A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  “That’s the sort of thing he said.”

  He smiled at her as he said this, and—rather shamefully—she allowed herself to be disarmed. But she persisted a little. “Someone has to stop this—or at least not let them just get away with it. Someone should say something. If he won’t tell a teacher, you have to do it.”

  “No one else is complaining; and if he gets them into trouble, things will be worse for him. Anyway, he kept saying I mustn’t tell anyone about it.”

  This was the final word for Hwee Leng. From the age of eight she had suffered in bitter impotence the parents who openly read her diary, who rummaged through notes and letters from her friends, and who laughed at her protests, at first tearful and now stony. “Aiyoh, so drama mama until like that! What privacy? Please! What is so bad in here that you want to hide from your father and mother? You were come out of your mother’s stomach one, you know!” Something abject in her gut cried out at this—I didn’t ask to owe you!—but it was true, she lived in their home, and ate the rice they put on the table, and so she must give way. In a lifetime full of such rotten compromises, keeping a confidence was one of the few good deeds wholly in her power; and so, if this boy desired secrecy, then secrecy must be counselled.

  “The poor guy,” she said to the table.

  “Yeah,” Andrew sighed. He seemed suddenly very grave. “I don’t know why he told me about it. I don’t really know him also. We’re not like—I only ever talked to him once or twice before. Do you think it’s a bit weird for him to tell me?”

  “Not at all. It probably makes him feel better to tell someone.”

  “But why me? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Maybe he just thought you would be a good person to talk to, after that first time.”

  “You don’t think there’s something funny going on? Like, he’s telling me for some funny reason? Like he has some kind of strange ideas about me or anything? I’ve felt kind of—weird—about it.”

  “No lah, why would there be a problem? People need to talk about things. It’s just natural. Maybe you just come across like someone he can trust.” She paused, nerving herself. “I mean—I’d trust you.”

  She was rewarded with another smile, broader this time, warmer, more open; and then, natural as daylight, he reached across the table and enclosed her right hand in his.

  “I’m really glad I could tell you about this,” he said.

  Astonished by her triumph, she looked away.

  When the twins got home, Andrew entered their bedroom with relief, a relief that felt like great happiness. It was too late to start work on them tonight, but he looked with anticipation at the neat leaves of paper on his desk, the stack of fat, friendly books with their clear curves and sparse, pregnant notations. Tomorrow he would make his way through the material he had put off for the last two weeks.

  There had been too much of the other lately—evenings with the pages open in front of him but unread, unreadable, as he mulled over the shifting, jumbled fragments of… of what? Of nothing, really. Nothing had happened, and it had, in any case, nothing to do with him.

  He was able to return to this diagnosis now that he’d spoken to Hwee Leng, putting the event, such as it was, in proper perspective. He’d known from the first that it did not merit his attention, but aimless details had persisted: the fierce morning sun outside; the pattern of shuttered shadows on the dark wood of the hall floor; the weave of the flags, rough and dusty against his fingertips. A small gold cross twinkling in the brown of Kevin’s neck. “Leila transferred in March,” the other boy had said despondently. “She went to Republic JC. I wanted to change too, but my parents said it’s better to stay in Ashford. Top JC and all that. Nobody here gets it, Andrew—you’re the only person who even listened to me.” As he said this he laid light fingers in the crook of Andrew’s arm. Under the weight of his pleading, round-eyed stare, Andrew thought of the small polished wood metronome in the music room. He felt like he was on the end of that curious inverted pendulum, tipping forward with agonising slowness, and then righting himself again.

