The next message arrived on Thursday night, sandwiched between an advertisement seeking Caucasian children as models and a link to a series of theatre reviews. Again, Kenneth’s clipped, precise prose. An initial apology to his audience for not writing sooner, followed by an explanation of how busy he’d been. Kian still found it puzzling to know who Kenneth might be. Obviously, someone who knew the family well. Not a brother, clearly—he referred to the parents as Mr and Mrs Ng. Surely not a husband or fiancé: he was too restrained, not proprietary enough. Yet thinking about Kenneth was a form of procrastination, Kian realised—the way you stand waist-deep in cold water, waving your arms, delaying the shock of plunging in.
A deep breath and he dove below the surface. She seemed to be recovering well but now she’s developed an infection. The doctors don’t know where it came from—you know how it is in hospitals. She’s conscious for most of the time, but she finds it difficult to speak. There’s some internal bleeding, somewhere in the body… Her mouth fills up every now and then with a mixture of blood and mucus, like the filling of Ang Ku Kwei—you know, the peanut one, how it gums up your mouth—so the nurses have to clean it away. She’s in intensive care now, so I’m sure you’ll understand that we can’t have many visitors. The illness has been a long one; she has fought very hard… We can still hope. Whatever your religion, you may wish to remember her in your prayers during this difficult time.
He knew the hospital where she was warded. She was in the star-shaped, pink new building that he’d visited frequently towards the end of his grandfather’s life—not on the same floor as the geriatric medicine ward, but then again all floors were identical. And so he could visualise entering the building from the taxi rank, floating disembodied up the two flights of escalators, past the clinics, the shop that sold curry puffs, the crowded food court, to the parallel columns of waiting lifts. The lift doors closed with a click, like a bell struck once; he’d keep his eyes focused on the floor as they ascended the tower, stopping at what seemed to be every floor to embark and disembark new passengers. On the eleventh floor, the door would open to a lobby, glass windows looking out over a hazy cityscape. He would pass two small children playing in determined oblivion by the water fountain; the ward door to the right would open automatically with a rush of air onto another corridor which he’d follow, past the pantry and the nurses’ station, to the pastel vinyl and wood veneer of a closed door. But the door to her room always remained shut. He could visualise an empty room—the layout of the furniture, the elaborate controls of the bed, the sensible couch for visitors, even the small, framed fragments of china that decorated the walls. Yet he could not place her in it, could not see her visitors, the busy nurses, the family conferences held in whispers outside, the rhythms of life that ebbed and flowed around her unmoving body.
He gave up. This time he found it more difficult to sleep.
• • •
The next morning, he decided to act. He should call her parents. He mentally counted out the time difference: sixteen hours ahead. Best to call the parents in their morning, perhaps, before they went to the hospital, but not early enough to wake them. So he should call at about five o’clock. No teaching today; he drank strong coffee, worked his way through a stack of student papers, pacing himself, three at a time. Before lunch, he went for a run on the beach, past the old seaplane dock, the yachting centre, along the pathway by the beach looking out over the North Shore. The tide was recessed, revealing acres of mud; container ships floated, copper-red in the harbour, dwarfed by the mountains behind. He ran slowly, keeping time within himself. On the way out, he listened to a randomly-downloaded podcast—a plummy BBC voice described penguins in Antarctica struggling to maintain their habitat on a diminishing shelf of ice. At the café on Locarno Beach, he paused, stretched, and then began the return journey, feeling his feet crunch on the grey gravel of the pathway, listening out for the cyclists surging past him, like ghosts, from behind.
The podcast finished, and he found himself rehearsing what he might say on the phone. Li Jun’s father was fully bilingual, he remembered her telling him, her mother more comfortable in Mandarin or Hokkien than in English. It would be better to reach out to her in Chinese. The first part was easy—the formalities of greetings that you learned very early, and which never left you.
