Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  Lida packed her belongings, hocked the jewellery given to her by Mr Fu and ran away with Tom the English Sailor. Thus she became the first member of the Lim family to emigrate from Singapore. She never came back.

  That night Mei Ling called Pandora to her room and looked her in the eye for the first time since she had returned to the terrace house two years previously.

  ‘My eldest daughter is dead to me now,’ she said. ‘You have come home to take her place. If you are an obedient and respectful daughter, then Mummy will love you.’

  All of Pandora’s life, love would come with strings attached and conditions to fulfil.

  THE BUSINESS ACUMEN OF DONALD DUCK

  In the Lim household adult melodramas and childish games all took place in the open courtyard adjoining the kitchen. Two balconies overlooked the courtyard, one of them being a sort of mezzanine floor of the Lim terrace, the other belonging to the neighbour’s house. By mutual consent of the shopkeeper and the neighbour, long bamboo rods were placed across the balconies, and the laundry of both families was hung out to dry over the courtyard. On the dull and listless weekends after Lida Lim’s departure, Winston or Daphne would go up to the Lim balcony, draw in a bamboo pole, tie a raffia rope to the middle and push it out again so that the rope slithered down to the courtyard. They went downstairs and all the children took turns swinging on the rope, hollering bloodcurdling imitations of Tarzan calls.

  This was a favourite game until the bamboo pole cracked under the flabby weight of Winston. He sailed up into the air only to tumble, at the apex of his pendulum swing, and crash onto the concrete, breaking his wrist and being buried under a flurry of drying women’s underwear. His fear of punishment was far less than his terror that he was now cursed by bad luck because he had actually been touched by women’s defiling garments.

  All the children were walloped by Mei Ling, who bolted the back door and chased them around the courtyard until she caught them with flying whacks and whipped them soundly with the bamboo cane. After each child was red-striped and sobbing loudly, she followed her family’s tradition, breaking the bamboo cane in half and throwing it into the dustbin.

  ‘See what you’ve done,’ she said to them. ‘Your worthless hides have contaminated the cane. Good for nothing now but to be thrown into the sea.’

  Most of Pandora’s childhood memories ended with the walloping and the disposal of the bamboo cane in the same dramatic manner. Her stories were parables of imaginative mischief followed inevitably by harsh and painful retribution. In the world of the Lims, delights had to be stolen and happy endings were impossible.

  After the demise of Tarzan, their hours after school were spent playing rounders with the neighbours. These games usually ended in rancorous hostility as each family accused the other of cheating, swore vicious vengeance and vowed never to play with the other again. Sometimes, when it rained, they tore up their homework and folded paper boats to float in yacht races along the open stormwater drains outside the crooked rows of terraces. They chased each other around the streets, taking terrifying leaps across these gigantic drains which swelled and roared with rainwater during the wet season. Before the water eventually became too polluted, they’d spot tiny fish darting up the drains as they leant over to peer into the muddy water. Sometimes they fell in and were hauled out by Por-Por, only to be embraced by the unending supply of bamboo switches bought from the peddler who visited the house every week. But most of their games were harmless until Donald Duck came home when Pandora was eight and taught them the new game of stealing.

  Donald Duck had still been at school when the Japanese rounded him up and took him off to a work camp, and he couldn’t be bothered returning to his studies after the war was over. In later years he fiercely resented anyone who was more educated than him, and his bilious ire was reserved especially for anyone with a university degree. The Grads, he called them contemptuously as he tapped himself on the chest and proclaimed to anyone who would listen that he himself had been educated in the University of Life, and that was the one that really counted. In his garrulous old age he came to believe that there existed in Singapore a Conspiracy of Grads who aimed to destroy ordinary, non-university educated people and grind them into poverty. In the business world, he would proclaim impressively, you couldn’t trust the Grads. They were sly, tricky, ever ready to stab you in the back, trample you while you were down, kick you in the head, slit your throat, slice off your balls and generally dish out all other kinds of corporeal violence.

