by Tiffany Tsao
“James,” Olivia replied, watching the numbers as well.
“Our son was awfully cheerful this morning, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Yes, he was, James.”
“The crepes were delicious.”
“And his cooking is usually only passable at best.”
“He had a spring in his step.”
“A twinkle in his eye.”
“He was happy.”
“Frightfully happy.”
“I wonder why.”
“And he spoke of leaving. Leaving us.”
“Not a good sign.”
“Perhaps he’s fallen in love with someone. A girl.”
“Fallen in love? But with who?”
“‘But with ‘whom,’ Olivia.”
“That’s what I said, James.”
“No, you said, ‘But with who?’ The grammatically correct version of that question would be, ‘But with whom?’”
“Fine,” Olivia snapped. “But with whom?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“Well, we can scare her off like we did with the others.”
“Do you think it’s a girl, though?” James mused. “In the past he’s just been plain pathetic when he’s been in love—listless and moony-eyed and pining away and all that.”
Olivia frowned. “We’ll just have to watch him carefully and find out, won’t we?”
The lift, having reached its destination of car park level three, opened its doors, and husband and wife proceeded towards their blue Toyota sedan in silence. They slid into their car in silence. James adjusted the red fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror in silence. Then he started the engine and backed out of their parking space in silence. They were driving to Olivia’s office building to drop her off in silence. This was what they did every morning, excluding weekends and holidays. On weekends and holidays, they did other things together in silence.
As they merged onto the Pan-Island Expressway, Olivia yawned and watched the world speed past her window—the cars against the blurry backdrop of concrete expressway railing, green trees, and bright blue sky. It was so vivid that it seemed unreal—a toy world populated with play cars and plastic foliage against a watercolour background. Her fingers reached for the radio knob.
. . . Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew hailed the youths’ efforts at ecological conservation as ‘admirable’ and ‘a shining example which he hoped other young Singaporeans would emulate.’
“In other news, in a speech given yesterday, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong urged Singaporeans to be more innovative and imaginative in their respective sectors, stressing that it would take a combination of hard work and creativity for Singapore to achieve recognition and success on a global scale. PM Goh also said that he hoped the newly opened Imagination Centre in Bukit Batok would play an integral part in the ‘Think For Yourself, Singapore!’ campaign. SM Lee also expressed high hopes for the future imaginative spirit of Singapore.
“Traffic report: traffic on the PIE towards Tuas is rather slow this morn—”
James switched off the radio.
“Why did you do that?” Olivia asked, rousing herself.
“Because radio news is bloody irritating, that’s why.”
“Hmm. I find it soothing,” she replied distantly, returning to her state of torpor, slumped against the headrest, gazing out the window.
But for one brief moment, before she recommenced thinking about nothing in particular, she asked herself the question that all dissatisfied married persons inevitably ask themselves, however frequently or infrequently: How did it come to this? Didn’t we once, she thought as they exited the expressway and the scenery transformed into high-rise buildings, enjoy each other’s company?
A moment is all the time the mind requires to bring the past floating up like the bloated corpses of goldfish. She recalled how she and James first met. It had been her first year in Singapore, her twenty-fourth year of life. Her law firm in London had offered her the opportunity to move and she had hungrily snatched it up. She had wanted something different. She had wanted to live abroad. She had wanted adventure and romance and a fresh green world with the dew still on it. And after only nine months, she was already bitterly disappointed. Her youthful and energetic imagination had not prepared her for interminable evenings and weekends spent with the same unvarying expat crowd in the same unvarying bars, restaurants, and clubs; for the insular and petty agendas of the expat associations and groups to which she felt pressured to belong; for acting in Christmas pantomimes and making sticky date puddings for Queen’s Birthday parties; for perpetually wearing balloony white linens and leather sandals to cope with the “dreadful” heat. She didn’t want to go “local,” exactly—that world was still unfamiliar enough to her for her to recoil ever so slightly from it as all the others did, but she knew that she didn’t want whatever this world was.
