by Justin Ker
“I’ve heard that before,” he said.
Andrew turned the conversation over in his mind all through the long bus ride home. While they had been talking, the subject of discussion had seemed intimately connected to Kevin’s personal neuroses, indivisible from the odd figure barging his way into a forbidden space and weepily haranguing a stranger. But now, in the rumble of the upper deck, watching the orange-grey rows of streetlit flats parading past, Andrew could barely remember the boy’s face. It was the matter itself that troubled him.
He thought, now, that Kevin was right about the bonding activities that were so popular in school. They favoured humiliation, domination, mastery over resistance. This was not an unfortunate side effect—it was designed into them. But there was no wisdom, he thought, in challenging this. Submission was required of you; and if you fought back, they just had to hurt you harder to get it. If you put too much of yourself out there, it was just that much more for them to cut down. You weren’t safe unless they believed you’d given them what they wanted. You couldn’t be a part of things unless you played the game. That was just how it was.
Kevin wasn’t wrong to identify something grim in the lifetime of discipline that stretched before them. And the boy was right about his own role in it, too, Andrew thought, as his bus stop neared, and he clattered downstairs to stand, swaying, by the door. Kevin was a cautionary tale, an example of punishments to be avoided. Andrew felt sorry for him. But he couldn’t afford more than pity. From a distance, pity. Andrew was going places, and he wasn’t going to risk sharing that fate.
DECEMBER 1999
THE CHALK BALL had grown thin, but Brian rubbed it anyway. He had a good set of calluses on his upper palms, the skin torn and reformed over months of training, but chalk always helped.
He took another moment to survey the elusive hold above him—an overgrown pimple of fake rock. Not that he expected new strategies to suggest themselves, after so many previous attempts. By now he was fairly certain of what he should do; it was just (just!) a question of execution. But he forced himself to go slowly. Desperate as he was to crack this route before they reordered the wall and it vanished, he’d learned that rushing would throw everything off, not just for a single climb but possibly the whole afternoon.
And now. The shimmy rightward, the tiny toe-tip hop, and he was on a single foot, the left, reaching carefully, carefully, with the other. Fingers splayed against the wall kept him in that sweet space between fallen forward and falling back. They didn’t hurt yet, but they would later.
He was staring upward as his right foot found the nook. Barely a smudge in the wall. It was tempting to look down and fiddle with his position, but he knew from yesterday that this was as good as it got. There was nowhere safe to stand for long; you just had to keep going. So he rocked his weight straight over, stepping up into that perfect second when the strength in his thigh and calf and heel extended him with machine precision; when he knew where every gram of his body rested, and where every inch was headed. His hand swept up, gripped its target—his fingers fit, this time, easy as day—and then he scrambled up, the rest was trivial, done.
Later, as Brian climbed down, his muscles sounded with good clean empty pain. Like violin strings well bowed, filling the space around with a benign music. His faithful doubts came back only as he returned to ground. For many months they had formed themselves into questions—what else should he have done? What was he still missing, now?—which echoed uncomfortably through him. Brian had welcomed this. He should be uncomfortable, he’d thought.
More recently these questions had muted into quiet shadows, skirting the edge of his vision. Sometimes he went entire days without worrying about his own failures of memory; and instead of telling himself off, he replayed in his head Auntie Lay Choo’s audacious kindness, her impossible line: “Brian, you didn’t do a crime or what, don’t need to punish yourself any more already.” He could not acquit himself, but he could obey instructions: he would stop enforcing the loss of Andrew. It didn’t need his enforcement; it was what it was.
As he left the hall he realised he’d ripped his hands again.
The familiar beeps came through the curtain as he soaped his body. He moved hastily to rinse and towel off, but the message that flickered onto the small pager screen didn’t reward the effort:
SICK, CANT COME SORRY. CALL ME NEXT WK? HAPPY NEW YEAR.
