I was confounded. And then I met Mr Mohaiemen. He was from Bangladesh.
He was the one who had told us about the outbreak in the migrant worker community. As a rule, the employers had kept it quiet. If a man became unresponsive, they’d just send him home or throw him into the street.
And now he, Mr Mohaiemen, was in the clinic on his off-day, believing, surely, that Singapore must have a cure. He had been working on a site in Kallang, and now he saw planes.
I can hear them whoosh also, he said. Noise very loud. Come, you listen my body. Not only I hear. You hear?
Sure enough, when I pressed my stethoscope to him, I heard that distant buzz in his chest. You can hear, he said, triumphantly. You hear.
So we began testing our other patients. Amplifying the sound of their heartbeats, we saw signals emerge. Mostly household babble. Barking dogs. Religious chanting.
Our breakthrough came with that blond, expatriate child, taken sick after a trip to Fort Canning. He was catatonic by then; he couldn’t feed himself or use the toilet, but the recordings were clear. Cantonese opera. Indian ragas. Rock. Classical fugues and concertos.
That was when the Head Nurse spoke up.
The National Theatre, she said. I was there.
With the help of some parents and relatives, we managed to pinpoint some locations. The National Library, of course. The Van Kleef Aquarium. The zinc-roofed huts at Bukit Ho Swee.
It’s the government’s fault. There was a woman who said that. She was cleaning the pus from her granddaughter’s bedsores.
All the government’s fault. They knock down buildings. You imagine: you’re a building. You won’t be angry? You won’t want to come back and cause trouble?
Cases have rapidly proliferated since then. The diseased now cover every age and class. There are even celebrity patients. That national sailor, troubled by visions of life on a kelong. That Minister, haunted by Tang Dynasty City.
And there are duplicates. Three patients have been identified as the old Changi Prison, five as the old National Junior College campus, two as the original Odeon Theatre—but there are so many old cinemas, no one knows for sure.
And now there’s this talk that the very land is rising against us. Rumours of factory workers in Tuas, holiday-makers on Beach Road, all choking on reclaimed soil as if drowning in the sea. And that NS boy yesterday: one of my researchers claims he’s possessed by the original palace of the sultans (or Palace of the Sultans) on Fort Canning.
Our nurses work double shifts, triple shifts even, changing IV drips and adult diapers, and still the patients keep coming.
The patients keep coming. Something has to be done. And as chief medical officer of this facility, I have the responsibility to do it.
I had a dream tonight. I was in my clinic, between late night rounds in the hospital. Dozing off, I saw myself on Mount Faber. White shapes were moving in the distance. I imagined they were cable cars, but I looked again and, no. They were the buildings that had possessed us. The thousands on thousands of buildings we tried to forget, twinkling in this shining city in the open sky.
They were beautiful. The ancient voices: I’d heard them in recording, but for the first time, I understood their language. We are hungry, they said. We are so, so hungry.
Then I woke up. I sprang to my feet. I disabled the alarm systems. I ransacked the pharmacy for volatile chemicals. And as a man of science, I can defend these actions with logic. For if we can appease the spirits of humans with the gifts of burning houses, why not the reverse?
The patients lie sleeping in the ward before me: children, women, men. They are but a humble offering to the indestructible city.
It is not without fear that I strike the match, letting the flames fall onto the bed sheets. For in that world to come, my victims will be my neighbours and may curse me for my act.
Yet it is also with joy that I anticipate my arrival in that shining city, that deathless ghost of Singapore.
I shall sit on my stoop there and observe the towers rising below, like the hills of so many ants.
NG YI-SHENG is a full-time poet, playwright, journalist and minor activist. He is the author of Last Boy, a poetry collection which won at the Singapore Literature Prize 2008, as well as the novel Eating Air and the bestselling SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century. He blogs at www.lastboy.blogspot.com. ‘Nostalgia’ was inspired by Michael Lee Hong Hwee’s artwork, The National Columbarium of Singapore.‘
The House on Tomb Lane’ by Dawn Farnham
Chapter 1
They were walking and talking, but they were already dead.
