by Sharlene Teo
I never dream about my ex-husband. I’m glad we ended it sooner rather than later. We exhausted all our ugliness; we have nothing left to inflict upon each other. I shudder to think what it would be like had we carried on resenting and attempting to bridge our irresolvable differences, over and over, until we were forty, fifty, sixty. At least I’ve got some youth left in me. Working around twenty-one-year-old interns keeps me feeling trendy. I notice how this generation hold their bodies (slouching, eyes shifty, averted; white-knuckle grip on phone), how they speak (listlessly, favoring texting to vocal conversation) as well as what they wear. The seventies look is back in fashion—bell-bottom jeans, peasant blouses—as well as the Recession Chic of the midnoughties: crumpled shirts, muted florals, interview outfits to sweat in. Vintage hand-me-downs are essential—nothing freshly manufactured. Morgue-Core, it’s called. All the same there are entire factories dedicated to distressing new clothing, making it look dirtied and snagged.
Mummy, ever charming, insists that I only notice the stupid and superficial things in life (like clothing or TV shows) and ignore what is important. What is important? That is something I would still like to know. Nowadays I catch my mother looking at me with bafflement. As if I turned out to be the complete opposite to what she hoped and expected. She’s gotten more negative in old age. She tells me it is not a big surprise that I gave up on my marriage, because I’m a pathological quitter. She blames me for her gallstones and says I am ageing her. I tell her I can’t do that because she’s already old.
“You and your rudeness,” she replies. “I wish I had a sweeter girl.”
She’s kept my divorce quiet from most of our relatives. She secretly hopes Jarrold and I will get back together, perhaps go see a Christian marriage counselor, even though both of us are lapsed Christians, at best. No one needs to know, is her line. That’s fine.
Leslie is my mother’s ally. He lives with his wife, Rachel, in a swish East Coast condo with rooms the size of teacup Chihuahuas and a swimming pool that looks phallic from the aerial view. They are the flawlessly devoted parents of two precocious boys whom I find hard to handle; I’m bad with kids. We could not have ended up more different. The freshest impression I have of my big brother is his face contorted into disapproval, while his wife tiptoes around the shambles of my marriage with sanctimonious delicacy, like singlehood is a malady that needs curing.
I am deep into the process of unknowing my ex-husband. Unknowing is as delicate and gradual a practice as its reverse. It deserves the same space and deliberation. Why does a divorce carry so much more gravity and defeat than a breakup? Why do friends quietly judge and feel sorry? Sure, there’s the issue of assets, and titles, the naming of things. The people closest to us withdrawing the expectation that we would stay together forever and have fat, gifted kids. That’s the pinch. He can keep his boring friends and priority club memberships. I am not sorry. Right now I am at the stage where I’m startled that my ex-husband and I ever shared a straw, a blanket, a flat. I can admit to myself that he was a bad kisser, tepid in bed.
I never dream about the last ten years. I read a list on the Internet that said that some of the most common things that people dream about are:
1. Falling off buildings.
2. Being chased.
3. Animals.
Nothing as exciting as the first two for me. The animals I will come back to. No running or falling in my sleep. Just this sludge of the past. The well-trodden and the has-been. All these old feelings bubble up and leave a thin film over my waking day, like the skin on a soup.
*
I work as a social media consultant. I’ve been at my company for over four years. When I joined, in 2016, I was twenty-nine and happily married and very excited to be here. Now I’m almost thirty-three and happily unmarried, and on some Monday mornings, sitting in this very room, I feel like if I was stuck on a ship out at sea with these people I would kill everybody. I should find a new job, but I just don’t have the energy.
The main account I’m handling is Jolene See’s. She is a Channel 8 starlet who is trying to break into the Taiwanese pop market. First stop: Taiwan. Next stop: China. And then: the world. I’ll be impressed if she makes it out of Southeast Asia. She’s got a half-decent voice—a forlorn, saccharine soprano—but you just can’t force these things. I should know. Her management team are awful but they pay us on time. I end up doing a lot of their work for them, curating Jolene’s English language social media content. Every post, every tweet, every mailer. Jolene is seventeen, dewy-eyed and lithe and dumb as bricks, but she’s a nice kid.
