Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

  “No Madam Chang?”

  “No.”

  “And you just never saw her again? This woman who lived on the moon?” Szu interlaced her fingers over her stomach, very proper, like a little princess. Her wrists were tiny. Her expression was thoughtful and alert, eyes rising out of a crisp and pointy face. Almost like a ballerina. She looked a world away from the big-boned, galumphing girl I had met at the start of the year.

  “Nope,” I replied, blithely. “Didn’t want to look for her, either.”

  I didn’t bother to mention the article in the news-paper I stumbled upon a week after the incident. I kept the clipping for years, tucked away in a Hello Kitty folder: 23 September 1995, Top Stories.

  Two patients had escaped from Woodbridge Mental Hospital and remained at large, hiding out somewhere, or maybe they had crossed the Causeway, who knows. VULNERABLE ADULTS, the article said. Below were two grainy photos. One of the escapees was a frazzled Indian man in his forties with a villainous mustache and a granite stare; the other was an unhappy-looking Chinese woman in her late sixties, not called Madam Chang, but she bore a resemblance. The two women could have been cousins. Sisters, at a stretch. I couldn’t shake the connection out of my head.

  I thought I would show that newspaper clipping to the police one day, triumphant, and they would catch her. But that never happened. And my parents never asked me any further questions. It was horrible, no one believing me. Not even my brother, who was ten and supposed to be my best friend. When I turned thirteen I burned the clipping with a lighter.

  “It’s funny, a woman on the moon,” Szu said. “Like what you brought up about the astronauts. Madam Chang left earth and came back. What if you could leave earth and come back? Was Madam Chang real or a ghost? What if you could ask a ghost what they know, why they were like that? Is that possible?”

  She was prattling. I shrugged and picked at a hangnail.

  “What if what my aunt does is genuine?” Szu continued. “All my life I never believed it. I saw too much backstage business, their expenses books, the way they discussed clients, and all that . . . but what if it’s for real?”

  “Who the hell cares?”

  “You care. You said so yourself. At the bus stop, in town. Maybe this planet is just one place to be in, of so many others. And you can hop around. And time travel isn’t just made up.”

  Szu was babbling bullshit. And she was so fixated on the stupid moon, which was missing the point, even though I couldn’t quite describe what the point was. I felt slighted.

  “You’ve got me thinking . . . who knows . . .” she said.

  I stopped listening and watched her with a mixture of tenderness and disgust. She reminded me of a diseased animal with her furry skin and reddened eyes. Just like a rabbit afflicted with myxomatosis, which was a word we both learnt when we were friends all of half a year ago because it was a song on a Radiohead album. It seemed to me that all the knowledge I held on to at sixteen was either too awful or too embarrassing to forget, or just useless facts, lazy and incidental. Everything else I simply lost track of. Our placid afternoons of listening to music together seemed far-fetched now, fictional.

  “My mother used to think I was special, in a good way,” Szu continued. “When I was little I took a long time to learn how to talk. But once I got the hang of it, I started growing really fast. Taller, and chatty. And then she didn’t like me anymore. I could see it happening but I couldn’t do anything to change it. It was beyond my control. I wasn’t special enough.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back in the chair. I’d heard this diatribe from her many times before.

  “Even you are more special than I am,” Szu said softly.

  I pitied her too much to be offended. I flashed a brief smile and shook my head. Szu released her stare and tilted back to the wall. I guess I should have told her that we were both unique, some small, kind reassurance to make her feel better. It was clear that she was still consumed by the mean mystery of her mother, a lifelong rejection she had outlived but not necessarily outlasted. Something flipped, knotted, and hardened deep inside my guts. I wanted to tell Szu that her mother, for all her faults, had seemed to acknowledge my horrible encounter with Madam Chang even without me telling her, and that she had been so extraordinarily kind about it. Even just that once, but I’d never forget it, and never forget her. How she told me we were both different as she clasped my hands in her slight, cold palms. And I felt it then, a bond that even her own daughter didn’t share with her, and Amisa sensed it in me too, even if she ignored me ever after. What linked us was something real and true and rare. Szu wouldn’t understand.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said instead. “I’ve got tuition soon.”

  It was a lie but hopefully Szu didn’t notice. I patted my hands on my lap and stood up. She kept quiet and drew a sharp intake of breath as I hoisted my backpack and tucked my feet back into my shoes.

  “Don’t go,” she said in a quiet voice. “Please.”

  I paused.

  “I can’t action that,” I replied. “Not today. You’ll be okay. You just need some rest. See ya later, Szu.”

  No response. Just the still curve of her cheek. Lank strands of hair across the blanket. She sniffed twice.

