by Sharlene Teo
After a few minutes Amisa heard her mother’s breathing even out and deepen. One of her brothers—it sounded like Didi—cackled from the alleyway. She heard the hyperhappy thwack of slippers hitting the floor as the boys chased each other outside. She reached for the rag lying by the stove and used it to wipe her leg. And then she stood up and moved as lightly as a whim, even though a serious impulse had overcome her. She took the rag outside and descended the small ladder carefully, landing lightly on the dirt. The giant hen, Goreng Pisang, bobbed her head out and stared with beady eyes rimmed in red. Amisa stared at Goreng Pisang’s sagging comb and parted beak and felt tenderness for this poor, Jurassically stupid bird stuck in the coop.
Her father would be out until late tonight, drinking beers with his fishermen, and the boys would come and go as they pleased. Right now her sister was likely preparing a meal for her husband, in her own home, so close yet so private.
Just around the corner from their house lived an ancient shoemaker named Ah Huat, whose family had gradually moved away or died. When Amisa was tiny she remembered him as sprightly and cantankerous, prone to drunken rows in the common yard. Now he lived alone, too old to work or bother anyone. Amisa peered into the house with its rusty grinding wheel in the corner and bare, tidy shelves. She saw him asleep as she expected, head thrown back over the wooden chair with its faded batik cushions, white hair as fine and fluffy as a chick’s feathers, his bony chest rising and falling.
She stepped nimbly over the threshold. In here, she was an old hand: she often studied her neighbor as he slept, on late afternoons such as this when a stupor overcame Kampong Mimpi Sedih and even the animals napped. Ah Huat had one of those faces for which being at rest was transformative, conferring a quiet dignity, elegance in sleep. She stared at his smoke-stained mouth set in wrinkles. Times like this she imagined him as one of her grandfathers whom she had never met, both murdered in wartime. When she left she usually took a handful of peanut shells or a tab from a beer can as a souvenir for her own shelf: nothing he would miss, but today she boldly eyed the plate on the counter. Four slabs of watermelon, one half eaten, piled up in imperfect slices. She tiptoed towards the counter and eased the pieces into the plastic bag beside them one by one. Ah Huat stirred and she paused, but his mouth just opened and closed like a fish trying for air.
It was finally getting dark. The switch in the sky always happened like that: ridiculous sunlight all day, no segue, and then thin watery blues and browns as nighttime settled and the flying insects emerged from their hiding places. She walked through the forest with slow, deliberate steps. Monkeys stared and chattered from the branches above but kept their distance. She carried the plastic bag in one hand and the rag cloth in the other. Her blood had dried and the smaller cuts didn’t ache either. Perspiration cooled on her back. She remembered the path, straight through the trail and bearing left on the rickety wooden bridge, past the mossy old gravestones and through the thicket.
Amisa found them in the same spot, sitting opposite each other. They might have been easy to miss amidst the fronds if not for the seallike shape of the woman’s skull and the glint in her eyes as she turned to face her. The man started at the sound of her footsteps and the corrupt jiggle of her plastic bag. In the dimming light she saw that the oil on his skin had faded and rubbed off in places: a shoulder, a spot on the chin. Both their features were coming through with the insistence of injury, like pus through gauze. The orang minyak seemed altogether more human, as familiar as two factory workers she might have passed sometime in town.
The woman got up first, followed slowly by the man. When she got closer he snatched the plastic bag from her with canine impropriety, opening it so forcefully he ripped the handles. She flinched. He held up the slice of watermelon with Ah Huat’s bite mark parallel to his own mouth and set on it like he hadn’t eaten in years. The juice dribbled down his chin and onto his sunken belly as the oily woman fixed Amisa with a look of pure gratitude.
4
SZU
2003
The next morning I wake up with a start. My alarm goes off two seconds later, a shrill and invasive beeping. I struggle to turn it off, eyes bleary. Sixteen years and one day old. My mouth tastes like smoke. Half awake, I picture my mother watching me as I sleep, blowing smoke rings into my mouth as I snore. My lungs feel dirty. I rub my eyes and reach over to the curtain, pulling it open.
