If I Could Tell You (14 page)

Before, I didn’t have to think about it. Ma took care of everything to do with the move. Once a week, she brought all the letters we got in the mail to the neighbour below, Mr. Wong, who could read Chinese and even English. That’s how we found out that we had to move. Heard the official sounding words come out from Mr. Wong’s mouth. Ma said she would take care of it and she did. She was the one who answered the phone when it rang, listened to the voices of people she never met and arranged for things, pressed her inked thumb to paper and talked to people who were in charge of things, and other people who could help us. After months of talking about it, she told me where we were going to move and then we went to the place which would be our new home. I’ve lived here, in Block 204 for all my life. What is old and familiar and you — that’s home. I knew the moment we saw the new flat that it was not going to be okay. All white walls and hard floors smelling of stone. The woman bringing us around said that we could do what we wanted to the place. It was made like that.
Raw
, I think she said, so that we could do it up the way we wanted. Except we didn’t have any money to do it up with. It would have to remain like that for years and years. We’ll get used to it, Ma said. I said nothing, walked into all the rooms with my shoes on. The floor was covered with pale sand and I left the shape of my shoes on the floor walking in and out. The view outside the window was all train tracks and wide roads, not like the big field outside our flat — left alone most of the time, except for some weekends when it is used for football.

We went over to Ah Por’s the next day. We needed cardboard boxes to put our things in and the old lady kept plenty of those in her flat. She gave us five, told us we could have more if we wanted and Ma said thanks, folded a two-dollar note as small as possible into her own palm and put it over Ah Por’s. The two of them pushed their hands back and forth for a few minutes, like practicing
taichi
. Ma soon gave up, shook her head and thanked her again. Then we left to go downstairs to Ah Por’s mailbox and put the money through the slot. It’s only proper, she said, the old woman collects cardboard just for a few cents.

Poor soul, Ma said, she has no one to take care of her.

At home, we stood the cardboard pieces by our door but they kept sliding to the floor whenever we walked past so Ma told me to put them in the storeroom. We have to start packing next week, she said. Except next week she wasn’t there anymore, she had left me on my own.

NOBODY else could stop talking about the move. Boss talked about it. The customers who came to order tea and coffee and breakfast at the coffee shop, they talked about it sitting at the table, waiting for their drinks to cool a little before they took the first sip. It was always noisy in the coffee shop, with the sound of the overhead fans and the TV set put up loud enough for everyone to hear, even through the cracking of the woks and pans. I heard. People had their plans, turned them over and over in their heads, laid them out on the table, for their friends to see. They talked about where they were going to put their old furniture, where everything would go and what they would have to throw out, what they would have to get new, brand new to fit in with the new place. There was the father who promised his daughter a puppy if she would just please agree to share her room, her table and wardrobe with her younger sister. There were parents, many of them, wondering about which school their children could get into now, because the move shifted them close to this one school and further from a few others. People were worried about renovations and how long it would take before the dust was all gone — it was bad for your health, breathing in all that dirt, they said. There were plans and they were all happening so quickly. One month, then three weeks, then two.

EACH night, after coming back home from the coffee shop, I thought about starting to pack but I didn’t know where to begin. I started panicking two weeks to the date, and imagined strangers coming to knock at the door, to get me to leave the flat. I thought about the police. So I went into the storeroom. There was just enough room to stand up and I looked up into the shelves, holding a hand against the light from the bulb above my head. Closed my fingers around this and that; a lunar calendar from four years ago, broomsticks missing their brooms, flashlights and dead candles from the time we had our electricity cut off because Pa had died and the money had run out. I stood, touching all the objects and not picking them up. Finally let my arms hang by my side till the weight of the years, our possessions, all of it just mine now, seemed to come down upon me from a height and I had to fold down into a squat, put my fingers to the floor for balance.

