When a Flower Dies

by Josephine Chia

  “Children had more respect in the old days. All working children gave their parents monthly pocket money. Not now! You look around and see how many old folks have to go out to work, selling pocket tissues or cleaning tables at hawker centres, and rummaging through refuse bins to pick up aluminium cans and cardboard to sell! Some of these young people earn more than ten thousand dollars a month and they don’t even give their parents one single dollar! In the past, we believe it was our duty to take care of our parents when they grew old. Automatic, what! They gave us life and raised us, so when they’re old, we look after them. It’s a natural cycle. But these days…”

  “I heard that someone has bought Rediffusion and will air the old type of programmes?” Pansy interrupts him gently, trying to steer the conversation into less troubled waters. She is sure the taxi driver can vent his spleen ad infinitum. She wonders if other Singaporeans share his dissatisfaction and view.

  “Yes, I heard that too. Maybe we can get our old dialect dramas back,” the taxi driver says. “People used to sit in the kopi tiam and listen to Rediffusion as a community…”

  Rediffusion was the old cable radio telecast. The transmitter set costs five dollars a month to rent. This existed long before electricity came to the villages and before television came into the country. Pansy has a vision of the coffee-shop in her old kampong, open on two sides with white-top tables and wooden chairs, an enamel spittoon under each table. There the trishaw riders would sit with their legs drawn up on the chairs, their loose Chinese trousers or shorts exposing their inner thighs, pouring their coffee into thick china saucers to cool the coffee before slurping from them.

  Don’t sit like a trishaw puller, parents used to chide their children, a saying that began when the rickshaws and trishaws were not mechanised.

  Pansy and the taxi driver share their favourite programmes and reminisce about Teochew customs, opera and their cultural foods: Teochew moey, Teochew fish balls, Teochew steamed fish, Teochew soon kueh and many others, as the taxi makes its way down the East Coast Parkway (ECP) and towards the coast.

  The taxi driver’s face lights up when he talks about their food and culture. He tells Pansy where such genuine remaining stalls might be—in which food centres around the island. This chatting and sharing makes Pansy feel she is back in old Singapore, the one that she had known, where life was more laid back and people were more friendly and communicative, not staring into mobile phones and iPads, ears plugged by ear-phones, shutting out the possibility of interaction with another human being. Coming from her small English village in Bracklesham where strangers still smile and greet each other or comment on the weather, this enforced distancing, akin to unfriendliness, makes Pansy feel isolated and uncared for in a teeming pool of humanity.

  Sitting on a bench at the East Coast Park and looking out to sea and the sky, Pansy’s heart lifts a little. She loves the wind in her hair, the sun on her face, the sounds of the waves rushing up and over the sandy beach. The beauty of it is that the beach is not far from the city centre or any part of the island. There are advantages to being a small country. Being close by the sea makes Pansy feel most alive. She was brought up on it. It takes her back to her youth, to the halcyon days when mechanical and vehicular sounds did not intrude on the villagers’ consciousness. Every now and then, a moment reminds her of that period in Kampong Tepi Laut, daring her to open the sluice gates to her life there. She allows herself a little memory and remembers how she delighted in the sound of the waves as they ebbed and flowed under their house on stilts at coastal Bedok. Gaps in the wooden floor boards allowed her to see the sandy beach underneath if she lay down on the floor, allowed her to watch the moving water that sometimes sent her into a trance-like state. When Anthony was small he had loved it too, so the two of them had lain side by side to try to count the waves. It was a good ruse to put him to sleep! Pansy had felt that she was in a sampan, in a native dug-out, not a house; the shifting waves gave her the sensation of being rocked in a cradle.

  After the reclamation project began and they were forced to move, she had difficulty in sleeping without this reassuring constant sound. Fellow villagers, evicted from their seaside kampongs like her, had lamented about this as well, suffering years of insomnia, land-locked in their concrete HDB flats, unable to hear the sea, unable to smell the salt in the air or feel the breeze on their faces. People who have never lived near the sea cannot understand the enormity of such a loss. Sometimes, when George and herself were sitting in their conservatory looking out to Bracklesham Bay with an expanse of clear sea, horizon and sky, which stretched past the Isle of Wight all the way to France, George would recall their attap-thatched home by the sea in Singapore, one of the many which had stood by the water’s edge, amongst the clusters of seaside villages framed by leaning palm trees and long stretches of white sand, the kind of place that might be featured by travel agents in their brochures as a rustic holiday attraction.