A haze has settled over the garden. It blurs the outlines of the trees and terra-cotta pots. From my bedroom window the world looks like a low-budget film set. The neighboring roofs resemble ridges folded from dark-orange paper. At any moment, a construction crane could reach down and scrunch all these houses up, dump them in the parking lot of some crumbling studio. That burnt-barbecue stench from yesterday is everywhere, and it’s gotten thicker. Even though the window is latched shut the bad smell creeps all the way up my nose.
I stumble out of bed. I choke as I put on my uniform, my hands moving stiffly. I button up my blouse and zip up my skirt. It nips my waist. The skin of my finger snags on the zip.
“Fuck,” I mutter. I feel bitten. There is a bead of blood on my ring finger.
On the bus the radio is blaring from the speakers and I try to avoid looking at the television screen, which beams back the footage of commuters shot from three different angles. Nothing to make an early morning worse like being reminded of one’s hideousness. None of the angles flatters me. The camera is low-grade and casts the interior of the bus in an ominous gray-blue glow, as if a specter will appear at any moment. The macik behind me keeps blowing her nose. When she puts her hands on either side of her stubby nose and pinches she sounds just like the fuse from the kettle clicking at night. The uncle beside me jiggles his leg and keeps hitting my knee. I wish there was a bubble protecting me from every other human. I huddle closer to the window.
The radio announcer is a young woman with a smug, honeyed voice. “Today’s PSI is registered as 164. The public is advised to stay indoors as this is an unhealthy reading. If you must go outside, please wear a medical mask. Government-issued hospital masks will be available from the following public distribution points between nine thirty and six p.m. today . . .”
She lists the places, but I can’t bear any more of her stupid, phony, quasi-American accent. I put in my earphones. So I’ve heard the rumbles. The newspaper reports on forest fires in Sumatra, slash and burn, which sounds like the name of a bad rock band. I don’t like rock music. I prefer the fuzzy distortions of shoegaze. I found out about shoegaze from a music magazine someone left on the number 67.
This shoegazey kind of music is made for me. It cancels everything out: the tedious hours ahead, the pollution all around me. Most of these bands are from northern England. I picture castles and cold air, drunk white boys with backcombed hair and bad teeth stumbling over the cobblestones. Canned air suspended on a bass line. The bus shudders and jolts. I hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut.
*
By the time I reach the school concourse the haze has thickened into a gray shroud and I wave my hands in front of my face as I move forward. It’s almost time for assembly. Through the haze I see two flags hanging on their poles. On a typical morning two prefects raise the flags solemnly to the piped, scratchy track of our national anthem. Even when the flags reach the top there is rarely enough wind to make the fabric fly photogenically. Instead, they just hang there—limp, rain-stained. The prefects go away. The anthem carries on for two verses and just when the sound cuts out we cross our right hands over our chests and mumble the pledge. We, the citizens of Singapore . . . I have mouthed all the words every weekday morning for the past decade. They have no meaning to me. Like meat that has been chewed flavorless.
This air tastes and smells stale. It’s not like in Heidi, with all that clean, high-altitude Swiss air. This is secondhand smoke, a mess that hasn’t been cleaned up and has drifted over to us. I don’t know if we’ll have normal assembly today. I shift my weight from one foot to t
he other. I can’t see any teachers around. Through my daze I notice a group of girls gathered in the left-hand corner of the concourse. All I can make out is their clump of bent blackhaired heads, rustling uniforms, and mosquito-bitten legs shuffling around.
I nudge forward. There is a girl sprawled on the concrete. She makes a slight movement. She looks maybe two years younger than me. I have never seen her before. Her face is the sort you forget in a second. Not pretty, not ugly. She is looking at her own palm. Her mouth makes soft gulping shapes, like a goldfish out of a bowl. Her legs are splayed at obtuse angles, and I notice that her right foot has a smudged red circle around the ankle, no sock, and no shoe.
“One of the wild dogs bit her shoe off,” someone whispers. “Ate her sock. Would have chewed up the rest of her if Faizah and Sarah hadn’t passed by.”
