Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  He tries to imagine what it must have been like for her, to lose her grandmother and then everyone’s empathy. He can’t.

  “I didn’t understand anything. Nothing made sense. And I kept waking up and getting the days wrong.”

  The soft shape comes a little closer. He turns to face it. That nose again.

  “I just knew I couldn’t any more. I couldn’t. So I stopped, and I left.”

  A long silence. He wonders if it’s gone to sleep.

  It hasn’t. “And when you brought her, when I saw her—”

  It stays very still. He whispers, even though it’s hopelessly silly and he can’t remember if she likes Dylan Thomas and he feels like a fool, because it’s dark and because he wants to:

  Never and never, my girl riding far and near

  In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,

  Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood

  Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,

  My dear, my dear,

  Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year

  To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

  He puts his arms around it. It lets him.

  They are at a café. They met here once before, and she has chosen the same table. He notes the sentimentality.

  Sipping from a glass teacup, she is full of false cheer. Everything is good; everyone is well. What about him? Is everything good? Is everyone well? She watches him carefully as she tells him how very perfect life is. She waits for him to ask her questions; she wants to tell him more.

  The man doesn’t say much. He listens. He doesn’t ask her questions.

  They talk, circling each other for a little over an hour. They finish their tea. The man leaves. She watches him, wishing she dared to follow.

  XVII

  “ONE MORE THING, Mr Dhillon.”

  He’s already risen from his seat and taken a step towards the door, but he turns around and sits back down. “Of course, Mrs Tay.”

  The principal is a fan of sustained eye contact. Sukhin isn’t. And so every conversation they’ve ever had has involved his persistent efforts to break her visual equivalent of a chokehold, usually in vain.

  “I wanted to say how pleased I am with your contributions to the school. I’ve been told many, many times how lucky we are to have you.”

  He struggles to keep from grimacing. Is the Tay being sarcastic?

  “You’ve been here…” She breaks off the staring match to look down at a piece of paper on her desk. Sukhin takes a deep breath and blinks rapidly. “Ten years.” And the match resumes.

  “Yes.”

  “Our youngest Head of Department.” She treats him to a cheerless smile. “Mr Narayan was very—passionate—in his support of you.”

  Sukhin nods, returning the smile with a grim one of his own. “Yes. Mr Narayan was very kind.” Where is this all going?

  “I’ve been thinking, and Mr Leong agrees with me…” She pauses and sits up straighter, then clears her throat. God, the drama—if you weren’t a principal, you’d be a third-rate soap actress. “…that you’re ready to take on a bigger role here.” What? “What?”

  “We need a Director of Academic Studies.”

  “Mr Zahidi is Director of Academic Studies.”

  “Mr Zahidi is retiring in July.” She holds up a hand to pre-empt an interruption. “I know that’s seven months off, but I like to be prepared.”

  Sukhin, meanwhile, is so unprepared for this that he does something he never, ever, does with the Tay—he invites her to elaborate. “So you want me to be director of academic studies?”

  “Yes. Mr Leong and I feel you’ll be a good fit with the rest of the senior management committee.” Another creepy smile. “So between now and July, you’ll work with Mr Zahidi, learn the ropes…get a firm handle on curriculum planning. And we’ll be sending you for advanced leadership training, of course.”

  By the time he recovers enough from the shock to clamber after her, she’s moved on.

  “…so I’d also like you to lead the GoTech committee we’re setting up soon.”

  Mrs Tay launches into a lengthy explanation of the need to emphasise technology adoption at a higher level at pre-university “because we live in such a fast-paced world”. Her eyes continue their relentless gaze—“It’s like she’s trying for spontaneous telekinesis,” Dennis once remarked—and Sukhin’s head begins to pound. Did she actually say “fast-paced world”? And what is this GoTech crap? He hears her say something about tablets, and then something else that ends with “…interactive videos for English literature lessons.”

  He rocks in his chair to destabilise it, then pitches himself and the chair forward.

  Where are the bloody scissors?

  Sukhin puts his cup of tea on his chair for a moment while he reaches up and rummages in his top drawer. He wonders if the packet of biscuits is worth all this ridiculous blind fumbling. Yes, it is—he’s starving. Wait. So is it worth even more, then? Is it, perhaps, worth the risk of standing up, looking into the drawer, locating the scissors, grabbing it and then sinking back to the floor? Just five seconds should do it—but what if someone sees him and comes in?

  He should live on the wild side, like Alice, head of the Maths department, who’s put up a calendar over the window in her office door.

  “Wah, Alice, can do like that ah?” In the pantry earlier, over curry puffs left over from someone’s birthday party, Tat Meng came right out and said exactly what Sukhin had been thinking when he first noticed the white card blocking her window.

  “Who says cannot?”

  Tat Meng and Sukhin looked at each other, nodding. Okay, fair. Technically, there were no rules governing the transparency levels of door inserts.

  “But if we’re allowed to do that, everyone would do it.”

  “So if everybody do, you do. Nobody do, you don’t do.” Alice sighs. “You two ah. Are you sheep, or are you men?”

