CARDBOARD AUNTIE
IT TOOK A FEW DAYS FOR THINGS TO GO BACK TO normal. During those days everyone tiptoed about, whispered when they met each other in the corridors and lifts. The Bangla workers stopped gathering to sit on the patch of grass below and drink and make noise. The good-for-nothing neighbours, even they turned down the volume of their TV in the evening and managed not to quarrel or yell at their children. It was the accident. That and the police and their blue and white tapes. There were blue and white police tapes around the area where Ah Tee fell and in front of the door to his flat. While they were there, it felt as if everyone’s mouths were bound with those tapes. Now that they were gone, things could go back to normal. The building could breathe again.
I was going home with the day’s collection, it was after six and a few old men were sitting around the stone benches near the building, talking about the fall. Pretending to joke about buying the numbers on the door of Ah Tee’s flat, or any number they could find that had anything to do with him. His birthday (does anybody know?). The day and time it happened. They hushed when I got nearer and pretended to talk about something else. Someone put on their portable radio and a song came on — a familiar one I don’t know the name of. I can’t remember the words but it is one my mother used to sing when it was too hot and the six of us had to sleep pressed into each other so we could fit on the rattan mat. She would sing, her voice so thin it splintered, scattered over our heads but it still sent us to sleep. A soft breeze in our faces. I don’t remember the words so I hum it low while I put away the bowl and cup by the sink, go to bed and lay myself down. Slow and careful. The way I put him down on the grass that evening. It was dark and it was the right time. The shame of it goes away at night, just a little. Even now, after so many years, it seems I breathe easier in the dark so I don’t switch on the lights in the evening unless I have to sew. Every day, I draw the curtains when the sun shines in mid-morning and towards dusk. I am a thing of the dark. One of those creatures that go scattering when you pull up old floorboards or rustle through leaf litter.
I wrap myself in the dark the way I wrapped him up years and years ago, swaddled him in rags from the cell, then put him in the ground. That day, when I picked him up to leave, he looked half-blind, his right eye only open a crack. I was blind too, but from the sunlight, walking out into it for the first time in months, years. I scrambled backwards when the riben-guizi, the Devil, came around to unlock our cells, shouting at us in Japanese and pointing towards the main door. He motioned for us to get out but it took me a while to realise what was going on. Only when I saw everyone leaving, all the other girls, did I lift him, his nothing body, wrapped him up in the one rag I could find. It was the only thing I had. Then I walked out, expecting any moment to be pulled back, to be shot. But I walked and then I was outside, deafened by the whine of crickets playing their long scratchy tune, their evening call.
The others were standing around, waiting. Some exhausted just from walking out of there, I could hear the hiss of their dry throats, see the rise and fall of their chests, almost choking on the fresh air. Two of them, the ones who came in last, the only ones still able, went right off, torn wisps of their dresses rippling behind them. I envied their strength and imagined how fast I could run if I still had meat on my legs, then I looked down and took in my feet, blackened, sharp with yellowed nails and bones. They ran, not looking back, and I followed them until the little needles of pain in my chest grew unignorable. Then I followed them walking, focused on planting my feet firmly in the ground. Walked towards the sound of the crickets, away from the road. I told myself afterward that I had no idea what I was going to do while I was walking. All I wanted was to get away. Far as possible from the barracks. From the possibility of the riben-guizi coming back. It’s been so many years since that I can almost believe it if I don’t linger upon it too much, if I busy my hands, working and picking up things and cooking and washing.
I knew enough though, even then. I had to leave him. I knew the moment I walked out of the cell.
It was right by a tree. A tall, old angsana. I stopped and looked around, but there was no one. I lay him down, stayed squatting and watched him for a while, for so long I thought I saw his lips move just a little. For a moment I thought he might cry, claim me with his sound and smell and I wouldn’t be able to leave him then. He might cry after days of keeping silent and still. Like he had given up, realised I had nothing for him to eat. There was nothing of me he could have. I thought about putting my ear to his mouth or heart but I stopped myself. What good did it do to know? Dead or dying, it didn’t matter, I could never bring him home. So I stood up and stepped back.
Hey.
