Melange Magazine

Fiction

She steps out of the circle sweep of the revolving doors and into the country, it seems. The first blast of hot air is like a sticky suffocating blanket. The humidity seeps into her skin, into her pores, and she feels the old stirring in her bones. The wizened uncles in their fake faded Polo shirts, collars soft and stretched, accost her to take their taxis, but she will spend the night in the hotel and keep the soaps and the plastic-wrapped toothbrush and rent a car and drive and drive until the gravel-strewn highway turns into dirt road.

Then
He is playing marbles, smooth blue-tinged glass with the bright coloured eye trapped inside like a treasure, those perfect spheres smooth and hard to suck on, cool under the warmth of a tongue, bulging against cheekflesh.

He was one who dived under snaking water that looked dirty green, but clear in cupped hands. Looking at palms under the water the river magnified creases and grooves of life lines, the etchings of fate. In those years the children played games with empty tins and cardboard cigarette boxes, dreams of owning rusting motorcycles filling their water-logged heads.

Sixteen years later, surveying with bated breath, Emily does not think this place has altered. It is a space, a place of Time holding its breath, while standing very still on tippytoes. It is this very lack of interference that ensures its constancy, the reason she is loathe to come back.

She grows younger, degenerates, becomes Li Ting in this place. Named for her maternal grandmother, that is it, for her. Chinese names are only chic when you are Eurasian. Emily is just so much easier, though, she notes, her new name comes from the old.

She feels this the most when the house comes in sight. She remembers climbingcrawling under the stilts, many times, to escape the throng of mosquitoes and the sweltering heat, and sometimes, to hide from her mother, when she had been naughty. Her mother would chase her with the feather duster, a shouting blur of gleaming green-brown feathers, brandishing the crook of the duster’s curving handle.

She wants again to crawl under the house, to share the shade with the mongrels.

Reason Enough
You should think about making a trip back home Ting, her mother says. You know you haven’t been back for a while. Ah Tee’s cousin is getting married. Do you remember Ting Ting? She was just like you.

Who?

Ting Ting ah. Last time they always confuse you with her. She also go overseas to study. Medicine in US, you know how their degree takes ages one, that’s why we told you not to go there. Too long! See, she only recently finished so now she’s getting married. Li Ting, you should come home. We haven’t seen you for a while.

What are you talking about? I saw you only last year…

But that’s you flying us over. You should come home to Kota Tinggi. How many years already? Do you even remember anything about home?

That’s the whole point ma, I mean. I told you already. It’s not exactly home anymore. And I’ve got commitments and plans and I mean… I just don’t see the reason why. It’s not that I don’t want to see you and Pa, I’m quite happy to fly you out again. It’s just you saying that it’s too maafan and too cold… Anyway ma I have to go now…

Ting, wait.

All of a sudden her mother’s voice is clogged and snuffly.

Ting your Pa has cancer. The words come out in a rush, or maybe she just hears them as a rush, syllables running together in a mess, sounds that she understands individually but pegged and strung together, she struggles for their meaning.

What?

Pa has cancer.

Are you sure it’s cancer. What kind? She feels ridiculously calm.

Colon. He… Blood in the toilet-bowl.

Okay. I will take emergency leave and get the next flight.

No no… It’s okay. Not so bad yet. Uncle Yang Soon said he -

Oh please ma, what does uncle Yang Soon know? His practice is so small, does he even have the proper diagnosis equipment? Have you all gone to see a proper doctor yet? Since when did you know?

Last week. We… Pa is hoping you can come back and help him with all the things.

Oh ma. Oh god. Where is Pa now?

Sleeping… He couldn’t sleep at night. Taking nap now.

I’ll come soon ma.

The spring of the cord is curled round her forearm like a tourniquet as she sits dully on the carpeted landing. Sorrow swells quiet and fatly white. Like barley seeds boiling.

Memory now
In the long backyard – the narrow flank of the white semi-detached house that Yeh-Yeh and now her parents and, she realises briefly, she too would someday own – she stares at the papaya trees. The swells of fruit hang ponderous.

The almost darkness strokes her memory.

In the front of the yard they have a chicken coop for two chickens. Both female, so she never sees them mate.

Pa says -

When I was young, we used to eat fresh eggs.

