by O Thiam Chin
“I don’t believe you,” Cody said, grinning. “You were always so daring during university days, soliciting numbers from boys and asking them out.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side. Don’t badmouth me. When did I ever do that? You must be talking about yourself.” Ai Ling scowled at Cody, who reacted on cue, frowning in shocked amusement. “Cody was the real flirt at university. You would not believe all the things he did, even if I told you.”
“I want to hear,” Chee Seng said.
“Some things are best left in the past. No point dragging them out again,” Cody said, laughing. Under the table, he slipped his hand onto Chee Seng’s thigh, stroking it.
“Okay okay, I let you off this time,” Ai Ling said. “I’m sure everyone has a part of their past that they’re not proud of. God, I know I’ve done so many things in the past that I wish I could forget. Why is it that we always remember so much about this bad stuff, and so little of the good in our lives? It’s almost like we’re punishing ourselves for every single thing that we’ve screwed up.” She turned to stare out at the sea again. The sky had deepened from a deep blue to a deeper purple. She could feel Wei Xiang’s eyes on her.
“Now you’re just being morose,” Cody said. Ai Ling turned to smile at him. The loud cawing of the squabbling seagulls in the distance reached their table.
“But you know what I’m talking about, right? This fixation on the past that all of us have,” Ai Ling said. Around them, the restaurant, now full, bustled with a hum of voices, laughter and the soft soundtrack of Thai pop songs playing over the audio system.
“Shall we order some Singha beer? I’m suddenly in the mood to drink,” Wei Xiang said. “Do you want one?” Ai Ling shook her head without looking at him. Cody and Chee Seng took Wei Xiang up on the suggestion, and Wei Xiang placed the order with the waiter.
When the beer came and they had taken swigs straight from the bottles—Wei Xiang had declined drinking glasses and a bucket of ice—Ai Ling spoke again: “Actually it doesn’t matter how long a couple has been together, to show the kind of love they have. Though of course, the longer you know someone, the more you know about him, what makes him tick, what makes him happy. But is that all we can know about him? How can we claim to know anyone, a lover, a husband or a boyfriend, fully, completely, when there’s always a part that is hidden from us, maybe a side of him that even he is not aware of? Every man is a mystery, to himself, to others.
“Maybe that’s why we can continue to love someone after so many years, because we can never get to the end of this mystery. But I don’t want to pretend to know anything about love, when it’s hardly the case, when I’m still trying to understand what it’s all about. Don’t laugh at me, I know I sound silly, but seriously, what do we actually know about love? What is it exactly about this person we profess to love that we actually love? What, really?”
“Are you drunk? What’s in that calamansi lime drink you had? Did they spike it with something?” Cody said.
“Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying,” Ai Ling said, keeping her voice level, before continuing. “Just hear me out. I have this aunt, my mother’s younger sister, who lost her husband to a heart attack while he was driving. One moment he was signalling to turn right at a junction, talking to my aunt, and the next moment he was clutching his chest. The car was still moving and slammed right into the back of a truck. He was dead before he reached the hospital.”
Cody sneaked a look at Chee Seng, and then back at Ai Ling and Wei Xiang. Nobody spoke.
Ai Ling tapped her fingers on the red-checked tablecloth and took in a long breath.
“I’m very close to my aunt. My mum used to ask her to babysit me when I was much younger, when she had to work an extra shift at the factory. Maybe because they were childless, my uncle and aunt doted on me a lot, always giving in to my requests for anything: snacks, toys, colouring books. They treated me as if I were their own daughter.
“Right after the accident, I rushed to the hospital. My aunt had suffered a few broken ribs and some bruises, and was in a coma for a few days, but otherwise she was okay. I can still remember when she finally woke up, the look on her face, this raw, open confusion, like an exposed wound. Nobody wanted to tell her about the death of my uncle at first, but I think somehow she knew, from the way we were keeping a guilty silence around her. We thought we could spare her the pain for as long as we could.”
