Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

And every sailor’s head turns.

  Feathers and a dress of midnight blue

  Barbara’s got an axe to burn.

  He bows, his bandmates bow, they scream; he bows, his bandmates bow, they scream. The adrenaline crescendos, the area before his eyes explodes into tiny bright stars.

  Peace.

  • • •

  They were walking to the carpark behind the National Theatre, equipment in tow, when a Rolls Royce pulled up in front of them. The backseat window rolled down.

  Deddy Haikel, you did it.

  Ling Ko Mui was smiling, shining. Long, finger-waved curls had replaced the schoolgirl bob, and her face was lightly made up. Only five years and now she was a woman.

  This is my husband, Leong Heng.

  It was the son of the dried goods merchant. In the backseat of the Rolls Royce, he looked perfectly civil. He smiled at Deddy Haikel, holding his hand up as a perfunctory greeting.

  When I saw you on the poster I squealed, “I know him, he used to play at my father’s pub!” I made Leong Heng get tickets right away. We had a marvellous time—it was a great performance.

  Thank you.

  It’s a pity you stopped coming around to the pub though. I wanted to call you up at home but my father wouldn’t give me your number. I’d thought maybe you lost interest in music.

  No, that would never happen.

  Well, then I guess our pub got too small for you.

  It wasn’t that either.

  What was it, then?

  My dear, you’re not being very polite are you, Leong Heng interrupted, leaning over to put a hand on his wife’s knee.

  Look at me going on about the past. I don’t mean to, Deddy Haikel. Congratulations again.

  Thank you.

  We should go, Leong Heng said. My heartiest congratulations to you.

  He signalled to the driver, and the window began rolling up.

  Goodbye, Ling Ko Mui said.

  Goodbye, Deddy Haikel said, but the Rolls Royce had already pulled away.

  • • •

  The day they began tearing the National Theatre down in 1984—with its sharp rhombused frontal design, its amphitheatre, its crescent-shaped fountain—Deddy Haikel had his first heart attack.

  Too much mutton, his first wife said. Too much cendol, his second wife chimed in. Too much kueh, his third wife added. This was his problem with having three wives. The rotational sex was good, but the three wives got along so well that they frequently rallied against him.

  Sometimes he wondered how they could be so chummy—did he not inspire the surly beast of jealousy in his women? He tried to grunt and moan louder in his orgasms, so the other two wives who weren’t on the master bedroom bed that night would hear. He hoped it kept them up at night, that they would try to outdo each other.

  But they never did. They continued combing each other’s hair, purchasing colourful faux silks when there was an offer at the market on each other’s behalf, taking turns to bake sugee cookies for the brood, like sisters.

  • • •

  Wife Number One is signing in at the counter at Flamingo Valley for her visitor’s pass. She’s the fat one, the one who waddles when she walks, her ass expansive. She kisses his hands and they speak in Malay.

  How are you, the doctor says you can come home soon? Still two more weeks?

  Sayang, I’m still recovering from the bypass, look at me. He clutches his heart and pulls a face. Wife Number One frowns amusedly.

  Five hundred dollars every week even after subsidy, you know.

  Isn’t that what I have seven children and three wives for?

  He says this cheekily, with a roguish grin.

  Wife Number One looks at him, exasperated, but it is a loving exasperation.

  We need to save up for our retirement—you don’t want to be a burden to the kids, do you?

  Yeah okay, okay. It’s not like I’m having a holiday here, you know. They poke all these needles into me three times a day, and the food is awful. I miss Khairah’s beef rendang.

  We’ll get her to cook that on the day you return. I’ll get the beef from the market.

  Doctor says no more coconut milk and less red meat! Clogs up the heart.

  How then?

  Skim milk. Fish.

  Poor Deddy. All your favourite things gone out the window.

  She’s near enough; he reaches out and squeezes her bottom gently. She pushes his hand in surprised outrage, turning to see if anyone’s seen the act, but laughs.

  Deddy, Deddy. She strokes his arm.

  • • •

  Deddy Haikel sits by Ling Ko Mui’s bed. His is a shared ward of six but hers is a single.

