A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  There was a pause, and then they spoke at the same time:

  “Do you want to see his—”

  “Did you know already about—”

  They both stopped. After a confused moment Mabel went on.

  “Did you know already he was a homosexual?” Like many Singaporeans she elongated the word, with equal, and heavy, emphasis on each syllable: hoh-moh-seck-shuerl. “Your mum told my mum about the photo,” she continued, as Brian opened his mouth and then shut it again. “She was very upset, she thought maybe it is her fault. Was it a big shock to you also?”

  “I don’t want—I’m not—” Brian began, and then stopped, baffled. He looked to Jasmine for help, but she had, without moving, retreated even further away. Her face was firmly neutral, her eyes fixed on the pair of lizards resting on a nearby pillar. This pose was the result of meticulous craft: she had spent the day assiduously gathering her energies, so as to give this exact response at this precise moment. Appraised the night before of Mabel’s intentions, she had keenly felt their crassness, and the danger to herself: the mortification, the vulgarity, the threat of conflict. “Eh, I think it’s maybe not so nice to say leh,” she had hazarded, without much hope. “People’s brother just died, he won’t be in the mood, and you know he isn’t a Christian also, if you start talking about God he will just switch off lorh. It’s not really our problem, don’t so kaypoh, Mabel.”

  Her sister responded, implacably, with something about the importance of the Word, and being the salt and the light; and Jasmine, hearing this, gave up and reverted to her usual plan. She would erase herself, and ready her nerves for the trial of someone else’s drama. She could not be blamed for just existing, or indeed for being present at her own cousin’s wake; if she said and did nothing more, she would have no part of it; and when the whole sordid business was over, she would emerge cleanly and return to her tidy and tasteful life. With luck, this would take maybe twenty minutes of endurance. She was more than equal to that; she had perfected her powers of disconnect through countless slack-jawed hours, over many years, of family quarrels. Her mental space was a silent island of innocent neutrality, preserved amid the chaos of screams, blows and tears alike. When it came to handling confrontation, Jasmine was a dab hand.

  So Brian was on his own. He turned back to Mabel, whose face was bright with expectation.

  “Your mum was very worried she did something wrong. With your brother. To make him into a homosexual.”

  “I don’t think we should talk about this.”

  “I know it’s not very nice to bring it up, but it’s important, I must tell you. I saw your mum; she was truly suffering. If we stay silent, never discuss about the problem, the suffering will be worse. Like my mum said to your mum, she must not blame herself. This homosexual behaviour, it was his choice to do it. And there is help for the homosexuals to become normal, but we must talk about it, otherwise they will not know what they are doing is wrong and they can change. My church has very good programmes, with experts from US—they have seen a lot of this kind of thing there, from their experience they know a lot about the homosexuals, they can tell you what to do. Andrew had this problem, but nobody to help—”

  “No—you don’t—that’s not—he wasn’t—” He stopped. He couldn’t say what Andrew had or hadn’t been: he had no idea. He had only the picture, and whatever it did or didn’t mean, when he thought of the picture, and Andrew smiling from it, what Mabel was saying felt wrong. He tried again—“Andrew didn’t have a problem,”—and regretted this instantly; it was a stupid thing to say; there was a body in a coffin a few metres away, which made that much clear. And now Mabel’s face filled with a dreadful pity.

  “Look,” he said. “Whatever it is, okay, he’s already, Andrew is dead already. So it doesn’t matter, okay? Please, just, leave this, it, him, in peace.”

  “Your parents are very upset by this,” Mabel said. “I think if it is my son, this thing is worse than him dying! God gave us more than this world and this life, but now it is not only Andrew’s body that is dead, but his soul is lost to Christ forever, why? Because he went down this path, and this path is not just against the law, but a path of sin, and so he did not know that God loves him—”

  “Please, Mabel,” Brian said. “All this—church—stuff—” He waved his hand. “It’s got nothing to do with Andrew.”

  “Yah, that is what I am trying to tell you!” Mabel said impatiently. “He had a problem and God could have helped him. If only he accepted the Lord, but he pushed the Lord away, and embraced a homosexual lifestyle.”

