He knows Kok Cheong, in a desultory fashion, from school: it is assumed that they are friends, since Kok Cheong says so. The truth is that Tom’s primary emotion towards Kok Cheong has always been one of tepid indifference, though he has never had the heart to tell Kok Cheong, who has, over the years, taken his fealty for granted. Tom had drifted through school in a pleasant haze; his reports had always said, “has the intelligence, but won’t make the effort.” Kok Cheong, on the other hand, had been one of the golden boys, top student, fleet athlete, school prefect. Tom has always hated the guts of these golden boys, with a cordial, visceral hatred. But he has noticed that they frequently choose as friends someone less bright, less popular, grateful for whatever scraps of reflected glory are available. He knows that Kok Cheong has selected him for the role of sidekick, court jester; he ought to mind, but somehow he doesn’t. In any case, he sees little of Kok Cheong these days, now that he is studying medicine at the university, and Tom is in business administration, fitfully trying to muster an interest in the details of business while his mind wanders into riffs, licks, snatches of Muddy Waters songs. He plays blues guitar in a pub at weekends, and he would play full-time if he could, except that his parents would have a fit if he failed to get his degree. (Tom is nothing if not filial.)
Occasionally, he sees Kok Cheong cruising around campus in a shiny black convertible sports car, which elicits untold envy in the mind of every right-thinking male student. Kok Cheong’s father is a heart specialist with a lucrative practice. Tom’s father is a primary schoolteacher with a homicidal dislike of eleven-year-olds.
Lately, the buzz around campus is that Kok Cheong is going out with a girl called Christie. Tom has seen her around, a tall, long-legged girl with a mass of kinked hair that changes colour every month. She is supposed to be Filipino, Eurasian, he is not sure. She is well-known for wearing red bustiers to class, causing the more fainthearted tutors to wilt, and for her string of boyfriends, all of whom are uniformly wealthy and, strangely, quite dull. Kok Cheong is wealthy, but rather less dull: he does, after all, have a black sports car and a fondness for baggy Italian clothes which do hang rather well on his athlete’s body, admittedly. Soon, Kok Cheong, Christie and the black sports car are a combined fixture in the leafy lanes of Kent Ridge.
• • •
Soon after this, he runs into them at the pub where he plays on weekends. Cornered by Kok Cheong during an intermission, he is dragged, unwillingly, to where Christie is sitting by the car. She extends a slim hand.
“I like your bracelet,” Tom says, for want of something to say.
With a swift, unthinking movement, she holds her wrist up to the light. The bracelet is composed of human teeth. “Oh, wow,” he says. Now he really doesn’t know what to say.
“I used to go out with a dentist,” she says.
He senses that she is gently poking fun at him, and he decides to ignore her. Up close, he thinks her rather plain, even gawky; all her features seem a little too large for her face, and she is too thin and bony. She is smoking steadily, sunk into herself; her right foot taps with a sort of suppressed energy on the floor.
“She collects body parts,” Kok Cheong says, and there is something in his voice which makes Tom look at him. Yes, the signs are unmistakable: the guy is moony, possessive, proprietary and quite ridiculously happy. He is in the mood where everything and everybody seem good, kind and explicable to him, and he wants to share this feeling. Tom, conscious of a rising irritation, excuses himself.
Back on stage, he is acutely conscious of Christie’s presence, without actually looking at her. He knows she is still smoking; he sees again the way she drags on a cigarette, with that tender, defensive flick of the wrist; he senses her looking over the heads of the crowd, in her distant manner. He thought her silly and negligible; he is wrong.
• • •
When his set finishes, they are still hanging around by the bar. Kok Cheong has seized him again and is suggesting they go to the beach. Tom says he wants to go back and sleep. “Sleep is for the dead,” Kok Cheong says. Tom shrugs. Don’t they want to be alone? But a lack of anything better to do, some instinct of curiosity, makes him agree.
