Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  “Sukhin, I’ve got it! Do I get to say ‘eureka’ now? I’ve always wanted to say that.”

  He laughed, then went over to the opposite side of the set-up and started working his own strings. The entire machine came to life—strings flying, tubes rocking, a boy and a girl applying the laws of motion, paper precipitation everywhere. With Sukhin shouting instructions across the room, they joined forces to unleash a great downpour, going on and on until the tubes ran out of rain.

  She ran up and threw her arms around him, and he let her. They danced around the room, laughing, triumphant. Sukhin had never danced around a room before, but that night it felt absolutely right to be absolutely foolish.

  When they had danced themselves breathless, they filled up the rain tubes and made it rain again.

  “Yes, I do remember it.” He reaches out to take the last slice of cake from her plate.

  “You were such a slave driver.”

  “You were a terrible slave.”

  “Spoken like a true slave driver.”

  Smiling to herself, she goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. “I see you’ve been busy.” She takes out another one of the chiffon cakes and begins to rummage in a drawer for a knife.

  She’s back, she’s calm and she’s eating. Watching her from across the apartment, he’s struck by an immense sense of relief. The grim shadow that was on her face last night is gone, and all she wants to do right now, it seems, is have her cake and eat it while staring at the pangolin. He sips his tea and leans back against the sofa. This, this is the idyll, isn’t it: cake and tea served with a side of banter, with her. And yet, now that the drama and tension he’s expected and already made space for—the uncomfortable conversation, the profuse apologies and, perhaps, more of her weeping—have been wiped out, Sukhin feels strangely bereft. And cheated—yes, cheated—out of a well-deserved, crazy, cathartic showdown.

  God, I’m messed up.

  She’s filling up the kettle. “Shall I make you another cup of tea too?”

  He says yes; he thanks her. He sounds chirpy, even to himself.

  Why does he want to be raged at? Because that’s what he wants now, really. To have her shout at him, demand an explanation for hurling Ping into the kingdom she’s acquired all by herself, the weird kitchen realm in which she’s this sainted sage-pirate-chef instead of a refugee from whatever it is she’s run away from. Has she really managed to shrug off that entire evening?

  She hands him a mug. “Here you go.”

  He remembers the anguish on her face, the way she clawed at herself.

  “I found some lapsang souchong in the cupboard. Smells amazing.” She scans the bookshelves, then picks up the book she was reading the week before. The Name of the Rose. One of his favourites.

  He thinks of the weeping, the horrible little sounds she made. Sukhin, what is wrong with you.

  He stands. “I need to get some work done, okay? I’ll be in my study.”

  She doesn’t answer, already lost in her book.

  “Go ahead.”

  Her face lights up. She stares at the handle, as if willing it to cooperate, then takes it and turns it. Seconds later, the heavens open. He watches her through the handmade rain, still trying to decide if he’s more pleased or frustrated that she’s returned. What is she doing here? Why did she bother coming back? And he will have to go shopping soon. My girl, your sleeve is hanging by the grace of some divinity.

  When the brief shower ends, she turns to him, paper balls stuck in her hair.

  “Let’s do that again.”

  “Okay.”

  She tiptoes to refill the baskets. He decides he will get her pyjamas as well.

  In the dark, just an arm’s length away, all she is is a soft shape. He decides it has to be now—when the sun rises and she’s a woman again, he won’t have the courage.

  “Are you awake?”

  The soft shape replies with a low, non-committal growl.

  “Can we talk? About Christmas Eve.” He sighs.

  The blanket shifts. The soft shape turns around and edges closer. It stops just centimetres from him. It has a nose now. He turns onto his side, facing it. If he stretches his neck, he can touch that nose with his. But he won’t.

  “And I’d like you to tell me—why.” There, he’s said it.

  It has eyes now. “Why?”

  It’s very close. He can feel its breath on his face.

  “Would you be happier if I told you?”

  “Yes.” He doesn’t know, but it could be true.

  “Okay then. Tomorrow.”

  It’s 7.30 and they’re sitting on the balcony, drinking iced tea and watching the sky change over the neighbourhood. Bringing out the kitchen stools and the tea and just idling here is Jinn’s idea—Sukhin reads here every now and then, but mostly he just comes out to hang the laundry. In fact, he’s thought of closing up the balcony and turning it into space for more bookshelves, but he’s never got around to it.

  It’s surprisingly pleasant on the balcony. There’s a nice bit of breeze, and while he can hear the neighbourhood children, the noise is far off enough that it’s easy to ignore. Maybe I’ll keep the balcony.

  He turns to ask her what she thinks about roast pumpkin and leeks for dinner.

  “So basically I lost my mind,” she says, squeezing lemon into her glass.

  Sukhin stares, wide-eyed. All thoughts of roast vegetables dissipate.

  “I’m not sure how much you want to know, Sukhin.” She stirs her drink with a finger. The ice cubes clink against the glass. “Or how much I should tell you. But stop me when you’ve heard enough.” She pauses. “If I’m still going on.”

  The losing of a mind, she tells him, is a messy and terrifying thing. It just wanders off and can’t, or won’t, find its way back. “At first, I didn’t realise that I’d lost it. And when I did, I couldn’t lure it back.”