  Brian’s face flushed. “Please, Mabel, he is dead, whatever he did last time, whatever lifestyle—” (the word stung) “—or what—why do you want to bring it up, now it is—he is dead, how many times must I say?” Until now he had held back from a certain boundary, but now anger made him rash, propelled him over: “And if it made him happy, why do you care? Now he is dead—at least, let him be happy, at least he was happy, at least a little while.”

  Mabel gave a brusque shake of her head. “You don’t know anything about this, Brian, I read up on it, the experts from US said before, the homosexuals think this lifestyle is what they want, and they become—” She paused to recall the words. “—they become enslaved to a lie, they think it makes them happy only, but they cannot see the truth. It leads to all kinds of negative things—usually AIDS lah, drugs lah—but even where that kind of thing don’t have, homosexuality makes people turn away from their family, from God. They say, right, it makes them despair—that is why—we all know this is why he killed himself, Brian, over this homosexual problem.”

  Her voice rose here, to shut out his angry groan. “You know it’s true. Don’t lie to yourself also. You better not make this same mistake with values. I only say for your own good. If you know anyone else with this homosexual problem, or if you have a problem—” (she held a hand up against his protests) “—any kind of problem, you should remember there is always help if you ask God. Always. No such thing as something He cannot solve.” She looked at him significantly, and then, duty done, walked off to join her parents. Jasmine stood, still slumped, for a fraction of a second more, and then roused herself to follow. As far as she was concerned, it had all gone swimmingly; it was over, she noted, in record time.

  For Mabel, the news about Andrew was touched with a kind of Providence. For a long time she had paid the whole gay thing, like all dirty things, little mind. It was only an occasional theme in church, after all, and she had reassured herself, early on, against a checklist of warning signs. Not just obvious ones, like inappropriate daydreams, but also subtler things, like being a tomboy. She knew she had come late to a proper attentiveness to femininity and its labyrinthine requirements as to appearance and demeanour. Now it had become a practised routine—finished nails, shaped eyebrows, restrained steps enforced by dainty shoes; and though she struggled, still, from time to time, with the prideful sense that this relegated her to a certain triviality, on the whole, she felt in no personal danger.

  This complacency ended with the disgrace of a fellow leader in her church youth group. Competing accounts of his offence circulated among the congregation with perhaps less than Christlike glee. The more salacious concerned a Bible camp in the swamps of Pulau Ubin, a witching hour tryst, another boy blundering sleepily into the tent during the unspeakable act. Pastor Hong made no allusion to this idle gossip when he gathered the group leaders for a hushed and icy conference in the church’s office. But even at their driest, the admitted facts—sexual misconduct, with a fifteen-year-old in the church’s care—were scandalous enough.

  Under thick blasts of air-conditioning, the pastor delivered a penitent lecture, touching on the gravity of this sin, the threat it posed to the integrity of the church, and his own shame at being deceived by this seemingly clean-cut young man. He vowed zero tolerance for such perversion amongst those tasked with spiritual leadership. They could not, of course, involve the secular authorities—that
would only give ammunition to the enemies of Christ, who were multiplying in these increasingly Godless times. They must themselves be vigilant; the responsibility for rooting out the serpent lay with them all. Danger stalked, all around, in the most unlikely of places, and failure to act was itself culpable.

  At this point of her life, Mabel thought of herself as having “calmed down”. She looked back on early adolescence, with some indulgence, as a time when she had been moved to organise everyone and everything, to rankle against all injustice and iniquity, in the name of the Lord. She believed she had grown up since, directing the once tumultuous stream of her faith into the smoother plains of the church’s organisation; and also acquiring the steadying accoutrements of status, both professional and social: the practical degree, the good job, the respectable churchgoing boyfriend. (These things seemed also to propitiate her mother. At any rate she was no longer beaten.) Glossiness and also godliness: perhaps life was not after all so inhospitable to the righteous.