  Donald Duck first went into Business—and you could always hear the capital ‘B’ in the word—during the war. When he was conscripted by the Japanese to work for them, he made himself useful by obtaining women, antiques and rare food delicacies for his Japanese masters. He learnt to speak Japanese and became their interpreters as they stormed their way around the city streets. (This skill, incidentally, served him well when he started a dubious underground company trading organ parts with the Japanese after the war, craftily selling out to another associate who was then arrested and imprisoned for twelve years—some say on the information supplied by Donald Duck.) He led Japanese troops into the dark, densely populated wormholes of Chinatown and brought them safely out again, richer for the expensive herbal medicines, jewellery, watches and pens they’d acquired. He stole for them and kept a substantial commission for himself.

  Towards the end of the war, after its cessation in Europe, he contracted malaria and was allowed to return home. While the Americans were bombing Hiroshima, he tossed and sweated feverishly in bed, and was nursed back to health by his loudly lamenting mother. He lay exhausted and wasted as the Japanese were driven out of Singapore and the Allied troops returned. By the time he had regained his health and slipped out onto the streets again, there was no-one to point him out as a Japanese collaborator. Instead, he made himself useful to the Allies, continuing his black-market and pimping business. He eventually abandoned all these activities for a nine-to-five job in a warehouse importing soft drinks from America.

  While Lida Lim was busy causing a local scandal, he had been living with some friends in Chinatown, but now he returned home because he was flat broke and deeply in love. Donald Duck should have been rich, but he was an incorrigible and unlucky gambler. Most of his profits from the war had dribbled into the hands of the bookies, and he was in love with an expensive, high-maintenance eighteen-year-old woman who was famous for winning that year’s Miss Singapore Telecom contest—which basically meant that she was a beautiful woman who could answer the phone in a pleasant tone and smile dazzlingly while she dealt with the flood of tedious questions and complaints then pouring in as Telecom rolled out cables and connected phone lines to homes.

  Wendy Wu came from a background even poorer than the Lims. Her father had been a rickshaw-man. But she had a stunning face dominated by large black eyes with the desirable epicanthus fold, soft white skin greased with Oil of Olay, a slender, long-limbed body and big firm breasts before the age of affordable implants. Those breasts, prominently paraded with the help of a state-of-the-art Maiden Form bra under her tight cotton cheongsam, were objects of desire among men and envy among women, the Lim girls and their female neighbours included. Not only did she have big breasts, Wendy Wu also had a veneer of femme fatale poise borrowed from years of watching Bette Davis, Mae West and Lauren Bacall films, for although sex was always a priority with her, Hollywood was her first and truest love.

  Donald Duck was in love and, confidently, he thought he had a good chance with Wendy Wu because he was a handsome man. The Lim sisters used to say that in his youth he looked like a Chinese version of George Reeve as Superman. He was tall for a Chinese man, he had developed his upper body and biceps with weights and martial arts, and he slicked his thick black hair back into a James Dean pompadour using Brylcreem. He strutted cockily around the city streets and posed on red plastic stools in the markets as young women sidled up to flirt. But he needed money to push his case with Miss Telecom so he came
home to recruit his siblings into Business. He taught them how to steal and sent them to practise in their father’s shop. When they were proficient he assigned them to various shops around the city and they stole for him successfully for months before Mei Ling discovered what was going on.

  Daphne was caught stealing a radio from a shop one day and threatened with prosecution. She cried with terror and wet her pants, a sour puddle forming on the green square-tiled floor of Lee Hong Ting Good Luck Electronics. Someone, Lee Hong Ting presumably, called Mei Ling. Then Daphne, holding her skirt carefully so that the damp patch didn’t show too much, was dragged home to be walloped until she couldn’t sit down for a fortnight. Mei Ling snapped the switch in half and threw the two parts into the dustbin. Henly rummaged through the rubbish until he found the pieces, rescued them and used them to make a frame for a kite which never got off the ground. Disgusted, he abandoned it, and the kite was later seen floating dismally down a stormwater drain.

  After that, nobody dared to steal again, even in the face of Donald Duck’s dire threats. Donald Duck eventually wheedled his way back into Mei Ling’s good graces by offering to babysit Pandora after school. Mei Ling was thrilled. Her first-born son had changed. What a dutiful, caring son I’ve got, she bragged to the neighbours. He takes such good care of Pandora. So nice to see them together. He’ll make such a good father to my grandsons, you just wait and see. Donald Duck helped Pandora with her homework and indirectly got himself an education. When she came back with good report cards, he smiled smugly, as proud of himself as he was of her.

