Death of a Perm Sec

by Wong Souk Yee

  “Who’s talking? And since when did you care about how I look?”

  Ming goes to the fridge and gives her a bottle of mineral water. “You’ve got to go to work later?”

  “You called at the right time. Got a day off.”

  He manages a wider smile, which softens his harsh features.

  Still lying on the chaise longue, he fills his lungs and exhales slowly.

  “Hey, you all right?” Julianna sits up. “You want to sleep with me now?”

  “You think I’m a bastard?” he asks with his eyes on the crystals.

  “They’ve been harassing you again?”

  “All my life I made use of my father. After his death, I tried to save my own skin, even if it meant his name would be further sullied.”

  “That’s the way of the world. We exist to be of use to others… for something in return.”

  “Even to your own family?”

  “Provided you do something back for them, I suppose.”

  “It’s because of people like you that the world is so fucked up.” Ming drops his head on the backrest of his seat and stretches his legs out.

  “Ditto for you.”

  “I was hoping you would be a good listener…”

  “You need a priest, not me,” says Juliana.

  He closes his eyes. He sees his father, shivering over some statements he had been made to sign. He sees his good-for-nothing brother buried among empty bottles, he sees Ling with a swelling stomach and doesn’t know who the father is. He sees Hoong quarrelling with her husband. Then he gets up, goes to his bedroom and fishes out 100 dollars from his wallet.

  He comes out and places the money on the coffee table. “You’ve been a great help. Thanks. Make sure you’re protected on your job.”

  “Since I couldn’t do anything for you, I won’t accept anything. Take care.” She picks up her bag, kisses him lightly on one cheek and makes for the door.

  NINETEEN

  STEAM RISES FROM the chicken curry and black pepper beef dish in the Wedgewood bowls. The red snapper, eyes bulging and mouth wide open, simmers in a stainless steel contraption comprising a plate above burning candles. Next to it is a side dish of stir-fried broccoli and mushrooms. The Indonesian maid serves rice and soup to the four members of the silent assembly seated at one end of the long marble table. As they proceed with the five-course dinner, she returns to the kitchen, where her Filipina co-worker is coaxing a child to eat. The child refuses and spits his food all over the floor. The Indonesian maid helps herself to what’s left on the stove and eats at the small table where the feeding endeavour is going on.

  In the air-conditioned dining room under the chandelier, the Chins eat with downcast eyes. Chow Hoong averts her face from the shocked stare of the fish’s eyes. The screaming of the child in the kitchen comes through the kitchen door.

  “Curry again. No wonder Meng Meng refuses to eat,” mumbles the finance minister at the head of the table.

  “He eats chocolates and cakes the whole day, that’s why he doesn’t eat at dinner time,” the minister’s wife complains. She casts a furtive look at Hoong opposite her.

  They resume their wordless eating. When there are no sounds of her son yelling and kicking in the kitchen, it is so quiet Hoong can hear her own swallowing, and everybody else’s. She looks at the red-hot chicken and relishes the day she will stew her mother-in-law in curry. That thought tickles her and she wipes her mirth off with her hand. Her pot-bellied husband, the minister’s son, goes to the kitchen to refill his rice bowl.

  “How’s your mother? Is she in good health?” The minister looks up from his bowl at Hoong, then back to his food.

  “She’s all right. She walks to the market every morning.”

  Why should anyone think she isn’t, Hoong mentally retorts. She’s not too old.

  “Does she still play mahjong?” the mother-in-law asks.

  “Occasionally.”

  So what if she does? At least that keeps her alert, which is more than I can say for you.

  The younger Chin returns from the kitchen with a second bowl of rice and demolishes the black pepper beef. The spiciness of the dish causes his nose to run and he sniffles, his only communication that evening. Hoong sweeps the last grains of rice into her mouth and puts down her bowl. Because the others are still eating, she remains seated. Her mother-in-law calls out to the maid to serve more soup for herself and her husband.

