Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  “Busy or not?” he asked.

  The young man grimaced.

  “We’re like animals in a zoo,” said his friend; and the counter was, indeed, like one of those modern enclosures you saw at the Night Safari; they were separated from him not by bars but by a chest-high glass wall and a moat of food in which flat dishes of each item floated upwards, as round as water lily leaves. The two of them put down their spoons and mimed a struggle against imaginary bars.

  “You’re from Malaysia,” Zi Qiang said. “How do you find it here?”

  “The money’s good,” said the first young man. “But…”

  “You can tell me. I won’t be offended.”

  The young man paused for a moment while his friend served another customer. “Did you see on the news, about the orang utan in Australia? The one that escaped.”

  “Yes, I did. He went back to the cage after half an hour. I guess he didn’t like it too much outside; the cage was too comfortable.”

  “It’s like that here. Don’t think I’m trying to offend you.”

  He passed Zi Qiang the two styrofoam boxes, stacked in a thin pink plastic bag; they rubbed together and squeaked as he walked home.

  He thought Adelyn would work late tonight, but she didn’t; around seven o’clock he heard the rattle of the grille as she swung it aside, the grunt of the key in the lock that he needed to oil.

  They held each other.

  “You’re early,” he said.

  “I wanted to catch the show,” she replied, shedding bags, jewellery and jacket on the way to the bedroom. A minute and then she stuck her head round the door, hair dishevelled.

  “I’m going to wash my hair. Ten minutes?”

  “Sure. I’ve got the food.”

  When she came to sit next to him in her sloppy T-shirt and oversize slippers, the theme song was already playing.

  “So we’re hooked again?”

  “I guess so.”

  In the opening scene, Yee Siong’s daughter Ting Ting sat with her new boyfriend at a restaurant table. She was as perfect as ever, skin luminous, ears studded with two tiny pearls like stars, baby-pink sweater thrown over her shoulders against the cold. She skimmed the menu, making suggestions; her companion was less at ease, eyes edging away over the tables to the open door. The camera moved closer. He was honest, fresh-faced, but uncomfortable, his mouth opening like a stranded fish, not quite at ease in his immaculately-pressed shirt or the expensive watch that circled his wrist. The mother arrived. Small, and her suit made her seem smaller, but you couldn’t deny her presence; as she bustled between the tables, one or two diners nodded to her deferentially. Ting Ting stood to greet her. Mother, this is someone I’ve been wanting you to meet for so long. Jing Wei, my mother.

  Conversation was formal, but not overly frosty and she insisted on ordering for the young man. First she questioned. Where did he work? Where did his parents live? Where had he studied? And then she listened. Of course, she insisted, it was so admirable that he’d gone so far with such—and she paused and plucked a word out of the air—disadvantages. He’d done so well to win the government scholarship, to go to…where was it? Oh yes, Berkeley. A public university, wasn’t it? But there were more things to life than study, weren’t there? She paused and cut a small piece of fish with her knife, pierced it with her fork and conveyed it slowly to full, wine-red lips.

  “Seems to be going well,” Zi Qiang said. “I think she likes him.”

  Adelyn reached up to pull back her hair. “Sure. She’s got her knife ready. She’ll fillet him.”

  The mother ordered wine with the main course and Jing Wei grew more voluble, waving his arms excitedly. His aspirations now seemed slightly vulgar, superficial: traces of long-forgotten “disadvantages” of speech returned. On his cheek, a sliver of arugula leaf from the salad the mother had insisted on ordering for him had stuck; it wobbled as he talked but did not fall. Ting Ting gestured to him impatiently, rubbing her cheek, but he failed to notice.

  After the dinner, they waited while Ting Ting vanished behind the smoked glass partition of the restroom.

  “It’s so good to get to know you,” the young man said, when his girlfriend was out of sight. “You know, I was afraid you wouldn’t approve of me.”

  In response, she reached out and gripped his elbow, her face hardening. “We’ve invested a lot in Ting Ting,” she said. “It’s important she doesn’t make mistakes now that will ruin her future.”

  He looked back at her in silence.

  “How much do you want?”

  “Mrs Tan,” he protested. “This isn’t to do with money. I love Ting Ting. What we feel is real.”

  She took her arm away, looked out over the restaurant terrace to the river. His eyes followed hers, across the reflections flickering on the sun-dappled water, the bumboats full of tourists scuttling backwards and forwards.

  “Nonsense,” she said, as the music swelled and the camera returned to her face, immobile as a mask. “Everyone has his price.”

  • • •

  A week or so later, Zi Qiang received his polling card in the mail. The design had not changed in years; a simple black-and-white piece of paper with a government crest and his personal details printed in a simulated typewriter font. It seemed out of place on the table among the glossy brightly-coloured flyers advertising tuition or real estate, like the fossil of some magnificent long-extinct species: a snake with vestigial limbs or a ponderous, flightless bird.

  Only the address of the polling station was unfamiliar and so he checked the election website. His block and its neighbours, he noted, had been moved to a new constituency, named after a coastal residential district some miles away and now linked to it by a thin loop of territory. He traced the constituency on the screen with his finger as it curved inland and his hand rose and fell in a gentle wave.

