Now That It's Over

by O Thiam Chin

  Two old women wearing wide-brimmed, straw-woven hats brush past Wei Xiang, talking loudly; one of them gives Wei Xiang a long rueful stare. Standing in the middle of the street, Wei Xiang assesses the two possible routes he can take: towards the sea, or away from it. He can also head down any of the alleyways that branch off into other parts of the town and find his way around. A hard object bumps against his calf and jolts him; he looks down and sees a small dead dog gliding away, the fringes of its matted fur trailing in the water. A group of locals carrying a torn-off aluminium panel knocks into Wei Xiang, almost throwing him off his feet; a hand, white knuckles taut, peeks out of the plastic sheet covering the makeshift stretcher, and he quickly moves aside. The path clears as the crowd makes way for the men to pass. Wei Xiang watches the procession till it disappears around a bend, near the main road. Then he glances down the waterlogged street leading to the beach and sees hordes of people making their way into the interior of the town, away from the wreckage.

  Someone grabs his arm and Wei Xiang jumps, staring into the anguished face of the frantic young woman he saw earlier, the one searching for someone. He does not pull away from her touch, certain that he’s also wearing the same raw, pleading, desperate look. The woman’s voice is hoarse, but she utters the word again, like a chant: “Yari! Yari! Yari!” Wei Xiang shakes his head, and the woman loosens her grip, stumbling away to another passer-by, calling out the name.

  Where the landscape has flattened out in the direction of the sea, Wei Xiang can see the ruins of toppled huts, reduced to perilous fragments of walls, carcasses of their former selves. The coconut trees have been stripped clean of foliage, their bare trunks jutting into the sky like accusing fingers.

  A dizzying chill runs through him as he registers these images, his clouded mind lacking the ability to process them or put any definite meaning to what he is seeing. Everything is scrambled up, a reel of disconnected images. Yet, amidst all this, an overriding thought shrieks for his attention: Where is Ai Ling?

  Stirring from his indecision, Wei Xiang takes a step, and allows himself to be pushed along with the flow of the crowd heading towards the sea.

  PART TWO

  12

  AI LING

  Two days after the tsunami, the weather is sultry, the sky a clear expanse with hardly any clouds. In mid-morning, as the sun parks itself above the horizon, the dewy lightness of dawn gives way to the intensifying warmth of a humid day. The seashell-littered sand glisters with a shine, reflecting winks of light, as the coconut trees sway in the breeze that sweeps across the small island.

  The body of the woman on the beach has darkened into shades of blue-purple blotches, decorated in livid patterns; the tributaries of veins and arteries are mapped out clearly in red, green and black under the skin. Visceral fluids leak from the body, pooling around the woman’s ears and mouth, staining the front and back of her shorts. Under the heat of the sun, the body continues to execute its functions like clockwork, breaking down and tearing apart from within. Life, still persisting, still working, through death.

  The sea breeze carries the smell of death across the island and ruffles the long, frizzled hair of the woman. The loose strands leap and dance in the breeze, as if charged with energy. The world around the woman’s body teems with little acts of movement, small signs of life.

  The first thing Ai Ling noticed about the new boy was his hair—soft coils that hung like cursive loops on his forehead. She patted his head twice when he was brought into the class by the principal. The boy looked up at her, his eyes full of questions. For the rest of his first day at the childcare centre, Ai Ling watched him attentively. The boy was slow to come out of himself, and while the other children largely ignored him, the boy’s eyes never left them, watchful and observant as if making mental notes of what they were doing or saying. During mealtimes, he sat quietly by himself eating his porridge, never once staining his shirt or dirtying the table. During the afternoon games of tag and skipping, the boy fell but swiftly got up, brushed his knee once, and ran to the back of the queue, waiting for his turn again. When Ai Ling asked him whether he was okay, he nodded his head, barely lifting his eyes to look at her. The boy perspired freely, and his wet hair was plastered to his forehead like a row of inverted Cs. That day, Ai Ling stayed back late and waited with the boy for his parents. His mother came, a stout, wide-hipped woman with dull, darting eyes, and Ai Ling talked to her for a few minutes and told her about the boy’s first day. The mother nodded her head, saying little, before she picked up the boy’s haversack and hurried him out the door.