  The maid scrambles out of the kitchen and before she can carry out only the 20th order for the day, the minister’s wife tells her, “Don’t cook curry so often. I didn’t give you Mrs Kwok’s recipe book for your bedtime reading.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The maid takes the soup bowls from her employers and scurries back to the kitchen. When she returns with the soup, the minister’s wife asks, “Is Meng Meng eating his dinner?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She addresses no one in particular. “I always say don’t give him so much sweets and chocolates. See, now he won’t eat properly at dinner time.”

  Hoong ignores the comment and hopes for some noise from her infant daughter in the room upstairs, to give her the pretext to leave the table. But the baby is quiet. She thinks of going up to see if her daughter is waking but she has just gone up before dinner. She stares at the empty bowls. One day is a long time in family politics. Before the day her father was hauled to the CPIB office, dinnertime was for father and son to talk shop, for unsolicited but well-intentioned advice from her in-laws, and open season on complaints about the two maids. Since that day, however, she feels she is sitting on a chair of knives.

  When only the bones of the carcasses are left, Hoong makes to rise. Then she hears her mother-in-law calling out to the maid to cut and peel some fruit and serve it in the living room.

  Hoong gets up. “I’ll see if Meng Meng is eating his dinner.”

  She goes to the kitchen. The finance minister shakes his head and gives the back of his daughter-in-law the look he generally reserves for war orphans and psychopaths. The last time he wore that expression was when he saw on TV how Pol Pot had brutalised Cambodia and annihilated millions of lives. His wife purses her lips and says nothing. Their son lays down his chopsticks, stares at the wall behind his mother, waiting for the fruit.

  Her son is playing with the food on his plate. There is half-chewed rice and vegetables on the floor. Grains of rice are sticking to the Filipina maid’s hair. Hoong does not fret as she usually does, but tells the maid to clean up the mess while she takes over the feeding. The heat and grime of the kitchen and the company of the maids give her the sensation of a soldier running into a bunker from a bombing raid. She has always treated the maids as if they existed for her every beck and call. While she never raises her voice at them, she is not beyond dragging one or both out of bed at midnight to squeeze oranges for a glass of fresh juice for her. She now sees them as obliging, rather than dumb. Most of all, she now feels it beneath her to have been no different from her mother-in-law.

  She sees how all three of them are treated as foreign, functional objects, pitied for coming from troubled backgrounds, targeted as the cause of domestic crises. Not so many months ago, Hoong thought she was well near being the most successful woman who ever lived. She had a golden boy of a husband, two heaven-bestowed children and in-laws who would leave their enormous estate to her husband and children. She had had her revenge on her father, who saw women as mere child bearers. Though in the irony of life, it was her father who had been instrumental to her good fortune. She had felt she had the right to look down on the less fortunate, for she had not arrived at her blissful state through inheritance, but pure determination. The poor had themselves to blame, for they had not applied themselves to achieve goals in life.

  She puts a small spoonful of rice and mushroom into her son’s mouth. Meng Meng chews a little and promptly spits the food in his mother’s face. She stands up, flings the dinner plate into the bin under the sink, then slaps her son across his f
ace. The four-year-old bawls, flailing about in his chair. The noise summons his alarmed grandparents to the kitchen. Hoong wipes her face with her hands and stalks out of the kitchen. On her way to the stairs, she sees her husband eating fruit in front of the TV. She clambers up to the bedroom.

