by Sharlene Teo
“Circe, do you mind giving Szu and me a moment?”
Circe and I exchange a look but she does as she is told and steps aside to stare at a plaster statue of a mermaid with her arms thrown up in the air. The sun moves behind a veil of viscous white clouds. I feel faint and a little cold. I narrow my eyes to try to focus on Mrs. Tay.
“Szu, I’m afraid I’ve received a phone call,” Mrs. Tay says. “It’s about your mother.”
I feel like someone on a television show. This is a scene I have watched unfold many times before in Channel 8 drama serials. I’m playing the part of the young girl with the quivering mouth and the eyes already welling up with tears. My face feels hot and unreal, yet my hands are freezing.
“Your aunt just called to tell me. Your mother has passed away. I am so sorry,” Mrs. Tay says.
It occurs to me right then that when people say “passed away” it implies that we have just missed them. As if they passed by on their way to another errand.
Mrs. Tay keeps her voice flat and calm but I can see that she is trying to control her expression. She wants to scrunch her features up. Pity is upsetting. For a moment I feel more sorry for her than she must for me.
I keep staring at her, in that bovine, blank way that I know usually irritates other teachers, but Mrs. Tay’s gaze remains soft. I feel a mosquito land on my right arm. Its snout pierces my epidermis and sucks out my rare type AB blood. All of a sudden I can hear every cricket in the park, little green bodies hiding amongst the reeds and in the crevices of the gaudy plaster statues.
“I am so sorry,” Mrs. Tay repeats, and I can tell she really means it. “You poor girl.” She shakes her head and comes over to me, pulls me close for a hug. I wilt like a soggy cabbage. I stare at Circe over Mrs. Tay’s shoulder. Circe’s mouth hangs open and her hand rises up and lands at the base of her throat.
“Do you want to call your aunt back?” Mrs. Tay asks. She releases me and my arms flop to my sides. I shake my head at her.
“Um, no, it’s fine, please, no, it’s fine,” I finally reply, and scratch my neck as I lower my head. I don’t want to look at her. The pavement is turquoise with a pattern of swirls, an imitation of the ocean, only the cracks have gathered so much dirt over the years that the surface seems muddied.
“When did it happen?”
“Forty minutes ago.”
Why did the news take so long to reach me? What timing is normal? How am I supposed to know what to do (a) now; and (b) ever? One hour ago we were boarding the huffing bus and I had one foot on the step. I was thinking of why some steps are built so much broader and harder to climb than others. I was also thinking of my mother lying in the hospital bed. I had started to picture her perpetually, habitually, that image of her waxy, sleeping face stuck fast to the back of my mind like a fly poster. I made a list of possibilities:
— Maybe my mother is one day from getting much better, and when I see her tomorrow she will be sitting up in bed. She can be healthy and bitchy again. Maybe she will snap at me as she applies rouge to her cheeks. Maybe she will demand a cigarette and for me to fetch the younger doctor, Dr. Ngoi, with the chubby char siu bao face, and the eunuch voice.
— Maybe my mother will slip into a coma, and come out infirm, vegetative. And then I could spend the rest of my life taking care of her, being so admirably nice.
— Maybe she will really go (and to where, or nowhere, I do not know). But only some time in the future, after we’ve grown close and entered into the realm of moving conversations, parting pearls of wisdom. Love in spades and blankets, easy love.
My fantasies were similar to how they had been, even before she fell ill. I hadn’t sensed anything different. I hadn’t paid enough attention, or I would have known.
“You are free to go if you need to, Szu,” Mrs. Tay says. I shake my head.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’d like to stay here but I need to be on my own.”
“Of course.”
I feel trite tears welling up. I try to think of my eyes as small basins, holding water.
“Can I go?”
“Yes, but I might come to check up on you. If your aunt Yunxi wants you to go to her, I’ll let you know. But for now you take your own time. Just as long as we reassemble by the main gates in two hours. Are you okay?” She reaches into her bag, brings out a tissue packet.
I take it from her. The packet has a design of a small yellow bear holding up a balloon on one side, and the plastic is all crumpled from days in Mrs. Tay’s bag. The bear makes me want to cry.
“May I go?”
“Yes, Szu, of course.”