  But this disgrace, and those strong words from the pastor she so admired—these things unsettled her, and sparked something like her old sense of the world’s fundamental hostility. She dug into some Christian resources on sexual deviance, and armed herself with knowledge. This seemed at first excessive caution: but two weeks later, on an overcast Saturday, God spoke. She unlocked the door to her home and found Auntie Poh Ling weeping at the dining table amongst tufts of crumpled, sodden tissue. Mabel’s mother, vigorously stroking her sister’s back, nodded grimly to Mabel, and gestured for her to make something to drink and sort the mess out.

  Two cups sat where they were placed, cooling untouched through the afternoon: Poh Ling and Poh Lian were too busy with sobs, and speculations, and recriminations, for tea. Mabel drank hers, Lipton with its grainy bitter aftertaste, and listened.

  And what a tale. For years, Andrew had been a legend. There had been no end to the boasts and the praise, originating from his parents, absorbed and re-transmitted by hers. Poh Lian’s hairdresser and Bernard’s golf caddy had heard all about this boy, who was in not only Ashford Hall but also the Gifted Education Programme. (This crowning apex of the Singaporean taxonomy of young human capital devoted especial resources to only the brainiest half of a hundredth of children—though its strictly scientific process lighted remarkably often, statistically speaking, upon the affluent.) Bernard’s siblings were duly informed when Andrew enrolled in the top junior college; and Poh Lian’s mahjong kakis knew this nephew wasn’t just a bookworm, but also captain of the school badminton team, and Vice President of the Student Council as well. By the time he appeared in the papers, little more had to be said: everyone saw immediately that Bernard and Poh Lian were bathed in the silver glory of this achievement, too.

  And yet. Mabel was privy to remarks her parents made, in the confines of their home, about Poh Ling and Kim Seng: who lived in public housing, drove a small Malaysian car, enjoyed no memberships even in the cheapest country club, and were entirely ignorant about the higher callings of church life. They were socially backward; they didn’t give their children proper guidance. Andrew was no credit to them—they were just lucky, he could as easily have been his brother, that boy, always daydreaming, no drive. And of course these exam results and scholarships were all very well and good, but it didn’t mean Andrew could make it in the “real world”, the one that had delivered the grey Mercedes. Nor did it mean he had the important things in life correct. Their own daughters might not be such academic high-flyers, but they were good Christians; and didn’t that, in a way, matter more than mere grades? In fact, it was quite sad, quite meaningless, wasn’t it, to have all these certificates and whatnot but not to know anything higher than this life, or to have the right values?

  The last of these waves of judgment not only washed over Mabel, but left some of its grit behind. Apart from the spectacle of Andrew the achiever, full of worldly cleverness, she had long had another, lingering, sense—that her cousin could have been, if the chips had fallen differently, truly thoughtful. In him lurked the spiritual depth to appreciate the Almighty; it was only dry happenstance that he didn’t. “Calmed down” Mabel felt the great and searing waste of this only latently, as the reflected ripples of a lost pebble, which had skimmed across a lake and sunk. But this impression was forcefully resurrected in the Mabel who witnessed the heartbreak of her aunt, over the son whose name had once been synonymous with every reason for pride. Now the gears and engines were exposed, and Andrew’s rootlessness was revealed to be not merely banal anomaly, but tragedy. The surfaces of things really did hide malevolences. Mabel had to act.

  Over in Simei, Lay Choo sat hunched on the sofa, staring at the condensation on the outside of her glass. A fine pinprick pattern appeared from the air on the pale amber frosting, and then the thin drops glommed together at irregular intervals, and ran to soak the cardboard coaster on her new coffee table. It irritated her. She did not move it.

  “Why don’t you just go?” Nurul’s voice floated from the open kitchen door. A knife sounded steadily over a chopping block.

  “Told you already, he said I better not go, it is shameful to the family, if I show my face there he will never call me sister any more, all that kind of thing. He said all of this is my fault, my bad influence, it is because of me his son is dead.”

  “Aiyah, how many times has he said this kind of drama things? Last time also, in the end also gostan, everything was okay.”

  “Yah, but now people’s son, you know.”

  “End of the day also your nephew, you want to pay your respects, I’m sure he knows this is correct also. He just say only.”

