Death of a Perm Sec
Page 24
She edges towards hysteria. “But he didn’t have to die. Wouldn’t a few years in jail be enough to pay for whatever crime he had committed?”
“Your father was a proud man. For him ignominy is a sentence worse than death.”
She looks around the room. “You’re not saying this because they want you to say this to me?” Her tone is pleading.
There is pity in his eyes as he says gently, “This is just how I feel. We don’t know what actually happened. Maybe you can take comfort from the fact that some people out there agree with you.”
“So some newspapers have run my press conference story?”
The door opens and the two male guards seize Siew Kian’s arms and take him away.
She hastens after them. “Wait!” The female officer holds her back. Ling is kept in the room a little longer, then escorted back to her cell.
*
Four days later, Ling is taken from her cell to the same room. The assistant director, T.M. Chua, serves her with a detention order for two years, renewable at the end of the order.
In the moments just before death, a person is said to be able to see the turning points of their life flash before their eyes in lyrical clarity. Ling is now having one of those moments, when she has the existential condition of her humanity explained in roaring sound and colour. She sees her father picking out the juicy chicken legs, the best part of the bird, for her brothers. She sees Hoong in a flouncy dress brushing past her, sailing into the arms of their adoring mother. In a kindergarten game, the teacher shouts “Four!” and excited children form groups of four and squat down; she stands alone. She is out of the game. The teacher shouts “Two!” and she stands alone, out of the game again. She is strolling down a crowded street. People step on her feet and walk right through her. The stray dog does not sniff at her and the cars do not stop for her at the zebra crossing. She finds the diary and her life is truncated; everything is arrested in time and space, slowly dissolving to become a grey, withered woman standing in a cell, counting strokes and grids that cover the four walls.
THIRTY-ONE
THE WHITLEY ROAD Detention Centre is tucked away from the public eye in a wooded area next to a cemetery in a suburban district. Ming and Hoong park their cars outside the blue gate and show the thumbprints on their identity cards to the guard at the gate. They wait in a small room divided in the middle by a glass pane and a narrow counter. A telephone hangs above the counter on each side of the glass. Ling enters the other side of the room, picks up the phone and clutches it close to her ear. Hoong lifts the phone from its cradle, but is too distraught to speak. She passes it to Ming. Ming tells Ling that only two visitors are allowed each week, so Matthew and their mother will be there next week.
Ming speaks into the phone and places his other hand on the glass pane. “Matthew came back the day after your arrest. He says he’s proud of you. And so are all of us.”
Ling smiles.
“Yang has not been able to forgive himself for letting you do it instead of him. I wish I had done it myself too, if I had known about the diary.”
“When is he coming to see me?”
“He’s in hospital. He’s okay now. He fell into a ditch outside a pub and had a concussion.”
She feels the impulse to smash the phone on the glass. Instead she asks, “How’s Ma?”
“She’s okay.”
“How’s your noodle stall?”
“Business is good.”
She grips the phone even harder. Hoong is in tears. “Tell Hoong to take it easy. It’s not so bad here.”
Ming passes the phone to Hoong, who nods vigorously at her sister and loses control again. Ling sticks a piece of paper on the glass wall separating them. They are not allowed to talk about anything regarding her case, otherwise the phone line will be cut off. She had stolen a few sheets of paper and a pen from the doctor’s room when she was brought there for a routine check up. Ming leans forwards and reads the message on the paper: ‘Did any foreign press publish my story about Pa?’
Ming looks at his sister and nods.
He does not tell her that the only newspaper that ran her story has since been banned in the country and the editor and reporter taken to court for criminal defamation. He does not tell her that another journalist who reported the press conference has been sacked and her article spiked. He does not tell her that the government had a media blitz, calling Ling “a Marxist saboteur undermining the stability of the country by making seditious allegations against the state.” The government has posthumously declared their father a traitor for having sold state secrets to a Chinese agent who had seduced him. It has claimed their father’s suicide was out of a deepening guilt of having betrayed his own country as well as having received bribes.
Ling smiles and loosens her grip on the phone.
After collecting herself, Hoong asks if there is anything her sister needs from home. Ling wants books and writing material but knows that those will be granted at the pleasure of her captors.
“Nothing.”
Hoong notices the deep lines around Ling’s eyes and her sunken cheeks. “Mother will bring some chicken broth next week.”
The half hour is up and a female PC escorts Ling from the visiting room. On her way back to her cell, she catches glimpses of Ming and Hoong crossing the driveway, walking towards the blue gate.
