Surrogate Protocol

by Tham Cheng-E

  Far away to the south, a plume of dark smoke grew against the blue sky—Arthur could see it over the fraying roofs of the ramshackle houses. But it seemed to be bothering no one.

  In a coffee shop at Beo Lane loafing youths perched themselves on teak stools and watched the world like a pack of carrion vultures, harrying working-age men on suspicion that they might be a spies of a rival gang or gadfly officials from the Housing Council, seeking to evict families and demolish homes. Arthur was spared this because the lookouts knew him on account of a job he once held at a nearby warehouse.

  “Bo dai ji la,” said one of them nasally, referring to the plume of smoke. He had a foot propped on the edge of his stool. “Si Kah Teng eh lang sio pun soh nia la. Bian knia. Wa nang kuah tau kuah beh kuah ho-ho eh.”

  It was true. The semi-autonomous slum dwellers, isolated from the Council administration, were rather civic-minded about fires. They even had an alarm system of roving watchmen at night. Despite lacking proper utilities and an effective postal system, the slum had an excellent communications network: a name was all that Arthur had to give to a family residing at the slum’s edge, and that name was relayed from one person to another, frisking children to labouring adults, until at last the name emerged from the tangle of alleys—a gaunt young man clothed in a frumpy singlet that hung emptily off his bony, sunburned shoulders. His hair however, was combed and oiled with liberal amounts of brilliantine.

  “You must be Ar-ter,” he proclaimed loudly.

  Nearby a few girls snickered. They were returning from a trip to the public tap, water-filled kerosene tins straddled across their small shoulders on bamboo poles. Arthur knew they were sniggering at his name, which meant “pig” in their dialect.

  Arthur returned a nod. “I’m here for my documents. Khun said to collect today.”

  The skinny young man curled a finger at him. “Ar-ter come, follow me.”

  They trekked across bridges of coffin boards that spanned perilously across polluted canals and through alleys too narrow even for motorcycles. Four large pigs foraged in a squalid puddle beside a common latrine. After a series of painted wooden walls they turned a corner and crossed another narrow bridge to the next cluster of houses. Outside one of them two boys poured kerosene over four caged rats and set them alight. Then they upended the cage with a stick and had the flaming critters scurrying to their deaths.

  It wasn’t long before Arthur lost track of the number of alleyways they passed or the number of corners they had rounded. The smell of charring grew stronger.

  “Is it much farther?” he asked.

  “We here,” his guide answered.

  Arthur was hustled inside a shack, in which three men sat lunching around a table laden with little dishes of food and a blackened pot of rice porridge. The guide said something in dialect to one of them—a scraggy, dark-skinned man with a coarse gold chain that hung like a shackle around his thin neck. He gave Arthur no more than a quick dart of his eyes as he ate.

  It was the guide who spoke. “Khun busy today. He tell me to give you this.”

  Arthur took over a brown paper envelope from him. He tipped it and out slid IC renewal documents and a blue passport bearing a coat of arms depicting a lion and a unicorn.

  “Did he say where he went?”

  “Kio yi mai meng ah ni tsuay la,” the gold-shackled man said tetchily. “Kio yi gia yi e mee knia gin tsao la.”

  Arthur looked away. They didn’t know that he comprehended the string of dialect and it was better left that way.

  “Maybe gone downtown,” the guide added in an empathetic tone. “If your document okay give me collection money. Forty-five a week.”

  “Khun said forty a week for ten weeks,” said Arthur, taking care to sound more surprised than belligerent.

  “Forty-five,” said the guide. “Plus interest.”

  Even a fool would know better than to fuss with the yobs of the Twenty-Four Society. In a spot like this you just had to know your way around, and Arthur came prepared. The extra five dollars were meant for them and it had always been that way. Bastards. Grudgingly he shoved a roll of notes into the guide’s open hand and trudged up the alleyway from which he came.

  Or did he?

