Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  ‘Just don’t, that’s all.’

  ‘And cleaning. What kind of a career is that?’

  ‘I don’t want a career,’ I explained to him. ‘I like to clean and I just want a mindless job that will leave me lots of time to read and watch movies. You know, like Otis.’

  ‘Otis?’

  ‘Redding. “Dock Of The Bay”. Watching ships roll in and out and all over the place. Wasting time. That sort of thing.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he warned. ‘I’m so disappointed in you. After everything I gave up in Malaysia, all the sacrifices I made, this is how you and Sonny repay me. Both of you drop out of church and don’t go to uni, and what do you end up doing? Cleaning and unpacking boxes! Wasting your lives away. You all are useless. Good for nothing.’

  It was more difficult to sever ties with Mum. She needed me although she didn’t realise it. I covered up for her. When I was free I went over to the Burwood house and made sure that the place was cleaned. As I vacuumed and dusted, I looked for any telltale signs that she was having an affair and destroyed them. I cooked curries and stews and stored them in the freezer so that if she was running late after one of her afternoon assignations, she could just take something out and defrost it for the Patriarch’s dinner. I didn’t want her to get into trouble.

  On the day that she decided to leave the Patriarch, one of my clients postponed a cleaning job until later in the week so I had the afternoon free. I went over to my parents’ house to do the laundry and ironing, and I saw the envelope that she had left on the kitchen table. I ripped it open and read it, then I tore it into tiny pieces, dumped it in the trash can and took the plastic bag out to the big green bin at the side of the house. I went back inside and rang Rodney Philippe’s office but there was no answer. Maybe I was wrong, I thought. Maybe he really had gone to get her. Maybe he wasn’t just screwing around with her. Maybe he did care for her and love her.

  But I knew that he didn’t. He couldn’t. If he had really cared for her, he wouldn’t have kept her in limbo-land for the last couple of years. What did she see when she looked at him? All I could see was a selfish and gutless man who didn’t have the courage to make a choice and take what he really wanted, to live with the consequences of his actions. Instead he made two women unhappy. Did he really think that his wife would not suspect he was having an affair? The rumours had been rumbling in the church for years, he just didn’t know it. Pandora had become yet another statistic, just an ‘other woman’.

  I tried ringing his office again but the line was engaged. I had no idea where my mother was and Rodney Philippe was the only one who could tell me. I had no choice; I found my mother’s car keys and drove over to the church. His secretary said that he had gone home as he wasn’t feeling well, so I walked over to his house, taking the chance that Josie wouldn’t be there having one of her numerous women’s groups or mission meetings. The screen door was unlocked. I pulled it open and stepped into the house. I could hear the sound of someone sobbing. I followed the noise to the study and found Rodney Philippe kneeling on the floor, the bible open on a chair in front of him. His face was blotchy with tears, mucus dripped from his nose and he was reading from Psalm 51.

  Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness . . . Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight . . .

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ From his desk I grabbed an ugly cut-glass crystal vase that some grateful member of his congregation had probably given to him, and I hit him and hit him and hit him with it until the skin broke on his head and blood oozed angrily through the scalp. I could have killed him. I wanted to. His blood would cleanse my mother’s shame, his pain would ease hers.

  ‘Grace, stop that! Have you gone mad?’ He struggled to his feet, light-headed with tears and dazed by the attack. ‘Give me that.’

  He reached over and wrestled me for the vase, wrenching it out of my hands. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘You didn’t just sin against God, you fucking gutless prick. You sinned against my mother.’

  He stood there staring at me, this man who had laid his hands on me so many years ago, promising to lead me into salvation and the love of God.

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Of course I know. Who do you think’s been covering your fat arse all this time? You with your wussy notes and lying love letters.’

  ‘I loved your mother,’ he said. How easily he put her behind him. ‘But we were wrong. We sinned against God and we’ve got to repent.’

  I looked at him and saw such a pathetic man. ‘Oh, never mind. Where’s Mum? I know she’s waiting for you somewhere. She left a note behind for my father.’

  ‘Does Jonah know—’

  ‘I just want to know where my mum is,’ I interrupted. ‘C’mon. Please.’

