A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  “I don’t know. Maybe telling him would also be no use. Don’t even know why he did it in the end.”

  “No.”

  “But I still feel like I wish I told him. Don’t care how angry Seng would be. And maybe Andrew had don’t know what other problems, but at least then he could have some kind of, I don’t know, he could have seen a future. I should have told him. I should go now and tell his brother. And Peng’s kids and Teng’s and Guan’s also. Someone should tell them. Just in case. Just tell them, it can be okay.”

  Nurul crossed the small space between them, and they held each other for a long time: Lay Choo flushed with longing and resolve, with the sense of opportunities missed.

  But later, turning and turning again in the dark, sleep hopelessly far off, she thought: she would not say anything to anyone. There was really nothing to say. In the grey of those small hours the room filled with the white noise of Kim Seng’s rage. The same words again on the telephone line: sick, disgusting, perverted, selfish, sick, ungrateful. They were ugly words, empty, so far beneath her, so unworthy of this space. And yet indissoluble: they were again and after so long still her companions. No walls, it seemed, could keep them out. Lay Choo touched Nurul’s arm: her lover shifted and subsided, and breathed evenly by her side: and if even this certainty, this joy, could not keep her safe, if she could not even protect herself, she thought, what magic words could she ever have uttered against the long night Andrew had known?

  JANUARY 1993

  IT WAS DARK out when Andrew woke up on the battered old cane couch in the Student Council room. He sat up quickly, a little confused. A fellow councillor was laughing at him from across the room. “Hey, hey! I didn’t know should I wake you up or not, you were sleeping until so peaceful like that!”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost eight already. I think everyone else went home already. Sorry Andrew, my mother is coming to pick me up, I can’t walk to bus stop with you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “See you tomorrow,” she sang out as she left, soft bag slung over one shoulder.

  Andrew ran a hand through his hair and tried to smooth his rumpled uniform. A triangle of white shirt had escaped from the waistband of his trousers. He wasn’t normally one for naps, but the last few days had tired him out. He was glad that the school would be empty. His group of newly arrived Year Ones seemed to be enjoying Orientation—the trust falls, the mass dances, the treasure hunts—but his own attention was absorbed in bustle and logistics, in the job of shepherding them around, and he felt himself to be observing, rather than experiencing, the atmosphere of fun. He couldn’t quite remember how it had been on his turn, last year.

  He was privately eager for the introductory week to end and for proper lessons to start, so that he could return to the genuine interest of their ideas, his work.

  The lure of this was stronger now than ever. Stitched tightly into the pleasure of work was also its promise, and that promise had always been this next step, after this final year of school: university. Enter the right one and membership in the world was assured; fail and shadow foreclosed on every future possibility. You could still do things without a good degree, of course—even, to be thoroughly logical, without a degree at all—but not things that counted. This was his primly abstracted version of the parental admonition repeated throughout his childhood: “Must work hard, otherwise next time become roadsweeper, then you know!” Real people did not sweep roads. That the roads were nevertheless swept, and presumably by someone, had no bearing on this axiom.

  This future had taken on new urgency since last July, when he had been flown to Moscow for the International Mathematical Olympiad.

  “The what?” Ming Wei had asked.

  “It’s a really big maths competition. People come from schools from lots of different countries and solve problems.”

  “What—I can’t imagine anything sadder. I mean, good for you lah, you just happen to be a genius, but the other people must be the biggest nerds in the world.”

  After returning, Andrew struggled to correct this description. “A really big maths competition”, populated by “the biggest nerds in the world”, was accurate enough. But it gave no indication of how the two short weeks had changed everything for him.

  He hadn’t expected this, before the trip. He hadn’t had expectations at all. Oddly perhaps for a boy who’d never been further from home than a three-hour bus ride, he had not felt the glamour of international flight. He could not have conceived of Moscow, so immense and so alien, any more than of Mars. His only real feeling prior to the journey had been relief, relief that he had done well enough to be selected for the team. Even on the day of departure, the mechanics of travel seemed terribly unexciting, as he wrestled at the Changi check-in counter with a creaky old suitcase, stashed with too-big woolly jumpers borrowed from Uncle Bernard.

