A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  Didn’t this strike her as a rather strange thing to do? Did she make a habit of going into the male toilet? She was silent, here, and the incessant picking at her hair increased in pace. What—de Souza continued forensically—what precisely was the nature of her relationship with this boy?

  “He was my boyfriend,” she said, after a long pause. “But it doesn’t matter! I didn’t—I didn’t want it.”

  But she’d been in the toilets with him before?

  She said nothing.

  What had they done there, before?

  Still she said nothing.

  De Souza sighed heavily. “Listen,” he said. “I cannot do anything if I don’t have the facts. You come to me with this story, you cannot expect that I don’t ask you any questions, correct? Someone ask me to discipline a student, okay!” He brought a palm down, sharply, on his desk. “Just like that, I do it. No questions asked, I just punish this boy. Cannot be, right?”

  Leila considered this for a while, her eyes on the poster on the wall behind him. Against a hospital-green background it depicted an oversized and smiling cartoon heart—an anatomical heart, not a symbol—wearing jogging shoes. It was accompanied by two impossibly large-eyed, white-toothed and glossy-haired cartoon students. De Souza, impatient, was about to try again, when she spoke, rapidly:

  “Okay. Yes. We sometimes went in there, to—to have some privacy.” She coloured. “But that day, I didn’t want it. I told him only—only with a condom.” De Souza kept his face scrupulously blank as she turned her tense gaze to his. “And he wanted—not to—he wanted to do it without one—so I didn’t want to, but—he still did it.”

  She took a deep breath, and released it noisily. There. She’d said it. Again. That must be enough, now.

  De Souza got up abruptly and turned to face his bookshelf to hide his annoyance. He hadn’t invited this conversation to begin with, and now it had suddenly become even more distasteful than before. To think that all this disgusting behaviour had been going on—right here, beneath his very nose—and for her to bring such things up so shamelessly—it sickened him. But he couldn’t afford to get emotional. He had a job to do. He turned back.

  “Why didn’t you report this right away?”

  Something, an edge in his voice, alarmed Leila. She looked up at the soft-faced man standing ramrod straight in front of her, and the wave of urgent confidence that had carried her to the office that day began to ebb away. Stay focused, she told herself; answer what you have to, and we’ll get there. He mustn’t get away with this.

  “It was—very difficult,” she said. “Very—emotionally—mentally—difficult.” Impossible to speak of the questions she had put to Ben, again and again, as if they were relevant: did you love me? Do you care? It is all okay with us? For weeks she had wanted nothing more than a sign that she mattered to him: because then, applying the backward logic of human decency, he could never have done what he had done. His bona fides, once established, would scrub the past clean of the act. After an age of tussling, Ben became imperious, bored; he began to put the phone down on her; and only then did she see the falseness of her premises. It didn’t matter what she got him to say, or not say: those minutes when he had split her open were an unarguable wound. “I needed—I needed some time to think.”

  “A very long time,” de Souza observed.

  Again the note of challenge. This didn’t seem to be going in the right direction. “What are you going to do?” she asked, trying to fight down panic.

  “What am I going to do? I told you already what I am going to do. First I must find out what actually happened—”

  “I told you what happened. I told him I didn’t want it, and he did it. You can ask him. Ask him!”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” De Souza was coming to dislike this girl more with every minute. Barging into his office with such melodramatic, attention-seeking stories would have been aggravating enough, even if she were still at Ashford, and even if they had been true. What more when they turned out to be liberally embellished accounts of her own irresponsible behaviour. The girl had as good as admitted her own willing participation in this scandal: she objected only that it hadn’t gone in the exact way she had wanted. De Souza wasn’t employed by Singapore’s premier junior college to settle silly squabbles between wayward youths about precisely how they degraded themselves. And what with the fishy timing, who knew if even this was the real complaint, or just a lurid invention to exact petty revenge for some imagined slight by an ex-boyfriend.

