A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  Ming Wei began to wonder if this relationship was not merely, as he had previously assumed, a temporary lapse on his friend’s part—the type of entanglement that resulted if you were awkward or inexperienced around girls, and you compromised your pride for a bit, because easy release for your dick offered itself for little effort. That was embarrassing enough, of course, and, contemplating it, Ming Wei had been embarrassed on Andrew’s behalf; but now he suspected the truth might be even worse. Maybe this acquiescence to Hwee Leng, to her overtures and her strictures, revealed some more fundamental bedrock defect in Andrew, some essential wishywashiness, that Ming Wei had been too ready to overlook. Perhaps her repulsiveness was no accident. Perhaps Andrew really did agree with the bitch.

  Ming Wei cast a furtive, appraising look at Andrew, who sat to his left; and then at the insipid identical brother on his other side. This new view of Andrew was both disappointing and oddly liberating. Andrew’s achievements remained what they were, of course; in terms of academic and general social success he was no less a symbol of zai. But the connections Andrew chose went unavoidably to who he was. This flaccid deference before mediocrity, this cloying refusal to judge, mashing the solid world and its honest realities into a tepid porridge of cringing blandness, was a perversion, a failure of standards, and it diminished him, at the core, in a darkly irreparable way. The coarsely pragmatic might disagree, and say his sex life was his own business, but you could take pragmatism too far, Ming Wei thought.

  On balance, it made sense to stay on the right side of him. Andrew was still a credit to him, a friend worth having. But perhaps the moral of the story was to be careful about admiring anyone. What seemed like the safest person could have the most damning personal weaknesses. Ming Wei would save his loyalty for his standards and where they would get him—which was, in any case, where it should always have been.

  If he was honest about it, his hero thing for Andrew had never just been about his friend’s merits, genuine and substantial though those were. It also had roots, Ming Wei knew, in his insecurities about his own background. Ashford and the Gifted Education Programme were full of guys who lived in large detached houses in pricey District 10. Each day they stepped out into the school foyer from the leather seats of air-conditioned BMWs or Mercedes Benzes, sometimes driven by chauffeurs; and every July and January, after the long school holidays, they swapped accounts of their sophisticated trips to London, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles. They spoke matter-of-factly of weekends in the swimming pools and on the tennis courts of private country clubs. Girls whispered about them with an undercurrent of excitement. Rightly or wrongly, being rich put you—effortlessly, talentlessly—several rungs up the ladder of zai.

  Ming Wei both resented these guys and despised himself for it. The results of differences in wealth, like those in intelligence or beauty, were the textbook type of unfairness—bald and unarguable and entirely rational—about which he considered it petulant to complain. One should know one’s value and one’s place; and he did not exempt himself from this maxim. Nevertheless the question of money hurt him. In the Ashfordian scheme of things, the only scheme that mattered, he saw himself on the struggling end of the spectrum. He lived in private housing too, but it was only a flat in an old condominium estate, badly in need of renovation, without its own swimming pool. Unable to afford the latest SEGA machine, he made do with a knockoff console, preloaded with Nintendo games of dubious legality. He had never been further than Bangkok.

  And needless to say, unlike spoiled kids like Hwee Leng, to study overseas he would have to pay for the government’s financial assistance with the first six years of his professional life. A scholarship was prestigious, to be sure, and well worth having—but only if you couldn’t get abroad without one. It hadn’t escaped Ming Wei’s notice that the bungalow guys and the country club girls eschewed the common chatter about Ministries and statutory boards and government-linked corporations. Asked about the future, they gave non-committal shrugs and spoke of “going into business” or “keeping their options open”. They planned for jobs in investment banks, law firms, multinationals. For more of what they already had. For money.

  Ming Wei was headed for the consolation prize. He would not pass Go, or collect $200. He was on the loser track.

