If I Could Tell You (2 page)

She looks down again. From here, she can just make out the fallen stick-figure lying at the foot of the block of flats. Limbs sprawled wide, feet bare, like a sleeping child caught in a bad dream.

What on earth was he thinking, she says, leaning out of the window. She pulls in the bamboo poles flagged with clothes and folds them over the back of a chair, breathes in the smell of soap and sun. She stands there even after everything had been brought in. Telling herself she would not be able to have an accident like that, because she would have to get a stool to stand on and heave herself over the ledge, which she was too old to do. Even if she wanted to, it would take some work.

In a second, someone in the flat below, to the left, has stuck her head out. A young girl, her long hair swinging in the wind. The girl, the old lady thinks, who walks around half-naked, with black coloured all around her eyes so that she looks like a haunting, a wandering ghost. The girl drew her head back in to shout something, she couldn’t hear what, then her friend, a skinny boy who’s always wearing shirts too big for him, sticks his head out alongside hers. The girl has a hand to her mouth and the boy is saying things. Then she takes out a phone, punches in the numbers and holds it to her ear, all the while staring at the figure on the ground, as if thinking it might move again, it might move and she’ll have to cancel the call, hang up.

Tch, I’ve seen worse. When the Japanese were here. Much worse, she says.

To show how little she cares, she turns away and calls out again. Old One, what do you want for lunch?
Fan wat ze jook
? Rice or porridge? she asks. Then she nods, bends her old body to retrieve the rice from the bucket, measures out half a cup and pours it into the pot. She will put it under the open tap, rinse and pour, and repeat until the water runs clean. When she is finished, when she puts the pot on the fire, the police vehicle will just be turning into the parking lot, screaming much too loudly for her to ignore. She will wipe her hands dry and go to the window. Call out for the Old One again.

DID you see that? he says.

The neighbour (he can’t remember her name, only what everyone in the building calls her) stops mid-sentence, turns away from him to face the staircase landing.

Auntie Wong shuts her mouth, then opens it again, says calmly that if it’s those young people throwing things out of their window again, somebody should call the police. It’s not the first time. Potted plants, they’ve thrown, and plastic bags full of rubbish. Those people, she says and stops there, shaking her head slowly.

Yang says nothing. He goes down the flight of stairs so he can lean over the railing. He thinks he knows what it was that fell and he can barely contain the scream inside his throat but goes to the edge of the parapet and looks out and all he can think is, thank god.

Thank god, he thinks. Then he turns to her. We need to call the police, he tells her, hoping that his voice is not shaking, that he doesn’t look too relieved.

She puts one foot forward and stops there, as if she couldn’t make out what Yang’s look meant — if she should go to take a look or not.

Don’t, Yang says, backing away. It’s an accident, call the police, he says.

He has to go back to the office now, he thinks. He shouldn’t be here, standing around when he should be at work. He left the office during lunchtime, intending to grab a sandwich around the corner but he found himself in the car, driving the twenty minutes it took to get back home. All because of the text Kim sent him some time during the morning. He had asked her what they should do about dinner and she had replied, anything. Doesn’t matter. See you, Yang. The last three words had made his stomach lurch. And he had gone home, ran into the bedroom, the kitchen. He left the bathroom till last because he was too afraid, turning the handle of the door as quickly as he could and flinging it open. She wasn’t there. He was leaving the flat, starting to think himself mad when he ran into the neighbour close to the stairs. She had said hi, told him that it was going to rain and had they brought their laundry in when something fell through the air, close enough that they felt and heard the whoosh as it went past them.

Auntie Wong has the phone in her hand now. She’s just holding on to it while leaning out into the air, looking at what’s on the bottom, on the ground. It takes a while for her to realise what it is, she can’t quite believe it.

I have to go. I have to go back to work, Yang says and goes down the stairs, two at a time. He leaves the older woman standing there, silently staring at the ground below.

I’M not kidding, Cindy. There’s somebody lying on the ground. I think he fell, the one leaning over the window says. Behind, music and the sound of car tires, gunfire and shouts come to an abrupt stop.

