Singapore Noir

by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  Yes, Eddie, you need to take care of her. She needs to be cleansed of all the filth, the sins.

  He had too much on his mind to go to his ridiculous special school so he wandered off to the arcade in Parkway Parade. He needed to think and school was not the place to be. Fortunately, the voices left him alone at the arcade.

  Around noon, he decided to head home. His mother was usually at work at this time, but this day was different, he knew she would be home.

  He saw her back first; she appeared to be on the phone. She turned toward the door, but did not seem to notice him. She was staring at the ceiling and talking very quickly.

  “I can’t believe this happened . . .” she was saying.

  He stopped. Perhaps now he would hear what had occurred. She would reveal the name of the bastard to her friend, he thought. This would be good, he needed to know and he would find out right now. She began to cry and her words got muffled. He could barely make out what she was saying, and he stared hard at her lips.

  “We were walking through the park . . .” She was clearly getting more and more agitated. “It was so quiet and no one was around. He turned and kissed me and then . . . and then he pulled at my blouse . . . in the dirt right here in the park. I can’t believe it happened. I think I’m—” She stopped mid-sentence when she saw him and quickly hung up the phone. “Would you like something to eat?”

  He said no. Her question surprised him; usually it would have been a torrent of, Why are you not in school? Where have you been? Today she seemed uninterested.

  Told you, man. Told you, she is hiding something.

  She is seeing a man.

  Eddie, don’t listen to him. You don’t know what she said. You did not read her lips all the way through. You don’t know the whole story.

  There he goes, Eddie, calling you stupid because you can’t hear properly. Yes, he is calling you stupid—are you going to let him do that?

  No, I am not stupid.

  I never said you were.

  Thoughts clawed at his brain like tiny crabs taking over the shoreline.

  He remembered that day even more clearly than the day of the rape. Because after that phone call, her behavior began to really change.

  Ma began to stay out later after work each day. When he asked why, she made excuses that made no sense. She seemed constantly lost in thought, and he hated the fact that she ignored his questions. She began to scout local resale stores for silk blouses and bright skirts. She even started wearing makeup. Perhaps, he thought, she feels like she has been prostituted so she needs to dress and behave like one. He wondered how he could help her. He asked her constantly about that day; she never responded.

  Although she did still go to the Holy Family Church, he noticed that she had stopped praying in the mornings. She was more concerned with the way her hair looked than with reading the Bible.

  I told you, she is turning into a prostitute.

  No, she isn’t. She is a kind, gentle woman, don’t forget that, Eddie.

  She is a prostitute, Eddie. Ever wonder where she goes out at night? Why is she so late? Who is she with? Why won’t she tell you?

  The final straw was when she began to have people over several times a month. Men and women came to his house for what she called a reading club, to discuss some book. He hated them on sight, and hated the fake attention they showered on him. She thrived on it. A cleaning lady in a book club—it was a joke. The people came and talked to her, they ate and drank together and laughed. They were stealing his mother from him, and she was letting it happen.

  “Why are you trying to be so atas?” he asked one day, and she slapped him. It was the first time.

  She doesn’t need you anymore, Eddie. She has them.

  A cleaning woman—what does she need to read for, Eddie?

  She is becoming atas, Eddie. Soon she will think you aren’t good enough for her.

  He began to withdraw.

  He knew it was all because of the rape. It had changed her; she was no longer the beautiful, pious woman he had loved. She was now a cheap slut, flaunting herself in front of these people in her new clothes and makeup, laughing out loud, pretending to be someone she was not. He was sure she was in a lot of pain.

  You are right, Eddie, she needs help.

  Her soul has been desecrated, you need to cleanse her. She is in pain. Evil is making her hide the pain. You need to help her, Eddie, she is your ma. She would do the same for you.

  Help her, man, help her.

  The decision was made. The voices were unanimous. He decided he would help her. He would put her out of her pain.

  He picked a day about two weeks later, telling her he had saved enough to treat his mother to a nice meal.

