A Certain Exposure

by Justin Ker

  Without the whetstone of oppositional argument, her nerve began to fail. Who was she to Andrew? He had never told her about this boy in the picture, or indeed any others. Had there been others? How many? And when? She felt ashamed. How swiftly these nosy questions came! What right had she to be told anything? But there was, beneath her own awful smallness, she thought, a genuine problem. If she mistrusted her own purposes, then so, quite fairly, might Andrew. It was entirely possible that she would be a bad, or at least a charged, presence, no matter however inoffensively she conducted herself. She had no concept of how he might react.

  She leaned against the external college wall for a moment, but pulled away quickly as it sent icy fingers through her coat. This faffing about in the dark was doing no one any good. At last she took herself into the musty yellow warmth of the porter’s lodge, silent save for the low tick-tick-tick of an old wooden clock, and deposited a hastily scribbled note in the pigeonhole marked TEO, A.C.S.:

  Andrew, I heard what happened at the bop. Really pissed off someone did that to you. Hope you’re OK. If you want to talk about anything, let me know. You can call me anytime. Take care, Hwee Leng.

  It occurred to her, when she was midway through writing this, that the words of sympathy ought perhaps to have come before her own anger; but she sensed the danger, once she started on a search for the perfect text, of standing there all night. Better to just get it down and go. Leaving a note was that most feeble and hated of things—a compromise—but if she could neither abandon Andrew nor barge in on him unasked, she couldn’t think what else to do.

  She had the sensation, all through the windy uphill walk, that her mind was abuzz; but she had nothing to show for it as she unlocked her door and kicked her shoes to one corner of the scuffed and familiar carpet. Neither insight nor decision had struck. The business was both unfinished and futile. She retrieved her telephone book and sat for a long time on her bed, receiver in hand, staring at the accusing LED glow of her alarm clock. All the arguments against visiting applied with as much force to a call. In any case, it was much too late now; he was surely asleep. And yet. And yet. How could she just leave him, alone? Maybe he wasn’t alone—he might have found comfort elsewhere—this mystery boy perhaps?—she hoped he had—but what if he hadn’t? The unsteady carousel of her thoughts dizzied her. After an age, she began to dial, hesitated on the last digit, thought better of it, put the phone down, and went to bed. Against her expectations she slipped straight into a heavy black sleep. She only remembered to look at her email in the morning.

  They’d found him by then. The misfortune of discovery fell to Rosie Warner, one of the army of women employed by the college to empty bins and change bedsheets. (Cambridge students were mysteriously assumed to be unable to carry out these tasks, or unwilling, or both.) Rosie spotted Andrew’s slumped figure once she opened the door, and she rushed to free his body from the chokehold of cloth, but it was immediately obvious from his chill blue flesh that he had been dead for a while. Still she undid the knot around his throat before reconnecting the phone (someone had unplugged it at the wall) and ringing the porters for a doctor.

  From: Chua Hwee Leng

  To: Brian Teo

  Date: Thursday, 5 March 1998

  Subject: Fw: Check out the Pervert Scholar

  Attachment: Pervert.JPG

  Brian, I’m so sorry about Andrew. I can’t imagine how you and your parents are feeling.

  I tried to ring you but no one picked up. I’ll try again later, but in the meantime I thought I should send this to you anyway. There isn’t going to be any good time to see it, and I don’t think there is anything I can say to make it less horrible, but it’s not fair for you not to know. I have more to tell you, but the basic story is: nobody admits to knowing who did this, and I don’t know who the other guy in the picture is. I asked some of Andrew’s neighbours and his college friends, but nobody has any idea. Whoever he is, I hope he’s okay.

  I deleted a bunch of email addresses from the message below, but this went to the scholarship mailing list, the scholarship officers at the CSB, and some other SingSoc people here.

  I’m really sorry about everything. You take care ok? I’m thinking of you, and I’ll call you soon.

  Hwee Leng

  Forwarded message begins:

  From: Pervert Scholar

 

  To:

  Cc:

  Date: Tuesday, 3 March 1998

  Subject: Check out the Pervert Scholar

  Attachment: Pervert.JPG

  Check out this pervert scholar! What a disgusting pervert.

  Forwarded message ends.

  Brian and Hwee Leng disagreed on the subject of investigation. The local coroner opened an inquest, as she did in all apparent cases of violent death, including suicide: but though the process would not produce a final report for months, the answers to the plain questions within its remit were never in doubt. It was Andrew who had died; he had died in his room in college; he had died shortly before daybreak; he had hanged himself. This much was all too well established.

  There was no reason to expect more. After preliminary inquiries, the police quickly disclaimed interest: whatever else sending insulting emails or distributing embarrassing photographs might constitute, absent evidence of blackmail, they were not crimes under the law. College and the University made mournful noises, and then shrugged. It was sad, but sometimes people just couldn’t handle stress. They dutifully reminded students and staff that in times of distress a counsellor was available on request.

