Heaven Has Eyes
Page 19
“Was it good, Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Remind you of Jalan Kayu?”
He nods, but still will not look at her. A private smile. Now surely is the time to talk.
“You wouldn’t want to come to Singapore, Dad? To live with us?”
He looks up. She is not sure whether she has made a statement or asked a question. Something in her voice is already pulling back.
“I mean, you could come to stay, but everything would be different for you. And you’d miss your friends.”
“Kath.”
That shortening of her name again, which no one else ever does, that reaching out to her, trying to pull her back into childhood.
“Dad.”
He looks up. “That was a long, long time ago.”
He takes a sip of beer now, and then he’s off somewhere else, on another memory. Outside the barracks at Seletar, a young Indian man would cut the grass. They were about the same age: they would share cigarettes, the young man speaking a beautiful, modulated English. “Better than yours, he told me once, you know. And he was right!”
Should she read these digressions as refusals? In a way, they are enough. She can return. She can say now, to Jian Wei, to friends, even to taxi drivers in casual conversation, My father is still in England. I worry about him. We’ve asked him to come here, but he’d rather stay in England. Really. What to do?
• • •
In the evening, she finds that there is little to do. It is light until eight, and her father, after the meal, goes back to work on those tiny pieces of paper under the glare of a silver Anglepoise lamp. Shoulders hunched over the easel, he seems almost to be burrowing into the paper, blindly, finding his way through the touch of his broken hands alone. What is he searching for? She can go out for a walk, of course, into the park at the end of the road, on to the footpath along the old railway line, or wander along the single street of shops that have already closed, trying to summon up interest in country bungalows, or package flights to Malta, Ibiza or Thailand. Yet all routes lead back eventually to her father’s door. She’ll return, and if he’s paused, coax him into conversation for ten minutes, and then make tea. At nine o’clock, he’ll pause, tidy everything up, and then wish her goodnight, slowly climb those narrow, precarious stairs up to his bedroom. Confounded, she’ll linger a little in the sitting room, thumb through his brochures and magazines, and then, after brushing teeth, admit defeat. In bed, she tries to read a novel, but defaults to checking social media on her handphone. A text from Jian Wei, finishing with the inevitable question. So, did you ask him yet? She does not reply. Finally, frustrated, she falls asleep.
• • •
In dreams, she ranges further than she does in her waking hours. She is in the garden at the back of the house, walking down the steps under the wisteria trellis, and onto the stone flagged path. The path is much longer than she remembers, but eventually she comes to the rusty corrugated iron garden shed where he keeps his tools. The door is locked, but she notices something she has never seen before: a flight of concrete steps to a cellar. She descends. They are lined with books from her childhood, that set of leather-bound encyclopaedias inherited from her grandfather, which she would look through, fascinated, on rainy afternoons. She squats down and opens one, to a map of Malaya, and a photograph of a beach with palm trees. The paper crinkles, and that peculiar smell she remembers from childhood flies out, dry, of camphor and pressed flowers, forgotten leaves. The smell puzzles her. She thinks, But I am fifty now. I am no longer a child. And then she feels a tug on her hand. Dad. He has joined her.
They climb the stairs together. He moves with difficulty, apologising for his age. At the top of the stairs the garden has somehow become covered over with mud, soft, grey, glistening, stretching away for miles to the horizon. On the last step, he stumbles, and she clutches hold of him before he falls. As she does so something changes. His body begins to twitch, to slip not down but upwards, his arms dissolving into something close to fins, his torso flapping, spilling through her hands. She holds on to him, her head braced to his back, so that she can no longer see his face. And then he tells her—and she is not sure whether he says this, or whether it is somehow made clear to her without words—Let me go, Kathy. I want to be with her: why do I have to wait so long? But she won’t let him go. She holds on to him, even as his body falls out from her hands and yet remains somehow mudbound, tethered by its weight. The mud sucks at her ankles. If she releases him, she feels, he will still not be able to float free. Yet she does not let go.
• • •
On the day before she is due to leave, they go on a longer drive, to the coast and a little village with its fishing harbour, and a long expanse of beach beyond. It’s hot, and her father surprises her by bringing out a jaunty panama hat. A cravat round his neck, too. He hasn’t quite managed to fasten it correctly, and as she helps him out of the car, she has a momentary urge to reach up, to straighten it out. She resists: she will not become her mother. At the end of the path to the beach, they pause, and he points to a bench. She can go on the sand, and he will wait for her. He’s quite happy to admire the view. So she walks forward, past crumbling concrete fortifications, and the rocky outcrop on her right, teeming with intertidal life. She takes off her slippers. Her sandals. The sand is coarse and gritty, and then smooth. It goes on forever, mingling with sea and then sky. The water, when she reaches it, laps against her toes and then her calves, surprisingly warm. She wades further in. Words begin to return to her. She paddles. She thinks the water will be colder further out. But it’s still warm. Like tea, while it’s brewing. While it’s steeping. Words only we share. . One’s own people. She should ask him again, properly.