  ‘She’s in the park at the end of Glebe Point Road.’

  It was very dark when I arrived. She sat so still under the tree that I didn’t make her out at first. I didn’t know how long she had been sitting there, waiting. I wanted to cry, but I walked over to her instead.

  She heard the sound of footsteps and turned her face towards them. ‘Rodney, is that you?’

  ‘No, Mum. It’s me,’ I said. ‘Rodney’s not going to come.’

  ‘I can’t see,’ she said. ‘I think my retinitis pigmentosa is getting worse.’

  ‘It’s okay. We’ll take care of it.’

  ‘You should go to the eye doctor and get your eyes checked too,’ she said. ‘It’s hereditary, you know. Your Auntie Lida Lim had it. Your father says the Lims have bad genes.’

  ‘Let’s go home, Mum.’

  In the end I had to move back home to take care of her. To become a mother to her. She just let herself go. Stopped caring for her appearance, lost interest in clothes, couldn’t care less about the house or her husband or me. She lost her eyesight over the next few years but it didn’t matter much by then anyway. She was already used to spending her days sitting at the window, staring sightlessly out into the garden to where the jasmine and wisteria once grew. Now there is only a tangled mess of tomato vines and ferocious weeds that nobody tends.

  THE INSUPERABLE LONGING TO FALL

  After my mother’s wake and funeral the relatives returned to their normal lives. The doctor uncles went back to their hospitals and GP surgeries in Singapore, Sydney, San Francisco and Sussex to heal and play golf. Death had made little impact on their lives because they saw it, or traces of it, every day. They were not hardened, merely resigned and accepting. Pandora’s death would soon have ceased to be a topic of conversation, would have been a taboo subject at subsequent clan gatherings, had it not been for the horrific and unspeakable sin of suicide and, of course, Sonny’s dramatic slaying of the Cod God.

  Sonny’s obscene action had actually redeemed my mother’s memory in their minds. The secret condemnation they exhaled to each other behind a raised, half-cupped hand was instantly transferred from my mother to Sonny. The scandalous circumstances of her death were far outweighed by the unspeakably unfilial behaviour displayed by Sonny.

  Uncle Winston and Auntie Shufen could have explained, but they never did. Certainly they felt guilty enough not to demand compensation for the ruined rosewood furniture and the fish, although when the Patriarch insisted on replacing everything (excluding the pagan Cod God), their refusals were half-hearted and not sustained for long. Uncle Winston and Auntie Shufen exited abruptly from our lives. A few months after the funeral, Uncle Winston started shitting blood and discovered that he had bowel cancer. The Patriarch wanted to fly to Singapore to see him, but he refused all contact with our family. Sonny’s sin had tainted all the Tays and made us pariahs.

  Auntie Percy-phone told us that Winston was firmly convinced that the messy deterioration of his body was caused by the loss of the Cod God. He dedicated the rest of his lif
e to trying to replace the Cod God and squandered what remained of his illegal lottery winnings in extortionately priced anti-cancer programs involving organic food, coffee enemas and Ohira Mountain Extract pills. We never spoke to him again and when he died, the wake and funeral were held without us. In fact, apart from Auntie Percy-phone, we never saw the Lim relatives again. Not even Wendy Wu.

  For an instant, we found ourselves in the same economy-class carriage on a train of grief. But the major terminus had been passed long ago and people had begun to get off at their suburban stops, until I alone was left on that train. The older cousins disappeared into their glittering towers of financial success. The Singaporean aunties went back to buying Dior lipstick, quilted Chanel handbags, Gucci shoes, Armani evening gowns and Versace suits that were too hot for the climate. They planned package trips to Disneyland for their kids and tours to London and Paris for themselves. They even planned to come to Sydney, although I knew they wouldn’t contact us.

