Death of a Perm Sec

by Wong Souk Yee

  “Like the place?”

  “Yeah.” He lay on his back, eyes closed.

  “Enjoying the holiday?’

  “Yeah.” He still didn’t move.

  “Love me?”

  “Yeah, sweetie.”

  “You want to live here forever with me?”

  “That’s a bit rich, isn’t it?” He was still not moving.

  “What do you want to do most?”

  “Right now I want to sleep, sweetie. I’m bushed.”

  “What do you want to do most in your life?”

  “Hey, let’s get some sleep.” Then he was snoring.

  She knew then that it was all over. Reflection and intimate talk were too cerebral for him. She had tried so hard that feminists would be ashamed of her. But he never loved her back. He couldn’t give her something he didn’t have.

  Ling moves up from her corner of the bed and places her hand on Matthew’s chest to feel his even breathing. She whispers in his ears, “Wake up,” and shakes him gently. “I want to live with you in Sydney.”

  “But?” he asks, expecting a condition to the proposal.

  “I want to live with you in Sydney and do you bloody want to?”

  “You still want to go back?” he asks drowsily.

  “Why not? There’s lots of space there, except I didn’t have many friends. But now I have you.”

  “Are you a citizen there?”

  “Just PR.”

  “How did you get that?”

  “Through marriage.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Was.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It’s okay. He was a dickhead.”

  “No, I mean, that you were married.”

  They both avoid each other’s eyes and wonder what the last sentence would translate into.

  “How long?” he asks at last.

  “Over a year.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Would you also leave me one day when you think I’m a…dickhead?”

  “You’re not, are you?”

  The more Ling laughs at him, the more Matthew craves her. He clears his head from the nap and weighs up the possibilities. He’s used to living in another country but that was when he had the security of a job. Sydney would be different. Working all these years in the foreign service has not equipped him with many skills. He might end up a janitor, washing dishes or both in an Indian restaurant. But Australia is a more laid-back country. He would not have to break his back just to catch up with the latest office memo and the endless politics and technology (though he might still break his back and the dishes). He would not have to beam his toothy smile at embassy cocktails anymore, or get the dirt on his hosts by skulking around hotel rooms and brothels. And there would be the dole to help tide things over. She has a past, her ex, her father, but who doesn’t? Most importantly, he’d have her all to himself without the burden of relations.

  He swings his legs over the bed and sits next to Ling. “Is there a catch somewhere?”

  She smiles and shakes her head.

  EIGHTEEN

  IT IS 2AM. Ming stands at the door and takes a last look around his office on the 43rd floor of the OCBC Centre, at the glass and chrome, and the columns of metallic filing cabinets with confidential client files in alphabetical order. He has chosen this time to go back to his office to pack up to save himself the agony of saying goodbye to his colleagues and them wishing him well. His years in the law firm, which have turned his youth to age, fill a single brown box. His impressive bank account has been frozen. He sees his past and future fleeing past him to disappear into weightless smoke. His work defined his person and formed his routine; his father gave him a sense of history and continuity. With both gone, he has become a piece of flotsam in the vacuous present. He could not have felt more frightened if he were held at knifepoint, which would have at least validated his solidity and existence. The office appears colder without its occupants. With his luck, he would not be surprised if he got mugged on the way to his car. An economic recession is creeping into the country and the crime rate has been climbing. As another statistic in the unemployment graphics, he suddenly feels a strong bond with the unsavoury lowlifes who used to walk in and out of his office.

  In the equally cold car park, he throws the brown box into the back seat of his car, gets behind the wheel and pulls out of the firm’s parking space. He drives in the silence of the night, going wherever his turbulent mind takes him. He first races through red lights but then stops at a green one. After driving for an hour, he is back at Shenton Way. It gives him a feeling akin to the metallic taste in your mouth after a meal of oysters and steak. The road, lined by artificial intelligence buildings, seems humbled by the awesome stillness. He knows every street and building better than he knows the birthdays of friends, of which there are few. He has eaten more meals alone in restaurants and hawker centres in the CBD than at home.

  He swerves left onto the link road to the Ayer Rajah Expressway. Along the broad, quiet highway, he sees strips of fluorescent lights glowing from every floor of the blocks of HDB flats in Redhill and Clementi against the inky sky. The inhabitants are mostly asleep; some would be watching TV soaps from the 60s. But the corridors are lit, he assumes, for people returning home from their night shift. He imagines the types of people they are—factory workers, foreign exchange dealers, flight attendants, bar waitresses, sex workers. Thousands of people living in those little squares. He supposes them to be coarse and uncouth, speaking broken English and staccato Hokkien, eating with their mouths open and picking their noses on the bus. He shudders at the thought that should the bailiff come to possess his condominium, he may have to move into one of those sardine cans. He is afraid of people even at this moment, when he most needs someone.

  He continues to drive as though his hands and feet have become parts of the car, free from the command of his brain. He zips through the sprawling factories in Jurong which, during boom time, hummed and hammered and belched black smoke into the sky day and night. Now most factories operate only on a day shift, and nights are visited by the spirits of industrial accident victims and workers who came from rural villages and lost their nerves on the hectic factory floors. Ming steps on the accelerator only to see more lost souls flying at his windscreen, smashed to smithereens. He is now doing 110 kilometres per hour, 30 above the limit. Willy-nilly he reaches the western-most tip of the island—Tuas.

