If I Could Tell You (3 page)

All of this while the moon, a white, curved sliver, reclines lazily on its side like a devoted bedmate, watching, watching a sleeping partner.

BEFORE THAT MORNING, I HAD THOUGHT ABOUT ALL the things I wanted to say, the words nearly bursting out in my sleep, filling up my chest while I swept and wiped the sticky green tiles with a cloth, while I filled my cup with black coffee. Coffee which I left untouched because my mouth was too busy pretending, shaping itself around the words in my head to eat or drink. But then they showed up. She with her broken Mandarin, and the
keling
, the darkie. And it was all gone. All the words. Just like that. The church lady asked me the week before if it was alright to have two of their volunteers over, just for a chat and a few photos, they needed something for their newsletter. I couldn’t say no to her. Pauline who came over every fortnight for a chat. Who brought me homemade rice dumplings and showed me pictures of her five-year-old son, who didn’t mind that I didn’t go to church, that we prayed to different gods in different ways. I said yes and I prepared myself and thought about the things to say.

But this girl. She thought I spoke her language and I opened the door to find her talking, letting go a jumble of twisty noises, flat and fast. I knew bits of it — the few things people kept saying to me. Things like Hello Auntie, want to buy? want to sell? want to sign? and Auntie, excuse! when they were in a hurry and wanted me out of the way. This one said to me, helloauntiegoodmorning. That was all I got before it got tangled up into a long, continuous babble. She was babbling while she shook my hand and pointed to her partner, babbling while she stepped out of her shoes. I had to shake my head, explain myself in Cantonese and then a bit of Chinese before she stopped, froze with one foot hovering in the air. Then she muttered something I couldn’t hear and said, wait, before going off to talk on the phone for some time. She left the
keling
with me while she did that. He said nothing, just smiled at me and hid his face behind his camera, looking through it at this and that; the doors with their faded paint along the corridor, the miniature shrine on the wall outside my home with its morning joss sticks still smoking away, the cigarette butts scattered on the floor by the good-for-nothing neighbours.

When the girl came back, she shook my hand again as if the minutes before had not happened, saying nothing this time. Her mouth kept smiling and then not, smiling and then not, as if her face couldn’t quite decide what to do with itself. Then the two of them stepped in and stood around my home, arms at their sides, shifting from one foot to the other, like children who had been told to behave and didn’t know how to move anymore. I motioned for them to sit. Anywhere was fine. There was the one other chair which I pulled out for the girl. And the boxes. I thumped on one of them to show how strong they were, they were okay even for the
keling
, who was solidly built, to sit on.

She started immediately with questions. She had a long list of things to ask me. A page full of them, I saw, scrawled onto a sheet of paper, with question marks at the end of each. She started asking them as soon as we were seated, shaking her head to my offer of water or tea and waving her own bottle of mineral water at me.

Have you eaten? she said. Have children? Husband? She asked me all this, weaved the questions together best as she could with broken bits of Mandarin, made up for the missing words with her hands, her arms, her eyes.

I said, yes, no and no. Crooked a finger — dead.

The girl made a sad face, writing it all down.

How long live here? she asked.

I put up four fingers and then made a zero with my fist, and she widened her eyes and said, waaaaah. Drawing the sound out with her breath as if I were a child that she had to pat on the head, indulge with high-pitched coos.

Forty, I said out loud. Just to be sure. And if not for her broken Mandarin, if not for that tricky little smile that kept coming and going, I would have gone on to say:

forty years living in this flat, and this will be the last. They are moving me out, you know, into another neighbourhood. They keep saying it will be a. What. An upgrade. The building will be for people like me — old ones who have nobody, no children, or children who don’t want them (I would rather have no children than have three or four who don’t want me around, like Heng Poh on the third floor). An agent brought me to see the new place last month. Better for you, the agent kept saying, not removing her shoes before stepping in, so that her high heels went click-clacking on the white tiles, leaving dirt on the floor.

The rails are better for you, she said, so you won’t slip in the bathroom. And the cords that you can pull for the alarm in case you fall, you need help, there is a fire, an emergency. In case you– Hmm. All better for you.

