Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  Nobody ever found out what had happened on that last afternoon in Singapore. Eventually she was brought back to Uncle Winston’s apartment, distraught and barely intelligible, her speech reduced to a stuttering patois in which English, Malay and Teochew nouns had been erased from her vocabulary to be replaced by the word ‘thing’. Lost and disorientated, unable to see and frustrated by her inability to communicate, she found herself suddenly surrounded by an alarming world of unnameable Things. She phoned the Patriarch in Sydney that night and irritated him with her incoherence, hurt him when she forgot his name.

  ‘I wanted to find that thing where I used to live and I told the thing to turn left at the thing, but he went past the other thing and couldn’t do a . . . this thing. Then we went round and round until he got lost. And then finally he said he was at this thing and I had to get out, so I paid him and got out. I asked this one to show me what to do with that thing but nobody stopped until finally a young man stopped and helped me across. I knew I was at the wrong thing, but I thought that if I walked to the other end of the thing I would find the station and get on the thing. But even though I had my stick I kept walking into things and turning at the wrong thing until I got completely lost.’

  The Patriarch had been characteristically terse with her. Her incompetence annoyed him as much as it worried him, and as usual he showed his concern in a hot blast of scolding. Upset and shaken, Auntie Shufen told us, Pandora went to feed the six guppy fish that she had acquired during her first week in Singapore, when she was striving to recapture and relive her childhood memories. Long ago, Donald Duck had given her six guppies that he’d caught from the river for her tenth birthday. She could never remember what happened to them, but she suspected that one of the boys had mischievously poured them into the stormwater drain outside the terrace house. It was Auntie Percy-phone who bought the guppies this time. Using the leverage of guilt and the last vestiges of pity for the disabled, Auntie Percy-phone finagled a small fish tank out of Uncle Winston.

  It was one of Pandora’s greatest pleasures, during those last weeks, to sit by the fish tank each day and slowly dip her fingers into the cool bubbling water. She said she could feel the tiny currents running over her fingertips and, occasionally, the feathering of a fin brushing her skin.

  On that last day, however, when she dipped her fingers into the water to calm herself, it was still. No tiny tidal ripples, no bubbling, no sense of sleek miniature bodies slicing through the fluid. In a panic, her fingers groped and grasped, inched from one corner of the tank to the next, one hand soon joined by the other, until she was up to her elbows in water which slopped out of the tank onto the opulent Chinese carpet. Uncle Winston was furious that she’d soaked the carpet. He sounded just like the Patriarch. She ignored him.

  ‘Where are my guppies?’ she called out, over and over again, her distress crescendoing along with the volume of her litany. Her sodden fingers fluttered helplessly in the whirling eddies of water she created in the tank.

  Finally Auntie Shufen told her. ‘Hi-yah, don’t make such a fuss, lah. Winston fed them to the Amazonian Cod. He got no more fish food and was too lazy to go down to the NTUC supermarket and buy some more. Sorry, lah. I go and get you some more guppies tomorrow, okay?’

  But it was not okay. As the shops began to open the following morning, Pandora stepped out onto the balcony of Winston’s apartment. She leant over and felt the sucking space below her. Slowly, she took off her red Ferragamo pumps and climbed over the edge until she sat on the railing. Nobody was there to see her except God. She looked up and out, and saw nothing but white light.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘Oh, God.’

  She flung herself off the balcony and fell into the void of his love.

  ‘Pan!’ Auntie Shufen rushed to the spot where a pair of red Ferragamo pumps pointed towards the balcony. She looked over the edge and saw the mash of organs and shattered bone, shuddered, and quickly turned away. Then she picked up the red Ferragamo shoes and took them back inside the flat where she rang the police. In the end, Auntie Percy-phone identified the body. She stared at the pulped flesh and crumpled material of the shirt and trousers, at the spreading tide of blood that thickened and darkened in the growing heat until Pandora lay in her own black hole. All my life my mother smelt of soap and talcum powder—clean and child-like. In death she reeked of bitter violence and disappointed dreams.

