by Carissa Foo
Cheryl Dada let her mind linger on the memory of her old house and saw again the kitchen that was L-shaped, and the big silver basin. Underneath it was a metal square with a handle that had opened to the rubbish chute. She thought it was odd how all the units in the flat were connected by something so filthy and malodorous. Sometimes, when she opened the lid, she wondered if her neighbour who was also throwing stuff would be able to hear her if she said hello. The dark, hollow space was really echoic and sound travelled well through air. A hello can go a long way, Cheryl thought. All the way up to level 12 and down to level two.
Her fascination with the chute was short-lived. In a matter of months Cheryl began to avoid it, for the stench was intolerable when she opened the silver lid and she hated cockroaches. Once she pulled it open and an army of cockroaches climbed out. Afterwards it was impossible to get her to open the chute. She never again went near the sink.
What stupid architects, thought Cheryl Dada. Who in their right minds would think it was a good idea to bring the rubbish chute into the house? Was it not common sense—how could they not know that it was a gateway to roaches and rats and—God forbid!—snakes? The spawn of Satan! She had seen on the news that a python had climbed up the sewage pipe and hid in a toilet bowl. Hadn’t there also been a python sighting in the industrial park last year? Cheryl Dada was easily and too often bedevilled by limbless vermin.
Thankfully, for the sake of hygiene and her peace of mind, the bin was outside now. Neither did she have to worry about rubbish or cockroaches because the cleaning lady emptied her bin twice a day.
Her mind ebbed and flowed over the BTOs with multi-storey car parks and electronic parking gantries. Indeed, the new flats had extra facilities and features that the old ones did not, but the space-efficient upgrades—for instance, a narrow gas pipe replaced the bulky gas cylinders—did not increase the actual living space. In fact, the flats had shrunk. Rectangular living rooms and bedrooms were reduced to squares. There was not enough space in the toilet for a bathtub, not enough space in the kitchen for a built-in oven. But most distressing to Cheryl was the tiny balcony. The balcony was where she had kept her tortoise tank, where her mother had played mahjong. Her grandmother had flipped thousands of love letters over the charcoal stove set up in the balcony of block 316.
According to Lulu, who had heard from her friend, the new balconies were not roomy at all: a small space in which to fit a washing machine and dry laundry. Lulu added that the current four-room flats also did not have a good-sized dining area.
Someone said, “How small? Can put table?”
“Don’t think so lah.”
“Aiyo just buy a small one—”
“Or the foldable type. Also can use mahjong table.”
“Mai siao lah. Dirty how?”
“Kitchen got space?”
“No space then eat in the room lor.”
“I also want to eat in the room.”
“I also!”
“Kan ni na. You all siao ah?”
To that end Lulu interrupted: “People still eat in the dining area lah. My friend’s employer ah, knock down the kitchen wall to make the dining room bigger. Only thing is, like that ah, less space for the kitchen. So small—like the security post like that.”
Minutes later, as it might happen, the conversation went beyond the obelisk wall of the kitchen and became about some prudish neighbour and what was for lunch later. But the image of a kitchen as small as Cheok’s room stuck with Cheryl Dada.
No, she remembered thinking then that she did not prefer the new flats. No, she would not want a house like that. So what if they look neater and have lifts that stop at every floor? she thought, and paused to recall those days when the highest the lift could go was up to the 11th floor.
Block 316 was 12 storeys high and splashed with colours. Colours of the rainbow, to be specific, Cheryl Dada thought, crossing her arms. Eyes still fixed on the flats, she felt a surge of triumph. The BTO flats did not have stone tables with chequers boards carved on them or mama shops or barbers in the void decks. No coffeeshops either. One of the flats across the road had a 7-Eleven and a cash machine, and that was about it. There was also a sandless playground that made no sense to her. The spongy carpet-like ground was awful—it reminded her of the mats in the toilets. Those always left her feet sticky. No, Cheryl Dada would rather live in block 316.
