by Jeremy Tiang
A few months later, one of the others phoned—they were planning a press conference to tell their side of the story. They’d been mistreated, and wanted the world to know. People thought their confessions had been voluntary, that they were all meek and repentant now. Had she been slapped, kicked, deprived of sleep? The officers weren’t supposed to do that. Would she stand with them? She said she’d think about it, and whenever they called after that, she got Vanda to say she wasn’t in.
In the end, only nine of them put their names to the statement. As Stella had feared, they were rounded up and put back in detention almost right away, along with their lawyer. The government said their actions proved they hadn’t really been rehabilitated, that the Malayan Communist Party, the Ma Gong, were trying once more to gain a foothold amongst the English-educated intelligentsia. The newspapers were agog. Another plot to overthrow the government, so soon after the last one?
Stella and the rest were summoned to Phoenix Park, and ordered to sign a declaration refuting the allegations. Devin was there, grim-faced. He was glad to see them looking so well, he said. “We hope you’ll co-operate with us. We don’t want people to misunderstand. Weren’t you all treated nicely? Free meals from the government! I think some of you even put on weight.”
Stella couldn’t stop thinking about the nine who’d spoken up. It seemed likely they would be held for years this time, not months. She ought to feel pity or guilt, but instead she resented them for putting her in this position. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t go inside again, she knew that. There was so little left of herself, she couldn’t afford to lose any more. When her turn came, she felt Siew Li’s disapproving eyes on her, but still—not knowing how she would atone for any of this, trying not to think what she was doing—she picked up the pen.
6
Henry
“My father died last night,” says Henry on the phone to Revathi. “Also, Ralph is gone. For good this time, I think.”
“Ralph is an arsehole. I’m sorry about your dad.”
“I should have gone back sooner. I didn’t think he’d…”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think. We weren’t close or anything. Still…”
“How’s your sister doing?”
“Janet? You know, indestructible.”
“Can I do anything?”
Henry lies back on the sofa. “No. I don’t know. Talking helps.”
“When are you going back?”
“Day after. Saunders can take over my classes. I might be gone a while.”
“The funeral?”
“Friday. There’s the whole flat to be cleared out, and probably all sorts of paperwork. I should give myself a bit of time.”
“Sensible.”
“I don’t feel sad enough. It comes and goes in waves, but even at my saddest, it doesn’t seem sufficient. I don’t really feel much of anything. Is that normal?”
“Your boyfriend dumped you and your father died. You’re allowed to be discombobulated.”
“He left yesterday, before I got the news, for the record. He’s not that much of an arsehole.”
“Why do you care how much of an arsehole I think Ralph is?”
“Rev, what’s happening with my life?”
He hears crunching, and she says indistinctly, “If I could give you the answer to that, I’d be a lot wiser. You’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right, I was just trying to make you feel better.”
“Will you feed my cat while I’m gone?”
“I’ve got a better idea. I’ll come with you.”
“What, to Singapore?”
“I’m due a trip anyway. Haven’t been for a couple of years, and you know I need to stay in touch with what’s going on.” Revathi’s books and articles very much depend on her being ahead of the curve on Southeast Asia, packaging trends and developments into neatly understood gobbets for consumption in airport lounges and board rooms. “Hey, I have air miles and an expense account, I’m happy to come. You sound like you could use the company.”
“I really could. But are you sure?”
“What else would I be doing?”
After hanging up, Henry remains prone on the sofa for quite a while, watching the waning sun paint long shadows across the ceiling. When it’s almost too dark to see, he shambles to the fridge and mechanically starts eating the most perishable things, using a spoon for propriety’s sake but still spilling brown sauce down his front.
It doesn’t take him long to pack. Most of his clothes are completely unsuited to the tropics, so it’s a simple matter of packing everything short-sleeved and lightweight. More books than he could possibly read on such a short trip, but he doesn’t know what he’ll be in the mood for. The cat starts sulking when she sees the suitcase, and he has to placate her with an extra treat. He sends an e-mail, arranging for a grad student to feed her. His phone pings—Revathi, checking his travel details so she can book herself on the same flight.
This is a good opportunity to move Ralph’s detritus out of his flat. There is nothing valuable enough to return, so he bags up the random garments and trashy paperbacks for Oxfam, and bins the extra toothbrush. The relationship wasn’t long enough to be worth mourning, but he still feels—not sad exactly, but weary. It would have been nice, just for once— But never mind, a trip away will scrub this ridiculous episode from his mind.
When Henry first moved away from Singapore, he didn’t go back for a long time. There was something about the thought of returning that filled him with claustrophobia, as if he might somehow be prevented from leaving again. He’s more secure now, after the many decades here and the “indefinite leave to remain” stamp in his passport, though recent developments have made him nervous—there have been some horror stories, people deported for the tiniest infraction. Still, Singapore doesn’t allow dual citizenship, and he isn’t yet prepared to cross over completely to the other side.
Each death is the severing of a connection, though there are too many of those for him to become completely untethered. He searches his e-mail for a photo of his father, and finds one Janet sent a few years ago, at one of the boys’ birthday parties. He is smiling vaguely, perhaps not completely sure where he is, as a slab of cake is placed in front of him. A harmless old man.
