by Tiffany Tsao
For some, it takes years. James couldn’t wait years. It was only a matter of months before he revealed his true sentiments about their child.
“Oh, James, aren’t you ever so happy?” Olivia asked him one night (rhetorically, of course) as he stood casually slouched in the doorway, reading spectacles tucked into the front pocket of his button-down shirt, hands deep in the pockets of his khaki trousers. But as she looked up from the nursing infant she held in her arms, she saw a change come over his entire demeanour. He looked haggard and weary. He withdrew his hands from his pockets and clenched them in frustration before burying his face in his palms with a loud sigh. Thrusting them again into his pockets, he began to pace in small circles, his eyes fixed on the floor. Olivia watched her husband’s movements with the intensity of concentration one applies to watching every movement, every gesture of a lone actor onstage about to deliver his soliloquy. Abruptly, he turned towards her and the baby, and stood looming over them, blocking the light overhead, enshrouding them in his shadow. In his face, Olivia couldn’t help but detect a faint trace of something dangerous, something menacing. She shrank down in her chair, uncertain of what to expect.
“James?” Olivia asked in a small, frightened voice. She lowered the baby from her breast.
Her husband sank to his knees, gripping the edge of her rocking chair, wild anxiety in his eyes. He answered her rhetorical question.
“I’m not happy, Olivia,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m not happy.”
Those words of desperation and confusion echoed in the stillness of the room as Olivia silently absorbed the significance of these words.
She gazed sadly into her husband’s eyes. “Oh, James. Why didn’t you tell me?”
James stood up and began pacing around in an agitated manner. “Well, I—I didn’t want to worry you. I’m being silly. I don’t know why. I’m sorry, Olivia. I’m sorry. I—”
Olivia interrupted him, “But James. I’m not happy either.”
James stopped midpace and stared at his wife. “What?”
Olivia looked around cautiously, as if she feared someone might overhear her. She gestured for James to come close, and then whispered in his ear something he had never suspected for a moment. “To tell you the truth, I find our son rather a nuisance.”
And with its usual impeccable sense of timing, the infant in her arms began to cry.
After Olivia finished nursing the baby and put him to sleep in the crib, James fixed them both some hot chocolate and biscuits, and they adjourned to the living room sofa to have their most heartfelt and truthful discussion since the birth of Peter. And in the course of that discussion, they discovered that both of them felt little Peter to be inexplicably irritating in almost every respect.
“Even his cute little baby button nose. I can’t stand it,” Olivia confessed.
James nodded vigorously, “And his little baby gurgles. They disgust me. Darling, he’s adorable . . . I suppose. But he disgusts me.”
“James, why do we feel this way? What’s wrong with us? Even the worst parents love their children. Don’t they?”
It did indeed seem that, for the Floyd family, something had gone deeply, terribly, and horribly awry. It has been conjectured that babies appear cute to their parents in order to ensure their survival. Ordinarily distasteful chores—the changing of soiled nappies, the wiping of bottoms and runny noses, the waking up every other hour in the middle of the night to the sound of someone screaming at the top of his or her lungs—are all dutifully and doggedly endured by new mothers and fathers enamoured with their miniature human beings. Thus, small children manage to procure for themselves comfortable living conditions replete with doting and servile relatives, succeeding where the physically repellent elderly often fail.
Under normal circumstances, little Peter Floyd, a baby certainly not lacking in cuteness, would have been the unrivalled object of his parents’ affections, the centre of their universe, the apple of their eyes, the light of their lives, the plum in their pudding, and so on and so forth. Yet, Peter Floyd had been unlucky enough to have been the fruit of two pairs of loins that remained inalterably immune to his infantile charms. In fact, James and Olivia were worse than indifferent. They were downright annoyed.
“We can’t help it, can we?” James asked, biting into a gingersnap.
Olivia nodded. “I don’t think we can.”
“Is it really our fault?”
“We’ve tried our best.”
“We really have.”