I was reminded of that morning, touching my feet to the cool tiles before opening my eyes, knowing even then that something was not quite right. I’d always enjoyed dawn. The stillness of it. I could walk outside and feel safe as I never felt during the day. That milky darkness. It was a balm, a salve, cooling my nerves as I stepped outside. Downstairs, I ventured out as far as the field sometimes, watching the mist lifting off the grass before I went to the coffee shop and warmed up the kitchen, putting the kettle on to boil for the first pots of coffee, lining up the glasses and mugs on the counter so they would be within reach when it got busy. But that morning. Something had changed during the night. The air was different. The smell and sound of it moving through the small space of the flat. A burglar, I thought, there had been a couple of them in the neighbourhood last month. I walked into the living room, shoulders pulled up around my ears, feeling certain that I would be greeted by chaos — front door wide open, the television set spirited away, our bank books and money box in the altar drawer, below the picture of my father, gone, clean squares of well-preserved wood where they had been kept for years and years. Ma would have to call the police, they would have to come and take note of everything that the burglars had taken. Stand around and ask questions while I tried to form words with my mouth to answer them. Ma would insist on giving the policemen hot chrysanthemum tea and they would have to linger until they finished, obliged to drink the very last drop. But no, nothing seemed to be missing; I knew this even with the half-light sifted in through the curtains. I switched on a lamp. Everything was there. It was just me being foolish, I thought.

Ma was still asleep, so I showered and dressed and left the flat without making too much noise. She often woke when I did, as if she were still going to work, cleaning up offices in the city. They got rid of her last year, just as she turned seventy-five. She was getting a bit slow, they said and gave her a little send-off cheque. Now she just stayed at home and watched TV or listened to the radio or stood in the corridor outside chatting with the other old ladies. But she kept hours as if she were still going to work. Most mornings, I could hear her through the walls, shuffling and turning her body to try and find a cool spot on the bed. I would hear her sighing, which meant she had given up trying to sleep. She would sigh and slowly shift herself up to sitting. She slept less as she got older, a fact she brought up whenever we saw each other in the morning. I’m getting old, she would say, old and useless. Shaking her head as she said the words. I was glad that she hadn’t woken, shut the door with smallest of clicks as I went out so that Ma would have a few more minutes of sleep. Maybe even an hour or two.

The rest of the day was normal. Quiet, but normal for what was happening with the big move. Fewer people lived in Block 204 and in the other buildings around it now, so fewer people came in to eat and drink because they were mostly gone and living in their new places, where they might have another coffee shop that they could go to for meals. There were the taxi uncles though. They were always there in the morning for their cups of coffee, thick and dark as anything and saucers of soft-boiled egg mixed with soy sauce and pepper. There was a big guy, as tall as he was wide, who wanted his coffee with a raw egg in it, every single morning. The big guy talked a lot and seemed to want to get me to talk as well.

How’s business? he asked, as if he didn’t know that Boss was going to shutter it for good in just a few weeks. I handed him back his change and walked away.

At noon, I returned home with lunch wrapped up in brown waxed paper. It was quiet in the flat. A nothing noise, like the quiet of this morning hadn’t been disturbed at all. I knocked on her door. Ma, you awake? I said.

There was no answer. I listened hard and only heard someone else’s radio, the laughter and music of a talk show, then I knocked again. Maybe she’s ill, I thought. I should go in and look, or I should not go in and let her sleep. I waited outside until lunch break was over and I went off to work again. I couldn’t not.

