If I Could Tell You (11 page)

TODAY, the people from the church came to help me move. Not that I have a lot of things — it’s just that an old woman like me cannot do it by myself. They made me sit by the wall, protested whenever I went to pick up an object or to help. The only thing I could do was to daydream while they busied about, whispering to each other, as if they thought it wasn’t right to talk to each other in a language I couldn’t understand. So I told them I wanted to take a walk, that I couldn’t stand the dust and needed fresh air — it
was
getting dusty, with all the things I haven’t touched in years and years being moved around. They worried at first but I insisted. After a minute, the one in charge said, okay, auntie, you go have a cup of tea and then we’ll meet you there. I nodded, waved at them and left.

The only object I carried on my own is the black and white picture of the Old One, the photo for his place on the altar. I took it just in case the Christians get offended, or they decide to lose it on the way to the new flat.

It is a short walk to the new place. But the neighbourhood is entirely new. Full of shops and streets and people I don’t know. I wonder how long it will take for me to learn where to get my usual shopping again, how long it will take to know stall-owners well enough so that I learn about their children, how many they have and how old they are. And how long until they start to keep aside cheap bits of meat, and insist on giving me extra vegetables and eggs just before the Lunar New Year. I walk and try to memorise where exactly everything is; the nearest doctor, coffee shop, grocery store. In twenty minutes, I’m there. I take the lift up to the fourth floor. The corridor that I walk through to get to the new flat is clean and quiet and almost all the doors are open because other people are still having things done to their new homes. I look into them and see that they look exactly the same as mine. Maybe with different coloured doors and floors but these are the same one-room, built-for-the-elderly flats. I get my new keys out and let myself in for the first time. It is still dirty from construction work, but nothing a good sweep cannot fix quickly.

This is our new place, I tell the Old One. Then I put his photo on the only tall surface there is, the kitchen counter. Without curtains, the room is bright, with light bouncing off the walls. The newness of everything makes me stand still for a moment and I think carefully before saying what I said next, because you don’t make promises to the dead and not keep them. I made up my mind and then I said, I have a story to tell you. Maybe tonight, or tomorrow night, I will tell you. A story. My story. From a long time ago.

THE POLICE TAPE WAS ALREADY GONE A FEW DAYS later when I left with all my things in a box and my bag. No one, I thought, was going to go near the spot any time soon. No one who knew what had happened there would be able to walk casually over the place where he landed and stop themselves from imagining that it was happening over and over again, at every single moment. They would not be able to stop their skin from lighting up with goosebumps at the feeling of him falling through their bodies, all moonlight and wisp. He was still there, you could picture it. But then I saw the tins and the stumps of two candlesticks, bits of food left on a paper tray. And I thought, right, of course. I wondered who the first one was to try this and win, if ever anyone had won money from getting numbers from the dead at all.

The others, Sam and Linda and Xinyi, all took turns trying to get us back together. They tried tricks of all sorts — calling Cindy and then passing me the phone, saying that it was another one of our friends wanting to speak to me or making her go to my new workplace for “a drink and a chat”. It took them a while to realise that we weren’t just fighting, that we hadn’t fought at all, really. I missed her but I knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good to see each other. So I told my friends to stop, there was nothing left for them to do but let me sleep on their couch or shut up. It was fun at first. Sam and Linda had their own place and that was easy. I slept on their big couch and we got takeaway and camped out with a bunch of DVDs the first weekend. The novelty wore off quickly, since both of them worked and arrived home late at night, too tired to do anything but shower, eat, and sleep. I started to mind that the couch smelled of their two dogs and Linda got increasingly jealous that they preferred to curl up with me even though their bed was big as fuck and I shoved them off the couch whenever I bothered to. I stayed for two weeks, moved out when it was clear that they were fighting whenever I was not around. I didn’t want to be the cause of trouble like that.

