When a Flower Dies

by Josephine Chia

  “Oh they’re so cute, like fluffy black cotton balls.”

  They are at the Kidney Pond near Satay by the Bay, which is an eatery selling satay and other local food, and it has a splendid view of the bay, which is walking distance from the domes. Satay by the Bay tries to capture a bygone 1950s attraction, the Satay Club, which used to be on Beach Road. It was where customers sat on low stools whilst the hawkers roasted their satay on charcoal spits, the delicious aroma made more delicious because the hawkers used sheaves of pandan to oil the satay and when the flames caught the pandan, they sent a mouth-watering fragrance into the air.

  The young man is an officer with the Gardens, one of several experts on its wildlife.

  “Do we get many migratory birds in Singapore?” Pansy asks.

  “Of course,” he says. “All the birds escaping the cold from Asia, North America, Scandinavia and Europe stop here. Last year, the Botanic Gardens had three million visitors throughout winter. But of course our Gardens here are still young and we haven’t finished recording our feathered guests yet, though we get about a hundred different species of birds at any one time here, and probably about half of them are migrants.”

  “Gosh, how astonishing,” says Pansy. “How foolish of me not to know. What types of birds do you get?”

  “All sorts, really,” the man says. “Singapore gets visits from shore birds who love the mudflats, like at Sungei Buloh and Chek Jawa: the whimbrels, black terns and grey herons. They feed on fish and crustaceans that are easy to catch there. Our Gardens get visits from the purple heron, the scarlet back waxbill, pitta and orange-headed thrush, that feed on berries and nectar.”

  The information makes Pansy rather happy. To know that the city is alive with nature and wildlife gives her enormous joy—that it’s not just a mausoleum of architectural magnificence.

  After she has thanked him and said goodbye, she decides to go into the Flower Dome to see what the current display is. She finds it lovely that the exhibition in the Flower Field is changed from time to time to showcase a particular region, country, or flower. She had enjoyed the display of Dutch tulips and Dutch houses in spring. They had reminded her of when she and George had gone to Amsterdam to visit Anne Frank’s house. The French Parisian theme brought back memories of Paris, of them having coffee and croissants at its cafes, and when they strolled along Champs-Élysées, the bridges of the Seine and the cobbled streets of Montmartre. The Persian display had brought back the holiday she had with George, skiing in Andorra, after which they motored through Spain, stopping to visit the Alhambra Palace. This time, when Pansy enters the Dome, she is delighted because it’s an autumn scene, displaying red maple leaves, flaming acers and even a miniature English oak!

  She understands that the temperature in the Dome can be regulated in varying sections to promote the appropriate seasonal climes, to seduce the plants and trees into thinking there’s a change of season. How twenty-first century is that? To Pansy’s utter surprise and joy, she sees a widespread display of blackberries everywhere! Here, in Singapore. It’s mind-boggling as they seem so out of context. Blackberries in pots and flower beds. There are even some tangled amongst the orchids, of all things, which is a strange juxtaposition of two plants that could not exist in an unengineered reality. Without doubt, blackberries always connect her with George, reminding her of the times they went blackberry picking in the countryside of England. Wild and thorny brambles in summer yielded fat, juicy blackberries in autumn. Pity she didn’t manage to get blackberries when she was showing Goldie how to make apple pie. Apples go well with blackberries in a pie.

  “Now, now,” George had said. “Don’t think I don’t know you’ve been eating them as you picked them! Look at those tell-tale signs on your lips!”

  The hedgerow alongside the path skirting the wetlands at Roman Landing was full of berries. They were dark and plump. George and Pansy had come prepared, parking their car at West Wittering, and walking along the quiet path, each armed with a Tupperware box. They took care not to be pricked by the thorny brambles or be stung by the stinging nettles that grew in abundance in the countryside, and at the feet of the blackberry bushes. George and Pansy always competed to see who would pick the most.

  “Look who’s talking,” Pansy had replied, pointing to the fresh purple stain on the collar of his windbreaker. “Sneak!”

