Highway

“The usual?”

The usual, yes. Local coffee, strong on sweet condensed milk, served in a cracked glass on a green plastic plate, none of that designer stuff that retailed criminally for five dollars at the fancy outlets that had sprung up all over the city. All as usual, including the packet of cigarettes he’d bought that morning at a 7-Eleven and had been saving for this moment. Nothing in a long shift ever felt better than this mid-morning coffee break in a still-empty hawker centre in the middle of town.

The policeman made a show of drawing his wallet. Halim, the stallholder, said hastily, “Please. On the house.”

All as usual. The ritual had begun several months ago, after the policeman had done Halim a favour by pounding the head of a loanshark who had been bothering Halim against the wall of a lonely side-lane until the loanshark had pleaded for mercy and agreed to forgive the loan. The policeman had taken no money for the favour. Halim had come to him at a low point and he had thought, why not? It was as simple as that. Yet, after it was done, it somehow seemed less simple. Halim had thanked him, of course, with a profuseness that bordered on obsequiousness, his eyes bright with a fear that the policeman realised, after a beat, was of him, he who had just done Halim the favour, and he’d almost laughed, except it was no laughing matter. So he kept coming back to Halim’s stall, though he knew it would be better to stay away, because he had the irresistible, and perhaps slightly cruel, urge to test the limits of that fear.

He sat for some time, his ashtray filling up with half-smoked cigarettes. His coffee grew cold. As a traffic policeman, he’d perfected the art of sitting or standing and staring for long stretches without getting bored, waiting for the one stray vehicle or accident that could transform an otherwise dull day into an adrenaline rush. He thought of nothing in particular. He was good at that too. It was what kept him sane; that, and the always comforting possibility of suicide. It had been some weeks since he’d last sat up in bed cradling the gun he ought to have returned after his shift, his finger cocked on the trigger. The hour before sunrise always the worst, when he despaired of the night ending. In those hours of raging wakefulness, the sweetest sound was the rumble of the first rubbish trucks rounding the corner, the signal for him to tuck his gun back in his holster. Always, always, this petty, indestructible, shameful will to live. The charade of the cocked pistol its own perverse comfort.

He stubbed out his last cigarette. The last vestiges of the morning cool still lingered in the cavernous hulk of the hawker centre, the sun finding its only entry through cracks in the metal roof. He did not want to leave, to move through the dazzling rectangle of light that was the entrance into the furnace of the street. But it was time to go.

He became aware that a Chinese man at the next table was staring at him, too insistently for him to ignore. Late thirties, tall for his race, his long legs sticking out into the passageway while he stirred his coffee; he looked trim, tanned, too upscale in his red polo t-shirt and khaki pants for this place. His face wore a perplexed frown.

The policeman studied him for a moment. Memory stirred, sluggishly. A weekday morning, watching a trickle of vehicles string themselves along the dusty black ribbon of the North-South highway. Ensconced in his police car artfully concealed in a layby, he had been jolted out of his stupor by a truck with Johor plates thundering past at one hundred and thirty kilometres an hour, spewing black smoke. Behind the truck trailed a silver BMW with Singapore numberplates, just outside the speed limit. Perhaps it was the gleam of the newly-waxed car in the morning sunshine. Perhaps it was the way Singaporeans drove, always hovering just around the speed limit with their prissy, useless regard for rules. Whatever. In this job, he didn’t need an excuse. It was the arbitrariness of the whole thing that was its attraction.

He pulled the car over.

“Ah—is there a problem—”

“Passport.”

Tan Kai Ming. Aged 39. A seasoned traveller, to judge from the crazy patchwork of immigration stamps. Mr Tan travelled a good deal to Malaysia on business. But there were other stamps as well: Pretoria, Sao Paolo, Prague. Where were those? Places he would never see. Never go. They touched him with a kind of wonder, and unexpected longing.

Mr Tan tried again in passable Malay. “Officer. I was inside the speed limit.”

“Not according to my monitor.”

“Then your monitor was wrong.”

“It’s never wrong.”

“Oh, come on. Then why didn’t it catch the truck in front of me? Why stop me?”

The man had been wearing sunglasses, the policeman remembered, small, fashionable, gold-rimmed ones like a movie star’s. (The policeman’s were black, impenetrable, like those of a thug or a Latin American dictator. The truth was he had weak eyes; strong sunlight made them water.) They looked too young on a face that hovered near middle age, and the policeman was irrationally irritated by them. That, and the aggrieved belligerence and the Singaporean assumption that you could always prevail with reason. In the policeman’s experience, reason had no role to play in the forces animating mankind.

“You were speeding.”

“You want a bribe.”

They were speaking in English now, the transition so rapid that neither registered it. The policeman leant into the interior of the BMW, inhaling the smell of leather and air-freshener. In the backseat, he saw an array of brochures on toilet bowls and shower stands. Evidently, Mr Tan was a salesman for bathroom supplies. Again, the policeman experienced that sense of irrational irritation: what business did a bathroom salesman have driving a car like that?

“You see a policeman in this country and immediately you think he’s corrupt, he’s dirty, right?”

“You tell me whether I’m wrong to think that.” Mr Tan began to rub his eyes behind his sunglasses. His back slumped. The policeman had the impression that defiance was not natural to him, that some last restraint had snapped that morning. Maybe his business was going badly. Maybe his wife had left him. Just as quickly as the unexpected twinge of fellow-feeling had arisen, it was stamped out.

“This is my highway.”

“What are you talking about?”

He repeated, slowly, deliberately, so there would be no mistake, “This. Is. My. Highway. Understand?”

Mr Tan stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

“You want we can go down to police headquarters right now and settle this.”

“What the shit!”

He paid, of course. They always did. Five hundred ringgit. Paid it in complete silence as though he’d suddenly realised the presence of a mightier force than justice or fairness or any of those shibboleths, and then he’d roared off in a cloud of dust and gravel. The policeman smacked the bills against his palm and whistled through his teeth. Money was always useful, but he was aware he didn’t really need it, not today, not in this manner. No, he had taken the money simply because he could.

In the hawker centre, Mr Tan looked younger, more defenceless, without his sunglasses. The policeman could tell he was debating with himself whether it was the same policeman. What were the odds of them ending up in the same place, at this hour? A thousand to one? To discourage further speculation, the policeman turned away. He took care to finger his holster. He felt no guilt over his victims but the encounter was vaguely disturbing, like the bizarre juxtapositions that one found in bad dreams.

Outside, the bright sunlight made him blink; he donned his sunglasses hastily. The phrase, home free, occurred to him, though what was there to be afraid of? Mr Tan had not stirred—the policeman had not expected him to—though he had been acutely conscious of the man’s stare boring into his back as he threaded his way out. Then he heard the sound of running footsteps behind him, and he turned sharply, but it was only Halim.

“I meant to tell you ... I heard something from a friend of a friend. It may be nothing, but I thought you would want to know all the same—”

The policeman listened without expression. Of course he would check out this tip, as he’d checked out all the others he’d received since Deanna’s flight three years ago but he guessed that, as with all the others, this would also come to nothing. He was more preoccupied with observing the ingratiating smile that slid fitfully around Halim’s mouth and seemed to have a life of its own. Halim was a blameless, hardworking man; it was the policeman who was at fault for letting him this far into his life.

He nodded, meaning, thank you, and turned away.

“God speed,” Halim called.

He had once had ambition. He remembered it vaguely, or thought he did, but it was hard to recall its texture exactly. It was like trying to remember the sensation of pain: so searingly real at the moment of its happening, the memory of it vanished into a void once its source was removed.

He had once spent a year in college studying electrical engineering, paid for by a hardwon bursary; it was one of the rare periods in his life when things had come together in perfect riveted fashion. Then his mother fell ill with cancer.

Mother. Ibu. Whenever he thought of her, it was of how he’d found her the day his father had upped and left the kampung for good: stretched out like a pale lovely corpse on the mat, her face upturned tragically to his, a trickle of blood from her wrist staining the floor. His baby brother Anwar propped next to her in dirty diapers, one finger stuck in his mouth. The older boy was eight, too young to know that the sheer theatricality of her pose meant that she couldn’t possibly be dying. He’d screamed for his grandmother, who clumped over from her house next door and slapped her daughter on the cheek. His mother sprang to her feet with a yelp.

