by Sharlene Teo
Szu took the money and got up. Amisa squeezed past her and sat in her chair. At the doorway Szu turned towards Amisa and Circe. Circe moved, as if to follow.
“No need for both of you to go, this is not a military operation. You stay,” Amisa said, fixing the friend with a pursed smile.
“Er. Okay,” the girl replied. She didn’t want to be rude.
They said nothing as Szu walked down the hallway and left the house. Amisa thought of asking the girl what she did, but of course, she was just at school. She did schoolgirl things and had schoolgirl worries. She had all the time in the world to figure out in what direction to swim, and how, and when.
Amisa studied her daughter’s only friend. She was small and skinny with a long nose like an Afghan hound. It conferred an air of distinction on her young face; Amisa liked people with striking noses. The girl looked down at her lap, and then up again.
In that instant the dull-purple walls of the room seemed to funnel down to a point of warm brightness. It was the look in Circe’s eyes: scared, both powerful and pleading. She had the desperate yet resigned stare of someone on the run, in the jungle, starving to death. Someone who had been through bad and sad things and who needed help she didn’t realistically expect to receive. Almost forty years had passed since Amisa had come across the oily man and woman, and she never thought she would see them again. And yet here they were, looking at her with gladness and recognition.
Amisa took Circe’s hands in her own, and Circe started to pull away but changed her mind and left them there.
“You’re going to make it out alive, don’t worry,” Amisa said, gripping her. “I know how people are. They don’t give, and they never listen. But you’re different. I’m different, too. I know you’ve been through hell. I believe you.”
A shadow passed, and when the sunlight cut back through the feeling faded and they were strangers again. Amisa briskly withdrew her hands. The girl’s mouth was a bamboozled circle.
“Um. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon, Sissy,” Amisa said. “I’m going to take a nap. When Szu comes back, tell her to leave the things outside my door.”
23
CIRCE
2020
It is Saturday afternoon. I’m in FairPrice, hungover and pushing my empty trolley with a dreamy laboriousness. There is something calming about supermarkets in times of mild, self-induced physical crisis. Ambling down the produce aisle I eye up the verdant bunches of chye sim and butterhead lettuce without taking anything; the keen fresh vegetable and pesticide smell calms me.
Last night I went out to this new bar in Amoy Street called Kopi O))), which looked and felt just like a dingy old kopitiam, down to the unstable plastic chairs and stray cats, except it served S$25 chendol espresso martinis and the staff wore a uniform of printed black wife beaters and too-tight jeans. Julius tried to set me up with his friend Deon, a margarine-hued man in his late thirties with a mustache of sweat on his upper lip.
Julius didn’t tell me he was setting me up but I knew from the moment I arrived. It was coded in the way his advertising friends shifted their weight in their spiffy shoes and sipped their drinks, and how quickly everyone left a conspicuous radius around Deon and me. Three martinis in, the sugar was making me sick and I didn’t want to partake any further in this disappointing social fumble. I was all talked out from five days’ worth of tense and boring conversations at work. Besides, Deon wasn’t interested in me either. I noticed the tiny downturn in his eyes when he first said hello, and the way he kept looking over my shoulder while we were talking.
I’ve never been much of a drinker, so right now I am suffering the effects of the alcohol grievously. My head pulses and my mouth tastes like shit. I am squeezing an exorbitant Hass avocado that feels like a boob when my brother calls. I haven’t heard from him in weeks, possibly months. Seeing LESLIE flashing up on my phone is so unlikely that I stop my trolley to answer.
“Hello? Did you call me by accident? This is Circe.”
“Yeah, I know. Hi, Sisi.”
“What’s up?”
I balance my phone in between my jaw and shoulder and resume pushing the trolley. I can hear the strain in Leslie’s voice even as he tells me about how his youngest son Ezekiel has started swimming classes and the little prodigy Thaddeus just had a piano recital. I have always hated his kids’ names. I think they sound pretentious, but who am I to talk? My parents named me Circe.
