If I Could Tell You (13 page)

JONATHAN is who I hang out with when I am home alone with nothing to do. We used to do our homework together. Since he is three years older than me and is a lot smarter, he helps with my math and science homework. In return, I lend him the comic books that I buy at the second-hand store every weekend. He would always finish his work first, no matter how much he had to do. Then he would go off into his room to play some kind of war game on the computer. I am not very good at those, I die too quickly and then I get bored because I’m always doing the same thing, making the same mistakes and never getting anywhere. I asked Jonathan how come he’s so quick with his schoolwork and he said that if I quit staring out of the window I would be quick too. He was in my primary school for some years and then he went to secondary school a little further away. I heard he got into trouble there a few times. For fighting, or something. My mother told me. Word gets around, she said, and then she said not to spend time with Jonathan anymore, she saw him smoking in the stair landing a few times and he was a bad influence. She said that a lot. Wei Long in my class was a bad influence because he never handed in his work and got caught stealing someone’s wallet. He got caned in front of everyone during Wednesday assembly and he didn’t even cry. I thought maybe he wore extra shorts and put newspapers underneath them, which is what I would do if they were going to cane me in front of the entire school. The people living a few stories above us, the two people, are bad influence. The girl used to say hi to me while her boyfriend pretended like I wasn’t there, but my mother said they were Shaming Their Parents although she didn’t explain why. Next door was bad influence because the brothers (Aziz and Abdul and Aaron) were mad about soccer. They sometimes played in the rain. I looked out at the field once and it was raining so hard you could hardly see the trees and the playground. But then I saw the three of them, plus a few others I didn’t know from our school, yelling and sliding all over the soaked grass. My mother said their mother was crazy to let them play like that in the rain. Mrs Ibrahim didn’t look crazy to me — she smiles whenever she sees me and calls me
sayang
. I think if anyone is crazy, it is– Anyway, my mother says a lot of things and if I listened to them all, I would have nothing to do besides homework and making sure my room was tidy.

I remembered what Jonathan told me. Stop looking out the window and finish your work. I did, except for a few really difficult questions. Which is why I then went over to his flat, just three doors away. Maybe he could help with my math. Also, maybe he would like to go catch frogs or fish in the
longkang
. It hadn’t rained for a few days and the canal just has a small stream of water running in the middle. I thought it might be good to climb down and see if we could catch anything so I got my fishing net, the one I still had from when I had goldfish, and a red pail.

When Jonathan came to the door, he was in a T-shirt and shorts, all crumpled up like he had been sleeping when I rang the doorbell. He didn’t look at me but went straight back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.

You didn’t go to school today? I said, because he looked like he had just been sitting there all day. There was a cigarette burning in an ashtray, which was just a tin cup cut in half. I always wondered if his parents were mad at him for smoking but if they were he wouldn’t be doing it in his room like that. And then I wondered what kind of parent would be okay with that and I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

Jonathan didn’t answer. Then he looked at me, at the net and the pail in my hand and asked me where I was going.

I thought we could go to the
longkang
. Catch fish? I said.

Hm, he said, stabbing away furiously at the arrow keys on his keyboard while I stood in the doorway, looking at all the comic books (some of them mine), CDs with no words or pictures on them and clothes, dirty ones lying around and a stack of folded ones on the side of his bed. After a while the sound of fighting and guns stopped and I knew that he was finally done. He spun around on his chair a few times before stopping so that he faced me.

There’s this place I want to go. That guy’s flat. The guy who jumped that day, he said. We can go there and afterwards, we go catch fish.

I looked down at the red pail. I should have put some water in there, the stream might not be deep enough for me to get water.

Oi, can or not? Jonathan said.

Why you want to go there for? I said, trying to sound bored, like I just didn’t care for it. There’s nothing wrong at all with not caring for something.

I just want to go see, he said.

WE walked all the way up to the top floor. There was writing all over the wall in the stairwell. It was all things like:

O$P$

Mindy Tan is a FATTY BOMBOM

Harry Lee, I
U

lire lire pants on FIRE!

Mei Ling Mei Ling in the air I can see ur underwear

We were reading them and trying not to trip over the unwanted things people left behind when they moved out. Things like pieces of a bookshelf, potted plants all dry and grey, even a TV set and a radio that looked like it still worked. I would have brought it home except I knew I would get into trouble for doing it — bringing back something that someone else had thrown away.

We stopped at the sixth floor so that he could light a cigarette. Hey, he said, what happened to that dog? The one you found?

Oh, I said, they came and took it away. The SPCA.

Your mother called them, huh, he said.

Why you want to go see the man’s flat? It’s not like we can go in. It’s all locked up and everything, I said.

Jonathan just shrugged and turned to blow smoke away from me.

IT was shut up tight, like I said. The windows still had curtains over them so that we couldn’t see inside. When we walked past them, I saw in the glass how short I was next to Jonathan; he was almost a head taller than me and it made me stand up straight, as tall as I could. There was police tape on the front door and right in front of that, on the floor, was a plate of food, pink-coloured buns, the kind people usually get for death anniversaries and the seventh month to put on the altar at home. There were other things too, candles and joss sticks and little scraps of paper.

I pointed to the mess on the floor and Jonathan just said, it’s just people. Praying for luck and stuff. They think the ghost of the man will help them if they’re nice and give him food.

Then he spat loudly, towards the outside, his spit going through the air in a wide arc and sailing down and down. I went over to the railing to see, just in case there was anybody below who might be hit by it, which would be funny.

Pray for what? I said.

Oh, he said. Anything. Good exam results, money, help with some kind of problem. But mostly just money. You didn’t see the one downstairs? People been praying there too, where he landed. Every time the cleaners clean it up. But next day there will be fresh offerings again. Food, tea and beer.

