Revenge

by S. L. Lim

  She does see him later, at the dinner table. It’s hard to find a time they can talk properly: her mother has organised a gathering, uncles and cousins, all the better to celebrate with. The house is loud with voices: everybody chattering, either with excitement or just the pleasure of eating food which they didn’t have to cook. ‘Look at Yannie sitting over there with her black face!’ her mother says. Two aunties turn in her direction and snigger kindly.

  It takes her a while to extract her father from the group, but she persists. At last she corners him while he’s coming out from the toilet. ‘Why did you lie to me?’ she demands. ‘Why did you tell me that there wasn’t any money?’

  Her father looks confused, then attempts indignation. ‘Are you telling me that you are in charge of this family?’ he demands belligerently. Then he looks sheepish. Argument by authority isn’t really his style. ‘Oh, Yannie dear, I’m sorry, I really am. But there was no other choice. And it’s such a wonderful opportunity for your brother. I know the two of you are like cats and dogs, but remember, he is still your family. A good thing for him is a good thing for all of us.’

  ‘But what about me?’ Immediately after having spoken, Yannie is sickeningly conscious of all of the people, through history, who have uttered these words, usually to no effect. ‘Aren’t I part of this family? Why does he get his chance, two chances, and I get none? What about my opportunities?’

  Her father gives her a pained look. ‘But Yannie, I need you here.’ He’s looking at her almost pleadingly, but she’s not going to be pulled into his show of fake devotion, not this time. ‘I need you to look after the business, your grandmother – your mother and I, when the time comes. Oh, Yannie …’ His expression is such tenderness, such love. ‘What have we ever denied you?’

  *

  Now begin the long years of waiting. Entropy. The slow drain of heat and light from where there is life to where there is none. During these years you don’t think about the future. Not because you’re stupid, but because if you looked it in the eye, you’d never open your eyes again.

  Her grandmother dies. It’s almost a relief at first – no more airing the bedsheets, rancid with sweat from constant use; the smell of dying oozing under the door, getting into your own skin and clothes, into your psyche. Yannie is far too tired to cry at the funeral, or for weeks afterwards; distant relatives look at her with suspicion, and she persists in not crying, just to spite them all. She tries to remember Por Por as she was before the illness took over, but comes up blank. Only one image remains: Por Por, already ‘old’, but in retrospect, incredibly young and fit compared to how she was more recently. She’s looming over Yannie, she seems enormous – Yannie must have been very young at the time – trying to insert small pieces of fried dough into her mouth. How her grandmother must have loved her, she thinks. She tries to love her in return, but all she can muster is a generalised regretfulness, less for her grandmother in particular than for the concept of grandmothers as a whole. This terrible asymmetry. Her grandmother gave her life, but Shuying can, just by walking across the room, excite such tenderness, such an uprush of heady and unadulterated feeling.

  She works at the shop. Her parents grow older. More and more, she becomes like them.

  Jun comes by now and then. He’s friendly, responsible and honest – ‘husband material’, her mother says again – but his appearance on her doorstep always fills her with a faint sense of dismay. He’ll begin by asking after her brother, happily oblivious to Yannie’s lack of interest. If he notices at all, he takes it as a sign of modesty, befitting of the sister of a great man. The one who was like us, of flesh and blood, but went over to Oxford, land of gods. He is full of remembrances of her brother, which he deploys in a misguided attempt to charm Yannie: some jaunty anecdote from school, logistical capers with a happy resolution. While telling his story, he is always cheerfully absorbed. But once it is over he looks at her nervously, head tilted slightly and wearing that sad, begging smile.

  ‘He likes you,’ her mother says. ‘Why don’t you like him?’ She slides Yannie a suspicious look. Yannie mutters some excuse to leave the room.

  Every now and then, they get a letter from her brother. He is enjoying university. His tutors say that he has great potential. He loves Oxford, the weather, the history, the neighbourhood. Occasionally he asks for money. Her father sends it.

