by Tash Aw
The first days of the new works started in this way, but then there was a change – as swift as a thunderstorm on a hot afternoon. One day the workers were fine, the next they had slowed down to a near stop. Tasks that usually took a couple of hours, like digging a small trench or repairing the floating cages, lasted nearly a whole day. I tried to reassign them to different jobs, change the workload, but often I’d find them sitting on the bare earth, in a patch of shade under a tree, heads bowed. The patient rise and fall of their shoulders as they breathed. Even the air seemed to weigh down on them.
‘What the fuck?’ Mr Lai said every time he saw them. ‘I paid for men, not livestock. Look at them, just sitting under the trees like goats!’
‘What’s up with you guys?’ I asked several times, but nobody would answer. They just shrugged and looked away. ‘Sack them, hire new ones,’ Mr Lai said. He was spending all day on his mobile phone, and it seemed like wherever we were on the farm we could hear his voice, clattering away like a machine gun, always on the verge of shouting. I wouldn’t fire the men, I’d replied, I’d clear things up. Besides, these men knew the farm, they knew me. I’d never had a problem with any of them.
‘They’re sick, they probably caught colds when they had to work in the rain last week,’ I said. The winds that week had been very heavy – the tail end of the typhoon that blew down from the Philippines. ‘Just give them a few days, they’ll get better quickly.’
One by one, in the space of two, three days, they all succumbed to a lethargy that I’d never seen in them before. Their mouths were hanging open. Eyes bloodshot and sinking into their sockets. Lips cracked as if they’d been shipwrecked on a desert island. They were always drinking water, but it was never enough, and sometimes they’d hold the hosepipe above their heads and gulp down as much as they could. Still, they didn’t get better. By the end of the week half of them weren’t showing up for work, and the ones who did could barely walk from one end of the farm to the other without sitting down to rest. In the meantime the works we had started lay virtually abandoned, the earth scarred with half-dug pits filled with rainwater and beginning to collapse in on themselves. Piles of nets and wire, rolls of black tarpaulin. Men sitting half-asleep in the shade. Around us, the black stumps of trees we’d cut down and poisoned so the roots would die.
When I asked Hendro what was wrong with him, he shrugged and said, ‘Stomach ache.’ His cheeks were sunken; he seemed to have lost ten pounds in two days.
‘You can’t stop work just because of a stomach ache.’
He shook his head. Muntah, muntah. He made an action with his hand in front of his mouth to indicate vomiting. Lots of vomiting. Everyone was vomiting. In the village where they lived, someone had started vomiting and having violent diarrhoea one night. By the end of the next day, three other people were sick with the same symptoms, the day after it was ten, then twenty, and now everyone who lived there was ill, nearly fifty people in total. I’d seen where they lived, I’d driven past it, on the outskirts of the port area, and it wasn’t surprising that they were all ill. One tap for all the inhabitants, the drains clogged with black water. Cats picking through small heaps of rubbish. Children playing with sticks and pieces of string, lines of washing hanging outside the houses, sagging under the weight of clothes that looked grey even after they’d been cleaned. You know the type of place I mean – you drive past them in two seconds and you don’t even notice them. Funny how people use that word – kampung – when what they mean isn’t a village in the countryside, surrounded by trees and flowers, but a semi-slum, a shanty without amenities except for one or two cheap generators that everyone chips in to feed with diesel now and then.
‘You have cholera,’ I said. I’d seen the symptoms before; there had been an outbreak in the village when I was small, and nearly all the children had fallen sick. Suddenly I felt sweaty, a slight shiver ran down my neck. I thought of all the things we’d touched that day – the oil drums, the packs of fish feed, the shovels – and wondered if I had cholera germs on my hands too. I wondered if I was going to be sick. I wondered if they were going to die. In the washroom I cleaned my hands with soap as thoroughly as I could, twice, three times. I found some bleach and poured a few drops into the basin and filled it with water before soaking my hands in it, submerging half my forearms. The sharp smell of chlorine on my skin afterwards felt reassuring; it followed me around for the rest of the day.
Later, I got all the men together in the yard and told them to go home. ‘Go see a doctor!’ I shouted as they trudged off, knowing that they wouldn’t because they couldn’t afford to. It wouldn’t even cross their minds. I remembered how it felt. If you were sick like that, you just waited to get better, and if you didn’t, well, there was nothing you could do about it. I looked at the pools of stagnant water collecting on the ground. Collapsing trenches of grey sludge. No doubt the men had relieved themselves in them, and now there was cholera in the water, seeping into the red soil everywhere around us, into the fish enclosures, into the rivers and the sea beyond.
Mr Lai rang from Kuantan – he was on the east coast looking for more business (‘Hunting for more stress,’ Jezmine said) – and asked how it was going, whether I’d hired more men.
How the hell could I hire ten men just like that? I felt like shouting down the phone. You think they’re just going to appear out of thin air? That’s not the way things work. You have to ask the guys if they have any friends, a cousin from their village back home, someone reliable. We needed ten men to finish the job in time, maybe fifteen. Now we had maybe two healthy ones. There was no hope for us.
