by Sharlene Teo
“Sisi tells me your mother is a movie star,” Mummy said.
“Um, yeah,” Szu replied. She gulped and looked up from under her eyelashes. “She acted in the Ponti trilogy. Local horror movies.”
“Ah! I can’t say I’ve heard of them,” Mummy replied. “Does she still act?”
“Not anymore. She’s retired.” Szu had on that gummy, bashful voice she reserved for teachers.
“Well, I’ll look for Ponti in the movie rental store next time.”
“Please, Mom,” I said. “You never go to the rental store. Nobody uses rental stores anymore. It’s all pirated VCDs nowadays. From Johor.”
“You young people, I cannot catch up. Auntie is a dinosaur! And what about your pa, Szu? What does he do?”
“Antique restoration.”
“Sorry, dear? I didn’t catch that.”
“Antique restoration.”
“Oh! How nice. Our family friend Uncle Meng also—”
“We’re going to my room,” I said. “Come on, Szu.”
Upstairs Szu squinted at the Backstreet Boys poster tacked to my farthermost wall. SHOW ME THE MEANING OF BEING LONELY, it read. The Backstreet Boys stood arms crossed or akimbo, all curtain fringes and bleached tips, five set jaws over five pairs of priceless sneakers. Szu crossed her arms and stared down at her own canvas shoes. There was a dejected cast to her hunch.
“Sorry Mummy asked about your dad,” I said. “She didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like he’s dead. At least, not that I know of. Anyway, I don’t really want to talk a—”
“I can’t believe he won the lottery! Your family is so random! My dad always said if someone wins the Toto they’re not supposed to tell anybody or they’ll get murdered for their money.”
“Murdering someone is a megastupid way to get money.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I don’t really care about money.”
“Yeah, right!” I laughed. “Everyone cares about money. Just look at our school. If you claim you don’t you’re either lying or deluded.”
“Can I use your toilet?”
I pointed her towards my en suite. She shut the door and had to pull it twice to lock it. She stayed in there for a long time.
“Why do you use men’s shaving cream?” Szu asked when she came out.
“My brother Leslie likes to use my bathroom. He probably just took a shit and shower in there, before he went out. He has his own toilet but he messes mine up because he thinks it’s funny.”
“Oh,” said Szu. She sat down, gingerly, on the edge of my queen-sized bed and looked around again. I rifled through my CD collection.
“What do you want to listen to?”
“Anything. I’m neutral.”
My upper lip curled up as I selected a Fleetwood Mac album. “Neutral” was my term, one of my catchphrases. As the music started to play I shifted up on the cloud-printed covers and flopped down to one side on the bed. When I peered up at Szu she was sitting ramrod straight, hands on her lap, eyes lightly closed.
“Your house gives me a happy vibe,” she said.
After she left I took a shower. When I stepped out and rubbed the foggy mirror to judge my body, I noticed that all the bottles and Kodomo toothpaste on my counter had been lined up straight, turned label-outwards. I pictured Szu taking her time, studying their ingredients.
*
I’m renting a flat in Tiong Bahru. It’s been superhip for about a decade, and the cost reflects that. Even the prata is more expensive around here. Sibeh Hipster pricing, I call it. My flatmate is a forty-year-old named Julius (or Yong Ling Kiat on our rental agreement). I met him through an ex-colleague. My only stipulation for a roommate was: not a freak. So far, Julius and I get along just fine. Julius works in advertising and identifies as asexual. He told me this early on, to get any misconceptions out of the way that he might ever have any designs on me. Initially affronted, I’ve come to appreciate his directness. He is really tall for a Singaporean guy, over six feet, and wears his hair in a greasy ponytail.
“When are you going to cut your hair?” I ask him as I put down my bag. “It’s getting scraggly.”
“Don’t boss me around,” he replies. He’s making a pot of tea. His mother bought him this transparent teapot from Japan. I watch the gray-green bud unfurl and bloom in the center of the pot.
“Something in the mail for you,” Julius says.
“What is it?”
“It’s on the side table.”
I pick up a thick padded envelope with my name and address scrawled on it in black marker. The ink is running out and so the final line of my address is scratched with frenzied strokes of the marker pen, indents in the paper.
