by Jeremy Tiang
He talks to the nurses about the many people who have left him, and they nod with sympathy and impatience. Gerry ward is full of the abandoned, and for all his grief and anger, Jason is visited by his daughter every day. Such a respectable lady, whisper the staff, and her husband an actual MP. They don’t understand what more he wants, with such a good daughter to take care of him.
Each evening, when Janet leaves, he takes stock of his body. Often it is tense from the effort of being in a room with her, both of them straining towards cordiality. He lies stiffly, listening to the other inhabitants creaking around getting ready for bed. Although he still has most of his teeth, he can’t be bothered to brush them very often. He doubts he’ll be around long enough to see them rot.
It is hard to accept this decrepitude, which the nurses seem to think is all you can expect at his age (he’s 76, not even that old these days). Jason would really like to be one of those smiling centenarians, usually Japanese, who appear in newspapers attributing their continued good health to genes and a daily glass of brandy, lively eyes looking out from a mass of origami-fold wrinkles. A hundred seems like a good age, although the doctors have told him that he’ll probably not see out the year, or even the month (in fact, he suspects they wish he wouldn’t, so they can have their bed back—there are shortages). In any case, long lives are probably the domain of the guiltless, those at peace.
•
He knows he hasn’t always been a good father. In his defence, it was unusual for a man to be left in charge of children back in those days. He had help, naturally, after Siew Li went away: from his mother (and hers, though he didn’t like to ask after a while—she just cried all the time). Mollie helped for a while, but she had her own baby, then she was gone too. Sometimes Jason wonders if they could have stayed a family, had Mollie continued to be there. His mind slips into a familiar groove: what if Mollie had lived? What if his children had grown up alongside her Stella? He imagines them all sitting together after school, feasting on jam sandwiches.
He wonders if he should have joined forces with his brother-in-law, but he never had much time for Barnaby—even when they’d both lost their wives, and were falling apart from within, they still barely spoke. Barnaby was weak, had always been. So the two fathers brought up their children separately, sunk in isolation, even as the kids grew closer.
Janet takes pleasure in reminding him of the many ways in which he has failed them. She drops these into conversation like amusing anecdotes: the time Henry, aged seven, refused to eat his dinner, and Jason smashed his bowl of soup on the floor. The time Jason forgot to come to Janet’s graduation ceremony, as a result of which she has no photographs of herself. The time he beat them both for going into his room without permission. She still has the scars.
His daughter is an unknown quantity to him. She is a good mother—at least her sons have turned out well—but she seems as closed to him as she is to the world. Implacable, armour-plated, so sleek and single-minded that she appears to have no weak points. Quite often, when he hears her crisp footsteps approach the ward, his initial reaction is claustrophobic fear. When did this happen? Surely it used to be the other way round.
Henry, his son, has been in London for decades, and seldom comes back to Singapore. It would have been easy enough for Jason to get on a plane—especially with all these cheap flights now—but something about his sense of the fitness of things made him feel it was Henry’s duty to come back here, to his home, and not for others to go to him. What if Jason had gone, and been unwanted?
He allows himself to regret this. It would have been nice, at least, to know how Henry lives. His son has transformed himself, now has the patched tweed jacket and clipped accent of an English academic—he’s a professor of history at one of the less exciting London colleges. How is it possible to escape your origins so utterly? Henry has a flat in Bayswater, something he vaguely imagines from the few British novels he has read to be poky, damp, and smelling of cabbage. Janet has been to London a couple of times but never says much, apart from hinting darkly that she’s surprised the English did not succumb to cholera generations ago.
Large areas of his son’s life are not open to him. Why has he never married or had children? Jason never asked. He hopes his son isn’t damaged, afraid any woman he married would abandon him like the mother he has no memory of. Of course, Jason himself has never remarried, and couldn’t tell you why either. He and Henry have simply never talked about any of this, never talked about anything that mattered.
They do speak—Janet bought him a mobile phone and calling card, and he can now talk to his son in London for surprisingly little money. He’s distrustful of this, mindful of the days when an international phone call meant weeks of low-level anxiety until the phone bill arrived. His youngest grandson frequently tries to persuade him that it would be free to call the UK over the Internet, but he doesn’t see how that could possibly work, and in any case doesn’t own a computer.
Calls start the same way—hellos and how-are-yous, then awkward silence. “How’s your health?” Henry asks.
“Terrible,” he replies—he truly doesn’t want to discuss his ailments, neither interesting nor fixable. Instead, he asks about Henry’s work. How are the students?
“It’s not just teaching that I do,” says Henry wearily, as if he has rehearsed this argument before. Perhaps he has; Jason’s porous memory forces repeats of entire conversations.
“I know. You have to do the admin as well. So does Janet, you know. In fact, the other day she told me she had a meeting that went on the whole afternoon.” As he speaks, he remembers that Janet hasn’t taught for at least a decade.