  She’s nuts. The truly mad, he thinks as she talks about trying to entice her mind to return with holidays and yoga, must be able to talk about going mad like this—casually, almost flippantly. You went to the cinema over the weekend? I went mad.

  The first time her mind wandered off was after a death.

  “Yes, I know—very cliché. And actually, there were two.”

  The first was Isaac’s. He sat next to her at work and handled the more conventional over-the-top glitzy parties, while she had ended up specialising in the bizarre end of the socialite-party spectrum.

  She raises a hand. “Sshhhh, Sukhin. Yes, the socialite-party spectrum. We had a chart on the wall with numbers and everything—I made it.”

  “Where would Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome be?”

  “Sunny with caves of ice? Pah. Level Three—closer to glitz.”

  The sky is dark now. The children are gone. The balcony has a light, but Sukhin doesn’t turn it on.

  So, Isaac. Jinn didn’t know him very well, but they sometimes went for lunch together when neither of them had better plans. And then one day she went to work and he wasn’t there. No one knew where he was, or if he was down with something; no one socialised with Isaac outside of the office. No one thought much about it, though everyone complained that it was terribly inconvenient, with one of the biggest parties of the year happening that weekend. After two days, their boss called the emergency contact on his personnel file—Isaac had put down his mother’s number— and found out that he’d had a heart attack and died.

  “A heart attack, Sukhin. At thirty-two. The man played tennis twice a week and ate salads for lunch every day. The year before, he climbed Mount Kerinci.”

  Sukhin makes a face. Mountaineers. And immediately regrets it. The man is dead, he tells himself. Try not to be a shit.

  She went to the wake, then to the funeral. She cleared his desk and ferried everything to his sister’s house. And then she took over all the events he’d been assigned. When the last of Isaac’s parties was done and every bottle of Champagne signed for, she quit. She didn’t know exactly w
hy, but it definitely had something to do with not wanting to drop dead and leave behind a to-do list that started with “Check if elephants are allowed on hotel garden path”.

  “Wow—which hotel?”

  “The Capella.”

  “And are they?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t go back to work. She didn’t want to think. She had a thought, once, about what the world would be like if it had been her heart and not Isaac’s that had given up, but she shut it down. She didn’t want to think. For two months, she spent her days reading, watching television, sleeping and going to the grocery store several times a day to buy crisps and ice-cream bars.

  “And then my mind started going off by itself.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “Oh, all sorts of places, I suppose.”

  She would lose hours, sometimes days. She’d start reading a book in the morning and then realise it was dark outside, with no idea what had happened in between. It was usually like this, but sometimes she would come around and find that she’d done things that she couldn’t remember doing. She might feel a little tired or a little hungry, or sometimes an urge to listen to a particular song, and there would be a stretch of nothing, and then she’d find herself in the kitchen surrounded by plates and plates of marmalade sandwiches, or lying in her bedroom with Bowie’s “Starman” playing at maximum volume on loop. Once, she came to on one of those tourist boats with wheels, the kind that drive around the city and then into the water.

  “That was somewhat fun, but I got worried—what if I found myself running across a highway, or jumping from a plane?”

  “God.”

  “So I went to see a doctor.”

  At the swanky hospital that her mother insisted on, they ran a series of tests. She was made to lie still in machines, run on a treadmill, bleed and spit into a number of tubes, breathe into some sort of accordion-like contraption and then wear a helmet-like thing with wires attached to a machine.

  “Very sci-fi horror flick.” He tries to sound light-hearted, but it comes out leaden.

  “Very. But they found nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  The doctors said it might be stress- and anxiety-related. That’s when she tried yoga. Didn’t help at all. She took some website’s advice and went on a cruise, on which she hid herself in her room and refused to leave— she didn’t know why. And then to Bali, where she had a panic attack at a traditional kecak performance, certain that one of the players was not who he was.

  “Not who he was?”

  “I don’t even know who I thought he was supposed to be, or who he was pretending to be. It was all very weird.”

  The psychiatrist said it might help if she went back to work or at least found a way to add some sort of routine back into her life.

  “I looked, but none of the jobs I could do were any better than the one I’d left. Everything just seemed so lame.”

  She didn’t go back to the hospital. She didn’t get a job. She watched a lot more television than she ever thought possible.

  And then her grandmother died.

  She stands up. “Shall I make dinner?”

  “Is that the end of your story?”

  “That’s all for tonight.”

  Sukhin barely survives the first day of school. The hordes. The noise. The hours.

  By 12.30, when he goes to the canteen to get his tea and sandwiches, he is a raging mess. Watching him leave, muttering to himself, Mrs Chan decides she will say a prayer for him to the Goddess of Mercy when she’s at the temple tonight. Poor Mr Dhillon, why so old still never get married? His parents must be so worried.

