BOY

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I HAVE BEEN STARING AT the trees like that. I’m supposed to be doing my math homework but last week in school, they told us we have to do this: look up and out of the window at the trees in the distance. Actually, just anything green if we have been reading or using the computer for a while and someone said, really, teacher? Anything? Then the whole class joined in to try and come up with green things. I shouted, frogs! Someone else said, ‘cher! what about my father’s car! Oscar the grouch! ‘cher! what about nose dirt! Everyone started laughing then, we were much too loud but we couldn’t help it. Mrs Sim, our real teacher, wasn’t around. She was on sick leave for a week and this relief teacher Miss Tan was young and skinny with big eyes like a cartoon person and her voice was so small no one in class could ever hear her. The recess bell rang when Miss Tan was waving her hands in the air, trying to get us to shut up but it was no use. Everyone was already getting out their water bottles and wallets from their bags. She was still shouting when we ran out of the classroom. I was glad because recess meant that I had only three hours and forty-five minutes to go before I could go home and see Bobby again. It was Friday and ten o’clock in the morning and I had the whole weekend, if I was lucky, before my mother decided to do something about him.

At least, that’s what I thought before I got home. Because by that time (two o’clock), my mother had already called up the SPCA. Maybe they picked up Bobby when I was in the canteen, when I was eating my usual lotus paste bun, trying to swallow it all in as few mouthfuls as possible so that I had fifteen minutes to go play basketball. Maybe he was already gone then, locked up in a cage at the back of some van. I was looking at the trees outside and then back and again at the clock on our classroom wall, wondering why time got so slow when you watched it. Like watching grass grow, which is what my mother says about work. Being a receptionist is as fun as watching grass grow, so work hard, then you can have a better job, she said. (Although if you can watch it on TV, grass and plants and flowers, when they put a video camera in the forest for a long, long time and then they make it go fast — a whole year in one minute — and you see the sprouts coming up quick as anything from the seed and then curling upwards towards the sky, it’s not that boring. It is actually quite cool.)

My mother was at home when I opened the door. I didn’t expect her to be there since she usually works Monday, Thursday, Friday. So I had a bad feeling when I put the key in the lock and she opened it before I could do it myself, like she had been waiting for me to come home, the way I sometimes wait for her to come home in the evening.

She put her hand on my head and the bad feeling got even worse. Boy, she said, I called the SPCA. They took the dog.

All I could say was, Bobby?

Then she bent down and said, change your clothes, I’ll take you out to McDonald’s and we’ll go somewhere, okay? Where do you want to go?

My mother kept coming up with different places while I was in my room, shouting them through the door, but in a different voice, one that was higher and softer than usual (Marine Parade amusement park? East Coast Beach? We can rent bicycles!).

I was wiping my face on my sleeves when she said, what about the movies? There’s this show you wanted to watch, right? she said.

We went to the cinema and my mother got us popcorn, the mixed kind, sweet and salty. The movie was about this bad guy who is actually good; he saves the moon and these three little girls. I was feeling better then and by bedtime, I was telling myself that Bobby wasn’t a very nice dog anyway. He was old and his fur was falling out in places. Plus, he ran away from me when I took him downstairs for a walk which is how I saw the man.

Jonathan says everyone dies. That it is all bull**** when adults talk about heaven. Which is what they made up just to make the kids feel better. I remembered this when I thought about asking him if he thought Bobby was in heaven, if they had him “put to sleep” already. That is what the SPCA does to dogs when no one wants them. My ex-best friend had a dog that was old and blind. It had eyes like blue marbles and his parents brought it to the vet to be “put to sleep”. Sleep is not what I thought the man was doing when I saw him lying on the ground like that. Bobby was sniffing around the man and barking. The stupid thing. All I could do was stand there. There was nowhere else for me to go and the leash, the string I was pulling Bobby with was near the body so I couldn’t pick it up. I kept trying to get the dog’s attention so we could go home but he wouldn’t even look at me. There was a puddle of red next to the man and it kept growing and getting redder and redder. I just stood there until the police came. The police were very nice (which is what I plan to say to my mother the next time she tells me that the police will get me if I don’t behave myself). A lady police went to the shops to get me a bar of chocolate, which I ate quickly because my mother didn’t allow me to have sweets and she would surely take it away if she saw this. They let me sit in the police car while they asked lots of questions like, did I see anybody around before and after the guy fell? Did I hear anything, like shouting or people arguing? At the end they said I did a good job and shook my hand. I felt quite good until I saw the man, now covered by a piece of cloth except for his arm. It was his arm sticking out that made me vomit. It was like I was six again, with people patting my back and wiping my mouth with paper handkerchiefs. My mother had to wash my shoes that night. As she scrubbed, she kept saying, what bad luck, what bad luck. I thought it wasn’t that bad, I could wear my old ones and just go over the dirty bits with chalk.

