Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

  Jiejie sniffed on the other end of the line. Amisa didn’t want to hear any more from her, didn’t know what else to say. She thought how ridiculous it was, that they were making the same feeble bird sounds from their throats.

  After she put down the phone, Wei Loong wrapped his arms around her, but she pushed him off like he was a towel that had fallen from a rack. She went and lay on their bed with her clothes and shoes still on. She interlaced her fingers over her stomach, staring at the ceiling, her mind full of Didi’s face when she last saw him. He waved at her from the curb with the rest of the family, a crooked smile playing on his mouth. What was he thinking? She imagined him now, crushed and still.

  She heard her husband enter the bedroom with the tentative steps one would take towards a wild animal.

  “Just leave me alone,” she said.

  14

  CIRCE

  2020

  The day after I see Szu at the station I can’t concentrate. I squint at my screen all morning, wavy lines in my vision like phantom tapeworms swimming. Just after lunch, Gordon calls me into his office.

  “How’s the Ponti promo going?”

  “Great,” I reply, and even as I smile I feel the strain in my cheeks.

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” Gordon says. He has been staring at me the whole time since I came in. The light from his monitor illuminates the sunspots and graying stubble across his face. He looks like he needs an eye-mask and ten years’ sleep.

  It has been years since Gordon has addressed me in this slow and reproachful tone. Usually we are chummy. The small hairs on my forearms bristle. I pull my black Baleno cardigan a little tighter over one shoulder and clear my throat.

  “Well, we’ve finished the social media audit. I finalized the overall strategy with Mark and Yihan; we’re going for the kitsch old-school Singapura angle. Like the brief called it: ‘analogue horror for the digital generation.’ So that’s the direction I’ve taken. I sent you the revised marketing plan last week.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it up here. Let’s see.”

  He makes no effort to tilt his monitor towards me. Instead he stares at it with the slack-jawed intensity of a football spectator, as if willing the document to score at any moment. Finally, he turns back to face me.

  “I don’t know how else to put it,” he says.

  I blink at him.

  “All this is blah, Circe. Pages and pages of blah. It doesn’t pull me in. We need to be great, not middle-of-the-road. You get it?”

  “Yes,” I reply. I feel my stomach tighten. The tapeworm was poisoned out of me a month ago, the X-rays proved it, but sometimes I feel like it still lives in me and I don’t know whether I am disgusted or mildly comforted by this.

  “The problem is, I just don’t think you’re engaging with the brief,” Gordon says. “Listen, Circe . . . you and I, to put it bluntly, we’re not superyoung anymore. We have to work even harder to think outside the box. You know what I mean? The world has changed even from when you joined till now, it’s moving at such a rate.”

  I’m not comfortable being lumped into the same group as him. I’m thirty-three. Gordon is in his midforties, with expensively highlighted hair that is short on the back and sides that makes him look more forced than trendy.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” I reply, in the practiced, conciliatory tone I reserve for difficult clients. I try to smile but feel my stomach flip.

  “Look, Circe,” Gordon says, but this time his voice softens. “I know things are not easy for you right now. With the divorce. It’s a lot to take on.”

  “I’m handling things fine,” I reply. “To be honest, I got a stomachache.”

  “Okay,” Gordon says. His face clouds over. “Then I’ll get straight to the point. Is it true that you haven’t been to any of the archive screenings? You haven’t seen Ponti! or Ponti 2 or Ponti 3: Curse of the Bomoh? Not even a single one of these, when our client explicitly asked us to link the promo back to the original movies? What is going on? Wake up your ideas, Circe! This kind of stuff is basic! If you were an intern I’d fire you straightaway.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it.

  “It’s not like you to act like this. Are you sure everything is okay?”

  I nod. I don’t know how to explain it.

  “Okay. What do you do when you’re promoting a remake and you don’t have the rough cut of the film in question?”

  “You watch all the source material.”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, feeling really small.

  “You know what to do, then.”

  I gather my papers and tablet and leave. I bet Jeanette is the one who ratted on me. Jeanette, with her perfect ass and impeccable flirtatious timing. Two hours later, outside the screening room, she glances up from her phone and says, “Oh, it’s you,” as if she hadn’t been expecting me.