“You can’t even kill yourself properly,” his grandmother snapped.

His mother said, defiantly, “I’ll try again.”

His grandmother snorted. “No, you won’t.” His grandmother was as tough and stringy as the chickens that she reared for eggs. She had seen a man decapitated during the Second World War and nothing had ever shaken her since.

His grandmother was right. His mother never tried suicide again, but all the same she’d made an indelible impression on him. He vowed to look after her, no matter what. (He would forget his father, a feckless charmer who had met his mother one morning on his deliveryman’s route while she was walking to school and found himself, a bare three months later, the husband of a pregnant teenage bride. Bapak had been good at fishing, singing and making balloons into funny shapes to amuse his sons, but abysmal at providing for the family. Money flowed out of his pockets and he could not account for it; women flocked to him and he could not turn them away. His leaving was only a matter of time, as inevitable as the turning of the world on its axis.)

Ibu was still young (just sixteen when she gave birth to him), still pretty (he remembered sourly the men who’d competed to take her out after his father left), still not entirely devoid of hope that she would meet the right man. When he was a child, she’d seemed to him the most enchanting creature alive, with her delicate perfumes and her small refinements and airs. Nobody else’s mother, he thought, was like his, and he was right. Princess, his grandmother used to call his mother; as he grew older, he realised it had not been meant as a term of endearment. His mother was completely unsuited to poverty and the string of low-paying jobs that she had to take to support her sons. Older, he thought her a fool. Still, she was his mother.

The government doctor that he brought her to see pronounced the illness terminal. An innate stubbornness led him to seek a consultation with a private specialist that he could ill afford. Gently, the specialist told them that treatment was expensive and that government assistance would only go so far. The specialist was quite old and trying to be kind, but it was clear he wasn’t used to dealing with people like the future policeman, who wore flip-flops into the hushed, spotless office and paid for the consultation with crumpled notes fished out from various parts of his clothing.

“Let me die,” his mother had begged her sons, “don’t spend the money” and Anwar, a boy tender as a bruise in his emotions, had wept with her like a pair out of a soap opera. Coldly, her older son told her not to be stupid. The next day, he signed up with the police for no better reason than that the station round the corner had a large recruiting poster in the window.

His tutor urged him to reconsider. He was bright; promising; hardworking. The compliments echoed emptily in his ears. In the police, he accepted the first posting that was offered him; it happened to be in the city’s traffic division. It was not what he would have chosen, but he wanted only to draw his first pay cheque as quickly as he could. Hope or ambition or whatever it was called had not entirely deserted him: he still harboured vague dreams of becoming a superintendent.

Superintendent! Later, years later, during long, dull stretches on the highway, he would think of this and laugh. Not bitterly, but in a kind of enduring wonder at his youthful innocence.

He did not think of himself as corrupt. Or not more than most, anyway. He did not take money for greed, or necessity, or because everyone was doing it—all the usual, tedious reasons, or at least, he no longer took it for those reasons. No, he took it simply because he could.

What was it the inspector had told him, the morning that he’d called the policeman into his air-conditioned sanctum? “You need flexibility in human relations. As you do in everything else.”

And he’d said, too cocky for his own good, “Is this about human relations? I thought this was about law and order and justice.”

He could see the car even now. A silver Lamborghini, so sleek and aerodynamic it looked like it could skim the air. He would have noticed it even if it hadn’t run a red light, narrowly missing a truck; running the red light the way it did only added to its general air of insolence. The policeman gave chase, though, as the Lamborghini led him on a white-knuckled ride through the busy downtown streets, he wondered if he’d been wise to do so; his lumbering police vehicle couldn’t keep pace, surely, with the gaudy bird of a car in front. Someone would get killed, probably him—like a charm, his thoughts had the desired, opposite effect. The Lamborghini mounted a central divider, crashed the railings and turned turtle, its wheels spinning uselessly at the sky.

The driver was not hurt, only angry. He was a bumi dressed in what looked even to the policeman’s untrained eye like a very pricey ensemble: black sharp suit, black pointy shoes made out of some poor reptile’s hide and cufflinks bright enough to blind. He cursed the policeman, his voice rising to a high-pitched scream. “Do you know who I am?” he kept saying. “Do you know who I am?” Unmoved, the policeman continued taking down his details. It was only when the man started jabbing him in the chest—hard, so that the policeman almost fell into the path of an oncoming car—that he snapped. He remembered pinning the man to the side of his wrecked car and wrestling on the handcuffs, breathing hard and feeling a kind of psychotic rage that made him tremble from fighting the urge to break the window of the Lamborghini with its driver’s head. (And indeed he couldn’t sleep that night, the vision of the man’s head crashing through the glass recurring so persistently that he was almost afraid he’d done it.)

The first thing he saw in the inspector’s office, apart from the fine, upright figure of the inspector himself, were the arrest sheets he’d painstakingly filled in for the Lamborghini driver. He’d guessed instantly what was afoot. The inspector did not waste his time on recruits of slightly more than a year’s standing unless there were good compelling reasons. And so he’d waited out the pleasantries and the small talk, knowing that these were but distractions on the circuitous route to his subornation.

Finally, reluctantly, the inspector had tapped the arrest sheet. There was a long silence.

“You know that was the son of—” and the inspector had named a prominent businessman, who was said to be close to the finance minister.

“Really.”

“Didn’t you guess?”

His tone was more belligerent than he intended: “No, I don’t know his family, do I?”

Oh yes, he was thinking, my heart will really bleed if the scion loses his licence, gets convicted and upsets his father’s well-laid plans for him to enter politics ... He let the inspector fumble and turn red in the face and didn’t help him a whit.

He said, flatly, “I can’t do it.”

The inspector drummed his fingers on the table. The hum of the air-conditioner was very loud—the fan-belt needed repairing—but he was perspiring freely. Idly, the policeman wondered what favour the businessman had done the inspector (helped a brother? a cousin?). The details didn’t really matter; it was the nature of the payback that was always the interesting question. And now he remembered a rumour he’d heard about the inspector having once been an army officer. The rumour had it that a cache of arms had been stolen on his watch by a band of Muslim extremists. Or else he had failed to salute some general. Whatever it was, he radiated the anxiety of a man who had messed up one safe pension and did not intend to lose another. And yet he was not a bad man in his way: he was kindly, he remembered names, he let the men have time off readily if they’d worked shifts, which was more than could be said for other officers.

“Why the hell not?”

“He ran a red light. He assaulted me.”

“He says he tapped you in the chest.”

The policeman laughed.

The inspector said, slowly, spelling it out for a congenital idiot, “I can override your arrest, but it looks better if you withdraw it yourself. Say you made a mistake.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know you’re a good policeman. I’ve seen your appraisals. You’re honest. That’s good.”

“Thank you.” If his tone was ironic, the inspector failed to notice it.

“But honesty isn’t enough to make it. Do you follow?”

And that was when he’d made his remark about flexibility in human relations.

The policeman had been curiously detached, his mind cold and clear. Graft didn’t shock him. Graft was everywhere. Graft had reared its head his very first day on the job, when he’d booked a white Honda for parking on a double yellow line and its owner, a pretty Chinese housewife weighed down with grocery bags, had tried to buy him off with a ‘gift’. He had not liked her imperious manner and so he let the ticket stay and was startled by the invective which she showered on him. He was under no illusions as to his own principles. He was honest when it was convenient to be honest. And he had a sick mother and a baby brother to support. But he wasn’t yielding his virginity without a pantomime of righteous indignation, not least because he needed time to think.

Everything had its price. A week later, he named his.

The inspector had laughed. “So that’s what it’s about? The money?”

He’d said, smiling, though it’d felt as though someone was holding up the corners of his mouth with tweezers, “It’s always about the money, isn’t it?”

His mother lived another four years after the onset of the cancer. Lived through the loss of her hair, the collapse of her teeth, the shrivelling of her skin and the pain that saw her ratchet up higher and higher doses of morphine to little effect. He’d been amazed and not a little awed by her resilience, her determination to cling on to a life that so far had disappointed her at every turn. Towards the end, barely able to move, strapped down as she was by an intricate fretwork of tubes and drips, she’d asked to go home. He’d asked her if she was sure and she’d nodded her head, barely.