I march off as quickly as I can, past Circe, who starts to follow me but I shake my head and put out my arm like I’m holding a sword in a samurai film, tilting the hilt downward, elegantly. Last week Circe and I tried to watch Rashomon because sophisticated film buffs seem to love it, but we ended up snoring on the sofa instead. I remember the samurai in the film, so strong and stoic. So I pretend I am a stalwart Japanese warrior and keep on walking.
I go past the figure of the crab with a man’s head and past the sculpture of a village at work: figures toiling, wielding sickles and balancing bamboo sticks across their peeling plaster backs. I walk farther and farther into the park, away from everybody, until I arrive at a cave flanked by two figures of a bull and a horse, both dressed in finery for battle: chain armor and bold turquoise-trimmed robes, boots for their hooves, clutching scepters. I’m out of breath even though I haven’t been going that quickly. My inhales are rapid and ragged.
The Chinese sign above the figures reads: THE TEN COURTS OF HELL.
I’ve been here before. Seeing that dead-eyed horse stirs up the faint embers of memory. The cave entrance looks so much smaller and shabbier than I remembered. Why do the dimensions of real life always disappoint me?
My father was standing right over there, eyes downcast, forehead furrowed gray. He looked deeply sad and angry at the same time. Like a man that had just been slapped with a prison sentence. There was so much depth in his face it was like staring into a chasm. I remember thinking, Is this what adults do, brew their frustrations inside their heads? Does anger charge up like batteries? Later that night, my parents mumbled like thunder, and one of them knocked a pot of pu’er tea off the table and it shattered. Sometimes I wished I were blind and deaf. Maybe six was the year that unhappiness started to cluster like spores of mold in our household. Maybe I’m just speculating. I plugged my ears with my fingers and lay still as my parents clamored next door. I longed for a thick, soupy silence, calm walls behind which nothing hateful happened.
*
Circe finds me huddled in the Third Court of Hell, sitting beside a figurine getting his heart pulled out by a man in a yellow mask. His small, pinched face has an expression of quiet anguish, made even sadder by the paint peeling off in flecks, giving the illusion of a skin condition. She comes across me with my mouth slightly ajar, like a frog catching flies, and my eyes glazed and watery. It is humid in the cave, and its interior seems to stretch on and on, illuminated by orange, low-wattage bulbs. There are even more mosquitoes in here and they bite me in awkward places, the fold of skin behind the knee, the shin.
“Hey,” Circe says, and sits down beside me. Water drips off the cave ceiling and onto the crown of my head.
“Are you okay?” she asks. I don’t say anything, just pick at a scab on my knee and offer her a small smile.
I hope that she cannot see, in the dim orange light, that I have been crying. Circe looks unsure of herself; she doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. She looks so much younger when her face isn’t contorted into a sardonic sneer. She could be thirteen. Maybe it is the lighting, but her eyes are slightly pink. Perhaps she, too, has been crying.
“Mrs. Tay told me to look for you, and of course now everyone else knows,” she says, staring into her lap.
“That sucks.”
“I know.”
I let out a long sigh. The thought o
f mumbled con-dolences and forced smiles makes me so tired. Even Trissy Kwok and Lee Meixi possess the capacity to turn suddenly, and fashionably, feeling. I dread the soft focus of their empathy, the awkwardly kind gestures that will fade once the tragedy isn’t fresh.
I’ve seen this happen before, with Nancy Lau, the girl with severe eczema who everyone ceased to tease for the brief few weeks after her grandmother passed away. During that time Nancy was treated to warm smiles at recess, shared textbooks, invitations to Lido, until the unexpected morning when Trissy and Meixi resumed calling her “Lizard Legs” during PE, chanting it with increasing speed. This was their declaration that her period of respectful mourning was over and they were done with feeling sorry. Nancy slunk away from the netball line. Mr. Toh, the PE teacher, picked me to fetch her. Nancy had hidden out under the farthest rain tree, where she hugged her bare, shamed legs and cried like a baby. I brought her a tissue but she waved me away, infuriated by my fellow pariah’s pity.
“I don’t want to go out there,” I say.
“Don’t worry, we don’t have to,” Circe replies, and glances at her watch. It is a glow-in-the-dark Swatch and I have often envied it. It is not something my mother or Aunt Yunxi would allow me to have.