They pile into the black sports car, Kok Cheong and Christie in front, he at the back with his guitar, which goes with him everywhere. Kok Cheong is a little drunk and drives erratically; Christie sometimes grabs the wheel, and Tom expects the police to appear at any moment and to ask them to pull over. Still, he likes the feeling of the wind ripping past and shredding the sound of the music from the radio. He studies the back of Christie’s head, thoughtfully.
They make it to Changi intact and stumble out of the car. A sudden silence is ringing in Tom’s ears, after the roar of the wind. He is amazed by the amount of activity still going on at the beach: barbecues in their last throes, people sitting on mats listening to radios. Now and then an incoming aeroplane roars overhead, so near that he can make out the shape of the wheels protruding as the plane, a gawky bird, prepares to land. There was a time when the idea of an all night vigil in itself used to excite him, but those days are past: it has been ages since he saw the sun rise.
They move further down the beach, to where it is darker and more secluded. Now they are stumbling over couples lying treacherously in unseen sandy hollows and beneath clumps of bushes; an angry murmuring begins to make itself felt underfoot, like the rumbles of an unseen giant coming to life. Christie is beginning to burst with suppressed laughter; taking off her shoes, she runs on ahead, pealing. Then she starts skimming stones across the surface of the water. The shadows of disgruntled couples can be seen retreating further down the beach.
Kok Cheong says, out of Christie’s earshot, “We just got engaged today.”
“Yeah?” Tom is surprised. Then, remembering his manners, “Congratulations.”
“What? Oh, yes. Of course we can’t get married for years yet. Not until I’ve started practicing.”
“Well, if it’s what you want.”
“It is, it is.” Kok Cheong is kicking at the sand, absently. “At least, I think so. It just sort of happened.”
“You don’t have to justify yourself.”
“I guess not,” Kok Cheong says, drily, and then he is grabbing Christie round the waist and they are scuffling, like unruly puppies. Tom flops on his back, and stares at the night sky. It is full of stars, and he wishes he knew their names, but he doesn’t. He has never managed to identify the constellations on his own and he doesn’t think he ever will; anyway, he likes them as random clusters, just as they are.
• • •
It is four A.M. on Sunday morning, but they won’t hear of letting him go. Kok Cheong insists that they all go to his house for coffee. Kok Cheong, especially, is kind and solicitous towards Tom, while Tom, for his part, is succumbing to a deplorable savagery. He knows this smug self-absorption of fresh couples, their need to have an ordinary mortal around as a touchstone by which they can gauge their own radiance and reassure themselves that, yes, they are lucky.
Tom has been to Kok Cheong’s house before, on a similar occasion, except that at that time the girl was a model called Janina, and Tom hadn’t liked her at all. Light-headed with lack of sleep, he notes that Kok Cheong’s house, which is a gruesome pastiche of a Southern plantation owner’s homestead, has acquired a second set of gates. Both gates are electronically operated and swing open in an impressive, squeak-free silence. Both are made of shatterproof glass, with a crystalline sunburst emblazoned in the middle. Would two gates keep out burglars better? He shelves this interesting question, momentarily.
“I heard you got engaged,” he says to Christie, when Kok Cheong has disappeared into the kitchen to look for food.
“We were drunk,” she says.
“Well, congratulations on having got engaged while drunk.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not. I’m trying to say the conventional thing.”
“Well, don’t,” she says, frowning. She takes out another cigarette.
“Why do you smoke so much?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
He throws up his hands.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
It is on the tip of his tongue to say she is wrong, but he doesn’t.
“I’ll show you something,” she says, abruptly.
They go out to the garden, down some steps into a sort of sunken grotto. Leaves brush against his face, like webbing; he smells the cloyingly sweet, overpowering smell of frangipani, and bumps, unawares, against metal bars. Then he sees them, about a dozen white cockatoos, asleep on their perches in an aviary taller than he is. They look like carved, feathered statues, snowy white in the darkness.
“They cost a fortune,” Christie says, “and they’re as noisy as hell.”
As if on cue, the birds awake; seeing the two intruders, they range themselves against the bars of their cage in an impotent fury, screeching with all the shattering intensity of a siren breaking the silence of the night; the din is amazing. He and Christie run for the house, pulling the front door shut; the screeching subsides to a distant crackle.
