Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

  Laundromat

  IT STARTED OUT as a 24-hour Laundromat, really, and then he saw from his little CCTV that the people in there lingered, wanting to talk to one another, wondering if they were both the same kind of lonely, but they were Asian and it was difficult. The Laundromat did not carry with it the same type of casual grungy romanticism as it did in Western countries, an invitation to treat over churning denim and cotton and underpants. Here perhaps it was something to be ashamed of—that you had no one to do your laundry for you, that you accumulated soiled clothing and found it more economical to use token-operated machines, that you were airing your dirty linen in public. So they turned away from one another, collecting their freshly laundered clothes in gaudy plastic pails and baskets, walking away from one another into the day or night.

  And so the proprietor introduced the cats. Nothing fancy, just a ginger and a tortoiseshell he’d seen loitering at the nearby void deck. He was too cheap to get something pedigree, and besides he didn’t think the heartland crowd might appreciate a Russian Blue or a Maine Coon much. He put red collars with shiny gold bells on them, and gave them each a bowl in the corner of the room. They did well. They were less nonchalant than he’d expected. They circled the legs of customers in infinity loops, rubbed their heads against a variety of shins, and leapt onto rumbling washing machines demanding to be stroked.

  The proprietor went back to watching, and he saw the way the man was able to approach the woman because she was petting the tortoiseshell, the importance of an intermediary. He saw them sink down to the floor to tickle the tortoiseshell together when the cat stretched herself. He saw the man taking a picture of the tortoiseshell on his phone, showing it to the woman, and how they exchanged numbers afterwards.

  It was a viable business. More people were coming in, and the cats acquired names. The elderly crowd—who came mainly in the day—called the tortoiseshell QQ and the ginger Ah Boy, whilst the younger ones—who came by night—called them Belle and Mittens. People coalesced around the cats, squatting to pet them. A week later, the proprietor put in an old foldable table a coffee shop had discarded, and four white stools that’d cost him only eight dollars each. He brought in his electric kettle and his mini fridge, his old study table and swivel chair. Then he went to the cheapest supermarket and bought a whole range of cup noodles and a few cartons of carbonated soda. He arranged them as a pyramid, and the ginger knocked them down after an hour. He rearranged the pyramid.

  The tortoiseshell had a habit of entwining her longish tail round the proprietor’s calf, but as soon as a customer walked in she would stalk over, as if the stranger owed her something. When you approach people with clarity, it is perhaps difficult for them to not reciprocate. More often than not, they would put down their laundry and tickle her under the chin. The proprietor had never thought of keeping a pet because he thought he’d make a bad owner, but he saw then that not all living things pin all their hopes and dreams on you. Life goes on and it was egotistical to imagine otherwise.

  In the last week of the first month of the Laundromat’s opening, he brought in the second-hand bracket-mounted television set and the karaoke system with the amps. He’d personally selected all the songs loaded up in the CDs—mournful, melodramatic songs of heartbreak and loss across Chinese, Cantonese and English. Steve Chou’s ‘Dusk’, Shirley Kwan’s dream pop take on Teresa Teng’s ‘Forget Him’, even Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’.

  The first hesitant middle-aged woman who approached him wanted to know if she had to pay to use the karaoke system.

  No, as long as you’re a customer here.

  She indicated her wash and he nodded to her and asked if he could help to rig her song up. He offered her the song list with two hands. He’d typed out the available songs and laminated the printout at the stationery shop next door. There were air bubbles at the edges. She chose Sandy Lam’s ‘In Love With Someone Who Never Comes Home’.

  In love with someone who never comes home

  Awaiting the opening of a stolid front door

  Inconstant gaze, tightly sealed lips

  Why pursue bitterness?

  When the song ended, she had tears in her eyes. She asked, Is there a limit to the number of songs I can sing?

  No.

