by Justin Ker
Twenty minutes in, a rapid exchange of strokes crescendoed into a dramatic smash; and Andrew, exhilarated, wiping runs of fresh sweat from his forehead with a white cotton sleeve, looked up toward one of the wide open lengths of the hall and caught sight of a familiar frame. It was Kevin, leaning against a pillar, watching them play. He wore the clean look of new-cut hair, and his face was thoughtful and composed in the soft afternoon sun.
Sport had set a steady fire going in Andrew’s muscles and made him expansive. He smiled at Kevin, and Kevin smiled back. He was just a guy he knew. Of course Andrew could offer him a hand, as Hwee Leng had suggested. Probably he wouldn’t want it—and that would be it, case closed—but he would appreciate the gesture, one person to another. They could pass like this, and smile at each other, and it would all be natural, matter-of-fact.
He played on, giving no further outward attention to their audience of one, although the inner coil of him glowed with secret contentment. As the game wound down—Andrew and Ming Wei won—he cast a quick glance at the spot. It was vacant now, but no matter, he told himself dizzily, no matter. The four players moved to the changing room together, in a swirl of noisy chatter: reviewing an early rally, dissecting a skilful, unexpected save. Andrew floated easy contributions into this talk, all the while looking back on the past hour in the warm double light of the hidden chambers of his heart.
Perhaps he need give nothing up, after all.
Then he heard Ming Wei, as he pulled a clean shirt on: “—that was freaky, man, staring at us, I kept wondering when he would go away.”
“Who?” Andrew asked.
“Aiyoh, you mean you didn’t see? Sometimes you really are a blur king.” The others chortled. “This ah kua from Year One spent the whole match ogling at us, that, what, Kelvin Teng—”
“Kevin Cheng,” Halim corrected.
“Yah, yah, okay, whatever, I’m not an expert on the exotic world of the Ashford homos, but obviously Halim is. Why so interested in them ah?” Ming Wei crossed his arms across his chest in a gesture of exaggerated protectiveness. “Shit, man, I got change in front of you how many times already some more.”
“Don’t anyhow say lah, my excuse very solid one—this guy is in my sister’s class, that’s how come I heard of him before. He is one hundred percent psycho. Always breaking down over crazy things.”
“I heard his classmates gave him a hard time.” Andrew said it before he could stop himself.
“Oh, yes,” Halim said, with the knowingness of gossip.
“What? What?” Ming Wei demanded. “Don’t just give us this oh, yes, oh, yes—what’s the story!”
“It was one of those—surprise birthday celebrations. Some of the guys got him a present—some deep heat. And helped him to apply it—you know—” Halim, eyebrows raised, pointed to his crotch.
The other two howled, half in delight and half in disgust.
“That’s damn horrible,” Choon Keong said, between chuckles. “Wahlau eh. You got to feel sorry for the guy. Even if he’s psycho. Deep heat on the little brother—ow!”
“To you lah,” Ming Wei countered. “But this guy is a homo, remember? He probably liked it. Ask your sister to ask the guys lah, Halim. I’m sure they can tell us that he liked it.”
More laughter. Andrew shivered. He made a surreptitious scan of the three mirthful faces. None of them had yet noticed him here, outside, complicit, unlaughing, unsafe. He had been lucky, but he could not count on it to last if he did not regain control of himself. He curled his hands into fists to keep them steady. He schooled his face into a blank. He had to be vigilant. There were too many opportunities to make irreversible mistakes.
They vanished: Ming Wei sloping off eagerly to his meeting in the canteen, the other two melting away into the late afternoon. Clouds sat fat and low in the sky and the wind carried the moist smell of coming rain. Andrew, peering out at the spread of grey, wondered if he could make it to the bus stop in time. Probably his chances were best if he left right away.
He had just stepped out through the school gates onto the street when he heard the slap of running shoes on the paved ground behind him. Even before the shouts of “Hey! Hey!” he knew, with a curious mix of dull excitement and fatalistic dread, who it would be.
