That was five years ago, a lifetime. In the space of five years, I had finished primary school (though I hoped I wouldn’t have to – hoped and hoped that the millennium bug would crash all the computers so I wouldn’t have to go to my new secondary school), lost my only friend, and become an outcast in my new class. The erasers are now thumbnail-sized, and only the blue bit is left of the French flag.
Back then I could still see what faces people were making even when they weren’t sitting right next to me. Now, unless I press my face right up to whatever I’m supposed to see, everything is a smudge of cloud and colour.
While I read the posters on the optician’s wall – TAKE AN EYE BREAK EVERY 40 MINUTES & LOOK AT A TREE – my mother picked out my new frames from the hundreds, thousands, lined up under the glass-top counter.
‘How much is this?’
The man took out a calculator and started tapping on it. ‘That one, with student discount…hunnerd-twenty.’
‘That one?’
Tap-tap-tap. ‘Hunnerd-seventy-five.’
‘Anything below a hundred?’
‘Oh, that one lor.’
‘Come, Kevin, try these on.’
She handed me a pair with plastic rims, thick, black. I removed my own glasses, then put them on. I could just make out a me-shaped blur in the mirror – a beige-yellow circle, black on top. ‘How does it look?’ I asked, turning to face my mother.
There was a pause before she said, ‘We’ll take them.’
The optician coughed and rustled some papers. ‘And the lenses? You want high index? Better get them for strong prescriptions like his, so the lenses are not so thick.’
‘How much?’
The calculator went tap-tap-tap-tap and my mother sucked in her breath. ‘The normal one is okay.’
When my father came home that evening, I told him that I was going blind.
He pulled his right ear and said, ‘Makes your ear sharp.’
At school, I’d hoped no one would notice my new glasses but of course Albert did. I had known him ever since we moved into the block but we had never been in the same class. The moment I stepped into the classroom on the first day of secondary school and saw how he had been watching me walk in, how his lip had gone up a little on one side, my stomach started to hurt.
It hurt that morning, when I looked in the mirror and saw that the glasses covered half my face. At least the bowl cut which my mother had given me was growing out. I spent ten minutes combing my hair forward to see if it would cover up the glasses, the thickness of the lenses and frames, until my mother started screaming about me missing my ride. It didn’t help that the new glasses kept sliding down my nose. Or that she’d thrust the red thermos at me in front of Albert, and in full sight of everyone on the bus, or that my breakfast congee had extra fried onions on top, stinking up the school bus when I opened up the thermos. I tried to ignore Albert when he shoved me at the steps of the bus so that he could get off first. Pretended not to hear him and his friends calling out to me,‘Oi, gay boy’ – ‘ah gua’ – ‘retard!’ But some things are harder to ignore. All of that was fine (at least that was what I tried telling myself). What was not fine was finding the cover of my maths and English workbooks scrawled with the same words, alongside cartoon mounds of shit inked in black marker. On the pages within – both blank and those filled with my own handwriting – were more drawings: a face, with giant specs and rabbity teeth, which was supposed to be me, and a crude sketching of a cock and balls next to an exercise where I’d filled in all the missing verbs in a sentence.
After that, I brought my lunch (always the same: char siu rice, no cucumbers, extra chilli) to the garden even though no one was supposed to. When the school janitor was there, pulling up weeds and tending to the rabbit hutch, I had to go somewhere else. Not the canteen, where they were sure to see me, so I skipped lunch and just went to the library. Once, when the library was closed for inventory, I made the food-stall auntie put my lunch in a takeaway bag and brought it to the boys’ bathroom, locked myself in a cubicle and ate sitting down on the toilet seat. It was March, during one of those too-hot afternoons that made the back of my uniform stick to my chair, when Ms Pereira told us to bring in our workbooks for the quarterly check. This is it, I thought, this is the end. I could already see it: Ms Pereira’s nose flaring when she saw the lewd drawings, then calling my mother to talk about my ‘problematic behaviour’. Or worse, Ms Pereira getting the discipline master to cane me in front of the entire school at assembly. I wondered which would be worse, throwing my books into a bin and saying that I’d lost them, or getting new workbooks for all my classes and copying everything I had done so far into them. Except I couldn’t afford new ones, even skipping lunch to save up for them wouldn’t be quick enough. I did the only thing I could think of: go to my grandmother.