Seriously? Cindy says, rising from the couch. When she gets to the window and squints and sees the person on the ground, she says, shit, oh my god, is he dead? Then she steps back and says, wait– Wait, that’s the guy, Alex. Isn’t that the guy from the coffee shop?

Alex leans out again. What? I don’t know, I can’t see. Get the phone. We– We need to call the ambulance or something.

The girl takes out the phone from her pocket, her hands shaking so much she thinks she might drop it. While she talks to the operator, she pushes the window open wider and sticks her head further out. They’re too high up for her to see and she’s half-glad. More disappointed than glad so she squints and tries to get a clearer look, she doesn’t want to but she can’t help it.

Later on, after the ambulance and the police and people have left, they will go back to the couch and see that the man on the television screen is still frozen mid-run, his mouth still widened in a yell, his eyebrows up in his hair. Both of them will stare at the screen for a second and the girl will laugh and shake her head, as if it’s the funniest thing she has seen for a while. She will call up their friends saying, oh my god you won’t believe what happened just now. They will talk till late, until they finally decide that they can’t sleep there tonight, they don’t want to. And when it is decided, they breathe easy again, quickly dressing and getting the keys. Let’s go, they say, and they will go out into the dark, avoiding the place, the taped out square at the back of the building.

HE’S used to the waiting. Watching the clock. The passing of ten, fifteen, thirty minutes. Knows enough that when his mother says fifteen minutes she means thirty and when she says thirty, it will take her closer to forty-five minutes to get home, although it still catches him off-guard. Like today, he made himself a peanut butter sandwich as a snack but of course it wasn’t enough. He tried not to think about dinner but his stomach was making low, rumbly noises and he looked down, imaging that he might be able to see the prodding of little hungry devils through the skin on his belly. It didn’t matter though. Everything was alright today. Nothing could spoil it. Not even the neighbours could spoil it. He was sitting in the doorway, the door swung wide open, hoping to catch a breeze. Already, two of the neighbours had passed on their way back from doing the shopping, asked in their sing-song voices, waiting for your mother, huh, boy? Strolled past with plastic bags of vegetables and raw meat and their wallets jammed into their armpits.

He tried to ignore them, kept an eye on the dog sniffing around the things in the living room. The couch, the TV on its little table, their shoes by the door. He sniffed the air, imitating the dog. It smelled like rain. It was probably going to. His mother might need an umbrella, he thought. It was a short walk from the bus stop to their building but there was no shelter in between all the other buildings. She would get drenched and that would not be good. Ah. He would go to the bus stop with an extra umbrella to make sure that she stayed nice and dry. His mother would come out from the bus expecting to get drenched but then she would see him with the umbrella. Then she would realise that he was all grown up. Responsible, that’s the word. He was responsible for her, and therefore he could be responsible for the dog.

Come on, he says to the dog, and he picks up the big umbrella propped up behind the front door. He locks up and they walk through the corridor, going down the stairs to the outside. There is a grass verge by the side of the parking lot, where there are never any cars because the trees there bear fruit which fall heavily and bleed a dark juice which you can only get off with hard scrubbing. The boy stops for a bit to let the dog sniff around and make a pee. He kicks away a few of the dark fruit, watching them bounce across the tarmac a good distance away. Maybe there’s a stick he can throw around and have the dog fetch. He will have to give him a name, he thinks, looking at the dog now putting his nose everywhere in the grass, making deep, snuffling sounds. This is what he is doing, running a list of names through his head, trying to decide on Bobby or Tin Tin when he hears a loud, damp thud behind him, and then the dog is barking, running away all of a sudden, running towards the building. Hey come back, he says, going after the new dog. Come back.

THE FIRST ONES ARE BEGINNING TO WAKE.

Stirring reluctantly within the warmth of their bedclothes. Small children, shapeless words bubbling out of their mouths, an arm gripped fast around an old toy, some with only minutes to go before their shower, a bowl of sugary cereal, and the bus ride to school. Mothers and fathers in the next room, breathing into each other’s bodies; the clocks on their bedside tables ticking firmly on, ready to burst out into a short-lived wail before the last of the sleepers’ dreams swirl to a close. There are the ones already lying awake, the elderly, bus drivers, hawkers, habitual early risers, watching the sun come on outside before sliding gratefully out of bed.