Mrs Ng? My name’s Kian Boon. I’m an old friend of your daughter’s. I live in Vancouver now. I called because…
But here he paused. How would the conversation continue? He needed to find a way in, past the wall of formality. Like when you’re out on the Sound, and you come to a boom of chained logs. You nudge with the boat, seek for an opening that you cannot see—a link left deliberately open so that a beam can pivot back, like a clenched arm, in the still water. He could not think of how he might find it, this way into the intimacy of family.
He returned, showered, hung around the apartment, picking at marking and at lunch, making brief excursions to buy a newspaper and milk, yet returning quickly, as though held by an invisible tether. When he eventually came to call, the process was somehow reassuring—the thick weight of the cordless phone in his hand; the recorded voice messages as he navigated his way through the calling card menu; the scale of tones as he entered the numbers on the keypad.
A pause. Then, he could hear the phone ringing in another living room, half a world away. Once, twice, three times. Then a scuffle, the sound of a breath exhaled; in the distance, a Teresa Teng song. A woman’s voice.
“? Hello?”
“?” he mouthed back, lips opening wide, like a fish.
“?” She was more persistent now, more suspicious.
He opened his mouth. He wanted the words he had prepared to march out in a procession, but there was only emptiness, only air. A pause, and then a clatter: the tap of fingers, maybe, on a marble table-top? He heard her call out for Li Jun’s father to come to the phone. His breath was trapped, extended over thousands of miles.
Approaching footsteps.
“” she said again.
He spoke with effort.
“ Sorry, wrong number.”
He put down the phone.
• • •
On Friday, he went over to Jan’s again, bringing offerings—wine, fresh fish and vegetables from the store. They cooked together with less humour and a growing domesticity. Then, for the first time, she told him of her frustrations at work, chopping onions with venom, scraping scales with a blunt knife as though they were a carapace over her boss’s skin. This again was something new, if not entirely unexpected—a confirmation of intimacy. And yet listening to her, tasting food and wine in the mouth, looking out over the lights of the city, he was aware of a persistent itch of dissatisfaction. I do this more these days, he thought. Others talk, I listen, echo back, empathise, using skills that I’ve never needed to learn. And yet I’m less interested, less hungry for confessions.
“It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this,” she said finally. “You don’t mind me venting, do you?”
Of course not, he assured her. And yet somewhere inside himself he knew that this wasn’t true. It’s not that I mind listening to you, he thought, but I want you to listen to me. Listen for my sound.
When they went to bed, her fingers were thankfully warm under the covers. When they made love, he was always surprised by the determined angularity of her body, the concentration she took in controlling pleasure, climax, release. The bed was by a window, looking out over the city: when he woke at night, he felt that he could step out onto a ground of frosted stars. The comforter had shifted sideways, one corner protruding between them. The coldness of her hands now. He burrowed next to her for warmth, but never quite found a way for their bodies to fit together. And the smell of her body: cinnamon? almond?—always something he couldn’t quite locate—exotic, entrancing, but unfamiliar, not everyday. Something that would never be his own.
The morning was bright—sunlight through open curtains, joggers on the seawall.
No ghosts here. She shook out her hair. “It’s a great day,” she said. “Want to look at the salmon stream?”
He remembered the hatchery on the North Shore: square tanks, the heavy-nosed, penned fish. This was different, she told him. This was real. After coffee, they drove out in her car up the valley, suburban malls gradually flattening to a narrow strip of farmhouse-studded fields framed by mountains on either side. She drove for half an hour or so, then turned off the road. Soon they were in suburbia again; they passed a White Spot, a small mall with a credit union, an insurance agent and a funeral home, and then she turned into a parking lot surrounded with trim privet. “Over there.” She pointed to a path next to the hedge, got out, and gestured to him, impatient.