  Time passes. Physically Yannie looks about the same, but it’s undeniable her youth is flaking off. Gradually, she is losing the expectation, preserved up to this point against all reality, that something beautiful and amazing is going to happen just around the corner. Before going to sleep at night, or while she’s daydreaming behind the counter at the shop – that’s one thing to be said for being in the shop, it leaves abundant mental space for dreaming – she sees a being with Shuying’s face and name but drawn in the colours of another planet. Dream Shuying always has time for her, laughs at her jokes and understands her secret heart. Dream Shuying never gets bored of the intense fluctuations and emotional tides by which Yannie’s consciousness is governed, which she is capable of revealing to no-one living in this world. Shuying, Shuying, Shuying. Her entire being yearns towards someone who doesn’t even exist.

  Try as she might, she can’t help shrinking away from old people when she meets them. They smell like mothballs and death; they smell like her grandmother, during her final, cancer-ridden years. Rationally, she knows they must have hearts and lives and feelings just like her own. But she can’t comprehend any kind of continuum between her own existence and theirs.

  One evening, she comes home to see an elderly man sitting in her father’s usual seat. It’s her father, of course, but she hasn’t seen him like this before. Or rather, she has contrived not to see him as he really is. There are liver spots on his face, and two long hairs growing out of the mole on the side of his forehead. When he speaks, it’s in a papery old-man voice. ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re back, Yannie!’

  The innocent sincerity is too much for her, and she is sideswiped by sudden tears. She grabs the edge of the table, steadying herself for the spasm of pre-emptive grief.

  Up till an age there are certain milestones, dividing the path of your existence into regular and meaningful increments. You can be quite passive, but still have a sense of progress and achievement. One more year of school. First job. First kiss. But after a certain point, time spools before you in a great undifferentiated length. Either you embark on a new category of experience – husbands, weddings, childbirth – or else the only milestones you have to look forward to are ones of loss.

  ‘Why …’ her mother starts to ask, and then falls silent. Why have you never had a boyfriend?, Yannie can tell she wants to ask. She’s not sure why her mother broke the question off – out of shyness, maybe. Or maybe she has her suspicions and doesn’t want them to be confirmed. Once, she thinks, her mother would have tried to force the issue, but her strength’s not what it was. Often she has to stop and hold her side while she’s vacuuming the floor. The vacuum, growing older itself, has become so loud that it’s hard to hear her mother’s wheezing breath.

  Speaking of weddings, her brother gets married. There are two ceremonies: one in England, for the wife’s extended family – they’re Malaysians, but apparently they’re rich – and a big dinner back home as well. Yannie refuses to show up.

  ‘I would like you to come,’ her father says. ‘Must I broadcast to the world that my two children don’t get along?’

  The breath nearly goes out of her. That even now he would still care less for her genuine experience than for saving face. To him, Yannie’s failure to feel on demand is a blemish on the family’s surface presentation … but no, this is unfair, she realises. This is her father’s conception of love. A verb rather than an affect state. Showing up when you don’t want to. Even when in your heart you would rather vomit or evaporate.

  ‘I will not go to his wedding,’ she says. ‘I would rather suck pus from an abscess.’

 
He looks pained but to her surprise does not rebuke her. That’s the good thing about being an adult. Your smartass cracks can pass, if not with agreement, then at least without too much undue comment.

  Shortly after this, her father starts to lose his marbles. It happens very slowly, so you can hardly tell what’s happening at first. He forgets his words, mixes up prepositions. Left becomes right, up becomes down, big and small are newly interchangeable. Foods he used to love, like fried fish skins, he now finds repulsive; eventually, he retreats to a diet of rice porridge and clear soup. At first her mother praises him for losing weight. Then, unsure of what else to do, she starts to scold. Her mother thinks anger can solve any problem, even time. Her father’s skin clings to his skeleton, like a damp sheet over the laundry horse. You can see the point where the prongs of his collarbone meet in the centre of his throat.