  Then he began to plan, meticulously writing down each step.

  * * *

  When the day finally arrived, his mind was calm. He was prepared.

  Even though God had not given him the best ears or brain, he had given him several advisors who dwelled in his head.

  His mother dressed down for the dinner, which pleased him.

  At five p.m., he told her he was ready to go.

  Together they walked to a little beachside restaurant nearby, one he knew she liked. Because it was right by the water, you could feel the sand under your feet at the table. Ma loved it, and he wanted her to enjoy this evening.

  She ordered her favorite, fermented shrimp-coated fried chicken wings, for the two of them, the extra large basket that they had shared many times before.

  As they ate, he began to tell her about the new place he had discovered—it would be his present for her birthday.

  “It’s beautiful, Ma! You have to see it, will you come with me?”

  She smiled at him. “Yes, of course.”

  She reached into her purse to pay. He protested. It was his treat, he said. After he paid, he took her hand and started walking.

  They had been strolling along the water for about fifteen minutes when Ma started worrying. “Where is it, Eddie? I’m getting tired and it’s getting dark.”

  “Just a bit longer, Ma,” he said.

  They reached a tiny jetty, a long slender walkway that cut a swath far out into the blue.

  Eddie squeezed his mother’s hand, gently tugging her along as he stepped onto the jetty and headed toward the edge. “Happy Birthday, Ma!” He beamed as he pointed toward the panorama at the end of the pier.

  She had lived on Singapore’s East Coast all her life, but even in the dimming light of the evening, she was stunned by the view. He had managed to find a view of the sea that she had never seen before. Shades of blue looked like flowing silk, the shadowy tankers twinkled in the distance. All the colors and sights melded together to form a perfect seascape.

  She stepped further toward the edge to take in the beauty. She never saw the push coming.

  This is for you, Ma, this will save your soul.

  Yes, Eddie, you did it, you have cleansed her of her sins. Now she will be with Him, she is safe.

  When she screamed, he began shouting along too: “Ma. I love you! I’m coming, Ma! I love you!” In a new pure world, they would be together. No unhappiness.

  He closed his eyes and took a step forward. But then a bony hand grabbed him and pulled him back.

  “Ah, boy!” he heard a stranger shout. “What happened? Did your mother fall in?”

  Eddie began to cry.

  * * *

  Her funeral was held a few days later. It was a quiet ceremony. There was no body; it was never found.

  When her new friends, the ones he hated, showed up, he sidled up next to them to hear what they were saying.

  “Pity,” said one.

  “Yes,” agreed another, “she was so in love and ready for her new life. What a waste.”

  Love? In love? What were they saying? His mother in love?

  “Yes,” whispered the first. “She told me about him a few months ago. Their first encounter made me blush! They made love in Fort Cann
ing Park! She said she was a mess when she got home.”

  * * *

  The jolt of the bus stopping brought him back to the present. “Time to get off, Eddie,” Uncle Teo said. “I’m sorry.”

  Eddie thanked him and walked out into the night breeze. The bus had dropped him off where he had started, by the Merdeka Bridge.

  He pulled the thin jacket closer to his body, heading to his usual spot in a corner. When he closed his eyes, he knew he would see his mother, the jetty, her back, his hands. Slowly but surely the dreams would come; dreams filled with snakes. Some nights they would slither up his legs first—on others, they would simply coil around his stomach. Just before the bites, he would wake up screaming.

  KENA SAI

  BY S.J. ROZAN

  Bukit Timah

  On Monday afternoon the old man with the erhu was at the corner again.

  In the soft shade of a tembusu he sat on a folding stool, the ancient battered instrument held upright. The knobby fingers of his left hand slid along the strings while his right arm worked the bow. A tight-stretched cobra skin fattened each long slow note before releasing it into the air.

  Watching through sinuous heat shimmering up from the concrete, Ed was caught. Davey stopped also. He stared, let go of Ed’s hand, balanced for a moment on not-quite-steady toddler legs, then plopped down on the grass of the verge, never taking his eyes off the old man. Ed smiled and slid down against a mahogany tree. It would make no difference when they arrived at Ellen’s. They could stay here for now and drift on these melodies, alien and alluring.

