She fans herself furiously with a piece of cardboard. No breeze today. No sign of rain. No sign of the hot spell ending. The grass along the road has browned. Singapore is seething in this heat and humidity. In the car park below, heat waves rise from the sun-beaten tarmac. Her headache is threatening to return. Four-thirty, and the sun is still a fiery ball. If only there’s a bit of breeze the air won’t be so oppressive. Her clothes are soaked. But no, she won’t switch on the fan. Must save electricity. Earlier, Kow Kia had complained of feeling cold despite the hot weather. He’s lying in bed as usual with his face turned to the wall. She has stopped trying to coax him to eat. What’s a mother to do? He’s a grown man. Can’t force him to eat like she used to when the children were small. Besides, she has no appetite herself. And it isn’t because of the heat. It’s been two months since she lost that job. Eight weeks since she shouted at Mr Rajah, the cleaning supervisor. He said people had complained to the boss about her. Said he had no choice. Had to ask her to leave. She’d broken the rules.
What rule? What rule?
Hey! Don’t shout at me lah, Ah Gek. Not me complain, you know. You’re not allowed to sell things in the office.
But no one told me!
Read your contract.
Read your head! Did that fart of a man expect her to read the English words?
Your head, my head, it doesn’t matter now, Ah Gek. You sold suon kueh in the office. Lady Boss said this is a publishing house not a market.
Ah so! It’s Miss Ting, that kaypoh! That busybody!
It wasn’t the wisest thing to say. She knew that and Mee Sua Soh also said that. But she had said it and now her bridge is burnt. The company will never give her another job again. A daily rated worker. The company owes her nothing.
‘Si kia!’
The screech jerks her awake. She must’ve dozed off.
‘Si kia! Dead child!’
Her next door neighbours are at it again. She too used to yell at her children like this. All the women in the block did it. They yelled at their kids all the time. Her own brats made her so furious sometimes that not only did she screech and yell at them, she also caned them and wanted to strangle them. They were a pack of yapping, fighting animals when they were young. Couldn’t understand words at the normal volume; she had to screech at them or hit them on the head. Never a moment’s peace with them yapping at her heels, getting in her way and knocking into her every which way they turned. It was a tight squeeze, this one-room flat with four kids. The children had to eat their meals in the corridor outside. Kow Kia’s father, who wasn’t so stoned and drunk then, had placed two large wooden crates along the wall outside their flat, and he brought home soapboxes for the children to use as stools. Nancy, the eldest, took charge, yelling at Lily and Molly. Nancy used to smack them but Lily fought back. Only four years old, the little mite fought her sister tooth and nail while Molly the second girl squealed, Ma-aaa!! Lily and Nan are fighting again!
The girls wore her out. Such screeching little vixens they were. But not her Kow Kia. He was different. A quiet child, a sweet baby boy. How he’d clung to her breast even when he was asleep, and wailed in angry protest whenever his sisters tried to carry him, his baby arms flailing out at them. She loved the feel of his plump little body against hers when he was born, the way he wound his baby arms around her neck, nuzzling against her breast, his baby mouth sucking at her nipple. He was always hungry, always needing to suckle and afterwards peeing all over her so that she had to change her clothes several times a day some days. But she never minded it. The truth was she was suffused with love for her son. She loved his clinginess, his baby greed, his sourish milk-curdled smell and his fresh-from-sleep sweet infant smell. At two, he was such a healthy brown and chubby toddler that his sisters promptly named him, Kow Kia or Little Pup, and the name had stuck.
Her little pup brought his father good luck too. She remembered the foolish grin on Ah Seng’s face when she told him that their fourth child was a boy. He couldn’t believe his luck. A son? I have a son? He was beaming when she placed the boy in his arms. Your son, she’d said to him. Speechless with joy, Ah Seng gazed down at the bundle, unable to say a word. Not a word. How proud and happy she felt that morning. Her son’s birth changed Ah Seng’s status in her eyes. From then on, she saw him not as her husband but as the father of her son and took to addressing him as ‘Kow Kia’s father.’ Later, even their neighbours addressed him as such. He was earning a decent wage working at a construction site then. Life was good even though there was not much left after paying for rent, utilities and food. But they had enough to eat.
