A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  Lay Choo was frustrated. She could trim and squash and redact so much: she had never been interested in bridal fuss and frippery; in public, she kept her hands dutifully back from Nurul’s waist; and except among a tiny knot of trusted friends, she skipped deftly over strategic gaps in her patter. But there was no arguing with the fundamental fact of bodies needing room: for movement, and for rest.

  And so she sat down to work out the Byzantine rules governing sales and resales of HDB flats—the only housing option she and Nurul could ever afford—and determined that there was nothing else for it. She would have to turn thirty-five, and as soon as possible. The only alternative was hoping for her mother to die: an unacceptable position, and anyway unreliable. With five siblings and a troupe of nieces and nephews, she was unlikely to inherit the whole flat; and if she didn’t, there remained Kim Hock to reckon with. Until he reached thirty-five (only eighteen months before she would) or married (halitosis notwithstanding), the rules might require them, as brother and sister, to make any flat purchases together.

  So the waiting game began. She worked hard—was promoted—duty manager, branch manager, Customer Relations in head office—eyes always on the prize. She had it all lined up—she would be ready—she was ready—she wanted to be older. She and Nurul continued to quilt their patchwork weeks together: the brief relief of afternoons crumpled and hastily pocketed; a few hours in a cinema like guilty teenagers; now and then a lucky find, an entire night. She kept a running tally in her head: this many more years in the decade, this many more months in the year. Every time she wrote a date she made a quick calculation of the time to go.

  Their situation softened slightly. Lay Choo’s old mother befriended Nurul, and enjoyed having her around, though this too had its bitterness. “Nurul,” Ma lisped in Melayu. “You’re a nice girl, you must have lots of friends, can’t you introduce someone to my daughter? You should get her to wear clothes like yours also, much nicer, you see she is always dressed so sloppily. How will she find a husband?” Her views on the necessity of husbands were robust: they had survived the nation’s independence from the British Empire, its ejection from the Federation of Malaysia, the cot death of its democracy, the destruction of its kampung villages, and perhaps most impressively, her own husband, with his liver cirrhosis and his liberal fists. They would survive a lesbian daughter.

  It was having Nurul about so much that prompted a question from Kim Seng.

  “Your friend, this Nurul,” he began. “I noticed she always come here. You sure she is not disturbing Ma?”

  He was sitting at the kitchen table. It was a Saturday morning and he had come over for lunch. Kim Hock and their mother were in the living room watching a game show on the television. Every now and then muffled laughter or applause reached the pair in the kitchen, over the low murmur of rain.

  “No,” Lay Choo said lightly. “I got ask Ma before, she said she doesn’t mind.” She bent a little further over the bin, keeping up a constant rhythm of peeler against potato.

  “Hrm. Okay, good that you asked her.” He looked out of the window, picking absent-mindedly at a thickened patch of skin on the bottom of his foot. “She argues a lot with her parents, is it, this Nurul?”

  “No,” Lay Choo said. “Think I got tell you before, her father and mother died long time ago. Car accident.”

  “Is it? Then she lives with who?”

  “Brother. She got one older brother, he drives taxi.”

  “She doesn’t get on with him?”

  “No lah, why you say that?” Lay Choo said. “Think they are okay.” She brought the skinned potatoes to the stove, and turned her back to him with deliberate slowness. Where were these questions going?

  “Hrm. I see. And no boyfriend?”

  “No.” Surely he had not guessed? She and Nurul had been together three years now, and she generally had little difficulty hiding the truth. In her school days her classmates had taken her careless rhapsodies on her crushes as the rightful abasement of one schoolgirl before the enviable prettiness of others. “Lesbian” was only an outrageous punchline, a self-evident absurdity; she had merely to laugh along at it, and all was forgiven. It might be whispered semi-seriously as a criticism of the tanned, broad-shouldered giants of the basketball team, but not of Lay Choo, with her abundant hair and her birdlike air. When it came to women, she found, most people had astonishingly limited minds. They took for granted that she wanted to look like something; they could not imagine she ached to touch someone. And much as she liked Kim Seng, she did not think he was capable of any more than others on this score. She wondered if her brief answers were not as casual as she hoped—perhaps she should say more.

