by Justin Ker
“That’s why!” his father exclaimed. “So young already and doing this kind of thing. You better not go and make some girl pregnant.”
White hot shock showed in Brian’s face. His mother tried to steer the conversation to safer ground. “Now is your PSLE year, very important for your future, your whole life. Your father and mother work so hard so you can have a good life, don’t need to worry about rice bowl every day. Don’t say we are not reasonable. We don’t like scolding you also. All we ask is you concentrate on your studies for now. Next time after you pass all your exams, go university and have a good job, then you can think about having a girlfriend.” She paused. “Your father and mother will not always be around, Brian, don’t make us disappointed.”
Brian stared at the floor. The last line was irrefutable. He wasn’t persuaded by any of this, so much as winded under the crushing knowledge of his own smallness and ingratitude. He hated this knowledge, which clung viciously to all open disagreement with his mother and his father. He had no arguments in his favour other than his feelings about Priya—the warm and prickling aliveness, the joyful unfolding—fragile phantoms, all—and he knew it would be stupid to speak of them. They were nothing against the weight of his parents’ responsibility for his entire existence. Disobedience was unthinkable. He took a deep breath.
“Sorry,” he said.
His parents exchanged glances. “Good,” his father said, after a moment’s silence. “Good that you realised you made a mistake. But cannot just say sorry, sorry is just saying only, you must make sure you don’t do it again.”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Don’t talk to this what, Bina or what, any more. Better that you don’t mix with this kind of people, don’t know how their father and mother brought them up also, young girl already behaving like this.”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Do you promise your father and mother?”
“Yes, Mum; yes, Pa.”
“Okay. Good.” Kim Seng gestured abruptly for his son to leave.
“Good boy,” Poh Ling said. “You know it is only because your father and mother want what is best for you, that we must sometimes be firm with you.” She opened the door to the room, smiling at him, pleased that matters had been handled with a minimum of fuss. “Dinner in a few minutes, I just reheat yesterday’s chicken. Andrew,” she called. “Andrew! Dinner soon.”
Kim Seng could remember his own childhood in the crowded kampung village. Days among the muddy dirt tracks and the peeling wood walls. Mangy dogs and pungent bullock carts and everywhere mosquitoes. A meal was frequently the flesh from a single chicken thigh, parcelled out among all the brothers and sisters. Nights brought terror, the brewery smell of his father’s coming-home breath. His own sons had been well-fed and comfortable all their lives. He had never raised a hand in anger. No one could say he wasn’t good to them.
Brian lay in bed that night listening to Andrew’s breathing, waiting for his brother to fall asleep so that he could have some privacy in which to cry. But he drifted off, himself, before the moment arrived. He slept well, and woke the next morning to his brother drawing blinds, the sun a yolky orange disc, low and rising in the sky.
Elsewhere that June there were bare cells, impossible questions in icy rooms, honest answers met with blows. Vincent Cheng and the other conspirators perjured themselves, against themselves. The nation accepted their confessions and averted its eyes from the confessors (and the cells, and the questions, and the blows). It was safest to act as though nothing had happened or changed.
Brian avoided the Frankie Wong bookstore for a while. It didn’t offer much in the way of the non-fiction Andrew preferred, anyway, so the boys made trips to the local library instead. The day when Brian had arranged to next meet Priya quietly came, and just as quietly went. The boys kicked a chatek about in the void deck. It was hypnotic and comforting: the slap of the weight on the side of his foot; up and down, the rhythmic flash of fuchsia feathers. He was better at it than was Andrew. They played a lot of badminton.
He was in the lobby of the Community Centre after one of their games—Andrew had just dashed off to the toilet—when he heard a voice call his name. He took a moment to place it, and then Priya was standing in front of him, beaming. “Brian!” she repeated. “I wondered what happened to you! Did you have to go somewhere—were you sick?” She moved a hand towards him in greeting. His shoulders froze and he twisted away.
“What’s wrong?”
Her eyes brimmed with bright concern. They were pretty, he thought with alarm; she was pretty. He put a palm over his face and looked at her through his fingers.