He didn’t look like a murderer. Of course, it was a cliché that vicious men don’t look like monsters. But he was monstrous, despite his pathetic looks, his bony, sallow frame, his thinning, greasy hair. Maria watched him step through the gates of Changi Prison to be greeted by his pudgy wife and skinny sister.
Three years. His sentence for beating, burning and murdering his maid, Maria’s cousin, Flora. This was the sentence deemed suitable for the torture and death he had visited on a frail, lovely girl in the flush of her youth. For the other two who lived in the house, who said nothing, who watched silently, indifferently, as he crushed her bones and scorched her flesh and let her die starving, in agony—no conviction, no charges … nothing.
She gazed at the newspaper picture she had brought with her. Cyril Lim, his wife, Pearl, and his sister, Stella. Her eyes rose slowly, her face impassive.
Maria had done her research. She could stay in Singapore for up to thirty days. She had shown the authorities her nursing certificate and the letter of employment from the London hospital, her hotel information and her onward plane ticket. She was stopping off for a holiday on her way to join the thousands of other Filipina nurses recruited by the UK National Health Service. Her last name was not the same as Flora’s, whose long-dead mother was her aunt. There was absolutely nothing to link her to either Flora or the Lims.
She watched as the taxi pulled away. She had no need to follow. She knew the address of the Lims’ house.
Flora had come to Singapore in the usual way: through an agency, and been placed with the Lim family. It was supposed to be safe, both sides carefully vetted. What a joke. Maria and Martin, Flora’s brother, now knew that Cyril Lim had a history of violence with maids but few employers, apparently, were ever blacklisted. Martin had followed the investigation during and after the trial, trying to piece together how Flora had ended up with this monster. Everyone was at fault. The agency who didn’t care, the Philippine government who didn’t care, the Singapore authorities who didn’t care enough.
At the tender age of eighteen, Flora had been utterly alone and defenceless. Absolutely no one was watching—including Maria knew, Flora’s own father. He was as cruel and callously indifferent to his daughter’s predicament as Cyril Lim. When the hideous facts of the case had been made known to the ordinary people of Singapore, an outpouring of horror, a compassionate disgust, had impelled many to send money to Flora’s family. A lot of money. More money than his daughter could have earned in two lifetimes. Maria had watched the old man’s eyes glitter at this unexpected bounty.
Maria had dispatched her uncle to the search for eternal riches with a neat air bubble in the vein. It was too easy. He was diabetic. He needed insulin and, being cheap, he expected her to give the injections for free. Maria was a remarkable nurse. She was a cum laude graduate from the College of Nursing and had received the highest award for academic achievement. She prided herself on giving painless injections. He had certainly not suffered enough. Nobody had cried for him.
Maybe no one would cry for the Lims either but she would not be so compassionate with them. They had two children under Flora’s care—a baby and a toddler. Cyril Lim had beaten Flora senseless for drinking some of his toddler’s milk. The autopsy had revealed a hairline fracture along her jaw. She had been given one packet of noodles to eat each day. In six months tiny little Flora had lost almost half
her body weight.
Maria’s hands tightened around the newspaper picture. She walked slowly back to the bus stop and waited. Lim had admitted to forgetting how many times he beat Flora. The coroner’s pictures showed two hundred separate injuries to her body; bruises, fractures, burned and scalded skin. When he had kicked her in the stomach for the final offence of eating some cold rice, he had burst her duodenum and left her. She had died alone in an agony of peritonitis. Lim had gone to the police station and given himself up.
And now he thought he was free.
Chapter 2
She gazed into the mirror. Things change you. It was an immutable truth. Horrible experiences harden you, turn you into a different person. She looked into her eyes and saw herself, the same features, the dark brown eyes, the same full lips, the rich black hair. She seemed the same but underneath the skin she was fundamentally different, as if her cells and sinews had been subtly rearranged.
