by Gwee Li Sui
Beyond the stand of casuarinas, we could see the snout of the headline and a ragged line of ghostly white foam that marked out the shoreline. All around the sea glittered under an almost full moon and a sky dazzlingly lit with stars. The tall trees soughed in the wind, and the distant rumble of the waves seemed to echo the starlight, so near yet so far. We longed to have each a girl with us and blot out the barracks, the barking commands of sadistic instructors, the marching and rifle drill, the long inventory of training routine that was to be our life for the next two and a half years.
“Remember we swore we’d find a way to get out of the country when we ROD-ed,” Alex said, lighting another cigarette.
“God, how did we survive those two and a half years,” I said. “It was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“What a waste of our youth,” Alex sighed, stretching out on the reclining chair.
“Don’t you miss it sometimes though? The mindlessness of it all. Just carrying out orders, not having to worry about making decisions. Not having to think. The camaraderie too,” I said.
We had looked out for each other, even though we weren’t buddies in the platoon. We shared the love of good books and music, horsing around like Hawkeye and Trapper in M.A.S.H. to make it more bearable. Though we didn’t see each other after the three months of basic training – Alex was posted to Artillery while I was dispatched to the Combat Engineers – we picked up where we left off when we met again at university. The three years there deepened our friendship. We took trips to Malaysia and Thailand that were full of high jinks but also solemn moments. We went for a Buddhist retreat at Suan Mokh Monastery in Surat Thani, just a day after attending a crazy full moon party on a beach in Koh Samui. These short wild trips, far from answering our restlessness, only exacerbated our desire to escape the country.
When university ended, it was time to get real. I didn’t see Alex for a few years. He joined a big advertising job that required frequent overseas trips. Then I heard that he had married Sue, Chinese Australian, and, before long, I started getting postcards from Sydney, Bondi Beach, the Blue Mountains, Uluru. He loved the wide open spaces, he wrote again and again. You should come and see for yourself.
“Remember our pact to get out of the country? We’ve made it. We are free now. Aren’t we?”
He drained his glass and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Space, fresh air, and good cheap wine, that’s what’s good about being here.”
We sat in silence. It felt like we were shipwrecked, aliens who had somehow drifted to this strange shore and who could find comfort only in the vast span of star-studded sky that seemed foreign, yet familiar, comforting.
***
In my dream, I was locked in the room that my mother had rented. Strange that the rented room and those nomadic years with my mother should come back in this worn and cheerless apartment, with night after night of broken sleep, Lin stirring on the futon’s hard and thin mattress, the planks creaking each time we shifted.
We lived in a quick succession of places after my mother had packed a suitcase one night, woke me up, and said that we were leaving my father. She had enough of the drinking and gambling and the last few weeks of being terrorised by a loan shark.
The first place was a small, curtained-off section of a living room in a three-storey apartment block on Race Course Road, a ten-minute walk through a few streets of old shophouses from New World Amusement Park. The flat belonged to my grandmother’s sister. She had a hard life bringing up five children after her husband was executed by the Japanese during the Occupation. There was a daughter who rarely appeared; she dressed in men’s clothes and didn’t say a word to us the whole time we were there. It puzzled me that she should wear men’s clothes and smoke. Then there was a son who worked at a bar and came home in the wee hours of the morning. Years later, he would be hanged for heroin trafficking.
Then we spent a week or two at a kampung house in Pasir Panjang, a short stroll from the beach. I watched the children play tops and marbles and the fishermen haul their boats out for night-fishing as the sun set. This was followed by a few unbearable weeks at my mum’s best friend’s flat in Alexandra, a glamorous woman who was a gambling addict and who later would gas herself, being hounded by loan sharks. It was a gambling den really, with three tables of mahjong, the air poisonous with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. Then we holed up at a fleabag hotel in Chinatown, along a row of three-storey shophouses. I remember staring at the cockroaches patrolling the ceiling, their long antennae flickering; it was hard to fall asleep, with the Taiwanese pop and noises from the street below, which was lined with street stalls and hawkers.
One day, we took a bus to Newton Circus. We walked past a row of black-and-white colonial terrace houses, then crossed the busy road to Makepeace Lane. It was as the name suggested, quiet; the pre-war Chinese terraces were beautifully tiled, and many had swing doors, like the one we were standing at. A brown collie hurled itself at the grille gate when we rang the bell. We heard the sound of wooden clogs on the tiled floor, then an old man appeared, wearing an unbuttoned plain short sleeve shirt and a white singlet underneath. He had a bony dignified face, his thin white hair combed back. He held the dog and invited us in.
We were led past the ancestral altar in the living room with tint portraits of what must be the old man’s parents to the sitting room at the back. We followed the old man, and his resounding clogs, up two flights of creaky wooden stairs to a landing, turned left past two closed doors to a room at the back of the house. It was tiny, with just a bed and enough floor space for a mattress and a small wardrobe. It was more like a cell, with a grille gate and curtain instead of a door. But it had a window that looked into the kitchen and backyard and further out to a field and colonial terraces around it.