“Brian?”
“Sorry,” he said, uncovering his face. “Sorry.” There was an uncomprehending silence, and then he said, all in a rush, “Sorry, I can’t meet you any more, my parents don’t allow me, sorry, Priya.”
“Don’t allow you? What did you tell them? How do they know—” The question was too embarrassing to complete. They stood mirroring each other. “But—but we can be friends, right?”
“I can’t, my parents don’t allow me,” he said again. “Sorry.”
“How can they don’t allow us to be friends?”
“I don’t know, they just don’t, they don’t like you.”
“How can they don’t like me?”
“They don’t, they made me promise, I can’t, Priya.”
“But why not? Why don’t they like me? What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re Indian,” he said, miserable.
She stared at him. Her face worked in all different directions at once. For an awful moment Brian thought she was going to cry; and then her look fixed into pure scorn. He returned it with hangdog helplessness, and she turned and walked rapidly away.
“Sorry,” he repeated, his heart firing in sharp staccato code, but she had gone.
“What?” Andrew was at his elbow.
“Nothing.”
“I heard you say sorry, who were you saying sorry to?”
“No one,” Brian said quickly. “It was no one.” He picked his tube of shuttlecocks off the floor. “Let’s go home.”
MARCH 1998
THE PICTURE WAS a scan: of a Polaroid, it looked like, from its squarish proportions and its thick white borders. Much of the space in it was occupied by the head and shoulders of a young Caucasian man. He had a thin, freckled face, set with wide but sleepy blue-grey eyes, and framed by dark hair that curled wildly around his ears. He looked straight into the camera, and the curve of his lips was half cheeky, half shy. A small gap showed between his front teeth. His shoulders were bare.
Andrew was also in the picture. His face was partly obscured, and tilted gently downward, but it was clearly him, pressed up close behind the unknown man, kissing the slope of his neck. Brian recognised the hands, so like his own, brushing pale collarbone and chest. The expression on Andrew’s face was less familiar: a slow almost-smile, peaceful half-lidded eyes. He looked like the exhalation of a long-drawn breath.
To Brian’s knowledge, his parents looked at the photograph only once. He’d shown it to them together with the email from Hwee Leng. They did not ask to see it, nor did they refer to it, again.
Brian himself, however, spent a lot of time studying it. It was frustratingly small on the computer monitor, a box within a box. Items in the background offered themselves with deceptive clarity: pinned up on a corkboard there were other photographs, and the dismembered edges of brightly coloured bits of paper, yellow, orange and aquamarine, printed with snatches of black text. But when Brian zoomed in, the tiny sharp figures expanded into blurs of pixellation, the illusion of resolution destroyed.
Most likely these fragments were of flyers and posters for college events, glossy and anonymous, revealing no more than the bland personal effects which returned with Andrew’s body. (Notebooks of matrices, equations, graphs; jeans, T-shirts and woolly pullovers; a small collection of pop music; a Discman. A computer with its hard drive wiped.) Brian wasn’t lo
oking for answers. He just found the picture—not exactly comforting, but something close to it. Despite everything. Whatever else it also was, it was a totem of his own ignorance and of Andrew’s reality. These both seemed important. He mistrusted his own unaided remembrance.
Inevitably he sought other pictures of his brother. Bleached and grainy scenes from the zoo: the twins about eight, all twiggy limbs and mussed and sweaty hair, fidgeting under the stare of the lens. They had shared all their clothes back then, and though one boy distinguished himself through a missing front tooth, Brian wasn’t always sure whom he was looking at. (In some photographs, this difficulty was resolved by the presence of Jojo, a pale blue stuffed dog with a solemn face and a red bow tie, over whom Brian had exercised a tyrannical possessiveness.) He found crowded shots from forgotten family dinners with his father’s five siblings and their sundry children—the twins always looking out together, an island of repetitive simplicity in the choppy sea of faces. A single holiday album recorded a long weekend spent in Malacca when they were thirteen.
