The Catherine Lim Collection (7 page)

Angela was delighted. She hugged the little
girl and requested another song.

How I wish my Michelle were as pretty, she
thought. And my Michael. If only he were as open and spontaneous as these cute
little girls! How strange that Chinaman and Chinawoman should have children
like these!

She left in high spirits. She had never seen
Gek Choo in such a good mood, and she reminded her to bring the little girls to
Mark’s birthday party.

“I won’t be able to come, but Ah Tiong will
take them,” she said, and smiled again when her daughters swarmed round her,
wanting to know more about the party. Poor little things, thought Angela. So
pretty and living in such a squalid environment.

The stench of urine hit her in the face as
she reached the ground floor, panting. She put a piece of perfumed tissue paper
to her nose and mouth and again was nearly knocked down by a group of noisy,
unkempt children chasing a cat with tin cans and stones.

Poor baby, she thought. How pathetic. To
wait for a son for 10 years and then have this weakling. Again, the dreadful
possibility occurred to her, but she dismissed it.

There’s no truth in such dreams, she
thought. I have had many frightening dreams myself since the old man’s death,
and I count them for nothing. It’s explained purely by psychology, as Mark
says.

The last visit, and more gifts.

Gloria’s mother was not in, and Angela was
glad of that, for she had nothing in particular to say to the fat, obsequious
Eurasian woman who flattered her shamelessly in bad English. Gloria and Wee Nam
stayed with her, in her small, two-bedroom terrace house. They had applied for
a Government flat, but would have to wait at least five years.

Gloria was in; she was listening to the
radio when Angela came in. She immediately turned it off and rose
deferentially, a very young-looking woman, looking no more than a teenager with
her hair in two bunches and wearing T-shirt and shorts. Angela had brought her
a box of barbecued pork and a packet of grapes. She was nervously profuse in
her thanks.

“This dress has become a little too tight
for me. I’ve worn it only once, so it’s still new. If you don’t like it, you
may give it away to one of your neighbours,” said Angela, knowing Gloria would
never do that. Gloria would get her mother’s help in making the necessary
alterations, but she would never pass on such an expensive dress.

The girl’s eyes showed deep interest as she
took the dress and looked it over. “Thank you very much, I think I can wear
it,” she said, and then put it aside with deliberate casualness, Angela could
already see her wearing the dress for church the coming Sunday.

Poor girl, thought Angela. If her husband
were more responsible and less a rolling stone, she could afford dresses like
this. Poor girl.

The topics of the two previous visits having
quickly exhausted themselves, Angela went on to ask Gloria about her sisters.
Gloria’s pale face took on an animated look. She went into the bedroom and
brought out some colour snapshots of her two sisters, one in Australia and the
other in Canada. The one in Australia was photographed against an apple tree,
holding an apple hanging from a branch, the one in Canada amidst a riot of
summer blooms.

“How nice,” said Angela. “Do they like it
over there?”

The girl’s eyes dimmed.

“I wish I could be there too,” she said. “I
wish I could go away – go far away.”

This was invitation enough for Angela to
probe into the poor girl’s troubles, something she had wanted to do since seeing
the dejected face at the funeral.

“Why, Gloria,” she said. “Aren’t you happy?
Aren’t you happy with Wee Nam?”

“My sisters have emigrated. I wish I could
emigrate too, but Wee Nam says it is difficult to get a job in Australia or
Canada,” said Gloria with small-girl petulance, as she looked down and fingered
a corner of her T-shirt, adding, “Surely he could do some business there. My
friends say you can open a restaurant or a curio shop or something like that.”

Angela would have liked to ask, with vehemence,
“Where’s the money coming from, pray?” But right now, she felt sorry enough for
the girl to content herself with, “It’s not as easy as you think, Gloria.”
Then, with great solicitousness, “But tell me, Gloria, are you very unhappy?”

She was not prepared for the response – a
spasm of sobbing – and she took the poor girl into her arms and comforted her.