  The lens of this thought brought his view into razor-sharp focus. The whole business must be something of that kind. A genuine victim would obviously have gone to the police straight away. Having decided this, he was loath to probe any further. There was no telling how much more sordid the tale would become, what manner of fetid detail would be unearthed, if he continued to stir the muck. Leila was visibly agitated, now, her shoulders hunched tightly, her teeth slightly bared. He just wanted her to go away.

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job,” he repeated, and cleared his throat. “You have given me your side of the story; I will consider the case and the school rules, and take appropriate action.”

  She watched, confused, as he began to purposefully tidy the small stack of papers on his table.

  “But is that all?”

  “What do you mean is that all?”

  “I mean—are you going to talk to him? What’s going to happen?”

  “I told you,” he said, with deliberate patience. “I will consider the case, and the school rules, and take appropriate action. I cannot rush into doing anything now. Unless,” he added, as they stared at each other, “there is anything else you want to tell me about your—prior activities—with this boy.”

  It was a trap, she knew. There was nothing she wanted less to talk about. It was this thread, yanked from her, which had thrown the whole meeting into a snarl; but now it was offered as the only way to buy a continued audience. His mode of questioning had been distressing, but she was frightened of what it meant that it had stopped. What could lie behind this total phase shift, from pushing for so many uncomfortably private details, to seeming to want to know nothing at all? The vicious certainty unfurled in her, like a black flag, that he was just trying to get rid of her. And that he would succeed. She knew, she had known, she should never have come here at all.

  And that had been de Souza’s morning: an unwelcome but mercifully brief excursion into the seamy side of the world of youth. He knew there were certain merits to “exposure”, as he called it. It was good for you, in the way everything unpleasant was, to skim the knowledge of how messed up other people could be. But still he was glad that the class of people he dealt with at Ashford made such experiences rare. The biggest nightmare of his career to date had been that hopeless girl, Ming-jun or Ting-jun or something like that, who had tried to kill herself because she had been pregnant. It had created weeks—weeks!—of fuss and anxiety for de Souza and the rest of the Ashford administration. He’d never wanted so badly to slap someone and tell her to get a grip.

  He had hopes that this latest affair would prove—or had already proven—far simpler. But even so, even after her departure, Leila left toxic eddies of disruption in the air, and, finding it hard to concentrate, de Souza took the short walk to Commonwealth Hawker Centre to have an early lunch of roast duck rice and ice kachang.

  He regretted the ice kachang now, back in his office. Too much for the middle of the day. The beans and the rich dark meat sat uneasily together in his guts. He tried not to belch.

  He was meant to be planning a new staff training programme, but his mind returned, reluctantly, to one final aspect of the morning’s sorry saga. That was the matter of the boy, Benjamin Chia of 2S01B. Not a superstar, but still a consistent performer, and widely thought a good candidate for next year’s civil service scholarships. He spoke of an engineering degree somewhere in the States. His friends were all cut from the same polite, hard-working moul
d. None had ever come before de Souza with his Head of Discipline hat on.

  De Souza had no intention of burdening Benjamin Chia with the girl’s more overwrought charges, the r-word and such. There remained, however, the question of the boy’s possible inappropriate behaviour on school premises. Getting up to that sort of thing in the toilets was serious misconduct, for which, ordinarily, de Souza would not hesitate to issue a strong reprimand; even to call the boy’s parents. But in this case, de Souza felt strangely unwilling to act.

  It was the human factor, he thought, the unfortunate human factor. On paper, and according to the purest principles, there were infractions on each side. On Benjamin’s part an error of judgment, a lapse in decorum. But de Souza was sure, having encountered both parties, that the fundamental wrongness, the real moral fault, lay with the girl. A girl who could say “not without a condom” to his face. A girl who blithely advertised her own shamelessness, and who could even go as far as to fashion, from it, a sense of grievance. If a girl had grown so wild, then—if one examined the problem honestly—what boy, at that age, could not be led astray? (De Souza remembered being a boy of that age.) And pragmatically speaking, it appeared the danger was now past; the agent of disruption had been excised from the Ashford environment. There should be no future cause for worry.