Aye, those were good days, the good old days before the crane crashed down on him. Before he broke his leg. Before he started to drink. Before he turned moody and crazy. Before he started to beat her and the children. Before he took a chopper to her neck. Before she ran away with the boy. Before he jumped down the block. Aye, before all that happened, that year, that happy year after Kow Kia was born, Ah Seng took her and the girls to the Great World Amusement Park. It was the first day of Chinese New Year. A hot glorious day. Entrance to the Park was free on Chinese New Year’s Day, and Kow Kia’s father had money to spend. He had won a small prize betting on the birth date of his son. They feasted on plates of chicken rice and roast pork, and he bought the girls huge bowls of ice kachang for dessert, and tickets for rides on the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round. The girls were so happy! And she was so happy just looking at her brood and their beaming father. Ah Seng made them delirious with fright on the Ferris wheel. What if we fall, girls? Eh? What if we fall? Don’t look down! We’re going higher and higher and higher! Hold us! Hold us, Papa! The girls had squealed as they clung to their father. But little Kow Kia slept through it all. He was asleep in his father’s arms. Kow Kia’s father, who had never carried his daughters, was carrying his baby son that Chinese New Year. It was the happiest day of her married life.
How come we humans realised we’re happy only after the happiness was gone? Sorrow strikes like a hammer’s blow but happiness, fickle and light as a butterfly, brushes our shoulders and darts off. Why is her life so full of hammer blows? If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Money is always not enough. Never enough. Each month had been a struggle to make the dollars last till the end of the month. The children were always in trouble. School trouble when they were in school. Men trouble or money trouble when they grew up. The girls hitched up with one bloke after another. How many? She’d lost count. Only when the four of them left her did she enjoy some peace. But then Kow Kia came back. What had she done to deserve such children? And she’s a baptised Catholic some more.
She gazes at the implacable blueness of the sky outside her window. A blue unchanging cloudless sky. Vast, silent and oppressive. The heavenly Father is a distant figure, absent from her life in a one-room rental flat among neighbours who burn paper offerings to the same deities that her parents had worshipped. Her Catholic God and His saints are keeping away from her neighbours’ Ti Kong in Heaven, the pantheon of Chinese saints like the Kitchen God, the Earth God, Prosperity God and Longevity God. A Catholic since age fourteen, she hadn’t been near a church for years. Not since Father Patrick Lee humiliated her in front of the women in the Legion of Mary. Stop living in sin, Ah Gek. Go and marry the father of your children. And have them baptised. Later, he scolded her again during confession for going to the government clinic for abortion and ligation. That was the last straw. She lashed out at him in the confessional. Father, will you pay for my fifth child then?
Since then, she’d never gone back to church. So now God must be punishing her. Something was sapping Kow Kia’s blood and energy. Like a rat in the gutter, guilt gnawed at her. But surely, surely, Heavenly Father, you remember how at fourteen I rejected my parents’ false gods.
Her parents, drunk on a future that never came, were forever shaking a milk tin filled with pieces of rolled-up paper, written with the numbers zero to nine.
Bless us! Bless us with
a lucky number! Her mother had even knelt under the banyan tree while her father cried out to a large python in the wire cage.
Lord Python. Do what you will with her but please give us a winning number.
She was disgusted. How could her father offer his own wife to the reptile god? Gamblers were willing to do anything. Scurrying from one shrine to the next, from a hole-in-the-wall to a hole-in-the-banyan tree, from temple to cemetery, her crazed parents had prayed under trees, knelt beside drains or knelt on the beach in the dead of night calling up the spirit of a drowned man to tell them what numbers to buy for the next big lottery draw. By the time she was thirteen, her mother had lost all her jewellery. She could remember times when there was no food in their attap hut in Sembawang. Her brothers and sisters were crying but there was no sign of their father. One night, her distraught mother had lined up all six of them to kowtow to the God of Wealth. Fighting hunger pangs, each child had to pick a number out of the milk tin. That night, instead of buying food, their mother betted her last ten dollars on the numbers they had picked. A month later they lost their attap hut and had to move into a rented room. Eight of them, parents and six children, crammed into one small room. From then on, she stopped going to school and left home the night her parents prayed to the python god.