I turned around, almost tripping, and put out a hand to steady myself against the rough trunk of the tree. Then I saw someone standing some distance away. A ghost, I thought. But then it moved and I saw that it was another girl from the barracks, clutching at the front of her torn blouse to keep it closed, so thin her trousers were almost falling off her hips. She looked about my age, was seventeen at most.
Hey, she said again, walking in my direction. Wait for me! Do you know the way? she said.
I said nothing, just watched her get closer, close enough to peer around me, to see what was in the bundle on the ground. There were bruises on her cheekbones and a cut that was mending on her lip. She looked at me as if she knew exactly what had happened and understood that I couldn’t go back like this — not with the child.
You should bury it, she said, it’s only proper.
I raised my hands to look at them. Or rather, I felt them moving on their own. They could be paper. Paper, or air, I thought, looking at them.
I’ll help you, she said and she crouched down.
Soon we were digging, both of us, with our fingers. Scraping away the rich, dark soil so soft I imagined I could put it in my mouth, chew, and it would taste of the lunches they used to give us in school. Rice and fried egg and even minced meat, sometimes. I would chew and swallow and be full.
That was what I was thinking while I dug out the hole in the ground for my child.
After five minutes or so, the girl stopped. I think that’s deep enough, she said.
I was glad because I was tired and my arms were aching. I was so tired, I could fall asleep right there but I picked the bundle up from the ground, rearranged the rag so that it covered all of him, his face down to his tiny doll feet, and put him in.
AS soon as the war was over, my mother wanted me married off. She didn’t say it but I knew she wanted me out of the house so they wouldn’t have to look at me. Even after a year, the neighbours still talked, whispering among themselves while they hung out their washing in the courtyard right below our window. It wasn’t as bad as before, when people would turn away from us at the market, call me wei-an fu, comfort woman, as we were walking away. My mother’s face would burn and she would fan herself vigorously with her palm-leaf fan, as if doing that would chase the shame away. At night I heard her ask my father who to give me to. When to do it. Soon as possible, was her suggestion. My father never said much, only grunted his assent. I heard this all through the thin veil of the curtain dividing the room. My six-year-old brother, the only one of my siblings left, would sleep through, legs twitching to the dream-feel of his afternoon games of football or sepak takraw.
It wasn’t long before the matchmaker came by our place. Instead of just talking to my mother, Auntie Tin made me sit with her, patted my hand kindly while she talked, a corner of her pink handkerchief peeking out of her sleeve.
I found someone for you, she said, a nice Hokkien man; a bit older but he’s a good man. Even has his own shop. She stopped there, then lowered her voice. His wife, his first wife died in the war. But better not talk about that. Bad luck.
For a minute, she just sat, sipping from the cup of tea in her hands.
He’s a good man, she said, looking straight at me, a good match for you.
Auntie Tin arranged everything,
told him how useful I was around the house, how prudent I was, gave him a picture of me taken just for that purpose, lips and cheeks rouged with red paper. It was the first time I had seen a camera; and they had to keep telling me to smile but it seemed that I had forgotten how. Years later, the Old One showed me the picture he had been given. In it, I looked stiff and humourless and I wondered again why he had chosen me.
There were many times in the later years when I felt I had to tell him. Talk about why I couldn’t give him children, about what happened during the war. I had always wondered if he knew. He must have known. I wondered why he married me then, if he knew. I almost asked him, once, at the hospital during his last few weeks, watching him as he slept, falling in and out of a fit of dreams. I sat next to him and listened to him murmur, talking a little and I thought I might be able to tell him and he would wake up and nod at me and tell me it was alright. I needed to apologise, for what I didn’t know. A nothing word, sorry. There was nothing to mend, to be sorry for unless I wished to rip up the quiet, soothe myself by talking about something that wouldn’t help him, not now. So I touched his hand, careful not to go near the tube running into it and let him sleep. The same as when the doctor came in and told me to be ready, it was time for him. I told him, it’s okay, Old One, you go rest now. And I kept watch until the rise and fall of his chest was no more.
