‘You know there’s more to Singapore.’
‘I used to think so, but lately, I can’t see it. You’ve changed. You’ve become the clichéd Singapore career-woman. It’s all about the money. You have your ‘five Cs’; what are they again? Condo, cash, credit card, car – and what else do you want now? Should we join a country club? Can we stop after that, and decide we’re there? Or will there be more, more, more?’
Mama was not counting to ten this time.
The first sentences she screeched so hard I could only hear a few words – Ang Moh, judgemental, crazy, mean. She ended with, ‘If you hate it so much here, just leave! Go! I’m not stopping you.’
Then, more intelligibly, ‘Why are you Ang Mohs always so hung up about ‘real life’? What is this so called reality? Would you rather go and live in some longkang like Jakarta? You can taste reality there in a slum, with no running water or electricity, no waste collection or sewers. Will that make you see what really counts? You grew up in luxury. You don’t understand.’
‘Maybe I don’t,’ Dad said, ‘but I know how this place makes me feel. I’ve been here sixteen years, you know. I use to love it, but the veneer is wearing thin.’
You could hear the offence streaked through Mama’s words. ‘Every single Singaporean is proud to be part of this nation that they created with their bare hands. People like my mother. Maybe sixteen years isn’t enough to get to know us. It’s not about the money, it’s about what it stands for. Taking responsibility. Independence. Safety.’
‘I know you,’ Dad said. ‘I mean you, as a person, not as a Singaporean. You’re compassionate. You used to be creative, and confident, a collaborator who built bridges. But you’ve lost it. You’re burning out and you need a break.’
‘Maybe it would be easier for me to take a break if my husband was actually at home sometimes. Maybe he should quit himself. Or when he’s home, maybe he should be married to me and not his phone!’
That shut Dad up.
I imagined Mama looking at Dad defiantly, adding up points in her head towards winning the battle. But the war wasn’t over.
‘Well, maybe if my wife was more fun to be around, I would be home more.’
The last thing I heard was a door slamming.
There was no way I could get up after that. It was a Saturday, and I reached under my bed for a book, trying to read away the sentences echoing in my head, the ones that overshadowed thoughts about feminism and quitting jobs.
Why was our life not real? This was the only life I’d ever known, and it was real enough to me. I felt offended and confused. I kept thinking about the suggestion that if you didn’t like your life you could just pick up and try somewhere else. Would it be a cowardly thing to do or a brave one? It would mean being rid of Jenny, but also of Cat. And Cat, the foreigner, had just started to make me love Singapore again – its natural world, the lively markets, the quirky and contradictory people, and, of course, the best food ever. Cat’s wish to explore them all reminded me of when Dad once said that he loved having visitors, as then you finally went to see all the nice sights in your own town.
But my thoughts kept going back to the shouting, the unhappiness that echoed through the house. The whole argument had split me down the middle, shutting up even the cockroach, the cockroach that my parents couldn’t see.
It was clear what we needed: PoPo. PoPo could show Dad the real Singapore, the one he needed to see to love us, to love Singapore, Mama and me, so maybe together we could chase out the cockroach. But PoPo was dead.
When I finished my book I couldn’t do much else but get up. The house was quiet. Dad played tennis on Saturday mornings and Mama must have left too and taken Chloe with her. It was safe to come out.
Aunty M was in the kitchen washing up the breakfast things. I wanted to ask her about Dad, about the bubble and real life, but she didn’t hear me. I asked her again, and she started and turned around with wild eyes.
‘Aunty M,’ I began, but my questions seemed wrong suddenly. ‘Where’s Mama?’ I asked instead.
‘She went to the shops with Chloe. She needs new shoes.’
Her eyes were wet and red. Something felt terribly wrong.
‘Aunty M, what’s the matter?’
She walked to the kitchen table and slumped down in a chair. She was still holding the washing up sponge and it dripped over her lap.