(Home, the leaky shack in the small kampung that she’d lived in all her life and that the policeman had fled with such relief. In the force, he was to meet former kampung boys like himself but, unlike them, he did not sentimentalise his rural roots or deplore the anonymity of the big city. Anonymity was what he craved. Only in the throngs clacking heedlessly along the pavements did he finally feel the pressure lift: nobody whispering that his father had deserted the family, nobody poking into the dark clouded recesses of his soul to ask why he wasn’t more like his saintly fool brother. No more tripping over the chickens that wandered underfoot and fouled the ground with their droppings; no more kampung nights when the blackness became something physical, suffocating. In the city, total darkness was rare and he slept with the streetlights shining full into his room.)

Those last few days, she’d seemed almost serene. He drove the hundred kilometres after his shift every evening to be with her, and she’d look up dozily from her mat on the floor at his entrance. He slept in a rattan bed in the next room, alert to her every movement. One night, thinking she was asleep, he was startled to find her eyes, large in her shrunken face, fixed on him. She beckoned to him with difficulty with one finger and he brought his ear close to her mouth. Even then, he’d had difficulty making out what she was saying.

“You can be more than this.”

He brought his ear away. Her lips were still moving. She thought he hadn’t understood, but he had, only too well. The anger that was his faithful companion flooded his veins.

“You can be more than a policeman.”

“Being a policeman,” he’d told her with icy contempt, “paid for your treatment.” More precisely, graft had paid for her treatment, but he wasn’t about to draw these fine distinctions. “Being a policeman puts food on our table. It’s what I am. It’s all I am.”

And in one of those explosions of temper that his mother was so familiar with, explosions that made her shrink back in her mat even where there was no room to recoil, he’d got on his motorcycle and driven back to his rented room in the city. In the morning, he was sorry, but it was too late. Anwar was on the phone, crying. His mother was dead.

He had stood over her grave that same day while it was being dug, eyes stinging from dry-ness. It was not the memory of his last conversation with his mother that was eating at him. It was the knowledge that he was finally free.

His freedom brought him no sense of liberation. He was like a prisoner, grown used to his windowless cell, feeling a surge of agoraphobic panic at his first glimpse of the sky outside. For weeks afterwards, he would return to his room and look round with dazed unfamiliarity. He could not remember what he was meant to be doing. He forgot to eat. He went back to his old college and walked around the hallways trying to screw up the courage to ask about re-admission procedures. A friendly student accosted him: “How can I help you?” He looked at the boy’s smooth, unlined face and shook his head. The boy was only a couple of years younger but they seemed to have nothing in common.

Then he’d met Deanna. Zigzagging drunkenly across the street, causing traffic to screech to a halt and drivers to lean out of their car windows to yell at her. She wore a yellow sundress, flowing down from her armpits and stopping just above her knees. Her beatific smile never wavered.

He was waiting for her when she finally made it across.

What he noticed first were her eyes: large, feverishly pinwheeling holes punched into a tiny heart-shaped canvas of a face. He realised that she was high, not drunk. And then he saw that she wore no shoes and that her feet left bloody prints along the pavement. “Officer,” she said with a giggle, before pitching forward at his feet.

Amphetamines, the emergency room doctor had said with a sigh, a truckload of them careening their way through her system and enough to send her sky-high and crazy; they would have to pump her stomach. He mentioned the latest designer drug. The policeman nodded and left, meaning to go back to the station to write up a report, but somehow he found himself shelving this. Somehow, he found himself, after his shift, walking up to the hospital and asking for the girl who had been admitted that morning. Deanna, the receptionist said, vaguely waving in the direction of the wards.

She was awake in bed and staring into space. Her feet were in bandages. When she saw him, she drew her arms across her chest; she’d recognised him even out of uniform and he felt a strange elation at the thought.

“Am I going to be charged?”

He said, with a clumsy attempt at humour, “Not unless you want to be.”

She stared at him and for the first time he saw that half-smile of hers appear. “Of course not.”

“Are your parents here?” She looked like a kid, eighteen at most.

“My parents?” She considered this and laughed. “My parents have disowned me. I’m not as young as you think. I’m probably older than you.”

Detoxed, she looked wan and skinny and not even very pretty. Her eyes, something in the slant of which made him think she could not be fully Malay, had gone flat and unwinking like the stone eyes of a statue. Her fingers picked, obsessively, at the bandages on her feet until she saw him watching and then she flushed and tucked her hands beneath the bedclothes like a little girl and he had a sudden impulse to untuck them and hold them in his own, an impulse of such unaccustomed tenderness that, alarmed, he took himself out to the corridor and walked it up and down several times before he could bring himself to return to the ward.

He stayed until visiting hours were over and she let him. When he said goodbye, she gave no indication of having heard, but he wasn’t disheartened. He came again the next day and the next. The bandages came off and he found himself staring, surreptitiously, at her bare feet as though he’d never noticed feet before and in a way he hadn’t (who did except for shoe salesmen?). She never seemed surprised to see him; she never evinced any emotion. She accepted his presence with total passivity and he had to be content with that.

Then she told him she was being discharged. Told him this while sitting by the side of the bed, swinging those bare feet of hers just above the floor. He asked if she had a place to stay. She shook her head. The words popped out of his mouth before he could recall them: she could stay with him. She looked at him and her mouth curled up in what might have been scorn or a smile: he couldn’t tell. But she didn’t say no.

It never struck him, until he brought her back to his room, what a rathole he was living in. The once-elegant pre-war building now crumbling and sub-divided illegally into more rooms than seemed humanly possible, the air fetid with the smells of cooking from the hawker stalls below. The room itself containing just bed, chair, table, portable TV, wardrobe, sink and a small cooking range. He thought: this is the kind of room where a dead man can lie undiscovered for days. But it was also cheap and anonymous and in the beginning that had been its attraction.

From the doorway, the girl said, “It’s nice,” and he wondered if she was being sarcastic but then she smiled at him, as though knowing he needed to be reassured, and he felt a sudden tightness in his chest that filled him with foreboding.

Every day he expected to find her gone, but she was always there when he returned after work. Sometimes watching TV, sometimes sleeping. In those days she slept with a narcoleptic’s ease, and he’d stand and watch her sleeping form—curled up like a sickle, her legs bent at right angles from the knee. (He had given her the bed, while he took to the floor. “Oh ... the bed,” she had said that first night, and he’d heard the quizzical note in her voice.) She seemed to sense his presence, even in her sleep: eyes flying open, she would sit bolt upright and, “Oh, it’s you,” would escape from her, in that ambiguous tone he could never fathom. Who did she expect, who did she want to see?

He never asked. Just as he never asked what she was doing on the street the afternoon he’d found her. She discouraged all questions, even the simplest ones, and her techniques were many and varied. She would yawn, or feign deafness, or cast him a look of infuriating blankness or, if all else failed, tell him sweetly, but with an unmistakeable mind-your-own-business belligerence, “It’s all so boring.” Her mind, her wit, was quicker than his; often, he found himself lumbering in her wake.

At times, he was tempted to yell at her, “And who’s paying for you now? Where would you be if it wasn’t for my charity, my milk of human kindness, my crazy impulse back in the hospital that to this day I don’t understand?” But he didn’t, because he knew the answer anyway. He could glimpse a procession of shadowy men in darkened rooms, the girl on her back watching the ceiling fan whirr and waiting only for her customer to finish before she could pocket the money, roll off the bed and totter off to her dealer. And every time he thought of this he would feel his vision blurring and his fingers digging into his palm until his nails drew blood: it was not the girl he blamed but the men and he thought with loving hatred of what he would do to them if he ever laid his hands on them.

So he held back his questions because he did not want to take advantage of her like those other men and because the fact of her presence there, in his rathole room, was at times so amazing to him that all he could do was stand and watch her sleep and call himself, silently, fool, fool, fool.