  The lights have already dimmed as we settle into our seats. I lean back into the plush chair and feel my cheeks flush with a swirl of anxiety and adrenaline. I always refused to watch the films. I preferred to hear Szu’s accounts of their grandeur, imagine Amisa in them rather than familiarize myself with the actual footage, diminish her power. Especially after Amisa died, they became ghostly relics. I have a heavy feeling in my throat, like I’m being judged, like I’m disrespecting the dead.

  Every time I shift, the chair creaks. The screen flickers on and the title credits appear: PONTI 2, unsteady white words across a canopy of brown and green. The sound of strings gives me a sense of rising dread. The camera pans out from a quiet dirt road into wet green paddy fields flanked by traveler’s palms with their parched, fanlike leaves. The shot keeps broadening until it takes in the entire landscape of sparse houses with thatched orange roofs, sheds of rusty corrugated steel, and the odd silo, joined together by thin, snaking roads. Was this the sort of place Amisa grew up in? I wonder. Broad, sun-parched stretches of nowhere. I glance to my right. Jeanette has her eyes glued to her phone.

  A rattling truck appears, white and blue, coming down the dirt road. A handsome man frowns in the driver’s seat. He squints and grimaces all the way to his destination. In the village he strides through the shadow of palm trees and a cluster of Malay villagers gather around him, wearing tengkoloks and baju melayus. When one of the men starts to talk, he is dubbed over in a gravelly American voice.

  “We need your help!” he tells the hero. “There is a Pontianak terrorizing our village. She’s claimed so many of our men’s lives. If we’re not careful, we will run out of men. She looks like a beautiful young woman, but don’t be deceived.”

  “I know her,” the hero replies, with a determined set in his jaw. It turns out his brother was murdered by this same creature in Ponti! before.

  How to defeat this spectral interloper? How to set things right? Thirty-five minutes in, the hero trundles through vegetation, carrying a parang for safety, a frown clouding his handsome features. He has been warned about how dangerous this monster in the trees is. She’s worse than a typical Pontianak. She’s Ponti! with a shriek, an exclamation mark. She is furious because she will never find peace. She got her heart broken from a stillborn child and her husband cheating and beating her. She’s unreasonable and crazy and every womanly wrong.

  The hero searches for her past the tranquil fallow, deep into the untidy, sloping greenery that borders the banana plantation. Telltale musical cues: strings swirling. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. I can’t bear to look. Cut to silence. A pause.

  “Did you come here to find me?” a voice asks—sweet, inquiring.

  The man whips his head around. The banana trees rustle. It is dark in the clearing, and he looks confused as to where he should be searching. And then. There she is, standing calm and coquettish in a pool of moonlight, as if she’s been waiting there all along. Amisa is the most expensive-seeming thing in this cheap movie. She looks so young it makes my heart hurt. She smiles and he
r eyes are bright and playful. It strikes me hard for the first time: film is such a deceptive fiction. Here is a woman back from the dead—only she doesn’t exist anymore outside of this screen, her body rendered in slightly blurry footage.

  The last time I saw her she was the opposite of larger-than-life: so real and impossibly small. She lay in bed, lightly shutting her eyes. She was in constant pain and her body reflected it, her skin both waxy and dried out. Her cheekbones were too angular, tipping off the knife-edge of sleek straight into ghoulishness. She wore a blue wrap around her head, a vestige of pride or even vanity. And she looked very, very old. Isn’t that a sign of humbling maturity, realizing that the people I dismissed as impossibly ancient at various times of my life weren’t actually that much older than my present self? She was only in her forties. Amisa onscreen looks no older than twenty-one. She’s in the prime of her beauty. Her hair goes down to her waist, and even with powder dusted on her to make her look a little undead, she gleams.

  “Who are you? Have I met you before?” Her mouth moves just out of sync with the American voiceover artist. The dubbed voice has that antiquated, mid-Atlantic English diction that sounds nothing like Singaporean slang.