“We’ve got until four thirty. It’s just past three now. Plenty of time.”
“Good,” I say. I don’t know how to tell her that I want to be on my own, and even then, the impulse changes from moment to moment. A drop of water falls off the ceiling and onto my bare arm.
“This place is just as weird as I remembered it,” Circe says. “Leslie and I played hide-and-seek here once, when we were kids. I fell and scratched my knee. There was a man with claws for hands and, like, a globe strapped to his back. That gave me nightmares.”
“Who even comes here?” I look at the display in front of us, the painted figures with their suffering faces—pulled black commas for eyebrows, downward jelly bean–shaped mouths. A demon with gaudy yellow hair grips the sides of a man’s chest and rips it apart. The man’s shiny little organs threaten to tumble out of his stomach. I read the sign:
CRIME:
Ungratefulness
Disrespect of elders
Prison escape
Drug addicts and traffickers
Tomb raiders
PUNISHMENT:
Heart cut out
Tied to red-hot copper pillar and grilled
“Which would you prefer?” Circe asks. “To have your heart cut out, or to be grilled?”
“Heart cut out.”
“Yeah, it’s more poetic. Who wants to be grilled? Like a sotong or a piece of chicken? No dignity,” Circe says, and laughs, but there is something forced in it.
A chill enters the cave; long shadows flicker over the entrance. We can hear some other girls coming up. Whispers. The shuffling of canvas shoes. A peal of laughter echoes, and then it ceases, like an audio file that has cut out. We wait. After a few moments they go away, but now the cave seems darker than before and the figures being tortured seem a little more lifelike, as if they might actually move when we aren’t paying attention. I look down at my hands. I can almost see the energy flowing out of me like a cartoon life force, something to pillage a planet for, a glowing green substance that evaporates into the stupefying air.
“Um, Szu?” Circe says. “Don’t you have to go? To see Aunt Yunxi, or to the hospital, or wherever.”
“No.”
“Are you sure you want to just sit here? I’ll go with you, to the hospital—we’ve got permission.”
“I don’t know. No.” I can feel the tears welling up again and making the sight of my hands blurred and misty. My tears keep falling into my palms, hot fat drops that I can tell alarm Circe just as much as they embarrass me.
It is so exposing and unpleasant to be watched crying. Even babies bawling on public transport know this, which is why they always look so stricken.
“I’m sorry,” Circe continues. “Look, I’m really sorry, Szu.” She pats me on the back, gingerly. Her bony hand taps in time to my sniffles. Like Mrs. Tay, she’s trying. I’m not used to all this effort made around me. The spotlight is unnerving. I can tell from Circe’s strained posture and her Serious Voice, which is so different from her normal one, that she is out of her depth as well. It feels like we are acting but we don’t know our lines.
“I feel so—” I gulp.
“So . . . ?”
“I—I don’t know. Like I want to vomit.”
“Are you okay? Do you want me to get you some water?”
“No.”
“Aw, man. Look, do you want to get out of here? Mrs. Tay said you could go.”
“No. I kind of—I kind of like it in here,” I say. “I don’t really want to leave.” The last thing I want to do right now is to see my mother’s body laid out clear and plain for all it finally is: a body. It’s both too much and too obvious.
“Okay,” Circe says.
“Okay.”
“Hey, you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m kind of in shock too, you know. Your mom and I were never cl—”
I put my hands up over my face and that seems to stop her.
“Sorry,” Circe says in a small voice.
“You don’t need to keep saying it,” I reply, even though I feel a knot of anger gathering in the back of my gullet, like a furball or the beginnings of a sore throat. After all, right until the end Circe had made such a joke out of the hospital visits: the Land of No Hope. She was right, there had been no hope, but she shouldn’t have kept on reminding me.
Hours pass, or what feels like hours. There is something comforting about the boredom, something novel about the silence. Usually we prattle nonstop. Instead we just sit there as if we have known each other for decades, and not just since the start of the year. I feel this grand exhaustion in the tightness of my throat and in my joints: now that my mother has died I have aged irreversibly over a single afternoon. The distance between now and before seems to stretch into infinity. There is so much I have left to say to her. I think of the last few frenzied, other-peopled months that got in the way of me and her and Aunt Yunxi. I think of the oncologist with his clipboard and the radiologist with the painted nude nails and the jaw specialist with the soothing voice—they had indicated to Yunxi and me any day now with every flicker of expression, every glance in the other direction.