As soon as she thought about block 316, her mind floated to her mother with her in the house, just the two of them in unit #04-215. She shuddered. Between her mother’s place and the BTO flats, it was still better to be here, Cheryl Dada concluded, looking at the concrete driveway, at Lulu pulling at the tablecloths, at the landscaped vista right outside the gate.
But if she could afford a house, things would be different, she thought, turning to look at the edifice behind her. It was white with blue window frames. The wooden porch beneath her feet extended into the common sitting area that was in the main building proper. The pale interior walls were not as white and immaculate as the outside (but they were next on the building improvement plan). Today the cedar chairs and benches, weathered to a silver grey, were unoccupied.
Cheryl wondered about the whereabouts of everyone, and turned around. The iron gate had recently been painted white; the previous coat was deemed too dark and unwelcoming. Management said it was “moody” and “unfriendly”, as if metal could ever be unsteely. If it were not for the gates and the foxtail palms that flanked the entrance, the whole place would have had a white-picket-fence look.
Or a beach cottage. It was a very pretty-looking house. The façade was one of the reasons for Cheryl Dada’s final decision to move out of her abode and she seldom regretted her choice. Many of the women had chosen the home for its appearance too. It also had a good track record—only three reported falls in the past year.
But having a house at 35, the thought came back to Cheryl Dada, that was different. Just think about that—her own house! Sure, it was not freehold and 99 years would eventually run out, but she wasn’t going to live forever either. To have a house of her own for 99 years, that seemed more than enough.
If buying a house were possible back then, Cheryl Dada might be one of those people behind the grills, looking out the tiny windows at this beautiful white and blue house across the road. If living alone were a viable option, she might not be here, on the porch, under this fucking hot sun. Where would she be—London? Or Australia—her unmarried uncle had a farm in Perth. She could also go back to Melaka. So many possible places, so many untrodden paths. Yet here she was, this August afternoon, standing on the wooden porch, a home on a cul-de-sac, somewhere in Ang Mo Kio.
She could have explored more. All the if-onlys and what-ifs circling in her mind did not have to be hypothetical. Cheryl Dada might not have made the decisions she had at 35, many of which she regretted quite instantly, including the helix piercing. A house at 35, she pondered, rubbing the bump on her ear. How many more scars, unsightly keloids before one makes the right cut, the right decision?
The sound of bells chiming to the tune of “She Loves You” broke her concentration. She looked at her watch but the hour was not yet. It was 12.25.
“There’s a call for you,” hollered Lulu, as she walked over and passed the vibrating phone to Mrs Dada, who handled the device with an inspector’s care. She placed her right thumb over the front camera and covered the lens on the back with her other hand.
“Hello?” The face on the screen twitched.
“Hello?” she echoed.
“Can you hear me?” the voice carried on in a rising tone; the face was frozen at 00:06. The number confirmed her suspicion. Somebody was listening. Something sinister, something evil! She had suspected for a long time that the millennium bug was still crawling. It made no sense that the devil would give up technology in the technological age. The Prophet Daniel had warned that knowledge shall be increased in the time of the end, and never has knowledge been deeper and more discovered that it is
in present times. These are truly the last days, Cheryl avowed; her case was proving true. Never mind the naysayers. They said the Y2K bug had left, but it was worming elsewhere, burrowing escape tunnels in unknown computer systems. They said it would rain fire and brimstone; Cheryl Dada believed it would be an implosion because the devil was within.
“No!” she cried suddenly, and cried again, “No, no!” She would not let herself be one of those left behind. Never! Especially not today!
“No! Get away from me!” Cheryl swore vehemently. “Get the fuck away!”
But wait a minute, what were those two bloody stripes? Those thick red squiggly lines! It suddenly dawned on her that the face was a disguise. The red lips, the red lips were morphing and revealing their true selves. Worms! Beneath the blurry face were worms! The worms had one voice like Legion in the Book of Luke. It had found her. It was talking to her.
“Hello?” Legion wriggled. The numbers on the screen read 00:36.
The devil thought he could fool her but, oh no, she was smarter than that. No Legion was going to get her.
“No, no, no!” she shouted back at the legless creatures.