  Their kids were armoured with the iconoclastic irreverence of childhood and they turned my mother’s death into a joke. They flung themselves off the top of their bunk beds in six-foot suicide attempts and re-enacted Sonny’s slaying of the Cod God, wrestling with their bolsters and giggling. The wake and funeral were barely hiccups in the competitive round of their rigidly disciplined lives, centred on school, after-school tutoring in mathematics, science, English and Mandarin, followed by piano or violin lessons, swimming or ballet lessons, and furtive late-night games on computers or Sony play-stations.

  As for me, well, I cannot return to normality.

  In the days after the wake I take to wandering the streets of Singapore. Each night I come home to Auntie Percy-phone’s flat. Each morning I wake up just before dawn and watch fluorescent kitchen lights flickering on in the HDB apartments a few metres from my barred window. I lie awake and listen to people scrubbing off the sediment of sleep. I hear the sounds of flushing and the loud gurglings of the pipes that pass through the bathroom next to my bedroom, and I try not to imagine the sewage swirling around in them. I can’t get back to sleep. I drag myself out of bed and shower in the darkness. Then I make myself a cup of coffee with the ground beans and the Bodum I’ve brought from Sydney, and I sit in the dark kitchen, staring out the window, spying on the strangers preparing for life.

  By six-thirty the hawker stalls in the market below the apartments are setting up for the day, while in the new shopping centre near the MRT station, Delifrance prepares to compete with sticky croissants, pain-au-chocolats and pastries. It is in these quiet hours of the morning, I suppose, that I feel most at home in Singapore, and I can begin to accept that part of me which is embedded here and refuses to wither away no matter how many times I chop and sear those roots. I let myself out of the flat and walk in the early morning coolness. In the distance the electronic tones of the MRT station sound as a train pulls up to the platform. Buses rattle along the estate feeder roads, picking up schoolkids and people on their way to work. Cars whine on the Pan Island Expressway and pedestrians impatient for the lights to change step out onto the pristine roads, dodging traffic and irate police officers issuing fines for jaywalking.

  Breakfast is ready by the time I’ve taken my morning stroll. I turn into the hawker centre and wander from stall to stall, debating between a bowl of fish porridge, nasi lemak or a couple of spicy, smelly, vermilion-coloured otak otak wrapped and roasted in banana leaves. When my mother was alive she used to crave such things for breakfast. Spooning soggy Weetbix into my mouth or scraping Vegemite onto my toast, I exaggerated my incredulity that anyone could eat anything so pungent and spicy that early in the morning. How is it that my dead mother’s tastebuds now coat my tongue and nudge my cravings?

  I sit on a red stool at a rickety table, sip coconut juice from a plastic bag expertly sealed with a tight twist of pink string, and watch old men shuffle in for breakfast, their white singlets tucked into dark dress pants, brown slippers on their feet. They order, sit down at other tables, unfold closely printed Chinese newspapers and slip into a world that is foreign to me. Out here, away from the city centre, it could almost be a scene from the stories my mother used to tell me.

  After breakfast I pass the local school and look through the chain-link fence to where neat, black-haired kids in crisp white shirts, navy skirts or shorts and white sandshoes parade in geometric shapes around the playground, standing to attention while they sing the Singaporean national anthem in a language that I cannot understand. The kids fascinate me. Did my mother stand to attention like this in the dripping heat as she sang ‘God Save the King’ and her principal read out letters from Queen Mary’s secretary? Did she march like this when she was in her school? How would I have coped? I try to see my own legs pumping up and down in unison with others in those intricate drills. I simply cannot imagine what I would have been like, who I would have been, if the Patriarch had not cannibalised his fear and migrated to Sydney. I go back to Auntie Percy-phone’s flat to do the laundry—separating whites from colours and darks from lights, of course—and to sweep and mop the cool white tiles of the flat. Cleaning is such a calming, satisfying activity.

  Later in the morning I walk over to the MRT station to catch the train that departs Pasir Ris to slither west into the city. One day I get off at City Hall and change for the Dhoby Ghaut, Somerset and Orchard line. In the viscid heat, my T-shirt sticking to my back and arms, I wander down Orchard Road from shopping centre to shopping centre, hotel to hotel, until I stop in Fort Canning Park and look across to St Andrew’s Cathedral, where Por-Por had come to pray with Percy-phone and Pandora so many years ago, only to be thrown out instead; where the Patriarch had married my mother. On another day I stop at Raffles City to look at Raffles Hotel. My mother had always talked about staying there. The next time I go to Singapore, she used to tell us, I’m going to book myself into a grand red room in Raffles Hotel, take high tea, stroll along the verandahs and corridors and pretend I’m someone in a Somerset Maugham novel. But the next time she came to Singapore, she threw herself off an HDB apartment block.

