The Catherine Lim Collection (24 page)

Michael, on his sick-bed could not yet be
told. Wee Nam judged it appropriate to tell Gloria; she said nothing, but later
alone, she wept.

Ah Kum Soh and the idiot foster-son were,
mercifully, away then.

“It’s all over now; her soul is at rest,”
Angela said, tired, beyond words. She had lost 15 pounds.

“I shall tell you everything, everything, you
wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through,” Angela later told Mee Kin.

After the funeral, she had taken four days’
rest; she was totally exhausted, and spent the four days sleeping and taking
care of Michael who was improving daily.

“I have put him under the care of Dr Phua,
upon the recommendation of Dr Wong, said Angela. He’s the best psychiatrist in
Singapore. Mikey’s stopped asking for his grandmother and the idiot one now,
and that’s a very positive start. Dr Phua says he’s dealt with more difficult
cases.

My Mark is much happier, and so is Michelle.
The events had had a disastrous effect on their nerves, but now they’re much
better.

I hope you don’t think I’m boasting, but
Mark’s just sat for the Merit Scholarship exam, you know the one for the cream
of Singapore’s students and his teachers tell me that he will easily come out
tops. These boys will be groomed for third echelon political leadership. The
government’s going to build the Elite College soon; it’s going to sprawl over
the cemetery. Did you see the notice of exhumation in The Straits Times and New
Nation? Well, we’ll have to make arrangements to have the old man’s grave
exhumed. So what was there to do but to have the old one cremated, even though
she had expressed the wish for burial? It was government policy; it had nothing
to do with our personal inclinations. It would have been the height of idiocy
to have her buried there, only to be exhumed almost immediately afterwards. But
we provided the coffin she asked for. It was even more expensive than the old
man’s, but money was no problem; her every last wish had to be fulfilled. A few
thousand dollars reduced to ashes, literally. Her ashes now lie in the temple
at Tank Road. We’ve reserved a place for the old man’s ashes next to hers, so
that they will lie side by side, as she wished. Did you see the obituary we
inserted in The Straits Times? One-eighth of a page. All the names of her
children, including the idiot foster-son, and her grandchildren. You wouldn’t
believe the amount for an obituary that size. Five thousand. Every cent came
from Boon and Wee Tiong. Chinaman and his wife are obviously so happy about the
recovery of their son (they’ve never mentioned to anyone that I’m the
godmother, but I’m above all this pettiness now) that they did not appear to
mind costs this time. I heard they made a fantastic sum at the Stock Market,
just before the crash. They’re going to move into their Victoria Park house
because Chinaman says his son is learning to walk, and needs a garden to romp
in. A safe time now for moving out of that wretched two-room HDB flat, isn’t
it? But good luck to them. It’s not likely that after this, we’re going to see
much of one another. Old Mother was practically the last link. I could still
see some of the old greed when I brought out Old Mother’s jewels after the
funeral. I had a hell of a time looking for the jewels, but at last found them
stuffed in a pillow. She had thrown away the nice lacquer box I’d given her to
keep the jewels in, and had put them back in the filthy blue cloth bag. Well,
she did express the wish to let the foster-son have the jewels, but she had
added that it was up to us to decide. I’d already given $3,000 to that wretched
woman to take her son away – far away; it was pure blackmail on her part. She
would have gambled away the jewellery in a week. Anyway, there was no fuss over
the distribution of the jewels; each took back what he or she had given the old
one, and do you know what I did? I gave the diamond ear-studs to Gloria. By the
way, she’s leaving for Canada for a vacation and Wee Nam will be joining her
shortly. They’re planning to emigrate. I gave her the diamond ear-studs as a
farewell gift. I don’t know what Wee Nam is going to do in Canada. He’s
enthusiastically talking about some fantastic import-export business; importing
batik, silverware, pewter-ware and whatnot from Singapore, and exporting Red
Indian decorative ornaments from Canada. Watch out, Boon. There’ll be more
forays into your bank account.

Not that Boon can’t afford, but it’s the old
story of the parasites all over again. Did I tell you, Boon’s going full swing
into business ventures? He’s expanding the Haryati and teaming up with two
others to buy a cosy hotel-cum-restaurant by the sea. He’s much happier now,
and if it hadn’t been for my timely intervention, he would have been played out
by a servant girl, after being played out by a Minister. That’s a gullible man
for you. I sacked the girl; I don’t know what hanky panky she’d been up to on
the day my mother-in-law and the idiot one ran away with Michael. She couldn’t
give me an acceptable explanation and I’ve sacked her. She was all out to
seduce my husband. Now I hear she’s working in a bar with Sharifah. Dorothy
told me she saw her one evening, all dolled up, with a man; and wearing a very
low-cut black blouse and tight shimmering pants.

No more of her. I don’t wish even to mention
her again, and the children haven’t referred to her, even once. Michelle did
ask vaguely, but she’s now too busy training for the ASEAN games to be
concerned about anything. My only worry is Michael, but Dr Phua tells me he’ll
be all right. I won’t tell him about the jade bangle yet, in case he gets all
morbid again and asks for his grandmother or dreams about her.

