Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  Was it a question of money? He’d heard about people losing their jobs and their homes and not being able to pick themselves up again. At first, he thought this had to be what happened—not quite as dramatic as embezzlement or terrorism, but it would explain her reticence. Always too proud to ask for help, and he couldn’t imagine her asking anyone for money or a place to live. But Jinn, clever minx, always resourceful, good with people— she would find something, or something or someone would find her. No, this, all of this, whatever this is, is her not wanting to find anything. Jinn 2.0 is deliberately unplugged.

  The few tentative, carefully considered questions Sukhin has dared to ask haven’t yielded anything useful.

  “Is anyone trying to find you?”

  “I hope not. But maybe.”

  “Are you hoping they’ll find you?”

  “I’m hoping there’s more of that banana cake.”

  “Why don’t you come live with me?”

  “Why, are your boxes nicer?”

  “Would you like something to do?”

  “I have lots to do. Is there something you’d like me to do?”

  “No. Nothing in particular.”

  “Okay. You let me know if there is.”

  He types Jinn’s full name into the search bar and waits. Google hurls more than twelve thousand results at him. Twelve thousand! What the fuck. And just from the first page, it’s clear that at least three other women out there have the same name.

  “Jinn Hwa.” She stuck out her hand—rather formally, he thought. He shook it, mumbling his name. This was at some school production or other, probably the annual drama fest. Sukhin can’t remember who introduced them or why anyone even bothered, but he remembers sitting beside her for the entire performance, feeling baffled every time she laughed at something because he didn’t find anything on stage funny. But without wanting to, he paid more attention to her laugh than to anything else in that crowded hall, and he could still hear it in his head the next day—the loud, unchecked, ungirly cackle that he would spend the last year of junior college listening for in the corridors as he went from one class to another.

  Sukhin shakes his head at the memory, caught between ridiculing his seventeen-year-old self and wanting to do it all over again. Read Hamlet in the library hoping she would suddenly appear; dawdle between any two points, hoping to bump into her in transit; scan the foyer, the canteen, the field, the basketball court every time he passed them, hoping to see her. And then, if by some chance he did bump into her, scurry away without saying a word.

  God, to be seventeen again. With no baggage other than the books he’d read and some ragging from the rugby boys. No crushing anxiety—wait, was that true? It is far too easy at thirty-five to dismiss the struggles of being seventeen, but what really qualifies thirty-five to look down at seventeen? Not much, in Sukhin’s case—thirty-five-year-old Sukhin isn’t even taller.

  He makes himself another G&T, weaker than the first. Twelve thousand results, three or more Jinns—he’s going to need a bit more of his brain than he assumed.

  What does he really know now, that he didn’t at seventeen? His thoughts run back to this, over and over. Eighteen years since junior college—has he learnt anything useful? Well, maybe. The teenage Sukhin would never have dreamt of being a teacher and kudos to him for self-awareness— he would have been terrible at it. It’s taken years for him to admit this to himself. It’s taken him years to understand what works for him in a classroom, how to set and control the rhythm of a lesson, how to cope with the disinterested kids and the smart-asses, how not to talk to his shoes. He cringes at the memory, arriving unbidden but sharp, of his first lesson as a trainee teacher.

  “So is it an urn or a woman?” the student who had been staring out of the window since the start of the lesson suddenly piped up.

  Before Sukhin could answer, a girl in the first row snapped, “Urn, dumbass. Haven’t you heard of personification?”

  “Why is he talking to the urn?”

  Sukhin pounced on this. “Yes, good question, Alex—why? Why doesn’t the poet just address his reader?”

  Alex hesitated, but only for a second. “Urns don’t talk back?” he ventured.

  The girl burst into derisive laughter. Sukhin felt an urgent need to slap—Edwina? Erina? Erica? He cannot remember her name now, but he can still see her smug round face after all this time. He took a deep breath, thankful that none of the senior teachers was observing the lesson.

  “That’s a good point, actually, Alex,” Sukhin tried to smile encouragingly but failed. “So what difference does it make that the urn doesn’t talk back? Let’s look at…”

  “Are you taking his side because he’s a guy?”

  “What?”