We stayed for half a year. Looking back, it felt like we had been adopted as part of a huge traditional Chinese family. Ah Kong, the head of the household, had seven children, four of whom were living in the house. Mother was close to one of his daughters and would entrust me to her when she went to work.
In the dark little room next to us lived Ah Kong’s second son and his wife. They smiled but never spoke to us. The wife was heavily pregnant and moved about with difficulty. One day, I heard terrifying wails and, from the adults’ distressed exchange, gathered that the baby had died upon birth. I can’t be sure now, but I think that I saw a tiny white coffin carried into the house.
I became close to Ah Kong’s grandson, Jimmy, who lived with his father and stepmother in the front room next to the stairs. From time to time, there would be violent noises: things being thrown and Jimmy and his stepmother being beaten up. It was rare not to see Jimmy without bruises on his arms and legs. To this day, I can hear the sounds of his screams behind the close door and Ah Kong banging on the door trying to stop the beating.
Once, I saw the door open and a man step out. What greeted my sight first were the tattoos before I took in the body and face and realised that it was Jimmy’s father. It would be a long time before I saw another body so liberally decorated with images, when I was posted to an infantry battalion after five months of Combat Engineers training and ended up in a platoon where half the men belonged to triads and wore tattoos as badges of identification. From the strong shoulders, past the bulging pectorals to the lower abdomen, two dragons spiralled. There were coiled snakes and fish encircling his thick arms, and, as he turned about after catching me peering through the grille gate, the Chinese god Guang Gong on his broad back glowered at me, his halberd-wielding martial figure hovering in the corridor long after Jimmy’s dad had disappeared into his room.
Jimmy and I often sneaked out to the field. There was a swing set, and we would challenge each other to swing up highest into the sky. We played cops and robbers or hide-and-seek with the other kids in the neighbourhood, running around in the long grass, and caught grasshoppers and spiders. We stayed outdoors for as long as we could; Jimmy feared more beatings, and I hated
being in the cell-like room.
My mother went to work in the evenings, and I’d be left alone. One night, I woke up sick, and a wave of lonely panic washed over me. I was sweating profusely, yet felt chilled. A dark blanket seemed to dangle from the ceiling and was going to descend on me. I started crying and then crawled to the gate and kept rattling it, harder and harder, and crying weakly, then louder till my throat hurt, and Ah Kong came with his big bunch of keys to let me out.
Very soon after that, we moved again. I cannot remember why. I never questioned my mother. At that age, you accepted that grownups made decisions without you, and you trusted that they were the right ones. You wake up in the morning, and the bags are packed. In those years when my mother was newly independent, we went through a change of habitats like we were trying on clothes. She was finding her way in the world, relishing her freedom but fearful also. Sometimes I heard her weeping at night and pretended to be sound asleep.
I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Jimmy. He was either locked up in the room or had gone to school. Years later, my mother told me that Jimmy’s father had received a twenty-year sentence for throwing acid on his wife. Of Jimmy she knew nothing, except that there was no more Ah Kong to fend for him; the old man had died soon after the violent domestic tragedy.
It is hard to remember all of these places, rooms rather, that we lived in. In the end, my mother decided that she could not cope with work in the nightclub and caring for a young child and left me with my grandmother. Those were really nomadic years, and the succession of places and faces left the boy I was then bewildered and with little idea of what home and a normal family were. I don’t miss any of it, but I regret leaving that place on Makepeace Lane without saying goodbye to Jimmy.
***
On the edge of the front lawn, in front of a low hedge, the “For Sale” sign is plastered across with “Sold.” The Tuscan-painted house has a frail look about it in the late-summer sun, as though uncertain of its future, even though it is double-brick, built in the thirties when you could trust the materials and the workmanship. It is the kind of house I want, if I could afford it. I can see Lin and the baby happy here.
Alex stands at the door, smiling weakly.
“I remember, when we came to look at the house, Sue was immediately smitten. She was so sure it was what she wanted. The bay window and seat and the fireplace which we never used.”
Our steps ring loud and hollow on the dark polished timber floor. The rooms have all been emptied. After the divorce settlement, Sue took her share of the furniture, and the rest were sold in a garage sale that I helped with. The books that he had brought from home, that ones that had shaped his life, and the LPs he had hunted down: they were all gone.
I help carry his bags, tent, and camping equipment to the Volkswagen kombi he has traded his Ford hatchback for. It has a white top and greyish-blue body. We have talked of exploring the country in this hippie icon.
“Wish you could come,” he says. I would join him, he knows that, if not for Lin and the baby.
“Who knows what I am going to find at the end of the road.” He looks scared but tries not to show it. “I haven’t seen him since I was ten. Well, if things don’t work out in Perth, you know where I will be headed,” he says, then pulls the side door of the bus shut and turns to me.
He is going to drive to Adelaide and then across the Nullabor Plain to Perth. He has tracked his father down, who settled there in the late seventies, after walking out on his wife and ten-year-old son. I guess it is another thing that drew us together in the beginning: an errant father.
“I’ll be in touch. If things work out you can visit me.” We shake hands. His feels cold, despite the warm weather. For the first time, I notice a few grey strands in his hair. He has let it grow so that it covers his ears and back of his neck. For a fleeting moment, before he gets behind the wheel, there flashes before my eyes the recruit in crew cut, his strikingly handsome face and trim body tanned under the Tekong sun. I remember the relief and secret joy when I spotted him lying down on his bunk after training, reading On the Road.