The air outside was cold. He closed the car door reluctantly, listened to the central locking click shut, then followed her. At first he doubted that it was a salmon stream. The setting was impossibly domestic: a thin trench of water that cut through the turf of gardens and backyards, skirted the sidewalk of a suburban street and vanished into a tiny, well-groomed park. Here there was a small bridge, and they could lean over the tubular steel of the railings and look into the creek. The water was shallow, its surface uneasy, scored with traces of underwater snags that only occasionally broke the surface. If he looked upstream, the low winter light bounced off the water and turned it silver-grey, as opaque as the towers of the city. But directly down from him, it was transparent as air, flowing over logs and other debris now cloaked with a velvet of silt.
“Look,” she said.
She was standing on the other side of the bridge, facing downstream, where the creek deepened into a tunnel excavated between the trees. She pointed. A grey fish, moving sluggishly, just at the place where the surface of the water began to break into lumps of light.
“More like a catfish,” he said.
They moved along the bank to get a closer view. The single salmon swam slowly, its dark body blotched white with fungus. Every now and then, an unseen current of water would catch it unawares, slide it a metre or so downstream; it would struggle with an ebbing undulation of the body to regain position.
“Look,” she said again. “At the bottom of the river.”
He saw them in dizzy revelation: the floor of the creek was tessellated not with logs but with dead fish, shrouded in the fine grey silt, already receding into the riverbed. The snags that broke the surface were fins, or flanks picked through to the bones by hungry birds. In the outer world, decay, but in the cold folds of the stream only suspension, a gradual fading into the comfort of the riverbed. The salmon bodies were stiff, stacked on each other like logs in a fire. They puzzled him, as if there were a pattern to them, a regularity that he could not quite grasp.
“Like a cemetery,” she said.
When he took her fingers in his hand, he noticed how pale the skin was—translucent, broken only by the chocolate brown of a mole.
• • •
This is what life does to you: it catches you up in its rhythms. Saturday and Sunday with Jan, all those mundane domestic tasks still deep-dyed with the warmth of novelty when done together. It was only when they returned to his apartment to pick up clothes that he half remembered: he felt a renewed restlessness, as physical as an itch. He wanted to go to the computer, hear the hard disk grumble to life, open the inbox and then scroll through the messages. Yet he was buoyed up in the moment: he had almost forgotten what he would look for there. Another life claimed him now, brushed thinly but persistently like watercolour over the blankness of memory. The ache of muscles after the gym; coffee in the mouth over slow brunches; sunlight through hemlock on trails high into the North Shore mountains. Another weekend opened and then closed. On Monday, he taught classes again, returned in the afternoon to the disorder of a neglected apartment.
More emails. A ladder of messages that climbed endlessly up the screen. A walking tour of the museum district, a performance art piece at a converted shophouse. The last posting on Caucasian models had generated a frenetic discussion on “race”. He traced it, from a sharply-worded first intervention, an escalation of conflict, to the moderator’s humorous deflation, and agreement by all parties to agree to disagree. He saw Kenneth’s messages early on, but left them until last, three islands of bold type in a long stream of discarded headlines. Then he clicked on the most recent one.
Dear Friends,
I regret to transmit you some sad but not unexpected news. Li Jun passed away at about noon today. Her mother, father, and brother were with her. The wake will be held at 44 Jalan Simpang and the funeral ceremony will be at Mount Vernon on Saturday at noon…
Kenneth, he thought, you’ve outdone yourself.
He remembered again. Once in Singapore, when she was in England, when they’d still kept their connection alive, he’d taken a bus to the west of the island, walked by her parents’ house. It was set in an estate built for public servants in the 1970s. Then, he imagined, it had seemed remote, almost on the frontier of the advancing city. Later, it was part of a middle-class suburb, crouching beneath the towers of public housing that had sprouted behind it. He had loitered unobtrusively at a nearby bus stop, as though waiting for the next bus. From his vantage point, he could read a history into the house. There were confident, early additions—a brick wall at the foot of the front garden, and a porch for the car—all to accommodate affluence and a family which grew in tandem. There were later additions, also—hole-in-the-wall air conditioners wedged into improvised gaps in upstairs windows, a room extended awkwardly out over the porch. And after this, after the children had left home, perhaps—nothing. The fruit trees and flowers in the garden, the wild guava and the bougainvillea, grew with a barely trimmed abundance. The car in the driveway was a small Honda Civic, old but well maintained.