‘Ah Ma, I need some money.’
‘For what?’
‘I need workbooks.’
‘There’s a whole stack under the coffee table,’ she said and went to look for them. My stomach started to hurt when she bent down and the knobbly bits of her spine poked through her shirt. ‘If not, you can go down to the convenience store. Ah Beng’s shop sells them cheap.’
‘Not exercise books, Ah Ma. Workbooks. I need the one for English class. The expensive ones you can only get at the bookstore.’
‘Har? Why? What do you mean? Don’t you have one already?’
That was when I told her what Albert had done. Before I had finished, she’d gotten up and hobbled over to his flat a few doors down. I heard her high voice even from the living room, snapping in my ear like a rubber band. Later that evening, I heard Albert crying as his mother whipped him with her bamboo cane. My mother had looked at Ah Ma as if to say ‘look what you did’.
‘He drew in my workbook,’ I said, showing my mother the pages. She flinched when I got to the page with the cock and balls on it before looking away.
‘Just ignore him. Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you.’
That was when everything else came out, I couldn’t help it, about Albert calling me names, putting out a leg to trip me whenever I went past.
‘I can’t even have lunch in the canteen because they make fun of my water bottle.’
‘What’s wrong with your water bottle?’
‘IT HAS THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE ON IT.’
‘Boy, don’t shout at your mother,’ my mother said. She breathed loudly, in and out of her nose several times before she continued. ‘Ignore them. They’re just jealous.’
‘Jealous of what?’
‘Be the mature one. You know, there are two types of heroes? The flashy ones and the quiet ones. The quiet ones grow up to become doctors and pilots and policemen.’
‘I don’t think I can become a pilot,’ I said, squinting at her.
‘They become teachers and civil servants and vets.’
I thought about the time I had two white mice, Harry and Jane. How Jane had got pregnant. We separated them but in the end, when she had finished giving birth, I got there in time to see her pushing one baby after another – plump, raspberry pink – into her tiny mouth. My mother had screamed but Ah Ma had simply brought the mouse back to the pet-store owner at the market. Harry died a few weeks later in his food bowl, round as a tennis ball and just as firm, after overeating from heartbreak.
A year ago, when I was in the last year of primary school, my teacher had written in my report card: ‘Kevin is well-behaved but rather lackadaisical.’ My mother had made me go to my room to get the dictionary and look up the last word.
‘Lak-uh-dey-zi-kul,’ I’d read. ‘Without interest, vigour or determination; listless; lethargic.’
‘What? What’s that mean?’ Ah Ma said and made my mother translate it for her. ‘Well, who’s this? Is this that keling teacher? They don’t know anything.’
‘Ma!’ my mother said.
‘What is she, Wei Han? This teacher? Is she ang moh? Or keling?
Her name sounds Indian.’
‘MA, don’t use those words in front of the boy. You’re supposed to say “Indian”. Keling is a bad word.’ But she was looking at me, not at Ah Ma. She does this every time my grandmother says anything like that, ever since I embarrassed my mother in front of her boss, Mr Truman, during a company dinner when I asked if he was the ang moh my mother worked for. He had laughed and said yes but my mother turned red and piled food onto my plate to stop me from talking.
‘Mrs Singh is Indian,’ I said. ‘She brought homemade murukku to class for Deepavali.’
‘I hope you didn’t eat them. Don’t know what these people put in their food. They are all the same. The Malays steal, the Indians just drink beer all day…’
‘And what do the Chinese do? They just say ugly things about other people all day,’ my mother muttered before turning her attention back to me and narrowing her eyes to let me know if I were to repeat any of these things to anyone, I would be in trouble.
