by Lu Huiyi
The Chief paused briefly to take that all in; she seemed almost drunk on the power she had over the rapt audience.
“You wait, hungry, for fools to promise you good things,” she went on. “But the time for good things is gone. There is no more oil. But the Society does not leave its people behind. We can bring you steam. We can bring you machines. We can bring you everything, if you follow us.”
A scattered burst of applause. Beng wasn’t sure if it was from someone planted by the Society, or if people were simply swayed by her grandiose promises.
“You are hungry and poor. The Government did not plan for the end of oil. The Government did not plan for you.”
“No, they didn’t!” a few people yelled back, getting into the mood.
A brief rustle; a sense of disturbance. Policemen had arrived, a small convoy of them. They spread out at once, girding the perimeters of the swelling crowd.
“Look at them!” she called, pointing in the direction they had come from. Stone-faced, the police officers kept their positions, acting as though they hadn’t heard her at all.
“Look at those men in blue.”
Her voice was now mocking and harsh. The crowd loved it; they laughed obligingly.
“Who are you defending? You drank all our oil and fuel—there is no more to drink. None of you know what you’re doing. None of you can save our country. We built the country a train—we are going to build more. We are loyal to the country. Who are you loyal to?”
A roar of approval, so great and so furious that some of the policemen now looked a little taken aback. Beng had never seen his countrymen so roused by so simple a speech. Then he looked over and found Grandfather shaking his fist and yelling in a way that belied his eighty-five years. Grandfather had always been a sucker for theatrics.
“You could shoot me now, if you wanted,” she said. In one fluid, deliberate action, she wrapped an arm around the chimney of the engine, pressed her bare feet against it, and then allowed her body to hang exposed like a rallying flag, open to stray bullets and attack.
“You can shoot me,” she repeated, her body tense with strength, not fear. The statement had the air of a challenge. Beng wondered fleetingly what chaos would erupt if someone did shoot her, but the policemen held their fire. “But I am the phoenix that will rise even if you burn me to ashes. You cannot kill a phoenix. The Society has built a train. We will rebuild this country!”
“Re-build! Re-build!”
Wild cheers and a steadily growing chant. The Chief pulled herself back to the safe anchorage of the engine, and then climbed down. A dozen willing hands reached out to steady her descent. She was still that same underfed young woman, but she carried herself with the stature of a martyr and a hero. The crowd did not stop clapping.
As she descended, she cast her eyes across the crowd again. He wasn’t imagining it—they had landed right on Beng again. There was something malicious in her look.
Then she beckoned at the closest Society member, and whispered something to him, gesturing in his general direction.
“Ma—Pa—Grandpa—we need to go home,” he said.
Grandfather looked at him with obvious reluctance.
“Now?” he groused.
Huat caught his eye. Beng wasn’t sure if his brother had seen what he’d seen, but the panic on his face must’ve given something away.
“We should go back,” Huat echoed, deliberately.
“It’s not safe,” Beng added bluntly, discretion yielding before fear. Internally he was panicking. The Society member that the Chief had spoken to had disappeared from the front of the crowd. Beng feared that they would soon find him right beside them, ready to finish the kill that she had not, back in the rubbish dump.
Just then, someone jostled them roughly. Mother nearly fell from the suddenness and force of the blow. The crowd was beginning to surge forward to get closer to the shining train, mindless in its excitement and adoration. Father grabbed hold of her arm to steady her before she could be trampled on by the masses.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Trying not to be shoved over themselves, the five of them pressed on against human traffic until they had passed even the wall of policemen. Close up, the policemen looked very ordinary under their berets. There were middle-aged men who looked like they had children and wives waiting at home, and young faces that looked like they had just left school. The crowd could not see past their suits of blue, however, and occasionally someone more violent would shove at them or spit at them, heady with a sense of power and revolution. One of the policemen, who looked particularly young, had his hand on his holster but did not move; he had not been given orders to shoot. His face was grimly set, with the stoicism of one who knew that he was at the mercy of the angry masses, a lamb to the slaughter.
Beng smelled bloodlust in the air.
“We need to get home,” said Mother, and he knew she had sensed danger too. She was too sharp not to see how the mood was shifting, and she looked distinctly unnerved.
They moved as fast as they were able. Grandfather was limber for his age but even then, allowances had to be made. Ten minutes into their frantic scramble homeward, though, they found themselves confronted by a Society barricade.
All of them froze on instinct.
There were about a dozen or so of them, all armed, and they had blocked off the main road with heavy articles and scrap metals. A small crowd was forming, confused and slightly chaotic.
“Check their pockets,” the leader of the lot said.
They did. Beng let them, because fighting with armed people was a decidedly unpleasant alternative. They took whatever little cash the family had on hand, but left the house keys as an afterthought.