  “I am just wondering,” her brother continued, “why she is always here. I think it is not very healthy, she should be with her own family, or find someone settle down, or with some Malay friends, don’t see why she is whole day here disturbing. Don’t know if she is trying some kind of funny business or what.”

  “Aiyoh, say until so suspicious like that! You think what, Hong Kong drama serial ah? We are all big businessmen, some kind of towkay family, and she wants to steal our secrets? Xiao.” She made herself turn to him then, with a wide, automatic smile. “People friend mah. Like to watch the same movies, talk about the same things. Ma likes her also. She cooks dinner for us sometimes. Her nasi bryani very good, okay. Next time I ask her to make for you also lah. Eat already won’t say this kind of crazy things.”

  It worked, as usual. Kim Seng continued to pick at the skin on his foot, the potatoes found their place in a chicken curry, and nothing more was said. But that evening, sitting with Nurul in the smoke and bustle of the hawker centre, Lay Choo became pensive. It was so easy to lie. Had she grown too used to jesting and simpering her way around the plain facts of her life? There were gaps between her and this favourite brother, but she had always looked up to him, perhaps because she had been quite so small when their father finally sank beneath the stout and the lager, and Ma had gone to pieces for a time. She remembered being seven years old, and Kim Seng finding her after twenty minutes’ panic in the snaking warren of a building site. He had surprised her by scooping her to him, and making no reproach. And, once, when she had washed into hot tears over a quarrel at school, he had unbent from his habitual stiffness to pat her awkwardly, and bring her some kueh. When he came by, he sat and talked with her in the kitchen precisely because he liked her. He liked her. That must count for something; she couldn’t be sure that he was safe, but mightn’t she hope that he would try?

  Nurul took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was sceptical. She had noticed Kim Seng’s unsmiling stares. His astringent remarks on his sister Lay Peng’s ongoing divorce and on the multiplying rolls of flesh on her belly (subjects that seemed for him mysteriously connected) did not inspire confidence in his powers of sympathy. She would never dream of making confessions to her own brother without something stronger to go on. But then Imran had never asked; and every family was different; and really, she couldn’t bring herself to be too discouraging to this oddly torn version of Lay Choo, who spoke in pleading bursts, and whose hands agitated in hopeless, involved circles, while her mee goreng went cold on its plate.

  “I don’t know,” Nurul said at last. “Really, Choo, actually, what I see so far, I don’t think he will be okay with it. But I only met him so few times, he is your brother, you know him better.” She paused. “Will he tell other people? If he won’t, then worst case is just he himself is angry, right?” She reached out to brush Lay Choo’s hand briefly, and was gratified to see the defeat lift for a moment from those soft eyes.

  Lay Choo started the search with the sleeper’s maddening certainty of something half imagined, half remembered: if the method could only be found, the rest would follow in perfect order. And so they play-acted. They made, and ripped up, careful plans. They grappled wordily over tactical details. His place or hers? Should they both be there? How to get him away from Poh Ling? Or might she be
a calming influence? Nurul began to suspect it was like cracking an egg: the angle of attack could make no difference, it all came in the end to the same sticky spillage. No decision was made, no strategy was formulated, and she wasn’t entirely surprised when Lay Choo called her one day to say that she had simply blurted the lot out, and it had been a disaster.

  Lay Choo could not find the energy to blame herself for playing it wrongly. Merely conveying the basic facts to Kim Seng turned out to be mind-bendingly difficult. Confusion pinched her brother’s face. What did she mean, she and Nurul were “more than friends”? No matter how good her friends, at some point she had to find a husband and settle down. How could she “settle down with Nurul”? They could not be “like married to each other”—did she even understand, in the first place, what married couples did? It didn’t make sense to say that about two women. What kind of rubbish was she talking?