‘Nurul has gone missing.’
32
I stared at Aunty M, pondering how to react to this bombshell. Aunty M looked back at me and sighed.
‘My mother called last night. She left yesterday morning, and nobody knows where she is.’
We sat there for a few minutes, neither of us knowing what to say. Aunty M went back to the sink and squeezed the rest of the water from the sponge.
‘Did you call her Dad?’
She turned around and looked at me. ‘Why would I do that?’
I shrugged. It just seemed like she should.
I took some rice crackers from the cabinet, and decided it was best to go back to bed.
When Mama came home and I knew Dad could get back at any minute, I asked if I could go to Cat’s house. I was bored of reading in bed, and I didn’t want to face Mama, or Dad, or Aunty M right now. They were all too difficult to deal with.
I’d pondered enough about Nurul, about running away myself, trying to decide whether it was a smart thing to do or not. I needed out. At Cat’s place you could never be bored, like you could in our stacking block condo apartment. It was such a different world; it was a good place to forget things.
We were on the veranda playing Uno when Mimi ran out the side of the house waving a broom and shouting. A group of little monkeys was sitting in the orchid pots, chomping on the flowers. Mimi swung the broom and shouted at them, chasing them away. What she couldn’t see was that there was one little baby monkey sitting behind her, not in the orchids but the frangipani tree. The rest of the family, including a large and imposing daddy, were by the fence. The baby squeaked. Mimi, shaking her broom after the culprits, started to turn. But suddenly the daddy charged towards her. Mimi shrunk back, stumbling away with hurried steps. As soon as the way to the frangipani tree was clear, the baby jumped out to the safety of the family.
Mimi shouted what sounded like swear words, but Cat was unperturbed. ‘Aren’t you afraid, living with monkeys?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ said Cat, ‘Bob’s ok. He was just protecting the baby. Perfectly normal monkey behaviour.’ I remembered this was a family of monkey experts.
‘Bob?’ I said.
‘Yes, Bob. He’s the alpha male. He’s a decent guy. It’s Harry that’s the problem.’
‘Harry?’ I asked. Who the heck was Harry?
‘Harry’s been giving us grief. In this group of macaques, there are two large males. We had a monkey war last week.’
Seriously? ‘What do you mean, a monkey war?’
Cat sounded like her dad right now. He would tell amazing stories about the proboscis monkeys. He was a bit like my dad, in the sense that if he started talking about a subject he kept going, as if he were in teacher mode, everything a lecture. But where with Dad it always sounded like he got all his information from his phone, with Cat’s dad, you could see he’d experienced it. He would never live in a bubble.
I’d hang on his every word when he spoke about monkeys, jungles, Borneo and Burma. Cat got bored after a while, but I couldn’t get enough. Whenever he spoke like that, Cat’s mother looked at him lovingly. No Mamamonster there. Sometimes Cat’s dad looked at me as if I were a specimen under a magnifying glass, and I imagined him slicing me up and looking at the fragments under a microscope. Would he see the cockroach in my stomach? But a minute later he’d have forgotten I even existed, and go back to his monkeys. He was scary and fascinating at the same time.
Their family was so much noisier than ours. Ollie alone could produce more decibels than Chloe when she was hungry. Talking was done at high volume, heatedly and pas
sionately, but it never became a fight. My family made less noise – at least in between Mamamonster visits – but with us, the things that weren’t said were the loudest.
I’d never heard Cat’s dad mention the macaques. I’d thought they were too plain to be interesting. Most people regarded them a pest, rather than wildlife.
‘Macaques live in large family groups, with one male, the alpha male. He’s the boss,’ Cat lectured. ‘But sometimes another male wants to be boss, and they fight. That happened last week. They were fighting up there.’ Cat pointed at the large rain tree past the gate.
