Miss Seetoh in the World (38 page)

There were the marks of proud assertiveness
of her new position of power as the one being eagerly sought – the terse
language, the laying down of precise conditions of time and place of their
meeting, the reference to a boyfriend at her beck and call.

Brother Philip said anxiously, ‘You think it’s
safe for you to go on your own? It will be rather dark. And I’m not sure what
the new Maggie is like, back in her world that she’s been keeping secret from
us.’

‘Bless you, dear Brother Phil,’ said Maria.
‘I’ll be alright. And I’ll tell you all about it.’

As it turned out, when Maria next turned to
Brother Philip for advice and help, Maggie’s matter would take second place to
a host of others that threatened to engulf her. Now, in a mood of the kind for
which the language of romance drew ridiculously extravagant comparisons with
blue sky, blue ocean, billowy clouds, eternal birdsong, she walked airily into
the Chantek Café at precisely the appointed time, looked around and saw no
Maggie. She knew, with certainty, that the girl had arrived in time and must be
hiding behind a shop façade somewhere to make her wait. She waited a full ten
minutes, after which she saw Maggie enter the café and approach her. The signs
were not promising. The girl’s face bore the same intense anger as on that day
when she had fled from the creative writing class. But she was determined to be
conciliatory all the way; if she was going to make any mistake now, it had to
be one on the side of kindness and forbearance.

She said, ‘Maggie, I’m really, really sorry.
I can explain,’ and the girl said, with a toss of her head, ‘Okay, you explain.
I listen.’

Apparently, Maggie had no interest in any
explanation; she had long since come to her own conclusion about the incident
and had called the meeting purely to unleash her fury. Again and again, she
accused Maria of making fun of her and her sister Angel, at a time when she
needed the help of the teacher she trusted most to help her through a crisis.
Again and again she said, ‘Miss Seetoh, how you can do such a thing to me?’

‘Maggie, stop, for goodness’ sake, you have
to stop and listen to me,’ cried Maria, grasping her hand, as if that could
stop the torrent of words coming out of her mouth.

She said angrily, ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Maggie, why do you bring in Angel? There
surely is some misunderstanding. I was only reading out your story to the
class. I’m so sorry if we laughed. We were not laughing at you, Maggie, only at
the funny story. This has happened many times in our creative writing sessions,
remember?’

She saw Maggie’s eyes suddenly fill with
tears. ‘Miss Seetoh, I tell you the tragic story of my sister Angel, how we
both desperate, how I have to protect her and keep her in the canteen till I go
home with her, and instead of help us, you make fun of us, and encourage whole
class make fun of us! Even if my sister got killed, you all will laugh and make
fun of her!’

‘Maggie, what on earth – ’

The girl was mad; she was talking
incoherently. Nothing could be more disconnected than the hilarious story she
had written and the tragic one she was revealing now. Only one thing was clear
– the deep distress connected with the younger sister whom she loved so much.
Maria would ignore the incoherence and concentrate on helping the poor girl
unburden her heart. She reached out for Maggie’s hand which once again moved
away abruptly.

‘I say not to touch me,’ said the girl.
‘Miss Seetoh, you stink. I thought you are best teacher in world and I can
trust you and share secret with you. Now I know you are like all the rest. Only
laugh and make fun of me and my sister. Look down on us, like we are dirt.’

Maria said very slowly and calmly, ‘Maggie,
I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t we calm down and you
explain everything to me. Tell me about Angel and how we can help her.’

‘Too late,’ said Maggie haughtily. ‘Now I
depend on myself, not anyone in the whole world. Angel is safe now. I find a
place for her to stay because I can find work and earn money. If I depend on
world to help me, Angel by now raped and I kill my father and don’t care if
police come after me and lock me in prison!’

Suddenly the picture of Maggie’s dark
mysterious world began to shape, and its connection with the strange story of
Uncle Joe and the dismemberment, to emerge. It was still an unclear picture;
what stood out with certainty was the girl’s need for help, disguised as a
proud insistence on a full-blown apology in a public place.