“I do research, I publish papers—I’m an associate professor. Dad, it’s not just about face time with the students. We have postgrad monkeys to run the tutorial circus. I’m an academic.” Henry, he can tell, is getting frustrated and annoyed, which in turn makes him sound like a teenager. His voice grows strangled, as if he is only a hair's breadth away from snapping at his father. He wonders how his son deals with his students, who are probably much less well-behaved these days.
“Are you going to write a book?”
“I’ve written a book. Three. I sent you copies.”
“They’re somewhere in the flat. But I don’t mean some textbook. A real book. Something normal people will read.”
“Dad—” Again, that clenched-throat noise. It can’t be healthy.
“I saw on the news that your students are rioting,” he says, trying to change the subject.
“They seem to do it every year. There’s always something, some war or government policy to be unhappy about. Too much free time.” Henry has always been distinctly antipathetic to any kind of political agenda. Perhaps his long view of history has given him a sense of nothing ever changing, not really, and therefore the best thing being to keep your head down and get on with the things in front of you. Jason can sympathise with this.
They are then able to discuss some of the stories on the news with reasonable civility. Henry complains about the folly of Brexit, a country cutting itself off from the world, and his father points out that Singapore did the same, albeit not voluntarily, but no one could argue with the results. Henry tries to explain that the circumstances were completely different, the populace in Singapore didn’t get a real vote, but Jason is already drifting off. It was all so long ago, he’s bored of it all. So much history, especially with the 50th anniversary of independence just recently. Everyone wallowing in it—all over the TV and papers, even in the streets. Why? Bad enough living through it the first time round.
Jason feels almost tender towards his son during these conversations. For all that it seems impossible to say anything without one or the other of them being offended, this at least feels more bearable than the brittle politeness he suffers with Janet. The difference in time zones doesn’t help the patchiness of their conversations. When Henry answers the phone with “good morning,” he takes weak pleasure in answering
“afternoon.”
“When are you coming to see me?” Jason now says, his voice querulous.
“It’s not very long till the end of term, maybe then?” Maybe. “I’ve had a look at tickets, they’re quite pricey.”
“Of course they are, everyone knows it’s expensive to fly in the summer. You should have booked your flight sooner.”
“I didn’t know you were going to fall ill,” says Henry quite reasonably. “And it’s term time.”
“Let me know when you’ve fixed a date.”
“Of course. I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you soon.”
“You should come now. I might die.”
“I have responsibilities. You’ll just have to hang on.”
•
Siew Li and Mollie appear to him at different ages. Mollie sometimes comes as a little girl, demanding a leg-up onto the rambutan tree in their back garden. Siew Li was in her teens when they met, and not a great deal older when she left—still, each new glimpse startles him with how different she has become. Siew Li in her Nanyang Girls’ uniform, Siew Li as a bride, then with her babies, and much later in that other uniform, when—
He knows they are not in the room with him, not really: his faculties aren’t quite that gone yet. But when the alternatives are the clammy dark, the coughs and moans of his fellow inmates, he can’t resist giving in to them. Mollie’s cool hands on his temples, Siew Li arranging his pillows the way he likes them, folded over to support his neck. Let them be here. Let the dead return.
There was a while, early on in their relationship, when he thought he’d lost Siew Li for good. They’d only recently met, which was the worst feeling, the fear that he’d found this precious thing and it was being snatched away. She was detained indefinitely—no indication at all if she’d ever be released. It wasn’t fair, a girl of fifteen with everything still to come. But that’s you too, said his friends, you’re young, move on. He couldn’t. So he kept visiting.
He’d thought this would be the hardest time of his life, not having her with him, not even being able to see her regularly once he started national service. He didn’t tell his parents, just Mollie, who was sympathetic and kept his secret, for which he was grateful, even if her main emotion was amusement that her staid older brother was finally in love. It was even a bit exciting for her that his crush was an outlaw girl, one of the dangerous elements the government said were destabilising the country.
He’d never believed that, although he could see the establishment doing great things for the nation, and trusted them to know best. Still, he knew Siew Li—or was at least getting to know her—and she didn’t want to blow anything up. The strikes she’d help organise were necessary, she said, because how else were the workers to get their voices heard? The stories she told him were horrific. He had no idea, in his clean, light-filled existence, just how most people lived. It was true, he supposed, and yet he could also see this was no way forward, paralysing the country with violence in the streets. They were both children of the 1940s, and their first memories were of the occupation. Why have yet another warzone, just a decade later?
And yet, she fascinated him. He wanted to know more, not just about her, but about everything. Even at that age, he was aware the world only made sense if he looked away from most of it. At school, history was a straightforward pageant of progress with a few unfortunate aberrations. But then there was Siew Li, who called his parents capitalists as if that were a bad thing, who looked down on their successful business precisely because of its success. Why should so many people be working, but only they get rich? He had no answer for her. But he wanted to find out.
His curiosity was how they had met in the first place. The newspapers had been full of this riot at the bus company, and on the radio it sounded like an apocalypse. This had been going on for a while, Chinese middle school students joining forces with labour unions to hold the country hostage. He thought it was important to see this historical moment for himself—though, if he was honest, he just found it exciting—but anyway there he was, on Alexandra Road, the heat and energy of the protest searing through the order of his life. And there she was, a man’s handkerchief folded double and slung rakishly across her face, like she was a bandit. A banner in her hands—Marianne, brandishing a flag. On impulse he said hello.