After that, Xinyi took me in even though she still lived with her parents like most people our age. She was the only child and simply told her parents that I needed a place to stay for a few days and that was that, no questions asked. Her mother was nice. A nervous little woman, but nice. At first, she couldn’t tell if I was a boy or girl and had to ask Xinyi when I was away in the washroom. Afterward, she told me she couldn’t be sure if her mother was more relieved that I couldn’t get her daughter pregnant or if it was a cause for more concern, since we were sleeping in the same bed. We laughed about it and stayed up nights talking. It was okay for more than a month until I met up with an old girlfriend one evening and stayed over at her place instead. When I got back to Xinyi’s the next day, she picked a fight and told me to leave. I hadn’t seen it coming, or perhaps I refused to since it made things easy for me, a comfortable bed, home-cooked food made by either Xinyi or her mother. I packed quickly — I could now put all my things together and be ready to leave in fifteen minutes — and left.

I went back to Sam and Linda’s, knowing full well that the arrangement couldn’t last long, and slept there for a few nights until I found an ad online. I moved into a room, lived alongside a single mother and her children. It was then, while living in a stranger’s flat and constantly worrying about not being able to make rent, that I thought about sleeping outdoors. It was the kind of thing that would horrify my mother if she found out and the thought of that alone made me go round to the stores, the ones which sold hiking and climbing equipment, to have a look around. I made a game of it at first. I was just looking for fun, I thought, but I went and chose a pop-up tent in dark blue one day. The salesman said it was the easiest kind to set up, there was no need to put any stakes in the ground and it folded away just like that, and he snapped his fingers to make his point. It was light in my hands and felt oddly like freedom. I carried it with me to work that day and stashed it in my locker, telling myself that it was there for whenever I needed it.

It wasn’t long after that. Three months, I think. Three months of not being able to afford real food, and hearing the cries of the landlady’s kids as they got whipped for not getting their homework done on time, or messing up their school uniforms by playing after school, or for looking at her wrong. I was done asking for help from my friends, I thought, and I opened the locker to change out of my work clothes, which had dried milk and coffee all down the front and there it was.

THAT first night I picked a spot on the grass, near the trees. The tent opened right up, like the salesman said but the location was a mistake and I woke up after an hour, realising that the fucking ants had gotten in. The next night, I set up camp on the beach and that was better.

I told myself that my age allows it. There could be no better time for it; twenty-two and sleeping in a tent on the beach. In the morning, just before it gets really light, I stick my head out into the fresh air, breathe in a bit of the sea before packing up and leaving before the sweepers arrive. They arrive pretty early with their cart and different bins and brooms and rakes. I’ve slept in a few times to wake up to a rustling around me, a scraping together of the piles of trash weekenders left behind. Some of the cleaners try to get rid of me, as if it’s part of their job to make sure that people don’t sleep there. The foreign workers try to pretend that I’m not there, keep a wide berth from my spot and avoid my eyes as if they’re telling themselves it is not true — this country that they moved to just for work, this country laid with glitter and gold couldn’t have its people out on the streets.

Once, the park officers came on one of their routine checks when I was still asleep and this old man came to wake me up, prodding me through the fabric with his broomstick.
Ma-ta lai liao
, the police are here, he said, when I stuck my head out to see what was going on. I’ve had run-ins with them before and I didn’t want to get stuck with another fine I couldn’t afford to pay, so I had to knock my tent down and run into the public restroom with all my things. How lucky I was, how funny, that I could get up and run off in a minute with all my life in my arms, I thought. The sweeper was waiting outside the bathroom for me. Up close, I saw how old he was, older than my grandpa when he died and got laid out in the coffin for everyone to look at. He looked like the kind of old Chinese man who would live on. Live on and look tougher with age, the thick veins on their arms and hands taut like piano strings. They are strong until they’re not. When I came out of the restroom, the old man shook his head and sighed so heavily that he started to cough and I thought he might start to lecture me. I’ve had that happen before, especially with elderly Chinese people. They seem to think it was only right that they demand me to go home, because of my age, because of theirs. But then he gave me a tied-up plastic bag, put it on top of all the other things I had in my hand. From the rustle and clink of it, I knew it was money, so I ran after him trying to return it but he started to talk in Hokkien, pushing the palms of his hands towards me. He wasn’t going to take it back so I said,
kam sia
,
kam sia
, thank you, several times, until he turned away and went back to work. I had to sleep somewhere else after that. I couldn’t bear seeing him again. I could take the stares and the cleaners sweeping their dirt towards me, but this heavy kindness, I couldn’t bear.