  De Souza was not making excuses for Benjamin Chia. Not at all. But it would be misguided, in the discharge of his role, to have no regard for proportion. If he took action, and especially if parents were involved, there could be a paper trail. This didn’t just have potential consequences for the boy’s future (otherwise so promising!) It might also have the disturbing side effect of lending credence to Leila Ismail and her complaints. As an outcome that was surely wrong. Anything which detracted from a full rejection of the values behind her outrageous claims must be avoided.

  As this all clicked into place for de Souza, he began to wonder at his own easy credulity in letting things get so far. From everything he had seen and heard, it was just as probable that the entire story was a pack of lies from top to bottom. There was no reason to suppose that Benjamin Chia had ever laid a hand on the girl at all. Imagine the embarrassment if de Souza had raised the matter and shown himself to be taken in! Clarity flooded in and he almost laughed with relief. That was enough time-wasting. There was proper work to do.

  The large and steeply sloping hall was thinly populated. From Ming Wei’s seat, about a third of the way up, the team from Marine Parade looked awkward and boxy in their ill-fitting burgundy blazers. A nervous, angular, moonfaced girl; a runty nerd with a fiercely receding hairline and a permanent glare; and that Indian friend of Hwee Leng’s. Ming Wei was unimpressed, and would have said so, but with Hwee Leng sitting on Andrew’s other side, you couldn’t count on him not to be in that irritating, moony, brainwashed state, where instead of laughing at jokes that Ming Wei knew he knew were funny, he would murmur something inane about “everyone having different taste” or some comments “not being very nice”. It was extraordinary—and disgusting—the effect Hwee Leng had.

  But at least Andrew had the excuse, however poor, of an unreasonable girlfriend. His brother, on the other hand, was just dull. Ringingly dull, all the way down. (It really made you pause and rethink this whole genetics thing, didn’t it?) Watch his face when you spoke and you couldn’t see the cogs turning in there; all you got was puzzled, bovine silence. So there was no point trying for intelligent understanding from that quarter, either. They would have to just watch this bunch of clowns in bored, frustrated silence.

  Familiar sensations, Ming Wei reflected. These days, around Andrew, he was all too frequently unimpressed, bored, press-ganged into holding his tongue. It wasn’t as if he minded being quiet when it was appropriate. You didn’t go to his sort of school without learning soon enough to discipline your voice. Sometimes you had to still it—for the duration of the weekly assembly lectures, say, on the Ashfordian spirit or Singapore’s unique multi-racial society or putting community before self. And sometime you had to lend it to the wider group, as he had every morning for twelve years, chanting the national pledge and singing the national anthem. The point was, he knew when to take things seriously, and when to relax. Whereas Hwee Leng was the wrong way round: chafing and fussing against all kinds of normal, but bizarrely reverent toward the laughable. You couldn’t joke around her. She’d almost turned green when Ming Wei was telling Andrew what Benjamin had told him about the dance club slut’s latest drunken exploits. “One of those horse face ones, but you know, body’s not bad, can always cover the face, bang the base. But wahlau eh, what a slut.”

  “Don’t you think it’s very bad to talk about her like that?” Hwee Leng asked acidly.

  “It’s true what! She had sex on a pool table. At a party. People saw it. I’m not making anything up. And I don’t find her face attractive, is that a crime?”

  “Doesn’t mean you have to be so insulting about it. How is it even your business?”

  “Please lah,” Ming Wei laughed in disbelief. “Like you never talk about who is with who, who breaks up with who?”

  “Come on, that’s obviously different—”

  “But it’s true what. And it’s not like it’s top secret or what. If it’s such a big deal to her to have people talk about it, then she shouldn’t do it, right? In public leh.”

  Trounced, Ming Wei thought, well and truly trounced. You could see it in her face, teetering on the edge of tantrum. So much about Hwee Leng to detest, but this emotionalism was the sour icing on the cake: if she couldn’t stand the heat, she shouldn’t pick fights. At the very least she could learn to recognise when she’d been beaten, and to shut up. But no, the self-righteous harangue just wouldn’t stop—

  “What if she hears the kind of words you use to talk about her? If it was me, I’d be really upset.”