I saw my father dart his eyes at my mother, then at Ah Ma and dart them away again and I knew he was thinking about the Tiger beers he had after they went to bed. He had one every night, and usually many (many) more than that on Friday and Saturday nights. I didn’t have to go to bed early so I would sit and shell peanuts for him. If he was in a good mood, he would help me with my maths homework as he drank and let me tip the empty cans so that I caught the last drops with my tongue. They didn’t taste like anything, just fizz and metal. Sometimes he drank and watched TV until he fell asleep, snoring and waking everyone (except Ah Ma, who is hard of hearing). Once, next door even came to complain about the noise.
‘I don’t think I can be a vet and I don’t think I want to become a teacher,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter. Stop complaining about Albert. And besides, you have no proof that he drew in your book.’
‘Proof?’ Ah Ma said, ‘You want proof? Just look at that neighbour boy, you think he’s a nice child? Fat as a pig, mean as one too.’ Then she went on to tell the story about how a sow had taken the hand off a child when she was living in the kampong. ‘We let our pigs run around the village the way people now let their dogs run around their garden. Pigs are like people; half are nice, half are devils.’
All of this, I remembered as BEFORE THE STROKE, because AFTER THE STROKE was when Everything happened. Ah Ma had her first stroke that evening just as the Chinese ten o’clock news was finishing. The newscasters were saying goodnight when Ah Ma announced that she had a headache and tried to get up from the sofa. Then she fell over and couldn’t get up on her own again. While my parents lifted her onto the sofa – my father at her head and my mother at her feet – I looked on and couldn’t move, not even when my mother screamed at me to get the phone. All I could do was stare at the bottoms of my grandmother’s feet, child-sized, a callus near her right pinkie toe.
I was following them out of the door when my mother shooed me back in. ‘You have school tomorrow. Stay here and I’ll call with the news.’ I sat on the sofa by the phone until I fell asleep. It was one in the morning when my mother shook me awake to say that my grandmother was okay – that she’d had a stroke and was all right but my father would stay with her just to make sure. The following day I took the bus to the hospital after school. When I got there, my father was fidgeting in his seat next to the bed. I could tell from the way he was tapping his fingers on his knees that he had been there for some time and had been waiting for me to arrive. Ah Ma was sitting up in bed; one corner of her lip was glistening with saliva and I was torn between wanting to give her a handkerchief and running out of the room.
Then my father got up to go to the bathroom and left me alone with my grandmother. It was in those five minutes that Ah Ma said it. The thing that was going to come true later that week. As soon as we were alone, she turned to me and said, ‘Wei Han, listen. I’m going to die soon and when I die, you can have everything in our room.’
‘Ah Ma!’
‘There is money in my underwear drawer, in a biscuit tin.’
‘Ah Ma!’
‘Maybe you should write that down, in case you forget.’
‘Ah Ma, stop!’
‘And the cassette player and my tapes, you can have those as well. Go and get it from my overnight bag over there. I want to show you how to use it so you don’t break it.’
She spoke slowly, putting effort into making each sound. I looked at her for the first time since the previous night and saw that one side of her face was not like the other, as if she had been tilted and left like that, leaning at an angle. I couldn’t figure out which side was the wrong one, the bad side, until I brought her the cassette player and she reached out with her left arm. Ah Ma, a righty all her life. She put it in her lap and pointed with her left index finger.
‘Look. Press here to play, there to record. Remember to rewind the tapes when you’re finished listening. Always rewind them. Don’t forget.’ The earphones unspooled and dangled from her lap, swinging in the air.
‘But those are your tapes.’ I knew there were about twenty of them on her bedside table, all filled with hours and hours of Hokkien and Teochew opera. She would sit in front of the radio and when one of her favourite operas came on, she would call out ‘Aiya!’ and walk-run into the bedroom, arms swinging at her sides to propel her forward, and I would hear the crack of a new cassette shell being opened for the first time, the snap of the cassette deck being shut. Then she would come back out again and put the recorder next to the radio, push Record, and wave for everyone to keep quiet, a crooked finger to her mouth. At night, she slept with it on her chest as if that would make the sound of the people and instruments travel through her person and into her head. Most of the time she fell asleep with the music still whining out of the speaker and I would have to get up, feel my way over to her bed in the dark and click it off.