“You going home?” Kevin asked, slowing to match him.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know anything about badminton, but that looked exciting.”
Andrew regretted the smile, the invitation to contact, which he could not now disclaim. Every instant in this boy’s presence was an error. How to make him go away? His mind turned, dissolutely, to excuses—he had left a book behind, he had forgotten an appointment. Kevin walked by his side with a kind of bounce in his gait, a rustling energy, and the novelty of his cheerfulness confused Andrew. He looked briefly at the other boy’s profile—the dark fans of his eyelashes, the line of the bone in his jaw—and then he looked away, his throat closing. He could not regret the smile.
“We’ve got some big games when school re-opens. So we’re training pretty hard.”
Speaking magnified the error; but it would only be a short walk together, along a limited way, Andrew told himself, and then (and something in him fluttered in protest at the thought) it would be over forever.
“Even during holidays! I was in school for orchestra practice.”
“What do you play?”
“Clarinet. But I’m not very good.”
Andrew didn’t know anything about music beyond what they’d had to do in school, perfunctorily, for an hour or so a fortnight. Mostly this had involved graceless mechanical puffing on hollow wooden recorders. But some of the equipment had interested him, vaguely, with its intimations of mathematics. In their shadow Kevin seemed both more solid and more unknown.
“Have you got—a concert, or something?”
“Yah, all the time, but every year the big one is in August.”
The first bus stop they came to ran in the wrong direction for Andrew—he had to cross an overhead bridge to board from the other side of the dual carriageway. He had no idea where Kevin was headed, and with that odd double feeling in his gut again, a compound of alarm and relief, he thought they might already have to part. There was a moment’s hovering, an exchange of looks, and then without words both continued toward the stairs up to the bridge.
Thunder rumbled but they took the steps unhurriedly. At the top their way along the concrete path was lined on either side by planter boxes filled with the deep rich pink of bougainvilleas. A daily route turned strangely ceremonial. Andrew divided it into portions: they would walk the whole length of the bridge together, they would walk more than half, they had half left, a quarter, five steps, now the descent. There would be a wait for the bus. Two minutes or twenty. Either of them might go first. They might need the same one. He did not want to jinx it, whatever that meant, by asking.
There was no one else at the bus stop. They stood, loosely facing each other. Andrew longed for the silence to go on, just to go on, but Kevin was trying to speak.
“I never thanked you,” he said. “For, like, listening to me. The last time. About the guys in my class.”
The last thing Andrew wanted was context, crowding round. He made a non-committal sound.
“You were nice about it. Lots of people wouldn’t be. I—I have a friend,” Kevin continued, hesitantly, and then, with a kind of sad calm, he told Andrew the brief and anonymous story of Leila’s encounter with Samuel de Souza.
At first Andrew struggled to listen. It was both too distant and too raw: it had to do with someone else, not him, not them; and it was too much to do with that person, the account was composed of items too visceral to be neutrally shared at such a remove. The dirty language of violence and of shame. This nameless girl should have gone quietly, he felt. A bad idea to speak, to offer herself up to be mangled coldly and bloodily between the gears of the way things were done. A bad idea, too, to tell Kevin, who was now telling Andrew—and who k
new who else would sup on her pain, pinning her open at the skin to probe and rootle inside. Each word a further greasy grinding of flesh, and it was out there now, she could never recall it or keep it back.
“So I think it was lucky I talked to you,” Kevin said, simply, at the end. “I guess it wasn’t only luck lah, you were nice to me before, but still—” he shrugged. “—if I went to this teacher instead…”
And Andrew had meant, at least in theory, to urge him to do just that. More—he had agreed to volunteer, to place his own body between Kevin and an order that was without mercy. For what purpose? So that they could be destroyed together, in some weird and sickly gesture? Far from her sustaining force, Hwee Leng’s imperative logic unravelled. Remembering her made Andrew feel ill.