The family photographs began, here, to dwindle. Andrew appeared instead at a string of competitions: holding trophies and plaques aloft, in his sports kit or smart school blazer and tie. On class trips—in the thickness of mangroves, in front of Parliament House—he grinned out of circles of friends. Some of these boys Brian recognised, some he didn’t. More familiar to him was the short sequence of scenes, from when they were eighteen, of both brothers hanging out together, eating prata, or sitting on the beach at East Coast Park. Hwee Leng appeared in these pictures too, her face flushed and happy; and in a few, Brian saw that mouthy guy who used to tag along with Andrew—Ming Wei, that was his name.
And then, of course, the newspaper cuttings their parents had preserved—telling the tale of the boy from the Housing Development Board heartlands, whose impending journey, first to England’s finest university and then to a gilded position in the state bureaucracy, served as proof, if proof were needed, of the fairness of Singapore’s meritocracy. Andrew’s hair was still cropped close to his skull in those press shots: he had only lately finished three months of Basic Military Training, though as a government “scholar” he was permitted to postpone the remaining two years of his National Service obligation until after he had acquired his degrees.
As if in response to this brush with baldness, Andrew wore a thick mop in the university pictures. These he had explained to Brian and their parents in light and rapid tones. They were taken in places with curiously diminutive names, like the homes of woodland animals in some pastoral children’s book: on the grassy Backs along the river Cam; by the Van of Life, which sold midnight burgers to hungry students; in Maypoles and Mitres and other dim and foreign pubs. Andrew was surrounded by other students in fleeces and in stark striped scarfs, laughing toothily, smoking, holding forth; and by forests of pint glasses, emptied to white traces of foam or filled with brassy brown beer. (Brian looked for that other young man, with his dark curly hair, and could not find him.) Time was partitioned in novel ways in this world: red and yellow leaves were assigned to Michaelmas, a snow-covered bicycle to Lent.
Brian had found his brother’s explanations difficult and dazzling. After a week in the barracks, with its ceaseless, pounding labour, the vampiric drain of its night shifts, the constant fear of some officer’s caprice, he was always bone-tired, hungry, holding himself back. Against this, the carnival of a life that Andrew brought home in his assured summer anecdotes was never quite conceivable. Brian leaned back into the sofa, exhaustedly rubbing his own botak head—for he still had to keep his hair short—and let the patter run over him in rills.
But in a sense the change was not so great. Since their paths had split in secondary school, his brother’s world had filled with bright and unusual things, and Andrew himself had altered. He stood differently, walked with a different gait, spoke with a new quickness and a refinement of accent that all but eliminated confusion between them. For a long time, Andrew had been strange to Brian. The sudden Britishisms and the casual talk of European cities were merely extensions of this established fact—the very continuity of his strangeness was paradoxically familiar. And whatever these shiny add-ons, the context of them was clear. The context was Andrew, whom he had always known.
Few of Andrew’s friends came to his wake. Many of them, like Andrew, were government “scholars” or Ashford alumni or both, reading prestigious degrees in famous universities in Europe, the United States, Japan. Three of them called. Others dropped Brian safe, generic messages (his email address had clearly been somehow shuffled among them), explaining that they could not afford the airfare for such a brief return, and offering stiff condolences.
Brian didn’t know how to read their reticence. Even Hwee Leng, whose sympathies on the matter (or any matter) were in no doubt, spoke haltingly, without her usual fluency, when the phone call finally came. Perhaps he could expect no more from the others. Perhaps, young and privileged to the last, death was simply not in their vocabulary.
Still it bothered him. Was anyone keeping away? There must be more than this handful of old classmates in the country. And those who were there made him anxious; he thought he could feel them exchanging looks and words, stained with knowledge—a prickly, vibratory feeling, like the blind sonar detection of a bat. He didn’t always commit himself to what Hwee Leng said, less because he doubted her, exactly, than because she never seemed to doubt herself, and it was hard for him to take that in whole, her blazing certainties were too much for him. But what she told him on the long-distance line, taken even tricklingly, was difficult to ignore. “Some people are saying—do you know what they are saying?” She sobbed. “I’ve heard them say he was gay so he must have been crazy, as if gay people are just all completely crazy, and kill themselves for no reason—and they say he must have had HIV, and that must be why he did it, as if it isn’t perfectly obvious what actually—it’s so hateful—and even if he did—oh God, they are such bastards. It makes me so angry I am shaking. I’m so sorry, Brian.”