‘It was early evening. They screamed and screeched and made such a racket that all the neighbours came out. It was a bit scary, but Dad said it was amazing and we were lucky to see it. There have been more clashes since. One time Harry fell out of the tree. But he ran straight back in to take revenge.’
Wow. Who could imagine such a thing in their own garden?
‘So who won?’ I asked.
‘Bob. Look, he’s with the family now. He’s a nice guy. He was just protecting his baby. He’s quite shy with people. But Harry…’
‘What about Harry?’
‘Harry has been kicked out of the group. He’s on his own and sulking. He’s a bad loser. He’s aggressive. He needs to start a new group somewhere, but that means competing with Bob for territory around here. Singapore is paved with concrete, not much monkey space left. He’s been coming into the house a lot. Mama is scared of him. She bought a water gun to shoot him.’
‘A water gun?’
Sometimes I couldn’t believe Cat and her family were for real, let alone living in the same town I was.
‘Yes, they hate it when you squirt water at them. It’s fun. Mama gets freaked out, because sometimes Harry will tiptoe into the house when she’s working. He just sits there until she turns around. He gives her the creeps. She bought a handgun for indoors and a big super soaker for outside. But Ollie usually hoards the super soaker.’
‘And shooting them with water, does it work?’
‘Usually. They’ll scatter if you do it. Dad says we need to make sure they know who’s boss. He calls it power play. Harry is competing with us for territory, and we need to show him this is our territory and we are alpha people. We keep shooting to try and enforce that.’
‘Cool. Can we shoot some monkeys?’
‘Sure. Mama says only to spray them when they’re on the ground, close to the house. Only she can shoot inside. She says we’ll ruin the furniture.’
Cat stood up. ‘We’ll have to wrestle Ollie for it, though.’
Most of the monkeys were trooping around the gate, blocking the way with their toothy grins and swinging, sticklike tails. Nobody could pass, so the gate had to be human territory not monkey. As soon as we shot water at them, they all scrambled for the safety of the trees. We tried hitting them high, but it was hard to aim upwards. Cat’s mother came running out. ‘Don’t shoot them in the trees! I told you Cat, this is about territory. The house, patio, and ground around it are ours. The tree is theirs.’
‘But they were on the gate,’ Cat countered.
‘They aren’t anymore,’ her mother said drily.
When her mother had gone back inside, Cat said, ‘Next time we go to your place, we should bring these guns. We need to teach Jenny and her brother something about territory too. And about good manners.’
From the way she looked, it didn’t seem like she was joking at all. I thought about the power play, and the employers as well as Jenny. Maybe Cat had a point.
I had dinner at Cat’s place that evening, and when I came home Aunty M was in her room. Mama, Dad and I watched a movie. We didn’t speak much, and I went to bed straight after. When I woke up, I felt really bad. Guilty, for ignoring Aunty M all day yesterday. For being more interested in the monkeys than her daughter.
It was Sunday morning, and Aunty M was in her room. I thought about knocking on her door, even though I wasn’t supposed to. But I needed to know. I was standing there, pondering, when Dad passed by. ‘Maya, leave Aunty M alone on Sundays, please.’
‘But Dad, Nurul, her daughter, she’s missing.’
‘I know. We were all so worried, sweetie. Good news last night, she’s been found.’
I realised my heart was racing and my stomach had clenched. ‘Where was she?’
Dad pulled my hand away from the door. ‘She’d run away to her father. Aunty M is very upset. Just let her be today.’
One of the knots in my stomach loosened. At least she was safe. ‘Will she be ok? Is she going to stay there?’
‘She will for now, until Aunty M can speak to her and sort things out.’
Would Aunty M be able to fix this? I thought about yesterday morning, when I had considered running away myself, away from the tension in the house that was thick as porridge. But Dad was right there, so where could I go?
‘Dad, can I go to Cat again? We started a game of Monopoly yesterday and we need to finish it.’
‘Sure,’ Dad said. ‘Give me half an hour to get dressed, and
I’ll drop you off.’
