If I Could Tell You Page 3

  ALEX

  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.

  That’s what she said. My mother. I let her down. She also said a ton of other things, hissed them at me when she got the chance to. Spat the words into my face, enunciating them perfectly in the way that she has; she could be asking for a pot of Earl Grey at Sunday brunch. She said things like that to me all the time, during a break in the nine o’clock news, while pruning the bonsai on a Sunday afternoon, or during a cousin’s wedding dinner. Things that my dad and brother shut out, pretended not to hear. She said, you’re a disgrace, I am ashamed to have you as a child. If I tried, I would be able to recall more of these gems. I used to do that. Lie in bed, thinking of all the things she said to me and coming up with witty comebacks that I never would have uttered, even if I had thought of them right then and there. It doesn’t matter now. I let her down, she said. That last time, I replied. I told her I was tired of doing that. For a second her face softened but then she narrowed her eyes. You’re tired, what about me? she said. An hour later, I was gone.

  Gone. For all she knows, I could be gone like the drinks guy. I yelled at him without thinking, then drank my coffee, much too fast, swallowed it, feeling it burn the inside of my mouth, being grateful for that so I could focus on the pain and not think about what he might have seen. Not that it matters now. He can’t tell anyone. Whatever thought he had about me, it is gone like him. All of it, his thoughts, gone. I wonder if he had been planning it already. If it had been in his head while he was bringing us the drinks. If I had looked hard enough, maybe I could have seen it in the stare — seen that it wasn’t about me at all. Bloody arrogant fuck. Everything is not about you. He could have been thinking, there, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow. Leap off the top of the building.

  And I could have done. Nothing. Nothing, really.

  When I saw him the next day, spread out on the floor like that, I thought it was a joke. Or that he had passed out from too much alcohol, like Sam did one New Year’s Eve. I saw from where we were, from our window, six floors up, a dark red pool quickly gathering on the ground below his head. Even from high up I could see. It was then, with the life coming out of him, that I thought of him as a person. Someone who had been breathing, talking, living through each hour of his life just as I did. Strange how I only thought it when he was dead or dying. I only thought it when he was no longer there. It’s like when something happens with a person and you find out that they’re real, real in a way that makes them step out of the box you put them in. Sometimes they go back in there, as if that departure, that one-off incident which made you look again, closer this time, never occurred. You pretend that it never happened, quickly forget about it. Sometimes though, they leave the box for good, and you realise that you never really knew them.

  It was afterwards. After the police and their questions. What time did you see? Did you know the deceased? Anything happened recently that might have something to do with this? Anything suspicious? I answered all the questions, feeling twitchy all the while. At the end of it, my mouth was dry and I started to feel I might have been the one who pushed him off the top of the building. I leaned out of the window to get another look but it was all quiet. The police had all come and gone. The ambulance too, and I remember the way that it had cruised in silently, lights cold. It had no reason to hurry. Somebody had cordoned the area off and put up a tarp over it. A neat little square, like it could be a patch of ground undergoing construction, an archaeological dig, even one of those full-of-shit modern art pieces, except I knew the guy. I knew the guy and never really saw him until he was dead.

  It was afterwards. After all that, going back to the couch and watching-but-not-watching to the end of that video we had on before it happened. After going about the whole day with it on our minds, and lying awake in bed for hours, both of us pretending to be asleep when Cindy said — she had wanted to say this hours ago, I know — she said, Alex? Are you awake? Do you think he jumped?

  I dunno, I said.

  He would have taken off his shoes, right? If he had jumped, she said.

  Hm, I said.

  She flipped onto her stomach, raised her head so that her face loomed above mine. I could see in the half-light, the excitement in her spilling over, touching her lips with a smile. She said very softly, I think it’s like when someone gets home and they enter their flat and take off their shoes. It’s like getting home and trying to be comfortable. I think. Like what we saw on that TV show where the guy said that people take their glasses off before they jump because it’s like going to bed. Did the dead guy wear glasses?

  Her words came out in a rush. Like she had been waiting. Keeping them in the whole day. I told her I don’t know. Then I stood up to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. I heard her from the sink, saying, guess what happened today you won’t believe it. And then calling someone else and starting with the same line. I think it was right then, after that second phone call. I couldn’t be alone with her after that. When I got back into the bedroom, I told her I couldn’t sleep, and we went out at one in the morning, joined a bunch of friends. For the next few days, I tried to have other people over at our place as long as I could, staying till late at work, saying little when I got back in the evening and telling her I was too tired to go out and do anything.

