Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  “You do know this is a member-only club?”

  I nod. “I’m a journalist. I’m here to see Mr Lee Kuan Yew.”

  He picks up a pen, and then looks down.

  “From which newspaper?”

  “The Ubyssey.”

  He raises his eyes.

  “The student newspaper? Do you have an appointment with Mr Lee?”

  No, I tell him. But I met Mr Lee yesterday. We talked. It seemed that we had many things in common. I’m sure that he would want to share his experiences with students here. I stop talking, but I can still hear my voice bouncing around, too shrill among the leather chairs, beechwood tables, and bright steel bannisters.

  The club has a policy, he replies, of not disturbing guests. Perhaps I might like to leave my name and contact number?

  “Can’t you just check?”

  “It’s against our policies.”

  I look sideways, up the stairs to the guest suites. If I could just run up there, and knock on his door. His eyes follow mine, and he shakes his head, slowly. He offers me pen and paper.

  “Miss…?”

  “Marshall, Tessa Marshall.”

  “Just write your details here.”

  I reach for the pen. He passes it to me, but he is already looking over my shoulder to the staircase, his expression softening. There’s a Chinese man on the stairs, in a suit as crisp as Mr Lee’s coat, descending slowly.

  “Mr Yeoh,” says the Suit, as if I now don’t exist. “I hope everything is now to Mr Lee’s satisfaction.”

  Mr Yeoh nods. That accent again, those full vowels. “Just a couple more questions, Mr Gardiner.”

  “Of course. The dinner arrangements?”

  He’s next to me now. I am expected, I know, to stand back. But I sat there at the counter, ignoring the receptionist’s glares.

  “Mr Yeoh,” I find myself saying. “I’m so glad that I’ve managed to meet you.” And I tell him, in something of a hurry, about the breakfast yesterday.

  He shakes his head. “Mr Lee has come here to rest, and to study. He’s already said all that he wanted to the press.”

  “” I say. Please. He looks at me, surprised. Then he reaches for the phone, dials up an extension. Snatches of speech. He turns back to me.

  “Mr Lee would be delighted to see you tomorrow, at four. Do make sure you are punctual.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll be there.”

  “Make sure you sign in as a guest when you come,” the Suit says as a parting shot as I take up my umbrella. “We can’t just have anyone roaming around in here.”

  • • •

  October 23, Evening

  Characters to write on flashcards to memorise; very important to keep up!

  – kuang1 lin2 – honour someone with yr. presence

  – tsung3 li 3 – prime minister

  – yu2 hsing2 – demonstration

  – shih4 wei1 – to demonstrate, to put on a show of force

  – chin4 ch’eng2 – the Forbidden City

  • • •

  October 24, Midday

  By the time we get to the Hebb Theatre, the crowd is already spilling out onto East Mall. We stand on the fringes in the thin winter light. After five minutes, we’re hemmed in. I can see nothing, apart from the branches of trees above. In the nearest tree is a young man, blond, startlingly beautiful, the hairs on the back of his neck lit up by the sun. Sean squeezes my hand. I look down, and then up again. “The SUB,” the boy is shouting. “The theatre’s too small. Jerry’ll talk to us from the stairs.” And so the crowd flows, across the road, through the rows on saplings, to that new, raw concrete concourse. We are closer to the front now, so when Jerry Rubin appears at the top of the steps, we can see him clearly.

  Jerry knows his theatre. I saw him once in a newspaper, appearing before HUDAC wearing the costume of an American revolutionary. Today he wraps himself in a red and blue flag, a caped crusader.

  “What’s he wearing?” Sean’s voice, and then stubble, in my ear.

  “The NLF flag. National Liberation Front. From Vietnam. Listen.”

  He starts slowly, to a mixture of boos and cheers, shouting through his megaphone. He stops, waits until the crowd falls quiet. We’re about now, he tells us. This is our time. Society wants to turn all of us into policemen, policemen of ourselves. There’s no need to obey those rules. We shouldn’t be the spare parts that keep someone else’s automobile running. Universities like UBC? They are babysitting agencies, when they could be so much more.