  On another day I venture further westward and wander through the tangled streets of Chinatown. The skyline is splashed with giant calligraphy. From the cinema posters, beautiful Hong Kong actresses toss their hair and flash their eyes at daring heroes who split the air, hovering in midTaekwondo kicks. It’s exactly as she described it, all those years ago. Just cleaner, more sanitised. I peer into dark and obscure doorways where wizened Chinese herbalists guard their boxes and jars of gnarled ginseng roots, ground pearls, Tiger Balm and various jellies, pastes and powders behind green-tinged, scratched glass counters. From the black and white photos that form my mother’s memories of the cityscape, I look for the ghosts of buildings that are no longer there. I feel self-conscious and inadequate because passers-by and hawkers of ‘genuine’ Rolex watches for only twenty-five dollars call out to me in Hokkien, Mandarin and Cantonese and, of course, I can neither understand nor respond. I realise how completely I had depended on Mum whenever we went somewhere Chinese. I had been culturally lazy, content to smile and nod and let her order the dim sum dishes and demand more tea and the bill.

  Finally I get off at Lavender one day. (‘It’s not la-ven-der; it’s lav-ender,’ I still hear Niree say.) I walk up Lavender Street and turn left into the Indian district along Serangoon Road. I sniff the aroma of grilling roti prata, simmering curry, oil and incense as I zone through temple-land, passing the Temple of a Thousand Lights, the Sri Sreenivasa Perumal Temple, the Angullia Mosque and the Kali Amman Temple. I know that on the day before she died, Mum had been found wandering along Serangoon Road. This was why she had come back to Singapore. She wanted to come back to where it had all begun. To trace the moment when she could have made another choice and life would have been completely different.

  She had been looking for her childhood home—the terrace shophouse with the cracked cement courtyard—but he had given the taxi driver the wrong street address. Actua
lly, there was no right address. The entire terraced neighbourhood in which she had grown up had been bought by the government in the early 1980s and bulldozed. This was before the days when colonial shophouses were preserved to attract tourist dollars. Whole streets and narrow lanes were eradicated to make way for brightly lit, air-conditioned, neon-signed shopping centres. Exasperated by her increasing incoherence and distress, the taxi driver had eventually dumped her near Dhoby Ghaut. Lost in the city she’d always considered her ‘real’ home, her white walking stick tapping wildly in front of her, she must have wandered up Selegie Road and crossed over into Serangoon Road.

  Did she, at that point, sniff the same pungent air as me and become aware of her utter foreignness in her homeland? On that last afternoon, did she suddenly wish that she was back in Sydney, where she could at least orientate herself with ease? The city where she had crisscrossed George Street and cut through the Grace Bros building or the Strand Arcade to get from the QVB to Pitt Street Mall a hundred times. Had she missed the mechanical ticking of the pedestrian lights in Burwood which signalled to the blind when they could cross in safety? Did she finally realise that, whatever she might now be, she was no longer Singaporean? Perhaps she had longed for a familiar voice, even if it was only that of the guy in the car park ticket booth at Strathfield Plaza asking her how she was doing that day. Perhaps she had yearned for the breeze on her face and the gentle slap of water against the wharf at Mortlake Bay where Sonny and I sometimes drove her on Sunday afternoons. She had sat in the sun, shaded by her unfurled umbrella, while we took turns reading the newspapers out to her. Perhaps—horror of horrors—she had even missed Brian Henderson intoning at six-twenty-eight on weeknights: ‘And that’s the way it was . . . I’m Brian Henderson . . . Good night.’ She’d then quickly switched channels to the SBS news and Mary Kostakidis before the theme to ‘A Current Affair’ could sound.