Unpolished Gem (19 page)

But whenever I went to visit my grandmother, the old world would come flooding back. “Agheare,” she would coax from the bed, “are you cold? Oh, your hands, so cold!” She would grab my hand in hers and fill my ears with words that made perfect sense to her – visions of her young girlhood self who cried for her mother back in Chaozhou, China. But in my other hand, I would be holding my opened book, and I would be hearing one thing and seeing another, until nothing made much sense to me anymore.

I
WOKE up one morning with a false skin on my face. This skin was made of rubber, and it took great effort to move the muscles. I put my fingers on either side of my face and pinched, but no red came, not even patchy fingermarks. I could not prise off this rubber death-mask. I felt a funeral in my brain, and we hadn’t even studied Emily Dickinson yet.

I was seventeen, and all the right things seemed to happen to me at the right time. I had got into a good school. I got the usual Asian High-Achiever marks. I had even been asked out by a boy. But the “right” things, like everything else in my life, had their false, unsettling undertones. In the good school I existed slumped against walls and slinking through corridors. And the Sunshine boy who asked me out told me that he had put a gun to someone’s head at fifteen because he was so angry that his mate was
chasin
’. I would go to the grammar school and watch the clean bad boys downloading angry rap lyrics about the same “issues” over the internet, because life here
was not a life, man
. “
This
is life, man, this is da life.” That
was
da life, and they were lucky that they only had to live it vicariously.

They thought that I was the naive girl, the one in the ivory tower of books and ideas, nothing running down my skin except soap and detergent suds. Who did not know what “da life” was, who lived in a big bubble, or a zillion little bubbles soft and white. With one red steaming hand in the sink I could smother them all without a sound, and run the knife under the water, all the while reading
The Age of Innocence
. And I too, could forget the reality of this life, believing that my real life would begin sometime soon.

When this false one ended.

*

No one noticed the rubber mask until it started to leak. After a month, my mother could not stand it, so she took me to the doctor. “Tell Dr Cheng everything,” she commanded. “Everything that is wrong.”

In the car, I imagined the consultation. What is wrong, Alice?
Everything
. There.
Tah-Dah
! The end. Curtains for me, please, or perhaps a white sheet.

But when I arrived and he asked me the question, nothing would come out.

I wiped my nose with my sleeve. It was getting incredibly difficult to find dry areas along my wrist.

Our good doctor passed the box of tissues towards me. Then he held out a pen and pad. Printed on the top of the page was a medical company’s name and, beside that, a flaming-torch logo which looked more like the tentacles of death. Below were dotted pale grey lines “Then write,” he commanded in English. My mother was right next to me watching. I took hold of the pad and the pen.

“Go on, write down what is wrong for the doctor,” she urged.

How could I do this? I looked down at the pad. I held the pen in my other hand. I made a little dot on the paper. There. A speck. Done.

I handed Dr Cheng back his pad.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Don’t know.”

He looked at my mother. My mother looked at him, eyes as wide as soup bowls.

“What does this mean, Doctor?” she asked. She pointed to my speck.

I’ll tell you what it means
, I wanted to say,
It means I am going
dotty.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” said the doctor, “unless Alice says it means something.”

“Then what do we do?”

He wrote slowly on a piece of paper with great concentration.

“Here. Take this. It’s the name and number of a very good specialist.”

“You mean a mind-doctor?”

“Yes.”

“But why does she need a mind-doctor?”

I didn’t know myself, but Dr Lim’s office was pale, with pastel-coloured walls, and it smelled nice – there was a big bouquet of flowers bursting from the brim of the vase on the bench. Inner-city address, best Asian-Australian shrink in town, though we Indochinese usually didn’t usually go to shrinks, we prayed to the Lord Buddha for good obedient kids.
But what
happens when you get them exactly as you prayed for? When they
cannot cope when there are no more orders to follow? When there are
no consistent orders to follow?
I looked at the flowers – tulips allegedly made Sylvia Plath better, but these weren’t doing much for me.