  He tells us about the Democratic Convention in Chicago. November 5th will be election day in the United States. The tragedy is that Americans are choosing a world government, a government for whom no one else in the world can vote, not even here, in Canada.

  The woman next to me takes a long toke from a rollie. She passes it to me, but I send it on without sampling. There’s feedback on the megaphone, and I lose track of what Jerry is saying for a minute. He’s talking about Pigasus, the porker they nominated for President. Why have half-pigs like Hubert Humphrey, Governor Wallace, or Richard Nixon, when you can go the whole hog? I’ve seen the Chicago protests on TV, a drove of police officers hustling Pigasus off into custody. But he seems to have made his escape. He’s here before us now, squirming in a yippie’s arms. They were going to roast him after the election, Rubin tells us, but that pissed off the vegetarian members of the movement. So he’s been reprieved. Cheers from the crowd, even from the engineers.

  We need to stop talking, he tells us. We need to act. We’ve got all these people together: we need to do something. Is there anywhere on this campus that needs liberating?

  “The faculty club,” I say, more to myself than anyone else. But someone nearby picks up my words, shouts them out. Others echo them, nearer the stairs.

  “What was that?” he says. “The faculty club? The faculty club! Lead the way.”

  The crowd oozes past the library, gathering onlookers and activists alike. Sean and I are at the back again. When I get to Main Mall, there’s a little rise, and I can look forward, to the rose garden and the sea. The mall is full of bodies. Students in their thousands, surely: our own little march on Washington. At the club itself, the mass slows, coagulates.

  “Should we wait?” Sean again, tugging at my hand.

  “I’m not standing around.”

  These are the bystanders, I see, crowding the parking lot, not daring to enter. The atmosphere’s festive. But the real action is inside. I push my way through them to the entrance.

  Reception’s deserted. In the dining room and lounge, a few faculty members remain, hunkered down in their easy chairs, or staring mournfully into their consommés, sunken islands in a sea of students. Sean’s gone missing, but squeezing my way into the bar, I meet Albie, passing out cigarettes. A friend of his has found the key to the liquor cabinet, and lined up bottles of spirits and liqueurs on the bar counter. Mix your own cocktail he tells me, thrusting a drinks menu into my hand. I look at the names: Mai Tai, Tom Collins, Doctor’s Special, Stinger, Screwdriver, Singapore Sling. And this makes me think of Mr Lee, and our appointment.

  When I climb the stairs, I find the doors on the guest suites corridor locked. Outside, one of them, a bearded man in a tweed jacket fiddles with his tie. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demands, so I just push past him, and carry on as if I know where I’m going. At the corridor’s end, there’s a glass door, and then a long balcony, running back along the length of the club. I look down, to the courtyard with its pool. Two students, with what looks like a Zippo lighter, are trying to set fire to an American flag that obstinately refuses to catch alight. Splashing in the water. It’s the golden-haired boy again, swimming naked in the pool. He stands up, nipples pinched with cold, and shakes his upper torso dry. Behind him, dark green cedars, and then the mountains of Bowen Island and the North Shore.

  There are French windows on the balcony. The first room is empty, but in the second, I find what I am looking for. Mr
Lee and his secretary sit in armchairs. Mr Lee is nearer the window, a coffee table piled with papers and books in front of him. He has picked up one of the books and is reading, oblivious to or uninterested in the commotion below.

  I knock on the glass, and Mr Yeoh starts, looks up, and comes forward, reluctantly. He can’t see my face, I realise: I’m just a silhouette against the sky. There’s a brief exchange of sign language through the glass. I mime writing, then cup my hand to my ear: he, recognising me now, shakes his head, and points to his watch. Too early.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  It’s Tweed Jacket, now, at the end of the balcony, accompanied by the Suit from reception yesterday.

  I’m here for an interview, I tell him. His friend should remember me.

  They come closer. Why don’t I go downstairs, he suggests. Join the fun and games. I have to understand that the club isn’t a zoo. I can’t just wander round, looking at the big game. They have a guest staying here, a very important guest whose care is of paramount importance.

  “And my interview?”

  “Regrettably postponed. If you don’t leave, we will call the police.”