  But this was all nothing, and it had nothing to do with him. Even the sudden electric race of his heartbeat, and the distinct stiffness in his crotch, which he identified with clear-eyed detachment. Andrew was pragmatic about the body. He acknowledged the fundamental randomness of its machine parts. As its uncountable molecules clicked together in their unfathomably complex game of three-dimensional billiards, messy things were bound to spill over now and then; you couldn’t avoid the occasional meaningless spikes of chemical noise. In his view, there was nothing so magical about an erection. If you could wake up from a dreamless night with a hard-on—if the organ could stir as you dried the dishes, or as you revised for a history test on the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824—it only stood to reason that you could have a corporeal sexual response to any human contact, even with boys. With Andrew’s many years in all-male schools, his primary human contact had in fact been with boys. This had happened before, and passed without consequence: there was no reason to attribute significance to it now.

  Yet it nagged at him. Not Kevin’s problem, this time, but the boy himself, his high-wire urgency, the restless animation of his hands, the hopeful curve of his lower lip. Quite by accident, Andrew noticed, two days later, that he was walking behind Kevin, between tutorials, and something in him tightened at the sharp line of hair at the nape of the other boy’s neck, and the neatness of his narrow hips. He almost went past his class but stopped himself just in time. He sat and stared numbly at the teacher for the next forty minutes.

  It occurred to him that he must have seen Kevin around school scores of times before, and paid no mind. After their first meeting, in January, he would have had difficulty picking the other boy out of a line of seventeen-year-olds of similar height and colour, though the triangle of his build and the long fall of his fringe seemed now so very individual. The last day of term came and went without any further encounter; and Andrew felt an odd disappointment settle over him as he made the last lone humid trek to the bus stop, for the journey home, and the four weeks away. The erection visited again that night, revenging itself on him, as he lay in a wakeful grey stasis, resentful of the logistical difficulties presented by sharing a bed with his brother. (Resentful—and also grateful. Because he wasn’t really going to jerk himself off to thoughts of this guy, was he? There was being pragmatic about things, and then there was—who knew what that was.)

  It was absurd. He had a girlfriend. It was nothing. He had a girlfriend. The late night phone calls with Hwee Leng continued, and through them all Andrew remained impeccably attentive. It took great conscientiousness, but he managed. He was exhausted, each night, as the phone clicked back into its plastic cradle—exhausted enough to think, with some hope, as he rubbed his eyes in the bathroom fluorescence, of untroubled slumber. But desire rose again to torment him once he was back in the dark of his bed. Brian slept through it all.

  Before this began, talking to Hwee Leng had been the only thing—other than mathematics—which carried the tang of those crisp few Moscow days. Hwee Leng came at things from unusual angles; she strayed from well-trodden circles of speech. He had to work at their conversation, and the work had until recently been rewarded with all the real pleasure of genuine interest. “I ask everyone why they like what they like,” she had said when they first met. “I love it when people really like things. I can’t stand it when they say they are sian, not just like when they are forced to sit in a boring assembly or something like that, but when they are—permanently—sian, like it’s become a part of who they are.” He recognised this description. The possibility of this fate had disturbed him ever since his time in Russia.

  Like him, Hwee Leng was impatient to escape the purgatorial confinement of these last long school days. So much of their talk was of a dazzling future in an unknown land, shimmering on the road just ahead of them, almost within reach. “What gets me is, it has to be even more differe
nt than we can imagine,” she said. “There’ll be all this—new—stuff. What I’m really looking forward to is all the things I don’t even have a picture of to look forward to yet, the fact that they’re there, if that makes any sense.” It did to Andrew; and when they spoke, he nearly had the feeling of building it.

  But this comforting sense was dashed, now; lost, for Andrew, in an uncharacteristic lather of guilt and distraction. He needed it back. But what could he do? The ragged ends of loose impulses batted about in the aimless winds of his unease. He began with the thought that there was no need to tell Hwee Leng about Kevin, because it was nothing. This idea was thin enough to start, but as he clung to it through too many waking nights, it grew threadbare, and gave way, rottingly, to fear. Fear that he simply could not tell her, because honesty was impossible: had been made impossible, by some deep malformation in his nature from which this all sprang. And then, seamlessly logical, came the conviction: he must talk to her about it, he must, precisely because the talk itself would prove that this was all nothing, and there was nothing wrong.

