by Lu Huiyi
He had seen Mother defeated, her face streaked with tears of hopeless rage, but that had not galvanised him into doing anything. But her desperate clutching-on at the most impossible of hopes was something else altogether, and for a moment it nearly drove him into reckless action. The fragility of it all, and her deliberate blindness to it, made for a train wreck waiting to happen, and Beng knew nothing was so important as to send the trolley trundling the other way. Nobody else had to get hurt. Nobody else would be hurt if he did what was right.
And what was right was to turn himself in, so that his family need not be associated with his taint anymore—he knew that, but part of him was so shamefully afraid.
They walked mechanically, not quite knowing what else to do but to keep going.
There was a distinct whistle—it was the sound of a steam engine. They were nearer to the City Hall Station than they had realised; somehow, having to go everywhere by foot had scrambled their impressions of distance and place.
“Let’s go there,” said Mother. She had lost the power that anger conferred upon her, but this time, she looked so beaten down that nobody had the heart to disagree. The station seemed to be reasonably well-lit; there must be somewhere they could kip for the night.
They unveiled the re-done Merlion with even more pomp and circumstance than they had for the first steam train. There was a proper day earmarked for it, and on the day itself the Guards patrolled the streets and went to houses and settlements and anywhere there might be people, herding everyone and anyone they could find down to the river to play audience.
Beng stood amidst the crowd as the concealing curtain of tarp was cut down to reveal a fresh re-imagining of the beast. It had been a long while since the day he had contemplated laying his life on the line for his family’s freedom—but he had never found the courage, and now he too was re-imagined, transformed, into part of a new world that he’d never signed up for. He thought of all the poets and songwriters who had composed odes and lyrics for the Ghost of Merlions Past. He looked at what it had become, and wondered what kind of grotesque effort it would take to write beautiful things for such an ugly creature.
What had resulted after six months of hard labour by Guards and conscripts was a sea-lion of brass and steel, belching periodic bursts of steam. Its mouth was now lined with jagged, turning gears for teeth, so that its surprised expression had turned into something out of a horror movie instead. Its eyes had been replaced with great copper marbles that gleamed in the sunlight. It was a mechanical child born of the Steam Revival, feeding on the whirr of blades and gears and a world not moulded, but carved, from the past.
People were clapping, though he wasn’t sure if they were clapping for the Merlion or for the parangs that hung heavy on the belts of the surrounding Guards. Used to the language of obedience, Beng kept quiet and inconspicuous, waiting for the moment when they would be allowed to go back home.
Nearly a year into the Revival, home was a back alley next to the City Hall train station.
There was a great whistle of steam. Then, a general clanking and creaking, the turning of a hundred cogs and gears. The screech of heavy wheels against much-worn tracks, and the press of sweaty bodies and the ceaseless clamour of hundreds of men. A signboard declared this to be the City Hall Train Station, the main functioning train station in the country, and the station itself was crowded with people, all with places to go and things to do.
The streets were pitch dark. The precise paving had become cracked and uneven from lapsed maintenance, and one of the manholes was missing its cover. The faint sour stink of old garbage and dried piss, drifting in from side-alleys and dim corners, mingled freely with the smell of re-used animal fat from the rickety stalls lining the streets.
The Koh family walked past the train station, footsteps light and avoiding eye contact with passers-by. Beng kept his head down, his footsteps light and his cap pulled low to hide his face. He took strides obviously meant to be even and composed, but still he moved with the self-conscious hunted-animal quality of one who knew that he was probably being watched by hungry eyes anyway. Everyone watched everybody else these days. It wasn’t malice, at least not in everyone’s case—but the Deprivation had made brutes of even the kindest of men. It wasn’t safe to be out late, but it couldn’t be helped today. Nobody had been allowed to leave the unveiling of the new Merlion, not till the grand speeches and overwrought ceremonies had come to a close. Grandfather was swaying slightly as he walked; he wasn’t able to stand for such a long period of time, especially out in the open air.
They veered off towards the right, towards a quiet lane tucked at the side of the City Hall station. The lane was dark and inconspicuous, no open flames, no candles, nothing. It smelled faintly of cooking, intermingled with odours of a less pleasant quality, a putrid combination that Beng had long since gotten used to. The lane was lined with a row of huts and tents and makeshift shelters. None of them greeted any of the tenants as they walked. Everyone minded their own business here.
“Mind the platform gap!” the conductor hollered, his practised cry cutting above the noise and movement of the general crowd. The family turned into the alley, to the little mess of canvas sheets and cardboard and thin plywood pieces that they had somehow fashioned into a shack of sorts.
The third hut from the right—that was home. Not their apartment unit with its orange-brown chunky furniture sets, not the homeless shelters with nasty staff and nastier guards, but a ramshackle hut shrouded in the residual fumes of the roaring trains.
