Singathology

by Gwee Li Sui

  Because I was the youngest in the family, I was not expected to do much, except to stay at home after school and study for the impending exams, while everyone else did whatever they could for my mother. My eldest sister accompanied her to the hospital for her checkups while my second sister helped my father out at the fish stall from time to time, since my mother was already too weak to handle anything at this point, with rest and sleep taking up the bulk of her days. When she was at home, I would stay by her side and talk to her about the latest Channel 8 drama serials, the actors who were in them, the gossips, and the scandals, and she would sometimes ask me about school, my homework, my preparation for the O-levels, and my friends. I would skip from topic to topic with as much gaiety and lightness as I could muster, not wanting to worry or trouble my mother in any way. Though there were things on my mind I had wanted to say or ask, I could not get the words out of my mouth. They had not seemed important at the time; they could wait for another time, for the right time.

  Frankly, how could I tell her what was going on in my life then: that I was struggling with my studies, that I had been failing my class tests even though I had studied for them, that I had a crush on a boy in my class, that I was confused with my feelings, how I had become fearful and anxious all the time, about who I was, and who I was becoming. She did not need to know all these; she would not be able to comprehend any of it in her current state. Even before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mother had a personality that was forceful and domineering and, at times, overwhelming and overbearing. She raised my sisters and me with the same authority and discipline she was brought up with by her parents, especially her father who was extremely liberal with his slaps and punches, though she only resorted to beating us with a cane when we were much younger and disobedient, which came to a stop after we entered secondary school. In the family, she was the disciplinarian, who would watch over our comings and goings, making sure that we did not get into any trouble, that we knew exactly what and why we were punished for, that she did not raise us to be spoilt or ungrateful children. She would mete out her punishments – ten strokes of the cane, five slaps on our calves or thighs – and tell us to reflect on our actions, to think carefully about our wrongdoings. Only fools repeated their mistake, she would tell us. Growing up under her shadow, under the unbreakable spell she cast over us, my love for my mother had never been one that was easily accessible or easy to understand. It was a love that came with thorns, a beacon of warning.

  ***

  The boy, the one I had a crush on, was my classmate in school, and we had been friends since Secondary One, though the level of our friendship never went beyond acquaintanceship, simple exchanges and basketball games and smiles-and-nods. We were in the same class throughout our four years in secondary school, and, though we hung out together with other classmates on many occasions, I hardly knew him, except for the fact that he had a younger sister and his father was an accountant. Our friendship existed on the basis of the larger group of friends we had in common: nothing personal, or close, developed between us. It was only in Secondary Three that I began to become aware of my attraction to boys and to him specifically. It was hard to know when all this first started, and, by the time I grew aware of it, it became something that took up most of my waking thoughts, like a terrible secret had crept into my head and stayed there permanently. At thirteen, my body had broken out of its old shell and grown into a new one, a body I was constantly conscious of, its demands and urges and vanity. When I had my first erection, it shocked me; I was surprised by how little I was able to control something that had seemed so natural to my body. My first wet dream, when I was fourteen, had shamed me so properly, so thoroughly – I thought I had peed in my sleep – that I threw my soiled underwear and shorts into the rubbish chute. The first time I touched myself and produced an instant erection and later a quick ejaculation, I was overcome by the intense sensation and a complexity of feelings – a knife of pure joy – that my body could generate at such a private, secret act. In the jail of my changing body, this act alone was my only constant, an escape into something that my other life, public and visible, was unable to provide.