The chicken lay already, Ah Ma just pick it up, clean a bit. I mean wipe only la. Then poke a hole – Schloop! Suck it out. So nice. Still warm.

The chickens die off, one by one. She wonders guiltstruck if it was because she’d teased them, tried to tempt and trick them, feeding the wrong leaves. They only ate one kind, maroony-oxblood-green-tinged and slippery. She wonders if chickens have teeth or if they can tell the difference with their chicken tongues.

Yeh-Yeh carried the dead chickens out, warm bodies in a grey plastic bag, emptied of tender choysum wet with veggiesmell from the market.

But the papaya trees, they stayed they grew. Trunks too smooth to climb or monkeyshimmy up, still forming fruit like pendulums, like great green sagging breasts that drop, ripesoft, as orange melons.

This is the outside where she was small.

Sitting atop the platform of the house of stilts and slats she breathes in lungfuls of morning kampung air. Feeling like an interloper. Foreign but not unpleasant – fresh motorcycle exhaust, the ripening of green mangoes, children’s river bodies.

She walks back inside and now she is grown. She has come back to a place where breakfast is hot teh tarik, sweet small bubbled foam. Flat white noodles in strips in soup, discs of oil like shallow abscesses floating on the surface. Glycerine soup.

This is good ma, she says awkwardly. Usually I eat on the go. Or just yoghurt.

Even now, at thirty-two –

You are ruining your body, her mother tells her. You better be careful. Or you won’t be able to give birth –

Look mum, that’s not likely. I’m thirty-two.

Aiyah. Such a shame I tell you Ting. Even Ting Ting getting married. Still can, she only four years younger than you. Aunty Tee purposely ask you to go. Can’t imagine hor? Ting Ting and Tee. After he used to tease her so much!

Her mother shrugs, getting up from the table. She wanders into the rooms of the house, careful to close the fly-screen door straight away after her, to keep the mosquitoes out. Ting always leaves it to yaw shut on its hinges.

Ting thinks about the girls they were. It seems life started when she was eight. Four lifetimes ago she went to a convent school. The playing field was a slanting parallelogram of dust. They dug holes and played with marbles. She would take the back alleyway to walk to school, balancing on the rotting timber slats over the gaping drains. In the smalltown no one ever took the proper way – the longcut over the freshly-laid tarmac road.

They would tease her and Ting Ting. Was it really teasing Ting Ting or teasing her, if Ting Ting’s name was used as the insult? Ting Ting used to be chubby, she remembers. And there was just something unsettling about her face. Features uncoordinated and awkward, as if they had all been made for someone else. You knew that she didn’t care what other people thought of her, all she wanted to do was study. And now there she was, getting married. Even if it is to Tee…

Aunty Tee must be happy, she calls out, forgetting her mother has walked upstairs. Usually, she finds she cannot remember her mother’s friends, or even her friends’ mothers. They belong to another era, the parochial fast-talking aunties and their smalltown mindset. But she remembers Tee’s mother vividly. How can she not? Known only as Aunty Tee, with her hunchbackback, her left eye squinting, the whittled cane she leaned on to help her walk. She walked surprisingly fast, her heels kicking up dust on the dirt roads especially – perhaps like all irate mothers, smalltown or not – when chasing after her disobedient offspring.

Ting is still embarrassed of her knees, the dark skin on them. She realizes they look like Tee’s – ragamuffinlike. Except that Tee also had laughing knees. When his mother punished the three of them – her punishments were perhaps worse than Ting’s mum’s, because they were long – they had to stand against the wall, straight and unmoving. But Tee would move his knees, making the skin on his kneecaps jump, and she would double over with laughter. Tee’s mother would glare from her mahjong table, and sentence them to another hour of standing. To keep them out of trouble and acting like hooligans, she said.

She resolves to look for Tee. She is sure he has his own life now; he must, as he is getting married and all.

Mending
She looks at his slim fingers. Deft, gentle hands with just the right measure of firmness, the flick of the wrist as he twists the spanner. His fingers are heavily grease-stained.

Very wasted, she imagines her mother saying. He should have been a doctor. She wonders if it is really her mother’s voice she is imagining or her own.

