‘Can I offer you a drink?’
‘No, thank you. Alamak!. It’s one thirty already! You better go in. Better rest.’
He knows it’s not the lateness of the hour that has stopped Mak Som from coming inside for a drink. No one has come into the flat ever since he returned from the hospital. Not his sisters. Not the neighbours. Not that the neighbours had said anything bad about him to his mother. But even if they had, she wouldn’t tell him. The neighbours still greet his mother. He has heard them talking to her in the corridor. Yet the few times he struggled out to the common corridor, just for a change of air after lying for hours in bed, the neighbours’ doors slammed shut. The children, who used to come into the flat for his mother’s suon kueh, have stopped coming. He’s not surprised. It’s inevitable.
Ya-lah! What to do? Singaporeans are like this, Sayang! All want to avoid trouble. That’s what Honeybear would have said if he were alive. He can hear the bugger laughing. They don’t want to come into your flat, never mind, lah! Tell them. You keep your germs. I keep my germs! Share your sperm but not your germ! Good, eh? It rhymes some more!
Honeybear had a corny sense of humour. Sometimes in the witching hours between two and four in the morning when his body is shivering in a cold sweat, he has been comforted by his lover’s voice, not so much by the words said but by the timbre of his voice like the bass of his old guitar. There it is again. His cackling laugh. And his face. His unforgettable face. The skin stretched tight like thin parchment over the face. No flesh under the skin. Dark dried scabs of old sores clustered around his lips and nostrils. Honeybear’s eyes, once bright with mischief and laughter, once beautifully lined with kohl and mascara, were dull opaque disks. His beloved, his sweet babe, his darling, his whatever, he stuffs a fist into his mouth to stop himself from sobbing out loud.
It has been two years. After the first rush of anger, after the initial shock, after the news from Honeybear about the deadly virus had sunk in, after the accusations and counter-accusations, after the bouts of fear and drunken stupor, after their tears had dried and their eyes could cry no more, what was left between them? What else? What else? Death, when it came, was swift and sudden. The funeral was rushed. He didn’t know that the law in Singapore then had ruled out embalming, had required that the dead be thrust into a black body bag and buried within twenty-four hours. There was no time for goodbye. No time for closure. He didn’t even know that his Honeybear was gone until he was gone. His real name was Malek bin Abdul Samad, he was told. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know at the time.
So much then for living together. How many secrets did they keep locked inside their hearts? How little they knew about each other. How little. He didn’t even know where his Honeybear was buried. Did the authorities or his family bury his body? Or was it burned? Was his body flung into the fire like a diseased log, the flames scorching the vermin in his flesh? The body he had once held against his own healthy body. But no, no, Muslims do not cremate the dead. Did Honeybear ask for him? Did his beloved want to see him one last time? One last time. But even if he had wanted to, Honeybear had no way of getting to him. Damn, damn, damn. He’s imagining things again, imagining his beloved’s last moments when he should have been by his side, holding his hand, easing his passing. He buries his face in his pillow. God, where were you when Honeybear was dying? Where? Bloody hell, where were you, Kow Kia? You shouldn’t have left for Manila. He hit himself. He heaves his skeletal frame out of bed and shuffles to the kitchen.
His mother is at the sink, washing her hands and face. From where he’s standing, she looks grey and thin. Her blouse is hanging loosely from her shoulders. She seems to have shrivelled in the last six months. Had it been six months since his return from hospital? He bites his lower lip. He’s dripping sweat again exhausted by the effort to get up and walk. When she sees him standing in the doorway of the kitchen, she moves to one side thinking that he wants to go to the bathroom.
He shakes his head, unable to speak. His throat is sore. He points to the kettle on the table. She pours out a glass and gives it to him. His hand shakes when he takes the glass from her hand. It shakes again as he holds it to his mouth, his teeth chattering as he drinks, water dribbling out of the corner of his mouth and down his neck. He’s aware that she is watching him, watching the water dribble from his mouth to his neck. Gingerly he puts the glass down and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Her watchfulness irritates him. He wishes she would relax. Let go of her worry. He won’t die if she were to relax a little. But tonight, looking at her tired face, he softens. He wants to tell her that he knows why she had borrowed the money and why he said nothing. What can he possibly say? What’s there to say? Where else could she get the money for his medicine if she didn’t borrow? He had thought of ending his life many times to end her burden. But each time he had thought of her, and his courage failed him. Pray, she always urged him. But where’s God? Heaven is void.