Four walls, clumsily cobbled together from uneven layers of varying material, and a thin sheet of scrap metal by way of a door. Whatever could not fit into the interior of their little hut was crammed higgledy-piggledy into the few centimetres of space between their shack and the neighbouring one; the entire slum was held up by odds and ends and keepsakes and trash, squashed into any empty nook available. Any violent movement left the walls trembling and the little huts wavering slightly; Beng always thought that all it would take was the right wolf to bring everything crashing down around their heads.
Once everyone was indoors, there was barely any space for them to move around. Huat, who always found the hut claustrophobic, especially when it was so crowded, had retreated outside within a quarter of an hour—he liked to sit right outside the door, musing over things, and would only come back in when he was ready for sleep. Meanwhile, their parents and Grandfather had laid out their bedding and gotten into bed; there wasn’t much to do anyway, but to lie around till they fell asleep.
Beng rubbed at his arm unthinkingly; the answering throb of pain made him stop.
This was, surely, Beng thought, as he curled up into his sweat-soaked bedding, one of the ugliest cities in the world.
Part Two: The Steam Revival
Chapter 4
At the end of the day, people were all out to use one another.
Beng tried to remember this when the going got tough. It was harder to think it at the start of everything, when his mother was crying and the house was taken and everything was a confused, ugly mess. But the harder it was, the more important it was for him to think it. Beng tried to remember this when people said things they didn’t mean or when people didn’t follow through on their promises or when he found himself sitting alone looking at the night sky, now pitch-black (no lights, no lights) and too smoggy and foggy for him to glimpse even a single star. He thought there was nothing so useful left as the realisation that life was, by no means, an organic and unstoppable disappointment. It was not that life had let him, and only him down—all of them, pressing through the confusion of the Deprivation and then the mad changes of the Revival, were equally using and discarding and sifting through this junkyard of souls.
And going by that theory, it was not that life was inherently bound to be a vast expanse of disappointing blankness, but that one, in that present moment, had not accrued enough utility to be worthy of valuation in the eyes of those around oneself. To accumula
te social currency would be tedious, but not impossible—even in these times. Beng found it very empowering to think that the world still revolved within the radius of his control.
Mother had always said that Beng thought too much.
But Mother’s problem was, and has always been, that she thought far too little. Beng had always suspected at the back of his mind that that was why she had found, as the years went by, less and less of a use for him. Mother had spent her own childhood in a delicate world of perfume and powder and over-high heels. Marrying down and taking on the cares of the household had already been something of a struggle for her, and childbirth even more so. Childbirth was, in her mind, a process so ugly that she had probably never ever fully accepted that it had happened to her. It was a grotesque, difficult surrogacy eclipsed only by the grime and gore of the new world order, and since it was easier for her to distance herself from the former than the latter, she began to grow more and more apart from her family after everything changed.
In retrospect, Beng could not find an exact point from which he and his mother had begun to diverge in their views and wishes. But it roughly began in the midst of the Revival, when she had taken up a factory job because that was all that was left, departing from decades of office work into the unfamiliar world of menial labour.
The problem, Beng supposed, was when he failed to do the same.
After they had made themselves at home in the City Hall slums, it had taken Mother about three weeks of searching before she had landed a new job. The Copper & Brass Distributors, which enjoyed not just a first-mover advantage but also blatant, unreserved Gahmen backing, had instantly become a massively successful enterprise. However, there were also rumours that they paid their workers poorly, that the work was backbreaking and dangerous, and that the hours were ridiculously long. It was the one place that didn’t care about past records or family backgrounds or ill reputations when hiring, but they worked their employees so slavishly that many didn’t stay on very long.
Undeterred, Mother applied anyway.
During the probationary period of her employment, Beng saw very little of her. She was working over fifteen hours a day, and came home with her hands streaked with soot-dust and with a persistent cough that kept her up at night. Her eyes were red and irritated and she was so tired that she could barely manage to wash up and change before collapsing into heavy sleep. But every time anyone suggested that she should try a different job, she would respond with virulent rejection (“I just need to get enough experience—we can be citizens again—don’t try to stop me”), determined to the point of obstinacy, so cutting and curt that eventually nobody dared to try.
Mother’s example made Beng dread finding work. Even when she succeeded in keeping the job, employment seemed like a painful servitude with few meaningful returns. His brief attempt at the blood bank had also made him skittish. In any case, the family had agreed that he’d better stay out of sight for the time being. It was almost a year before he’d dared to show his face at factories and stores again, and his evasive answers about where he’d been as well as his lack of experience got him turned away at more places than he could count.
But surprisingly, it didn’t take him too long to find a job once he got started, all things considered. At the end of the month, he had found work at a pottery factory, a smallish place just a few blocks from where his mother worked. He mostly alternated between quality control work at the conveyer belt and a variety of fetch-and-carry duties, bringing documents and sales items and other logistics back and forth as was demanded of him. Sometimes he wondered why he had ended up expending his life, with all its hopes and dreams and possibly-imagined potential, on such an irrelevant pursuit. But the pay, meagre as it was, kept him going. There was no argument or dream as compelling as the ache of hunger.
But the security of paid work may have made him complacent—daring enough to speak and fight without remembering the cost that resistance might inflict upon him.
