Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  On the doorstep, I give her oranges, placing them firmly into her yielding hands. As they step out into the corridor and put on their shoes, they shrink again in the darkness. A careworn couple, descending reluctantly into old age, returning underground. I might even know them.

  Then they realise the girl hasn’t followed them. The mother bends down to undo her shoes again, while the father opens his mouth to call out.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll get her.”

  She is standing in the study, at the wide open window, her back to me. The rain has stopped and the late sunlight streams into the room in heavy slats of gold. Her hands reach forward, towards something I cannot see. For a moment I am terrified: I think she is going to jump. I move towards her, silently. Then she rocks backwards slightly, and I relax. A smell of crushed oranges. She is holding up a book to the light, its black covers pulled together so that the pages flap open, like wings. But she’s not reading: she is looking through the paper, at the light that wells up around the smudges of print.

  She must have heard me, because she turns and smiles, places the book down on the desk. I don’t recognise it; I want to ask her where she found it, to show me the shelf she took it down from. But she reaches out, instead, for my arm, tugs at my sleeve, showing the contusion that threads up towards my wrist, the red and white shapes braided beneath my skin.

  “Look, uncle.”

  She holds up her hand. The sun is even stronger now. Her fingers part like the segments of an orange: the webbing between finger and thumb is translucent, molten with light. I can see it now, the beginning of a crescent moon, held within the darkness of her skin. And then a single, reluctant star. She keeps her hand there for a second, and then another, illuminated, while her parents scratch and scuffle in the darkness of the corridor outside.

  Penguins on the Perimeter

  SPHENISCUS ORIENTALIS, the Asiatic Penguin. Order: Sphenisciformes. Family: Spheniscidae. A small bird with white plumage, inhabiting water margins. Historically endemic to much of Southeast Asia. Hunted almost to extinction in the colonial period; now apparently returning to much of its former range. The only member of its order with the capacity for flight.

  1987

  He used to see them as a child, the old man tells him. At Tanjong Rhu, with the light fading. A flock of birds like a long low cloud, each standing upright, lining the beach right up to the edge of the water. As if they were taking part in a ritual; waiting, clad in white, to slip into water that had become briefly molten, as brilliant as a mirror. Sunset would smudge them golden. And then a shiver would go through the crowd. It would crumble at the edges, and then begin to peel. The birds would take flight, wheeling east to roost. They would pass over his boat, and the sky would darken further, under a whir and a hiss of stubby wings.

  David aka Da Wei, twelve, squatting next to his grandfather on his weekly visit, knows that’s not possible.

  “Gong Gong, what kind of birds?” He stumbles in his bookish Mandarin.

  But the reply is incomprehensible. A dialect word that he can’t reduce to hanyu pinyin to tap into his dictionary.

  “Gong Gong, can you write it down?”

  The old man takes up the pen and paper eagerly, but then pauses, his forehead bunched up in thought. He begins, then stops. David looks. : the radical for bird. And then? The old man can’t work it out. He rehearses the stroke, fishing with his pen in empty air. Once. Then once more. He begins again. . Perhaps a fish? Still not right.

  “David!”

  His mother is calling from the kitchen. It’s his cue to set the table, to help bring out the dishes his mother and Yati have cooked. He stands up, flexing two calves that have gone to sleep. His grandfather puts the paper down, and the moment passes, submerged in the depths of Yati’s chicken soup; hidden in the rice bowl, forgotten beneath the tangles of sambal kangkong and the flat red-scaled body of the steamed fish whose white flesh he loves, and yet whose name he also does not know.

  • • •

  During the next week, he can’t let the idea of the birds go. He thinks of Tanjong Rhu the last time he saw it. From the Sheares Bridge, with its battered shipyards, its jetties crumbling into the river among the green of trees. He remembers a sky darkened by thunder, not by birds.