Olivia had been drowning her sorrows in chardonnay one Saturday evening with her “friends” at the bar in the Tanglin Club. And suddenly, across the room, she saw him. Young. Attractive. And different somehow.
He had seen her too. He walked up to her, and introduced himself. “I’m James Floyd. And you are . . .”
“Olivia Bentley,” she had said faintly.
And then he had put his mouth close to her ear and whispered. “I’ve been watching you for the past half an hour, and I see that you detest them all.” He drew back and gazed coolly into her eyes. “I do too.”
“Yes, it’s true,” she had murmured. Was this all a dream? “I find them all repulsive.”
“Let’s get out of here,” he had replied. They left and never looked back. They got engaged, then married. They became each other’s lives, they became each other’s worlds. Oh, what they might have been, if it weren’t for . . .
Olivia let herself sink once again into a restful state of apathy and thought no more on the subject, letting herself be distracted instead by the droves of people on the pavement and at the intersections, hurrying to their respective places of work. The car glided, slowly, past Raffles Place MRT station just as its entrance belched up another swell of office workers, surging over the escalators and out into the light of day.
James and Olivia never discussed the state of their relationship, although they were each aware of it in the same way that one accustomed to the state of hunger is dimly conscious of a perpetual muted ache in one’s belly—an ache which, over time, simply becomes an integral part of daily existence. They had certainly never dreamed that it would happen, that they would gradually disintegrate into this—this thorough indifference, and even mild revulsion, towards each other. It was as if some poison had seeped, slowly and steadily, into the marriage, corroding it from within, until there was nothing left but a hollow exterior, which itself was beginning to show faint signs of decomposition.
Yet mingled with this contemptuous apathy was precisely that feeling that Olivia felt even now—a stubborn devotion, sickly, but still clutching and clinging to the memory of a golden past when gaiety and love had blossomed so effortlessly between them. And there were moments yet when James and Olivia found it possible to regain a semblance of that past, as distorted as it was. This semblance was to be found in the mutual pleasure they derived from ruining their son’s life.
What they had told Murgatroyd that morning, unfortunately, was the honest-to-God truth. James and Olivia couldn’t do without their son. The deep satisfaction they felt whenever they peered into his bedroom on weekend mornings and saw him curled up on the hard wooden floor, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a mongrel dog. The low, evil laughter they shared as they concocted new, unappetizing dinners for him after finishing their own delicious meals of fettuccine Alfredo or lamb chops with mint sauce. The pride that swelled in their hearts whenever they had the opportunity to survey him from head to toe and take in their handiwork—the wretched and pathetic specimen of human that stood hunched humbly before them, eyes upraised to them in unquestioning love. These wer
e the shared moments that offered them the likeness of younger, happier days. In a remarkably cruel twist of fate, their happiness together had become dependent upon the presence of the very thing (for they regarded their son as more of a thing than a person) they had first found irksome, then grew to despise. His departure would mean their destruction.
The car pulled up outside Olivia’s office building. Olivia looked over at her husband and tried to muster up the energy to say goodbye. She even got as far as parting her lips, a farewell on the very tip of her tongue. But then again, she really couldn’t be bothered. She left the car without a word and James drove away to his own place of work.
CHAPTER 12
To be fair, James and Olivia Floyd had never intended for things to turn out the way they did. They weren’t what you would call truly “bad people,” although they did have their flaws. Olivia couldn’t be bothered to cover her mouth when she coughed in public. On principle, James showed up for all appointments at least ten minutes late. Both of them had great quantities of personal charm and often used it to take advantage of others, from getting tables at crowded restaurants without making reservations to getting coworkers to take on some of the extra work they didn’t feel like doing. Both of them were very adept at lying, and took perverse pleasure in telling the most outrageous tales with the straightest of faces. Like many well-to-do expatriates working in Singapore, they often complained about the hot and humid weather and tended to think themselves entitled to a standard of living above that of the local populace. When visiting other people’s houses, both took a perverse pleasure in using the last of the toilet paper and deliberately neglecting to replace it with a fresh roll. But they weren’t really “bad people,” and they most certainly had never dreamed that one day they would actively seek to make their one and only offspring utterly miserable.