“Carry on.” The guards stood aside so that the Kohs could squeeze through the debris to the other side. Behind them, a queue of people was growing. It was a mark of well-trained Singaporean civility even in tough times, that people had begun queuing for their turn without being prompted. It was also a mark of either the people’s docility or their astuteness in the face of new power balances, that nobody questioned why there was an ugly barricade where a clear road should have been.
Father murmured something that sounded like a cross between a thank-you and a whimper. They began to scurry away like ants from a carelessly-destroyed hill, but the same guard reached out, caught Beng by the arm and forcibly pulled him back. He let out a yell of shock—and pain, piercing, sudden pain, and the other four turned as one and stopped in their tracks.
“What’s the matter?” Huat asked, in the forced, polite way that he had when trying to plunge headfirst into a delicate situation. Everybody ignored him.
“You’re the one,” said the guard. He looked Beng over in great seriousness.
“The one?” Beng echoed dumbly.
“The Chief knows who you are.”
It didn’t take exceptional inferential skills for him to figure out who and what the man meant. There was a long pause.
“Yeah,” Beng said, as casually as he could. “We go way back.”
It also probably wouldn’t take exceptional inferential skills for anyone to figure out that Beng generally dealt with a crisis by letting his mouth operate independently of his brain. He knew it wasn’t the wisest move, but it was just how he worked. Therefore, it would probably also not take exceptional inferential skills for anyone to predict that pieces of him would probably be mashed all over the sidewalk by the end of the day. But at that moment, only one thought occupied his mind—he couldn’t believe he had crossed the Chief of the vicious Society simply by the impudence of not dying.
The guard smiled, revealing yellowed teeth, vicious and grotesque like a chain-smoking shark. He let go of Beng’s arm and shoved him aside roughly. Beng stumbled a few steps, mentally cursing how physically outmatched he was.
“The Chief doesn’t like losing,” he said.
“It’s a pity I don’t like dying,” Beng replied, his voice shaking only a litt
le. The guard laughed, but it was an empty sound.
“You ought to watch your back,” he said, smile widening. “Because we are too. Like a target board.”
“Oh, we’re smack-talking now?” he snapped, because he never knew when to back off. That was when Huat, who did know when to quit, grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him with fear-induced strength through the barricade and homeward-bound.
“What was that?” Mother hissed, as they hurried on home. Even Grandfather had gone from heady excitement to subdued paranoia. All five of them kept darting glances behind them and getting jumpy at the slightest and most inconsequential of things; once Father walked right into an abandoned post-box and scared the living bejeezus out of everybody.
Beng thought she had meant that as a general exclamation of shock and dismay, until he realised that all three of them were casting expectant looks at him.
“Remember the night I got attacked?” he muttered.
They nodded.
“Well, they remember as well.”
“I thought it was because of the donation clinic,” said Huat.
Beng considered this.
“Possibly that too,” he conceded. “But the attack was a little more personal.”
“That had something to do with them too?” Father asked.
“You offended them—twice?” Mother said at the same time, incredulous.
Beng felt inexplicably insulted, which was probably because he had expected a little more sympathy and moral outrage at the news of a threat to their youngest child.
“Apparently escaping offends them,” he said shortly.
“You shouldn’t have offended them,” Mother said.
“What, so I should’ve just let them kill me? Sell me to pirates?”
“Did you say something to them?”
“No!”
“You know you run your mouth sometimes.”
“The only thing running was me,” he snapped. His arm was still throbbing where the guard had snatched at him, and it made him angrier. “Does nobody care that I nearly died?”
“Shut up—”
The last contribution was from Father, who had flung out an arm to hold them back. The entire family jerked to a stop at once. They found themselves back in their estate at last, but their high-rise flat, like the others around, was teeming with guards. Guards in all black. People from the Society. They had moved fast, while everyone in the vicinity had been occupied by the reveal of the Dragon. Now they were everywhere, like a plague of locusts.
“What do we do?” Grandfather half-whispered. He was still keeping it together, but even he had lost most of his usual bravado.
“They’re looking at us,” said Mother.
Father looked back for a minute, as if considering whether they should return the way they had come. But it was a pointless venture and they all knew it. Then he set his jaw and began walking, resolute to see even a bad business through. He was the protector, the man of the house, and he knew he had a duty to seem strong and to lead the way when everything they had was under threat. Beng looked at his father, cocksure and strong—or at least very good at faking it, and wondered how close he was to giving up that mask of masculine pride for good.
“Maybe we should ask other people what’s happening,” Huat suggested tentatively, to give his father a way out.
Father did not stop walking.
“It’s our house,” Father said shortly. “Of course we should keep going.”
They did, obedient in the face of his authority. But they didn’t even make it up to their floor—there were heavy chains blocking off the staircase and even (for good measure) the defunct lifts.
“We live here,” Father began, voice stiff and tense, and then faltered at the way the guards were looking at him.