  Cedric – that was the boy’s name – was about the same height as me, though the shape and size of our bodies were at opposite ends of the spectrum. I was skinny with a long torso and gangly limbs while he wore his mass of lean muscles like a man slipping into a second skin, comfortably and proudly. Like some of my classmates, he would play basketball without a shirt, his pants riding low on his slender hips, the pelvic bones making a V that disappeared under the waistband of his underwear that peeked out from the pants. Sitting at the side of the court, I would pretend to watch the game enthusiastically while, at the same time, quietly keeping my eyes on him, ingraining my memory with as many images of his body as I could, which I would replay later in my head when I masturbated in the school toilet or at home. I never went far with these images in my head; they were only the brunt means to an end, to the pleasure I wanted to extract from them, and I would never once considered where they could lead me, to recognise something in me I was evading from. At fifteen, I was far from knowing what I wanted, or who I was, or whether there were other boys like me; yet under this murky, impenetrable surface, I was deeply aware of the weight of the burden I was carrying, of the secrecy that enshrouded it, and I took great care to hide it from everyone I knew. In order to hide it well, I presented another self to the world, a self that was remote and detached, yet accommodating and highly adaptive to its surroundings, changing its shape and form to survive, to appear normal.

  Towards the end of her life, my mother became a pale shadow of her former self, one that was more docile and frail and sombre. She would lie in bed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, mumbling to herself; when I entered the room, she would turn to me and stare at me as if registering me for the first time, a person who had materialised from nowhere. It was the medicine taking effect, my father would tell me. I would bring her simple meals of sweet potato porridge or herbal chicken broth and feed her in small spoonfuls, which she would refuse after two to three mouthfuls. Enough, enough, you eat, she would tell me, lying back on the bed, exertions straining into deep lines of wrinkles around her eyes.

  On her clearer days, she would tell me stories about her past, how she had wanted to be a teacher when she was my age, but her father’s disapproval – he needed her to help out at home and at the fish stall he owned and also to take care of her nine siblings, my mother being his eldest daughter – led to her discarding her ambition although she did not harbour any regret at the end. It was just a silly ambition after all; there were other important things in life, so why focused on things you could never have, she would tell me, shaking her head, her gaze turned inwardly. She took great pride in her responsibilities towards her younger siblings, a role that had shaped her to be who she was now: unremitting, tough, no-nonsense. Yet, when she told me about herself and my father, how they had met, she would become a different version of herself, younger, more bashful, hopeful. Helping my grandfather at the fish stall in the mornings, my mother was always conscious of how she smelled. “The stench of fish went into everything, into my clothes, under my nails, into my skin; no matter how I cleaned or showered afterward, it’s always there,” my mother said. So, when my father asked her out one day, he being the delivery driver for the vendor who supplied fish to my grandfather every day, she was caught off guard. What had he seen in her, my mother asked herself then, but her doubt did not stop her from going out with him. She was twenty and of marriageable age, and my father was the first man to ask her out, and she was curious about this shy, sinewy man who had never said more than a good morning to her every day when he handed her the invoice. They went out for four months, and then my father proposed marriage, and she accepted, and then they were married for twenty-five years.

  So fast, I would add at this point in her reminiscence, how come you never consider other guys, or date more before decidin
g? Why, what was the point, my mother would say, amused at my remark. Waste of time, I knew he was the one I wanted to marry, a good man, stable and reliable. Unlike young people these days, talked about love and romance all the time, had so many choices, but still could not make any good decision, breaking up here, divorcing there, she would add before closing her eyes, slipping into other thoughts.

  Sometimes, in her slow, muddled state after taking her afternoon medicine, my mother would tell me that she had not married my father because she loved him from the start – “none of that nonsense” – but because of something in him that she felt drawn to, the realistic, steadfast qualities that marked him as a man of courage, of conviction. The love came later, two, three years after they were married, and, by the time, their love had already taken hold, planted firmly. Love didn’t always have to be the first thing, my mother said. Use your head first, and the heart would follow later.

  Love would not be the word I would use to describe how I felt about Cedric. What I felt was something more evasive, more illicit, feelings that belonged in the shadowy realm that was beyond my articulation then. Lust? Infatuation? Perhaps all this and something more? It only took a sneak look at him in class for my whole being to be wrapped up the whole day in a confounding state that was mired in confusion, shame, and deep, unabated longing. I would feel sharply alive, and I would feel like killing myself from what I was feeling. There was no way for me to do anything about this, and, in the midst of what I was going through, I could feel nothing but a growing, deepening despair.

