by Justin Ker
“That would be cool. That would be really great.”
He was surprised by the solidity of this image, and by a flash of the distant glamour of being fifteen, and his face lit up with real enthusiasm. Enclosed in the safe grey tunnel of the stairwell, Priya looked at him, and the electric sympathy of friendship mixed with the thought, again, that he was really rather beautiful. There was a coiled-spring energy in the movement of his arm, from the line of his sleeve to his long brown fingers. She found herself taking his hand. His fingers curled round hers, and they smiled at each other in a flush of newness.
Theirs were clumsy embraces. Bits touched bits, absurdly. They were children, after all, covered all over in soft child skin, sticky with a Singaporean day of sweat, just on the threshold—if not yet tipped over—of unutterable self-consciousness. Brian was wearing his usual get-up of flip-flops and some cheap pasar malam T-shirt and those dirty green shorts that didn’t do his toothpick boy legs any favours. As for Priya, bright-eyed, pudgy, round in the belly but not yet in the breast, it was some years before fashion would blip onto her radar. Grubby children, not magazine-perfect starlets. This afternoon they were all lips and hands and cloudless disbelief, comic and grandiose.
Brian had to be called to dinner twice. He clicked the television off and hurried over. Auntie Lay Choo, his father’s younger sister, stood at the table, unfolding waxy brown paper packets. “This chicken rice is from a new stall near my work there,” she announced. “You all must try and say whether good or not, maybe next time buy from there instead of Avenue 1.”
Lay Choo was a small, energetic woman with dense waves of hair like her brother. But while Kim Seng wore his combed down and rigidly parted on the left, hers splayed out around her face like a stylised sunburst. She worked for a popular chain of shoe shops. Brian liked her. She dropped in now and then in the evening, and usually brought takeaway, which saved the boys some washing up; and her blunt talkativeness relieved the humid silence of the dinner table.
She measured up particularly well against Brian and Andrew’s other aunts and uncles. Auntie Lay Peng, for instance, their father’s oldest sister, was given to much stroking of Brian’s arms and pinching of his thighs, and she invariably referred to him, cooingly, the vowels stretching in her mouth, as “Brai-Brai”. (His brother was “Andy-boy”.) This had all been bad enough when they were younger, but now that they were twelve it was unbearable.
And then there was Uncle Teck Sam, their mother’s brother, who never paid any attention to the twins, except in certain leering, knowing comments, which triggered aggressive laughter from other uncles. Not that this really counted as speaking to the boys, because they never quite understood what was so funny, and they weren’t meant to, either. Once Brian had a squeezy Doraemon figure on him, about five centimetres high, from one of those plastic bubbles that the machine by the bakery dispensed for twenty cents a piece. He had hoped for a top—one of the other guys had got a really cool one, wings unfurling in a sparkly black and orange blur as it spun—but Doraemon wasn’t too bad either, except that its round blue earless head started Teck Sam going. “That thing!” he exclaimed. “Made by Japanese. You know where they come from or not, the Japanese?” Brian shook his head. “Long time ago, ten Chinese women were lost on the island, and ten monkeys came and raped them—and they gave birth to the first Japanese!” Brian recoiled, and his uncle laughed; he coloured angrily, and his uncle laughed some more. Later he learned—hating it—to feign knowingness, just to contain the laughter, but he could never quite join in.
It was a close thing between these two and Mabel’s mother, Auntie Poh Lian, for the position of the most irritating figure in the family pantheon. Whenever Brian came within Poh Lian’s line of sight, she would immediately offer her sister an authoritative appraisal of his appearance: “Aiyoh, Ling ah, Brian’s hair grow until so long like that. Must tell him to cut, otherwise look like secret society gangster like that.” He was so skinny, he needed to put on weight; he had become so tall already, next time he would be so much taller than his father; but his legs were not so long as this Keng Yong’s son whose piano teacher’s daughter’s netball teammate was in Jasmine’s class. Even ostensibly positive remarks grated—Brian would much rather not hear assessments of himself at all.