JONATHAN is who I hang out with when I am home alone with nothing to do. We used to do our homework together. Since he is three years older than me and is a lot smarter, he helps with my math and science homework. In return, I lend him the comic books that I buy at the second-hand store every weekend. He would always finish his work first, no matter how much he had to do. Then he would go off into his room to play some kind of war game on the computer. I am not very good at those, I die too quickly and then I get bored because I’m always doing the same thing, making the same mistakes and never getting anywhere. I asked Jonathan how come he’s so quick with his schoolwork and he said that if I quit staring out of the window I would be quick too. He was in my primary school for some years and then he went to secondary school a little further away. I heard he got into trouble there a few times. For fighting, or something. My mother told me. Word gets around, she said, and then she said not to spend time with Jonathan anymore, she saw him smoking in the stair landing a few times and he was a bad influence. She said that a lot. Wei Long in my class was a bad influence because he never handed in his work and got caught stealing someone’s wallet. He got caned in front of everyone during Wednesday assembly and he didn’t even cry. I thought maybe he wore extra shorts and put newspapers underneath them, which is what I would do if they were going to cane me in front of the entire school. The people living a few stories above us, the two people, are bad influence. The girl used to say hi to me while her boyfriend pretended like I wasn’t there, but my mother said they were Shaming Their Parents although she didn’t explain why. Next door was bad influence because the brothers (Aziz and Abdul and Aaron) were mad about soccer. They sometimes played in the rain. I looked out at the field once and it was raining so hard you could hardly see the trees and the playground. But then I saw the three of them, plus a few others I didn’t know from our school, yelling and sliding all over the soaked grass. My mother said their mother was crazy to let them play like that in the rain. Mrs Ibrahim didn’t look crazy to me — she smiles whenever she sees me and calls me sayang. I think if anyone is crazy, it is– Anyway, my mother says a lot of things and if I listened to them all, I would have nothing to do besides homework and making sure my room was tidy.

I remembered what Jonathan told me. Stop looking out the window and finish your work. I did, except for a few really difficult questions. Which is why I then went over to his flat, just three doors away. Maybe he could help with my math. Also, maybe he would like to go catch frogs or fish in the longkang. It hadn’t rained for a few days and the canal just has a small stream of water running in the middle. I thought it might be good to climb down and see if we could catch anything so I got my fishing net, the one I still had from when I had goldfish, and a red pail.

When Jonathan came to the door, he was in a T-shirt and shorts, all crumpled up like he had been sleeping when I rang the doorbell. He didn’t look at me but went straight back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.

You didn’t go to school today? I said, because he looked like he had just been sitting there all day. There was a cigarette burning in an ashtray, which was just a tin cup cut in half. I always wondered if his parents were mad at him for smoking but if they were he wouldn’t be doing it in his room like that. And then I wondered what kind of parent would be okay with that and I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

Jonathan didn’t answer. Then he looked at me, at the net and the pail in my hand and asked me where I was going.

I thought we could go to the longkang. Catch fish? I said.

Hm, he said, stabbing away furiously at the arrow keys on his keyboard while I stood in the doorway, looking at all the comic books (some of them mine), CDs with no words or pictures on them and clothes, dirty ones lying around and a stack of folded ones on the side of his bed. After a while the sound of fighting and guns stopped and I knew that he was finally done. He spun around on his chair a few times before stopping so that he faced me.

There’s this place I want to go. That guy’s flat. The guy who jumped that day, he said. We can go there and afterwards, we go catch fish.

I looked down at the red pail. I should have put some water in there, the stream might not be deep enough for me to get water.

Oi, can or not? Jonathan said.

Why you want to go there for? I said, trying to sound bored, like I just didn’t care for it. There’s nothing wrong at all with not caring for something.