Christie is laughing. “The last batch of cockatoos they had,” she is saying, “someone set them loose in the middle of the night. You can see them flying about wild, in the neighbourhood. I think that’s why the ones in the cage are so furious—they can hear the other cockatoos, the free ones, mocking them.”
An apocryphal story, he thinks later; then, he is struck by the proprietary air with which she recounts it, the air of a chatelaine showing a guest around. She would like to be the owner of this gruesome Southern plantation pastiche; she likes, he hazards, money.
“I hate birds,” he says. Ever since he saw the Hitchcock film, as a matter of fact.
Lying on the sofa, she lights up one of her inevitable cigarettes. Her movements have a rangy carelessness as she blows smoke rings, very deliberately, at the ceiling. “Why don’t you sit down?” she says; she is mocking him.
Kok Cheong comes back in with coffee. “We saw your pets,” Tom says.
Kok Cheong rolls his eyes. “My father. His obsession. Once he got two parrots and was trying to teach them the National Anthem but they never got past the Majullah. Now he’s moving onto guinea pigs and hamsters.” He slips onto the floor, wraps his arms casually around Christie’s long legs. “He keeps two of them in a cage beside his bed. He calls them Laurel and Hardy. When Mum isn’t around, he slips them into the bed—”
Christie laughs.
“—and lets them twinkle over his stomach. Oh, hi, Mum.”
Kok Cheong’s mother is tiny, but lethal; the most impressive thing about her is her punk haircut, which stands up in waving anemone tendrils a half inch or so from her scalp; she is also clad in a kimono dressing gown with pink dragons imprinted on it. A fifty-year-old doctor’s wife with a rock sensibility; Tom warms to her. She is, he knows, the owner of a string of very successful boutiques. Eccentricity, apparently, is not a bar to the accumulation of wealth in this family.
“Hello, Tom,” she says. To Kok Cheong, “Have you been defaming your father again?” She nods, coolly, at Christie, while Kok Cheong unwraps his fiancée and does a fair impression of twiddling his thumbs. He is in awe of his mother; she was the one who bought the black sports car for him, after all.
“So what’s happened to Janina?” she asks Kok Cheong, pleasantly.
“Over,” he mutters, sulkily. “Over.” As if in answer to an unbidden signal, he follows his mother into the kitchen.
“She hates me,” Christie says, stating a fact. Tom nods; the mothers of sons always hate girls like Christie—it seems to be a universal law. She adds, dreamily, “I hope I have daughters later on. If I have a son, I’m going to leave him on the hillside to the elements. An ancient Chinese tradition.” Seeing his face, she says, kindly, “I’m just joking, lah.” But he senses that she means it.
That night, Tom dreams of cockatoos in flight through the trees in a white blur of anger.
• • •
Tom’s band is called The Leopards. A dreadful name, coined largely because the lead singer, Hamzah, used to like to wear leopard-spotted trousers of a life-threatening tightness; now they are stuck with it, even though Hamzah has since discovered B.B. King and Otis Redding and John Lee Hooker and now wears torn jeans with army boots, the street-cred-prole look. Built like an American football player, he can do a high, mincing falsetto and a sexy James Brown growl.
The last band member is Animal (actually Anun Chandran), but he has been known as Animal for as long as anyone can remember. Very thin and hirsute, he is popularly supposed to change into a werewolf when there is a full moon. Animal plays the drums. He once studied law, but it gave him such nightmares he soon threw it up. On stage, he has been known to throw the drum sticks at the audience in his exuberance and to continue walloping the drums with his bare hands.
Tom is the quiet workhorse of the band; he prefers it that way.
They have come to an accommodation with the management. For every hard blues number they play, they have to do what the management calls “crowd pleasers.” The management has definite ideas about crowd pleasers. These include, A Horse With No Name, Speedy Gonzalez, I Just Called To Say I Loved You and Hello. Among The Leopards, this is known as the List of Increasing Pukability, but it’s either that or not playing at all. The Leopards are pragmatic.