“Make it cute,” her team instruct me.
“I’ll action that,” I say to them.
For at least half my working week this is what I do: paid ventriloquism. I adopt the voice of a “cute,” kooky, highly relatable seventeen-year-old. My office is open plan; everyone can see my monitor. The sun is coming in strong through the floor-length windows. There must be a word—some German or Inuit term—that describes the stuck, dreadful feeling of disliking a beautiful view just because it is overfamiliar, and synonymous with work and daily boredom. I’ve lived on this island all my life, and I often forget it’s just a speck on a map of the world.
So much is crammed into this city. No such thing as a quiet, empty space around here, unless you count a corporate car park on Sundays. I crick my neck left and then right and take in the crystal ship glint of Marina Bay—skyscrapers of silver and mirrored blue glass, the swoop of a highway, construction cranes lifting container crates. Reclaimed land, all this. Thirty years ago it was part of the seabed—now it’s a tall jagged skyline, hiding a giant sinkhole. By our long windows is the sage-green Feature Wall, so called because it’s meant to be a special feature of our recently refurbished office. This color is meant to be calming. Instead it reminds me of the terrible paint job by the staffroom in my secondary school. Someone needs to change the batteries for the wall clock. The hands are stuck on six thirty, which is just cruel, because no one can leave until our boss says so.
The government is constructing another MRT line outside. BAY VIEW STATION—READY TO SERVE YOU IN 2023. I don’t see the need for so many stops within such a small radius. Tunnels of marble, steel, and Plexiglas, with subterranean magazine stands and incessantly beeping barriers. The stations are so close to each other that it takes less than twenty seconds to get from one stop to the next. By the time the door hisses shut it is time for it to reopen.
I’m writing an email to a painfully obtuse woman in the Joy Management Hong Kong offices. I need to get the tone just right: not too snarky but firm enough to let her know that if she was doing her job correctly, I wouldn’t have to keep asking her for the same stupid things. After two sentences, my focus is interrupted by drilling and the clang of metal. I check the time on my phone. I take a medication called Praziquantel every four hours, after meals. This is a new development, these small beige capsules in a blister pack. I pop the pill silently at my desk, wash it down with fizzy water. I haven’t told anyone in the office that I am recovering from a tapeworm infection.
How I picked up a tapeworm in a first-world country like Singapore is a mystery to me, and to my doctor as well. Dr. Quah said it was raw meat. Some shoddy hawker not washing his hands properly. Tapeworm eggs are spread through feces. Somewhere along the line, during the past two months, I must have been too busy to realize that I had eaten shit. I could have eaten shit and died if I wasn’t careful.
I know that some people ingest tapeworms in the hope that the parasite will eat them thin. Mine just gave me cramps. I remained the same weight, but developed a little more of an appetite. I craved sharp and demanding tastes: candied orange peel, fried cuttlefish, chilli kangkong, pickled cabbage. It was only when the cramps worsened that I went to the doctor. I was shocked to find that something had taken up a home inside me, uninvited. It thrived, whilst I clutched my sides and felt dizzy.
Dr. Quah prescribed the medicine to treat it. Now I’m killi
ng the sucker, slowly and surely. Poisoning the life out of it. When it gives up the fight I’ll shit out segments of its sickly white body. An eye for an eye, a shit for a shit.
I know what my worm looks like. I’ve seen its little face in my sleep, peeping behind my eyelids. Cestoda cyclophyllidea, that’s the name for it, which sounds like a thrush medication, or an ugly woman in a myth. My Cestoda is long and slender and moves with purpose. It’s not a dumb creature. It wants to sap up the very best of me. All the vitamins and nutrients. All the funniest anecdotes and fondest feelings. Cestoda lives in my intestines but likes to travel around my body, take a gander, have a look-see. I have a meeting in a minute. I squirm in my chair as I feel the worm wandering down my gullet. There is something exquisite and almost sexy about how alone I am with this knowledge. I feel it ripple past my esophagus, clogging up my voice box, avoiding the heart. Nestling into the atrium of my lungs, down to the belly. Is it the worm, or a bad lunch?
