IN EARLY June, nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, Antonio went to bed with a problem bearing heavily on his mind. That bridge. The bridge which he was rebuilding was too narrow for the traffic volume today. He had used the new technology pre-tensioned prestressed concrete piles. He was nervous about it. He had told the contractor to use a light hammer to be safe. And fine cracks began to appear on the piles. Something had gone wrong.
That night he dreamed. He saw two rivers meeting at the bridge, merging, rushing under it. One was as red as blood but as he stared at the swirling water he saw it was not blood but a tumbling mass of deep red roses that dissolved into the earth-brown waters of the other river, a sluggish stream like the rivers winding their way through the alluvial plains of Malaysia.
The convergence of the red and brown looked like blood poured on the earth, like bodies of Malay women, thighs, breasts, calves, sucked into red flames of a raging inferno, like the soft brown of the chiku fruit sinking into a sea of bright crimson chilli chuka, pounded chillies in vinegar.
He woke up and groped his way to the bathroom in a daze. He burped the odour of the mutton curry they had had for dinner. Unlike his usual ephemeral dreams the images clung to his consciousness as ghee cloys to the surface of a clay pot.
There was conflict in those images. He was sure. He recalled the many times the tingling feelings of his random premonitions had crept into his mind and gnawed at it until suddenly a crystal clear picture emerged. Like Coolie winning the four o’clock in Ipoh. Or seeing the gun glinting in the dim streetlight at Menglembu the night Tit tried to kill him.
Yet never before had blurred visions like these come to him in his sleep, in a dream.
His junior technician rushed at him as he got out of the car at the bridge site.
“Pile Number forty-four is cracked. Clear cracks …”
The contractor’s foreman, behind his man, added, “Suey … bad luck … Number forty-four …”
Antonio knew that forty-four in Cantonese was an evil number. ‘Four’ and ‘Death’ had the same oral sound.
Antonio stared blankly at them. The bridge, the pile number, the churning coalescing streams in his dream …