Against this competition, if Auntie Lay Choo had a tendency to chatter on a little too much, and to direct somewhat banal questions to the twins without really listening to the answers—well, these were trivial enough faults in the general scheme. At twenty-seven, she sometimes seemed cut from a different generation of cloth from Brian’s parents. Her speech was peppered with references to a kaleidoscope of friends, places, events and activities, which the boys and their parents had trouble tracking. They formed a foreign world which never really intersected with Teo family occasions, although Nurul, a frequently mentioned colleague, had once put in an appearance at Chinese New Year. Brian had been rather confused about how to address her. “Auntie” was the obvious choice, given her age and her friendship with Lay Choo. But she had called herself plain Nurul, and his parents had, unusually, made none of those chivvying introductions in which the boys were ordered—mildly, but unmistakably—to acknowledge the superior status of adult visitors. (“Brian, Andrew, call Auntie Joy!” and “Auntie Joy,” they were to reply, with a suitably deferent nod.)
Now, at dinner, the others were slotted in tightly around Lay Choo. Stools shifted restlessly to accommodate Brian. It was a pinch even for four in the kitchen, but habit reserved the living room’s dining table for smarter occasions, like birthdays or New Year. Brian felt hemmed in, with Mabel at his left elbow and Andrew jogging his right. He began to eat rather impatiently.
“Wah, just now the show very exciting is it? So engrossed.”
Brian murmured vague assent. In fact, the onscreen intrigue had hardly registered. But Lay Choo had already moved to something else: “Looks like you are better now already, Andrew? Your mother and father were very worried, you know! Dengue fever is no joke, okay.”
“Yah, better now, Auntie.”
“No more fever already,” Mabel added.
“Doctor said should be better after a week lah,” Brian’s mother said. “Actually when she said don’t need to go hospital I was less worried already, don’t have to stay in hospital means not so serious one.” She spoke laconically, far from the early horror when she’d thought she might lose her child. “Mabel has been very good with helping, horh, Andrew? Thank you ah, Mabel. But I think now don’t need already lah, make you come all the way to Braddell so leceh.”
“Actually, Auntie,” Mabel began, and stopped short. She glanced urgently past Brian, at Andrew, who said nothing. “I don’t mind, Auntie.”
“No lah, now is your holidays some more.”
“No really, Auntie, it’s okay.” She looked again at Andrew, who continued to eat silently.
“Andrew, luckily your dengue is during June holidays!” his father said. “Don’t need MC. This year exams very important, PSLE, better don’t miss school.”
“Oh yah, PSLE horh. So next year secondary school already, right? So boys, where are you going?”
“Andrew should apply to Ashford Hall,” Kim Seng said, pronouncing the name carefully. He was expressing high hopes here: children in Singapore were fed into a multi-tiered boilerhouse of academic assessment, which separated them into different grades, again and again, with ever subtler distinctions and refinements, until—according to official theory—each was deposited in an output tray reflecting their innate ability. The Primary School Leaving Examination or PSLE was a crucial component of this island-wide distillation process. It didn’t just determine whether a child made it into the Express stream of secondary education (to be Normal was to fall off the edge of the known universe), but also which of the relentlessly ranked and re-ranked secondary schools they would enter. For obsessive, hawk-eyed parents, this said everything about where your (and your colleague’s and your sister’s and your nei
ghbour’s) twelve-year-old avatar stood in life, and how smooth their path would be toward those much coveted places, first in junior college, and then, one prayed, university.
A few stately giants among secondary schools spread their canopies far above the rest of the jostling undergrowth; and for boys, the undisputed lord of the jungle was the prestigious Ashford Hall, widely understood as a passport to the highest lifelong success.
“Wah, Ashford? Really ah? Ashford very high-pressure one, you know? My big boss, his nephew started Sec One this year, went to Nanyang Boys—wah, he says it’s very stressful. But you boys are hardworking one, lah, can cope.”
“Andrew will have no problem, I am sure,” Brian’s father told his sister with satisfaction. “Brian also, can try right? But Brian said before he wants to go with his friends to St. Alexander’s.”
The conversation was uncomfortably close to Brian’s recent exchange with Priya in the stairwell. Some instinct kept her secret. He shrugged. “See how lah.”
