Beng Beng Revolution

by Lu Huiyi

  The next hour passed in a dreadful blur.

  Suddenly Beng was holding the bucket and the tools. And suddenly he was up on his feet, and so many pairs of hands were on him, pushing and jostling, and there were fragments of instructions that he could not quite differentiate from the gleeful jeers around him. Then he was in the furnace, holey shoes crack-crackling upon the layer of yellow sand.

  The hands shoved and pinched and pushed. He was climbing. There were little metal handholds built into the brick, hard to spot and harder to grip on to. Beng had always been scared of heights, and he was terrified now. His palms were clammy. His left shoe slipped a little on one of the handholds, and for a heart-stopping moment he knew with absolute certainty that he was going to die.

  The chimney narrowed a little as he went higher.

  “Lucky he skinny,” said someone from below. A general wave of laughter followed.

  It was very dark. It didn’t feel like it was daylight outside.

  “Sweep!”someone hollered. Maybe it was Ma’am.

  Beng managed to ease the heavy brush out of the bucket hanging on his arm. There was an indented ring on his forearm now, from the pressure of the bucket handle, with little occasional patches of broken skin. Experimentally he swiped the brush against the black wall, and a cloud of soot descended upon him, so thick and so abrupt that he breathed half of it in, lapsed into a long choking coughing fit, and nearly lost his grip altogether.

  By the time Beng could hear above the sound of his own hacking and gasping, the shouts from below had changed in quality. Now they were impatient, even angry. He was taking too long.

  Then he felt the heat.

  It was just a strange warmth from below at first. The chimney was stuffy, but he was perspiring a lot more than was normal. Then there was a sudden stripe of pain, across his legs, and he screamed at the shock of it more than anything else.

  They had lit a fire.

  The tongues of flame were growing higher and more vicious. Beng looked down once and promptly decided that he was not going to do that anymore. He began to climb, with more frenzy than caution now. He had to get away, had to get away.

  “Sweep!” the voices called from below. “Hurry up—sweep!”

  They were crazy—Beng could barely see. Smoke was everywhere, and his eyes were stinging horrendously. Somehow he managed to sweep wildly at the walls now and then in instinctual compliance, but largely he was just trying to get out of range of the fire, climbing as fast as he could and as high as he dared.

  “Oh God,” he whispered. It was intolerable to be silent, but he could barely speak beyond raspy rattling gasps.

  “Oh God, please, God.”

  Breathing hurt. Speaking hurt. Beng chanted his incoherent plea as if it was a mantra that would keep him safe.

  He felt a brief flicker of something, of power, of that something that had helped him break out of the blood donation clinic. But it petered out almost immediately and he was still there, all by himself, mortal and choking and scared.

  Part of him wanted to cry in despair, but involuntary tears were already flowing freely out of his smoke-irritated eyes. He wondered where Mother was. He didn’t want to die alone. He hadn’t said goodbye.

  And then, suddenly, a hissing from below. It took Beng a while to realise that the unbearable heat was slowly fading back into a more tolerable stuffiness. Someone had extinguished the fire.

  “You have thirty seconds.” It was Ma’am’s harsh, cruel voice again. His heart sank. It wasn’t Mother. It still wasn’t Mother.

  “You come down fast, or we’ll start the fire anyway,” she went on.

  Beng had no idea how he made it down the ladder, only that he stumbled back out into a cooler, brighter world to see everyone munching nonchalantly on sandwiches. The food trolley must have come and gone. He slumped against an empty bit of wall and tried to breathe; it hurt.

  The door was open, just a silver. He could glimpse Mother on the other side, standing with Darryl, exchanging tender goodbyes before she ended her lunch break.

  “You are very hard on yourself,” said Darryl.

  He leaned in towards her with an intimacy that reeked of gentleness and bordered on indecency. Then his eyes landed on the strip of light between workroom and corridor. He reached over and gently pushed the door shut behind them, closing off the vision to their undeserving eyes.