  Ling Ko Mui, do you believe in magic?

  Ling Ko Mui looks at Deddy Haikel, shakes her head no.

  How about fate, then?

  She nods, very slowly. It’s been awhile since questions such as these were asked of her, for a long time it’d been: How are you feeling today, Have you taken your medicine yet, Is it time to change those diapers?

  She wants to speak, but language has been beyond her for so long. She shapes the words with her lips. Whhh. Nothing comes out.

  Deddy Haikel is looking at her closely.

  Fate is when you come from a different place from someone, but you keep seeing that person. Is that talking it down?

  He scratches his head.

  You know the way in your Chinese folktales, where the mortal spends a minute in Heaven and returns to Earth to find that thirty years have passed?

  Ling Ko Mui is gesticulating, verging on speech.

  A woman enters the ward, with her an unwilling child pulling on his own hands. Who’s there? she demands.

  Who’re you? Deddy Haikel returns. The woman is affronted. This is my mother, the woman says, placing a hand on the side of Ling Ko Mui’s bed.

  Excuse me, Deddy Haikel says as he stands up, smoothing his johnnie shirt down and extending a hand, I’m an old friend of your mother’s.

  Really, the woman says skeptically. She doesn’t take his hand. Ma, she says to Ling Ko Mui, who shows no interest in her nor the child. Call Ah Ma, the woman says to the child. Ah Ma, the child parrots. A nurse comes along, and the woman makes small talk with her, but as with long-stay nursing home talk, the talk is rarely substantive, prognoses seem at best a plateau, the only direction of progress often a slow careen towards certain death.

  The nurse leaves and the woman eyes Deddy Haikel with suspicion again.

  I used to perform in your grandfather’s pub, he says.

  The woman softens, looks at him now. My mother used to love talking about that place, she says, A pity I never got to see it for myself—demolished before I was born. She pauses. I’m sorry about earlier, she says. It’s just—all the old people on this floor seem to have lost their marbles.

  Don’t worry about it. Deddy Haikel waves her apology away. I’m a short stay. Recovering from a heart bypass. Still got my marbles, for now at least.

  She smiles at him.

  Where’s your father? Deddy Haikel asks, suddenly.

  He passed away from a stroke several years ago, the woman says.

  I’m sorry to hear that.

  It’s just so difficult having to deal with this again, the woman says, shutting her eyes briefly. I’m glad he’s not here to see this, though—if you knew them, you must have known how much he doted on her.

  Deddy Haikel strains to smile. The woman smiles back.

  What did you play back then?

  It was the 60s, sayang. Everyone played rock ‘n’ roll. A touch of Pop Yé-yé.

  • • •

  It smarts when he thinks about it later that night, the life Ling Ko Mui shared with the son of the dried goods merchant. Five decades, half a century. He tosses in bed, dreams of an eighteen-year-old girl in a white skirt, eating nasi kandar with both hands.

  Deddy Haikel sneaks into Ling Ko Mui’s single ward before dawn. When she opens her eyes about an hour later, there h
e sits. It startles her, but she’s always had a strong heart.

  Ling Ko Mui, remember when I brought you to eat goreng pisang? You loved it. Remember when I took you to eat nasi kandar? You asked me why Malay chilli was sweet.

  She’s shrinking away from him in a sleepy stupor, but already there’s the taste of deep-fried bananas, kampung chicken and yellow rice in her mouth.

  Do you remember, when you brought me to eat dough fritters and soybean milk, and I was like, Why the hell would you guys dip the fritters into the soybean milk, wouldn’t it lose its crisp? You laughed at that. Remember? Or when I told you I’d have to pray ten times a day because you were taking me to eat food that wasn’t halal? How when I tried to kiss you later, you said “But I’m not halal”, and then you closed your eyes and leaned in anyway?

  Ling Ko Mui looks at Deddy Haikel’s hand. She opens her mouth. The words don’t come out, but she’s nodding, this time with confidence. She’s smiling. She reaches out for his hand. Before he gives it to her, he draws the peach curtains apart, throws the windows open. He sits by her bed, gives her his hand. He doesn’t ask more, doesn’t nudge her to speak, doesn’t venture to ascertain what it is she remembers. They remain like this till the sun comes up. He has an eye on the clock. He removes his hand from hers at 7.15am, before the breakfast trolley comes around to the single wards.

