‘Are you thirsty?’ I filled a plastic cup and put a straw to her mouth like I’d seen my mother do before. Ah Ma took a few sips, clamped her mouth shut and pushed my hand away.
‘Enough, enough.’
She puckered her mouth again, crumpled the end of the blanket in her hands and swept her hand over the cloth, making staticky tic-tic-tic sounds – so many that I thought I might see sparks flying from her. When the blanket was finally smooth, she pulled at it again so that the smoothing was undone. I was watching her hands, thinking how much they looked like pigeon’s feet, lined and raw and gnarled with bumps where there shouldn’t be, when she said, ‘Son…’
I looked around, thinking that my father must be in the doorway, back from getting tea and sandwiches in the canteen, but there was nobody else in the ward except for the five other patients in their beds. One of them, a man around Ah Ma’s age, was looking at a basket of fruit on the table in front of him and talking to it in a voice loud enough for me to know that it was Cantonese, but too soft for me to make out the words. Once or twice he paused and nodded, the way my mother nodded when the neighbour complained to her about the problems her children were having at school, then continued talking.
‘Son,’ Ah Ma repeated.
‘Pa went to the canteen. If you want him now I can go and get him.’ I said, stepping back so quickly the plastic folding chair almost tipped over. But my grandmother had already shot out one arm and wrapped her fingers around my wrist, so tight that it reminded me of how she used to do the laundry, wringing water out of all the clothes and towels and things until they were almost dry.
‘Ah Ma?’ I heard myself, the way my voice started on high and went up at the end, higher still. ‘Ah Ma,’ I tried again, trying not to sound scared this time.
‘Son,’ she said, slow and clear so the words could come out properly. ‘I have sumding impordant to say before I… I… Budd you have to promise. You can’t blame me.’
‘AH MA, I AM WEI HAN,’ I said, sounding out each letter and opening my mouth so wide I could feel the corners of my lips crack. When she didn’t respond, I put my head down and whispered, ‘I’m boy-boy.’ I could feel my cheeks getting warm when I said this. Boy-boy, mam-mam, shee-shee; this is why my classmates ignore me, I thought.
‘I’m boy-boy,’ I repeated, bending over to whisper this into the curved seashell of her ear.
But Ah Ma didn’t seem to be listening. Didn’t seem to hear anything other than the rush of words coming out of her own mouth.
‘Slow down, Ah Ma. I don’t understand you. SLOW DOWN.’ When she didn’t, I did the only thing that I could think of. I took out the tape recorder and pressed the record button.
‘I found you! Pease don’t baneme… Ifoundyou and tookyouawaay. They were dead ormowheregobemouuuuund…I…dinnnnow…Eerbuddyelsewasgoooh…and…waadoondydyingdohell. I wanndeddosaveyou. Youwerejusababy, soniddle. I wannded to look forem, I did, but ondmund begamedoendend idbegame dooyears tree. EndnafterdatI just cuddent. I couldn’t.’
She stopped and breathed in through her mouth, the effort of it making a deep hollow in her throat. She seemed to be waiting for something, something from me, but I didn’t know what.
‘Dooyouvergeefmee? I tried to look forem. Ayr reelly did. Eyydunwanyada blammee weenyfindoud. Pease forgeef me.’
While my grandmother begged, the patient who had been talking with his fruit basket sat up and watched, holding a peeled banana in one hand. Another patient got out of bed and slowly, carefully drew shut the curtains around her cubicle. When the clink and drag of the curtain hooks came to a stop, I repeated, ‘Ah Ma…’ I pulled at the arm she was holding on to and felt, with each tug, the tightening of her grip.
Then I asked, because I felt I had to, because I could taste the words, thick and bitter, rising up my throat. I needed to spit them out.
‘Who? Who were you looking for?’
She took a big gulp, like a fish on land fighting for air. ‘Your parents.’ Then she closed her eyes, turning her face away as if she couldn’t bear to see. ‘Doyoublamemeee? I’m still your mother, righhh? Do you blame me?’ There was a long pause. Her eyes were still closed and I thought for a moment that she was gone. Then she turned back to look at me, eyes wet but clear as I’d ever seen them.‘Do you blame me? Pease,’ she said and then in Chinese, ‘qiu qiu ni.’
I shook my head and realized my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I swallowed and said, ‘No.’ I wasn’t thinking when the rest of it came out. ‘No, Ma. I don’t blame you.’
When she finally let go of my wrist and closed her eyes, I knew that there would be no waking her up this time. The bright-red call button was pulsing in front of my eyes so I reached out, jammed my thumb into it and braced myself for the wail of a siren, something loud and alarming and appropriate, but nothing happened. Ah Ma still had her eyes closed. The too-slow pips coming from the heart monitor machine were slowing down even more. The man in the corner had gone back to chatting with his fruit basket. I pressed the stop button on the recorder and put it back in my pocket. Finally, I heard the soft clip of someone brisk-walking along the corridor.
When my parents came back into the room a few minutes later smelling of coffee and sweetener from the hospital cafeteria, the doctor was already there.
‘What’s going on?’
