Portraits

ONE
When he left for work he peeled off the layers of home that had accumulated around him. The first was his wife, who would kiss him goodbye the first thing in the morning, because she had to rush off to teach in junior college. Like an unwanted rind his house clothes were discarded in the laundry bin. Next, the children conveniently of schoolgoing age would leave, without question of how voluntary or involuntary the act of going to school was. It was not a question of  choice, or even of necessity. No question had ever arisen in these matters of life. 

Mr Tan was grateful that the family was not one of those families. No, as easily as he dropped his clothing, he dropped his children into a neat container for domestic affairs. Then it was off to work, and to the life of bossing his people a little, and treating his superiors with the most politic combination of deference and peermanship. Occasionally, when in a good mood, he would casually brag about the latest gift Mrs Tan had received, or the eldest aiming to enter Harvard. He was a most ordinary man. 

TWO

Her morning routine was precise, unmarred by the demands of others. She cleaned up. She pulled on each item of clothing in quiet reflection but with certitude, like a warrior on the edge of an impending battle. The blouse was followed by the skirt followed by eau de toilette, necklace and make up. She made sure her work clothes were crisp, always cutting a neat silhouette. Nothing would link her to the frump and weariness of middle age.

 As she clicked across bank corridors in no-nonsense black leather three-inch heels, she prepared her face for the twenty faces that would surround her, that would make demands and no concessions, that would declare the improbable and denounce the factual, that would not listen but react, that would agree but fail to act. A skilled strategist, she would assess the situation and decide whether to take the easiest win -- the influential but silent retiree in the corner -- or go for the kill by taking down the ringleader, or play one group off another. When things were bad, she would bide her time and influence from the shadows, through the coffee talk and casual lunches, even going so far as to attend the evening drinking sessions which bored her. 

There had been another retiree once -- one she was rather fond of for his avuncular habit of asking after her health. He never failed to do so, even after the few meetings when he had sharply disagreed with her methods. She knew he had three children and seven grandchildren. He had been fond of talking about them. She felt she knew a little of each person through their father: the eldest son who was an Oxford grad, in-house counsel for an investment bank; the younger son, a romantic, an excellent musician with no interest in luxury so his father had set him up with a guitar shop of his own; and the youngest, a daughter, petite and unassuming, but already a vice president in a pharmaceutical firm. 

She had dropped by at this retiree's funeral. She wanted to bring the flowers personally, but nobody had thought to inform the company that the family had requested for no wreaths. So she was forced to leave it in a corner, as discretely as she could. As she walked towards the coffin she felt each lily staring accusations at her. When she shook the hands of the two sons and the daughter and introduced herself, they gave her a blank look. "From the company," she said. Knowing nods, and then their gaze turned to the other guests queuing behind her. 

----

Dealing in Death

Blood bespeckles the carcasses laid in neat rows across the stainless steel surfaces. Beside them, behind rusty iron bars, future victims look on. The cages are barely a foot high--just enough to live in, but not enough room to raise one's head and plead for clemency, for a momentary reprieve. One cage happens to be level with the block, and a young fellow gazes with curiosity at the glint of knife as it swings up and then down onto a former cellmate. I wonder if he knows what he sees, or if that cold, calm gaze means that he has accepted his status in the food chain.

"Dua ayam kampung," my father requests. We are shopping for a dinner party for the extended family. I look back at the trolley basket, at the parcels of other cold, dead things. They are more slimy, but there isn't much blood to look at, and there isn't much that looks back. The lady opens the cage, the chickens rush squawking to the corners, like a game of musical chairs. One doesn't find a safe chair. It is stuck at the fringe of bodies pressing against the iron. She drags the slow one out by the neck, pinioning its wings behind it before she places it on the weighing scale. Satisfied, she hands it to her assistant. Its nervous clucking rises to hysterical screeches as he carries it away, out of sight.