  As I made my way down the corridor I glanced at Amisa’s emptied bedroom: door gaping, curtains drawn, dark furniture. It was depressing to see it so exposed, just a square room not much bigger than her daughter’s, scent of mothballs with a hint of floral freshener. That old, mysterious haunt. It didn’t provide any answers. Szu felt cheated of explanations, and I felt sorry for her. But life just happened and it wasn’t fair, wasn’t my fault. Memory tussled us backwards with idiot hands, just the past insisting on its pastness because it didn’t know what else to do.

  At the kitchen doorway I said good-bye to Aunt Yunxi. She was hacking a watermelon to pieces and she turned towards me with a wary look. She made a sound of acknowledgment: ugly, almost guttural. It was only when I hurried all the way out of the cul-de-sac, veered right, and reached the bus stop that it hit me with a pang that Szu might have been crying. I didn’t know yet, nor did I truly expect it, but that was the last time I saw her.

  24

  SZU

  2020

  I’m watching the 8 p.m. news with my husband, Ben, and my daughter, Elizabeth, when my phone vibrates. I tilt the screen to read it:

  Hi Szu,

  This is Circe here, from secondary school? Long time no see. I got your number from Leslie. He says he ran into you the other day. Nice to know you’re back in town. I was wondering if u were free to catch up sometime?

  I glance up at the television. Wide shot of nebula, cut to scientists talking. Chang’e 6, the unmanned lunar orbiter from China, just landed on a lava plain on the moon. The footage shows the shuttle in the black thickness of space, and then the camera cuts to a diagram indicating the location of its landing.

  “The landing site is a vast lava plain called Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. Data gathered from the orbiter will be used to refine key technologies for further missions . . .”

  I glaze over at the newscaster’s magenta lipstick and sleep-deprived face and ponder the message. Elizabeth tussles my arm and I smile at her. I was holding her hand when I ran into Leslie at Railway Mall the other day. Elizabeth and I were on our way to buy cornflour and onions. Leslie, my first crush; I was surprised by how much he’d changed, when really, isn’t that how time works? He looked like a grown, tired man, but I couldn’t help but paste the ghost of his eighteen-year-old self over his features. We made small talk and bade our farewells and I remembered the sad, truncated way I’d said good-bye to his younger sister.

  It’s been seventeen years since I saw her last. Circe left my childhood bedroom in a criminal hurry, tossing excuses in her wake. I knew she meant well but she was afraid of and for both of us. And she had just shared something ugly and important. But I didn’t know what to say, nor how to help her. I was at the start of
my worst, way back then. It’s hard to find the strength to be giving or forgiving in times like that. It was a worst that would take me years to wade out of. I can name it plainly with a developing detachment, now that I’m well: my eating disorder, the way I tried to use the numbness I felt from denying myself to blanch and stymie the gushing, greedy chaos of everything else. It sounds dramatic, but that was a dramatically bad year. When I was ill everyone at school pretended not to notice. They thought kid gloves were the kindest way to handle me. I had lost my mother at sixteen, and my father all over again. All I had, at the end of it, was Aunt Yunxi. Even she knew we couldn’t completely rely on her amulets, her twists of dried roots and white fungus.

  “I told you your friend is bad news,” she said at the time. “Abandoner. Don’t worry, I’ll summon a long wriggling worm inside her, because that’s what she is, a little worm herself.”

  I laughed, weakly.

  I withdrew from school. We moved out of the house two weeks later, and went to Penang to meet my aunt, my real aunt, for the first time. Jiejie is the kindest woman in the world and took Yunxi and me in without question.

  Not that Yunxi needed her help—she’s the most re-silient person I know. Shortly after I moved in with Jiejie, Aunt Yunxi went on one of her expeditions again—this time to Tibet. She comes and goes as she pleases. And when she came back from one of her trips, a few years back, she announced to all of us that she had renounced her mediumship, and was now a born-again Christian. It makes me happy that she’s happy. Now she lives with two church friends in Georgetown. She still behaves like the same person she was in her other life, with her hoarse, funny voice, her jolty mannerisms. I remember her trying to explain to me many years ago about the difference between shamans and mediums. How shamans have the power to let their spirits leave their bodies, lift off, and walk far from home. They travel across great distances, encountering wonders we’d never otherwise see or know. Mediums are the reverse: they invoke, inviting gods and spirits into their bodies and feeling them as violently as a flagellation. I think Yunxi was trying to tell me that if our body is a vessel we have to treat it with respect while we have it to ourself. But I’m not sure: she’s always been a roundabout type.

