The Catherine Lim Collection (20 page)

The girl listened and nodded, but utter
wretchedness was written in the hair that had grown thin and straggly, in the
thin pale face that only a year ago was beautiful with the freshness of youth.

I know it’s a burden, thought Angela as she
left, but what’s a few months compared to the years I’m going to endure with
the old one? Everyone must share the burden.

“Mikey darling, have you finished your homework?”
asked Angela, when she got home.

“There’s no homework for tomorrow,” said the
boy. “May I watch TV?”

“Of course, darling,” said Angela, for whom
the reply, in a full sentence, and the request for permission constituted such
a vast improvement over the taciturnity and rebellious silence of a few weeks
back as to make her heart almost sing for joy. Dr Wong was so right, she
thought. She cast a surreptitious look at a composition that had been marked in
school. It was entitled ‘A Happy Dream’. Angela read, puzzled, of her son and
his uncle Bock catching golden fish in a pond, of a Moon Goddess, of
Grandmother making a pair of walking tins that went Plock, plock, plock, of a
strange bird that said tee-tee, tah-loh. The teacher’s comments, written neatly
in red ink at the bottom of the page were: “Your sentences are disjointed. They
do not seem to link up to form a sensible story. But your grammar, spelling and
punctuation have improved. Keep it up.” Even Michael was doing better in
school. Angela was happy.

“It’s all over now; he’s selected another
man, an idiot named Choo Beng Siew, a stupid, grinning idiot with some vague
engineering qualification,” muttered Boon. It shocked Angela; he had come home,
drunk, dishevelled. The bitter chagrin was in the forehead, suddenly
deep-furrowed, in the voice louder than usual.

“How do you know? Is it official? This thing
has been vacillating for months,” said Angela with the greatest of anxiety,
wanting her husband to go to the bedroom, but he persisted in throwing himself
upon the sitting-room sofa and remaining there. “It’s official; the bastard’s
played me out.”

A tremor of terror swept through Angela; the
violence of language against Minister was shocking, coming from Boon. She sat
down beside him, trying to comfort.

“Never mind, darling,” she said soothingly.
“You did your best. Nobody could say you didn’t do your best. You’re absolutely
in the clear.”

Her husband sat up, the stupor of
drunkenness suddenly giving way to a biting clarity as he looked straight at
her and said menacingly, “Why in hell did you interfere?”

“Whatever do you mean?” cried Angela, but
beginning to feel a sickness overcoming her.

“You went to his secretary,” snarled Boon.
“You went to his secretary and made inquiries and tried to ferret things out
from her. Do you deny it?” The snarl had subsided to a sarcasm, heavy,
frightening. “You made yourself a nuisance, pushing like that. Surely you must
have known such a step would have prejudiced Minister against me, knowing what
kind of man he is?”

“Really, I only spoke in a casual way,” said
Angela, her mouth dry, her stomach tightening. “I meant to help, darling.”

“Help!” A sardonic laugh as he fell back on
the sofa, one arm across his eyes. “Pushing, you mean. You’ve always pushed, haven’t
you? Me, the children, everyone else. You were impatient to become wife of a
Member of Parliament, weren’t you? Perhaps later the wife of a minister?”

“Now that’s not fair!” Angela’s fear had
suddenly disappeared in a burst of anger. “I was straining every effort to
please you, and here you are accusing me of interference, because things have
not turned out the way you wanted them! It’s not fair, not fair!”

Her voice had risen to a shrill pitch. She
saw Michelle, and waved her off; she glimpsed Mooi Lan, loitering at the
doorway of the kitchen, and suddenly grew exasperated at the sight of the girl,
hanging around to listen in to everything.

The tears came, furiously. Boon had settled
back on the sofa, eyes closed.

“How can you say things like that to me,
Boon?” she continued. “You know how much I’ve gone through the last few months,
what with your mother and the children and Mooi Lan.”