He’d tried to reconstruct the house of her childhood then: the cool mosaic floors which her mother—and later she herself—would have mopped clean, the heavy metal-framed windows always fastened open, the iron-grating twisted into wavy lines and the outlines of flowers. He’d summoned up cooking smells, the taste and texture of barley water in the mornings, drinking the syrup and catching the puffed grains in his teeth. He was trying, he knew, to map his own past onto hers. But her past might have been very different; he had no way of knowing.
Now, with Kenneth’s letter before him, he tried another form of reconstruction. The space of the house would be turned inside out: the coffin in the front room, awnings with round tables underneath them, like water-lily leaves encroaching on the surface of the lane. At night, after work, shoals of friends would gather to pay their respects, and then stay, talk, drink the packets of water and melon tea, chew nervously at peanuts and melon seeds between the walls of white wreaths, heavy-smelling flowers. There would be the usual family disputes: was she a Buddhist, Christian or freethinker? Chants and prayers would compete over the coffin until it departed on its last slow journey.
Sending condolences was easy. He searched Singapore websites, found a florist, chose a bouquet, typed a brief message. Credit card and contact details, then a final touch of the mouse. Done. In a few hours, he knew, they’d email back. Just to check, Mr Kwek. You want the flowers delivered on Friday, on the last day? We can send them earlier, you know, then everyone will see them. And he’d reply, no, you don’t understand me. I want them to come very late. She’d understand that. So as few people as possible see, just before the wreaths are all taken down, when the undertakers pick out the most beautiful flowers to place on the coffin.
He sat for a few minutes at his desk. The heat of the apartment bothered him. I can’t stay here, he thought. I need to go out. And there’s still time. I can walk out now, on the September beach, before it gets dark. The weather’s clear; I can look out, over the still water, the huge ships silent, like logs in the inlet, the black wall of mountains beyond. I’ll walk on the sand, by the sea’s edge, the jetty in the distance, its fishermen like cutouts against the beginnings of a sunset. The water there w
ill be as opaque as beaten silver, or mirrored glass. I won’t even try to see beneath. As I walk, I’ll pull my elbow away from the side of my body. Just a little; like that. I know that she will come. I know that she will touch me just here, on the inside of my elbow. I know that she will take my arm.
When Pierre Met Harry
9 August 2015
Dear Madam Chin,
Thank you very much for your recent correspondence.
We are pleased to accept your donation of the papers of your late husband, Dr Chin Boo Geok, to the National Archives. As per our prior discussion, given the sensitive nature of the documents, particularly those from the period of Dr Chin’s residence in London, we will not list them in our online catalogue. However, they will be available for consultation at the Archives, subject to application by individual researchers.
There is one item that we regretfully cannot accept. We found among Dr Chin’s letters a short typescript that purports to describe, from Mr Lee’s point of view, a meeting between Mr Lee Kuan Yew and future Canadian Prime Minister Mr Pierre Trudeau at the London School of Economics in 1947. While we have determined that the document has been typed on an Oliver portable typewriter of an appropriate vintage, the pages are either an elaborate fictional joke, or a forgery. They do not correspond to any notion of history that I am aware of, and surely represent muddled thinking on Dr Chin’s part. We are certain that you will agree that to include them in the papers might confuse readers, especially the younger Singaporeans who frequently use our facilities for their National Education project work. This is particularly true given the public mourning in Singapore on the passing of Mr Lee in March this year, and the current SG50 Celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of our nation’s independence. The document is thus returned to you with this letter.
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