  This story was what Auntie Shufen had whispered to Sonny on the night of the wake, when I dozed off and woke up to his madness.

  ‘And that’s it?’ I asked him incredulously when he finally told me. ‘You think she killed herself because Uncle Winston fed her guppies to the Cod God?’

  How ridiculous are our last straws, then.

  For Sonny, it is quite straightforward. The burden of her blindness, coupled with years of insecurity in relationships—with her parents, siblings, husband, friends and, finally, even with us, her children—had literally pushed my mother over the edge. Sonny has found his answers and Uncle Winston was largely to blame; he had somehow provided the flint sparking the conflagration of despair that enticed her into taking that wild step into space. Sonny will look no further beyond that. He has his own life now; a partner, a child. His family. He needs to put all this behind him in order to salvage his future.

  But there are no clear answers for me. Not then, not now. The more I peer into the pond of her life, the less I am certain of anything. Currents move under the surface, strong and tidal, pulling and pushing until I can no longer pinpoint that originary moment of her decision, the one incident that broke the dam of her resistance and swept her into death. I can’t locate it, but still I sift through the public fragments of her private life. Looking for answers, looking for reasons that will never satisfy. Searching for the real person behind my mother.

  Finally, there are no more excuses for me to hang around in Singapore. Nothing more will be gained and my presence is an alien intrusion on the cityscape. A glimpse of me on the streets causes an awkward stumble in the steps of my relatives; a sudden wrenching of the neck, faces carefully turned away; a hurried, furtive crossing of the street. Cousin Adrian gets fined for jaywalking and I have to admit it gives me a sour pleasure. I should return home. Auntie Percy-phone says as much.

  ‘You should go back to Sydney, Grace. You’ve mopped my kitchen floor and scrubbed my bathroom tiles for long enough. You’ve got to get back to work. Or better still, go and clean up your own home.’

  ‘Come back with me,’ I beg Auntie Percy-phone. ‘I can’t go back alone.’

  ‘I won’t stand between you and your father, Grace,’ she says sadly.

  ‘We need you.’

  ‘I can’t try to be Pandora.’

  ‘But you love him. You said you’ve always loved him.’

  ‘Love is not enough.’

  And really, who am I to argue otherwise?

  So I leave Singapore behind. Although at last I’ve learned to love my mother’s homeland, this time I won’t be coming back.

  THE HUNGRY GHOSTS

  When I return to Sydney I don’t recognise the Patriarch anymore. His hair has been bleached white and he looks cadaverous. His skin is like yellowed parchment, brittle and dry, spotted with age. He is getting old, I suddenly realise.

  ‘Are you going to stay here or will you move out?’ Oh, how he hates the fact that he has to ask. He’s not used to it, and he can’t tell me what he wants either. ‘You can stay here if you like. I don’t mind. It will save you paying rent.’

  When I was a child I was as frightened by the Patriarch’s stony silences as I was by his lashing anger. Now I hurl that silence back at him. I press my lips together and turn away from his unspoken plea. I will not weave a lifeline with words and toss it to him. We don’t talk to each other much these days. Silence screams the things we cannot say.

  ‘Well,’ he says hesitantly, ‘I have to go to work.’

  For the Patriarch, the narcotic mundanity of scaling, drilling an
d filling teeth, of extractions and root canals, crowns and bridges, will see him through his grief during the day. But in the evening he comes home to a noiseless darkness. He doesn’t eat, he just sits in the kitchen in a daze, unable to recover from the concussion that life has given him. He is so alone.

  In the end I decide to stay. The blood of generations of dutiful Chinese daughters flows in my veins too. He is not fit to take care of himself although he anxiously tries to assure me otherwise.

  ‘I’m all right, really,’ the Patriarch says. ‘I’ll be retiring soon anyway. You don’t have to do this, you know.’

  ‘It’s okay. I want to.’

  But he feels the resentment in my care.

  ‘Well. Thank you,’ he says awkwardly.

