A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  There were no surprises here. Loose, overlapping circles of figures, bobbing and swaying, were lit up, poorly and periodically, by the repetitive red-green-blue of cheap party lights. The air was filled with the undemanding comfort of four-four beats and lyrics everyone knew, or learned in seconds, even if only involuntarily. People posed, and watched, and swigged mouthfuls from bottles; a few, more ambitious, made shouted attempts at conversation in irregular pockets of the room. In her early undergraduate days, Hwee Leng had dutifully painted her face (a task for which she had neither skill nor enthusiasm), and pulled on too-tight clothes and tottery shoes, to endure far more such evenings than she liked to remember. All part of the experience, she had told herself at the time. This is what you do here. Don’t miss out. She was more willing to admit it these days: this stuff bored her stiff.

  Where was Andrew? As the SingSoc Treasurer he was ordinarily a reliable fixture at socials. She didn’t recognise any of the younger students, and she wasn’t really in the mood to meet new people. She was beginning to regret the wasted pound when she sighted Karen in a corner, sitting in a semicircle of similarly skinny girls wearing sleek identikit haircuts. Hwee Leng didn’t know the others, but she and Karen had shared lectures in their first year, swapping cordial enough observations on the material. Someone to chat to for a bit, at least. She hurried over to the table.

  “Hey.”

  “Oh, hey.” Karen looked up.

  “How is everything?”

  “Not bad. How’s the thesis going?”

  Hwee Leng made a face. “It isn’t, really. Going, that is. You know how it is.”

  Karen smiled. She offered brief introductions of the others at the table (the Cambridge standard, college and subject), which were incomprehensible over the din. Each nodded and smiled in turn, but they seemed disinclined to speak further, and Hwee Leng had the feeling she might be interrupting. Back to Plan A, then. “Have you seen Andrew?” she yelled.

  “Andrew…?”

  “Andrew Teo. Corpus Christi.” There weren’t any other Singaporean Andrews, were there? Some new undergraduate she hadn’t yet met, perhaps. “Have you seen him?”

  The unknown girls stirred, firing nervous looks at one another, and then returned to Hwee Leng with new attention. It reminded Hwee Leng of the cloth-spreading motion of a flock of birds, disturbed from a field into momentary flight. Karen frowned and bit her lip. “He was here earlier, but he left.” She hesitated. “Do you want a drink?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Karen nodded. After a second she opened her mouth as if to say more, and then shut it, and then seemed about to reconsider when the first notes of a squeaky Danish pop song—the universal soundtrack to all public spaces for some months now—pealed through the room, resolving the question for her. “Hey—” “Oh, yes—” “Come on—” Eagerness spilled through the table like a wave. The girls were all on their feet, headed for the dance floor. One tugged politely at Hwee Leng’s arm, but she demurred, and they did not press her.

  Alone, and mildly put out, Hwee Leng made another quick round of the room, keeping an eye out for Andrew. Perhaps Karen was wrong, and he was still here; but no, he wasn’t, and she began to feel faintly ridiculous, circling a bop full of semi-strangers in pursuit of her ex-boyfriend. It was then that she noticed it, him, the face she was looking for, lying on an unoccupied table in the half-light near the door. What she had assumed to be a flyer for the bop, or some other event, was in fact a colour photocopy of a picture. Half a dozen more copies slumped near it on the floor.

  She grabbed one square and ran out into the entrance hall to hold it up to the light. Yes, it was Andrew. Or Brian. Well, it must be Andrew. That explains a few things, a selfish part of her noted wryly—but then a dreadful idea crystallised, as she remembered the paper scattered on the ticket table, and she whirled round to have a look. The trio of SingSoc members, still there, drank in the view of her with undisguised glee. She lunged forward and put a hand to the stack of pictures on the wooden surface, another four or five, some stained burgundy with wine.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Nobody knows,” Gaurav said. “Maybe you can tell us. Who’s the other guy, the ang moh?”

  Ashleigh had to hide behind her silk turquoise shawl, she was shaking with so much silent laughter.