  Lay Choo fell into an angry and embarrassed silence at the patronising stupidity of this. Did she honestly have to explain to him that you didn’t need a cock to do it? This was not what she had wanted to talk about. It was nothing, she muttered, it had been a mistake, she tried to take it back, but he seemed suddenly, cheeks reddening, to comprehend well enough. This was some kind of dirty sexy business she had been taught by a perverted Malay. How could Lay Choo be so shameless, doing this kind of disgusting thing, and then telling her brother about it? They had failed to bring her up properly, he and Ma, she would break Ma’s heart, she would kill Ma with her selfishness. His voice rose in horror as it occurred to him—Lay Choo had even brought this woman into Ma’s home to take part in this sick nonsense. What if she tried anything funny with Ma? Lay Choo was an ingrate. She should not call herself a Teo.

  So be it, she decided, and walked away. It was all so miserably predictable in hindsight. She told Nurul that his disapproval was too stupid to get upset about, and it followed that his approval was not worth seeking. She had lost nothing but a lie, the lie that he had ever really cared for her. Pining after it would only be weakness. She told Nurul this, and she believed it, too, or felt that she should: neatly defining the ragged ache in her chest out of existence.

  She had barely replaced the receiver when Kim Seng himself telephoned to elaborate upon her defects. She must end this disgraceful behaviour now. How would she have children? She wouldn’t, she replied coolly. Every woman wanted children: she would regret this. She didn’t think so. Had she bothered to consider that Ma wanted grandchildren? She pointed out that Ma already had grandchildren. He lost any veneer of patience. How could she choose this perverted Malay woman over her own brother? She was letting the family down. She hung up on him.

  Life went on. Kim Seng spoke only to Kim Hock and Ma, ignoring his sister, when he turned up at the flat. They did not notice. Ma had a small fall, and some trouble walking for a while. She mentioned, as they sat around the lunch table, layering sweet sauces, stewed turnips and ground peanuts into the fresh thin skin of popiah rolls, that that nice Nurul girl had been very good to her that week, helping her to get around. Her son compressed his lips into a thin line, and changed the subject. During each visit, Lay Choo was studiously cold; and if she once or twice sat in her room, crying, after her brother and his prejudices had left, she did not admit such anomalous acts of unreason even to herself.

  Five months later, without warning, he came into the kitchen, as of old. He spoke without looking directly at Lay Choo, appearing instead to study the calendar hanging by her head.

  “Your this Nurul business.”

  “What?” She was surprised into turning to him.

  “Your this Nurul business,” he repeated. “You know already lah, I think it is not good for you, but—” (he gestured a quick plea for attention, as she began to roll her eyes) “—you are an adult, yah, you want to get yourself involved in this kind of thing, it is your own business, your own problem. But you must remember, no matter what, what you get up to with what other people, you must think about your family. So—you better not anyhow say what, you and this Nurul are more than friends or what, all over the place, later Ma hear about it, then you know. This kind of thing, hear already you will make her very unhappy. I also don’t want to hear about it from other people.” He paused and ended grudgingly, “Don’t go and tell outsiders and make trouble for Ma, can already.”

  It was as close to reconciliatory language as she was going to get. A tightness in her throat eased. (She hadn’t realised she was carrying it.) She missed something about the clarity of rage, though, because it was difficult, being alive to his opinions or his silences again, and feeling the absence, like a phantom limb, of something more which she had once thought connected them.

  Yet there was a happy ending. It began, unexpectedly, on a Saturday, in the supermarket aisle between the rows of instant noodles and the bottles of sauces and marinades. There Lay Choo lowered her basket to the floor for a moment, winded by a sudden throbbing flare in her belly. All morning her body had pulled dully at her from the inside, and now it gave a sharper, more insistent yank. She bent over to collect herself, but before she could go on, a second round fired, and a third, and then they smeared into a blur of pain. She was on her knees, her mouth hot with the afterburn of vomit, as her mother rushed over from the next aisle to her side.