It was hard to focus on what grey-suited, square-glassed Doctor said to me in our hour, and most of it didn’t make sense because he was talking about athletes. “Alice, you know those Olympic runners always wanting to win?” he said, the weight of two degrees behind his back in solid silver frames, “always striving for number one? They like to believe that they will always be number one, and they train hard for it. But the reality, we know, is that some day some other person is going to beat them and be number one.”

I couldn’t have cared less about numbers. Cipher was not a number. But my mother and father nodded in agreement – number ones, number eighty-eights, number fours. They understood. Four sounded like the word for “dead” in Chinese, so if you were Cantonese you could never use that word.
Sei
lah! Sei Sei Sei
! Dead dead dead dead. My grandmother never let us use the word because she was scared of dead, and death, and the dead. But if we were all going to die anyhow, why not live life, why not even wag school?

Soon there were more meetings, this time with the school administration, and I found myself sitting in the vice-principal’s office with my anxious fingers tearing holes in my blazer pockets and a smile fixed on a face that was no longer mine. This time the staff did not tell me, as they had before, “You should apply for university scholarships, Alice, you’ll surely get them.”

But the smile still stayed in place.

The vice-principal looked into my eyes. She had clearly seen this many times before, and could probably count herself to sleep by listing the nervous breakdowns she had dealt with in her office.

“What pills have the doctors prescribed for you, Alice?”

There were little pink pills to help me focus, big white ones to help me settle, tiny white ones to help me sleep. And not only were there pills, there were natural therapies. Horlicks and bananas. Incense and charms. And the depths of my pa’s medicine pot always contained boiled black monstrosities which came in white paper packages from the Barkly Street apothecary.

Before I went to sleep each evening, my father came in with his electronic acupuncture machine. He attached the pods of his acupuncture device to my tummy, to my calves. “Got this in Singapore,” he told me, “Lucky hah? It doesn’t hurt like the needles do.” Pim pim pim pim pim went the little electric pin-pricks.

He massaged my neck, my shoulders, my feet. When he tickled me on the soles of my feet, I did not move. I had stopped feeling ticklish ever since this shadow began stalking me. It was scary being stalked. What could this dark shadow do to a person? It had already made my feet feel black and gangrenous. They looked like my grandmother’s wasted toes, with her crusty toenails like dirty broken brown shells dropping off on the sheets.

“Don’t be ridiculous, don’t know where you come up with this crazy stuff,” scolded my mother. “Your feet look fine.”

She looked down and saw long, evenly coloured toes. Skin the colour of washed sand against my father’s gnarled old tree-twig fingers. She did not see the gangrene. She did not see the leprosy, she could not tell that I was wasting away. Or perhaps she did not want to see it. “You are fine,” they all told me. My body was still working, my brain cells were still intact, I was
not
going mad mad mad.

“Pa, go to sleep. I’ll be okay,” I said.

Pa did not believe me.

“Did you take your pills?”

“Yes.” My hand wrapped around the soggy solid spots in my pocket.

“Even the pink ones?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t lie,” said my mother, standing over me. “We haven’t even given you those yet.” I lay there, blinking up at the ceiling.

“Why don’t you take it?”

Smaller than a Smartie, it nestled under my tongue. I hoped it was not getting comfortable and ready to multiply. I swallowed.

“Did you take it?”

I opened my mouth, poked out my tongue.

“Good.”

No, it was not good. It was awful. It felt like crushed cyanide powder beneath my tongue. Specks floated on top, to the area where you taste bitterness.
Now I feel like an authentic Chinese
woman
, I thought
. Yippee, adolescence is over! I’m all better now.

“Now go to bed.”

I got up from the bed, went to one of our four toilets, closed the door and spat it into the bowl.
Bye bye, bitter pill. Parting is
such sweet sorrow.
Down it swirled.
Bye bye, clouds of clarity.
I would rather be blocked than have this false sense of calm. Back to the room I went, back to bed. Between the sheets I slipped, and no longer did I write in my journal. There weren’t even any anxious etchings anymore. I had no words left.

“Go to bed,” said my mother, “go to sleep.”