  He needs me now. I tell him brusquely what to do and he obeys meekly, like a fearful little child. The desire for revenge still throbs like a toothache in me. Sometimes I bait him with barbed words and I see him clenching his temper, forcing his anger back down into his body. He has inherited my mother’s dyspepsia; hurt and unhappiness rumble in his bowels and rack his body. He turns away and disengages from conflict, no longer a tyrant, not even a competent opponent. I am almost ashamed of the power that I have over him now, a power I must try to control because now I can actually hurt him. And maybe I had that power all along, maybe my mother did too, but we just never recognised it.

  My twenty-sixth year is a year of regression. I’m back to my old cleaning job, back in my father’s house in Burwood, back in my old room looking out to the railway track. At nights I find that, as in my adolescence, I cannot sleep. The Patriarch chases dreams in his sleep, is chased by nightmares in return. I lie awake and watch a spider crawl across the ceiling. Horlicks no longer works, I know. Two-thirty creeps towards three o’clock and then to four. I have such a long day ahead of me. In growing rage I burrow my fingers under my nightshirt and underpants, close my eyes and begin to stroke myself. Urgent, violent strokes that seem intent on ripping flesh from bone. Eventually, at last, I manage to jerk myself off. No pleasure, no satisfaction. Only release and exhaustion.

  ‘Fuck. Fuck it all,’ I say as I begin to doze off into hideous dreams.

  Mother, dearest mother, how I hate you. If your body were lying before me now I would snatch up a knife and stab you, stab you, stab you until you opened your eyes and cried out in anguished pain. I would rip open your heart and bathe my frozen hands in your warm blood. I would make you look at me and see me. I would make you feel the hun- ger in my eyes—the eyes of your ghost child returned. But you have disappeared into your black hole. And in doing so, you have shattered my own crystalline darkness; the jagged edges of the void inside shred me until I haemorrhage my longing, my desire, my very self into the woman that you might have been.

  For how do I know who you really were? You kept yourself whole and secret, hidden away from the greedy hands and lips of your husband, the neediness of your son and daughter. How was it that you could pour yourself into the careless hands of strangers so that everything I have learned about you since was gleaned from the reminiscences of people I hardly know? I banged and battered at the steel grille of your heart but you kept it resolutely locked. In my frustration I mocked you and belittled you, and you retreated even further behind your bars.

  ‘What kind of mother are you anyway?’ I said in anger, and the hurt in your eyes fed my viciousness. ‘You’re a fucking hopeless mother.’

  But you were the only mother I had. You slipped away from me. Like my father, I loved you so much but I never understood you. You bewildered me. Death has short-circuited our relationship and now I can’t reach you; we will never connect. I stitch down words to the page but your life unravels as soon as I grasp the fraying threads.

  These days I dream the Patriarch’s dreams. His nightmares seep into my sleep. I see you watching me from the other side of the red wooden bridge you crossed to reach the other world. In my dreams I step onto the bridge and run towards you but the span lengthens as I run. My feet pound the red slats, but the faster I run, the more slats appear like railway sleepers barrelling endlessly before me.

  ‘Mum, talk to me,’ I cry out. ‘Don’t leave me like this.’

  What do you want me to say, you ask me, as you asked my father so many years ago. And, like him, I can’t resist the question that I’m not supposed to ask. Did you ever love me, I demand, and because I asked—because you didn’t volunteer it, because you never volunteered it—I will never know. Mum, do you love me, I ask over and over again in my dreams each night. Each time you answer yes, yet I’m right back where I started. I run onto the red bridge and the span yawns wider than ever before. Love is the answer, but my question is wrong. If you loved me, why have I never felt loved?

  When I was a little girl, before you abandoned the lore of your Chinese childhood for the lure of Anglo-Christian acceptance, you used to tell me about the Hungry Ghosts, the spirits of the restless dead who rampage the earth seeking to satisfy their ravenous appetites. They are outsiders, searching hopelessly for food, fulfilment, acceptance, peace. Do you remember how, each year, on the night of the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, we sneaked out in the evening when the Patriarch had fallen asleep in front of ‘Sale of the Century’? You made Sonny and me bring a small red bowl of rice, the leftovers of our dinner, pieces of fruit and glossy photographs of clothes that you had cut out of women’s magazines. In the dim indigo light we walked along the embankment above the railway tracks running from Burwood to Croydon.

