by Sharlene Teo
“I am thinking of nothing,” I reply. “Thanks for the soup.”
When she leaves the room I wait until she is out of earshot before I spoon bits of pear and fungus into the bin and cover them with graph paper. Tomorrow I’ll get rid of the rest.
*
The afternoon of our last prelim exam, I walk out of the hall with an executioner’s gait. The big, actual O levels are next month. I feel like the final girl halfway through a horror movie, eyes wide, peering around a corner, falsely safe because her ordeal needs further complication.
Circe asks me to come along to K-Box with her new-found choir cronies to celebrate. I accompany her just to curry the last scraps of good favor, even though I know it won’t make much of a difference, and she knows that karaoke combines two things I hate: singing and socializing.
In the red-and-black K-Box reception three choir girls are waiting. They finished their prelims earlier and God knows how long they’ve been here, with their purposefully undone laces, bobbed hair, and neutral expressions. Tsarina, Rong En, and Angela. We’ve shared a school for four years but I have never hung out with them before, much less had a proper conversation. Circe and Tsarina are second so-pranos in the choir and they have been spending time together lately in early practices for a choral festival. Circe’s speaking voice I am accustomed to, but Tsarina Chong sounds like she has a throatful of phlegm and helium. Oh, she’s horrible, and she waves at me like I should feel so bloody blessed. Angela and Rong En don’t even acknowledge my presence. I fall back into step as Circe and Tsarina lead us down the narrow black corridor, past darkened, flickering soundproofed rooms, until we reach our booth.
Our session consists of two hours of singing, inclusive of one jug of soft drink and a bowl of “assorted snacks” that turn out to be the saddest peanuts on earth. I don’t want to sing and the other girls just shrug at my lack of participation.
“You’re so extra,” Tsarina says. “You’re like someone who goes to a theme park and doesn’t ride the roller coasters. Wait and hold bags only.”
“Ha ha, that’s funny,” I chuckle.
Circe glares at me and starts to scroll through the song catalog. I get it, I’m her accessory, a human comfort blanket filling the role of the silent boyfriend, if only we had boyfriends. After an everlasting five minutes of ordering and selection the singing begins.
Tsarina and Rong En go first. They have the same level of competent but not-amazing voices and that’s probably why they are friends. Circe is up next. She picks a Stefanie Sun song, her inflections forced from pretending her Mandarin is worse than it actually is. She thinks that being bad at Mother Tongue makes her cooler. Tsarina and Rong En and I are laughing at Circe. Subtly at first, and then more raucously. Tsarina and I exchange sideways glances, in on the same joke, and I can hear Circe’s voice waver as she tries to focus on the song and not lose her temper. And it’s all so funny. But then I notice the other girls shooting me a look because they’ve stopped laughing and my shoulders are still shuddering, almost involuntarily. I wipe the tears from my eyes and clear my throat. I stifle my hiccups and direct my attention to the red walls and the bowl of peanuts on the table. A soft burning pain flexes my stomach.
“You sure you don’t want to have a go, Szu?” Angela asks, one claw around the microphone. I shake my head.
“Say one ‘ah’!” she exclaims, and clears her throat. “Okay!” Her cheerfulness is an impermeable rainbow bubble. She’s chosen a Mariah Carey song. During the lengthy instrumental I turn away and expect the worst. And then she starts to sing. Ten seconds in it is clear she is really good, miles better than the other three, and she will always be blessed unless she smokes a pack a day like my mother did. She makes it seem easy, executing impressive vocal slides while the other choir girls lean tight-lipped into the faux-leather seat and flinch with every inflection. The song lasts forever. Every time I think it will end Angela carries on, smart-ass gesticulating like she’s doing an unplugged performance on live TV.
I think of the choir terms Circe mentioned to me: glissando, tremolo, portamento, rolling off my mental tongue like flavors of fancy ice cream, and the thought of dessert makes me sick. Circe grins encouragingly at the screen, cheeks straining, her eyes hard and shiny. Every few seconds Tsarina grabs a fistful of peanuts and chews like a cowboy. I watch the ticker onscreen counting down as Angela’s ostentatiously great voice floods the room. It wasn’t a competition but she wins.