  But when it came, it came all at once, like a plunge into a cold bath. Sheremetyevo Airport alone was full of bewildering things: Cyrillic script; the heavy blond stare and thick accent of the immigration official; the impossible pleasure, for an equatorial child, of cool outdoor sunshine, as the chaperone from the Ministry of Education herded the team toward the tournament bus. The bus itself was foreign smelling, from old upholstery, and already full of hopeful teenagers from places Andrew was unable to picture even theoretically. People of ethnicities he couldn’t guess at to name. Across the aisle a smiling, dark-eyed Argentinian boy said “Hola,” and Andrew was dazzled.

  The stream of sensation might have become too much, but once the maths arrived, he began to be able to order and manage strands of everything. The problems gave him focus. He could see that they were built up, at bottom, of parts he understood, though he had to shift into high gear to approach anything like the neighbourhood of solutions. Maths also lessened the total mystery of the other participants: talk emerged, frail but real, from its thin threads of commonality. Andrew worked for every word. He was elated by the smallest exchanges of sense in the most halting English. He felt continually sharpened, like a pencil.

  The team didn’t place well, but to his surprise, Andrew didn’t much care. He realised early on that he was out of his league, maths-wise. What troubled him during the long flight home, as he shifted and turned in the cramped and scratchy airplane seat, was that the world had already shrunk rapidly, into this dark cabin and its stale air, and was hurtling back through the clouds, further and further from the crackling magic, the continents of novelty, of the last few hectic days.

  The idea came to him, and immediately gathered irresistible force, that in Moscow he had tasted a tiny silver slice of the future, his future, lying just around the corner. For the first time, it occurred to him that university would involve not just consequences and qualifications, but beautiful problems yet to be explored, and conversations yet to be created, with people yet to be met. Before he received any degrees, he would linger a while in college quadrangles: and now that he saw these waiting phantom spaces, however faintly, they threw ambient shadows and reflections over the complexion of the present.

  School became boring. He was coasting, dotting and crossing what was put in front of him. Treading the flat grass flatter. He had always done this, but he had never noticed the tedium of it before. (How could he? The world celebrated him for it.) He felt impatient with this stage of things, and at the same time distrustful of his own impatience. These were necessary steps, after all. It was part of the way ahead. There was no point in resenting what had to be done; it was like protesting gravity, it made you careless. He was doing well, there was a plan, he shouldn’t mess with it. He promised himself he wouldn’t mess with it.

  “Hello?”

  A blurred figure hovered in the doorway, resolving into an uncertain-looking boy in a uniform Andrew didn’t recognise. Green trousers and green collar on white shirt. A Year One, then, but not one of the group Andrew was in charge of—he’d diligently learned all their names and faces.

&nb
sp; “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said automatically, sitting up straighter. “It’s for councillors only.”

  “I know,” the boy said. He hesitated on the threshold for a moment, and then came in, and began to talk at length, while gesturing vaguely in front of himself. “But I wanted to talk to you. You’re Andrew, right? I hope it’s not weird I know your name, but I guess you’re used to it, right? You guys are up there on stage in front every day, so of course we all know you. Anyway, we talked the other day—remember? At the track there. I wasn’t in uniform that time, I was wearing PE shorts, I was sitting down and you talked to me. I didn’t say my name, it’s Kevin—Kevin Cheng—it was the second day, Tuesday—okay, I can tell you don’t remember.”

  He deflated a little, and at this Andrew placed him, dimly. “No, I think I remember.” There had been a boy, at some point, it was true, with a flushed, sweaty face, his mouth twisted in unhappiness, grass caught in rogue tufts of his hair. They’d exchanged a few words, the gist being that the boy—Kevin—was in fact okay, and Andrew had hurried on to the next set of icebreaker games on his schedule.