She knows she should not stay out too long. If you are not careful here, the tide returns, elliptically, through hidden runnels and channels that snake insidiously behind you. You think that you have your retreat prepared. But you might easily be cut off by this deepening of water, with no way back to land. When she returns, she finds that he has found a friend: one of the fishermen from the village who now crews the lifeboat, swapping sea stories. Another opening closes: they walk back up the hill to the car park. At an ice cream stall, she sees his eyes light up, and so she buys two cones, one for each of them, not forgetting to take plenty of tissues. There must have been a time, she thinks, when he did the same for her, forty-five years ago. She has looked through old photographs of beach outings he keeps in albums in the room she now sleeps in. His body then was tall, like a wall above her. Even then she had looked forward to adulthood, to venturing out. She had not thought then about how you return, half a century later, to childhood, with your future closing in ahead of you. This moment should be perfect. The sun declining on the hill, the high grass waving, like hair, and, very faint, the sound of the sea on shells, tinkling.
“Kath.” He’s looking at her with concern.
“Hay fever. Grass pollen,” she says, sniffing, rubbing her eyes.
• • •
In the evening, he’s suddenly talkative, reminiscing about London in the sixties, the kaleidoscope of Carnaby Street. He remembers he has some drawings he’d like to show her, and so he gets up with effort. Still tall, his body: thin, with that ruined, persistent beauty. He lumbers upstairs. She follows him, trying to stay back, not to rush him, but he still hurries himself and she finds herself pressing behind him, caught up in his enthusiasm. Her foot slips fractionally, and she notices for the first time since arriving the bubbled carpet, the stair rods that have worked their way loose. She’ll fix them before she leaves. Halfway up the stairs, the carpet slips again, further this time. His hand reaches out and clutches for the bannister, but only plucks at it and then flaps away. He begins to fall backwards, very slowly. She is also falling, forward. There’s a cracking noise. She cannot breathe. Her ears are ringing, as though the air has been sucked out of the house. She tries to brace herself, and reaches out. They will catch each other. She will not
let him fall. Not this time, surely.
Acknowledgements
Writing acknowledgements is like drawing up a list for wedding guests: it’s potentially limitless. So many friends, colleagues, family members and students have helped me indirectly in the writing of this book, and I can offer only specific thanks to a few of them here.
I’d like to thank Johan Geertsema and Matilda Gabrielpillai for reading and commenting on earlier, very different drafts of this collection. Conversations with Goh Poh Seng and Lydia Kwa in Vancouver, and with Wee Wanling in Singapore, even though often they weren’t directly about my fiction, helped to shape the collection as a whole. I’d also like to thank the folks at Epigram Books, especially publisher Edmund Wee, editor Jason Erik Lundberg, and designer Lydia Wong for making this book a reality. And above all, I’m grateful to Yun Sian for being with me in so many ways in a writing journey that had many detours and dead ends.
Several of the stories have been published previously. “September Ghosts” was originally published in Prism International 44.3 (Spring 2006); “Two Among Many” in Cha 4 (August 2008), and then reprinted in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2009. “The First Star from the Moon” appeared in an earlier and rather different form as “Host” in QLRS 9.1 (January 2010), and an earlier version of “Penguins on the Perimeter” was published in QLRS 13.4 (October 2014). The title story “Heaven Has Eyes” was one of a number of short stories chosen by Wasafiri to celebrate the journal’s 30th anniversary in 2014, and published digitally on the journal’s website. “Aeroplane” was written for the anthology In Transit, edited by Zhang Ruihe and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (Math Paper Press, 2016). I’d like to thank all the editors of these publications for their thoughtful responses and suggestions for revision.
A number of the stories also adapt archival or published material. “Forbidden Cities” cannibalises accounts of Lee Kuan Yew’s visit to the University of British Columbia in 1968, available in the Rare Books and Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library. “When Pierre Met Harry” makes use of Lee’s speech, “The Returned Student”, made at Malaya Hall, London, in January 1950. “Mudskippers” is informed by oral history accounts of British servicemen at Seletar Camp available in the National Archives, Singapore. Finally, “It’s All in a Dream,” responds to and follows the structure of Lee Kok Liang’s story of the same name, first published in the literary journal Tumasek in 1964.
About the Author
PHILIP HOLDEN is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author and editor of several books of literary criticism and history, focusing on auto/biography, and Singaporean and Southeast Asian literatures; these include the historical anthology Writing Singapore, co-edited with Angelia Poon and Shirley Geok-lin Lim. His short stories have been published in Wasafiri, The Carolina Quarterly, Prism International, QLRS and Cha. Holden has served as Vice President of the Singapore Heritage Society, and Deputy Director of the NUS University Scholars Programme.
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