Ai Ling caught her breath, brought Wei Xiang’s beer to her lips and took a long swig. Wei Xiang covered her hand with his and held it. Ai Ling smiled at him.
“This tastes great, I should order one,” she said. Her eyes shone in the semi-darkness of the restaurant. The waiters were flitting about, lighting the tea light in the flask-lamp on every table. Tiny buds of flame came to life from every part of the room, a field of hovering fireflies. Outside, the waves fell and crashed in gentle, lulling succession; moonlight dappled across the inky surface of the sea, tracing the outline of each wave as it pushed onto the shore.
“So what happened to your aunt after she knew? I mean, she would have known everything later on, right?” Chee Seng said.
“Of course she knew everything, my parents had to tell her. My aunt took in the news with composure, but underneath you could tell she was not herself at all. She seemed so lost and helpless then, stuck in her grief. The doctor said it was only natural, and that we should be patient and just let her take her time to come around.”
Ai Ling paused to take another sip of the beer, to clear her throat.
“I’m not sure she will ever get over it. She was married to my uncle for over forty years. How can anyone survive that kind of loss? How can anyone get over this? It’s like having two arms chopped off and someone telling you to get over it, move on, live a normal life, go back to the life you used to have? It’s ridiculous.”
“But people do get over these things, and move on,” Cody said.
“No, not entirely. All this nice talk about getting over death and moving on is just bullshit. If you’re truly frank with yourself, you won’t get over these things so easily. It will hit you again and again, and you won’t know what to do with it, this terrible grief that’s inside you, that’s fucking you up inside out. How can you stop loving someone just because he’s dead?”
“Now, who’s the one being melodramatic?” Cody said.
“Anyway, let me finish the story. Shortly after my aunt went back home, I got a call from her in the middle of the night. She was distraught over the phone, trying to say something to me. I rushed over to her place and found her on the floor, clenching my uncle’s reading spectacles. I had to pry her off the floor and coax her back into bed. The spectacles were crushed in her grip and the broken glass had cut deep into her palm. I bandaged the cut and stayed with her until she finally calmed down. It was a long time before she returned to herself. That was the only time it happened, and we never talked about it.” Ai Ling stopped and shook her head.
“Dear, don’t…” Wei Xiang said.
Ai Ling continued: “Some nights, I dreamt that I was my aunt, sitting in the car, watching my uncle die before my eyes. The car still moving, just about to crash into the other vehicle, my uncle with a fist to his chest, head on the steering wheel, losing control of the car. I could not move a single muscle while watching all this unfold before me. I could not understand a single thing of what was happening. The whole event took only a split second, everything flashing forward and playing out in slow motion. And then the crash finally came, and in my head, or maybe my aunt’s, all I could hear was just: Why didn’t I die with him?”
“Ai Ling…” Wei Xiang brought his arm around Ai Ling’s shoulders. Under the table, Cody felt Chee Seng’s hand tighten on his, fingernails digging into his flesh.
“Okay,” Ai Ling said. “I’m just being incoherent now. I’ve talked too much. I’ll shut up now.”
The waiter came over to suggest some desserts, but nobody was in the mood f
or any. Wei Xiang asked for the bill and took out his wallet. Chee Seng offered to pay but Wei Xiang declined. “You can pay tomorrow,” Wei Xiang said.
Cody brought up his bottle of beer and proposed a toast. “For our trip, for the next few days. And also, Merry Christmas!”
“Yes, to us, to what we have now,” Ai Ling said, tapping her glass against Cody’s bottle.
When the waiter came and put Wei Xiang’s change on their table, he barely looked at it. Even when everyone had finished their drinks, nobody made a move to go. A silence had settled between them.
“Where shall we go next?” Wei Xiang said, eventually.
Ai Ling looked at him, not registering anything, her eyes blank. She held Wei Xiang’s gaze. Chee Seng turned to look at the dark sea; Cody closed his eyes for a moment, stifling a yawn. Sitting in the noisy restaurant, separated from the other patrons, none of them wanted to make the first move to leave.