Gordon Cheong, my boss, nods his head at me. I get up and we file into the meeting room, seven of us. Jeanette Kok Hui Ling is walking in front of me, the office babe. I study her ass in a taupe-colored pencil skirt, her sashaying at once both effortless and practiced. I wonder what it would feel like to hold her hips like a jar and rattle them. Jeanette brings back the oiliest meals for lunch at her desk; char kway teow, dripping satay sticks, mee goreng, and deep-fried chicken wings from the food court next door. Sometimes she takes the food out of its sweating Styrofoam box and lays it on the one square white plate we have in the office kitchen. From the water cooler, I watch her angling her phone camera. After she’s uploaded and tagged the evidence, she eats it. Wolfs it all down whilst online shopping, making gobbling and slurping sounds like a cartoon, a frenzy of disposable chopsticks and plastic spoons snapped in staccatos by her ferocious hunger. Where does all that oil and fat go? Does it clog up her tiny arteries? Does it travel out of her body peacefully, like rabbit pellets, or does she take epic, life-or-death shits?
That apocalyptic appetite is the only thing that makes me warm to her. I wonder if she has a worm that she knows nothing about. Maybe they have a one-sided, long-term relationship. Her worm would be inferior to my worm—less selective in its tastes, lethargic in the afternoons.
As if she senses that I am thinking about her, Jeanette slides into the leather seat across from me and glances up. I half smile at her, but she dismisses it. She returns to her tablet. Her nails are violet-colored shellac. Kiat Ming, Irfan, Carl, and Mona assume their seats and take out their tablets as well. Tap, tap, tap. Everyone scrolls to the schedule for today. Carl gawps at Jeanette’s cleavage. Gordon clears his throat and starts talking. I look at him and try not to glaze over.
“Look at the screen,” Gordon says. Our gazes follow, like good little sheep.
On the large monitor on the wall a woman’s face appears. Her features bear the artificial clarity of digital restoration. It takes me half a second to recognize her, and when I do a lump forms in my throat. The bastard child of a feeling at once both horrified and deeply moved. My stomach shifts. My worm must like that. Plenty to feed on.
I force myself to examine a younger version of the woman I knew. She is half hiding behind a large green leaf, smiling so that you can see the crinkles at the corners of her gleaming eyes. The dark-red painted crescent of her mouth is in shadow. Even though the image has been retouched, the woman is the biggest giveaway that this is an old photo. She has that Peranakan, Nyonya kind of beauty that you just don’t see on the streets these days.
“Anyone know who this is?” Gordon asks.
“Never seen her in my life,” says Jeanette.
“Me neither. She’s hot,” says Carl.
“I know,” says Irfan, who seems to know everything. “That’s the chick who played the Pontianak in the seventies movie.”
“That’s right,” Gordon replies. “Amisa Tan. If you don’t know her name you might recognize her face from vintage posters. Aaron Leow’s studio is doing a reboot of this movie. This is a major project. All hands on deck. Thali and Joseph will tell you how hard they had to fight to win this client.”
Carl and Irfan make murmurs of assent. Gordon hovers his cursor over Amisa’s face.
“Ponti!, 1978. Followed by Ponti 2, 1979, Ponti 3: Curse of the Bomoh in 1980. Iskandar Wiryanto wrote and directed all three of them. Anyone heard of him?”
Silence in the room. Jeanette is smoothing her index nail with her thumb. Kiat Ming is checking his phone under the table. Mona is borderline snoring.
“Don’t expect anyone will. He never made it big. He thought he was making art-house movies. But these Ponti films are camp entertainment. Nobody took them seriously. Anyway, Leow’s production company is currently in casting, and they want us to handle the promotion. Any ideas? I want to see you excited.”
Carl and Irfan pretend to be excited. Ming is still texting. Nobody is looking at me.
I remember the first time I saw her: Szu’s mother. I never knew her as Amisa Tan the cult actress, the siren from the film archives, doe eyes on a painted poster. Just the jellyfish billow of her nightdress as she walked away from us. Her pale wrists and those sharp features, steely even off guard, too striking for someone’s quiet, housebound mother. Amisa had a face that was always lit up with anger, or irritation, or some grown-up, storied sadness she never thought to disguise from two teenage girls.