  “Are you stupid enough to have sex on a pool table? In front of ten softball players? No? Then it’s no problem lorh. Don’t be so stupid, can already.”

  “It’s mean.” But she had no better comeback than that—she never did. And yet Andrew deferred endlessly to her killjoy whining. It was making his company unbearable. How long would it take him to wake up?

  It had been a mistake, Ming Wei thought, to get dragged along to watching this today. He didn’t have anything against debating—there was usually a zai character or two on the Ashford team, even if only in that gabby arts student way, sometimes separated from mere wordy bullshit by the finest of lines. But everyone knew the only match really worth the time was the annual final, which could be relied upon to pit Ashford against traditional rivals King Albert. This lot was just fodder.

  Nothing about the hour to come changed his mind. The first speaker from Marine Parade, a stiff-kneed girl flapping tattered sheets of foolscap, stuttered mechanically through her material before sitting down, flustered, with three unused minutes on the clock. Ming Wei couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “Watch out, it’s the robot invasion! But she’s like an anti-Transformer lah—less than meets the eye.” She was succeeded by a neat, smiling Ashford boy whose understated urbanity came across as even smoother than usual.

  “Wah, this is damn painful, man,” Ming Wei said gleefully. “Massacre! Look at the next guy—” Here he referred to the unfortunate Chinh, glowering over his notes. “—the midget, sure he is in JC or not? Looks like forty years old like that. And check out his face, he looks like a serial killer. Sorry, man,” he turned to Brian, “but Marine Parade got any normal people or not? Someone dumping radioactive waste in your canteen, is it, then all come out like that? Teenage Mutant Junior College.”

  Hwee Leng leaned across Andrew. “Will you stop it? It’s not funny.”

  “Aiyah, don’t so ngeow lah. Are you having PMS or what?”

  “Hey, let’s just watch the debate,” Andrew said.

  Ming Wei rolled his eyes.

  Hwee Leng burned in anger for the rest of the match. She couldn’t say a word about Ming Wei’s behaviour
toward herself—though annoying, it was, ultimately, nothing extraordinary, expressing nothing she didn’t have to hear each day, in sly and stifled giggles, among her family and in her school. She’d long learned to sublimate these constant aggravations into her personal atmospheric mix; so that they appeared to the onlooker to vanish, while in fact they fed the invisible layers of disquiet that enveloped her, and that moved as she moved. She could absorb this sort of abuse, she sometimes thought, bottomlessly. Only injustice toward others precipitated her latent feelings into solid rage.

  This wasn’t altruism, but strategic instinct. Part public relations manoeuvre, part self-protective cloaking. She was on surer ground, with herself and with others, as long as she wasn’t the victim. It would be too draining, and leave her too vulnerable, otherwise. She’d understood for longer than she could remember that it had to be that way.

  Ming Wei, on the other hand, was borne aloft on a rising wave of amusement. It was mostly amusement. He would have called it amusement. But as it crashed and swept away, it left a flinty deposit of irritation in its wake.

  The speech by Chinh, the small angry-looking weirdo, was an obvious disaster: he accepted seven interjections from the Ashford team, three times as many as usual, so that his opponents spoke for almost as much of his allotted time as he did. A performance so risible merited more than the few small snorts and murmurs to which Ming Wei confined himself, but Andrew met even these restrained offerings with polite stonewalling, while his girlfriend’s eyes flashed reproach.

  She had no sense of humour at all. People like that were fortunately few in number, but they really got under Ming Wei’s skin. It showed a deplorable self-importance, an arrogant determination to put oneself above others. In Ming Wei’s books, a refusal to laugh was a good barometer of character. Fun was serious business.

  On one level, though, it was only to be expected that Hwee Leng would deny the objective crapness of her own team. Perhaps it was natural that those of little ability should be defensive about the whole idea of having standards. More troubling was Andrew’s capitulation to her self-deception, even as the pathetic hilarity unfolding before them vindicated Ming Wei in every way. Just how low would Andrew stoop? Was there no limit to what he would play along with?