June 1971
It’s always been toilets for Neela hasn’t it? It was toilets in the old place where she had been lucky to get a job until she was thrown out and it’s toilets here too. Cyril doesn’t like it when people call her the cook but sometimes she feels like telling him, you should count yourself lucky they don’t call me what I really am. Cook would be a promotion. Oh of course they always tell you at first that it is marketing and cooking and all that sort of thing. Then if you are cooking it is understood that your job includes keeping the kitchen clean. Then they will say a little light housekeeping: sweeping as needed dusting once in a while no need to mop too often. If anything it was more honest in the old place: the whole thing a speedy progression from cooking to toilet scrubbing. Whereas here she knew they were waiting with bated breath to be able to saddle her with the shithouses. “After all the cooking only takes a few hours a day,” she heard that Mrs Arasu remark to Hilda Boey but they couldn’t just come out with it and issue orders could they? There are no leaders there are no followers oh the bullshit they tell themselves. In degree of falsehood this was second only to there are no masters and no servants which only Cyril Dragon tries to believe and even then not very successfully.
Still. The suggestions and instructions never came from him. It was because they did not want him to see what they were doing that they had to hide them. Oh Neela if you wouldn’t mind just … but only when he was out of earshot.
So what. She can do toilets if it means her son gets to grow up in a house full of books under the watchful eye of someone who does believe he deserves a real education. No danger of the temptations the boy would be facing out there. Out there if she nudged him towards higher ambitions he’d be a keling too big for the rubber estate boots he should’ve been wearing. He’d be mocked and bullied for tucking in his shirt and doing his homework. By age twelve he’d be in a gang. If the price for this is swallowing her memories and her pride and scrubbing toilets so be it.
The funny thing is she has to deal with both categories of toilet customs here: the wiping and the washing. Biggest feud in the country—You Chinese who don’t wash your bottoms! You Indians and Malays who wash your shitty backsides with your hands and then eat with them!—but of course here the fight has to be buried like everything else. It falls to her to mop up the splashes from the secret cebuk the washers smuggle into the stalls (and why the smuggling? In this place nobody is supposed to be ashamed of anything anymore isn’t it?) and also to replenish the toilet roll so that the wipers are not reduced to hoarding old newspapers. Oh she knows all their secrets all right being in charge of both input and output. Whose stomach can’t handle what. Which of the men has the worst aim.
Scrubbing feels almost good for her soul. At least she can take her anger out on a shit-streaked toilet bowl. She is not yet thirty and her hands are the hands of an old woman but someday her son will hold his head high. That is what she tells herself at the end of each day when she massages her hands with their pruney chapped skin and their bulging veins.