‘Forgive me for judging them. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault!’
Her fingers tap her heart three times in a ritual prayer that was drilled into her by her former employer, Mrs Mary Chia. Mea culpa, Mea culpa.
‘Hoi! Si kia! You dead bastard!’
A bottle shatters the still afternoon air. The drunk next door is at it again. His wife screams at him, and the children wail. The block’s daily afternoon opera has begun. What shit! These men! They drink their way to hell and damnation. Just like Kow Kia’s father. She’s mad whenever she thinks of him. His death was so pointless. A wall! Climb over it, lor! But no! He bangs his head against it. Chose drink and death. Ack! Why waste her time thinking of him? It’s past five already. Time to pray. She reaches for the box of matches and lights a candle. Places it in front of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Time she returns to saying the rosary. Beads of the desperate. That was what Mrs Mary Chia had called it. A fitting name for the string of beads. She makes the sign of the cross, holds the string of blue glass beads in her hands and begins: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee… A prayer so achingly beautiful to her ears when she first heard it as a lonely fourteen-year-old maid in the Chia household. Each night she had watched the family praying together, yearning to be part of their circle of father, mother, grandmother and children, each one on their knees, counting their rosary beads, murmuring in unison,
Hail Mary, full of grace…
She had knelt at the fringe, praying with them, happy to be connected to them by a string of beads. The family that prays together stays together; Mrs Mary Chia taught her. But Kow Kia’s father, he refused to pray. And her children followed their father’s bad example although, in her heart of heart, she must admit that this was not entirely his doing. She herself was erratic in her praying after she’d left the Chia’s employment. They had sacked her when they found out that she was pregnant at seventeen.
‘Our Father Who art in heaven, holy be thy name…’
She ends the first decade of beads and gets up to sit on a chair. At sixty-six, her joints are not as strong as they used to be. But to do penance properly, she has to be on her knees. So she kneels again.
‘Please make Kow Kia well O Blessed Mother Mary! I promise to recite the rosary every day for the rest of my life if you ask your son, Jesus, to make him well.’
She prays to the Virgin, mother to mother. She was not above bargaining. Prayers are offerings to a divine deity in return for favours granted or sins forgiven. You pray for what you did or what you desire. The bigger the favour, the bigger the sin, the longer you pray. A fair system. Hammer on God’s door. That’s praying, Father Patrick said. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace…’
Her prayer in Teochew rises and fall in a lilt that sound quaint to modern ears accustomed to Teochew spoken in the market place. The words of the prayer are formal and tonal unlike the Teochew of daily speech. She clutches the string of beads in both her hands, pushing down a bead after each Hail Mary. When she reaches the tenth bead, she recites, ‘Our Father…’ and starts again bead by bead, one bead for one prayer until she’d said the ‘Hail Mary’ prayer fifty times and the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Glory Be’ ten times each.
She has been praying like this every evening for the past fortnight. Her plan is to say this number of prayers each night for a month. By the end of thirty days, she reckons she will have said ‘Hail Mary’ one thousand and five hundred times, ‘Our Father’ and ‘Glory Be’ three hundred times. She imagines each prayer as a knock on God’s door. Knock, knock, knock! Out in the great beyond, He’s bound to hear her and answer. A soft groan comes from behind the red checked curtain. She remains kneeling and continues to pray with her back to the curtain while her ears pick up every move and sigh behind it. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb …’
7
Just what the hell is she doing? When is she going to stop this mumbo-jumbo? Her words dropping like marbles on the hard floor and bouncing off the walls. Praying for him, she’d said. More like hitting him with a hammer on his head with each ‘Hail Mary’. He’s broken out in a cold sweat again. His soaked tee shirt clings to his back. He feels drained. Last night, she’d badgered him to see a doctor again. What can the doctor do? Bound to give him bad news and a prescription for the expensive drugs he can’t afford. How else can these medical blokes buy their BMWs and Mercedes? That’s how the business works. If I die, I die. I’m prepared, he told her, and she’d cried. Said he was killing her with his intransigence. Big Teochew word – intransigence! Where did she learn that kind of Teochew? Like from the opera.