  It lasted a week, a week was all I could take. We were watching TV, one of those reality shows where everyone tries to screw over everyone else. I said it all of a sudden, forgetting the perfectly formed sentences I had arranged and rearranged in my head. In my head I spoke so convincingly that it made absolute sense, even to her. It made so much sense that we would talk, laugh and decide to be friends. Wishful thinking. I tried to do it several times during the week, but my tongue tripped up each time. Then, when I wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t thinking about it at all, it tumbled out of my mouth, surprising me. It’s not working, I said. On screen, two women in tidy corporate outfits were
staring daggers at each other, close to having it out any second.

  What? Them? What’s not working? Cindy said, then she looked at me and saw what it was. Oh, she said.

  It’s not working, I said again, switching the TV off. The women were starting to shout.

  She said nothing for a while, continued staring in front of her, at nothing at all, then she turned away, tilted her head up to look at the top of a tree outside the window. There was a length of string whirled and tangled in the branches, and the remains of a kite, blue and yellow and red. She watched the wind tug at the mangled pieces, watched this for a while before she said, you don’t mean it. You’re just. You’re making a mistake.

  I felt a heaviness wash over me. It made me want to sit or lie down, except I was too weary to decide which. People liked telling me that, it seemed. You’re making a mistake. They said it with a voice so sure, as if they knew me far better than I did, had my life mapped out so perfectly that it was madness to try anything else. My mother had said the same thing at the end of that long speech about how I was a disgrace to her. Auntie Sue had seen me in town with a girl, she said. Holding hands, kissing. What would the people at church think? She had known, she said. She had always known, since I was a child. She used to laugh and call me a tomboy but this. This was too much. I was embarrassing her. I stopped listening at that point, transfixed instead by the gleam of her pruning scissors, the delicate ones with red handles that she used just for the bonsai. They were lying right there. I figured why not, picked it up and started shearing away at my hair. Waist length, thick. My mother used to braid it every morning when I was a child, jerking my head back as she tightened every plait and adding a pink ribbon at the tail end. No more, I thought, cutting high up above the band of my ponytail. Alexandra, what’re you doing? she screamed, you’re making a mistake. She kept on repeating this, screaming as each rope of hair scattered and fell, dusted the tiles of the kitchen floor.

  THE CLEANER

  IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE THINGS I HAVE TO DO, THE heavy work, or the dust I breathe in while building houses that I would never come close to having. Or the food that they feed us, sent over in a box, old rice and dal tasting nothing like back home. Or even being away from my family and sitting around, waiting and waiting for work. Not even that. Sometimes, in the night when everyone is asleep, I hold my eyes close and imagine that there are not twenty people in the same room, breathing and dreaming and wanting. We all want the same — to earn enough and then go back home. Ismail, who sleeps next to me, kicks and cries out for his ma even though he is nineteen. No one makes fun of him; everyone knows he gets enough from boss. Just that day he threw a hard hat at Ismail and he had to go get his head sewn up at the doctor’s. He was gone for a long time, so long I thought he would not come back. But he did come back and he cried in his sleep that night, like every night.

  It is not so much the cages they put us in, but the stares that we get.

  On Sundays, we go to Little India, the one place in this country that feels a little bit like back home. It even has a bare field where some people play cricket, with the wrong ball and bat but still it is cricket. It takes forty-five minutes to get there. And all the way from Jurong, to the train station, in the train, to the streets, we get looks. I try to ignore them, some of the others don’t even notice, but I see the people on the streets quietly wishing we weren’t there and occupying the air and space on their island. This wonderful country.

  So many pictures I saw of Singapore before I went. All pictures on the wall of the agency. I thought, that’s a place where I could work and bring back something for the family. There, streets are clean, trees are tall like back home, and buildings look so new that they give off their own shine. Then I got here, and I realised there are two different Singapores. For them, one Singapore. For us, another — made up of construction sites and rubbish dumps and backrooms where no one has to look at us, at our dusty hands and our faces.

  It is in our other Singapore that they expect us to live. Stay. Don’t go out from there. The rest of the country is not allowed. I can almost hear them saying all that when we come out of the wooded area where we live, where the metal containers we sleep in sink a little more, each day, into the orange mud. They glare at us when we walk on their pavements on their streets. It is almost too much, all the clean brightness. It makes the others loosen up, so they start talking and joking. They don’t see the looks. I am happy for them not to see. I don’t know why I have to see everything. My ma used to say I have too many eyes and I thought there was nothing wrong with that, it was a good thing to have.

