The Catherine Lim Collection (21 page)

Gloria, fixed to her bed, saw her rosary
beads around the neck of the idiot; a god clad in gold and silver paper
wrenched them from him and flung it away.

She felt a multitude of hands on her body,
on her belly in which the child was, as yet not ready to stir. Her voice came
back all of a sudden, and she let out a piercing scream. With a mighty effort,
she wrenched herself from the bed, and ran out, fell, and then all was,
mercifully, silence, darkness.

“She’s now recovering in hospital,” Angela
told Mee Kin who sent flowers and presents to all Angela’s relatives when they
were in hospital, insickness or for childbirth. “A neighbour heard her scream
and rushed in to find her on the floor outside her bedroom. Old Mother was in
her own room. She was combing her hair, seemingly unperturbed. It seemed, as
she told Gek Choo, that she had heard moans in Gloria’s room, and thinking the
girl was ill, had gone in to offer some of her Chinese pills. The idiot foster-son
was with her at the time. Poor Gloria, sick and feverish, must have been
terrified at the sight of them. She must have mistaken them for ghosts or
something like that, for she was delirious on the first day in hospital, and
kept screaming about my dead father-in-law and a whole host of devils attacking
her.”

The girl was now under sedation, but she
continued to weep silently. Wee Nam who had been urgently recalled could not
bring himself to tell her about the miscarriage. The poor girl needed all her
strength to recover. Angela visited her every day, heavy with a sense of guilt
at having contributed to this tragic outcome. Towards the old one who was now
back again in her house, she could have nothing for the moment but the deepest
resentment: “Why does she cause trouble wherever she goes?”

The plan was
simple,
and would make for much good all round. Mark
would get the rest he needed and freedom from the disquieting influence of his
grandmother, her mental faculties now badly deteriorating. Besides, Mark
deserved a reward for having done so well in school. Boon needed a rest; indeed
they all needed a rest. The six-week long tour coincided neatly with the
end-of-year school vacation, and by the time they got back, the new house would
almost have been ready. The tour would take them to the places that the
children, ever since they were small, had been hankering to go to, because some
of their classmates had been there – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Disneyland,
Hawaii.

Mooi Lan with some persuasion and money
might be induced to endure the old one a little longer. That wretched Ah Kum
Soh, despite her irresponsible behaviour, could be asked to stay to be a
companion to the old one. Even the idiot one, if Old Mother so wished, could be
allowed to come and keep her company.

“I don’t want to go,” said Michael with
resolution and Angela’s heart sickened, sickened at the thought of the old
troubles starting all over again. She got Boon and Michelle to persuade him; it
was no use. The boy remained resolutely silent, and only once said in a tone
that left little for argument or persuasion, “I want to be with Grandma and
Uncle Bock.”

“Thrash the boy,” Angela almost said to her
husband, anger mounting, but she knew it would be of no use. It might make matters
worse.

It was impossible to go off, leaving Michael
in the house. In the end, Angela decided to stay behind, while Boon, Mark and
Michelle went. It was a wrenching decision. It made her retire to her bathroom,
to cry, in the manner of bitterly disappointed children.

“I love all my children in the same way; no
one is a favourite,” she used to tell her friends, but in the privacy of her
thoughts and feelings, she firmly believed this was not possible. She had tried
so hard to be close to this very difficult child, but he had spurned her
mother’s efforts all the way; how could she love him as much as she did Mark or
Michelle? The resentment on more than one occasion had shaped itself into a
wish. If only he had never been born, but it was a wish too horrifying for
expression, and Angela suppressed it each time it had shaped itself.

The weeks of waiting for the return of the
others were not as difficult as she had anticipated. The old one spoke less and
was in her room most of the time. There was an occasion when she came out and
spoke sharply to Mooi Lan, shaking her forefinger at her and calling her a
snake, but Mooi Lan simply ignored her, much to Angela’s relief. Mooi Lan was
at last learning how to handle the old one. Angela sent Mooi Lan home for a two-week
rest; she felt the girl needed it, after the harrowing experiences of the past
few months. She took leave from work, and found to her surprise that housework
need not be a chore; she managed the cooking and house-cleaning superbly,
helped by Aminah. The washerwoman was in tears again, having discovered the
true nature of her daughter’s work. Sharifah had lied to her, had told her that
she was working for a European family, at three times the wages she was getting
from the last household. Angela tried her best to comfort her.