  “Well,” I say. “Why don’t we let Mr Lee be the judge of that?”

  We turn to the window again. Mr Lee is beckoning Tweed Suit with his little finger. He hesitates in reply, then draws a circle with his hands. He’ll enter by the corridor. When he enters the suite from the back, we’re treated to a silent movie. Mr Lee listens, then points with his fingers; Tweed Suit replies, speaks again, and finally shrugs. Mr Yeoh opens the door.

  “Sit down, Miss Marshall.”

  I take the offered chair.

  “Professor Huberman here,” Mr Lee says, “has been concerned to protect me. But this doesn’t bother me at all. It would take something of a much greater seriousness than a student protest to get me excited.”

  The chair’s small and hard, quite unlike Mr Lee’s plush armchair. Mr Yeoh has placed it in such a way that I am looking into the light, so that I see Mr Lee in his armchair in profile, like one of those silhouette miniatures at the art gallery. The French windows are still open a crack, and I hear music starting up from below.

  “Now,” he says, settling back in his chair. “You have some questions for me?”

  I clear my throat. “Are you a socialist?”

  • • •

  Downstairs, afterwards, I drown my sorrows, sipping Scotch beneath a sign that reads PEOPLE’S BAR: FREE FOR EVERYONE. In the corner, a bearded professor explains Freudian repression to two women in Afghan jackets. Or rather, to their breasts. Still no Sean. I find a place by the door where I can see the action. The golden-haired boy ambles up to me, smiles, and at first I think he’s hitting on me, but he’s tripping; he’s somewhere else.

  I want to nurse my disappointment with the interview. All those questions that he would not answer, that he turned away with disdain, or with laughter. Only forty-five, he told me, and yet he seemed in our conversation so unutterably old. I look downwards through the smoke, to the dancers by the pool. They’ve brought in an amplifier, and the floor shakes. A girl with long hair plays the mouth organ, holding it closely, nervously, as though she is biting her nails. What now? Storm the walls, enter the Forbidden City, and only then you realise that power is not here.

  I do not know why I look up at that moment. Mr Lee is descending the staircase, two policemen in front of him, one behind, while Mr Yeoh scurries along at the rear. He looks down into the foyer with something like contempt. For a moment our eyes meet, and I think he nods to acknowledge me, but then he flinches and looks away. Perhaps he no longer recognises me; he is catching, clutching at a memory only so that he can crush it. The university authorities will come for him, he has told me. They will take him to a place where he can read in quiet, and prepare his speech. At that moment, as now, he looked infinitely weary. You have to understand, he told me. We are the masters now, in our own house. We are on our own. We will not follow anyone. But as the police part the crowd, I wonder. I have seen how he commands, but at that moment, flanked by his guards, he might just as easily be a captive, led off to imprisonment. The last I see of him is his back, tightly encased in that tailored coat. Mr Yeoh opens an umbrella. The door closes. In the club, the party continues all night.

  Mudskippers

  EARLY ON THE morning before she is due to fly to London, Kathy and Jian Wei go to Sungei Buloh. They are among the day’s first visitors to the wetland reserve. Fifty now and greying at the temples, Kathy’s husband seems to her—at these moments at least—curiously boyish. He has prepared for the expedition like a Boy Scout, squirrelling away umbrellas, insect repellent, water, and other treasures in his backpack. Now he marches ahead onto the boardwalk. She wants to tell him to slow down, not to brush cobwebs aside without noticing the golden orb spiders suspended at each web’s centre, big enough to span a palm. When they come to the river, she points out the crocodile under the bridge, almost entirely submerged in water, and he grunts in acknowledgement. She feels a certain relish in showing him something that he’s missed. This comes, no doubt, from a comfortable sourness in the way they relate to each other that is found in all old married couples, especially childless ones. You put on all the bug repellent you want, but you still walk with a companion whom it cannot quite guard against, who knows all the tender places on the body, how easy it is to draw blood.

  “You’ll miss me?” she asks, with a faint hint of remorse.

  “Of course. But make sure you ask your Dad this time?”

  “You don’t mind if he comes to Singapore to live with us?”