It was just three weeks into his stint at the factory when he saw the manager lay hands on a girl—slim, underdeveloped and vulnerable, someone around his age or a little younger. She was not an adult—barely a teenager—almost a child by all physical, mental and emotional standards. And it was obvious that she, batting weakly at her aggressor with frail arms, was in no position to fight back. Most people turned away, but a significant few had the gall to go right on working, watching the scene unfold shamelessly. Beng thought of the resounding silence he had been met with when the Society had tried to kidnap him, and left his seat by the trundling, creaking conveyer belt.
“What’re you doing?” he called, striding over. His voice was tense and wavering, despite his attempts to exude confidence and a sense of threat. He felt like he was watching himself act from a distance away, his mind in overdrive and trying to adjust to the situation.
The manager stopped. Not in shame or out of fear at being caught out, but with the sort of irritation that came from being unnecessarily disturbed. He was in his mid-twenties, tall, bespectacled and on the skinny side, the sort of guy that Beng might have traded gaming cards or made casual conversation with in better times. He didn’t look like the kind of guy to be trying to cop a feel from someone who couldn’t fight back.
“Aren’t you the new guy?” he said.
“I’m on belt duty,” said Beng inconsequentially.
“Then why aren’t you at the belt?”
There was a moment of tense silence.
“Where’s she supposed to be?” Beng asked, pointing at the girl, who had frozen stock-still, terror still written all over her face.
“She’s where she is supposed to be,” said the manager. “You aren’t.”
“She doesn’t want to be here,” Beng said. He was aware that everyone in the vicinity was staring, shamelessly, though nobody seemed much inclined to jump into the fray and back him up.
The manager stared at him for a while. Beng held the stare, not out of courage or defiance but out of the sheer inability to look at the girl. She was so frightened and so stricken by her terrible circumstances, that the rawness of her anguish made him somehow afraid to meet her eyes. Suddenly, the manager shoved her aside; she stumbled and threw her hands out in wild instinct to break her fall. Nobody helped her up, leaving her to stagger, tear-blind, as far away as she could get. Then the manager nodded at Beng, cool and unkind.
“I want to speak to you,” he said. “In my office.”
Now everybody was watching. Beng hated all of them.
They went to the manager’s office.
The office was nicer than any other place that Beng had seen since the Deprivation. It was uniformly furnished in old-fashioned cherry oak, but there were some brass fixtures here and there that made the design seem somewhat out of time. The manager took a seat on the great carved chair behind his desk, and gestured vaguely but imperiously at the stool on the other side.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Three weeks and a bit,” said Beng, not taking a seat.
“New, huh?”
“A bit. But—”
“I took a risk hiring you,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re one of those on the blacklist. Don’t look so surprised, of course I knew that.”
“The b-blacklist?” Beng managed, the bravado leaving him almost instantly.
“You’ve got a tracker on you. Did you think you could keep it a secret? But I thought young men like you deserved a second chance—and look how you’re paying it back.”
“This isn’t fair,” said Beng. The skin had healed over on his arm; nobody should have known that there was an implant in him.
“What isn’t fair is me hiring you only to find how uncooperative you are as an employee.”
“Look,” said Beng, losing patience even amidst his growing dread. “She didn’t want to be there.”
“Do you want to be here?” the manager shot back.
It was har
der for Beng to refuse than he had expected it to be. He had just started here, damn it, and he had worked hard to make sure he was useful, and it just was so terribly unfair that it should all be taken away from him for doing what was right. And it was so unfair, because it was Beng who had been on his way to getting a diploma and who had done his assignments and played by all the rules, and he didn’t see why he should be standing on the wrong side of the table being chided like a child.
When he finally spoke, it was with a great effort.
“This isn’t right,” he said, the words sticking in his throat. The manager shrugged, callous and indifferent.
He was sent packing that day, without even getting the week’s wages. Nobody in the factory showed any awareness of his dismissal, let alone any concern about it. He resented them for it.
But he had done the right thing.
Beng tried to remember that when the going got tough. It was harder to hold on to it at the start, when he had had to tell everyone that he had failed to hold down his job and Father had been disappointed and Grandfather worried and Huat indignant and Mother—well, Mother was a hell of a lot harder to read.
She wasn’t hostile or angry, not with him, anyhow. It wasn’t as simple as that. Maybe frustrated that the household had lost a source of income, but not all that resentful. But she was detached, as though it was easier to dissociate herself from all the unpleasant things in her life that she could. Whenever they spoke, it felt as though she was approaching the conversation with an air of mild surprise, as if unable to believe that this towheaded specimen of nearly two metres had emerged, a parasitic insect fully-formed, from the most intimate regions of her body.
In the empty, struggling days in the slums, Beng began to realise that while his mother’s love was not negotiable, she didn’t seem to like him as much as she loved him. It was a shame to think that Mother’s aversion to the crude and the ugly should have found a focal point in him. Through the gentle confusion in her eyes he saw, as though through a tinted lens, the casual ugliness going on around them. It made Beng sensitive in a way he couldn’t quite explain.