  Elevating Andrew, he recognised, had taken some of the sting out of this. Ming Wei had indulged in a romance: a romance about a boy from a HDB flat coming to Ashford, a house of pure contest, and using pure ability to best the privileged at the game of life. A romance about the innate virtue of being a loser. It was so obviously stupid, now that he thought about it. Sure, Andrew was doing pretty well—considering he could do no better. The fastest horse on the sucker’s course. But that couldn’t change the hard truth about where he was—which was also where Ming Wei was—and it was useless fantasy to imagine otherwise.

  He ought to be glad for this Hwee Leng affair, really, for exposing his own lazy and sentimental investment in such magical bullshit thinking.

  At least there wouldn’t be long to go now before the debate ended and they were released from this tedious hell. He gave another sidelong glance at Andrew, who was a picture of earnest attention as the final Marine Parade speaker delivered an enthusiastic argument. Ming Wei would concede that this one had more of a brain than her teammates, and there was nothing immediately offensive in her appearance, but boy, did she have a screechy voice. Leaning toward Andrew, he released a high, thin wail in imitation. “Not bad huh, Indian also can sing Teochew opera.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Hwee Leng said, stabbing at the mound of shaved ice with her spoon, “is why you’re friends with him at all.”

  Ming Wei had left them half an hour ago, with the parting words “Yah, yah, whatever” for her and “See you later, man” for Andrew, and still she had a bee in her bonnet about him. Not unreasonably, Andrew supposed, carefully folding bits of basil seed into his own bowl of ice. He never really minded Ming Wei’s remarks himself, but he could see that they took some getting used to, and that going on about Marine Parade in that way might rankle if it were your school. “I agree he went too far today.”

  “Not just today. He’s horrible to people!”

  “He’s just too blunt lah. But that is good also, in a way—you know where you stand with him.”

  “He’s mean,” Hwee Leng said, with another stab. “His whole way of seeing things, it’s mean and—small. And it’s not like he’s stupid, or incapable of thinking differently. He’s deliberately small.”

  “I think he’s just saying what a lot of people are thinking.”

  “Maybe, but that’s no reason to say them too. The whole world can be wrong about something, we don’t have to go and follow them.”

  “No. No, we don’t. You’re right. But he isn’t always so bad lah.” He knew it wasn’t entirely true, though, even as he said it. Ming Wei was a constant, a dependable quantity, as far as people could be. His brand of levity just didn’t seem so crass when Hwee Leng wasn’t around, her livewire consciousness saturating the air like an ion stream, charging the world with meanings Andrew didn’t otherwise catch.

  “Do you trust him? I mean, would you? With a secret or something, something really private, something that could really hurt you?”

  Andrew hesitated. Until recently the question would have made little sense to him. He didn’t go in for secrets or sharing, both portents of a kind of mess that he avoided by instinct. But now, without wanting to, with the memory chest of his guilty nights sunk somewhere deep in chains, he knew what she meant.

  “I don’t think so,” he said after a while. “But—you can’t trust everyone you know in that way, right? And you have to get along even with people you don’t trust.”

  “You don’t have to be friends with them.”

  This, again, was a foreign idea. Why not be friends with someone? Approaches, praise, deference and admiration: this had been Andrew’s experience of other people, and it had never done him any harm. Th
e lottery of labels had fallen in his favour; being with his peers had never come at the price of joining in laughter at someone who looked or sounded like him. Approval was his balmy natural habitat, outside of which lay danger without bounds. He homed toward approval with something between the magnetic instinct of a migratory bird and the strict cautious foresight of the chess player. Accretions to his identity—his sensibility, his interests and his desires—were meticulously trimmed to a kind of bonsai perfection, so that he seemed to conform quite organically to the world’s demands. If he had been born with nothing that denied him inclusion, he had also never denied it to himself out of a commitment to something that didn’t fit.

  “Like that,” he said. “There might not be many people to be friends with left.”

  “No,” Hwee Leng said. “Maybe not. Isn’t that an awful thought, though? That we’re surrounded by people we’d call friends, who can’t be trusted. Doesn’t it make you sad?”

  Perhaps it was sad, in theory. But how sad could it be? It didn’t touch the perfect geometry of his plans, those open roads ahead.