• • •
“We’ll be back,” Hamzah promises the audience, “in half an hour.” Scattered applause; most people are too busy roaring at two television screens propped over the bar, playing reruns of I Love Lucy.
Unstrapping his guitar, Tom sees Christie for the first time, sitting alone in a corner. She is looking directly across at him. It has been a week since he last saw her at Kok Cheong’s house, and he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her. Her smile comes swimming at him out of dreams, like a Cheshire cat’s; he finds himself mentally composing songs around the motif Christie; he wonders, distractedly, where it will all end.
He makes his way across and squeezes in beside her. Her hair has a light reddish tinge this week and is done up in a knot just below her neck. It is too difficult to talk above the din emanating from the speakers, so he orders two Cokes, and they sit in a companionable silence, waiting for his next set.
• • •
Backstage, Animal, who sees everything (like God), wants to know what Christie does.
“She’s studying Economics at the university.”
“Good grief,” Animal says in horror.
• • •
Tom has no illusions about his looks. He is not good-looking, not in the conventional sense. Residual acne scars have given his face a craggy, weathered texture; he could be taller; his hair is thick and wiry and he keeps it cropped short, military-style, to prevent it from sprouting into an Afro aureole. On the other hand, years of swimming for his school have given him a good build and he does have nice eyelashes, as his aunts keep telling him, impervious to his embarrassment.
Tom is the youngest in his family. His two elder sisters have long since married and moved out; they visit on weekends, swooping down in a flurry of rackety children, morose husbands and a level of noise and bustle which seems inordinate but necessary, though Tom can’t fathom why. His sisters, used to seeing him as the baby, pull his hair, tug his clothes and inquire with meaningful winks after his girlfriends, especially a girl called Li-Shen whom he used to date in his teens and was rash enough to introduce to his devouring family. She is now in the United States doing computer science and Tom can’t even remember what she looks like, though she still writes to him regularly. In answer to his sister’s queries, he says he intends to stay celibate.
“Please don’t bother him about girls!” Tom’s mother always cries, at this juncture. She is the antithesis of Kok Cheong’s mother, a housewife who wears faded floral prints long after they have ceased to be fashionable and is letting her hair, heavy with pins, go grey; a gifted cook, her happiest moments are spent swapping recipes with her daughters. She is not happy about Tom playing in a band, but sees it as an aberration, something wayward and adolescent that will stop once he graduates, finds a job and loses his soul. A kindly, fussy woman who worries too much, she sees hidden traps and temptations for Tom everywhere: chief on her list of vices is Woman, followed closely by music.
Tom’s father is a well of silence in this commotion prone family. Years of hectoring primary school pupils during the day have left him voiceless, averse to talk, at night. At night, he reads thick volumes of history in his room, all the wars, depredations and political ineptitudes throughout the ages. Reading history has made him dry and cynical: he believes firmly that all politicians should be shot.
Tom is the first member of his family to go to university. Because of that, he knows, he is treated with a sort of totemic reverence which irritates him, and frightens him, too: he is expected to bring home the goods.
• • •
Lying in bed, his radio turned low to Billie Holliday, Tom cannot sleep. The murmuring silence around him nudges him awake, every time he is on the verge of dropping off; as only true insomniacs know, the dead of night is the noisiest time of all. He tries counting sheep, tries counting the number of cars grazing past way below at the foot of his block of flats, but nothing works. He picks up the phone and dials Christie’s number.
“Hmm?” she says into the phone, a sleepy cat’s murmur; then “Tom?”
“Did I wake you?” he says, knowing it is a stupid question.
Long silence; he is afraid she will hang up, and he knows that sharp, definitive click of the receiver will finish him off forever. “No-o,” she says at last. “I was waiting to be woken up. Talk to me, Tom.” She came to him, he reminds himself, all gold and smoke-wreathed and confident.
So he talks to her about the first thing that comes into his head, the blues and how he discovered it, and his heroes and his burning, inchoate desire to escape, knowing he sounds like a fool and not caring, all through the long, slow slide to dawn.
