Waiting for Venus - A Novel

by Robert Cooper

  I keep my eyes on the open doorway, away from the figure stirring the air around us. I hear the sound of the fan; it’s the normal creak plus some. The some must be the weight of Uncle’s body; weight transformed to sound. It’s a surreal conjunction of images: the laboured circling of fan and Uncle, me sitting in the armchair Uncle sits in when I visit, the big brown bitch on my lap. Unreal. I’m not really here; Uncle isn’t really dead. The word denial comes to me. Am I in denial? I do know Uncle’s dead; I don’t deny it. But I don’t feel he’s dead. Not yet. I don’t feel much, to be honest, other than the weight of Barnaby and a wish to be somewhere else; but I can’t move, I’m stuck in Bernard’s armchair.

  * * *

  Sirens sound. Red lights flash blue. A car draws up. Uniformed police get out. From Guild House TV news, I recognise Superintendent Wong, top cop; he does up the buttons of his police shirt and pulls on his hat. Behind the police car, an ambulance. And behind the ambulance a little red Toyota Starlet. And spinning out from the back door of the little red Starlet, Siggy the faithful cameraman, crouching and weaving to avoid unfriendly fire, battery lights blazing from a shoulder saddle, camera capturing the spot-lit descent of Venus into the theatre of crime. Divine intervention is here.

  * * *

  Bernard’s lonely circling is upstaged by Venus snuggling up to the superintendent of police for the sake of those few Singaporeans – if the Corporation has not already closed down for the night – watching Breaking News as it breaks while spooning down their midnight rice porridge and the many more who will be watching the already broken Breaking News while they chopstick-up their morning noodles.

  Camera lights arc towards me. Bernard’s shadow flickers around the walls. Barnaby reverts to body-shaking growls. All good television, I’m sure. Madhu is still gun in hand but now he’s a TV cop I doubt he’ll use it: the decision is now in more senior hands.

  I think I see Superintendent Wong wince. The last thing he must want is an interview on TV before he’s even glimpsed the hanging man. But there is no way to brush aside this particular newsperson’s microphone without insulting half of Singapore. Certainly not today. The banners and posters went up just this morning proclaiming the Island Republic’s latest Huxleyan campaign slogan: Courtesy is Our Way of Life.

  Within the uneasy juxtaposition of courtesy as a way of life and hanging as a way of death, Superintendent Wong pulls Madhu firmly – but politely – into the camera. ‘This officer was the first to arrive after the death was discovered; he will brief you on the situation.’

  Venus swings the mic to the quivering lips of Madhu and purrs. ‘Who discovered the body?’

  ‘I d-d-d-did.’

  ‘That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? A policeman actually finding a body. I mean, were you expecting to find a body? Suspecting perhaps the professor was dead?’

  ‘N-no. Er. Yes.’

  ‘You were expecting to find the professor dead?’

  ‘It w-was m-m-m-y b-b-irth d-d-day …’

  The superintendent stabs a look of horror at Madhu and interrupts. ‘Please try to understand, Miss Goh …’

  ‘Mrs Goh,’ Venus corrects, somewhat sharply.

  ‘Yes, well, Mrs Goh …’

  ‘Was the professor celebrating your birthday with you?’ Venus turns the mic back to Madhu. Madhu rolls his eyes and opens his mouth. Before he can form an answer, his articulate superior jumps in.

  ‘Mrs Goh. It is a shock to anyone to find a person hanged by the neck until dead.’

  ‘That sounds like a judge ordering an execution.’

  ‘Does it?’ Superintendent Wong seems to be wondering if he should apologise for something. The official memo he’d received that morning said all authorities and role models are to lead the courtesy campaign by example; being another ‘role model’, I’d got the same memo. Wong looks like he’s considering asking Madhu if he would mind awfully putting that wavering gun away, but a commanding, ‘Gun away, man!’ jumps out.

  ‘Well, the fact is, Mrs Goh, the body has only just been discovered and discovery was made by a policeman – coincidentally. The policeman was off duty and in the Guild House when the manager of the Guild informed him things didn’t look right at the house of Professor Fox – the front door was open in the middle of the night. The case is so fresh I’m rather surprised to see the national TV network arriving at the scene within seconds of the police.’ The tone sounds slightly critical; Wong immediately softens it. ‘I mean, I really must congratulate you on your up-to-the-minute news coverage. Your source of information seems almost as good as our own.’