  He’s worried he might be a sheep. Meek, indecisive, useless without a guy with a stick. Here he is, damned with eating biscuits under his desk because he doesn’t have the gall to break an unwritten rule on school office doors. Here he is, hiding, instead of openly telling people he’d rather not speak with them. And later, he will go home and spend the rest of the evening—like he’s done every single evening for a week—trying to decide if he shouldn’t just drag Jinn to a doctor.

  “Have you had any…episodes since you left?” he finally asked her last night, after deciding, after much deliberation, that the word “episode” wasn’t too much of a euphemism.

  No, she hadn’t lost a single day since that morning when she put a bag over her head and left her flat.

  “You put a bag over your head?”

  “So the corridor wouldn’t recognise me. How else could I have escaped?”

  Straight-faced, she speared a slice of carrot with her fork and popped it into her mouth. No doctor would assume she was joking—and Sukhin can only hope. He turns on his desk-lamp-turned-under-desk-lamp and begins going through the notes for his next lesson. Surely everyone’s a little mad? How mad does one have to be in order to be properly mad? He’s talked about this in class so many times, but in a strictly Hamlet universe—and now when he looks at Jinn and thinks about everything she’s told him, all the verse, all the arguments, just fly from him.

  So basically, I lost my mind.

  But has she regained it? Is the madness quite firmly a thing of the past, or is it an evolving part of her? She has said nothing about recovering— but that could be because she’s recovered. Is that even the right word? Do people recover from madness? He’s heard stories of people recovering from trauma, from conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, but is that the same thing as recovering from mental illness?

  Are people mad if they say they’re mad? Or even because they say they’re mad? To define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad?

  His
leg has fallen asleep.

  I’m the teacher who spends all my breaks under my desk, hiding from my students and my colleagues.

  And I’ve been asked to be Director of Academic Studies.

  It’s a mad, mad world.

  She isn’t home. Not stretched out on the floor or on the sofa, reading. Not world-watching on the balcony. Not messing up the kitchen or making tea or drinking it. Not in the bedroom or the study or the bathroom. Not hiding in the rain machine—he checks it twice.

  Okay, she’s gone out.

  He puts on a Lou Reed record, surprised to find himself so calm. He takes a deep breath to check—yes, perfectly calm. People can become accustomed to anything, he realises—in his case, to the impulses of a self-declared madwoman and the capriciousness of life lived with her. Any moment now, she might come through the door and tell him that she’s found a—a boat that will take her to Bangladesh, to a commune where she’ll spend the remainder of her days meditating and planting rice. Or that she’s going to help set up the local chapter of a guerilla eco-terrorist group. Or that she’s going to go to live under the pedestrian bridge near the Esplanade.

  And it will be all right—he’ll poke his nose into things as far as she will allow, then he’ll hang out at the margins, just in case.

  Easy.

  Not so easy: figuring what he’s going to do with this appointment that the Tay has decided to favour him with. Unperturbed by his collapse in her office yesterday, which he blamed on a dizzy spell before pretending to stumble about and out of the room as quickly as a nausea-ridden man can be expected to, she sent him an email afterwards and accosted him today right after the morning assembly.

  “Mr Dhillon, I’m surprised you even have to consider.”

  “It’s a great responsibility.” He put on his gravest expression.

  She pinned him down for a few seconds with a thumbtack stare but looked less irate as she reminded him of the deadline she had set out in her email. “Tomorrow, Mr Dhillon. Let me know at the end of tomorrow.”

  Sukhin doesn’t understand why him. Especially as he’s the only one who would turn the promotion down—not that the Tay knows this. She probably assumes, like everyone else will, that he’s immensely flattered by this and is now busy counting the years until he takes over as Principal. He shudders— if that’s where he’s headed, he will throw himself off the balcony.

  It’s raining. He looks out the front window and hopes she’ll be back soon. Did she bring an umbrella?

  Wretched woman. Where is she?

  The day guard jumps. On his phone screen, the host of a Japanese variety show urges two juggling contestants to come on, try another pumpkin.

  Another sharp rap on the door of the security post. The guard looks out the glass window. It’s raining too hard to see clearly, but there’s someone right outside. He opens the door.

  It’s the sour-faced man. Mr Dhillon. #04-03. He’s under a large black umbrella, his glasses completely fogged up.

  “Hello.”

  “Ah, hello.”

  “Sorry, but have you seen my friend?”

  “Your friend?”

  “Woman. Short hair. About this tall.” Mr Dhillon holds up a hand, knife-like, to his cheekbone. “I think you told her where the wet market is, sometime last week.”

  Ah, yes, that nice lady. “She went out around three.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  The guard gives Mr Dhillon an incredulous look. Who ever tells the guards where they’re going? “No.”

  They both turn to look at the clock on the wall. 8.15. 8.16.

  “Raining lah, maybe she stopped somewhere.”

  “Thanks, Mr Loh.” Mr Dhillon reaches into his pocket and hands the guard an envelope. “And here’s the money I owe you. Thanks.”

  The guard stares, first at the envelope and then at the retreating rain-blurred figure. It’s the first time Mr Dhillon of #04-03 has called him by name.