“At least Mooi Lan understands, she cares,”
came the muttering from the sofa, and Angela, with a new pang, tried to see if
the girl was still at the doorway. She had disappeared into the kitchen.

“And pray, how does she care more than I
do?” cried Angela shrilly. Her husband had fallen into a deep drunken sleep,
snoring loudly. In mounting exasperation, she wanted to shake him violently,
rouse him from his stupid drunken state, extract a statement that would still
the pain, newly caused. But he remained deeply snoring and in distress, she
went upstairs to her room. Fortunately, the children were in their rooms and
could have heard but little.

How unlike Boon, to blame her, to reckon the
ministerings of a servant girl, the offering of a cup of tea or Bovril, as
greater than all her efforts of affection. Angela’s anger was soon directed
against Minister – they were all like that, these people in power. They played
around with other people’s lives, raised false hopes, then dashed these hopes
without so much as a word of explanation.

When she returned downstairs, Boon was
sitting up, his shoulders slouching in abjection and Mooi Lan was hovering
nearby, apparently asking whether he wanted a drink or some food. Angela went
up impatiently, waved her away, and sat beside her husband, holding his
shoulders.

“Come up to our room now,” she said gently.
“You’ll feel much better after a good night’s sleep.”

His mood was markedly better in the morning;
she needed his reassuring morning embraces, to wipe off the pain of the
previous night. He gave them duly, but dully, and she coaxed him to have a good
breakfast.

“I’m thinking of joining Richard Pang in the
hotel-and-restaurant business,” he said. His wife pouring out the coffee, could
hardly contain her relief and delight. “A Mr Szeto is selling his hotel in
Changi, a small, cosy home-like two-storey building with eighteen rooms.
Richard has been talking of taking it over and improving on it. Such hotels
with their home-like atmosphere are a hit with tourists, especially Japanese
tourists who come on a few months’ contract.”

“Darling, that’s a marvellous idea,” said
Angela enthusiastically. Now was the time to release the latest figures on the
Haryati Restaurant, to reinforce this mood of optimism and banish the dark
devils of the previous night forever. “Darling, the manager of Haryati tells me
that we may need to expand, to cope with the increasing business. More and more
people are coming. The lunch-time crowd is enormous. I’ve seen it with my own
eyes!”

“That’s good,” said her husband. “I’m going
full steam into business. That’s where the real rewards are.”

Angela thought, Even if Boon does not get
into politics, Mark eventually will. For hasn’t he been marked out for the
Elite College already? But it would be premature, inappropriate to talk about
such things at present.

“I hear the government’s thinking of
building the Elite College on Grangefields near the Su Kien Cemetery,” she
remarked, giving her husband another slice of toast.

“Yes, the cemetery will have to go,” he
said.

“Does that mean exhumation of the graves,
including your father’s?”

“That’s inevitable. The exhumation notice
will be gazetted shortly.”

Gloria
listened;
her every nerve was taut from listening for
sounds from outside her tightly closed bedroom door. She heard the old one
talking to herself, and then afterwards she heard the sliding of the metal door
and a gurgling sound, which meant that the idiot one was on one of his frequent
visits.

His visit that evening had been particularly
harrowing. It was Gloria’s turn to lend her house for the monthly rosary
sessions conducted by Father Xavier. About 12 of the parishioners had gathered
for prayers. As they knelt down in the sitting room, Father Xavier leading the
prayers in his deep reverential voice, the idiot appeared, staring, grinning,
fascinated by the unwonted sight. He actually moved forward, and Gloria,
fighting revulsion, got up from her knees and told him to go back to Old
Mother’s room. He stayed there obediently for a few minutes, then emerged again
to stare and grin. Since he made no sound, Gloria left him alone this time.

But the incident had made her sick, had
given her a violent headache.