  “Do you remember us sitting on our verandah looking out to sea?”

  “Oh, yes, I can never forget it. Kampong Tepi Laut is stitched into my memory. It can be destroyed physically but it will continue to exist in my mind. There are some things that can never be taken away. No matter how long we’ve been away, Singapore is already in my blood and cannot be siphoned out.”

  “Indeed,” George had said, his voice bitter. “Singaporeans think that those of us who stay away from our homeland are quitters. Fancy people using such an absurd term! They think we’ve betrayed our country. But they don’t understand that we felt betrayed…”

  “We know what happened,” Pansy said, patting his knee to comfort him. “We know why we had to leave.”

  “Who would have thought that our idyllic life would have been shattered so drastically?”

  “Yes,” Pansy said. “If not for what had happened, Mak might still be alive…”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to have started this conversation …”

  George had reached out to hug her then. Talk of Kim Guek invariably brought up that twist in Pansy’s guts. She tried to block out the unspeakable memory of her mother’s last day. Pain might be smoothed out by the whetstone of time but it could never be erased entirely. So many of our pleasurable memories are interlaced with sorrowful ones.

  Here at East Coast Park, the sun is wonderfully warm, kind to Pansy’s old bones. There’s so much sunshine here that it is not regarded as precious, but she recalls deep winters in England when people hungered for a single ray, like the winter of 1986 when the white landscape stretched intermittently for miles, thick layers of snow shrouding rooftops, hills and trees. Or like the time she was in Skagway, Alaska, with George, at minus forty; office workers were given leave to go out to stand in the sunshine for the precious twenty minutes that the sun showed its face. It was so cold that if your ear-muffs slipped and exposed your ears for even a minute, they would bloom into cauliflower-swellings! Yet, here, in this country, people often complain about the excess of sunshine and humidity, and mosquitoes that thrived on such conditions. Sitting on the stone bench at East Coast Park, Pansy releases the tension in her chest with a long outbreath, breaking into a smile. At least she has the memory of a fulfilled life with George; many people go through life not having known what it was like to love and be loved. What was it? It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Or better still, to have loved and not lost. Without love, one’s spirit becomes dry, parched, unable to sustain or render joy.

  The sea here is as gentle as a millpond. Yet, this concept is relative—a few ruffles on the surface of the sea, and locals consider it rough. But the strength of the wind and waves are potent enough for gentle windsurfing and sailing. Pansy can see a few windsurfers out with their pretty sails, probably students from the school nearby. The lack of a forceful wind means that it is not easy for them to tack, their boards gliding to a standstill and hitting the doldrums, their sails becoming floppy and harder to manoeuvre. How different it was for the surfers at B
racklesham Bay. There they had to wear wet-suits, even in summer, as they braved the icy water and the cold, strong wind, riding and balancing their surf-boards on huge curling waves. Before she left England, Pansy had started watching a new sport, kite surfing, and had felt delighted. If she had been younger, she would have attempted it. Surfers sailed on their boards and hung onto colourful parasails that were handheld but not attached to their boards. When the wind took them, they were lifted aloft like giant tropical birds before they landed with resounding splashes. That was the kind of potency the wind had there.

  Once, a journalist had managed to photograph a woman who had been walking along the shoreline, but was suddenly lifted by the strong wind and airborne into a parallel position with the ground, as if she were in the skydiving position! Here in Singapore, the wind is never strong enough to lift human beings into the air. It caresses rather than whips. In the distance, Pansy can see huge metal tankers, some really rusty looking. They blight the seascape as they traverse the international channel. Of course the international channel is much closer now than before, since the land reclamation. So it’s not quite the same as sitting at George’s bench at Bracklesham where the sea was open and wild, the waves rising to six feet sometimes. But at least she’s not confined in a tiny space.