He fought back disappointment. It might not have led anywhere, after all, and at least she’d said to call. Brian really liked her, though; and he knew this was all a bigger deal than it should be. Twenty-four and this was his first whisper of a date in seven years. He remembered the string of girlfriends in school, who had taken up an enormous amount of time and energy, until that whole business, when he was seventeen, at junior college, with Ting Ting.
The discovery that he liked Ting Ting arrived unexpectedly, after two months of pursuit and three of going steady. Mostly it made him realise that he hadn’t much liked—or known—any of the other girls at all. He had liked the idea of them perched by him. He had liked making out. And, if he was honest with himself, he had liked most of all the small, unacknowledged movements from Darren and Ravi and the other guys at school, when they saw him with an arm around a cute girl. Their eyebrows flickering upward, their glances sharpening: infinitesimal salutes which affirmed that he was on safe ground. That he had achieved something with this one. He had liked all of that, but he hadn’t really liked them, the girls.
Ting Ting ought to have done well by comparison, but instead he found himself wondering what he was doing with her. Or with any of them at all. The pleasure in holding her was muffled, as though it came through a thick barrier, and always with a distracting sense that something vital was missing. He didn’t know what, though he pictured it, sometimes, peripherally, inconsequentially, as walls and platforms shifting. Layers and structures unfolding. Some more complete feeling just out of reach, as if he had forgotten a word for what he wanted to say.
Ting Ting adored him. He felt like a fraud.
“Are you crazy?” Darren’s eyes were saucer-like. “Wahlau, you’re never happy, man. Every five, six months got some new char bor. She’s damn hot lorh.” (Darren’s appraisal, in fact, had prompted Brian to seek her out in the first place.) “And you yourself say you like her, and she’s not like that super high maintenance one right?”
Brian shook his head. Here Darren meant Shuyi. The description was somewhat unfair. Shuyi hadn’t demanded anything of Brian, exactly, but she’d had money in quantities alien to him, and thought nothing of going out to cinemas and bowling alleys and video arcades and fast food joints almost every day. She had always paid her own share, but even so, his pocket money simply hadn’t been able to keep up.
“Yah, then?” Darren demanded. “If there’s no problem, then what’s the problem?”
He didn’t really know. The problem was just that there was a problem.
“If you’re not into her, then dump her,” Hwee Leng said, sharply. Brian knew she meant well, but he did sometimes wish she would mince her words.
“But what if I’m just asking too much? There’s nothing really wrong.”
“I’m not spending hours talking about this, Brian. My advice is very simple. If you don’t really, really want to be with her, then what’s the point? It’s mean to her to act like you care, if actually you don’t. Dump her.”
So he had. He felt a little bad about how awfully this tore her up, but a single dose of guilt was better than the sticky film of the stuff coating him constantly during his pantomime of affection. For the first time in years, there was a lapse in the stream of girls Brian brought home to while away afternoons in his bedroom: kissing, listening to tapes, doing a bit of homework together. Andrew, if he was home at all, sat wrapped in work at his desk, undisturbed. Brian and the girls rarely spoke; they were quiet as mice.
His mother noticed the end to the girlfriends and inquired.
“Don’t have time now.�
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She made an approving noise in her throat. “Yah, good. A-Levels coming already. Better to concentrate on your studies first. Your mother and father didn’t want to nag you when you started with that Cherilyn, we don’t want to interfere in your these private things.” (Unknown to Brian, this girl’s appearance had in fact triggered a panicked parental conference, which cautiously resolved to wait-and-see: it was at least a girl, and a Chinese girl, this time.) “But A-Levels is an important year. Good that you are now matured enough to realised what the priorities are.”
Nothing she said surprised Brian exactly, but at the time he found it odd that the matter was broached at all. As the boys reached their late teens, directives of this sort had slowed to a trickle and then dried into silence. No other mode of conversation grew up in its place. On many days, boys and parents said nothing to one another at all. The childhood ban on eating in front of the television was implicitly dissolved; more often than not Brian came home in the evening to find his parents on the sofas, plates on their laps, as casino showdowns and romantic rivalries played out fuzzily on the screen. Andrew’s success, the luminescent promise of his future, had exceeded every reasonable demand. Kim Seng and Poh Ling could, perhaps, cut their sons a little slack. They seemed calmed then, reassured, safe.