  He did not try to deny it, but burst out laughing instead. His laughter rang in Pansy’s ears. She was content to be beside George in this beautiful and tranquil setting. The tide was high and the inlet was dotted with sailboats. As far as the eye could see, there were sand dunes, pebbled beach and harvested fields. Not a single motor vehicle in sight.

  Pansy is caught in the stranglehold of the memory. George’s laughter is in her ears. Something starts to shift within her, and she is transported back to that time and place, losing all sense of where she really is. She is simply aware of being so delighted that she’s back in England in a season which is visually stunning. She tells herself that she needs to pick enough berries for George’s apple pie, and perhaps extra to make blackberry jam, a coulis, or to freeze some. She loves cooking for him and making him happy. Now, where is George? She turns this way and that to look for him. Has he moved along to another hedge, hidden from her view? Or has he gone back to the car to get the Tupperware? Where has she put hers? But she is not worried, confident that he will bring one back for her when he returns.

  I know, she thinks with a cheeky smile, I’m going to have a head start on him and start picking the berries!

  So Pansy, believing that she’s in the lush countryside of England goes walking round the Flower Dome looking for blackberries. The cool air of the Dome and the extensive field of flowers and plants collaborated in her delusion. Her heart is bursting with happiness in anticipation of seeing George. She bends and stoops to reach for the blackberries and she picks them wherever she can find them and stuffs them into her handbag which she thinks is her basket.

  The Flower Dome’s young manager, who is instructing his helpers on deadheading the wilted flowers and leaves, does a double take when he sees the old lady suddenly walking round the Flower Field, nonchalantly picking the blackberries he had painstakingly nurtured to grow in the tropics! The woman examines each berry as if to see if it’s wormed or wholesome, and if it looks bad, she proceeds to chuck it back into the flower bed, presumably keeping only the good ones, storing them in her handbag. His jaw drops. He can’t believe his eyes.

  Chapter 12

  By the time Anthony arrives at the Gardens by the Bay security office, Pansy has forgotten the whole episode and her momentary lapse from reality. Fortunately, because of her diagnosis, he had placed family contact details in her handbag. He had expected to see her in an emotional state but instead she is sitting quite relaxed and nonchalantly drinking the tea that someone had kindly made for her. They have even provided her with some biscuits, which she is happily dunking into the tea, the way some English like to do, calling it Builder’s tea as most construction workers liked to drink tea in this manner, from a mug rather than a cup. She has calmed down considerably after security had first accosted her. She had created a scene, refusing to let the two burly security officers, one a Malay, the other, a Bengali, take away her handbag. She struggled and vented expletives which shocked the two men, incongruous from the lips of such a fine lady. She had struggled between them as they led her away. To the amazement of the security officers, by the time they had reached the office, she had suddenly returned to being a docile old lady, not realising what had taken place just moments ago. She spoke to them in kindly tones, asking about their jobs and families as if they were her kampong neighbours.

  “Hi, Anthony,” she says, not in the least perturbed. “What are you doing here? I didn’t think you were interested in flowers.”

  Anthony rolls his eyes upwards. He is furious, but is trying to calm himself. As soon as the security officer had called him, he had rung Dr Kwa and asked her for
advice. She had told him not to upset Pansy by overreacting.

  “It will happen more and more,” she said over the telephone. “No one can predict how Alzheimer’s affects each patient. It depends on which part of the patient’s brain it affects. Some patients lose their capacity for speech, others lose muscular control. We can only try to manage the condition through medication and drugs. But they are not a cure. One moment your mother can be lucid, in the next she won’t be. The disease changes the personality of the patient as well. Some of them can turn really vulgar and bad- tempered. But you must always remember that it is not your mother in action, it’s the disease talking. Sadly, it sounds as if your mother’s condition has deteriorated rapidly and she needs full-time care now. She won’t be safe on her own. I would suggest you start looking for a full-time caregiver, or put her in a nursing home.”