I GOT to realise that it is not being alone that I mind so much but the wakefulness of it. Outdoors, I have to be aware of everything and I miss crashing in front of the TV, going through every channel, watching nothing in particular. Bare feet on cool floors, that’s another thing I miss. And fresh air at night; I chose stuffiness over the constant threat of mosquitoes. But I got used to it, even started liking it, living in my own little shell. There was no need to creep around someone else’s home, feeling bad for taking up space, for making them invent stories to their parents about why this girl was staying with them, what’s wrong with her doesn’t she have a home. No need to give some stranger six hundred dollars out of my nine every month to have them watch me and sniff around my things, just for a bit of space and a bed.

With the money I saved on rent, I could afford real food again — not just instant noodles and nothing else — and go out and hang around with my friends. I stopped shoplifting books, which I had to do when I was renting. I had barely any money after paying rent. So I stole newly published paperbacks from the big bookstores in town. Only paperbacks, never hardcovers. Every single time, I would look into my wallet before walking into the store. I had to make myself feel better about stealing — none of my friends read the books I liked and I couldn’t wait ages and ages for them to get stocked in the library. I took only bestsellers, and only male writers. Jeffrey Eugenides and Haruki Murakami. I would flip through them to find the security tag (almost always tucked into the first few pages or right at the back) and walk out with it in a shopping bag. I’ve never had a problem. When I finish the book, I usually put them back where I got them. There were some books I refused to steal. Alice Munro, I saved up for. Also, Ali Smith. All I brought with me to the beach was my tent, a battery lamp, water and biscuits and toiletries and some books. I read, and when I tired of that, solved the puzzles from magazines which I brought home from the cafe. Sometimes it was just good to lie there and listen to the waves right outside.

I got to like being close to all that water. Being woken in the night by the wind and rain almost on me, whirling away just a few inches from my body. It kept me up, the first few times. I stayed awake waiting for the tent to fall in on me, for the rain to swamp my body and I wondered if I would finally get up when the fabric had closed itself in on my eyes and nose and mouth or if I would just let it be and let it be until I couldn’t care or get up anymore. Now I’m so used to it that I note it in my sleep, mid-dream. It’s raining heavily, right outside of me, I would think, and the thought would disappear and I would sink right back into the dark.

IN the beginning, it was strange to emerge from a tent every day, wash in the public restroom and go to work, pretend like I was normal. Like everyone else. I thought my colleagues and the customers might see it in my face. Ragged sleep lines made by the zip on my jacket that I used as a pillow. The smell of nylon and cheap soap. I imagined they wouldn’t want a homeless person making their morning cappuccino, handling the food orders. No one ever asked though and I realised that no one looked at other people the way they looked at themselves. Not half as close. No one saw and my colleagues were nice enough, the managers were talking about promoting me, having me take care of the shifts and things. We went out for meals sometimes, and movies. But it was hard to get closer than that. I would have to tell them where my home was and what then? I was tired of pity and wary of the inevitable, half-hearted offers of a couch or spare mattress. I had no desire to fuck things up with the people I worked with. So I lied and led them to believe everything was just fine with my parents and we all lived happily under the same roof.

It was at the beach that I ran into my brother one weekend. A Sunday, early evening and quiet enough for me to set up my tent without getting too much in the way of anyone else. I was busy shaking out my towel, the one which I used for sleeping on when he called my name. Except he called me Alexandra. It took me a while to hear it and turn around. It had been months and months since anyone had called me that.