“Never mind, Gloria,” she said soothingly.
“I understand. Wee Nam owes Boon a lot of money, but we understand, we both
understand.”

“He owes other people money too,” said the
girl with some bitterness.

“Do you know how much?” asked Angela with
sudden concern. She already saw the younger brother running to the elder,
begging, and the elder brother writing out a cheque and surreptitiously passing
it to him. “How much?”

“A few thousand, I think,” said Gloria.

“Gloria, listen. You be brave and take care
of your health. What else can you do? On my part, I shall advise Wee Nam to be
more stable and to stick to his job. I think he will listen to me if I catch hold
of him and give him a good talk one of these days. But don’t worry. I won’t
tell him what you told me.”

“I have these horrible nightmares,”
wrhimpered Gloria. “I wake up and can’t go back to sleep again.”

“Oh, never mind that,” said Angela. “Since
that dreadful funeral, we’ve all had frightening dreams. It’s the psychological
state we’re in, that’s all. The most important thing is that it’s all over. Now
you promise me you’ll take care of yourself? Next week I’ll come with some poh
piah for you and your mother. Mooi Lan makes very good poh piah.”

The grateful girl accompanied her to the
door, visibly cheered by the visit. Angela was heartened.

Three visits today, each more satisfactory
than the last, thought Angela with satisfaction, as she drove home. She had
gone out of her way to bring gifts and cheer to three pitiful women.

No, five women, thought Angela with greater
satisfaction; for early that morning, Muniandy the gardener’s wife had appeared
at the door, a thin bony woman in a smelly sari with a baby on her hip and a
skinny little boy with scabby legs by her side. “Muniandy,” she complained,
“had spent all his wages on drink again.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you more money,”
said Angela, knowing that a gift of four or five dollars would be promptly converted
into toddy by the wretched woman herself. Instead, Angela went to the store
room and brought out a big tin of biscuits, four tins of condensed milk, a tin
of canned soup and a handful of sweets for the little boy. The woman received
the presents with effusive thanks and hurried away.

And then Aminah, the washerwoman, equally
thin and scrawny – Aminah coming up, smiling apologetically and asking if she
could have an advance of $20 on the next month’s wages, as one of her children
was ill and had to be taken to a doctor.

Angela was tired of the frequent requests
for advances, but this time, in an impulse of generosity she said, “Listen,
Aminah. You take your son to my husband’s clinic, Toh Clinic – you know where
it is, don’t you? I shall tell the nurse there not to charge you anything,” and
a further impulse made her slip a five dollar note into the washerwoman’s hand.

“You are very, very good, mem,” said the
poor woman, overcome.

Angela was happy – she, dispenser of good
things, bringer of relief.

The boy was
so happy
on the morning of his birthday, Old Mother
remembered, that he got up with the first cockcrow, when it was still very dark
and cold, and he turned over to wake her up.

“Ma, ma, wake up! It’s my birthday!” he said
excitedly, shaking her. She was lying on the plank bed; on her other side was
Wee Nam, sound asleep.

She said, “It’s still very early. Go back to
sleep,” but he was wide awake now and persisted in waking her up, showing all
the impatience of a five-year-old.

“All right,” she said at last, with a laugh,
for she loved this youngest son of hers; even his impatience and waywardness
brought forth indulgent smiles and laughs, whereas she used sharp words for the
other sons and freely knocked her knuckles on their heads.

“All right, Ah Siong,” she said and allowed
herself to be dragged into the kitchen, for she had promised to make him
noodles with pork for his birthday, as well as boil him a big egg, with the
shell stained bright red for luck.

The loud knocks on the large wooden chopping
block as she minced pork with her chopper woke up the rest of the boys, who
trooped into the kitchen to watch, but she said firmly, “The noodles with pork
are for Ah Siong only, it’s his birthday today.”