  The accompanying brochure was more difficult to locate; he’d put it aside and now discovered he could not find it again. After some searching, he traced it to the wastepaper basket, where he’d thrown it together with a glossy booklet advertising Citifarm, the new preschool chain. The mistake was understandable; both brochures were printed in bright primary colours, with similar logos and cartoon strips that curved from page to page.

  He began reading. Democracy was not simple, the booklet told him. It needed fine-tuning, like a car, to keep running smoothly. In life there were big people and little people, successful and unsuccessful ones. And so the electoral system had evolved to reflect this unique reality. Thus there were big constituencies which could elect several members from one party who stood on a common slate and small constituencies for one member only. No one size fits all there. And when Members of Parliament were elected, they came in several flavours. First Class MPs, represented by a purple gummy-bear like figure, were elected through the old and now admittedly rather antiquated process. Second Class MPs, coloured lime yellow, were a new innovation, made up of the ten best losers. Third Class MPs were coloured bottle green; they would be chosen by a parliamentary committee from a group of concerned citizens who had put their names forward. In a final diagram, they all clustered together in segments of a circle, like fruit filling up a pie; he idly wondered which would taste best. He rubbed his eyes, placed the brochure back on the desk next to its Citifarm neighbour. Even from so close a distance, it was difficult to tell one booklet from the other.

  In the evening, he and Adelyn went to his parents’ house for dinner, the house where he’d grown up. In the last few years, it had seemed as if the earth itself was trying to shake the old couple off. The road outside had been dug up once for the new underground railway line and then again for a new highway; the old line of houses vanished behind steel hoardings, while the traffic snaked this way and that, rustling over a road bed of metal plates. When things eventually returned to order, the house seemed much smaller, crouched near the up-ramp of a new flyover of asphalt, concrete and steel. Yet it persisted.

  Entering the house
was like working your way into a fortress: first the heavy wrought iron gate with its paint-gummed padlocked hasp that you had to nudge open from the outside. Then the yellow herring-bone tiles of the car porch, slippery with fallen leaves and flowers after rain, and the swollen wooden door, its frosted glass panels lit up like jewels from inside, always jammed half open. Finally the heavy security grille that creaked as you pulled it aside. Sometimes, this would cause his father, sitting in a chair in the living room, eyes glued to the new LCD television, to start and then turn to his visitors in recognition. At others, he would not notice and, if they were feeling playful, they’d creep up beside him and stand still, looking down on him. Wait a moment and he’d look up in a slow smile of exaggerated astonishment, belatedly acknowledging their presence.

  His mother would come in from the kitchen to greet them. Recently she had taken to embracing him when they met. She’d never done so before and he was unsure where she had picked up the habit; from one of her fellow volunteers at the museum or from something she’d seen on television. He felt awkward; as his arms encircled her body, he could feel her thinness, all skin and bones, like the tortured, dusty Christ that still hung on the crucifix above the sideboard. At these moments, he felt as if she were trying to pull him down, far back, into a secret, private place from which he had struggled to escape.

  Adelyn chattered brightly as Hein, the maid from Myanmar, brought out the dinner; for her, at least the house had nothing to hide, no burden of memories. But for him, it wasn’t so easy; rub hard on any surface or chip off the clean new gloss paint on the window frames and you’d descend layer on layer into the past. Behind the glass doors of the cabinets by the stairwell, he knew, were family albums, arranged neatly year by year. As you moved further back in time, he grew smaller and the colours of the photographs less distinct; finally there were only the monochrome pictures of his parents’ wedding, his father sparkling in a cream suit, his mother’s stomach rounded into a hint of a curve. Upstairs, crammed into the sagging bookcases in half-forgotten bedrooms, he could still find his schoolbooks, yellowed and shrunken. A prayer book, foxed with brown spots; sheets of Chinese writing paper too, gridded with pale blue lines, in which he’d written long-forgotten characters in a neat, obedient hand. Once, on impulse, he lay down on the bed he used to sleep in every night, looking out of the open window to the long branches of the rain tree, its leaves as small as fish scales. He could hear his parents whispering somewhere in the house, but he could not understand what they were saying. At that moment, he felt unmoored, floating but not sure whether he was rising or falling.

  They gathered round the table in the living room. Hein, eyes downcast, brought in the dishes from the kitchen: curry chicken swamped in yellow gravy, sweet potato leaves, gailan fried with translucent half-moons of garlic, steamed pomfret so tender it smelled of apples. Adelyn served his mother first, choosing the choicest pieces for the older woman, peeling the white flesh of the fish from bone as easily as opening an orange. Conscience-stricken, he joined in, taking the pomfret cheek and placing it carefully on his father’s plate.