She took up her brush and began to stroke it through her hair. She had no regrets for the Maria who had gone. That one had served her well. But experience and time add layers, like the pearl inside the shell, smooth and hard. People think nursing is about compassion, but it isn’t. It’s about practicality. Nurses don’t blubber at the sight of blood or faint at broken limbs. They deal with them, calmly and methodically. The practical application of skills.
She picked up her handbag and took the bus to the Lims’ neighbourhood. She had studied maps, bus routes and the series of pictures Martin had brought back with him. She walked down a road with restaurants and shops, most closed now at this early hour, to the first junction and turned left. This street was quieter and stretched away into a snaking sprawl of terraced houses. Another turn, at the second corner, right this time, and she was surrounded by a mixture of houses and light industrial work units. There was nothing very attractive about the area but even here Singapore was leafy, with rows of lofty trees and shrubs softening the hard urban edge.
This street was called Lorong Makam: Tomb Lane. She’d grimaced at the name. The houses and units were closed up, vegetation sprouting from cracks, bleached Chinese characters emerging here and there from the grime. At its culmination, Lorong Makam formed a short T. In the middle of the cross bar was a pavement which led to a pedestrian bridge over the wide storm drain beyond. On either side of the T were four houses. To the right the houses were abandoned and crumbling, paint peeling, leaves gathered in drifts inside the gates. To the left were numbers 43 and 44, inhabited, but looking no better than the other two. The Lims lived in number 44. There was a ‘For Sale or Rent’ sign above the gate. These two houses stood opposite a disused factory. She read the fading lettering across the top of the building. Wai Wai Prawn Cracker Co. Ltd. She had examined it yesterday morning, quickly, wandering around with a map in hand, appearing lost. She needn’t have worried. The area was deserted. The factory was locked and empty, just as Martin had said. Martin’s plan had begun exactly at the moment he’d seen how close this factory was to the Lims’ house. It was like a sign from the Almighty.
Maria knew that number 43 was the home of a man called Neo for he had been interviewed by the newspapers during the trial. When asked if he knew about the terrible things going on inside his neighbour’s house, he simply said that, even had he known he would not have told the police. ‘Not my business,’ he said.
Running along one side of the factory, the end of the cul-de-sac and one side of the Lim house, there was a culvert which fed the storm drain, lined with trees, and beyond the trees was an alley way which traced the backs of low buildings. It was isolated. Maria felt Flora’s awful isolation, imprisoned here with these monsters.
Now though, Maria saw what Martin had. The isolation was their friend. She did not stop to examine the houses, did not allow her feelings to overwhelm her, but went onto the bridge and crossed to the other side of the storm drain into the small park beyond. Seated on a bench behind the rim of the tall trees, she was invisible. Martin had taken a lot of photos from here. She sat and took a bottle of water from her bag.
The houses backed on to the storm drain. They both had high walls concealing the lower part of the buildings. Only the upper storey was visible. Sitting here now, she felt tears rise. Had Flora thought of this leafy park as she lay dying in agonising pain? Perhaps these trees were all of the outside world Flora saw for the final six months of her life. Maria felt the pity of it like a knife in her guts. She understood why Martin had taken so many photographs.
Maria intended to get inside the house. It was part of the plan of course but she needed to see for herself the prison in which such tortures were inflicted. She needed to see it with her own eyes and not in the dreams which had haunted her for months.
She and Flora had been like sisters, for Maria’s mother had raised Flora after the death of her own sister. They had held hands on the way to school, they had skipped and played together. They’d braided each other’s hair and talked about boys and felt lonely apart. And Martin was her brother too, for he was always in the house though he lived with his father. When Flora’s father had remarried six years later, his two children went to live with him and his new wife, but they all lived nearby. The new wife was a decent woman but Flora’s father simply wore women out and, within two years, she had left him.
Flora and Martin endured his bitter tempers and foul language. They escaped to Maria’s family but by then Maria’s father, too, was sick. As soon as possible Martin got out. He ran off to Manila. When Flora was sixteen she got out too. Two years later she came here. It was a fatal mistake.