He thought he appreciated being told this, but he wasn’t sure. As a conscript, he had declined to participate in speculation in the barracks about the sexuality of those unfortunates who were singled out for any of a number of failings—slight frames or fine gestures, a certain set of mouth perhaps, an unacceptably high voice. He’d kept out of it partly because he’d felt sorry for those guys, but also because the concept of gayness seemed at once both dirty and esoteric: a sleazy fog of compulsion, anuses, shit, cocks (too many cocks), self-absorption, and, yes, insanity and AIDS. Unnecessary and unhealthy to dwell upon. Alone in his room, Brian did not connect these notions to Andrew or his picture: but he felt them floating, now—in this torn and sticky web of people, tugging and twitching around him—just out of sight.
No one else spoke directly to his anxiety until the second evening of the wake, when Auntie Poh Lian and Uncle Bernard arrived in their gleaming grey Mercedes Benz. (The 1990s had been kind to the Lows.) Brian was having a smoke in the fading light at the edge of the car park when he saw them pull up. Four doors opened together, like the shuttering wings of an enormous metal beetle, and then thudded closed behind the emergent passengers, with a smooth and expensive weightiness.
He ground his cigarette with the toe of his sandal as the family advanced. “Auntie. Uncle.” Poh Lian and Bernard acknowledged him with small nods and made their way over to his parents, leaving Brian alone with his cousins.
They stood together in an irregular triangle. Mabel, now twenty-four, still almost ascetically thin, was elegantly suited from another day in the office. She wore crisp make-up, a well-fitted silk shirt in baby blue, and a single pearl on a sleek gold chain. Jasmine, in an oversized muddy-orange T-shirt and faded bermudas, slouched a half-step behind, her gaze falling in corners and studiedly vague middle distances. She was clearly delegating all responsibility for human interaction to her older sister; who, for her part, regarded Brian owlishly, without speaking.
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br /> An unusually short interval had passed since he’d last seen them, at the Chinese New Year visits six weeks ago. They had exchanged the obligatory greetings, and then sat cracking open melon seed after melon seed, and picking at the fiddly white pith of mandarin peels, to pass the stilted hour while their parents conversed. Brian particularly liked the soft, melting kueh bankit, but there was only so much silence one could fill by eating, and only so much eating one could do, before even those feathery coconut cookies brought on a sense of sticky overfullness. The families rarely gathered for any other occasion now: Wa Ma, dead some three years, no longer required birthday celebrations with her children and grandchildren. Even at those dinners, the women and children had often been sequestered off at a different table, while Brian and Andrew, once they reached sixteen, had been seated with the men. So Brian had barely spoken to his cousins for years now, and possessed only skeletal notions of them—a satiny whiff of Mabel’s careful grooming, a hint of Jasmine’s negative intensity, and a dim feeling that the older sister had an obscure childhood reason for not liking him. He believed Mabel was an accountant somewhere in a big multinational firm, and that Jasmine was on a communications course at a polytechnic, but he wasn’t sure that even these scraps of knowledge didn’t come filtered through his mother, rather than from direct conversation.
“Hi,” he said eventually.
“Sorry to hear about Andrew.” The sentence began with Mabel and ended in a quiet, trailing echo from Jasmine.
“Thanks,” he said, almost automatically. “Thanks for coming.”
“I’m not sure when I last saw him, actually,” Mabel said. “I think he hasn’t been at Chinese New Year for a few years already. Since going to Cambridge.”
“Yah,” Brian said. “It was always during his term time. I also haven’t seen him since last year, he came back for summer, then he went back for his Masters.”