She lay on her bed, the tears falling
silently on to her pillow. She felt sick, but was unwilling to go out to the
toilet; she vomited into a small spittoon kept under her bed. She wished that
Wee Nam were back. He had been home for a few days, and then was off again; he
said he had an Indonesian friend to meet, one who could be useful in helping
him set up the agency for recruitment of foreign domestics. She wished her
mother were around, but it would be a full two months before she returned from
her vacation.

The cheerful letters from Canada and
Australia which enclosed photographs of the new babies did nothing to lessen
the misery; indeed they accentuated it, for they increased the painful sense of
what might have been. The photographs in one hand, her rosary in another,
Gloria lay inert, tears silently flowing. She felt very hungry and had a
violent headache, but going out of her room to get food or the aspirin from the
bathroom cabinet was out of the question. The gibberish of the idiot one with
occasional deep gurgles could still be heard.

It was getting dark, but Gloria did not feel
inclined to get up or switch on the light. She just wanted to lie still, to
wait for the idiot one to leave and for the old one to retire to her room and
lock herself in, as she was wont to do every evening. Her head felt unbearably
heavy. She got up several times with great effort, to move the spittoon to vomit
into, but each time fell back on her bed, exhausted, the sickness undispelled.

She heard sounds, they seemed to be
converging upon her. With a great effort of will, she moved her head towards
the door, and saw the door moving open slowly. Two figures, dark against the
outside light, walked in slowly. They were Old Mother and the idiot one. A
sense of panic overcame Gloria. She had locked the door; how had they managed
to come in?

The old one moved towards her bed and in the
dimness of the street-light on the road outside, Gloria saw her face, ugly,
distorted, blotched and her hair let down so that they floated in stiff strands
about her face. She was smiling; she held out something to her, but Gloria
couldn’t see clearly what it was – was it a piece of yellow paper with Chinese
words written on it, or was it the ghost paper money with the square of silver
in the centre?

The old one suddenly let out a shrill laugh
and that unleashed a babel of noises in the room – harsh, raucous sounds, mixed
with high-pitched yells. The idiot one, his face actually contorted with the
effort of yelling, stepped forward, made to touch her, was then suddenly
arrested by the altar in her room where stood two candles, the picture of the
Christ Child and His Mother, a statuette of Saint Theresa and a bottle of holy
water from Lourdes. The idiot one moved to the altar, gurgling; he took down
the statuette of St Theresa, examined it with intense curiosity, then abandoned
it for the bottle of holy water, which he uncorked, smelt and sprinkled on
himself.

“False! False!” Gloria heard a rough rasping
sound, and saw an old man – yes, it was the old father-in-law, resurrected from
the dead again. He knocked off the bottle of holy water from the idiot’s hand
and then knocked him resoundingly on the head with his walking stick.

“False!” he shouted again and was echoed by
a babel of voices. “Let the gods destroy what is false,” and then a multitude
of gods, some looking like warriors with their ferocious eyes, eyebrows and
beards and their armour with a myriad swords sticking out, and some old with
white eyebrows and beards and some with faces like monkeys and pigs – all
surged towards the altar and broke everything on it, amidst ferocious yells.

“Please – ” screamed Gloria, but it was a
scream in the head only, so nobody could hear it. Old Mother, her grey hair
still streaming about her face, came closer, touched her forehead. Gloria tried
to break away from the touch, from the near contact with the old livid,
blotched face moving closer to hers, but she seemed tied to the bed. Escape was
impossible.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph – ” she muttered
weakly, and this time, the old father-in-law turned savagely upon her and
rasped, “Away with your false gods! They will not allow you to put up an altar
to your dead father-in-law or mother-in-law? Of what good are they then?’ The
statuette of Saint Theresa already lay broken, smashed; the old man hurled out
the window whatever was left of the picture of the Christ Child and His Mother.

“What’s going on?” came a loud voice, and
Gloria was relieved to see Father Xavier. “Why are you doing this?’ he demanded
as he saw a god with the monkey’s face grab a holy candle and dash it to the
ground. A chorus of derisive voices greeted them, and then the gods chased
Father Xavier out of the room.