  ‘Exactly as good.’ I notice Venus flash thankful eyes discreetly towards Li Fang. ‘And I do believe we might have got here first if I had a siren and didn’t have to keep to the speed limit and stop for red lights.’

  The superintendent laughs just a little. Not too much. It must be no easy matter striking a balance between sympathetic appreciation for the charm, wit and beauty of Venus Goh – by far the most popular newsreader of the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation – and the serious face appropriate to an investigation of a hanging body. The superintendent’s compromise between charm offensive and crime offensive achieves the look of a clown smiling with his painted mouth turned down.

  ‘What seems to be holding up the investigation, Inspector?’ I hear Venus ask. Siggy mouths ‘Superintendent’ at her. The superintendent looks very much as if he wants to shout ‘You are!’ Instead, he waves an ambulance man and Madhu towards Barnaby and begins explaining to the TV camera.

  ‘It’s poor Professor Fox’s dog …’ The super stops as Barnaby interrupts, leaving ambiguity over the object of pity. Barnaby gives out her loudest growls as the body snatchers approach. She’s a good Singaporean and knows her values: honour will not allow her to give up her master without a fight to the death. Madhu and the paramedic sensibly stop at the open door.

  I speak quietly to the ambulance man. ‘Have a tranquilliser handy?’

  ‘For you or the dog?’ the ambulance man jokes. He works very fast, as if he does this kind of thing every day, maybe he does. A full syringe is placed in a pouch and skimmed across the floor to my feet. Barns shrinks into my lap.

  ‘Just stick the needle in her bum and push down quick on the plunger. It won’t hurt her. Just knock her out for a couple of hours and give her sweet dreams.’

  I’ve never stuck a needle in a bum before. Not even in the Red Cross first aid course, not even a polystyrene mannequin’s bum. But there’s a first time for everything. Barns yelps and snaps at the syringe as the drug races towards her brain. I hold her on my lap as she gets ever heavier. She looks up trustingly into my eyes and slips into the type of whimpering dream that only dogs have.

  As I walk out carrying Uncle’s dog, the house lights go on and the fan stops turning. The front doors are closed behind me and a uniformed man sets his feet firmly at ease on the step outside. Bernard’s home is now a crime scene waiting to be processed.

  My exit with the dog into the glare of Siggy’s floodlights prompts a splattering of applause. Given the circumstances, a bow might be in bad taste. I acknowledge my fifteen seconds of fame with a modest smile in the direction of my lady Venus and the camera of the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, both covering their first-ever hanging.

  * * *

  David flounces up in his prison-stripes and asks are you all right dear, a silly question, of course I’m not, but what do I expect from David? He means well, most of the time. Venus says to put the dog on the seat, lah, and holds open the back door of the Starlet for me to tuck deadweight Barnaby nicely into her Thai silk cushions. ‘You were fantastic,’ she says – three little words that mean so much more to any man than ‘I love you’. I can taste the honey in her tone. ‘A real hero,’ she continues – another blessed trilogy; I’ve always wanted to be a hero. Through the dark cloud of Bernard’s death, a silver lining struggles to glimmer.

  ‘Lucky you came after all,’ I say, opening her pass
enger door. ‘I’d given up hope. Well, almost. Then here you are. Beautiful as ever. Bit of a coincidence you turning up practically as the news happens. But you came. That’s what matters.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ she says, patting the seat next to her for me to get in.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I say, misunderstanding. ‘I’m just glad you’re here now.’

  Venus looks at me. ‘Tom, that’s not quite what I meant. Of course, I’m sorry if you were waiting for me and I didn’t show. But when I said I’m sorry, I meant, well … you know.’ She’s heading into a commiseration over the death of Bernard, I think. But wrong the second time. ‘It’s the same old thing. You know I wanted to come, don’t you, but the voice inside held me back. I’m still not ready … you know.’ Sure, she’s sorry about Bernard, perhaps she’s sorry for my hanging around waiting, but essentially Venus is sorry for … Richard.