  That left the Singapore Civil Service Board, who was then not favourably disposed to Andrew. Government scholarships had been rocked by scandal lately, thanks to media reports of rogue scholars fleeing their obligations to service. These reprobates had to repay all monies received under their awards—no small sum even before you added a hefty rate of compound interest—so this was possible only for the tiniest minority. Nevertheless the Board was battling the perception that it existed to throw taxpayer money at privileged ingrates; and it did not welcome the further revelation that its ultra-selective processes had lavished resources upon someone so deplorably weak as to kill himself. And it could only be weakness. Everyone suffered, after all—every man had endured Basic Military Training—and it wasn’t as if this generation of youngsters, who took for granted piped water and colour television and three square meals in their bellies each day, had ever known anything but coddled luxury. What could a Cambridge graduate reasonably complain about? Everyone suffered. Only the weak opted out.

  No—the Board had its plate full. It couldn’t control the electronic rumour mills, then still in toothless infancy, but it could prevent Andrew’s sexual deviance from surfacing in the mainstream media. He had unsuspected emotional instabilities, aggravated by murky private disputes: that was the story, and though it was poor, as far as the public was concerned, it would have to be enough. The Board would not concern itself with the provenance of this unpleasant photograph, a question that could only return inconvenient answers. “Look at who got the email,” Hwee Leng pointed out. “It’s probably another scholar.”

  Perhaps Andrew’s parents could have rolled the stiff wheels of one or more of these bureaucracies uphill. But they said nothing. What good would probing do? No doubt, from the email Brian had shown them, someone had been unkind; but at bottom this unkindness was only that of the universe, responding inexorably and impartially to something which did not fit. The identity or motivations of its anonymous agent did not matter: if not now, if not in this way, the disaster would have found another time to emerge, in some other form. Their son was a pervert, his death was a logical outgrowth of his warped nature, and his life had been a lie. They had failed him and themselves. They did not say any of this explicitly, but they didn’t need to. After so many years, Brian knew it as if by osmosis. When he tried to tell them about the events at the bop, his
father simply left the living room. His mother listened in silence and asked no questions.

  “This kind of shameful thing,” she said at last, in a broken voice. “Better not to talk about it.”

  “Hwee Leng told me,” he said. “So I thought better tell you and Pa.”

  “Yah, it’s good that you tell your parents,” she said automatically. “But better not to talk to outsiders about this kind of shameful thing. I think better don’t talk to this girl too much also.” This direction astounded Brian: and perhaps some of his confusion showed in his face, because his mother went on, hesitantly, “Sometimes your mother thinks in a way it’s also good that you didn’t get a scholarship to go overseas and encounter all these bad influences. Singapore university also quite good, and at least you are at home with—the right kind of people, the right values.”

  Brian met her red and fearful gaze, and understood. She wanted him to reassure her. Don’t worry, Mum, I am not like Andrew. Magic words that should be so easy to say. They were true enough in the sense that mattered to her—Brian only fancied girls—and once spoken they would lift some of that strain from her shoulders. But he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t fair to his brother that his mother should take comfort from such a thing. He didn’t know what that fairness was worth, with Andrew dead, and his mother breathing, suffering, still. But Brian thought he understood Hwee Leng and her everyday state of anger better now: it ate at him that nobody else cared about what was fair to his brother. He looked away as the uneasy mix of hope and anxiety in his mother’s face drained into a kind of doubtful misery, and she left him on the sofa without a further word.

  Then he felt sick at heart: he had done her a deliberate injury. Some lizard brain reflex rose in reproach: who was he to sit in judgment of his mother, who had given him everything? But the feeling slithered away as soon as it came, because the response, for once, was clear. He was Andrew’s brother.

  Still, Brian was no more inclined than his parents to pursue the details of who had done what to whom. What they saw as shameful he simply found futile.

  “There’s just no point.”

  “But there’s a real person behind this,” Hwee Leng said. “Or people—maybe more than one. They shouldn’t just get away with it.”

  But how could they be unmasked? There was barely any evidence to go on, even with the suspects narrowed down to the Singaporean students at Cambridge. Andrew had left no hints: his computer hard drive was blank, his college pigeonhole empty except for a bank statement and Hwee Leng’s forlorn note, apparently unread. In theory, the sender of the email might be traced through an IP address, but without legal compulsion the company that administered the account would surely never divulge that information. Probably nothing could have been gleaned from the hard copies of the photograph, pawed over by just about everyone at the bop, even if they hadn’t been mostly reduced by Hwee Leng to sodden bits of trash. And while the young man pictured might have furnished a clue as to how anyone else had come by the shot, his identity remained an enigma.

  “I bet you the CSB could find out,” Hwee Leng said. “If they kept digging and put some pressure on. Someone would crack eventually. They should at least try. Aren’t they concerned about having such a malicious scholar in their ranks?”

  “What can they do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Some professional downgrading, maybe, in their postings or something, when they come back. You know they keep files on everyone. They rate and rank all their people. But even if not, don’t you think it matters to know? Don’t you want to find out just what the hell went on?”

  Brian wasn’t so sure. He shared, he thought, Hwee Leng’s basic sentiment: that even if it was of no practical consequence—no one punished, no acts reversed—it was better to understand than not. What he doubted, though he didn’t know how to explain it, was that any of the forensic detail that she so craved would help him understand any better.