In fact, the day that they found out they were to have a baby—that day so long ago in 1978—was perhaps one of the happiest days of their life together. That evening, as starry-eyed husband and wife, they sat together on the sofa and speculated what the baby would look like, what the baby’s room would look like, what the baby’s first words might be, what kind of food they should feed the baby, how to get the baby to be fluent in English, French, and Italian (no, English, French, and German) and so on and so forth. They babbled excitedly into the early hours of the dawn until, worn out like two children after some fantastical imaginary adventure, they fell asleep in each other’s arms as the first sunbeams of the new day trickled in through the window, flooding the whole living room in fresh, clean light.
The following months found them in a perpetual state of euphoric anxiety. For the sake of the baby’s health, Olivia gave up her afternoon cup of tea, her evening cup of coffee, and her morning martini. Fearing that Olivia might contract toxoplasmosis, James abandoned their pet cat by the side of the Singapore River. They spent several weekends in shopping centres searching for the best baby clothing and accessories that two expatriate executive salaries could buy: the softest blankies, the most luxurious cot, the most absorbent disposable nappies, the plushest plush toys, the loudest rattles—all imported, of course. The remainder of their free time they devoted to hunting for books about children and for children. They systematically visited all the Times and MPH bookstores on the island, and even paid a visit to the secondhand booksellers in Bras Basah Complex. And when they didn’t find what they wanted, which was often, they demanded catalogues and placed orders from overseas.
From one of the first books they bought—The Encyclopaedia of Baby Names—they lovingly picked out names for their growing child. Peter, if it was a boy, Lauren, if it was a girl. Another book they bought—Cultivating Genius: Secrets to Raising a Gifted Child—advised them to read opera librettos to the baby during meals and, once the baby was born, to frequently mock the stupidity of others.
By the time Olivia’s pregnancy had reached full term, they owned thirty-three books about babies, all housed on the top shelf of the three-tiered powder-blue bookcase they had bought for the baby’s room. The bottom two shelves were stocked with children’s books: an exquisite anthology of Hans Christian Andersen stories, two volumes of tales from the Brothers Grimm, the entire set of Beatrix Potter books, several Enid Blyton story collections, the complete works of Roald Dahl, and at least five dozen miscellaneous breathtakingly illustrated, award-winning picture books.
The colour of the bookcase matched everything else in the room. “To hell with things gender neutral,” Olivia had proclaimed when they found out the baby was to be a boy. She decided on a nautical theme for Peter’s room, replete with sailcloth curtains, a mural of a sunny seascape adorning the walls, colourful semaphore flags bedecking the crib, and a hanging mobile with plush toy pirates that played the song “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?”
“Perhaps he’ll become a naval officer. Peter’s a fine name for an admiral, don’t you think?” James said jokingly, putting away a newly acquired pair of booties in little Peter’s dresser.
“Ahoy there, matey. What do you think of that?” Olivia asked her proudly swelling stomach, playfully cocking her head to one side to hear little Peter’s answer.
To their disappointment, Peter didn’t even answer with a timely kick against the wall of his mother’s uterus.
Olivia’s water broke during a business lunch with one of her clients, and she was rushed to Mount Elizabeth Hospital in a taxi. She gave birth six hours later to a healthy, screaming baby boy. “It’s Peter,” James whispered into his wife’s ear, enthralled by the infant nestled in her arms, “A wonderful name for an absolutely wonderful boy.”
“Yes, it is. Wonderful.” Olivia whispered back. She felt utterly exhausted and completely at peace.
