Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  Three days’ notice to end a seven-year relationship seemed a little on the short side. But I couldn’t blame her for leaving. She had stuck by me for years, hoping I would change, hoping I would evolve into a reasonable person, someone who could control their emotions. The better part of a decade of her life had been wasted on me. It was time for her to start again. Time for me to learn to be alone.

  Jessica and I spent Christmas together on a dog-friendly beach near home until Jen, a friend from work, invited us around to her house in the afternoon. I didn’t hear a word from my mother. When we did eventually speak, all she said was, “What did you expect? You’re unbearable, Sarah. I’m not surprised.”

  A few weeks later I came home from work to discover Jessica was sick. There was a coldness to her that scared me, and she could barely lift her head from her bed. I picked her up, carried her to the car, and took her straight to an emergency vet hospital.

  “She’s dying,” the vet said after she had examined Jessica.

  “Yesterday she was fine! She ran around the park chasing birds. How can she be dying?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” the vet said. “Cancer, probably. The kindest thing would be to put her down now. She won’t last another few days.”

  I began to sob. I hugged Jessica and nodded to the vet. She shaved a patch on Jessica’s leg and inserted the needle.

  Can you do me next? I wanted to ask. I kissed Jessica’s head and told her I loved her. She looked up at me weakly and licked my hand. The last of them was gone.

  At forty-one I had managed to lose everyone I had ever loved.

  10

  YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE

  With Laura and Jessica gone, there was nothing to keep me in Melbourne, a city that had brought me little but grief in the nine months I had lived there. Luckily, the bank was bolstering its Asian operations, and when an opportunity arose for a regional head of human resources to cover Asia and the Pacific, I was the first person to put up my hand. I moved to Singapore in December 2004. I wanted to start a new life in a place where no one knew me. Laura’s relationship with her boss hadn’t worked out, and she had left Melbourne too, for a job in New York City.

  Singapore is a country with no freedom of speech, where hangings and canings occur in a prison near the airport on Friday mornings, where it is against the law to walk around your apartment with no clothes on “while being exposed to public view,” where homosexuality is illegal, where HIV-positive travelers were forbidden from entering the country16, where a children’s book about two male penguins raising a baby chick was pulped because it was believed to contradict the nation’s “family values.” It is also a country with one of the highest disparities between rich and poor. Pop into any Burger King or McDonald’s and you will be confronted by women in their seventies and older cleaning tables. Go to the airport and you will see hunched elderly men retrieving luggage trolleys. Since the Maintenance of Parents Act was introduced in 1995, any parent over the age of sixty who is not able to provide for him- or herself may sue their children for financial support. That, of course, assumes the child has the means to provide it.

  My new home was a country that had been governed by the same party since 1959, a government that had conducted a series of bizarre social engineering experiments in the 1970s, during which they paid uneducated women to stop having children and paid female graduates to encourage pregnancies. It was a government that had used public campaigns as a way of changing citizens’ behavior—to make them more courteous and gracious to others, to stop them from urinating in lifts, to ban the use of chewing gum, to keep Singapore clean. For the first offense, litterers are fined. Repeat offenders are made to dress in fluorescent-orange vests that identify them as litterers while they sweep the streets. Personally, I think that last one is a pretty good idea.

  The threat of punishment looms large in the psyche of Singaporeans. No one wants to be caned or hung. Only men are subject to canings, but both men and women are hung. Hangings, though rare, were known to take place at Changi Prison early on Friday mornings. Canings were more regular occurrences. The cane used is four feet long and half an inch thick, making it twice as thick and probably twice as long as the canes that had been used in Australian schools to punish unruly children while I was growing up. The maximum number of strokes is twenty-four. Before its use, the Singaporean cane is soaked in water to make it more pliable. A person is stripped naked before being caned and strapped into a trestle, which holds him in place. He is then caned across the buttocks. Each stroke of the cane opens the skin. When the caning is finished, a doctor applies a special caning cream to the wounds to stop infection. Vandalism and overstaying one’s visa are canable offenses.