In the corner of the garage there is an old television she supposes must be broken, its dented aerial wrapped in foil. The air is cool, cold almost.

Tee? She says, even though she is sure, even from the form of his back, that the torso of the lean man curled over pistons and sprockets and spokes is not her rapscallion childhood friend.

I was told I could find Tee here.

Hello Emily, Kiat says, and the smile in his greeting is unmistakable.

Dying
The smell of nutmeg oil in the air is like being touched by Pa’s warm rubbed hands. Small hands and feet for a man, large snores. She has in her head the picture of serpentineintestines, roiling together and decaying. His hands all knuckles and mottled. She knows there is nothing she can do, this time neither she nor he can use fire, palms and care to soothe the stones of that stomach ache.

‘It’s because you never eat your food faster,’ he would say, the man who bought her favourite sponge cake from the rotiman, and made her a paper maiche globe around a blown-up balloon, painting Africa in green so she could win the Principal’s Award.

‘You cannot always expect me to save you.’

He will never eat sambal chilli paste again. She suddenly wishes he was the paranoid kind, that he had not dismissed it as a minor discomfort, the natural result of a generous appetite and a dislike for fibre. Maybe then he would not be disintegrating. There is no one to blame.

When she goes to the toilet where the flush is a chain, the water is stagnant. A deadly stinking red.

Worth
What happens next?

When is next?

After your Pa dies.

It hurts her to see and hear her mother talk about her Pa gone. When she was younger her mum would say, not without a sense of truth or bitterness, that Em will not take care of me if you are the first to go.

She was angry with her mother for saying this, and so she did not correct her.

You mean what happens to the house?

The house, your old mother, everything.

She wonders if her mother expects to come live with her in London.

Will you come back more often?

The plaintiveness in her mother’s voice is suffocating. She feels the branding stamp of filial duty near to her skin, radiating, singeing her. She thinks of the past three weeks that have felt like three years back, three years away.

I can’t stay here ma, she begins tentatively, pressing her chin hard against the knobbly tops of her knees. There’s no future for me here. I know when I first left I almost didn’t want to go. Back then there were more reasons for me to stay… Or I thought there was. Now there’s nothing. I see things differently now.

I’m almost making partner. That’s why I can’t stay so long here… We have some big cases soon. A lot of paperwork, it’s true what Pa always said about lawyers. But I am comfortable. I mean there’s good benefits and you know how I love London.

But are you happy Ting? That is what is important. You know that is all we wanted for you. Are you happy like Tee is happy, like Ting Ting is happy. Even Kiat is happy.

Parting (19)
She rises, coiling herself around him, body half-naked in the dark. Strokes his face like it is darkness. His hand meandering on the expanse of warm, bare stomach, rivers on her belly.

Goodbye.

I am not the only girl to make you cry, she says, and he knows, without looking up, that she is already half-turned away.

I do not believe so. You’re stronger than that, she offers.

No, he says. Yes. You are not the only girl. But you are the first.

I’ll believe that, she states. Because I want to.

You were never meant for the smalltown, Kiat says. You were never meant for me.

Contingencies
The wedding is an intricate affair, even for the smalltown, she thinks – and then stops to correct herself. The wedding is an intricate affair.

She is mildly surprised at how beautiful Ting Ting looks. Only mildly though, as everyone always presupposes that brides must look beautiful on their wedding days. But Ting Ting looks radiant and shy in the high collar shiny red cheongsam, even though her beehive upswept hairdo is so hard and stiff it looks lacquered. Tee is resplendent in his western style suit, and for once, looks scrubbed clean. Kiat is his best man, naturally. Ting thinks about how right this is.

She eats for prosperity and luck after helping at the registration desk. The registration desk isn’t so much for guests to register or pen their felicities and congratulations, but for the family to record how much money, how many crisp blue fifty ringgit notes come neatly folded in the rectangular pink envelopes. Name and Amount.

The yamsengs make her head spin. She is noting Old Uncle Tan’s lecherous leers at Ting Ting’s legs, the split of the cheongsam at her thigh, and shudders, when Kiat taps her shoulder and bows formally and takes her hand.

The happy couple look very happy, he says.

They do, she agrees. Who would’ve thought?

Who would’ve thought she’d come back, Kiat says, looking at her.

