TAY SMOKED TWO Marlboros on the sidewalk outside the Cantonment Complex, then he went up to his office and spent the rest of the day moving stacks of papers from one side of his desk to the other.
He was waiting for a great idea about how to find Vincent Ferrero to drop out of his head and fall face up on the desktop right in front of him. Sergeant Kang was out doing something to make it look convincing that they were really reopening the Mayling Aw case, so mercifully there was no one to interrupted his paper moving or his waiting. It didn’t help. No ideas fell onto his desktop, face up or otherwise.
Tay did ring the number he had for John August again, but August still didn’t call him back. He also called Goh, but the woman who answered at ISD said Goh was out of the office and not expected back for several days. Tay doubted that was true. It was probably what she said to everyone who called asking for Goh and whose name she didn’t recognize. But whether the woman was telling him the truth or not, all Tay could do was leave his number.
If an afterlife existed, Tay had often thought, hell would not be a place of roaring fires and cackling demons. It would be a desk and a telephone and no one ever returning your calls for all eternity. In other words, it would be pretty much like the life Tay had now on earth.
***
By five o’clock he’d had enough. He hadn’t had a single original thought all afternoon and the only two people he knew who were well enough plugged into the intelligence community to finger Vince Ferrero weren’t even interested enough in his telephone calls to return them. So Tay locked his desk and headed out to find a cab to Emerald Hill.
He told himself he was going home because he could think more productively there, but he knew that was just a lot of crap. He was going home because he could sit in his garden and smoke. That was it pure and simple and he decided not to bother to lie to himself about it.
When he got home, he realized he had nothing in the house for dinner and he certainly didn’t feel like going out anywhere, so he walked up to the Cold Storage Market on Orchard Road and bought two frozen Mrs. Mac Beef and Pepper Pies, a quarter pound of green olives with pimento, and six bottles of San Miguel, the real stuff from the Philippines, not that shameful slop they made in Hong Kong and called San Miguel. He dumped everything in the kitchen, poured the olives into a bowl, and took the bowl and one of the San Miguel’s out to the garden. He came back inside, opened a fresh pack of Marlboros, picked up a lighter, and found a pad and pen and his cell phone, then he carried them outside too and settled into his chair all prepared for some serious thinking and note taking.
He called August’s number one more time just for the hell of it, and Goh’s, but now neither of them answered. He dumped his cell phone on the table and leaned back and thought about what he ought to do next.
Tay had finished the beer, two cigarettes, and half the bowl of olives when he finally accepted that he had not come up with a single idea worth writing down.
So, having no better idea what else to do with himself, he went in and heated the two Mr. Mac Beef and Pepper Pies in the microwave and got himself another San Miguel. He grabbed a bottle of HP Sauce to douse the pies and a couple of paper napkins, then took everything into the living room and watched the BBC News while he ate.
As usual, the television news was little more than a lumbering chronicle of depressing disasters, both natural and man-made. It didn’t enlighten Tay about the state of the world. It just reminded him why he never read newspapers or watched television news. If this was what had happened that somebody thought worth remembering, Tay generally ended up deciding on those few occasions when he did either, today was certainly a day that mankind could just as easily have skipped.
He took the dishes into the kitchen, then made some coffee and returned to his chair in the garden. The night air was heavy and there was no moon. He lit another Marlboro and watched the smoke curl away into the darkness.
It was mostly his imagination, of course, but it almost seemed as if he could still smell the smoke and dust from the bombs. He thought he could smell the death, too, and the agony of those who had not died, but might have wished they had.
The bombing of Singapore had already been reduced to just another chapter in the world’s daily parade of agonies. Three hundred killed by suicide bombers today in Singapore, fifty more slaughtered tomorrow in Afghanistan from a rocket attack on a school, another five hundred dead the following day in China in an earthquake. Man and nature were equally callous to the suffering they inflicted, and we had all gotten used to it, mostly. No matter what awful events transpired, a few days later more awful events transpired and we all moved on.
No, that wasn’t really true. Everyone remembered the fires that had burned them, just not the fires that burned others. Here in Singapore no one would ever forget the bombings. And Singapore would never again be as it was. The buildings could be rebuilt, and Tay had no doubt they would be, but the smug certainty that life would smile on them forever here in their little corner of the world was no more.
Tay was a policeman and he had always known how fragile life was, that catastrophe visited without warning. That life was a succession of random turns and arbitrary choices. If you were standing in the road when the bus got there, it ran you down. Simple as that.
Now everyone else in Singapore knew it, too.
Tay stabbed out his cigarette, swung his feet up on another chair, and folded his hands over his chest. He closed his eyes. Just for a moment, he told himself, and only because the death in the air made them burn so badly.
Tay thought about things he could not remember. Thinking about things he could not remember was what Tay usually did in the moments right before sleep took him.
What had happened to that red VW he had owned when he was in university? What was the name of that woman he had gone out with when he first joined the police force? What had he done with that green ceramic ashtray that once sat on his desk?
Tay slid over the cliff that separated the conscious world and the other world for which he had no name, and slipped away.
***
A sudden sound like someone speaking befuddled Tay.
Was he asleep and dreaming someone was speaking to him? Or was he awake and someone was actually there in the garden with him?
No, it was impossible that anyone was there. He was alone. He had been alone when he closed his eyes for a moment and he was still alone. No one had broken into his house, walked through the living room, gone into the garden, and started speaking to him. That was stupid. Of course he was alone.
Tay opened his eyes. Or he dreamed he opened his eyes. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether he was awake or asleep.
He looked around. It was so dark he saw only shades of gray. The lighter gray of the patch of sky above his neighbors’ houses became the darker gray of his garden wall, and then became the deep, brooding gray all around that seemed on the verge of swallowing him. One lamp was on in the living room and it cast a dim glow through the glass panes of the French doors, but most of the illumination was lost to the gloom before it provided any definition to the world around him.
Tay bent in the direction of the glow and lifted his wrist, but he could barely see his watch. It was certainly too dark for him to read the time.
“Wake up, for God’s sake, Samuel! I’m back, but I’m in a hurry!”
It was a woman’s voice.
Oh no, Tay thought. Here we go again.