  “You didn’t know he was—that way—either?” Ming Wei asked. “We wondered, you know, because back in JC you were together and all that. Wah, this is even more shocking—”

  Hwee Leng intended merely to shake her head, but her impatience swelled the motion to include her shoulders. “I couldn’t give a shit about him being gay—” The word sent Ashleigh, behind shawl, into further paroxysms. “—I mean, what the hell is this?” She waved one of the pictures in their faces. “Why are there—these—things—all over the fucking place?”

  “Somebody left them here,” Ming Wei said. “Before the bop started.”

  “Who?”

  Gaurav spread his hands. “Don’t know. Must be the same person with the email.”

  “What email?”

  “Didn’t you get it too? Oh—but you’re not a scholar. Don’t know who else got it.”

  “Check your email lah, probably you’ll see it.”

  Hwee Leng’s head began to spin with fury and confusion. “Where is Andrew?”

  A shrug passed through the others. “He was here just now, but he left suddenly,” Ming Wei said. “Not sure where. He didn’t say. We had to stay to run the bop.”

  “Why the fuck—” —didn’t you follow? —do you find this so funny? —would anyone do this to him? She started to shout all three things at once, but stopped herself. It was useless with these people. Worse than useless; they were loving it, siphoning and savouring all signs of distress, like it was a rare nectar. That was her answer right there, that was why someone would do this. A pleasure too great, it seemed, as she stared into their faces, for Ming Wei to even try to withstand.

  “You asshole,” she said to him. “Aren’t you supposed to be his friend?”

  Ming Wei gestured to the spread of photographs. “How was I supposed to know he’d be so stupid to get himself into this kind of position?”

  Hwee Leng responded by snatching up the pictures, knocking aside cups and bottles to reach a few more.

  “Hey, watch it!” Drink on cloth. “This is Chanel!”

  Rage rushed through Hwee Leng. She deliberately pushed more bottles over, unleashing frantic cries from the others, before stamping to the black bin bag hanging from the edge of the table and thrusting the scraps of paper in. A moment later she had second thoughts. Better to be safe. So she reached into the sticky beery mess of the violently rustling bag, fished the pictures out, tore them into pieces, and dropped them back in again.

  Then she returned to the other room and barrelled through the dance floor, shoving bodies aside without apology, gathering fistfuls of photographs as she went. She found them mostly clustered on and around the tables—it turned out she had been standing on a few while speaking to Karen—and in a minute or two she was done. People stared and pointed and shouted to one another (whispering was impossible in the blare of the synthesisers). Well, let them. She didn’t care.

  As she dumped the last of the loathsome collection into the bin bag, she became aware of someone touching her elbow gently. It was Karen.

  “I wasn’t sure should I tell you or not,” she said in a small voice. “When you asked about him, I thought maybe you’d seen them already. Or the email.”

  This email again. “No. I have never seen any of this shit in my life. Do you know who did this?”

  “No idea. Quite mean, right?”

  Quite mean. But you did nothing. Drank and danced. Hwee Leng took a long slow breath, doing her best to hold back her contempt.

  “Are you okay? I know…” Karen trailed off.

  “Am I okay?” Red haze threatened Hwee Leng’s vision. “Am I okay? What the—what does it have
to do with—” She choked it back. Priorities. Information. She needed information. She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep her voice down. “Did you see him here earlier? Andrew?”

  Karen hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah—” And she gave Hwee Leng a brief account. She had come by early in the evening, with some SingSoc committee members, to help set up for the bop. Initially the tables had been bare; but at some point, without anyone being able to say exactly how or when, while crates of drinks were carried, and lights were rigged and tested, and sound checks echoed through the rooms, the pictures had appeared everywhere at once, like some kind of toxic plankton bloom. The preparations halted in amazement, as people gathered and gaped around the table in the entrance hall; and it was into the middle of this shocked and swooning crowd that Andrew himself pushed when he arrived, completely unaware.