She wore the same yellow dress for days—she must have washed it during the day and hung it out to dry while he was working and the thought of her with no clothes on and no curtains in the windows left his mouth dry—until he could bear it no longer and told her to get some clothes. He placed a wad of notes on top of the TV before he left for work and when he returned, she was wearing a new dress, one of those cheap batik things flogged to tourists, all swirling blue and white like a meteorological storm on a TV weather report. With the rest of the money, she’d bought some rice and meat and vegetables and put together a clumsy meal. “Like it?” she said slyly and he had no idea whether she was referring to the dress or the food. He shrugged, dumbly.

After that, he got into the habit of leaving her money every other day and she would pocket it calmly and never mention the arrangement between them. He was careful not to give her much, and to do a mental reckoning of whatever she bought. Food. Newspapers. Small decorative items, like cushions with North Indian beadwork and a red batik cloth to drape over the table lamp. Blue scented candles. Things he-would never have chosen, but they always seemed right once they were there.

Once he asked her, “Where do you find them?” and she looked at him curiously and said that one could find these things everywhere, one just had to keep one’s eyes open for them! And he heard again the laughter flare in her voice, the undertow of gentle mockery. He was not used to being teased; he felt his face turn red, and saw hers turn quizzical.

He could not tell her that her cheap knick-knacks scared him. They suggested permanence, an annexation of his territory and his emotions that seemed to be happening too fast for him to grasp. Women, with the exception of his grandmother and mother, had been fleeting in his life. Late-night fumbles with the neighbour’s daughter back in the kampung hardly counted; nor did the prostitutes he’d visited several times in the city, always furtively and with a sense of shame so overpowering it had cancelled out whatever release he might have got from the encounters.

So he’d resigned himself to the absence of women, putting them on hold together with all the things he’d put on hold since his mother’s illness, including life itself.

But now she was here, and all the old desire and dread and restlessness were back. He thought about her, watched her, all the time. Watched her when he thought she was not looking: during dinner, which they ate with the television on, she sitting cross-legged on her chair, the wide skirt of her dress tucked decorously in her lap, laughing at the silly jokes on screen. He observed everything about her, from the way she sat with her back perfectly straight and the way her head seemed to rest on her slender neck like a goblet perched on its glass stem. And even then, even in those early idyllic days, a splinter of ice would suddenly dart into the heat of his longing: he would think suddenly how easy it was to snap that slender neck in two, and a shiver that was very like hate, or self-hatred, would go through him.

One night she danced for him. Turned out the lights, turned up the radio on a late-night music station and danced in the rectangles of streetlight that patterned the floor. He had no idea what kind of dance it was, whether it was good or bad. He watched while her shadow skittered across the ceiling in sync with her and remembered how, even on her suicidal trek across the road the day he’d met her, she had still managed to retain a certain precarious poise.

When she was done, she collapsed, laughing, on the bed.

“Did you like it?”

“I liked it.”

The phone rang, interrupting a dreamless sleep. One look at the sky outside told him it was the brink of dawn. Who would call at this hour on a public holiday? Even as the groggy thought formulated itself, he knew the answer. Only his grandmother still got up before the cockerel’s crow. He was not quick enough getting to his feet and it was Deanna who picked up the receiver.

Anwar needed a computer.

“A computer?” he repeated, wondering if he’d heard correctly.

“A computer,” his grandmother said firmly. “They have computer classes in school nowadays.”

His grandmother had taken in the child, but Anwar’s maintenance was his responsibility, the blood money he paid for escaping from the kampung. His needs were endless: uniforms, books, track shoes, all the paraphernalia of a modern education that seemed to have passed the policeman by. Once he had ventured to ask whether something was really necessary and his grandmother had fixed on him her thousand yard stare, the one that led the children in the kampung to whisper behind her back that she was a witch. He had not asked again. Anwar was her favourite, and she was past the age of dissimulating such feelings.

A silence. He pictured his grandmother walking out in the dark to the new public payphone that the government had installed outside the provision shop, and painstakingly dialling his number from a slip of paper that she would have folded into her sarong. She refused to have a phone in her house; she distrusted phones, banks, politicians, all the appurtenances of the twentieth century. A computer! It was as startling as though she’d announced her belief in the theory of relativity.

He said, aware of Deanna’s gaze hovering at his back, “I will have to see.”

“That girl. Who is she?”

“A friend.”

Another silence. His grandmother was famous for her silences; they were as eloquent and varied as other people’s conversations.

She spoke again. “You look after your own.”

He was angry now. “Don’t I always?”

“You look after your own. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Who was that?”

“My grandmother.”

She said, ready to be amused, “You have a grandmother?”

“And a brother. Yes. People do.” His tone was rough, the first time he had been rough with her. Her eyes widened, but she did not flinch. She was used to this, he thought, used to violent, hurtful men; they did not faze her. “Don’t you?”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“You must have someone.”

“I did once. Not anymore.”

“You’re not self-invented. You come from somewhere. Someone gave birth to you.”

She said, simply, “Why are you angry?”

You look after your own. He shook his head and slammed the door on his way out.

Deanna. Not a common name, he would have thought, but the parade of wild-eyed, bold-eyed, kohl-eyed Deannas in the police files daunted him. The mugshots were not always clear and hairstyles changed but there was one file he took out and studied at length. This Deanna had grown up in the city, a woman who, if still alive, would have been several years older than he. Both parents were teachers. Her mother was Chinese. (And, fairly or not, he would thereafter attribute all her waywardness and her stubborness to this miscegenation.) Three other sisters, all with unblemished records. “Deanna” had attended a mission school, where she had shown “great promise” before “things fell apart.” At sixteen, she was caught shoplifting a pair of shoes (“strappy,” “slutty,” “I loved them”), the last straw for the long-suffering nuns at her school,, who had put up with her truancy and smoking for years. She was expelled (“the day my life began”).

A spell at a girls’ home followed—not for long, because “Deanna” showed a remarkable facility for escaping. The matron of the home said that “Deanna” was a problematic case precisely because she seemed so amenable and quiet on the surface ... Her next arrest was for selling Ecstasy tablets at a rave. The arresting officer noted that “Deanna” was homeless and became aggressive when he suggested calling her parents. She said she had not seen them since she was sixteen and wanted nothing to do with them. When asked if they had abused her, “Deanna” said, “I wish ...” They meant well, they wanted “the best,” they were boring beyond belief. She underlined boring with such force that the nib broke.

Asked to pen her own statement, she’d seized the opportunity deliriously; the writing sprawled off the lines and sloped precipitiously downwards as though falling off a cliff. She must, he thought, have been still high when she wrote it. (“No excuses. No justifications. No turning back. Can someone be bad through and through and enjoy being bad and bad through and through? It’s an interesting question ...”)

At which point he stopped reading and snapped shut the file. He didn’t want to know more.

He never found her presence as intrusive as when the lights were off, when he became acutely aware of every rustle of the bedclothes, every turn of her body in the sheets. Sleep came fitfully, broken by every isolated sound of the night: a baby crying, a motorcycle revving in the street.

One night he woke with a start to find that she had slipped in beside him on the floor. She lay facing him, eyes closed, but he felt certain she was awake.

“What are you doing?”

She opened her eyes. Her fingers, cool, nerveless, traced the contours of his face. He felt a mild electric shock. He caught her hand.

“You don’t have to do this.” In the dead of night, his voice sounded inordinately loud. “I’m not asking for anything.”

She regarded him steadily in the soupy street-light that leaked through the window. “Don’t you want to touch me?”

Of course he wanted to; she was the only thing in his life that he had ever wanted with this passion of wanting that was new and frightening and made him, several times a day, pull over by the side of the road just so he could lean his head against the steering wheel and try to still the fever. He would forget over time how she looked but he never forgot how she felt in his arms, the deceptive density of her bones in that small frame of hers or the touch of her hand on the back of his neck. After making love, she would go to sleep as easily as a baby, while he lay awake for hours. Just listening to her breathe.

A vacant piece of land, the size of a football field, its red earth newly churned up, lay just beyond the monsoon drain behind his building. A faded billboard had promised for months the development of a condominium, a slice of heaven in the sky. But no building work ever commenced and he returned one day to find that a makeshift fairground had sprung up suddenly, the unmistakeable waltzy oom-pah-pah of fairground music penetrating all the way to his rathole room.