  As they ate, the television flickered and muttered; his mother had turned it down so that there was only a hint of sound. The news with its bold subtitles: another policy announcement and preparations for evening rallies throughout the island. The size of the opposition meetings had been unprecedented and, with changes in technology, this could not be hidden. Bloggers, exploiting a grey area in the restrictions on political coverage, had posted pictures of huge crowds; a few days later the print and television media had reluctantly followed suit. Tonight there were images from a rally by the ruling party; the journalist at the scene, hair blown about by the wind, opened lips so wide he seemed in danger of swallowing his microphone. Even strategic camera shots could not disguise the thinness of the crowd; a few hundred at most, he guessed, clumped awkwardly under umbrellas in the pouring rain.

  He caught his father’s eye. “Would you like to come to the opposition rally, Ba? Adelyn and I are going later.”

  A half-smile. “You are?”

  “Look at the sizes of the rallies. Do you think things are different this time?”

  His father shook his head. “Always like this. Everyone likes to watch a good show. But see how they vote.”

  The news anchor now, crisp in her white jacket. Then the advertisements for shampoo or skin whitening cream, in which ethereal pan-Asian women emerged from water like dolphins. He was just turning back to the table, feeling his way back into conversation with Adelyn and his mother, when the familiar theme tune started up, faintly at first. Over the next five minutes they fell away from the conversation one by one, eyes glued to the television set. Finally, his mother reached across for the remote to turn up the volume.

  “Don’t know why we watch this programme,” his father said. “Useless people. It’s a waste of time.”

  “Maybe we like to dislike them.”

  They grunted in reply to Adelyn’s comment; all eyes were already on the screen.

  They hadn’t, he reflected, missed too much of the serial in the last week; most of the action seemed to have been devoted to a sinuous subplot that had now reached temporary resolution. Ting Ting’s young boyfriend had marked time, showing remarkable resilience; her mother had, after her stratagems failed, finally called on Yee Siong to intervene, but he’d been uncertain how to approach his daughter. Finally it was decided: the old man would give her a talking-to. He cornered her one Saturday morning; they drank tea. He expressed concern. How was she adjusting to being back in the country after her study abroad at that top liberal arts college? At first, she sat stiffly on the sofa, pulling a powder-blue cardigan around her, pearl buttons catching the light. And yet he was persuasive; he drew her out, talking of his own college days in England over half a century ago. She couldn’t help but relax. She talked about how difficult it was to come back. How much smaller everything seemed—even the buildings, which had seemed so tall to her before she left, now seemed shrunken, almost like toys or models. This was her home, she was sure, but she no longer knew how to inhabit it.

  On the sideboard behind them, the family photographs stood to attention. He moved on to the offensive. It was easy in this modern world to forget who you were or your duties to your father and your mother, to your society. The first drops of rain gathered on the window outside. He carried on, sketching out the path the family had mapped out for her. She needed to have courage now; to walk forward, upwards, not to look around too much, not to be distracted by alternatives that seemed easier for now.

  Here she sighed, ran her fingers through a waterfall of dark hair. She seemed on the point of saying something, then thought better of it.

  He knew what she was thinking, he said, he knew the word that had been forming on her lips. Love. She was young. It was natural for young people to feel this; as a young person he too had been attracted to things that were new. But it was best to be with your own kind. Best also not to be governed by emotion. She shook her head almost imperceptibly and he smiled, his face pale in the gathering darkness of the house. He wasn’t saying that emotion wasn’t important. Or ideals. But these were things to be guarded, to be locked away and treasured. Somewhere very secure, very safe. She needed to go on living in the world. She needed to give the young man up.

  While he talked, she sipped her tea, eyes downcast. Outside the rain was stronger now, curtaining the garden.

  The camera cut to her face, showing what the father did not see; in the corner of one eye, a teardrop swelled, then broke and fell, trickling down the flawless cream arc of a cheek. She took a tissue and wiped it away.

  “You’re right,” she said finally.

  He looked at her sharply. “You’ll give him up? You’ll tell your mother?”

  She nodded, struggling to hold back the tears. “You’ll have to excuse me. I need to go out soon.”

  She fled upstairs to her room, locked the door, flung herself on the bed, weeping, pulling
the covers to her. But only for a minute. Something had crashed to the floor. She searched for it and held it up; the photograph of Jing Wei she kept by her bedside, covered over now with a spider’s web of cracks. She stared at it. Music swelled in the background. She reached into her bag and drew out a tiny red handphone that perched on her hand like a brilliant wingless insect. She paused for a moment in thought and then sent a text, her fingers a blur of motion on the keypad. The music faded; she changed, pulling off the cardigan and designer T-shirt to reveal a tattoo that licked the top of her shoulder. Later that evening, Ting Ting met Jing Wei for dinner in a restaurant by the river. She told him what had happened; they held each other, swore they would never give each other up. Then the camera moved back, so that they were framed by other diners at tables on the wharf, the stone embankment and the black water beneath. The scene softened and a face swam into focus in close up on the bridge across the river. Her uncle. Watching.

  During the commercial break, Hein brought them cut fruits: translucent fingers of fragrant pear, wedges of dragon fruit that tasted very faintly of lemon, and slices of overripe mango that you struggled to hold onto with a tiny, two-pronged fork.

  He looked over at Adelyn. “So? Ting Ting’s in trouble now.”