  “It hit him pretty hard,” Karen said. “He just kind of stood there and stared for a few seconds, and then he turned around and ran out.”

  “Didn’t anyone go after him?” Hwee Leng didn’t really expect an answer; and, sure enough, Karen merely spread her palms helplessly. “And this email thing—what’s this email thing?”

  “I don’t really know. Huimin told me about it. She came a bit later, and she said she’d already seen the picture because it was in some email. I haven’t seen it myself.”

  So it could actually get worse. Pity twisted in Hwee Leng’s gut. She felt both that she desperately had to speak to Andrew, and that there was no good at all that it could do. But either way—she looked at the faces around her, some openly titillated, others embarrassed, and weakly attempting discretion—she had to get away from this gruesome theatre.

  “Thanks, Karen,” she said, pulling to leave.

  “Are you okay?” Karen asked again.

  She didn’t answer, just got her coat and left.

  “It was damn drama!” Ming Wei recounted to a bright-eyed group, standing in a half-circle in the cold, a few minutes later. He was buzzing with delight. “First time I ever saw something like that in my life, man. She was like a madwoman. Guess it must have been hard for her—her big high point in JC, the one time she scored so far out of her league, he turned out to be a homo!”

  “It was damn bo sei, can?” Ashleigh said, taking a drag on her cigarette and tossing her fringe out of her eyes. She was still sour about her spill-soaked cardigan. “Okay lah, it’s some super emotional moment for you, whatever, you can still have some dignity, right? You went out with a homo, that’s one thing; don’t need to embarrass yourself with a giant public meltdown some more.”

  “Bet she liked the attention. How else is she going to get any?”

  “You have to feel sorry for her,” Gaurav said with a chuckle. “What a way to find out.”

  Ashleigh smiled. “You know, I find it really funny that that Karen Soong and some of her friends were like, oh, it’s so mean to spread the picture, it’s so mean, it’s his private business, all that. But when I look at the photo, all I can think is, man, that ang moh guy is so bloody ugly! Weedy, pasty, teeth all crooked—I mean, homo also can have standards, right?”

  “Aiyah, what mean,” Ming Wei said, annoyed. “Facts are facts, right? Seriously, man, I never thought Andrew would be so dumb. Want to be a pervert, okay lah, that’s one thing, but don’t go and take photos of yourself some more, and then later complain when of course other people find it scandalous. You take stupid risks, you got to accept you might get burned. That’s just life, man.” He took a drink from his bottle. “That’s just life.”

  The wine was much better, and there were hors d’oeuvres, when the trio revisited the subject almost a decade later, at an invitation-only gathering of the young and upcoming among the establishment elite.

  “This is not just about the narrow gay issue,” Gaurav intoned. (He was making quite the name for himself, these days, in the Ministry of Finance.) “We wouldn’t need to talk about it if it was just this single petition on a trivial law. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter if gay sex is legal or not. More importantly, it’s about managing the social rifts that result from the uneven effects of globalisation. Many of us in this room saw homosexuals when we were studying overseas, and to us it is not so shocking, but not everyone in Singapore has that level of exposure. We Cosmopolitans have to realise we are the minority; the attitudes are not the same—some might say not so enlightened—among the Heartlanders.”

  “I think it’s very true, what you say about the social divide,” Ashleigh said. (She was now a rising star in the lower divisions of the judiciary.) “But we shouldn’t be so quick to stereotype the Heartlanders as backward: questions of values are inherently subjective, and the Cosmopolitan viewpoint is not always superior. We shouldn’t blindly assume Western societies have the correct balance between individual freedom and social responsibility. Anyway, where does it stop? Today, change the Penal Code; tomorrow, they will want to adopt children. Human rights—” (she made air quotes with her fingers) “—may be the fashion in the West, but that doesn’t mean they should trump everything else.”

