Death of a Perm Sec

by Wong Souk Yee

  “So what are you going to do now?” Ling asks after a long silence.

  “Work hard and wait for them to promote me to principal.”

  “How often can you see Meng Meng and Ying Ying?’

  “Three times a week.”

  “Damn.”

  “I suppose I can now concentrate on my career and have no excuse for going on sick leave.”

  They lie there for a long time without speaking. Hoong feels more relaxed after all the shouting. She has never lain down anywhere that was not her bedroom or a hospital bed. She has always been told that couches are for sitting and entertaining guests. Her sister is teaching her to experience the house in a different manner.

  She thought she had made a moving plea for the custody of her children, that she had been a nurturing and loving mother. Hadn’t she given up a teaching career to take up the joys and pains of child-bearing and rearing? She had glowing testimonials from her school principal, her father’s former ministerial colleagues and directors of all the charities she had volunteered with. All saying what a responsible, dependable and caring person she was. Her children surely needed her much more than a father who had been working 14 hours a day in the office to get a promotion. If the children went with their father, they would only grow up with foreign maids. They would never know the warmth and security of parental love.

  Ling gets up. “Let’s go to your room. I’ve got something to show you.”

  They climb the stairs and go into Hoong’s room. From her jeans pocket, Ling removes two tiny blue pills from a small zipped plastic bag.

  “What on earth is that?”

  “LSD.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’m angry, not mad.”

  “Take it easy. Just once, for the experience.”

  “You can go off your rocker from just one experience.”

  Ling holds out the pills in the palm of her hand. “C’mon, all your students may be taking this. If you don’t try it yourself, you won’t be able to help them.”

  “This will be the death of my career.” Hoong pushes Ling’s hand away and throws herself on her bed.

  “You’ll be the best principal in the country for having gone through a gamut of experience.”

  “I’m a teacher, not a junkie counsellor. Have you tried this before?”

  “Not this. Just a couple of joints.”

  Ling goes down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Hoong tugs at a corner of her mouth. She cannot help looking at the pills again.

  Ling returns. “Look, it’s up to you but I want to try it.” She pops a pill into her mouth, gulps down some water and crawls over to lie next to Hoong.

  Hoong props her head up with her hand, looking at her sister. What the heck, she thinks, she has already lost so much, what is losing a bit of reality? She reaches over Ling’s body for the remaining pill on the bedside table. She pops it into her mouth and drinks from the same glass. They lie in the double bed and wait. Nothing happens.

  “It’s not working,” says Hoong.

  “Wait a bit.”

  Minutes pass. Still nothing.

  Then Ling begins to feel hot and starts to sweat. She gets up to switch on the air-conditioner. She shuts the windows and door and draws the curtains. The room becomes shrouded in darkness, which she hopes will heighten the effect of the acid. She returns to bed and stares into space. Without warning, everything becomes blurred and elongated. The walls of the room begin to surge and retreat like a tidal wave of molten concrete. As the walls melt, she hears them moan. Or is that the droning of the air-conditioner, she wonders. She feels her hand brush something. It could be Hoong’s body, but she doesn’t look; she is drawn to the epic scene in front of her. In the midst of it, she hears Hoong talking to her but cannot make head or tail of it. Her body stiffens as she tries to hear Hoong, grappling in vain to understand the words coming out of her sister’s mouth. Then, behind the rubble of the wall, she sees her father playing the umpire of the game, and her siblings and herself, when they were screaming teenagers, forming two table tennis teams at the Olympics, China versus the USA. All of them are fat and short, flying around the table in the air as they play. It’s exhilarating until her father cries, “Foul! Foul! Foul!” but they continue to smash and spin. Her father makes an attempt to stop the game by grabbing at the ball, but it swirls out of sight, leaving trails of golden dust. He flings away the whistle, blood streaming from his eyes.