Afterwards, Circe and I stand at the entrance for a good ten seconds watching the other girls leave. If I weren’t here like her weird tall appendage, maybe she would be fol-lowing them to MOS Burger to chat about confounding church boys and choral things.
“I guess I better head back to do some revision,” Circe says as we descend the escalator. “Also I’m running out of allowance. So I can’t afford to stay in town.”
She’s never used the money excuse before. We reach the bus stop in silence. She seems irritated with me, even though I feel like I’ve been good today.
“I’m having bad dreams,” I say, because dreams used to interest her due to her sleeping problems. She’s facing away from me, waiting for the 77. My bus is the 518. “My mother keeps popping up,” I continue, and this is true. I also think if I mention my mother Circe will have to at least pay attention.
“It’s normal to dream things,” Circe replies.
“Some nights she looks peaceful,” I continue. “Other nights she looks so sad and I can’t stand it and I wake up sad, too. It feels as if she’s trying to tell me something. But I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Hm,” Circe replies, craning her neck a little, keeping her eyes on the road. “I wouldn’t overthink it.” She squints at the number on the approaching bus but it says 7, not 77. “Lately I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?”
“Isn’t it crazy that we are stuck here on Earth, and we won’t make it out of here alive?”
“What do you mean?” I feel quietly peeved at her dismissal of my dream.
“I was watching this thing on TV the other day about NASA. And it occurred to me that the only way to get off this planet is to die or become an astronaut.”
My eyebrows rise. “Hm. Yeah. Guess so. What made you think that?”
“I dunno, just feeling random. Anyway, have you heard of any Singaporean astronauts? No, right?”
“No . . . and since when were you interested in all this space and planet stuff?”
“Why not? I’m being serious.”
“It’s cool, I guess.” I look at the floor. “I don’t mind being on this planet,” I continue uncertainly.
“Why, though?”
“I don’t know . . . it’s too hot here, but it’s okay.”
Circe stands back as if assessing me, and blinks like she’s getting dust out of her eyes.
“You hate being here,” she says.
“No I don’t.”
“Yeah you do. Earth-hater.”
Even though it’s a dumb conversation it is still progress, almost like how we used to be. For the past few weeks topics have skirted around exams and how busy she is. Circe seems so insistent about this. For a moment I space out at the wide green trees across the road as cars rush past. And then something occurs to me.
“Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you read that on the Internet a while ago? That Earth-astronaut thing? I remember. We were on your PC, at your house.”
“Don’t remember.” Circe’s chapped mouth twitches.
“Yeah, I think you showed me someone’s Livejournal or something. It was on a blog. The thing about how we won’t make it out of this planet alive and we only have this time on Earth, etc. Some American chick wrote it. I remember!”
Circe’s face drops. She looks older, stern. She frowns and takes a deep breath. When she speaks her words are soft and slow, loaded with last straws. “What’s your problem?”
“Er, I don’t know what you mean.”
“God, you’re so f
rustrating.”
It’s Thursday early evening and brutally busy in town. The bus stop by Tangs Plaza feels more exposed than most—right by the wide, rushing road, people everywhere. Another bus pulls up and people spill out and shove past us. A middle-aged man with a blue tie accidentally strikes me on the arm with his satchel.
“Ow,” I say, rubbing my shoulder. “Shit. Chill, it doesn’t matter.”
Circe crosses her arms. People keep jostling. I step to the side. She’s still frowning.
“You know what?” she asks. I shrug weakly. Her eyes dart from my face to the bus. The crowd begins to form a long queue. “I’ve tried my best,” she says. “I’ve tried to be understanding. But it’s so hard to be around you, Szu. It’s not just hard, it’s painful. It’s like this big, dark pain follows you everywhere. You’re no fun to hang out with. You feel sorry for yourself all the time. And you hate everything. At least I try. You think you’re better than everyone.”
“So do you,” I reply instinctively. Her eyes narrow. “That’s not true,” I correct myself. I clench my fists, which have gone cold.
“I care about my future,” she replies. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” I bark. My face is flushed with adrenaline. I want to hit her.
