Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  “No.” The strange look, on cue. “You two quarrelled ah?” And the awkward question.

  “Yes.” Sukhin looks away. No point lying about that one—Kim Seng is clearly just fishing. By now, Gopal would have said something to him—to everyone. Sukhin can imagine the lot of them discussing him, indignant on the behalf of their X.

  And of course they’d be right. He deserves nothing less than righteous indignation—he ruined the evening for her, unboxed who knows what demons, drove her away from her safe places, showed himself to be a thoughtless fiend. If only someone would just punch him in the eye in exchange for her safe return, he would wash their feet with his tears and dry them with his very best towels.

  “You young people—too much energy.”

  Kim Seng begins to lecture him on the virtues of balance—“All arguments start because people don’t think about the other side in the first place, and all arguments continue because people don’t listen to the other side”—but Sukhin isn’t listening. Next to a shelf stuffed with old records, half hidden by a filing cabinet—is that what he thinks it could be?

  He waves to interrupt Kim Seng, then points at his quarry. “May I have that?”

  They spend a good half-hour moving things out of the way so they can fish it out and take a closer look. It’s a hand-cranked sewing machine—a relic from his mother’s girlhood. His grandmother had kept hers for years— and Sukhin was allowed to try it once—before Aunt Lillian gave it away to the karung guni man. Ah Mah refused to speak to her for weeks.

  “It doesn’t work lah. And there’s a whole chunk missing. What are you going to do with it?”

  Sukhin kneels next to it and cranks the handle. He watches the wheels turn, lost in speculation.

  “Aiyoh, you. Take lah, take lah.”

  The doorbell rings and he jumps—but it’s not her.

  “Let me in. I come bearing gifts.”

  “Go away, Dennis. Christmas is over.”

  “Twelve days, sweetie. So it’s day four.”

  There’s no point hoping Dennis will go away—there’s a higher chance of global nuclear disarmament before the new year. Sukhin opens the door. “I don’t do Christmas. This is a pagan household.”

  “So Happy Winter Solstice then.” Dennis kisses him on the cheek. “I have wine—we’ll drink to the rain deities and beg them to spare Orchard Road from floods this year.” Brandishing a bottle, he shoves a large box wrapped in silver paper into Sukhin’s arms and bounces into the living room.

  And stops.

  “Sweetie?” He hugs the bottle of wine close to his chest. “We’ve been teleported onto another planet, where everything’s made of cardboard and no one has heard of housekeeping.”

  “Don’t be dramatic.”

  Dennis’ eyes widen. “Dramatic?” He raises his voice. “Dramatic? What is this?” He gestures at the living room, at the piles of boxes and cardboard scraps, at Four in the middle of it all. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Dennis walks up to Four and circles it—once, twice. He reaches out and gingerly strokes the outer shell. “Did you make this?” He traces the edges of a few interlocking pieces of cardboard with a fingertip. “How—? Are these all individual pieces?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are so many!” Dennis circles Four again, frowning, incredulous. “You cut all of these by hand? All of them? There must be thousands!”

  Three thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six.

  “But what is it? Some sort of shrine?” He slides the door open. “A walk-in wardrobe?”

  “Please, Dennis. Don’t touch it.” Sukhin wants to drag him away, but what if he struggles and damages Four? “Please don’t touch it.”

  “Calm down—I’m just looking.” He pokes his head inside and looks up at the network of strings, wires and pulleys. He inspects the newly installed hand crank on one of the side panels. “God, honestly, what have you got here? A torture chamber?” He shakes his head, stepping away from Four, taking Sukhin firmly by the elbow. “Tell me what’s going on, sweet cheeks. What’s all this for?”

  Sukhin can’t answer. He still doesn’t know.

  “Oh my god—is that our sofa?”

  Chinatown again. Duxton Plain Park in the middle of the afternoon, around the time that they used to take their walks here. Everything is the same— the trees, the quiet, the odd loiterers.