  Ma’am took the bucket from Beng’s unresisting hands and strutted off without a care in the world. Beng stood before the fireplace still, feeling as though the world was moving a little too fast. Nobody spoke to him. He spoke to nobody. His eyes stung. The doorknob turned audibly; Mother must have finally made up her mind to come back to work. Beng ran a hand absently across his face and it came away black with coal-dust.

  “I’ll go out with you tomorrow,” Beng told Father the moment he got home.

  He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything about the factory.

  “You own self tell your mother,” he replied.

  That, however, was a lot easier said than done.

  “They’re just teasing you because you’re new,” said Mother comfortably, when Beng finally found a way to tell her, at night, in broken words, what had happened. Her understated dismissal was a slap in the face. She had no right to be so serene about all this.

  “You knew,” Beng said, bitter.

  “No, you new,” Mother said.

  “You knew they were going to hurt me.”

  “Of course,” Mother said. “You new what. Of course they want to hurt you.”

  “That’s not the point,” Beng said. He wanted to scream but his throat felt like sandpaper. “You don’t care. Never mind.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” said Mother. “Never mind. They know you can do it now. Next time, they’ll send someone else.”

  “Yes, they will, because I’m not going back.”

  “What?” said Mother.

  Beng looked up at her—tried to stand his ground—he tried to exude the kind of aggression and certainty that might have saved him from the lunchtime ordeal, but that kind of compelling presence seemed to be a talent unique to tattooed little aunties with a penchant for burning hapless newbies to death.

  He met her eyes, and then faltered. Mother was looking at him in a strange angry-sad way. It was strange because it seemed as though if she could be truly sad, then she wouldn’t be quite so angry. And if she had been properly, thoroughly angry, then there wouldn’t have been a place for bitterness to ferment.

  “Don’t be like that,” Beng said feebly, as the silence stretched on. He felt almost like he was losing, but he didn’t know why.

  At that, Mother snapped, so suddenly and absolutely that it was almost visible.

  “I went through this before also, okay?” she said, now affronted and raising her voice. “You think I don’t know?”

  Father, who had hitherto been sprawling in silence on their broken-down excuse for a couch, exerted himself enough to prop himself up into a half-sitting position. Once he’d gotten everyone’s attention, he broke out into disgruntled grousing.

  “Hello. You think I can sleep when you all shouting, shouting the whole evening? Cannot quiet is it?”

  Mother laughed. It was a mocking and ugly laugh.

  “Sleep for what?” she snapped. “You don’t even do anything.”

  Father bristled right on cue. They would be going at it half the night now. Beng used to worry that the neighbours would look at them funny the day after the worst of their squabbles, but it seemed like most of the slum families fought all the time, so it was okay.

  Grandfather shuffled past his quarrelling son and daughter-in-law and to his bedroll, as though they were invisible. Beng thought such selective vision was a talent that he ought to start honing more, because these ugly fights over nothing were happening more and more frequently than he could deal with. Beng looked at his arms, which he’d scrubbed red raw to get rid of all the soot. He felt very u
nclean, as though he had soot coating the very surface of his soul. The ugliness of his world shrouded him in inedible certainty, every bit as oppressive as the black walls and billowing smoke of the chimney had been.

  It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going back to that cancer-inducing stovepipe of a company. The semblance of autonomy and rebellion was comforting to think about.

  Huat was sitting in the far corner of the room, seemingly oblivious to all that was going on around him. He was reading a book, a ragged inky tract that he had brought home one day. Books were such expensive things nowadays; Beng had no clue how he had managed to get his hands on a copy.

  “What’re you reading?” Beng muttered to him, trying to take his mind off things.

  “Shut up, I’m busy,” Huat murmured back, but his knuckles were white from how tightly he was clutching the cover.

  Beng shrugged. He unfurled his bedroll next to his brother, and turned himself away from the shouting and snarling just a short distance away. Tomorrow would be a new day, he told himself. New things were okay; it would be okay.