It was a humid night. In the twins’ room, the table fan swung a blind, ponderous face from side to side, its blades cutting a narrow channel of relief through the heavy air. Mabel let herself in after helping with the dishes—a duty she had spared both boys for some weeks now. She turned the chair at the desk around, sat, and stared first at Andrew, who fiddled with his Rubik’s Cube, and then at Brian, who said nothing.
Finally she turned back to Andrew. “Tomorrow morning I have a church outing. So I can’t come until afternoon.”
“Okay.” One panel was almost green.
“You and Brian should come to church on Sunday. You’ll learn a lot. Important things that even your parents or your teachers never tell you.”
Brian groaned loudly. It seemed to him that some version of the God conversation took place, with dead regularity, whenever the cousins were alone. As if Mabel had a divine sales quota to fill. It was always the same: the demands for obedience thinly masked as concern. Tonight, in the frazzling heat, talk made Brian prickle with irritation. He wanted to be alone; or at any rate to sit in the hum of the fan and the click of Andrew’s Cube, the closest to aloneness he could manage.
Andrew, for his part, was fundamentally uninterested in church: it was ritual and clutter. Mabel’s efforts embarrassed him. But he heard a note of appeal in her voice, and was hesitant to join in Brian’s open derision. “See how lah.”
“No,” Brian said. “I don’t want to go. It’s boring.”
“You’ve never been,” Mabel said crossly. “How do you know? You should try new things. Have you ever even stopped to ask yourself, am I missing out by not trying to find out about God? You shouldn’t be closed-minded, it’s not good for you.”
“I’ve heard about this stuff before lah, at school also got, you know? St. Alex. Catholic school.”
“But church is different lah. And Catholics are not exactly the same as Christians.” She paused, uncertain that elaborating the finer points of theology would be persuasive.
“Aiyah, it’s all the same thing. Jesus and Mary and all that. It’s like going to school, have to wake up early in the morning and sit there and listen to some old man talking on and on, what for?” He looked to his brother to back him up, but Andrew was gazing diplomatically into a corner of the room. The possibility of his defection was alarming. “Andrew, you’re still sick, right? Like that how to go?”
“Aiyah, it’s not taxing at all! He can go. Anyway, he’s better now.”
“Is it? Then you can stop coming every day, right? Nobody wants you here nagging about your god.”
Mabel coloured. “Andrew still needs help,” she muttered to her hands. The line sank in the dense, wet air.
The table fan reached the end of a pendulous sweep and cranked noisily into reverse. They sat for a moment, and then the doorbell rang, prompting a jangle of keys, and the clang and rattle of the padlock and the grill on the front door. Lay Choo bustled in. “Mabel, your mother’s here.”
Mabel left in a cloud of wounded anger.
“She’s trying to be nice, you know,” Andrew said. “She thinks she’s being nice.”
“Aiyah, told her so many times already, we’re not interested. Don’t know why she thinks if she just keeps bringing it up, over and over and over, we’ll suddenly want to go.”
“Yah…” Andrew tried to think of the right angle. “You know, I think she doesn’t really have friends to hang out with.” He meant this by way of mitigation.
“No wonder, right. Everything always god, god, god, church, church, church. I don’t get it. It’s weird.”
Andrew sensed that the point was lost. He shrugged. “Of course lah, it’s Mabel what.”
They shared small, complicit grins. Brian was reassured. He sat back in the lull of the fan, finally left to his thoughts about the book. He had finished it now, and was both chilled and thrilled by the image of a heart first swapped out for illicit powers, and then hidden, like treasure, from pursuit by dangerous others. He thought also of Priya, and wondered what she was doing. He did not think to say anything to Andrew. He thought in pictures and not in any practical detail.
Much later on, Priya remembered and forgot Brian, in quite a different way from how he remembered and forgot her. Events as such escaped him, but their hours together became suffused, for him, with tints of romance, wistfulness, tragedy, that became the full substance of his association with Priya Menon. She was what he had lost. She, on the other hand, understood the entire business as a textureless sequence of things that had happened, concluding in a lesson to be learned. Any memory of how she had felt that June only increased her contempt for her own childish self. Brian himself sank beneath consideration. He was a delusion, fractured by fate, which it would be worse than useless to re-piece.