Deanna stood by the back window, gazing out at the fairground. A ferris wheel rotated slowly against a sky lit up by a red pulsating glow. “It’s a fair,” she said unnecessarily. There was a curious muted longing in her voice he’d never heard before. He said nothing, and soon she stepped away from the window to get his food.

“Oh look!” she said. “Dodgem cars!” She bent a face full of mischief on Anwar. “Shall we?” He had no choice; she pushed him into one of the cars while she lowered herself, laughing, into another. The place plunged into hell, all giant strobe winking lights and hypnotic dance music and the sound of crashing cars and whooping laughter.

It was Friday night, teenagers and courting couples were out in force, the crowds electric with an energy that could easily turn ugly without warning. In the maelstrom, Anwar waved to his brother, who did not wave back. The policeman was watching Deanna. In the bad light, her face looked distorted, cracklingly alive; he didn’t recognise her.

You do your best to live your life in compartments like the double spies we all are to one extent or another, but sometimes the cross-flows cannot be controlled. Sometimes the cross-flows make the hairs at the back of your neck stand on end, such as when you walk into your room after your shift to find your lover and your kid brother seated cross-legged on the floor, playing chess on the pocket board that Anwar carried with him everywhere. Chess! Who would have imagined she knew anything about chess, with her barely-there dresses and semi-feral air and that slow lazy curve of her mouth that never quite made it to a full smile?

You say, “What the hell are you doing here?” And your kid brother scrambles to his feet, all the tiny chess pieces scattering to the floor, and stammers that he just thought of visiting you, he hasn’t seen you in a while and he’s never been to your rathole room ... Then his voice falters, because he knows what a temper you have, and the girl’s eye catches yours and she’s looking at you in a new, grave way that you don’t like. I look after my own, you want to tell her, don’t look at me like that. But the fact is you never go back to the kampung if you can help it and you’re so much older than Anwar that he sometimes seems more like your son than a brother, a son you never wanted and towards whom your primary emotion is one of duty than of love. And of course you haven’t invited Anwar to this rathole room because would you invite anyone to a place like this if you could help it?

But what you think about chiefly is what Deanna and Anwar have been discussing while playing chess and how all this will play back in your grandmother’s house, the description of your rathole room and the girl—especially the girl—tripping artlessly off Anwar’s tongue and into your grandmother’s ears. Your grandmother fears her own sex with good reason. All you want to do is run Anwar out of the house as fast as you can but all you can do is concur, stonily, when Deanna, looking from one brother to the other, puts her hand on your arm and says, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “Let’s go to the fair.”

So they go to the fair. He does not remember what they do: eat sweet sickly candyfloss, fire at a row of moving ducks, sit in the stomach-churning pirate ship? He’s always disliked fairs and amusement arcades, loud pinging noises, accordion music and the general concept of fun. He doesn’t understand fun. He doesn’t understand when he’s supposed to be having it. When he’s not working, he’s sleeping. Or holding down a second job as a security guard, anything he can find.

But Anwar and Deanna are having fun. At least, he supposes they are, because they seem to be laughing a lot and talking like co-conspirators. He hears her telling Anwar about her schooldays, when she played truant to “go to the fair”; he hears her say that she wanted to be a dancer when she was younger. She reveals more in those few hours with his brother than he’s heard her divulge in weeks of living with him and a kind of pain or could it just be heat spreads across his chest. And Anwar’s eyes follow her about with undisguised fascination: he’s never seen anyone like her, or rather he’s never met a girl who’s paid him as much attention as Deanna has tonight.

He cannot believe that Anwar cannot immediately see Deanna for what she is, but then the things that Anwar knows and doesn’t know never cease to stump him. Anwar can talk New Economy until the policeman’s brain cells are fizzing with boredom, but he can’t open a tin without cutting himself. Anwar is—touch wood—destined for the white-collar life in one of those gleaming glass towers in the city that the policeman only skirts at street level to hand out parking tickets. It is a future that Anwar’s grandmother and brother have been working towards, in unspoken complicity, ever since he began to top his classes with unnerving regularity. He is their joint investment, the payoff for all the sacrifices they’ve made. Like a prize thoroughbred, he has to be kept in mint condition, free from any whiff of disease or sabotage. And Deanna is more than a whiff, she’s a storm, a gale-force, of corruption, and it takes all the self-control he has to watch their heads bobbing together and their cars crash without leaping in to keep them forcibly apart ...

He steps away from the Dodgem car arena for a smoke. In the five minutes that he steps away, it happens.

The cars have mercifully stopped their crashing when he returns, but he sees from Anwar’s face that something is not right. All the animation is gone and he is in a suspicious hurry to leave. But Deanna looks fine; she looks fine enough for two. Her hands are clasped to her shoulders and she’s swaying a little to the love song blaring from the loudspeakers. A group of boys whistles at her and she doesn’t appear to notice.

“Let’s go,” the policeman says to Anwar. He will walk his brother to the bus-stop; Deanna can find her way back. Anwar strides ahead of him, and it is the policeman who has to sprint to keep up.

“Stop.” The policeman’s hand falls warningly on his brother’s shoulder. “Slow down!”

Anwar’s eyes glisten with the tears he is too ashamed to shed. It comes out in a rush. After the Dodgem cars stopped, they tried looking for the policeman. Where was he? (But the question is rhetorical.) Deanna said she felt giddy. She asked him if he had pills. Or knew of anyone who wanted to buy or sell any. Anwar didn’t understand at first. Was she sick? If she was sick she should see the doctor. She looked at him for a moment, took his face tenderly between her hands, and pealed with laughter. He’d never felt such a monumental fool.

“You’re not angry?” That perennial cry of the child Anwar, goading the policeman beyond endurance in days past to small petty cruelties.

“No. Go.”

He sprints back to his room. Takes the hallway steps three at a time and kicks open the door. She sees his face and is on her feet, dancer-nimble, but there is nowhere to run. He catches her round the waist and they fall in a heap on the bed. “You leave my brother out of this,” he hears himself saying, over and over again, in a voice he doesn’t recognise. After a time, he realises she isn’t resisting, that the face she directs at him from where she lies flat on her back on the bed is composed and remote. He falls back and covers his eyes with his hands.

She turns on her side then and he feels her hand slide experimentally across his chest. “Do you want me to go?”

His mind toys with various answers, all sensible, rational, judicious. What he says is, “No. Stay.”

Madness, to be going to the beach at noon beneath a blinding white sky in the face of a hot wind that was like the breath of a fire-spewing monster and on a motorcycle that afforded no protection from the elements. But the only heat he felt was the warmth from her arms around his chest and cheek where it rested against his back. She wore no helmet, and her hair whipped against his back and his neck. “It’s illegal not to wear a helmet,” he’d shouted to her above the wind, and she’d called back, “Who’s going to book me—you?”

She made him do things he would never have thought of doing. Going to the fair, for one (though it was not something he liked to think about, and certainly not the way he’d ransacked the room after his brother’s visit, looking for the pills he was momentarily convinced she must have stashed away somewhere, while she stood by the door and watched him expressionlessly.) Bringing him to the rooftop of his building, for another, late one night when it was too hot to sleep just so they could sit at the parapet with their legs dangling over the side and only a railing separating them from the street ten floors below. She made him feel—adolescent. Tautly aware of being alive in a way he hadn’t been since he was a kid, racing with the other kids across the sharp curve of the railtrack that used to run beyond the kampung and leaping clear just as the snout of the train engine rounded the corner.

The beach was not much of a beach,—just a strip of dirty sand bordered by a seawall and a high hedgerow shielding it from the main road. He had glimpsed it once from the top of a bus; it was always empty, not least because of the sign warning of deep water and strong currents. He had no time to call out to Deanna as she shucked off her sandals, kicking them high in the air like a child and running straight into the sea.

Then she was gone. He looked again, but the sea from where he stood looked clean of people. From where he stood, the sea looked like a great rippling sheet of gunmetal beneath the sun, so dazzling it hurt the eyes. He yelled her name and plunged in. I can’t swim. He felt the current at once, a high-speed urgency in the water that could have knocked a child off his feet. The sand beneath his toes was trickling away in frighteningly fast rivulets; he thought, with a fear that was almost like exhilaration, that he would lose his footing and drown, here, in seawater not even seven feet deep. He steadied himself and swore.