  “Oh, you do!”

  “I think so. So what question did you have?”

  “It’s not really a question.” He slipped around the large meeting table and pulled up a grey chair in which to sit himself, about a metre from Andrew. He was a broad-shouldered boy, but thin, with narrow hips. He leaned forward eagerly. “It’s more I wanted to talk to you about—about Orientation—we feel very uncomfortable with a lot of things—we—that’s me and Leila, she’s also in my group—we had this idea we could talk to you about it. Or I did, anyway, Leila thought there was no point, but I told her about how you talked to me, and I thought you would listen.”

  Andrew put a careful hand to his chin. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he gathered this was the sort of thing he had heard teachers describe, summatively, as “pastoral care”. People with problems, basically. Neither he nor his friends ever had anything to do with it. “Which group are you in?” he asked.

  “What? Oh—Panther.”

  “That’s John Almeida and Sangeetha’s group, isn’t it? Did you talk to them?”

  “No,” Kevin said quickly. “Of course not! That would defeat the—they’re the ones who—sorry, I’m not making sense. I’ll start again. That day when you talked to me, I was—not happy—because—they—the group—and John—they tau pokked me, and I really don’t want to be tau pokked. I know—” He waved his palms at Andrew, to forestall a response. “I know that’s the whole point, everybody says no, but I really don’t want it.”

  Andrew wasn’t sure what he had expected Kevin to bring up: but not this, anyway. Tau pok was a beloved school tradition, a particular staple during Orientation Week, but popular all year round. One boy was pushed to the ground (girls were exempt, by unspoken convention), where he lay, stomach-down, while other students piled upon him, with lots of hooting and gasping, to form a heaving stack, six or seven bodies high.

  “Is it really so bad?” he asked. “Everyone seems to enjoy it.”

  Kevin gave him a sceptical look. “You’ve never been on the bottom before, right?” Andrew shook his head. “It’s horrible, they crush you—the weight is so enormous, you feel like your ribs will break—and you can’t breathe, and you can’t fight back, and you don’t know if it will ever end. It’s like—it’s like being beaten up, and in the meantime they’re all laughing and enjoying themselves, like everyone is celebrating beating you up.”

  This seemed much too dramatic a response to an ordinary, even a festive, activity. “They don’t mean it to be mean,” Andrew said without thinking. “It’s just a joke.”

  “That doesn’t make it better,” Kevin said. “I’m in pain and they find it funny—how is it any better that they think beating me up is entertaining?”

  Andrew felt suddenly that his own remarks had been feeble, even insulting, and stopped himself from asking the next question that rose in him. Of course it would have made no difference if Kevin had said anything to the group. Protests from the tau pok’s bottom layer were always ignored: they were, by definition, part of the game. That was the fun, the spirit, of the thing—not this fierce, wounded gaze from this highly-strung boy.

  Out the window, the field was a wash of insect sound. After a few moments, Andrew turned back to Kevin. “Yeah, okay. That is bad.” The other boy visibly brightened. “And—” Andrew hesitated. “Maybe you could talk to John and Sangeetha—or just Sangeetha, might be better—another time. When it’s quiet lah, not just before another tau pok. If you want them to stop, I think they will listen more if you do that.”

  Kevin shook his head. “The tau pok is only one example. It’s more than that. It’s everything. The entire introduction we’ve had to this school.” His voice grew somehow both bolder and more nervous at the same time. He always let himself down at these critical moments, he felt: the words that would make everything clear racing upstream in perfect formation and then collapsing, jumbled, in retreat, in the air. “It’s a whole—soup—of everything. They made us do this—thing—we had to pair up, the girls had to lie down and the guys had to do push-ups over them.” He felt stupid just describing it. “And another group tied this girl to the car park railing and threw buckets of water over her. She was screaming and crying and they just went on, like it was hilarious.” He paused. “Why do you guys do this? It’s like the whole point of the things you do is to make us feel dumb.”

