Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  The stranger and Jinn turn around and start walking in the opposite direction. Sukhin does the same on a lower section of the boardwalk. They all walk in parallel, back and forth along the river, Jinn and the stranger oblivious to Sukhin’s presence. Back and forth, back and forth. The man shows no signs of flagging and Sukhin becomes anxious.

  Who is he? What is he saying to her?

  By the time the stranger leaves, two hours later, Sukhin’s mind is a wild and distended thing. He walks off for a bit after deciding not to follow the man, crosses the first bridge he sees, then turns around and walks back in her direction, quickening his pace. By the time he catches up, she’s further along the river. He sees her bicycle chained to a bench nearby, the backpack chained to the bicycle.

  “Hey.” He hopes he doesn’t look as frazzled as he feels.

  She looks tired. “Hey, Sukhin.”

  Suddenly, he can’t bear it any more. He bursts. “That guy you were talking to. Who is he?”

  She doesn’t look surprised. This surprises him.

  “Just some guy.” Placid, not placatory. “No one.”

  She’s holding the bright yellow box.

  Two little girls sit unsupervised in a hall with grey walls, watching the adults scurry around in quick mincing steps, some with vases of fresh flowers, some with trays of food. In a corner of the hall, their mother harasses a man in a jacket, the nice one who kindly sat the girls down earlier and gave them a bit of cake from one of the trays.

  One of the girls grows bored of watching. She kicks the chair in front of her, making little growling noises. The other girl stops her. She is older; she knows why they are here. She tells the younger girl that she must behave or Grandpa’s ghost will take them both away. The younger girl stops kicking the chair.

  The older girl invents a quiet game for them to play. They are to guess which flower the other likes best and which flower, least. They look at the flowers in the vases around them. They consider them all.

  They have the same favourite—the large, white one that they learn later is called peony. The older girl likes most of the other flowers, but her least favourite is the lily. The younger girl thinks most of the flowers look the same, but hates the one that looks like a spider, but with so many more legs than a regular spider. This, her grandmother tells them later, is the chrysanthemum, much loved by Japanese royalty since ancient times.

  “Ugly,” says the younger girl. “Spider.”

  Her sister laughs and takes her hand.

  XIV

  THREE HAS BEEN chucked—it lies in a corner of the living room next to Two, surrounded by cardboard scraps. Four, he thinks, Four will be it. Sukhin is so sure of this that he’s already decided, even at the first phase of construction, to make it larger than its predecessors. The base will occupy six square metres and the entire thing is going to be two metres high, twice the size of Three.

  The peacock sofa has been pushed against the bookshelves, forced to defer its place in the living room to Four. The coffee table is a rolling work station, crowded with boxes of tools, bottles of glue, different kinds of wire, string, thread and fishing line, balls of shredded paper—accidents have happened; its surface will no longer be the same again. The television screen is just another surface onto which sketches may be taped.

  The study is a cardboard jungle. The desk is invisible, stacked high with magazines and newspapers, overrun by sketches and drawings and prototypes of mechanism parts. Boxes everywhere—piled high on the floor, on the chairs, under the desk. Very little light enters this room now.

  The bedroom has put up a better defense. A clear path leads from door to bed to bathroom; a sliver of floor space remains empty in front of the wardrobe. But apart from these last bastions of order, chaos—still more things have been moved here from the study and the living room, boxes that will no longer fit in the study or living room have crept into the corners. In plastic containers that now occupy the bedside table: bits of Three’s mechanism that are being saved for transplant into Four and must remain safe from accidental discard.

  A single, small box has found its way into the kitchen. Otherwise, the kitchen remains pristine.

  Sukhin has given up running, regular meals and scheduled sleep. He no longer fears decrepitude; he eats when he’s too hungry to work; he sleeps when he’s too tired to handle a blade.

  He wakes up on the Sunday before Christmas without caring that it’s Sunday or that it’s one in the afternoon. He checks his phone—two texts from Dennis, one from his mother, one from Kim Seng, one from an unknown number, offering low-interest loans with immediate approval.

