If I Could Tell You (12 page)

Adrian looked surprised and happy to see me. Even grabbed me in a half-hug, something he had never done before.

Mei
! he said.

Kor
, I said. He must have heard me but he went on talking. They were just here for a walk, him and Grace and she had gone to the washroom. They were going to have a baby, they just found out.

That’s great, I said. He was still smiling. I had never seen him so happy before and I couldn’t help but be happy too.

He told me they were taking a walk. And afterwards, they were going for dinner, why not join them?

I looked back at my tent. He saw me looking and then said, oh, are you waiting for your friends?

Yup, I said. But why don’t I join you for dinner? They’ll understand.

It was during dinner that he asked me to move in. He and his wife exchanged glances before he said it, and the way Grace looked at me made me feel I was a part of some new project, something to busy herself with while she was taking time off from work. I’d lied to them, of course, told them I was staying with a friend. But we’re family, he said. Adrian had never been like this before. When I left home some time ago, he texted, telling me to call if I needed help, but that was it. Nothing like this. His tone was warm, pleading, almost. I said okay.

I moved in to my brother’s place with a kind of hope, imagining that he would help me, lead me around by the hand the way he did when I first started primary school, and I would be comforted. At age seven I hadn’t asked for his kindness, was even resentful of it. I could find my way, I thought, even as I got lost trying to get to the canteen. All I had to do was wait for him outside my classroom during recess time and there he would be.

They gave me the spare bedroom. It had a guest bed in it, a nightstand, an old study table worn and marked with ink, which he had brought from our parents’ home. Grace led me in and told me they were going to paint the room yellow. A colour perfectly neutral so it wouldn’t matter what gender the baby was. They didn’t know if it was going to be a boy or a girl and didn’t want to find out beforehand.

Why spoil His surprise for us? Grace said, putting a towel on the bed. And then, feel free to take anything you want from the kitchen. Oh, and no smoking, she said, before shutting the door behind her, patting her belly even though she wasn’t yet showing. She smiled widely at me, as though smiling could hide that she thought me a wreck, an aberrant.

I had not bargained for the extreme quiet of their home. Air-conditioned to freezing, sealed shut against the air outside. It was meeting him at the beach that did it. Talking to him like that brought back memories of Saturdays with my brother and our parents. Whole afternoons spent knee-deep in some pit that we had dug, collecting seashells and counting afterwards to see who had more. It made me imagine that we would fall to it again. Go back to board games and laughter. Fights that we would almost enjoy and quickly get over. Childish thoughts.

Their initial pleasure at having me in their home faded quickly. Eventually, Adrian and I only came to interact around the occasional meal and the news, which we felt obliged to watch together, a lingering habit from the days when we both lived at home, and were forced to watch the news on first the English channel, then the Chinese because our father said it was important to keep up our mother tongue. Mostly, it felt as if only Grace and I lived in that sleek, carefully furnished apartment. I would come home from work in the evening, if I were doing the opening shift, and we would have dinner together. Adrian often got home from the clinic around nine, to a meal warmed up in the microwave oven, served hot the minute she heard his keys jangling outside the door. The two of us would sit at the dinner table, me thanking her for the lovely food and her being polite, modest in return, and try to think of something to say, often about how she was feeling that day, the different things she was going to do once she had the baby. It was pleasant enough. She didn’t pry, didn’t try to practise her mothering skills on me, which I was grateful for. They did try to get me to church again though. The first Sunday, they stood at the doorway asking if I would like to go with them. They kept on at it every week even though I always said no. All the while, Adrian remained kind, his kindness drawn from a stock brewed to a thickness from all the mornings in Sunday school. The type of kindness that can smother. He waltzed in and out of his living room much as a doctor would, solicitous but distant, letting his pretty wife tend to the practicalities. It became all too familiar and more than once, I caught myself looking at him and seeing both my mother and father in his face.

He only ever tried to get us together once. During Christmas. It had been awhile and I didn’t feel like putting up a fight so I shrugged and left it to him. We were supposed to go to dinner at a restaurant. He had reserved a table for five people but my parents never showed up. My mother had refused to leave the house once she realised that I was going to be there. Not until she goes to church and asks for forgiveness, she said. Grace relayed this information to me, twisting the ring on her finger all the while. Maybe you should think about it, she said. I mean, you can’t avoid your parents forever.