  This bit of coast is new to Pansy, reclaimed when she had already left for England with her family. They did not want to hang around after their home and village were ravaged by bulldozers. Like them, the other villagers had felt their hearts being torn open when the bulldozers broke the legs of their houses, toppling the houses that had sat on them. The spindly wooden stilts did not stand a chance against the open-mouthed mechanical monsters. Sand, gravel and pilings were slapped in front of the natural coast that she knew, literally burying the village she grew up in and where she had lived with George as a newly-married woman.

  Fishing folk in many other seaside villages on the same coast and all the way to Pasir Panjang in the west suffered a similar fate, and were forced to become landlubbers, when they were moved inland. Like the kampongs, the long sandy beaches that gave Pasir Panjang its Malay name did not survive modernity. No memorial tablets attest to their existence. Villagers were moved from attap houses into concrete HDB flats. No one provided counselling to help them to cope with the transition. But at least there, they had running water, indoor taps and bathrooms, flush toilets and electricity. As Singapore’s land expansion crept towards its neighbouring countries, Indonesia and Malaysia watched with critical eyes, in case their fishing waters were compromised.

  Pansy decides that one day, soon, she’ll go down to Bedok to retrace her old village. She had not rushed to do it because she wasn’t sure if she could handle the overwhelming memories of her mother, of George, and their early years, that the place may bring back.

  Pansy talks to the waves, “Where have you just come from? Have you been round the world? Can you go and tell the sea at Bracklesham Bay that I wish I could see it? Tell George I miss him awfully…”

  Through the West Sussex County Council, Pansy had erected a wooden bench in George’s memory on the shingled beach at Bracklesham Bay, the Isle of Wight, across the curved bay in the shadowy distance, between England and France. There on the shore, because of the high waves and wild winds, no tall trees can grow—only hardy brambles, tamarisk bushes and low-lying sea spinach can survive the harsh onslaught. But in summer, these enticed and brought the butterflies in colourful, fluttering flocks, which delighted Pansy: Brimstones, Large White, Red Admiral and Painted Lady. They reminded her that life was a process of metamorphosis, if we knew how to observe and read the signs, to learn to be patient with each of its stages, be it caterpillar or cocoon. Screwed to the backrest of the bench was a small brass plate which said simply:

  To George, who loved this view. Pansy.

  It was what they had agreed upon—that whoever died first would have their ashes strewn there and a bench sited, to give rest to those who walked the shingled beach that stretched for miles to Selsey in the east and Bosham in the west. In some respects, Pansy was unsure if the pact they made was helpful. Would she have coped better with George’s death if there had been a tomb for her to visit, or even an urn she could touch? She cannot even say to Anthony “when I die, bury me next to your father” or “mingle my ashes with his in the same urn”. How is it possible for someone to have lived with her for so long, shared such personal intimacy, and yet not leave a visible trace of that union in her life? Except for Anthony, there is nothing else that visibly records their having been together. For some reason, this hurts Pansy more than anything else. She wants George to be carved onto her forehead, etched into her face, so that anyone looking at her will know George and she had once been one; that upon seeing her, they can see George as well, that he has not vanished, just because his body has.

  For more than fifty years they had been together. More than half a century. You cannot erase that length of years from your heart and mind like you erase the writing on a blackboard, or press ‘delete’ on a computer keyboard. George is branded on her consciousness in so many ways. For months after the funeral, Pansy had gone out with her thermos of hot food, soup, chicken curry, sayur lodeh or noodles, and sat on George’s bench, talking to him whilst she ate. If the weather permitted, she stayed for hours, but if the wind was howling and the waves were spitting, freezing her in minutes even when she was well wrapped up, she would beat a hasty retreat. She was not as firm as before, and a ferocious wind from the wide open sea could easily chill her, and even lift her off her feet. She was sure that at such times, she looked quite mad to others, this foreign-looking woman, muttering to herself, her limbs and clothes in a tangled mess, her grey hair in disarray, eating rice and noodles out of a thermos on a bench by the beach, when the red flag was flapping furiously in the wind and in the face of the board that warned of ‘No Swimming’.