  She sits in the window bay next to the cot and looks at her sleeping daughter for a long time. Then she shifts her gaze to her matrimonial bed and above it on the wall, the framed enormous photograph of her in a virginal white gown and her husband in a tuxedo, both looking at the camera with a seriousness of purpose. As she holds the picture in her sight, she feels something is amiss, her old feeling of love and gratitude that welled up in her chest whenever she saw her husband’s image. Her memory chases back to the day they first met at a dinner arranged by their fathers, anxious their children should marry within the service. They hit it off immediately, in a mutual admiration of each other’s values. They were in agreement on the purpose of life and believed the day the human race failed to progress would be the beginning of the end. In place of stargazing, they had spent a great deal of their courtship at evening classes learning Wordstar and other computer programmes. She did not have any interest in the subject but persisted to give him moral support. They had to rush through dinners, sacrificing coy conversation and mind-reading silences, in order not to be late for the lectures. She had dropped out of their part-time business administration course after they got married, while he carried on for two more years to graduate with an MBA degree. Then at 41, he became the youngest man to head the Monetary Authority of Singapore. She quit her job to have children, to give him respectability and stability. They had not been to a movie before or since, preferring to spend their time on self-improvement. They bought a house in Siglap to rent out, as a hedge against inflation. They also bought blue-chip shares and unit trusts. Her occupation had been the education of the children and the management of their investments. But the sustained recession this year and the bear market that accompanied it stampeded the property scene and slashed prices of most of their stocks, disturbing their domestic harmony. One evening, her husband returned home and scrutinised the net worth of their investment portfolio.

  “Why did you hold these shares for so long? You should’ve cut losses long ago,” Michael Chin grunted.

  “I thought—”

  “No, you don’t think. You should’ve just asked me.”

  Hoong swallowed. “I didn’t expect the prices to fall so sharply. And, I thought your father or you would have warned me…”

  “I hope you won’t ever repeat that outside this bedroom. You know I could be accused of insider trading!”

  “I’m sorry, Michael. I didn’t mean to—You know, you never tell me much, so I just have to—”

  “All right. Just get rid of some of those shares, ya?”

  Hoong nodded and made a mental note to call the broker the next day, and another one to send her husband’s clothes to the dry-cleaner.

  “Oh, Michael, I was thinking of getting a British teacher to give Meng Meng private tuition, because I remember you said about Meng Meng’s speaking poor English.”

  “Ya, please do it soon,” Michael said, still poring over their investments.

  It had given her great pride to see their older boy spouting big new words, but now she fears her son’s typhoon number ten temper is driven by being deprived of TV and playing with other children. The only games her husband allows the boy are computer games and brain-cell-building toys.

  Beyond the bay window, the moon rises above the neighbours’ pine trees, in a starless sky. Through the tracery of the pines, she can see the neighbour’s kidney-shaped swimming pool from her bedroom window. Their own swimming pool has been filled and covered with carpet grass because her husband didn’t want to worry about their children drowning. She has not spoken to Mrs Quah, their next door neighbour, for some time. They used to go ballroom dancing, each persuading her husband to come along. Mr Quah owns the country’s second largest travel agency. On the rare occasion when both men agreed to go, Hoong remembers holding her husband’s arm and swanning into the crystal ballroom. In her slinky, low-cut sequined gown, she was dancing with the most desirable man alive.

  *

  Michael comes up to their bedroom after the late night news. He gives his wife a quick look and goes to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He comes out, gets his pyjamas hanging in the cupboard, returns to the bathroom and closes the door.

  “How’s Ying Ying?” he asks, coming out of the bathroom in his pyjamas.

  “I thought you’d lost your tongue,” Hoong snaps.

  He does not rise to the taunt but turns down the coverlet and slips underneath.

  “What happened to you? Come out with it! What are you so angry about?”

  “You’re the one who’s screaming the roof down.”

  “I’m sick and tired of your holier-than-thou attitude. You think by keeping quiet, the problem will go away?”

  He lies with his back to her. “Don’t talk so loud, you’ll frighten Ying Ying.”

  She strides over to his side of the bed and stands over him. “Michael Chin, look at me and let’s have it out once and for all. You’re still angry with me for what my father did, aren’t you? But what can I do? I can’t control what my father did. Why do you hold me responsible for his mistake?”

  He throws the coverlet aside, kicks his legs over the bed and stands up to face his wife. “Mistake? You call that a mistake? Do you know how much damage that ‘mistake’ has caused my family?”