“What can you do? How can you stop her?
Besides, she gives you money every month, doesn’t she? At least she thinks of
her younger brothers and sisters.”

And the planning for the new house was pure
pleasure. Angela had bought or borrowed from her friends stacks of glossy
magazines on house decoration; she had a clear idea now what she wanted every
room in the house to look like. Even the separate wing – she would spare no
effort or expense to make it beautiful and comfortable, for, she told Mee Kin
and Dorothy, the old one would not be there long, and it could later be
converted into a comfortable den for Mark, or separate quarters for guests and
entertainment.

Michael gave no trouble. He went to his
grandmother’s room often; it was painful to see that another little metal
cylinder on a red string had replaced the one she had thrown away, but this
time, for the sake of peace, she would let things be. Such a state of affairs
could not go on forever. Old Mother was now going to be 72.

The idiot one came on a few occasions and
Angela had to make sure that he did not make himself a nuisance. The trophies
were now in locked glass-cases; it was easy to keep the idiot relatively
harmless by plying him with food for he often felt sleepy after eating and
dozed off.

Michael seemed to be in a more cheerful
mood. For weeks, Angela could not help thinking as she looked at her younger
son: Because of you, there is no proper family holiday. You are both difficult
and selfish. But the boy had passed his exams again; that ought to be balm
enough.

The return of her family from the tour was
one of great joy and relief to her; she wanted to see them again so badly. They
looked well, happy and refreshed, especially Mark. He had grown very tall in
the past few months; he was even taller than his father. In a few months he
would sit for the Merit Scholarship examination. Angela never had the anxieties
that other mothers suffered for their sons and daughters before examinations,
for she had full confidence in him, and he had never disappointed her, not
once.

“Once there
was a snake,”
said Old Mother with vehemence. “It was a
small snake, but it had sharp teeth and a lot of poison in its bite. Now this
snake lived under a stone in a village. It came out one night and drank the
water from the village well. The next morning, the well-water was contaminated
by the snake’s poison, so that all the village women could not put in their
buckets. They went away angry. They wanted to kill the snake, so they went to
the chief in the village. He saw the snake, curled asleep under the stone, but
it was such a tiny, harmless-looking snake that he said, ‘No, no, I can’t kill
the snake. It looks so small and weak.’

The next evening the snake went to the
rice-fields. Why it went there nobody knew. But a lot of poison leaked out of
its body. One by one the rice plants died. Now, the men who had spent so much
time and hard labour planting the rice were very angry. They went to the chief
of the village and said, ‘Kill the snake. First it poisoned the water in our
well. Now it has poisoned the rice in our fields. Kill it.’ Now the chief
thought, ‘This snake has gone too far. I let it go the first time, but this
time, I shall kill it.’ So he went to look for the snake, but alas, it was no
longer under the tree. It had escaped.”

“Perhaps it knew the chief was coming to
kill it,” said Michael. “Did they kill the snake in the end, Grandma?”

“I don’t know. It’s difficult to tell, and
now I don’t remember things very well,” she said. She lapsed into muttering.
Michael put his head on her knee, and she stroked his hair. The smoothness and
coolness of the jade bangle again touched his cheek, and he looked up to
examine it closely. “Almost all green now, Grandma,” he said. “Except for this
little white speck here, and another one here. See?”

Angela looked in briefly, to see the boy
talking animatedly to the old one. The deterioration was more rapid than she
had thought. Her room was a shambles; it smelt foul too.

It won’t be for long, she thought in
self-comfort.

“Will you allow that snake to serve your
husband, to go near him, to bewitch him?” It was frightening, to be accosted by
the old one like that. Angela was in her room, reading; the old one stood in
the doorway, her hair let loose. Even from that distance, Angela could smell
the sweaty staleness of her clothes.

“Mother, do not be worried about such
things,” said Angela calmly. “Rest and get well. You haven’t been well lately.”

She got up and guided the old one downstairs
to her room; she had been given a room downstairs, to save her the trouble of
climbing the stairs.