“Babysit you,” Circe spits out. She turns away as the bus door hisses open. She shoves past a salt-and-pepper-haired auntie. The auntie tuts and whips her head around to glare at me as if I’ve done the pushing.
My eyes are stinging as I watch Circe board and beep her EZ Link card. Her blue, beat-up Jansport backpack weaves and bobs down the body of the bus. It is too crowded to sit so she holds on to a handrail and faces away from me. Her stance makes her look even shorter. As the bus pulls away I spot my own crumpled face reflected in the window.
It happened so fast that we hardly made a scene. I feel like this is the last time we will ever speak. Tonight it’s not just the haze that gives the air on Orchard Road this choked, impersonal finality. People push me around and hit my calves with their shopping. Maybe Circe is right and I hate being on this planet because I am useless at living here. Except for my aunt, no one would notice if I left or dropped dead. I have no parents or siblings or friends. The future is a failed exam. I feel wispy as a dandelion and haven’t eaten for thirty-six hours, so I’m not surprised when I trip and fall forward with a thud. It sounds dull but feels sharp, and in the moment before I black out my belly aches so much, as do my brittle bones and the pit of my heart.
22
AMISA
1987
Late January 1987 the baby was born. She was a little girl and Wei Loong liked the name Szu Min; it had been his grandmother’s. Amisa agreed to it, exhausted from carrying around and painfully expelling this wriggling red bundle. Ng Szu Min resembled Wei Loong more than her; it was hard to find her trace in that mushed-up face with the small brown eyes like rocaille beads.
In June Amisa found out from the newspapers that the Everitt Cineplex, former Paradise Theatre, had been demolished to make way for a megamall. The shophouse where she had stayed in Geylang had been sold en bloc and converted into offices. Nothing was recognizable. Not even her own child. She waited for that savage ten-derness, the instinctual stirring of maternal affection, but even staring at Szu made Amisa feel bloated and foggy. For the first time she understood her own mother with an undeniable, visceral intensity. Her swollen feet were foreign to her. Her skin itched and dry patches began to form on her hands and ankles. She spent ages in the bath lamenting her wrecked body while its fault cried in the nursery room.
Wei Loong would rattle the door, furious.
“Since you like acting so much, why don’t you act like a mother?” he said.
“Why don’t you act like you have balls and a spine, then?” she would reply. Her words echoed in the bathroom. Ugly things like: “Where were you earlier? You’re not home half the time. Go out and drink beer only. You don’t even know how to wipe your baby’s ass. Go on! Who’s the model father? Fucking hypocrite.”
Her voice turned hoarse, cawing. After she spat out the angry things she would run her fingers through her wet hair and scowl at him. He would glare back, before the baby’s cries summoned him to the other room.
Some mornings she took her daughter to the nearby community park. Smiled at the other women with their prams and flat brown slippers. Amisa was a woman pushing a problem. The problem gurgled as they took two laps around the park.
*
1995. It had been a bad year before it even began, and every passing day confirmed its rottenness. Late afternoon, stalemate weather: soupy air bearing down on her photosensitive skin, her aching, peeling shoulders. The smell of wasted food from the big bins outside traveled from room to open-windowed room. The child was asleep next door, ceiling fan on full. Amisa sat up in her bed and watched Wei Loong carefully applying pomade to a stray cowlick. He would be forty soon. His hair had started thinning in a patch on the left-hand side of his head. He stood in front of her dressing table, handling a black comb with painterly seriousness.
“Where are you going?” she asked, trying to be jocular. “Why the effort?”
“To meet old army friends.”
“Army friends like who?”
“You won’t know them. Not like you ever come out anymore,” he said, softly. He shot a furtive glance at her. She tilted her head at him like an eastern grass owl and did not blink until he, as usual, looked away first. She stretched out her legs under the thin green sheets, one strap of her negligee slipping off her shoulder.
“Bye, now,” Wei Loong said. He came over and pressed his mouth briefly to her right cheek before he left the room. The sight of her half naked in mussed-up blankets did not have the same irresistible appeal as when they first met eighteen years ago. This was only natural, she thought. Not like she missed his groping, incessant hunger for her, anyway.