  As he moves away to the door, he hears a rustle of bedclothes. He turns, and she is reaching out for him, the way a child might.

  He walks over to her bed, kisses a prominent vein on the left side of her forehead. His faulty heart thuds from acting on impulse. He leaves briskly, just missing the breakfast trolley on its rounds as it turns the corner on the other end of the corridor.

  • • •

  She begins responding to her name, but only if the doctors and nurses say it in full with an exclamation—Ling Ko Mui!—not if they call her Mrs Tan, or Madam Ling, or Auntie, Asian assumptions of preferred deference.

  She’s stopped needing her bedpan. They bring her for physiotherapy sessions now. Atrophy is easy, effortless; but when you have something to live for—even if you’re not sure what it is—the body fights back.

  They call her daughter, informing her of these improvements. Ling Ko Mui’s daughter arrives to witness the changes for herself, but is still ignored by her mother, who simply stares straight ahead in her daughter’s presence. She returns home and thinks: what a waste of time. She isn’t sure if there’s a difference between a bedridden dementia patient and a more active dementia patient.

  Ling Ko Mui still can’t speak, but her mouth contorts itself around language as she remembers it. They see the marked change in her, the younger nurses aren’t so hardened as to let this pass. They try to encourage her.

  They ask her: What do you remember?

  Ling Ko Mui remembers five stars and a moon.

  But the five stars are a building’s pointed façade, and the moon is crescent, with jets of water shooting out of it. She draws this for the nurses, who are puzzled.

  She’s walking towards it, it’s a futuristic brick-and-brown building and as she passes the threshold the crescent moon-like fountain dies down. She files past the box office, enters a sprawling hall of 3,420 seats, takes her place. She looks up to the cantilevered roof. When she looks back down all the seats are filled, Deddy Haikel and his band are on stage, and the music is inside her.

  Deddy Haikel, she writes on the piece of paper shakily, Deddy Haikel.

  It is lunchtime, and the nurses wheel her to him. She sits with him in the halal section of the cafeteria. She looks up into his face, she touches his cheek from time to time, his forehead, as if anointing him.

  He smiles, first with his lips pressed together, then breaking out into a crinkle-eyed grin. He picks up his guitar, propping it on his knee.

  And she begins singing with him, in perfect time, the lyrics word for word.

  Barbara shimmies down Bugis Street

  And every sailor’s head turns.

  Feathers and a dress of midnight blue

  Barbara’s got an axe to burn.

  • • •

  The nurses show Deddy Haikel the paper where Ling Ko Mui has sketched the diamonds and the crescent. They want to know if he knows what it is. They have romanticised it as some cosmic hieroglyph.

  It’s the National Theatre, Deddy Haikel says decidedly.

  What’s that?

  Deddy Haikel shakes his head.

  Another dead national monument. Do you know they had a-dollar-a-song campaign for it on the radio? You called in and paid a dollar and the DJ dedicated a song to you, and that dollar went to the building fund.

  That sounds fun, one of the nurses says.

  Fun? It was pride. We were a new nation. Everyone buys their firstborn the best clothes. Rich businessmen made phone calls arranging for direct contributions, trishaw riders called in to the radio with their day’s savings earned through backbreaking work, and went hungry after. These days, they do whatever they want. It’s still your money they’re using, except they don’t remind you of the fact any more, and you don’t get a tune out of it. They don’t want it to get personal.

  What happened to it?

  Twenty-three years was what it was worth, demolished to make way for part of the Central Expressway underground tunnel.

  The tunnel? I thought this was what happened with the National Library on Stamford Road.

  Well, it would seem then that we’re always one tunnel short, wouldn’t you say?

  • • •

  Ling Ko Mui’s talking, pissing and shitting of her own conscious accord, asking the nurses and doctors plucky little questions. Her sudden recovery is a miracle, that much is agreed upon. The doctors shake their head at the mysteries of neurobiology.