It was the day after and Adrian was at the clinic again. We were having a decidedly un-Christmas-like meal. Chicken rice bought from a stall near the apartment. Not half as good as the chicken rice at Block 204, before all the food stalls moved away. Grace was busy putting everything on a plate, going as far as to shaping the rice into neat mounds. I wouldn’t have minded eating off the brown waxed paper, but Grace seemed to enjoy the civility of having plates and bowls and napkins.

You know, I knew someone like you when I was in secondary school, she said while washing her hands.

I laughed. Someone like me, you mean a barista? Or someone who really loves reading? I said, and was instantly sorry. Grace had turned around and cheeks were flushed red.

I’m sorry, I said, you were saying.

Well, she said, putting the food on the table and sitting down. Well, this classmate of mine... She went with girls. We were friends, though not very close. She got into a lot of trouble when her parents found out — even more so because we were in a Christian school. But I ran into her sometime ago. She’s married now, has kids and everything, Grace said and fell silent.

She didn’t look up from her food for a few minutes and we ate in silence. Then I said, did my mother tell you to say that?

Grace shook her head. No, no, no, I just thought it might help. You know, there are other people who come out of it...

We hardly spoke for the rest of the meal. After that night, I took to working the closing shift even though it meant that I had to wash up and stack the chairs, which I hated.

It didn’t last long after that. It was only when Adrian started to bring up Grace in every other conversation that I realised they felt it too. Grace is just nervous about her pregnancy. Grace thinks you should get a better job. Grace would like to know what your plans are. If you could come with us to church this Sunday, for once. Grace with her long neck and her perfect hands and nails that I stared at so often when I was supposed to have my head bowed over the dinner table while she or my brother gave thanks out loud. I thought how much easier it would have been if I were anything like Grace. Once she opened her eyes and saw me watching. Her eyelids had snapped open as if she’d felt the shot of a dart and she had looked at me with a kind of dread, and then she looked at me no longer, not once after that night.

HOW’RE things? Where are you staying now? he said.

I’m fine, I said.

I told Adrian nothing about sharing a flat with someone else. I could afford it since I got promoted. I said nothing about going to night school either, maybe because I hated talking to him over the phone. I could picture him in his office, squinting through his glasses at his patients’ files, tapping away at his laptop, hoping that I couldn’t hear the sound of his finger on the trackpad.

Maybe I was just afraid that I wouldn’t see it through, that it’ll be another thing he would be disappointed about.

How’s mum and dad? I asked, for lack of anything better to say.

Why don’t you call and ask them yourself? he said. Maybe you could go over for a visit one day, you know? He paused for a while, and then added, I think they miss you.

I couldn’t think of a good answer to that so I just told him my break was up, I needed to go back to work.

How long are you going to work at that coffee place? All your life,
mei?
Skipping around from one stranger’s home to the other. Is that what you want?

I hung up on him and finished my cigarette before going back to work. All that day, I kept thinking about what I should have said. What I want. What I want. Even if I had told him that I was the same person, it wouldn’t have made a difference, not a dent or a scratch on his armour. I was irrevocably changed, as if by moving in with Cindy and cutting off my hair I had metamorphosed, Samsa-like. If I said to him, I am still the same person, he would have kept silent; to him, it would sound like the most transparent of lies. There would be nothing left for us to do but stop calling, stop pretending to talk on the phone. I was left with the most tenuous of ties with my family through him and even that would be lost, perhaps for good, if I opened my mouth and spoke.

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I HAVE BEEN STARING AT the trees like that. I’m supposed to be doing my math homework but last week in school, they told us we have to do this: look up and out of the window at the trees in the distance. Actually, just anything green if we have been reading or using the computer for a while and someone said, really, teacher? Anything? Then the whole class joined in to try and come up with green things. I shouted, frogs! Someone else said, ‘cher! what about my father’s car! Oscar the grouch! ‘cher! what about nose dirt! Everyone started laughing then, we were much too loud but we couldn’t help it. Mrs Sim, our real teacher, wasn’t around. She was on sick leave for a week and this relief teacher Miss Tan was young and skinny with big eyes like a cartoon person and her voice was so small no one in class could ever hear her. The recess bell rang when Miss Tan was waving her hands in the air, trying to get us to shut up but it was no use. Everyone was already getting out their water bottles and wallets from their bags. She was still shouting when we ran out of the classroom. I was glad because recess meant that I had only three hours and forty-five minutes to go before I could go home and see Bobby again. It was Friday and ten o’clock in the morning and I had the whole weekend, if I was lucky, before my mother decided to do something about him.