  The old man’s hands gained speed, racing, nimble as the macaques in the park; then they slowed, slipped supple and flowing, like the water in the Strait. The macaques had ruled the island once, dancing through the trees, screaming by the water holes. The Strait had washed the shores of island and mainland, tying them together as it held them apart. Now the few macaques left were confined to the reserve and the Strait was causewayed and ferried, narrowed by landfill and curbed by barriers. But the monkeys were still monkeys and the water was still water.

  The music sounded sad to Ed. That was the minor scale, he knew. Probably these were not sad songs, just his Western ears that made them so. The old man did look sad, though. Because he was far from home? Or because he was old? Or because no one but Ed and Davey stopped to listen, and he knew Ed didn’t understand?

  No one in Singapore stopped to listen, or stopped for anything. No one played music on streetcorners, either, and on a less out-of-the-way sidewalk the old man would’ve been arrested for interfering with the public progress, for distracting citizens from their daily rounds, for being unnecessary. But on this hot afternoon in Bukit Timah, no one other than Ed and Davey were on the street to be distracted.

  Ed wondered if the old man lived here, in this sweet, treed expat enclave where Westerners dwelled to be reminded of home. He doubted he did, thought it more likely he traveled to this corner by bus, to other corners of the island also, other quiet empty suburbs where he could sit and play his quavering melodies in the damp heat. Maybe he lived with his family; maybe his daughter was a banker, his son-in-law a doctor, his grandchildren energetic high-achievers who ran off in their school uniforms in the morning, none of them with time for the old man’s music or his memories. Maybe, long ago, young and energetic himself, he’d come to Singapore from South China, from heat like this, and now he was old and an expat and he, too, wanted to be reminded of home.

  Ed didn’t. Home was worlds, years, lives away. He didn’t miss it and he didn’t want to go back there, back to New York, back to winter slush and politics he had to pay attention to and buses that didn’t come. It was ten years since they’d left, since Ellen had called, so excited, the promotion had come through and they were headed to London. No more taxi drivers who didn’t know the way, no more slithery roaches, pretentious hipsters, brown smothering clouds drifting over from New Jersey.

  “I think they have roaches,” Ed smiled, kissing her at the door that night. Her eyes had been glowing. “And I’m sure they have hipsters.”

  “My God, what smells so great in here?”

  “Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I should learn the exotic cuisine.”

  All through dinner she talked, making lists, assigning tasks. She would tackle this and Ed should follow through on that. He sipped his wine, enjoying her incandescence, her mad caroming. A month later they’d settled into a West London flat. “You’ve got to call it a flat now, darling,” she told him as she breezed out the door her first day.

  Ed’s own clients were people he’d never met and they didn’t care where he was as long as their websites got designed, updated, and populated, a word that delighted him: as though each page were a tiny village, JoeJones.com, pop. 313. He methodically took care of them and then took long midday walks, as he had in New York, as he always had.

  In their new suburban London home Ed saw himself as one of the islands revealed when the tide of commuters swept out each morning. His walks took him to the greengrocer, the locksmith, the fishmonger, islands also, each one craggy or forbidding or gentle, each one worth exploring. The cars driving on the left-hand side of the road he found interesting to watch, like choreographed dancers in a number new to him. He wondered whether England had no tornados because her traffic went counter-clockwise. He learned to differentiate the subtle variations of fog and rain and he liked the clinks when he jingled the coins that made his pockets heavy.

  Ellen didn’t. The money exasperated her and she couldn’t get used to traffic coming from the wrong direction. The gray weather was draining. The cabbies never got lost but there weren’t many places, she found, that she wanted to go.

  “New York made such sense,” she sighed over lamb chops and green beans one night. The chops were particularly good; Ed had made friends with the butcher, a fat man from Sussex. I’ve given ye the best ones, tender and tasty if ye cook ’em right.