  In school during recess, I would sometimes head to a deserted boys’ toilet located in a quiet corner on the third floor of the Technical block where we would have our weekly two-hour Design and Technology lesson. I was exploring the block in one of my solitary walks around the school, during recess when I did not want to join my classmates in their game of soccer or basketball, and the rusty, bulky lock to the toilet had sprung open in my hand after a few easy tugs. The toilet was a storage room of broken toilet bowls and covers, spoilt tables and chairs, and cracked mirrors and was covered with a brown carpet of dried leaves, animal faeces, and shrivelled carcasses of cockroaches, beetles, and even sparrows, who had flown into the musky-smelling toilet through the broken window slats. I had tried the taps and flushes the first time I was in there, but there was nothing as the water supply had been cut. I had pissed into the washing basin while staring at my reflection in the cracked mirror, emboldened by my little act of subversion. The toilet soon became the place in school I escaped to whenever I had the chance or needed to be alone.

  Sometimes, I would bring a book to read, but, because the air in the toilet was stale and dusty, I could not concentrate for long. A few times I had gathered the dried leaves into small piles, set fire to them with matches, and watched them burn. When the smoke became too overwhelming, I would quickly stamp the fire out. When the mood struck me, I would strip my school shorts and masturbate in front of the row of mirrors and come very quickly onto the dirty floor.

  Then, one day, I heard someone outside the toilet door while I was masturbating, and, before I could pull up my shorts and run to the nearest stall, the door opened. Someone came in just as I slammed the stall door behind me.

  “I saw you, Cody.” I recognised the voice. Cedric’s. “What are you doing here?”

  I did not reply him; my heart hammering in double-time in my chest. I was still holding onto my erection, which had become even harder. I willed it to go away, to subside, but no luck.

  “Come out now, why are you hiding?”

  “Go away, please,” my words came out like a plea.

  “What are you doing inside?” Cedric knocked on the door, and, for a long pause, there was only silence. In that instance, I came furiously, thick, milky spurts that hit the graffitied wall of the toilet stall, dripping slowly downward. I bit my lips to suppress my cry.

  “Nothing. Just go away.”

  Cedric let out a laugh and banged his fist once on the toilet door and left. In the descending silence, I could feel myself gradually slipping back into my own skin, tight and incongruous now, bristling with heat and shame from the sudden exposure, from my own foolishness. How close it was, my only thought reeling ad nauseam in my mind, how close I had come to my own ruination.

  Recovering but only barely, I left the toilet and went to one of the school administrators and reported the faulty lock. In no time, the lock was changed, and, after that, I never went near the toilet again. With Cedric, I laughed off the matter when he broached the topic with me later on, brushing the whole thing off as nothing more than a minor, childish incident, an innocuous act. He cocked his eyebrows and looked doubtfully at me but did not ask any further.

  I was in school the day my mother passed away. I was called out of the class by the school clerk and was informed of the news. I was excused for the rest of the day, and, as I made my way home, my mind was vacant of thought, a blank canvas of nothingness. There were a few relatives present in the flat when I finally got back; my father were talking to them while my sisters served them tea and packet drinks. I slipped past them, catching snatches of words here and there, and paused at the entrance to my parents’ bedroom. My mother was lying on the bed, her eyes closed, hands by her sides. For a brief moment, I thought she was deep in sleep, her features undisturbed, restful; yet, there was an absence that held a certain hold in the bedroom that was palpable even in its stillness. As I walked up to my mother, I could not lift my eyes away from her face as if I were waiting for some signs, for anything that would break the inertia, the silence. I stood by her side for some time before my father entered the room with a relative, and I quickly left, averting the look from my father.