  So next Saturday, he makes one more addition to the comics he borrows from the library at Stamford Road. He wanders into an unfamiliar section of the building, cool, less crowded than the fiction shelves, searching for a call number he has noted down on a scrap of paper. He finds the book easily enough: Birds of Malaysia and Singapore: A Field Guide. He thumbs through the plates, looking for the species his grandfather has described, marking up the most likely candidates with carefully placed post-it notes. On his way out, he stops at the children’s section and borrows two books for his cousin Shuyun: animal books with bright pictures and big text. Make sure they’re age appropriate, his mother has said. He likes that phrase: he turns it over on his tongue, whispering it to himself on the bus, when he finds a place to sit at the back, over the rumble and bump of the rear axle. He repeats it like a mantra, so that he forgets where he is, and returns only when the small sliver of a ticket falls from his unclutched hand.

  When he arrives at the house, his grandfather is listless. Whispers scuttle into the corners of the room. His mother reviews the medication, and asks Yati whether the hospital appointments have been made. In the kitchen, the two women check through the pill box, with its rows of compartments, counting out capsules and tablets in red, white and pale pink. David retreats into the living room, where his grandfather is adjusting the lens on his camera.

  “Gong Gong?”

  “Ah?”

  “Can I show you something?”

  The old man gives the lens a last twist, and looks up.

  “Da Wei?”

  “The birds you talked about at Tanjong Rhu? Can you show me?”

  Again that unknown word. But when he thumbs through the pages, pointing out the pictures he has marked, the old man just shakes his head repeatedly. Not that one. Not there. Bigger than that. White colour, not grey.

  “David! The plates!”

  His mother is calling again, asking him to get the table ready. He leaves the old man to browse the book. Useless. Back from the kitchen, bowls in hand, he sees that his grandfather has given up on Birds of Malaysia and Singapore, and picked up the books he borrowed for Shuyun. On his next trip his grandfather is excited, more animated than he has seen him for a long time. He smiles, beckoning his grandson over with his little finger.

  • • •

  In the taxi, returning home from his grandfather’s house, David tells his mother what happened. Those birds at Tanjong Rhu. Gong Gong insists they were…penguins. Impossible, David had argued, with the help of his dictionary. Penguins were a . An Antarctic species, confined to the chill of the Southern hemisphere. But the old man grew truculent, brushing away any arguments to the contrary, and finally lapsing into silence.

  The taxi is cold. When they turn into the road leading to their home, he slithers across the plastic of the back seat, squeezing his mother against the door. It’s dark outside; he can see traffic cones and bollards next to a hole in the road; behind it, the wooden Malay house that still persists on its bare plot. Then he notices that his mother is crying. He will never forget this.

  “Ma,” he persists. “I was right, about the penguins.”

  She turns to him. Look, she tells him. At the roadworks. The longkang, with an elephant’s trunk of a hose stretching downwards. If you go deep enough, what do you get? Sai. Shit. That is a dialect word he knows. That is what you find if you spend too much time digging into the past.

  2001

  More than a decade later, he returns to Singapore. On Sunday, sleeping in after that long intercontinental flight, he wakes to the sounds of cars horning and raised voices in the street outside. The churchgoers are here, his mother tells him when he stumbles downstairs. Parking is so difficult now.
After ten minutes, the noise subsides. He sits with her in the front room, drinking barley. Too sweet, he thinks, but then there’s something in the texture of the drink. He stirs with the teaspoon, sips, and then sips again, feeling the grains bump up against his teeth. He’s a child again, playing games with food: do you tilt your head back, and let the last barley grains go down in a single, explosive clump, or use that teaspoon, as your mother prefers, and spoon them gently into your mouth?

  In the morning light, his mother seems older, more careworn. You haven’t changed, he tells her. Not one bit. Not a single grey hair on your head. What’s your secret? She smiles, girlishly. He is so charmingly convincing that this might just be true. But on this visit, after all the news has been updated, the gossip told, the relatives visited, they find that they have less to talk about than they expected. At times they will sit together in silence. Ani, the new maid, bustles in and out. He will read, but his mother will simply sit, without distractions. At times she will glance over at him. He wonders if in these moments she is searching for the son she once knew.