  He didn’t expect to find her and he hasn’t. He’s walked up and down the path three times and now he’s at her favourite bench. He’s even brought a book. He imagined finding her here, reading, looking up when he arrived, saying, “Oh, there you are—good, you’ve brought a book.” He’d shrug and say, “You’re observant today.”

  Not that he expected to find her here. She isn’t here. He isn’t disappointed— he never expected to find her.

  He opens the book but doesn’t read. He studies the few people who pass.

  An hour later, he leaves. Back in his apartment, he spends the next twelve hours ripping pages out of old magazines and tearing these down into strips, then rolling them into paper balls not greater than two centimetres in diameter. He falls asleep with aching shoulders.

  After much careful deliberation and dedicated product research, Sukhin goes to the supermarket for a dozen canisters of portable-stove fuel refills, two different kinds of instant coffee (one with sugar, one without), biscuits (plain, with fruit, with nuts, without nuts), shampoo (no sulphates) and shower gel (no sulphates), and adds these to the bags in the boot before driving down to East Coast Park. This forces him to make two trips from the car park instead of one, but Keong goes with him the second time.

  “Eh, sorry, I haven’t said thank you. The dinner that day—very good.”

  “Glad you enjoyed it.”

  Sukhin struggles not to pant with the effort of carrying the large sack that he and Kim Seng filled yesterday at a fruit wholesaler’s. Take them all, the pirates had been told. Crates and crates of apples, all part of a two-week-late shipment that the supermarkets had rejected—the guy in charge explained that there was now no room for these because a new shipment was arriving in a few days, and no point in sending them back to the supplier in Australia because they had been written off as damages. Sukhin was aghast—marginalised fruit? Had it really come to this? What a piece of work is man!

  When they finally reach the cluster of tents that make up the park’s homeless village and stop outside Keong’s, Sukhin is hot, sweaty and angry that he didn’t think to bring a trolley. He scans the area, looking for her. It’s unlikely that she would come here and live among strangers, but he feels better now that he’s looked. No, no tall skinny short-haired very possibly scowling woman in the vicinity.

  “You okay ah?”

  “Yes.”

  “The dinner—you all work very hard, yah?” Keong gestures at the other tents. “Everyone said everything very nice. My wife very happy—got somewhere to go, can sit and eat nicely.” Keong offers him a cup of water. “And my children like the cakes.”

  “What sort of cake do they like, exactly?”

  What a good idea it was to put in lights.

  Sukhin sits in the belly of Four, congratulating himself. The lights are tiny, dim and battery-operated, slotted at random throughout the inner layer of the shell—not at all sophisticated, but the effect is unexpectedly pleasing. He feels like he’s in a candlelit cave, much like the one he saw in that documentary on modern English Satanists—who probably use the same kind of lights, everything being made in China and all.

  He’s inspected the mechanism and made sure that the baskets on the topmost layer are loaded. The wires and strings are all in the correct grooves and slots, every layer connected in a loop through a system of wheels—one taken from a broken pram, two from a trolley suitcase, two from a disused handcart, the largest borrowed from his mother’s old bicycle—and a series of simple pulleys made of thread spools and toilet-paper cores. Everything is anchored to a wooden
bedpost, which rotates by the grace of a hand-cranked system inspired by the sewing machine he pilfered from Kim Seng’s scavenged heap. As testament to this, that machine’s handle is now this one’s.

  And now, for the moment he’s lived for for the last few weeks. Holding his breath, his chest a big ball of anxiety, Sukhin reaches for the handle and turns it.

  Moments later, he is smiling.

  The world is a good and beautiful place.

  Four works like a dream.

  He takes it all apart.

  He puts it back together again.

  Five orange chiffon cakes sit in the fridge, each one whole except for the slice cut out of it at tasting point.

  Four stands in the living room, surveying its kingdom.