At least, that’s what I thought before I got home. Because by that time (two o’clock), my mother had already called up the SPCA. Maybe they picked up Bobby when I was in the canteen, when I was eating my usual lotus paste bun, trying to swallow it all in as few mouthfuls as possible so that I had fifteen minutes to go play basketball. Maybe he was already gone then, locked up in a cage at the back of some van. I was looking at the trees outside and then back and again at the clock on our classroom wall, wondering why time got so slow when you watched it. Like watching grass grow, which is what my mother says about work. Being a receptionist is as fun as watching grass grow, so work hard, then you can have a better job, she said. (Although if you can watch it on TV, grass and plants and flowers, when they put a video camera in the forest for a long, long time and then they make it go fast — a whole year in one minute — and you see the sprouts coming up quick as anything from the seed and then curling upwards towards the sky, it’s not that boring. It is actually quite cool.)

My mother was at home when I opened the door. I didn’t expect her to be there since she usually works Monday, Thursday, Friday. So I had a bad feeling when I put the key in the lock and she opened it before I could do it myself, like she had been waiting for me to come home, the way I sometimes wait for her to come home in the evening.

She put her hand on my head and the bad feeling got even worse. Boy, she said, I called the SPCA. They took the dog.

All I could say was, Bobby?

Then she bent down and said, change your clothes, I’ll take you out to McDonald’s and we’ll go somewhere, okay? Where do you want to go?

My mother kept coming up with different places while I was in my room, shouting them through the door, but in a different voice, one that was higher and softer than usual (Marine Parade amusement park? East Coast Beach? We can rent bicycles!).

I was wiping my face on my sleeves when she said, what about the movies? There’s this show you wanted to watch, right? she said.

We went to the cinema and my mother got us popcorn, the mixed kind, sweet and salty. The movie was about this bad guy who is actually good; he saves the moon and these three little girls. I was feeling better then and by bedtime, I was telling myself that Bobby wasn’t a very nice dog anyway. He was old and his fur was falling out in places. Plus, he ran away from me when I took him downstairs for a walk which is how I saw the man.

Jonathan says everyone dies. That it is all bull**** when adults talk about heaven. Which is what they made up just to make the kids feel better. I remembered this when I thought about asking him if he thought Bobby was in heaven, if they had him “put to sleep” already. That is what the SPCA does to dogs when no one wants them. My ex-best friend had a dog that was old and blind. It had eyes like blue marbles and his parents brought it to the vet to be “put to sleep”. Sleep is not what I thought the man was doing when I saw him lying on the ground like that. Bobby was sniffing around the man and barking. The stupid thing. All I could do was stand there. There was nowhere else for me to go and the leash, the string I was pulling Bobby with was near the body so I couldn’t pick it up. I kept trying to get the dog’s attention so we could go home but he wouldn’t even look at me. There was a puddle of red next to the man and it kept growing and getting redder and redder. I just stood there until the police came. The police were very nice (which is what I plan to say to my mother the next time she tells me that the police will get me if I don’t behave myself). A lady police went to the shops to get me a bar of chocolate, which I ate quickly because my mother didn’t allow me to have sweets and she would surely take it away if she saw this. They let me sit in the police car while they asked lots of questions like, did I see anybody around before and after the guy fell? Did I hear anything, like shouting or people arguing? At the end they said I did a good job and shook my hand. I felt quite good until I saw the man, now covered by a piece of cloth except for his arm. It was his arm sticking out that made me vomit. It was like I was six again, with people patting my back and wiping my mouth with paper handkerchiefs. My mother had to wash my shoes that night. As she scrubbed, she kept saying, what bad luck, what bad luck. I thought it wasn’t that bad, I could wear my old ones and just go over the dirty bits with chalk.