  She didn’t back down, not this girl. “Are you taking his side because he’s a guy?”

  Sukhin was so baffled that he made the mistake of defending himself. “I’m not taking sides. If we consider—”

  “That urns don’t talk back? That’s what he said. Are we seriously going to discuss this?”

  Sukhin glared. “Yes. Yes, we are, because…”

  “Because you say so and you’re a man?”

  He should have studied engineering. Or economics. Palaeontology— oh, for palaeontology.

  He leapt towards the teacher’s desk, where his lesson notes were. There was nothing in them that would help him handle this situation, but he desperately wanted something to hold. Anything that would prevent him from covering his face with his hands and walking backwards out of the room.

  “This is nothing to do with anyone being a man,” he said. Firmly and kindly, he hoped.

  “The poet is a man, right?” Someone else. Daft question, but thank god.

  “Yes. Keats was a man.” Easy enough. And just ten more minutes until the end of the tutorial.

  “Are we only doing male poets?” Edwina-Erina-Erica again, eyes narrowed.

  “No!” Sukhin was horrified to hear how shrill he sounded. “In fact, for our next lesson, we’ll be—”

  He takes a step forward, clutching his lesson notes. Edwina-Erina-Erica looked ready to bite. Fate intervenes: a sudden, intense pain shoots up his leg.

  “Mr Dhillon! Mr Dhillon, are you okay?” Not Edwina-Erina-Erica or Alex.

  No, no he wasn’t. He was in a heap on the floor, his ankle twisted spectacularly. The unbridled, unfortunate, collective force of a shoelace come undone and a small depression in the concrete classroom floor. Sukhin felt a wave of dizziness. He tried to stand but couldn’t. If I faint now, I will never live it down.

  He fainted.

  But he lived it down, though it still horrifies him that he’s now head of the English department. Sukhin can’t decide if he’s got away with a crime or is the victim of one. How has he managed to not only keep a job he never thought he was good at, but somehow end up alpha wolf? All he’s done, all along, is aim to survive—forget outwitting or outlasting or whatever. But what kind of logical, prudent higher power decides that a man who hates the thought of speaking to people—of which teenagers are the most terrifying, unfiltered specimens—should spend most of his waking hours doing exactly this, with the express duty of transferring knowledge and the unexpressed but expected duty of inspiring even the most cabbagey of students? What kind of perverted cosmos arranges for him to be good at this—or at least thought to be good at it—while combining the elements that make this man ensure that he will fear every moment, be in conflict with every moment, be ever equidistant from paralysis and nirvana?

  Okay. Another drink. Now for twelve thousand results and four Jinns.

  None of the Jinns on the first page appear to be his. One isn’t even a person—it’s a stationery store somewhere in Johor. Just to be certain, Sukhin checks out the website. Hopelessly amateurish, site menu laid out like a calculator, not the slightest sign anywhere of anyone called Jinn. Good—one down. Sukhin modifies the search to exclude the name of the bookstore. Close to ten thousand result
s. Good—two thousand-ish down.

  The Jinn that now appears on top of the pile is a prolific—Twitterer? Is that the term? Tweeter?—whose handle is @jinnjinnlovesjinnjinn. Fucking hell, what are you, thirteen? Why do you think anyone cares what you think about anything?

  He reads her last tweet, from about five minutes ago:

  “So hungry can die but McDonald’s not delivering because raining. Huh?? U all no umbrella ah. So lousy service. Boo!”

  And exactly fourteen minutes before that, a rather cryptic missive to someone in particular flung into the world at large:

  “Always like that. Never ask what I want, just do whatever then say why I always so angry. Just take me for granted.”

  He scans the rest of the page before he can stop himself.

  “Dare to say me fat then cannot breath in the dress she stole from me. Can die.”

  “Try to sabo my diet, say can eat avocado. 300 calories! Now must go walk one hour. F U, bitch.”

  It’s a wonder that her handle is grammatical.

  She has 7,582 followers. And 32,473 tweets, lapped up by so many feeble minds. Two weeks ago, Sukhin discovered that, eight months into the academic year, more than half of his second-year students hadn’t finished reading any of the texts required for their A-Level exams.