  Fifty yards into the maze Arthur realised he was lost. He stood in the middle of the alley like a rock between streams of kampong folks going about their business in a shade of unspoken apprehension. The distant column of smoke was still rising, and it had widened considerably such that it gave its end of the sky a stormy hue.

  A squad of volunteer firefighters appeared from around a street corner. They were young men in their teens, some of whom bore red tin buckets and hooked poles that were used to dislodge burning attap roofs. A last man was dragging a partly reeled fire hose with its end burnt away. They were sooty and soaked.

  The buzz of human activity amassed around the battered firefighters. The nest was stirred. Following a brief exchange of words the crowd hurriedly dispersed, scurrying in all directions in a sort of organised panic. Messages were hollered and relayed. Ablebodied men sprang into action fetching pails and empty kerosene tins. Nearby a group of caterwauling women began trundling out children and cast-iron sewing machines.

  A southerly wind carried an acrid odour, and Arthur knew for certain that a conflagration was underway. Someone ran into his shoulder; the tides of panic were pouring into the alleys. At the base of the smoke column Arthur saw sporadic flashes of orange—his first glimpse of the flames.

  He folded the documents securely into his pocket and packed himself into the growing lines of fleeing folks, certain that they would lead him out. Behind him another pail-wielding firefighting squad began dousing the attap roofs with water. Farther south he saw steam rising.

  The lines led him around a bend, possibly towards the direction of Delta Circus. Just ahead an old woman joined the human river, her arms wrapped around two live hens. Somewhere in the middle a family rolled out bulky furniture and halted the flow. Hysteria spread amongst the fleeing folks as powerful updrafts hurled zinc roofing sheets into the sky. Close behind, flames raged over the roofs of doomed homes. Heavy black smoke suffocated everything in billows of umbral gloom.

  Waves of frenetic jostling shoved Arthur onto the threshold of an abandoned, ramshackle home where he spotted a peculiarity. Amidst a clutter of greasy rags and wicker baskets, a bundle of blue chequered cloth moved. Then a corner of the cloth fell away to reveal a small, pudgy hand.

  The discovery frightened him and the panic Arthur thought he had under control surged forth. He began hollering in a mixture of English and dialect and pointing to the infant. But few paid attention.

  A passing woman responded, “Nei fai di pou houi zhao le! Ngor dou mm ji bin gor hai hui ke lou-mou.”

  She had a baby on her back and two young children clutching her trousers. Arthur was burdened by nothing. He scooped the bundle into his arms. It felt light. Parting the swaddle, he found an emaciated toddler with ribs showing, limp as a stringed puppet and clothed in nothing but a pair of brown shorts.

  To the right, a group of men tore away a large section of attap roof in the hope of creating a firebreak, but instead sent flames billowing from a burning structure behind it. Arthur pressed the child to his chest and ran himself up against the wall of fleeing folks. A few of them tripped over their own possessions. They hustled to pick them up and were quickly left behind. Explosions rang out from the kitchen of another house when the fire got to its kerosene stock. Flames rolled over a window and ravenously consumed its attap roof. Against declining visibility Arthur tried in vain to locate his bearings. He knew nothing of the route except that they were now shuffling towards higher terrain.

  An explosion engulfed the Beo Lane warehouses to a barrage of screams. Livestock, corralled and doomed, squawked and bleated into the streams of fleeing folks. Farther ahead looters carted rice and crates of tinned milk and canned food out of provision shops.

  The torrent of fleeing folks pour
ed into the safety of Havelock Road and Arthur found himself deposited on the sidewalk. The road was choked with the cars of rubbernecking drivers, who hadn’t realised they were obstructing the arriving fire trucks. A curious crowd lined the skeletal structures of unfinished flats at the nearby Ma Kau Tiong estate as if the fiery spectacle were a football game.

  A lone fire truck roared by and stopped just yards behind Arthur. Firemen, dressed in their khakis and black helmets, leapt from the vehicle with hoses and pickaxes. Men ran up to render assistance, unknowingly obstructing them. Tearful youths and women paraded the length of the road, clutching their salvaged possessions and grieving for those lost to the flames.