‘It seems she had another stroke.’ The doctor stopped talking and looked at me, then looked back at my mother again. She nodded. My father nodded. I wanted everyone to stop nodding and just say the obvious but no one did. The doctor signed his name on the bottom of a chart, clicked the pen and put it back in his breast pocket. He stood there with his hands folded behind his back. Everyone except me seemed to be waiting for something.
‘Boy, are you hungry? Let’s go outside, to the canteen,’ she said.
I nodded but I stood where I was and watched as my father sat down in the chair next to the bed, picked up Ah Ma’s limp hand and stroked it. He held on to it with both hands, as if he were trying to warm her. It was the first and only time I had ever seen them touch.
‘Let’s go.’ My mother took my wrist, the one that still had the sharp bone-feel of my grandmother’s fingers on my skin, and led me out.
All the way back home, I thought about telling my father what Ah Ma had said before she closed her eyes. I could repeat to him the few words that I’d understood, poor Ah Ma, struggling to get the words out of her crooked, half-frozen mouth; the few words that were now in my chest (I found you) and were growing in the secret dark (I took you away). Growing and growing into a feeling (They were dead. I found you. Please forgive me). I felt like when I was little again and taking my first bus ride. We were on the bus for only ten minutes before we had to alight for me to throw up at the bus stop. The words churned around in my stomach until we were almost home; once or twice, my fingers hovered over the rewind and play buttons on the recorder and I wished I had my earphones with me so I could listen to it right there in the back seat and try to make out what my grandmother had tried so hard to articulate.
That evening, the phone rang just as my mother was plating the dishes for dinner. I waited for my father to get it but he was in the bedroom so I picked it up.
‘Hello, can I speak to Kevin Lim?’ went a badly muffled voice.
‘Yes? Who’s this?’
‘I want to make sure I’m speaking to the correct Kevin Lim. What is your full name?’
‘Kevin Lim Wei Han. Who –’
‘Wrong! Your name is Kevin Chao Ah Gua.’
I heard laughter, several different voices, on the other end of the line.
‘Chao Ah Gua, I know you still sleep with your grandmother. Too sissy to have your own bed, right?’
‘I’m going to hang up.’
‘Why? Because you need to get your Pampers changed, retard? Why don’t you go to a special school? No one likes you here.’
I could feel my mother standing not four feet away so I kept my face down and said noth
ing.
‘Boy,’ my mother said, fake whispering. ‘Tell your friend it’s dinner time. Food’s getting cold.’
‘Bye, Albert.’ I hung up the phone.
I spent some time washing and drying my hands extensively, making sure that my face was normal again before I left the bathroom. My father was sitting at the table and staring into space with his chopsticks in his hand. My mother pushed the bowl of soup towards him but he didn’t react.
‘Was that Albert? The boy next door? Good. Good to see you making friends at last.’
I went to sleep that night in the room I used to share with my grandmother. The room was now all mine. I wondered if they would move the other single bed out and when. And when they would put away the things in her chest of drawers. I was about to fall asleep when my father came into the room. I put on the lamp, which was a mistake. It lit up the shadows under his eyes and around his mouth. The lines that had been hiding on his forehead. It made his face white-yellow and I thought about my grandmother’s bloodless face on that stiff, plastic, hospital pillow, and all the other faces that had been on it, had dreamed and drooled and cried into it.
My father swayed left and right on his feet but stayed where he was, in between the writing desk and my bed. ‘Are you okay?’
I said yes but it came out more as a question. ‘Yes,’ I repeated, to make sure he wasn’t going to ask again. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Do you still have classes next week?’
‘No. It’s midterm now. Today was the last day of school.’ I sat up straighter and rubbed my eyes. How strange it was, to remember that I had been in class today, sitting next to Victor and adding item after item to the list of holiday homework at the end of each class. If I flipped to the last page of my notebook now, I would see a red circle around the words ‘show-and-tell’, with exclamation marks all around it, each one signalling my alarm as the teacher talked about the assignment; how it was supposed to be an essay, as well as a five-minute presentation. Next to me, Victor started talking about his trip to Canberra and how he was going to go snorkelling and bring back a coral reef to show the rest of us who were never going to see one. I would have told Victor that he was going to the wrong city, if his plan was to go snorkelling, but my tongue was leaden with the fact that I was going nowhere and doing nothing. Nothing then, to show or tell. There was talk about Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong until I noticed Albert – his face stony and dull in the sea of excitement. He wasn’t going anywhere either. Below ‘show-and-tell’ I had scribbled down ‘Zoo? Underwater world? Ikea?’– the last barely readable because the thought of going to Ikea (my mother had drawn a circle around a dining table in the magazine and told me that we were saving up for it; we were going one weekend during the June holidays, she said) and then talking about it in front of everyone had made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I thought about the map tacked up on the wall right above my head. It was old and faded but the mark I had made, right below Malaya, was still red. ‘Little red dot, see there?’ My father had showed me, pointing it out. Then he went on to explain that we were right on the equator and that was why it was hot all the time and rained every day at three in the afternoon. I had looked at the speck he had pointed at and coloured it in with a red marker pen so I wouldn’t have to squint to find it anymore. My father had driven us across the island once, west to east. It took forty-five minutes. Tiny. And I would have to find something worthy of a show-and-tell on this tiny, tiny island.