  They ate for a while in silence. The sun was starting its heavy descent, spilling hot red gold across the sky.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Hwee Leng said. “About what you told me the other day.”

  The thought of Kevin, unbidden, tightened around Andrew like a fist. No, no, he thought. No. “What?”

  “You know, what you said at Sentosa.” The fist squeezed. “About that guy, the Year One, the one people were bullying.”

  “Oh yeah, that.”

  “I get that he didn’t want you to tell anyone about it,” Hwee Leng said. “And of course if that’s what he says, then you can’t. But I can’t stop thinking that it’s terrible for the classmates to just get away with it. I mean, it’s a kind of—of molest, right?” Embarrassed by the subject, she didn’t notice the strain that collected in Andrew’s face before he smoothed it, with an iron will, away. “So I thought, maybe you should try to persuade him to go to a teacher. You could even say that you’ll go with him, for, like, moral support. I guess you have to be careful how you do it, you don’t want to push him if he’s uncomfortable, but it could be that to him it doesn’t look like an option right now, to do anything about it, but if there’s someone behind him, then it will seem…possible.”

  Scattered ice floes and slivers of jelly remained in the cold syrup of Andrew’s bowl. Also the white oval piece of attap chee, hard and translucent, he had been saving for last. He pushed these bits around gratefully—it gave him time, he thought, to work this out—but it was no help, he could not think under these conditions, with Hwee Leng’s face turned toward him, bright and expectant. Above all he needed to see the matter with Kevin the way she did—the way he had communicated it to her, in that seaside moment of absolution. If he lost that meagre trail of crumbs he was out in the wilderness on his own. But he was afraid of where her call to action might take him—blundering into contact with Kevin, entanglement, intimacy—and it made him afraid that he was afraid. This was dangerous, these thoughts, they would catch him in a hall of mirrors. He needed a response that would make sense on her terms. She was still watching him. He could not think.

  “I don’t really know the guy,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know him very well. I don’t know if I should just anyhow bring this up again. It’s a sensitive thing and it might be—kind of busybody.”

  “Well, he obviously felt he could bring it up with you.”

  He took a steadying breath. “That’s—true—but then it’s been quite some time already, since it happened. Half the June holidays already. Maybe it’s better if he can just move on. Who knows, maybe he is already getting over it, and if I mention it again, it might just make things worse for him.”

  Hwee Leng, picking at her lower lip, considered this perspective for a while. Andrew watched her credulously placing his counterfeit concern on the scales, among her own true weights, and felt a creeping shame. This was no good. His feeble, scrambling insincerity undermined whatever it was meant to defend; it was itself an admission that he had something to hide.

  “I can see why it might be awkward,” she was saying now. “And I can see why—well, I’m not surprised—you’d feel weird about doing it. But he had faith enough in you to talk about it the last time. I guess you’re right that you should make it clear from the start, you won’t push if he’d rather just leave it alone. But it doesn’t sound like it’s wrong to even mention it at all. From what you’ve said, I think he’ll recognise that it’s not out of malice or you being kaypoh or anything, it’s just—an offer to be there if he wants it. I’m sure he’ll see where you’re coming from.”

  Where exactly am I coming from? Andrew wondered hopelessly. Perhaps she was wrong, and perhaps she was right, but he wasn’t in a place to think sensibly about why. Because he couldn’t trust his own rejections of her analysis, he felt himself tilting, with fatalistic illogic, toward agreement. He would do it, because he had to prove to himself that he could.

  “I can see what you’re saying,” he said quietly. “I mean, it’s a good idea.”

  Hwee Leng was surprised and pleased. She habitually formed schemes of this nature, always without takers: she’d tried for months, without success, to get Brian to get Ravi to ease up on Chinh. “I’m glad you think so. I really think someone has to be there for him, as a sort of—matter of conscience—and it sounds like there might not be anyone else.” Andrew nodded through all this, with a crooked attempt at a smile. “I appreciate it’s not easy,” she went on, trying for softness, now that she’d won. “Especially when it’s not someone you know well. It’s great of you to do it. It’s a difficult thing to do.”