  This generation—no, the world—is doomed.

  And so is his laundry—did she say it was raining? He looks outside. Yes, it is. Hang this changeling weather.

  Another modification to the search. Goodbye, @jinnjinnlovesjinnjinn, and this time, Sukhin scans only for images—that should filter out all the Twitter rubbish. And then he sees it, halfway down the results page, buried among photos of smiling women in corporate suits, a surprising number of floor plans and technical drawings of pipes and windows, sketches and illustrations for some sort of anime production—a photograph of Jinn. He doesn’t recognise her immediately; his first thought is only that the woman looks familiar. But it’s her, staring unsmiling into the middle distance, her expression taking baby steps towards serenity. The background is fuzzy, but it looks like an outdoor shot—sunlight has softened the usual shadows under her eyes and cheekbones, given her pallor the barest semblance of a glow.

  There’s another photograph a little further down the page—this is clearly the one that the first photograph has been cropped from. Four women; a bride and three bridesmaids. Jinn stands on the far left, next to the bride, the only one not smiling. The bride holds one of Jinn’s hands close to her chest instead of the bouquet, which has ended up with one of the other bridesmaids. She is leaning slightly towards Jinn, who doesn’t reciprocate but appears indulgent and at ease. Sukhin realises that the bride is Jinn’s elder sister, whose name he can’t remember now. Xing Hwa? Ling Hwa? He clicks on the photo and is taken to some sort of photo-sharing platform, where he’s asked to sign in or create an account. No.

  Back to the first photo then. The link takes him to a local news site and an ad automatically pops up: “Don’t miss out. Get the latest news and updates for just $0.99 a day!” Fuck off. He remembers why he stopped bothering with the news, besides the substandard writing.

  But clearly he should have bothered—how did he even miss this? The article is six years old, brief and completely devoid of emotion. Jinn has been missing for days. The police have searched her apartment—no indication of robbery; passport and documents found in a drawer; wallet missing.

  “Teo was reported missing by her sister, Teo Ping Hwa, on Wednesday evening. By this time, Teo had not been seen by friends or family for a week.

  “It is not known exactly when she went missing. When questioned by the police, none of the other residents of her building reported seeing or hearing anything suspicious at any time during the week.

  “Witnesses or anyone with information pertaining to her possible whereabouts are urged to come forward.”

  At the top of the page is that photo of her, cropped to remove her sister and the two other bridesmaids. It is the same photograph, but for Sukhin her expression has changed—it has lost all its quietude; what remains is a calculating patience, like that of his grandmother’s cat as he sits among flowers watching a bird that has not yet seen him.

  “You left a note.”

  They are in the park and Sukhin has been pretending to read for the last hour.

  She closes Paradise Lost without marking her page and gives him a long look. He has to force himself to look her directly in the eyes, keenly aware that he has not felt this anxious since he was a teenager. It’s like a clamp closing over his throat and chest and brain—he finds it hard to speak or breathe or think. Damn this woman. He is suddenly angry. What on earth is she doing, what point is she trying to make and why is he here? Does she even know what she’s doing? Does he? Well, he can answer that—no, no, he doesn’t.

  “I did.” Evenly.

  “What did it say?”

  She says nothing but doesn’t look away. In the end, he does. What right does he have to demand an answer? Who is he to her, she to him? Two people sharing a bench in a park. Two people who once shared a school, a handful of friends, an economics textbook, a blanket, a few hundred kisses—maybe. Two people who talked together of children and careers and dreams and other things when they didn’t know enough not to talk about these things. Two people on a bench in a park that really isn’t.

  “Forget it. It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.” Sukhin picks up his book again and wonders what he’s doing. Why does he keep coming back here, to her? Is it inertia? But surely inertia would mean not coming back, since the act of coming back is what takes him off the path more easily travelled. Unless she is the path more easily travelled. God. So much ridiculousness. Sukhin wants to slap himself.

  Her hand on his shoulder. “Sukhin. Let’s walk.”