  He would come clean. He was not an especially verbal boy, but the words stuck with him now: he would come clean.

  And so, today, he had. It felt good, he thought, a little light-headedly, to have told her everything.

  Andrew had once read that a Rubik’s Cube could be twisted into forty-three quintillion positions. This number was unimaginable, twenty digits long. Only fifty-four flat squares of colour, and the ways to arrange them outnumbered all the people who had ever been on the planet. But that was just from turning the Cube’s faces. A few years ago, his friend Eng Siang had sabotaged Andrew’s Cube: he’d ripped pieces out and stuck them back in differently, producing a configuration that Andrew hadn’t been able to solve, no matter how hard he tried. He’d looked the problem up in the school library, and it turned out you could make twelve times as many combinations that way, but more than ninety percent of them would leave you frustrated forever, if you played by the rules. It felt like cheating, but you had to pull the rogue pieces out of the structure entirely, and put them back in manually, one by one, to restore the possibility of order.

  Tonight Andrew felt like someone had done this with his mood, wrenched displaced elements back into legal grooves. Things weren’t all in the right places yet, but the game was no longer rigged against him. It was only, once more, a matter of logical effort, and of time.

  Samuel de Souza, chemistry teacher and Head of Discipline at Ashford Junior College for some seven years now, enjoyed sauntering through the white, airy spaces of the school, pausing in strategic places—the canteen with its long benches, the perimeters of the sports fields, the high-ceilinged front foyer—to remind the young men and women in his care that authority was present. He habitually stood with his hands behind him, one folded loosely over the other. A small man, with a barrel-like torso, he kept a very straight back. He was fond of reminding his students about the importance of posture, and of rearranging them as they sat, prodding their spines and pulling their shoulders back.

  De Souza took his job seriously. He knew, he had been told often enough, sometimes with an air he didn’t like, that discipline was a different job altogether at the neighbourhood schools. Yusof, at their last meet-up, had spoken of teens huddled in stairwells over bags of glue, and of blows exchanged by snarling boys, with older brothers covered in the curling blues and greens of gangland tattoos. Much worse than anything de Souza dealt with, of course; but, in de Souza’s opinion, the very intractability of these problems lessened, in a sense, the value of his old classmate’s role. Suppose you worked hard—as he was sure Yusof did—and eked out some semblance of order. Say you pulled the students more or less in line, and communicated enough rudimentary understanding of the syllabus so that it wasn’t completely futile for them to sit the examinations. At the end of all that, you were still hampered by the quality of the raw materials you were given. You still produced only bus drivers, shop assistants, at best small businesspeople or minor clerks. Society’s drones. It was running to stand still.

  But at Ashford—at Ashford you shaped the nation. Future ministers, embryonic lawyers, inchoate doctors and professors: they passed through these rooms in their wet clay forms; they sat looking up at you from their tidy rows of chairs, their quick minds hungrily taking in every influence. And it was here that de Souza came in. Cleverness alone would not instil in these future leaders of Singapore the necessary sense of community or of pride. For that you needed order; order that went beyond the mere absence of the most overt disruptions, like smoking, shouting or public displays of affection. It took finer rules, with subtler purposes, to maintain the delicate calibrations of atmosphere so crucial to the students’ moral development. To this end, de Souza carried, at all times, a clear plastic ruler, with which he measured suspect watch faces. Those with a diameter exceeding three and a half centimetres were confiscated. (A small collection of timepieces lived, as a result, in the bottom drawer of de Souza’s desk.) He scanned the seas of shoes as students passed, and issued warnings if he detected anything but the plainest, most sober white. Three warnings in a term earned an afternoon’s detention, from which fidgeting, chatter, books and magazines were forbidden—it was a time for silent homework, or else silent reflection.