  Craters in the idle construction sites stretch to the end of the desolate universe, like a lunar wasteland. Ming feels a pair of invisible hands clutching at his entrails. The black hole in him rises to his throat and he lets out a single loud, lonesome wail, stabbing at the car horn to lash out at he doesn’t know who. He wheels a violent turnaround, tyres screeching, and heads back for the city. He locks all four doors and drives with the fury of a caged animal, ignoring the lights at traffic junctions.

  His car takes him to Hill Street. He slows down and circles around Hill Street Centre. It is 5.10am and he reckons he has all the time in the world. In the day, the busy street would not have allowed waiting cars. He drives almost at a crawl and observes the early hours of Singapore’s street life. On his third round, at first light, he sees hunchbacked women on New Bridge Road dragging straw baskets out of Ellenborough Wet Market, leaving in their wake trails of flattened vegetables leaves. Ming gets out of his car and approaches a small woman whose face resembles a railway track map. She is straining to pull a particularly large basket. He asks her in his appalling Cantonese where she is going. Chinatown. He hauls up her basket of shrivelled choy sum and kangkong and leads her to his car. The car boot is not big enough for the woman’s wares so Ming places the mucky, dripping basket onto the back seat, next to the brown box. He tells the woman to get into the car and realises later that she has never sat in a car in all her 74 years. He opens the door for her and helps her with the seatbelt, an act he generally reserves for younger women.r />
  “How much do you make from these vegetables here?” he asks her in the car.

  “Enough for two meals, lor,” she replies in a Cantonese which traces her origin to Shunde county in Guangdong province.

  “You do this every day?”

  “Don’t do where got enough to eat. I’ve no one to look after me.”

  Thinking that he must have asked a stupid question, he tries again. “But…why do the vegetables look so old?”

  “Chay, these are scraps. The market don’t want them so they give them to us. We can still make a few cents out of them,” she says dismissively, her rough knobbly hands smoothing the velvety seat.

  On South Bridge Road, Ming turns right to Smith Street but cannot get onto Trengganu Street as fruit, vegetable and livestock stalls have already filled the narrow lane. He parks illegally on the street that smells of dead rats and carries the old woman’s basket to her lot next to a chicken stall. The sight of chickens being slit at the throat and thrown into a drum of boiling water does not please him. Nor does the poise of a white-haired man plucking feathers from the dead birds’ bodies. He turns away and sees the old woman borrowing newspapers from the chicken stall owner to use as wrappers. He takes another look at her brown, leathery skin and stooped body, stuffs some money into her palm and leaves.

  “This mister is such a good person,” she says to no one in particular and smiles her toothless smile at Ming’s retreating back.

  Ming makes his way back to Hill Street, pulls alongside the kerb of Hill Street Centre and waits again. For a fleeting moment he feels a little bit more like a human being deserving of belonging to the species. An uneasy calm settles on him. He looks at his watch. At 8.30 he tailgates a car driving towards the Hill Street Centre car park entrance. There is a prominent sign: ‘For Tenants Parking Only’. Once in the car park, he pulls into a reserved lot. He gets out of his car and ignores the glare from the driver of the car in front of him. He turns to the stairwell tucked in a far corner of the car park and memories of the subterranean encounter here three weeks ago almost destroy his composure. He slinks past the lift lobby, pushes open the glass door and accosts the same receptionist who was there before.

  “I want to see your deputy director.”

  “You again.” The receptionist rolls back on her castored chair in case Ming throws something at her. She picks up the phone, dials an extension number and whispers into the receiver. After a pause, she replaces the phone and looks up at Ming. “Mr Hoe says he’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  Several minutes pass and Ming is still waiting at the reception area. During those many minutes, Ming has oscillated between stabbing fury and resigned calm. When he is somewhere between the two moods, the heavy door behind the receptionist opens and Hoe Yuan Hai steps out. He nods at Ming and signals to him to come through. They walk down a corridor, flanked by blank concrete walls and shut doors with numbers on them. No plants or framed pictures relieve the starkness. Still, Ming is grateful he is not being taken to the basement freezer. When they enter an empty, windowless room with a wooden table, he is reassured by the comfortable temperature of the air-conditioning.

  “Why did you do this to me? You wanted to know about the private journal, but nobody in my family knows anything. What more can I do?” Ming spits once the door is shut like a sick man who has been holding back his vomit.

  “I don’t know what private journal you’re talking about. The evidence we’ve gathered is enough to send you to Changi for some time. You’re lucky you only got struck off the Bar.”

  “You’ve frozen my father’s assets and mine. Now I’ve lost my job, what do you expect me to live on?”

  “We’ve made a provision for you and your family to withdraw funds for ordinary living expenses.”

  “One thousand dollars a month. That’s not enough to pay even my credit card bills!”

  “Perhaps you might like to come down a little from your high living.”

  “That’s none of your fucking business.”