‘Everything’s OK,’ I lied. ‘By the time you get back next week, you’ll see the difference.’
‘Die lor!’ Jezmine screamed with laughter as I hung up. ‘You’re in big trouble. Don’t count on me to help you with your lies.’
At home that evening I couldn’t concentrate on anything, couldn’t even keep up with the story of Winter Sonata, which we were watching again. Jenny had bought the DVDs from some counterfeit place, with Japanese subtitles, so we couldn’t understand any of the Korean words. It didn’t matter – we’d seen the entire series years before, when we were dating, and had found those tragic love stories romantic. I guess that’s why Jenny had bought the DVDs, to remember how it was to be moved by the beauty of love affairs that don’t work out. By the failure of love. I wasn’t keen on the idea at first – why watch something you’ve already seen? – but from the very first episode, I was the one who was hooked, more so than I remember having been the first time round. Those frosty northern landscapes, people wrapped up in scarves. The idea of someone not remembering his past, becoming someone entirely new because he no longer had his memory. Oh, the poor unloved young man. And yet, love remained in his heart!
Jenny kept making noises – snorting, laughing quietly at the most tender moments, sighing impatiently when the characters looked at each other for a long time without saying anything. Sometimes she’d make the odd comment. Ridiculous. Just hurry up. Hei, little girl, just move on, forget about the past. She’d pick up a magazine and read it. But still, I knew she was sneaking a glance at the screen now and then. Why else would she have sat watching it with me almost every night?
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked that evening.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’
She leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder, as if she needed comforting, when in fact we both knew that I was the one who was troubled.
‘This episode is really boring,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe anyone can just turn up in America and become a famous architect.’
‘You’re so cynical.’ I laughed, putting my arm around her.
‘I mean, one minute you’re just some Korean kid, next minute you’re a hotshot architect in the States … just because you had a car crash?’
‘Ya lor, that’s what happens in TV dramas.’
She sighed – a long, slow breath that seemed
to fill the room. She closed her eyes and mumbled as if she was getting ready for sleep. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me. These days I only find real life interesting, not all this made-up nonsense.’
Later, as I lay in bed, I thought of the workers at the farm, the cholera drying them to their bones, their eyes dark and bulging. Staring at me. I tried to ignore the germs in the water, spreading everywhere. I thought of pouring concrete into all the holes, covering the entire surface of the farm with cement – was that even possible? Driving the cholera deep underground until it suffocated and died. I didn’t know if cholera breathed. Or maybe I’d burn it. Set the whole place on fire and rebuild it all within a week. I imagined the flames sweeping across the flat land, cleansing everything in their path before moving on in search of something else to consume and transform. They would leave only me in their wake, but that would be enough. One solitary human being who would resurrect the whole damn place. Mr Lai would come back and find new, healthy men, a farm transformed beyond recognition. He’d stand there and say, You are a genuine wuxia superhero.
In the dark, Jenny turned over and her hand brushed my arm. I wished I could sleep, I didn’t want to wake her. I lay perfectly still with my eyes closed. The men. Water. Earth. I listened to Jenny’s breathing, and knew that she wasn’t asleep either.
December 9th
I decided to call Keong the next day, when all twelve men were so sick that none of them could come to work. Jezmine came out from the office and stood with me as I surveyed the farm – the uncompleted jobs dotting the land with piles of bare earth and sand. Two concrete mixers, a stack of timber beams. In the distance the automatic systems continued to pump water through the ponds, but the fish wouldn’t last more than a couple of days without being fed. In the shed, the fingerlings needed tending to. Someone had to check the filtration systems, make sure the water didn’t become too hard, or too salty, or too hot or cold – any of which could kill the tiny fish and lose us thousands. I looked at the enclosures, neatly divided into squares by the wooden walkways, and I’m sure Jezmine knew what I was thinking: could I do it all by myself for a whole week? I’m sure she also knew the answer.
‘Two of us won’t be able to cope, right?’ she said.
I shook my head. In truth it might have been possible in the past, when I was a younger, different person. I knew that if I’d arrived early and got into my work clothes I could have started the rounds before Jezmine arrived, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with feed around the enclosures. If I’d started at seven, before it was properly light, and finished twelve hours later, when it was beginning to get dark, I could have done it. And the next day, and the next. But even as my thoughts began to fall into place and devise a plan of action, I knew that my body was no longer capable of performing such tasks. I thought of some of the workers I’d met in the past, older than me, who’d still been working on farms and construction sites, outdoors the whole day. I remembered their hands, bony and strong. Their milky eyes. Then one day they’d just disappear. Gone back to Palembang or Sylhet or wherever they came from. Or died from a heart attack at the age of forty. One day you’re working on a building site for a new mall, you look up and the sky is white, no haze, just pure sunlight, and suddenly your chest tightens and you drop dead. It happens all the time.
I knew that wouldn’t happen to me. My body had slipped away from that kind of life, escaped into a safer place. The elements could no longer kill me now. The sun, the tides, the wind, the end-of-year floods – I was safe from them, but I was also incapable of facing them. I thought of my mother, squatting on the bare earth of our smallholding for hours as she tried to dig out a tree by its roots. Was she older then than I was now? She must have been.