TODAY, the people from the church came to help me move. Not that I have a lot of things — it’s just that an old woman like me cannot do it by myself. They made me sit by the wall, protested whenever I went to pick up an object or to help. The only thing I could do was to daydream while they busied about, whispering to each other, as if they thought it wasn’t right to talk to each other in a language I couldn’t understand. So I told them I wanted to take a walk, that I couldn’t stand the dust and needed fresh air — it was getting dusty, with all the things I haven’t touched in years and years being moved around. They worried at first but I insisted. After a minute, the one in charge said, okay, auntie, you go have a cup of tea and then we’ll meet you there. I nodded, waved at them and left.
The only object I carried on my own is the black and white picture of the Old One, the photo for his place on the altar. I took it just in case the Christians get offended, or they decide to lose it on the way to the new flat.
It is a short walk to the new place. But the neighbourhood is entirely new. Full of shops and streets and people I don’t know. I wonder how long it will take for me to learn where to get my usual shopping again, how long it will take to know stall-owners well enough so that I learn about their children, how many they have and how old they are. And how long until they start to keep aside cheap bits of meat, and insist on giving me extra vegetables and eggs just before the Lunar New Year. I walk and try to memorise where exactly everything is; the nearest doctor, coffee shop, grocery store. In twenty minutes, I’m there. I take the lift up to the fourth floor. The corridor that I walk through to get to the new flat is clean and quiet and almost all the doors are open because other people are still having things done to their new homes. I look into them and see that they look exactly the same as mine. Maybe with different coloured doors and floors but these are the same one-room, built-for-the-elderly flats. I get my new keys out and let myself in for the first time. It is still dirty from construction work, but nothing a good sweep cannot fix quickly.
This is our new place, I tell the Old One. Then I put his photo on the only tall surface there is, the kitchen counter. Without curtains, the room is bright, with light bouncing off the walls. The newness of everything makes me stand still for a moment and I think carefully before saying what I said next, because you don’t make promises to the dead and not keep them. I made up my mind and then I said, I have a story to tell you. Maybe tonight, or tomorrow night, I will tell you. A story. My story. From a long time ago.
ALEX
THE POLICE TAPE WAS ALREADY GONE A FEW DAYS later when I left with all my things in a box and my bag. No one, I thought, was going to go near the spot any time soon. No one who knew what had happened there would be able to walk casually over the place where he landed and stop themselves from imagining that it was happening over and over again, at every single moment. They would not be able to stop their skin from lighting up with goosebumps at the feeling of him falling through their bodies, all moonlight and wisp. He was still there, you could picture it. But then I saw the tins and the stumps of two candlesticks, bits of food left on a paper tray. And I thought, right, of course. I wondered who the first one was to try this and win, if ever anyone had won money from getting numbers from the dead at all.
The others, Sam and Linda and Xinyi, all took turns trying to get us back together. They tried tricks of all sorts — calling Cindy and then passing me the phone, saying that it was another one of our friends wanting to speak to me or making her go to my new workplace for “a drink and a chat”. It took them a while to realise that we weren’t just fighting, that we hadn’t fought at all, really. I missed her but I knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good to see each other. So I told my friends to stop, there was nothing left for them to do but let me sleep on their couch or shut up. It was fun at first. Sam and Linda had their own place and that was easy. I slept on their big couch and we got takeaway and camped out with a bunch of DVDs the first weekend. The novelty wore off quickly, since both of them worked and arrived home late at night, too tired to do anything but shower, eat, and sleep. I started to mind that the couch smelled of their two dogs and Linda got increasingly jealous that they preferred to curl up with me even though their bed was big as fuck and I shoved them off the couch whenever I bothered to. I stayed for two weeks, moved out when it was clear that they were fighting whenever I was not around. I didn’t want to be the cause of trouble like that.
After that, Xinyi took me in even though she still lived with her parents like most people our age. She was the only child and simply told her parents that I needed a place to stay for a few days and that was that, no questions asked. Her mother was nice. A nervous little woman, but nice. At first, she couldn’t tell if I was a boy or girl and had to ask Xinyi when I was away in the washroom. Afterward, she told me she couldn’t be sure if her mother was more relieved that I couldn’t get her daughter pregnant or if it was a cause for more concern, since we were sleeping in the same bed. We laughed about it and stayed up nights talking. It was okay for more than a month until I met up with an old girlfriend one evening and stayed over at her place instead. When I got back to Xinyi’s the next day, she picked a fight and told me to leave. I hadn’t seen it coming, or perhaps I refused to since it made things easy for me, a comfortable bed, home-cooked food made by either Xinyi or her mother. I packed quickly — I could now put all my things together and be ready to leave in fifteen minutes — and left.
