We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  He was talking before he even sat down, as though he was just picking up a conversation we’d recently had somewhere else. ‘Klang traffic is crazy these days, I’m so stressed. They finish the new flyover then close it again after two weeks. Fuck. Why aren’t you drinking beer? Hey Auntie, give us two beers, please. Carlsberg. What the hell, this place doesn’t even serve beer, meh? Fuck. Life these days – everything costs so much. Alcohol licence, health and safety licence, even soy sauce. People can’t run a decent restaurant any more. Look at this place. Poor bastards. How’s anyone supposed to make a living when the price of petrol goes up all the time? That’s what it’s all about, you know. Oil. The moment there’s a war in the Middle East, the garlic gets more expensive in Sekinchan.’

  Hayati brought me my usual order. ‘Same for your friend?’

  Keong waved her away. ‘No, I don’t want to eat here. I’ll get something later. I just need a beer. Can’t eat without beer in my stomach.’ He laughed, and started playing with the piles of small plastic sauce dishes on the table, arranging them into separate stacks. ‘How was your day, anyway? All OK at work?’ Just the sort of question he’d have asked when we were hanging round the streets of Puchong ten years back, drifting in and out of work. A lifetime ago.

  Work? I thought. You don’t know what I do for work, you don’t know anything about me. ‘Yes, all OK.’

  ‘That’s all we can ask for in life. That things are OK.’

  He talked all the time I was eating – he had an opinion on everything. Whether the government was going to rig the elections. Buddhist monks on the streets in Myanmar. Plainclothes police at Suria KLCC Mall. The price of wheat in Australia. Whether Andy Lau was better than Louis Koo in Protégé. The shooting in Virginia, USA. Things I didn’t know about, and wasn’t interested in. I finished my meal as quickly as I could, and when I signalled to Hayati that I wanted to pay, Keong reached into his pocket and eased out a thick bunch of hundred-ringgit notes, tightly folded and held together with a rubber band. He peeled one away from the others and let it fall to the table without interrupting his constant stream of talk. I looked at the wad of cash in his hand. He wore three rings on each hand.

  ‘Got anything smaller?’ Hayati asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, if you don’t have change you can just pay me back later. Take a small loan.’

  I stood up and gave Hayati the right amount of money. As I made to leave, Ah Chan called out to me. She was holding a bag containing some soup and a small portion of rice, neatly tied up with pink raffia string. She had her own special way of tying up those takeaway servings, a double loop that came undone with a small tug, unlike the messy knots other people did. ‘For your wife,’ she said. ‘With extra ribs as usual.’ She turned away quickly without waiting for thanks.

  ‘Where’re we going now?’ Keong said.

  ‘I’m going home,’ I replied.

  ‘Come on, brother! I only just got here, we need to catch up on old times! I know a couple of places in town, people know me, we’ll get free drinks. It’ll be fun. Just a couple of hours. It’s not even eight o’clock yet.’

  I looked at my watch. Jenny’s gathering at home would most likely still be going on. I could maybe have a beer, just one, with Keong, and then he’d go away and leave me alone. I rang Jenny and heard laughter – hers and others’ – Jenny saying to someone, We already knew that, sweetheart, followed by more laughter before she finally came on the phone. ‘Hello? Umm, yes, no problem. We’ll be here a bit longer, take your time.’

  The line went dead before I could say, Don’t worry, I won’t be late.

  Sometimes I wonder how the last nine or ten years would have played out if Jenny had said simply, ‘You joking? Come home right now, you good-for-nothing man. Call yourself a husband!’ Perhaps I would have bought the farm from Mr Lai a few years later, and although it would have been tough at first, I’d just be starting to turn a profit now, with all the investment in new machinery finally paying off – big money coming in right at this point in time. You and me sitting here, my business growing even as we spoke. You’d be interviewing me not as a forgotten criminal with a little forgotten life, but as a successful figure in society. Jenny and I would have had children, we’d have plans for them. I’d be asking your advice about how best to have them educated – in one of those fancy international schools in Kuala Lumpur that I read about, or maybe boarding school abroad. I’d ask you tons of questions about New York, whether you enjoy being there – questions about your studies, what you eat, the weather. Things that would be of interest to rich people. Just think of it – that might have been what we’d be talking about. But these matters are of no relevance to me now, and we’re talking about different things – about regret. And I’m sure you’re thinking: There’s no point dwelling on what might have been, because this is my life, my fate.