Huh, I said.

If it really worked, people would be praying all the time to dead people. Everyone would be buying buns and going to the cemeteries and where people died on the road from accidents and all. Which is ridiculous. But then I remembered my uncles at my grandfather’s funeral last year. The way they crowded in front of his photo. A black and white one they put up just that morning. For half an hour they prayed and tossed around bits of paper with numbers written on them.

Oh, I said.

What? Jonathan said.

Nothing. I said, thinking that I still didn’t know what we were doing there. It was too quiet, with him just leaning on the railing and smoking. It was too quiet and I had to say something.

I saw him, you know? I saw him die. I said.

There was a silence. The kind that comes during the moment someone changes their mind about you. Like when my mother told me that my father wasn’t dead after all, told me that he just left one day and there was no shame to it. None at all. I wondered why, if there was no shame, she had to lie for years and years about it. She lied whenever I asked. But I just kept my mouth shut, nodded to let her know that I heard and was okay with it, like I had a choice.

What do you mean, you saw him die? Jonathan said.

I was outside, near where he fell. I saw him jump and fall and land. There was a lot of blood. I said, trying not to swallow too loudly.

You mean you actually saw him jump? Why you never tell me earlier? He stepped back, pushed his hand through his hair. Wow, that’s sick, man, he said.

I shrugged and said, it was very sick. He had blood coming out from everywhere. And then he was trying to say stuff and then he stopped, and died.

Wow, he said again. Wow.

Didn’t you see what happened? I said. Where were you?

In school,
la
, he said. I didn’t get back until six, it was raining and I didn’t even notice the tent and stuff. Couldn’t see anything, the rain was so heavy.

We stood there for a few minutes, leaning over the railing, looking down. There were people walking out of the building and in. People my age just coming back from school, this girl nearly toppling backwards from the weight of her schoolbag. There were a few elderly people playing chess or watching other people playing chess at the stone tables. There was the really old lady with the cart, going out with it empty and hoping to get cardboard and things to fill it with. And birds quarrelling on a branch, like they were fighting for space. We stood there and just watched. Maybe this was what he was doing last Monday. The man. Just staring and staring until he felt like he had to be down there, with all the other people. And the only way he could do it, the quickest way, the best way, was to jump.

THEY HEAR EVERYTHING FROM THE WINDOWS. From the time they wake up, to the time they lay on their beds, pressing their faces into familiar-scented pillows, trying to shut out the yellow glow of the lights right outside, lighting up the corridor, sneaking in through the thin film of their eyelids. Trying to shut out the sounds they can’t help hearing through the open window, it’s too warm to sleep with it closed.

They can tell time from the different sounds if they had to. Morning brings sharp, quick twists of birdsong, the creaking awake of bones and pipes and doors. Sounds of people in their homes — the shrill cry of kettles, alarm clocks, the yelling of parents and children to hurry up hurry up they’re going to miss the bus the bell the shutting of the school gates. The heavy rolling-in of school and factory buses. Cars and motorcycles starting up and moving away, the smoky vibrato and rat-a-tat-tat fading off slowly. And then a deep calm for a while. The moist heat lulling everything into a stillness, a sticky quiet, clinging to the tarmac, to the concrete and brick and paint coming off the walls of the building. The ones who are not at school or work — the stay-at-home mothers and their young children, the elderly and the ill — they fill in the quiet by putting on the radio, the television, even if no one is watching or listening, it’s just good to fill in the space next to them while they’re closing up a wound in a skirt pocket, watching grandchildren trace out daydreams with crayons held tight in their fists. There’s the fleeting echo of nursery rhymes from the preschool a little away from the block, whisked through the open window and chased up by the wind. Then, as evening sets in, the buses and cars which left quietly in the early hours come back, letting loose the caged up, shut up voices of children and teenagers from before.

They hear it in birdcall. The trees full of crows and mynahs squabbling for a place to roost. The Asian koel with his long, woeful lament, pouring his heart into a resonant
koo-woo
, a parting song for the sun which he repeats every day. It is to this repetitive cry that the walk from the bus stop the train station the car is made. That doors are unlocked and swung open. And calls made to ask what to do about the evening meal, where to go and what time. It is to this cry that lone, passionless meals are consumed, eyes blinking in the glow of their screens’ covert flicker.

They hear even more with the settling in of night and the accompanying quiet. TV sets oozing its cloying, dramatic dialogue. Children howling from the flick-and-whoosh of their parents’ cane for homework left undone or lies uncovered. They hear it, lying in bed, the click and buzz of wires and metallic parts all around. The gathered, living hum of their home, their building, sending them to sleep. They don’t wake when it rains — when the roof threatens to tear open with the force of each heavy, determined drop. It is in their bones, this rain, the turbulent, frantic sound of it. They don’t wake.

I THINK I CAN DO IT. EVERYONE ELSE MAKES IT look so easy, reaching into cupboards full of things, things used a thousand times and put away in the same place. Folding or rolling up the shelf linings, sheets of newspaper, marked with overlapping squares and rings from the bases of pots, empty jars and biscuit tins put away for in the future, things which they thought they might need again one day. All over the block, people were laying out black trash bags full of old, unwanted objects they could no longer find use for, things that wouldn’t fit in with their new flat. I saw some newly discarded thing every time I went out. They put the bags out during the night or early morning, bags spilling their insides out. Sun-faded shirts and lone shoes, opened and forgotten boxes of cream crackers turned the texture of paper and dust, use-by date rubbed off by time. There were things clogging the corridors and stairwells, furniture marked by human scents and shut-in cigarette smoke. Bags ripped open by cats or children. Not even the rag-and-bone man who came once every two weeks to pick up used paper and clothes and household appliances wanted them.