‘Ma.’
She looks up, waiting, but the words are lodged like fishbones in his throat. He coughs. No other word comes out. He turns away.
Kow Kia! Kow Kia! He hears her calling from a great distance. Kow Kia! She’s waving to him. He’s in the playground, climbing the monkey bar. He must be four or five years old. Look at me, Ma! Look! Look! He’s balancing on one foot on the top rung of the monkey bar. Maaaa! Headlong into the sandpit he falls, wailing like a banshee for his mother. She picks him up. Young, warm and smelling of sweet lavender talc she wraps her arms around him and he buries his face between her breasts, breathing in the sweet sour milky fragrance of her nipples. The hot ginger tea burns his throat. He coughs and spits out a gob of green phlegm.
‘Thank God! Thank God! You’re all right. Don’t die on me, Kow Kia. You hear me? Let me die first. You must live. Can you stand up now? Try. I’ll help you. Lean on my shoulder. Yes, yes, lean on me. Don’t worry. Just lean on me. I’ll get you back to bed. You fainted. Such a scare you gave me.’
11
The thin reedy voices of three women and one man fail to comfort Ah Gek, kneeling with head bowed at the back of the church. She has slipped in when the church doors opened at six. Never having attended early morning mass before, she is glad that the church is empty except for a sprinkling of old folks. At communion time, she joins the queue inching its way to the priest. She clasps her hands and opens her mouth. When the priest places the consecrated host on her tongue, the feeling of reverence that sweeps through her is so strong that she dares not chew on the wafer and waits for it to melt in her mouth.
‘Lord, have mercy on me.’ She prays for strength and courage. She has to do it. If she doesn’t, she will never be able to help Kow Kia and clear the huge debt she owes Big Eye Dragon. ‘So help me, God.’
‘Arise, the mass has ended. Go and serve the Lord,’ the priest intones.
12
Ah Gek crosses herself, relieved. She has cleared Custom & Immigration. Standing on the road divider in Johore Bahru town centre, she watches the never-ending stream of cars and joins the others as they dash across the road. Si Tua Pui has told her the job is easy.
Very simple, one! You take some suon kueh to JB and bring some suon kueh back from JB. What’s so difficult?
She had asked him why she had to take a bag of suon kueh into Johore Bahru, and bring back another bag of suon kueh. It didn’t make sense.
Must everything make sense to you, meh? Can you not be such a busybody? What for you ask so many questions? The big boss said to do it this way. You do it this way. When you’re done, he’ll cancel your debt and will give you more money some more. Good, right or not? You’re getting a good deal, Ah Gek. So! Just do what you’re told. Now this is what you do. Take a taxi into JB. When you come back, take the bus. Easy, right? Once you reach JB, go to the central market. Go to the Chinese section. Not the Malay section. Got it? At the Chinese section, look for the suon kueh stall. You can’t miss it. There’s only one stall selling suon kueh. Husband and wife. You go up to the husband. G
ive him your bag of suon kueh all packed in styrofoam boxes. Tell him, they’re from me. He’ll know. His wife will give you a bag of her own homemade suon kueh. Very delicious, hahaha! You bring those back to Singapore and give them to me. Simple, isn’t it?
She pushes her way through the crowds in the packed open-air market. Pushing and shoving, elbowing and nudging, people yell at her to get out of the way. Wooden clogs nick her heels. Baskets knock against her. A flood of humanity weaves in and out of the narrow spaces between the makeshift stalls. The air reeks of beef and mutton. She hurries past huge shanks of beef and carcasses of goat and sheep. A few goat’s heads hang from steel hooks, their goat eyes like opaque glass marbles. She has heard that the Malays in Johore love to suck goat’s eyes cooked in a curry. She has nothing against eating eyes. She herself loves fish eyes especially the eyes of a grouper or red snapper steamed with garlic, red chilli and fermented black beans. But a goat’s eye? No, thank you.