It was past seven when I left work. If Ma was sick, I thought, it might be good for her to have some fish porridge. She could make a big pot, enough to last until lunch, or even dinner tomorrow and it would be good for her. There was the right kind of fish in the freezer and there were jars of pickles in the kitchen cabinet which could go on the side. I thought about suggesting it to her, maybe asking if she wanted me to get the fish ready by getting it out of the freezer first but all of this fell away when I opened the door, found the flat dark, silent. This was how it would look, I thought, if I didn’t exist. But then, if I didn’t exist, this flat wouldn’t be mine and I wouldn’t be standing there. I wouldn’t be there thinking these things and worrying about Ma staying in the room all day or maybe not being there at all. The door to her bedroom was still closed. I tried knocking again and when she didn’t answer, I went ahead and opened it. I walked in and there she was, lying on the bed on her back, still asleep. There was a smell in the air but it didn’t bother me that much because I saw that Ma was still there. Not like the last time she went to the hospital to visit my father and didn’t come back until the next morning. We had just moved into this flat, our third home. First was the
kampung
. It was a hut and everything was made of wood. There were always chickens running outside and packs of dogs which belonged to nobody, which I was afraid of because I didn’t know if their hanging-out tongues and open mouths were friendly or not. Then there was the cramped walk-up where the three of us had a single room and shared everything with everyone else who lived there. Everything. Like the kitchen and bathroom and toilets. There was constant quarrelling about someone taking someone else’s eggs or rice and there was never any space and I had to sleep on the floor on a rattan mat, next to my parents’ bed. Then we moved here. I was seventeen then and it was here that I got my first proper room and first proper bed. Then my father got ill and went away, which I didn’t mind that much because my father was always gone anyway and it made no difference where he was when he was gone. (Sometimes I forgot and pictured him at work somewhere, carrying a bag of something heavy in a warehouse by the river.) But it was to the hospital this time and Ma went as well. She left after cooking rice and a few other dishes and left them under a mesh cover. Told me not to play around with the kitchen stove and then she left. I was alone from eight o’clock in the morning until noon the next day. I couldn’t sleep all that night so I went around putting on all the lights. They were the electric kinds and they made a reassuring sound going on and off. When Ma got back, the first thing she did was to grab the duster and whip me for leaving all the lights on. You stupid boy, she said. Wasting money like that, she said. It was after the screaming and crying that she told me that my father had died in the early morning.

When I remembered this, I thought maybe Ma was ill too. If she was, she needed to go to the doctor. The Chinese clinic was in the next block, just across the street. I knew their faces, the people there. I spent hours sitting in the waiting room, or sitting in a curtained off area of the doctor’s room waiting for my father to be finished with his treatment. That was before my father went to live in the hospital, which I went to only once. I preferred the clinic because Doctor Tan kept a bowl of herbal candy on his table and always pushed it towards me whenever I went there. Thank you, Doctor Tan, I would have to say afterwards. If my father noticed, he would tell me to leave it. I was too old to be taking sweets off the doctor’s table, he said. My father.

Tell me a story, I said to my father. That was when we lived in the walk-up, and there was always something going on that made it too noisy to sleep. Stories were something I remembered from being in school, during the year or so that I was there. It was a school with a church. Or at a church, I forgot which. It was a school with/at a church and the teachers taught in Mandarin. For lessons, they told stories. They had stories about a man who died and went up into the sky. Also, AND IN JESUS NAME I PRAY A-MEN. I was there for a year until the teacher told my parents that I was slow and needed to go somewhere else to learn. My father said he could hardly afford this one, with the books and school shoes and uniform so he told Ma, forget it. Waste of money, he said.

Tell me a story, I said to my father once. And he sat down, heavy with the day’s work and said.

We had another child you know. Before you. A girl. We named her for you. We named her a name which meant “to bring in a brother” and then we got you when she was two years old. You were what we wanted and we were so happy. But then you kept falling ill and we didn’t have enough money for the doctors and medicine. So we had to give her away. She was obedient and smart. Three years old and already she could write her own name. She used to go with your Ma to the market to sell eggs and they would always come back with an empty basket. We named her for you. But there was not enough food so Mrs Lim took her in, they lived in that big house outside the
kampung
for a few years. And then everybody moved and we lost contact. Then we found out that you– Well, that is the only story I know.

It was the only story my father ever told me and he didn’t even finish it properly.