Dawn was creeping up and it was almost pleasant in the deep shade of the rain trees. An old man came by, hobbling along, followed by a young Indonesian maid. She looked no more than fifteen. The nappies of the young and the nappies of the old, the house, the cooking, the car, work, work, work. Why you want to eat? Greedy! Why you need rest? Lazy! Why you alive?
In the Philippines, Maria had talked to other women who had been maids here, in Hong Kong, in Saudi Arabia. She desperately needed to understand how sweet, lovely Flora had been ground into dust. So many of their tales, especially in the other countries, were a litany of horror. Abused in every possible way: imprisoned, raped and beaten, their bodies shattered by starvation and violence, their minds by a torrent of words which spilt like filthy slime over them day in, day out.
The Lim children were not here. When Cyril went to prison, Pearl had taken her children to her aunt in Penang. Pearl and Stella’s livelihood was a small hair and nail salon. Maria smiled at this thought. Skinny Stella and Fat Pearl: the Laurel and Hardy of the beauty world.
Some in the kopitiam on the corner were happy to talk to Martin, who posed as a foreign reporter. During the trial it was the constant talk of the neighbourhood. Pearl and Stella Lim were ashamed and didn’t want the children to know, the Chicken Rice woman said. Ashamed of the prison sentence, Maria mused, not of murdering a young girl. When Lim got out, the Roti Prata stall owner said, the whole family was getting out of Singapore permanently.
It was six o’clock. She rose and walked along the edge of the storm drain, keeping amongst the trees until she came to the end of the park. Here another little bridge led to the small street on the opposite side of the culvert. She crossed and walked up the back alley. The units had been small businesses, places that made fish sauce, paper decorations and incense. The flickering sunlight dappling the ground was in pretty disproportion to its flaking, sagging surroundings.
Where the bushes were dense she slipped across the culvert and saw the door. She took the key and turned the lock. Martin had cut off the old one and put on his own, equally aged, one. She slipped quickly through and shot across the bolt she knew was inside the door.
She took her torch. It was powerful and she swept it around the dark space. She walked surely to the front of the building. Martin had drawn her a map and she knew every step.
When the sentence had been handed down, they had known what they had t
o do. Martin, a steward with Philippine Airlines, was often in Singapore. Three months ago he had come and checked out the warehouse. It was still empty.
Martin had asked about the area at the kopitiam. Urban redevelopment, they said. Two years from now the last of the houses would return to the state and the area would be razed.
She went into the room opposite number 44. The grimy window gave a perfect view of the house and now a filtered light was beginning to seep through the dirt. She turned off the big torch and turned on her pencil light. A cardboard box stood in the corner. Maria quickly ran through its contents. Martin had been thorough, everything was there. There was an old chair and three bottles of water. The factory creaked. Martin had put a slide lock on the door of this room. It was creepy, he said, to have the door open behind you into such a huge black space. He was right. She slid the lock across and felt safe. She sat down and looked at the house across the road.
Chapter 3
She and Martin had had time on their side. Time for Maria to complete her nursing qualification and get experience in a hospital. Time for her to apply to the UK and be accepted. On the last weekend of the month, if Martin was in Manila, they made the trip to their home town, to the cemetery where Flora was buried. The brutality of her death had been television news and Philippine Airlines had flown her home for free and delivered her to the Manila funeral home. They had asked to see her. Maria was used to corpses but this was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Her lovely cousin was a wraith, her poor bruised body covered in scars, her bones protruding under her skin. They touched the puckered burnt skin on her cheek and neck and the scars of cigarette burns on her hands. Lim had thrown boiling water over her as a punishment for making the bath too hot for his toddler and put out cigarette butts on her hands for any reason at all.
The horror of this had run like a cinema reel inside their heads and they had cried and cried over her body. They cried for her pain and loneliness and for their own feelings of guilt. Martin was filled with remorse for letting her go to Singapore. Maria was ashamed that they had let six months go by without wondering why she had not written or called.
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