  The one from Kim Seng is from two hours ago: “When u coming later? Freezer already clear.”

  Right. That’s today.

  Shower, cereal, pudding, car. Sims Avenue, car park, lift.

  Kim Seng is outside his flat, arranging objects in a large shelf next to the door. “Eh, hallo. I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”

  Sukhin watches as Kim Seng takes a packet of printer paper, a pair of old sneakers, a phone charger and a can of pickled lettuce out of a very large canvas bag and puts them on the shelf. There’s clearly a system—the lettuce joins a few packets of biscuits and a couple of loaves of bread; the phone charger goes on another part of the shelf, next to a small fan.

  “Sorry, woke up late.” Sukhin picks up a can of tuna from the shelf and puts it back. “What’s all this? Need help?”

  “No need, no need—I just put everything here, then people come and take what they want. Very easy.”

  Sukhin takes a toy truck that has fallen onto its side and sets it upright. “But where’s all this from?”

  “Anywhere,” Kim Seng tells him. Everything here is technically rubbish—someone has decided they don’t want it and thrown it out. “But we all want different things, right?” Kim Seng regularly makes rounds of his neighbourhood dumpsters and recycling bins, looking for junk that someone else might be able to use. “Recycling isn’t simple, you know—a lot of things can’t be recycled. And people throw a lot of stuff that can’t be recycled into recycling bins. Food also got.” Kim Seng sighs and rubs the spot between his eyebrows. “A bit stupid lah, but never mind—if I see anything like that, I take it and put it here. Like this—see? How to recycle? Got metal parts joined to plastic parts and rubber parts here and here. Cannot lah.” He shows Sukhin a hair dryer, pointing to its different components. “And this is still working, you know. People are so wasteful.” He spits out the final word.

  Sukhin stares, fascinated—so it’s not just veggies, then. The man is some sort of junk heap Robin Hood.

  “Got bigger things also. Come in lah, I show you.”

  Oh my stars.

  Two entire bedrooms, piled to the ceiling with all manner of things. Tables, file cabinets, shelves, racks, fans, chairs. A child’s toy kitchen. Another child’s bicycle. CRT televisions, VCRs, fridges, vacuum cleaners. A massive coat rack. Umbrella stands. Ironing boards. An inflatable pool. Rope. Kim Seng is talking about where he found the inflatable pool—“Someone put it into a recycling bin two blocks away—these idiots don’t check the label”—but Sukhin is far away. His heart races a little; he doesn’t know why. There is something surreal and hopeful about all this—that, in this nonde-script flat, in these two bedrooms where no one sleeps, all of these objects have been rescued by a man who has no reason to, aside from his conviction that “we must not throw good things away”, and that they all wait here now for someone to come along and carry them off into the sunset.

  “Eh, you okay?”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  Kim Seng looks at him kindly. “Yah. Scary, right? The things people throw away.”

  The space in Kim Seng’s freezer is only big enough for three puddings. Sukhin has brought eight.

  “It’s okay,” he tells Sukhin. “Let’s take these next door—already told my neighbour we might need to borrow space.”

  All of Kim Seng’s neighbours—everyone on
this floor—are aiders and abettors of the veggie pirates, as well as regular contributors to and partakers of what he calls the Everyone Shelf. A few of them will be ferrymen on the evening of the party and all of them are donating food, he says happily. Once again, Sukhin marvels at Kim Seng’s ability to mobilise people and make them do things—most people he knows can’t even name their neighbours. Sukhin can’t name his neighbours, not even the guy who’s lived next door for two years.

  Kim Seng claps him on the back. “Thank you, yah. Your friend called Gopal—she says she’ll help. We’re all set.”

  Sukhin nods. Good, good. Crazy, but good. “I’m glad everything worked out.”

  “Me too—we were all getting super stressed. Without your help, I don’t know what we’d do.”