  “Difficult,” he repeated. “But the right thing.”

  “Exactly.” She beamed at him. “And I keep thinking, no matter how difficult it is for you to offer to help, it has to be a thousand times harder to be him.”

  Andrew could not go as far as that. He was at the limits of his charade. He ran a hand up across his face, and back through his hair, so that for just a few moments he could block out the sight of her and the need for speech.

  He told himself later that perhaps it did not matter too much what he said he’d do. He had no clue how to locate Kevin: he didn’t know the other boy’s class or his faculty, or which teams or clubs he might have joined. He wasn’t even sure of his last name. There was no reason, in the ordinary course of things, why they would meet; and with two weeks left in the June break, a chance encounter was unlikely to take place soon. So it was entirely possible that Hwee Leng would forget about the whole affair before he was in any position to follow up on his word, although he suspected (correctly) that she didn’t generally forget such things. It was also possible—of course, why not?—that Andrew himself would forget, and that would be the end of that. It could all be carried away, fluttering, by a breeze: this oddly fraught evening conversation, its idle speculations on a stranger, the other boy’s shoulder blades and forearms and soft dark hair. Pond skaters across the surface of his life. Vanishing into the grass. In the meantime it was no big deal, one student lending support to another, just a dry matter of conscience, as Hwee Leng had said. She was a persuasive girl, after all; and he had been, he told himself, persuaded.

  If such thoughts did not grant Andrew serenity, they at least pulled the world around him into flat, manageable planes; and he succeeded in confining his feeling of impending threat to a few well-defined blocks of time. In these airless moments, he knew he was going to have to give something up, although he couldn’t say what it would be, and everything, everything, seemed non-negotiable if he was to be safe. But after ten minutes, fifteen at most, grimly, determinedly, he jerked these freefalls of emotion to a halt, and returned to the spartan efficiency of his functional routines.

  He said less and less to Hwee Leng, without realising it. A number of major badminton matches appeared on the horizon and he gratefully scheduled a punishing series of pra
ctice sessions in response. Within the tidy white rectangles of the court his objectives were clear, his communications bounded. Off it, before and after, he submitted easily to the clockwork predictability of Ming Wei’s cynicism—a quality which made his company undemanding, if not precisely pleasant. Once or twice Andrew felt a sneaking sympathy for his complaints about Hwee Leng. There was something to be said for not being asked to think.

  On an afternoon about a week later, Ming Wei, buoyed by his friend’s partial return to the fold, was especially garrulous. “Sorry, man,” he said excitedly as they limbered up on the court. “Can’t stick around later. Got to meet this Year One chio bu. You know that Jennifer Chong? Med fac girl, quite flat-chested lah, but damn nice legs. She needs help with binomial expansions, they are so hard—” He flapped his wrists to affect his idea of feminine confusion. “—and you know I’m the ultimate gentleman, right? Especially if you have such great legs.” He paused, calculating how much he could get away with. “You should try it out, man, make use of your capital. You’re hot currency! There are so many cute chicks waiting to be impressed.”

  “Aiyah, who has the time?” Andrew gave a pained smile and went on stretching. Part of him felt he ought to protest this erasure of Hwee Leng, but he hadn’t the stomach to fight any fights today. All he wanted was to play some badminton.

  They took up their usual stances beside each other, mirrored on the other side of the net by their teammates Choon Keong and Halim. After a few lukewarm rallies they began in earnest, and Andrew trimmed the beam of his attention down to the play—the intricate series of arcs weaved by the shuttlecock through the air, swooping and diving across thirteen by six metres of space, a superficially random result generated by the interlocking of four strategic minds. As the game flowed through him, he felt a powerful relief. He had always known this and, he could feel sure, he always would. He was eighteen years old, obliviously strong, and his mind would not go as far as the illness or accident or plain old age that might rob him of it. The darting dance of forecourt, midcourt, rearcourt, and the swift and controlled applications of arm and wrist, were firmly and unassailably his.