We sit there until our bums are sore from the ledge and the mosquitoes have bitten each of us twenty times. And then we hear Mrs. Tay and Mrs. Yeo calling for us. As we walk to the coach Circe links her arm in mine. I lean into her, stooping slightly to accommodate our difference in height. Everyone is watching but they make no snide remarks this time. I feel like a shamed celebrity. I feel like I’m walking down an aisle or a gangplank.
*
When I get home it is a quarter to five and shadows dapple the bright sunlight on the kitchen table. Aunt Yunxi is out. She’s left me a hastily scrawled note in Chinese: Settling things. There’s soup in the fridge.
The soup lies in a blue china bowl covered in cling film. The fat and oil has congealed into a thin, murky scum over its surface. I know for a fact that Aunt Yunxi slow-boiled this fungus soup two days ago. It stank up the kitchen with an odor like armpits and expired chicken. Could it be said that this soup that smells like death has outlived my mother? Things look just the same as they did yesterday. Every object in here seems dishonest in its fixity. The house has the static air of a furniture showroom after hours. As if the walls are made of plywood and everything is held in place by Scotch tape and safety pins.
The water in the fish tank needs changing; it has turned sickly green and a dark sludge has started to form along the glass. The moldy damp aquarium smell puts me off food, even though my stomach is rumbling. I suck in and shudder. Three saddle grunts with their yellow scales and cold, unquestioning eyes continue their perpetual loop from one side of the tank to the other in languid synchronicity. My favorite, th
e milkfish that I’d thought was dying over six months ago, is still going strong. I had been wrong about him. The milkfish has grown new, shimmering scales over the fissures in his side and he avoids my gaze with his flat, impersonal fish eyes. I think of some of the things that have happened in the brief time between my pronouncement that he was doomed and today.
Last week it rained so heavily that the huge monsoon drain on the main road overflowed and a tree broke and fell halfway across, a long, peeling trunk sticking out of inches of rainwater so muddy it looked like gallons of Milo. Traffic was congested for ages, cars marooned on the wide, sloshing roads. For seven days I had weak sleep, empty of dreams.
Last month the Sumatran haze came back and the Pollutant Standard Index measured above 150, but instead of panicking and keeping their children indoors everyone just grumbled, because it had happened so many times before. I coughed up a giant ball of phlegm the size and color of a baby chick.
Earlier this year, just after my birthday in January, I made a best friend and she talks a lot. Circe can be bossy and really irritating but I am grateful for her. Aunt Yunxi lost two clients because a reporter from the New Paper came to see her and accused her of being a scam medium. The annual Star Search competition happened and I didn’t follow it. A new shopping arcade went up on Orchard Road called the Hive. A fire broke out in a shophouse three streets away and one month later the Urban Redevelopment Authority tore it down.
It was only ten months ago that my mother first went to the doctor. It wasn’t her hacking, smoker’s cough or perpetual tiredness that drove her there. Much like her functional alcoholism, those things had been constants for many years. But her shoulders had started to hurt so much that some nights she couldn’t sleep. She said it felt like a cast-iron hanger bearing down on her nerves. Her groans, which I heard through the paper-thin walls that separated our bedrooms, made me wince. She put the pain down to the exhaustion of being a spirit medium, channeling or appearing to channel the harsh, reticent voices of the dead. One day, her right eyelid started to droop and would not reopen to its normal shape. I would never have dared to tell her she looked kind of funny, that now there was something loopy about her beauty. She went to the polyclinic expecting to be referred to a cosmetic surgeon, but instead she had one doctor referring her to another, and finally another, gathering opinions. A specialist with a dyed-red chignon and a consultant so old he resembled a carp with whiskers and an oncologist who looked worryingly young, as if fresh out of NUS med school, with acne battle scars across his cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple. They recited these labels that meant nothing to her: ptosis, miosis, presentations of Horner’s syndrome, Pancoast syndrome, eventual paresthesias. They showed her the broccoli-bloom X-ray of her lungs where, at the top of the right side, was a gray shadow, so faint that we had to squint.