  Sukhin is embarrassed now. “Please. It’s no big deal.”

  “But it is lah. Lucky for us your friend said yes.” Another clap on the back for Sukhin. “And thanks for all the cake.”

  “Pudding. But no problem.”

  They’ve stowed the rest of the pudding in the freezers of three neighbours— Vijendran from next door didn’t have enough space—and now they’re back outside Kim Seng’s flat.

  Kim Seng turns to him, arms crossed. “Eh, I ask you—but don’t get angry, okay? You and X—how? Got something?”

  What the fuck. You too?

  “Good friends.” Sukhin puts his head through the door. “Hey, have you got anything with locking wheels? Ball bearings?”

  “She’s a good girl, you know. Don’t mess around.” Kim Seng gives him a stern look. “Wheels? Got. Ball bearings, not sure. Let’s have a look.”

  Slightly dazed, Sukhin follows him into the flat. Threatened by the captain of the veggie pirates—now, now his life is complete.

  He won’t tell Jinn about Kim Seng’s menacing don’t mess around, but he can hear it in his head as he walks up to her. He imagines being made to walk the plank—possibly into the river right here—by the entire Free Kitchen crew while they pelt him with rotten vegetables. “These aren’t fit for eating, but at least they won’t go to waste now,” Kim Seng will patiently explain to onlookers.

  “You look tired,” he tells her instead.

  “I am.” She doesn’t say why and he doesn’t ask.

  They read together, under the shade of a large, canopy-like structure in the middle of the river. The words on the pages of his book swim and swim and won’t settle. A curious dullness has made a nest in his head, right behind his eyes.

  She tells him that it rained the night before for the first time in days. “The frogs sang all night.”

  He didn’t notice that it rained at all last night, or that it hadn’t rained this week.

  “You’re quiet these days, Sukhin.”

  “I guess I’m tired too.” And you won’t tell me who he is.

  He doesn’t stay long. But before he goes, he tells her that her Christmas surprise is all sorted. He’s decided he will let her light one of the bombs, but he keeps this to himself.

  “Going to be a blast.”

  The intercom buzzes, loud and slightly terrifying. The intercom! Sukhin can’t remember the last time anyone used it.

  “Sukhin, it’s me.”

  Jinn! He looks at the clock. It’s one in the morning. His first thought is that she’s been injured or assaulted. He knows it. He’s been mad not to have seen this coming, mad not to have insisted that she stay here, mad to have let her roam some stupid park full of crazy people hooligans miscreants fuckers of the first order. He runs to the intercom panel and jabs at the button that unlocks the main gate. A click and the line goes silent.

  He grabs his car keys and his phone and runs downstairs—it’s faster than taking the lift. He dials the nearest hospital, ready to hit the call button.

  Jinn, the backpack and the bicycle wait for him at the lift lobby. None of them appear harmed. Nothing is torn, broken or blood-spattered, but Jinn looks more tired than he’s ever seen her—her face strangely wooden, her head and shoulders pitched forward.

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.” He takes the backpack from her. His first instinct is to ask if she’s just cycled all the way, three hours, tonight—but he stops himself. Of course she has; what a stupid question. “What happened?”

  The expression on her face is the shadow of an old one, grim and stubborn and cold. The look she gives him is slightly, deliberately, out of focus.

  She reaches out and presses the Up button. A bright, metallic ding, the lift doors open.

  “Let’s talk in the morning.”

  “So, tell me what you’re making.”

  She sets down the mugs of tea and sits next to him on the floor. The light coming in from the glass door leading to the balcony is grey and soft. Sukhin has been up for hours and hours, working on Four, begging Four to work with him.

  “I don’t know if I’ll finish it. Harder than I expected.” He stares at the tangle of string and cardboard in front of him.

  “I’m sorry. I’m in the way, aren’t I?” She picks up a piece of cardboard and studies it. “But this was the safest space I could think of.”