  Beng didn’t get to go out with Father the next day after all; he woke up with a hacking cough, and a handful of bloodied black-speckled spittle in his palm. For a while he felt a flash of concern, but the feeling of unwell-ness was too great and he sank in and out of a feverish drowse.

  At some point, someone stood before him. Beng tried to focus on the pair of yellow-nailed dirty feet set before his face, but focusing was beyond him at that moment.

  “So late,” Father said.

  “I’m sick,” Beng managed to croak.

  “Ten o’clock already,” Father continued.

  “You see,” Beng proclaimed, thrusting his bloodied palm upwards as if giving a benediction.

  “Eeeyer,” Father said, quelled at last.

  “See?” Beng said, taking comfort in the gloomy satisfaction of having proven his impending death.

  Father went and got him a glass of tepid water. It felt like hours had passed before he came back, but that might have been because Beng was a little giddy.

  “Jialat lah,” said Father, who was not very good at being reassuring. “The last time my cousin was like that, it burnt his brain you know. After that, he was very slow at everything.”

  Beng wanted to tell Father to stop scaring him, but his head was spinning too much for speech to be possible.

  “You drink more water,” Father instructed. It would have made sense if Beng thought that he could actually manage to sit up and hold the glass without dropping it. “Jialat lah. You rest first, you rest first, I’ll find something.”

  There was an odd shuffling sound that was either Father putting his shoes on, or him leading an elephant through the hallway. Beng felt uncomfortable; over-warm and aching all over and as though he were crawling through molasses. His throat felt clogged and painful. The chimney must have felt like that too. It had needed a good sweeping. Beng was crammed full of illness and somehow could not purge the sense of profound discomfort from his being. The chimney had needed a good sweeping.

  The door clicked shut.

  “Look at you—you’re crazy.”

  Beng jerked awake from a feverish on-and-off nap. The house was overheated; it might be mid-afternoon already. Nobody seemed to be home.

  “They would lock you away if they knew how crazy you’ve become.”

  It wasn’t Mother’s voice, nor Father’s. Huat had said something vague about medicine and left at dawn. Beng had a distorted impression of Grandfather heading out with his pipe earlier, and no memory of him coming back either. It wasn’t the voice of anyone he knew.

  “Brain burnt. Slow. Cra—”

  Beng turned frantically and regretted the movement in an instant. His head began pounding unrelentingly and his vision flickered alarmingly for a moment.

  The only creature in the house besides himself was a stray crow—birds sometimes got in and refused to budge unless aggressively shooed out. Beng looked at it and it looked at him, and then he remembered that birds could not speak and felt somewhat embarrassed.

  “That wasn’t you, was it?” Beng murmured, just to be sure.

  “Awk,” said the crow, which probably meant, are you delusional or something, because birds cannot speak.

  “Thought so,” Beng said, and then turned back and closed his eyes, before he could betray himself into more acts of derangement.

  “Crazy fool,” the voice said at once, with unholy glee.

  Beng’s eyes flew open. He turned back at once.

  The bird continued to stare, its eyes gleaming but unfocused, the picture of perfect dumb animal innocence.

  “I must be dreaming,” Beng said. It was more reassuring to speak aloud, to fill the empty spaces of the house with his own familiar voice. He pushed himself, slowly and carefully to his feet. It hurt still. Everything did. With small, wobbly steps, he began to advance towards the door.

  “So weak,” said the voice, once his back was turned on the bird. “So easy to kill.”

  The house had been very warm, but suddenly Beng was cold with fear.

  “Who are you?” Beng said.

  “How many people do you think there are in the house, idiot?”

  Beng forced himself to turn around, and to stay facing the demon-bird. He had watched horror movies before, and had a healthy wariness of dark alleys and abandoned houses and cracked mirrors, but nothing had prepared him for an occult bird.