  The last stung. “It’s not meant like that,” Andrew said. “It’s just for bonding. I heard about that girl, later she said she really enjoyed it. It brings the groups together. It’s just fun.”

  “But it’s not!” Kevin half-shouted. “It’s just not! We said we didn’t want to, and they spent ten minutes—ten minutes—trying to make Leila and me do the push-ups. They surrounded us and kept on saying we had to. They didn’t stop, they wouldn’t go away, until we gave in and did the start position for them. How is that fun for anyone?” He blinked back tears. “Why is it fun to make people do things they don’t want to? If forcing people to do things—and making them force other people to do things—if that is really what bonding means, that’s horrible. It’s stupid, and, and it’s wrong. Why would you want to make a school like that?”

  Andrew was annoyed. It wasn’t as if he adored every last Orientation activity either. Was a little push-up so great a price for social passage? Kevin could just learn to roll with it, as they all did, without quite so much yelling and crying. On the other hand, the yelling and crying were a large part of the exasperating justice of Kevin’s argument—and Andrew did, if he was honest, see that it was justice. There was no harm in it if this boy and his friend simply wanted to be left alone; and there was something awful, something chilling, in this vision of badgering and cajoling.

  “Okay,” he said. “You have a point.”

  “I really hoped you would get it.”

  “I think probably the group handled things badly.”

  “It’s not just handling,” Kevin said. “It’s the…the problem is in what they have to handle. They should just stop having this whole stupid Orientation in this way. It’s—it’s poisonous. It’s built around nastiness.”

  “You can’t say that. A lot of people find it fun.”

  “But they shouldn’t!”

  Andrew frowned. “Don’t you think you’re going a bit far now? Okay, you don’t want to take part, fine, nobody should force you. But most people like it.”

  “Most people have to like it!” Kevin was shouting again. “They have no choice! Because they know they’re supposed to just get over it. Everyone has to show how sporting they are—nobody wants to become the cry baby—nobody wants to end up like me.”

  Andrew closed his eyes. He didn’t want to agree with this; it was, he realised, conceding the case. It was frustrating. How had Kevin managed to turn his own weakness into a winning salvo? But the magnitude of his complaint was impossible. He m
ight sneak it into the Council room on one unusually quiet night, but once exposed to the ordinary flow of discussion, the momentum of how the student body did things, it would soon be swept downstream like so much detritus. It wouldn’t last a second in the sunlight of inspection by the others. Surely Kevin knew this, too: so why was he bothering Andrew?

  “Look, I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy yourself, but it’s almost over. Tomorrow is the last day already. There’s really no point telling me about this.” The last came out a little more aggressively than he’d meant it to. He stood up and reached for his rucksack, which lay at the end of the couch.

  “I just thought you might get it,” Kevin said, rising from his chair. “You—saw—you noticed me, and you asked if I was okay, so I thought you might get it. And, actually, I think you do. You could make them do it differently next year. I know you won’t be around at the time, you’ll have graduated by then, but you could say something now. So all the next Year Ones don’t have the same—shitty—time.”

  Andrew paused. He realised that he had decided, fairly early on in the interview, that Kevin would not really, at any point, make sense. But there was a logic to this suggestion. The yelling and crying was not without purpose: Andrew was being asked to be on its side. He had to refuse, of course, but he had to admit there was something to it.

  “I could give the new councillors your feedback,” he said at last. “After they’re elected. They’ll consider it. But it won’t change the way they do things.”

  “They’ll never listen at all if I say it. If you do, there’s at least a chance.”

  “You have to be realistic. It’s practically zero chance. And it won’t change anything for you.”

  “A small chance is still a chance. It means something to me, already, that you listen.”

  Andrew shook his head. “You’re completely crazy.” It took him a moment to realise that he had said this out loud, and he flushed at his own indiscretion, but Kevin just gave him a small smile.