• • •
The next time, it is she who calls him. He leaps for the phone, afraid his mother will reach, martyred, for it, and hear Christie’s voice. The phone is in the hallway; he lies on the floor on a cushion, legs propped over the back of a chair, hand cupped over the receiver to muffle the sound of his voice. Living on the fourteenth storey, the only shadows cast on the walls of his living room are the humpbacked shadows of passing clouds. For the first time in years, he watches the sun rise.
• • •
They play twenty questions. Christie won’t talk about herself; usually the most she will answer to a question is yes or no.
“What school did you go to?”
“A convent.”
“Which one?”
“That’s a secret.”
“What did you like best about school?”
“Roller-skating. I used to go early every morning and skate like mad in the basketball court, round and round. I wanted to be a speed skater. Until one morning, I crashed into a wall bordering the court and broke my nose. I was in hospital for a week. After that Sister—Sister Mary—banned all roller-skating in school. I was so upset I cried.”
He imagines her lying back in bed, amidst a welter of pillows and cushions, twirling a chain on her index finger.
“Do you love him?” he asks, abruptly, too abruptly.
“Who is he? she asks, innocently.
“Do you believe in love?”
A long pause. “Tom, you’re getting sentimental,” she says, and puts the phone down. The nightly teasing ritual is over.
• • •
“I paid a thousand dollars for the engagement ring,” Kok Cheong says. “And I still haven’t told my parents about us.”
Kok Cheong’s voice over the phone sounds very much the same as it does in person, low, precise, every word clearly articulated, authoritative, even when he is confessing to doubts. Tom, cradling the phone on his shoulder, draws tiny guitars on a memo pad. He wants to get off the line, but cannot bring himself to be dismissive. He has always found it difficult to shatter the images which other people have of him, and Kok Cheong’s is particularly inviting. Tom knows he is seen as trustworthy, loyal: it has something to do with the deceptively open face he bears, a look which mothers and old ladies gravitate towards, instinctively. It has made him the repository of more secrets than he cares to remember. He cannot help having the sort of face he has.
Kok Cheong has been calling Tom, on the flimsiest excuses, which are merely pretexts to talk about Christie. A note of dissatisfaction has infiltrated his happiness; he has begun counting the flies in the ointment. He starts with the most trivial. He doesn’t like the way Christie smokes all the time; it gives her nicotine-stained nails; kissing her is like kissing an ashtray. At this, Tom laughs out loud, while a tiny, internal polyp of hate grows at the thought of Kok Cheong and Christie, together.
Kok Cheong registers the laugh, grimly, and continues his litany. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think about her all the time; I try not to think about her all the time. I asked her what she wants, and she says she wants us to be together, the next minute she says, no, she doesn’t want that at all, so I ask her, does she want to break off the engagement? And she says, yes, then no, then your mother doesn’t like me, which is true, but that’s never bothered Christie before. OK, that’s bad enough, but she’s got these mood swings, you know, first she’s laughing, then she gets all furious and won’t talk to me, then she gets hysterical and wants to fly a kite at East Coast at eleven at night, and this is driving me crazy, you know, and if I ask her, is it PMT, she storms out and slams the door—”
And then Kok Cheong says, “You know, that night at the beach, that was the best night of my life.”
Tom is deliberately non-committal: “Uh huh,” he says, or, occasionally exerting himself, “Gosh.” He feels no obligation to be even minimally consoling; he has not sought out these confidences.
He does not tell Christie what Kok Cheong has said, and he does not tell Kok Cheong what Christie has said. He feels all the power and helplessness of an intermediary, caught in the middle of these telephonic dances; he feels, fleetingly, criminal.
Perhaps he simply likes betrayal. Perhaps he should have been a spy.
• • •
They go out once in a while, the three of them, always to pubs, discos, where the noise is such that any sort of normal conversation is impossible. The threesome is usually at Kok Cheong’s insistence; he wants Tom along as an ally, Tom knows, a sort of silent witness to the incipient bloodletting which he feels, prophetic, to be in the air. As for himself, he derives a sort of perverse pleasure from the knowledge that when he goes back, he will call Christie, or she will call him. Kok Cheong’s blindness makes him seem touching, almost lovable, in need of protection, a thing he hadn’t thought possible.