“Rach’s been so busy with work lately. And it’s been crazy for me as well.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” I say, trailing past the pulses. I round off into meat and dairy.
“Have you called Mom?”
“Yeah, last week,” I lie.
“She hasn’t heard from you. You’re meant to go to Thomson Medical with her on Monday. Checkup for her gallstones, remember?”
“You have a car.”
“Yeah, but I’m tied up with this project and the kids right now. I’m swamped.”
I hate his tone. “I thought Ma’s appointment was the week after next. Look, I’ve been busy too. I got a lot going on.”
I hear my brother adjust the phone and gather his breath.
Even in his late thirties, Leslie still looks young. If he went around claiming he was twenty-five, nobody would bat an eyelid. He has alabaster skin and delicate features and wears sunblock with full SPF. He is unable to grow much facial hair and has the distinctively long Low nose that looks dignified on him and harsh on me.
We arrange that I’ll accompany my mother for her appointment next week.
“How’s Julius?” he asks.
“Fine, he’s fine,” I reply. I breathe out sharply and feel a bloom of heat still sitting on my clavicle. Leslie seems to think that Julius and I are dating, living in sin. While he rambles on I start filling up my trolley, chucking in Gardenia bread and sutchi fillets and tofu and beetroot and minced pork and a packet of pepper.
I’m deciding between discounted jumbo packs of toilet paper when Leslie says, “Oh. You won’t believe who I ran into the other day. Blast from the past.”
“Who?” I pick the cheaper brand, my throat constricting.
“Szu Min! Your friend in Sec Four. Your tall twin.”
“Wow. Small world. Where?” My hand grips the silver handle of my trolley.
“Railway Mall. She was with her kid. Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” I say, shifting my phone from left to right. I resume pushing the trolley. “She’s got a kid?”
“Yeah. A little girl, around Ezie’s age. Very sweet.”
I picture Szu as a distended, pastier version of her teenaged self, drifting about her old neighborhood in a maternity dress, her belly a batik-covered half-moon. Having a daughter who grows up as gangly and morose as she was; Szu being responsible for an entire human being. It seems a little absurd, almost obscene.
“How was she? Szu, not the kid.”
“She seemed well. You know, I always liked Szu. She always seemed older than her age. She was smart.”
“Where got. She had her head in the clouds.”
“You’re so bad,” Leslie says in that prefectorial tone of his, and I hear him inhaling to start to say something but then he drops it. It is remarkable how potently a family member can cram years of disappointment into three seconds of silence on the phone.
“Anyway,” Leslie continues. “She asked after you. She gave me her card.”
“Oh, cool.”
“Maybe you should get back in touch. Such a shame, what happened between you.”
I don’t know what to say for a moment. I even feel insulted by his directness. He’s never brought it up before. There wasn’t much to bring up in the first place. Still.
“Yeah, maybe . . . Listen, I’ve got to go. I’m getting another call,” I say, and mumble good-bye and hang up. I abandon my trolley and hurry out of the supermarket. Errands can wait. I need some air and my head hurts.
I board a bus home and brood out of the window, trees a
nd clouds and flyovers. My thighs stick to the seat. From time to time a pair of teenage girls in the bay of the standing area let out peals of laughter. One is taller than the other; she wears braces and has short hair. The smaller one has a pinched kiddy face. We enter a long tunnel. The smaller girl shows something to the tall one on her phone; they peer into the cryptic glow of the screen and look back at each other with derisive grins. Cocooned in some small, secret knowledge, they are their own squirrelly and absorbing universe of two.
*
When I think about the Age of Szu, it often surprises me how brief it actually was. A little less than a year elapsed and then she and her aunt and mother were gone. How weirdly indelible the smells and shadows of that cul-de-sac, the Marlboro fog and wafts of incense, the moldy fish tank bubbling like a cauldron, the altar with its rotating gods, the locked room.