  ‘You study hard, Pan-Pan,’ he told her when he took her to the goldsmith to get her ears pierced and bought her tiny gold sleepers. ‘Don’t be a lazy dumb-dumb like me. You study hard and get a good job. Then some rich man will want to marry you one day.’

  In his own selfish, limited way, Pandora was the one person in his family he genuinely loved even though he exploited her whenever he could. She was the embodiment of everything he could not possibly be. Years later, despite his hatred of Grads, he would encourage her to go to university. When she dropped out of her course, his disappointment was so acute that he did not speak to her for a year.

  In the afternoons, when school was over, Donald Duck took Pandora to the hawker centre near Bugis Street. Big Brother will give you a special treat, he promised her. Just outside the market he pulled a pot of rouge from his canvas knapsack and smeared a pink blob over each of her cheeks. Then he took a used tube of Wendy Wu’s red lipstick and spread it thickly over her lips so that she looked like a clownish China doll. Isn’t this fun, he said to her. Just like Mummy. He tied back her hair with colourful pink and red ribbons. Then he took her by the hand and brought her around the hawker stalls, watching her pretty eyes growing round with desire as she sniffed the savoury air and looked at steaming dishes of fried noodles, rice vermicelli, roti prata, green and pink Nonya cakes, red bean soup, ice kachang, juicy stalks of freshly cut sugarcane, fat pillows of curry puffs and crisp fried banana fritters.

  ‘Do you want a special treat?’ he asked. She nodded. ‘Big Brother will give you a special treat, but first you have to do something for me. Deal?’

  Before she could answer he pulled her over to a crowded coffee stall where unshaven men in white singlets, dusty black trousers and brown plastic slippers sat on red stools, sipping muddy coffee from huge glass tankards. Donald Duck slipped his hands under Pandora’s armpits and hefted her onto a stool.

  ‘Sing the song I taught you for all the nice uncles,’ he coaxed. She ducked her head shyly and looked uncertainly at him. ‘Go on, sing.’

  She just looked at him and his hard palm hovered near her rouge-smeared cheek.

  ‘Do it,’ he said.

  In a thin, reedy, off-key voice, accompanied by Donald Duck on the harmonica, she sang a doleful song about how the flower of her youth would soon be plucked. She faltered to a halt and a smattering of bored applause broke out. Donald Duck smiled mournfully and bowed obsequiously to the listless patrons of the coffee stall.

  ‘Uncle, may I?’ He pulled a stool up to a table where four men lolled and sat, cradling Pandora lovingly on his lap. She turned her face away from the men, burrowing into Donald Duck’s light blue shirt, smearing it with her face paint.

  ‘Your sister?’ A man with white stubble on his head and shrivelled arms the colour of cooked liver. Watchful eyes over a thick curve of glass as he slurped coffee.

  ‘Ai-yah, yes. My only surviving family.’ He pulled off his cap and sighed gustily. Looking the man in the eye, he recounted the pathetic story of how she was his beloved sister and the only surviving relative left in the whole world, the others having been struck down by malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis or the Japanese—the means of death varied each day and mattered little as nobody believed him anyway. He tried his best to look after Little Sister, he said, but they were poor, had only the clothes on their backs and a small corner of a room in Chinatown. Poor little sister, sometimes she needed the comfort of a father. He paused and looked hopefully around the circle of cynical eyes until, finally, the white-stubbled man offered a father’s comfort to the poor little girl for a while.

  ‘I have two little girls of my own,’ he grinned, playing along. ‘Little girls need their fathers.’

  ‘See how kind Uncle is to you, Pan-Pan? What a lucky girl you are.’ Beaming broadly now, Donald Duck lifted Pandora off his lap and made her climb onto ‘Uncle’s’ lap. Then he stretched, yawned and sauntered off to buy himself a beer, settling down at another table to chat, smoke or roll the dice for an idle half-hour until the uncle had had his fill of playing father and Pandora, now teary-eyed, was allowed to slip off his lap.

  ‘Uncle, are you going already?’ Donald Duck said. ‘Pan-Pan, are you hungry? Kind Uncle, my little sister is hungry.’