Since then his dating life had been a simple blank. The drear military years hadn’t helped, of course. But even in the bright new bubble of university he had held back. Sometimes Lay Choo ventured nervous queries, and dropped cryptic references to twins and genes and closets, giving him the vibe that—his early clarifications notwithstanding—she still thought he was maybe into boys, and frightened of it. He wasn’t into boys at all, but only lately had he realised that the fear she sensed was a real thing. The threat of charged wires strung between himself and himself, an old distrust he was finally learning to test.
Brian didn’t like extracting lessons from the photograph of Andrew. “What happened to him was his own thing. It shouldn’t be like some kind of secondary school essay,” he’d told Lay Choo during one of their coffee sessions. “Or a Chinese textbook chapter, there’s always a moral of the story.” He didn’t want to be parasitic.
But he also couldn’t help it. He looked at the picture with the selfishness of the survivor, and details kicked him. Hands on collarbone. Always, always, Andrew’s face. He looked and he saw the forgotten fact of desire. This alone seemed to Brian a vast work of courage, one which shamed him. Andrew had wanted someone, despite its price. Brian could only recall, very thinly, that he had once known the shape of such a thing. Like ghosts through layers of tracing paper.
The picture tugged him the other way, too. Say he reclaimed what he had lost—say he found a girl and it was really there this time, the startling movement beneath his feet. He was dogged by the feeling that he shouldn’t take joy where his brother had found punishment. There shouldn’t be any difference between them. If Andrew had been robbed, Brian had to steal from himself to balance the scales, or he would be an accessory to the original crime. He knew it was an absurdity, but it was taking him time to let it go.
Lay Choo was already at one of the tables outside the café when he arrived.
“Sorry, I just came from climbing, I had to shower first.”
“Never mind, I came late also. Normally I never come this area, very far from Simei, and all the buildings so confusing.”
“Sorry to make you come all the way.”
“Never mind.” She didn’t begrudge her nephew the hour on three different buses, from her home in the east of the island to his campus in the west. Their meetings were too hard won for her to resent a little travel. “I get you a drink.”
As she queued at the counter, Brian half-heartedly fought a cigarette, and lost. Next year, he told himself. Tomorrow. Or when this pack was through.
Sessions with his aunt no longer made him nervous. Sometime in the last ten months they had shed their novelty and their treacherous sheen. Or perhaps his treachery was now so commonplace, so complete, that it made no sense to fret about a few chats over tea, of all things. It helped that they’d given up trying to meet at his family flat, dodging and weaving about his parents’ expected movements. He still wasn’t always sure what to say to Lay Choo, but being with her felt ordinary now.
She returned with their cups. “So, how’s it like living in the dorm?”
“Not bad. More convenient lah, don’t have to travel all the way from Braddell to go for lectures. Also I can go to the university climbing wall a lot.”
“Oh yah, you said just now. So this climbing is on a wall? Like that dangerous or not?”
“No lah, it’s okay, the kind I do doesn’t go very high.”
“I never knew you did this climbing. Must be getting very strong.”
“Last time in school I also did a bit, but not so much. Nowadays I have more practice, definitely getting better.”
“Yah, very good, can just walk over whenever you feel like it.” She paused. “And—how are your parents with you living out here?”
Brian shrugged. “They’re not very happy, but you know what they’re like, whatever I do they’re also not very happy.”
“Hmm.” Lay Choo wasn’t sure what to say to this. However impossible she found her brother, she could never fully shake the sense of wronging him at these moments. Sneaking around to meet his son was one thing; failing to reprove heretical remarks about parents was another. But she didn’t have it in her to scold. She felt responsible for Brian, but she had no idea how to go about shaping another entire person. She met her nephew in order to talk and to listen, not to dispense moral education. Maybe it was just as well, she thought, that she would never have children.