  Singapore is a utopia and a dystopia at the same time, and you don’t find that every day. The government’s intrusion into the lives of its citizens has helped make the nation-state an economic powerhouse. Singapore has no natural resources, and yet its economy booms. It was true that I would have taken a job anywhere to get out of Melbourne, but I was happy to move to Singapore. Politically I found it fascinating. And there was a lot the government had done well. It was an easy place to live with excellent public transport, hospitals, schools, and roads. Asia 101, as seasoned expats liked to call it.

  I had stayed in Singapore on two separate, brief occasions. During the trip that I remember, before my accident, I had lived in a cramped room on the National University of Singapore campus. The room had bathroom tiles covering the bedroom floor, fluorescent strip lighting, and no air-conditioning. At that time in my life, I mistakenly believed I was heterosexual. By the time I moved back there in 2004, in a desperate attempt to flee Melbourne and the havoc it had wrought, I had the means to live in a comfortable apartment. And I was openly gay.

  Lily, the relocation agency expert who found apartments for expats, said she would take me on as a client even though my housing budget was “a fraction” of what she was used to. I was earning more money than I had ever dreamed of, and the bank covered my housing on top of that. Lily’s clients were mostly investment bankers. “Very good people,” she said. “Very kind.” Really? I wanted to say but decided to keep quiet. My experience at the bank had been the opposite.

  She told me she would make an exception for me as we drove around Singapore in her brand-new golden Mercedes-Benz with four-wheel drive, because she hoped that I, as head of HR, would send my better-paid colleagues her way in the future. “I look after you. You too, lah,” she said.

  Lily took me to see ten apartments in one day. Nine of them were what she described as respectable homes.

  “You’re not going to get better than this with your budget!” she reminded me. I wanted an apartment close to a train station or a bus route. In an effort to reduce the number of cars on its roads, the government had introduced a variety of taxes and levies, which made Singapore one of the most expensive places on earth to own a car. To provide an indication, in 2017 a Toyota Corolla cost $76,500. Lily had calculated that I wouldn’t be able to afford a car.

  We had only seen a few houses when Lily put her hand on my knee, patted it twice, and told me how sorry she was about my inability to bear children.

  Thinking I had misheard her, I waited for her to go on, but she looked at me expectantly, waiting for a response.

  “Um, well, thanks,” I said.

  “And no husband either!” she said. “Very bad luck.”

  I fumbled through my bag and hoped she would change the subject.

  “Maybe you a bit too fussy, lah,” she said, shooting me a stern look.

  “He’s dead,” I said, with a certainty that surprised me.

  She patted my leg again. “So sorry, so sorry.” After a short pause she asked, “That’s why no children?”

  I toyed with saying they were dead too, but decided that would be too much, so I stared at the ground.

  “So sorry, lah,” she repeated. I thanked her again and glanced out the car window at a man tug
ging on the lead of a Pomeranian dog, which seemed to be either lying down on the footpath in protest or dying from heat exhaustion.

  Lily was the first person I had ever lied to about my sexual orientation. The truth was I hadn’t given much thought to speaking about my sexuality in a country that viewed homosexuality as a crime. It turns out, in a strange twist of logic, that homosexuality between women is not a crime, but I was yet to understand the finer points of Singaporean law. In Melbourne I had been out at work, and there was sufficient communication between the head office and the regional office to ensure word of my sexuality had reached my Singaporean colleagues. There was no point trying to conceal it. I also believed that, as a senior HR person who happened to be gay, I had a responsibility to be out at work. In doing so, I hoped I might make life easier for other gay employees.