  ‘Then buy her something to eat,’ the man said. He pulled out a few grubby, crumpled notes, tossed them down at Donald Duck’s feet and walked away.

  ‘Bastard,’ Donald Duck muttered as he stooped quickly to pick up the money and count it. ‘There, Pan-Pan. Don’t cry anymore.’

  True to his word, Donald Duck would then buy Pandora a small treat, tapping his foot impatiently while she slobbered it down, eager to be back home sprucing himself up for his date with Miss Telecom.

  ‘Finished?’ he demanded. She nodded, cramming the last bite into her small mouth, her smeared red lips studded with crumbs. He grasped her hand and walked briskly to the bus stop to take her home. On the bus, he pulled out his handkerchief and scrubbed her face painfully clean of makeup until she cried out.

  ‘That dirty old man,’ Donald Duck said contemptuously. ‘Fucking prick.’

  As the bus wound its way into the city he grabbed Pandora by the shoulders and turned her to face him. ‘Listen to me, Little Sister, and listen well. You’re my favourite sister, yes? Big Brother loves you, yes? Don’t you ever let me catch you letting a strange man put his hands all over you if Big Brother is not around or else I’ll wallop you until you wish you were dead. Understand? Dirty old men like him can’t be trusted. Someone ought to slice off their balls and feed them to the pigs.’

  Hanging around the hawker centre, Donald Duck soon developed another enterprise. He went into partnership with a hawker who sold roasted meat served with steamed rice and water convolvulus stir-fried with chilli, all arranged decoratively on a banana leaf. Donald Duck guaranteed the cook a cheap supply of good quality meat in return for thirty-five per cent of the takings.

  He came home with his wallet bulging with notes and made Winston jealous.

  ‘Where you get all that extra cash?’ Winston demanded, for he worked at the same company as Donald Duck. ‘How come you all of a sudden got money to splash around?’

  ‘Business acumen,’ Donald Duck said smugly. ‘I got Business acumen.’

  Winston saw Donald Duck selling meat to the hawker, but he couldn’t figure out where Donald Duck was getting his supply from. He decided to tail Donald
Duck. He sat in a darkened cinema sucking on the straw of his Fanta, craning his neck to peer across the aisle to where Donald Duck wriggled in his seat, his left hand stroking up the hem of Wendy Wu’s skirt until he could slip his fingers between her stockinged thighs. Irritably, she slapped his hand away and stared at Humphrey Bogart on the screen. Donald Duck tried it again, and again she slapped his hand away, then pinched him hard for good measure. He turned away sulkily and shifted restlessly. After a while he turned back to Wendy Wu and took her right hand, romantically linking his fingers with hers. ‘I love you, Wendy,’ he told her.

  She smiled at him and let her hand lie passively in his. He stroked her forearm lightly and she snuggled closer to him. He inched their hands towards his crotch, then unlinked their fingers and pressed her palm flat against it. He covered her hand with his and began massaging his crotch slowly, cautiously. When her gaze remained firmly fixed on the screen, he looked around him surreptitiously and Winston quickly ducked his head. Everyone was staring at the screen, elbows bent and hands moving rhythmically from mouths to popcorn boxes and back again. Donald Duck slowly unzipped his trousers and started to ease her stroking palm between the slit of material. Wendy Wu heaved an exaggerated sigh and glanced at him. Looking down, she pushed aside the flap of material. Her fingers grabbed his cock impatiently and began to knead it mechanically. ‘Happy now?’ she said in a savage whisper as her gaze returned to Lauren Bacall staring at Bogart. Donald Duck subsided into satisfied silence.

  After the movie Winston trailed behind Donald Duck and Wendy Wu as they meandered through the night market and shared a late supper, Donald Duck gobbling down most of the plate of fried noodles since Miss Telecom was watching her weight. They wandered down to the waterfront, found an empty trishaw and climbed into it. Bored, Winston imagined what it would feel like to fondle Wendy Wu’s plump breasts. Then, because he had very little imagination and could not get a hard-on from his thoughts, he lit a cigarette and stared at the dark shadows of boats gently rolling over the streamers of moonshine on the water. His mind fell into its pleasant and natural state of blankness.