The chicken seller tells us to return in fifteen minutes. My father and I oblige. We head to the butchers' section where the pork sellers' stalls are. The floor is wet with melted ice dripping off the fishmongers' tables as we pass by. Enthusiastic stall hands wave fish in our faces, opening their gills to show their redness. "Ini cantik, very nice fish, sir, twelve ringgit a kg." "Miss, miss any fish for you? Sotong?" But its eye was dull and jellied. A fresh fish looks back. Even when dead, there's a gleam in the eye that takes a while to disappear. Beneath the table, a blue crate of swirling black things. Several whiskers protrude from the mass and sway in the air. It's a glistening mass of catfish, the layer on top writhing their way below, drowning in the air above; the layer below struggling to the top, crushed beneath their fellows.

I turn the corner after my father. The white-tiled walls aren't so clean here. They have a mottled appearance, stained with brownish streaks and specks. Old blood, maybe. Huge hooks suspend various parts of meat, even whole carcasses, from long steel bars. The butcher takes hold of one chunk, slices a hunk off it and chops it up for a customer. The pinkish meat left on the hook sways gently in tandem with the knife. We order trotters. The leg is difficult to cut. The butcher's chopper gets lodged in the bone, so he raises the whole leg with the chopper, and smashes it down on the board until it cuts through. He does this several times, then gathers the pieces into a pink plastic bag.

Notes From Home

Sakura plant in bad condition. Dad seems to have lost interest in maintaining it since the kingfisher ate all the guppies from the pot.

***

Family dinner last night. Gulf with same-age cousin Ching gets wider each time. We sat at the table after dinner. I was thinking of the requirements of my Milton essay. From the corner of my eye I could see her shift.

- The old days, huh, Alissa, those were the great times lah. The old stories are the best.
I smile, but I don't offer to play remember with her. It's a family habit to regale each other with stories forgotten or familiar at the end of the meal. She starts it off instead, pulling a random memory from one of our annual family holidays. We're clannish that way. Can't go off on a holiday without extending an invitation to uncles, aunts and grandparents.

- Remember anot, that time in Pangkor? We took torchlight to look for crabs?
- Which time? You have to specify. We went so many times I don't remember.
- That time..I'm not sure you were there or not.

I cannot bring myself to answer in our lingo. Maybe I'm feeling contrary. Maybe I don't dare to because I know I've lost the sense of rhythm. Afraid I might sound false. So I answer curtly, knowing she could hardly follow me.

- But which one? Was it the last trip? You need to specify, otherwise how can I tell? I think that must have been three years ago.

Bro steps in to say that I had been in England at that time. Yes, I had chosen to visit the houses of dead white writers over returning for the largest family holiday in years. Even the family in Australia flew over to join them. Ching continues, undeterred. She straightens in her seat, drawn up by happy memories unmarred by the demands of morose telebanking customers. A familiar mischievous glint in her eyes. Without even saying so, she skips to one of our earliest mutual memories--another crab hunt of antiquity. I cannot fail to identify it.

- Aiyoh that time Andrew and Chester take the torchlight to look for crabs, there, at night in Port Dickson one. Then they chase the big one and Andrew whacked it. Then Nigel you said, "die already, why you whack," then Andrew keep whacking and whacking and say "I don't care!"
She imitated Andrew's manic voice and his frantic arm movements. He had always been the initiator of all our adventures, whether it was venturing out on mud flats only to sink knee deep into mud and almost get sucked under, or throwing firecrackers at the lion's feet at a lion dance. It's been years since he left to the US. Nobody remembers his wife's name. But we prayed for them when we said grace over dinner. Someone remembered that it was their birthday (they share the same birthday). Now it is Maxi, his son, who is the evening's entertainment in his place, sole KL representative of the fourth generation. A displaced US citizen, the family's first ABC, and not a little confused with his Malaysian relations. He seems to call my cousin William his papa, who is actually his uncle. He must learn to live the life of one who belongs to the clan, loved and claimed by all--until his parents take him back again.