  He watched her sleep last night and the night before, stretched out like a plank under his blanket, her face buried in his pillow, and understood what it meant to be dogged by anxiety—because, suddenly, he wasn’t. He’s decided he will keep her here by force if necessary and hunt her down and drag her back if she escapes.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I try to find the fuckface, kill him, dismember him and feed him to crows?”

  She smiles. “So dashing, Sukhin.”

  He takes a sip of tea to hide his scowl. “You should have told me from the start.”

  “I was going to. Then you stormed up and demanded it.”

  Smug, wicked wretch. One day, one day, he’s going to bite her.

  But first, first he will find the fuckface.

  A student, she told him. Seminary school. Used to be some sort of marketing consultant, but saw the bright light of god one day when he missed colliding with a truck by less than a hair’s breadth after falling asleep at the wheel driving home from work. Decided he would justify the rest of his life by giving it up to the great divinity that saved it, applied to seminary school, et cetera.

  “Could have just started taking the bus.”

  “Sukhin, don’t interrupt.”

  The rest of the story was just as eye-roll-inducing as Sukhin feared. It was as if the guy googled “mid-career change spurred by post-motor-accident revelation paved with predictable obstacles, particularly bouts of self-doubt and paranoia” and decided that he would live the cliché. The thought of Jinn enduring the unabridged version of the story filled him with an uncomfortable mixture of awe, disbelief and envy. The envy is mostly of the man, who managed to find someone to whom he could tell his stupid, dull, uninspiring tale without being stoned or laughed at, but also of Jinn, who managed to look past the ridiculousness and listen to another person go to pieces trying to make sense of some emotional, spiritual turmoil that had zero to do with her.

  “But how do you know each other?”

  “We don’t.”

  It didn’t make sense. He frowned. “And he just showed up one day and started talking?”

  Jinn laughed.

  No—and yes. She woke up one morning to find him sitting next to her, on the floor where she had laid out her sleeping mat. They were under one of the park pavilions. The sun had just risen. It was drizzling.

  “How romantic. Morning light, a drizzle. The stuff of novels.”

  “He was taking shelter from the rain.”

  Right. And what kind of weirdo went to parks before sunrise?

  Something to do with prayer and running, according to Jinn. Anyway, the man asked if she had spent the night at the park.

  “I said yes—no reason to lie.”

  Stupid, credulous woman. He would have to muzzle he
r.

  The story arc was pretty predictable from that point onwards. Religious fanatic sees woman. Religious fanatic figures out woman is homeless. Religious fanatic decides that woman is part of grand divine test of his faith. Religious fanatic tries to drag woman into safety of church, organised religion and unhomelessness. Religious fanatic persists, in spite of patient resistance by woman. Religious fanatic becomes unwelcome stalker. Woman exits.

  Religious fanatic is killed by woman’s ex-boyfriend and dismembered and fed to crows.

  “He wasn’t a fanatic, Sukhin. He really wanted to help.”

  “And he brought you chocolate.”

  She gave him a long, narrow look. “Don’t be a shit. Those were biblical-verse postcards.”

  The tipping point, she finally told Sukhin, was when he began showing up in the dead of the night, while she was sleeping, to pray over her. She asked him to stop but he wouldn’t. She was meant to be part of his journey, he told her, and he meant to press on until she realised it too. Two nights ago, he broke down, shook her until her head spun and demanded to know why she was making things so hard for him.

  “So I came here.”

  “Should have kicked him in the balls first.”

  Yes, he will find the fuckface.

  For now, though—lunch, laundry, supermarket run. No way he’s going to keep feeding her cereal, which is all he’s been eating for weeks. That, and all the Christmas pudding that didn’t make the cut.

  They’ve all been here since eight in the morning, dicing slicing peeling cutting chopping filleting dipping basting baking broiling. Everyone is sweaty, tired and, ironically, hungry, but spirits are high—Kim Seng, darting in and out of the kitchen in between phone calls and deliveries, manages to keep them all in a state of convivial near-panic. Sukhin is amazed at how much noise twelve adults can generate.