Now, finally, tears prickle his eyes, and he lets them flow where they will. No point thinking about the conversations they never had. Both of them had decades in which to reach out to each other. There were terse phone calls, birthday cards approximately once every three years, and messages passed on via Janet. So much lost. Questions are already forming in his mind, things he wishes he’d asked when there were answers to be had. Never mind. Make the best of it. He cries himself empty, and drags himself to bed.
The next day passes in a welter of errands, and then he is meeting Revathi at the airport. The rigmarole of security, judicious use of the sample moisturisers at Duty Free—“Airplanes dry out your skin,” he says defensively, as she raises an eyebrow at him—and onto their Singapore Airlines flight, which may or may not still be the best in the industry, but is comfortingly familiar. They are flying eastward, into the night, and not long after take-off it has grown completely dark.
•
“You only come home when someone dies,” says Janet at the airport, and Henry can think of no rebuttal. He was last in Singapore for Uncle Barnaby’s funeral almost a decade ago, but he didn't stay long enough to visit. He’s been terribly negligent, only seeing his nephews occasionally on Skype, and briefly when Kevin was over in London on a school trip. There’s so much that can be deferred indefinitely.
He hands over the bags containing her demands: lemon biscuits from Fortnum and Mason’s, Earl Grey from Whittard, blackcurrant jam from Harrod’s. Janet has very specific tastes. She nods thanks, and slings them into the boot along with their suitcases. She could probably have got all of that on Amazon, but she also has old-fashione
d views about familial duty, one of which is that her brother is obliged to supply all her British needs, otherwise what’s the point of him living there?
Janet has a civil servant’s car, clean but cluttered with papers and books. Revathi has to shove some garish hardback folders out of the way to squeeze into the back seat. When he asks what’s in them, Janet rolls her eyes. “Policy documents. I need to read them to know roughly what’s happening, in case Minister happens to ask me in a meeting or something. Waste of time, they’ll change it all in a couple of years.”
“Do you miss teaching?” Revathi asks.
“No. I don’t like kids.”
There is a silence as they purr down the long, straight road from the airport, the arrays of pink flowers on either side fetching in the early morning light. They’ve gone straight from air-conditioned airport to air-conditioned car, and thus been spared the sharp burst of heat to the face that tells Henry he’s home, though the shimmering haze on the road ahead reminds him of what he’s in for.
He asks Janet about her husband and children, treading carefully so she doesn’t discover that he only ever skims the long e-mails she sends anatomising their lives. He remembers the highlights: the younger nephew’s exam results and Winston’s ministerial position, but otherwise her messages are a blur of banal detail, sandwiched between forwarded jokes and Christian tracts.
“So how do you two know each other?” says Janet, in a tone of voice that indicates she doesn’t really care. Henry says something about all the Singaporeans in London being acquainted, swapping tips about where to find the best laksa, which is the cue for Revathi to launch into an anecdote about how they first met at some ghastly Singaporean Chinese New Year event, god knows why she was even there but good luck trying to find anything for non-Chinese Singaporeans, and Henry was the only one who’d looked as appalled as her by the emcee’s awful jokes, so they’d bonded over that.
“We’re going to the Tiong Bahru flat, by the way,” says Janet. “It’s Henry’s idea. Not that we have room to put you up anyway. I hope you’re okay with that.”
“It’s fine,” says Revathi, “I’m not superstitious.”
“He didn’t die there, if you were afraid of that.”
She turns off the highway, wrenching the wheel a little harder than necessary. The buildings here are low-rise—shophouses and four-storey apartment blocks—and the streets named after people who were once famous. Eng Hoon Avenue. Yong Siak Street. Who were these men? He has never bothered to look them up. Revathi would probably know.
“They’d like to tear all this up, but it’s a conservation area. Waste of space, all this prime land.” Parking makes Janet short-tempered—she is enraged by anything she can’t do well.
The open-air car park sits enclosed by the horseshoe-shaped block, shaded by old trees. Emerging from the car, Henry feels the moist humidity, smells the sweet sap of seed pods crushed underfoot. Funny to think of Englishmen, two hundred years ago, embarking on an adventure to this small island, many dying from the smothering warmth and vicious diseases. The Victorian novels he used to devour barely mentioned the colonies, yet all their wealth was plunder.
“Come on,” says Janet brusquely, and he shakes himself free of his jet-lagged thoughts to help with the bags. The flats are old enough not to have lifts, which seems eccentric in high-tech Singapore. He struggles with his suitcase while Revathi, the seasoned traveller, has shown up with no more than a light rucksack and her capacious handbag.
The flat is more crowded that he remembers. The old furniture is still there, dark wood shelves stuffed with books and papers, but there is now a secondary layer of furniture in front of it, shoddy chipboard things, also crammed full. Stacks of newspapers fill any spaces the furniture doesn’t. It’s dingy until Janet savagely jerks a curtain, letting in bright tartrazine sunlight that haloes all the dust in the air.