Do you know, it’s funny, but our dreams of
the old one have generally been pleasant. Gek Choo told me that shortly after
the funeral she dreamt about the old one dandling the little boy on her knee
and singing to him. She then put an ang-pow into his vest pocket. She was
smiling all the time in the dream, Gek Choo said.

I haven’t been so lucky in my dreams for
occasionally I still dream of the old man in his coffin, and the old one in her
madness, but look, nothing frightens me now, for I’ve been through so much. The
last dream I had of her was after I cleared the things in her room and burnt a
great deal of them, including those weird umbilical cords in the cylinder. She
had continued to keep them with her jewellery. After the distribution of the
various items, I set fire to the old cloth bag and then shook out those weird
things from the cylinders and burnt them all. Then I had this dream. She
appeared rather annoyed and asked, ‘Why did you burn them?’ and I replied,
“Because there’s no more use for them.” She seemed to get very angry and began
to curse, and it was then that I woke up. All the mess is cleared now.

I alone had to do all the clearing up. The
new house is ready now. I shall get Aminah and some others to go and clean it
and then we can move in. The separate wing will be used as a kind of annexe for
guests, or later on, by Mark as a kind of bachelor’s quarters if he wishes.

Do you know, by the strangest of
coincidences, I found from a friend that the Mrs Daisy Perez who bought my
antique bed is selling her house and all the furniture in it? It seems she
gambled in the Gold Market and lost heavily. Well, I’m thinking of getting back
the bed for the new house. There won’t be those dreadful dreams to haunt me any
more, for all the devils have been driven back now.

We’ve heard nothing about that fanatic from
Australia. Perhaps he had no intention of coming back in the first place.
Somebody tells me he’s in trouble with the police, and yet somebody says he’s
back with the divorcee woman or that both of them are in the sect and busy
evangelising. But that’s their business. The important thing is that he doesn’t
write back to ask for more money.

What a mess – a big, big mess.

But it’s been cleared up now, thank God.

One of my
earliest recollections
is of an immense coffin –
perhaps the immensity was derived from the child’s perception of the world from
her tiny, three-foot frame, for I could not have been more than four then –
standing in a covered part of the stone courtyard of a very old house. The
coffin had been bought by the mistress of the house for her father-in-law, who
had reached that hopeless stage of senility of having to be fed and bathed like
a child.

I could still see him clearly – a very old
man with long white, wispy hair and beard, crouching in a corner of the balcony
upstairs, wearing a kind of faded coat, but naked from the waist down.
Occasionally, his daughter-in-law would squat down with scissors and patiently
trim his hair, beard and fingernails.

We children used to stare wonderingly at him
whenever we were brought on a visit to the house. After the coffin, the old man
with no trousers was a natural attraction, and we stood in a cluster just
beyond the doorway, staring at him, but at the same time poised for flight
should he spring up and attempt to catch us. Of course he was incapable of
doing anything apart from eating soft food and soiling himself, but still we
associated him with a large fund of supernatural strength that he could always
draw
upon to attack and kill people.

The coffin had been in readiness for the
last 20 years, but the old man lingered on, and his daughter-in-law, whom I
remember we called ‘Ah Han Chare,’ had clearly quite forgotten about its
existence or had chosen to ignore it as she went about her business of being
the town’s matchmaker and bridal helper. She was a jovial, friendly woman who
laughed a great deal, and even at that age I remember I was struck by the
contrast between her effervescence, her merry laughter and her bright jangling
jewels, and the desolate coffin now beginning to gather dust and cobwebs, that
had become a fixture in her house. That she had bought it for her father-in-law
was a measure of her great affection for him.

At some time in their old age, men and women
fretted about the possibility of dying without a proper coffin to be buried in.
To reassure her father-in-law that no such calamity would befall him. Ah Han
Chare had bought him the coffin, and from that moment he had ceased to fret and
worry.

“My mother-in-law was a mean, cruel woman,
but he has always been good to me,” said Ah Han Chare, explaining this filial
gesture. The coffin had stood for so long in the house that soon it lost all
its terror for the children in the household. They played around it, and when
no one was looking, tried to lift its heavy lid and slip inside.

On the night the coffin knockings began, Ah
Han Chare and Ah Kum Soh, a distant relative who was staying with her, sat up
in their beds, listened intently and nodded to each other.

“It will be soon,” they said. “The signs are
here already.” And they thought, without sadness, of the deliverance of the old
man curled asleep on a mat in the room next to the balcony, a place grown musty
and foul-smelling with urine and dropped food. They listened for a while and
counted the knocks, all 17 of them.

“Perhaps it will be tomorrow,” said Ah Kum
Soh. When morning came, she padded softly to the old man’s room, but he was
clearly still alive, for he looked at her with his bleary eyes and signalled
that he wanted to be carried to his warm sunny spot in the corner of the
balcony.

In the afternoon, someone rushed to Ah Han
Chare and said, “He’s dead!” But he was referring to Ah Kum Soh’s husband, an
idle good-for-nothing wastrel who wandered through the town all day in singlet
andpyjama trousers, picking his teeth. The man had fallen into a drain and died
there. There was a deep gash on his head and he had apparently been dead a few
hours before being spotted by a passing trishaw man. Ah Kum Soh became
hysterical and put the blame of her husband’s death squarely on the old man in
the balcony.