  Lying to Lily unsettled me. I had never had any qualms at all about people knowing I was gay, and denying it felt like an unnecessary betrayal. I had never felt even a shred of shame about my sexuality, and my view had always been that if anyone took issue with it, it would be their problem, not mine. My reaction to my head injury had been the polar opposite. I had fiercely guarded the truth about my accident because the shame had been crippling. Almost no one in my life at work, at university, or among my circle of friends knew anything about it. I hadn’t told more than five people.

  My caution over exposing my head injury was only partly paranoia. Studies have shown that society holds certain (unflattering) beliefs about people with head injuries. Many consider us to be intellectually challenged, violent, unpredictable, embarrassing, and untrustworthy. That was certainly my mother’s view. As one study concluded:

  When people with brain injury become aware of how some members of society may perceive them it is possible they could withdraw from many social situations. They may fear disclosure of their injury because of the way people are likely to view them. This could lead to certain members of this vulnerable group feeling isolated and perhaps impede their seeking support.17

  I may have been wrong, but I believed that I would not be being driven around Singapore in a gold Mercedes, looking to rent a nice apartment, as regional head of human resources for a bank, if I had been honest about my head injury.

  The nine apartments Lily chose for me were decorated in what she described as local décor, which meant pink marble floors, gold chandeliers, and elaborate light fittings that resembled huge lilies sprouting from the ceiling. There was a lot of built-in furniture made from cherry-stained veneer. Some of the apartments we saw had so much built-in furniture that there was no room left for any furniture of my own.

  “Very convenient. Save a lot on furniture!” she said encouragingly in one apartment that boasted a huge built-in shoe rack that accosted us as soon as we stepped inside, a floor-to-ceiling wall unit with missing shelves that took up two living room walls, a built-in bar, built-in beds, and built-in desks and wardrobes in the bedrooms. All the built-ins were covered with a light pink gloss that had been chipped over the passing years. Local décor also embraced strangely shaped rooms: there was a triangular bedroom next to a bathroom with five walls. I was learning that local décor wasn’t really my style.

  “Do you have anything more, um, modern?” I asked, after we had spent six hours traipsing through apartments.

  “Ah, you prefer Western style?” She looked at me as if I wasn’t just a barren widow, but a barren widow with very poor taste.

  “I think so,” I said meekly. We pulled over by the side of the road so she could make a few phone calls.

  “Yes, we have, but only one that fits your budget.” The last apartment was perfect. It was large, with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the only built-ins were the wardrobes in each of the three bedrooms. Best of all, the long marble-floored corridor made the perfect runway to test out the skateboard I had bought myself after my breakup with Laura. “I’ll take it,” I told Lily, releasing her from my barren, tasteless wasteland and back into the arms of the kindly investment banking folk.

  I was the only woman on the bank’s Asia Pacific leadership team. My peers were all white men who were married with children. They spent their weekends at country clubs or hosting barbecues, where they mixed exclusively with people exactly like them. Best of all, these men could pay someone less than a thousand bucks a month to provide twenty-four-hour childcare, seven days a week.

  I attended only one barbecue. The women lounged around inside the host’s apartment talking excitedly about the hairdresser they found after months of searching for someone who knew how to cut Western hair and had a way with peroxide. There was a lively discussion about a handbag one woman had just bought and how hard it was to find decent milk and bread in Singapore. The women also took time to complain about their domestic helpers who lived in quarters the size of broom closets while two rooms of the apartment sat empty in case guests came to stay. Their obnoxious kids tore around the house until someone literally snapped their fingers and a helper appeared to cart them off to their bedrooms.

  I spent most of the time staring out the window, watching the men, who were huddled around a barbecue outside discussing their investments and the Malaysian guy who delivered illegal pornographic movies wrapped up in brown paper to their homes.

  I had managed to mask my injury at work without anyone catching on ever since I had taken the policy job in aged care. Masking it in my private life had proved considerably more difficult. After the accident, I had changed in certain fundamental ways. If I let my guard down in social situations, I was seen, almost instantly, to be lacking in social graces. I had learned to keep myself from uttering the things I was thinking. But that was exhausting. I was incapable of making small talk, which was a problem given my role in HR. If I found myself drawn into idle chitchat, I would nod, smile as best I could, and hold my tongue for a few minutes before politely excusing myself.