Maria said, ‘Maggie, I just can’t tell you
how sorry I am for upsetting you that day. I was so wrong. Will you forgive
me?’

The girl stood up, by no means mollified.
‘Miss Seetoh, I go now. We are not friends any more. I was so happy before
because I trust you and you trust me and you even tell me secret about the
diamond ring, I the only student that day in the searching group. But now
everything change, Miss Seetoh. I don’t want to depend on anybody. I will work,
make money and give Angel good education. She will go to university. Then
nobody will harm her. Goodbye, Miss Seetoh.’

‘Maggie, wait, please wait – ,’ but the girl
had disappeared, as quickly as she had that day when she ran out of the
classroom. Maria cursed under her breath. ‘Dammit, there’s a limit to how far
I’m prepared to go, even for you.’

‘Go and find out more from Auntie Noodles,’
said Brother Philip.

It would only be much later that Maria
understood how the need to disguise pain in a story could distort the disguise
beyond all comprehension. Auntie Noodles told a story of incredible anguish
that Maggie had confided in her. Maggie and Angel never knew their real father,
the man they called father was their stepfather, one of several men in their
mother’s life, one of whom could be Angel’s real father, making the girls only
half sisters. It was a pitifully tangled web of relationships sometimes
discovered in dysfunctioning households visited by counsellors anxious to help.
The father who held odd jobs and had tattoos of dragons on both arms often came
home drunk; for as long as Maggie could remember, he had tried to molest her as
soon as her mother was out of the house. When she threatened him with a knife
one evening, he simply transferred his attention to her young sister whom
Maggie protected fiercely. There was a dangerous one-hour period when Angel
would be home from school and be alone with the drunken man; Maggie solved the
problem by making her sister go to St Peter’s and wait for her in the canteen.
At night they slept huddled together, Maggie’s ears ever alert for the rattling
sound of the doorknob, the sight of the lurking shadow under the door. Her dream
was to get her G.C.E. O level, find a job and remove herself and her sister
permanently from the dark, perilous world of her parents. Her mother cared
little about what was happening; after her work at the Blue Moon Lounge, she
sometimes came home and joined her husband in his beer-drinking, sometimes
laughing merrily together, often quarrelling loudly and throwing things at each
other.

Maggie despised her mother. She told Auntie
Noodles that she sometimes spat at her. Upon her sister, right from babyhood,
she had lavished all the love she never knew, while using all the wiles she
had, to beat off any threats to the little world of safety she had carved out
for themselves. Auntie Noodles hinted that Maggie sometimes joined her mother
in the Blue Moon Lounge to make some money to spoil her adored little sister
with gifts of clothes, toys and colouring pencils. Maria had the saddening
recollection of that day in school when Maggie complained of a heavy period,
making a great show of a fistful of sanitary towels; she had probably been just
discharged from one of the government clinics for an abortion that had not gone
too well. Auntie Noodles said, tapping the side of her head with a forefinger
to demonstrate Maggie’s shrewd mind, that the girl had once talked about
looking out for a rich man, even an old one, to marry, for a job with a G.C.E.
O level qualification would not support Angel through university.

Maria read the infamous story again,
scouring it for telling details. Then she showed it to Brother Philip.

‘Read it,’ she said, ‘and tell me if it was
really a cry for help. Idiot that I was, I missed it.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said the
kindly brother. He laughed so much over the story that Maria was provoked to
laugh too. She remembered the precise moment when she had bonded with the
strange, overaged, most disliked student in St Peter’s Secondary School; it was
the moment she saw the truth of her entire life flashing before her eyes in the
inspired words on a playful strip of paper: Mrs Tan is no more. Long live Miss
Seetoh! She told Brother Philip about it.

He said, ‘Don’t worry about that girl;
she’ll do well in the world. She has more savvy than both of us combined.’ He
asked,‘What will you do now?’