Olivia sighed. “He’s just so—”
“—irritating,” James finished. Hearing the rumblings of thunder in the distance, he moved towards the balcony window and peered outside at the rain, which had just started to fall.
“If it were only the nappy changing or the crying. Then a nanny would solve all our problems.”
“But it’s not all that. It’s him.” James sighed. “He’s just so—”
“—irritating,” Olivia finished. She rose from the sofa and took her husband’s hand. “Oh, James. What are we to do? I’m so unhappy.”
He squeezed her hand sadly, in return. “So am I, dear. So am I.”
They stood like that for a few moments, the both of them, clinging to each other, frightened at what they had gotten themselves into. The lights inside their apartment turned the sliding glass doors leading out to their balcony into a mirror; in it they saw themselves dimly reflected against the backdrop of the rainy night sky outside. They saw a pair of sleepless, hopeless human beings facing a lifetime of unhappiness and lovelessness, of going through the motions of happy family life, all the while knowing it to be nothing but a farce. Under the constant strain of dislike for the third member of their family, their own relationship would inevitably suffer. But getting rid of their son was simply out of the question. After all, they weren’t monsters.
“A child simply isn’t a cat. You can’t just leave it by the river,” James thought out loud.
Olivia agreed. “No, we have to face up to this. It’s our own bloody fault. He’s our responsibility. He may be irritating, but he can’t help it.”
A loud crack of thunder shook the windowpanes, and a shrill wail could be heard from Peter’s room. James raised an eyebrow. “Are we sure about that now?”
She sighed. “I’ll be right back.”
James grabbed her wrist. “Wait.”
“Peter’s crying.”
“I know.” He looked her straight in the eye and for the first time in a long time, his mouth widened in a diabolically roguish grin.
“James?”
“Oh, we have to take care of him, all right. We are his parents, after all.” And here, James leaned conspiratorially towards his wife. “But who says that we can’t have some fun while doing it?”
Olivia frowned. “What are you saying?”
“It’ll be like a game. How much can we get away with without him suspecting? Without anyone suspecting?”
She began to understand, and a sinister smile spread across her own face. “We’ll be the very model of perfect parenthood.”
“He’ll never know we hate him.”
“No one will ever know.”
“Do you honestly think we can get away with it?”
“Why not?” Flushed with excitement, James pressed his wife’s two hands fervently in his own. “To all appearances, our conduct will be without fault.”
Olivia giggled. “Of course! He’s our pride and joy! Can we help it if . . .” she thought for a moment before inspiration struck. “If we accidentally dress him in girls’ clothes?”
“Or . . . forget to pick him up from school from time to time?”
“Or misinform him about the location of Peru?”
“Or shrink all his trousers in the wash?”
“And . . .” Olivia turned her eyes towards the room from which little Peter’s insistent bawling could still be heard. “And can we help it if we can’t hear the baby crying?”
“The rain is
awfully loud, don’t you think?”
“I can’t hear anything, can you?”
“Hear what?”
“Pardon?”
Laughing uncontrollably, they collapsed in each other’s arms. It was the first time they had really, truly laughed together since the baby had been born, and the tears of mirth that ran down their cheeks were the expression of their tremendous relief that the magic in their relationship had been restored, albeit at the cost of a human sacrifice: the price of their own happiness was to be the happiness of their unwitting son. But then again, they never really liked him very much to begin with, however appealing they had found the idea of him prior to his actual arrival on the scene. It was a sad situation, but it couldn’t be helped. Their imaginations running wild with ingenious schemes and tragicomic scenarios, husband and wife confabulated together about how to turn their son’s life into a living hell. And what better way to usher in this turning point in their relationship with little Peter than a bestowal of a new name?
They brought out The Encyclopaedia of Baby Names—the very first baby book they had bought after finding out the happy news—and as the storm howled and bellowed outside, and as their child howled and bellowed inside, they searched through page after page for a suitably awful name.
“What about a girl’s name?” Olivia suggested. “How about Bertha?”
