A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  He felt full of something, he wasn’t sure what. Something heavy, glimpsed between sliding panels. It was only as the afternoon drew to a close—after they’d monkeyed about on the climbing frames and the fireman’s poles; after Priya’s wonder that Brian’s brother could and did look exactly like him (“I really want to see you together”); after Brian’s sympathetic horror at tales of Priya’s most imperious classmates (“Mabel my cousin is just like that also”)—it was only then, as Brian was taking himself home, across the bare concrete of the void deck and up two steps at a time, that the fullness and the heaviness drained away into a kind of clarity. He was happy.

  Between his own unconsciousness and Brian’s haze of elsewhere, Andrew saw little of his brother. Eight hours a night they slept side by side. But Brian bounced out of bed early each morning, and when he returned Andrew was usually asleep, exhausted from a day of sweating and headaches and pains behind his eyes.

  The dengue was poorly timed. It didn’t even bring the compensation of a Medical Certificate to get him out of school. A weekend was all Andrew had of the June holidays before the fever began, and the promised month of freedom opened with a week of fatigue, discomfort, the frustration of time burning away in enforced waste, and Mabel. (Aiyoh, Mabel.) It wasn’t a combination he would have chosen for himself.

  But Mabel, among these elements, surprised. Perhaps they had always been unjust to her, or perhaps something about his present neediness satisfied her desire for control. Whatever the reason, she was far more tolerable than the shared opinions of the brothers had led him to expect. She sat with her book, and waited, and asked for nothing. As his temperature approached its restless peaks she gently and efficiently applied a damp cloth. In his alert intervals they managed some commonplace exchanges about their family, and exams, and the current Li Nanxing drama serial. And she anticipated his thirst with regular hot mugs of barley, where Brian, he realised, would have had to be asked, before coming in with glasses filled at the kitchen sink.

  As he himself would too, Andrew thought, were he nursing anyone: a strange idea to entertain. He propped himself against his pillow and considered Mabel’s back as she sat at his desk. She was pencil thin, with a craning pony neck framed by a severe bob. He was for the first time clear-headed enough to appreciate how many hours she was spending in the sole company of a twitching, largely comatose cousin, half a stranger anyway, and to wonder why, exactly, she was there.

  “Mabel, you don’t find it very boring meh?”

  She replied carefully, without turning round: “Find what boring?”

  “Sitting here nothing to do, must be very sian, right?”

  “I’m studying the Lord’s word.” This line was a shade more brittle in the air than in her head, where she had practised it enough times, silently, in response to more or less the same question. But she couldn’t tell Andrew that, any more than she could tell him the rest, the things she barely acknowledged to herself: that there was nowhere else she had money or permission to go, which would lie beyond the Brownian motion of her mother’s rattan and her rage.

  “The Lord’s word.” He couldn’t quite keep the laugh out of his voice.

  “I know you don’t believe in that.”

  “No, I don’t.” But it kept Mabel there, with damp cloth and barley. That was something. He had to respect that.

  They became friends of a sort. After several days, Andrew’s fever subsided. A watch was no longer strictly necessary, but Andrew was still too weak to leave the flat. Mabel continued to come by, and they sat together as they had gotten used to doing. (Brian roamed, and spent the family dinners in distraction. He remained sharp to Mabel, who noticed it for the first time, by contrast with the altered behaviour of his brother.) Andrew immersed himself in mathematical puzzles and a series of faded science books that Mabel fetched from the local library on request. He was particularly preoccupied with one on the human body, full of pictures, the large grey coils of the intestines and the fist-like lump of the heart. Mabel kept to her Bible with the occasional foray into The Straits Times. Once or twice they played Uno or Monopoly, and sometimes they watched SBC 8 dramas and afternoon cartoons in companionable silence.

  A few days into this routine, Mabel insisted on tuning the television in to an interview. “What is this?” Andrew asked.

  “It’s one of the people they arrested. For the plot.”