  “Who are you?” he managed. His head was pounding more than ever.

  The crow did not speak, now that he was looking at it. Its head was cocked to one side. If it had had a mouth and not a beak, Beng thought it would have been smiling.

  Then it let out a hacking, guttural sort of sound, and from its beak gushed a copious quantity of dark blood.

  Beng suddenly felt faint. Hands scrabbling against the wall, he sank down into a half crouch, but the world did not stop swimming before his eyes. It was hard to make things out. He wanted to throw up.

  “Leaving already?” said the voice, the moment his vision blurred.

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Beng choked, almost incoherent in his fear. In the background he could hear distant laughter; he almost thought he was up the smoking chimney again, struggling to breathe through noxious fumes. “Oh God, make it stop!”

  He didn’t think God would listen. He hadn’t listened when Beng was up the chimney and afraid to die. It had been more out of instinct than anything else, that he’d spoken the way he had. Really, Beng just hoped that either of his parents would be home soon.

  “What’re you screaming about?” said the voice, tauntingly. “You aren’t going to die. Other people will die for you.”

  “Beng?”

  Beng woke up to surprisingly gentle hands shaking him awake. The gentleness was what made it surprising. It was even more surprising to find that it was his father who was kneeling by his side, one hand on Beng’s shoulder.

  The feverish feeling was gone, but Beng didn’t feel that much better. He tried to say something, but his throat was tight. There was an ugly sick-taste in his mouth. He tried to swallow and nearly gagged.

  “Wha—?” He managed. There was a faint aroma in the air, like the old days. It didn’t smell like their house.

  “I made you something,” said Father. Somehow he managed to prop Beng up into a sitting position. He pressed a bowl against Beng’s lips and Beng drank obediently. It was some kind of soup. It burnt his tongue but it tasted good so he drank anyway.

  “I added these herbs,” Father said, gesturing with his free hand at something that Beng couldn’t really be bothered to look at. “Finish hor.”

  Beng did. It was actually very good.

  “You were very sick,” Father went on, in what he obviously thought was a calming voice—but his eyes were bloodshot and his hands trembling just a little. “Two days already, and you couldn’t eat. The fever broke, but you must rest. We don’t have medicine. But you can rest.”
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br />   The soup tasted like chicken, Beng thought. Now that the sick-taste was gone, he could taste it. It tasted like chicken.

  “Pa,” Beng said, slowly and painfully, garbled words through cracked lips.

  “Mm?”

  “Where did you get the meat from?”

  “Huat brought it back.”

  “He— How did he pay—”

  “He didn’t want to say. Maybe he saved money?”

  The crow was gone. There was no patch of blood on the bit of floor where it had vomited earlier on. Beng wondered whether he had dreamt it all, or if Father had cleared it all up. He had lost too much time in his sickness, and for the life of him, he couldn’t think of a right way to ask.

  There was a moral tale that he had been told when he was very young, about a filial child who had cooked a slab of her flesh to feed her ailing mother. Beng wondered what it meant in the way of kinship for his brother to have procured such riches for another. Maybe the gods would bless him for it, or maybe it meant that they would always be poor.

  Father rose and padded off with the empty bowl. Beng still didn’t feel quite like himself, but he managed to force himself to his feet anyway after a couple of tries. After a series of starts and stops, he tottered out of the shack. He sat down in the doorway, his vision swimming slightly from the exertion; it took a while for the world to steady itself.

  The altar was in his line of sight, but the candles were burning low and the offerings scarce, as though Father had neglected his daily rituals in the panic of the illness. It was very touching but also made Beng feel a little burdensome. There was a faint clinking and splashing in the kitchen; Beng closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

  “There’s a place I want to bring you to,” said Huat.

  “A place,” Beng echoed. He was sitting up at last, finally feeling a little more like himself after a long period of wretched convalescence.

  “Yeah, I came across it when—”

  “If it’s another factory, count me out.”