“A girl’s name is too obvious. Remember, no one must know.”
They considered Alf and Archibald, Billy-Bob and Bingham.
“How about Cuthbert?” James asked. “That ought to get him at least two beatings a week at school.”
“What’s wrong with Cuthbert? I rather like it,” Olivia answered.
It was promptly dismissed as a possibility.
They paused over Dempster and hemmed and hawed over Habakkuk and Humbert. They lingered for a long time over Lingonburton (by which James was particularly repulsed, making it a very attractive option.) The Encyclopaedia was indeed a comprehensive and massive tome, and page after page, entry after entry, they scrutinized and deliberated upon late into the night until they could barely keep their eyes open. They were just about to call it a night and start on the second half of the alphabet the next evening when, all of a sudden, they found it.
“Murgatroyd,” Olivia gasped.
A sharp crack of thunder split the night. But the couple was too enraptured by the name before their eyes, mesmerized by its exquisite and complex monstrosity.
“It’s perfect,” she whispered.
“What does it mean?”
“It says, ‘Murgatroyd. From surname. Meaning unknown.’”
James looked up from the book into his wife’s eyes and smiled. “And he shall be called Murgatroyd.”
“So let it be done,” Olivia murmured back.
On that terrible night, at that terrible moment, their lips met in a long, passionate kiss. And on that terrible night, the fate of little Murgatroyd Floyd was sealed.
CHAPTER 13
Murgatroyd sat on the bus, heading to work. He was picking his ear with his left pinkie, and in his right hand he held a tattered old photo he always carried around in his wallet. It was of his parents and him, taken on a trip to the Singapore Zoological Gardens when he was four years old. In the photo, his mother and father were dangling him playfully near the hyena enclosure. It really was astonishing how little his parents had aged in the past twenty or so years: they still looked almost as young as they did in the picture. Again, he felt a little guilty about leaving them, but they were more than capable of taking care of themselves. And he was grown up, after all. He couldn’t stay with them forever, could he? Putting the photo back into his wallet, he turned to the little plastic bag he had placed on the seat next to him. He smiled. Murgatroyd had originally intended to attend to the items on his to-do list in strict numerical order, leaving the purchase of a beautiful brand-new toothbrush for the Quest for the very end—as a sort of reward for completing the list. But because of his failure to accomplish the first item, Murgatroyd figured that the order of the tasks really didn’t matter anymore. After washing the dishes, making the beds, and sweeping the floors, he had caught the bus to the nearest Watson’s Pharmacy, where he had spent two hours in the dental hygiene section.
The cashier—a sixty-year-old woman accustomed to spending most of her Mondays leisurely reading magazines—found herself interrupted several times by a young Caucasian man who would place a toothbrush on the counter, take out his wallet to pay, then suddenly change his mind and run back to exchange the toothbrush for another one.
“How come take so long?” she asked with a scowl on her face as he placed a toothbrush on the counter with an air of finality that she hoped meant he wouldn’t change his mind yet again. “Never buy toothbrush before, is it?”
“No lah, Auntie,” Murgatroyd grinned. “This is very special occasion toothbrush!”
Quickly recovering from her shock at hearing his accent, she replied sarcastically, “Huh! Special occasion toothbrush! You sure you don’t need to buy special occasion toothpaste also?”
This thought had never occurred to Murgatroyd. Ann had told him only to bring a toothbrush and a clean change of underwear. But wouldn’t he need toothpaste as well? Did Ann forget to mention it, or should he follow her instructions exactly? Would toothpaste be provided in the More Known World? He debated briefly whether he should call Ann to ask about toothpaste, but it seemed a rather silly and inconsequential question.
“Erh. Sorry, Auntie, be right back,” he said, snatching up the toothbrush. Much to her horror, he trotted back to the dental hygiene aisle to contemplate whether he should purchase toothpaste or not, and which kind he should purchase if he did.