While she said all this, she walked through the place much too fast for me to keep up. Her words bouncing off the walls and ceilings so that they rang out, clung on to the still air even after she was finished. The same way my voice lingers on in the flat when I call out to the Old One to ask if he slept well, if he wants coffee, if he knows what he wants for lunch. I used to ask him all this, even though I already knew what he would say in reply, I knew even before I asked. The only time he said no to coffee, it was because of his stomach. His stomach wasn’t feeling too good, he said. A month after that, he was gone.

I might have gone on to explain that I still talk to him because it was easier to do that than to stop. If it’s something you have done for almost sixty years, more than half your life, you would find it difficult to stop. Not that you’d know, I would say to the girl, you’re far too young. It felt strange to have a cup of coffee without offering a cup to him. Wrong to start on the dinner before asking if he wants this or that. But I’m no fool, I would remind her, not a child playing pretend. I know he’s not there anymore (at least not that I can see), I knew he was gone when I heard that last rattling breath escape him. It made me uneasy not to say the usual things and when I did, trying out my voice after having kept quiet for a week, it was a relief — it felt better, not perfect, but okay again. So I went on doing it.

I would have said all that if.

She was writing as I thought about all this and when she looked up, she was all business. Or trying to look it by frowning and pitching her upper body forward.

She wanted to know why I still worked, why I did this. Of all things.

I thought, of all things? There’s nothing else an old woman like me can do to feed herself. I could sit in my flat and wait. Live on handouts of biscuits and rice and tinned food which they pass out once a week here, at the ground floor of the building. (Not that it is wrong to live like that, some people my age are too ill or weak to walk around like I do.) I tried a cleaning job once. A few hundred a month to clear tables at the food court after people have finished eating. But pouring away all that food, putting perfectly edible things into trash bags made me nervous. I couldn’t help imagining what my mother would think if she saw this. How loud her cries of shame would be when she and my father could only afford to feed us meat once or twice a year. It was strange, getting paid to do the opposite of what seemed natural. It made me disappear as well, so that I was just a pair of floating hands attached to a slop bucket. I wasn’t there in people’s eyes, not even when I was right in front of them, wiping down the table they were sitting at. They looked everywhere else but at me. At least with this job, picking up cardboard and used drink cans and things, I was myself. It didn’t feel like work — collecting things that were still useful and trading them in for a bit of money.

I couldn’t do this forever, I knew. It took my legs longer and longer to wake up every morning. I needed to wait and pound at them with my fists to get the blood running again. But I would keep on with my cart as long as I could still walk.

The girl wrote this all down. How much of it she understood, I don’t know. She wrote for a while and then seemed happy with herself. Then she looked up again and said, what do you eat? Special food? For, she stopped and thought for a while. For becoming so old? No, no, that’s not what I mean, her face said.

But I shook my head, not minding. I did not get to live this long, past the war, past my husband, by minding every single thing. I said this to her blank eyes, watched the silver cross on her necklace collide into her pen, knowing that she got none of it. That the words travelling out of her shiny pen and onto the paper had nothing to do with what I just said. How could it be the same, in two different languages? They were night and day. White and black. I used Han characters, whittled down from pictures, early drawings, words thousands of years old. She used a language stolen from other people, strangers. Lost her own words in the meanwhile.

So I got up. This is what I have, my hands said — showed them my bed with its rusty metal frame, the kitchen table, pickled vegetables in jars, and the rice pot that I put to use almost every single day. Pointed to the tins of cream crackers on the shelf and the bags of ground coffee that I brew and soften the crackers in. Waved towards the cardboard pieces, all stacked up by the door and the trash bag half-filled with empty drink cans, the bag I meant to fill later that day but never did because of what happened after.

They finished by taking a few pictures of me. I don’t remember when I last had my picture taken and it made me aware of my face, of how difficult it was to try and smile. Then I watched them leave, walk under the caged lights, the one blinking, threatening with a buzz and click whenever it came on again. I saw her put out a hand to help with the camera while the
keling
adjusted his bag and for a second she had her hand, smooth and pale in the way mine used to be, on the dark of his skin.