  Anthony looks into his mother’s handbag that security had confiscated as evidence. He sees its contents—address book, cosmetics and apartment keys drenched with purplish blackberry juice and fruits. She had talked so much about how his father had liked blackberry pie, so he can guess why she did what she did. The sight produced an ache in him. Anthony sighs.

  Goldie is upset to hear about her grandmother’s furore at Gardens by the Bay. Her father had told her about it. Alzheimer’s sounds like a life sentence. But she won’t be able to get back to Singapore till Chinese New Year the following year. She hopes that Pansy will still recognise her. She has tried talking to her grandmother on the telephone but it’s getting more and more difficult to carry on a conversation with her. Her grandmother gets disoriented listening to a disembodied voice.

  Pansy cannot understand why she’s not in her own home, and why she is in this place with many other old people who seem to be in varying states of mobility and comprehension. Depending on her vacillating mind states, sometimes home to her is Bracklesham Bay, but sometimes it is Kampong Tepi Laut, never at her small apartment in Aljunied. Her short stay in the place had not reinforced any memories. She tells herself she must be in hospital or somewhere like that. Fortunately she has her own suite, a room with a bathroom attached, so that she doesn’t have to share a bathroom with the others. But the nursing aide regularly takes her out to the living room so that she can socialise with the others. When she remembers George and realises he’s not there with her, Pansy kicks up a fuss, screams and shouts, “I want George! I want to go home!” On other occasions, she weeps inconsolably when she asks for George and he doesn’t come.

  “You said you’ll always be there for me,” she shouts accusations at him when she’s in her anger mode. “You promised!”

  In February, Goldie finally makes it back to Singapore in good time for the reunion dinner for the Year of the Sheep.

  At this time of the year in China, there is a huge exodus of people travelling back to the countryside, to be with their families to celebrate the onset of spring, which is generally taken as the beginning of the Lunar New Year, which will fall on 19 February 2015 on the Gregorian calendar. Goldie knew she had to get out of China before the mad rush began, when roads are jammed, trains and flights over-booked. Her company is satisfied with the results of her work there and has given her an extra bonus. If she had the courage, this would be the right time to tell her parents that she is going to quit her accountancy job to become a professional diver. She might even go so far as to tell her parents that she wants to change her name by deed poll. She will take on her great-grandmother’s name, Kim Guek. Her hair is long now, glossy in its blackness, making her face seem daintier, her features sharper. At her homecoming, she surprises her family with her spruced-up appearance, no more spiky hair, no more heavy metal studs or chain belt. Even Emily has to concede that she looks much more feminine. Anthony smiles indulgently.

  “Wah! Dajie,” both Andie and Winona marvelled, “you look so different!”

  On the evening of the reunion dinner, Goldie amazes her family by wearing her tailored sarong kebaya, her transformation complete.

  “Where did you get that?” Emily asks. “I have to say it does suit you.”

  Emily must be mellowing. It’s the first time that she has ever complimented Goldie.

  “Oh. Before I left for China, grandma took me to a tailor in Katong.”

  “She’s not a bad grandmother. Or mother-in-law. Come to think of it. Pity about her loss of memory.”

  “Mum!” Goldie says with amazement. “Are you all right? You seem different.”

  “Mum had a cancer scare when you were away,” Winona whispered. “Doctor found a lump in her breast and did a biopsy. Dad said not to worry you about it until we know the results. It turned out to be a benign growth. But since then, mum has been acting really weird.”

  “You look lovely,” Anthony says to Goldie when he comes into the room. “It’s quite astonishing. You look so like my grandmother did when she was young.”

  “I’m thinking of changing my name to hers,” Goldie whispers to him. “Don’t you think Kim Guek reflects our Asian culture more than Goldie?”

  “What? Your mother will have a fit! She hasn’t changed that much you know!”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Goldie says in a voice which has acquired a quiet confidence. “It’s time for me to make my own decisions and to live my own life.”

  Anthony raises his eyebrows, but not with disapproval.

  “I like your guts,” he says.