- Yarlah, I don't know why he kept whacking, says Nigel.
- And Liam so cruel uh he, he pull the hermit crab out of its shell. Eiyer, Ching intones, and winces in disgust.
Nigel turns to explain to Mei Qi our Australian cousin's cruel talent for deshelling hermit crabs. Their inside bodies were a wormy purple tendril--just seeing their delicacy gave you the shivers. If the crab submitted to being pulled, it survived; but if it clung too tightly to its calcite home, it ended up torn in half, and Liam would proceed to the next one in our bucket of live catch. We also raced our chosen hermit crabs on a table at the holiday bungalow. I could not have been more than eight years old.

As for Mei Qi. I only found out yesterday that Mei Qi had officially become part of the family. Dad had said in the car when he picked me up from the bus station,
- William and Mei Qi signed the registry on Valentine's Day. Probably they'll get married in November.
Later I asked bro,
- Why so secretive?
- No, no, not secretive. William went to Ah Ma first and told her.
My grandmother is the grand matriarch. No holiday plans, no Chinese New Year celebration, is planned without her consent. Everyone else hears through the grapevine.

Sometimes my family forgets to tell me someone has been hospitalized, or they choose to save bad news for when they see me face to face. Somedays I worry that I'll return to find that somebody has died without me knowing it. All this travelling back and forth, this switching of worlds...I've learnt to build a shell around myself, a compound of the best things and the best people in both places to protect me. Hermit wanderers carry their homes on their backs. It is our burden, our protection and--if we cannot live without it--possibly also our destruction.

***
Bro wakes me up early for church. We walk out to the bus stop in the dawn light. The street lights are not working again.
- Is it wet? The lady at the seat asks aloud, in order to warn me politely that the tiled concrete bench might hide a puddle in the darkness.
- No, I don't think so.
I feel the bench and sit down. Two ladies on their morning walk pass by. I recognise the voice of my childhood best friend's mother.
- Hello aunty.
- Hello.
She pauses.
-Eh, Alissa. Sorry ah, didn't recognise you. You...grow big already.
That's what she always says. In her eyes I'm always the scrawny bespectacled piece of awkwardness who appeared at the gate to invite her equally awkward, bespectacled daughter to the playground after homework had been completed.
-Do you have two ringgit? Bro asks for the third time.
- Yes, I say without checking.
Four elderly men pass by on their morning walk. Two cuckoos call to each other across the playground in a series of piercing whistles. I look to the right, down the road to catch a glimpse of the bus as it rounds the corner. No bus in sight. Squares of light in the far distance, like jewels strewn across the narrow band of blue velvet horizon, crowned the trees. Not stars, but hovering lights from distant high-rise apartments, whose blue silhouettes had receded and merged into the shadowy sky. I had not known. Even the city could be beautiful.
- Do you have two ringgit? asks my brother.

Akisha

Thursday Session 8: Rewriting Exercise

Bear with me. This was written several years ago at an age when woodland fantasies still had some appeal. It has a similar theme to the Lighthouse story. I prefer the Lighthouse story. Which do you prefer?

****

There was a land where rain came more often than the sun for one half of the year, and sun came more often than the rain for the next half. This happened for every year as long as the sun continued to chase its lover the rain, who continued to run away, crying at the sun’s great heat.

Akisha loved both the sun and the rain. When it rained she stayed indoors and practiced the sword in the sheltered yard with her father, or if Ruika was around he would shoot at the straw balls she threw for him; sometimes Ruika would teach her the bow, too, but she was never as good at it as she was at the sword. Akisha had never yet touched a metal sword, or hurt anyone even with her wooden practice sword. Father refused to say if he had killed anyone, which was one of the ways Akisha knew that he had. He would come in with a heavy walk, sometimes with a scratch or a wound, and he would not answer when she asked him, “Did you kill anyone today?” “Hush!” Mother would say. Then she would push Akisha to the kitchen to bring the lemongrass ointment from its place in the cupboard.

Akisha stopped asking that question one day when her parents gave her permission to follow Ruika hunting. This time it was no straw ball but a rabbit hopping about in the grass, stopping every now and then to nibble at the stalks. Ruika gave it a little more time than he normally would so he could tell Akisha about how a hunter stalks his prey.