  Then Ling sees her short, fat self vaulting into the night when she was in her father’s study, and found that in his hurry to leave the house, he had left the safe open. She pokes her head into the cavern and, among stacks of papers, she finds a diary buried underneath a pile of US dollar bills. She takes it out and reads it on the swivel armchair. After each page, she sees her short and fat self shrink a little more, so that by the time she gets to the end of the diary, she has shrunk to the size of a cockroach. When her father returns, he finds her, beyond recognition, reading. A howling typhoon rocks the study, swallowing both of them. The typhoon splits into a brilliance of colours, then explodes into static electricity like snowflakes on a TV screen. The screen grows bigger and the infinitesimal dots continue to split into more and more dots. Ling hears them screech. Then she and her father are sucked into the blizzard of static and all is quiet. Perhaps they are underwater. She sees bubbles coming out of her father’s mouth as blue, purple, pink and tricolour fishes perch on swings.

  *

  When the effect of the lysergic acid wears off somewhat, she finds herself sitting on the edge of the bed, in the space between slipping forward and falling back. She rubs her eyes and stretches her limp body. She glances at the clock. She has been tripping for over six hours. Hoong is lying next to her, her shoulders arched up, her hands twitching. Her sister’s rapid eye movements behind closed lids tell her she is in the grip of a bad trip. No wonder some poor buggers suffer from depression after the prolonged use of LSD.

  She shakes her sister hard. “Hey, you’re all right?”

  Hoong sits up and clutches a pillow. “Shit, I think I wet the bed.”

  Ling laughs. Hoong gets up to go to the bathroom. She returns immediately and feels the side of the mattress she was lying on.

  “False alarm. But I actually felt my bladder letting go with no inhibition. Goodness, Ling, what poison did you give me?”

  Ling tugs at Hoong’s elbow. “So what was it like?”

  “Ugly and embarrassing. I don’t want to talk about it. And why are my hands trembling?”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’ll go away.”

  “Gee, thanks a lot, sister. You always keep the good stuff for your family.”

  “Any time.” Ling giggles and tries to push Hoong back to bed. “At least it made you happy.”

  Hoong resists her sister. She pulls aside the curtains, to find it dark outside. “I didn’t feel happy at all. I felt confused and lost control of myself. One moment, I felt so intense, I almost got an orgasm.”

  Ling cracks up. “Was that when you thought you peed?”

  Hoong grabs Ling’s head and shakes it. “Is that what Australia has done to you?”

  “Yeah, I’m going bonkers.” She laughs out loud. “But what else? What made you come?”

  “It’s all very fuzzy, like in a trance. I think it was at the court hearing. I could see the judges in the next court and the next court until the end of the building. Like the walls were transparent or something. And they were all passing judgement on some women. And I could also see through their robes. They had these naked shrivelled bodies. And they all had small dicks.”

  Ling becomes hysterical. “That was a phallic good trip you had. And then?”

  “It gets ugly. Before that arsehole judge—”

  “They have no arseholes, remember?” Ling bites a corner of the pillowcase, laughing.

  “Before that arseholeless judge read the decision, I felt myself trembling all over, electricity running through my body. I wanted so much to t
hrow my shoe at the judge and then all hell broke loose and I felt like I peed.”

  They stop laughing.

  Hoong gets up and heads for the door. “I’m going to get myself a cup of coffee. You want?”

  Ling smiles at her sister. “Yes, tea please.”

  When Hoong returns to her room with the drinks, Ling has just been to the bathroom to wash her face.

  “Whoa…this must be the first mug of tea you’ve made me in your entire miserable life.”

  “And how many mugs of coffee have you made me? So you cook and feed Matthew?”

  “I figure the idle poor have to do the housework for the working rich.”

  “So he services you well in bed too?”

  “Good God, you’re gross! And I thought you were a Christian puritan.”

  Hoong’s face changes. “You know I attended church only because of his family.”