  You stopped halfway along the road at a T-junction and, when there were no cars whizzing by on Railway Parade, no curious eyes to watch us, you knelt down and built a makeshift altar. You burnt a fat red candle and stuck joss sticks into a clean peanut butter jar. Reverently, with a quick, fearful glance over our shoulders in case the spirits were watching, hovering over us, we offered the food and burnt the paper gifts. Then Sonny and I ran home, our sandals slapping the asphalt and the wind tearing through our hair like fingers, screaming with terrified excitement in case the Hungry Ghosts descended and devoured us too. It was just a game to us; we made our offerings to placate ill-tempered, discontented, vengeful sprites who were caught between one world and the next. Whereas you—an outsider in a foreign land—made yours out of empathy with the dislocated dead.

  These days I imagine that you have joined the ranks of the unearthly exiles. A Hungry Ghost, phantasmal vagabond, you wander around trying still to fill that bleak black hole inside you. In death, as in life, you remain displaced. This year, during the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, I leave a plate of your favourite food and a cup of Tikuanyin tea for you in our garden. I tear out the fashion pages from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, I cut out advertisements for beautiful handbags and glamorous gowns, and I burn them all for you. In death you shall have nothing but the best. I rip out pictures of comfortable living rooms, renovated country kitchens and elegant bedroom suites, consigning them to the fire. I want you to have a home.

  As flames curl the paper and it crumples to ash, out of the corner of my eye I catch the curve of your cheek and the flash of your smile. When I turn to look full-on, I can no longer see you for I do not have the yin eyes that can gaze upon the dead. But I know that you have understood my best intentions. I look down at the conflagration of my love and then I walk away, back to the house.

  The Patriarch sits in the darkness of the living room, the phone cradled in his hands. I switch the light on because he shouldn’t be alone in the dark.

  ‘There were some phone calls for you while you were out. Here, I wrote down the messages.’ He indicates the notepad by the telephone with names and numbers written neatly.

  ‘Thanks. They’re probably just cleaning jobs.’ I scan them quickly and I am surprised to see Sonny’s name and number there. I will call him back, but not too soon and not too eagerly. I have learned not to lasso him with my love.

  ‘Grace, you don’t go anywhere but work,’ the Patriarch says tentatively, astoundingly.
We make it a policy these days not to comment on each other’s lives. ‘Perhaps you should get out more. You should get a life of your own.’

  He is right, of course. I should, and I will. Eventually. Still, I can’t resist a spiteful jab at him. ‘Like you let Mum have a life of her own?’

  His eyes leak unexpectedly, his nose bleeds with painful sobs, and immediately I regret my malice. He turns away, groping for the Kleenex.

  ‘Dad, are you all right?’ I ask helplessly. He takes my shoulders and I can’t prevent the wince because I’m so shocked. We have always been careful not to touch. He thinks I am revolted by this unexpected contact, his touch. I’m not sure how I feel. His hands drop away.

  ‘Grace,’ he says. ‘Are you ever going to forgive me? Am I always going to be the villain in your story? I didn’t mean to be a bad father or husband, you know. I should have done things differently. I wish I could go back and change it all.’

  I say nothing because I understand the futility, the absolute pointlessness, of ‘I should have’ and ‘I wish’. I glance up at him and suddenly I see him looking at me with my mother’s bleak, blank eyes. Hungry Ghost eyes which fill me with guilt. Why are grudges so difficult to let go of? Why is it so hard to love?

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ I say, and at this moment I am amazed to find that I actually mean it. Maybe I won’t mean it tomorrow, but it will do for tonight and it will get easier as time passes.

  Questions still remain unanswered; there will never be a reconciliation with those we have lost. But maybe this is all I can do, maybe this is all we can ever do: to make up to the living our debt to the dead.