Christie talks to Tom on the phone but she is sleeping with Kok Cheong. Or, has slept with him. Tom guesses this, from what he knows of Kok Cheong (“It takes two to tango” is one of his more infamous sayings) and from their showy physical intimacy in public. They are constantly nuzzling, reclining against each other, lacing and unlacing hands: Tom could have given them marks for the whole panoply which, he feels with some paranoia, has been put on specially for his benefit. Or he could be imagining things: his frame of mind is such that he imagines conspiracies, treacheries, where there are none.
Now and then Christie looks at him, mutely challenging; she is contemptuous of him, for sitting there, stolid and unbudgeable. “Voyeur,” she says to him over the phone. “Spectator.” It is true. He plays with his glass, looks round for people he knows, while all the time violent, unreal thoughts run through his head, thoughts of smashing the glass, digging the fragments into his palm.
Kok Cheong is trying to tell a funny story about medical school, something about a severed arm being missing from the mortuary. How a severed arm had then turned up in the locker of an unpopular student called Cheng, everybody assuming that it was a cruel, but fitting, prank. How it turned out that the severed arm was not in fact the missing limb at all, and nobody could figure out whose it was—
“Excuse me,” Tom says, and runs for the bathroom.
He makes up his mind never to go out with them again.
• • •
The worst thing about love, Tom decides, is that it ruins your concentration.
Ragged, he hasn’t opened a textbook in weeks. He skips lectures or doodles his way through them, his mind a blank. He can’t even feign much interest when Animal manages to dig up a bootleg Jimi Hendrix record on which he has blown his life’s savings. He stops calling Christie, and stops taking her calls; yet he waits, obsessively, for the phone to ring. His body and joints ache, for no apparent reason.
Hamzah and Animal suspect something is wrong. He has been downcast; he broods; he sings Speedy Gonzalez with such a tragic air that customers have inquired whether he is ill. The management threatens a termination of contract unless the act picks up. Froth and energy, though, are things Tom is currently deficient in.
“Forget her,” Hamzah says, brutally. He delivers a stirring little homily along the lines of “plenty of fish in the ocean,” etc., etc. All very well, Tom thinks, but what does one do if one’s irrational hankering is for a particular fish?
He hears things. That Kok Cheong and Christie have had a public, enthralling row; that they have broken up; that they have made up; that she is seeing someone else; that he is seeing someone else; the gossip and the malice ebb and flow, as regular and cyclical as the tide—they are, after all, one of the more colourful couples on campus.
Once, he runs into Kok Cheong at the university tennis courts. Kok Cheong looks wrecked, beady-eyed, hungover. In answer to Tom’s queries, he replies, abstractedly, “Fine, fine,” and challenges Tom to a tennis match; he won’t take no for an answer. Tom is pulverised: Kok Cheong plays like a demented hare, chasing every ball and giving uncharacteristic whoops whenever he hits a winner. Later, he asks Tom, not looking at him, “Have you heard from Christie?” Tom says, truthfully, “No.” Kok Cheong nods, morosely, and walks off without another word, batting a tennis ball over his shoulder as he does so. Tom’s hand flies out, mechanically, to catch it. Fellow sufferers, he thinks, we should get together and commiserate; he ought to relish the irony in it, but he doesn’t. He gives the tennis ball to a child who has wandered on court.
• • •
“What a surprise,” Kok Cheong says, flatly.
Christie is sitting by his hospital bed, biting her nails. She looks up as Tom steps into the room, bearing a basket of fruit. Tom stops short; he didn’t expect to find her here, in the role of solicitous bedside companion. He hasn’t seen her in weeks, and the vividness of her presence is like a slash, cutting him anew. He judges from their faces that they are not enthralled to see him. “Hey, I can come back,” he says.
“Sit down,” Kok Cheong says. “Join the party.”
Kok Cheong has had a serious accident. A few days ago, he crashed his car through the central reservation barrier on the expressway, crumpling the front of the car like a concertina. He is listed in a stable condition at Mount Elizabeth, where his hamster-loving heart specialist father works. Christie was also in the car, but escaped largely unscathed, except for a few minor bruises.