When I met Szu and she told me she had no friends I found it hard to believe; she was intelligent and interest-ing, which was a rarity in that convent full of preening Stepford-Wives-in-training. Szu and I were citizens of nowhere. We never felt a belonging. Not with the happy or the popular or even the outliers, the rebels. We were too gawky to be mysterious, too cautious to be wild, and too self-conscious to stand out. We thought our alienation was unique, and felt secretly enlivened by our discontentment; it meant we weren’t sheep.
After Amisa died things shifted. Szu stopped eating regularly or even trying to study. She grew scarily thin and too intense. At first we tried to act like how it had been during the first few months, such relieved companionship. Yet by the end of that year, being friends with Szu was like carrying around a heavy, sloshing bucket of water. Her grief weighed me down and I couldn’t escape its drip: not in the cinema, not studying in cafes, not even on my own. She followed me around school and in the afternoons afterwards, like a phantom with her blanched face and hollow eyes. She started wearing her hair in a bubble ponytail just like mine and mooched about my house all day drinking gallons of Diet Coke and draping her sadness over my things. She developed a sour, musty odor that caught me in surprising whiffs. She shed her hair everywhere, leaving tangled black strands all over my bedspread. She was infatuated with Leslie. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she stared at him with a bawdy, open hunger. It disturbed me.
When we started dating, my ex-husband and I had a conversation about former relationships. I told him that in a way, even before my boring boyfriend in junior college, Szu felt like my first test of patience: a tenuous, milk-toothed kind of love that evolved into the toil and torpor of a difficult marriage. You could say it was prophetic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we were only sixteen but I felt like we had been through decades.
When Szu and I shared a bed, in the darkness I could sense the thoughts and moods pulsing from her stone-still form, a telegraphed presence so strong it felt like an extra being. When my feet skimmed hers she was cold as ice. I turned away, simulating sleep, and put my face on my hands. Nothing worked; I couldn’t block her out. She was like sarin gas, leaked poison.
Szu and I had one argument (if it could even be called an argument—as always she was annoyingly reticent, conciliatory, muted) and after that she kept away from me. For a couple of weeks I slipped into a rhythm of normality: revision, choir practice, new friends from choir, a couple of bland but pleasant girls whose names I barely recall now. Occasionally I spied Szu’s shuffling gait out of the corner of my eye, those sallow limbs like chopsticks, and I just looked the other way. She grew thinner and more sunken, her voice strangled-soft if she was ever called upon to speak. Her deterioration was both frightening and affirming to me; on the one hand I worried but on the other I felt that I had made the right decision. Even the bullies left her alone. Our big exams were close and it was one step too far to pick on a girl who was clearly unwell, who had only recently lost her mother.
Things might have carried on this way through our O levels and until we graduated and went our separate ways, had she not collapsed in the concourse one hazy morning that smelt of burning. It happened just before assembly. I was standing elsewhere and I remember a cluster of people forming a space for her, the murmurs of distress. Our first O-level exam was the week after. Two days later she fainted again, during a Chemistry revision session. I wasn’t there but I heard about it within the hour. Something about an ambulance and emergency services. They took her to the hospital; she was too ill to sit the exams. Everyone in our level was intrigued and a little envious of her exemption and all of a sudden they remembered that Szu and I were supposed to be best friends.
“How is Szu? Heard any news?” Clara and Meixi and Elizabeth Kwee asked.
“Um, she’s recovering,” I said, supposing this was true.
Then, midway through the exam period, I received a call at home. It was Aunt Yunxi. She spoke in English, her voice crackling.
“Can you come and visit? Szu is not well.”
*
Going down Szu’s driveway, I remembered the wake with its strangers and interruptions, and the irretrievable ease of our early days. The garden stank of rotting vegetation. Crickets and cicadas trilled. Swarms of gnats followed me, flirting with my hair.
Aunt Yunxi was waiting at the door. She looked the same, stale and dusty as tinned food and very thin. She wore a patterned mauve blouse-and-trouser set. She did not return my smile; just let me in through the sitting room with its lit altar.
“Be careful, floor is wet,” she said. A blue bucket stood in the corner of the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of the fish tank, which lay empty. The glass of the tank was still dirtied green with mossy stones at the bottom.