  The cardboard scraps, the bits and pieces, the dismembered boxes, the gutted toys and things—all gone. The tools are all accounted for, safely returned to their boxes. The refugees from the living room and study have returned to their proper places; the bedroom is itself again.

  This morning, Sukhin drove to his parents’ to return a few unused boxes. His father was thrilled. His mother bit her tongue.

  The study, too, is back to normal—files and reference tomes back in their shelves, books back where they belong, the desk finally clear from all clutter. Sukhin sits at his desk and looks around. It’s been so long since he’s last sat here and actually worked that it feels like someone else’s desk. Sighing, he turns on the computer.

  He hasn’t done a scrap of work in the last month and school starts again in three days. More than two hundred unread emails wait in his inbox. He hasn’t reviewed, let alone approved, his entire team’s lesson plans for the next six months. This should scare him, but it doesn’t. He knows what he’ll get: a humdrum pile of recycled lesson plans, with book titles, characters and authors changed and perhaps an additional word or two thrown in, everything vague and obfuscated—and, too often, unintelligible.

  He downloads one lesson plan. Lynnette’s. Might as well start at the bottom of the barrel.

  “This lesson will cover a key passage in Wuthering Heights, in which the characters Hamlet and Catherine are forced by circumstances to confront each other, and themselves. Students will be asked to analyse the following passage, paying attention to how Shakespeare builds tension in the scene.”

  Sukhin chokes on his tea.

  He shuts down the computer and makes himself a gin and tonic. It’s four in the afternoon.

  The intercom, at nearly two in the morning. Sukhin doesn’t wait for anyone to speak—he knows who it is. He unlocks the gate, then goes to the door.

  He opens it and waits for her. She walks up to the open doorway and stands there, facing him. He forces himself to meet her gaze instead of looking down at his feet.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we talk in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  Sukhin steps aside so she can enter, then closes the door behind her. He wonders where she’s been, but he’s not going to ask. Right now, it’s enough that she’s back. And that she looks calm, even if a little haggard— and grim. This is a bigger relief for him than her return, he realises. He can handle haggard, and grim is nothing compared to the look on her face he remembers from the other night.

  Like Dennis, she stops at the sight of fully-assembled Four, the elephant in his living room.

  “Sukhin, it’s beautiful.”

  Nothing could have moved him more. He takes her hand. “Come on.”

  They approach Four like a couple of supplicants, silent, heads bowed. He slides the door open slowly and enters, thinking how bizarre it is that his life so far has managed to lead up to this moment. She follows him into Four, shutting the door, and they sit down in total darkness. He waits a short while before turning on the lights, wanting this to last a little longer than he knows it will. In the dim, scattered light, he watches her look around, her eyes growing wide as she takes in the layers and layers of scale-like cardboard pieces surrounding them, interlocking and undulating, stretching up and up to form a vault.

  “Oh, it’s like an alien egg.” She’s grinning suddenly, and so is he.

  He holds a finger to his lips, then reaches for the handle and turns it.

  A whirr as the wheels turn in response and, overhead, a complex dance of strings and wires begins, setting in motion three layers of slats that now start to slide and shift from side to side, each layer built to turn and twist at a different rhythm. At the very top, invisible but ever so important, rows and rows of wire baskets tilt and tremble, shaking out their contents bit by bit into the moving layers below. Released, tumbling in all directions, these little balls of paper acquire a different cadence in every layer, falling, finally, randomly, through the last of the slats and through the air and onto Jinn, who whispers, “A rain machine”, and Sukhin, who allows himself to kiss her hand.

  “Yes.”

  Years ago, when they parted, she felt lost and afraid.

  She took long, meandering walks and wondered why she couldn’t bring herself to call him. She cannot remember now exactly what prevented her—was it just foolish pride? Inertia? It was something stupid that only the young can afford.

  In a curious, roundabout way that was part cowardice and part romance, she gathered things she felt might make him think of her. A nice round stone she found on one of her walks. An old copy of Gone With the Wind. A book of illustrated cake recipes. She put these things into a box and wrote his name in capitals on the side in black marker, exactly the way she had written his name on all his school books.