  Somehow they got into a taxi. The journey washed by in agony. The pain had an alarming grip: it crested and surged, and after each momentary slackening seemed only to dig deeper. Thought was impossible—everything shrank into, was swallowed up by, this clawing and scraping inside. But Ma surprised Lay Choo with her calm: she spoke only sparingly, and gently, but kept a steady pressure on her daughter’s hand: and the dual focal points of pressure and surprise kept Lay Choo from dissolving into panic.

  At the hospital there were doctors and questions and prodding and needles, and eventually she was told that it was appendicitis. They would have to operate. As she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, she could have the slot that was open that evening. She lay in an immobile haze—pain was, who would have thought, really rather exhausting—and worried, through it, about Nurul. Dared she ask Ma to make a phone call? Some facile pretext or another, they were meant to meet that day and she didn’t want to leave a friend waiting… Nurul would know how to manage her reactions, not to give the game away. The nurses approached her bed with painkillers.

  By the time Ma returned from the toilet, Lay Choo had been swept into a cloudlike chemical blank, Nurul forgotten.

  The happy ending comes the next morning, several hours after Lay Choo first awakes, one appendix down, and she is at last deemed ready for visitors. Clutching a few wet flower stalks, her face arranged into perfect shades of concern, relief and delight, Nurul walks in, perhaps leading Ma and Kim Seng or perhaps behind them—Lay Choo can’t track such details, she is too floodlit with joy at the sight of those beloved hands, shoulders, face.

  So, it seemed, Kim Seng had looked—with what inner struggles only he can know—into the slim black book of numbers by the telephone. No matter that the nurse came in to chide them about crowding the room, so that Nurul stepped out for appearance’s sake. No matter that Kim Seng never did warm to Nurul afterward, and always spoke of her as at a distance. No matter that during the visits that Lay Choo began, once more, to make, her brother would sometimes, in fact rather too often, pose annoying questions about when Lay Choo might find a boyfriend, or if she still ate pork. She brushed this detritus aside: Kim Seng had thought to make this one phone call, and that was for Lay Choo the proof she needed. When serious matters were in the balance, he would be on her side. For her, this was a promise of future victory.

  And her home, here and now, was full of yellow evening light and the warbling of birds congregating in the hash of crossing branches outside. It felt like ingratitude, to whom she couldn’t say, to possess all of this and yet to feel dejected on her own account. She had this haven now, a little safe sleep: could she really need more? A chubby wooden hippopotamus gawped at
her from the television stand across the room. Kim Seng had helped with boxes on the day she moved in—she had a memory of him paused right there, mopping trails of sweat from his brow.

  “Choo, dinner.”

  The food was fresh, sharp, good. A few hot mouthfuls and her plate was clean. She was surprised by her own appetite, and then troubled. Her nephew was dead, and she was eating. He had been alive, and she had done nothing.

  “I wish,” she started, putting her spoon down.

  “Yah?”

  “What Seng said, it’s so stupid. What bad influence, I am the one who killed his son and all that.”

  “Yah, of course. Please, Choo, don’t listen to his…you never even said one word to Andrew about you and me. And even if you said, so what? You are you, he is him, we are nothing to do with him and what happened. Your brother is just being unreasonable. Again.”

  “Yah, I know, but, you know, right, I do feel bad—I feel like it’s my fault, not—” (she held her hands up against Nurul’s astonishment) “—not like Seng said, but something like the opposite. I feel like actually I should have told Andrew about us, like maybe if he knew, it would have helped him.” She gestured around her. “If he knew it could be okay.”

  “Maybe. But you didn’t know about him…”

  “No. And if I told him and Seng found out…”

  “Yah, then you would really get it from him.” Nurul gave a small, bitter laugh. “But then now you are getting it anyway.”

  It was very quiet now, except for the hum of the ceiling fan and the faint whine of cicadas. The chorus of birdsong had gone out.