  One afternoon, when her mother is out having a blood test at the hospital, Yannie comes home to find him naked in the living room, covered in excrement. The shit is in his hands, under his nails and in his hair, it’s smeared across his eyelashes and the moles now on his face. It’s in the gaps between the tiles and on the couch; the very air they breathe is dense with it. Her father giggles and squirms and calls out ‘God save the Queen!’ before collapsing in uncontrollable hilarity.

  She washes the smell out as best as she can, turning the pressure of the shower hose to maximum. She attacks him with soap, which doesn’t lather the way she wants it to. Once she’s finished, or as finished as she’s going to be, she towels him off. She rubs his face, dabs his sad little genitals. The smell isn’t gone, so she douses him liberally with talcum powder. Then she puts him to bed, rolling him onto his side because she’s heard that old people on their backs can sometimes stop breathing.

  ‘They’re a danger to themselves,’ she begs the cardiac specialist. Although it’s not quite clear what she’s begging him for. A revocation of reality? ‘I see my mother lose her breath, she starts gasping like this –’ she flaps her hand against her chest – ‘and they’re alone all day. It’s like a disaster waiting to happen. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll come home and find them both stone cold there on the floor.’

  The doctor looks at her appraisingly, over the top of his glasses. She’s seen a pair in that style before: left, rather eerily, on top of the urn when she went to pay her respects to a newly deceased great-uncle. ‘Ideally, someone will be there to watch them twenty-four hours a day. A professional, obviously, someone with a level of medical training … Either your father or your mother might need CPR at any time.’

  ‘But I have to work.’ She looks at him, pleading. His expression says, What do you expect me to do about that? ‘You’ll sort it out,’ he says, glancing at the clock. ‘Your family will find a way.’

  She writes to her brother, a long, obsequious letter full of fawning enquiries about his new wife and newer daughter. And at the end she says, our father is dying, could you send some money please? He doesn’t even bother writing back.

  He does come home for the funeral, though. He brings flowers, a great bunch of white lilies, flowers from books rather than life. Everyone, all of their extended family, talks about him behind his back. How handsome he’s become. How adorable his daughter is. How good his English is, without a trace of local accent. Apparently he runs his own company, a consultancy specialising in human resources. All of these words might as well be in Spanish as far as Yannie is concerned. Dirt falls and falls on her father’s grave.

  Later, she catches a glimpse of her brother’s wife. She doesn’t come to the funeral itself – something about the baby being sensitive – but Yannie sees her stepping out of the car when she comes to pick up her husband from the reception. Small, like a child, slender, ponytailed and elegant; her gaze is intelligent, yet mild. She seems to come from a different universe, made of a substance different from Yannie and her ilk. There’s a toddler in an expensive pram, swinging its legs in squeaking boots. The three of them turn, as if they sense Yannie is watching. They freeze in an impromptu tableau on the other side of the road, while the cars keep passing.

  *

  A funny thing happens after Yannie’s father dies: she and her mother become close. All her life her mother has rationed her words, at least where feelings are concerned. Confessions, scenes, self-excavation she regards as defeatist, self-indulgent. ‘Navel-gazing’ is one of her favourite terms, which she uses to describe any sort of introspection.

  Now, on the cusp of frailty, ‘ageing’ transitioning to ‘old’, Yannie’s mother starts to confide in her. You could be cynical and say that she doesn’t have much choice, since there’s no-one else to talk to. But for once, Yannie is not in the mood for being cynical. Her mother’s mental faculties have not deteriorated – if anything, she’s even sharper than before, or at least less filtered. Often, while frying rice in the kitchen or braising vegetables in the pot, Yannie will feel her mother’s gaze against her back and be filled with fear, as if she’s about to be found out. She is playing at love, at dutiful daughterness, at filial piety. There is nothing unreal about her parents’ suffering, which has always been solid, bodily and awful, but there is something surreal about her role in it, the pill packets and hospital appointments belonging to someone else.

  ‘Your brother is a no-hoper,’ her mother says one day, apropos of nothing. ‘We can’t rely on him for anything.’ Yannie, in the process of combing her mother’s hair, looks around uncomfortably. She’s loathed her brother all her life, loathed even more the way her parents have always doted on his meagre talents. But it feels strange to finally hear her mother say it.