‘Nothing,’ said Maria. ‘Clearly she doesn’t
want to have anything more to do with me.’

The opposite was true of Yen Ping. The girl
looked forlorn on her own, though she tried to put on a brave front. Mark
Wong’s mother had made good her threat and transferred him to St Paul’s High
School; she had him driven every morning to school and brought home every
afternoon in a chauffeured car, with strict instructions to the chauffeur to
double up as private detective and watch out for any girl trying to meet up
with her son.

‘Miss Seetoh, can I see you for a moment?’
Yen Ping needed constant encouragement in her studies, in her attempts at
creative writing, in her need to fight the sadness of the greatest loss in her
life. ‘Miss Seetoh, I love Mark very much, and I will study very hard so that
we can have a good future together.’ ‘Miss Seetoh, I received this letter from
Mark; would you like to read it?’ ‘Miss Seetoh, I’ve written this poem for
Mark. What do you think of it?’

Young love was so pure, simple,
uncalculating.

She had but one call from Dr Phang since
their last meeting, and it was to tell her, very quickly, that his departure
for Europe would be postponed by a week. He said, ‘Looking forward so much; you
have no idea how much,’ and hung up.

The road, it was said, was better than the
inn, the travelling better than the arrival, the anticipation, if it was fed by
the dreams of languorous sleep, far sweeter than the reality.

They were lying, not on the silken couch of
pleasant jesting, but some kind of sofa in some kind of place that did not at
all resemble a room, for she could see some pillars in the distance, festooned
with plants, and hear the low hum of insects. They were laughing like happy
children, their nakedness covered by a white bedsheet.

He pulled it over their heads, snuggled even
closer to her and said, ‘There, isn’t that nicer,’ before his hands did a slow,
luxurious exploration of her body and invited hers to do the same of his. He
was a very handsome man, driven by the vanity of a regular regimen of
thrice-weekly workouts in the gym.

She said, ‘Meeta and Winnie say you are the
most distinguished man they’ve ever seen. They think you take great pains over
those fantastic Richard Gere locks.’

He lifted her hand to let her fingers run
through them and said, ‘They make Olivia go crazy. You should see her in bed.’
She said, ‘Let’s not talk about Olivia. But first a question. Do you love her
as much as you love your daughter?’

He said, ‘Here’s the truth. I love my
daughter most of all. No woman can come even that close to her.’ He showed a
precise inch between thumb and forefinger.

She said, ‘I understand that perfectly. In
the end everything boils down to biology, you see. It’s nature’s way.’

He said, ‘Hey, you read too much and think
too much. No wonder poor Bernard couldn’t come up to your intellectual level.
He passed off a paper as his own, but I could see your hand in it.’

‘Don’t talk about Bernard.’

‘Alright, I won’t talk about Bernard if you
will not talk about Olivia.’

She remained silent for a while, before
asking with some anxiety, ‘You think they can hear and see us?’ For now they
were in a parked car in a dark area and could see the shadowy forms of people
moving about in the distance. He gathered breath, then released it in an
explosive expletive, accompanied by a crude raised finger. ‘That’s what we
should say to them.’

She wanted to laugh but instead said
reproachfully, ‘Why, Benjamin, that’s not like you! I’ve never heard you use
any vulgarity!’

He said, ‘I use them enough in the office
when I get frustrated. I swore once at our great Tua Peh Kong, and he swore
back. But hey, you’re calling me ‘Benjamin’! At last. Why don’t you call me
‘Ben’ or ‘Benjy’? I would love the sound of that.’

It was at this point that the ever vigilant
mind, never asleep even when the rest of the body was, pushed through the
unreality of dreams with its own reality to sound a grave warning. It said to
her, as she lay pressed against him, murmuring with pleasure, ‘Are you sure you
want to cross the line? He will ditch you as soon as he gets up, puts on his
clothes, returns to his wife and starts to look around for another conquest to
add to his crown of victory. The man’s a bastard. The man’s bad news.’

She thought, I’m not that much of good news,
either.