“Always stand downwind of the animal. Become grass, become rock, become the rain that falls on the earth.”

“I know that already. Quick, shoot it before it runs away.”

“Be quiet! And don’t be impatient. They can sense danger, even if they don’t see, hear, or smell you. The smallest movement…”

He also wanted to show off his shooting skill, so he let it hop a little further away.

“Oh, it’s getting--” but her words were interrupted by the bow’s twang as the arrow hissed towards its target. For a moment the rabbit seemed only alarmed—perhaps the arrow had missed—as it jumped high into the air. But then it landed on its side, gave two twitches, and stopped moving.

“Yes, a good shot!” said Ruika, punching his bow into the air. He usually celebrated with a little self-satisfied smile and sometimes one who looked closely would think his eyes sparkled: the exuberance today was for Akisha’s benefit. Yet she did not praise him. She stood up and ran to the little brown heap on the ground. “You killed it,” she told Ruika, and he did not understand why she looked hurt, as if he had said something nasty to her.

Two more rabbits and a pigeon followed in place of the straw balls. Akisha helped skin them with her small knife. One rabbit, the last, had not been hit cleanly; it was still twitching, its hind leg describing feeble circles as if it still imagined it could escape. Akisha held it by the ears and slid her blade across its throat in one swift movement. Something warm and wet trickled onto her fingers, and without opening her eyes she knew it was blood. She heaved a sigh and the sudden release in her chest made her realize that she had been holding her breath, too. Ruika was resting on a stone, looking at her with a lopsided smile. Not wanting to disappoint her brother, she continued her work with business-like alacrity. The animals were soft and warm to the touch, but as she sliced through the skin and her blade hit flesh the warmth was already ebbing; the pinkish flesh looked glazed. Blood oozed lethargically out of the wound.

When it was done, Akisha wiped her knife on the grass and said in a soft voice that she never knew she possessed, “Let’s go home.”

At home, Mother asked, “What did you get?” Akisha laid the dead pigeon on the table. Ruika recounted the day’s killings with pride as he surrendered the rabbits. One had been brown, and the other two black, but without their fur coats they were indistinguishable flabby masses. Akisha wondered if people looked like that underneath their skin too. Mother praised Ruika and tutted at Akisha’s sun-browned face: “Oh, what is to become of you, if you go out and play hunter with your brother. I tell Papa to keep you at home, but no, he trains you with the sword and arrow.” Mother always put up a fuss and Ruika told her it was something to do with getting married.

A week later, when Akisha’s father returned wounded and weary from one of his trips, she crept onto his lap and clung round his neck and hugged him tight as her mother washed his wounds. She wondered what he had done that week to keep the village safe; how many of the bandits and Southerners he fought were marksmen; whether they had the metal arrows which Ruika said could pierce armour. She knew he would not say anything if she asked, so she shifted till she could whisper into his ear, “I’m glad you’re back.” "As long as you're here to welcome me, I'll come back." Akisha thought of the rabbit leaping high into the air, caught in the sharp surprise of an unsuspected arrow. For the first time she realized that what Father said might not always be a promise he could keep. But it was good enough.

The Lighthouse That Fell Into The Sea

Timothy ran his foot along the edge of a wave as it pulled away from the shore, leaving a thin crust of foam that eventually faded into the sand. It was a relief to be by the water’s edge, away from the sun-scorched sand that he had run over to get here. He looked up a moment to view the sea in its entirety, but it was too vast. To the left was a promontory cut off by rocks and overhanging trees; from the very tip of the cliff sprang a lighthouse, tower and balcony and all, like a bizarre overgrown mushroom. It blazed white in the sun. To his right, the bay tapered off in another series of huge boulders. It seemed as if the cliffs were breaking apart, however slowly, and falling into the sea. Timothy wondered with alarm if—the next time he came—the lighthouse might have followed the rocks too, becoming a fossilized wreck. It would be famous. People would visit it and say, “this is the lighthouse that fell into the sea.”