Someone spoke his name. He swung round and saw her head bobbing just above the water, her hair hanging down in crazy rats’ tails on either side of her face. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was smiling.

“I didn’t mean to scare you. Honestly.”

He could have hit her. Instead, he turned his back on her and waded back to shore.

Jump.

That was what she’d whispered to him, that night on the roof, while she was leaning against his shoulder. He wondered if he’d dreamt it, but it came again, insistent, unmistakeable. Urging him on to satisfy that irrational vertiginous itch he always got to test whether he was immortal whenever he looked down from a height. You know you want to.Jump.

He’d jumped. In his mind, where it mattered, he jumped. Again and again.

“I heard about your mother.”

His eyes flew open. The sun lay low and streaky-red in the sky. He had fallen asleep on the strip of dirty beach. She was sitting up, hugging her knees, facing the sea.

He said nothing. He’d been waiting for this. She had been watching him for days ever since Anwar’s visit, weighing the sum of his parts to see whether they added up.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me. How does a trainee policeman pay for his mother’s medical bills in a private hospital?”

He said, tightly, “He manages.”

“By the grace of God.”

“God doesn’t enter into it.”

She turned to look at him then, and it was a look of complicity. “That’s what I thought.”

She said, “It’s another world.”

He thought, yes, she was right. The North-South Highway at three A.M. in the morning, silent but for the deafening buzz of insects in the plantations flanking the highway, pitch-dark except for the glow of instruments on his dashboard and the yellow snaking lights of a lone, stray car hurtling past—it was another element altogether. Elemental. One where the modern world, squawking through his car-radio at jarring intervals, seemed very far away. It was like night in the kampong again, but blacker, vaster and with the secretly comforting knowledge that he could, at any time when it felt as though the night was closing in too tight, step on the accelerator and take off.

She had wanted to know what it was like, sitting in his police car like a sentinel of the night, and he had weakly agreed to bring her along in breach of all the rules. (Sit low, he’d kept hissing at her while he steered his way through the city; it was only when the highway unfurled itself before him in all its black plenitude that he could breathe again.) At three am in the morning, she was unnervingly alert (yet why shouldn’t she be? she slept all day), curled up in his passenger seat and running her fingers along the dashboard.

“So this is what you see. All those nights when you don’t come back.”

“Why do you care?”

Another car shot past on high beam, yellow lights raking the sky, rocking his police car in its layby. He looked at his speed monitoring device: one hundred and seventy. The driver was asking to be killed on a moonless night like this with a treacherous curving stretch of the highway looming up just ahead. But he let it go.

“I wanted to see,” she said, “where God doesn’t enter into it.”

He looked away. An absurd resentment came over him that she was trying to drag him down to her level. He wanted to tell her they were not the same. I sin for a principle. To look after my own. But you?

The rains had stopped. The monsoon was unusually long that year, culminating in a downpour that had continued, with varying degrees of intensity, for almost three days. The drumming rhythm of the rain had seeped into his brain, playing tricks with it; one day, he walked into the inspector’s sanctum and asked for a transfer to narcotics. He did not tell Deanna. The wet days and nights turned his room into a cocoon; they fell asleep at night to the sound of water sluicing into the drains and clattering like gunfire on the zinc roofs of makeshift shacks behind their building. “I like the rain,” Deanna had said, “I wish it would never stop,” and he knew what she meant, even though it made street patrols wet, hazardous work.

The rains had lifted and suddenly he felt restless, cooped up in his rathole room. He suggested a drink at the hawker centre. “Must we?” Deanna said, but she got up and slid into her sandals. A light wind brought with it the smell of a freshly rainwashed city; thousands of points of reflected street-light glistened from wet, slick pavements. Her sandals quickly becoming soaked, she took them off and walked barefoot. Her hand was on his shoulder. Happiness. Was that what this feeling was, of total immersion in the moment? He’d always thought that only the very young and the very old could be truly happy—happiness was born of obliviousness, of truncated memories and garbled time. He turned to Deanna, but the sensation was already gone: to think it was to lose it.

“My friend,” Halim said, pumping his hand, “you take the trouble to come here, after your shift. I’m honoured.”

Who was Halim? No-one really. Just an acquaintanceship the policeman had struck up while on his patrols. No-one that he gave any real consideration to, not until that night, when he saw Halim’s glance alight on Deanna in grave astonishment. (Too late he remembered that Halim was a pious man who had quoted religious texts to him in their infrequent conversations.) And then it was as though he were seeing Deanna for the first time too in her flimsy dress and all her barely-dampened sensuality and he wished he could just turn on his heel and leave but it was too late for that. The shame had entered him like a poison.

It was the shame, working its way through his blood, that made him say to her when they were seated, though he knew it would be better not to, “Why do you always dress like that?”

She stirred her coffee, her face assuming the thin, fox-like aspect it always did when she sensed she was under attack. “Like what?”

“Your dress shows too much.”

“Since when does it bother you?”

“It bothers me when other men look at you.”

“It’s not my dressing that bothers you. What bothers you is what other people think.”

Knowing she was right, he could only say feebly, “If you know so much, why don’t you give consideration to my feelings?”

She looked at him incredulously. “I’m not your wife.”

He stood. “Let’s go.”

She said, with demure sarcasm, “If you wish.”

They threaded their way among the packed tables. The whole world seemed to be out that night, eating, coughing, laughing, talking, clattering in a cacophony and a fug of cigarette smoke that the policeman suddenly found oppressive: he wanted only to get away.

He heard someone shout Deanna’s name. He had time only to see her mouth tighten and feel her hand tugging him, urgently, towards the entrance, before he turned to find a man bearing down on them. Tall, mixed race, his white blood showing itself in the pointed, quivering nose and the light brown hair. He wore a tight fitting t-shirt and a narrow pencil moustache. He had the kind of seedy good looks that reminded the policeman of his father.

“Where’s my money?” the man was demanding, in English and Malay. “Where’s my money?”

“What money?” the policeman said. He could feel Deanna’s hand twisting in his, trying to pull free; he only gripped harder.

“My money! That she stole! From me! To buy her pills!” After each exclamation mark, he spat on the ground. In his agitation, his sleeve tugged upwards to reveal a red tattooed heart slashed through with the word Deanna.

“You’re mistaken,” the policeman told him. He turned to go, but the man lunged over his shoulder to grab a fistful of Deanna’s dress. She gave a muffled scream. Without thinking, the policeman whirled round and hit the man square in the face, a blow that sent him sprawling across a table, scattering food and diners in all directions. The place erupted in an uproar, people shouting and gesticulating. The policeman had a glimpse of Halim dashing out from his stall, mouth agape, hands clutching his head in a theatrical display of consternation. And now Deanna had managed to wrest her hand away and she was gone, running, stumbling, pushing, overtaken by a pure instinct for flight.

He chased her down the street. It wasn’t a long chase; she wearied quickly and didn’t resist when he pulled her into an alley and pushed her against the wall.

“Who was that man?”

She looked him in the eye. “He used to be my pimp.”

She must have seen something in his face because she flinched. He took his hands away from her shoulders.

He pointed out, “Your name was tattooed on his arm.”

She shrugged impatiently. “So?”

“So he must have been more than your pimp.”

“Maybe he liked the name Deanna. Who knows?”

He did not like her when she was defiant, when she came back with answers that were like whiplash in their speed and ferocity. To his utter surprise, he heard himself saying, “I think we should get married.” And realised, even as he released his grip on her shoulders, that this was what he had been building up to ever since the night of the fair. She had him in her thrall and he resented it. Marriage would turn the tables, redress the balance of power between them. Marriage would be an act of munificence, charity, on his part. Making her his own. He looked after his own. And as his wife she would have to acknowledge his will.

She stared at him, then burst out laughing. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

They walked back to the room in silence. He could feel her watching his every move and for the first time since he’d met her he wished that he could be alone, just to think. He turned off the light and lay down on the mattress and made himself lie still, even as she slid in beside him. “Talk to me.” “What about?” She stood then and helped herself to one of his cigarettes. He watched the lighter flare in the dark. “He means nothing to me. He’s just dirt, scum.” The words rolled over him like a wave. He slept, heavily.