  He eats his sandwiches and drinks his tea under his desk, with the lights turned off and his desk lamp rerouted so that he can read. King Solomon’s Mines again, his old favourite, worn out and dog-eared from being read over and over and over since he was about ten. Even now, its power over him hasn’t diminished. Hunched over the yellowed pages under his desk, Sukhin lopes after Quartermain and gang in spirit, shielding his eyes from the desert sun, clambering up a mountain slope in his polished Oxfords. A knock on the door nearly causes Sukhin to yelp in fright. Fuckity fuck. His breath quickens but he stays quiet, sinking slowly into the floor. Another knock and someone tries the handle, but Sukhin has locked the door—thank goodness.

  Later, two voices:

  “Have you seen Mr Dhillon?” Hussein, the office receptionist. “I tried calling, but the line is engaged.” He peers through the small glass panel in the door. “But there’s no one here.”

  Sukhin remembers lifting the telephone receiver and burying it under a stack of administrative forms in November, in a fit of post-exam passive resistance.

  “Not today, but I was in class all morning. Just going for lunch now.” Mrs Chandra, from next door.

  “There’s a package for him downstairs.”

  “I’ll let him know when I see him.”

  “Thanks!”

  Curious—who would send something here?

  The apartment smells of ginger, lime and a few things else. Jinn is bent over at the stove, peering through the glass lid of his largest pot. Next to her, on the kitchen counter: every bowl and plate he owns, and both chopping boards. The table is strewn with vegetable peel, seeds, ginger shavings and—guts.

  “I’m making fish soup. You owe Mr Loh twelve dollars for the fish.”

  “Who’s Mr Loh?”

  “The security guard. I asked him for money and directions to the wet market.”

  Sukhin squeezes his eyes shut. He owes the security guard money. Will the madness stop, please?

  She straightens and turns around. “It’ll be ready in a couple of hours. Tea?”

  She puts the kettle on. He starts washing up, beginning with the bowls.

  “Granny dying—that was difficult.” She opens the cupboard above the sink and takes out a box of teabags. “She wasn’t ill at all. She just collapsed while gardening, and that was it.”

  “Were you close?” He doesn’t remember her ever talking about her grandmother.

  “Yes, but she wasn’t one of those lovely old ladies, you know? Very old school, rather strict. Made sure we learnt to cook.”

  “I never knew you could cook.”

  “I didn’t always like it. And my mum didn’t want us anywhere near the kitchen—I think she always meant for her girls to be tai tais.” Jinn rolls her eyes as she hands Sukhin a mug of steaming tea. “But Granny made us go over every Sunday to help cook dinner. And she taught us how to bake, so we could pitch in at the bakery if she needed to play mahjong on Sunday afternoons.”

  This delightful woman created the kind of posthumous chaos only soap-opera scriptwriters could calmly imagine when it was discovered, at the will reading, that she had left the bakery to Ping and Jinn, and everything else—her house on Duchess Road, the house Jinn’s uncle lived in, the apartment Jinn lived in, her properties in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, her Hong Kong stocks, every last cent she had—to Jinn alone.

  Sukhin almost gasps. “That’s a lot.”

  “I didn’t even know half of that existed.”

  Her uncle—and her parents—contested the will.

  “They said I wasn’t of sound mind. My uncle told everyone that I must have tricked Granny somehow.” She doesn’t sound the slightest bit bothered.

  “What did Ping do?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugs. “Ping said she didn’t want to take sides.” She refills her mug with hot water, then reaches for Sukhin’s.

  And that was when her mind just pottered off.

  She checks on the soup. “Almost done—would you like rice with this, or shall we keep things light?”

  “So what happened?” He frowns.

  “Tomorrow. And let’s not bother with the rice.”

  “Why not today? I’m not planning to have you killed at dawn.” He hands her a paper bag. “See? I bought you pyjamas.”

  “Of course—
she should have just asked the king of Samarkand for PJs.”

  He’s reading in bed when she comes out of the bathroom, frowning.

  “Where’s my toothbrush?”

  “It’s the yellow one.”

  “No, mine’s blue.”

  “I threw that out this morning. Yours is the yellow one.” He continues reading.

  “You got me pyjamas yesterday. Sukhin, stop buying me things.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” He holds out a hand, not looking at her. “Give me the toothbrush.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re welcome, then.”

  He lies in bed after he turns off the lights and wonders if it will always be like this—a general cosiness of a level approaching domestic bliss, but never quite there, punctuated every so often by some protest over toiletries or clothes or whatever.

  The soft shape rolls over and comes towards him in a sort of lengthwise shuffle. “Thank you for the toothbrush,” it says. “And the pyjamas.”

  He smiles, knowing it can’t see him.

  It’s stopped moving. “I can’t quite describe it. Things just got weirder and weirder.”

  The lawyers kept calling. Her mother kept asking whether she thought she deserved everything. And she found she couldn’t leave her apartment any more.

  “I’d open the door and the corridor would grow longer and longer, and I just couldn’t.”

  At first, she kept trying. It was always the same—she would open the door, and the corridor outside her apartment would stretch and stretch and stretch, not even stopping when it got hard for her to see the start of the stairwell. But when the delivery men arrived, the corridor would behave. After a while, she gave up.

  “And I tried talking to Ping, many times—I’d call her at the office, and she sometimes came to see me and she’d say I mustn’t be difficult, when I was so lucky.” A pause. “She kept calling me lucky.”