  I can’t place my finger on what else is so uncanny about watching Amisa onscreen—and then I realize. It’s because she looks so happy. She beams at the actor like she’s in love with him. She lays one hand gently over the other, crossed in front of her body, ladylike in her white shroud dress.

  She was nothing like that in real life. Whenever she entered the kitchen or the sitting room, I couldn’t take my eyes off her because she was so glamorously sad. Always something heavy to ponder.

  The hero sprints back through the lalang fields as fast as his feet can carry him. He wants so badly to warn the neighboring villagers—although when did a plan like that ever work? Nobody will believe him.

  The beautiful young woman saunters down the street, makes a right, heads into the hero’s patio. She takes her time. The tracking shot takes us every step of the way, focusing on the leisurely sway of her hips, the loveliness of her supple shoulders in a white floral dress. Once she’s invited inside, the camera pans out and we see her face. Amisa smirks. The hero’s good wife gasps. The Pontianak reveals her true, hideous nature, and thunder claps. She looks garish, deranged, red lipped, with monster makeup caked on like papier-mâché. With a flutter like a sheet being aired out, the Pontianak flies away. The body of a plantation worker is revealed under the fronds of a nearby tree, bloodied and bruised. The camera zooms in on his face with one eyeball sucked out, the socket a gelatinous prosthetic pulp, like splattered raspberries. She’s torn his stomach open. Blood everywhere, slightly too pink to be fully convincing, but it’s sickening to look at. All too much. I cover my face with my right hand, peer through my fingers. A piercing scream and the sound of frantic drums: shot of the good wife hunched in the dirt as an old woman hurries to comfort her. The drum beats to the quickening of my own pulse. Dizzy angles. Shaky cuts. Something about the knowing set of the old woman’s face and her skinny limbs reminds me of Aunt Yunxi.

  I met Yunxi for the first time when I had been going over to Szu’s house for a little over a week. She came up behind me and tapped my elbow lightly: this tanned, very skinny woman whom I’d previously only heard murmuring and rummaging within the locked room behind the darkened antechamber. That particular area always reeked of incense merged with something much harder to pin down: sweet and a little rotten. If I had to place it, it smelt most like frangipanis—old, pungent flowers left to wilt in the rain—mixed with armpits.

  “Circe? I’ve heard so much about you. Szu has told us such nice things. Let’s have a look at you,” Yunxi said in Mandarin.

  I stood frozen in the corridor, eyes darting around the room as she regarded me from top to bottom, left to right, and back again.

  “You’ve got a robust constitution, a stable family, not much to atone for . . .” The old woman’s voice was as low as a man’s with a sore throat. It was a voice that seemed to rise up from the floorboards.

  “You’re not mourning anybody . . .” All that was true, so far. Szu, who was in the bathroom, had told me about what her aunt did for a living. Her clairvoyancy made me nervous.

  “There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Yunxi said. I started.

  “You’ve got a special energy,” Yunxi continued, smiling to reveal a row of small, straight and yellowed teeth. “But you’ve got to be careful about your behavior.”

  “What behavior?”

  The walls of the four corners of the room seemed to narrow in over my head, and a dark, heavy feeling began to plume within me, like ink in water.

  “Circe?” Jeanette is staring at me intently. The lights have come on in the projector room and one of the spotlights shoots straight into my pupils. My head and limbs feel heavy, as if my body just shut down.

  *

  After the screening I cut through Haji Lane on the way to Bugis MRT station. It’s 4:45 p.m. and the buildings and branches are tinged in rose gold, skyline gleaming like a credit card commercial. Walking down the stretch of manicured shophouses with their candy-hued accordion windows, I come across no fewer than four different teenage girls posing against blank, white walls. Their friends or boyfriends stand opposite them, taking shot after shot with phones or angling DSLRs. Each time after the camera clicks the girls strike a minutely variant pose. Each girl seems primed for some sort of pagan desert apocalypse: wide-brimmed hats, billowing vests, and bandagelike leggings impractical in the tropical heat. I guess this is what is in right now: the same ugly shit only the beautiful can pull off. They are either fashion bloggers or blogshop models.