“Talk to me.”

“What about?”

The tables were turned; usually it was he who wanted to talk, while she fended off what she perceived as attempts to pry. He felt no inclination to talk; what was wrong with that? He had no intention of being cruel, so why was she keeping at him like a small yapping dog? Talk to me. One night, as he was falling asleep, he heard her voice, barely audible, come at him out of the dark. “We can get married. If that’s what you want.” There was a note of anger in her voice, but he chose to ignore it.

At night, lying beside him, she made a pillow of her body for him and he burrowed into and held her without moving. The nights were cool and after the food stalls below had closed the breeze would bring the very faint smell of frangipani from the stunted trees in the street. A childhood habit came back to him, of trying to catch the exact moment when his eyes closed and he drifted off. He never did, of course, and he would wake stiff from their sleeping entwined through the night. That should have been enough for him: Deanna, her nightly presence, her sinewy adolescent body. He should have been smart enough to know this and not tinker with it. Not hanker for permanence but to take his happiness where he could find it. But he wasn’t.

There was a certain side-lane off Jalan—, which he never visited if he could help it. At the corner stood a crumbling mosque, its walls a shabby blue, where he and Deanna had been married. It did not escape the notice of the imam that Deanna seemed vague about the simplest personal details of her life. Her age, for instance. Whether she’d previously been married. The pace of the ceremony, short as it was, seemed excruciatingly slow to the policeman; he did not intend to walk out an unmarried man. No-one came to the wedding; no-one had been invited. It was a squalid, furtive ritual and they were both silent as they emerged at last into the long slanting rays of the late afternoon sun.

He had always supposed he would marry one day, but not like this. This felt like the end of something, not the beginning. He had taken his grandmother’s injunction to heart and made her his own but even then he had a premonition that in doing so she would, finally, elude him. For want of something better to do, they walked to a nearby park, a handkerchief of greenery between two buildings. Deanna took off her shoes, ignoring the sign that forbade walking on the grass, while he watched from a bench.

“Well?” she called.

He echoed her, reluctantly: “Well?”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?”

And he would recall, again and again, like a snippet of film that had snagged in the projector and kept replaying itself, the way she’d cocked her head and looked back at him and how the new ankle-length dress she’d bought for the day had flowed about her hips like water.

The day he married her was the day his marriage ended. Of course he’d always known it was there, the manic self-destructiveness lurking just below the surface like water never quite coming to the boil. Wasn’t it what had attracted him to her in the first place, if he was honest? He knew he was himself indestructibly sane, that he came with his own inbuilt, permanently-hinged safety catch and there were times he felt imprisoned by his own sanity, the sheer impossibility of giving way to heady irresponsibility. Craziness in others, beginning with his own mother, had always held a sneaking, seductive appeal for him. But his mother’s version had been a low-grade, controllable variety, amenable to another’s strong will. Deanna’s was not. Marriage, to her, was the final turn of the key in the prison lock and she devoted herself immediately to escape.

The cunning of the addict: it was a many-headed serpent, a hydra he could never slay. He suspected her of doping again. There was an evasiveness about her, the hint of a new secret life. Yet, try as he might, he could never catch her in the act of buying her poison, popping a pill, or even discovering where she hid them. She developed a habit of drifting in and out at all hours without explanation; when he questioned her, she would fling herself in a chair and light a cigarette with one slender leg drawn up, regarding him with the bold, unsmiling look she’d never used on him before they were married. He learnt to get up, catlike, in the middle of the night to rifle through her meagre possessions, looking for things he didn’t want to find.

Nights, she would turn the radio up loud, her eyes fixed on him in what seemed like a challenge. (But a challenge to what?) “Dance with me,” she’d say. Always, he said, stubbornly, “I can’t dance.” So she would dance alone, every small gesture or turn of her head feeling like the tightening of an invisible cord around his throat.

There were times when he wondered if his memory was playing tricks on him, that there must have been moments, days, even in the midst of the madness, when things came together with a perfect clarity of pitch. Moments when she still made love to him with that cool detachment of hers that drove him wild; moments when, watching her sleep in the streetlight, he would try to believe that things would work out. That she would settle down. Slip into normalcy. But the outlines of those moments were blurry, gauzy, and they kept getting overlaid by those other images, the ones he didn’t want to remember, the ones that had a frantic, kinetic energy and that brought him roaring out of sleep in the middle of the night for months after she left, to find himself drenched in sweat and his heart racing.

“I need money.”

“What for?”

“Food. Necessities.” She pronounces the word as if it were an obscenity. He has stopped giving her money; he does the shopping and accounting, he even buys her clothes. He is afraid, so afraid, that she will use whatever he gives her to buy drugs. The fact that he no longer gives her money does not go unnoticed, though she is too wily to attack him directly. “I’d like to a buy a little canary bird,” she says. “A little yellow canary to do my bidding. I’d feed her, clothe her and put her in a cage. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

His hands are round her throat. He sees from her eyes this is what she wants, there is a kind of delirium in her goading. She tilts her head. “What’s stopping you?”

Her dress flowing around her hips like water. Ricewater frothing over the rim of the saucepan on the stove, slopping onto the floor of an empty room, its door ajar. He slams out of the room, hurtles down the stairs. Puddles of dirty rainwater have pooled in the potholed back lane behind his block; they glimmer with a false magicality under the night lights. Deanna treads barefoot through the puddles, with the elegance of someone making her way down a catwalk. Three giggling children and a mangy cat follow her, a band of rag-tag disciples. He shouts her name and the children imitate him: “Deanna!” Cuffing them round the ears, he sends them away crying. The girl stops, with unerring instinct, beneath one of the street lamps, turning her beatific smile and pinwheeling eyes on him.

Things can go wrong, he learnt, with terrifying speed, like a plane ploughing into the ground at hundreds of miles an hour and exploding in a fireball and a cloudburst of debris. And the wrongness is irreversible, the good irrecoverable. The crash site smoulders while bits of metal wink incongruously in the sun. If this were a film, he could rewind the tape, reassemble the debris and stitch back the pieces until the superstructure is gleamingly new again, but this is life. And there is no going back.

Her life was all boom and bust, highs and lows, periods of normalcy where everything was a flat staleness followed by the big blowouts that nearly killed her and sent her, meekly, back to the normalcy until the cycle began again. They could have had a sort of life together if he’d been willing to fit himself into this pattern. Accept her for what she was, but he wasn’t. And she didn’t want to be reformed. Saved. Made new. Led into the Light. Or whatever the hell he decided to call his overzealous bloody interference in her descent into the abyss. Or so she informed him during the long, hysterical days that mark the end of their marriage, days of screaming fights that had the neighbours banging on their walls to silence them, days of long, sullen walks around the city that resolved nothing. Days when she threatened to jump from the window if he didn’t give her the money to get her dose. Days when she held a knife to her throat and when he said, “Go ahead,” tried to stick it in his hand instead. Sleepless nights merged into hungover days and he began to have difficulty distinguishing his nightmares from his waking life. In his nightmares, he dreamt that she was dead. Awake, he knew that he was the one who had killed her.

One morning he woke and knew with a flat, absolute certainty, even before he’d opened his eyes, that she was gone. Her absence was something palpable, a force sucked out of the air. When he did sit up and look round, he saw that she had removed all traces of her existence as cleanly as if she’d never set foot in the place. The room was as monastic as the day he’d moved in. He hurled the plastic chair against the wall and it bounced off and landed squarely on its legs again, mocking him.

The uncompleted shopping mall lay marooned, a massive concrete outcrop, in the grassy wasteland, its unclad upper floors gaping like cavities at the sky. Cruising down the highway, he had seen it often and never given it another thought; it was just another orphan of the recession, one of many pitting the city skyline. In the distance, the rumble of traffic on the highway was just audible, like surf on a distant beach. Mounds of gravel lay in conical heaps across what would have been the carpark and a dumpster blocked the main entrance to the building.

A Sikh jaga sat on a rattan mattress behind the dumpster. He looked with suspicion at the policeman. “Nobody here, officer, nobody here at all.”

It was late evening, the sun sinking rapidly in streaky rashes of red and yellow. In an hour, less, this place would be swallowed up by the night and be indistinguishable from it except as a faint ghostly outline rearing out of the dark to startle travellers on the highway.