  That first night with Keong, I never thought about how things might turn out – how could I? All the days that followed, it never occurred to me that things would end so badly. Not even on the night we met Mohammad Ashadul. Driving up to the spot near the riverbank, I still thought I was just helping out a friend who had some problems, and the sooner they were sorted out, the sooner he’d disappear from my life and things would continue as before. Even when Keong and Ashadul started to raise their voices, I never felt that my life was going to change. When Keong started jabbing his finger in Ashadul’s face, I thought, It’s a small fight, it’s nothing. The whole scene seemed so distant from my life, or at least the one I’d built for myself in my head. The two of them standing in the near-darkness, shouting at each other. Keong moving closer to the Bangladeshi guy until he’s shouting in his face. Ashadul rooted to the ground, not backing off. Feet planted, solid as a tree trunk. Taking a drag on his cigarette. When he shouts back at Keong small wisps of smoke appear in the dark like threads of silver. He looks away and spits on the ground. Keong lunges at him. Doesn’t punch him, slaps him. With one hand the other guy strikes out and knocks Keong to the ground – the other hand still holds his cigarette, so delicately that he looks like an actor in a movie. Keong lies there, suddenly silent. He’s been taken by surprise by the swiftness of the man’s retaliation. Keong has a knife. I’ve seen it. A switchblade he bought in Hatyai recently, ‘in case of an emergency’. But he’s lying on the ground, he’s fallen in an awkward position, the knife is lost in the undergrowth. The other man turns to face me. He’s short, powerfully built, with a moustache that even in the dark appears neatly trimmed. He takes half a step towards me – no, actually he’s steadying himself on the muddy grass. I’m on the ground too. How did this happen – why am I surrounded by a tangle of branches and leaves? He reaches into his pocket and takes out a switchblade that looks very much like Keong’s. The noise the blade makes as it flicks sharply into the night is smooth, almost comforting, not at all alarming. He turns to face Keong squarely. And it’s in that brief pause that I notice I have a piece of wood in my hand. As I stand up I think, It feels very light.

  II

  NOVEMBER

  November 2nd

  My father left for Singapore when I was four years old. Of course I can’t remember anything about his departure, though over the years I’ve convinced myself that I was witness to certain things that happened on the day he left. For example: that he left his bus ticket in the kitchen and had to rush back to get it, but when he got home my mother had already gone to work, and he had to break into the house to retrieve it. It was late at night, my mother had just started a job as a cleaner at a fish wholesaler down the road, and I’d been asleep for a few hours. When my father broke the latch on the window it disturbed the dog in the yard next door, which began to bark. It was a thin mongrel the colour of sand, old and half-blind, and maybe because it was slow and couldn’t see anything it got spooked easily and barked at the slightest movement. I remember that dog well, eyes like glass marbles that seemed as though they could pop out of their sockets at any moment. I woke
up and started to cry in the dark. My father came into the bedroom to comfort me, but he knew that if he picked me up and held me until I was calm again he’d miss the bus, and all his chances of decent work and money would disappear, and he’d have to go back to gutting fish at the factory on the other side of Kuala Selangor.

  It was raining heavily. The sound of the rain drumming on the tin roof, normally so soothing, agitated me that night, and I sat up in bed, blinking and sobbing in the dark. Outside: the barking dog, the yard turning to mud. My father stood in the doorway, staring at me. He’d been caught in the rain; his clothes were dripping and left patches of water on the linoleum that my mother would find when she came home some hours later. He’d been in a hurry, he hadn’t had time to take his shoes off, and had ended up leaving muddy tracks all over the floor. He stood watching me for a while, then left. The sound of my crying followed him out of the house, all the way into the rainstorm as he boarded the night bus headed south.