  For two hours Arthur peddled the toddler like merchandise amongst the families until he was convinced that it would yield nothing. By then his throat was dry and his arm throbbed with a sour ache. A policeman he approached wouldn’t take the toddler and instead instructed him to wait at a holding area.

  Frustration got the better of him. For an instant he contemplated abandoning the toddler on the sidewalk but a faint wheezing cry startled him back to his senses. When the fire reached Havelock Road he gave up his search and boarded an army truck that took them to a school at Kim Seng Road. Standpipes had been erected behind a classroom block, where children washed and frolicked like wartime refugees.

  A series of registration stands offered re-registration for anyone who had lost their papers in the fire. A quick idea seized Arthur: He could get the child registered as the next surrogate before surrendering him to the authorities. With the renewal documents an identity from the toddler would buy him another thirty years before he had to switch.

  But the man at the desk nixed that plan when he told Arthur that the child was too young to be registered, and that he would have to be taken to a crèche from which his parents would be notified to collect him.

  Grudgingly Arthur went to the crèche, only to find that it was full.

  “Especially at these times,” said the crèche man. He was sitting behind an old counter of lacquered wood that smelled bitter and fusty. “Just two years back we got a whole lot of them when kampong Tiong Bahru burned down.”

  “But he’s a fire victim.” Arthur held the toddler up. “He’s got to live somewhere.”

  “With his parents.” The man pushed his heavy black-framed glasses up his nose. “Until he is proven to be orphaned the others get priority. You could choose to be registered as an interim guardian until he’s claimed by her parents. Or you can come back in a day or two. There might be a vacancy then. Who knows?”

  The crèche man directed Arthur to a bench where he could wait in case the parents should turn up. Arthur, crestfallen, flinched at a warm and moist sensation around his thigh on which the child rested. He hoisted the child up by the armpits and his head lolled and dropped over a shoulder. In that posture the child strained to look at Arthur and broke into an adorable beaver-smile that revealed only his upper and lower incisors. Not only did he seem unusually floppy, his right leg was also perceptibly shorter than the left.

  Two hours into the wait it occurred to Arthur that no one would probably want to claim the child.

  / / /

  It was almost midnight by the time Arthur got to Hannah’s rented room in a shophouse along Petain Road. Arthur crouched low and duck-walked along the sidewalk with the child in his arms until he got behind a tree. In the tenebrous light of a streetlamp he watched Khun light a cigarette and the hungry glow of its tip and the stream of grey-blue smoke. He felt dastardly; there was no reason why he should be hiding from the pimp. He just didn’t want to deal with him any more than he needed to.

  Fortunately Khun did not linger. After his Beetle passed beyond sight Arthur ran across the road and pattered up the narrow stairway that led to a single door at the top of it. His steps resounded so loudly that the door flew open before he even got to it. Hannah, dressed in a modest set of nightclothes, stood at the doorway and regarded him with displeasure.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” She folded her arms. Her hair, straight and parted at the centre, was bound low behind her nape.

  “You leaving me out here with a baby?” Arthur panted, as he pushed past her.

  He came to a small room sparsely furnished with a bed, a couch, a hardy little shelf with a few books and a small closet. He sank into the green and white cushions of the couch and allowed the toddler to doze in the crook of his arm. From a record drifted the words of a song softly playing:

  I’m discontented with homes that are rented

  So I have invented my own

  Darling this place is a lover’s oasis

  Where life’s weary chase is unknown

  Far from the cry of the city

  Where flowers pretty caress the stream

  Cozy to hide in, to live side by side in

  Don’t let it abide in my dream

  Arthur wagged his finger beside his ear. “Something very familiar about that song.”

  Hannah closed the door behind her. “I told you not to come here.”

  “You said to see you right after I got the papers.”

  “Not here. You could’ve called.”

  “I met your guest on the way in,” Arthur said. “Was it because of him?”