  “I agree with you both,” Ming Wei said. (Currently doing time in the Transport ministry, he desperately wanted a permanent place in this charmed circle. So far he had only managed to wheedle a colleague into bringing him as an occasional guest.) “What bothers me is the entitled tone of the gays, all this playing of the victim card.” There was a lot of vigorous, knowledgeable nodding. “The government already said very clearly, many times, nobody goes to jail just for being homosexual. Nobody is stopping a homosexual from going to university, getting a job, working hard like the rest of us. So when they make all this noise about being oppressed, it’s obviously not the real agenda. They’re not happy just with having their private life; they want to push everyone else to celebrate their lifestyle, never mind if the rest of society is not ready, or not interested in hearing about what sex they have.”

  “That’s a very good point,” Ashleigh said. “They always talk about freedom and rights, but they don’t give other people the freedom, the right, to have a different opinion from them. They talk about being open-minded, but they don’t accept any questions about their own dogma. If you don’t line up one hundred percent behind them, and say yes, whoo hoo, let’s show Brokeback Mountain to primary school children, they make personal attacks on you.”

  “Exactly,” Ming Wei said. “They don’t let you talk about their AIDS problem—you mention AIDS and you are a bigot! And as some of us know from personal contact with them—” Here his voice dropped to convey a suitable solemnity. “—many homosexuals have other psychological problems too, mental instability, not family-oriented. But if you bring that up, any facts which conflict with their gay pride agenda, they brand you a homophobe.”

  Gaurav sighed. “The sad thing is, it only hurts their own cause, when they adopt such a confrontational, almost a hysterical, stance. Makes them seem like extremists, when they act like impatient screaming banshees, demanding change overnight. Nothing justifies incivility.”

  “It’s so ironic,” Ming Wei added cleverly, feeling pleased with his own performance, and optimistic about his chances of being asked back. “I think most of their problems come from their own behaviour. If they just kept quiet, instead of petitioning and promoting themselves so aggressively, society wouldn’t feel the need to push back. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies.”

  They all agreed this was very true; and the conversation drifted on to higher things. Their wisdom was too urgently needed in other quarters to linger on such hopeless cases any longer.

  Hwee Leng reached the front gate of Christ’s at a trot, and then paused on the street to assess her next move, the roar of blood in her face somewhat cooled after a few seconds in the witching hour night. Something had to be done—but what? The most obvious option was to drop in on Andrew, but Hwee Leng didn’t know where his room was exactly, though she had the impression it was back in the main college site this year. She wasn’t sure whom she
could ask. The Singaporeans at the bop were out of the question, and she suspected the dour college porters wouldn’t look kindly upon such a request even in daylight, never mind at this time. She could call him; but her phone book was lying in the bottom desk drawer in her room—a good half hour’s trek up the hill. And what if he was asleep? Karen’s account placed the episode at Christ’s at several hours ago. Might it not be a better idea to leave him to rest, and to check in on him in the morning?

  This was all terribly unsatisfactory. She supposed she could take her chances at Corpus—some colleges put the names of students on their staircases. She would look absurd peering at them in turn, but she was used to that; and perhaps she would get lucky and find him near the front gate. In any case there was no point loitering here. Across the street loud drunks crammed a taxi rank. She hurried down Petty Cury, dodging the counterflow of scarfed and coated students, then wound rapidly past the Corn Exchange, glad that she had given up wearing heels in winter. It was getting colder now, the fading season asserting a last few hours of triumph, and as she came at last to the heavy, unfamiliar gates—Corpus was a college she had rarely needed to visit—she was seized with doubt. Was it wise to simply turn up? Would it upset him? What, after all, did Andrew really need?—and could she provide it?

  These doors opened on further questions. Though she perceived, sharply, the necessity of action, its closer contours were shrouded in the fog of her own intentions. The pictures at the bop had surely needed destroying, as agents of Andrew’s humiliation; but beyond that, what precisely had impelled her to hurtle over here? Why the drive, so intense, to talk it over? Was that really about righting a wrong, or was some part of her acting out of a scab-picking relish, a desire to dig into her own past? Her ears burned in remembrance of the looks she’d received at Christ’s. Wasn’t this just another version of the same sordid busybody impulse that she abhorred in everybody else?