  ‘But you’re here? Or am I dreaming?’

  ‘I worked late at the studio. Can’t you get a phone, Tom? How does any girl break a date with you if she can only get to you through Li Fang? Actually, the Li Fang link was lucky this time, I was calling him to send you a message that I couldn’t come when he gave me the tip about the professor’s death and a ten-minute start before he called the police.’

  ‘Good for Li Fang.’

  ‘Yes, he’ll get a nice present.’

  Venus has managed a tricky reverse and is pulling away through the Tamil lawyers. Tambiah is looking down over his tummy and through the car’s open windows to Venus’s long and lovely legs. ‘Lucky, lucky bastard,’ I hear him murmur; maybe so.

  I know Venus has only just passed her test and now she has to cope with changing gears, looking in mirrors, dodging portly Tamils and talking to me. Venus, normally so fully in control, sounds a bit nervy as her words staccato out in a breathless ramble. ‘It’s a good story, Tom. You’ll have to help me flesh it out. You knew the professor better than anyone. You saw him every day. Professor Fox’s special friend. Everybody needs a special friend. So, I want you – for the news. Background interview outside the Prof’s house. We can do that in daylight, when the coast is clear; no hurry. I can’t remember there ever being a hanging on campus. There should be mileage in this one. Unless there’s anything political about it, of course. If it turns out to be murder, this could be big. Feel like a fruit juice at Newton Circus?’

  Venus pauses her wordy cascade just long enough for me to ask, ‘What about Barnaby?’

  ‘Is that his name? The faithful dog defending his master even after the master’s death. He looks like he’ll sleep for a week.’

  ‘She. Barnaby is a bitch.’

  ‘Funny name for a girl.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how she got it one day. What about your cameraman?’

  ‘Siggy? He’ll hang around here getting what gossip he can and shots of the body going to the morgue and then jump into a taxi back to the studio. No midnight supper for him. Big news at dawn. Another scoop over the printed word. Fortunately, my bit’s in the can, so I don’t have to be there at daybreak.’

  ‘Does this mean …?’

  ‘What it means is I can take my time with you at Newton Circus and come back and help you tuck in Barnaby. I presume she’ll be staying at your place?’

  ‘Yes. If she’ll stay.’ As I speak, I suddenly find myself choking back tears and turn my head away. Bernard died and all I did was wait for Venus, who wasn’t coming anyway, not until Bernard died.

  ‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Grief, Venus. Good, honest grief. I loved that guy hanging from the fan.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly a feeling I sympathise with. You know that, Tom Haddock, don’t you?’

  I certainly do. Venus cannot be faulted on her sympathies.

  ‘Like some chewing gum, Tom?’

  ‘What flavour?’

  ‘Mango and lime.’

  Chewing gum in Singapore: embryonic social deviance. I pop it in and chew it over. Barns is jerking away in her doggy dreams on the silk cushions; her pungency rising from the back seat to merge with the sweet smell of Venus. Sweet and sour. I quiver on a sneeze and again choke back the tears; I never did like mango and lime flavour.

  I’m feeling unreal again. It’s all like watching a film and being in it. Come on you bastard, I tell myself, it’s not a movie, there’s more to losing your best friend and only known living relative than choking back a few tears and chewing gum. Surely the black hole of Bernard’s death can’t so easily be filled by the glow of Venus … can it?

  Well, yes, maybe it can, for now. No sackcloth and ashes just yet. I’m too busy tingling at each light touch of Venus’s bare arm with every change of gear. Our eyes meet for a split second and my thoughts space-warp a million light years from Professor Bernard Fox. Bernard’s mind expanded my universe, the eyes of Venus capture it – perfect magnets pulling me irresistibly towards those full red lips.

  I don’t normally think in clichés, really, I don’t, but I am now. Must be the effect of Venus so close and so utterly head to toe flawless. Long hair, a Malay wave or two in a silky black Chinese sea, flowing softly over amber skin. She’s so insanely impeccable, a fusion of sanity and inanity, beauty and banality. She could win Miss Singapore on the curves of her nostrils alone. Can’t get more cliché than that. The perfect blend, that’s Venus: Chinese delicacy and Malay magic. Venus – the Strait’s own breed, Peranakan, perfect Singaporean – and it’s at my elbow she sits on the way to Newton Circus, chewing gum.