00:46. The devil’s incarnation! It was clear to her that the worms had morphed into a two-headed serpent that was trying to crawl out of the glass. There was no doubt; it was coming for her.
“Not today!” Cheryl Dada screamed, holding the devious face away from her. Where was the crusher of the serpent’s head? Nowhere near and present. She was on her own; the battle was at hand.
“Go away!” The beast must leave. “In the name of Almighty Lord! I cast thee out!”
Cheryl Dada slapped the face once, twice, thrice. She went at it harder, more zealously, yelling again, “I cast thee out!”
Suddenly the face on the glass rippled and contorted, like raging waters in a storm. The sea split and out of its mouth erupted: “Mum! For God’s sake—”
Then it was silent. The screen froze again. It was 01:16. Satan’s number again. Cheryl was sure it was the devil on the line. The devil was trying to play nice, but she was no Eve. Communication in low resolution is extra trippy. Cheryl Dada flung the device out of her hand; it landed on the concrete floor. She heard a crack. The serpent was gone.
Lulu, who was wiping the tables at that time, lifted her head and saw the phone flying across the driveway. Her eyes followed its shimmery trail as it glided under one of the tables and landed on its screen beside her bare brown feet.
“Oh, for the love of Christ!” Lulu muttered under her breath. Does she know the price of one of these? It’s the third time this year. If she didn’t want to talk to Madam Clare, she could have just hung up. What story to tell Mr Dada this time? That the phone dropped into the toilet bowl? She was running out of excuses to cover up for her charge. Or she could just tell the truth. But no, she could not bear the sight of Mr Dada’s pitiful face. The man has already been through so much, she thought. Did Madam deserve his goodness? Lulu did not want to judge. She only knew that rich people like Madam were a disgrace and she couldn’t care less about their problems.
Lulu had concluded that rich people were brats. She knew this before she had come to Singapore. Her first employers—an American couple from New Bedford living in Hong Kong—put her in charge of their twin boys, Spencer and Jake. The brothers’ favourite game was fetch. They had no dog, so they threw the ball and Lulu fetched. The game was eventually banned in the house when the ball broke the family’s prized cloisonné vase. The boys blamed it on their helper’s poor fetching skills and she was dismissed the next month. She bottled up the injustice and applied for another job.
The next stint brought Luisa Mae Morales to Singapore. Her employer was a French–Chinese couple with an adopted 16-year-old girl. They were very messy people who lived in a big mansion. But cleaning was the least of Lulu’s problems.
The beautiful Angelique Marie Yang-Dumont was a kleptomaniac. She stole from her parents’ drawers and took coins from Lulu’s money tin. This went on for months. Lulu knew better than to tell on her. But when she came back to her room one day to find her stack of $10 notes gone, Lulu knew she had no choice. It was one thing to take a handful of coins, another to take hundreds. Thus it was time to not play nice and confront the thief. Lulu knew that her word would not stand against the face of an angel: hers was regarded as a poor brown face; Angelique Marie had big blue eyes. Since flight was no longer a choice, Lulu decided to fight shrewdly. If Justice had arms, they were her own.
Part of the plan was to creep into the young mistress’s room and take back the loot. What’s stolen cannot be more stolen than it already is, she reasoned with herself. Anyway one cannot be more wrong than one was wrong—was it called the law of double jeopardy? She learned from Law and Order, the Yang-Dumonts’ favourite series, that one cannot be charged for the same crime twice. That would be a miscarriage of justice. So, with a peace of mind—and Mother Mary’s blessings, hopefully—Lulu went into the room when the family was in Nice for Christmas and took everything.
To say the young mistress was furious was a gross understatement. Her anger was doubly squared because she could not expose Lulu without implicating her own proclivity for theft, so she wailed and cursed words Lulu had never heard before. The spew must have been offensive—one did not have to be French to know that—but the sing-song quality of the language softened the edges of each syllabus—“Ce n’est pas ma faute. C’est injuste! Fait chier! Putain cet enfoiré je t’en merde. Sale connard de merde! C’est vraiment des conneries! Va te faire foutre! Va te faire enculer!”—and the entire tirade reached Lulu’s ears like the sound of waves gently breaking on the Cebuano coast.