He hadn’t really looked Kevin full in the face once during their entire conversation. He did so now. The other boy had pulled the cross he wore on a chain up to his chin, and was picking at it unconsciously, jamming its bottom edge into the skin under his fingernails. The hard white of his teeth peeked out from between his lips. Andrew formed, for the first time in his life, the clear thought that he would very much like to kiss him. And the clear thought that he must never do such a thing.
This was it, he thought. The bargain. He had to give this up to have the rest. He had been promised the safe, shining fields of the future, and they did not come without a price.
He pulled back quickly, standing straighter. “I’m sorry that you have problems,” he said stiffly. “But I can’t make them mine.”
Kevin looked puzzled. “I just wanted to thank—to say—”
Andrew, with the perfect clarity of panic, willed as much coldness into his stance and his voice as he could. “And I don’t think you should tell me about these problems of your friend. I can’t help you. Sorry.”
The other boy stared at him in openly hurt silence. If he couldn’t parse the sense of Andrew’s words, he grasped their tone well enough. The confusion in his eyes lodged in Andrew like a dagger.
Behind Andrew came the rasping engine of a bus. He hadn’t noticed it rolling up, but he felt an immediate and painful burst of gratitude. He couldn’t bring himself to any niceties—“This is my bus”, or “I have to go”, or a plain goodbye—none of them would add anything. There was nothing to add. He turned away from Kevin and fled, up the broad single step through the waiting door, into the vehicle’s dim and empty refuge. Habit took over with its blessed automatic magic: he bought a ticket, steadied his feet, climbed the stairs, and moved as he always did, toward the front, to take a seat. It was only a few minutes later, as plush drops of rain finally shattered against the window, washing the world outside into watercolour waves, that he realised that he and his fellow passengers were churning down an unfamiliar street. He was on the wrong bus entirely.
When Brian came home from the first day of term, a week or so later, Andrew was sitting in their room in his usual working position: leaning earnestly forward, his left arm forming an L, fingers propping his forehead and elbow on the desk. His right hand skimmed quietly over the pages of a book. He looked freshly washed.
Brian slung his bag into its customary spot by his side of the bed. Ordinarily he would busy himself at the closet, preparing wordlessly for a shower of his own. But he had just spent much of the day, between lessons, with Hwee Leng, talking his brother over—or, perhaps more accurately, offering awkward companionship as she contemplated Andrew, silently and not-so-silently, tearfully and not-so-tearfully. Facing Andrew himself, after hours of this, it seemed odd to now say nothing at all.
On the other hand, saying nothing at all, whatever the circumstances, was their established mode of shared existence. It felt almost like what this room was for.
He compromised on saying just a little.
“Hey, er—Hwee Leng told me—you know, about you guys.”
Andrew turned round very slowly. He looked unperturbed. “Yeah.” He paused. “Is she okay?”
Brian sat on the bed. “Er—actually—not very good lah. She was quite unhappy today.”
“I hope she’s not pissed off at me.”
“I don’t think so lah. She says it’s up to you—if that’s how it is for you, then it’s better than wasting everybody’s time. She’s just, you know, upset.”
Andrew sighed. “I feel bad about it,” he said. “She’s great, you know. There’s nothing wrong with her or anything. There’s nothing wrong with any of it. I just don’t really… I mean, I’m sorry that she’s upset, but I just—don’t really want to go on.”
Brian nodded. “Yah. Sometimes it’s just like that. It’s normal lah.”
“Is it really?” His brother’s voice was bitter.
“Yah, I mean, aiyah, this happened to me too. You can’t help it, you—you like someone or you don’t like someone, it’s just like that. Can’t really explain these things with logic or what. Don’t worry about it lah. She gets it.”
They were silent for a while.
“I hope it’s not weird for you,” Andrew said.
“Me?”
“Yeah, I mean, you guys are friends and all that, I hope that isn’t—affected—by this.”
“Oh, no lah,” Brian said, surprised. “It’s fine.”
“Good,” his brother said. This last loose end resolved, he began to collect himself to return to work. “Thanks for—for the talk.”
“No problem. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks. I’m fine.” He turned away, back into the world of his books.