  “Yah,” Lay Choo said doubtfully. “But.” She did not know how to divide it into closer parts, this lumpish mass of negation. The loss of Andrew had a distanced quality to it, for her; and this in itself felt, abstractly, wrong. She had ladled rice and soup for her nephew into many a bowl, but she could not say that she knew him much at all. In the early days she had tentatively imagined friendship with the children of her brothers and sisters, as they unfolded into people. They seemed natural allies when they were born—at thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, even eighteen, Lay Choo felt with these new faces a kindred incompleteness. But her life whirled quickly on into jobs and paperwork; and at family gatherings, their obedient silence as children grew seamlessly into the fierce reserve of teenagers. Whatever currents flickered in their hidden lives, they could not spark at the family dinner table. Kim Seng’s sons were, for her, mediated by her brother’s matrix of expectations—exam results, prizes, discipline and management—and they saw her, she knew, sitting across from them at the narrow table with its stiff chairs, as just another in a set of aunts, an accessory to their parents, irrelevantly there.

  She might have submerged the uncertain mourning of Andrew for his own sake into mourning him for her brother’s sake, but that wretched phone call forbade it. She struggled to tease apart the wrong done to her and the (surely much greater) wrong done to her nephew. She felt guilty about this running together of things. She felt angry about her guilt.

  Glum silence gave way to the merciful scent and sizzle of onions. Lay Choo put her face in her hands, enveloping the clean walls of her home in the black warmth behind them. Long before she first set eyes on this flat (almost three years ago), or moved in (a few months later), all the lines of her life had run towards it, as towards a vanishing point on paper. The hope of this place had oriented almost every facet of her decisions and her doings. For her and Nurul merely to share a meal cooked in their own kitchen was a triumph; to wake up together each morning a luxury. After everything, it seemed terribly unfair that she could not, now, have peace.

  Lay Choo had spent the better part of her twenties wishing her youth away. This wasn’t so at first. For a few months after that sandy grey night, when she and Nurul sat on the breakwater and talked till dawn, fingers interlaced in the sunrise, she felt life fill with a rising tide. Nothing seemed more wonderful than that she should be so
unmoored, that she could have washed into a world so vast and unknown in its joys as this. Things were finally beginning: after those suspended school days when she had permitted herself only glittery crushes on distant girls with wide eyes and sleek ponytails. Two seconds of caught breath as she passed them, moth-like, in the corridors. Pale-bright flares of excitement, from which no shadows could deepen. But then adulthood, and Nurul: it was as easy as growing. They had become immediately close; and then closer; and then everything had opened. If this could exist, and exist for her, then the worst and the hardest must be over. Every future moment must be a gift, a treasure to be savoured—

  —ridiculous, to be sure, and sentimental, of course; but allow her this for now, because life’s ugly muddle accretes around it soon enough. What began in delighted disbelief, sweet as air, thickened fiercely, developed forces and demands of its own. And started to feel crowded in. Lay Choo’s mother didn’t understand why her daughter had to shut her bedroom door, or why this friend had to disturb everyone by being in their flat until so late. Didn’t she have a family of her own to stay with? To that family, then: the pair nestled down in Nurul’s fusty small room with its narrow single bed, and the ratty old curtain always over the window. Her brother Imran was unconcerned. Outside, at all hours, his friends, too, came and went; there were footsteps and music, cigarette smoke and talk; and there was word of Imran’s marriage plans and his new wife moving in.

  Perhaps they should have explained themselves to him, negotiated a home out of this waystation. Imran and Norhaili might have said yes. Imran thought he understood the nature of his sister’s friendship, but assumed she had her reasons for silence, and he was too delicate to ask. With the lofty clarity of the theorist, we can sketch them some happy orbits: four people in one apartment, tracing overlapping circles in peaceable parity. But Lay Choo and Nurul could not conceive of such an arrangement; it was too audacious, they had always needed walls to brick their secrets in, and they imagined that they always would. At a last ditch they could hire their walls by the hour in the hotels of Geylang and Balestier, among brothels and gambling houses, but despite its neatness and its safety, the succession of anonymous rental beds only left them feeling more adrift.