  I wish I could say that I remember him standing in the doorway, or that I could hear his breathing, heavy and rushed because he’d been running. But the likelihood is that I started to cry because I had a bad dream, and only woke up for a few seconds before falling asleep again. It must have been one of those nightmares that only children have, where sleep and awakeness and dreaminess and reality get entangled before evaporating into a cloud that hangs over them for hours, so that even when they’re awake, they’re really still asleep, still dreaming. You and I – we don’t have this muddle. Everything is distinct. Work time. Play time. Eat time. Sleep time. I don’t know how this change takes place in someone’s life, but it does, overnight, and they don’t even know it. I’m not sure how it happened with me – I just woke up one morning and thought, Hurry up, it’s time for work now. I was fifteen years old. And that beautiful cloudiness on waking from slumber that I remembered from my childhood, sometimes sad, sometimes comforting – it had just vanished.

  The story of my father coming home in the rainstorm to retrieve his bus ticket was told and retold to me by my mother numerous times over the years, until the image of him that evening became so sharp and true that I believed I’d seen him myself. She repeated the story so often that I thought: She wants me to believe that he cared for me. I cried, he wavered. Back then we still believed that he would be coming home to us, and when he did we would have more money and life would be easier. My parents were still in contact, on a more or less regular basis. A letter would arrive from Singapore from time to time, a single sheet of thin paper with a rough edge where it had been torn from a notebook. He could at least have bought decent paper to write on. My mother would read the few lines so intently you’d think it was the I-Ching or some special advice sent to her by Confucius himself. Sometimes she’d read just one line aloud, slowly and seriously, like a newsreader announcing a headline. Singapore Is Very Clean. Or, Here, Spitting Is Not Allowed. Or, No One Has to Pay Bribes Here. I have no idea what else he wrote to her in those letters – everything was just condensed into those single lines, like a public-service announcement.

  A few times we walked to Ah Heng’s sundry store half a mile away to wait for a phone call from my father, which I guess he must have promised in a previous letter. Only the call never came. Who knows why – maybe he had to line up for too long to use the phone at the warehouse where he worked, or maybe he had to work overtime, or maybe he just forgot. How did people live without mobiles? It feels like only yesterday, but life was so different. It seems strange now to think about how much time we wasted at Ah Heng’s place. Hours and hours hanging around for that call that never came.

  To hide the embarrassment and pain of that fruitless waiting, my mother pretended that we’d needed to come to the shop to buy things. I’d sit on the sacks of rice, filling the time by memorising the way the various things were arranged on the shelves, then closing my eyes and reciting them until I got the order right. Mumm 21. Shelltox. Maggi Mee Perencah Kari. There was never very much stock, and what there was never changed position – biscuits, nappies, flour. Everything stayed where it was, covered in a thin film of dust. If I close my eyes now I can see every single object on those metal shelves, and I bet if you went there tomorrow, they’d still all be there, arranged in exactly the order I’ve told you.

  My mother would chat to Ah Heng about all sorts of things, giving him news about my father, which wasn’t actually news because it was the same set of things repeated every time: he had a new job, he was sending money home, he would come back soon and we would either build ourselves a new house somewhere in the Sekinchan area or move to Klang. Either way, we would stop living in that house – half-wood, half-cement – because the wood was rotting and my mother was tired of patching up the gaps between the planks with pieces of biscuit tins that she flattened out with a hammer. She spent a lot of time doing this, but new holes were always appearing – spots of white light, brilliant as stars. She couldn’t keep up with them; nature was stronger than she was. We had to move. I would need my own room, I couldn’t go on sharing with my parents. With my father-mother. She spoke as if we were a family, a normal, proper family, because that’s what we were in her head and in mine, and probably in Ah Heng’s and everyone else’s too. When she talked about the life we were going to have, it all made sense. It seemed connected to where I was, sitting on the sacks of rice; it was part of the same story, a story of waiting, of waiting for things to get better, because they would. We all thought we knew how the story would turn out, because why would it turn out any other way? My father was in Singapore, he was earning a decent wage in a warehouse in a country that had rules about employment, where he got paid in full on the same day each month – a detail that seems small and irrelevant as I talk about it now, but back then seemed so important to us that we boasted about it. Every month, without fail – no arguing, nothing – he gets his salary. I can remember my mother saying that to Ah Heng one day.