17
CHEE SENG
We leave the burial mound and head back to the hut in silence, treading through the dark, the night air chilly on my skin. The old woman has taken the lead, and I try to stay in step with her, not wanting to lose sight. She moves with the certainty of a person who knows her way through the forest—a dark maze of rocky, dirt paths—even with her eyes closed. Around us, the forest is a discordant chorus of nocturnal sounds: buzzing, clicking, and the occasional throaty drone of an unseen bird that sounds like a prolonged burst of pellets shot from a pistol. Even with my eyes open, I can’t see much, except for the dark moving form of the old woman before me; the darkness is full and material, a presence that envelops me from all sides. My legs are covered with scratches, my arms and neck dotted with mosquito bites.
When I look up, I see the silhouettes of trees against the satin deep-blue sky, glittering with stars. The hue of the sky is like nothing I have ever seen before—rich and velvety. I crane my neck to see what lies ahead of the old woman; the small hut slowly materialises. I sense the old woman hastening her steps, her footfalls light, almost soundless. We stop at the well and she draws up a pail of water and splashes both our feet, a biting relief. I plunge my hands into the pail and splash the water all over my face, feeling my sweaty skin bristle.
After crossing the threshold and entering the hut, it takes me a few moments to adjust to the dimness of the room. The smell of paraffin oil fumes from the lamp hangs heavily in the air, and, along with it, I detect the faint burning of dry wood. The old woman is at the brick stove, setting a kettle to boil, fanning the flames. The red-orange glow casts a halo of soft amber light around her, agitating her shadows on the wall. She takes up a flask and puts some dry leaves—tea? herbs?—into it.
I sit on the wooden bench and lower my head onto the table, burying my face in the crook of my arm. I can feel my body losing its tension, unwinding; a numbing fatigue soon takes hold, spreading across my body. Draining slowly of energy, I can’t keep my eyes open, though my thoughts are creating a racket in my head. The old woman sets a bowl before me. The soothing scent of jasmine fills my nose, and I take a few sips. She sits beside me and watches me drink. With the shadows flickering on her face, her eyes seem like empty pits that draw me into them—a deathly calm, the gravity of darkness.
It would be easier to stay where I am, somewhere up in the hills with the old woman, distanced from the rest of the world. Nobody knows whether I’m dead or alive, and this realisation is harsh but sobering. I could live like this for as long as I want. Maybe in some ways, I’m avoiding the need to take the next step; maybe I’m hoping to delay the decision to head back, to return to where I’m expected. Nobody can stay still, or hidden, for long; life always demands action, movement, choices, a nudge to take the next step.
In the days I have spent in the hut, recovering under the care of the old woman, I think about the life I used to have, about Ai Ling and Wei Xiang, and of course Cody. They are the people I care about and love the most, but now, after all that has happened, I can’t summon anything in me to feel for them. They have become, over the last few days, immaterial, mere shadows from the past, stripped of any history or connection to the reality of my current existence. It’s as if I have conjured them up from my own imagination, from different fragments of other people I have known—wisps of smoke rising into the air, fading into nothing. I have almost no desire to return to them, or to whatever is waiting for me.
The old woman, on the other hand, is already preparing for my eventual departure. She feeds me another round of the bitter brew, changes the wound dressings, and mends the rips in my clothes, going about these tasks with her usual efficiency and silence. From time to time, she checks on me, putting her hand to my forehead or applying a lotion to my bruises. She takes out a cloth bag from the larder and puts in a few vegetable buns that she has prepared, a bottle of water and a small jar of medicinal lotion. She secures the opening of the cloth bag with a piece of rattan string and leaves it at the foot of the bed.
Watching her move about in the small, dimly lit hut with a single-minded focus stirs up memories of my maternal grandmother who passed away six years ago. She was the one who took care of my siblings and me when my mother was holding down two jobs, after she and my father were divorced. Every day after school, my grandmother would keep me in the kitchen for hours, seated at the dining table to have my meals or work on my homework, as she busied herself with the scrubbing of pots and pans, preparing the spices for her special bak kut teh soup, or cleaning out the fridge, which was always packed to the gills with plastic bags of varying size and colour, the contents known only by my grandmother. She never wasted or threw away food, even when it was past the expiry date. For snacks, she would give me stale cream crackers that tasted like dry cardboard, which she kept in a large tin can. The day after she died of a sudden stroke, I peeked into the fridge and saw that it was as full as it had always been.