  She sang till the sun set. QQ and Ah Boy, morphing into Belle and Mittens, were asking to be fed. Her clothes had completed their spin dry hours ago and he’d helped her to remove them into her kingfisher blue plastic pail. A small audience had gathered and dispersed across the three hours she’d sung. Customers of the Laundromat watching her with a canned drink in hand, schoolchildren on their way home passing by en route to the McDonald’s at the neighbourhood town centre, the uncles who hung out outside the barbershop two doors down, mothers with NTUC supermarket plastic bags laden with groceries.

  When she finally put down the microphone, there was a smattering of applause. She looked a little flustered, as if she weren’t sure how she’d ended up here. She turned to the proprietor and said, Thank you. She left forgetting her fresh laundry, and the proprietor ran after her, pail in hand. When he got back, an old man had taken to the microphone. He’d dialled up Liu Fong’s “You Made Me Happy Once”. Before he began singing, he said to the proprietor, Know what you need to sing well?

  What?

  Dead knots in your heart.

  The proprietor’s hours in the Laundromat were not fixed, but he tended towards the hours between noon and midnight. When he wasn’t in the Laundromat, he would place a metal till with a slot for money for the self-service canned drinks and cup noodles, with a felt-tip pen sign on the counter to pay a dollar for a drink and a dollar fifty for the noodles in the four official languages. He woke often in the middle of the night and when he did, he enjoyed watching the CCTV. Even when there was no one there, he could watch Belle curled up on the table or Mittens swatting a lizard. Sometimes when both cats weren’t in, he would feel afraid that he would never see them again, but they always returned.

  Twice, in the dead of the night on separate occasions, he saw an old lady and a teenager help themselves to noodles or a drink without making payment. The old lady was a Laundromat customer and she helped herself to the electric kettle and slurped up her noodles seated on the plastic stool. After she was done, she took a long time selecting her brand and flavour of drink, finally deciding on ice cream soda, which somehow surprised him. The teenager ran in, swiped the noodles, and ran out. There was a middle-aged man who came in with a much younger woman one Friday night, and they’d tried to sing a duet on Jacky Cheung’s ‘Cuts Like A Knife’. There was only one microphone, but the woman held an invisible one in her right fist, manoeuvring it to accommodate movements of her head. There were the foreign workers on a Sunday night who made up their own Tamil lyrics to keep beat with the sprawling Cantonese instrumentals. They finished up his entire supply of cup noodles, and left money for the whole lot, with a small tip.

  One night he woke to the CCTV showing a girl alone in the Laundromat. She sat atop a machine, Belle was in her lap and she was singing Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’. He watched her from his laptop and thought, I’ve waited all my life for someone to sing ‘The Sound of Silence’ in a Laundromat. He could have brushed his teeth and put on a clean shirt and taken a cab over and he would probably have been able to catch her, but he didn’t. It was difficult for him to relate to people without abstraction.

  He went into the Laundromat early the next day, at six in the morning, petted QQ and Ah Boy, and opened the mouth of the machine she’d used. He merely wanted to smell the washing powder she used, but he saw something dark in the reel. He fished out a pair of red nylon panties. He held it apart, filling in the detail of her hips and thighs in the negative space. He folded it delicately in his handkerchief and kept it in his pocket.

  When he got home later that evening, he would resist the urge to place it into a Ziploc, to tag it. He hated the way he always needed to label things and people;
he wished he could simply observe—and partake—but for him order and classification had always been paramount, even as a child. The more he looked at the red panties, the less and less it looked like underwear.

  The proprietor was in fact an urban anthropologist. He could only look at things at arm’s length. If he wanted to get closer, he could only do so if he was studying it. The Laundromat was a social experiment-cum-community-study that had received a grant from a university department interested in profiling social loneliness in urban density and the potential of interaction and ownership that could be initiated by ground-level tenancy in low-income housing estates. The Laundromat would be open for only six months in this old estate bordering Chinatown, and there would be student assistants who would work shifts sitting at the stools incognito, taking field notes from the second month onwards, when the situation was thought to have stabilised and behavioural patterns would have been set in motion.