The sound of his engine traveled all the way down the driveway. Amisa pushed herself up and sat on the edge of the bed, leaned her face into her hands. If she had ever loved him it was because he had loved her. That was how it had been in the beginning. But now that he did not love her there were nobody’s feelings to be hurt. In a way, it felt freeing. She was a person of no tactical importance to anyone, except, perhaps, the smaller person in the room next door. There was probably some youngish mistress somewhere, waiting for Wei Loong’s pomade embrace, his genuine suckerfish kisses. So-and-so could keep him. Amisa had no energy to be angry or jealous about a third party interfering in her antique marriage to the antiques restorer. In a second she would get up properly and see if Szu was still asleep, or if she wanted a snack.
*
2003. Amisa’s whole body hurt, up to her eyeballs, and she was so, so tired. She needed a drink, and she was out of cigarettes. The sun glared in the garden and would scorch her skin if she went out at this hour. Yunxi was stuck in the session room with a neurotic and profoundly irritating woman who needed spectral life advice about even the smallest matters: what to have for dinner, and whether the tax man was out to overcharge her. Still, she always paid for her extralong consultations.
Amisa sat up in bed and watched the light shifting on the dusty windowpane. Perhaps because Wei Loong had left for good and she no longer bothered with men, she indulged in wondering about Iskandar Wiryanto. He had left Singapore almost two decades ago. He would be an old man now.
She said these lines to him in her head: Do you know who I am, Iskandar Wiryanto? Nobody does. I’ll never be famous. I am forty-three, and utterly unknown. Also obscure: Iskandar Wiryanto. Your name means nothing to anyone else.
She got up and felt the blood rush to her head, and her legs almost gave way. Water, she probably needed water. She went to the hallway and stopped outside Szu’s door. Her daughter had her friend over again, that annoying girl whose name Amisa could never remember.
Teenage habits mushroomed and rotted in the fierce hothouse privacy of that bedroom. Stuck to its wooden door
was a DO NOT ENTER! DANGER ZONE sign and below that a half-scratched-off Spice Girls sticker that had gradually lightened under the glare of Szu’s embarrassment. (“I never loved the Spice Girls,” she now claimed. “They were okay only.”)
When Szu was eight, just before Wei Loong left, she begged her parents to buy her that huge sticker from a stationery shop in Bras Basah. It had touched and amused them so much (at that point, it was one of the few things that touched and amused them), how desperately Szu wanted that huge, ugly sticker. She pleaded for it as a matter of life or certain death. Back then, Amisa marveled at how little it sometimes took to make a child happy—even one as solemn as their Little Bunny. It had taken just S$1.99 and a piece of colorful, adhesive paper to make Szu feel over the moon. But that was then. Now all that was left of the sticker was nail-clawmarks and the shadow of one arm casually slung over another, a shock of hair, bleached teeth on faded faces.
Amisa knocked. She heard shuffles, murmurs. She rapped the door twice and opened. Szu was sitting on her chair, and her friend sat cross-legged on her bed. Fuzzy music played. They were flipping through magazines, which Amisa disapproved of. Szu reddened.
“Hi,” she said.
“Ah girl, can you go to the shop for me?”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Szu replied, meaning: No.
“Your friend can stay. While you’re away, I’ll talk to her. We can have a nice chat.”
“It’s okay, Auntie, I’ll go with her,” the friend mumbled.
“Please, it’s Mrs. Ng,” Amisa replied, and fashioned a smile. The girl shyly returned it. “What was your name again?”
“Circe.”
“Ah, yes, Sissy, of course. Like Sissy Spacek.” The girl didn’t reply. Amisa got out S$120 from her pocket and handed the crumpled notes to Szu.
“Two packs of Marlboro Reds and a bottle of Jim Beam. Chop chop.”
“Are you sure?” Szu asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Amisa replied. “The uncle knows you’re my daughter, he’s my friend, will close one eye. Just pay when no one is looking. And you can use the change to get a snack for you two. Something low-calorie, though, you girls got to be healthy.”