Outside, in the square of the parking lot, the only thing you can hear is the sighing of trees. The breeze tugs loose a number of leaves, browned and ready, so that they make their descent — listing first to one side and then to the other, performing a slow, lilting waltz to the ground. Two young cats observe this dance from below the belly of a car, their eyes darting, flashing wide; sleek bodies ready to fire off into a chase. One of them does just that. The other blinks lazily at its brother, stretches, then struts out into the open. It leaps onto the bonnet of the blue taxi they had been sleeping under, leaps again, up onto the roof, displacing the dewdrops dappling the cool, smooth surface. There it sits, washes itself carefully for the next few minutes.

Nearby, pigeons, crowded beneath the eaves of the coffee shop, have started to shuffle and coo. They know well enough. Breakfast. As soon as the owner of the Indian
prata
stall arrives and goes into his shop through the door in the back, they will alight on the grassy patch just outside the building, pretend to peck carelessly about. As if they weren’t waiting for him to come along with the stale crumbs, swept up and kept aside just for that little morning ritual. When he has fed them, brushed the last of the remaining bread off his palms, he goes back in. Stands behind the counter of his nine-year-old stall and starts on the dough. He takes his time — pulling it with his hands and adding more flour or water until it sticks and never falls apart no matter if he stretches it to the length of his arms, and then leaves it to sit in a bowl, covered with a sheet of cloth. Later on, just before the morning crowd starts to line up in front of his stall for their breakfast, different kinds of
prata
, the filled ones with onion and eggs and a dish of curry on the side, or the plain ones with just a bit of sugar to go along with it, he will sit at the usual table in front of his shop, pour coffee into big enamel mugs and share it with his wife. She is immediately above him at that moment, in the bathroom of their modest three-room flat, singing an old tune while she scoops pails of water from an old earthen vessel and tips it over herself. As she steps out, wrapped in a faded sarong, the tops of her shoulders still dusted with drops of water, the newspaper lorry winds in, curving past the bends in the long driveway. It stops by the curb, and out springs driver-turned-delivery-boy. For half an hour, he will wheel up stacks of everybody’s
Straits Times, LianHe ZhaoBao, Berita Harian
and
Tamil Murasu
. He knows it all by heart, goes door to door without a list, without missing anyone or anything out. He will slot these carefully between the metal bars of their gates. Finish up just as the first school buses roll in. Nobody notices, upon opening their doors for their newspaper, that they have been balanced neatly on a metal rung at a comfortable height. No one has to stoop, bend their bed-stiff limbs for their morning read.

The sun is now starting to peep in, revealing pink streaks across the steel blue. Then, little by little, a dusky red as the night lifts. Everything is held still for an instant, right before a deep roll of thunder rumbles through the air. It goes unnoticed but for someone on the sixth floor. There, a light comes on in the kitchen, windows swing open and a pair of hands reach out to draw in the bamboo poles flagged with freshly laundered clothes, forgotten and left out during the night. In a matter of minutes, rain starts to fall. First quietly, then ascending fast into the full-blown orchestra that comes along with tropical showers. The drumming on the roof is loud enough to drown out a child’s morning alarm for school, enough to drown out even her mother’s call to wake up, come down for breakfast; but not to draw her out of bed. Instead, the steady beating of rain on the roof sweetens her slumber, and so the girl shifts, burrows in deeper under the covers. As quickly as it started, the storm ends, leaving the sky still dark, an uncertain shade of grey.

Rainwater is still drip-dripping off the blue sign on the side of the building, falling off its raised white numbers shining 204. Sliding off the leaves, still making their way down the gutters and pipes, down from the roof, when the kitchens start up. A blue fire below a pot of savoury porridge. Kettles bubbling next to ready cups. Already, doors have been opened for the fresh air, for the neighbour’s children who pop over to say hi and linger before the other is ready to go downstairs for the bus. There is the child again, still drowsy, propping herself up with her arms on the table. Her straight-backed father coaxing, scolding, shaking out the newspapers in front of him while his wife comes in with the plates of toast, a tub of margarine, and a pot of jam. They listen to the news on the radio, waves to the couple next door as they walk past the window of their dining nook.