It’s mostly bubble padding that has bulked up the envelope. Inside are red sheaves of paper, and when I take them out I see they are paper stencils, the sort you find all over the place during Chinese New Year, of the different zodiac animals. I count eleven of them, my heart quickening in my throat. Only the rabbit is missing. I grope around the envelope for anything else, inspect it carefully for a return address, find nothing.
“Viral marketing,” Julius tells me. “It’s really well done. Looks authentic, like some poor intern actually used a faulty marker pen to take down all those addresses. Maybe the logo is in invisible ink. Chinese manufacturers. Hm, I’ve got a hunch which agency this is. Give it.”
“No,” I reply. I put the stencils back into the envelope. Thin crêpe paper in my hands, giving off the faintest whiff of dust. I feel the urge to hide them. I know it’s not someone trying to sell me something. It’s someone trying to tell me something.
I remember being eight years old, and an old woman who smelt like dustballs pressing stencils like that into my palm. I picture her sad, inky eyes and shiver.
Later that night, I feel a presence in my room. It must be two or three a.m.—witching hour to someone somewhere. Whoever believes it, feels it. Wasn’t that what Szu’s crazy aunt used to say? Aunt Yunxi, a proponent of her own personal brand of voodoo.
When I sense somebody in my room, the first and most obvious person that comes to bleary mind is my ex-husband, Jarrold. I might as well say his name now, calm and flat, two words that otherwise mean nothing. Jarrold Koh.
I remember the weight of Jarrold’s fading, bony-chested body in bed—how he would dream like a dog, legs tussling and scrambling, twisting the sheets; for a rare, shimmering moment I feel fond of him. This man I grew not to hate but to feel disdain for, total utter disinterest. Which is even more damning than hatred. Towards the end, when we weren’t arguing but filling the room with a noxious fog of conflict, he would be the first to start talking. To start trying to explain things to me or accuse me of not listening, and this would literally put me to sleep. My eyelids closing in spite of themselves, I would pinch my arms with the jagged nibs of my nails to keep myself awake. And he noticed, of course he did. Even thinking about it now my eyelids start to droop.
And so I remind myself: I only miss him because I’m lonely. And it’s less lonely to do that than to have nobody to miss. Because we no longer have to squeeze into the same bed, and maintain the young-couple charade of sharing our lives. As if life is a jumbo packet of chips. As if you can make odd shapes fit. As if everyone is built for bliss. Maybe Jarrold has a shot. I reckon he’s moved on and fallen for someone docile. I can imagine him murmuring endearments to a moon-faced girl with glossier hair and a kinder heart than me. Every sticky step of love, emoji trails and coy conversations, I can picture it. Date night: he’ll bring her over some lontong and soya bean milk from the hawker center near her place and she will beam at him, accept thankfully. And later on they will dim the lights and fuck full of earnestness to Adele or something.
All these details I’ll never know, all of it is happening. While I lie here on my own, getting haunted. And this wakes me up a little bit, brings me back to my body. I return to the limp, shea-buttered heft of my limbs on the mattress and all th
is space around me, blanket all to myself. And then I realize that the someone else I sensed isn’t Jarrold but a woman standing at the foot of the bed. Her shadow stretches over my pillow.
Long ago I stopped believing that you can will things, good or bad, to happen to you. But now it seems so obvious, half awake, that Szu should appear to me tonight, because I’ve been expending so much energy thinking about her. No choice of my own, this sense of someone near me.
Szu is wearing our secondary school uniform. Her scuffed white shoes are the only things catching the slice of moonlight coming in through the slats of my bedroom window blind. Arms crossed. She is lankier and just as angular as I remember. When I put together her shape, facial features a little blurry, I don’t even cry out. Why would she scare me? She was never capable of intimidation.
“Circe, what’s up?” she says, and she doesn’t sound hostile or sad, either. Her voice is so matter-of-fact and familiar, it makes me choke. The tone is a little off-kilter. She sounds like one of those American voiceover dubs on a Japanese animation, slightly out of sync.
My tongue unglues itself from the bottom of my mouth.