Cat and I were in the living room playing Monopoly when she jumped up. Harry’s grinning face popped over the windowsill. Cat signalled with big arms and shouts that he shouldn’t come in. Harry ignored her, climbed onto the table below the window, and sat there. He looked at us, unflustered.
‘Mama,’ Cat yelled. ‘Harry’s inside again!’
To me, she said, ‘Don’t look him in the eye, and especially don’t show your teeth. He’ll take that as a challenge.’
Cat’s mum came in, swearing under her breath, aiming at Harry with her small water pistol. Harry looked annoyed, protected his face with his hand, waving like he was swatting a fly, and then calmly went out the way he had come.
‘That monkey is getting out of control. We need to talk to your dad about what we can do about him.’
Harry’s quiff popped above the windowsill again. He bared his teeth in a scary grin. Cat’s mum took aim, shouting, ‘You stupid bully. Go. This is my house! Out!’
She hit him right in the face.
Harry ran off into a tree at the back of the house. Cat’s mother went back to the kitchen, muttering.
Cat and I looked at each other and laughed. ‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘that Jenny’s brother is called Harry?’
We laughed even harder.
‘That makes sense,’ said Cat.
Afterwards I felt sad for Harry. Cat knew all about monkeys, but little about people. Harry the monkey was the loser, yes, but Jenny wasn’t. She was Bob. She’d won. She was the real alpha. Like Harry the monkey, I had been kicked out, having to fend for myself. I’d have tried to cuddle him, if only he didn’t have such big teeth.
33
Cat and I did more research by eavesdropping. Not all of it was interesting; mostly employers just complained about slow maids, lazy maids, maids with attitude (which was a bad thing, if you weren’t a pop star), maids that talked back, broke things, stayed out late on their day off and generally couldn’t be trusted. How much of it was true? I started to see that truth was different things to different people.
The aunties complained as much about their employers as the employers did about them, and the playground was the perfect spot to listen in on the gossip. The aunties talked about being shouted at, called stupid, not allowed to go out. About having to hide the fact that they had boyfriends, and having curfew on their day off at five in the afternoon. They grumbled about eating only leftovers, or only being allowed to go out after the Sunday breakfast table was cleared up. Employers were stingy, mean and generally couldn’t be trusted. How much of that was true?
It was like there were two versions of the world: the one in which domestic workers had abusive employers, and the one where employers had lazy maids. Were they both real, or two different bubbles?
Some of the conversations stayed with me for days, rolling around my mind as I tried to make sense of them.
Her friend nodded in agreement. ‘Of course. You need your rest.’
Lady one went on: ‘Also, if she goes out all day on Sunday, how is she going to be fit to work on Monday? She will tire herself. No. I need her to watch my kids on Sunday.’
‘The government is so soft these days, always protecting the maids. This new law, you have to give the day off, right?’ lady two pondered.
‘Yes, but you can decide to let them work. So I told her, I had agreed when I hired her that she should work on Sundays. That was two years ago and to be fair, she never complained, she did the work, she did it well. But now, I was kind, offered to renew her contract, and she takes advantage of my kindness by demanding a day off. So I sent her home.’
She continued. ‘It’s not really her fault, you know. These maids, these countries they are from, they just don’t have the work ethics we have here in Singapore.’
Lady two nodded vigorously.
Was it right to even try to look for logic? There was no way I could have gone up to them and addressed them, even if I’d found the words. And the other side did not necessarily make more sense.
It was an aunty I didn’t know; she came to the playground occasionally but wasn’t one of our regular crowd.
‘My employers are easy,’ she said. ‘Ma’am never checks the receipt. So when I go to the market, I always buy the nice things. Some snack, my lunch, or something else.’ She giggled with her mouth covered, not letting on what the something else was. ‘She is nice to me, but the nicer she is, the less I believe her. It is better if I just take.’
A Yellow House Page 20