  That night, while they were having dinner, Ai Ling told Wei Xiang about the new boy.

  “He is really small for his age, the shortest in my class.”

  “Boys are usually like that, shorter and smaller than the girls, until they hit puberty.”

  “And he is too scrawny. His arms are so thin, that I’m afraid of pulling them off.”

  “Maybe he has a higher metabolism than the others. I was a skinny monkey when I was young. A tiny body with a huge head. Try imagining how I looked.”

  “But he’s really adorable and quite obedient. The rest of the children have not taken a liking to him yet, but I guess they will, sooner or later.”

  “Children are like that, they take a long while to adapt to changes, to new people. I’m sure the boy will be fine, and will get along with the rest when he’s comfortable with them.”

  “I hope so.”

  In the days and weeks that followed, Ai Ling could not help but pay the boy more attention, keeping him within her sight, noting his movements and behaviours. Her interest was purely professional, she told herself; she was a teacher, and she had to look out for the children under her care. But deep inside, she was aware of something that went beyond her duties, something more instinctual, as if the boy had triggered a latent maternal impulse in her, a seed that had been sown and was now growing of its own will.

  “Do you think I’ll make a good mother?” she had asked Wei Xiang once.

  “Of course, no doubt, you’ll make a fantastic mother.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen you with kids. You are wonderful with them.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I’ll be a good mother, even though I’m good with other people’s children.”

  “Well, this shows that you possess some sort of a maternal instinct.”

  “Having a maternal instinct doesn’t translate to being a good mother. I know a few teachers at the childcare centre, the younger ones, who are also good with children, but are happy being single, or happy being childless with their husbands.”

  “Maybe you are at the age where you now want to consider having a child?” Wei Xiang looked at Ai Ling, searchingly.

  “I don’t know. Are we ready?”

  “We can be, if you are.”

  Ai Ling knew Wei Xiang was being kind and accommodating; he had wanted to enjoy the first few years of their married life, just the two of them, before plunging into parenthood. He wanted to take it easy until they had everything in place: finances, the proper frame of mind, the ideal time. Ai Ling went along with his decision, only because she was still working out her own thoughts about being a mother. They were in their fifth year of marriage, and she was only thirty-two; the years stretched before them with other possibilities, other choices. Maybe she should give herself another year to think; maybe she would have a firmer decision by then. She had heard of women giving birth in their late thirties, even early forties, and the idea took the edge off her anxiety.

  When Ai Ling had to stay late at the centre to catch up on her paperwork, she would look out for the boy’s mother so she could talk to her. From their brief, truncated conversations, Ai Ling found out that the boy was the eldest of four siblings, and that the mother was working as a part-time retail assistant at a chain supermarket. Nothing was said about the father. While Ai Ling was all praise for the boy’s good behaviour, the mother only cited incidents
at home when he had misbehaved, how he could never sit still for a single moment, always climbing all over the furniture, how she was afraid one day he would fall and break his neck. The mother’s reproachful tone, whenever she spoke of these incidents, was nonetheless filled with bemused affection. It was clear to Ai Ling that the boy held a special place in the mother’s heart.

  Once, when the mother came to pick up the boy later than usual, she would not look Ai Ling in the eyes, and busied herself with helping the boy put on his shoes. The boy’s mood changed in the presence of his mother, becoming more subdued. When the mother finally looked at her as she was leading the boy out, Ai Ling saw the dark bruises near her right eye. Ai Ling asked casually about the bruises, but the mother brushed it aside with a vague reason. She dared not meet Ai Ling’s gaze; the boy remained hidden behind a blank expression, his large, unblinking eyes moving between his mother and Ai Ling. The next day, when Ai Ling tried to find out about the family situation from the boy, he remained tight-lipped, turning his full attention to whatever he was doing—drawing with coloured pencils, building wobbly towers out of building blocks, or playing catching with his newfound friends. For a while, Ai Ling felt helpless at being merely an observer, and also angry at the woman for her passivity. But she knew her ambivalent, fluctuating sense of helplessness and anger was fuelled only by speculation—what did she actually know about the boy’s family? Nothing, except for the little she had seen. She was being a busybody, and it would do her no good to meddle in other people’s affairs. She knew she had to stay out of it.