  Hannah rolled her eyes but made no reply.

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  “That’s audacious of you.”

  “Did you?”

  “It was business.” Hannah’s gaze was icy and unflinching. “You read too much into our friendship.”

  “Then why are you helping me?”

  “Sympathy,” said Hannah. “I was also a vagrant once.”

  “Vagrant?” said Arthur, his tone dripping with disdain. “You don’t know me, Hannah.”

  “And you don’t know how to stay out of things.”

  “Can I date you?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Hannah’s eyes flitted down to the bundle in his arms. “What’s with the baby?”

  “From an earlier marriage.”

  “Not in the mood for jokes, Arthur.”

  Arthur told Hannah about how he had found the child at the fire and that he had decided to keep him because the crèche didn’t want him.

  “That’s stupid of you,” said Hannah.

  “You don’t know children, Hannah.”

  “I don’t like children.”

  “Poor thing.” Arthur gently rocked the bundle. “When death becomes imminent we prepare ourselves for it. Children cry their eyes out till death takes them. It’s very heart-breaking.”

  “Where’re the papers?” Hannah broke in as soon as he had finished, apparently with the intention of changing the subject.

  He handed them to her and watched her swallow, as if with emotion. She checked the edges, bent it a little and felt its printed text. “Looks like Khun didn’t cut corners this time round,” she said, sniffing it. “I wanted to make sure the base was transferred off a real one. It’s a nightmare to replicate the watermark and most copiers make a good mess of it. Once the colonials pull out you’re going to need them to exchange for a legitimate one. It’s going to be anytime now, with the talks about merger and all.”

  “Glad to know.”

  “Bottom line,” Hannah held him in her sight. “Never put yourself in a position where your past might be dug up and scrutinised.”

  Arthur took time to admire her sombre visage. “You’re one beautiful, naggy old hag. But I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Just then the child, distressed by the heat from Arthur’s body, started whimpering.

  “You got something I could use as a nappy? He wet his pants an hour ago.”

  Hannah went to the closet and returned with a few safety pins and a small towel. Arthur’s feeble attempt at rocking failed to work and the child was becoming increasingly upset. His mouth popped open and out came a muted cry that sounded like asthmatic wheezing. With an air of authority Hannah took the child over,
pulled off the shorts and began dusting the child’s bottom with talcum powder and wrapping the towel over it.

  “What do you reckon we should do with him?” Arthur asked.

  Hannah’s fingers worked deftly. “Nothing. Take him back.”

  “Aw, Hannah, have a heart. He’s so cute.”

  “Get his birth registered,” she said, her tone laced with unmistakable sarcasm. “Forge an identity in case you want to ditch you current one.”

  “Funny you should bring that up,” said Arthur, looking rather uncertain of himself. “I don’t see the sense in that. What’s going to happen to him when I become him?”

  “Erased,” Hannah answered coldly. “However you do it as long as it’s clean.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Hannah looked away and confessed: “No, I don’t.”

  / / /

  It was unwise of Hannah to have spoken so spitefully. The conversation triggered the same painful memories. She’d like to think it was a mistake—someone else’s, not hers. Someone had paid dearly for it and she had nothing to do with it. But the truth was that she never managed to convince herself of it.

  After she pinned the towel in place Arthur held up the child by the armpits and inspected her work. “You’re very good at this.”

  “Are you going to name him?” said Hannah.

  “I don’t know yet. Suggestions?”

  “Langdon.”

  Arthur chuckled. “Where did you get that?”

  From the shelf beside the couch Hannah pulled out an old hardback book titled The Fifth Column by John Langdon-Davis. “He’s got three names,” she said. “Pick one. But I think you might end up looking like a Langdon.”

  “Before I consult the experts on an auspicious Chinese name I think I shall name him Poppy,” said Arthur.

  “Like hell you will.”

  Arthur flipped over the sodden pair of shorts and there at its back was a large red poppy flower with a black core of velvet. “There, written all over his bum.”