Again for the first time
At seven o’clock the street lamps that sentry the dirt road go on. Rain makes rivulets and the cups hugging the trees of rubber plantations overspill white-grey, the latex scored from the bark immiscible with the falling slants of rain. If her mother had pushed up the metal lever to open the stiff glass-pane shutter window, and looked out into dusk, she would not have seen them. If her father had searched, even past the deafening wail of the mosque’s evening prayers he would not have found them, riding round and round the roundabout.

He lets her get on first and she grips the handles tightly. Her feet feel sticky, her big toe and her second toe tightly clenched around the plastic of her slipper. She is afraid her slipper will fall off, afraid her toes will get stuck in the spokes. Afraid her skirt will slip out to billow in the night breeze. She tugs and wraps it secure beneath her legs, very carefully.

No space for mistakes, she thinks.

She is afraid that if she steps or shoves too hard they will topple over – but that is not what she is afraid of, not really. She is afraid that if they should fall she will be touching him, a twisted tangle of limbs and metal carcass. She thinks this might hurt more, to have wrist on wrist, or a hand held out.

He eases himself onto the seat and she inches forward a little uncomfortably. Turns the key in the ignition and listens to its choking cough, its splutter puttering as the three of them start to shake – man, woman, and motorbike.

You can turn more, he yells. Lean more. Don’t worry, we won’t fall!

You finally got a motorbike, she calls into the wind, afraid to look back. The headlamp lights a faint beam, useless for anything except illuminating a sodium tunnel space of rain streaks.

I got my childhood dream, he bellows. What about you?

Happily she doesn’t hear his question. They careen, unbothered by any other vehicles. She rings the ridiculous bicycle bell he has fastened to the left handle with a rusty piece of wire. The sound like a scraping trill. With the torque and gathering force of the motorbike she finds herself laughing with abandon at the lack of corners and the way the wheels bore into the muddy ground, scoring an inevitable path.

Forgotten
Ting is also surprised that she remembers so much more of childhood days with Tee than he does, as if, when she left, all traces of her existence were blotted out.

Kiat and I talk about you a lot after you go leh, Tee tells her, shaking a scolding finger.

Oh? Ting says. But what’s there to talk about. There’s nothing to talk about what. You didn’t know me at the same time. I mean. There was only a short time when we all knew one another right.

I know you too long la, Tee shrugs in mock-disdain, splitting thin black sunflower seeds between his teeth with a satisfying crack. He spits out the shell and leans forward conspiringly.

Eh, how come you never fall for me one? Kiat know you only after Form Three like that but you still so crazy over him until you almost didn’t go. You better be glad you did.

I am glad. I mean. What do you mean be glad. Why. Because I have a good job now?

No. Because you did.

Coming
He shows her the tin as if he has forgotten it existed. As if the very reason he had kept it for so long had not arrived.

In her pocket the hand with the marble burns.

And for the first time in the ten days she has been home, she knows clearly what she is feeling. She is knowing what is has been to wait for the day when she could turn to him, in the half-light, the rain boiled away, in the sticky heat of older years, and show him these things, and she would say – Look, I have kept them. I have kept them because I knew I would come back.

Hurtheld, Ting takes out the marble and holds it out to Kiat.

Their love is the wordless kind.

Framing
She would not have known, upon first sight, that he could or would be someone she loved. When was the first sight? Kindergarten?

You were in my kindergarten class, she realizes. I never knew you then.

It is a strange feeling, to know each of you, both of you, have the same round-edged faded photograph. In group pictures, when and where you are present, rather than behind the camera, you first look for yourself. Unless the person you are really looking for is gone, the dead kind of gone, and the sepia-spotted photograph is all you have to remember them by. Otherwise, the other faces? We gloss them by.

What were you like as a child, she asks curiously. Then, almost laughing – I still see the boy in you.

When I was young I powdered my sister, he says almost somberly, the gleam in his eye. The whole room was white and she was covered. My parents, my mum, she was so angry. The whole soft plastic Johnson & Johnson bottle shaken out covering the parquet floor so it was so slippery she couldn’t even run to chase after us with the feather duster. We hid the canes so she used the handle of the duster.

She kisses the lips of the boy and tastes chalk dust.