‘It sounds like stray cats in the alley,’ I had protested one morning. I had held my face above my pork congee so that my glasses steamed up and I wouldn’t have to look at my grandma while I complained about her. I said it twice, first in English, then in Mandarin. ‘Hao xiang mao jiao.’
My father laughed and I knew I had won. The next day, he’d got Ah Ma earphones for her music and she went to sleep that night with the earbuds in, the black cord of it twisted around her hand. The funny thing is, after that, it took me longer to fall asleep. Remembering this, trying to stop Ah Ma from listening to her music like that, made me want to hit myself in the face.
‘But it’s yours.’ My cheeks were burning from the memory of having complained about her and I couldn’t look at her in the eye.
‘And it’s still mine. Until I’m dead. And don’t let it get rusty while I’m in here. I might be gone for a while.’
‘Ah Ma…’
My father came out of the bathroom. ‘Boy, are you ready to leave?’
I stood up and waved goodbye to Ah Ma.
A few hours later, while we were having dinner, Ah Ma had her second stroke.
That night, as we waited once more in the same pink-and-white corridor, outside the same room, I asked my father when Ah Ma would be able to go home and he just looked away. That was when the doctor came out to say that we should probably prepare ourselves; it was unlikely that Ah Ma was going to improve. Then he pressed his lips together and scribbled something on his chart. His shoes made squeaking noises as he walked away from us. Instead of thinking about Ah Ma, I scrabbled around in my brain for other things to think about and came up with two. One: that I wasn’t going to be a doctor. Two: Ah Ma’s cassette player.
It was strange that night without Ah Ma hobbling around in our two-bedroom flat – the absence was solid, something we tiptoed around, pretending not to notice. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like going to sleep with an empty bed on the other side of the room but the thought of it made the dark behind my eyelids darker than black. So I stopped. Instead, I got up. The cassette player was still in my school bag fro
m earlier that afternoon, when she’d forced it into my hands. I took it out, pressed Play, and left it on her pillow so that I could just about hear the tinny faraway sound of her music sneaking out of her earphones at the loud bits, the exciting bits, when the gongs and cymbals really got going. Then I closed my eyes again and pretended that she was there, listening to her opera, her head propped up on her wooden pillow.
The rest of the week that Ah Ma was in hospital, my parents and I talked about everything else but about her. Even when we were there, next to the bed, with the tubes going in and out of her and the machines making little beeping noises, everyone pretended that we were at home sitting around after dinner. Except there was no TV to look at, and Ah Ma was lying down instead of sitting in her usual spot in the armchair. She looked even worse than before, even less like herself. That one side of her face wasn’t just slightly crooked now, it seemed frozen, as if it didn’t belong to her.
My mother used her Hospital Voice the second we were in the ward. It was soft and an octave higher than usual; it sounded wrong, like lullabies sung outside, under the afternoon sun. It made me think something bad was going to happen (it was, it did).
‘Hello Ma,’ she whispered, ‘how are you feeling?’
My grandmother was lying down and had to press a button to make the top of the bed fold up with a ‘zzzng’. While we watched it inch up, all I could think was I didn’t understand how she could be comfortable on the hospital pillow the way it is, soft and almost flat and covered in plasticky cotton. I felt like asking if it might be better to bring her her wooden pillow from home.
‘O-gay,’ my grandmother nodded. ‘Eden?’
‘Yes, yes, we’ve eaten. Na, soup – peanut and pig’s tail.’
My father stood by while my mother tucked a handful of paper towels down the front of Ah Ma’s hospital gown and spoon-fed her, his eyes far away.
I tried to guess what it was he might be thinking about instead. His clients? Their swimming pools? Worrying if he smelled too much of chlorine? The plants that he was growing in pots in the corridor outside our door? I stopped there. I realized I knew very little else about my own father. Then a little black thought crawled in. Maybe he was thinking about how expensive it was, a bed in a hospital. Almost a week. Maybe he was thinking it was better if –
How We Disappeared Page 5