  Then one day, the mother did not turn up to pick up the boy, and after an hour of fretful waiting, Ai Ling decided to send the boy home herself. From his records, she found out where he lived, a housing block only three streets away. The boy, who had been sitting on the bench beside the shoe cupboard and glancing out the window, went submissively with Ai Ling. When she offered to carry his haversack, the boy shyly declined.

  It took less than ten minutes to locate the block of flats. The boy seemed hesitant when they were in the lift, his hand clutching the long strap of his Winnie the Pooh water bottle. At the flat, the door was wide open; Ai Ling peeked in and saw a man lying on a sofa, watching a game show on TV, with two younger boys and a girl crowding in front of the screen. The mother was nowhere in sight. When Ai Ling said hello, the man jerked upright on the sofa, visibly annoyed. He stared at Ai Ling for a moment before noticing the boy standing beside her. Ai Ling explained the situation as the man opened the metal gate and invited her in. He was in his late thirties, a paunch evident behind his loose white singlet, with features that crowded in the middle of his long, pinched face. The man seemed friendly and cordial, though Ai Ling could sense a wall of guardedness behind his words and in the even tone of his voice. She asked about the boy’s mother, and the short reply she received was that she had to work overtime and had not been able to pick the boy up from the childcare centre. The other children sitting on the floor turned their attention to Ai Ling, curious about the interaction between her and their father. The boy, meanwhile, had disappeared into the kitchen. When Ai Ling left, she could detect a hint of censure from the sharp closing of the door.

  When the mother turned up the next day, she thanked Ai Ling for her help and gave her a box of cream puffs. She wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and black slacks, a departure from her usual attire of T-shirt and shorts. When she declined the gift, the woman insisted, pushing the box into her hands. Ai Ling offered the boy a cream puff, which he took after receiving a look of approval from his mother. He ate in small bites, holding the puff in both hands, the cream leaking from the edges.

  That was the last time Ai Ling saw the boy’s mother. After that, the father came to fetch him.

  On some nights after work, and on weekends when Wei Xiang was in the office, Ai Ling would head down to the boy’s housing block and linger outside the flat, out of sight. She would stand against the wall, an eye out for any passing neighbours, and listen to whatever was happening inside. Mostly she heard the television and the voices of the children as they played, and several times the severe, scolding voice of the father; never once did she hear the mother’s voice. Ever since the mother’s disappearance, Ai Ling had tried to investigate the woman’s whereabouts, but received only empty stares and imposing silence from the boy or the father whenever she attempted to broach the topic. She had even appealed to the other teachers for more information, but they were as clueless as she was.

  The children were often left alone at home on weekends; the father would be away, perhaps for work—Ai Ling did not know what he actually did, though he worked long odd hours and would sometimes fall asleep when he came home without changing out of his clothes. A few times, during periods of long silence in the flat, Ai Ling would walk past, peeking into the gap offered by the ajar front door, trying to see what the children were up to. She took great care not to be seen; only once, when she stepped out of hiding, she came face to face with the boy’s younger sister, who was picking up a ball near the metal gate. Ai Ling had to walk away quickly. If she had been discovered, Ai Ling never heard anything of it, at least not from the boy.

  It was only when Wei Xiang started to get suspicious about her late-night wanderings and perpetual state of distraction that Ai Ling told him everything.

  “Why are you doing this? What were you thinking?”

  “I’m just curious about the mother, why she disappeared all of a sudden. The children are left alone most of the time.”

  “But what you are doing is not right. You have no right to pry into their lives.”

  “I’m not spying on them, if that’s what you’re saying. I just want to find out what happened to their mother.”