Just then, Peter began to cry and wouldn’t stop for twenty minutes.
Two young female nurses, loitering in the hallway, raised their eyebrows at each other.
“He can really cry one, hor?”
“So young, already acting like ang moh: complaining all the time,” the other one giggled.
“Oi. We’re ang moh, not deaf,” James’s irritated voice sounded from the room.
Bursting into even more laughter, the nurses scurried away down the corridor.
For the rest of the day, James found himself in a peevish mood.
“Oh, James, don’t mind them. You’re becoming a cantankerous old fuddy-duddy before your time,” Olivia said in a gently teasing manner. James smiled and attempted to forget the whole thing, and yet his irritation still lingered on. And most irritating of all was the faint awareness that he wasn’t irritated at the nurses so much as at his very own newborn son.
Of course that’s perfectly ridiculous, he thought, waving away the idea as one waves away plumes of cigarette smoke. How in heaven’s name could I be irritated at my own son?
Yet he was. And in the ensuing weeks and months, he continued to be irritated at his son. James cringed inwardly at whatever sound the baby made, whether it was a cry of distress or a gurgle of happiness. As James watched the baby sleeping serenely in the cot, he felt inexplicably annoyed. And even as James held the baby close to his chest and watched the tiny, delicate fingers pluck at his shirt buttons, the fascinated blue eyes twinkle in delight, the toothless mouth gape open in a gummy, drooling smile, James felt nothing but profound disgust. And he didn’t know why. The baby was as cute as a baby could be. And James had been more than prepared for all the “dirty” aspects of parenting—the soiled nappies; the vomiting and spit-up; the runny noses; the disgusting, scabby cradle cap; and so on. He briefly wondered whether it was all an unconscious manifestation of doubt as to whether he was indeed the child’s father, but after five minutes, he decided that such suspicions were absurd.
Unable to come up with any reasonable cause for disliking his own son, James found himself plagued with a constant and gnawing guilt. He’d heard theories of fathers who resented newborn babies for taking up all of their mothers’ time and attention
—time and attention that would once have been lavished upon their beloved husbands. That might be the reason, he thought, inwardly congratulating himself for such an accurate self-diagnosis of his psychological state. He was unconsciously jealous of little Peter for taking Olivia’s attention away from himself. Of course, he didn’t really feel like that was the case. But ah! That was the problem with the unconscious: you weren’t really conscious of such things. But now that he had discovered the problem, wasn’t he conscious of it already? And didn’t he feel consciously that he didn’t feel jealous of Peter? Well obviously then, he wasn’t truly conscious of his jealousy—he was still in denial, and his pettiness still remained, lurking in the deep dark interior of his mind. How would he go about dealing with this? Perhaps he should go for therapy? No, that was silly, he thought proudly. He didn’t need therapy. He would deal with this himself. And there was poor Olivia to think of. The last thing she needed to deal with in addition to caring for her newborn child was the worry that her husband felt (albeit unconsciously) neglected and resentful.
So the guilt gnawed on. It nipped at the toes of his conscience when he came back from work and kissed his radiant wife and gurgling baby boy a good evening. He felt it nibbling at his stomach, which turned every time he picked up his baby boy and tossed him high into the air. And he felt it chewing away at the edges of his heart on nights when he stood in the doorway of the baby’s room, gazing at his Olivia under the soft glow of lamplight as she sat in a rocking chair, nursing the baby at her breast and softly humming lullabies.
“Oh, James, aren’t you ever so happy?” Olivia would ask—rhetorically, of course—shifting her adoring maternal gaze from the suckling baby to her husband who stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, to all appearances, the very picture of paternal ease. James would smile—a smile that answered, “Of course I’m happy,” and amble away to another part of the flat to contemplate his shame.
But most people can’t hide their feelings forever, no matter how heroically they may try. Like a small air bubble escaping the lips of a drowning man or woman, the sentiment rises to the surface and, silently and unostentatiously, explodes.