  They walk. It is nearly six, but because Singapore standard time is a big fat lie to make sure the country gains an hour’s trading time with Japan and Hong Kong, it is still bright and the sun won’t set for another hour. They walk. Slow and silent, through the long, linear park, past the backs of shops facing the din of the main road, past the alleyway overlooking the kitchens of the fashionable joints on Keong Saik Road. Two teenage girls wander out the back door of a café into the park and stare, disorientated. A group of kitchen staff from a nearby restaurant hovers near a rubbish bin, smoking.

  One of them recognises Jinn. “Eh. Boyfriend ah?”

  “No. Slave.”

  Laughter. She waves as they walk past. Sukhin avoids meeting anyone’s eyes.

  They walk. Through the underpass, under Neil Road, out of Chinatown and into Tanjong Pagar. Along the back of another row of shophouses. The paved path is much wider now, and children from a nearby condo tear up and down it, screaming. At the end of the path is a small playground with the unimaginative plastic usuals—a low slide, a few animals on springs, a see-saw. There are more children here.

  “Stop, stop. We have to turn around or stop.” Sukhin squeezes his eyes shut, but of course he can still hear the little monsters.

  “Okay. Let’s stop.”

  They stand still for many minutes. The sun sets. As if this is her cue, she begins to tell him about the note and why she wrote it and where she left it and who she wrote it for. She recites the note from memory. The telling is calm but the pace is erratic—sentences tumble out in bursts, then nothing, then another burst, like a verbal version of Morse code. The note is short and horrible. Sukhin’s heart pounds and pounds and he stops listening to her.

  They face the back of a vintage store. It is dark and dingy and old, and a balcony hangs overhead, crowded with random furniture, a jukebox, some sort of large stuffed animal.

  “…had to be a certainty of free will and a possibility of death…”

  A giant handwritten sign hangs across the balcony rails. Red letters, neat and perfectly legible even in the falling darkness:

  We buy junk and sell antiques

  Some fools buy, some fools sell


  The sky turns a deep liquid blue as it uses up the very last of the evening light. The street lamps have not come on. The children have all disappeared.

  “I didn’t want to be part of any of it any more. I couldn’t bear it.” A pause. “I don’t want to talk any more.”

  He takes her hand and gives it a squeeze. Not a loverly gesture, more of an admonishment. Silly woman. When has he ever made her talk when she didn’t want to?

  “So. You want to tell me about her?”

  “No, Dennis. Still no.”

  “Combed cotton. Organic. She must be fussy.”

  “Shut up, Dennis.”

  “So hot when you’re angry. Does she tell you you’re hot?”

  The woman is in the bathroom, looking into the mirror. Her hair is so much longer now. She says this to him, her voice full of surprise. She hears the surprise in her voice and laughs.

  The man is in the bedroom. He can see her from where he is as he sits up in bed, reading, waiting for her. He doesn’t laugh. He wants to know if she wants him to take her to a hairdresser, or to whoever crops it short.

  She cuts it herself, she tells him. It felt right, before, to cut it before the curls crept in. It kept her from recognising herself immediately in the mirror. It kept her from seeing their eyes their faces their hair.

  He watches her tug at her hair and look at it, turning her head this way and that. He remembers how long it used to be, when they were younger. She had read Gone With the Wind and she wanted her hair like Scarlett O’Hara’s, so long it could go around Rhett Butler’s neck.

  You’re mad, he told her then.

  Now he wishes she will let her hair grow long again, and he will wind it around his neck.

  IX

  IT IS THE best of times, it is the worst of times. All around: wisdom, foolishness, belief, incredulity, light, darkness, hope, despair.

  Exam season.

  Sukhin cannot go anywhere in school without being accosted by students in various degrees of panic. His office is no longer safe—it is the first place they look. Dennis has taken it over—no Further Maths student ever wanders into the Humanities section, so he’s safe as long as he avoids all the main corridors. This leaves Sukhin with Dennis’ desk in the Mathematics department, which works out rather well—most of Sukhin’s students will not darken that section of the staff room, for fear that their Maths tutor will corner them and demand six months of unsurrendered homework. What Sukhin doesn’t know is that a small, resourceful group of students does know where he is, but is biding its time—they are planning a proper ambush, to be launched in a couple of days once they have all properly finished their mugging.