Brian took his clothes to the shower with the thought that the exchange had been much less uncomfortable than he had feared. He didn’t know if he had succeeded in reassuring his brother at all, but on balance, he felt it was better to have brought it up than not. As he unbuttoned his shirt it occurred to him that this was the first time they had ever had a conversation of such a personal sort. He wondered if it would take them quite so long to get around to the next.
MARCH 1998
ONLY THE SHRAPNEL of the event, scattered bits and pieces, made it to Brian over the telephone; and they came in no very organised fashion at that. But this is what happened.
The first that Hwee Leng heard of it was at the SingSoc bop on at Christ’s College. “A bop is a kind of shitty Cambridge student disco,” she offered by way of explanation, which still left Brian mostly in the dark, but he didn’t want to interrupt more than strictly necessary. She usually gave SingSoc social events a miss, “because it’s always the same smug Ashford scholar lot, who all know each other from junior college; they spend all their time in Cambridge hanging out with other Singaporeans, talking about how backward and inefficient England is, and they’ll all go back and mingle incestuously in the civil service, thinking they’ve now seen the world—you know what I mean.” (Brian didn’t really.) As it turned out, her boyfriend Dilip had resolved to patch a leak in his thesis that night, and kicked her out of his room, grumbling, close to midnight. Since she hadn’t made other plans, and Dilip lived more or less next door to Christ’s, Hwee Leng decided to drop by.
She hoped partly, in fact, to catch up with Andrew, whom she hadn’t seen for—it must have been months. It had occurred to her lately that he was soon embarking on his last term, after which he would fly home and begin a glittering ascent through Singapore’s administrative elite; whereas she, if all went to plan, would spend several more years in a cold rented room somewhere in England, living on pasta and tinned tomatoes, while somehow producing enough words, reflecting enough thought, to amount to a doctorate. She wanted to meet Andrew on the same plane, in the same space, before their lives diverged with such finality. (This was how she framed it for herself, at any rate. There was something artificial about the idea: functionally, their friendship was limited to a handful of chats a term at best. They were not close. But Hwee Leng had too much self-regarding nostalgia to let that interfere with the set piece in her head.)
It was a typical night in early March: essentially still crystal cold,
but brighter for longer, and those precious extra minutes of evening sun left gentle hints of spring in the air, so that you could risk a short walk without hat or gloves. Even so, Hwee Leng was glad to make it past the chilly old stone college courtyards, and step into the heated mouth of the 1960s concrete building that housed the bop.
There weren’t many people in the entrance hall as she peeled off her heavy brown coat and the red fleece underneath. A few SingSoc committee members—Ashleigh, Gaurav and Ming Wei (“You remember him, don’t you?”)—huddled animatedly over a table. The wooden surface was covered with small square scraps of paper, a cluster of empty beer and alcopop bottles, and the ubiquitous white plastic cups from which students knocked back bad wine and unpalatably strong parodies of mixed drinks. When the three noticed Hwee Leng their voices dropped spontaneously into a shared hush of excitement, and they fixed her with a curious stare that she only partially registered at the time. (It was not exactly unusual enough to draw her attention; if she was happy here at university, it wasn’t because her compatriots sniggered at her any less than they had ever done.) Gaurav swung open the little black metal box in front of him and eased it round to face her. “It’s a pound, madam!” he announced theatrically.
Hwee Leng fished her wallet from her jeans and dropped the entry fee in with a clang. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” Ming Wei said. “And you?”
“Yeah, not bad.”
“It’s been quite an exciting night,” Ashleigh said, her rouged face flushed redder with drink. “Don’t you think?” She tittered and almost slipped off her seat. Hwee Leng raised her eyebrows and gave a thin smile. This was more conversation than she was ordinarily deemed to merit. She knew that Ashleigh had christened her—among other things—“that spotty bulldog bitch”. Presumably it was the alcohol being friendly tonight. Hwee Leng turned and made her way into the darkness of the bop proper, as Gaurav jabbed his giggling friend in the ribs.