  “They have the cheek to still go to church. May they be struck by lightning before they step into one again.” Ling lowers her head and reaches for Hoong’s hand. Hoong shrinks slightly, not being used to intimacy from her older sister.

  They put the mugs on the bedside table and curl up again on the bed.

  “So what did you see on your trip?” Hoong asks.

  Ling ponders. “I saw you eventually win Meng Meng and Ying Ying back.”

  “Really?” Hoong asks with the expression of someone falling over a cliff.

  Ling’s face softens. “Yes, you will.”

  *

  When Mrs Chow comes to the door later, she sees her two daughters talking softly in bed. They have been in the room for many hours and she has put dinner in the fridge. She does not interrupt. When was the last time she saw her daughters so close? They had been rivals for as long as she cares to remember. Since they were little girls, they were always vying for the attention of relatives and teachers. Although Ling behaved as if she didn’t care, their mother knew that Hoong’s cuteness and eagerness to please had been a source of jealousy for Ling. She had disguised it by sticking with Yang and doing boy things. Maybe by being boyish, she had hoped to win some affection from her father. And when he sent her away, she must have thought that she had lost his regard forever. Poor girl, it must have been horrible to hear later that her sister had married well while she languished in exile. Mrs Chow smiles inwardly, thanking the gods she prays to that Ling has finally found a good husband. Never mind he’s a bit dark. And now it’s Hoong’s turn to suffer. That silly girl, if she would only pretend to submit to her husband, she would not have ended up this way. For the sake of the children, what’s a bit of obedience to him? Sze Teck had been worse.

  Silently, Mrs Chow leaves the room. She sleeps well that night, soothed by the thought that, while their wealthy days had seen her children going their separate ways, the present bad times seem to have brought them back together. She is pleased that her older daughter has made her peace with the family, that she has finally come home, even if it is just for a while.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THEY HIRE TWO bicycles at Changi Village, by the cove of greyish-green water the locals describe as the colour of duck poo. But the waterbirds that might once have foraged in the cove would have ended up on someone’s dining table. They ride past the old British army barracks that have been converted to a drug rehabilitation centre.

  “The Brits sure knew how to live well, picking a waterfront for their boys!” Yang yells to his sister.

  They pedal along Loyang Avenue, and the stretches of open field with the sparse squat buildings take them back 20 years, when they could not afford bicycles. Only the increase in the traffic and their own tired bodies tell them time has not stood still. Vapour-sodden clouds with dark edges shield them from the sun. They turn onto a winding road canopied by old trees. The breeze has died down and Yang’s T-shirt sticks to his sweaty body. They keep to the side of the narrow road, perilously dodging lorries and buses.

  “Where are we going?” asks Yang.

  “Just follow me!” Ling shouts back.

  She leads him to Upper Changi Road North, which gives him an inkling where she is headed. Some zinc-roofed, low shophouses whiz past them and the grey-black fortress of Changi Prison comes into view. They stop in front of a coffee shop opposite the prison and sit at a cracked marble-topped table near a ceiling fan. A man in a singlet rolled up to his chest, held in place by his paunch, shuffles up. In Hokkien, he asks them what they want. Yang orders two cold beers. He wipes his face and neck with a handkerchief. The air is so dense with moisture that he longs for the sky to open its gate and release a deluge. He keeps looking up at the fan as though willing it to speed up.

  “There must be an easier way to get here?” he asks.

  “That was how we did it before. Remember I was your pillion on our neighbour’s bike.”

  The singlet man shuffles back with two bottles of Anchor in one hand and two glasses in the other. Like a mirror image, the brother and sister pour the beer into their glasses until the foam is close to flowing over. They lower their heads to the glasses on the table. In symmetry, each slurps, taking care not to spill a drop, then wipes the foams off their lips with their sleeve.

  “It didn’t feel so hot then.” Yang smiles, remembering their childish antics. Then something clicks. “Why have you brought me here?” He leans forward, breaking the symmetry.