  Where in Singapore had she seen a similar board before? One that said, ‘No Swimming’? Pansy rakes her brain, leafs through her brain, but she cannot retrieve the memory.

  East Coast Park is well planned, planted with instant trees to simulate the old forests, coconut palm, rain trees, casuarinas, sea figs and sea apples. The trees were transported from elsewhere by huge cranes and slotted into fresh-dug holes. Long sandy beaches are created from sand carved out from hills around the island, flattening the landscape so much that modern youngsters are not aware of how hilly Singapore used to be. The excavations created quarries which the heavy monsoons filled, turning them into lakes, like Pansy’s special lake near Koh Sek Lim Road or the fish ponds in Kampong Potong Pasir whose name meant ‘cut sand’ in Malay. All along the shoreline are open spaces for people to picnic, barbecue or erect their tents, after they have acquired an official permit. Two parallel bitumen tracks run side by side along the coast, one for bicycles and one for walkers and joggers.

  There are not many people in the park right now so the young lady walking briskly catches Pansy’s attention. Wrapped around her head is a metal band fitted to enormous earphones over both ears. Her arms and legs are moving in unison. Even in this heat, she is wearing a track suit with long sleeves and long trousers. Chinese Singaporeans have an aversion to the sun: golfers and drivers wear long sleeves or slip-ons to prevent its effect. The young lady’s outfit is in eye-catching pink with applique letters stretched across her bosom, JUICY. When the girl passes her, Pansy notices that a similar applique of letters saying JUICY is splashed right across her pert bottom. Perhaps she is not aware of its allusion.

  Tak seronoh sekali, Pansy imagines she can hear her parents lamenting.

  A young couple passes Pansy sitting on her stone bench at East Coast Park. They are sitting on a two-seater bicycle, laughing, the young man singing the perennial ditty, Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do… their joy filtering into the atmosphere.

  Enjoy! Enjoy! Pansy wants to yell. Feast on each other whilst you can. But oh, beware! Time is a robber. Don’t leave to tomorrow what y
ou can say to each other today.

  The young couple park their bicycle, laughing as they run hand in hand towards the surf. Her eyes home in on their hands clasping each other’s. This is what Pansy misses, the intimacy of touch, that tangible contact of skin to skin. Not being held by another is the loneliest thing about being alone. Perhaps now she has some idea as to why some single people indulge in promiscuous sex. It is not just for the orgasmic experience, but for the deeper sense of being touched, of being needed and wanted. Since her return, she misses being hugged. People here are less demonstrative, less inclined to take someone into their arms, body pressed against body. Maybe she ought to get a dog.

  Someone to take my hand

  And be a team with me

  So nice, life would be so nice

  The song runs in Pansy’s head.

  “Oh, stop being so maudlin!” she tells herself off yet again.

  Heaving another sigh, she takes off her sandals and steps onto the sand with the sprig of yellow bougainvillea she had picked where the taxi had dropped her off, near the Bougainvillea Garden. Not that she should have taken the flowers. This is a country where laws are stringent and rules are meant to be obeyed. Here, few people would consider vandalising or damaging government property. In the days when there used to be red telephone boxes, like the ones in UK, Singapore’s were reputed to be the cleanest in the world: no litter, no torn directories, no slips of paper advertising the services of masseurs and prostitutes, no urine pooling in a corner. In the rest of the world, the tome is attached to the wall by a thick chain and even then, the directory gets stolen or has pages torn out. Even the chain would be sold for scrap.

  Pansy had given in to her naughty streak. After all, who would miss one small sprig? She had been pleased to see the many varieties of bougainvillea that were in the cultivated garden, their petals light, like shaped tracing paper: red, orange, pink, yellow, mauve and white, trained into hedges, round bushes, arches and towers. The most delightful thing was that the flowers brought the beautiful butterflies, which had learnt to survive in densely populated urban conditions—the Cabbage White, the Common Grass Yellow, the Orange Emigrant and her favourite, the Painted Jezebel. They had flitted playfully with each other amongst the bougainvillea bushes, bringing with them a sense of gaiety and light-heartedness.