So she was thrown when, in the March of 1998, the news reports were published, and his face was everywhere, almost familiar, but impossible to identify.
It was, in fact, the second time pictures of him had made the rounds. He had also been in all the papers four years earlier. But Priya had no interest in the government’s annual awards to its “scholars”, those overachieving schoolkids, chosen for cultivation as young mandarins, who received full funding for their Ivy League and Oxbridge undergraduate courses, and became contractually bound to—were greasily accelerated up—the civil service ladder. Every year, among the few hundred selected for this privilege, a tinier handful still were anointed elite among the elite. These were photographed in suits and smiles, a trio or a quartet of smart, toothy marionettes, and splashed across The Straits Times. Nothing had registered with Priya then; she had simply turned the page.
Now, though, the story was irresistible—SUICIDE SCHOLAR ‘HID UNSTABLE TENDENCIES’—and why, she asked herself, was a curious bubble of recognition welling in her as she looked at this dead bright young man? His name meant nothing, she had never met him, but at the same time she felt bodily certain that she had. There were no clues in the text: the stratospheric schools he’d attended, the awards he’d won, his unfinished Master’s degree in Mathematics. Assurances from the Civil Service Board that scholarship holders were not only the very best academic talents, but also underwent stringent psychological assessment; every care was taken with taxpayer money, but mistakes did happen; the system took into account the possibility of a small percentage of error; some people were tragically unable to cope with stress in their personal lives. The bereaved family had no comment.
She stared again at his face, and forgot about it for most of the rest of the day. That evening, walking home from the bus stop, she thought how much more pleasant it was now, when the hot grey fuzz of the year before had lifted from the air, even if the Sumatran forests were still, by all accounts, burning, and the connection appeared in her mind all at once. The suicide guy. It was that random and embarrassing boy, Brian had been his name, he had—she surprised herself by retrieving the useless fact from some unlit mental recess—he had a brother who looked just like him. It wa
s the brother, whom she had, indeed, never met.
This feeling of recognition was the only evidence that she had ever met Brian himself. Nothing else in her life corroborated it. No one knew about him: he had been a story beneath telling. It was odd to think on his reality, somewhere out there, maybe living nearby still (even odder), and on the reality of his grief (surely he was grieving). His parents, silent players in her childhood drama, known only as objects of resentment, now given this extra dimension: they must be grieving too. She thought of the unknown brother, a stranger figure, whose sensitivities were being publicly canvassed, and wondered how he had been, that brother in that family. She felt pity, and then a flush of muted anger, ebbing even as it surged. An anger at her pity, an anger which intensified her pity. She did not want to feel sorry for them, she had no right to and they had no right to it, and yet she did feel sorry for them. She did.
The twins were locking the front gate as Mabel arrived. Traffic had been slow, and she was out of breath from the bus-stop-to-doorstop canter. From down the corridor the brothers were hard to distinguish, the same thin frames, each in identical shorts and a T-shirt, one holding a tube of shuttlecocks, the other with Yonex rackets slung over his shoulder.
“Hullo,” Andrew said.
“We’re playing badminton,” said Brian.
The question showed in Mabel’s face—a little later, and she’d have been shut out of an empty flat.
“We didn’t know you were coming today.”
“‘Cos normally you’d be here by now, and you hadn’t come,” Andrew added quickly. “Why don’t you come and watch?”
“Sure you should be playing or not? So soon after dengue? What if you get worse again?”
“Yah, yah, he’s okay already lah.”
“Should be fine.”
“Okay, I’d better come in case anything happens to you.”
Not knowing the way, Mabel trailed after the boys, through the estate, to the main road. They stopped at a pedestrian crossing. The sun blanketed them; it was another unpleasantly hot day, but even so, Andrew was glad to be out of the flat at last and standing under the sky. His legs and arms felt unused and ready. It had been easy for Brian to sell him on a game.