  The last girl before I round the corner is the prettiest. She commands attention. She is far too thin. Some things don’t change—I remember my convent-school days: girls pretending to subsist all week on small green apples, then relenting into Cup Noodle binges; the soft Japanese-horror-movie retching that emanated from the far-most cubicles. This girl is the goal of all that lunchtime crying: rag-doll limbs and satin spar skin, blunt fringe framing her hard, lovely eyes. There is something so barbed and familiar about her. The past rises up like the heat pimples that itch along the scalloped neckline of my top. And then it clicks. Clara Chua: one of the beautiful, bionic megabitches from school. I can’t believe I still remember her name.

  The girl notices me watching, and juts out her attractively pointy jawline. Her gaze is both challenging and entreating. Clara Chua dissolves.

  Her boyfriend stops clicking the camera and shoots me a stare. In the ruthless world of teenagers, anyone above thirty is either cool or creepy. What am I but some weird watching frump? An office drone in Mango slacks. I hasten away into the tree-lined neutrality of North Bridge Road. At least I haven’t come across a Szu clone today. They seem to be teeming in the city suddenly, but then I did just spend eighty-four minutes being forced to watch her late mother terrorizing people.

  Out now in the late afternoon heat I feel overcome by this weighty, gluttonous sensation. I feel it in my skin and my soul and the shame of being caught admiring some gorgeous, stupid teen. I check the time on my phone. I’ve got to catch a train to Outram for a meeting.

  I reach the traffic lights at Ophir Road and when the green circle shifts to amber I spot them. Just on the other side of the junction, waiting. They are standing beside another couple, or another pair of people. I recognize Jarrold immediately, the way a dog knows its owner, or an owner knows her dog. There is no chronology or politics to this moment of recognition. It just is. No labels of “former” or “husband” attached to what I see. I’m just a darting pair of eyes, hoping he hasn’t noticed me. I take a step sideways and try to blend into a group of university students.

  It’s been one year and maybe three months since Jarrold and I met to finalize our separation and any outstanding matters around the sale of our flat. Even though we actually had things to talk about, stuff to settle, that meeting wa
s so maudlin and uncomfortable that the memory of it still makes me cringe. In all the time since we’ve managed to avoid each other, maintaining our safe ambits. Jarrold likes to have work drinks at Dempsey, so fine, that’s a no-go zone. He knows I’ve conquered Verdi, that amazing Italian place on Duxton Road. I guess we never bothered to apportion Bugis and its surrounding area.

  My soon-to-be-ex-husband turned thirty-seven in May. He’s gained a little weight around the jowls, and is wearing a pale-blue office shirt with a starched collar. Entirely nondescript. But he looks good. Healthy. Happier. He’s talking animatedly to a girl who appears a little younger than me. I give her the once-over from behind the safety of a stranger’s shoulder. She has long, straight hair and wears a white sleeveless blouse and black skirt. So far, so boring. Is she his girlfriend? Colleague? Friend? It’s hard to tell. They are standing close, taking the liberty with each other’s personal space that conveys some kind of intimacy. She laughs midsentence. I can’t hear her, but I hate her already. The light changes and I stick to the students, manage to avoid Jarrold and his companion entirely. I’m so angry and alone I could kill someone.

  I hurry to the mouth of the MRT station and even though we’ve gone in opposite directions I get this prickly paranoia that they have turned around and are walking the same way as me. I don’t dare look behind me.

  15

  SZU

  2003

  It’s the first day of the wake and all the tables and chairs are set up, both fresh and artificial flowers arranged to distraction. They delivered the body this morning. Two men wheeled out the coffin from the back of the hearse. They set it up with the perfunctory tact and calm of professionals, across two long wooden stools with her head positioned towards the entrance of our house. That’s my mother’s body in there, there and not in her room or the hospital bed. I kept disbelieving, right until they opened the expensive walnut lid to let us have a look. They call it a half-couch lid because it doesn’t expose her legs. I mean, why would anyone need to see her legs? Just her face and hands. I think that even the term “half-couch” sounds disrespectful. Couches get sat on.