I WAS busying about the kitchen, lighting the stove under the rice pot and thinking about them, the two young people from Pauline’s church. About how young people are different from the rest of us — not just what they wore and ate and did. They looked different too. The set of their eyes and mouths. As if speaking another language changed the way their features were shaped. The offspring of my neighbours, some of whom I watched grow up, get married and have children of their own, still resemble their parents. Like Ah-Por and Ah Tee. They looked like mother and son. He is so much like his mother that whenever I bump into him in the corridor, I see her face, reminding me that it’s been a few months since she passed away. Ah Tee never married, but my other neighbours’ grandchildren never looked anything like them. Something happened along the way to change them into skinny little things with four eyes instead of two. Made it okay for girls to run about half-clothed, wearing their sun-blackened skin proudly. And boys to grow their hair long and dress with so much care I could laugh. Something must have happened along the way. Changed their tongues, the words that came out of their throats. Few of the young ones speak dialect now. Their ears filter it out, I think, so that the language of their parents, grandparents drift right by them. When I try to talk to the children I sometimes see in the lift, they stare back, their mouths half-open and mocking. I want to tell them, Girl, you’re supposed to be fair, lily-pale, not get dark like a farmer. Boy, act like a proper young man. You’re going to have to grow up, support yourself, your wife, raise a family. Then I steer myself past the what-ifs. The questions I used to ask myself when I saw young women with their babies, when I had to share the lift with people visiting their parents, carrying bags filled with fruit and cake and tinned abalone.

I would have been different from them. A different kind of mother, grandmother. I would have told them just what to do and not to. Raised them right. But it’s no good thinking all this at my age. I left it all behind. Years ago.

I could have been a mother but I let him die.

I was thinking about this when I felt something move behind me. For a second, I thought it might be the Old One. When I can’t fall asleep at night, it is always because too much is moving around me — the wind playing with the curtains, whistling through gaps here and there. Light from the corridor dancing on the walls. When that happens, I can’t help but say, go to sleep, Old One, it’s already late. The words are more for myself, but they help. I always fall asleep right after I’ve said them out loud. I turned around then and saw that it was nothing, of course, just a little breeze. The window was open and I knew without thinking that it was going to rain in a while. I went to it, reaching out to pull it shut when, for no reason at all, I looked down.

WHAT HAPPENED WAS WE DIDN’T SEE. WE NEVER saw him. He was just the coffee guy, the one who went to every table to ask if they wanted a drink, taking orders for tea coffee bottles of beer shouted from across the coffee shop, cleaning up with an old rag when children spilled their colas. I couldn’t tell you what he looked like. Couldn’t say if his eyes were round, or close together, if he was middle-aged, or just getting past his twenties. I never really saw him except for that one time when he came with the drinks and the change and the stare. A look like he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. I know that look. The one that can turn easily into a smirk — a look which says, I know who you are. Weirdo. Loser. Freak. The guy was staring so I said, what are you looking at? Retard, I said. Stupid fuck, I think I said, loud enough for him to hear. And for Cindy. She had to know I wasn’t going to let anybody treat us like shit. So I said. I shouted, stupid fuck. Retard. Go to hell.

I said all that without thinking. It’s amazing what you can do without thinking. Push the door open, walk out. You can walk for a long time without bothering about which way to go. Breathe, become real for the first time in your life. It was like that, the night I left the place, the house I lived in for twenty-two years. Home. I left with my work bag slung over my shoulders. Just a few things, tees, a pair of jeans. Before leaving, I took out my bible from the top drawer, gilt-edged, leather-bound, my name embossed in cursive script on the edge of the cover. I laid it on the bed, just for my mother. Then I walked away, touching my newly shorn hair. Feeling that I could breathe now. Let go. Dress however I wanted. Talk and walk and move however I wanted. It felt exactly right, walking down the street. Clomping, my mother would have said, with big strides, arms swinging. It felt right even though I had no idea where I was going to sleep that night. I could live how I wanted. Funny though, how that took a while, getting comfortable in my new skin, getting rid of the old. Little details, like how to sit to make sure no one catches the ridiculous hands-on-knees thing sneaking out of me — the habit my mother trained me into adopting since I was four — sneaking out of my limbs, letting me down.