  Part of this, of course, is inevitable. Children grow and become themselves, and they leave their parents behind. There’s a photo that she still keeps of a thunderstorm, when he and the Malay boy from the house opposite carried on playing football, even with the water pouring down. She came out to tell them to go inside, picked up the ball and then, laughing, threw it back to them, water streaming through her hair, down her face, her long hair and blouse soaked through by the rain. Gong Gong had captured them together through his telephoto lens, looking into each other’s eyes, laughing, wet through and absolutely happy. But they grew apart year by year: he entered worlds of his own, and closed doors behind him. He still loved her, but from a distance. What he remembers most now is the tension of those Saturday rides back from his grandfather’s house: how they would sit, awkwardly separate, in the back of the taxi. And then the visits had stopped. There was a brief fluorescence, in which the lane outside the house grew a canopy, and bloomed with pale flowers. A flood of relatives and friends, many of whom he had never met. Peanut shells and packet drinks to be cleaned up, and then the slow procession to the crematorium. Then nothing: a shuttered house, an empty space, a new en-bloc development where his grandfather’s home had been. No more taxi rides. And, just last year, after his most recent flight home, a final separation, when he had told her that he would no longer go to Mass. I just don’t believe in it any more, he’d said. And then, when tears began to gather in her eyes, You know, you can not believe in God and still be a good person. He had thought this emotional release might have brought them closer, but if anything it has driven them further apart. She has not spoken about it again.

  But there is something else that he notices about her, something that has nothing to do with him. A rigidity. On the outside, perhaps, like a carapace. Or perhaps it is inside her: a slow hardening of the heart. She has taken early retirement, and as early retirees do, thrown herself into a round of activities and good works. She tutors for CDAC; she volunteers at the community centre; in the morning, long before he stumbles downstairs, she has already returned from her exercise class. And yet as this part of her life has opened, something about her has closed off. There is one incident in particular that surprises him. She tells him that she would like to go on some of the trips that the CC organises, but that she has no one to go with. Go with Ani, he says: you get on well together now, after those difficult first few months. And then she says something that shocks him.

  I am not happy. I cannot bear it that she should be happy.

  He finds himself clinging onto her words, repeating them to himself, as he did with other words as a child. But this is different. It is as if you were out walking in the midday heat and came across something inexplicable: a well, perhaps, in the centre of the road, cold, infinitely dark and deep.

  • • •

  In the afternoon, he walks out onto a silent street. The churchgoers have long gone. The open drain has long been covered over: the street is neat, orderly, its pavements enclosed by concrete kerbs. There are orange signs telling you where you can or cannot park, and little parking bays marked out carefully with bright white lines. If he listens carefully, he can still hear the sound of water, flowing beneath a metal grid set into the pavement.

  Children no longer play in the road. He struggles to remember what it was like for him as a boy. Purposeless activity with friends; riding your bike here or there; improvised football games, scissors paper stone, guppies, spiders in the long grass by the drain; once, a dragonfly. The street is bare now, and seems hotter. Perhaps there used to be some trees that have now been cut down, but he cannot remember them, and there are no visible stumps. As he walks through the neighbourhood, in the next few days, he sees no one. Or not quite no one. The maid putting out the laundry or washing the car, exchanging quiet glances with the postman; the work crew with hard hats digging up the road; early in the morning, on future strolls, a group of seniors practising taiji in a small sliver of park. Yet the owners of the houses stay behind locked doors.

  After a few days, he realises the Malay house is no longer there. He finds he cannot quite remember it exactly. It was wooden, brightly painted, on stilts, with a set of worn stairs at the front, leading up to a door that was always open. The compound surrounding it had been quite bare, perhaps with a sealing wax palm in one corner, or fruit trees behind the house. There was a fence. Or was there? In Malaysia he has seen similar houses, with new wire mesh fences, coated in green plastic. So now he remembers the house opposite as having such a fence, although he cannot really be sure. The house, like his grandfather’s house, has disappeared without leaving a trace behind; he is uncertain which of the new dwellings has superseded it.