“What the hell?” I blurt out. And in a way I am being honest. What is up with me, lately? Answer: a constant state of what-the-hell-is-happening. I don’t know if my mouth is moving or if I am saying the words in my head.
I’m seized by the impulse to reach out and grab Szu by her scrawny wrists. I want to hold her shoulders, with the cavalier liberty of the old days, and give her a shake. Ask her what went wrong. The general and the specific.
The Internet can tell me in a millisecond where my old friend really is, but that would give away a game I don’t want to be a part of. I don’t want to know because to know where she is and what she is doing is to invite the past back as a symptom of the awry present. Our story is done. I don’t care and I don’t want to hear it. It’s ancient history.
Szu fades and flickers at the foot of my bed, and uncrosses her arms. Soon my jangling alarm tone will be right in my ears and the birds cawing their outdoor refrains, and the weekday, always the weekday, all over again.
“What a way to greet me,” Szu says, and this time she sounds just like me. She licks her lips. “Especially after what you did.”
She lets the words settle over my bedroom, like leaves shaken off a tree. My stomach flips. I can’t move, can’t even flinch. She opens her mouth to speak again.
“Go away,” I say, but all that comes out is a groan and the edges of my room begin to blur.
As I slip into deep sleep I think: I don’t want to hear about Szu, or see her ever again. If I run into her I’m sprinting in the other direction. Even if my feet won’t comply, I’ll force them. I don’t want to know if she looks as prematurely worn-out as I do at thirty-three, or whether she’s glowing; whether she’s put on weight, become healthy; whether she’s rearranged her face or cut all her hair off, highlighted it; whether she has a Caesarean scar on her body or broken bones, whether she is living in this country or on another continent. Or the darkest thing I fear, whether she’s been dead for God knows how long and I was too distracted by my own life to have even the slightest inkling.
*
I wake with a jolt. My left hand flails over the pillow and I gasp for air, just as my alarm begins its polyphonic pleas. I feel for my phone and swipe it quiet. I had an action-packed dream, before it was interrupted. My client Jolene was running after me; Jolene turned murderous, suddenly terrifying with her pop star perm and the acetate sheen of her skin. I bolted away from her, down a FairPrice aisle with flickering strip lights and shelves full of cereal boxes. I wore shoes with too-thin soles that made me feel as if any moment I might lose my footing.
I get ready to go to work, gulping down an acrid bitterness in my mouth. Two stops away from the office, I remember Szu standing by the foot of my bed, goading me.
When Amisa went into hospital Szu became obsessed with death. How long do you think it would take for someone to die if they didn’t eat, or didn’t drink? she asked me. She made me look these things up on the Internet because she didn’t have a computer.
I didn’t blame her. It is hard not to fixate on death if it is staring your own mother in the face. Mondays and Wednesdays after school I followed Szu to the hospital, Mount E., a massive complex of aquamarine and wretched beige. We dragged our feet past the circular driveway and into the air-conditioned lobby, took the lift to floor 3 and two lefts on the bleached linoleum that made our canvas shoes squeak.
At sixteen I had never experienced any real death in my family, nothing close enough to touch. But from TV and movies I knew enough to conclude that all hospitals truly look the same. And this uniformity was bare and brutal more than reassuring.
Aunt Yunxi spared no expense. Amisa had her own room, with one glass wall for observation. I tried not to look into the other units on the way there, but I couldn’t resist. Everything in the ward was sprayed clean, sterilized to a plasticky shine. Although there were no signposts Szu and I knew we were in the Land of No Hope. We had learned about this place from made-for-television movies but it was surreal to actually be unmoored within it. We had to observe decorum. Stand with our hands folded, our feet close together, heads bowed. The scent in the air was a mixture of disinfectant and disease. The disinfectant couldn’t cure the disease; it could only try to cancel out the infectiousness of a surface. A sign on the wall had a diagram that indicated, if you don’t wash your hands, and you touch your mouth, unthinking, sometimes this can be enough to make you sick. Left untended, even a small sickness can mutate into something serious. As if we needed any further reminders of this. The air in the ward was heavy, solemn. The curtains by the beds were dark mauve and the other patients looked older than Amisa.
