If I Could Tell You Read online

  Part

  ONE

  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.

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

  CARDBOARD AUNTIE

  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 k
eling, 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.