She elbows her way out of the crush, spies a pig’s head hanging by its snout on an iron hook. Ah, the Chinese section of the market. She can breathe freely now, walking between the stalls hawking slabs of pork, chunks of ribs, and strings of pale intestines hanging from metal hooks. Her nostrils no longer feel assaulted. Kow Kia’s father used to tell her that umbrellas have different handles; people have different tastes. That was what he used to say whenever she nagged him about not going to church with her. Ack! If I go to church, who will pray to my ancestors? These days religion no longer bothers her. She will pray to any god who can make her Kow Kia well again. Ah! There it is! The suon kueh stall.
‘Si Tua Pui asked me to give you this’
She gives the man the plastic bag of styrofoam boxes filled with suon kueh. His wife hands her another plastic bag.
‘These are our suon kueh for Si Tua Pui.’
‘Thank you,’ she says and leaves. They didn’t even exchange greetings or names. Later, she would regret that she didn’t look at their faces properly.
At the bus station she boards the bus for Singapore. Just follow other people, Si Tua Pui had instructed her. When the bus reaches the Malaysian Immigration checkpoint, she alights with the other passengers who rush forward towards the queues in front of the immigration booths. She joins one of the queues. When her passport was stamped, the bored-looking officer, a Malay woman wearing a headscarf, didn’t even look up.
She hurries back to the bus. The Singapore Immigration building at the other end of the causeway is the next stop. She is tense. Her bladder is full. She had avoided using the washroom in the Malaysian Immigration building because of its wet floor and dirty toilets. She would rather wait till she has crossed the border back into Singapore; wait till she has crossed the line that separated order from mess. She hurries out as soon as the bus pulls into the bus bay. Several other buses are also spilling out passengers who rush toward the immigration booths with their bags and children in tow. She has no luggage. Just her handbag and the bag of suon kueh. She quickens her steps. Everyone will rush for the toilets soon. She wants to go through immigration quickly and reach the washroom before this tourist horde.
A young woman in front of her in the queue is having a hard time with her year old toddler. The child is screaming and kicking, refusing to sit in his pram. His poor mother has to take him out of his pram, carry him astride her hip with one arm and push the pram with the other. As the child continues to scream and kick, the mother and child are holding up the queue.
‘Here. Let me help you.’
‘No need, Auntie, I can manage,’ the young woman says.
But her wailing child is flailing his arms, kicking his legs and twisting his body. It doesn’t look like the young mother can carry him, and handle the pram as well.
‘Here I push. I push the pram for you.’
Ah Gek places her hand on the pram but the child’s kick lands on her knuckles. The sudden pain causes her to let go of her plastic bag. Suon kueh tumbles out of their styrofoam boxes into the pram.
‘Aiyah! See, lah! See, lah! I told you no need! I don’t need your help! I’ve enough trouble already, Auntie! You’re giving me more trouble!!!!’
‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’ll clean your pram!
Ah Gek tries to retrieve her boxes of suon kueh.
‘I told you already! I don’t need your help! Go! Go! Leave me alone!’
The woman pushes her away. People crowd round. An immigration guard strides towards them. The raised voices, the child’s crying and screaming, and the young mother’s angry shouting disorientates her. She is faint with fear when two immigration officers gather up her boxes of suonkueh, and lead her into their office.
13
Kow Kia sits up in bed. Holding the small mirror to his face he stares at the dark purple lesions where the skin is broken around his jaw. His cheekbones and nose stick out like craggy outcrops. The mirror shows an old man with sunken eyes and cheeks. The disease is slowly but relentlessly remoulding his features. His face has become the face of the disease, the face of his withered soul. He has no words to describe the turbulence in his heart. His head aches. He regrets he did not kill himself long ago. He should have. Now it’s too late. Too late. His death will negate what his mother has done. He has to live. For her sake. A dry, hard sobbing shakes him. He pushes the mirror under his pillow and lies down to wait. This is his new routine now. Waiting. Every day, he waits for news of his mother, waits for the food that Mak Som brings on days when Lily can’t come. His life these past months has revolved around waiting for what little news his sisters could give him, waiting to find out what his sisters and the authorities are planning for him. He has very little control over his life, except his breath, and thankfully his bowels. He can still choose to inhale and exhale, and make his way to the bathroom without soiling his pants. Sometimes lying for hours in the silent flat, unable to sleep at night, he misses his mother’s snores, and is forced to listen to his own breathing. Count one, two, three, four, up to twelve before he releases his breath, and inhale again. He does this sometimes to remind himself that he still has some control over life, some will power to control the breath in his wasted body. In. Out. In. Stop. Out. Stop. He can slit his wrist. If he wants to.