Kok Cheong says, “Boy, do I feel stupid.” From his bed, he looks from one to the other, turning his head slowly, painfully; his glance has a searching, unsettling quality.
Christie stays silent, so Tom says, “Why?”
“Crashing my car. Being a cliché. That’s part of it.”
The scene, the tableau, is somehow unreal, Tom feels. It is as if he and Christie have deliberately contrived this meeting, this opportunity to gaze at each other theatrically across the poor, mutilated body of the sacrificial victim, except that the sacrificial victim is refusing to collude and is, in fact, radiating a distinctly prickly hostility.
“Yes, I feel stupid,” Kok Cheong says, ruminatively. “I’ve come to realise certain things. Christie knows what they are.”
“Don’t start,” Christie says.
“I’m not starting anything. In fact, that’s the whole problem, right? Endings. We’re talking about endings here. Or am I wrong?” No one contradicts him.
And then he closes his eyes, suddenly. “I’m tired,” he says. It is a dismissal. They stand and leave the room, like disciplined children.
“Thanks for the fruit,” Kok Cheong says.
• • •
Outside, Tom says, “What was that all about?”
“Oh, don’t pretend,” she says, angrily. “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“No,” Tom says. “I don’t?
She starts to cry, standing there in the hospital corridor. It is a kind of crying he has never seen before, a furious, hate-filled stream of tears, completely silent, while she looks at him, steadily, as if she could kill him.
• • •
Of course, he guesses by now what must have happened. Accidents have causes; it’s simply a matter of tracing them back to the one definitive, irreducible moment, the one when a teleologist says, “Yes, that’s when the Universe began.” It could have been the fact that she chose to tell Kok Cheong, in the car, that she was leaving him, which decision Kok Cheong refused, stubbornly, to accept, without an interrogation as to the rival whom he persisted in believing had cut him out, running through a list of potential swains, each more preposterous than the last, while Christie issued her denials, wearily, then with increasing fury. Then it must be Tom, Kok Cheong said, expecting incredulity, hilarity, until he saw by her face that none of these were forthcoming; and, in the fraction of a second that he took his eyes off the road, he lost control of the car. It could have been any of those facts; or none of them.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” Christine is saying. “I know everybody is going to think I was somehow to blame for the accident. That I provoked him or something. When the truth is, there was no causal connection at all.”
She looks at him, wanting affirmation as to the arbitrariness of life and death, wanting absolution. He wants to say he is not the person to give it, but he cannot bear her supplicating tone, so unlike her, and so he says, no, there was no connection at all. He senses the relief in her, while fear rises in him, setting the ends of his nerves on fire: he knows, as sure as he has ever been of anything, that they are bound together inextricably by this.
• • •
“You live here?” Tom says.
She nods, impatiently. She has already paid the taxi-driver and clambered out, while he is still looking out at a block of pre-war flats.
“I thought you were rich,” he says, wondering, following her past an overflowing rubbish truck above which flies buzz, luxuriantly, and up a dark hallway lit by a single bulb. She gives him a scornful look; she seems to have recovered, during the long, silent ride back.
The flat is small, and cluttered. Vases, books, newspapers, bits of cloth, stationery, lie jumbled together on the shelves, also plates of half-eaten, moulding food, he cannot help noticing. Two large armchairs, smothered in moth-eaten antimacassars, take up most of the space in the living room. The TV is an old black and white set that stands on an upturned box against one wall. One shelf is given over to dozens of photographs in rusting frames: sepia-coloured, stiffly-posed, curling at the edges, they are of some antiquity. He examines them, while Christie flies about, tidying up, emptying plates, wiping, straightening.
The photographs show a polyglot of races: an Edwardian man with a walrus moustache; a young woman in a Peranakan blouse; an Indian man in a 1920s duck suit and spats. The more recent ones show Christie as a child, suspended between two adults, her parents, he supposes; by then the ethnic blend is so complete it is impossible to tell the origins of these three people, assuming anyone thought it interesting. Tom does; he has always been curious about the genealogy of Eurasians; it has always been an unconscious, heretical regret of his that he is, unexcitingly, only Chinese.