  He stared blankly.

  “Don’t you read the news?”

  “Er, no.”

  “So you don’t know about the plot?”

  “No?” This line of inquiry struck him as unnecessary—she’d been there with him, after all, while he was convalescent for a week.

  “These Catholics were arrested, yah, and the government put them in jail. They might be there forever. They don’t get to go to court or anything. So they’re trapped lah. And this guy, Vincent Cheng, he’s one of them, they’re letting him out for this interview on TV.”

  He looked at the screen. A bespectacled, soft-spoken man was being questioned by four journalists. “What were they arrested for?”

  Contempt glittered in her voice. “Government says they’re dangerous.”

  “What was their crime?”

  “They didn’t do any crime.”

  “So how come they were arrested?”

  Mabel wouldn’t be drawn further: her attention was fixed on the screen. To be sure, Mabel moved in mysterious ways, but still the sight of someone about his age voluntarily paying heed to the news was baffling and impressive. Well, why not, Andrew thought, and settled himself down to watch. He tried to listen as unfamiliar phrases reeled past. Vincent Cheng, in the frame of the box, was asked about, and spoke of, Marxism. A classless society. An open, critical attitude. The ideals of the Church.

  Andrew was as ignorant about politics as any twelve-year-old boy. But he was intelligent, and careful, and encouraged to be conscious of his intelligence, to expect high things. He understood his future achievements, unspecified but undoubted, as part of his identity. And if the historical, national and global context of the words he heard passed him by, nevertheless he recognised in them, with sympathetic kinship, a kind of ambition, a kind of identity, thwarted and sidelong.

  This kinship frightened him. On the television, Vincent Cheng’s face was studiedly blank, his voice dull. He didn’t strike Andrew as dangerous or criminal, but as someone hollowed out in defeat. As if his guts were being scraped out with a spoon (he saw the large grey coils), and the air was being pressed out of his lungs (he saw empty, gasping bags), and his innards were now deposited in an ignominious public heap. The result was not an interview but fleshy puppetry, limp and grotesque.

  The show ended. Mabel clicked the television off, stood by the set in silence for a moment, and then turned with an air of martyred grandeur.

  “Those people who do the Lord’s work are always persecuted.”

  This classically Mabellian sort of line had, in the past, been the subject of a great deal of eye-rolling between Andrew and his brother. Now he felt a kind of sick recognition at its truth. The man on the television had gambled something real and of value in himself, a small feathered thing he should have kept close. If they sensed you were keeping it from them, those who wanted it had jail and journalists and other powers; they could cut you open and scoop it out.

  You had to tame it for them. You had to be on their side, the winning side. You had to keep it close.

  Andrew made himself a promise. He would never do the Lord’s work.

  Priya Menon, eleven years old, didn’t realise just yet how far she was disqualified from social notice, though others regularly did their best to educate her. It would be some time before their efforts bore real fruit, but in the meantime they were disagreeable enough. There was the day, for instance, when Michael Ong of 6A, tittering to himself, sauntered into the prefects’ room to claim his school bag. Seeing Priya bent over homework, he came to stand by the table. “Eh, Priya, you always like joking
one, right? Here, I tell you this one. What’s the difference between an Indian and a bucket of shit?”

  She stared into his long, beaming face, oily with the onset of adolescence. His thick hair was stiff with styling mousse. Why would anyone ask this question? Why would he ask it? Why would he ask her?

  “The bucket!” He released a hiccupping laugh. She felt her mouth twist involuntarily. Michael continued, “Eh, don’t so serious lah! This one is my sister told me one, quite funny, horh?” She shrank automatically as he reached out to squeeze her upper arm with unexpected force.

  Having retrieved his things, he left as suddenly as he had come. Priya willed herself to act as though he had not been there at all. She looked at the next problem sum in her workbook. Her heart was racing. She had to read the words twice before they made sense, and as she wrote in the blank space below, she could see her first equation wobbling. She stopped, looked up for a moment into the silent room, and then went on with grim doggedness. The feel of Michael’s fingers stayed with her for the rest of the day, a hot, invisible mark.