  For months after the closure of the Laundromat, the student assistants will replay the footage ad nauseum on the old monitors in the university’s Attitudes & Social Cognition Lab, one booth each with headphones on. The urban anthropologist will begin referring to the student assistants by the month they are in charge of. Can I see that transcript, November? Hey, August: do you think you could do up stats for the correlation between chair type and the length of time people spent in the Laundromat?

  One day, as October serves up his morning coffee, she’ll ask, Professor, don’t we need longitudinal studies? Don’t you want to know if the residents miss the place? If there was a reversion of behaviour? He’ll bite the end of a pen and say: That’s not within the scope of this study, October. October will press on, But Professor, isn’t it unethical to give people something they want and need, knowing you will soon take it away from them? The urban anthropologist will remember the section of the grant paperwork he’d pussyfooted with academic jargon, under the header Impact on Community. Remembering this will irritate him. October, the urban anthropologist will say, tapping his foot steadily, we are sociologists, not politicians. We are academics, not charity workers. Life is a phenomenon.

  QQ was rubbing her head on his shin. He touched her under her chin and she purred. He wanted to ask QQ what the girl smelled like, and if her skin was soft.

  The red nylon panties in the urban anthropologist’s pocket felt like a paperweight. He felt like it was difficult to go on now, but he was also old enough to know that life doesn’t change because you feel something at a certain point in time. If he wanted to, he could pay a sex worker to put on the red panties later tonight and he could push the fabric at the crotch to the side and fuck her with the panties on. He preferred experiencing things second-hand, with a delay, a justification or a proxy to soften the blow of life.

  At nine in the morning, two wheezing old men dropped a rattan sofa in front of the Laundromat.

  Are you the boss, one of them asked in Mandarin.

  I suppose you could say so, the urban anthropologist said.

  This is the best thing that’s happened to this neighbourhood.

  Thank you.

  We like this place, and we want to hear people sing while we wait for our clothes to tumble dry, but there aren’t enough seats. One of us saw this whilst passing the dump and we thought we’d bring it over to see what you think. What do you think?

  The urban anthropologist looked from the two old men to the worn sofa and back to the men again. I think it’s great, he said.

  There, one old man said to the other, mopping his brow, I told you it wouldn’t be a waste of our labour.

  We walked three blocks, the other old man said. It was a gamble.

  The urban anthropologist turned to the fridge, took out two cans of Kickapoo and opened them for the old men. They lounged on the rattan sofa with QQ and Ah Boy, and he joined them. One of the men was stroking the length of QQ, looking through the song list and chastising the urban anthropologist for not having the Hokkien song ‘If I Had A Million Bucks’, or the Teresa Teng favourite ‘The Moon Represents My Heart’.

  Why are they all sad songs?

  Happy songs are jarring, so you have to keep updating. I don’t have time for that. Sad songs are more timeless.

  Don’t you want the people who come here to be happy?

  Being able to be sad is a form of happiness too.

  The old man stared at the urban anthropologist as if he were waiting for him to say he was only pulling his leg. The urban anthropologist was silent. The old man brought the lip of the can to his mouth, taking a deep swig. He said: Well, young man, then, what you need here is beer.

  How’s business, the other old man wanted to know. Will you survive? He looked at the floor and mumbled, My old woman is gone. I don’t want to go back to hand washing my clothes again.

  We’re okay for now, the urban anthropologist said, but who is to say what the future holds?

  True, true, the old man said as he clasped his hands behind his back, the only certainty in life is uncertainty.

  The introductory bars of Anita Mui’s ‘Looks Like An Old Friend’s Returned’ were playing across the system. Ah Boy leapt off the sofa, followed by QQ. The other old man pressed pause. The TV froze on a still of a cascading waterfall, with the lyrics appearing on the bottom of the screen, the first Chinese character beginning to light up in pink. The old man who’d pressed pause was looking at a stain on the sofa. He suggested they wash the faded floral coverlets. They stripped the cushions bare and the urban anthropologist loaded up the machine.