When the house is ready, thought Angela, I
shall see what arrangements there need to be made. If necessary, Mooi Lan may
have to go. I can’t bear all this nonsense and stupidity much longer. Just a
month or so more – and all my troubles will be over, or at least the major part
of the troubles.

“Let’s go
and visit Ah Kheem Chae,”
said Old Mother. “She lives
in the House of Death in Sago Lane. I knew I would go to that place at some
time in my old age,” she added bitterly. “But Ah Kheem Chae’s already dead,
Grandma,” said Michael. “Mother said she went back to China and died there.
Nobody cared for her there. She should have remained in Singapore.”

“Ah Kheem Chae! Ah Kheem Chae!” The
recollection, dimly, of the old grey-haired one who once brought him in from
the rain and put a jacket on him, caused Ah Bock first to clap his hands
excitedly, then frown, as more dim images crowded his mind and he struggled to
put them in an ordered pattern.

“Let’s go to the House of Death, to the
House-where-the-old-await-death,” said Old Mother. “Ah Kheem Chae is there,
she’s waiting for me; I’m joining her. You’ll see, I’m joining her.”

“All right, Grandma,” said Michael.

Mooi Lan was later to be scolded by the
anguished Angela. How could the three of them have got out of the house without
her noticing? The old one slow and doddering, the idiot slobbering and probably
creating a great commotion, Michael who ought to have been in bed, with that
dreadful fever and due for his next dose of medicine. How could the three of
them have got out without being noticed?

“I saw them,” a neighbour later said. “I saw
them, they were going in the direction of the bus-stop. I thought it was rather
unusual, Michael in his pyjamas, they were laughing a lot. Somehow I didn’t
think at the moment to have warned you.”

Fool, thought Angela with great irritation
but she merely smiled wearily at the neighbour and said nothing. Her annoyance
with Mooi Lan mounted.

Now the neighbour had seen, the news would
spread, there would be gossip, speculation by hateful neighbours.

They had taken a bus and then walked a long
distance to the House of Death in Sago Lane.

It stood among a row of decaying houses,
derelict, in the shadow of taller buildings. The walls, doors and windows were
blackened with age.

Old Mother mounted the dark staircase
followed by the idiot and Michael. It creaked beneath them, ready to give way.
At the top of the staircase, they saw a darkened corridor, with rooms on either
side. An old man in a pair of khaki shorts tied with string lay outside one of
the rooms, on a mat that had frayed to a segment. He propped himself up weakly
on his elbow to look at the visitors, his deep sunken eyes pools where misery
overbrimmed. The idiot gurgled at him, while Michael looked on with awed
fascination.

Old Mother walked resolutely into the
nearest room.

“Where’s Ah Kheem Chae?” she demanded, but
nobody knew. The old ones there, fragile in the shadow of death, merely looked
at the visitors silently. “Ah Kheem Chae,” said Old Mother, going up to an old
woman, with a scalp bare except for a few stiff strands hanging down to the
nape of her neck. But the woman was not Ah Kheem Chae. Ah Kheem Chae was
already dead, dead and buried in her native village in China, or as someone had
said, had tried to return to Singapore and died on board ship.

The idiot, fascinated by these new
surroundings, looked around with dilated eyes of wonder. The room was dark;
some light pierced through a broken pane in a window. It was dark and cheerless
and was filled with old crates, newspapers and rags. One side was stacked with
them: a small wooden table was cluttered with flasks, chipped cups and plates,
enamel bowls and spoons. An abundance of worldly possessions, but the old men
and women sat in the shadows, detached and waiting for death. Old Mother put
her hand into her blouse pocket, brought out wads of dollar notes and –
distributed them laughing. The idiot pranced about, chortling with glee, seized
some of the money and gave it to an old man with sticky secretion encrusting
both eyes. He received it with both hands and broke into a toothless chuckle.
Michael, exhilarated, reached into his pyjama pocket. He was surprised he could
find money in his pyjama pocket. He took out the money and gave it to the idiot
who promptly threw it into the waiting, cupped palms of an old woman in a
patched black blouse who had quickly hobbled up, cackling thanks.