  “But you’re going too far. You have to stop.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Even after Ai Ling stopped the visits, she still thought constantly about the boy and his mother. In her classes, the boy was still the same, behaving obediently, never drawing any attention to himself, yet alert to his surroundings, careful to stay out of trouble; he would relinquish any toy or game that the other kids wanted without a word. When the other children ignored him and excluded him from their games, he would retreat to a corner and read or play by himself. Ai Ling would often reward his good behaviour with sweets or packets of biscuits. Unwittingly, she had stepped into a role left vacant by the boy’s missing mother, a role she secretly relished. Of course, she knew being a mother was more than what she was doing, yet she enjoyed every moment of it, and drew a fair amount of satisfaction from performing every task that the role entailed.

  When the boy did not turn up one morning at the childcare centre, Ai Ling did not think much of it, assuming he had fallen sick. She followed up with a phone call, but no one answered. When she finally reached the boy’s father, and found out that the boy had been out of the house since morning, she began to fret. The father, on the other hand, worked himself up into a rage at the thought of his son playing truant.

  “That boy! He told me he would go to school on his own. And now this! He will get a good beating from me when he comes home.”

  “Please calm down, sir. I’m sure he will return soon. Please call me once he does. I’ll leave you my number.”

  When the father called her later in the evening and told her that his son had not come home yet, Ai Ling advised him to file a police report. The boy is only five, she reasoned, where could he possibly go? It was likely somewhere familiar, a place he knew well. Unable to sit still or keep herself calm after hearing the news, Ai Ling told Wei Xiang that she wanted to check around the boy’s neighbourhood. Though Wei Xiang offered to come along to help, Ai Ling assured him that she would be fine on her own, that she would be back soon. She could tell that Wei Xiang wanted to say more about the whole matter and her involvement, but he had held back his words, perhaps waiting for another opportunity to voice his concerns. Ai Ling was grateful for the delay of the confrontation she knew was inevitable, but which
she did not have the means to deal with at the moment.

  In the taxi, Ai Ling remembered an incident from her childhood, an episode which had been dislodged from the tangle of her memories. When she was nine, Ai Ling had run away from home, though her parents never knew about it. She waited for the right moment to make her escape, when the front door of the flat was left unlocked by her mother while watering the plants along the corridor. She had never been outside the flat without her parents, so the idea of venturing beyond her immediate world was a strange, bewildering experience. She took the staircase instead of the lift, and after reaching the void deck, she walked across the car park in a direction that would lead her to a nearby garden. Once there, she decided to go farther, to another part of the estate she had only seen from the school bus; she recalled seeing a playground with swings and a concrete slide. To her nine-year-old mind, it had seemed like a paradise, a place where she could have all her fun.

  Even as Ai Ling tried to remember the reason for running away from home, she could not, for the life of her, recall exactly what had made her do it. She had never had any big issues with her parents when she was young, and she was not an unhappy child; what she had wanted was readily provided by her parents, and she was an undemanding child, simple in her needs. While she was curious, like any child would be at that age, Ai Ling could not see her curiosity as the main reason for her to stray out of the known perimeter of her world. Then what? And why? Ai Ling could not fathom her reasons now, across the span of over twenty years.

  At the playground, she had sat on the swing, pushing herself outwards and upwards. There were other kids, but they were playing amongst themselves and left her alone. Sensing their wariness, she did not approach them, staying away from their noisy game of hide-and-seek. She did not know how long she stayed there, but soon she got tired and thirsty. Ai Ling had not brought any money, and the immediate reality of her situation began to dawn on her. She started to panic. She looked up and, as if for the first time, saw beyond the playground to the blocks of flats that stretched beyond her vision, the streets heavy with mid-morning traffic, the rows of tall imposing trees. Everything suddenly seemed ominous, full of potential danger. As the world grew out of proportion in her mind, looming like an ever-growing leviathan in her imagination, Ai Ling was also aware, however vaguely, that she was shrinking inwardly, reducing herself to something that was easy to manage, quick to take flight, like a bug burrowing itself into the earth, or a dragonfly taking flight. How small she felt then, how inconsequential, how easily she could lose who she was. Within minutes of this realisation, Ai Ling decided to retrace her footsteps, and in the end did manage to find her way home. When she knocked on the front door of the flat, her mother was surprised at her appearance. Her parents had assumed that she was in her room all this time, reading, and did not want to disturb her; her absence from the flat had been completely unnoticed. She quickly returned to her place in the only world she knew.