  Mostly she refused to be rattled. She treated the cries of “Ah pui ah!” and “Fatty bombom!” as cosmic background radiation, and learned to drift quietly into sharp imaginings when her classmates babbled in the impassably alien tones of Mandarin as though she was not there. She decided that the real world consisted of what her cleverness and her sunniness earned her: her parents’ love, the praise of her teachers, shared laughter with the scatter of breezy, chatty, good-natured girls at school toward whom she unerringly sailed. The real world was lying across the comforting expanse of her father’s stomach, on the sofa, while he hummed to himself and stroked her hair. When Michael thrust his Brylcreemed jibes in her face, or the boy who collided with her in the swimming pool shouted “Mangali cheebye!” she dismissed their abuse as the vaporous excrescences of marginal cranks, like the venomous muttering about munjen she heard from her uncle Sundar now and then.

  The real world was made up, also, of imaginary ones: books, about tesseracts, ancient artefacts, and dark shadowy powers loosed by arrogant young wizards who had then to pursue them across the sea. Priya couldn’t be down about the pale life going on around her when here was such vivid proof of heart-catching beauty, of thrilling fellowships, of vital stuff. She thought everyone would strive for these things—would be pulled, as water ran downhill, toward their deep charm, once they only knew of them. She thought everyone confined to the cardboard day-to-day must feel their own ignorance like an aching hollow. Since fiction and its possibilities were there for the taking, it could only be a matter of time before they learned. Therefore the indignities she endured were evanescent, already scheduled for doom; and so, from her child’s-eye view, with all of futurity stretching before it, they were not quite real. Someday soon, her peers would see the light; if not in Primary Six, well, she gave it till Secondary Two at the latest.

  When Brian Teo had bumped into her in the book-lined aisles of Frankie Wong, it had all the feeling of a door finally opening from the waiting room into this real world.

  “Sorry,” he said, retrieving the book he had knocked from her hands and offering it to her with a nervous, solicitous smile.

  “It’s okay,” she said, thinking that he was very handsome. She was slightly surprised to be thinking it. It wasn’t something she thought often. When her friends giggled over poster pin-ups or boys at school, she often felt unmoved, and sometimes impatient. Brian had neat features—sharp cheekbones, a clean jaw, lively eyes crinkled at the corners by a ready smile. His face already had a grown-up sort of clarity of expression, not the wet, uncertain look of children; though it would change little through his teenage years, as if it had got ahead early and then stalled.

  Priya was drawn to Brian. She didn’t want him to go, but she sensed that, left to his own devices, he probably would. “You like fantasy?”

  “Yah,” he said—not expecting conversation, but clearly not displeased.

  “Me too! What are you reading?”

  “I just finished Voyage of the Dawn Treader, third one in the Narnia series, you know it? I’m looking for number four.”

  “Reepicheep,” she said. “I love Reepicheep! He would be so nice as a pet, right? Just the right size to hug.”

  Brian smiled. “Yah, but better don’t say in front of him, later he stab you, then you know.”

  “I used to like hiding in cupboards,” Priya said. “I liked to jump out and shout ‘Boo!’ at my mother. But then I read Narnia number one—do you know it?—and then suddenly the cupboard felt too small. Where’s the forest? And the talking lion? And don’t have any snow.”

  “Put a lot of moth balls inside lah,” Brian suggested. “Can pretend. But might be smelly.” They both laughed.