  Ben flips the channel and the trailer for Ponti 2020 comes on. I make a face but before he changes it again I shake my head and we turn to watch it together. Eunice Prinze looks nothing like my mother. The new Ponti runs barefoot from one end to the other of the glittering SkyPark of Marina Bay Sands. New Ponti wears a maxi skirt. New Ponti haunts crisp-collared expats on Boat Quay. New Ponti tells the (predictably white) leading man, “I’ve lived through things you wouldn’t believe. Trust me.”

  “How can I trust a monster?” he asks.

  “Will you take a gamble?”

  “For you, yes.”

  I roll my eyes as they kiss to synthy Muzak.

  “Maybe it’s not bad. We can hate-watch it at home,” Ben says.

  “Yeah, definite hate-watch material,” I tell him. “At least they’re trying to push the film. So much effort. Remember those weird stencils the PR company sent us?”

  “And the hamper at the end! I think they feel guilty that they are butchering your mother’s legacy.”

  “Hm. Maybe.”

  The trailer ends and an American crime serial comes back on. Elizabeth starts hitting the blue cushion with her fists.

  “Stop that, you little monkey!” I tell her.

  I turn back to my phone.

  Hey Circe!

  Good to hear from you. Leslie says you’re doing well. It would be great to catch up. I’m free any day next week except Wednesday, so just say when.

  I hit send and watch the blue bar grow.

  *

  I’ve started part-time film-making classes, Wednesday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. It’s a foundation course. This week for homework we have to do some basic editing.

  Perhaps because the remake is coming out soon, or because I’m a masochist, I’ve picked footage from the original Ponti! I have it in front of me, digitized, scrubbed to clarity. I’m fixated on one particular sequence that comes from twenty minutes into the film.

  We open with a shot of a grotesque banyan tree, its limblike aerial prop roots and obscuring vines. Stillness. One beat of shadow. Leaves stir. And then the monstrous human thing that is my mother begins to emerge. First her thin white hands. And then her bloodied, beautiful face. Followed by the rest of her, an elegant attack of white dress and scarred legs. I’m obsessed with this moment. I keep looping it back and rewatching, as if she’ll grant me answers after a thousand repetitions. Amisa, Ponti, Xiaofang, hides from and reveals herself to me over and over, in the hypnotic shifting of frames. Her moonbeam skin comes into focus, before disappearing into the darkness again. The hope in her face breaks my heart. Rewind. The hate in her face breaks my heart.

  I’m thirty-three now. As the gap narrows, twelve years between my age and my mother’s when she died, I approach the notion of my forties with a tentative faith. So we are put on this planet and we won’t make it out alive. But while I’m right here, I can try to be kind. As my mother the horror-movie actress blooms out from the vines, I press pause and detest her and miss her, all at the same time. But most of all I talk to her. I remember my silly incantations before I entered the school gates. How I willed words to work, lines of protection. As if she can hear me from the other side, I lean in to the screen and tell Ponti the same thing I wish on my daughter every night. So it’s a hot, horrible earth we are stuck on and it’s only getting worse. But still. I want to care for you always. May you be safe, may you feel ease. May you have a long, messy life full of love.

  I unpause the footage but this time it doesn’t respond. I click again. The screen stutters and stalls into an imperfect blur.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to:

  Jean McNeil and George Ttoouli for guiding and encouraging me from the very start.

  Deborah Rogers, who I never got to meet but who gave me the lifeline, means, and self-belief to finish this book.

  Emma Paterson for being the most empathetic and incisive agent, reader, and person.

  Sophie Jonathan and Ira Silverberg for taking extraordinary and exacting care of my work. Yours in Ponti, thank you.

  The teams at Picador and Simon & Schuster, everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White, as well as Lucinda Praine.

  Dr. Karen Schaller, Henry Sutton, Giles Foden, and Trezza Azzopardi at the University of East Anglia.

  The David TK Wong Fellowship, the Booker Foundation, and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for supporting me.

  Elizabeth Berry, Zoe McCarthy, Owen Fung, Jennifer Eakins, Cecilie Olsen, Caitlin Ingham, Peter Bloxham, Tom Offland, and Joan Chan for wonderful, humorous friendship.

  Suzanne Ushie for being my first reader and best writing companion always.

  Avni Doshi for being the best fellow fellow there could be while this story was incubating (and helping me name Amisa).

  Soumya Poduval for reading the first draft and reality-checking the school scenes.

  My family—the Teos and Ongs—for everything.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © BARNEY POOLE

  Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore and lives in London. In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers Award for Ponti, her first novel.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Sharlene-Teo

  @simonbooks

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to rece
ive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Sharlene Teo

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by Picador UK

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department,1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2018

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Jacket design by Tyler Comrie

  Jacket image by Arman Zhenikeyev / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-5011-7311-0

  ISBN 978-1-5011-7313-4 (ebook)