  Siren

  The Merlion is a mythical creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish, used as a mascot and national personification of Singapore. The fish body represents Singapore’s origin as a fishing village when it was called Temasek, or ‘sea town’ in Javanese. The lion head represents Singapore’s original name—Singapura—meaning ‘lion city’ or ‘kota singa’.

  The symbol was designed in 1964 by Alec Fraser-Brunner, a member of the Souvenir Committee and curator of the Van Kleef Aquarium, for the logo of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). Although STB replaced the Merlion as its corporate logo in 1997, the board continues to regulate the use of the Merlion symbol. With the exception of souvenirs conforming to specific guidelines, members of the public are not allowed to produce artefacts featuring the Merlion or anything that resembles it without seeking permission from the board. According to the STB Act, failure to comply with these regulations could result in a $1,000 fine per artefact.

  HE TARGETS THE tourists, sarong party boy. They want something local and exotic, as all tourists do, and what could be more experiential, really, than a romp with him. Orchard Towers is where he plies his trade, vying for the indiscreet staring and propositioning with the Eastern European pretties in the leather minis and the docile Southeast Asians with their nasal sing-song voices. The finger-pointing and bad-mouthing fall in the wake of his path like so much confetti. He’s learned to revel in it, gracious as a beauty queen.

  Here we’re brought up to call a spade a freak with such backhand ease. His name is Marl, and he sat at the back of class trying for the cool pallor of indifference, but his little-boy heart was breaking.

  Your father is a lion! Your mother is a fish! we used to chant riotously behind him, before him, beside him.

  Already he’d looked so different—his pale skin a sick shade of grey, always covered with a light film of sweat, large eyes, jagged milk teeth strangely juxtaposed with lips too full for a boy, lips he pulled at like a catapult when he was nervous—but we’d laid off him because he was quiet. We ribbed him discreetly amongst ourselves but we never laid a finger on him, until he blurted out once: My mother is a mermaid.

  And then we were light-headed with relief because now he’d done it, given us a reason. Which self-respecting boy would say something like that? He deserved our ridicule, and we gave it to him in full force. We laughed boorishly. We drew pictures of his mother with breasts, seashells on her nipples. We drew pictur
es of what we imagined copulation between a boy and a mermaid would look like. We were graphic when it came to imagining where they would stick it in.

  At some point, one of these drawings surfaced to a teacher. Marl wasn’t the one who’d turned it in, we knew this, for between all boys—even the bullying and the bullied—there is a code of honour that is seldom transgressed.

  We were called in for questioning. She gave each of us three light raps across the knuckles, with a wooden ruler. Marl’s only making things up because he lost his mother, the teacher said, we should be ashamed of ourselves. None of us were. We were itching to get at him—someone had to take the discontent of our being ratted on, what more convenient a scapegoat than a victim?

  The good intentions of the teacher were completely flushed away by the time we were done with his head and the toilet bowl. At the end of it, we called him a liar, an orphan.

  To which he said, No, I have a father.

  Sure we remembered—we’d seen his father once, waiting for him by the school gate. He looked like a rangy beast, with a head of coarse and curly long hair, and a face obscured by whiskers and stubble. Lionhead, said one of us in a hoarse whisper as we crept past the school gate, and it stuck.

  Your father is a lion! Your mother is a fish!

  Lionhead fucked a mermaid, out comes a freak.

  My father is a sailor, Marl said. I live on a house made of sticks that floats on the sea. His hair was dripping toilet water. We laughed at his hollow boast.

  Liar liar pants on fire,

  Suck your pacifier.

  He snivelled wearily, drawing the back of a hand across his nose. We were quite prepared to let him off right then, until one of us thought to bring up a little rumour that’d circulated that very morning, right before the teacher had called us in—a boy in our class had been at the urinals at the same time as Marl, and came back reporting that what was between Marl’s legs didn’t seem to be what the rest of us boys had.