That first afternoon returns to me in jolts of film. Szu unlocked the front grille and the old beige door. I stared at the nape of my new friend’s neck, vaguely repulsed by the beads of sweat forming along her hairline even though I was sweating myself. The moment we stepped into the front room I knew that we had to keep quiet. This was a place of reverence, of a finger to a lip, hushing my jokes. It was an offensively bright day in January, three weeks after we met. None of the sunshine glare made its way in. The air was static and tomblike.
“Got any snacks?” I asked Szu in a lowered voice.
At that point I was still testing her, aware that I hit a nerve with every reminder of eating. She nodded somberly. We took off our shoes and padded down the corridor. Szu and I were sixteen, each other’s only friends in the world. We were symbiotic in the intense, irreplicable way that comes as part and parcel of being careworn teenaged girls; we wheedled and resented each other in fluctuating measures. I looked around the kitchen. It was so scummy—the dishes on the drying rack, faded or soup-stained. When Szu opened the fridge, it exhaled a bad breath of fish and pickled vegetables.
“You brought a friend back, Szu. I’m impressed,” someone said.
Szu turned away from the stressful glow of food, and my eyes followed. A spectacular, spectral woman stood in the doorway wearing a light-blue housedress and the red plastic slippers you can get for ninety-nine cents from the wet market. Even in that getup, I had never seen anyone more starlike. I gawked. At this point Amisa was already very ill. I didn’t know it then, but of course they did, mother and daughter both; their knowledge heavied the room. From this first time I met her Amisa Tan had less than eight months left to live. She was so thin. She seemed less like a woman made of flesh and bone, and more like an exquisitely etched stencil. Long streaks of gray and white showed in her chignon.
“Um. Hello, Auntie,” I finally said.
“Please. It’s Mrs. Ng.”
“I’m Circe.”
“Nice to meet you.” She assessed me for a moment. I felt insufficient in my dark-gray uniform. Her eyes flicked away. “Well, make yourself at home. Enjoy, girls.”
Mrs. Ng didn’t ask me to repeat my unusual name, didn’t feign any interest. She was so different from other mothers, who would have offered water, or chrysanthemum tea, or layer cake. She had this regality to her movements. She lit a cigarette and made her way to the room at the end of the hallway, and shut the door quietly behind her. I felt something catch in my throat. I had this fawning urge to follow her, but I kept still.
“Well . . . now you’ve met my mot
her,” Szu said. “Sorry. There’s nothing in the fridge to snack on. We might have Khong Guan biscuits somewhere, but I don’t know how old they are.”
“Forget it,” I replied. “Can I have a tour instead?”
The house was crawling with large red ants. The walls bore long, snaking cracks, half the paint peeled off in jagged archipelagos. The grilles of the kitchen window were matted inches deep with bird and bat shit. The old bungalow was dim and quiet except for the bubbling of the aquarium filter from the huge fish tank in the kitchen and, from time to time, the sound of low chanting. A man, or a woman with a hoarse voice, muttered in a dialect I couldn’t place.
“That’s my aunt Yunxi,” Szu said, a little apologetically.
I thought, Who could live here? What a creepy dump. Yet at the same time there was a certain aura about the place. I don’t know how else to put it. The house was suffused with a strangeness that has stayed with me for years. Its dirty windows and closed doors appear in my dreams from time to time. At the end of my afternoon visits I felt glad to return to the tidy familiarity of my own home, and yet I wanted to go back to Szu’s. I looked forward to revisiting that off-white building at the end of a leafy driveway, containing its beautiful discontent. The place was so run-down and neglected that my own mother would have been appalled. It reminded me of the backstage area of an ancient theatre in there. The melted-down candles, the orange lamps, the palettes of fine pink powder that I assumed Amisa applied to her smooth, ghostly skin.
6
AMISA
1975
She was all packed. It wasn’t difficult. She had not much to take with her, just one bag and all the ringgits she saved from odd jobs: rambutan and cockle picking, button sorting, dishwashing, Campbell Street trade assistant, steamboat dream girl, whatever she could get.