  “Number three is the best,” she went on. “It’s not as good later. Have you read this?” She plucked another volume from the shelf and thrust it at him. “She writes in all this really weird stuff, and at first it seems like it’s all anyhow like that, you get confused by it, but then suddenly it all comes together, and it’s all tight, it all makes sense.” This grew into a second recommendation, and then a third. Brian listened with surprised pleasure: it was hard to interest his brother, and the gang at school would enthuse only about battles. A pile of books soon gathered in his arms, but his pocket money only allowed one at a time. “Then you have to start with this one,” she said as they left the store, and he suggested they get some Milo. They sat together on the bright green rail running along the edge of an enormous storm drain, and drank the cold malty chocolate, through straws, out of soft plastic drawstring bags.

  That was the first of their handful of June afternoons together. In it Priya learned that Brian lived two blocks away from her; that he attended a nearby Catholic boys’ school; that his father worked for the Ministry of Labour and his mother was a police officer; and that he had one brother. A mundane list, not the stuff of adventure or revelation. But she stored these facts up like burnished, hard-edged pebbles, to be turned over and over in her mind that night, while she lay staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars and crescents stuck to the ceiling. They were countable, touchable; they kept the encounter anchored to daily banality, and were therefore delightful in themselves.

  She was elated, and triumphant, and relieved. She had acted and created something. She had hazarded herself, and Brian had responded, and there it was. Brian’s intent, open, good-natured look, as she rattled on about her beloved books: a look full of real interest. The look spoke of his own connection to the real world. It had happened. It was possible. It had happened.

  They saw each other, after that, almost every day, or every other. Mostly they simply talked, and wandered between the hideouts Priya had found for her June and December daydreaming. The external walls of the Braddell apartment blocks were painted in clean government pastel—soft cream, faded orange, flat crayon green—and there were no unexpected spaces in their uniform grey interiors. But there were quiet corner spots where you could look out over the geometry of the Lego town, with its overspreading trees, its neat covered walkways criss-crossing between market, coffee shops, more apartment blocks, the sandy gold circles of playgrounds. Songbirds in corridors hung in cages from the ceiling, dangling nonchalantly over the edge of the parapet. And there were shifts of weather. Once they sat and listened to a thunderstorm reverberating in their ribcages. They made afternoon raids on the ixora bushes that lined the paths in the estate: twisting the red stems, pushing the stamens at their hearts, and pulling out tiny, thin piston-like threads capped with large, surprising globes of nectar.

  It was a change for Brian, who said he was used to spending his holidays with Andrew, playing badminton and marbles, kicking a football about, retiring to their separate books.

  “So long already and he’s still sick. If I weren’t hanging out with you, I’d be damn sian.”

  They were standing at the base of a stairwell in Priya’s block, steps twisting skyward over their h
eads in a towering concrete ribbon. A week had passed since they’d first met, though with their hours together stretching out at leisure each day, it felt as though it had been longer.

  “I used to want a brother,” Priya said. “Or sister. I kept begging my parents for one.”

  “Aiyah, it’s no big deal lah. I guess it’s good there’s someone to play games with.” Brian had a sudden thought. “It’s a bit weird to talk about him to you like this, you know. Because, my family and at school, everyone knows him, even the guys in the ping pong club know him ‘cos he’s in my year. And he’s quite famous in school anyway lah. So it’s a bit weird that you don’t know him, but you know me.” He met the fixed brown of her eyes, and felt a kind of pleasing, creeping consciousness of himself.

  “What’s he like? Is he like you?”

  “Yah, I guess.” Brian had never really thought about this much, except in relation to the stock subject of discussion at family gatherings: “But he’s damn smart lah, much smarter than me. Always studying some more, he’ll go and find all these extra things, not even storybooks or what, maths and science, not even homework also, and bring home to read for fun. Since Primary Four, for exams he always gets high marks, every paper more than 90. Mine are okay, but his are damn high. Next year when he goes secondary school, confirm it’s a top one.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Don’t know. Probably stay in St. Alex lorh.” He assumed that he’d drift into the brother school of his primary school.

  “All boys again? So boring! Hey, you should go to a mixed school, and then if I went to the same one, we’d be at the same school. We could see each other every day.”