  ‘Your brother is a no-hoper,’ her mother repeats. ‘I heard that he came back for a visit. He stayed less than five kilometres away. But he didn’t stay with us – he stayed in a hotel room. Didn’t even tell us he was coming. I only heard about it from Auntie Eichoo. Didn’t even bother to come for a visit. I’ve hardly seen his child. Well, I suppose he thinks he’s an important man now. Doesn’t have time for simple people – even though we are his family. We wouldn’t be interesting to him now.’

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ Yannie says, mildly amazed at her own generosity. As far as she’s concerned, this is a total untruth: her brother is in every way ‘that bad’ and possibly worse. Still, it isn’t good for her mother’s health to get this angry. ‘He really loves his daughter. I heard him talking about her to Uncle after the wake. He’s very proud of his family.’

  ‘Huh.’ Her mother makes a derisive noise. ‘All parents love their kids. That’s a bare minimum standard for human nature. But not all children love their parents. Some of them prefer to go gallivanting overseas, earning money and being a big shot.’

  ‘Good thing you spent all that money educating him, huh?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get started.’ Her mother looks at her wearily. ‘So, yes, I admit that we made a mistake with you two. Parents make mistakes, because we’re also human. You’ll understand if you get married and have children of your own.’ Yannie notes the if, not when. ‘I’m not blind, you know. I understand the way you feel. Your father, now he was blind. In his eyes, his children could do no wrong. I was never so foolish. I had experience, you have to understand. I had older brothers, although you never had the chance to meet them.’

  ‘Were your …’ Yannie hesitates. ‘Do you think that your brothers were good people?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get the wrong idea!’ Her mother passes a hand across her forehead. ‘There was nothing wrong with them. You were too young to remember when they died. Maybe you think I am cold, but I don’t feel sad when I think about them at all. Death isn’t unusual, you see. And their lives weren’t very meaningful in the scheme of things. Oh, they were good men, don’t misinterpret me. Worked hard all their lives, made all kinds of sacrifices – everything they did was for their children. They had no lives of their own. Not very much, is it? Not that I have been so different. Anyway, no point worrying about it now. I’ll be gone very soon, t
hen you’ll be happy.’ Her mother’s voice sounds very far away, a train receding in the distance.

  Jun comes by increasingly often, bringing with him small presents, medical supplies. Yannie comes to depend on these visits, moisturiser for her mother’s chapped lips, the powdered milk to keep her strength up. For Yannie, he brings chocolates, sugared biscuits, or just the relief of a few minutes of outside company to break up the monotony of her day.

  ‘Do you ever have dreams?’ he asks her one day out of the blue.

  Yannie looks at him in astonishment. Jun gazes back, smiling ingratiatingly, lips stretched thin with utter terror. Already he’s laying the path for retreat, plausible deniability in case he is rebuffed.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Jun,’ she says. ‘Just tell me what you mean for once.’

  Jun lets out an embarrassed little laugh and goes off.

  Her mother dies. It’s relatively painless, as these things go. It’s not the heart condition that kills her in the end. The cardiac specialist, the one Yannie disliked so much, was pretty good at his job after all. What kills her mother is kidney failure, which goes undiagnosed until very late. The time from diagnosis to death is dizzyingly short, but the actual process of dying turns out to be agonisingly slow. The waiting is worse than the event. She sits by the bedside with some distant aunt, their gazes meeting over her mother’s body. Then they lower their eyes in guilt, each recognising her own thoughts in the other: they are wishing Yannie’s mother would hurry up and die a little faster. Even her aunt looks less substantial than Yannie remembers. Yannie thinks, It’s your turn next.

  There’s been so much dying going round. It’s not something you can easily unknow. All of your preferences, memories, likes and dislikes are mechanical, contingent on a decaying sack of flesh. She can hardly recognise herself in the mirror, this thing called Yannie. The lines grooved into her cheeks have become more pronounced: jowls is what you’d call them. She must have been born with them, but she never had cause to think about them before.