“These are your parents?”
“They died in a plane crash when I was two,” Christie says. “I never knew them.”
“Then who...?”
The unspoken question is answered by a tentative, “Christie?” and an elderly woman comes into the living room, blinking at the light. She is small and stooped and very frail; as she settles into one of the massive armchairs, she seems to be swallowed up in the upholstery, a tiny floral dot against the cerise leather. Her hair is completely white. “Hello, Auntie,” Christie says. “Some tea?”
“Yes please, dear,” the old lady says. She gives her hand, trustingly, to Tom, as though extending an audience. She seems not to notice that it is past midnight and that Christie has brought a strange young man to the flat.
• • •
The kettle comes, wailing, to the boil, and Christie makes three cups of tea. Great-aunt Eugenia is handed a plate of biscuits and this she puts decorously on her lap, nibbling at each biscuit with tiny, mouse-like movements. She talks about her childhood during the 1920s.
“We were well-off then,” she says, regally, to Tom. “We had a house in Nassim Road, and every weekend there were parties. My mother loved fancy dress parties. She would dress up in silk and feathers and beads and I would help her. All gone now, of course. My father drank, you see. Then the Depression came, and the War, and we shed the house, and the servants, until one day there were none at all and my poor mother had to do her own washing.”
Tom straddles a hard-chair brought out from the kitchen. He glances across at Christie, wondering whether she has heard these stories before. Christie looks impassive, walled-in, her eyes fixed on her great-aunt; he cannot tell what she is thinking. It seems very quiet, except for Great-aunt Eugenia’s spidery, rhythmic voice, a voice from the past. He has a sudden vision of Kok Cheong lying in the hospital bed, connected to various tubes and catheters and wires, no, they are growing out of him, he is sprouting them, organic stems and roots and tendrils, forming a flowerbed. He gives himself a little shake; he needs to sleep, badly; it has been a long day.
“Can we put the television on, Christina?”
“They’ve stopped broadcasting, Auntie.”
“Strange.” She turns to Tom. “I’ve forgotten his name,” she says to Christie, puzzled, her young-old face uplifted expectantly.
“Tom,” Christie says, patiently, for the fifth time. She has the briskly efficient manner of a nurse with her great-aunt—kindly, firm, but never really listening to the patient.
“I think,” says Great-aunt Eugenia, “I should like to go to bed.”
She wedges the plate with its heap of biscuit crumbs between two books on the nearest shelf, extends her hand again to Tom, and vanishes into her room. The door closes with a soft click.
• • •
“She took me in after my parents died, and brought me up. Two years ago, she had a stroke, and her memory has been failing ever since.” They are in Christie’s room, a Spartan affair. The bed is an ancient, creaky metal contraption like the ones in army barracks; a single chair stands beside it. A small table doubles as a desk and a dresser. He knows now where she derives her lack of sentimentality from, the capacity he has glimpsed in her for making a clean severance at the root in all matters.
Christie lights up and sits hunched on the bed, knees drawn up to her chin. She holds her hand out for the ashtray; he hands it to her.
“You smoke too much.”
“You’ve said that before.”
Her bed is hard and springy, uncomfortable; he cannot imagine that she has been sleeping in it all these years. He unfurls her legs and she flops back, the hand holding the cigarette raised above her head to avoid singeing the bedclothes. Ash scatters in an arc on the pillow. Arms propped on the bed, he lies on top of her, length to length, a pair of cards. He runs his finger along her cheekbones and removes her cigarette.
“I’m not rich,” Tom says, temporizing. “I don’t think I ever will be.”
“Pity,” Christie says, drily, a little wistfully, he thinks. Then she asks, “Do you think we’ll pay for this?”
He reminds her, “There’s no causal connection.” Then he says, incorrigible honesty getting the better of him, “Yes, probably, but who cares.” He has to ask as well, the thing that has been bothering him for weeks, “Why me?”
In answer, she touches his face.