“Serves her right,” someone adds.
At the back of our school is a secondary forest that the government grew to keep the air clean. It didn’t work. The fir trees sprang to full height at double speed, unsettled by the heat. The conifers are dark green, with tall tips like the bristles of mascara wands. There is a blue wire fence around the forest because of the pack of wild dogs that roams the tall grass. From time to time a hole appears in the fence, whether made by clippers or bitten open by the pack of mongrel dogs, scraggly brown and gray; there’s wolf in there somewhere. They run quickly, on sinewy legs. They never bark or howl. The authorities have brought in pest control and animal enforcement officers but these dogs are wily. They know how to hide.
I encountered one of them in my first year here. It came right up behind me when I was crying at the back of the canteen. As I watched my tears drip into my palms, I was so absorbed with feeling sorry for myself that I only sensed I had company when I heard loud, avid panting. My first thought was of Biscuit, back from the dead. I turned around and there was a huge, messy dog no more than two feet away from me. He—for it was a he, I could see his balls dangling—sniffed the grass in circles. I stared at his wet nose and yellow teeth, his long tongue discolored like a piece of old steak, not pink like Biscuit’s. There was, I thought, a certain grisly glamor to death by mauling. Yet the dog-wolf looked at me indifferently. After a few moments he padded away, haunches rising and falling. My heart shifted down from my throat and sank back into my ribs.
“Circe,” someone says. Sir-see.
The girl on the ground does not respond. A teacher comes up and makes us move aside.
“Circe,” the teacher repeats. “Can you hear me?”
The girl’s eyes roll round to where the teacher is standing. She moves her head and sits up, propped unsteady on her palms.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Circe replies. Her voice is small and scratchy. She sounds like she has a sore throat. It must be from the haze.
“Girl, can you stand up? Are you sure you’re okay?” the teacher continues. “Later on you need to come and find me and countersign the accident report.”
“Okay. I’ll action that. Just give me a few minutes.”
I lean in to get a closer look. What kind of person talks like this? Does she think she’s in the army?
The teacher seems familiar with her. She nods and walks away.
“Circe Low is such a drama queen,” someone behind me whispers.
“Thinks she’s the shit. When she’s not all that.”
“My dad knows her dad. Says they are nouveau riche, no class.”
Within a few minutes the crowd has dispersed, girls pairing off and mumbling small boredoms to each other. A flock of pigeons flies overhead. Circe and I look up at the same time.
“What’s going on with assembly?” I ask.
She glowers at me. “No idea.”
“Maybe they’ll let us go home. Because of this haze. I can hardly see anything. My eyes are so dry.” I’m mumbling, and soon she will try to get away from me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. She clutches her ankle and scratches her jaw with her other hand. “A gray dog got my shoe. It looked like a mix between a wolf and a pony. Not cute. Came out of nowhere and it held on to my ankle and wouldn’t let go. There’s blood but it doesn’t hurt. My Converse, though. Brand-new. Converse 77s, special edition. What am I supposed to do with just one side? That fucking dog. Next time, I’ll kick it.”
“Maybe you have rabies now. Or AIDS.”
“You can’t get AIDS from a dog. Don’t be stupid.”
“Of course you can,” I reply, even though I am not so sure. “You should get a blood test. In case you’re dying.”
I help her up and she brushes the dirt from the ground off her skirt. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Are you Ng Szu Min?”
“How do you know?”
“No big deal. I saw you outside the staffroom. You must have done something really dumb to end up in public detention.”
“I was talking in class. That’s all.”
“Hm. Well, I heard you bite and lick people and make shit up.”
“Says who? That’s not true,” I reply. “People in your year are dumb and gossipy.” I eye her tiny frame up and down. “And stunted.”
“What year are you in?”
“Sec Four.”
“I’m in the same year, stupid.”
“How come I’ve never seen you?”
“I transferred over last term. I’m not always in school,” Circe says. “I have trouble sleeping. It’s legit. I get some days off. I’ve got a medical cert. to prove it.”
“Wow. Lucky you.”