  “London,” Ellen went on, shaking her head. “It’s so . . . medieval.” Her response was to buckle down and work harder. Eighteen months later she called home one morning, an hour after she got to work, thrilled once again: they were going to Prague.

  In Prague Ed liked the tensions between the past and the present, the red roofs, the smell of yeast and cinnamon from the bakery. He couldn’t master Czech but the baker spoke English. From Madagascar, the vanilla, she’s cost too much but nothing else worth having. Ed cooked chicken with onions and paprika. Ellen railed against the narrow streets and the traffic. In London, she said, it rained all the time but at least you could get around.

  After Prague, Buenos Aires, where Ed paused in his walks to sit in cafés on wide boulevards. Try first without milk, señor, you drink Argentine coffee now. He grilled butter-tender steaks and Ellen felt nostalgic for buttoned-up Prague where ragtop cars didn’t pound out music twenty-four hours a day. Then Nairobi, to Ed a never-still metropolis of old jeeps, bright cloth, musical speech (Fresh pineapple! Come buy it! You can do much wid it!), and dark, glistening faces. He learned to make ugali from cornmeal and served it with roast goat. To Ellen, Nairobi was dust that made her cough, bottled water, failed Internet connections (in Buenos Aires the technology worked), and armed guards.

  In Nairobi, she got pregnant. It was time, she said; they didn’t want to wait until they were too old, until conceiving was a chore and delivery a risk, did they? Ed thought perhaps she’d want to go home, at least to have the baby, but she was working on some major deals and so Davey was born in Aga Khan Hospital three months before they moved to Singapore.

  Singapore astonished Ed.

  Ellen’s colleagues envied the assignment because, they said, Singapore was Asia Lite. Not like being sent to Shanghai or Tokyo, with their illegible street signs, illegible menus, illegible manners. Everything worked in Singapore. Crime barely existed, the water was safe. Everything worked, and worked in ways you understood. Not that life was perfect. The trees were groomed and the sidewalks pract
ically polished, traffic flowed—but be careful, they were warned: Singapore, it’s Disneyland with the death penalty. Jaywalking, gum-chewing, free-thinking: just watch yourselves.

  Ellen didn’t care about jaywalking, or free-thinking either. She was happy to be an expat among expats, to mix only with other Westerners, to live as though she weren’t in Asia at all. The safe, clean, functioning Singapore was the one she came looking for, the one she found, the one that—for a time—pleased her.

  Ed saw all that—how could you miss it?—but it wasn’t his Singapore. More than anywhere they’d lived, more than where they’d come from, Singapore instantly felt like home.

  He loved the damp heat, the daily rain, the bright and gray skies alternating, striping the day. The storms that blew through and scoured the air. The breathless young Singaporeans in the business of business; the expat community constantly churning, impermanent, strangers arriving and friends departing every day. Cultures mashing into one another in heady confusion: the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander, the roast Cornish hen with fingerling potatoes in one café, the nasi lemak in the next, the chicken tajine a few doors down. Singapore had four official languages, but the one Ed loved was the unofficial one, the one everyone spoke: Singlish—in vocabulary, in grammar, and in syntax, a knotted combination of them all. In Singapore you could live your life in English, but Singlish was what the locals spoke, and the transplanted, the settled-in. Ed set out to learn it.

  He also set out, as always, to learn the local cuisine. In Singapore that very idea was funny, because all recipes except the oldest Malay ones were immigrants and none were pure. He wrapped Davey in a quilted cotton infant sling and took him along to the markets, collecting the dozens of umber, ochre, black, and gold spices that went into curry, depending on whose curry you were cooking. He made pineapple tarts and oyster omelets, yellow egg noodles, coconut-stewed beef, and fish head curry.

  Ellen started to drink.

  “Singapore,” she sighed as they sat over the remains of vegetable dumplings and pork rib soup. She poured herself more wine. “At least in Nairobi when it was this freakin’ hot, it was dry.”