“Here without them maybe you have a bit more privacy.”
Brian tilted his head. It wasn’t quite a nod. “How’s Nurul?”
“She’s okay,” Lay Choo said. He’d started asking after Nurul recently, initially speaking of her only gingerly, and it was still a surprise and a pleasure. “She’s quite worried, last few weeks her brother has been sick. Then she has to help her sister-in-law take care of the kids. But on Monday he came out of hospital already and doctor said should be okay.”
“Hope he gets better soon.”
“Thanks.”
A breeze rattled round the open courtyard, sending a brown paper napkin swirling across the floor. Around them, students flashed one another white smiles and laughter, or pored over notes spilling from fat binders, neon highlighters at the ready. Just another afternoon cup of tea between friends, Brian thought, except that it wasn’t. His brother was also at the table, as always; he was why they were together.
Brian needed this. With everyone else he had to act as though Andrew wasn’t there, as if he had perhaps never existed. Just as bad, or worse, if he had to tell the story himself—“I used to have a twin”—to a whole new person, for whom Andrew had always been dead. He could see them working backwards from Brian as half a pair, undoubled. This was too convenient, unfair to Andrew, untrue. Thick crayon over the past’s secretive filigree of silences. But Lay Choo had actually been with them, both of them: she knew as much as Brian did and would never pretend to know more.
There’d been Hwee Leng, too, of course, right after it all blew up, but the swollen phone bills had ended their cross-continental calls within a month. Email felt too final, too formal; and lately in Hwee Leng’s messages her habitual outrage (which Brian could handle) was increasingly enmeshed among the springs and levers of busy political doings and academic theory (which he could not). He didn’t want to crack codes; he just wanted company who would understand.
When Lay Choo’s name first stole into his inbox back in February, a week after Chinese New Year and nearly a year after Andrew’s death, Brian was wary. He couldn’t imagine what she wanted with him. His parents must have put her up to it, he thought, except he couldn’t see why they would do that, either. By then their interrogations and their threats had gone into fro
sty remission, replaced by a biting silence. Commissioning his aunt to perform fake friendliness seemed to Brian an unlikely change of tack.
He hadn’t yet decided whether to reply when Lay Choo’s follow-up arrived, tipping him over to yes. (“Btw pls dun tell ur parents I emailed u. I will explain to u why when we meet in person. Tks.”)
Her story amazed him. The hidden histories, naturally—but also, especially, everything transacted right in front of him, only recently, when he was not a child or a fool any more (or so he’d believed). Even after everything, after Andrew, he hadn’t noticed any of it: like Lay Choo’s mere half an hour at Andrew’s funeral, after Poh Ling had finally convinced her husband that complete absence would be an even greater disrespect than attending while lesbian. “And when I came, they were so cold, very cold.” She could see that they wanted her to leave as soon as possible, so she had.
The end of the shared meals at Braddell, the phone calls flintily rebuffed, the strained dance of minimal civility at the New Year festivities: it had all passed Brian by. Throughout the reunion dinner gathering, Lay Choo observed Poh Ling watchfully steering her son away from his aunt. (It was unnecessary: wrapped in his own resentments, Brian hardly spoke to anyone.) Lay Choo sat by Ma’s idling karaoke machine and stifled the urge to scream. If she didn’t do something, she realised, they would play at this unconvincing game of happy families, from their placid private hells, forever.
“You had to work today?”
“Yah, supposed to be half day only, but because of this Y2K computer thing, my boss is very scared everything crash tomorrow, so then got all this last minute firefighting.” Lay Choo sighed. “Never mind lah, at least can still leave work early. Are you going to celebrate?”
“Not really.”
“What about your friends? I thought you young people, sure have a lot of parties.”
“No lah,” Brian said. “Actually I was going to meet someone, but she got sick.”