Can’t, I wanted to tell her, there’s a hole in my solar plexus. I think I can put my hand through it, and if I reach deep enough and high enough, I can also feel my chest cavity – black, miasmic and sick. I’m leaking to death, and if I should die before I wake, I pray my organs the donor registry to take.

But who would want this sick mind? How I would have loved to reach in there, twiddle with a few wires, tweak a few neurons and electrons, and bring me back to life.

F
OR my valedictory dinner, my mother bought me a white dress, because she thought it would make me happier. I wondered whether she could see that it would also be like dressing a body for a polished pine box. At my house, my friend Nina took one look at the scalloped lace and told me she would lend me one of her frocks. She insisted that I come to her house after school the next day, so I did. Volition had disappeared altogether from me. If someone had told me to lie in the pine box in the white gown with the neat lace shells tumbling down my arms and knees, I would have obliged. If they had closed the lid, I would have gone to sleep. I was in that semi-asleep state when Nina told me to turn around so she could see the sleeveless cheongsam she had put on me. It fitted like a black skin with a rash of orange and green blossoms. “You look good in that,” she said, adjusting the collar.

When Nina and her mother came by on the afternoon of the dinner to take me to the hairdresser, my mother was in bed staring at something – her hands, the light, the wall. Something. Beneath my coat, I wore the borrowed black dress. I preferred its fermenting scent of perfumed secondhand sweat to the cold sterility of a forced innocence. “I am leaving now,” I called out to my mother in her room.

“What are you wearing?” she yelled downstairs, without getting up from the bed.

Defeated, I could not lie.

As I finally got into my friend’s car, I was as clumsy as a doll dressed by a child four decades old. I was a wind-up obedience toy, or a coathanger for good intentions gone awry. I was almost eighteen.

“Look at her shoes.” Nina pointed them out to her mother as we waited at the hairdresser.

“My goodness, look at your shoes.” Nina’s mother shook her head with a sad smile. On my feet were shiny plastic middle-aged-woman pumps, yellowy-silver off-white. “These white shoes match the dress,” my mother had said.

“Don’t worry, you can come back to my house and borrow a pair of mine,” Nina reassured me. Again I was back at her house, and this time I sat on the edge of the spa bath and looked down at a pair of white stilettos, with lots of thin white straps at the ankles. Nina had made my feet look like party feet, like feet that danced to synthesised tunes and rubbed against young men. I was grateful to Nina. She had taken me to her parent’s ensuite bathroom and put her mother’s expensive perfume on my wrists. She had prodded and poked me into perfection. She was even diplomatic enough not to have said anything in the car as I handed back the black dress in a plastic bag.

“You should pluck your eyebrows,” she told me. I didn’t want to. I liked my eyebrows, black and thick like the Indian ink I used when I was eight and took Chinese brush painting lessons. She got out the tweezers for me, and I yanked out a few hairs to make her happy. I sat on the edge of Nina’s spa-tub, watching her smear herself all over with a cream the colour of caramel, looked down at my party feet and waited for our parents to pick us up.

“Look at you. So lovely.” The comments meant nothing to me that evening. I was carrying an empty shell around that did not belong to me, positioning it in different unobtrusive places in the grand function room, the girl with the rubber mask of a face.

We were on the only fully “ethnically-enhanced” table: Neylan’s mother in her jilbab, Natalia’s generous gregarious Russian parents, and Nina’s glamorous Vietnamese parents. Natalia’s aside, these were the parents who did not know much English, who drove taxis and sewed collars and buttons by the boxful so that they could send their children to a school such as this and watch them mingling with the upper echelons of society – the children of lawyers and doctors and professionals.

That night our parents realised something that probably shook them from their sleeping dream, the semi-dazed dream they entered when they rested from too many taxi-shifts, or when they closed their eyes from the fatigue of opening too many stitched buttonholes. They realised that their children were Watchers, just as they were. We watched everyone else, as tonight we watched our classmates in their smart suits and sophisticated frocks climb onto the stage to pose for photographs.