“You want something to drink?”
“No, thanks, Auntie.”
I could feel her displeasure. I knew that she knew I had neglected her niece. Szu’s bedroom door was open and I walked down the corridor at a gingerly pace, trying to seem casual but chock-full of guilt and dread. Szu lay in bed, facing the wall. Her long black hair was tucked under the bobbled pillow. Her toes stuck out of the edge of the bed frame. The rest of her was covered in a thin checked blanket that I hadn’t seen before. The scene reminded me of Amisa in the hospital, the impersonal antiseptic tang of the air, that palliative print.
Her breathing sounded shallow. She had the scuffed, bony elbow of an old woman.
“It’s me!” I called out. Szu didn’t move. The air in that purple bedroom was stagnant. I sat on her swivel chair and put down my schoolbag. After a few seconds she stirred and turned towards me. She had a serene expression but her skin betrayed her, worn and jaundiced. She attempted a smile and I smiled back, but I didn’t mean it. Where was my kindness? Szu Min was sick and she wasn’t going to take her exams at the same time as everyone else. Her aunt was creepy and possibly a charlatan. And both her parents were gone. Life sucked for her, but all I could think of was how burdened I felt, as if my time was being wasted. I had my e-Maths and History exams the next week and my head was full of facts and numbers. I wanted to do well enough to move on.
Szu let out a long, deep breath.
“I think I’m dying,” she said.
“No you’re not,” I replied. “You’re bluffing, right?” I didn’t believe her but my eyes filled with tears. Suddenly I felt incredibly and frankly sorry about the last few months; I wanted to reach out and hug her, but she seemed so frail.
“Auntie says I’ve offended some spirits, and I’ve breathed in bad air. I have light bones and a light body and if I am not careful I will die young.”
“Is that what the doctors said?”
“Don’t remember. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
She looked away and lay back so she was facing the ceiling. She closed her eyes. I wondered if she wished I wasn’t here or if she was waiting for me to say something, even to apologize.
After a few minutes I started to talk. I went on and on and the only sign that Szu was registering me was the grand, guileless way her eyes stirred behind their lids as if she was rapid dreaming.
Perhaps thinking she was asleep encouraged me. By that point, I was past caring how she would judge me and I had no consideration for the effect my words might have. Whatever my reasons, that day I decided to tell her something I’d never mentioned before and which I’ve never told anyone since.
*
I was eight years old, a quarter of a century ago. One afternoon in September, it rained so hard the mud by the roadsides rose and swelled. As I looked out from the windows of my school bus the big longkang along the main road coursed with drain water the color of milk tea. By the time I got home the sky had ruptured into a torrential monsoon shower.
We lived in our old flat back then, in our old life; this was just before my father’s business took off. It was on the third floor of the block. I tried the front door and it was locked. I pressed my ear against the window and heard the flat thrum with unmanned smugness. I shivered and rattled the brass handle as if it would budge. My mother must have forgotten that choir practice was canceled and I would be coming home three hours earlier. I was too young, apparently, to be trusted with my own set of keys.
My parents had recently fired Melati. She was our maid, a quiet twenty-one-year-old from Indonesia who had probably lied about her age to her agency and was eighteen at most. I adored Melati because she was funny and kind to me, but she had one fatal flaw. She could not stop eating sweets all day. This snacking habit was considered un-acceptable even though she worked hard and the boiled sweets and chocolate were bought with her wages, and she sometimes shared.
Without Melati the door was a dead end. I shivered outside the double-locked door, shit brown with a green grille. I tried to rattle it even though I knew my efforts were useless. My fists felt soft and weak. I must have stood there in my soaked pinafore for over half an hour, schoolbag by my feet. I stared at my Bata shoes, and then at the dirty concrete, and finally the rippling grass two storeys below. I thought of the unthinkable pain I would feel if I jumped. I anticipated it as abstractly as adult romance. How my legs would crumple. How my body would fold.