I went back to Sam and Linda’s, knowing full well that the arrangement couldn’t last long, and slept there for a few nights until I found an ad online. I moved into a room, lived alongside a single mother and her children. It was then, while living in a stranger’s flat and constantly worrying about not being able to make rent, that I thought about sleeping outdoors. It was the kind of thing that would horrify my mother if she found out and the thought of that alone made me go round to the stores, the ones which sold hiking and climbing equipment, to have a look around. I made a game of it at first. I was just looking for fun, I thought, but I went and chose a pop-up tent in dark blue one day. The salesman said it was the easiest kind to set up, there was no need to put any stakes in the ground and it folded away just like that, and he snapped his fingers to make his point. It was light in my hands and felt oddly like freedom. I carried it with me to work that day and stashed it in my locker, telling myself that it was there for whenever I needed it.
It wasn’t long after that. Three months, I think. Three months of not being able to afford real food, and hearing the cries of the landlady’s kids as they got whipped for not getting their homework done on time, or messing
up their school uniforms by playing after school, or for looking at her wrong. I was done asking for help from my friends, I thought, and I opened the locker to change out of my work clothes, which had dried milk and coffee all down the front and there it was.
THAT first night I picked a spot on the grass, near the trees. The tent opened right up, like the salesman said but the location was a mistake and I woke up after an hour, realising that the fucking ants had gotten in. The next night, I set up camp on the beach and that was better.
I told myself that my age allows it. There could be no better time for it; twenty-two and sleeping in a tent on the beach. In the morning, just before it gets really light, I stick my head out into the fresh air, breathe in a bit of the sea before packing up and leaving before the sweepers arrive. They arrive pretty early with their cart and different bins and brooms and rakes. I’ve slept in a few times to wake up to a rustling around me, a scraping together of the piles of trash weekenders left behind. Some of the cleaners try to get rid of me, as if it’s part of their job to make sure that people don’t sleep there. The foreign workers try to pretend that I’m not there, keep a wide berth from my spot and avoid my eyes as if they’re telling themselves it is not true — this country that they moved to just for work, this country laid with glitter and gold couldn’t have its people out on the streets.
Once, the park officers came on one of their routine checks when I was still asleep and this old man came to wake me up, prodding me through the fabric with his broomstick. Ma-ta lai liao, the police are here, he said, when I stuck my head out to see what was going on. I’ve had run-ins with them before and I didn’t want to get stuck with another fine I couldn’t afford to pay, so I had to knock my tent down and run into the public restroom with all my things. How lucky I was, how funny, that I could get up and run off in a minute with all my life in my arms, I thought. The sweeper was waiting outside the bathroom for me. Up close, I saw how old he was, older than my grandpa when he died and got laid out in the coffin for everyone to look at. He looked like the kind of old Chinese man who would live on. Live on and look tougher with age, the thick veins on their arms and hands taut like piano strings. They are strong until they’re not. When I came out of the restroom, the old man shook his head and sighed so heavily that he started to cough and I thought he might start to lecture me. I’ve had that happen before, especially with elderly Chinese people. They seem to think it was only right that they demand me to go home, because of my age, because of theirs. But then he gave me a tied-up plastic bag, put it on top of all the other things I had in my hand. From the rustle and clink of it, I knew it was money, so I ran after him trying to return it but he started to talk in Hokkien, pushing the palms of his hands towards me. He wasn’t going to take it back so I said, kam sia, kam sia, thank you, several times, until he turned away and went back to work. I had to sleep somewhere else after that. I couldn’t bear seeing him again. I could take the stares and the cleaners sweeping their dirt towards me, but this heavy kindness, I couldn’t bear.
If I Could Tell You Page 8