  Suppose Brian had names and dates and faces for all of it: the boy in the picture, when it was taken, how someone got hold of it, who they were, where they made the copies, what they were doing now. These things, he felt, could alter none of the fundamentals. They could neither soften the terrible knowledge he had gained, nor lessen the terrible ignorance against which he stumbled. The essential facts had long been to hand—the tyrannical possibility of such petty cruelty, the wonder and the strangeness of his brother, and the unfathomable bitterness of that brother’s despair—and he grasped as much of them as he ever would. No one would ever be able to tell him what he most wanted to learn: what Andrew had hoped for all these years, and how Brian could have helped.

  EPILOGUE

  SUNLIGHT IS A different creature here, a buttery gold, softening stone, soaking wood, seeping into green leaf to give off a rich fat sheen. He has often thought how odd it is that a country that receives so little sunshine should be so perfected by it.

  A narrow slab of warmth is falling across his bed through a gap in the curtains. Outside, treetrops gently wave. He shifts and turns to lay a cheek against the cool pillowcase. The sheets are fresh against his legs. Clean cloth on skin. This, his favourite season, always surprises him with how beautiful it is. At first, he supposed this was because it was all new to him; but he has since learned that spring is always new, that is the whole point of it. This is his fourth now, and it is still new.

  He could lie here forever, he thinks. This is all he needs. But there is so much to look forward to doing, and to do it he must break up his present contentment. This is a good problem to have.

  After a few moments he pulls himself up and sits, leaning back on his pillow, propped against the wall. Still tucked up snug to his hips under the cheap green duvet. The picture is lying on the bedside stand and he can’t keep from the indulgence of picking it up, or smiling as he studies himself next to those dark curls and that fey, mobile face. The scene is from shortly before he persuaded Graham—and not just with words—to put the camera aside. His penis stirs lazily at the memory. It was a distraction at the time, but he is glad of the photograph now. It will be a charm against the corrosions of memory, against unreality. He turns it over. On the back a phone number is set out in large, round digits, in black felt pen. Edinburgh, it says below that. Come say hello. G x.

  Will he ever make it up there, to Scotland? He doesn’t know. He has no particular plans to do so, but it is possible. Many things seem possible to him this morning. He has been led into bed, easily, pleasurably, repeatedly, by a visiting researcher, after a commonplace drink in the college bar. It was very simple. He feels sorry for his younger self. (And enjoys it. Pity is a lofty feeling.) His old agonies had such a cosmic scale. But sex, it turns out, is a practical problem with a practical solution.

  He can’t really blame himself, though, for having seen no other option than furious and total celibacy, of the mind as well as body. There have always seemed to him to be unbreakable binds, promises to keep, cause and effect; if you move part A in one direction, the physical logic of joints requires a predetermined result of part B. If you want to be safe, you have to play, absolutely, by the rules. He stretches in the late morning light. He isn’t giving up this view at all—he understands the need for caution—he just sees, now, that there are moments of flex, room for secrets, spaces to work it out. He sees that while you cannot escape the bargain, you can cheat it, around the edges. You can game the system. He knows this is greedy. But greed seems, after Graham, suddenly vital. That is the gift this time is making to him. He will take this picture with him when he leaves, to remind himself of the future’s hidey-hole openings, of all the possibilities waiting for him if he only keeps himself alive to them. He stares out at the intense blue of the sky, this blue that is almost a thing he can hold.

  There is a rap on the door and a “Hey!” The day is calling.

  “Hold on a sec!” He thrusts the photograph under his pillow, pulls on a T-shirt, and goes to answer. “Hey.”

  “Come on leh, Sleeping Be
auty, we have to get the drinks and stuff for tonight.”

  “Sure. I got to do my teeth, give me a few minutes.”

  “Yah, yah. Just don’t take all day.”

  He yanks some clothes from his chest of drawers and makes his way along the few metres of corridor to the bathroom. He isn’t away for very long. Just long enough for his visitor to perch, waiting, among the mussed layers of the duvet. To notice the square slip of paper that has fallen to the floor. To pick it up, study it, and slip it quietly into the back pocket of his jeans.

  Just long enough for the last brittle thread of an old admiration to snap, betrayed.

  Nothing seems out of place as he returns, his face washed, his hair brushed, ready and smiling.

  “I’m done,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to everyone at Epigram Books who has worked so hard to bring A Certain Exposure into the world—especially my patient and supportive editor, Jason Erik Lundberg.

  This novel has benefited hugely from the time and energy of its early readers: Jack Anderson, Dave Anthony, Sarah Howe, Jane Pek, Tim Saunders and Wong Pei Chi. Special mention must go to the Heidelberg Writers Group—vielen Dank!

  Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Li Wenying and Pooja Makhijani helped me to navigate the world of publishing; Michelle Tan and Esther Tan provided insight into medical procedures; the National Environment Agency answered a query about weather records; Vincent Cheng wrote an important account of detention without trial; and the Internet’s collective wisdom resolved numerous points of fact. Errors are mine alone.