“OK, as the song goes, I’ll be seeing you, brother,” he says and turns the ignition key. The engine whirrs worryingly, then splutters to life, its frame trembling.
“Good luck. Take care, brother.” I don’t know what to say, holding the house-key that I am supposed to leave at the estate agent’s office during the week.
He stops the van as it is about to pull out, leans out the window and calls out “Good luck with the baby,” and drives off. As the van disappears out of the cul-de-sac, it sinks in that I may not see him again for a long while.
***
Lin is lying down, her hands resting lightly on her stomach, which has grown from a little hillock to its full height. I think of mountains, their gestation period, the way they are thrust up from the buckled tectonic plates. She is feeling the full weight and tires easily, complaining of her back and swollen knees. When she stands up, the load pitches forward a little. Every night after work, I feel the probes, the little body chafing against its confinement, telegraphing its arrival in more urgent code the last few days. It is due next week.
We have moved into another apartment down the street, a considerable improvement on the first. It has beige plush carpet instead of the shaggy, stained seventies green one in the other apartment. The apartment opens onto a little yard at the back, next to a high fence draped in bougainvillea. It is good to sit out there and soak in the mild autumn sun, which has shifted further north. We are equatorial beings, and it will take a while to get used to this gradual seasonal decrease of daylight.
Outside there is a rustle and screech in the bushes along the fence. Last night I shone a torch and found a possum staring at me before it scampered off into the dark.
I lie down beside her. It is a good feeling. After a four-hour shift of kitchen work and three hours in the morning doing gardening work for three properties on the next street, I crave sleep’s oblivion. It’s like the army days, filled with mindless, mechanical exertions, then bodily exhaustion and deep slumber at the end of the day. Frost describes it as “the sweetest dream that labour knows.” Not sweet, that’s for sure, but good straight sleep. My copy of Frost is lost in the dozen boxes of books and letters, still unopened in the spare room.
“Baby’s somersaulting. Must be a boy, so restless,” Lin says softly. We’ve opted not to be told during the ultrasound sessions.
“I think it’s a girl. Father instinct. Would be nice to have a girl first.” We never tire of the guessing game. It takes the mind off other things.
“I got a postcard from Alex,” I say and hold it up to her eyes. It is a picture of the Pinnacles, the limestone spires spilling long shadows over the desert under a vast blue sky.
“He’s going back. Doesn’t say anything about his father,” I add. Perhaps they didn’t meet. Perhaps it wasn’t a successful reunion. After twenty years without a word, it was going to be awkward.
“How long has he lasted here?” Lin asks. She has never really taken to Alex.
“Four years. Might have been very different if Sue didn’t walk out on him, or if they had a child,” I said.
“How much time are we giving ourselves?” she asks, the hesitation clear in her voice.
I think of my mother in those few years seeking her place in the world, moving from one rented room to another. How much time did she give herself? Why did she leave that place on Makepeace Lane? What happened to Jimmy and the people through whose lives we passed? It’s too late to find out. Next week will be the ninth anniversary of her death. Death and birth, the timing of it makes you wonder. About reincarnation. About how events, distant and seemingly unconnected, can have deep, unseen links that hindsight discovers. How we end up where we are.
“As long as it takes,” I say, looking into her eyes.
My wife places my hand on her stomach and holds it there. The knocking and kicking are hard, prolonged, the fists and legs
trying to punch a way out. I can see the boy at the gate of the rented room, panic at being abandoned, the sense of suffocation making him push and shake the gate with all his strength. He shouts into the dark well of the corridor, willing his mother to emerge from the landing. He wants to be released into the safety of his mother’s love, the feel of home that Ah Kong and Jimmy give him. He wants to be let out into the field out there, to let the grass graze his knees, to chase Jimmy around the big rain trees. The knocking increases in tempo, and I can almost hear the thumping, the pounding, the life that has travelled from a distant, forgotten point in time, along routes that no one else will travel again, into the rented room of our lives.
Surfacing
BY O THIAM CHIN
The year I turned sixteen, my mother was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and was sick for eight long months before she died. I was taking my O-level exams that year, and, half the time, during the hazy, indefinite period of her dying, my mind was distracted by what was going on in my own life and in my family’s. My mother knew about her condition after she went for her regular check-up at the polyclinic, but she kept it from the family except my father, who also kept up the silence. It was only when the cancer reached its third stage and we became suspicious of the frequent hospital visits and the dwindling frame of my mother – she was always plump, with soft, hefty arms – and her thinning hair that they broke the news to us over dinner one night. The chatter that preceded the announcement went cold, and my sisters and I exchanged looks that barely concealed our disbelief and uncertainty. I lowered my chopsticks and stared at my parents, who carried on eating from their bowls of rice, unperturbed by what they just told us. My mother spoke up after a few unbearable seconds and assured us that everything was OK, that she was feeling OK, and that we would talk about it in due time, after everything was settled. After this, she did not say another word.