  The period between the wake and the cremation was inundated with an unending, unbroken series of activities, filled with noises, smoke, and voices of sympathy. People came up to me and took my hands and offered their words of comfort. I listened, nodded my head, and returned their smiles. My silence perceived as grief, I retreated into myself, into the space where words no longer meant anything, only breaths on my lips, disappearing, gone. Even when I was surrounded by people, I felt cut off, removed from whatever was happening at the moment, and the sensation that it brought was strangely comforting as if I were slowly becoming invisible, untouchable, and all I had to do was to sit or kneel or stand and nothing more was expected of me.

  After we had brought back my mother’s ashes, I went into my room and did not come out for a week. At first, I thought that I was just exhausted from the chain of events that came one after another, the sleepless nights of the wake, and the frictional effect that people had on me from an extensive period of contact and proximity. I slept for eighteen hours, dead to the world, and, even after I woke up, I could not bring myself to leave my bed, to come out of my room. My father and sisters left me alone for a while, thinking that it was a phase I needed to get over, but, after two days passed without me getting out of the bed, they became alarmed. My sisters came to sit beside me, putting their hands on my head, my shoulders, whispering into my ears, and assuring me with their soft, cajoling words. I closed my eyes and turned to the wall, stiffening my body to their touches, to their words. They brought me food, leaving it on the side table beside my bed, dishes of rice and vegetables and meats that turned cold and hard after some time, mostly untouched. They called to inform the school that I had fallen sick and was not able to attend my classes for a while.

  As I lay on my bed, I slept for most of the day, and, when I could not sleep, I would stare out of the window, into the jagged fragment of the sky, and listen to the world outside the flat, sounds that came to my ears, muffled, vague. I was not able to hold onto any thought that flitted through my mind even though I could feel it churning with movements, a moving train that went round and round, unstoppable. Occasionally, a memory would dislodge itself and force its way into my consciousness. A face, a word, a repeated montage of images, playing over and over again. I could not sh
ut these memories down, so I let them pass through me as I experienced and relived them. Even when I slept, these thoughts would slip into my dreams, and, in them, I could see myself trying to make sense of what I could not hold onto. My mother would feature in most of these dreams, not as who she was when she was dying but as someone whom I remembered, standing at the stove, stirring a pot of pork ribs and lotus root soup, or listening to a radio program on the Rediffusion. I saw myself as a younger boy, hovering at the edge of this vision, observing her, as if, even in my dreams, I could never approach my mother when I wanted to and she had existed in a realm beyond my reach. Even when I was awake, these dreams, seeping into my spectral thoughts, would haunt me, leaving me unable to discern what was real from what I had imagined.

  Sometimes, during moments of wakefulness, my father would come into my room, and I would sense his presence over my body, creating a shadow over it. He would lay his hand on my head and call out to me. He would listen for my response, and, when I did not respond, he would sit quietly beside me and stay there for as long as he could. At night, he would bring a face towel and wipe down my face, arms and legs, and when he was done, change me into a new set of clothes. I did not put up any resistance as he carried out these tasks, ministering them like a man performing last rites, attentively, purposefully. From his mouth, he would say my name, repeating it as if trying to call me out of a place I was not able to return. I heard my name, I heard it clearly, and yet I was too paralysed to do anything.

  One night, waking from a recurring nightmare, my body breaking out in brief painful spasms, I saw my father sitting on a chair beside my bed, sleeping, his head on the bed sheet, his hand on mine. In the light of the bedside lamp, I saw the grey hair on his head, a sea of white against his scalp. How he had aged, just over a short period of time, how vulnerable he had seemed now. I recalled what my mother had told me, the story of their beginnings, how she had fallen in love with my father not at first sight, not even in the first year of their marriage but over time, as she slowly got to know him and learnt to trust him, how he had persisted and won her over. Looking at my father asleep, I could feel the years that had passed between them, years that stretched all the way back into the past, before I was even born, into a time that only my father and my late mother knew, a time that existed only between them and no one else, and how all this, this immense weight of time and history, was now left to my father, who had to bear the burden of it all on his own.