He frowned a little. He remembered that someone had held his hand; they had looked at the lighthouse and a voice from somewhere above his head had said to him, “People will visit and say, ‘this is the lighthouse that fell into the sea.’” He remembered that the lighthouse had been grey and crumbly then, with a little tree sticking out the balcony. The memory seemed as far away and as hazy as the ships at the horizon’s edge, so unattainable. He could not tell if the ships were floating on air or on water.

The moment passed and he plunged into the water, spluttering at its sudden coolness and the saltiness in his mouth, then gurgling with delight. Perhaps he could swim to the island in-between. Or maybe he would swim as far as he could to the left and climb up the rocks to the lighthouse. All seemed like possibilities—the weather so bright and warm, the sea so mild. Janice called to him: “Whoay! Don’t go too far!” She was already running down the beach towards him, hand on head to keep her favourite straw hat from flying away. He had asked her why she wore such a ridiculously floppy thing. She insisted it was style, “the way the movie stars do it.” He contemplated his English teacher asking him, “define: sister.” Sisters are creatures who panic easily and who like to imitate movie stars.

Timothy poked his head out of the water. What was the fuss about? It was then that he realized the current had pulled him further out than he had intended to go when plunging in headfirst; that the gentle incline which first fooled him had given way to a treacherous depth his eight-year-old legs could not reach; that even though Janice’s hair was streaming behind her as she ran, she didn’t seem to get any larger or any nearer. His right foot hit down and touched only cold water that dragged him down further. He spluttered, thrashed. He hit the air and gasped.

He heard a sound of splashing other than his own.

The sun threw a glare in his eyes and the salt water stung his throat. Turning away, he caught a flash of red and white. Ma was standing at the lighthouse and waving at him. It was just near enough that he could make out her figure in her favourite red dress. She could not tell, of course. He screamed, but the effort ended in a sputter of water as a wave rolled over his head in one tranquil motion. And then another wave, and another.

And there was a sound of splashing, but it seemed no nearer than it had been before. There was red, and there was white and there were the rolling green hills that pushed him under every time he fought to come back up. The sound of splashing became louder, but it was only his thrashing about in the water filling his ears.

And there was white and there was red and there was green; then the white and green came together and for one moment, Timothy saw the lighthouse brilliant and white in the sea’s murky depth, except it was so dark the lighthouse quickly turned grey. The person holding his hand had been in a red bath suit, saying, “Someday the lighthouse will fall into the sea.” Was it Ma, or Janice? The palm had been large enough to enclose his, and he had felt as if, should the entire cliff have fallen away in front of his eyes, he would not have been afraid. The cold gave way to tingling warmth that unfroze his limbs. Timothy kicked out, launching himself forward against the current. He kicked again, arms flailing on all sides. A hand caught his wrist and held it tight.

“Papa,” squealed Timothy.

“Hold still, you idiot.” It was Janice.

She wrapped his arms around her neck and swam back to shore, gasping painfully all the way. Janice did not have the strength to carry him so they both flopped over where the waves broke and lapped at their ears and hair. The salt water drying fast on his body made it itch, but he did not have the strength to scratch it.

“Whatever made—” said Janice in between breaths, “you cry out—Papa.” Timothy lay there confused. He could not remember when the time of having a Papa had been, and when it had ended. He had not thought of Papa in a long time—maybe since he was three, when Papa would hold his hand and tell him stories. He admitted to himself that he had forgotten.

They lay there panting until Ma rushed over with a towel, fussing over Timothy and then over Janice. Timothy found that she was dripping water, though she had not gone into the sea. They mingled with the water on his body, not allowing him to be completely dry. They were tears. All the time she was muttering, “don’t you ever do this to me, Timothy, don’t you ever, ever.”

In the bus on the way home, Janice told him, without Ma hearing, “not to ever upset Ma that way again. Once was more than enough when Pa—” but the rest was cut off by the roar of a passing truck. Janice looked so serious that he did not dare ask again because she had pursed her lips and set her chin the way she always did when something was final and could not be unsaid or re-said. And he did not wish to upset anyone more than he had that day.