I just want to go see, he said.

WE walked all the way up to the top floor. There was writing all over the wall in the stairwell. It was all things like:

O$P$

Mindy Tan is a FATTY BOMBOM

Harry Lee, I U

lire lire pants on FIRE!

Mei Ling Mei Ling in the air I can see ur underwear

We were reading them and trying not to trip over the unwanted things people left behind when they moved out. Things like pieces of a bookshelf, potted plants all dry and grey, even a TV set and a radio that looked like it still worked. I would have brought it home except I knew I would get into trouble for doing it — bringing back something that someone else had thrown away.

We stopped at the sixth floor so that he could light a cigarette. Hey, he said, what happened to that dog? The one you found?

Oh, I said, they came and took it away. The SPCA.

Your mother called them, huh, he said.

Why you want to go see the man’s flat? It’s not like we can go in. It’s all locked up and everything, I said.

Jonathan just shrugged and turned to blow smoke away from me.

IT was shut up tight, like I said. The windows still had curtains over them so that we couldn’t see inside. When we walked past them, I saw in the glass how short I was next to Jonathan; he was almost a head taller than me and it made me stand up straight, as tall as I could. There was police tape on the front door and right in front of that, on the floor, was a plate of food, pink-coloured buns, the kind people usually get for death anniversaries and the seventh month to put on the altar at home. There were other things too, candles and joss sticks and little scraps of paper.

I pointed to the mess on the floor and Jonathan just said, it’s just people. Praying for luck and stuff. They think the ghost of the man will help them if they’re nice and give him food.

Then he spat loudly, towards the outside, his spit going through the air in a wide arc and sailing down and down. I went over to the railing to see, just in case there was anybody below who might be hit by it, which would be funny.

Pray for what? I said.

Oh, he said. Anything. Good exam results, money, help with some kind of problem. But mostly just money. You didn’t see the one downstairs? People been praying there too, where he landed. Every time the cleaners clean it up. But next day there will be fresh offerings again. Food, tea and beer.

Huh, I said.

If it really worked, people would be praying all the time to dead people. Everyone would be buying buns and going to the cemeteries and where people died on the road from accidents and all. Which is ridiculous. But then I remembered my uncles at my grandfather’s funeral last year. The way they crowded in front of his photo. A black and white one they put up just that morning. For half an hour they prayed and tossed around bits of paper with numbers written on them.

Oh, I said.

What? Jonathan said.

Nothing. I said, thinking that I still didn’t know what we were doing there. It was too quiet, with him just leaning on the railing and smoking. It was too quiet and I had to say something.

I saw him, you know? I saw him die. I said.

There was a silence. The kind that comes during the moment someone changes their mind about you. Like when my mother told me that my father wasn’t dead after all, told me that he just left one day and there was no shame to it. None at all. I wondered why, if there was no shame, she had to lie for years and years about it. She lied whenever I asked. But I just kept my mouth shut, nodded to let her know that I heard and was okay with it, like I had a choice.

What do you mean, you saw him die? Jonathan said.

I was outside, near where he fell. I saw him jump and fall and land. There was a lot of blood. I said, trying not to swallow too loudly.

You mean you actually saw him jump? Why you never tell me earlier? He stepped back, pushed his hand through his hair. Wow, that’s sick, man, he said.

I shrugged and said, it was very sick. He had blood coming out from everywhere. And then he was trying to say stuff and then he stopped, and died.

Wow, he said again. Wow.

Didn’t you see what happened? I said. Where were you?

In school, la, he said. I didn’t get back until six, it was raining and I didn’t even notice the tent and stuff. Couldn’t see anything, the rain was so heavy.

We stood there for a few minutes, leaning over the railing, looking down. There were people walking out of the building and in. People my age just coming back from school, this girl nearly toppling backwards from the weight of her schoolbag. There were a few elderly people playing chess or watching other people playing chess at the stone tables. There was the really old lady with the cart, going out with it empty and hoping to get cardboard and things to fill it with. And birds quarrelling on a branch, like they were fighting for space. We stood there and just watched. Maybe this was what he was doing last Monday. The man. Just staring and staring until he felt like he had to be down there, with all the other people. And the only way he could do it, the quickest way, the best way, was to jump.