In the Land of No Hope certain words were forbidden. “Dying,” “terminal,” “unfair”—those are a few examples I can think of. Nothing overt, no expressions of outrage, no alarm. Slack-jawed old men, eyes shut tightly, breathing through a ventilator as their middle-aged children stood by the side of the bed, past crying. Tiny grandmothers with thinning crowns of hair, skin pulled tight and jaundiced, or swollen and discolored blue-gray from the medication, the expensive drugs entering these failing bodies intravenously. And at the end of the corridor, Amisa Tan.
Her condition had deteriorated over the past two months until it became clear she needed to be hospitalized. Before, while her sickness remained unsaid, it was easy to mistake its increasingly pronounced displays for a doomed, noble fragility. I’d come into the kitchen at 3 p.m. to the sight of her delicate profile tilted towards the kitchen window, peaceful for a moment. When she looked back at Szu and me she had this expression of futile anger, as if we were bailiffs come to seize her furniture. Amisa turned her nose up at me with undisguised contempt, but this only made me want to win her favor even more. Back then I was too unformed to feel insulted. But the way she looked at her own daughter was far worse—she would flick her eyes from Szu’s messy black hair down to her feet, and grit her teeth, as if to say, Why her, why me, why all this?
Amisa was like this almost every time I encountered her. I derived the guilty pleasure of schadenfreude, watching the mother be so brazenly brutal to her own child. Szu kept her head bowed, hunched her shoulders until she was almost my height, and never challenged her mother’s hostility. Even I knew things weren’t so simple as that, and that there would be no empowering denouement to the daily insult of her bullying. Amisa affected Szu more than any of the taunting girls at school.
By the time Amisa entered the Land of No Hope, I had developed an intensity of feeling towards her that hovered between a crush and intimidation. She was incorrigible and out of this world: this beautiful woman who broke her daughter’s heart every day as much as she continued to fascinate us both. Isn’t this what magazines mean by star quality: that ineffable thing, charisma? No matter what we say, we humans are fundamentally shallow; it’s encoded in our eyes and monkey brains. I have never
met anyone like Amisa Tan. She had a brand of bruised yet appealing insouciance that I wanted to grow into one day myself.
It was the wrong time to think that, to gawp at the object of my grotesque private adoration. All color drained from her face, cheekbones so badly sunken. She was dying; it was plain to see, although nobody would say it. I can’t forget how she looked, towards the end. Dark hair with streaks of gray fanned out on the pillow, chest rising and falling like a small bird’s. Increasingly often, when we visited, she was asleep. Yunxi never came with us; she told Szu she had to stay in the house, attending to the roster of clients. After all, they had to keep up the business.
One afternoon when we visited, Amisa was sitting up in bed. Her blue hospital gown was bunched up all around her and she looked like a china doll nested in crêpe paper. Her face was swollen and waxy. She blinked as if she had something in her eye.
“Hi. How are you feeling today?” asked Szu.
“Hello, Mrs. Ng,” I said.
“Go away,” she replied. I flinched. And then she turned to her daughter.
“I bet you’re happy to see me like this,” Amisa said. Her voice was so hoarse and I could tell it was an effort to exert herself, to project it with such vehemence. “You’ve cost me.”
“What?” Szu asked feebly, even though Amisa had spoken loudly enough that we both heard. “Why would you say that?”
I started backing out of the door, my hands cold, hurt and shame tracing my ribs.
“Because it’s true,” Amisa said.
*
In 2003, the big haze lingered. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome had broken out in Guangdong the year before and coughed and hacked its way around the region. People had died from it. Everyone was afraid of getting infected. Some wore stupid-looking hospital masks but Szu and I would rather have been caught dead than join them. We drifted around Heeren like a pair of angelfish, giving boys the discreet side-eye. Our long black hair trailed like fine, wispy tails. Our bubble voices echoed in the atria of shopping centers—Takashimaya, Far East, the Heeren. How cute is that. How does this look? Too expensive. Cheaply made. Perfect for a hot date. What hot date? Ha ha. This chitchat of commerce. We were the target demographic, spoilt teenage schoolgirls with a proclivity for bored buying. We were more powerful than we realized.