  She and Deddy Haikel sit in the herb garden in the sunshine.

  So girl, let me ask you something: what’s going to happen to you when I’m gone?

  I’ll tell my parents I want to be with you. They can’t stop me.

  He starts in his seat. He wants to say, Baby, look at me. Look at you, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He’s waited half a lifetime for this.

  And, and if they do?

  Then we elope.

  What about my bandmates?

  They’ll come with us. I’ll be your agent.

  She has an impish look in her eyes.

  There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. What about Leong Heng?

  Who?

  The son of the dried goods merchant.

  What are you talking about?

  Sorry, I—nothing.

  Who’s that?

  It’s nothing, I just—there are so many people out there who could provide better for you. I don’t have much to offer you.

  Look into my eyes, Deddy Haikel: you have nothing to worry about.

  Deddy Haikel will leave in four days. Every night he dreams of the eighteen-year-old girl, and every morning he wakes to be with her. They have their meals together, they talk about music, he plays songs for her. She talks about her parents, she talks about being with him. She doesn’t question why they’re surrounded by the elderly and infirm, the doctors and nurses in uniform, nor where they are.

  At night Deddy Haikel thinks to himself, he’s setting things up for heartbreak, but what else can he do? He never thought this would happen to him at seventy. He pictures his girl segueing back into silence and incontinence upon his departure. He’s done this to her, it is done.

  Tomorrow he will tell her.

  • • •

  She won’t have anything to do with it. Her puzzlement is giving over to angry tears.

  Ling Ko Mui, listen to me. Look at my face—I’m an old man. We’ve already lived our entire lives out.

  She’s jammed her knobbly hands over her ears, she’s sobbing inconsolably like a young girl.

  I can’t be with you now. I have children, wives; a family.

  She turns to him hotly, tears and loathing
in her eyes, hands still over her ears, says in a low tone: I’ll never let another Malay boy break my heart.

  Ling Ko Mui, you don’t understand.

  He tries to come over to her, places his hands on her upturned elbows, says, I could come visit you, but she shrugs him off.

  Get out, she hisses, rocking back and forth on the nursing home bed, get out.

  • • •

  At Flamingo Valley, Ling Ko Mui’s daughter is speaking to the doctor, distraught. She doesn’t understand why her mother has recovered her faculties but not her memory of her family. She’d tried explaining to her mother—for the umpteenth time—who she was, but all Ling Ko Mui muttered was some gibberish, over and over. De-de-hi-ke, de-de-hi-ke.

  The nurses know who Ling Ko Mui is asking for, but they also know he checked out this morning, and what would be the point of attempting to explain to the daughter?

  In a flat in Tampines, Deddy Haikel is home. Khairah’s cooked beef rendang, Azzizah’s made lontong, Fathiah, who can’t cook, has prepared sirap bandung in a jug. Skim milk in all three cases, they hasten to impress upon him. The children gripe that it doesn’t taste the same, not as lemak, but they’re happy to have their old man back.

  Deddy Haikel’s heart murmurs, skips beats. He picks up his guitar absently, strums and sings. He imagines reaching into his chest cavity, disentangling heartstrings, affixing them on his guitar, like pro tennis racquets strung with Taranaki cow guts. What would that sound like? He tugs at a chord. He’s thinking of writing lyrics and melodies again. Songs for an eighteen-year-old girl.

  Carousel & Fort

  IT WAS MY director’s directive, the curator said before she’d even settled herself into the wicker chair, looking at the slightly smug, bemused—or so it seemed, to her—expression on the artist’s face. She folded her hands tightly in her lap, over the skirt that grazed her knee. She’d changed out of permutations and combinations of five outfits before deciding on this, a decision she regretted right before entering the cab. As it had pulled up, she saw her reflection in the tinted windowpane and thought: I look like I’m attending a state funeral.

  The artist held his hands up, smiling and shrugging disarmingly. His hair had begun to grey, a touch that lent credibility to his appearance, she thought. He was in a rumpled grey t-shirt and this made her feel even more foolish as she sucked in her stomach, corseted as it was by the severe-looking pencil skirt.