Silence on the other side of the curtain. The praying has stopped. At last he can breathe. He sits up, feels for his slippers and drags himself to the bathroom, and leans against the wall to catch his breath. Then the praying starts again. He swears under his breath. Why can’t his mother be silent? Sit quietly like other old ladies. But no, she can’t sit still and do nothing. If she sits down, her hands must reach for a cloth to wipe the table or wash a cup. Her eyes dart from one corner of the flat to the other, checking for dust, for dirt, for this, for that, all the while her hands would be wiping, sweeping, grabbing, her mind clicking, counting, adding, and her mouth yelling at her children. Sit up. Drink up. Wake up. Own up. Don’t lie. Don’t die. She can’t help herself. Has been like this ever since he was a boy. If her mouth wasn’t yapping, her hands were kneading dough and anger. Face taut with fury, her hands pounded the pastry, flattened and moulded the rice dough into soun kueh, chooi kueh, ang ku kueh, any kueh or cakes that would bring in a little extra to supplement his miserable old man’s miserable wage. Hard anger was buried in those hands. He couldn’t eat her cakes. Couldn’t stomach them. Used to throw up when she forced him to eat the unsold kueh.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace…’
Damn! His throat hurts. His tongue feels bloated and thick. He looks into the mirror on the wall, opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue. A cream-coloured fuzz covers it. There’s an ulcer at the corner of his mouth. Yesterday, she had looked at it and pronounced him, ‘heaty.’ He’d almost laughed. Heaty? What a joke! He wishes it were just the heat that’s bugging him.
When they were children, his sisters had borne the brunt of their Ma’s temper. She was a firecracker with a short fuse. Bang! Bang! Bang! Little things set her off. When the old man was alive, their flat was a boiling cauldron of quarrels and fistfights. She hurled things at him. Pots and pans were flung at the wall in the middle of the night. He banged his fists on the table, and thumped her and them, the children if they got in the way. Th
e pots and pans in her kitchen were dented, the bowls and plates chipped. Nothing was whole. She hammered her children’s heads with anything she could grab. A bowl. A plate. A mug. A pot. Once she hurled a stool out of the window. It landed on the path downstairs. Luckily no one was hurt, but it’d scared the shit out of him. She could have been jailed for ‘killer litter’ if someone had reported her to the police. Oh, she was reckless in those days. But she was the only one who stood up for him when the old man whipped him at the slightest excuse. He loved her then. When she hurled that stool out of the window, he was prepared to lie to the teeth to the police to protect her.
‘Ugh!’ At the sound of his cough, she stops praying.
‘Kow Kia! You want water? Toilet?’
He waves her off and is glad she doesn’t try to help him. He closes the bathroom door, but he can’t shut out her droning, which is not as loud as before, but that’s only because she’s listening to his laboured grunts in case he falls or faints. He chaffs at the lack of privacy. Untied the strings of his pants and gingerly lowers his bag of bones over the squat bowl, relieved that he hasn’t soiled his pants. His bowels are loose and watery again. If not for this damn diarrhoea, he needn’t have come back. There’s nothing here for him, just lousy memories of his old man. He knows he broke her heart when he left home at fifteen. But god! The flat had reeked of his sisters’ female things and smells. Their tits and bums had rubbished his face. The four of them had had to share the half of the room not occupied by their parents’ bed. The half that the old man had grandly called the sitting room. Sitting room, ha! More like a pigsty. His sisters’ clothes were everywhere.
The Man Who Wore His Wife's Sarong Page 9