It was madness to detour here on nothing more than a tip from Halim. Who would operate a vice ring in this desolation? Yet to ask the question was to acknowledge the perfect logic of it. No-one would think of it, therefore it had to be. He tried again. “I want to see the big boss. I’m not here on official business. You understand? I’m here as a customer. A customer.”

The jaga still looked unconvinced. Impatiently, the policeman pulled out his wallet. “How much?”

He gained entry into a bombsite, a cathedral to destruction. Rubble littered the atrium; exposed pipes ran along the walls and clumps of wires hung from the remnants of the ceiling. It was strangely bright, the sunlight tumbling in a long straight shaft from a skylight. A couple of crows beat a hasty, cawing retreat at his entrance; he saw they had been picking at a packet of rice thrown amidst the rubble. The rice looked fresh. He picked his way towards the EXIT sign, as the jaga had told him to do, and knocked on a door that looked new and reinforced.

The man with the tattoo opened the door. The moustache was gone. He wore a business shirt and sharply-pressed pants, but the same seedy, underworld handsomeness was still intact. Seeing the policeman, he tried to slam shut the door but the policeman had wedged his foot in the doorway. He placed one hand on the man’s chest and shoved him smartly back.

“Bloody jaga, he didn’t tell me you were a policeman—”

“I’m not here as a policeman. OK? Relax. Sit down. Shut up.”

He was in an office, rudimentary but functional. He saw a fax machine and a laptop, heard the thrum of air-conditioning. Nice, very nice. He turned back to look at the man with the tattoo, who’d collapsed in a chair and was watching him with the blank wariness that he knew so well from his own face. The man didn’t recognise him. Well, why should he? The policeman was just a passing painful encounter from the past. “I’d like a girl.”

“No girls here. You’re mistaken.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t trust policemen.”

“I pay cash. I’ll pay twice the going rate.”

The man with the tattoo watched him carefully. “Why?”

“There’s a girl you have I want to try.” A long pause. “Her name’s Deanna.” Another long pause. The man said, “Let me see your identification.” He took the ID and wrote down the details. His expression, as he passed it back, was still wary but also undecided; he didn’t want to turn away custom. Again, the policeman fished out his wallet and counted out the notes.

Mollified, the man said, “Deanna’s the best.”

The policeman said, smiling, “So I’ve heard.” For months he had dreamt of this moment: the neat hole in the centre of the forehead, the look of stupefaction under the slowly caking blood. For some reason, his fantasies of violence always had a purplish tinge, like a bruise; as the violet haze cleared, he saw the man busying himself with a set of keys, still very much alive. His hands shook a little with the effort of keeping them away from the gun at his hip.

Oblivious to his own narrow escape, the man said, “This way.”

Corridors: a warren, a labyrinth of them. He lost track, while the man with the tattoo strode ahead at a fast clip, like a guerilla who didn’t particularly care to linger in territory he had infiltrated.

“Stop.”

He found himself gazing into a dormitory, a cattle market of dozing women. Windows whitewashed to stop prying eyes, drying lines of clothes strung across the ceiling, a smell in his nostrils of too much sleep and too much powder and perfume that yet could not quite disguise the staleness of too many female bodies in a confined space.

The girl in the last bed stumbled out at a jerk of the man’s head. The policeman did not look round, but he knew she was following them into a room with a mattress on the floor and a rigged-up air-conditioning system. Again, the windows were whitewashed and the sole light came from a floorlamp,—over which a red batik cloth had been flung in a forlorn attempt at decoration. The policeman recognised the cloth; it had once been draped over the lamp in his room.

They were alone. She looked at him properly for the first time. Then she smiled her slow, beatific smile. “Why—it’s you.”

Now he had found her he felt dizzy, afflicted by a kind of vertigo as though he were looking down at both of them from a great seesawing height. He spoke slowly, in between the pounding in his brain.

“I looked for you. Everywhere. Everywhere.”

In the places they had gone to, in the case files, in the dead and missing persons reports, which he pored over obsessively until they began to invade his dreams, this kingdom of the lost and murdered. He’d begun to wish she were dead; he’d longed for her death with the hope that others reserved for news of life; her death would have been his release.

She came over and raised a hand to his cheek; he struck her hand away.

“You’re still angry. After all this time? Of course, I forgot. You were always angry.”

She’d cropped her hair, which ended now in a lank bob just below her ears. Gone too was the adolescent thinness, replaced by a strange pneumatic fullness in the face and in the thickened waist. Only the dress, the blue and white dress she had bought in her first week with him, was the same. He realised, with a kind of shock, that he would not have recognised her on the street looking like this.

“How did you find me? But you were always good at that, weren’t you? I’ve been looking out for you. I knew you’d show. I never thought you would turn up, all those times I got into trouble, and you always did. You were so dependable.”

The loquacity was new, but it was a slow, effortful loquacity: her voice drifted like a hand trailing through seaweed; her movements had a dreamy, slurry quality to them. No more pinwheeling eyes; no more methamphetamines. She’d chosen sedation instead.

She repeated, “You were so dependable.”

He asked, bluntly, “Why did you leave?”

“Why did I leave?” He wanted to shake her, to douse her in cold water until she broke free of her lethargy screaming. “Because I couldn’t see myself playing Mary Magdalene to your Jesus Christ for the rest of my life.”

“What the hell are you talking about?’ “Sorry. I forgot you didn’t go to a mission school.” She’d always had the knack, he remembered now, of making him feel stupid, uneducated. She was speaking again. “And you’re still a policeman.”

He said, with unexpected bitterness, “Yes.”

After she’d gone, a kind of paralysis had set in. He’d sleepwalked through the days, while the nights brought with them their tormenting insomnia, their vivid delusions that she was there beside him where she’d always been. His transfer to narcotics was approved but he turned it down; he could no longer remember the impulse that had prompted the request. He began to volunteer for night duty to avoid his rathole room but even then there was no escape. She was in the car with him while he waited in his layby, her voice sibilant in his ear; she was with him while he cruised down the highway, headlights staking a path through the darkness.

He said, and they could both hear the anger beginning to lap at the edges of his voice, “Well, aren’t you going to make love to me? I’ve paid for this hour.”

“If you want me to.”

In truth, he did not want her to, not like this; this new sluggishness repelled him. He kicked at the lamp in the corner, shattering the bulb and plunging the room into near-darkness. She stumbled backwards towards the door with a little cry. “Stop this,” he heard himself saying, “stop this.” Though whether he meant their banter or the life she had chosen for herself, he couldn’t be sure. “Listen,” he said with renewed urgency. “You can come away with me.”

He felt, rather than saw, her shake her head.

“Why not?”

“I think you’d better go.”

“Tell me why.”

She said, and for the first time her voice sounded almost normal, the way it used to, “This is me. This is what I am.”

“Is it him? Do you love him?”

“I detest him. But he lets me be who I am.”

“Who you are—who you are—you are not this. You only think you are.”

But he could feel the futility of his words beating like the wings of a maimed bird on the air.

“I tried with you. I really did. Do you believe me? But I’m not like you. I’m not responsible. I don’t want to be. It’s just too much work.” And now he could hear the old Deanna in her voice, the one that had led him out to the highway in the middle of the night just to see where God didn’t enter into it.

“I don’t understand. Make me understand.”

“I’m not afraid. I have nothing to be afraid of. Whereas you. You’re afraid of everything. What people will think. What people will say. What’s in the afterlife. I don’t care. I’m free.”

“You’re not making sense. You’re not free. You hate yourself.”

“So do you.”

“Yes, yes, and that’s why we can help each other—” He stopped. He could feel her sliding away from him, back into her trance. It was getting hard to breathe; either there was not enough air or it was heavy with dust, but a strange kind of dust, the dust of the innards of a building collapsing slowly within itself. “Deanna.” Clumsily, he moved towards her. His eyes had not adjusted well to the dark; he had not noticed her hand resting on the doorknob. With one twist of the hand, she was gone.

He stumbled after her. She was nowhere to be seen and he could not remember where the dormitory was. At the end of the corridor he could see the last of the evening light tumbling into the atrium below. He began to run towards it.