  * * *

  ‘Come on,’ a familiar voice chides deep inside my head, a voice that struggles to rise from the director’s chair and call cut. ‘I don’t want to spoil your fun, if that’s what it is, but I’m dead. Your Uncle Bernard’s dead. Venus is only here by accident. You are touching her arm early in the morning only because I’m dead. If I were alive, Li Fang would have brought a different message, a she’s-not-coming message. How am I supposed to know I’m dead if I don’t hear wailing and crying?’

  Sorry, Bernard, you haven’t picked the best of times to solicit the tearing of hair and rending of garments. The dead may always be with us but they are always dead, while not every day does the most beautiful girl in the world call me a hero, pat the seat beside her and drive me away. There’s a time to grieve and a time to lust; perhaps, with practice, the two might go together, but I don’t feel like practising right now.

  * * *

  I spit the gum out the window into the lawless black night. That’s the kind of role model I am. And I kiss Venus gently on a perfect cheek, letting my nose loiter in that perfect hair. The cheek comes lightly salted. As I draw my lips away, a passing headlamp lights up a parade of teardrops rolling slowly over the perfect skin of the perfect cheek of perfect Venus. Perfectly contoured teardrops, of course. Now what, I think, does she have to cry about?

  4

  Woolf at the Door

  MY DOORBELL RINGS only once in a blue moon and there hasn’t been a blue moon for ages. When I’m in, my door is open, no need to ring; when I’m out, I can’t hear it, and if I don’t hear it, it doesn’t ring, does it? I wouldn’t say it’s ringing now – it sounds more like an angry AK-47 attacking my door. A rude awakening. Oh Buddha, for whom does the bell clang?

  ‘It tolled for me last night; it must be your clang now, sleeping beauty. Answer the door!’ A cultured voice that sounds like Bernard orders me awake. It’s all in my head: Bernard’s voice, not the rasping doorbell. My clang now? Oh yes, consciousness clangs, this is the morning after Bernard was hanged by the neck and I enjoyed supper with Venus and now there’s somebody at the door – better get sorted.

  I open onto the familiar, spotty face of David. He no longer wears the broad stripes of the convicted; he now looks almost like a teacher of English at Singapore University should look. He keeps a finger on the button as the angry bell’s snarl bounces around the empty circular stairwell; he’s making a statement, I suppose. I karate chop it off.

&nbs
p; ‘David, why you attack my rusty ding-dong?’ The rougher the treatment, the more David loves it. Usually. Usually, he of all people can be relied on for a parry-riposte to opportunity-lines. Usually, but not this time. David seems to have lost his parry-riposte. He stands at my door looking at me as if I’m the one a bit cuckoo.

  ‘Are friends now supposed to have reasons to call by?’ he whines, playing little boy offended. David is twenty-nine but looks like a teenager and behaves more like a student at an English red-brick university than a teacher at Singapore’s second most prestigious establishment. I do too, I suppose, but not as much as David.

  I look at David’s Mickey Mouse watch; it’s the ungodly hour of 7.30. Ra’mad comes skipping down the stairs. He’s sixty-three years old, a year older than Bernard and the senior member of faculty. Sixty-three-year-old department heads don’t normally skip down stairs, not in public, but there’s not much of the normal about Ra’mad. Swinging on the Art Nouveau metal flame set at the end of the curly banister, Singapore University’s own Doctor Frankenstein smiles as if he has just received the Nobel Prize for the perfect poisoning. ‘Good morning, David. Good morning, Dr Haddock.’ First name for the juvenile delinquent and formal address for me, his only neighbour in an otherwise empty block of resonantly hollow flats that has seen better days and will never see them again.

  David, who boasts he can get his tongue around anything, machine-guns back: ‘Morning, Doctor Ra’mad bin Ra’mad bin Ra’mad.’ Ra’mad son of Ra’mad son of Ra’mad breaks into a chocolate-box smile, his pomaded moustache crackling with static. Now what, I think, brought Ra’mad skipping down from seclusion to smile on the likes of David? He isn’t exactly exuding grief, so it can’t be the death of Bernard, can it?