He had stayed up, waiting for her, trying not to fret when she failed to return home that fateful night. She hadn’t said a word about not coming back. It was not like her to go off and not tell him. She talked to him even when his back was turned to her. He heard footsteps in the corridor, but they were not his mother’s. Her walk was a soft rubber-soled shuffle, not a hard stride. He was surprised that he remembered such things about her, surprised that the months of lying in bed had made his hearing acute to the sound and rhythm of his mother’s footfalls, and the movements of neighbours down the corridor. He remembered he had glanced at the clock, heard the ticking of the minute hand. Then he must have fallen asleep until Lily’s shouts roused him.
Kow Kia! Kow Kia! It’s me! Wake up!
Ah, ah! Coming. He’d answered, but he couldn’t make his voice any louder. The lymph nodes around his throat were swollen.
When he opened the front door, Lily had stepped back involuntarily. A reflex action that had stung him to the quick. She stood some distance away from him, her face pale when she said, ‘The police have arrested Ma.’
14
‘I’ve brought you pork bone soup, fried rice and chicken porridge. One container each. Should last you two days.’
Lily puts the large plastic bag on the doorstep. He knows she won’t come into the flat even if invited. Not that it matters. He understands his sister’s fear and he is grateful that she still finds the time to bring him food and news of their mother.
‘Ma will be in court tomorrow. Her picture was in the papers again yesterday.’
Lily hands him a copy of yesterday’s Straits Times.
‘How…how is she?’
‘She’s lost a lot of weight. Gone very thin. Can’t sleep, can’t eat, she said. She
thinks too much. I told her to take it one day at a time. Not to worry about you. I haven’t been sleeping well myself too. Sometimes I ask myself, why, eh? Why did she have to go and do something stupid like this? Something so stupid! Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t say it to Ma. But each time I visit her; each time I see Changi Prison, I start fuming. Why? Why? Why did she do it?’
He bends down to pick up the bag of food. He can’t bear to look at Lily’s anguished face. Carefully, he folds the newspaper and puts it on the shoe rack next to the door. He will read it later.
‘Don’t blame Ma. Blame me.’
‘Don’t say that!’ Lily’s voice is sharp. ‘Don’t you say that! You didn’t make her go to JB! She should’ve gone to the MP for help, to the hospital, or the family service centre. We told her so! All their lives! She and Pa! Always borrowing from loan sharks! For this! For that! Remember Pa? After he broke his leg?’
It’s on the tip of his tongue to tell Lily that one of his sisters should have gone with Ma to get help. Instead, in a voice dulled by resignation, he mutters, ‘Ma owed the Housing Board many months rent. They wanted to evict us.’
‘All the more she should go to the MP. They won’t evict her. Just think of the bad publicity! Housing Board throws old woman with sick son out of their flat! So heartless. You think the bosses in the Housing Board want such publicity, meh? She should’ve talked to me! But she kept things to herself! Kept it in her heart! Aaah! I just have to get this off my chest. I can’t say it to Ma. I can’t say it to Nan. I don’t want to start a quarrel with her and Molly.’
‘Lily, listen. Ma did it for me.’
‘Now don’t you start me off. Ma doesn’t want you mixed up in this.’
He shakes his head. He’s the only reason his mother went to the loan sharks, and Lily knows it. ‘Has she got a lawyer?’
‘The court has given her a lawyer. No need to pay. They’ve a special word for it. Pro something … probono. For poor people. Ma’s poor. And we’re not earning much. I told the police I’ve a family to support. Look, I’ve got to go. Ah Lau is always so irritable when he drives me over. He’s waiting downstairs. Can’t park his lorry here. I’ve got to go. And you,’ she looks at him from across the distance that separates the diseased from the healthy. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to you after tomorrow. I can’t bring you food every day. I’ve got to work. Got to visit Ma, got to run here, run there and take care of my boys, take care of so many things. I can’t take leave too often. Now it’s still okay. Ma’s picture is in the papers. Everyone at work is very sympathetic. And the busybodies fawn all over me. But if I take too many days off, people will complain. I might get the sack. You understand or not?’
The Man Who Wore His Wife's Sarong Page 11