By the time Murgatroyd emerged from the pharmacy, toothbrush and toothpaste successfully purchased (he would decide whether or not to bring the toothpaste later), he only had fifteen minutes to get to work. And he had to wait ten minutes for the bus to arrive.
“Hey, Shwet Foo,” Ahmad, one of his coworkers, greeted him as he opened the door of the restaurant for Murgatroyd. “How come so late, man?”
“Where got ‘so late,’ meh? Only ten minutes late, what!” Murgatroyd returned sheepishly, using his sleeve to wipe the perspiration from his brow, accumulated during his mad sprint from the bus stop to the restaurant.
“Emergency pharmacy trip?” Ahmad asked, observing the green plastic bag.
“Erh. Needed a toothbrush.”
“Your first toothbrush, eh? That explains a lot!” Ahmad pinched his nose, made a face, then roared with laughter. “I just kidding one! Relax, lor. Boss not here yet, or else she slaughter you now and makan you for dinner.” Ahmad’s grin broadened. “Maybe she will makan you anyway after she hear about you being so blur last night.”
Murgatroyd’s eyes widened in horror at what little he remembered of last night. It consisted of a lot of bumping into things and indignant yelps, followed by a long period of time spent in a small pitch-black room.
“Erh . . . erh . . . erh . . .” he stammered nervously, a crimson flush spreading outward from his cheeks to the tips of his ears.
“I just kidding again!” Ahmad patted Murgatroyd on the back. “Don’t worry, Shwet Foo. We all won’t say anything, okay?”
“Erh. Thanks,” muttered Murgatroyd, and slinked off to the back office to change. As he pushed open the heavy metal kitchen door, he was greeted with gales of laughter and good-natured mockery.
Teasing the shy and easily embarrassed Murgatroyd had become part of working life at the restaurant. The waitstaff of L’Abattoir regarded their little Shwet Foo as one might a younger, naive cousin—the kind whose back seems particularly suited for a “kick me” sign, and whose buttocks seem particularly suited for the surreptitiously placed whoopee cushion. But the jokes and teasing would only occur at the times surrounding his arrival and departure from the restaurant, for the very instant Murgatroyd put on his patent leather shoes, knotted his bow tie, slicked down his hair, and
donned the black jacket, he underwent a complete metamorphosis into another being entirely—a being endowed with superhuman table-waiting powers; a being whose movements and words bespoke deference and authority, humility and capability, all at the same time; a being whom even the head waiter treated with special care and respect. And of course, there was the fact that he was Shakti’s pride and joy. While she treated the other staff in what she believed to be an authoritative, strictly business manner (the staff, on the other hand, believed she treated them as if they were idiot slaves), Murgatroyd brought out the maternal in her. This situation would have undoubtedly resulted in jealousy and resentment on the part of Murgatroyd’s coworkers, except for the fact that being the object of Shakti’s motherly affection seemed to be far more a curse than a blessing.
Parenthood doesn’t suit all men and women, and their children find that childhood suits them not at all. Shakti Vithani and her husband tried their best at the whole business, but one would have had to be extremely generous if not downright delusory to call their parenting skills “satisfactory,” much less “good.” If interviewed, the Vithani children—a girl aged twenty-five and a boy aged twenty-eight—might have called their father “too laid back” and “a bit inattentive.” What they really would have meant was that he was completely indifferent and downright negligent—which he was. He had the terrible habit of forgetting that he had fathered any children at all. Whenever the family had gone to the cinema or taken a trip to the zoo, he would purchase two adult tickets from the ticket booth, only registering the existence of his offspring when he felt his wife tugging at his elbow, patiently informing him that his son and daughter were being denied entry. Whenever the family had gone out for dinner, their father would calmly ask for a table for two. If Mr. Vithani was in charge of booking hotels for a holiday, he would reserve one hotel room with a king-sized bed, romantically strewn with rose petals, and an evening champagne and strawberries service. Still, the Vithani children were inclined to be forgiving towards their father’s inability to recognize their existence. Eventually, they gave up being upset about it and moved on.