  She went to his house and left it just inside the gate, which was never locked. Then she went home and waited.

  XVI

  IN THE MORNING, when he wakes up, he’s alone in bed and she’s gone. At first, he panics. And then he sniffs—in the air: a combination of shampoo and soap and Earl Grey. Stepping out into the living room, squinting against the daylight, he finds her curled up on the peacock sofa, which remains backed against the bookshelves on one side of the room. She’s drinking tea, looking thoughtfully at the rain machine. Her hair is wet, all slicked back against her head.

  “You look like a sixties gangster.”

  “You snored.”

  Sukhin goes into the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea, then cuts a few slices of orange chiffon number three and takes them to her on a plate. “Cake as reparations.”

  “Cunning man.”

  “I even bake.” He sits down on the other end of the sofa.

  “I still can’t believe you made this.”

  He frowns. “Well, it took five tries to get the texture exactly right, but it’s really not that hard. The one you’re having now—it’s got candied orange peel on top. I quite like it—”

  “I mean the rain machine.”

  “Right.”

  In the daytime, now that all the surrounding debris has been removed, Four looks less and less like a warrior-worthy space pod and more and more like a giant curled-up pangolin—rotund, scaly, somewhat cute. This is rather unsettling for Sukhin—hours and hours of research, of poring over drawings of futuristic furniture, ancient war machines and cruel-looking medieval automata, and he ends up with a pangolin.

  “It’s wonderful, Sukhin.” She takes a sip of tea. “Do you remember ours?”

  Of course he does—what a stupid question.

  They spent weeks working on it together, shut up in the drama room after school. There was a whole team working on the sets, but the rain machine fell to Sukhin and he’d already finished a made-to-scale prototype by the time she had volunteered to help with the production.

  They built the frames first, out of wood, one set for each side of the stage, then the delicate bamboo beams across them. And then came the strings and things. The paper rain, Sukhin explained to the girl with the loud but oddly attractive laugh, would fall from perforated tubes strung up along the beams and anchored by the frames, rather like a complex clothesl
ine, with four sets of strings controlling four sets of tubes, controlled in turn by two people standing on opposite sides of the framework, just off stage. Terribly simple, yes? No. While she was more than adept at the woodwork, she was hopeless at the strings. She broke them, she got entangled in them, she didn’t understand how taut or not a string had to be tied and to what effect. It drove him mad.

  What drove him madder was how she’d howl and fuss and sigh every time anything went wrong—such a waste of time and energy. But he stayed calm, repaired every string she broke and looked forward to 8.30 every night, when they would lock up the drama room and go to the McDonald’s nearby and talk for a couple of hours over greasy fries, burgers and sundaes.

  “My mother never lets me eat at McDonald’s,” he told her.

  “I never listen to my mother,” she told him.

  Once the strings were done, Sukhin spent all his breaks alone in the drama room, learning how to twitch and flick and tug at the strings until he could control the rain tubes like a master puppeteer. He knew it was a silly, perfectly useless skill, but still it thrilled him to play storm god with little paper balls.

  She watched him demonstrate how to make it drizzle and pour, and how to make it rain steadily, going from light to heavy by changing his grip on the strings. She was ecstatic. “That looks amazing—and we’re done!”

  “No, we’re not,” he told her. “You’re part of the machine too.”

  It took him two weeks to teach her how to make it rain. She fumbled at the strings, knotted them up and broke most of them, and he had to fix them while she sank onto the floor and went on about how hopeless she was, how this was never going to work, how he’d better find someone else. He came very close, very often, to telling her to just shut up and keep practising.

  But it finally happened one night—tugging lightly at her sets of strings, she managed to pull off an even drizzle. She looked at him, grinning madly. A little later, with a bit of a struggle, she set off and maintained a steady, insistent shower.