“The Gahmen will be reclaiming these units for development,” one of them said, coming forward. She was holding a clipboard and a half-chewed pencil. She didn’t look as burly or aggressive as the rest. Instead she was in glasses and her face was carefully, if unevenly, powdered, an accountant in a thug’s black uniform.
“The Government would never do this to us,” said Grandfather, with instinctive blind faith.
“The Government may not have the foresight to,” the lady said agreeably. She was tapping her pencil against the clipboard, however, with increasing force, and Beng suspected that she was not someone to cross. “The Gahmen, however, does.”
“The Gahmen?” Grandfather echoed in bewilderment.
She sighed dramatically.
“You need to keep up with the news,” she said. “The Gahmen is looking after the country now.”
“Who’s the Gahmen?” said Father.
She made a vague, expansive gesture at the uniformed people moving around the estate.
“Why, us,” she said, as though it was something hugely obvious.
“Who is us?”
“Elite members of the Society, elected to serve,” she said glibly, as if reciting something she had been told to learn by heart.
“You’re part of the Society,” Father began.
“Correct. The political wing, so to speak.”
“You call yourselves the Gahmen,” said Huat, with disbelief.
“But we paid for the house,” Mother burst out at the same time, obviously grasping at straws.
“It’s state property.”
“We paid with our own money.”
“The state prints your money.”
“That’s not how it works!”
“That’s how it works now.”
“But—”
“The needs of the state are greater. Don’t tell me you would cross the state in issues of national security and interest.”
“What would you do with a four-room flat that is so important—”
“Do you think we are here to divulge state secrets?”
Mother’s mouth worked soundlessly for a few moments, and then she stopped trying to speak and took a real good look at the aggravating lady in front of her. Said lady stood her ground, staring right back with pompous satisfaction as they all tried to make sense of what was going on.
“You’re trespassing,” the lady said. “This is Gahmen property, and you should leave.”
She made a quick gesture that Beng couldn’t quite get, and they were immediately flanked by a couple of the armed guards.
“At least let us go up and take our things,” said Mother, very quietly.
The lady looked at her with the vicious satisfaction of a bully who had gotten her way.
“What are you saying?” she said, with false incredulity, taunting and unkind. “Nothing here is yours, auntie. This is state property, or weren’t you listening? You should leave, before they set the dogs on you.”
Mother’s frown grew deeper and unhappier, and for a moment Beng thought she wouldn’t back down. But she, like the rest of them, knew when they were well and truly beaten. After an obvious internal struggle, she turned tail and began to walk away. The family followed suit.
The pain and humiliation of having to give up their home, without so much as an explanation or any form of recompense, was so bitter as to be almost intolerable. Beng didn’t look back or up or around, just forward, using every shred of his self-control to seem as though he didn’t care. As long as the guards could see their retreating figures, he was determined that they should not see his grief.
The fixity of his stare was why it took a while for Beng to look at—really look at—Mother’s face. When he did, he was appalled to find that Mother, of all people, was weeping.
Mother was the kind of person whom very few things could ruffle. The ugliness of her blotchy, tear-stained face left him with a dull ache and an unfocused, impotent rage. She caught him looking, and hastily ran a hand over her streaming eyes. They didn’t talk or anything. Beng suspected they never would talk about it. But that was the only time in the Steam Revival that Mother would cry; he never saw her in tears again.
It was not until night-time that he realised he’d been bugged.
They were in a makeshift shelter. There were massive tented shelters here and there, in stray fields and spreading across unused streets, sometimes branching off into community centres and religious buildings and the like. Nobody was quite sure who had set them up, and when. It was likely that it had been done by the very same people who had taken their actual homes away, but given that these selfsame homes weren’t likely to come back anytime soon, nobody was willing to turn away free lodging for the sake of principles (can eat meh?).
Their family had nothing on hand except the clothes on their back, their emptied wallets and their now-useless house keys. Beng felt like he was in shock—too much had happened in one day, and he hadn’t quite processed how they’d managed to lose everything they owned so quickly. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Society and the Gahmen could have done more to him than just that.
In fact, he had been so sore and aching and so high-strung from the events of the day, that he didn’t even notice it himself. After all, scratches and bruises were commonplace when he was out and about, especially with the kind of people he tended to have run-ins with nowadays. He sat down wearily on the floor and tried to make himself comfortable.
“What’s that?” said Huat, reaching out to grab his arm. Beng’s mind instantly recalled the shock of the Guard’s sudden hold on him, and he jerked back on instinct.
“What?” he said.
“Your arm,” said Huat, gesturing. Beng immediately glanced at the underside of his left elbow—the Guard’s earlier assault—the brief searing pain—there was a small cut there, seeping sluggishly. He could see the slightest glint of metal from within him. A brief image filled his mind, of cogs and gears turning within him, grinding muscle and sinew into bloody mush.