  He made no apologies for this meticulous attention to detail. It might seem harmless for a small loop of shirt to hang out over a waistband, for a boy’s hair to curl down almost to his shoulders, or for a girl’s skirt to creep a fraction of an inch above her knees; but it only took a few such deviations, fewer than you might imagine, for the careful harmony of the whole to be ruined. If there was one lesson he feared these bright Ashford sparks might not learn, it was how to subordinate themselves to the greater plan. To recognise that even as they sat at the top—perhaps especially as they sat at the top—they must think of themselves first and foremost not as individuals, but as parts of a bigger picture. Keeping the student body looking perfect was just an expression of, and training in, this deeper ethos.

  It was de Souza’s considered opinion—which he patiently shared, without admonition, with any student who asked—that the more seemingly pointless the regulation, and the more apparently unfairly enforced, the better. The truth was, life would never be reasonable. Poverty once made this clear to young people from an early age; but in these times of unearned plenty, it was easier for the immature to hang on to fantastical and self-indulgent ideas. It fell to de Souza, as a member of the older generation, to help them to recognise reality—to get over their self-importance, and accept their roles in society.

  He was generally less concerned about the boys. National Service would teach the boys what they needed to know soon enough. Polishing and re-polishing boots into the dead of the night, under the threat of a gruelling round of push-ups if an officer found the tiniest speck: though often the boots were spotless, and the push-ups had to be done anyway. Talk back and you might find yourself in the detention barracks, where disgraced soldiers, stripped to their underwear, moved pyramids of sandbags—bag by back-breaking bag—from one end of a room to the other, before collapsing to sleep on coarse straw sacks. Experiences like these had shaped de Souza’s philosophy, and he flattered himself that his boys emerged from school more prepared for recruit life than most.

  But the girls were another matter. Good, simple girls were an endangered breed these days. Every year more of them struck him as spoilt, and there was no promise of National Service to beat it out of them. In these modern times you couldn’t be sure that marriage would sort them out, either—many thought themselves “liberated” and might not marry at all, and those who did might still cow their poor husbands into who knows what kind of arrangement. Most of the girls in his school couldn’t even cook! And there was a worrying tendency, among a growing few, to show a form of hideously fashionable conceit—to think the world owed them respect, even if they had no idea of how to behave themselves properly.

  The case of
one such girl was vexing him at the moment. Her name was Leila Ismail and she wasn’t even at Ashford any more; she had transferred out, three months before, with the other Year Ones whose provisional acceptances had been withdrawn when their final O-Level exam results proved inadequate. In de Souza’s opinion, having looked her over as she sat in his office—her hair in a frizzy, leonine cloud which she kept tugging with one hand, her fingernails heavily chewed—this was just as well. Academic weakness aside, there was an air of chaos about her which didn’t fit with his view of the Ashford student. She moved too much, and her face worked into a series of arrogant responses as he spoke—fine, pencilled eyebrows drawing together, lips curling in doubt. She even interrupted him, more than once.

  He had this sense even before hearing the wild complaint she had brought, beginning (as was the way with such people) with the most dramatic overstatement she could find. “One of the boys here raped me.” She said this breathlessly, almost triumphantly, it seemed to him; and went on to give a name and class, from which de Souza recalled a clever, mild-mannered presence in one of his Year Two chemistry groups. A more gullible teacher, faced with such a sensational allegation, might have panicked and launched a witch hunt. But de Souza kept his calm. He didn’t want shocking accusations; he wanted facts.

  And duly got them, with a few simple inquiries. It turned out that this—incident—had taken place in February. Why had she waited so long to step up with her story? A full four months. “It’s more like three—” she butted in, but he shut her up with a wave of his hand. According to her, it had happened in school; yet she couldn’t identify anyone who might have been around. Whyever not? There were often students around on a Friday night, weren’t there? It seemed they had been in the second floor male toilet; which naturally prompted the question, what was she doing there? The answer was, apparently, that he’d asked her to go in with him.