In my dreams—sleeping and waking in an unending cycle—I sometimes confuse what is there with what isn’t—my long-gone past and the elusive present, the old woman and my dead grandmother. At one point, when the old woman put her hand on my forehead, and I opened my eyes, I could see my grandmother’s features superimposed on her face—the scattering of age spots on her cheeks, the sharp creases around her eyes and mouth like knife cuts, her perceptive stare. Words came pouring from me in a jumble of hard consonants as if I were learning to speak in tongues, harsh and guttural. And always, a presence hovering near me, a shadow cast over the wavy landscape of my dreams.
Towards evening, when the light outside the hut has gradually turned mellow, easing from a fiery red to a deepening shade of blue, I finally wake up from my spot at the table. My mind feels empty, my body light and incorporeal. From where I sit, I watch the changing sky through the doorway, and beyond the sweep of the trees, the satiny cloak of the dark sea. When dinner is ready, the old woman motions to me to join her. We eat in silence, and by the time we are done, night has fully descended, the lamps in the hut providing our only illumination.
Once the old woman has washed the dishes and put them away, she comes over to me, reaching into the side pocket of her threadbare shirt to pull out a ring. It catches the light from the lamp. It’s a simple, unadorned ring, perhaps a wedding band—where did she find it? Putting it in my palm, the old woman looks at me, pats my wrist once, and turns away. I try on the ring, but it can’t fit any of my fingers except the last one on my right hand. Whoever owned the ring must have had slim fingers, and it occurs to me that perhaps it belonged to a woman. I wrap it in a torn rag and put it in the pocket of my jeans.
For our fifth anniversary, Cody bought me a ring and hid it between the pages of a book that I was reading. That night, as I was picking up the book, a collection of stories by Alice Munro, the ring fell into my lap. For a while, holding the ring between my fingers, I wondered whether the ring was Cody’s, that perhaps he had misplaced it. From across the bed, Cody grabbed my hand.
“Happy anniversary,” he said.
“Happy anniversary. What is this?”
“A ring.”
“Yes, I know that. Why did you buy me a ring? So tacky.”
“No, it’s actually quite nice. Don’t you like it?”
“Yes, but still. A ring. You want to propose to me?”
“Yes, but only if you want to marry me.”
“No, take it back. I don’t want to marry you.”
“Why not? I know you want to.” Cody pressed closer to me, took the ring and slipped it on my index finger.
“Okay, now you are married. To me,” he said. “You can kiss the groom.”
I wore the ring whenever I was with Cody, so he could see it. But I was never interested in accessories; maybe a watch, but only because I needed it to time my regular runs, and even then it was a cheap, plastic Casio. And if I received gifts from friends—a chain, bracelet, leather wristband—I would put them aside for re-gifting, and if they started to clutter up the drawer, I would put them all in a box and give them away to the Salvation Army. Occasionally, when Cody saw a piece he liked, I would give it to him.
But the ring that Cody bought was a different thing altogether. It had meant something, at least to Cody, a commitment of sorts, a symbol of the years we had been together; but for me, it was nothing more than an inanimate object made to embody some significance that existed only in the mind of the giver, and divorced from this, it was nothing more than a piece of metal. So to counter my initial reluctance, and mostly for Cody’s sake, I wore it as if it really mattered, as if it were something that carried the weight of importance for both of us. I wore it when I went to bed, when we had breakfast, when we went out with friends, when we had sex. But when Cody was not around, or when I had to go for my runs, I would take it off and leave it in the drawer. By then the ring had already left its mark on me, the slight indent that went around the base of my finger, the skin a tone lighter as if drained of blood.