  “Chow Ming, I’m sorry for your predicament but if you still haven’t learnt from this, I’m even sorrier.”

  Ming hammers a fist on the table. His week-old nails scratch the surface of the desk in the interview room. “Learnt what?”

  “Enough. You just watch your step. Or I’ll take you out.”

  “Wait, what’s going on here? It’s something to do with the journal, isn’t it?”

  “Unfortunately your siblings have not been very forthcoming.”

  “So you punish me because of them?”

  “Such things are not within my control.”

  “The only one with a decent job is punished and the loafers get away with it,” Ming thinks aloud.

  “That’s not very nice to call your siblings loafers, and I’m not so sure your job was so decent.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll let that go given your circumstances.” And then as if he cannot help himself, “You were not born yesterday. You should know better than to ruffle the imperial feathers.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Hoe shakes his head as though witnessing a blind man being run over by a bus.

  “Dammit, what more are you going to do to me?”

  “Mr Chow, we’ve been very lenient with you. Just don’t push it.”

  Ming’s eyes burn like blowtorches.

  Hoe Yuan Hai stands and goes to open the door.

  Ming jerks upright so abruptly his chair falls back, hitting the door. The noise seems magnified in his ears. He keeps walking, not seeing anything except the stark white walls, hearing again the crashing of the chair. He does not think about his car or his aching body crying out for rest. The past 24 hours—the notice from the bar association, his rampage at the association’s office, his abuse of the senior partners at his law firm, packing up his life into a brown box, the encounter with the vegetable woman—are wiped out of his memory. He walks wherever his legs carry him, the crash of the chair continuing to resound in his ears, until he thinks he hears someone calling his name. He looks up and sees Lim Siew Kian. The two men stand on the pavement outside Hill Street Centre, facing each other.

  “Get out of my way,” Ming hisses.

  “I rang your office and found out what happened.” Lim drops his inspector demeanour and reaches out to touch Ming’s lower arm. Ming shrinks from his outstretched hand.

  “They should have you arrested, you imposter,” Ming says without any passion.

  “I’m sorry but you know I’m not your enemy. They asked you about the diary?”

  “How did you know? Who the hell are you?”

  “They did not find the diary and went for your blood,” Lim observes.

  “Fuck the diary! Fuck the CPIB! Fuck you!”

  Lim shakes his head. “Your father did not tell you anything about his younger days? About the party?”

  “Is that why they are after the diary?”

  “I suspect so.”

  Ming leans against the sooty wall of an old shop to steady himself, wishing the pain in his body could melt into the wall. He no longer hears the inspector’s questions about his father. Even if his father had been a serial murderer, he does not know or care. Finding out about the past, the truth or whatever shit will not bring his life back. He is destroyed, utterly and completely.

  Lim looks at him and says, “You’re young and talented, there are still a lot of things you can do. Most of all, you’re still alive.”

  With the man still speaking, Ming walks off.

  *

  He does not know how he arrives at his home in Bellevue Tower on Orchard Boulevard. He dips a hand into his trouser pocket and is relieved his house key is still there. He slumps onto the black and white striped chaise longue and is grateful they haven’t taken away his apartment. He gazes at his designer furniture, his crystal collection in the display cabinet, the red granite flooring. He lies there, inert. Finally, he picks up the phone and looks at the name
s on the speed dial list on the cradle. Then he replaces the receiver and stares at his crystal collection again—animal figurines, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, Golden Gate Bridge, the whole world captured in his glass display unit.

  He picks up the phone again, then goes to shower.

  After he comes out of his shower, he goes to the kitchen and eats a piece of four-day-old chocolate cake and makes a mug of strong coffee. The doorbell chimes the “Jingle Bells” tune. Julianna, a nurse, is at the door. They met a year ago in a bar on Orchard Road. To supplement her income at the hospital, she hangs out at bars after work, waiting to be picked up, usually by Western expatriates. Women like Julianna are called sarong party girls—girls dressed in exotic sarongs to seduce white men. The pejorative term doesn’t bother Julianna as long as the man pays and she can have some fun. She is 29, tall and buxom. Her father was a junior civil servant who had imbibed the virtue of speaking good English during the colonial days and thereafter. She grew up feeling different and superior to her classmates at Whitley Secondary School. But her grades were weak as her studies were interrupted by her interest in boys. Her dancing eyes and ripening body made her popular with the raging hormones in her class, whose company she had learnt to enjoy from then on. She doesn’t dislike Ming. His bad temperament is compensated for by his generosity in payment. Each time they go to bed, she closes her eyes and fancies she is holding Robert Redford in her arms. Ming sees her fleshy body as a refuge from the treachery of life. Her body never fails to make him feel safe and wanted, her well-endowed chest is as all-embracing, without being smothering, as a mother’s hug. And she never asks him questions, especially about his father.

  “Oh my God, you don’t look very good.” Julianna flings her clutch bag on the sofa and sinks next to it.

  The corners of his mouth curve up and his taut facial muscles relax somewhat. “Do you want a drink?”

  “A beer would be nice.”

  “So early in the morning? You better take care, otherwise you’ll look like an old hag before you turn 30.”