  To add to my challenges, most of my local Singaporean coworkers had never met a gay person, or someone who had admitted to it. They told me this and giggled. In my first couple of weeks in the job, there was a steady parade of people walking past my office, peering inside, eager to see what a gay person looked like. My new secretary, a woman in her early fifties, studied me with a curled lip from behind her desk. I held out my hand for her to shake, and she held her own up limply in response. It’s catching! I wanted to tell her, but my eyes were drawn to a small wooden frog sitting on a log beside her keyboard inscribed with the words The kingdom of God is within you, Luke 17:21.

  I had no friends in Singapore. I often went entire weekends without having a single conversation with anyone but myself. My first few weekends after I arrived were spent book shopping and reading beside the infinity pool on the roof of my apartment block. Books were cheap, thanks to a government subsidy to encourage reading. I felt like I was on a budget all-inclusive holiday in Bali. The only thing missing was the drinks waiter freshening up my fluffy duck. Occasionally, between chapters, I looked up at the sky and pinched my arm to remind myself I was alive.

  I was lonely from time to time, but in many ways it was a relief to be without Laura, to be without a partner. Being alone worked wonders on my ability to regulate my emotions, and my rage vanished. Nothing made me snap. If work gnawed away at me in some way, I would stop by the gym on my way home and spend forty minutes on the treadmill. What I did miss was having a dog.

  The only benefit of being dog-free was that I could travel as much as I wanted. My new job covered twenty countries and required me to travel for at least two weeks, and often three weeks, of every month. When I visited a city, I always made sure to stay on for a weekend, so I could take the time to look around. Only when I visited the head office in Melbourne did I make arrangements to take the first flight out. I was entranced by Asia, and travel was the thing I loved most about my job.

  Jen, my friend from Melbourne whom I’d visited on Christmas Day after Laura had left me, came to visit me in Singapore and suggested we go out to
a lesbian bar. She was a colleague of mine at the bank and one of the very few out gay people I knew in Melbourne. My track record with lesbian bars had not been stellar, and I would have rather done almost anything else, but I humored her as best I could. She sat down on the sofa with my computer on her lap and was genuinely surprised to find that there wasn’t an impressive range of lesbian establishments to choose from.

  “You do know homosexuality is a crime here?” I asked.

  “But not for women, you said!”

  “Oral sex is also a crime.”18

  “You’re kidding! What’s left?”

  I shrugged. “There’s a thriving club scene here for gay men. We could try one of those. They’re usually a lot more fun.” I had visited a gay club with a male friend who had visited fleetingly, and I was astonished to find it packed full of handsome young Asian men. We talked to a group of them who told us the police raided the clubs from time to time but rarely made any arrests.

  “No! Come on. Here’s one for women. Let’s try it. Please!”

  “Fine!” I’d had precious few visitors since I left Australia and would have even fewer if I was an ungracious hostess. It was nine o’clock in the evening—too early for any real action—but neither of us was looking for that. We simply wanted to satisfy an anthropological curiosity. So we found a taxi and set off in the direction of a lonely lesbian bar.

  After sharing a fish-head curry and banana-leaf-wrapped prawns at a local Indian restaurant, we walked about a block before we came to a small sign that read “Alternative Bar.”

  “Clever name,” Jen giggled as we walked up a narrow flight of stairs that led us inside a bar with bright-orange walls, just big enough for a few stools and a pool table. A handful of Filipinas stood around the pool table, chatting. They smiled and invited us to play. As the world’s worst pool player, I politely declined. I have never had any talent for lesbian games. Jen, on the other hand, was pretty good. I saw the night unfold: me in a corner of the bar drinking myself into a stupor while Jen impressed her new friends with tricky pool shots.