This was what I had worried about most of the day, about the holidays and the zoo, about the show-and-tell. And then I was in hospital watching my grandmother die.
‘Because if there’re classes, I can write a note so you don’t have to go. With the funeral and cremation, you’ll have to miss them.’
‘Okay, Pa. But there’s no more school… Only remedial classes during the last week of June.’ I spoke slowly to make sure he understood. This heavy-faced man with his faraway eyes.
‘Chinese?’
I nodded. ‘And maths.’ I wanted him to say something. To reprimand me again for having done badly enough during the midterm exams to need extra classes but he just nodded.
‘Okay. Alright.’ He turned to go, then stopped. ‘With Ah Ma gone, you’re going to be on your own during the day. Once your mother and I go back to work. You’re old enough, aren’t you, to be on your own?’
I nodded.
He nodded back, then shut the door behind him. I waited a little before getting up and opening it again just an inch. There was the smell of my grandmother in the room – a combination of jasmine and talcum powder and old cotton – and the imagined sound of her music in my ears, and I didn’t want it to be the last thing I was aware of before I fell asleep. Outside, in the flats on our left and right, the night went on: reruns on television, the metallic tinkle of kitchen utensils being put away, someone shouting at someone else who didn’t or couldn’t shout back. I could separate our own noises from the others: my mother’s bedroom slippers across the floor, the steady whirl of the fan in my parents’ room. I heard the bed creak as my father’s weight descended upon it, I heard the light go off and the rustle of their blanket as they each settled into their side of the bed, and I waited for my father to start snoring. Waited for him to start off suspicious and soft, and wind his way up into sounding like my mother’s blender if you put a stone into it. The familiar sound of it sent me to sleep the way opera music sent my grandmother to sleep. Used to send. I waited and waited but it never came.
Wang Di
There were just two people left who’d known the Old One and she had two hours that evening to find them. Two hours between five and dinner time, during which the cooler temperatures made it pleasant enough to be outside. She knew them simply as Leong and Ah Ren. At the Old One’s funeral, Leong had shaken her hand and said how sorry he was while his brother – younger but greying before him – stood aside and looked on. She hadn’t asked that day, but was aware, from talk, that they had chosen to stay in the same neighbourhood. She remembered how the housing agent had told her it was ‘just down the road’, and how endless the trek of that morning had been, and armed herself with a plastic bottle and her pushcart.
As she walked she had the discomfiting sense of having stepped, unwittingly, into another country. Her new building was sickly orange, and each one in the cluster was violently coloured, not sun-bleached and streaked with pigeon and mynah droppings. There were more flowering plants around the new estate, another riot of colours, green and pink and purple, to make up for the shut-in feeling people get from living in shoebox apartments. For more than an hour, she weaved in and out of the clusters of buildings, taking note of lift landings and large public bins, the back of shops and food courts where people left out boxes and tins emptied of beans, meat or fruit in syrup. Made a map of the neighbourhood in her head and tucked it away for later. The Old One had often marvelled at her memory, at the ease with which she rattled off telephone numbers, recipes she got from the cooking show on TV, and led the way to places that she had visited just once. ‘That’s what happens when you can’t write things down, I have no choice but to know it all by heart,’ she’d explained. And stopped. Wishing she didn’t remember everything. Soon Wei had noticed the look on her face and changed the subject, talking about how forgetful he was getting, how lucky he was to have a young wife. ‘Silly old fool,’ she had laughed, shaking her head.
It was only after dark that Wang Di decided to call it a day. She wondered how long it would take her to find the brothers and what she would do if she never found them. She didn’t even know their last names, couldn’t call directory services to ask. Both thoughts were enough to make her want to lie down and never get up again, so she kept walking until she couldn’t anymore, until she was out of the fold of buildings and in front of a newly built shopping mall. Glossy as a beetle. The cool air within it like a blast from a fridge every time someone entered or left the building through its sliding glass doors. Next
to it was the train station, which the housing officer had boasted about. They could hop on and off public transport if they wanted to, it was practically at their doorstep. Made things easy for visiting children and grandchildren, he’d added.
Except we don’t have children, she had wanted to shout, and my legs are no longer what they used to be. This neighbourhood and all that it contained, from its cheery Welcome! sign to the wet market, smelling of sea and flesh and earth. It was all she had known for years. This neighbourhood contains all of my life, our lives, and we’re going to die within it.
She had delivered this speech in her head that night as she tried to fall sleep, wishing all the while that she had got up the courage to say all this to the housing officer who hadn’t bothered to look at either of them in the face the entire time.
This is what growing old is like, she thought now, staring at the hordes of people streaming in and out of the mall. Being surrounded by more and more alien objects, small, sharp-edged and shiny all at once, until one day it simply becomes too uncomfortable to sit among all this strangeness. This was how the Old One looked in his last few weeks – uncomfortable. He had no intention of moving into Block 6A, bright orange and built just for the elderly.
How We Disappeared Page 9