  Then I saw one day a boy in the train, taking a video. I could tell from the way he held his phone. It was Abul and Mohit he was taking, Abul had fallen asleep during the journey — the cool of the air-conditioning does that to most people — and his head had drooped to the left, onto Mohit’s shoulder. Mohit just let him sleep, as a brother would. But there the boy was with his phone, taking the video, laughing with the girl next to him. I do not understand. Why people laugh and they point and call us Bangla workers like it is a dirty word. A word they have to spit. All we do is help with the jobs they don’t want. And all we get is the spitting looks.

  It doesn’t matter. Not if I can go to the hundi wallah with money which he then sends back home to my family. But I can only do this sometimes because we do not get to work always. Seven months I’ve been here and I’ve only worked three. What we do here is wait. We wait and sit around a lot. It is an expensive country to just sit around in. The food and the living all cost money even though the place we stay in, it is not for people. The container that we sleep and eat and wait in is more for the mosquitoes that feed on us, more for rats and snakes. That’s what I said to the boss when we found a dead rat on someone’s sleeping mat. I told him it is not for people and he said, yes it is only for people like you. Then I said more, about the dirty kitchen and toilets and he said, go home if you don’t like it here. I give you back your passport and you go home and bring your problems back to Bangladesh. I wanted to tell him the problems are back home. It is why I left my wife and son behind. Sold the family land, sold it and borrowed money to come here.

  Because when people talk about Singapore, their eyes are bright. They tell you, give me 200,000 taka and your family home and land and you will make many times that in a week. You tell them, okay, yes. Anything. You get your wife and your brothers to put all their money on you so you can go away and come back a rich man. With enough to provide for the whole family. Then I was there in the plane, floating over the edge of the island. I saw the beach, the trees, the buildings like in the picture, and I thought, I can do it. I can do anything.

  But six weeks later, there is still no work. We sit around in a place that smells like bistha, shit. The smell is everywhere in our dormitory. We get bad food — sometimes we open up our packet and see something that’s not supposed to be inside. A cockroach. Rat droppings. We throw it into the dustbin sometimes but when we get too hungry, there is no choice because we don’t have money on us to buy food from outside. We have no choice and no air. Two hundred people squeezed into a space. So when someone got ill that time, other people got the same. There are no doctors for us. We asked and they said, doctor busy. Busy for a week until Sanjib fainted and I helped him go find boss. I was the oldest so I went.

  I told boss that Sanjib was sick and he told me to mind my own business, he will get better by himself. I had to shout a bit, saying, he not waking up for one day, before boss and his worker took us in the van. We were at the hospital waiting for two hours, when Sanjib’s head on my shoulder felt heavier and heavier and I touched him and realised that he wasn’t asleep anymore. He never woke up. Back in the van, I told boss I will tell, go to the big government office and tell. About how people got sick and he didn’t get us the doctor. He got angry but I said I wasn’t scared. There is little a man is scared of if he has nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Then boss’s voice changed and he looked at my eyes f
or the first time and he said, you want to work? I am ashamed that I didn’t even have to think, it only took me two seconds to say yes.

  This is how come I am working now. How I get to have money every month to send back home. This new job is better. There is work every single day, Monday to Sunday, and the money comes every month, on time. Cleaning the building is not too bad, only the smell. Not even a cloth wrapped around my face can stop the smell from getting into my nose, my head. All day the rubbish smell follows me around but the pay is good and there is a proper place I can sleep in, in a flat with five other people. It is small but it’s a proper place, a building that even other Singaporeans live in. I almost couldn’t believe when I saw the beds, with mattresses in them, the two-storey beds which just fit into the space. It was the first time in months and months that I felt clean and comfortable, but I woke up four, five times that night, not knowing where I was until my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw the curtains, the light from the corridor outside, heard the other men in the room snore, breathe deeply in their sleep. Then I thought about Ismail crying for his mother, and Sanjib, whose mother must know by now. They got someone to call his family, not just to tell them about Sanjib but to ask for money to send his body back. I knew they couldn’t afford it but I left before they decided what to do. I thought about that until the birds started making noise, and in the end I stayed awake until the alarm rang and I had to get up to wash. My sleepiness made it feel even more dreamlike. Just a week ago I was sleeping on a thin mat on the ground, getting up in the morning for nothing, nothing to do but to wait. Now there was proper food in the morning and a T-shirt they gave me just to wear for work. It was all still dreamlike when I went downstairs but the smell soon told me it was real. My job was to collect from the bins — full of rubbish that comes falling down the chute, all the way down from all the floors, and wheel it to the rubbish centre shared with the other buildings. This work was bad at first but then I got used to it. The rest of it was okay. Cleaning and sweeping and washing the ground once a week with water.