‘Anyway,’ Jezmine pointed out, ‘even if we manage to finish all the smaller jobs, who’s going to do the construction work?’
I didn’t answer, I just stood looking at the scarred land.
‘You’re really, truly, going to get sacked,’ Jezmine added as she walked back into the office.
When I joined her there she was scrolling through some numbers on her computer screen, murmuring the names of people I didn’t recognise. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to find the name of an agency,’ she said without looking away from the screen. ‘Someone who can supply us with some workers – fast.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Like, today.’
‘If we get new workers, what happens when our guys come back?’
She shrugged. ‘That’s your problem.’
‘It won’t be fair on them.’
‘You want me to do this or not?’ She turned away from her screen to face me. ‘Listen, I can get another job in town by next week if I want to. But you can’t. What are you going to do if Mr Lai comes back and finds this mess?’
I nodded and went to make some tea, making sure to wipe the kettle and the work surfaces with a cloth that Jezmine had soaked in bleach. We took care never to touch anything outside without putting on rubber gloves, but we didn’t want to take any risks. I heard Jezmine ring one number and speak to someone, and I was surprised, as I always was, by the way her voice changed when she talked to people about work matters, even though I heard it every day. Her pitch dropped, the words slowing down so the other person could hear every syllable clearly, the way a parent talks to an uncooperative child. The sound of the words slowly pinning down the squirming kid. After a few minutes she hung up and rang another number, then another. Every time, there was a problem. No, this week was too soon. No, we don’t supply temporary workers. No, we only deal with three-year contracts. No, you have to provide accommodation. No, you must be joking.
‘What kind of idiots are you talking to anyway?’ I said.
Jezmine was spinning a pencil with her fingers, twirling it back and forth around her thumb. She only did this when she was annoyed – the only sign she ever showed of being flustered. ‘Legal ones. Like, they’re actually licensed?’
‘Licensed my ass. If you go and meet the guy you just spoke to, give him a thousand bucks, he’ll sort something out for you.’
‘Well I’m not going to break the law.’ She sat back in her chair, crossed her arms and looked at me without blinking for a long time. ‘What other ideas do you have in your brilliant mind?’
I won’t sit here and tell you that I hadn’t thought of Keong before that point. Of course I had. I considered ringing him the moment we lost the first man to cholera. I heard his voice in my head, boasting about the deals he’d cut, the tricky situations he’d been able to negotiate. Anything you want, I can get it for you. Half of what he said was lies – I knew that for a fact – but what about the other half? If he had achieved only 50 per cent of what he claimed, there was a chance he could solve my problems in a heartbeat. Even 30 or 20 per cent would have been fine. But on the other hand, I would have to speak to Keong, eat with him, go to karaoke bars and sing old songs with him. He’d have a reason to call me whenever he liked. He would expect gratitude; I’d have to pretend to be grateful. A 20 per cent chance of truth – of a solution to that one problem – measured against the return of someone you wanted to forget; of a life you thought you’d left behind.
That was the calculation that ran through my head over and over again as I sat looking at Jezmine. Her gaze was like a challenge. Eventually I said, ‘I know someone. An old friend.’
She turned away and began to scroll through the numbers on her screen again. ‘I didn’t think you even had any friends.’
I looked through my phone for Keong’s last text, which I knew lay buried somewhere in my messages from a few weeks before. I hadn’t saved his number as a contact in my phone, but I hadn’t deleted all his texts either. I don’t know why I kept a few of them – I can’t say it was because I had a premonition of some sort, an anticipation of his usefulness. It was nothing like that, nothing logical. I’d simply laughed at the silliness of a couple of them, and thought I might want to look at them again.
The coarse tone, the cheerfulness. The swear words he used, which no one else I knew would use in a text. When you hear them on the street their vulgarity seems funny, but written down, they acquire a different weight. They shocked me, but they made me laugh too. If Jenny ever saw them, she would have been disgusted – not just by the words, but by the mere knowledge that I knew anyone who would write them down. And she’d be right: decent people don’t use words like that.
I found the message, and walked out of the office before dialling the number. When I was a safe distance away I turned back and saw that Jezmine was watching me, waiting to see if my conversation was animated or subdued – to see if I could actually achieve something. I didn’t want her to overhear anything I said or to make fun of the way I spoke. I knew my voice and my manner changed when I talked to Keong and others like him, who had no time for pleasantries and didn’t respect other people unless they acted the same way. If you wanted something from them you had to be like them. ‘You’re not very convincing as a hard man,’ Jezmine had once teased me after I finished a call to a cement supplier in Kuala Kubu Baru. I didn’t want that kind of comment this time; I didn’t want to be distracted while talking to Keong. I turned and walked slowly until I was down by the ponds and out of sight of the office. But Keong didn’t answer the phone, and my call went through to the automated voicemail. I hung up without leaving a message. Maybe he’d changed phones, maybe that number didn’t even belong to him any more – I couldn’t be sure of anything. I redialled quickly; again, no answer.