  Anthony is preparing to go to the nursing home for his mother, so that she could share reunion dinner with them, a meal held on the eve of the Lunar New Year to bring members of the family together. Anthony is unsure if his mother is still capable of understanding the significance of the day, but he can’t leave her in the nursing home on the special annual family get-together. She can be lucid one moment and totally with the fairies the next. Dr Kwa has suggested that the periods of lucidity will decrease as the disease advances. Alzheimer’s is in many ways a long funeral where the patient is alive physically but lives in the ashes of the past, sometimes dead to normal day-to-day happenings.

  The Indonesian maid has spent the day before and today preparing a sumptuous meal. Having faced the prospect of cancer had made Emily re-evaluate her life and toned down her opinions. She had gone to the extra trouble of buying some food her mother-in-law would consider appropriate for a Peranakan reunion dinner: a good helping of itek tim, ayam buah keluak, and chap chye, from a Peranakan restaurant. She knows that the food in the nursing home is not of the standard of her mother-in-law’s cooking and wants her to have the best before she loses the capacity to appreciate such special foods. There’s a great deal in the media these days about heritage and the Peranakan culture, so Emily decides that it would be good for her children to know their Peranakan tradition. It is their heirloom after all. Having stood on the brink of possible demise, a sense of identity, culture and heritage has suddenly become significant to her. Emily had also bought the yu sheng from her country club, a raw fish salad that members of the family will toss together in the traditional manner, accompanied by gleeful shouts for luck and prosperity, before the dinner commences.

  “Mum, you know all this yu sheng lark is not an authentic Chinese tradition?” Andie, the student-lawyer says. “I googled it. It was actually started in the 60s by some restaurant guy who wanted to sell off his raw fish. And he even created the poem that is supposed to tell you which ingredient to put in first for luck. Since Chinese people are so into feng shui and good fortune, the practice caught on quickly. The restaurant guy was happy, people are happy. Anyway, it’s a good community thing.”

  “What nonsense you people find on the Internet,” Emily says with a huff. “You think that everything you google is the truth! Especially you, training to be a lawyer! You should be more circumspect with your opinions!”

  As Anthony is guiding his mother onto the sofa in their apartment, Goldie is shocked to see how much her grandmother has shrunk. She seems a ghost of the woman she had left behind.

&
nbsp; “Hello, grandma,” Goldie says gently. “I’m home.”

  Pansy looks up and she sees a young woman in an elegant turquoise sarong kebaya, her long hair draping her shoulders softly. Turquoise. The bright colour flashes in her inner eye. She has seen it before. There is something about the young lady’s face which reminds her of someone. Her brain chugs laboriously and it takes her a while to piece the information together in her faltering mind. The moment things click and fall into place, Pansy’s years fall away from her and she is a teenager once again. Pansy’s eyes glow and she smiles from cheek to cheek.

  “You are so beautiful!” Pansy says, standing up to envelope Goldie in her arms. “Oh, Mak! It’s so good to see you again. Have you come to take me home?”

  Chapter 13

  Anthony’s iPhone sings ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ from Les Miserable at 3am.

  “Oh, for Crissakes, why don’t you turn the bloody thing off?” Emily grumbles at being rudely awakened. She hates the song, knowing how gooey-eyed Anthony gets over Anne Hathaway.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he mumbles sleepily as he scrambles for his mobile on the bedside table. “You know I have to keep the phone on for my overseas contacts…”

  He glances at the lit-up panel and sees that it’s a CNA message.

  “Oh, no!” he cries out.

  “What, what, what?” Emily says springing up, a mother’s instinct on red alert.

  “CNA just announced that Lee Kuan Yew has died,” he says.

  “Oh…” Emily goes.

  “I had hoped that they will keep him on his resuscitator till 9 August…”

  “It’s only 23 March,” Emily says. “That will be too much to ask…”

  “It’s the end of an era,” Anthony says.

  In united grief, they sit in silence in the darkness, unable to articulate their feelings, unable to get back to sleep. Anthony’s hand reaches out to clasp Emily’s. For once she does not slap his away.