The kitchen cupboards are full of tinned food, some of it several years past the best-by dates. There are drawers full of light bulbs, matchboxes, cough mixture, sensible things to have on standby, apparently bought in bulk. All the rooms in the house are similarly crowded. Janet’s old bedroom is a warren of cardboard boxes (he looks inside one: instant noodles) and bin bags containing mothballed clothes.
Henry opens the door to his old room, and is overwhelmed by a smell of decay, emanating from a plastic bag of what might once have been fruit. Sifting through the bags underneath in case there are other perishables, he dislodges a large brown cockroach, which scuttles for cover. Reflexively, he steps on it, and then has to scrape the white ooze off his shoe. The room seems uninhabitable, but perhaps he’ll be able to clear a path to the single bed he last slept in more than thirty years ago.
“Do you want me to book you a hotel?” he murmurs to Revathi, and she widens her eyes.
“Are you kidding? Pass up the chance to witness a real-life Hoarders? Anyway it’s much more fun in the heartlands.”
His father’s room is no less occupied, but the bed can at least be seen, and it seems reasonably hygienic. He puts Revathi’s things in here and takes the sheets out to the washing machine. There’s no detergent anywhere to be found.
Revathi asks where the bathroom is. While she’s gone, Janet turns to him and says, sotto voce, “I’ve seen the will, by the way. There isn’t much money left, and he left me the flat.” She looks like she’s expecting a fight, and deflates a little when he simply nods.
“That’s fair. You took care of him.”
“We couldn’t have put him in an old folks’ home—how would that have looked? Anyway, we haven’t decided what to do with this place, either sell it or leave it for the boys when they want to move out. We’ll have to sort all this out.” She gestures at the mounds of rubbish, which look alarmingly permanent.
“Well. I’m grateful.”
She nods, mollified. “How are you, anyway? Everything fine with—your male friend?”
“We’re not together any more.”
“I’m sorry.” She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and turns her attention to one of the drawers. This is an improvement—it took her years to even stop wondering aloud whether her brother might suddenly switch to dating and, hopefully, marrying women. Now that they are in their fifties, she seems finally resigned to at least acknowledging, if not accepting, who he is.
“If you need to get to work—” he offers.
She takes the opening. “Thanks, yes, I only took half-day leave. You should know where everything is, but if not, text me.” She hands him the keys and then, awkwardly, fishes a parcel from her bag. “I made this for you. All that time in the hospital. Maybe it will be useful in the winter.” She clatters out the door before he can look. When he pulls the paper off, it’s a scarf, clearly hand-made, the colour of the night sky with flashes of brightness.
•
Having decided not to nap, they start sorting through his father’s belongings, but this quickly becomes overwhelming. To start with, Henry sets aside anything Janet might remotely be interested in, but very soon he is tossing everything he can into bin bags from a roll he unearthed in the kitchen. He had no idea things had gotten this bad, and wonders why Janet didn’t say anything, didn’t try to intervene.
After a couple of hours, he starts to feel like a bad host and suggests a walk around the neighbourhood. The sky is completely overcast, and the light has a glassy, heavy quality. Henry and Revathi stop at a provision shop for washing powder and cockroach spray.
Walking around Tiong Bahru, Henry realises he was wrong. The buildings might be the same, but it has unquestionably changed. Of course it has, he’s been gone so long. Several times, he sees faces that seem familiar, only to stop himself just before waving. His memories of the area are two or three decades old, and the people he holds in his mind couldn’t possibly look like that any longer. A whole new set of people have moved in, smartly-dressed and wielding iPhones.
The ground floor of these buildings are taken up by shops, but very
few are as he remembers, just the occasional tze char restaurant with its sizzling wok smells, kitchens spilling out onto back alleys where cats lurk for scraps. They walk past a yoga studio, a bookshop, even an art gallery. He sees cafés with outdoor seating, trendy expat mums and teenagers with Macbook Airs. They have cappuccinos and little French pastries. It became Hoxton when I wasn’t looking, he thinks. It’s disquieting, but Revathi shrugs each time he apologises. “I’d be surprised if gentrification somehow missed Singapore, it happens everywhere else.”
“This isn’t the heartlands any more,” he says.
“Of course not, I was joking earlier. Flats around here are going for a million dollars. You should seriously come back more often; the country you have in your head isn’t there any more—everything’s moving on.”
He’s thinking like an old man. Stop, he admonishes himself. It’s good that things are getting better. What he wouldn’t have given, as a teenager, to have a bookshop on his doorstep. And now here is one, a whimsical little place with orange crate bookshelves and a cat on the counter. He wanders into its coolness and is seduced into buying a small stack to add to his reading pile.
The afternoon feels empty. The funeral is the next day, but Janet has made it clear he doesn’t need to do anything beyond turning up. He’s not in touch with anyone else in Singapore, outside of his family. He cycles through names from school, from national service, from the neighbourhood, but has no idea where any of them are now.
Revathi is the one playing tour guide now, pointing out glimpses of the old neighbourhood, the art deco features of the architecture. “Someone told me they wanted to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status, but they’d have had to restore the façades, which would mean getting rid of the aircon units. The residents said no.”