She shoots me an arch, shrewd look.
“I heard you’re like the girl from The Ring. You never wash your hair and you’re fucking creepy. You climb out of TVs.”
Before I can react Circe shrugs, and then flashes a smile at me. She looks both twelve and like a cavalier twenty-something when she does this. I see that she is one of the 7 percent of people in the world blessed with what is popularly termed a Truly Winning Smile. The sincerity of the smile makes my stomach lurch, like sitting in the backseat of a car as it goes over a speed bump. She hops on the foot with the shoe. As we make our way into the school building and down the darkened corridor, she leans into my arm.
5
CIRCE
2020
Ever since my divorce I sleep better. Seven solid hours every night, right until my alarm goes off. I remember my dreams better, too. Lately I’ve had dreams about auditions and choir practice, sincerely hoping to be a professional singer, unaware of how discordantly my life would unfold. And even further back in time, dreams of being close with my brother—back when it was the two of us in collusion against adulthood.
Leslie and I would have done anything never to grow up. Even as kids, we knew what a cliché we were; we rewatched our copies of Hook and Peter Pan until the tape stripes wore out. Can’t believe that my brother is now thirty-five, and has a goatlike wisp of facial hair, a bitchy banker wife, and two smart, sulky children. Back when we were children ourselves, we hid behind the living room curtains pale and tense as Daddy sat stony-faced at the dining table, sorting bills. Leslie and I hated seriousness. Adulthood seemed to us like an endless stream of paperwork and sighing. Frowning and always saying sorry, even when you didn’t mean it.
“Yuck. Not the Borings again,” Leslie would proclaim at the sound of guests’ voices in the hallway. He would groan like the green monster from Are You Afraid of the Dark? because it was going to be a long, staid evening when our parents threw a dinner party.
When we watched TV Leslie and I made retching noises at any kissing scenes. When we got a fax machine connected to an extra phone line, we used to call each other from opposite rooms, inventing long jokes devoid of punch lines, telling elaborate ghost stories to each other until our ears grew hot from the receiver and Mummy wailed for us to do our homework. The year we had the Internet installed we listened in on the rainstorm jangle of data on the phone line, int
errupting each other’s connectivity. That was 1997: the dawn of the Asian financial crisis, a period of rapid currency decline and market upheaval—yet whilst other businesses crumbled, my father’s hitherto limping luxury trading company unexpectedly thrived. It turned out that even in times of fiscal ruin people still harbored a bullish, avaricious appetite for certain kinds of jewelry, watches, and double-breasted suits.
Our family moved out of the flat where I’d spent my whole life, straight into a two-storey detached villa on Margoliouth Road with floors so shiny I could see my gleeful face in them. We went from budget to five-star hotels, cushioned in my father’s new money. Funny how long it takes to adjust to the removal of privileges, but how little time is needed to get accustomed to comfort. A hotel is a hotel is a hotel. Mummy used to berate Leslie and me for taking nice things so quickly for granted, and my brother and I would roll our bratty eyes at each other and mouth Nag, nag, nag. We bickered with and play-hit each other in stuffy airplanes that crisscrossed the world. Our parents paid thousands of dollars in order to relocate our arguments and petty grievances across different cities. We Lows loved each other but seldom got along, even back then. Is every family privately the same, or were we especially negative? Athens, Tokyo, Mozambique. In tour buses, rented cars, rattling trains, we paid no attention to the scenery, blinkered by our freshly funded monstrosity. Leslie kept his eyes on his Game Boy, I on my Tamagotchis.
All these things come back with such clarity and detail in my sleep that first thing in the morning, just before I grope around for my phone, I feel this pit of old time nested in my chest. It’s a physical thing. A weight shifting. For a moment or two I think that I’ll see my old Backstreet Boys poster on the wall, and I expect to put on my uniform to go to school. All this, even though it’s been at least two years since Leslie and I had a genuinely nice time together, just the two of us (I think it was one of those nostalgic big-screen showings of Hook at the Old Cathay, when his wife was working late and at the last minute couldn’t join us). And next month I’ll turn thirty-three years old.