  Of course it was all fake. Our lives weren’t getting any better. If they were, we would have been buying more than just a packet of cornflour or a single coconut which Ah Heng would split in two and scrape out in his old machine with its big metal bowl and spinning metal head. We would have been buying tins of Danish Butter Cookies, going out for meals in seafood restaurants, I would have had a new school uniform that fitted me, that wasn’t four sizes too big because it had been bought to last me through the rest of primary school. Maybe a holiday – not anything fancy like a week all-included in Bali or a coach tour of Thailand that people do nowadays, but just some time away, on the other side of the country, visiting relatives in Penang or staying with my aunt in Kampar and spending a few days eating chicken biscuits. All the things that a normal family would do. How much could a bus ticket have cost back then? Even now it only costs twenty ringgit, max. We could have done all that if my father had actually been sending money to us.

  That was when I realised that my mother’s stories were intended not to comfort me, but to reassure herself. The more she repeated them to me and Ah Heng and whoever else cared to listen, the clearer it was to me that she needed to cling to the belief that they were all true – that my father was still part of our lives, that our future was bright, and soon we’d be living on the outskirts of Klang, in one of those new housing estates that were being built – just like the one we’re sitting in now.

  These days, I often take a walk through the neighbourhood after dinner. Sometimes I have trouble digesting my food, I don’t know why – I went to see the doctor, she took x-rays but couldn’t find anything wrong. Suggested it was stress. I said, Stress, what stress? I don’t have stress, what the hell do I have to worry about these days? She said, In that case no one can help you.

  It’s true. It’s not like it’s going to kill me, it just ties up my stomach sometimes, as if all the blood’s been squeezed out of my insides and replaced by a lump of concrete, and sometimes I have to get down on all fours like a dog to ease the pain. I close my eyes and wait for it to
pass. Sometimes it takes an hour, maybe more, and suddenly I realise I’m crying because it hurts so much, this block of rough stone inside me, and I wish my body could explode and spill everything out. I stare at the cement floor, and it soothes me. I see that there are patterns in it. From a distance it looks totally uniform, but when my face is right up close to it I notice it has uneven swirls in it. One time I saw blood on the smooth grey surface – I must have bitten my lip while trying to endure the pain in my stomach, and hadn’t even realised it.

  Personally, I think it’s those three years of bland prison meals that are to blame. I got used to tasteless stuff, so now I can’t eat greasy food any more, nothing too spicy or rich. But I just can’t help it – I love fried spare ribs and laksa too much. Sometimes the pain starts to ease after a few minutes, but then I’m worried it’ll come back again, and that’s when I go for a stroll.

  The houses all look shabby nowadays. No one wants to live in these single-storey places any more, that’s why. The people who live here wish they were living somewhere else. Secretly they all want to live in KL or Petaling Jaya. The drains outside the houses are blocked up by rubbish and dead leaves, the grass on the edge of the roads is overgrown and messy – the council doesn’t bother to clean the streets around here. There used to be small gardens in front of the houses, now there are only cars, only Proton Sagas crammed into the concrete yards. A few doors down from me there’s an old couple who use their Perodua as a kind of outdoor cupboard. At first you think it’s just another small lousy old car, then you realise it’s full of clothes and boxes and unwanted stuff like that. The neighbours – we see each other around and sometimes we say hi, sometimes we don’t. I like it that way. No one asks me any questions.