  Just before nine, the door opens and she walks in, cheeks flushed, swinging an empty bag. He looks up from his book, frowning. She’s wet through and dripping all over the floor. He growls, but only in his head, It’s late, where have you been?

  “Go shower and put on some dry clothes.”

  She sniffs appreciatively. “That smells lovely.”

  “Chicken and leeks.”

  “Sounds delicious.”

  “You’re not getting any until you’ve showered and changed. Look at you.” He does, and she’s glowing, radiant with some secret, metaphysical joy. Would he ever return home at the end of the day, after a day of classes and meetings and lesson plans, looking like this? “You’re mopping all of this up later, you know.”

  She pushes the wet hair from her forehead and grins. “It’s just rain, Sukhin. Just water.” Her tone is indulgent.

  He mops up while she showers, wondering if madness is the secret to all his problems. If he were mad, he wouldn’t have to avoid anyone— they’d avoid him. And mad people aren’t good candidates for Director of Academic Studies, so that would be out of the question. Or, if he were mad, he’d accept—and not think about how bizarre it is that the man who cannot quite teach will be responsible for the entire curriculum.

  “I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should stop,” he tells Jinn over dinner. “I’m not much of a teacher.”

  “Would not being a teacher make you a better human?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what else I would do.” He doesn’t, and he doesn’t.

  She steals a forkful of leek from his plate. “Well, would not being a teacher make you want to be a better human?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She puts down her fork and puts her hand on his. “You must think carefully about this.”

  He stares at her hand. “Okay.”

  “People aren’t like otters.” She speaks slowly, measuring out every word. “An otter doesn’t have to try to be a better otter. It can just be, and it will be the best otter that it can be. But if we don’t try to be better humans, we start becoming worse humans.” She gestures with her fork. “A gift and a curse.”

  “I wish I were an otter.”

  She nods sagely. “Yes, and you’d be an adorable snooty thing. We’ve talked about this before, Sukhin.”

  The neighbourhood dogs have struck up an impromptu concert. From the big house at the corner, from the unit upstairs, from other houses and apartment blocks on other streets cutting across Sukhin’s, the members of this canine choir know their parts—each individual bark is pitched for maximum effect; every bark combines with the others to create the most jarring cacophony possible; every new volley of barks begins just as the one before it ends.

  Sukhin and Jinn lean over the balcony railing. A dog walking a man struts down the road, its nose in the air, pointedly ignoring the performance.

  “Definitely not a sheep,” Sukhin mumbles.

  The dog goes up to a gate and wags its tail at the two larger dogs behind it.

  “Look at it, trying to make friends.” She gestures with her mug.

  “It’s taunting them. Look—obviously, it’s saying, ‘You may bark yourselves hoarse you’re inside I’m outside my tail’s nicer.’”

  “You’d be a snooty dog. How surprising.” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, you’ll ask around?”

  Before the canine concert began, she asked if he would mind asking his colleagues for old textbooks. She and Kim Seng are collecting them to give to some of the Free Kitchen regulars and the families at the beach.

  “Isn’t there a government assistance scheme that gives out free textbooks?”

  “Not to junior college kids.”

  “Oh.” He felt guilty for not knowing this and was relieved when the barking began, disrupting his thoughts.

  “Sure, I’ll ask tomorrow.” He’ll put a collection box in the pantry, maybe send an email around.

  “Thanks, Sukhin.”

  He thinks about the veggie pirates, the soup k
itchen, her latest collection efforts at the wet market two streets away. And now this textbook drive.

  “Did you have a plan, when you left? Did you know what you wanted to do?”

  “No.”

  “No clue at all?”

  “No.”

  She takes his mug and goes inside. He follows her. “And the note?”

  “I needed Ping to know I was leaving because I wanted to.” She opens a tin on the kitchen counter and helps herself to a slice of the cake he made yesterday. Pineapple upside-down—his Aunt Lillian’s recipe.

  “Did it matter?” He hands her a plate.

  She looks thoughtful—but it isn’t clear if she’s thinking about the cake or the note. “Delicious—you’ve added something different to this one.” A cake-filled pause. “Yes. Everyone was calling me insane—I wanted her to know that I understood what I was doing.”

  I love you. I’ve tried to cross the space between us, but I don’t want to any more. So I will turn it into a chasm. I’m leaving. I take nothing with me, and I leave nothing behind. I can’t talk to anyone because I will only say terrible things. I must go. I’m not coming back—count on that. Forgive me for what I do.

  “But at this point you were losing your mind? I added some thyme.”

  “Well, yes.” She laughs—he doesn’t expect this. “Sukhin, if you’re trying to make sense of all of this, don’t. I just didn’t want to be labelled mad. Not by her.”

  He remembers something else she said, that day when she told him about the note. “And you wanted them to think you could be dead?”

  “Yes.” She’s started on another slice.

  “But why?”

  “Lovely flavour.” A big bite. “All proper tragedies end in death. It’s the final-final thing.”

  “But you’re not dead.”

  “But I’m not alive.” She pauses. “Either way, it can’t be proven. As long as they don’t find me, I’m like Schrödinger’s cat.”