  “Just reliving our days of being innocent and bold.”

  “It’s not only our fate but our business to lose our innocence, to quote someone. Or do you want to cycle and picnic all your life?”

  She looks at the prison opposite. “How about catching up with my long lost brother?” Stretching her legs out, she hits a spittoon underneath the table.

  “Yeah, you are a pillar of society and I’m a termite. Lucky you.” He takes a large gulp, revealing the greasy fingerprints of the shopkeeper on the inner surface of the glass.

  “I’ve got something to discuss with you. I don’t want Ma and Hoong to know.”

  Yang looks at her without blinking.

  She lowers her voice even though the coffee shop and the road outside are far too noisy for her to be overheard. “Do you know why Pa packed me off to Australia?”

  Yang shakes his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Because I found Edward Wee’s diary in his safe and read everything.”

  “You read everything?” He feels goose pimples breaking out under his sweaty T-shirt.

  She nods. Since the day she found the diary, the world had darkened around her into a conspiratorial surface with subterranean cells concealed by layer upon layer of secrets and lies. From that day on, she had pitted herself against her father, and had stopped talking to him for several years. Ming sent her money, her mother sent her herbs and bird’s nest and Yang and Hoong talked to her on the phone occasionally. But in some inner corner of her mind, she was slowly forgiving him for his favouritism towards the sons. She had long ago rationalised that her father was a defective product of 4,000 years of Chinese feudal thought, rejuvenated by the present government. With the death of her father, she now decides that he sent her away to protect her from possible consequences of her impulsiveness as much as to save his own skin. And nobody had understood her impulsiveness more than her father. But surely truth cannot be established in just one diary? Surely there are many truths or versions of the truth out there?

  “Did you tell the CPIB when they were looking for it?”

  “Course not. How come you don’t ask how the diary got into Pa’s safe?”

  “I was about to ask that.” He picks up his glass for want of something to do.

  “I think Pa got hold of the diary when he became director of the Singapore ISD, you know, when it took over from the Malaysia Special Branch after the merger busted in 1965.”

  “And how did the Special Branch get hold of Edward Wee’s diary?”

  “Remember, the Special Branch arrested Edward Wee in 1965, when the Tunku had enough of his megalomania. They must
have confiscated a whole lot of stuff, including his diary.”

  “Pa told you all this?”

  “No. That’s my guess.” She takes another gulp from her glass. “When Edward Wee was released a few months later, the Malaysian side must have hung on to the diary.”

  Lightning splits the sky above the prison, and thunder crashes. The leaden stratosphere throws a shadow on the eastern part of the island.

  “But he would have moved heaven and earth to get his diary back when Singapore became independent,” objects Yang.

  “He must have, or he might have thought it was still with the Malaysians. Pa obviously held on to it as a bargaining chip. Until now. A couple of days after Pa died, I went into his study and saw the safe broken and the diary gone. When the CID came for their so-called investigation, they must have taken the diary.”

  “If they had, then why was the CPIB hounding Ming for it?” Yang asks.

  “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?”

  “Anyway, what can you prove without the diary?”

  Her brother’s impassive face piques her. “What? Bloody hell, Yang, Pa already told you about it?”

  “No…but I can guess. It must have all the dirt on Edward Wee.” He sips perfunctorily from his glass again.

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. You read it. I didn’t.”

  “How much did Pa tell you?” She spits hot breath in his face.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”

  She lowers her voice further. “The diary shows how Edward Wee pulled off the merger and used Tunku and the British to destroy his rivals. Mainly his chief political rival, Lim Min Tong.”

  She drains her glass and orders a second. She had hoped Yang would be more helpful but his detachment is frustrating her.

  “During Lim Min Tong’s detention,” she continues, “they used heaps of drugs on him, supposedly to treat his depression. But ironically, one of the side effects of those drugs is depression, which in extreme cases, can lead to suicide.”