That afternoon, she leaves the packet lunch untouched on the floor and sits on the bunk in her cell. She does not watch the geckos crawling on the ceiling or the ants going for her food. She just sits there and listens to her own breathing. Dinner arrives at 5.30pm and she lays the unopened packet on the floor. She shifts to lean against the wall and continues sitting, willing herself not to think. Any thought is too perilous to contemplate. The smallest urge, such as the desire to stroke her mother’s cat, will make her scream. Pondering her state will snap the remaining thread tying her to reality. The one thing she thought would anchor her to this world has crumbled into the windy wastes of outer space, the single thing that would make her solid. But one word refuses to go away. Out. Out of this hole. Out of this country. Out of this solitude. Out there. Out of this universe. Out of her mind. Out of this numbing pain. Out, you demon, she shrieks inwardly.
When night falls, her body gives way and she slides down the wall onto the bunk. It gives her soul a brief respite, before another day, when she will have to reckon with every second and every minute, again and again and again.
*
On 9 August that year the country celebrates its 21 years of independence with a show of military might and fierce nationalism on the Padang. Children from 16 schools in Malay, Indian and Chinese costumes sing and dance to personify the coming of age of the nation. The audience sitting on the steps of City Hall wave the national flag, led by their political leaders in the front rows. The prime minister and his cabinet and MPs smile, dignified and unblemished in their white shirts and pants. The haemorrhoid in the anus of government, Hoo Liem Choh, has been suspended from Parliament and is facing bankruptcy. The giddying fireworks augur an even brighter future as the nation sits on the threshold of spectacular economic growth in the next decade.
Not far away, at Bright Hill Temple, the turtles dip into the pond, annoyed at the distant explosion of the pyrotechnics. They know however, that the next day, they will be compensated with an abundance of lettuce.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WRITING IS EXHAUSTING and even debilitating. I am therefore eternally grateful to have had my best friend Jane Leong to be a pillar for me to lean on when I was tired, a sounding board when I wanted to test my ideas and a calming voice when I was in doubt of my work.
Jane passed away on 17 January 2016 when the manuscript was in the final stages of editing. Our last outing was attending the Epigram Books Fiction Prize award dinner at the Pan Pacific Hotel on 5 November 2015. She was radiant in her green dress she bought in Batam where we had our last holiday abroad, together with four other friends, in July 2015. On
Turi Beach Resort, she was frail but was happy soaking her body in the sea. Later that day, she sat under a tree with Gek and Agnes, and watched Soup, Joyce and me sit on a banana boat, pulled by a jet ski, and ride into the horizon. The jet ski driver must have felt obliged to give his three riders a bit of fun. In the open sea, he did a sharp turn, and we were dunked into the water. On the beach, Agnes turned pale when she saw no one was on board the banana boat anymore. Cool Jane remained seated on the beach chair, confident that we would not drown with our life jackets on. Gek went to inform the life guards who looked blasé.
This is how I will always remember my friend Jane, her perceptiveness matched only by her sympathy for others. She dealt with each of the many personal and political crises we endured together in the same manner as she dealt with the banana boat ‘crisis.’ She listened to the ravings, dissected them and formulated the precise problem. And through it all, she stood by me. Just as she had stood by my struggle to be a writer.
This novel would also not have been possible without the moral and material support of Paul White, my mate and landlord in Sydney, Australia, while I was pursuing my postgraduate studies. He left his townhouse in bohemian Glebe, an inner-city suburb in Sydney, at my disposal for me to bang out the characters and plot of the novel.
Dr Anne Brewster, my academic supervisor at the University of New South Wales, went beyond the call of duty to provide me with her theoretical insights and friendship in reading draft after draft of the manuscript.
Death of a Perm Sec had been searching in vain for several years for a publisher who is risk-prone and has the gumption to defend its publications. Until now. I am therefore indebted to Edmund Wee and his team at Epigram Books for shortlisting my manuscript out of 69 entries for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015. Even though it did not win the prize, it finally gets to see the light of day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wong Souk Yee is a playwright and former political detainee. In 1987, she was detained for allegedly taking part in a Marxist conspiracy against the government. In 1982, she co-founded the now-defunct theatre group, Third Stage. She co-directed and co-wrote the play Square Moon, staged in 2013, about detention without trial. Wong holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of New South Wales and is currently an adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore. She is chairman of the Singapore Democratic Party.
The Epigram Books Fiction Prize promotes contemporary Singapore creative writing and rewards excellence in Singapore literature. This richest literary prize in Singapore is awarded to the Singaporean, permanent resident or Singapore-born author for the best manuscript of a full-length, original and unpublished novel written in the English language.
The closing date for submission to this year’s prize is 1 September 2016. The winner will be announced in December and have his or her novel published by Epigram Books.
For more information, please visit EBFP.EPIGRAMBOOKS.SG
ALSO FROM THE 2015 EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE
WINNER
Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin
FINALISTS
Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! by Sebastian Sim
Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal
LONGLISTED
Annabelle Thong by Imran Hashim
Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam
Altered Straits by Kevin Wong