his eyes for a while to erase it out of his mind, and he did not want to do that in a crowded club. All that came back to him was a certain kind of warmth in a darkened theatre and two fingers on screen constituting some kind of magic.
The four boys seemed disinterested with what was going on around them; they did not get up to dance and their eyes glossed over people without any spark of interest or recognition. They were like the mirror balls, faraway planets, sending out splinters of light that skated across faces and bodies like luminous fish. A stone chorus, watching intently from their red velvet sofa, so still as if not breathing, such that each time one of them blinked it was like an exhalation, and Robert himself exhaled in relief.
As usual, the music they played was not Robert’s type. When Robert was once asked by Wan Tung what type of music he liked, he had said, “the sentimental kind”. When Wan Tung asked him further what that meant, Robert could not tell him exactly. But in his mind he knew it was something with some light piano, and candlelight, something romantic. But Robert realised that like ‘sentimental’, ‘romantic’ did not say much about his taste in music either. It was just one of those words that could mean something or nothing at different times.
In fact, the song blaring over the speakers annoyed Robert, what with its frenzied beats and the brassy wailing of a female singer. He looked around him to see so many people writhing to it, some flinging their arms up into the air and some shaking their heads around like dogs trying to dry themselves after rain. Then there were those whose bodies were still, but whose feet tapped restlessly, their eyes closed and their heads tilted upwards as if receiving some holy light, some ecstatic revelation. Robert decided to walk over to the bar counter and ordered a tequila. As he was walking, two men brushed past him, and he caught a whiff of the cologne they were wearing. Or maybe it was perfume, Robert thought wryly. You could never tell in a place like this. But the momentary friction of one of the men’s exposed biceps against Robert’s shoulder gave him a tingle, and he reassured himself that despite the music that roused nothing in him, this was the place for him to be.
When Robert got back to his spot, the boys were still there. Robert smiled and took more sips from his glass of tequila, and he felt generous. For the past three times he was at the club, that sofa had been his; he had sat there because it was the only way to disguise the fact that he could not dance. Now four boys had taken that place from him. Robert assumed that like him, they were not into dancing. Perhaps some of them had a certain clumsiness that was best hidden from a crowd that was quick to spot beauty and quick to expect that the beauty would come in a total package, wi
th attendant talents. (But how good they were at concealing it!) Robert felt comforted and no longer believed that he had been dispossessed of his one oasis in a whirlpool of shattered light and thunderous music. He had company. After realising that his glass was half empty, Robert decided to take a closer, though guarded, look at the boys. There was one sitting nearest to where he was standing, who had cheekbones so sharp and angular they were almost shiny. He was wearing a baseball cap whose peak was folded severely down the middle, and beneath it his eyes glimmered, appearing almost metallic in the chaos of the lights. It was this boy whom Robert approached suddenly, with the tequila still warm in his breast and the ice in his glass tinkling mutely.
“Hello!” Robert yelled at the boy.
The boy looked up at Robert and did not smile.
“Hi, I am Robert.”
He kept the fire of his drink burning as he stood in the boy’s cold gaze.
The boy said, “Hi, I am,” and paused. “Jason.” He came up with the name on the spot, Robert believed. His spontaneity grabbed Robert by the neck. Caught by such a lie, Robert suddenly lost all his nervousness.
“Do you go to the disco often?” Robert asked.
The boy nodded at Robert.
“I like your cap,” Robert said.
“Thanks,” the boy said.
“I’ve been looking for a cap like that for some time.”
“You want it?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Here, take it.”
“I don’t want it.” Robert backed off.
“I can always get another one,” the boy insisted.
“No, really.”
“Put it on.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“This is nice.”
“You’ll look good in it.”