  “Of course I know and I’m still suffering from it, from my own husband and his mother and father!”

  “No, you don’t know. The CPIB might look into Father’s and my bank accounts, just in case there has been some collusion. Before your family’s fiasco, I’d been slated for a junior minister, then to take over from Father when he retires. Now all that has gone up in smoke.”

  It feels as if a ton of lead is pulling down the centre of her body. She is gagged by her husband’s vitriolic glare. She drops her head. How much more has she to endure for having been a Chow? It’s always about her father! Why does she have to take the blame in bad times but not share his wealth in good times? Since he considered her no longer his daughter after she married Michael, why did she still have to bear the brunt of his damned greed? Even after his death, the family curse sticks with her, festering in her marriage, poisoning her in-laws’ views of her and destroying her husband’s chance of becoming finance minister. She is immobilised despite her desperate need to grab hold of her husband, to know that he is still there for her, to lift the dead weight in her core.

  They stand face-to-face for an interminable minute. She wants to scream but the words are wrenched down inside her. Michael goes back to the bed. She looks around the room and sees her baby sleeping sweetly, the moon outside smiling above the pine trees, deaf to her unuttered cry for help. Her husband is lying there, awake. The leaden weight has spread, distending her stomach, pressing against her lungs, making it difficult to breathe, making her nauseous.

  She heaves her chest to force the words out. “I’m sorry for what is happening to you at work.”

  Silence.

  “We’ve all suffered from this. Can you…can you and your parents stop punishing me for it?”

  He speaks with his eyes closed. “Nobody is punishing you. And I hope you will not take it out on our children again.”

  “I’m not just married to you. I’m married to your whole family.”

  “So am I!” He sit bolt upright and glares at her.

  Feverishly, his mind races back to Chow Sze Teck’s funeral, where he was disgusted by the praises heaped on his father-in-law by the invited dignitaries, including his own father; where his children screamed and kicked and had to be carried out at the most solemn part of the ceremony. He recalls standing in his father’s office a few weeks ago at the Ministry of Finance, being told it had been a wrong match from the start, that Chow Sze Teck was n
ot a suitable partner to have in politics, nor his daughter in marriage. His father had also told him that the prime minister was having second thoughts about grooming him for finance minister as the PM did not know where his loyalty lay. His immediate thought was to dash to the PM’s office at the Istana and assure him that though he was married to Chow’s daughter, he held the man’s behaviour beneath contempt and believed that Chow had gotten his just dessert. That his loyalty to the PM had never wavered for a moment since the day he won the President’s scholarship to read economics at Stanford. But his father had said he had already told the PM all that. It was up to them to back it up with action. He had felt dizzy, as if the blood in his body were becoming water.

  Back at his MAS office, he had told his personal assistant that he was not to be disturbed no matter who called. He had shut himself in the room for the entire afternoon and returned home at nine.

  “Okay, I know…I’m sorry.” Hoong pauses. “I can’t stay at home and face your mother all day. I want to go back to teaching.”

  “Who’s going to look after the kids? You want them to grow up with the maids and pick up their accent and habits?”

  “Let’s move out of here then.”

  “My parents expect their eldest son to live with them.” He sits on the bed, leaning against the brass bedhead.

  “You want to stay here with your father so that you can be closer to the centre of power,” she says, through clenched teeth.

  “So? Does that surprise you? Isn’t that the reason you married me?” His voice sounds emotionless.

  Hoong stares at her husband as though seeing him for the first time. She quit her teaching job to become his dependent trophy wife. She had breastfed their first child for 24 months till her nipples were bruised and swollen, because her husband said breast milk made smart babies. She had stopped playing mahjong with her mother and her mother’s friends because her mother-in-law thought mahjong was unbecoming of their status. She was told by her father-in-law to be a volunteer at the Lion’s Home, where she had to visit weekly and wash the bodies of invalids. Her eyes search behind the hard façade for the man she had entrusted her life to. Her brain though, acknowledges the truth. She has ended up with nothing.