Lulu resigned a month later. Because she had only worked for one year, Lulu asked for a refund of the agent fees for the second year that she did not serve. She brought all of the money home, including Angelique’s loot, and stayed in Manila with her in-laws for a while. She got pregnant and had a baby, and then her husband fell very ill. At around that time, the agent called and told her about the opening in Mrs Dada’s home—which was a healthcare assistant job, encompassing a range of responsibilities from offering residents help with their day-to-day life tasks to assisting with the home’s community building. Baby Magdalene and Kenneth needed her, but Lulu knew what they really needed was money. So she left for Singapore when Magdalene was three months old.
Lulu’s past work experience had determined for her that rich children were spoilt because their parents were spoilt first. With time passing, and their parents dying, they might sober up. Lulu could pardon rich kids, but rich old people had no excuse. Didn’t wisdom come with age? Madam’s 51 already and she also looks wise, Lulu thought, but why does she act like a child? It was true that Cheryl Dada was regressing, her body mass shrinking; she was losing bone density, chugging Ensure every morning. Still, Lulu thought, wrinkles and grey hair must indicate maturity, and at the very least translate to some thought and sense. But Madam is not sensible, Madam is a child, Lulu vouched again, glancing over at the woman who was staring vacantly at the nearby flats.
How calm she seemed, almost serene. It was hard to imagine that this was the same obnoxious woman who had flipped over the bowl of ah balling on the dining table yesterday because Mr Song had overlooked her dislike for peanuts. She went on and on about how the head cook was wielding his frying slice like Moses’s staff and should be fired for his negligence. If only Madam could see that in his eyes she was just another crazy woman, a difficult resident, a part of the job.
Lulu understood that people hurt other people because they themselves had been hurt. She knew all that theory on circles: karma, vicious cycles, chasing tails, turning tables, what goes around comes around. Everyone has a sob story—rich people included, though they might be too proud to tell it. Pride erected a brick wall between her and them. Though she saw through the old ladies and their antics, and as much as she wanted to sympathise, Lulu could not halt the great partition forming within: her feelings were
split between sympathy and aversion; her loyalty was torn between God and self.
The edge of the red and white checked cloth slipped and Lulu pulled it back into place, tying it to the leg of the table. Squatting down, she heard her stomach rumble. It must be almost one. The tablecloths were taking too much of her time. She had to hurry; she still needed to iron Mrs Dada’s dress for the party. She mumbled something inaudible and rubbed her stomach.
Mrs Dada watched Lulu as her eyebrows knitted together into a slight frown. She studied her expression and could not decipher it—the slight elevation and furrows, the thick lips pressed tightly. She understood only that it was an expression that was often seen on the faces of the healthcare staff who were from a class and country that she was excluded from. What was Lulu thinking of? Was she missing her family? Her daughter must be about two now. What’s her name again—Mary? It might have been another name in the New Testament.
Poor Lulu, Mrs Dada thought, suddenly empathetic. She must be beating herself up for leaving her baby girl, without her mother, in the hands of a divine power. The crucifix she wore—that must be for her family’s protection. The other nurses said her husband had terminal lung cancer even though he had never smoked a cigarette. Lulu never confirmed the rumour; she never mentioned anything like that. No one knew his health status or even if he were still around.
Mrs Dada wondered about the little girl, a child alone in a Third World country. That can’t be good, she thought, as she envisaged a dark-haired girl in a pink dress with the talking Elmo Lulu had bought from the charity flea market last year. Mrs Dada tried to think of better scenarios: of little Mary in a sandy playground with ice cream smeared all over her cheeks, of her tying her shoelaces on her first day of kindergarten, of her playing hopscotch and rubbing off the chalk lines on the floor. Was she the Barbie kind of girl or Cabbage Patch kid? Hot Wheels or Lego? Maybe she liked to read in the library.