  He shrugs, impatient. “Of course not. We’ve been over this. , what. He should be with family, with his own people.”

  They have been over this, many times. But it’s easy enough for you, she thinks. You’ll just come back from work and share a beer with him, tussle over the English Premier League scores. Some minor male bonding, another round of stories about his posting at Seletar airbase in the 50s, with the easy excuse of late hours at the office if it gets out of hand. Meanwhile, for me…

  “We can get a helper,” he says. “It won’t be too much of a burden on you.”

  “But all his friends are in England. He wouldn’t adapt. He’d just hang around the flat all day.”

  “We’ve talked about this. That’s for him to decide. Don’t ask him and you’ll never know.”

  They wander further. The boardwalk ends in a gravel path leading to another bridge and a viewing platform built out over the narrow estuary, with stairs spiralling upwards into an onion-shaped dome of staves. The leaflet they consult calls the structure a “pod”; it’s pretty enough in the mist, but strangely purposeless. The wooden slats are too far apart for it to serve as a hide, and there is no roof to protect you from the rain. They pause before the staircase and look out at the rising tide spooling across the mud.

  A flash of movement. She points.

  “Mudskipper. See it?”

  After a minute, they can see dozens of them, each the exact grey of the mud, some in the water, letting the tide pull them slowly higher, others glistening on mudbanks between the channels. You first see them only when they move. When the cheeks puff up, or the mouth gapes, or when, after doing push-ups slowly across the mud surface, they twitch suddenly, flick their tails into the water.

  “Eeee,” he says, childlike, but he’s right in finding something disgusting in them, halfway between a frog and a fish, but with the logic of neither. Creatures assembled from leftover parts, the bulbous eyes and the clumsy, heavy head grafted awkwardly onto that supple, tapered tail. And then that tall dorsal fin, raised suddenly, perfect but incongruous, like a sail stranded miles inland.

  They breathe through pores in their skin, he tells her. And keep air stored up in sacs, like a scuba diver, in their gills. The skin surface must be kept continuously moist: they must always be in water, or, when the tide is out, must burrow down deep into pockets i
n the mud. Yet they have left open water behind for good: some species, if completely submerged, will drown.

  She watches them slither and twitch a little longer, and then she begins to climb the stairs. He’s close behind her, so that when their feet slip on the wet surface of the tread, they catch each other in their arms, and freeze for a moment. She likes this sudden contact, this pressing together of bodies. Early in their marriage, he would have held onto her for a long time: now he pushes her away a little too quickly. She could turn to him, and say, “Do I disgust you that much?” But then there’s the difficulty of weighting the voice for such a question: light, of course, with just a hint of depth but no trace of a break. And even if she could get it pitch-perfect, she knows what would happen: a puzzled smile, protestations, and then, on the boardwalk as they walk back, a sly hand reaching out, held in hers for a self-conscious minute.

  “You’re okay?”

  “Fine,” she says, clutching at the handrail, and then shifting her weight forward.

  • • •

  The flight from Singapore to London is the same as ever. Overhead luggage bins bulge with last-minute Changi shopping, and she has to work hard to find a space for her modest carry-on. She has booked the aisle seat to have more room, but her neighbour to her left jams his elbow against hers on their shared armrest, and turns his face away so that she cannot catch his eye. They do not talk. She watches films fitfully, breaking off to the route map of a yellow plane inching its way across continents. New Delhi. After the meal, she sleeps, and wakes to a baby’s sharp cries. Ankara. Something hot brushes past her face. A lobster-pink arm, fresh from a beach in Thailand, followed by a muttered apology and the flapping of slippers in the darkened aisle. Only on arrival does she realise what has changed. The new passport she fishes out at immigration is thicker than before, and red, not burgundy. She can no longer use the citizen’s queue, but must wait in a much longer line with all the others. The booths ahead of her at the end of the hall are newly refurbished, all steel and dark glass. There’s something hard-edged about this country, not like the softness of the light at Changi, the welcome home when her passport is returned. Touch the wrong place on the edge of this cold, northern island and you might cut yourself, and begin to bleed. When she is called to the counter, the officer looks down at the passport, and then up again at her.