  His mother points the replacement house out to him, almost directly across the street. By future standards, at least, it is still modest: two storeys, with the rough stucco walls and terracotta tiled roofs that are fashionable at this time. Its occupants, she tells him, are seen only infrequently. She does not know their names. They have built a wall next to the street, broken only by small peepholes with wrought iron bars that curve outwards. In the week before he flies away again, when he loiters, solitary, on the street, he sometimes catches sight of hints of life through these gaps in the wall: clothes flapping on a drying rack, a potted plant, a plump brown arm raised up and, once, an eye that looks back at him, winks, and then quickly vanishes.

  In that week he stays with his mother, something about the house begins to bother him. If he goes close to the house in the daytime, or in the evening when its inhabitants are not about, he can hear something cry out. He says “something” to himself because it is not quite human. At times, he hears a low, drawn-out syllable, repeated ten or twenty times, rising in volume, and then falling again. If this is a word, it is not quite comprehensible, although he feels it should be: perhaps it is in a language he does not speak, but if so that language is raw and elemental, uncivilised. At others it is more musical, almost like a brass instrument, a tuba or a French horn, a snatch of the music that you hear at a wake that is too short to settle into a melody. And then, as he approaches the wall, the sound dies away, replaced by a scratching and shuffling, and the sound of beating wings. It is as if something is aware of him, through the layers of stucco and plaster, waiting.

  He mentions this to his mother. She’s noticed it too. A bird, she tells him, that they keep in a tiny cage, suspended from the eaves. A parrot, she thinks, or maybe a parakeet. He should try talking to it, to see if it will repeat what he says. One afternoon, he follows her suggestion. He sidles up to an opening in the wall, hearing the rustling, a creak of metal as the cage sways back and forward, out of sight. He starts talking, self-consciously, too fast, introducing himself. A pause. Then, in return, he receives that same old drawn-out syllable, rising up in intensity and then falling away.

  “It’s cruel,” he tells his mother in the evening. “You should call the SPCA
.”

  She shrugs. The bird is clearly mad, after its long confinement. If the door of the cage opened, would it really fly out? And where would it go? You cannot reason with a bird.

  On the night he is to fly off, he takes a last walk through the neighbourhood. The sun has just set, and the houses are, for once, full of life. Lights have been switched on in ground-floor rooms; he can smell curry, fried chicken, hear the clatter of chopsticks, a Taiwanese soap opera blaring on television, and in one bungalow, upstairs, a piano played hesitantly. A few of the houses, he notices, are lit up in silence, odourless, marked only by the quiet hum of an aircon compressor. He turns into the road to his house. Frogs croak, and fall silent as he passes. And then he feels an overwhelming sense that he is being followed. Something behind him steps on the cover over the storm drain, making it clatter and vibrate. He quickens his pace. There is a patter on the concrete, on the tarmac, like falling rain, or the imprint of tiny webbed feet. He turns around. Nothing. An empty lane, with only the sound of a bird’s voice that cannot possibly be human, rising and falling.

  2015

  Years later, he returns to the street again, on the cusp of middle age. When he comes to visit his mother, he crosses the street now, to the site of the old Malay house and its dumpy successor. A condominium is being built there; a developer has bought up a few adjacent lots. He’s booked a unit for his family, and the building is now nearly finished. A long steel gate, not yet operational, will roll open on a touch on his handphone. The workers know him from previous visits, and so he enters, shoes crunching on the grains of sand scattered on the granite of the lobby parking bay. The Bangladeshi workers who are putting finishing touches to the garden are asleep in the shade of the lobby porch, bodies in dirty blue overalls scattered like discarded clothes. One, he notices as he steps quietly past, has a smile on his face, sleeping as effortlessly as he once slept as a child.