She lifted the fabric from her face and he saw her firm jaw, her small teeth. He tried to talk to her in halting Chinese, until she took pity on him and they switched to English, which she clearly wasn’t fluent in, but somehow managed to make expressively her own. He felt a flicker of shame, and wondered why. Amongst his peers, it was a source of pride not to speak Chinese, a foreign language. English was the future. His friends mocked the Chinese school students, still clinging to the language of the old country, talking about “going back” to China when they’d been born here, listening to Yao Lee instead of Perry Como. And here he was, listening patiently as she explained the banner she was holding. “Gaicao huandai. Haven’t you heard this before? It means change the time and, what do you call it, the Emperor.”
“We don’t have an Emperor.”
“You know what I mean. The zhimin.”
“The what?”
“The ang moh. Those people.”
“The British? You mean the government?”
“Yes, government.” She pronounced it gahmen. “We
need change.”
“Isn’t this protest about bus workers unions?”
“How can you just change one thing? Everything is
not working.”
They kept going for a while, him tossing statistics and facts against the wall of her indignation, but she was already looking distracted, eyeing the nearby police, pulling the handkerchief back across her face. He didn’t want to talk politics with her, he thought, or not just politics. He wanted to know what else was happening behind those flinty eyes.
But before he could ask for her phone number, something shifted in the air, a slight hum of tension, and self-preservation told him to slip around the corner at once. There was shouting behind him as he strolled away, trying to look casual. He wasn’t the only one, he noticed—a handful of the Chinese students were also leaving the scene, not ready yet to be martyrs for the cause. He didn’t blame them. Protesting was one thing, but getting arrested was serious business.
A safe distance away, he turned back and saw her, at least he thought it was her, held in an armlock by two policemen, refusing to let go of her banner—it trailed by her side. She looked serene, almost mischievous, a still point amidst this hurly-burly. Something wilted inside him. He had to meet her again. Already he was thinking how best to find her. He could still see her face. What is it, he wondered, that made you look at another human being, and somehow just know?
•
Even though he can barely manage a shuffle, the nurses encourage him to get up and walk around, because otherwise his muscles will atrophy and he might get bedsores. He obliges with his ungainly walking frame, sometimes making it as far as the rooftop garden with its reflexology path and sterile little flower boxes. The main attraction is the view—it’s high enough here to look over the city, the tall colourful blocks and, in the distance, what he imagines to be the grey mass of Malaysia.
If he gets out of here, he decides, he will travel. See a bit more of the world in the time left to him. Why didn’t he do it when he could? There were the children, of course, but when they were grown, when he was still healthy and could easily have afforded it, why did he never seek out the unfamiliar?
When he visited Siew Li in prison, they promised each other so many things. She needed to look forward to something, but so did he, because the present was so unbearable. He felt guilty, each time, that he got to leave her behind and go out into the bright world. He told her what he’d done and seen, embellishing the details a little if it didn’t seem exciting enough. Best not to ask her about herself: it depressed her to have nothing new to report, just the dank walls of her cell, may
be a mild improvement in the food or a nastier interrogation than usual.
The pain of those three years might be why he never visited his niece Stella, not once the whole time she was put away. He feels bad about this, as he does about so much else. He could have spoken to her after, could have sent a message, but he did nothing. Luckily he was already estranged from Barnaby at that point, otherwise this would surely have been the last straw.
What would Mollie say? He conjures her up and tells her, again, I’m sorry about your daughter. I wasn’t a good uncle. I had my own children, but that wasn’t an excuse. I just didn’t— And Mollie smiles, kind as ever, and takes his hand. You can’t change that now, she says, we all wish we’d done things differently. Not quite absolution, but better than nothing. He holds onto Mollie, and thinks: you didn’t live long enough for me to let you down.
Janet has left a little Gideon Bible by his bedside, and he leafs through it nervously. He can’t remember when he stopped going to church, only that it wasn’t a conscious decision, he was just too busy, too tired, and how could any of this be God’s plan? So he let his parents bring the kids to Sunday school, which he now regrets whenever the proselytising portion of Janet’s visits comes round. It would be simpler if he believed, and more comforting—although what if she’s right, and beyond the curtain is not the void he fears, but all the dead, not as friendly as in his memory, but ready with an accounting of all he owes them?
He shuts his eyes. It was so simple, to do nothing but lose himself in work each day, then the newspapers and TV afterwards. His children learnt not to speak to him if he was reading, and never to enter his bedroom. He put food on the table (mostly packets from the hawker centre, picked up on his way back) and paid for their schooling. That was as far as duty went. Should he have done more? And Siew Li. He could have done something to save her, couldn’t he? He never tried. Those letters—he tries to remember now where he left them. He should say something to… The thought is tiring, and skitters out of reach.