“Yes, and I shall have a hard-boiled red egg
too!” exclaimed the little boy shrilly, to forestall any claims to a share of
the birthday feast.

“I didn’t have any noodles for my birthday,”
said Ah Tiong sullenly, “and no red egg,” but his mother waved him aside
impatiently and said, “Go back to sleep, the rest of you! It’s still early.
Don’t disturb me!”

By the time the morning sun rose, Ah Siong
had already had a big bowl of steaming hot noodles with minced pork and some
pieces of liver, as well as the hard-boiled red egg. His mother slipped a red
packet containing gift money into the pocket of his pyjama top.

“For you to grow up tall and strong,” she
chanted with solemnity of ritual. “For you to be good in your studies, to be a
good boy and obey your parents.”

The boy lost no time in investigating the
contents of the packet.

“A dollar,” he said beaming, putting the
crisp note back into his pocket and throwing away the red gift paper.

The rest of the day he took full advantage
of his status as birthday celebrant to shout lustily at his brothers and stamp
on their feet. When Ah Kum Soh brought the idiot one to the house late in the
afternoon, Ah Siong rushed out to show him the dollar note, shouting, “I had
noodles, too, a big bowl, and a red egg!”

The idiot one, whose large head moved
grotesquely from side to side on his thin neck, smiled and gurgled. Old Mother
brought him furtively into the kitchen, to the cement earthen stove where an
earthen pot stood over one of the three deep holes in the stove, holes for the
firewood. A few lengths of lit firewood kept the noodles in the pot steaming
hot and deliciously fragrant. There was half a bowl left, and Old Mother was
saving it for the foster-son. She made him eat it in a corner of the kitchen,
away from prying eyes, but Ah Tiong slipped in, looked into the bowl and said
peevishly, “I knew there was some left,” before dealing the idiot one a
surreptitious pinch on the thigh, in punishment for stealing away a mother’s
favours.

The idiot one began to whimper; Ah Siong who
happened to be coming in, heard him. The little boy who moved from tyrannous to
magnanimous behaviour as easily as from game to game, went up to him and said,
with self-conscious generosity, “Don’t cry, Ah Bock. I’ll give you more noodles
on my next birthday. Here’s a sweet for you,” giving him one of several that Ah
Kum Soh had brought for him to make him grow up tall and clever and good, to
sweeten his life.

That night, before he went to sleep, he
demanded that his mother tell him a story. She began to tell him the story of
the wicked young man who passed shit into the rice bowl of a poor old blind man
and was punished by being struck blind himself. “Tell me about the king who
built a huge temple,” said Ah Siong. She was half way through it when he said,
“No, no, the one about the goddess in the moon who washed her hair in the
silver river and combed it with a jade comb.” She began telling him
the story and he again said, “No, no, tell me about the wicked emperor who had
leprosy.” She began it, to humour him, this precious youngest son, and was
halfway through it when she saw he was sound asleep.

She covered him, tenderly, with the
patchwork blanket she had made for him when he was a baby, for she was afraid
he would catch cold.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!”

The wishes were expressed in a variety of
forms – in the red-and-gilt lettering on the banner in the background of the
Hotel Grande’s Orchid Room, in the loud chorus of the birthday guests as they
crowded round to see the boy, tall and handsome and self-conscious, blowing out
the candles on his birthday cake, and on the cake itself, a stupendous
structure of white and blue icing, the words ‘Happy Birthday Mark’ in artistic
whirls and flourishes to make a pattern with the rows of snow-white candles.

As the cameras popped, Angela and Boon
walked up to kiss their son, their pride, on each cheek. The boy looked down
self-consciously, blushing, but there was no doubt he relished being the focus
of attention in the large crowded room, carpeted and chandeliered, in the Hotel
Grande. He wore a long-sleeved, light pink shirt with a black bow and grey
tailored pants.

“How tall he has grown, how handsome he
looks,” whispered the friends and Angela’s heart glowed with pride and love.